skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are the `implore` and `swear` keywords different from python's `assert`?

Even the implementation looks like it's just custom error text for `assert`.
SlixMe Hacked Belgium Police
Warren Buffett Buys World's Largest Solar Project from SunPower for $2.5 Billion
Oh.

"If an oath is broken, the offending function (the caller in the case of implore and the callee in the case of swear) will be duly punished. ... it will be deleted from your source code"

Hahah, awesome.

Outsource-proof.
Madoff is a spectacularly bad example here. He was arrested Dec 11 and plead guilty on March 12 of the following year without even attempting to plea bargain.
Why Changing Jobs Can be Bad for You?
Asteroids May Have Brought Carbon to Protoplanet
FTC won't bring charges against Google on search, patents
"Gambling is illegal where it is illegal" is a bit of a tautology don't you think? Unless you are saying gambling is never legal anywhere, in which case you are wrong.
Along with a call to action, this would serve as a better homepage than the current one.
If I had to guess, I'd say the people who read 37 signals' blog (and HN) are much more likely to over engineer than under engineer. Most of the client work (and I've done my fair share of consulting) I've seen suffers from exactly what you describe, but those aren't the people who are going to read 37s' blog.

However, I've also worked on the opposite end of the spectrum, lots of turbo nerds who were big on planning for every eventuality (and WERE the types to read 37s etc) and that suffered heavily from exactly what he describes here.

Know your audience!
The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and Mehs
> Consider this, if I hold a certificate for fubar.com, why am I not permitted to issue a certificate for xyz.fubar.com Or, better yet - another certificate for fubar.com?

Because business model. StartSSL.com is afaik the first (only?) CA that charges solely for identity validation and then let's you create unlimited (wildcard) certificates (with the exception of EV certs).

* No ties, just a customer.
Up followed by return is too much work. Let's lighten the load:

while true; do echo $RANDOM; read -p "Press [ENTER] to continue gambling."; done;

Actually, our pasty friend doesn't really need a job:

while true; do echo $RANDOM; sleep 10; done;
That's because pixels are important. The non-trivial blurring you see is the result of the edge of the image not being aligned with the edge of the pixel. the screen has to anti-alias it onto the subpixel, and it looks shitty. High PPI screens mitigate this somewhat, and i'm sure every designer would love to get away from using pixels but the results just aren't good when you do.
Not as big as you might think. Looking nation wide for districts that only voted Democrat or only voted Republican, I saw 1041261 Democratic votes and 775970 Republican ones. (I could have missed a district.) If you eliminate those from the tally, we're still around a million excess Democratic votes. And those districts are all going to be very safe for their party, so even if they did have the opposite party as an option, it is likely that most of the votes would have been for the party that won that district.

So that source of skew does not explain much of the difference.
Google's search engine competitors were really hoping that the FTC wasn't going to regulate the "sort". We all have editorial voices that we want to be free to use, for what we think is good and bad. If you don't like a search engine's editorial voice, go find a new one.
I highly recommend referenced book by the author of the article, Harvey Silverglate, called "Three Felonies a Day" [1]. It's a great read and details many similar cases.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
Confessions of a Hotel Insider
I haven't seen any reasons around why an AI must be conscious to cause harm or existential risk. My opinion is that an x-risk causing AI would almost certainly not be conscious like humans.

As for human stupidity, maybe you just have more faith in humans than I do (but I am not entirely pessimistic). Let me ask a related question, to try and gauge this more deeply: do you think anyone will ever release an engineered pathogen into the wild?
This is pretty awesome. A friend of mine wanted me to look into doing something exactly like this. And this is definitely not useless. Great job!
FYI, for baseball fans, you can get similar data about each play in the MLB from http://www.retrosheet.org
libfitbit unfortunately doesn't currently work with the fitbit one, for the older devices it's apparently fine but the one changes how it gets talked to entirely. I've attempted a bit of work with getting something talking to it but it's not an easy thing to do. Their bluetooth dongle presents itself as an HID device and I think hides a lot of the details away from you if you wanted to talk to it over actual bluetooth. I'd love to get it to sync with both their site and to be able to capture the information myself to store.
... he could buy a Nexus 4 on Google Play and try to get support for it from a real live person?
While I completely and wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, and think fear-mongering is just that, the interesting thought experiment is thinking what technology would look like for something that _didn't_ shit the bed. Or when it did, it fixed itself. That, plus a little bit of intelligence, could (would?) be scary.
Ask HN: iTunesU and courseware recommendations for workouts?
I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and university courses while at the gym. Any recommendations? Nothing too technical, as I won't be able to take notes.
Google settles US anti-trust probe
Also for anyone who cares, the source is available on Github: https://github.com/chartbeat/percentoftheinternet
The same thing that happens when you screw up your laptop and find you can't email the cops.

Don't rely on your "hacking phone" for emergencies, at least until you can verify it will work.
V1 is ready to deploy, brands are already on-board, first campaigns go live in February. We are accepting Games on a rolling basis over the next two months. It will usually take a couple of days to get back to you.

This is not vaporware. Our tech team is among the best in the business, led by Alan Price former CTO of Electronic Arts. the server infrastructure we've built is one-of-a-kind, battle-tested, fast and scaleable.

The integration takes less than an hour, and is fully customizable / skinnable. our goal is to give game developers full control over the user experience.
ACT.md (http://act.md) - Boston, Massachusetts

At ACT.md, we're building web and mobile apps that will transform how patients, their families, and all their medical providers work together to deliver life-saving care. We may even transform American healthcare while we're at it — creating a paradigm shift from the inefficient work of disconnected individuals to the transparent and fine-tuned collaboration of care teams.

We're currently a small group housed at the Harvard Innovation Lab, but we're funded and looking to grow the User Experience and Engineering teams. Specifically:

- UI engineer (Backbone.js/HTML5/CSS3)
- Mobile web developer (your framework of choice)
- Back-end engineer (Python/Flask/SQLAlchemy, MySQL)

Nitty gritty details are at http://act.md

Thanks!
Agreed. I think this hire by Google is largely for PR.

If Google was very serious about A.I. I think they would have just acquired Jeff Hawkins' Numenta and his neuroscience crew, who have real, practical "brain-building" experience.
The Hotel California of cancellations: Audible tries everything to keep me
> So in other words, these guys are too lazy to do any of the hard things associated with their job

I would have assumed this wasn't laziness, but a desire to avoid having their fingerprints on potentially illegal activities.
I'd be more than happy with "just" better speech to text. Solutions for that problem is abysmal, especially for non-english languages.
Facts are not copyrightable, but databases (compilations of data) are.

IANALTINALA.
> Google is in the best position of anyone/any company to cause an AI disaster.

Are you serious ? Let's not overstate Google's position in this world.

They have a search engine, mobile platform, advertising platform and a bunch of popular websites. That's it. All of which have been done before for a decade now. Nothing they do directly influences whether people live or die.

I would be far more concerned about something like IBM Watson used in health care situations.
I don't know anything about the details of his contributions to those devices but I can't help but think that he is a charlatan whenever I see him speak; I would be interested in independent corroboration. He hasn't seemed to have made any progress on anything in the passed 10 years.
facebook would love this
I fear from your language that you aren't really interested in reasonable argument, but I'll try anyway: ActiveRecord had two variant find() interfaces, one of which tried to make it "easy" on the programmer by avoiding the need to extract an ID to do the lookup. And it went further by adding an overloaded argument syntax that allowed you to elide the first argument entirely. And it forgot that that second argument simultaneously (1) was defined by a remote client and (2) could contain arbitrary SQL.

So yes: "copy pasta" of the id boilerplate around an AR find() call would absolutely have prevented this. Rails got slick, and got burned. DRY helped reduce "copy pasta" (sigh) but hurt security.
All Top 2012 Lists I Can Stand - Tech and Social Media
At least on my Android devices, you can select which root CAs to trust via Setting -> Security -> Trusted Credentials. Click on TURKTRUST, scroll down and click "Disable". Repeat.

YMMV as I'm running Jelly Bean on both phone (CM10.1) and tablets (stock).
Thanks for the info, telemachos. I have always bought my eBooks from Amazon and, on some rare occasions, from iBooks iPad app. So I am happy to know there are better deals outside of Amazon.

In most cases, however, the eBooks (Kindle) are cheaper on Amazon, but I am willing to pay a few dollars more to get the eBooks in all 3 formats (.pdf. .epub, and .pdf). I personally prefer to use iBooks (.epub works fine), when I am on my iPad, and the .pdf—when I am on my laptop.
If Google's products answer my question / solve my problem, their search engine would be worse if those products were excluded from the results. If the government starts regulating the CSS, I'm even more worried.
http://i.imgur.com/Sq8Kd.jpg
Beercamp 2012
Tracking Call Conversion Rates with Optimizely
"Not a single sympathizer with the OP?"

I'll bite. I could have written this, and have said similar things here and there several times. The vitriol directed against PDF and me for recommending it has been quite surprising.

PDF doesn't reflow and a PDF formatted for a book-sized page will not be usable on your phone. No kidding! So write a script to run your LaTeX source (for example) multiple times for normal and large-type editions for, say, four canonical screen geometries.
"pilots still have to takeoff and land manually"

Do they? I remember a landing 15 years ago or so where the pilot announced "there's fog, so we had to land on automatic" (that was fog as in 'looking down onto a cloud deck, while taxiing')
Best I can find: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/google_11...

SPENCER MICHELS: Sergay Brin thinks the ultimate search engine would be something like the computer named Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

SERGEY BRIN: Hal could... had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Now, hopefully, it would never... it would never have a bug like Hal did where he killed the occupants of the space ship. But that's what we're striving for, and I think we've made it a part of the way there.
Yes, existential risk around AI. Really.

You can look at it that way, but I think it is currently far more likely than the "typical nerd wet dream about the Singularity".

Your last sentence is a complete non sequitur to me. You are comparing the output of a large, AI focused, for profit organization to an individual of unknown skill using some very specific open source tools.

I am not losing sleep over it, but I definitely think about it from time to time.
For Ubuntu, try this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/63999/how-can-i-install-typin...
Very true, but never underestimate the importance of theatrics. ;)
See, this is the problem - thanks to a decade's worth of state-sponsored smear campaigns, you think Conrad Black 'looted his own companies', when that's just not borne by the facts at all. I wish you luck finding someone who looks more sympathetic after the government finishes up with them.

And while I agree with your statement about 'most other countries', Americans should hold their government to a higher standard.
Give it time. It took them a bit to hire the Stanford team who won the DARPA self-driving vehicle contest after it was done.
That may just be the aluminum from his tinfoil hat seeping into his brain.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it seems unlikely. What are the odds that I'd need to call 911 and:

1) I'm alone
2) I'm not near my car (I carry an old flip phone in the glove compartment for emergencies)
3) I've messed up my phone sufficiently enough that 911 doesn't work but most other things work fine
People who have the autonomy and backing to do "real AI" and have those kinds of achievements don't change jobs often. If someone has real accomplishments in AI, that person's going to be very hard to hire away, because quality jobs are rare.

For all the hullabaloo, Director isn't that high at Google. He's not being hired as a VP (there are hundreds of those) or Google Fellow. It's not a bad gig, and I'm sure he'll get to work on interesting stuff, but I would have imagined a guy of his caliber getting more.
Bug report: you need to manually add some multi-part TLDs, right now it's listing "co.uk", "org.uk" etc. as domains
There is no such thing as unbiased search. There is no such thing as an objective ranking algorithm.

Even ignoring the first amendment issues, what possible way are you going to regulate the "fairness" of the ordering of search results without completely hobbling the usefulness of that search engine?

A MapQuest-fan's trash is another man's useful google map at the top of the search results.

Far better for the FTC to actually enforce their rules about disclosure of site-provided results, which have been on the books for a decade. Danny Sullivan covers the lack of attention there well: http://searchengineland.com/a-letter-to-the-ftc-regarding-se...
I wouldn't say that they are necessarily orthogonal, in fact, I would say that most of the time they align pretty well.
The return of the Atmoic Typo
Researchers Build a Projectile Vomiting Robot
This was an excellent read. I really like how the author presents clear, actionable, steps one can take to address the concerns series A investors might throw at you.
Which is legal in that county.
> none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view

It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart).

Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.
How _do_ you use story boards? In the newer xcode I always opt out. Seems to be too general to make it do what I want
This looks like a lot of "20% time", concentrated in one person.
The problem with giving truly gifted inventors all the resources they want is that they often end up inventing Segways.

The kind of desperate, burning passion that Wozniak had when inventing the Apple computer doesn't seem to be something that any established company has ever been able to intentionally recreate.
And here is that play :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM1iXHY8s9o
The NY State government has a huge hang up about gambling. I've had multiple discussions with NY State liquor control and the AG's office about what they consider "Gambling instruments", which you cannot possess in a establishment that serves alcohol.

Not Gambling instruments:

Darts
Chessboard & Chess Pieces (including checker pieces)
Bowling Balls (and Bowling in general)
Pool cues (and Pool tables & balls)

Gambling Instruments (possession of any of these items is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 1 year in jail):

Deck of cards
Dice

That makes the following games illegal:

Any card game (Poker, Blackjack, Rummy, Go Fish, Solitare)
Yahtzee / Boggle
Trivial Pursuit (just having the cards are OK for some reason)
Candy Land (!!!)

Just to further the point, you can shoot pool, for money, and it's not gambling. But if you carry a child's boardgame into a bar, you've violated NY State gambling laws.
Top 3 Problems Left to Solve
My point is that each leader displays similar traits and is expected to act/react in a certain way
The term "Web Page" was also coined in his honor.
I think it is worth mentioning that there is Cocoa and there is Cocoa Touch: supposedly saner and cleaner version. I am only familiar with the Cocoa Touch so I cannot compare myself.
The supporting argument is that, if proven guilty, there might not be enough assets left over to compensate victims. Also, in some cases to prevent the alleged perpetrator form fleeing. The problem is scenarios as described in the article. The issues that I see in this is a)that funds unrelated to any crime are frozen/held and b)there is no recourse when proven innocent. There almost needs to be some mechanism to hold funds while leveraging them for defense, in the similar way to a bail bond. As far as rich mobsters, having prosecutors resorting to vague statutes of unrelated crimes (wire fraud instead of murder) is indicative of a larger issue with the criminal justice system (as well as many other scenarios in comments here.) Creating obscure, vague, all encompassing statues to snare criminals, and ever more frequently, the ignorent and unwary white-collar, is not representative of an effective and fair social justice system.
I bought myself 60,000 views on YouTube for Christmas
I direct you to my final statement in my original post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998697):

> Edit: just for the record, I'm not necessarily trying to refute all or some of the OP's points. I think the original article was poorly written, and the case for C# was poorly made. Hence my "let's play this game" comment.

RE: "This is horribly mistaken in more than two ways."

Not all code is created equal. That 30% that needs to be rewritten for each device could be difficult to tune for each platform. Native widgets in iOS do not work the same as native widgets in Andoid. Unless there is some magical abstraction layer (which doesn't appear to exist), you're potentially rewriting the most difficult code for each platform.

But again, please see my original post. In my original post, I said the focus of the original article should have been the potential for reuse across platforms - but it was glossed over in a disappointing 3 sentences.
Objective-C dot syntax is fucktarded. The dot is a structure-member indicator; why are you using it on a value of pointer type?

The thing is, Smalltalk has a perfectly good getter/setter convention that's almost as compact and straightforward: for a property called 'foo' the getter is called 'foo' and the setter is called 'foo:' (takes one arg). Apple could have used this convention in its method synthesizer (they opted to make the setter the somewhat more awkward 'setFoo:') and everybody would be clear on what was a struct member access and what was a message sent to an object. But no.
i think you dont need to be a consultant in this, i mean its pure technique, if your technical and understand math, then you might be able to make something. you need the spirit of hackaday to be working in it, and dont think of goldmines, there is lots of competition. on the positives lots is done at universities (and they lack a lot of practical insight).
So there is room for improvement, you might try to build your own coca colla finder just to train yourself.
Hana Barbara has an iconic style. It's kind of offensive to use that as an example of "crappy" animation. That's like saying Jackson Pollock's "crappy," slapdash paintings could never compare to the intricate detail of the Mona Lisa.
Quite. You, are, of course, free to run your own CA. I rather like my version (a custom minimal Linux virtual machine, ~ 16MB, stored on an IronKey). Built from source, reasonably tamper-proof, works offline, encrypted at rest. It's a bit of pain to remember to reset the time/date every time I boot it, but it works quite well.

Sadly you'll spend the rest of your time installing your root certificates in everything (good luck with mobile devices, I have torn my hair out in the past with Sony-Ericsson; Oh, you have to drag the specially-named-file-in exactly-the-right-encoding onto the HIDDEN node in the PC-suite-file-explorer-horror-window, of course. HOW OBVIOUS.)
Room 77 Raises $30M Series C for Hotel Metasearch
Registrar's are trusted. They can change the DNS records for your domain to point at their servers, allowing them to intercept email. That's sufficient to allow them to get certificates issued for your domain through some providers.
Ah yes, the old "Person A has it bad so let's level the field by making it bad for Person B" idea.

I believe there's a significant difference between you not having the resources to mount a proper defense versus the prosecution removing your resources to prevent you from mounting a proper defense.

Why not go the other way? Assign the prosecution a budget in line with the defendant's ability to defend themselves.
no-one has mentioned perspectives (perhaps arguably because it's not an alternative, but a patch to help make the existing approach more reliable), but it exists now and seems to work - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perspectives/lnppf... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/perspectives/
Nokia planning aluminum body for thinner, lighter Lumia 920 successor
> after which you hire your real lawyers

Even after you do that, you still need to use your head. Frequently, what's in the best interest of the lawyer is not in yours.

Your lawyer will prefer a plea bargain, since he'll count that as a "win" and will still get paid. Even if there will likely be a dismissal of charges. A plea bargain is a certainty.
They just couldn't transform from a hardware company to a software one...
I'm very surprised Paul Irish veted this article.

It's far from "all" you need to know about transitions (delay, quirks of 3D transform regarding backface visibility...)

Moreover it's quite weak on cross-browser compatibility and performance.
Some improvements:

- show the percentages on the main page under the browser icon

- on the browser page show a breakdown by version
Thank you. I think this is useful project for me.
The other day, I also thought about making a algorithm to create a speech bubble around a piece of text. You have a pretty good implementation.
But isn't this exactly a high cost situation? Send a loud and clear message that CAs are entrusted with an enormous level of trust, and they damn well better make sure that their procedures are water tight, at the risk of losing their business overnight.
Top Ten Government IT Security Leaders of 2012
Thanks for the heads up. Sometimes I carry around a deck of cards for entertainment (solitaire or 500 rummy if multiple players are available) -- it's tiny, light and doesn't depend on electronics being available.

Knowing I could be arrested for this in NY makes me really not want to visit that state.

And their unconstitutional stance on gun control, but I digress.
Yes, Joda-Time is awesome and a default include is pretty much all of my POMs. I'd also add that if your dealing with monetary fields / calculations, Joda-Money is also a great way to avoid common pitfalls.
Which Hosters don't Lie About SLA