skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a popularizer of science, sticking to current consensus is fine, and a good way to avoid promoting pseudoscience. No one's claiming TEDx is the last word on these topics, or on science in general, and if they accomplish nothing more than making mainstream science more accessible, that's pretty good by itself.
The points I'm making don't have anything to do with transactions in a primarily Bitcoin marketplace. The issue is that there is nothing in place to maintain price rates, even including that, as you note, its primarily digital existence and small size make it highly susceptible to fraud. This is a major issue for converting Bitcoin to other currencies.

That Bitcoins are supposed to function as cash doesn't mean they are automatically stable. Consider that Bitcoins are becoming more accepted by online retailers, and lets say that, for instance, Amazon decided one day to not only accept them, but, because of the simplicity of Bitcoin transactions (e.g., you don't have to pay eBay to implement PayPal), any and all Amazon products would be 5% off using Bitcoins. Such a situation is unlikely, but if you imagine instead of Amazon, a number of small players, like how Wordpress is doing it, it's feasible. Then, suddenly, the government steps in and forces Amazon to pay sales tax, and, because Bitcoin isn't accepted by the US Government as a full currency, they decide to set some arbitrarily low Bitcoin to USD rate, and Amazon stops taking Bitcoin. Such a series of events would lead initially to a massive increase in demand for Bitcoin, then a massive decrease. Again, fiat currencies have systems built in place to protect against such an occurrence, including scale. Bitcoin does not, and so its interaction with the general market will scare people off unless there is some sort of holding policy in place (like a 24-hour transaction period) to secure the Bitcoin's value.

Not a great example, but it will do.
[pdf] The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object
Badger does one thing, and they do it well. They also have a kick-ass API.
I do.

I also call BS on:

1. The US has not declared war in over 70 _years_. -> Denial of objective reality.

2. In fact one of the biggest issues with a cyber attack is that we may never know where it came from. -> OMG must control internet.
Peter Thiel on The Future of Legal Technology
If you use a company workstation, DBAN your machine.
"Many millions of people are materially dependent on individual corporations, with no meaningful ability to opt out."

<sarcasm>Well then they can move somewhere else...</sarcasm>

What you're describing isn't free enterprise, so it's disingenuous to use it as an example as if it's the normal case. I could use North Korea as an example of excessive government, but I'm not because I realize it's not the usual case.
This article is from a site with a clear agenda rooted in identity politics. I would not treat it as unbiased.

Personally, I think that photography is essentially surveillance, which should be considered a potential threat. In this respect the report is accurate. The key word is potential. The FBI needs to catalog all potential threats, but not all of them are equal. As in most all of life, discretion is needed to properly weigh the threat of an activity in any particular situation.
My hope is that it will be handled differently than how it is apparently being handled in Washington.

I am currently in an area where cigarettes are not a constant problem for me. So I don't think my hope is unreasonable.
Theoretically, the government has an interest in seeing their dollars spent wisely, because if they don't, then people will get angry and vote them out of office. Currently, thanks to a generation of media exploitation, we have an ill-informed public and two parties which don't represent a healthy, balanced set of choices for American citizens – but I don't blame the government for that so much as I blame Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and the 70s-80s paleoconservatives that spent decades building misinformation into our media.

Very few things in life are willingly entered into. You didn't choose to be born in the place that you did, to the parents that you have, in the race or gender or of the sexual orientation which are yours, in the economic strata that you did. Simply being a user on Hacker News suggests that you've had at least a streak of good luck in your life that's given you the know-how and the comforts that enable you to post on a forum, to know which forum you'd like to post in, to understand the subjects well enough that you've decided you want to participate. We disproved that the heavens rotated around the earth, much less any one specific person, a long time ago; and with it, we began to throw out the notion that any one individual is entitled to rights or to privilege that are not derived from the consensus of her fellow citizens.

This is the basis of all civilization, of every society that's ever been; and progress has been a process that involves making "fellow citizens" as diverse a group as possible. Right now there are arguments over whether we should consider economically disadvantaged people our fellows – while we all would like to say we think they're our equals, we don't seem to think they have the rights to things like flu shots with the rest of us are allowed to take somewhat for granted. And it's not "equal" to tell them they ought to wait around for good people to give them things, because frankly there has never been a society in the world in which good people are so prevalent that there has been enough charitable donation to go around.

Private citizens giving to charity is great. If you have the money for it, donate money; good on Larry Page for this. But people being good doesn't preclude government from being a good idea, and it makes sense to point out, as we laud Page for being such an upstanding citizen of San Francisco, that it's a tragedy how costly even flu shots are, how terrible it is that in the 21st century it's still possible for kids to die of the flu for reasons entirely beyond their control, and that we should all be thinking about how, perhaps, we might make this issue a permanent thing of the past.
Chrome bug prevents users from installing extension from apps
Actually the conspiracy theory is that vaccines are designed to lower the birth rate, and Autism is just an unintended side effect of the various heavy metals and toxins.
No but, free health care is better than charitable health care.
You know what other day was preceded by newspapers not predicting a Japanese surprise attack on America? ALL OF THEM.

Nothing in this article gives reason to change my expectation of upcoming cyberattack.
Are they an accredited registrar? I was under the impression they were just a reseller.
Why LinkedIn Endorsements Don’t Change Everything
If you're talking about the Motorola acquisition, you (& the source author) need to add three more zeroes on those dollar figures.
Saying "voting against their own interests" is really insulting.

Do we dismiss Bill Gates as being too dumb to care for his own interests when he says his tax rate should go up?

Sometimes people feel differently than you. Even if it would be in their personal selfish interest to agree with you. This doesn't make them stupid. If anything, like when Gates or Buffett talk about how they should be made personally worse off, it shows the courage of their own convictions.
Delete anything personal from your work computer, including any saved browser logins.
Scientific consensus isn't "we believe"; it's "the results of widespread, independent, carefully executed, controlled experiments show."

Further, it doesn't mean that it "must be true" but rather that it is more likely to true.
Dare I ask what the legislation he wants actually does? Is it another "kill freedom in the name of security without actually securing anything" act?
You like the sound because you use it to predict the power/speed of the car. I'm sure you will latch on to another indicator for powerful electric cars, so no need to worry, bro.
Well, it's probably used for surveillance, though?
Not in the 'what did John search for yesterday' sense. But I'm pretty sure it's used for 'what are people searching for this week'.
Some access control is really easy to implement, other types are not, or they're not cost-effective. It's perfectly reasonable for a content provider to combine technological measures (like e.g. IP geolocation) with legal ones (terms of use, copyright).

That said, you're absolutely right: how hard can it be to block the Google News bot for a news organization? Not very. My point is merely that you can't draw any legal or moral conclusions from a 200 OK response, that's absurd.

To riff on your example, if my high-street shop has a sign that says "only people over 18" but doesn't have a bouncer, does that mean people under 18 should feel free to enter because nobody's physically stopping them?
Those public links though can get turned off pretty quick right if there's a lot of traffic to that image? Or no?
Another problem with just downloading something is that your less talented developers tend not to question how the thing works, and not have a good understanding of how it is best used, and what you'd better not try.

Good grief, yes.

I've observed this not just in coding, but across the board. For example, the young accountant who accepted verbatim and as authoritative every number that came out of the system.

The point of a lot of those reports was really to raise questions, not to provide pat answers.

Writ large, a lot of this "social" endeavor seems, one way or another, to mask a shallow grasp of the material at hand.

And, personally, having experienced how distracting it is for me and counter-productive vis à vis deep thought, I can't but consider it also causative.

I do collaborate. Very well. But not "24/7" while trying to avoid spilling my ramen noodles on the other person's lap.
Why Philosophy Still Matters
Note to self: If I ever become rich and decide to donate something to a bunch of kids... don't let HN find out...
Hackers Hit Former U.S. Military Chief
Some developers do their best work when alone, and suffer greatly wen forced to work in pairs (introverts). Other developers are the opposite; they are most productive when working in pairs, and are least productive when working alone (extroverted).

I hate these kinds of articles because it perpetuates this stereotype that introverted developers are unemployable.

In my experience, productivity and communication skills fall on a spectrum. Some people are very productive, but have bad communication skills; other people have great communication skills, but usually aren't nearly as productive. The first type hate pair programming, the second type loves it. Braintree is a company that culturally hires people who have great communication skills, but has to double up to be productive.

I think what is best is to just hire whoever, and let them work the way they want. If you want to work in pairs with someone, let them. If you want to work along, let them do that too. I hate this dogmatic thinking that its best that everyone work the same way.
Most of your response seems to be an off-topic rant against frameworks and new technology, and you're certainly not wrong on those points. But what I find interesting is the on-topic portion, where you basically say this:

"Social programming ideas are nuts." and then you follow that with "My company does collaboration wrong by saving it all until the very end of a project where it's too late."

The piece directly addresses this by stating that pair programming is trading a short-term cost (doubling up programmer resources on the project) for a long-term gain (far fewer errors, fixes and less review and deeper developer knowledge).

If pair programming meant you didn't have such painful, never-ending code reviews, would you still think it's such a horrible idea?
Yes, the challenge is not the physical products. It's the labor of getting it to people and administering it.

(I still haven't gotten my free flu shot at CVS because there is always a long line there.)
That is true.

Now, vaccines DO sometimes have complications - last time I got a vaccine (tetanus, 8 years ago), my elbow got swollen to about twice its size and was hard to bend. They weren't sure what went wrong (contaminated vaccine, parasitic infection, ??) but I had to take a two week course of antibiotics (which carries its own problems ...)

I'm sure at the herd level, 50% efficacy for individual vaccines is great.

But on a personal level, I can't find any analysis that takes into account both efficacy ("value") and complications ("price").

And on a personal note, I have the flu maybe once in ten years (if even that), despite hanging around people who get it regularly -- which is why I don't even consider getting a flu vaccine.

There is almost no research about how to improve general immune function, and I believe results on that front would be much more useful than a 50% efficacy vaccine.
Redditworthy. (1) No it doesn't; it says terrorists use photography, not that all photographers are terrorists. The basic logical error here is obvious. (2) Photography is one of a whole bunch of "suspicious activity" markers the FBI is publishing, including "materials acquisition" and "flying small aircraft around cities". (3) The FBI alert is factually accurate (if useless): terrorism operations (and criminal efforts of all sorts) do in fact involve detailed photographic documentation of targets.

I hope nobody on HN disputes the fact that local law enforcement and security personnel have a problem jumping the gun and denying people their rights to document public spaces photographically. But this memo wasn't an effort by the FBI to "label photographers as terrorists". This post sucks oxygen out of the room, not to mention the fact that it's not germane to HN at all, and I've flagged it.
I think this is probably a good opportunity to remove my Hacker News G+ Circle with thousands of people in it.
Cry me a river! Cost-efficient != free electricity and high-availability networking. I'm sure it was great while it lasted. Google have not actively shut anybody down.

If you want efficiency, buy low power machines and cobble together what services you need with free software. You can have RoundCube up and running in a matter of a few hours. I don't know any other webmail providers that provide SMTP, POP3, and IMAP for free. Those are all value-adds.

How much do you think that's worth? Would you include free support and maintenance if they were your machines and the setup charge did not fully pay for them? Do you think that it would be sustainable to do that?

Have you heard that it takes money to make money? If these businesses wanted to grow past 25 employees, they had to be prepared to move to a paying plan anyway. Those of us who were grandfathered in have obviously dodged a bullet. I can tell you that I've run mail servers on small machines for groups of users ~=25 before, and it's not very hard, but today I have free hosted Google Apps and therefore I want no part in it anymore.

Thanks, Google!
Ironically enough, the current issue of Wired magazine has an article praising TED for creating the TEDx franchise and allowing anyone to use its brand: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/11/ff-tedx/
Along the same vein: "The proposed speaker works for a university and/or has a phD or other bona fide high level scientific qualification". Many of the points they list are valid, but this conspicuous appeal to authority makes me much less inclined to watch the talks.
What you're describing isn't free enterprise

Correct. Government is not free enterprise. To govern a body is to take control of it to a certain extent.

We can quibble about how much control is too much, but that's the topic of this debate, not whether or not the government is controlling. I rather think "free enterprise" leads to horrible things when said "enterprise" begins to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and I like that we build systems to manage those large-scale enterprises rather than leaving them up to individual whim. It would be nice if we had more of those systems – say, to stop children from getting sick and dying just because their parents couldn't find work.
Instagram vs Twitter: A Solution
Info-graphic on Apple's imminent decline.
Why Stripe doesn't have product managers
This just strikes me as a case of "garbage in, garbage out." Of course the SNR of this new feature is going to be low if people don't answer it honestly.
A very personal opinion coming up.

I agree with his conclusion that there has to be a 'better way' than the smart phone, but my situation is slightly different. The author still embraces technology as the best way to handle our day-to-day problems. Mine have turned somewhat away from that.

A year ago I owned an iPhone 3GS. It was more than enough. I got the iPhone 4S, however, because some apps required a faster processor, so the simplest of tasks slowed down my 3GS. It just seemed like iOS was bulkier.

Fast forward to the present day, and I find myself only using my smart phone (iPhone 4S) to listen to music and use its GPS/map function. Sometimes I use it to check for venue reviews. I send a couple messages a day, be it SMS or a messasing app, and probably talk on the phone an average of a few times a week for a few minutes. I use Twitter as an RSS feed, too. For all its prowess, I don't seem to be doing much on it. I would sell it and get a cheap $10 phone, except I already bought it and as an ex-musician, I cannot stand listening to the radio, so I plug it in to my car stereo for that reason.

Basically, I feel like my smart phone was an expensive, over-rated, hyped piece of technology and machinery. Either we are not using it for the right reasons or it truly is a futile piece of metal that can be replaceable.

Again, this is my situation. I don't have a calendar and meetings I need to keep tabs on, so it may very well be that I am not part of smart phone makers' target audience, oddly enough.

Just another overstated opinion, I guess.
Did Microsoft recently hire Karl Rove as head of marketing? This is classic push polling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll
and add employees required to give their children flu shots.
Chances are once you are gone the business will continue as usual. Maybe a few things will come up that your former colleagues wished you were still there to address, yet once you walk out that door on your last day it's no longer your problem.

Button up your projects, do your brain-dumps, exchange contact information with the people you'd like to work with again, grab your personal belongings and head out.

Congratulations, and best wishes on your new adventure!
Prices also often shoot up. Not to mention unintended consequences. Look at the whole birth control situation. A study of a contraceptive mandate in Hawaii back in 2001 ( http://hawaii.gov/dcca/ins/reports/2001_contraceptive_report... ) increased pregnancies as well as costs to all participating in the plan (even those that didn't want the coverage). I don't discount the good intentions of programs like these, I just think it's naive to think that simply throwing more money at these problems is a scalable solution.
Oof. Well, in that case your dislike of them is wholly justified. Know at least that your company's partnership with them made one Superbowl ad-watcher happier for a couple of days.
I don't know how common it is, but it's certainly plausible. My startup has over 50 domains and we're actively using 10 or 12 of them. Buying domains was one of the largest early expenses. It's important for each of our products to stand on its own; using subdomains is not an option from a marketing perspective.
What if we spent our time making GitLab (http://gitlabhq.com/) better instead, since it's open source and users can host their own for free?
"It has been published in a peer reviewed journal (but beware… there are some dodgy journals out there that seem credible, but aren’t.)"

Dodgy journals should be omitted from everything relating to science. It's a shame that many of them get picked up by the mass media and blown out of proportion.

Also, the peer review system is so faulted that even bad studies make it into good journals due to politics.
Thanks for the post OP, it continues to drive me to get my company started which will hopefully reduce the amount of "bad science" data out there.
The holiday website built in Meteor I was speaking of: http://holiday.mcmillanagency.com/
I have the same reasoning as you. The number will be whatever amount that generates the income to support your desired lifestyle. This could be in investments or low involvement business income. Thus the number for me is 2.5 million based off of 4% dividend for a 100k income (about single engineer middle class Bay Area only because dividends are taxed lower). Or a number of side businesses that add up to that income.
There is also Out of the Tarpit[1], which also uses "accidental." This is a paper Rich Hickey mentions in at least one of his talks.

[1]: http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf
Wow. I wonder what this tells us about people who are dreaming of 24/7 video surveillance of the whole planet.. ? I mean, if a photo is worth a thousand words, then surely hi-resolution video is worth a lot more. So you see...
Google Reader - Google's Lost Social Network
It probably won't even show up. There have been some unintentional experiments with the flu vaccine, such as the year production got botched or that the people in charge of predicting which strains to include guessed wrong. There were no noticeable increases in sickness or morbidity in those years.

Don't take this too far; the data is very noisy and maybe it was there and we just didn't see it. Flu vaccines do seem to work in labs and in small community experiments.
That's an unethical and impotent strategy. Simply owning a domain without using it is not squatting. Having a trademark does not give you rights to someone else's property either. See Nissan Motors vs. Nissan.com.

The UDRP only allows you to take a domain for trademark infringement if:

a) the domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and

b) he/she has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and

c) the domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith
It's obvious, and you can too tell. I'm not worried about the comment being misunderstood, there are thick people everywhere and the Internet is no exception. Besides, this is just a friendly discussion forum, it's not like I'm Jonathan Swift.
App Store SEO Not Enough: Why Mobile App Publishers Need Inbound Marketing
I personally do not have http://www.fundingforlawsuits.com that are working for me, but I am seeing some major differences between my lawsuits from others. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this subject.
Except a number of these folks think of themselves as doing "science" they have "experiments" and "controls" and "theories" and more confirmation bias than is healthy. But they miss the bit about the 'review' and 'challenge' aspects of 'Good' science.

There is "bad science" done by earnest people, just like there is "bad music" created by earnest musicians. Properly labeling it as "bad" indicates that with work it can become "good" through better education about the scientific method, labeling it as "psudeo" dismisses the work outright and thus discourages folks who might actually have something from learning how to test whether or not they really do.
Sorry again for the email problem, team@uxarchive.com is back up! Please contact us if you have any user flows in mind we should add!