skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes! I would definitely pay for everything on my mobile device. There are a few companies that are looking to turn their cell phones into wallets like Square and Lemon. At Starbucks I can already do that with Square...The future will be to eliminate all credit cards and just have all important identification stored on your mobile device.
Hey, this is great! Thanks.
What is the cost of 100,000 lives lost every day? [1]

If you have objections to agelessness through medicine, and many do, then it is probably a good idea to first consider the question above, and then consider your objection in the same terms.

[1] http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra...
The Pocket Mini Computer on Parallax Propeller microcontroller
I’m not sure how that is relevant?

People being treated like that is always completely unacceptable. Nothing can excuse that. Everything you say there really doesn’t matter at all for this evaluation.

Actually and effectively doing something about that is the hard part and there are probably no simple solutions. That doesn’t change the nature of this crass violation of human dignity.
My thoughts exactly (but expressed much more eloquently!).

"Least worst option" sums it up.
Buying stock drives the price up of said stock, allowing the company to reap more money per share when it wants to sell more shares on said secondary market, and also allows it to get better deals on loans and future funding rounds. It might not directly give money to the company, but it's definitely an action anyone can take to "vote with your money" that actually benefits a company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
so.. how about that coffee price?
There are at least two major areas of music composition which the algorythmic attempts fall vastly short of humans.

One is that real music composition is never done where the timbres are separated from the composition. Classically notated music looks kind of like this, but it's really just a shorthand. A composer knows intimately the sounds she is working with.

For pop music, the timbre itself is a mode of creative expression. Innovation in musical timbres and sounds is an expected part of pop music. (I'm using "pop" in the most general sense, covering a large amount of contemporary genres). The meaning of the music is not captured by simplistic reference to musical notation concepts.

The other major limitation of generated music, to my ears, is that of overall compositional structure. The units of composition usually are short, and only locally referenced. So the compositions lack interesting shape over the course of time.

If you think of a composition as a story, it's as if a bunch of plausible paragraph that are coherent within them selves are strung together with only loose reference to each other. So a longer "plot" doesn't emerge.
I would concur as well. I believe they were doing this RFID system for 2 reasons: the students, and the contract. However, the reprieve allows all Christians to exempt themselves from this program.

My underlying worry is the Government will make further all-encompassing rules on the hopes that few are able to be exempt from them. This will be done by a religious test in front of a Judge.

However, it is all the worse that this occurs at a secondary school. With the rule of in loco parentis, it really is a dictatorship and a prison. At least outside that compulsed system, there is more regular rule of law.
Because the enemy (MySpace) of your enemy (Facebook) is your friend.
I imagine a number of things, such as:

* Analysing keywords to find an optimal set to focus on

* Optimising in favour of on-page factors, e.g adding well-chosen keywords in the page title and moderate coverage throughout your content.

* Actively building links using a number of strategies, e.g guest blogging or exchanging links

I guess "no SEO" could mean abstaining from actively improving your search engine rankings?

I don't think SEO is exactly the same as not doing paid SEM. As we all know, there are some factors we can optimise for free.
It might have been cool 4 years ago.

But these days, those tin dialogs and buttons are a joke. Heck, I've been bitching about non-resizable dialogs in Office for years.
To credit previous self, the idea came to me while in a discussion here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815628

Seems to have gone full circle HN -> g+ -> reddit -> HN

I posted it on g+ and reddit but not here since I had already discussed it in the comments.

my 15 minutes of fame I guess :-)
I knew someone in university that knew someone that made fake ids in Michigan. Even after they upgraded the driver's licenses to have holograms, etc, this guy apparently had sheets of hologram stickers to put over the fake ids. This stuff seems like big business in 'college towns' where there are a lot of under-age kids on their own that want to drink.
RFID is the future. Magnetic cards were a problem waiting to be solved. They wear out, have to be big enough to comfortably swipe, and are easy to copy.

Credit cards, door locks, train tickets and anything with a magnetic swipe or barcode will eventually be replaced with RFID or similar.

The tracking part, however, is optional.
A programmer who can't admit that his claim, expressed as an inequality, evaluates to false?
As I say, we've had widespread CCTV in shops in the UK since the 80s. In the last 30 years nothing has particularly changed.

I take your point, in theory an evil genius prime minister could install some mass surveillance system. But what the hell would be the point? And the chance of him not getting found out and called out by the media is negligable. Add to that the utter incompetence of government to do anything IT related, and I think we're pretty safe.
Perhaps it ought to be?
dont forget supermarketapi.com
So.... prices?

And I don't understand how you could quantify the "quality", i'd say the coffee in Vic, Australia is excellent but I haven't ever had coffee in a different country?

I be interested to know how the quality of coffee in my hometown differs from New York though?
This comment can be slightly rephrased to fit Apple as well.
Just take absolute numbers: According to indeed, there are over 1000 open jobs mentioning Scala in the US, and over 750 in the UK. Taken together, the number of open Scala jobs in both countries exceeds the number of open Groovy jobs. It's still small compared to Java jobs (to be precise 1.5% in the US, close to 3% in the UK), but Java is by far the most demanded language, so this is not surprising. To say there is no pick-up in adoption of functional languages is disingenuous, IMO.
> and ooh, they can't tell you anything about the idea because you might steal it

In my experience the fact that someone needs to hide it usually means that they have little to bring to the table other than that idea.
what do terrorist organizations exist to do? To terrorize.

What do governments exist to do? To govern.

There are all sorts of choices to make about how to govern, many of which do not oppress the people.

Any form of terrorism by its nature will harm people.

So it's not really analogous.

In no way is the source of the oppression the US, or Europe, or China. The source of the oppression is the Saudi government.
The history of military recruiting, and even police recruiting, shows that this check is a non-issue. Police departments hire power tripping bullies who enjoy harassing dirty/brown/hippy/communitst/Irish/whatever.
Logic Programming slides from #HNLondon
Why can't I reply to the comment below this one?

Anyway, in response: yes, i agree, if someone can't tell you their idea, it's probably shit. Most of the time, when someone won't tell you their idea for fear of you stealing it, their idea is Groupon for cats! Or Travelocity for Jews! Or something else equally stupid.
The religious angle is explicitly protected by the constitution. Privacy, not as much. You're rights to privacy relate to religion, privacy of your home to house soldiers, privacy against unlawful search and seizures, and the 5th amendments protection of incriminating yourself.

> That is not a situation I am comfortable with.

For better or worse, that's how the most powerful law in our land is framed. And, while you might not like it, it might have been the smartest thing our founding fathers did. After all, what's to stop people from establishing a religion founded on certain beliefs of privacy?

Consider that while you can argue for privacy, arguments for tracking could be made. And while you might hate the "think of the children" argument, it's a very real issue for many.

Personally, I'm happy with the situation, that the case can be challenged, and while religion might be apart of it, it's privacy that is at stake, and everyone knows it.

You just have to ask yourself: does your belief in your right to privacy trump someone's acceptance of being tracked?
> Keep in mind, as soon as someone notices enough people are choosing trains instead of air travel, "stupid security checks" will start showing up at train stations as well…

Then those people will have to be stomped on, hard.

People hate, but put up with, airline security checks because they (perhaps grudgingly) admit they serve at least some purpose, even if the actual details are often pretty questionable.

But trains and airplanes are fundamentally different in this respect. There's no rational reason to have airline-style security checks for train travel, at all.
Weird, couldn't reply to this, but then, after I posted the above comment, I suddenly could reply... Must be a timing thing.
http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962-ebo...
And, I should add, given this level of demand it's a good thing we just finished the Scala massive open online class with more than 10'000 developers completing the course with success.
I'm trying to remember that quotation I've stolen and hatcheted this from:

Bombs and tanks don't scare these folks, but a girl with a book does.
You sound very confident that immortality would be a bad thing.
Maybe.
We've never experienced it, so how can you be sure?

See, I just changed "good" to "bad" for you, because the question the way it is phrased suggests an opinion.

Personally, I see death as the equivalent of erasing hard drive full of valuable and interesting data. It's a shame people individual knowledge and experience are lost forever.

If as a society we can never come to agreement about immortality being good or bad, it would good to develop a technology to "save" knowledge and "load" it at will.

So when say an Einstein or a Feyman dies, their understand of the theories and technologies would become available for everyone to "download" in their brain - which hopefully would reduce wasted knowledge to a minimum.

Likewise, the same technology could free 15 year+ of a good life quality, currently spent on "education". It seems wasteful to me. Just load the knowledge in your brain, and skip school. Load "experience" too if you believe it is necessary.

A marked of "ideas" and "knowledge" ready to download in a brain. Wow. That would be a dream come true - even if immortality can't be achieved due to lack of consensus.
"Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster."
Church Numerals and the Y Combinator
Should != would. And there's also such thing as forfeiture - and with it, to confiscate, the government has only to have "probable cause", and then you have to prove that this property was not used for criminal purposes. They do not need to charge the owner in any crime - just to suspect him.
I'm an omnivore, but I also believe in reforming the farming industry to minimize suffering to below levels for the average natural death in the wild (being torn apart by other animals, dying in pain of a crushed leg, infection, etc). In doing that, raising animals in a safe healthy manner and then killing them humanely is logically more humane than not.
Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".
This has come at a time I'm looking at Grape mounted in a Rails app for an API layer. Is there a simple way to explain to those of us with less API building experience what the pros/cons are of using rails-api over something like the Grape gem?
Terminator 2: T-1000 special effects
Yes. I dropped out of high school in the US and I know it.
Scrambled message so the reader can't recognize them.
Tell HN: The RSS feed is broken
The RSS feed available here is broken: http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Can PG fix it ?
Thomas Friedman, in "hot flat and crowded" makes an elaborate case linking the price of crude oil to the undemocratic and oppressive nature of (middle eastern) governments.
Class declarations will be equivalent (can be desugared to) a function declaration and some manipulations of the function's prototype. JS VMs already optimize this pattern, so why should syntax sugar for classes be anything special for the compiler?
See my multiple "(and even then!)" caveats ;)
Probably just easier to hack the accounts.
I would imagine existing cryptography could work. Each card could have a unique private key, and the public key would be associated with the students ID. At this point, someone can verify a card is who it says it is by asking the card to encrypt a randomly generated message. Assuming we are using the method I described (as apposed to a crypto-system optimized for identification), the card would only need to be able to encrypt 1 block (probably 512-bits) for each identification. This seems quite doable.
It looks fine to me... How is it not working?
Wasn't the possibility of terraforming Mars debunked a while ago?
This is just plain nice. It's not often you get to say than on HN :)
Yup.

Melway is a company that makes excellent street directories for all the major cities in Australia.[1] It came out a while ago that on every single page, there are intentional errors that would help catch someone copying their maps. There was a phone box marked on my street that didn't exist, and a friend's house was next to a street that didn't exist.

It gained some attention a while back because it could turn into a safety issue - i.e. I rely on the map to tell me where I can find a phone box to call emergency services. They downplayed it.

[1]http://www.melway.com.au/
>something that could actually be upheld

Are you implying that the First Amendment (ie: religious freedom) is not something that can or has been upheld in court?

I understand the concern you voice, however in doing so you come across as so intolerant of religion that you're unwilling to even consider working with religious people when your goals coincide. Moreover, you seem to think that only one legal strategy is correct and only one legal strategy can be exercised at a time in order to challenge a rule or a law. I sincerely hope you represent the minority of HN and that most users are much more tolerant and inclusive.
I don't want more police in my neighborhood.

At first, more police would probably improve a few things. Fewer people would litter, and the occasional drunk who passes out on the side of a street would be removed faster.

The trouble is, there's not actually much for extra police to do, so they'd eventually find things to do. They'd have to start writing speeding tickets for 5 mph over the limit and picking up stray cats. That kind of enforcement would not make this a more pleasant place to live.
Payup - A Facebook app that keeps track of the money you have lent or borrowed.
> But maybe some of us will find a way to extract valuable information or insight from that.
Isn't that Google's business model (and that of many others).
Trigger the parking lot sensor == drugs. Bleachers == sex.

Proximity to known offenders, etc.
Bummer. I kind of wish I hadn't agree to go to my gf's family's house. I would rather be nerding out.
The one and only way to create JS objects
> To say there is no pick-up in adoption of functional languages is disingenuous, IMO.

The question is not about pick up (there is some, 0.01% to 0.03%, according to indeed.com) but whether that pick up is significant.
Very true. My partner is currently a schoolteacher in China, and has to go through regular examinations. However if a teacher does not have a politically powerful background, or fails to bribe the appropriate contacts, the result is guaranteed failure and missed promotion opportunities.
Bank of New York Mellon Wants to Foreclose
Bank of New York Mellon is taking over for Bank of America, who for 2 years, put a senior homeowner through pure hell in her quest for a modification to save her home. This may be the end unless help arrives quickly before the beasts finish her off along with her husband.
They wanted the couple to surrender her rights for the modification they strongly refused nad now this is their punishment from the banks with the blessing of the Federal government, it's agencies and the State of Connecticut politicians and agencies. The finest government money has purchased. Would you give up your rights of free speech, press and legal representation from the beginning of time, present and forever into the future?
Ask HN: Forums or Groups which one should I use
hey guys

Im building a video/pic site and wanted to also build a community around this.

What do you think is better to use a forum or groups - which is a better format to support user interaction.

Im thinking to start with a forum is better to get the discussion happening but once people start using to more transitioning to group would be better. Forum is a silo on it own contains all discussions whereas groups as each individual silos.

I like the idea of breaking things up into groups which people can join if they are interested. But again if there is not much discussion going on groups might be pointless. The other thing I could do is make 5 main groups to start the site and then let users add more. So everyone that joins is a member of those 5 automatically.

The site is about health and fitness.

thanks
>I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore, sorry.

The thread started with someone positing that panopticons aren't a bad thing, hence the mention of East Germany (a low tech attempt at a state panopticon) and segued to discussion of the modern state's surveillance capabilities in comparison with East Germany.

>I believe for example that CCTV is exactly as legal as anyone taking a photos / movies of the police for example (and the other way around)

They both fall under similar laws, yes, but the big difference between ad-hoc amateur surveillance and centralized, automated surveillance is the capability of realtime analysis of location, association, etc.
And of course there has to be a single source right? What a childish worldview.

By your logic: It's not the royal family's fault either since all the awful stuff gets done by employees, who don't get to be absolved of responsibility of their actions. They make their own choices.
Of course the United States, since its inception, has a perfect track record of treating women and minorities (sarcasm).

US foreign policy stifles natural progress and evolution in many countries in the Middle East.
I see. If that's the case, then I think there is room for a "teaser" news site that gives you just a bit more than the headline. If you want more details, you can click on a more detailed summary, or if you want to read the whole thing, then you can click to the full article.
Kind of a wake-up call for me. In the west we'll have some incident where a few people were killed, say the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, and there'll be books, movies, TV specials, and so forth.

In other countries you lose 36 million people -- six times the size of the holocaust in WWII -- and you're not supposed to even ask any questions about it.

We truly do have a lot to be thankful for.
Yes, that would probably backfire horribly.

What could be done is just to remove all the financial, material and intelligence support that the US gives to that country.
I live in china, I know how bad it is here; I went through school in the states, I know what goes on there. No one is bribing middle or high school teachers in the states, you would go to jail if you even tried! Our only problem is thte push from parents, oppurtinities are still open if you don't have money as long as you work for it. The same is true in Canada actually, we aren't that far off from our northern neighbors; only our unviserities cost more but are also better at the high end.

But whatever problems we have in the states, the problems in china are very different and much more wicked.
How precious are your Constitutional rights? Would you let a bully company strip you of them for a modification offer that wasn't what they said it was and you knew that after your signed from the language in the agreement that the bank and all their affiliates could cancel the modification for NO REASON AT ALL?
my 16 yo sister died two weeks ago tommorow. when i saw her dead just minutes after she had died, the first corpse i'd ever seen, one the things that popped into my head was how happy i should be to be alive. she died from cystic fibrosis, a disease that will most likely be eradicated completely in coming years by gene therapy &c. We should be thankful to live into old age, nevermind immortality, although I'd be surprised of anyone to refuse it considering our standard of life in the developed world.
Crabtree is measuring nothing, his arguments are just based on assumptions, there is no gene expression data in these two papers.
A true libertarian must pay for all education. Vouchers? Vouchers are socialism. Pay in cash or whatever arrangements are mutually acceptable to both sides. The government's only acceptable role is to guarantee the execution of contracts. The market will guarantee efficiency!
1. Your belief about significance of the data is immaterial - these emails were private and were not intended for disclosure. The fact that you think they're not that interesting does not matter - I may think the content of your private email account is nothing of interest and will give nobody any useful information - that still doesn't give me the right to access it.

2. As I noted elsewhere, here the word "hack" is not used in a sense of "cleverly use the technology" but in the sense "used computers to access information he was not authorized to access". Unfortunately, the battle for the former meaning agains the latter is long lost, and the press is using this word in the latter meaning for years now.
The fact that he had to write the script which uses special algorithm based on geographic distribution of IDs means the information was not public and he had to commit some work and apply his own ingenuity to access it.

3. Unauthorized access of private information is a crime. I'd rather it stay so - otherwise I'd have to rely on a good will of people like Auernheimer to keep my private information private. I think the consequences of this would be very grim. The problem is not that this guy was an ass - he was an ass long before that, and still was free to commit his jackassery. Until he crossed the line between being jackass and committing a crime. I agree that it is not the most heinous crime committed in the US ever - it is probably a small crime, like petty theft or trespass - but it still is. I hope he will be punished in accordance with the severity of the crime - not too hard, not too lightly.
Signed up, power to the free people.
French cyber-spooks claim US spied on the President of France
Did you account for wild variations in the same place? In Shanghai I could get decent coffee for anywhere between 3 kuai to 30 kuai depending on where you were.
I really wonder if a Zeppelin would be cheaper considering that it would require more personnel, accommodation and service for long period of time.

Actually like cruise ships: they are not cheaper than flying. They are a lot more comfortable.
1st draft of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Ed. complete « blather.michaelwlucas.com
I cannot imagine how difficult it could have been for you to comment on this article.

I am sorry for your loss.