skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And who would verify the passport's authenticity? That takes training."

The same way you verify ID now: for low risk (relative to your business) things, you judge a person and the quality of whatever piece of paper they present, for slightly higher risk, you limit that to a set of more official documents you recognize (say passports and driver's licenses of nearby states), for more official things, you go to a notary.

I fail to see what group of transactions falls between "It is OK to follow common sense and your gut w.r.t. the validity of the documents someone presents to check identity" and "you have to go to a notary" that visiting a post office would cater for.

"Every state has a different drivers license format: including watermarks and other security features. Post Office Employees in Texas will know how to read the Texas Drivers License (but not necessarily one from New York)."

So, post office workers, at least currently, cannot help solve that problem.

A nation-wide ID that almost everybody can show would help there, but it also would make people more familiar with recognizing it, decreasing the probability that one will think "I need help handling this kind of ID"

Also, a decent modern nation-wide ID could have electronic ways for relative laymen to verify it, for example a chip that allows one to query 'does this passport ID go with this name/city of birth/photo?'

TLDR: how often is the desire to verify identity so great that it warrants visiting a post office or paying a post office employee to visit you?
A curious thing: Every Wine Advocate-rated sake from one exporter
Except will that happen? ... :)
The arrested guy's spoutings are quite funny because they're exactly what the people on the receiving end of piracy tend to say:

“To all the [anti-piracy groups and authorities]: You are a lot of vile shit, destroying lives of people who are already struggling to pay their rent, their food, their bills,” he said.

Right, it's only pirates who have bills to pay. The people who make content get their homes for free!

“Why all this? Because they wanted to watch and because they didn’t necessarily have the capabilities to buy a DVD / BluRay or go to the theaters.”

If you own a computer and an internet connection good enough to torrent blurays then you can afford a DVD and a cheap player, certainly a theatre ticket. "Didn't necessary have the capabilities" is pure rationalisation - it's a fantasy entirely divorced from reality, intended to let him tell himself that he's a good person really.
Funny that, I think its too general!

Its a blank canvas - when you sign up who do you tell? With FBK, you invite friends, with Linkedin its your colleagues. But Twitter?
The work done by David Belk MD shows that these costs are an extremely small cost of hospitals, and that you're basically promoting a myth. [1][2]

He directly addresses the inaccuracy of that claim in the following 10 minute video, "The $55,000 Appendectomy: What Everyone Should Know About Hospital Bills". [3]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4lgnif/i_am_david_bel...

[2] http://truecostofhealthcare.net/conclusion/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkAY15p2DN4
Im not saying it has to be done a certain way. Im saying my college required the paper to have margins, a title, etc. Im surprised most of them dont require a date of any kind on the document sonewhere. They could write the year in Size 8 in upper-right corner in light grey and that would be better than many in my collection. ;)
(Subtly) edited :)
Why do you think it was a mistake?
Yep, sorry about that. Cannot find a way to fix the typo.
Twitter is really only useful for following influencers, famous public figures, popular people, however you'd like to describe them. There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users. Everything people go to Twitter for therefore can be done without having an actual account yourself; everything is public, so why have an account other than to curate a list of things prominent users say.

Which might not even be a bad model if you think about it. To have it be the premier "find out what they said" space, without the hoopla from idiots, trolls, etc. Would people pay to visit a site like that? I'm not sure. Would there be a way to monetize that sort of experience? I think so. Just my $0.02.
Show HN: Open Synthesis – open platform for CIA-style analysis of current events
From the perspective of the author of that article it's certainly professional networking, because she wrote a book about it :-).
Single digits is still excessive, we are talking 5 or 6 years in jail for crimes which were void of any financial gain. I'm thinking g of weev and swartz who are both dealt with in the article.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/41-months-weev-underst...
Author here, I started the project to help people deal with that information overload that modern media has brought with it.

The platform currently supports the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) technique [1]. Eventually, after we figure out ACH, I hope to roll out additional collaborative analysis techniques developed in the intelligence and business communities.

The submitted link is for a playground instance that has no editing restrictions and that doesn't require an email address to register. Please play nice! The official site is at https://www.opensynthesis.org. You can request an invite for the official site via Google Forms at https://goo.gl/forms/P6Lgx3nqAhD4zQ8v1. We’ll be opening the site up once we get a better handle on moderation features.

The project is open source (GPLv3): https://github.com/twschiller/open-synthesis. It’s built with Python 3 + Django. You can deploy a private instance to try via the Heroku Button.

The platform is very young and is rough around the edges. There's still a lot of interesting challenges to solve, especially with respect to user experience and community design. For example: what's the best commenting system? What's the best approach to moderation for politically-sensitive topics?

Want to help? I'm looking for contributors to help out with everything from design (we need a logo!) to devops and community building. Check out the 'Help Wanted' label on the issue tracker for concrete ideas of how to contribute. Alternatively, shoot me an email (email is in my profile).

Project Twitter: @opensynthesis

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypothes...
Not in the least (which isn't to say the relations aren't strained, just that this has nothing to do with that). Other major banks were pursued for similar amounts.
Woit's language is usually so measured it's actually shocking to see him straight up call someone 'embarrassingly incompetent'
Yup, I actually paid for two of these services before I realized they're just audio content. Great business for them, bad product for me.
To me the struggle is the rare collision of having both free time and ANY energy at the point the free time comes. Most of my energy goes into all those other buckets. I can see why some people just stare at a TV (which I don't have) or do other passive entertainment (which I'm sure I do). To be fair to myself...I do exercise (usually biking) 1-2 hours every day, which some will classify as "free time". While it is often enjoyable, I don't consider it an optional, spontaneous, or random endeavor...which is usually what I consider "free" (or "unplanned") time.
While it's true few people can snap their fingers to accomplish these goals, you certainly can over a period of 5-10 years by working on them consciously.
It used to be called DreamSpark, and it was awesome when I was in college - particularly since in those days, the Express, single-language free versions of VS hadn't come out quite yet, and the community edition was yet to be a twinkle in someone's eye.

It looks like they give away many Azure services now as well (https://catalog.imagine.microsoft.com/en-us)
Mostly spouse, children and lack of free time or energy after the abovementioned.
Beating 99% of people who weight train with modified bodyweight exercises is definitely a stretch.

A pushup is equivalent to benching roughly 64% of your body weight. So if we say one armed is similar to benching 128% of your bodyweight... That puts a person in the intermediate level of weight training.

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/BenchStandards.htm...
Omeprazole is a mixture of two mirror image molecules. One of the two versions is the active and the other isn't (for 97% of the population). When the patent was running out on omeprazole AstraZeneca patented esomeprazole, which is just the active isomer. In order to show improvement over omeprazole they did clinical trials that used a higher effective dose of esomeprazole than omeprazole. The FDA, for reasons unknown, let them get away with this fraud and approved the drug.

The government has spent literally billions of dollars buying esomeprazole when a double dose of omeprazole is the same damn thing for 97% of the population. I caveated my original statement ("something close to") because there might be some role for esomeprazole as a second line drug for the 3% of the population that is sensitive to the other isomer, but even there a perfectly fine alternative would just be a lower dose of omeprazole.

Nexium is 18th on the list of drugs by global sales in 2014. These are not small potatoes.
I think a lot of people expect this to be the way it works, and perhaps it should be, but it's not the way business thinks. They see it as you volunteering free labor and that's pretty much it.

There is some research showing that coming in early makes your manager rate you higher. But it seems unrelated to number of hours, ironically. http://qz.com/209513/no-matter-what-the-boss-says-about-flex...
> Is torrenting ebooks too immoral? Are there other options to getting plain text scifi/fantasy books?

You forgot that you can access most of the books at libraries. How immoral is
that? How immoral is researching using books borrowed from a library?
It's not how most people end up using React and it just causes confusion.
Well, in fairness he is somewhat smart. Most people don't successfully hack the FBI and the Federal Reserve.
> ...but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi.

That's absurd. I've seen numerous articles in online entertainment media sites (e.g. People, US Mag, TMZ, Buzzfeed) that are solely made up of embedded tweets. CNN and MSNBC (and even Fox News) reference tweets all the time. Maybe Twitter as a company has failed to monetize the platform properly and shareholders have taken a loss but to downplay Twitter's cultural impact seems largely misguided.
I don't understand. There are plenty of probes from other countries listed in that article.
Technically speaking they could target VPN users by infecting uploaded files with a simple trojan that pings home to a server, I assume you disable VPN after the download is complete.
3. Don't Answer Comment Threads Asking for Advice on How to Fake Your Own Death
There are two different Gigafactories. Tesla is building the one in Nevada for batteries, and that's the one you hear about in the news the most often. SolarCity is building a different Gigafactory for solar panels in Buffalo, New York.
No too many, and if I work on any on of them I get grumpy and addicted :|
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I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.
If your laptop was able to boot from USB, perhaps you could place the second disk (the one with Linux) in an external USB 2.0 (better yet 3.0) case. That'd solve the issue...
Tesla make a lot of people happy but there must be accountants at Jaguar, BMW etc. who have not enjoyed losing sales to the California start up. However there are many happy Tesla customers and only a small handful of motor company accountants. Obviously there are sales staff too plus suits in the oil companies who have been pained by Tesla, but still the balance is a net happy one. Compare with Tony Blair, makes his business cronies happy but inflicts more misery.

Footballers do have a connection with their fans and it is their admiration that is sought far more than money. So they are very much in it to bring happiness to the world, to put on the show. I don't see them working for free though.
Mediachain: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards
The LaySee Pillow – The pillow for people who wear glasses
Funny you mention two days of basic training being your worst mistake.

My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics. Once I was able to control that urge, it was pretty straightforward. I saw it, essentially, as six weeks of necessary bullshit that allowed me to get to the next level.

My term in the USAF as a 3C0X2 (computer programmer) was fantastically beneficial. I'd already been programming for over a decade when I went in. But the installation I landed at allowed me to really learn in a lot of new directions.

Having said that, I know a lot of folks that had a far less productive time. But it's still a pretty good way to bootstrap a life independent from family, in my opinion at least. The money from the GI bill is very valuable, plus, with some measure of self control, single Airmen can save up a ton of money, since the USAF pays in full for food, housing and medical.
Hopefully this works http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4ItGP5H...
But it's where you can see news before it's on the news. As a politics junkie (even in the UK) this is the prime reason I've always spent much more time on twitter than on facebook or any other social network (which are, you know, too social).

I have recently stopped using twitter because it was becoming too much on an addiction. I went back for a few days around Brexit, but I've not been back since. If I want to follow a political story in real time in the future though, I know where I'll go.
It's not a murder but...

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/20/the-long-ar...

>The cerebral Gundlach also gave investigators a tip for solving the crime. He says that while he was at home in his family room, it dawned on him that thieves would do a Google search using his grandmother’s name to find out more about the paintings and how much they might be worth... Gundlach told the authorities that they should check the Internet to see who might have googled the name Helen Fuchs. He says exactly two such searches were executed: one by him and one by the thieves.

That's just from a quick Google. I've heard of criminals becoming suspects from Googling crimes before they become public, it's not that hard to identify an early or frequent Googler in most cases especially if they are logged in.
It's actually easier than you'd think. A friend and his high school buddies decided to prank one of their friends by all writing on his all saying how sorry they were to hear about his dad, he was a great man, RIP, etc. Other people saw those and jumped on the bandwagon, writing their own condolences. It was a sick but very successful prank.
Show HN: A crowdfunding platform to combat patent trolls
It might be in the video (I don't have time to watch it to find out). It isn't in the slides (which I can skim quickly, and therefore I did).
Most of Europe doesn't act like us or behave like us and are pretty "secure" from a national security perspective.

The only power that really matters is economic power and, honestly, military strength doesn't really help with that past the point you are roughly equal to everyone else.
How to keep your HealthKit data
> In constrast, a Turing Machine makes no separation between code and data; it just has a tape (the machine's transition table is more like a language's interpreter than a program).

I think you're conflating "Turing machine" with "universal Turing machine".

In a standard Turing machine, the state transition table is the "code". That code could be an interpreter for another language, including for arbitrary Turing machines, or it could be something entirely different. Either way, it's static, just like a Brainfuck program. In fact, the translation from Brainfuck to a Turing machine is trivial: if each cell of the tape is a byte, then each character of the program becomes one state of the machine.
There are "Prison Consultants" that exist for this. Besides survival their main avenue of expertise is how to influence the decision on where you will be sent and/or transfer to your prison of choice.

Madoff hired a consultant which is why he's teaching economics classes at a minimum security trustee camp right now instead of letting the system just send him anywhere.
It really depends on the type of work that you're doing. If the work requires a lot of communication and details that need to be hashes out with people from various disciplines (i.e. PM, UX, Eng), you need to be colocated to get the job done quickly. Doing this part remote will only lead to frustrations and missed deadlines. But if everything is fully spec'd out and split into bite-size pieces for engineers to simply fill in the wholes with code and follow the spec, then a remote team can work really well. I've seen this many times at past consulting companies and now a product company where we do have some remote workers.
Pythonwise: Simple Object Pools
So if as a regular citizen I commit 2 rapes (and they know who I am) if I am able to disappear for 2 years, then I'm free? That's convenient.
Twitter at its most basic has a product problem and not a revenue or sales problem. I think for product problems founders have a unique perspective and legitimacy to make tough decisions. My guess is that the need for this founder perspective coupled with the fact that Jack was the only founder who was even partially available led to the decision of having him on as part time CEO.
It sounds to me that he is lying... A lot. He accepted a settlement and now is suing again because that wasn't enough? He doesn't want people to think his item is niche and expensive... But it is. He raised the price from something already expensive to "I think I'll just carry around a tent". When you improve something, normally you improve defects and make it better, so it should cost around the same price. Why double the price for something a little better? This guy seems to not know how to run a company at all.
Banking entities that admit guilt risk having all sorts of government business pulled or other limitations placed on them. The Feds are protecting their own interests to a great extent. I think it's still the case that you can't even trade in US treasuries as a primary dealer if you get slapped with a major conviction.
This is the perfect reason to use unique email addresses: they enable you to know exactly what the origin of the 'leak' is, and when you disable the address, the other addresses keep working normally.
No, because I don't use Jupyter notebooks.
I am seriously struggling to understand the rationale for that.
Real-Time Stream Processing: A Survey and Decision Guidance
I think the core problem is that Twitter should be a protocol, not a company. There's just no need for there to be any servers: users could send messages to one another, each running his own agents.

Since the Twitter experience doesn't need the Twitter corporation, there's always going to be friction and centrifugal force.
It is probably neutralised as otherwise the toothpaste wouldn't be effective. Increasing pH is one of the mechanisms killing bacteria and preventing decay.
I noticed that too. My question is, why then?
<rant>
I don't know, Jira feels like a conspiracy theory in action: Atlassian somehow tricked management into adopting JIRA. Then the management had to pay insane prices for external plugins in order to allow programmers to do trivial things like displaying in a visually appealing way hours spent over a week.

It's really an awesome business model. Worked great for Microsoft.
</rant>
No, I wish there was. Those were painstakingly drawn by hand.
> Hmm, I've noticed a huge spike of anti-China news sourced from USA lately. This also includes Chinese replacing the generic Russians as bad guys in popular media in games.

> What gives? Is USA gearing up the propaganda engine for another cold war?

Market manipulation, hacking US networks, and military posturing towards our allies. (e.g. Japan)
Hi Hacker News!

Patents were created to promote innovation, but as the whole industry agrees now, they're actually hurting innovators.
Patent trolls are using them to sue the hell out of startups and innovators — more than $29bn/year are wasted on patent trolls, not to mention the $21bn on VC investment also wasted on them.

We want to change this trend by empowering companies to invalidate patents that threaten them and the whole ecosystem.

Everyone can create a campaign against a patent, and then interested companies can back it. With the raised amount, we reward people for contributing prior art — which is any evidence that a patent was not novel. Then we file a reexamination before the patent office.

Patent office/lawyer fees + prior art rewards should be minimum $20k, which is extremely small for anything regarding IP litigation. The process takes ~6 months.

We chose patent '435 because it affects the whole ecosystem - everyone customizes online content with some user's preferences.

Let's kill stupid patents together! Feedback and personal experiences are super welcome. Thanks!
HN definitely has this bias and it's not a place to expect reasonable discussion of Microsoft, but if you look at the actual headline of the article instead of the submitted one the use of "weaponize" has more context and makes sense: "Microsoft Weaponizes Minecraft in the War over Classrooms"
The CFAA is too blunt of an instrument. At the very least it should have options for lesser charges.

But for some reason every politician's reaction to cyber events is to make the CFAA more draconian. President Obama is actually in favor of adding more provisions by amendment this year.

I'm not sure of the correct way to handle cybercrime laws, but I know the CFAA isn't it.
That's definitely one way of looking at it. Which is a fair point.

However, I worry it's implying suicide or murder as 'better' choices than faking your own death. Which is an incredibly disturbing thought.
I don't see how there would be a need for that. The code will work in Jupyter Notebooks just as it will work in a different IDE.

I came from Python using iPython. I missed them for the first few weeks, but now I can't switch from RStudio. It really is just such a great tool for data science.
If you were right, the US would not have pursued its own banks for similarly massive fines.
If you pre-order on amazon, you'll get the final version as soon as it's available.
The U.S. wasn't as smart as it should have been. Let's put it that way.
I work for a medical group that does just this. It is indeed possible and profitable. You just have to pay taxes on earnings.
Like I said, anecdotally. And I'm not talking about company policy, I'm talking about the behavior of individual engineers/managers during and after interviews. Even if a company has a policy that it WANTS to hire more women, it needs the people actually conducting the interviews on board for that policy to be meaningful.