skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Could we replace parts of the financial sector with computers?
Let me make it very clear: I don't have a lot of knowledge on the subject, so please excuse me if what I'm asking or saying is naive.

It seems like every day now that we read about housing meltdowns, LIBOR fraud, accounting scandals, and other financial market misdoings. It's apparent that our current financial system is not only unstable and unaccountable, but unsustainable as failure and fraud continue to destroy companies and nations. While I won't pretend like I know anything about how the financial sector works as a whole, it seems to me like, at the very least, large sections of it could be entirely automated and digitized, reducing the systematic vulnerability to fraud.

Take the Big Four public accountancy firms, for example. It seems to me (again, not having a deep knowledge of the industries) that the tax system and accounting should be handled entirely by computers since data handling is something computers do infinitely better than humans. We could easily eliminate many of the issues that lead to things like the Enron scandal with automatic computer based auditing, and resultant data from the sector as a whole would provide better insight for systemic issues.

I'm just trying to pull at the thread... let me know what you think.

Also, to any CPA's that I may have offended, I apologize. If it makes you feel any better, I think computers will replace everything we do at some point, and then we'll all just have to make art.
Naturally they're doing enormous amounts of market research.

Does this pass a sanity test? What they're talking about would be the biggest breakthrough in computing in a generation. The question is not whether there's a market for it. The question is whether it works.
we have plans to open it to unlimited participants - stay tuned for this and more shortly
An Unsearchable Problem (Meta Googling)
> Conservatives are anti all powerful controlling government (freedom from tyranny).

No. People who support democratic (note the small D) ideals are against an all powerful controlling government and tyranny. Note that this can include anarchists, in addition to those favoring a more traditional states. Neither conservatives nor liberals have shown themselves adverse to using the machinery of the state to give force to their views.
In terms of pure monetary value it is irrelevant, actually. Yes, $0.50 is much more a saving relative to meal price than car price, but it's still $0.50, aka. insignificant amount of money, usually not worth the time it takes to argue for it.
Yeah, Kyle seems to be missing some sort of social intelligence that most people possess -- or maybe career incentives make him choose to ignore or rationalize away what his social intelligence is telling him about how people are going to react.

EDIT: removed sentence that probably overstepped HN norms around meanness.
Could be blackmail gone unanswered (e.g pay us or we publish), could be hatred of Yahoo (either a competitioner, an employee, or just someone who feels wronged).

Or it could be a need to prove onself -- see what I can do, now fear my wrath.

Or it could simply be hatred of humanity, you embarrass people enough and they may lass out on you -- in this case by putting your password online, in other cases by bringing a gun to school.

Summing up, it strongly depends on who did it.
Patrick, can I ask if you get any actual calls in response to "call and talk to the real person" offer on your website? I'm sure many on HN recognize the importance of having a phone number on the site, but it'd be very helpful to know what it translates to in real world.
Ask HN: Minimum requirements (mainly legal) for accepting payments as a startup
Hey folks!

I realize content aggregators probably aren't the best place to ask for legal advice, but I can't afford a lawyer at the moment and researching this information on the web yields a pretty wide variety of verbose results. So what better place to ask than here among people with years of experience doing exactly what I'm trying to do?

The thread title should cover most of it, but more specifically, I'll be providing SaaS and operating out of my own home for the time being. What is the bare minimum that I can do to start receiving monthly payments from my customers and not worry about the IRS or whoever breathing down my neck? I have a feeling setting up an LLC or possibly incorporating up front is probably the best move to make, tax-wise; but if I can wait a little while (a few months maybe) to go to that extent, can I do that and still legally receive monthly payments until then through Stripe or something?
Show me the benchmarks. I have no reason to believe that the buggy, ad-hoc versions being written over and over again in every node app are faster than writing one good version and using it.

And it is not a call for a sync model. It is a call for a sane API.
That appears to be incorrect. Looking at the actual law, via the link provided on the submitted site (not just the section linked to, but also the surrounding sections), it looks like in the above situation you would be off the hook.

See section 50(3)(b). Also relevant is 53(1) and 53(4).
Uber rolling out on-demand ice cream trucks this Friday
An RPN Calculator In 113 Characters of Ruby
Love the idea of dropping repeaters and back-tracking if the wi-fi connection is lost. I guess you could also extend it to remember where the repeaters were dropped and try to navigate to one of these spots if the backtracking fails (imaging some debris coming in the way after the robot has moved ahead, making backtracking impossible).
Wow, apparently some people are so blinded by fanboyism (I know one such person myself) that they can't accept something created by Apple might have an issue. Some of the answers can be summed up as "hey, before you couldn't do X before, so stop moaning and keep doing what you did before if you don't like how X works!".

Even in the bad old days of Microsoft MVPs you didn't get answers as hostile as that. This is almost religious fervor. WTF?
Simule seu cons&oacute;rcio
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"But the Chinese, they will latch on to the concept of a 'diploma' forever."

Actually, the Chinese are the ones who invented 'meritocracy'.
Library authors won't, and I would argue shouldn't, make their code dependent on a particular promises implementation. When/if either ES standards body or Node authors choose a method that will become the default. Until then individuals will use the library they like, or none at all, and we've gotten by without promises in the last 10 years that JS has exploded in popularity.

By the way, Q can easily wrap node-style callbacks in a single line.
This includes, occasionally, eating alone, if you love the right people.
Heh. That's like the old joke about how "functional programming is the future of programming: always has been, always will be".
That's because the judicial branch was design to be a-political.

While I enjoy reading Posner's opinions, I think he should run for office if he wants to be in the political spotlight. I don't want judges creating and pushing new political theories. I want them to spend their time and energy understanding the laws created by legislators and interpreting those laws as best they can through the filter of the Constitution.
3 AZs all in the US-East region. That's consistent with what we're talking about.
Big Science and Big Data: New Vistas of Discovery
The EU does not allow business method patents, which is what most people actually mean when they say "software patents". It does allow computer algorithm patents.
The "Industrial Revolution" of Software.
"Unfortunately, cheap, off-the-shelf WiFi repeater units are not available and the network configuration for the devices we did find was extremely difficult, so we decided to use consumer-grade Linksys routers loaded with the open-source dd-wrt firmware."

Did you look at Ubiquiti devices? Their PicoStation would be perfect for this.

Also, and this depends on what you consider cheap, I would have used 900Mhz for the connections between repeaters, base station, and robot since it will go further through rubble. Use HWMP for mesh across the repeater links & use 2.4Ghz "access" at each repeater for access/interop with other devices. This could be done for under $500 per repeater with Mikrotik router boards and Ubiquiti mPCI cards in 900Mhz & 2.4Ghz.
I wish this post had a little bit less dramatic headline. It makes this post sound much more inflammatory than it actually is.
OpenStreetMap redaction underway
Contributions from individuals unwilling to accept the project's move from CC-BY-SA 2.0 to Open Database License (OdbL) 1.0 are being removed. OSM reports that less than 1% of data will be removed. @harry_wood has created a progress map for the progress: http://harrywood.dev.openstreetmap.org/license-change/botprocessing2.php
If there is scalar type hinting I wonder if that will lead to real method overloading by adding methods with different signatures or if devs will have to stick with the __call magic method, which I despise.
I guess there are some interesting results as a result of this effort:

* Javascript can be used to program these things and is quite capable of handling low-level kind of stuff

* Since it's easier to write js code than c/c++ code (for me), I would personally prefer it; assuming that the performance degradation is within allowable limits
At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support. But yes, they shouldn't expect Apple to be their friend and hold true to their word.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. You seemed to originally be claiming that there isn't an appreciable aesthetic difference between cheap wine and expensive wine, and that all wine is basically the same when you don't think about price ("When the cost of the wine is unknown to the taster, the differences disappear.")

But the article you provided seems to say that there is a difference between cheap and expensive wine - it's just that most people are not good enough to detect it. I think this is important because it invalidates the claim that "all wine is indistinguishable." There's a difference, it's just hard to detect, and the pros are better at it.

To return to the original point of the thread, though, wine actually is a pretty interesting example that complicates the original poster's point. The more you wine you drink, the more important it is to pay extra. It's not that the expensive stuff isn't better, it's just that you have to care a whole lot to appreciate the difference, so most people actually will be fine just getting relatively cheap wine.
So they are infringing on personal privacy, and practicing selective enforcement? If this came to America everyone would be brown from the big shit storm.
"controlled by the aristocracy rather than an elected representative"

The House of Lords and the US Senate are pretty different. The states in the US have their own constitutions and elections. The different between unelected and elected is large.
So... I'm guessing that no one here is actually interested in the engine, just in being pedantic about localized usage of a word?

FWIW, my 11 year-old amazes me with his Lego/Legos/whatever constructions and I'm definitely going to show him this. Anything to offer more inspiration.
Where do you get your information regarding the environmental costs of manufacturing and disposal of vehicles and large appliances so that you can make this judgement?
It still requires you to give up data for which it makes sufficient sense to be encrypted otherwise someone might get the idea that you are using this feature. While this is a solution it is certainly not as easy a solution as it might seem to be.
Please post a competitor here, I would love to know about them. Every other SMS gateway I have ever dealt with wants to know how many million messages per month you send before they will talk to you.
+1 great list Michael. I liked the contracts/Trammel link. I have never really got into contracts but this looks lite enough on ceremony that I can visualize using it. A long time ago I was very enthusiastic about the Little Schemer and Little Reasoner books, and sometime I need to make the plunge into core.logic.

I wish that I could (mostly) "go all in" with Clojure but there are also so many things I enjoy about Ruby. These two languages compete for my dev attention, and sometimes it is a brutal fight :-) Almost like there is too much good/useful/fun tech (cornucopia complex: http://blog.markwatson.com/2005/11/cornucopia-complex-ruby-o...)
Geotooth: universal location tracking of Bluetooth devices
In the "irony is ironic" department, we have a site with a low-contrast text/background combination. Readability Redux FTFW.

Which is more about Web design than FE, but still.
Does innocent until proven guilty and beyond a reasonable doubt apply to UK criminal law?
I remember telling people about this when it first launched, citing it as a vanity metrics booster.

As a startup founder, however, it's invaluable. I'm a converted fan, and the process even taught this rookie a bunch about link building and SEO.

Great work, keep it up, and loved the blog post.
> Can someone point me to a way to use Node that actually makes sense for something that doesn't have to be near-real-time?

I'd like to see a CMS+Framework like Drupal built in node. Serving an entire dynamic site (say, a corporate site with customer portal) in node could be extremely sweet.

Edit to point out: just because it's in node doesn't mean it's a single-page, ajaxy app. It's obviously the killer application for now, but as time goes on and we link together more and more with external APIs (that might not answer you right away), the async model will make more sense for even a mid-level webapp or customer portal IMO.
We've built a little nook for packages on our front porch, I wonder if more people will do that sort of thing as well.
The important bit doesn't show up until the sixth paragraph: "Today's decision does not affect the 'reproduction right' that they can collect a fee for, only the one for downloading. Until now, downloading fell under the 'communication to the public' right."

Apparently, downloaded/streamed songs in Canada had been earning royalties as a public performance. That part has been struck down. Royalties are still earned under the "making a copy" rule.

Seems totally reasonable to me.
Yahoo's No Encryption Trumps LinkedIn's Unsalted Hash
When your cursor is in the center of the word, you can't use ctrl-shift arrow to select that word [it will only select part of the word]. Therefore first you need to move cursor to a side, then start your ctrl-shift work that you described.

GP highlighted this special thing. I guess you missed his main point.
"I WANT YOU TO COME TO MY HOUSE AND EDIT MY SYS FILES!"
Maybe, but I didn't realize it, and I'll bet others don't either. Significant because of the accumulation of bad days, and because of the company's apparent hubris and possible over-valuation.
Absolutely not true. The best description for VIM is "programming your text". In VIM you have a set of commands that you use to manipulate text. Generally commands looks like nOm where n is number of times to repeat the whole thing, O is operator to apply, m is motion command/selection. So for example 3dw applies 3 times the d (delete) operator to motion command w move one word forward, i.e. delete next 3 words. The nice thing is if you learn lots of motion commands you instantly learn lots of ways to manipulate text objects based on those motions. Want to change inner if block in your code? Just type ci{ (change inner { which deletes everything inside the {} block the cursor is in and places you in insert mode. Etc.

In other editor you have keyboard shortcuts and there are only so many you can have. In VIM there are over 1500 commands (not shortcuts). People who say "vi key bindings" or "vi shortcuts" don't get vim.
This one sentence really changed my perception of his story:

"Sometimes I would open another tab and load Flickr or Open Processing so I had an excuse if someone asked why I was comparing every single computer."

If he truly thought what he was doing was legal (or morally right), he wouldn't have had to do this. Instead, he chose to hide the fact he was installing software on Apple's computers.
Yay the game of life!
Square, other payment processors enact ban on medical marijuana dispensaries
You could have a one-time pay service to get a "verified" badge on the profile, like what Twitter has for celebrities.
> if it is at all possible to implement an invention in software, it is essentially math and does not deserve patent protection

The current patent laws are insanity, but I don't agree with this. The class of mathematical ideas too abstract to patent should be distinguished not just by whether or not an idea can be modeled mathematically (they all can!) but by how fundamental the ideas are. The goal should be to protect abstract ideas that will naturally be discovered independently by mathematicians. Complex software that solves some real world problem shouldn't be disqualified on these grounds, since it is almost of exactly the same nature as hardware that achieves the same goals.
why state Indian specifically? Just curious.
True, but I guess I didn't realize this wasn't more common knowledge.
Not that I have any attachment or preference to Tropo or Twillio but I think Tropo was there before and it has most things free thru development time since I know. And it supported my country since I know of them.
What about the selection bias? You don't see the watches your grandfather bought that didn't make it down to you because they broke. Of course the few carefully selected things that have survived and been handed down are the exceptional pieces!
Contributions from individuals unwilling to accept the project's move from CC-BY-SA 2.0 to Open Database License (OdbL) 1.0 are being redacted. OSM reports that less than 1% of data will be removed. http://twitter.com/harry_wood has created a live map of the bot's progress: http://harrywood.dev.openstreetmap.org/license-change/botpro...
just noticed that you've been responding with two different accounts, pcambron and patrickambron
That has to be the clearest analysis yet for the prospects of the Ouya.
All the new traffic lights in our area have webcams pointed directly into the windshield of drivers stopped for the light. To what end, I don't know. But drivers on their way to the Apple store don't seem to mind their pictures being taken.

It seems Kyle's mistake was in publishing the results of surveillance. We don't care if we are watched, because we don't have to form a belief in the reality of the images stored. We do care if we see ourselves published, because that makes the reality of being watched undeniable.

Consider for comparison the TSA body scanner images being seen to be seen by agents at the scanner, versus not seen being seen by agents in a room. Passengers were not ok with the first, but ok with the second.

These examples offer a roadmap to a happily ignored surveillance society.
Will Johnny Code Again?
Realtime-ish. ;)
Yea, my fault; I had written something more inflammatory, but after a bunch of edits I had moderated my tone once I realized I was just ranting against bad FE candidates I had interviewed.
It was actually interesting to see how low it had gone – I hadn't checked in on it for a while.

Admittedly, nobody should be surprised by the downward trajectory, IMHO.
I can see Outlook and exchange alone representing major hurdles and expenses that could cause this.

If you already own office then the cost of getting new calandering and email software up and running for a large group and then training them on how to use it is non trivial.
Yesterday I ordered a used book from Amazon, and remembering the static shocks in that Mother Jones article (btw, wearing a metal thimble to touch the shelves with seems like it would fix those shocks), I was faced with a moral dilemma. But how was I to solve it.

Pick one of the higher priced used book options? How do I know they aren't using the same distribution warehouse and just pocketing the difference.

Without a "doesn't treat workers like crap" seal of approval, I don't see what I could have done. I'd love to subscribe to a white-list/black-list of sellers on Amazon for various ethical measures but it isn't there.
These guys should have taken the 4 billion from Google. Their unfair advantage is pretty much inexistent that leave them extremely vulnerable to any competition.
Remember, this was the fastest growing company of all time, gone from a billion dollar+ IPO price of over $30, down to $7 in a matter of months. Sheer evaporation of capital. Promoted by many of the usual suspects of the tech scene. I find it to be an incredibly interesting business case study.
I hadn't heard it put that way, but that's definitely a good point. My view on all of this is still evolving, and we're getting to a point where it's not going to make sense for me to the primary person on support. As far as above and beyond, you're definitely right. It's all relative. If that part of it bothered me anymore, I'd probably look to make some changes, but oddly enough, I enjoy it, so it's not too big of a deal to maintain that kind of turnaround time.

For us, the biggest change was adding an awesome system admin to the mix on retainer. He's been a huge help and we now have a much more resilient architecture. It's all evolving though as I find time to streamline the processes as needed.

All definitely some good food for thought. Thanks!
Europe's banking union: 172 German professors can’t be wrong
So, I'm not defending anybody.

Like most people who actually pay some attention to what happened in finance, I trace much of the problem back to deregulation and poor enforcement.

The parties who successfully rolled back regulation made a grave mistake, and should bear the consequences of their terrible judgement.

Similarly, the people who today suggest that regulation isn't the answer, but rather that we should simply let failed banks fails, those people are making today's grave mistake. The people who argued that systemic vulnerability would prevent any failed bank from actually failing were, as I see it, obviously correct. As it turns out, we can't even let a single auto company crash, let alone a nationwide megabank.

Having said all that:

It does us no good to pretend that the other side of this debate isn't a "side", but rather a bought- and- paid- for theater role occupied by those lucky enough to receive lobbying dollars.

The reality is that it's an animating principle of roughly half the American political establishment that regulation is bad, and that its unintended consequences will tend to harm the economy more than crashes will. A pretty large subset of those people also believe that however painful a megabank failure is, it's survivable, and one or two of them will suffice to teach CEOs not to allow their companies to gamble to the brink of failure.

It's no surprise that this half of the establishment receives truckloads of money from financiers; their principles align with the lobbyist's interests. But attributing those principles to the lobbying contributions is an instance of the post-hoc fallacy, unless you genuinely think that finance subcommittee legislators, Republicans, and pro-business "new Democrats" really don't believe in deregulation.

I can separate the bad principle from the "influence" here, is all I'm saying, and having done so have started to conclude that maybe the influence is a red herring in this case.

Lobbying "influence" is bad for all sorts of other reasons! Most importantly: because it consumes gigantic amounts of time, time that could be spent grooming a staff that could have some hope of understanding the issues they're dealing with.
GE's Novel Battery to Bolster the Grid