skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but there's a big moral weight on using your fame and influence to get your government to built atomic bombs. Though this was before the advent of strategic bombing, so I'm not sure how obvious it was to Einstein exactly how such a weapon would ever be used.
Where does the battlefield stop when drones allow soldiers to be remote?

If a drone pilot on active duty works and lives in a civilian population, are those civilians being used as human shields? How does that sit with the Geneva Convention? Is a US based pilot, who goes home of a night, counted to be on the front-line and unwittingly using their family as human shields?

I'd think the use of drones extends the bounds of the battlefield, making drone pilots fair game. Probably a moot point when fighting a adversary with limited range, but it might be quite important in a more equal contest.
Wish you success.
Have them get a project, personal side projects can teach a lot.
Bitcoin's really easy to use.

1. Download the client from bitcoin.org.
2. Launch it and let it sync with the network. (Unfortunately this takes a long time upfront.)
3. Use the "Send Coins" and "Receive Coins" tabs to send and receive coins.

Buying Bitcoins with credit cards is still somewhat annoying, but not hard. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_Bitcoins_(the_newbie_versi..., or for a more complete version, here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

If you wanted to go with a hosted service instead of running the Bitcoin client on your own computer, there are many available. A few include:

- https://blockchain.info/wallet/
- https://www.mtgox.com/
- https://www.coinbase.com (YCS12)
I can't pay my rent in bitcoins tho.
> Text editing and rendering

Unless you're working entirely in fixed point characters (and you probably aren't, given that even fixed-width systems like terminal emulators use double-wide glyphs sometimes), you need to know the value of each character to know its width. That involves the same linear scan over the string that is required to calculate the number of glyphs in a variable-width encoding.
Gmail in Cherokee
Scan launches version 2.0; 25m downloads overall.
great concept, I'd love to see what other eCommerce sites and apps will be created as a result of growth in the popularity (as well as the wider usage) of the Bitcoin currency.
I don't have any expertise either but here's a conjecture:

I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay... I want to buy 1000 Acres of pristine forestland and then spend 8 years wrangling with the government for the right to log it. So how much wood could I cut if I could cut wood?
Austin is quickly densifying but still doesn't have any public transit other than buses.

This solution avoids all the pitfalls associated with conventional rails (street level and underground) and I see it very rapidly becoming very successful.
I'm curious. Would you mind sharing what kinds of early decisions you made that you wouldn't have with 80k?
I'd be interested to know what other systems you looked at before settling on ICE? We evaluated HBase, Hypertable and Riak (kind of a wildcard entry) as analytics platforms but then found Infobright purely by luck, and were very impressed by the performance and ease of use.
Any ideas for suggested projects/games?
There are many exchanges that trade BTC against traditional currencies (for example, mtgox, btc-e, or bitstamp). It's very easy to convert BTC into USD or EUR.
Would be cool to see bitcoin services use your bitcoin identity instead of email
I don't know about how they do it, but I use both currently.

SendGrid for one-off emails (ie. a user signs up for an account, their welcome email).

MailChimp for email marketing (we send newsletters via them).

MailChimp has since released Mandrill that caters to the one-off emails, but we were already with SendGrid by then.
This presentation is Interesting, but I guess that I already saw many presentations like that. I guess presentations about real user cases with "erlang" will be a more informative.

Something like this:

http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/395/Erlan...

http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/297/Pikko...
Thanks for organizing. Free is very appreciated. Sounds like format/agenda is still in the works, any possibility of posting a rough idea of what to expect before would be sweet.
Yes? `System.Globalizatiion` or `ICU` can count grapheme, what's your point?

Those libraries are equivalent to normalize( utf16 `0x00 0x41 0x03 0x08`) == length 1

Back to my top comment, I stated that UCS2 counts faster than UTf8 internally, because every BMP code point is just two bytes, what's wrong here? If variable-length is so good why py3k is using UCS-4 internally? (Wich means every character is exactly 32 bits. There, I said character again.)
UDP all the things (in space)
Show HN: Goalie, an iOS app for tracking daily goals, reminders, etc.
Python Hackers
I believe the idea is that there aren't enough Windows people to work on both 64-bit and the Metro UI for Firefox. Metro is a priority, so 64-bit is getting mothballed for the near future.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX...
Why not just improve upon Linux rather than act like an asshat and post to HN?

The path to Linux kernel contribution is simple.

Learn C -> Master C -> Contribute -> Stop posting to HN
I'm sure you're right that some people will find them unusably terrifying, but my experience is that most people with a typical level of fear-of-heights can handle gondolae just fine. A friend of mine, for instance, refuses to ride on a chair lift, but has no problem with a gondola.
You have an exceptionally optimistic view of "everyone's" abilities.
"The fact that lots of people have a different interpretation of what counts as unethical use might mean the law will change" -- we can dream, can't we?

But, you're right, in a perfect world, ethics and law would correspond. But, not in this world.
I am interest in the missing part: what data structures/layouts are used inside LDB? Cause for In-Memory DB, CPU cache miss plays a key role in executing query. And how much data are touched to execute a single query in common case?
Newsstand apps use the same approval process as regular apps, there are no barriers to entry except figuring out how to code for Newsstand. Once you go Newsstand your "content" no longer needs to go through any Apple approval process. You just publish content any time you like, and a Newsstand App updates automatically. The only thing that needs to be approved is changes to your code. Overall though, Newsstand is not very well explained in Apple's documentation, and paid subscriptions are a mess.

We publish a standard app at the moment, because Baker did not support Newsstand until a short time ago. We will be updating in the next week or so.

DPS pricing is still bad. Single edition only gets you one issue. One freaking issue! You need to upgrade to professional ($495 per month!) or above to publish multiple issues, and then pay $.30 every time someone downloads one of your issues. Compare that to setting up Baker (free) and setting up Amazon S3 free account (15GB data out per month) and DPS looks like a total scam.
my first (cold cache) load of the homepage took about 7-8 seconds to be usable but the rest feels fluid.

don't be discouraged, after the initial load it performs better than most sites that look this nice.
I think the distinction is between software and hardware DRM. DirecTV controls the entire hardware chain. This means they can do various proper encryption schemes (public/pre-shared key etc) that are actually near impossible to crack and make it really, really hard to obtain the key by making the key write-only in the crypto-chip.

In a pure software solution, you control the hardware, and any hiding of the key is subject to reverse engineering the software.
This is my first app, I just wanted to see what you guys think of it.

Here is some promo codes:
JXRPHJ4NNRRR
6ETYWM7TXWL3
Thanks! I also added Pugpig, which is similar but can also publish to Android.

http://pugpig.com/
I think Mozilla is misapplying its development time on stuff like social integration [1] and Firefox OS [2]. I would say these types of projects would be fine if they weren't ignoring their mainstay, by first canceling the process per tab project Electrolysis and now abandoning 64bit builds on Windows says to me that Mozilla seriously has its priorities screwed up.

The web browser has become the most important app on the PC, with more and more web pages demanding more and more resources, I really wish Mozilla would refocus on making the best web browser available.

A few weeks ago I tried to delete some of my history from Firefox, I opened the history window, hit Shift and selected about 6 months of history and hit delete, and it took Firefox about an hour to delete the history all the while the UI going from responding to not responding back and forth. Firefox has some serious performance problems.

[1]. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/20/firefox-introduces-...

[2]. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefoxos/
Filing these under "claim chowder". We shall see.

Comparing startup development costs to huge company development costs is non-sensical. For starters, Phillips would need to worry about multi-multi-million dollar lawsuits. LIFx won't. And there are many similar issues.
How do I get users to on my mobile app before I launch?
My app, datemapps, allows users to view date itineraries that they'd be interested in based on their specific dating preferences and other criteria. These other itineraries are created by other members. How can I get these members to create such itineraries before the app is released. I don't want to be dead in the water when this app is released. Thanks.

Fouad
DateMapps.com
The idea of my time having variable value is a bit scary (trading at a bit over $12 currently, but I'm not sure what will happen when the payout drops soon). Then again, that's what working for a VC-backed startup is: the possibility that my development effort might not pay off. That said, the startup has significant potential, whereas working for Bitcoins will not likely have the upside to justify the risk.
What kind of attacks remain when using proper padding (e.g. OAEP)?
Is there any reason that a gondola can hold only a maximum of 6 passengers? Can't you have a gondola the size of a bus?

Imagine all the crazy muni lines in sf turned into gondola wires. Would be pretty awesome to be "flying" 15ft above all the traffic. Not to mention the timing and schedule of service would be consistent.
I read your version, and I get an entirely different gist than what I got from reading nerdfile's for part 1. I thought he was talking to the customer about using version control. In your version I get issue tracking. I've had both conversations (issue tracking & version control) before with non-technical people.

An easy thing nerdfiles could have done was to attach the email in question. In that situation, there's no need for the client to dig through their emails to find something they may or may not have deleted, may have ignored, or had end up in their junk folder. Then you can trade out "If you did not receive it, please let me know" with "I've attached it for your convenience".
Tesla Motors And The Dealers: What's Wrong With The American Economy
I like to think of it backwards; If I knew that I had a contribution to make to humanity as great as Einstein's, would I willingly sacrifice my relationship with my family to make it?
Why would they come in the same order of backing?
I don't know. On the one hand, it's very easy to see Bitcoin failing as a currency and disappearing within a few years. On the other hand, the aggregate value of all Bitcoins in circulation is ~$120M with millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins changing hands every day. Companies are pouring millions of dollars into custom ASICs to join the Bitcoin network, and there's a solid core community that's unlikely to abandon it quickly.

Two years ago a guy bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC when it was 1 BTC ~ $0.004 USD, and many people thought the fact it had any real dollar value at all was pretty out there. Now, people are already talking about using mBTC or uBTC by default if the value goes up a lot more. Just because $10 / BTC feels high doesn't mean it isn't still extremely early in the life of Bitcoin.

You can be long or short Bitcoin, but I think that if it does end up working, it has a long way up to go.
I went to a number of LA HN meetups organized by andrewvc that went really well. You might want to ping him for tips...

Usually we had some socializing/networking time, followed by 1-2 lightning talks and one longer talk, followed by more socializing.
Pugpig seems similar to Baker:

http://pugpig.com/
Developers are not fungible. The social integration work was mostly HTML5 and JavaScript, and Firefox OS is partly kernel and OS work (B2G), and partly HTML5/JavaScript work (Gaia). 64-bit builds on Windows requires Windows developers, who are focusing on the Metro UI.

EDIT: I'm responding to your edit here:

> A few weeks ago I tried to delete some of my history from Firefox, I opened the history window, hit Shift and selected about 6 months of history and hit delete, and it took Firefox about an hour to delete the history all the while the UI going from responding to not responding back and forth.

I would imagine the Firefox developers spend their time optimizing the parts of their browser that users would most likely use. I suspect that they are not terribly worried about an action that users would take (at most) once every six months.

EDIT2: I guess I'll respond to this one too:

> The web browser has become the most important app on the PC, with more and more web pages demanding more and more resources, I really wish Mozilla would refocus on making the best web browser available.

Making the best web browser is not Mozilla's goal. Their goal is to "promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web" [1]. Integrating social features into the browser is part of that, in the sense that users will be able to control their social presence from their browser, rather than being locked-in to a specific social provider's web site. Mozilla's actions are not inconsistent with their stated mission. (Whether you agree with that mission is another argument entirely).

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Javascript seems like throwing in the towel, lets go for coffeescript! Or markdown!
Just to understand, what is the value to the user for creating an itinerary?
It seems to me more like they have "solved" (or broken) the CAP theorem ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

* Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time)

* Availability (a guarantee that every request receives a response about whether it was successful or failed)

* Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss or failure of part of the system)

According to the theorem, a distributed system can satisfy any two of these guarantees at the same time, but not all three.
CFTC Files Charges Against Intrade and TEN Prediction Markets
It won't be meaningless
Location sharing app Moby launches Android version
After three weeks of work our Android app has shipped. Check it out and let us know what you think.
How does fast character counting help with full-text search?
I never implied that it was a "failed public relations campaign" that took place in Afghanistan. I also didn't imply whether or not the U.S. was making the right decision to go into Afghanistan. My point in mentioning the lack of support of the Afghan people was pretty much the same thing you were saying. I wasn't suggesting that we needed to win them over, I was simply pointing out the fact that success was always impossible unless we had the support of the overwhelming majority. We didn't have the support, because the Afghan people (rightly) didn't want to engage in civil war, because war is a horrifying experience for anyone. As far as my statement that the war in Afghanistan was "winnable", I was speaking on a technical basis, making no claims whatsoever about the morality. I was also speaking on a technical basis when talking about the Drug Cartels. Other than saying the world would be far better off without such people, I made no claims about who should be responsible for making the decision to go to war with them. I acknowledged the drawbacks to it, and as you said, they are indeed obvious.

From a technical "whether or not it's possible" standpoint, If the majority of the Afghan people wanted to get rid of the Taliban badly enough to start a civil war on their own, the hundred thousand or so members of the Taliban would have found themselves facing an army of millions instead of a hundred thousand foreign soldiers who traveled to Afghanistan and found themselves in a world they didn't understand. The same goes for the situation in Mexico. I wasn't commenting because I think that it's my country's business to act as World Police, I just find it frustrating that somewhere around 200 million people were killed in genocides worldwide during the last century by people who are quite a bit like Hussein, Bin Laden, and the leaders of the Cartel. The world largely responds to situations like this by looking the other way when offered favorable trade agreements, or by stating that we should let other cultures live however they want, when it's never the people getting slaughtered that made the choice.

As far as the United States' policy of putting violent dictators in charge of failing nations, I, like most people in the United States, disapprove. I can't do anything to change it, but I accept the fact that it makes us look like douche-bags.

One more thing. Perhaps you feel like you are bashing your head against the wall when you try to explain your ideas because your hostility overwhelms whatever point you are trying to make. A little civility never hurt anyone.
Wow, it seems like you actually co-designed BD+, HN never ceases to amaze me.

It would be really cool if you could go into more detail, this is extremely interesting! Especially the second paragraph.

I'm far from an expert on BD+, so this is pure speculation, but it seems to me though as the patches doesn't work properly because they can't patch the fundumental part of BD+ which Slysoft has figured out. It would be really weird if Slysoft actually have managed to find a completely new flaw in BD+ for every BD+ patch that is released. It seems much more likely to me that the patches can't actually fix the flaw itself, they can just hide it or change some parameters/keys (which Slysoft know how to find), requiring Slysoft to constantly release new updates to "patch the patches". It may give Slysoft's developers a constant challenge, but it also seems gives them a constant unique selling point that they profit greatly from.

Is this correct or have Slysoft actually managed to find dozens of different exploits in BD+, one for every BD+ patch?
Twitter's HTML5 is the worst possible example. That thing is unusably slow on high-end desktops, too.
I truly wish them the best of luck, better CS education in HS is sorely needed. When I graduated HS in 2006, my school was just starting to phase out our programming classes that were still taught in Pascal by a soon retiring teacher. I remember those classes fondly, but I also remember how difficult it was to get other students to care.
Store mannequins 'spy on customers' with hidden cameras
I don't see why we aren't nearing a threshold where we can do all system interconnects over some specificed serial digital interface and a parallel one. Past a point, it becomes more logical than trying to optimize edge case performants of things (like how dvi is uni-directional raw video digraphs) you can just have some usb-like (but not usb, usb is ugly and tacky and a mess) digital connector for every peripheral from the monitor to the network adapter to the speakers, maybe even off one controller with software handling the handshakes to determine what everything is connected to.

And then get rid of sata/pci/sas etc internal connectors and just use the same interconnect hub as the external devices. Again, handshakes to determine device connectivity.

Wouldn't that be so easy? One connection to rule them all! I'm not trying to say it would be easy to get to, we are mired in a world where we look at a concept like this and say "how dumb, you aren't utilizing a bidirectional link with video feeds, or you aren't using the power connectivity to a network router, or stream based vs packet based trasport layers having speed / bandwidth advantages over one or the other. But wouldn't it be great to plug a new gpu into a real universal serial bus?
OK, I cracked into the V8 source to take a look at what actually happens. It looks like the implementation does use random access for two-byte strings. However, it also uses multiple multiple string implementations (ASCII, 2 byte strings, "consString" (I presume some kind of Rope), "Sliced Strings" (sounds like a rope again, but might be shared storage of the string contents for immutable strings)), so they could likely use other implementations with whatever properties they choose.

See https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/3ff861bbbb62a6c0078e042d8077b2... and https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/3ff861bbbb62a6c0078e042d8077b2....
> A great deal of the truly hard work of running a University, like scheduling several thousand students into several thousand classes, is done either entirely by or with great assistance from computers.

The work you are describing used to be done by secretaries and office assistants -- you are quite right, and those jobs for the most part no longer exist.

When you ask what a dean does, it rather depends on the position. If we're talking about the dean of a particular college (say, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at a state university), then the answer is: _everything_. Every department with a problem comes to you, expecting it to be solved right now. Everyone always needs more money, and you have to figure out some way that no one's budget explodes (you will be talking to the Provost or Vice-Provost quite frequently). Oh, and you also have to fight all the other colleges over funding as well. And find out how to attract new faculty to your departments. And make sure that no departments are self-destructing, as they do every once in a while. Or perhaps the History Department has decided to phase out an antiquated method of teaching that has got some old fart alumni all riled up about a loss of traditions. Guess who's getting called? You.

The idea that an organization of 1,000 faculty and two or three times that in staff [1] would have no greater administrative worry than class scheduling is, frankly, laughable. Would you expect a corporation of that size to get by with no managers?

The positions that the original article bemoans (which are also deanships) appear to be higher up the food chain, and are almost certainly the result of severe bureaucratic bloat. And don't get me wrong -- it is in the nature of a state university to be incredibly bureaucratic, and they could always use a bit more slimming. I just wish HN wouldn't always take the bait of "OMG HIGHER ED IS SO BLOATED TEAR IT DOWN TEAR IT DOWN", which scans rather well but, as with any oversimplification, ignores all the interesting parts of the argument.

[1] e.g. a decently-sized college at a state university
Nice rundown/analysis. I've got a friend running a similar project to the LIFX - and they've got some pretty believable-looking accounting showing why they need to raise $700k to get to market - any they've already got experienced product designers and electronics designers on board, and have sunk something like 50% of what LIFX asked for up front.

(If anyone's interested, check it out here - "A Lamp with a LAMP stack" should be aimed exactly at most HN readers demographic: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloudlight/light-1 )