skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, the current website does not explain it very well.

Let me try.

The Ethereum vision encompasses three components: P2P messaging, a file distribution layer and Blockchains. I described them in more detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3npsoz/ethereum_i... In practice, this is actually more complex, but should suffice as an introduction.

The Ethereum developers are mostly focused on the Blockchain component. On-chain accounts can be associated with program code and state, the environment specifies a turing complete virtual machine, called Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Transactions can call these programs (also called "smart contracts") and contracts can call other contracts as well. To avoid infinite loops, every execution step in the EVM incurs a fee ("gas cost") that is collected by the miner of the new block that include the transaction. If a transaction does not supply enough gas (paid in Ether, the networks currency), the fees are collected anyway and all changes are undone. The validity of the program state is guaranteed with a consensus algorithm. It is replicated across all nodes. So if you want to censor the program, you have to attack the entire network. This makes them reasonably independent of human control and thus allows them to control arbitrary state, including the networks currency.

But how can the contract communicate with the rest of the world? It can only do so using transactions. For example, it could incentivise transactions that supply it with information, or could use other contracts to schedule micropayments to some service.

Contracts could also be used to reference content addressed data (have a look at ipfs.io, these are basically the other two components) and thereby act as a (domain) name system.

All in all, this decentralises storage, state and communication and is the most futuristic thing I know of. It took me weeks to understand how these components relate to each other, but it was worth it.
Note that we also provide write-ups and files for CTFs in 2013 [0], 2014 [1] and this year [2]. If you don't know what CTFs are: https://ctftime.org/ctf-wtf/

[0]: https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2013

[1]: https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2014

[2]: https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2016
Mothercare and ELC Recall Giant Wooden Activity Cubes
Sounds great. How can I find/hire a vendor that uses YardBook, though? It's not clear from the website.
If we didn't view people like Armstrong as role models there wouldn't be much of a problem. But as long as we tell children to view people like him as role models then they better behave ethically. Unless you want to raise a generation of psychopaths.
What can you learn from your GitHub stars?
Simon Singh criticises wasteful spending in science outreach
A little bit off topic but what is the meaning of "developer preview" in the context of an open source developer tool project?

edit: speling
Nice! Small nitpick: "-A" doesn't seem to be supported.
Ask HN: How can I find engineers/designers at failing start ups?
I realize that's 100% what a recruiter would ask, but I honestly just want to find a co-founder for an app concept. Feel free to DM me answers. Cheers, Kev.
Did you read any of Dr. Sarno's other two books? I'm wondering how they compare.

http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connection...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-Epidemic-Disorders/dp...

Besides challenging the mind over matter, this work also challenges the idea of what to believe and pursue when scientific evidence is relatively lacking.
The Circle of (Work) Life
I mean, I think we can make a decent guess. If Tencent came over to the US and offered free wifi, but it was limited to Baidu, WeChat, and QQ services, every tech celebrity in this country would flip their shit and the government would declare it illegal.
Video Marketing Tips: 3 Things You Must Have in a Video
RavenDb?
This strongly reminds me of a phenomenon I've witnessed on several occasions. I occasionally teach blacksmithing lessons and have found that new students can be pretty neatly grouped into two categories.

There's the "I want to be the blacksmith" crowd. They are far and away the most common type of student to show up for one of my lessons. The defining characteristic is they have little prior aptitude and even less interest in the hundreds of hours of work required to develop strong fundamentals and build up a toolset. They're perfectly happy to mash hot metal into gross approximations of a given shape and then post pics of the resulting catastrophe all over social media. They romanticize the mere act of tossing a chunk of metal into a fire and then hitting it with a hammer and are disinterested in end results.

The second group (maybe 1 out of every 10 students) are folks that want to make forged things and are concerned about achieving good results. These folks generally have some kind of background with basic tool use and typically blacksmithing isn't their first craft.

I teach the same material to both groups but after about the third lesson there's a distinct drop-off for members of the first group as we progress away from "yay I make metal hot whack-whack-whack" kitsch items like s-hooks and bottle openers and start getting into more serious work like making simple hand tools and tongs. The transition from 15 minute projects that are functional even if they look like hammered cat shit to 1-2 hour long projects that have to be right to work at all is normally where the first group drops out.
<<Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it.>>

I understand your concern, but this seems to contradict reality... According to this article, only a small percentage of your followers actually see your Tweets:
http://marketingland.com/facebook-twitter-impressions-90878
My favorite part of logentries is the fact that you can use structured logs to build dashboards showing service health. My least favorite part of logentries is the UX around that whole thing. Any chance more features are coming in the structured logging area?
I've many Debian servers without nodejs _and_ without python.

It requires conscious work as any other dependency, but it's possible (and convenient, if you don't depend on them).

So more than probably, I'll not install npm, to test a bash wrapper to a perl script, that does something that git itself can do without external dependencies.

But obviously, different persons have different concepts of the K.I.S.S. principle.

Being a perl script... why the author didn't use CPAN? it's available in all vanilla installs of Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu, RedHat, etc...
Ask HN: Best programming language to learn for expanding my knowledge?
Hi to all, I am a Ruby developer who primarly works on the web. I know also Javascript, and just enough PHP to be dangerous.

But I feel that I need to learn a most 'complete' or better, lower level, programming language to improve my arsenal of weapons and to improve the way I think while programming.

I am fascinated about a lot of languages, just to be clear, I am talking about the ivy league, something that is where C++ or Java are. Any advice?

Which is the best choice to improve my skills, and that can help me make the differences where languages like Ruby or Javascript can't?
The paper was also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661.
This is a stab on the back of the feature most of us signed Twitter for: seeing what our friends were doing in real time. If they think I'd be happier using Facebook, well they are mistaken.
> Brian [Chavez] based his C# library on our own official Java driver, which we released in December.

I'm guessing it's close to a line-for-line port, so Chavez kept all the Java style conventions.
Do you really think that every one of the millions of American citizens who travel or live overseas each year is supposed to tell the US about their current location?

I didn't presume there was such a requirement, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if the fine print somewhere made it a selectively enforced requirement. It doesn't strike me as more or less onerous than some other actions that are currently required.

There is no "supposed to."

I think you are correct, but when an official government agency "encourages" a certain behavior, it's not too much of a stretch to presume that one is "supposed to" do it:

We encourage all U.S. citizens travelling or residing
overseas to notify the closest U.S. Embassy or Consulate of
their contact information so that, in an emergency, we can
contact them to provide important safety and security
information, or support during a crisis.

https://step.state.gov/STEP/Pages/Common/FAQ.aspx

What would your guess be as to the chances that some sort of registration will be made requirement in the future?
There's a bro joke in here somewhere.
> When Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping a few years ago, the sports world was aghast. For almost a decade, he had dominated cycling so thoroughly that the thought of anyone else winning bordered on ridiculous. Few had guessed that he had done it by cheating, and many found it hard to believe, even after Armstrong himself owned up to his dishonesty.

Huh. I was just barely a young adult when Armstrong began his period of dominance, and this doesn't match my recollection. Most people I spoke with who had any familiarity with cycling were utterly convinced he was cheating. Maybe this wasn't true outside the bubble of my peers?
Media Startup Slant Wants to Democratize News and Opinion Content
Deals: Harry Potter Complete 14.99 USD
Hello HN--

I wanted to share what my Co-Founder and I have been working on. We built Yardbook to provide small landscape businesses with software tools to help them run their businesses. We have features for customer management, scheduling, billing just to name a few.

Check it out at: https://www.yardbook.com/pages/home

It’s a humble start but I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback on how we can improve the site.

Thanks in advance.
One of the supervisors for my Master's thesis was American but has lived in Canada since the '70s. He hasn't bothered to get Canadian citizenship. He's now retired living in BC. I'm wondering if he'll do it now.
Use CLOCK_MONOTONIC. Or you could make your client abort when the clock goes backwards.

If someone forks a VM from a running snapshot, you're screwed whether they mess with the clock or not.
Another attempt at Digital Receipts
https://www.stashrapp.com/

I was reading the threads in HN before I started building StashR. It still looks like we don't have a good solution for digital receipts. Paper seems to be the most convenient and frictionless way to receive receipts.

We are taking another stab at digital receipts where receipts could be delivered to a customer without requiring a email address or phone number.

While doing so, we decided that we should build a MVP to gauge user interest in storing receipts.

We have an Android app that we think is the best way to store receipts.

I would like to know what the HN community thinks about the app.

Looking forward to hear your comments.
That's a fair distinction, but I feel the core of my point remains - to say that bias doesn't exist or distract from that fact with other arguments is utter hogwash.
You don't have a cal for each user. Say you have rest api server, which talks to sql server. This doens't require a CAL for each user.
Clickable link:
https://www.stashrapp.com/
As someone who used to be able to do things like that: meditation.

Tricking your sense of body position is the most fun and weird thing you can do.
I can't see this feature. Has it not rolled out to everyone yet?
It sounds to me like they are turning it on for everyone but still leaving the option in, so more people can try out the feature.

Right after that they said "If you don't, send your thoughts our way, and you can easily turn it off in settings."
The HN guidelines ask you not to do several of the things you did here. Please (re)read them and post civilly from now on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074992 and marked it off-topic.
Not encrypting at rest seems like a huge oversight, given that your service most likely uses AWS S3 and it is dead simple to turn on encryption. I'm not sure anyone will trust you to store their log data without at least encrypting data at rest.
What I get from reading the article and comments is that while the elements of the prize winner's solution have been available, the novelty is in their application.

Did someone already arrive at their solution, and simply not try to claim the prize money?
If nothing else, it would make people more conscious about the quality of education.
Parse server now free on AWS marketplace
The simple solution would be to synchronize FBAR and FACTA to use the same reporting amount as this would remove the vast majority of people from having to report. $10K is far to low given exchange rates. $50K-$100K or higher would probably be a more realistic number.
What are all these capital expenditures that are not viable at 0.25% but are viable at -0.5%? It's all just currency manipulation.
many of the underlying design decisions in libuv clash with decisions that we’ve made in the RethinkDB core

Can you expand on this please?
Yeah I don't see it in the list at the top of the page. But the author says that he'd be happy see a pull request for common options that aren't supported yet.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingEncrypti...

It's literally setting a policy on a bucket and a flag on object PUTs if you're not managing the keys yourself.
Mr. Potter – Fashion Ceramics and Wearable Artworks
We considered a GitHub profile as gender neutral if all of the following conditions were met:
- an identicon (rather than a profile image) was used,
- the gender inference tool output a ’unknown’ for the user’s login name and display name, and
- none of the panelists indicated that they could identify the user’s gender.
Across both panels, panelists inspected 3000 profiles of roughly equal numbers of women and men.

Given that acceptance rates dropped for both men and women when this method determined that a user was not gender-neutral, I wonder if use of a profile picture or real name is the real killer here. Perhaps the kind of person to include identifying information in their Github profile is less likely to have good pull requests? More likely, perhaps having any identifying information at all gives people an excuse to reject your pull requests? That would explain why there was a drop for both sexes but a slightly stronger one for women. If you are identifiable from your profile image or name, people are more likely to reject your PR on the bases of your ethnicity, appearance, religion, or gender, with gender being only a part of the effect.
Any improvement in biomechanics would have a lot of positive consequences as the field has a lot of subfields. One example is soft body dynamics. Research in this area is very active as computational power increases more accurate and complex finite element simulations of soft tissues are possible. While the classical model used in the paper, from Delp et al., already contains pivot points, it lacks other important info. For instance, the tendon slack length parameter currently includes both the length of the free tendon and the length of the aponeurotic tendon. In reality most musculotendons consist of at least one tendon on each side. AFAIK, no functional representation is available that divides the tendon length into separate lengths for the origin and insertion of each unit, and also into its two constituents, free and aponeurotic. And as has been shown, deformation effects for muscles and tendon are indeed different as they they have different material properties. Regarding the cross-sectional areas, these are available, just not within the classical models. If there is a need to incorporate cross-sectional area into a model than the main issue is measure. Most models in biomechanics are created by taking external measurements of subjects in vivo, but I guess it won't take long before models go beyond piecewise line segments. Or soft body simulation get cheap enough to reach the same level of accuracy present in these trial-and-tested models.
5 Apps I Use for a Productive Morning Routine
CEO/Founder of OpenSignal here. Yep, our data is collected from anyone who downloads the OpenSignal app. Our mission is to provide a real world, empirical alternative to the traditional source of this data which is the operators themselves. I'd be interested (genuinely) in any reasons you have for mistrusting the data so we can address them.
No. That's not what office 'culture' is, that's 'employee perks'.

Employee perks may be a part of the culture, as they famously are in Google. But there are more considerations. E.g. the architecture, the history (important), the campus, (most importantly imo) the staff, knowledge networks, energy, etc. It's hard to imagine what a company like Microsoft would be like without Redmond, or Apple without Cupertino, etc. They're just bricks and mortar, but they've grown to define companies. The culture that surrounds HQs are attractive for potential employees and current employees. Many of these companies effectively have cult-like status, and their office spaces are central to this.
I highly recommend Sarno's work as well. I had severe tendinitis in my wrists for about 4 years. I was only able to work about 3 hours a day and was getting pretty desperate, so I decided to give what I thought was Sarno's "crackpot theory" a try. 4 weeks later my tendinitis was completely gone.
The best programming language to learn to expand your knowledge is one that is outside your current knowledge. Java, perhaps, but C++ is further outside your knowledge since it can go more low-level than Java can. Rust might be at the same level as C++, and might be easier to learn.

Or, you could go up - to higher-level instead of lower-level. Lisp or Haskell might be worth your while.
Perhaps some of those assumptions that you take to be axiomatic regarding the role of taxation in society, he did not agree with.

Use of public resources does not obligate you to pay taxes. The enforcers with guns obligate you to pay taxes. If you can escape the enforcers, you can escape the taxation. And that guy escaped the enforcers.

Also, you may want to take a closer look at the ownership and maintenance of communication networks, power grids, and hospital systems. Many of the so-called "public utilities" in the US are actually for-profit corporations that sometimes have to answer to a government regulator if a customer complains loudly enough. In fact, the only federally owned power grid company that I am aware of within the US is the Tennessee Valley Authority (though plenty of hydroelectric dams elsewhere are also federally owned), and it still buys 10% of the power that it sells from privately owned sources. It should also be noted that the TVA is not supported by taxes, but actually turns a profit.

As tax dollars are also spent on such meritorious projects as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the F-35 joint strike fighter, domestic surveillance networks, eminent domain abuse, civil forfeiture abuse, forced insurance schemes, chronic fiscal mismanagement, and countless others that an unfortunate minority of voters may consistently object to, I suppose that someone who avoids or evades paying taxes will have to replicate those things on his own as well.

If you tie an ethical obligation for paying taxes to anything a government does, you necessarily imply that withholding payment is an ethical means of protest against anything you object to the government doing, in proportion to the amount it spends on doing that thing. That strays dangerously far from the realpolitik situation, where your government will take its pound of flesh from you, whether you like what it does with it afterward or not.

The heart of the matter is that anyone or anything with an obscene amount of money has to eventually deal with London and New York, and the latter connection provides the access point by which the US IRS can bully and browbeat international banks into complying with any arbitrary and capricious rule that the US cares to institute, with the threat of losing an extortionate portion of any quantity of their money that passes through New York.

Many Americans suffer from the common delusion that life should, in some way, be fair, despite all available evidence to the contrary. This fuels all sorts of irrational outrage and bad behavior. In this case, expatriates are left to wonder "why is the US government spending so much effort on screwing me over for no reason?"
Unclear. What is clear is that Warner/Chappell don't have a valid copyright claim, but due to the history of the song/lyrics/tune other claimants could come forward and claim to own the copyright.

Happy Birthday will DEFINITELY be in the public domain in 2030, because claims of ownership seem to end in 1935, however as the Warner/Chappell claim has been debunked it might be public domain as early as 2022.

Keep in mind that "unknown owner" and "public domain" aren't the same thing. At the moment Happy Birthday isn't old enough to be public domain, there just may not be a known or established owner, so it could be "de facto public domain."
The Physical Web Expands to Chrome for Android
Right now Yardbook is strictly a tool for the vendor (lawn professional). You can almost think about us as Salesforce and quickbooks for landscapers and gardeners. We haven't yet built out an experience for the homeowner to find and choose vendors, but that is definitely a consideration.
Nice! My first impression of the website was positive. Some quick thoughts:

- I would like to see how the bottle (and maybe also packaging) looks like in real life before ordering.

- I would prefer to fill in my personal hair profile before entering my full name and email address.
Ars has a pretty fantastic write up on the whole thing [1]. Seems like beyond getting Atlantis into orbit, it would have required creating whole-cloth procedures for EVAs for extracting astronauts from a Shuttle and doing it with a skeleton crew of four people, which, even then, would have led to serious space issues on re-entry.

And even with all of that, was the question of, could Atlantis launch without the same insulation damage issue arising? Given that they hadn't prepared any mitigation strategies yet, the answer was "no" and under those conditions, the Shuttle is grounded.

How awful would it have been to lose Columbia AND Atlantis?

1: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-...
Yoga/meditation I assume?
Show HN: Transcrypt – Fast, small Python 3.5 to JavaScript transpiler
Except Meteor will not be using Webpack
By this definition, Julia is as strongly typed as possible: no automatic promotion or conversion is ever done for anything, including numbers. What appears to be "weak typing" is a clever application of multiple dispatch system with built-in fallback methods for numeric operations. See

http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/conversion-and-pr...
Hey HN, I wrote this to scratch a perpetual itch after reading enough API documentations and re-writing basically the same code over and over. Right now it only supports the most common flags that I saw. As far as I'm concerned the project is finished, but PRs are welcome to cover any glaring omissions or fix bugs.

Someone also showed me this tool which does the same thing but supports more languages and options: https://shibukawa.github.io/curl_as_dsl/