skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No doubt SMTP is asynchronous, but a lag of 115 minutes? For a consumer that is way too high to live with, whatever say the standards.

But obviously the title of the article and probably the topic borders on a flame-bait.
The correct term for his arguments is 'hair shirt green'.
That is plain stupid and only supports Apple
You are just angry you didn't get picked to be on the secret GitHub Code Evaluation Committee.
Funny story. Since october, If you own your cellphone on Mexico (not subsidized or contract has ended), according to the NOM-184-SCFI-2012 you can ask your carrier to unlock it for you, free of charge.
only buy unlocked phones. people need to wise up, stop signing contracts. make these companies bend to our will.
Dung beetles guided by Milky Way
Show HN: Dimsum generates lorem ipsum text for your Node.js and web projects
It's from a very popular Stack Overflow answer a while back. One longtime user got tired of having to explain the intricacies of HTML parsing to people, so instead he posted a Lovecraftian rant about the horrors of parsing HTML with regular expressions.
Scholarpedia extends $10K article writing contest
Well, there are many reasons you could need an urgent email for something that wouldn't be satisfied over the phone. Sending a contract or a statement of work, for example. Sure it could be faxed, if both parties have fax. It could be put on Dropbox, if both parties have Dropbox, etc.

If it's not just a communication but rather an exchange of data, a phone call won't suffice. The author even mentioned that he had called the person, who resent the email 4 times. Obviously a phone call isn't what needed to happen. There's just a lack of good file transfer solutions on the Internet.
Anecdotally, I wonder if the reason I don't see this as much as I used to is because the quick email discussions I have happen almost entirely between Gmail users.
On the related note:
Immigration backlog: Anti-fraud measures add years to citizenship process
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1319286--immigrat...
Yelp Case Study - Increase Social and Brand Awareness
> how is an upper bound on the supply of bitcoins deflationary?

If the supply of currency doesn't grow at exactly the same rate as the economy as a whole, then overall prices in that currency will change. If the supply of currency grows faster than the economy, then the currency will become less valuable in relation to goods and services, and prices will rise. This is known as inflation. On the other hand, if the currency supply grows slower than the economy, then the currency will become more valuable in relation to goods and services, and prices will fall. This is known as deflation.

The upper bound on the supply of BTC is deflationary because it guarantees that the rate of growth in the supply in bitcoins is forever approaching zero. This means that, in the long run, any growth in the bitcoin economy whatsoever will result in deflation.

Whether that's a virtue or not is, at best, debatable. Economists generally agree that deflation is very bad in the modern economy. While they aren't synonymous, the historical record indicates that economic deflation and economic recessions (and depressions) tend to go hand-in-hand, and there's a fairly strong theoretical explanation for why this should be. That's the whole reason why governments try to always maintain a small amount of inflation. Zero (or near-zero) inflation might be the ideal, but policymakers consider deflation to be scary enough that they prefer to err a little bit on the side of inflation as a cushion to guard against deflation.
I believe IE and Chrome use the operating systems list of certs. So your corporate IT dept can deploy the trusted certificates pretty easily. Firefox has it's own list of certificates so in theory is less susceptible to these corporate MITM attacks.
Banks have insurance, but you can't buy Bitcoin insurance. Some people see Bitcoin as uninsurable due to the fact that transactions are irreversible and each wallet is controlled by a single private key. It's a very brittle system; if you make a single mistake your money is gone forever. This may eventually be fixed with HSMs and multiple signatures.
Many of the analogies used to explain Bitcoin are, unfortunately, misleading. Saying 'each bitcoin', for example, as if it were a tangible collectable, introduces a bunch of associations that aren't helpful for understanding.

Instead, think of Bitcoin as a giant consensus accounting ledger. Everyone can see which crypto-signing-keys have the right to spend which balances. (The balances happen to be measured in an integral unit called a 'satoshi', and 100,000,000 of these satoshis equal "1 BTC"... but these are tallies in a ledger mapping key-identities to available-spending-balances, not rare collectables.)

Given that, a person's Bitcoin holdings are simply numerical totals which, at the direction of their signing keys, can be handed in full or part to other signing keys. But it works like having a bank balance at a shared "bank in the cloud", massively replicated, with no single authority or point-of-failure, where everyone can see every transfer. (Balance transfers are public announcements, not the secure sending of a rare secret.)

So bitcoin balances are valued with regard to $USD (or other currencies) like other foreign-currency bank balances - who's willing to buy it, for how much, compared to who's willing to sell, for how much. That is, yes, "supply and demand", but based directly on the willingness of holders/seekers to transact, and only indirectly on the total 'supply' in existence.

That the price has run up indicates that holders of current bitcoin balances want more $USD to give it up, and that seekers are offering more $USD to get it. Every day more people hear about Bitcoin, and slowly and slightly (because it's pretty complicated and different) come to understand it better. Also, using a heuristic common for new technologies, people only believe something new will survive after seeing it survive for a while. [1]

From my perspective, heists and scams are good for Bitcoin, because they're providing a trial-by-fire and accelerated-education in various economic, security, and usability topics for anyone involved (or just watching from the sidelines). Things that took decades or centuries to work out in traditional economic systems will be resolved in months or years, and with countermeasures optimized for today, not the 18th/19th/20th centuries.

[1] See for example Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the 'Lindy Effect': http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/worlds-not-ending-but-t...
This will be useful then: http://wtfjs.com
What do you propose we do about a man who kills his wife (or some other enemy) over a long held grudge and poses exactly zero threat to anyone else?
They're totally different styles of flow.

I find Macklemore's flow to be much closer to a prose spoken word style of flow than someone like Nas, Eminem, or Jay-Z. It's tough, perhaps misleading, to compare given that.
> You could certainly achieve the same result by buying a second phone just for traveling. But you already have a phone. In the rest of the world (and in the US until tomorrow), that's all the phones you need.

If you got your phone subsidized, then no, you don't have a phone. You don't get to unlock this not-paid-for phone the same way you don't get to change out the drive train on a leased car. At the end of the lease, after the dollar buyout, go wild. After your contract is over, unlock away. It's yours, do as you wish.

I believe the carrier owns the phone until you've satisfied your subsidy contract.

Similarly, I believe an unsubsidized phone should come unlocked.
I've been cut off in my hermit cave.

Also, alternatives have been starting to catch on, here. Such as pre-paid plans that offer significant discounts. Also FaceTime, Skype, and whatever else (although these eat into often stingy data quotas).

Many in the U.S. still have little or no clue. But I don't think it's quite as bad as before; also, someone "technically" "gaming" the system isn't as astonishing as it used to be.

Or so it seems, from my cave. Mostly, I'm just more familiar with reactions back at that time.
+1 for Django
Ask HN: How can I make a weekend hackathon a success?
A friend and I had a great idea. We've bounced it off some people in the industry and they really like it. We've spent the past few weeks putting together a framework and seeing if it translates to code. So far, so good!

We're planning to spend this weekend huddled up in our geek cave finishing a MVP, our first hackathon. I've already got some basic assumptions about productivity:
- Get some sleep, otherwise we'll be dead and Sunday's work will be worthless
- Make a todo list a priority, otherwise we'll just be spinning our wheels
- Have good technology (we'll have 5-6 computers for server/dev/etc. Awesome network too).

What can we do to make this a success?
Also, are there any subtle traps we should look out for?
You're right - this should have "again" concatenated on the end of the title string.
We used the service once at Santiago, Chile.

Amazing experience. Much better than going to a restaurant.
You should have bought an iPhone 5 if you wanted to own one.

I buy my iPhones, and the first time they sync, I get the message, "Congratulations, your phone is unlocked."

As it stands, AT&T owns your iPhone until you finish your contract just like the dealer owns your leased car.
If he wasn't splitting that #1 website with Larry, he wouldn't be anywhere near the list of billionaires.
> Or if someone finally gets around to writing a cool application that uses more features of the protocol.

What features would you like?
Isn't the 115 minute lag in the screenshot lag between one Google SMTP server and another Google SMTP server? That seems like a problem Google should be able to address.
Thanks for the writeup Anna. Founder of Chef Surfing Eric Knudtson, please A.M.A.
The solution is cheap and simple: FAX. It starts coming out on the other end before you're finished putting it in!
You don't know what you're talking about. I don't live in the US.
C# - MonoGame (supports iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 8 Metro - more to come).
Yep. I used to work at DreamHost and our customers would run into issues with Gmail greylisting incoming mail. In fact, they do it like crazy.

In a lot of cases, adding an SPF record for the sending domain would clear things up.
I can't wait for this to break out of the Latin American market and get over here to Australia! :) I love the idea!
Not to downplay the pain you got put through, but an important lesson for those who haven't tried it is that immigration is difficult in general.

> there are only two seasons, winter and construction

Come to Vancouver instead - here it's summer and rain, where summer is July through September.
To me, the douche move is whining about it when they decided against allowing it.
This is the future of web servers. I like it. 5 of these + Residential land based broadband + LTE failover and you have your own mini data center.
> trivial things as syntax.

Syntax is not trivial. You stare at something 10 ours a day, you want it to be a good user interface.
And for those fed up with copyright as a whole: http://unlicense.org
You can toggle zen mode with cmd/ctrl + shift + L :)
If one were to get a widely-used SSL-cert, that could be used to MitM any domain ? Or would it only work for specific domains like, this one works for Google and Yahoo, but this one would work for Microsoft?
It was not special cased in the DMCA.

The short, generalized answer is:

The DMCA's DRM circumvention provision (the one that made it not legal to decrypting dvd's you own, etc) has an exemption process, run by the registrar of copyrights every 3 years.

In 2010, they exempted unlocking phones.
That exemption was not renewed during the rulemaking at the end of last year, and will expire on saturday.

See http://www.copyright.gov/1201/
This is part of a larger scheme by Github to get you to start writing text and code directly into the website. This is just another nice, small editor improvement.
> prisons are not real punishment

I think Aaron Swartz would disagree.

> punishing them with the clear intention of feeling good in some way

This plays some role, but I'd say the biggest reason people give in favor of having prisons is rational: Deterrence. If crimes aren't punished, what stops people from stealing when they want something they can't afford? What stops the strong from beating up the weak for fun, for profit, or as a way to resolve disputes in their favor? What stops the weak from shooting the strong because they finally get tired of being beaten up? What reason is there to adhere to contracts and agreements necessary for effective commerce if it would be more beneficial to one party to break them?

If you agree that punishment is necessary, but prison is somehow deficient as a punishment, what's the alternative? The punishment has to be sufficiently undesirable to cause most people to avoid crime in order to avoid the punishment. In addition, if it's going to be implemented in the US, it can't be cruel and unusual punishment since that is strictly Constitutionally prohibited, and if it's going to be implemented in a relatively free and democratic society, it has to show respect for generally accepted human rights principles. This excludes solutions like lashing, waterboarding, more extreme torture, massive expansions of the death penalty (I believe England as late as the 1500's would hang homeless children for stealing clothes to keep warm in the winter), or collective punishment (punishing someone else instead of or in addition to a criminal, e.g. many authoritarian regimes are willing to punish opponents by jailing, torturing, and/or killing their innocent friends, relatives, and children).

I do think that US criminal justice could be better. Currently many crimes are punished too harshly, sometimes sentences are inconsistent, current implementation of plea bargaining sometimes leads to terrible injustices, public defenders are woefully underfunded, the education system doesn't do a good job of covering these issues, and life is far too difficult for people after a felony conviction (discrimination against workers with felony records is legal and widespread; this sort of discrimination shouldn't be illegal, but culturally we need to be more willing to let people have second chances).
Don't commit your private SSH keys
Well, I mean corporations in general, so I certainly endorse reigning in their influence in general, not just a specific company.
Show HN: I wrote a book on idiomatic Python. Here's its insane build/test system
Background:
I've been working on a book to help developers learn and write idiomatic Python. It's taken far longer than I imagined, but today I made it available for purchase (http://www.jeffknupp.com/writing-idiomatic-python-ebook).

The automated build and test system I'm using is ridiculous. It uses: virtualenv, tox, pytest, coverage, doctest, pandoc, make, xelatex, makeindex, and a ~200 line Python script to collect and format the output. The details of the build/test system I created are described in detail here: http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/01/24/the-writing-idiomatic-python-ebook-is-finally-available/

The result is two PDF files...

Does anyone who's done something similar have/know of an easier way to write a technical book (where code samples must be tested) that will eventually need to be translated into multiple formats? I know I'm not the first person to write a technical book, but I'm not aware of any existing tools (commercial or otherwise) to make the process easier. Does everyone who writes a technical book cobble together their own system?

I ask because I plan to eventually write a book where C++ is the language being discussed. The thought of going through this all again makes me shudder. After finishing this book, I'm convinced there must be a better way.
Take only Postal Money Orders.

The other thing I would stress is that if you provide a quality product, chargebacks won't be a problem. Keeping up with demand will.
I dont know why bitfloor was not mentioned there, but you can transfer directly from an Electric Orange checking account into Bitfloor.
Likewise, I've been meaning to convert my local projects at some point and post them to one of the newfangled online git repos. I was going to use GitHub or Bitbucket to avoid saddling my crap on the git hosting I have available from the open source project I develop for, but now I'm not so sure GitHub is the best place for that.

I don't mind the code being publically-accessible as the price for free hosting but I have no interest in being hounded about my personal scratch code either.
I've been making this point for a while. In particular, there is pretty solid data showing that immigration drags down the average hourly wage, based on longitudinal data which excludes them:

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/immigrants_simpsons_p...

(The data compares the income of Americans to that of their parents, thereby excluding people who's parents are not Americans.)

Note that this observation (by itself) is not an argument against immigration. http://openborders.info/compositional-effects/
Hiring a consultant seems like a bit too much overhead for the size of projects I'm talking about - Android apps with a few screens, small webapps etc.

I was thinking more about a review of code structure and design for learning purposes and self-improvement, rather than optimisations of the projects themselves.
Were you doing this work in Costa Rica? Because if not, your example is completely different. You were doing work in the US that the US deems illegal.

And actually, I'm not certain that your lawyers were correct in stating that the work was illegal. It's illegal to operate an online casino in the US. That's not the same as it being illegal to develop software that can be used by an online casino. If the casino in question was serving US customers, then you might be considered an accomplice in a crime. If they were only serving customers outside the US, I seriously doubt you'd be guilty of any crime.
My guess is that they're making sure this works before integrating it into the editor at large. Isn't that the most obvious thing to do with it?
I think you are being a bit dramatic. You can buy the digital download from iTunes, Amazon, etc.
This lacks vision. Petition to make locking cell phones illegal.

This is also misdirected. Legislators make and unmake law. Petition them.
All I see is a bunch of handwaving and distractions from what is admitted to be a real issue at the start.

Imagine we still had slavery in the US in 2013. Who would argue that slavery is perfectly ok because, by golly, slaves live longer and have access to nicer clothes and improved healthcare? And look, we had to deal with an influx of new slaves, so it's actually their fault! Really, those are your arguments?

After seeing this and the hopeless single mother making $260k infographic, WSG seems to be pretty out of touch.

[I'm not trying to compare low wage workers to slaves. At all. I'm making an analogy concerning red herrings.]
No, not convinced. I haven't taken a subsidy on the last 3 iPhones or Android phones and I've had no hoops at all to jump through, neither on AT&T nor on T-Mobile.

The iPhones, I simply demanded at the Apple store to pay full price (this is before the officially unlocked version was being marketed), and the first time I plugged the phone into iTunes, I got a dialog congratulating me on unlocking my phone. This was not widely reported, but always worked.

The Android phones, I can simply pull out the T-Mobile SIM and put in an AT&T one and I've never talked to anyone about it.

Both types work with pay as you go SIMs in Europe. I've never spoken to AT&T or T-Mobile about any of them.

Convinced?
>Consider the electronic products that every middle-class teenager can now afford—iPhones, iPads, iPods and laptop computers.

No teenager can afford this. They, or their parents, go into debt for it.

And that is the problem. The ability of middle class Americans to buy what they are implored by our consumerist society to buy has fallen sharply. General unhappiness and massive amounts of personal debt used to finance knickknacks is the outcome.
No, the author is upset about "email with a 2 hour delivery lag." Try getting away with that lag at your job. There is no mention of "instantaneous" time scales in TFA.
If people have made this mistake, is there a way of getting it out of the public archive (short of shutting down the repository), or will it forever sit there, part of the indelible history?
Well, not only are you not using their service, you're using somebody else's service when theirs is available.

As per your binding contract, you agree to only use their service in return for getting the phone at a subsidized price. Their incentive to charge you less for the handset (incurring a loss on the sale) is that you agree to guarantee doing business with them.

And if that's a problem, unlocked phones are still always an option.
For gmail the new compose allows full screen mode which is very distraction free and clean UI. http://i.imgur.com/jrqOfiQ.png
I believe Jason's point is that you're still paying off the phone subsidy. Nothing's changed, as far as that's concerned.

You may be avoiding exorbitant surcharges, such as roaming fees.

Well... why are those surcharges so exorbitant?

Pay through the arse. Or toss another disposable phone into a landfill. People are starting to think that "some law" doesn't necessarily make it "right".
Hi everyone, I started this because I think the Librarian of Congress' decision is really bad for consumers.

The new petitions feature requires 100,000 signatures to be considered.

Please sign, and if you can tweet it out, share it on Facebook, or email it to a journalist, every little helps.
Most middle-class teenagers with even a part-time job could afford these items.
If it was a really big heist, you do kind of expect the value to drop, and we have seen that happen especially with that big heist that brought down the value when it had reached as high as $30, less than a year ago.

The robber makes plays to dump his illegally acquired currency on the market and launder it into clean money, and while dumping he accepts prices that the original owner(s) would never have considered, simply because he's seeking to convert it into something untraceable before he can be apprehended.

I am kind of thinking that some day in the next couple of years, we are going to see a large bitcoin bust, and we'll get to make up our mind in the media whether the perp was the legitimate owner and is persecuted, or if he's a thief and should go to jail.

I don't think they will ever get Pirateat40 for his First Pirate Savings and Trust scandal. I'm not even sure that there's any law enforcement who is out there looking.
Vancouver is my favourite city in Canada (and runner up for running a business). Say hi to the steam clock from me :)

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/trips/us2/dscf0563.jpg.html

(not the best picture, taken on a road trip around the rocky mountains in winter, yes, I'm crazy).
I think you will need to refine your model. At the least, you will have to have some way to limit resting heart rate to be > 0. Alternatively, your model suggests that person will die from 6000 hours of practice, as it would bring his resting heart rate down to zero. If you don't, your optimization run would say something like "work out for 1,000,000 hours at a cost of 100,000,000 heart beats or so. Then, enjoy an infinite life with negative resting heart rate and even lower heart rate during exercise."

You also will want to model the fact that your resting heart rate does not stay at a lower level forever after exercise.

Finally, but that's peanuts compared to the other problems: let's start with a starting rest rate of 60 BPM. Exercise for 1000 hours to bring it back to 50 BPM, and your heart rate during workouts becomes 1.2 x 50 BPM = 60 BPM? Unlikely.