skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd think it's the least achievable thing of all. Governments will happily pass laws to {increase transparency / reduce privacy} and will happily pass laws that {add new taxes / close tax loopholes}, because these things align with their pre-existing agendas. They will not, under any circumstances, make it easier to engage in whistleblowing and especially not large data dumps, because governments absolutely do not want millions of { citizens holding them to account / vigilante info-warriors } increasing their OWN transparency!

That said, whilst I agree with that part, the rest of John Doe's essay left me cold. Other than its defence of whistleblowers it reads like more or less any standard left-ish Guardian article. The cause of increasing global inequality being a handful of law firms, really? They "write the laws" themselves, really? Which laws does he have in mind? All lawyers are corrupt and unethical? The British island territories are the "cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide" and not, say, African states where the corruption actually occurs? Billionaires own the press and serious investigative journalism is dead, except, presumably, the press and the journalists who he worked with?

I was and still am a huge supporter of Snowden because he revealed behaviour that was unquestionably bad. Literally nobody tried to defend what he showed was happening, and in fact the people doing it had lied in Congress to try and cover it up. It was a classic case where whistleblowing is justified. Additionally, Snowden had a very clear and straightforward thought process justifying his actions: what was happening was unconstitutional, and his attempts to use the formal complaint paths had failed.

John Doe comparing himself to Snowden rubs me up the wrong way, because although he claims the MF files are bursting with criminal evidence, so far all the stories I read about the Panama Papers were about things that are not illegal, and in fact apparently some of the papers show MF dropping clients when they started to suspect illegal activity, which implies MF was not quite the sinister conspiracy Doe makes it sound like. They clearly had legal compliance efforts and they clearly did things. And his justification is a long, rambling and rather incoherent screed that tries to claim the fault of every problem in the world lies with a kind of global conspiracy of evil and spineless people.

I think Doe is walking a very thin line between whistleblowing for a cause and generic vigilante-ism with his actions.
Inside the NYT Interactive Newsroom on Election Night
Indeed, the name would have been a hearty reassurance that the employer is not entirely lost up its own ass all the time.

I have always been a great fan of Dada, Surrealism, and Discordianism. So I am somewhat disappointed that it seems so dreadfully important to unwaveringly maintain the illusion that science is Serious Business. There is a time and place for both whimsy and gravitas in all aspects of life.
I think you are seriously underestimating the demand for Sir David Attenborough plushies. The dude is up there with Neil Degrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan with the I Fucking Love Science crowd pantheon of science fandom.
>Which is probably the usual reason people downvote. And it's a shit reason.

In a matter of public opinion about whether or not this would interest children in science - the votes are showing more people think it would than wouldn't.

I also have a feeling more downvotes are coming for trying to pass off their (minority) opinion as some sort of established fact that one could reason themselves into, when most people who have reasoned with themselves came to the opposite conclusion.

If you take that to the logical conclusion: they're insulting other people's intelligence for reaching the opposite conclusion. Which, last I checked, is not proper discourse on HN and routinely gets downvoted along with any other name calling.
The keyboard on the C64 is terrible though. I recently tried to get into C64 programming but got turned off by the tired and mushy keyboard.
Random observation: WTF would be a great base exception in a new, hip programming language.

WTF.happened
WTF.context
...and so on
I had forgotten about the number of apps, I just remember the postit-note style app in particular. I agree, it was mostly anti-ms fud... but it was still close enough to some really questionable motions by MS that they deserved some of that criticism. I was pretty big into C# at that point, and really liked the work being done.

I was mostly doing web apps (still am) and that story wasn't nearly as good as the desktop side of things. I still feel that C# is a really great language, and the bindings to native methods from managed code are still the best I've worked with... far better than JNI and other tooling. Probably why it was such a great fit, and why GTK# works so well.

I never bought the "but microsoft will always be ahead" argument, as the gtk apps that worked under mono wouldn't magically stop working because .Net kept moving forward.
What effect are you referring to other than "Oh yeah, I remember that thing that time" ?
> If god created the universe, but did not interact with it after it's creation then you can't claim him to be one of the many mythical figures people make him to be.

Sure, you can, since the watchmaker god precisely is one of the many mythical figures people make him out to be.

> Second, if god does interact with our universe he is than testable to some degree.

Not really; if you have a complete model of all interactions within our universe, you can test whether there is anything else acting on our universe (though that's indistinguishable from a gap in your model of what goes on in our universe). OTOH, if you have a predictive model of how God interacts with our universe (which mythical portrayals disagree on whether this is even in principle possible) you could test if that particular model seems accurate.
Why can't the blades be staggered so they don't follow in each other's wake?
Great work! The fact that data is stored in my account (to be read: under my control) instead of outsourcing to 3rd parties is a huge plus.

If you will be able to make it less "technical" and more "plug-and-play", I think this will be cool viable solution to integrate (to be read: for customers like ours, that uses serverless computing in enterprise apps -> https://github.com/MitocGroup/deep-framework).
Yep, I started it before that. I'd love to lessen the dependency on Babel/Webpack as much as possible.

I'm still using async/await, ES6 modules and some other more experiment ES-next features, so I think it will be awhile before Babel/Webpack can be completely removed. Of course, I don't really have to use those features. :-)
Actually their CEO is African American..
How are vote buying and voter intimidation enabled by online voting more than absentee voting?
Thank you very much for this. I was under the false impression that these informations would be hidden forever and just be accessible for a few.
Nature by default doesn't have nuclear weapons, stock exchanges, global supply chains, industrial manufacturing, central banks, etc. Humans need morals (and norms more generally) in order to ensure that the above serve us rather than hurt us. Morals are a cultural technology like language or counting, and like those they may be (at least in their strong form) uniquely human.
Are you making some sort of case against canaries? The most direct reading of this thread is that you're shouting at clouds, because you've put forth no arguments, just contrary opinions.
I enjoyed "The Fall of Hacker Groups". Clearly there is some deep nostalgia for the 2600 days out there ;)

"The only attitude consonant to our search for a comfortable, safe life is to constrain ourselves to our
own limitations, ignore the intelligent life out there, and surrender to the mediocracy that our society has condemned our leisure time to."
I'm not real worried about resource availability limiting production of batteries, but the lead comparison doesn't seem to provide much information about how much lithium can be produced over short to medium terms.

I know next to nothing about geology, but a little browsing suggests that it is easy to find galena and that it is a much more productive ore than the typical lithium ores.
'What did it sound like?'

I loved that film. Loved it.
Nothing, but no one will/should trust them without cryptographic expert consensus saying it's ready. Right now, the cryptographers most familiar with it are working on/with the official team and aren't clamoring to release it yet.

And anyone doing an early release will need to handle the initial parameter selection which has to be done publicly/securely to convince people that the private key toxic waste (that would theoretically allow counterfeiting) wasn't retained.

They are planning a secure multiparty computation that never creates the private key in usable form provided that at least one of the n parties follows the procedure correctly. This again relies on expert consensus that the process is secure.

On a side note, this is likely to produce some fun spectacle: I fully expect someone involved will try to verify they destroyed their private key share by live streaming the generation process then immediately and totally destroying the equipment involved.
Yes, although it might be a different challenge than coding the AI for a slot car. "The challenge for 2016 is yet to be revealed."
The problem is that you can't define "loophole". It's a meaningless term.

What one man perceives as a loophole, another man perceives as the correct functioning of the law as designed. Ultimately trying to second guess the law is a bad idea and lawyers, in particular, should not be in the business of saying "this is legal, but you shouldn't do it because it violates my own personal ethics". Lawyers are supposed to advise on the law, not act as wannabe politicians.
Prominent deists tended to also be major detractors of religious institutions (not just particular religious institutions, but the idea of religion and religious institutions), and very often were liberal rather than conservative thinkers, so I find the idea that deism was somehow a conservative response to justify religion as an institution to be rather hard to swallow.
Or there have been claims of morals for a long time. As in, "what serves my interests is moral".
All the positions are onsite?
Couldn't be happier that Phrack is still alive and well--still miss BSRF:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/v743p/what_ever_ha...
Sure. But there's no reason one couldn't start with a BASIC-like language in Racket. Someone would just have to implement it and support it. It's crazy powerful, see eg:

"Creating Languages in Racket -
Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap."
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2068896j
It's the other way around. American's can more easily get the same services on-shore, for instance, by setting up shell companies in Delaware.
This is a common and dangerous mistake. The size and timing of requests is visible, as is the hostname. It is straightforward to watch a cafe and identify all the requests corresponding to Wikipedia, and within those the Tienenman Square page.

HTTPS is designed to protect secrets, not privacy. That means short random bitstrings, given that the adversary knows you're passing short random bitstrings---TLS just keeps him from figuring out the actual random content.
Cargo shifting is a big deal. The yearly casualty rate for Bering Sea crab fishing used to be over 1% per year, because the shifting weight of crab pots on overloaded vessels in heavy seas. I saw a training film when I was aboard a tender boat in Alaska. Those boats could look fine one minute then capsize and be as good as sunk in the next 2. Shifting weight on vessels has and does cause rapid capsizing and deaths at sea.
I would be curious as to where you get "vast majority" from.

One of the things I love HN community for is the overall interest in collecting and representing reliable statistical information.

The reason I am questioning "vast majority" is that when something is illegal, it's very hard to derive accurate statistics on. When something is illegal your primary sources of information is law enforcement, people who have exited, and what a few people involved in the activity will volunteer. Since the activity is illegal, few people who are actively involved will volunteer information for the fear of having it used against them. Add to that the stigma that sexual services carries with it (regardless if they were cohered or not), and people REALLY do not want to divulge information about their activities in sexual services even after they have exited.

Because of this any metrics derived will be very law-enforcement biased, or from a vastly small sample of the overall community. Neither of these are reliable sources of information. Just looking at how the FBI in recent years /reduced/ the number of statistics available on their sexual-service stings is a great example of this. It makes it impossible for anyone to derive reliable or trend-able information from the statistics they have released.

Here's a great article that explains a lot of what I'm saying with links to verifiable references

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/...
Musk commented recently that he is indeed keeping a sharp eye on new-gen batteries, but nothing looks good for business use in the near-term horizon.
> I'm ethical - the lawyers I work with are ethical. The
vast majority of lawyers are ethical.

Please don't confuse "ethical" with "not illegal".
Forget about security email lists. Get all your news with Telegram bot
Related: http://cmx.io/ for markup-based xkcd-style comic generation, this old thread on xkcd-style graphs, which includes some d3 examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597977, and http://xkcdgraphs.com/
Has AirBnB commented?
SIRS: The Food Cops and Their Ever-Changing Menu of Taboos
People are trying to talk up existing investments somewhere in the lithium chain, or trying to get investments for somewhere in that chain; or if you like tinfoil hats, fossil fuel interests are trying to inject uncertainty into the growth of electric cars.

I think the last possibility is probably silly because available Lithium resources will likely behave similarly to other extracted commodities such as oil - with the difference that you can likely recycle lithium out of expended batteries.
They're not going to change anything, and it doesn't even make sense to suggest that they should. /usr/bin/git isn't a Git binary. It's a tool that is equivalent to running `xcrun git "$@"` (which runs git from inside your default Xcode / Command Line Tools installation). So even if you could replace /usr/bin/git, you'd still have a vulnerable Git binary on your system, since you won't have replaced the tool that /usr/bin/git was actually executing.
Of course if there is any chance of the rocket moving, it isn't even safe to pull up alongside, let alone send people onto the deck to secure it.
The call for whistleblower protection is important, but it'll never happen. The powers-that-be don't want to encourage whistleblowers.

What may change their mind is if all the data were made public. Since whistleblowers have not much protections, their only protection right now is to release everything on the 'net, anonymously. Now, clearly this is not a good idea, as in many cases there will be collateral damage. But what is the alternative? Once the governments see that such collateral damage is the only alternative, they will be force to enact meaningful whistleblower protection.
Here you can find many of those text files that used to sit on BBSs and floppy disks back in the day: http://www.textfiles.com/directory.html
A friend of mine in Houston Texas had a bumper sticker that said, "Yes, I'm literally a Rocket Scientist!" He had a degree in physics and maintained the software that tracked the Space Shuttle's trajectory.
This is it. Redis is one of the few things in the data-persistence space that is honest about what it can't do.

So many other DBs, caches, or whatever will promise that they can solve all my problems, making me quite angry when I spend weeks developing around them and find out that I've just wasted all that time because their marketing people lied to me.
In the blog post, I do link to some projects you can run on your own server. Actually, it wouldn't take much work to modify the code in this project to run in a Node.js daemon. I might just do it anyways to make testing/dev easier.
If we are supposed to be the last line of defense against poor English in products on the US market then that explains a lot.
This is really cool. Nice one.

It will desperately need a moderation queue.

Even smaller established websites get a ton of comment spam these days. I'd not even consider setting up any commenting system that doesn't have robust spam protection.
KE = 0.5mv^2, so the second stage would only have 16x the kinetic energy if the two stages had the same mass.

The dry mass of the first stage is approximately 25,600kg. At 2km/s, its kinetic energy is 51.2 terajoules. The dry mass of the second stage is approximately 3,900kg. At 8km/s, its kinetic energy is 125 terajoules.

So the KE of the second stage is actually about ~2.4x that of the first stage.

Here is were I found the masses of the stages: http://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-v1-1-f9r/
I'm fine about sporting events, because it's about something that doesn't matter --- the whole point of sport is to channel the sex-violence-and-tribalism thing in a safe and relatively controlled fashion.

What disturbs me about something like the chanting at SpaceX is that it's something that does matter, and which I feel strongly about. Seeing their great technical achievement turn into exclusionary tribal posturing makes me very sad.

I'm sure there's a long way to go before SpaceX fans and STS fans start beating each other up in the street... but it is one step down that path.
After MH370 there is a way to see location data from remote aircraft
I appreciate the criticism you are making to the popular social apps and the initiative, but I don't see how this one improves anything. Conversations don't have a place in the app, experiences are reduced to a picture and an icon that people can use to fake their lives to feel better, "likes" are everywhere, replacing actual relationships.

I've been wanting and thinking about a better social network for a lot of time now, so I guess you can ignore my criticism, because it is based on what I would have done and you didn't, so biased. Anyway, it is sincere.
I agree, I can imagine NASA became complacent, stopped embracing risk, prioritised perfection over practicability and became similar to many public sector departments.
> no real progress

My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress?

I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy.

As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half again by removing all the vendor bloatware.
Four Episodes in the Life of Einstein’s Mother
What can I say?

If you're looking for bad actors and intentional wrongdoers behind every mishap in the world... then that's the kind of world you'll end up living in.
The site is down and I can't get to Google's cache of it either, but the GitHub project is still up: https://github.com/sebcrozet/ncollide
NBC Sports to Broadcast the Kentucky Derby in Virtual Reality
Yahooligas
I meant relative to the mass of the stage, since that's what's relevant to the challenge.
Here's a configurable version by Mozilla: https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generat...
As a beginner to Objective-C, I found reading the source here highly informative, because it gives you a rare peek at the actual machinery underneath everything that's going on.
Simply incredible. Elon Musk is the New Thomas Edison
Given the current government war on encryption and the snowden revelations, we might say it's as timely today as it was in 92' if not more
1. I'm not talking about botnets, I'm talking about sites that crawl your content to copy your database and mine competitive intelligence on it.

2. Clients should be running firewalls anyway, yeah, yeah. 99% of the security holes online are because of "shoulds". In the wild many, many, many people will assume their IP is unguessable and then it will leak _somehow_. A single hacked device on the other side of the firewall, or a misconfigured firewall, etc.

3. Well that might be true for your home internet, but it's almost certainly not true for your mobile phone unless you live somewhere weird.
> Pretty much all the minority advocacy groups fight for more rent control, or at the very least section 8 housing

Rent control and section 8 are totally different things.

Also, in much of New York 80%+ of apartments are rent-controlled: http://www.nakedapartments.com/guides/nyc/renting-in-new-yor....
I know this "BitLicense" is technically different than the more general licensing requirements for "money transmitters." But FinCEN compliance is a regulatory nightmare. The process of licensing as a "money transmitter" is slow, expensive, and done on a state-by-state basis. The "money transmitter" classification [0] is very broad, and effectively qualifies any middleman as one. Keep in mind these are the same licenses that businesses like banks and brokerages need to get.

The regulatory compliance process is so expensive and complex that even large companies sometimes delay getting the proper licensing. Facebook, which qualifies as a money transmitter due to its payments system, and operates in all fifty states, at one point had licenses in only fifteen of them. [1] So technically Facebook was operating as an unlicensed money transmitter for multiple months.

Also see a quora answer for some personal anecdotes (behind FB nag wall). [2]

And I'm a big fan of the article "money laundering is financial thoughtcrime," posted to HN a while back. [3]

More:

[0] http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=f7495bb4cb9f4181f15...

[1] http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/facebook-obtains-money-tra...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-hard-is-it-to-get-a-money-transmit...

[3] http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/money-laundering-is-...
Not so much "inside" as an overview. But the scale of the place is pretty impressive.
400K? You might be able to get a porta-potty for that much. Try $1M.
You are completely forgetting about voluntary restrictions on land use via mechanisms like Homeowners' Associations. Want to enforce setback on your new development? Fine. But how do you know that setback is what everyone in the whole city needs?
Article is actually titled "Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals" which is less sensational and more accurate.
This is one I had never thought of... wild. I would think that cross-domain policy would block setting window.opener.location
The Huffington Post comments for this article are...something else.
A lot of rules around shipping actually have to do with physics. See my other comment. Shifting cargo can be very bad news. It has caused a lot of deaths. It's probably not a big deal in this case, except that booster is worth about (I'm guessing) 20 million dollars, SpaceX's cost? It's tall, but the center of gravity is low and it's on a barge.

Engineering is conservative "just in case." So are a lot of practical activities that happen on the sea. In neither case, is this irrational or a waste of time.
Jack Dorsey has lost $340M in two weeks
The Intel CPU's with unlocked multi's have had VT-D for a couple iterations now. They're still useless if you have zero plans to overclock. (Even more so now they don't even come with stock coolers anymore.)