skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> possession of credit card data amounts to permission to charge any arbitrary amount to it

The word you're looking for is "capability", not permission. Permission requires consent, which is something you give separately from the actual card number.

A minor point, but I think it changes the tone of that statement.

> possession of credit card data amounts to the capability to charge any arbitrary amount to it

I'm not sure anyone is ignorant of this fact though, and yet everyone seems OK with it.

> Not only should future payment systems be based on cryptography, but they should also require an affirmative step on the part of the payer to initiate a given transaction of a given amount. In other words, it shouldn't be a matter of handing over your card number, or even a one-use cryptographic token, and letting the merchant fill in the details. You should have to explicitly send an amount of money that you specify. Then, of course, a smart merchant would verify that the amount is correct before fulfilling her end of the bargain.

Ugh, no thanks. The system you describe is more like cash. I have to actively dole out the necessary amount, and then receive change that is counted at each transition. I abhor these types of transactions.

Convenience is a significant motivator in the adoption of credit cards. Any competing system will have to compete on simplicity. The fact that consumers and merchants haven't fled from credit card use as fraud rates (and costs) have increased is evidence that the market is willing to bear them.

The legislative changes that allow merchants to charge a CC-use surcharge will resolve the significant matter of ignorance. I do agree that consumers are largely ignorant of the hidden costs of fraud associated with the current CC model. The question is whether they'll pay these costs once they're brought to light. I believe they will continue to pay them in exchange for convenience.
It's not difficult to learn not to start walking when you're in VR. I've seen some people lean left and right when they play an FPS for the first few times, but they get used to it. VR with a simple controller though is just not good enough. You'll need arm/hand tracking and probably a gun controller for shooters. If you can track 6 degrees of freedom of the gun controller and 6 DOF of the head, then you have your first immersive VR right there.
Not true, I don't use Facebook and I was one of part of the Open Beta many years ago.
I get stutters with Sublime Text on my ancient MacBook Pro, but I'm often crushing the io systems (like a big Dropbox resync at the same time as a database compaction), so that may explain some of it.
Banks and card corps want a fool and his money to be able to push a button and buy something with as little hassle as possible. They are more than willing to use their trillions in profits to write off and eat some fraud if it means easy use for customers
Google Maps API keys now open all iOS developers
The Humble Programmer (1972) [pdf]
Gambit is getting backends that include x86 and JavaScript Real Soon Now. There has been LLVM work, but I don't think it progressed very far.
Research by individuals granted public grants is generally only published in scientific journals that cost thousands of dollars -- which means that normal people have a very difficult time of accessing research that they contributed (via taxes) to the funding of.
> I fail to see how "using your head as a dumb camera joystick" is a problem; that's the whole point of VR.

Perhaps you should try playing some VR games for a while. I clocked quite a few hours playing the old Virtuality SU2000 games like Dactyl Nightmare and I've idly kept up with HMDs. The chief problem is that without eye tracking, it's incredibly UNFUN to use your head for movements that your eyes could otherwise have done for you. Mind you when the HMDs were much heavier back then it sucked a lot more, but it's still pretty shitty not being able to glance aside. Nope, gotta move your entire head for absolutely everything related to what you're currently seeing, if you move your head for any reason you can't maintain focus on objects naturally, etc.

> Motion sickness is a real problem for some people (but not all).

Probably not something you should underestimate. See Nintendo's 3DS launch and about-face on their stance on pushing 3D once they found a small but significant percentage of their users could not actually see the 3D effect. This lead to policy that the 3D effect could not be used for anything related to actual gameplay mechanics, reducing it entirely to an optional gimmick.

Simulation sickness affects even more people than the 3D issue. It's a real problem if you want to go mainstream.

Just to clarify my position, I'm not against the Rift nor do I have anything against HMDs. I simply see the Rift as a step along the way to whatever device truly popularizes the tech. I don't think we're there yet.
It sounds like we would benefit from GPU and display manufacturers providing a set of standard low-level control primitives so that people like Carmack who know what they are doing can really play around with the entire pipeline without having to worry about all the things the cards and the displays are doing behind their backs.

For example, a GPU could have a set of standard settings with full buffering and all the other things that "help them win the framerate wars", but a developer should be able to turn all of that off when needed.

It's the same with displays. LCD manufacturers could, I suppose, allow a modern day "CRT Mode 13h" where you just have scan lines mapped to memory buffers and whatever shows up in those buffers gets turned into a pixel as quickly as possible.

Are there technical challenges preventing this from happening, or is it mainly inertia and lack of need from the current market?
Isn't it a bit difficult to navigate on the list without seeing the visualizations? D3 gallery is better. https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery
If he is referring to poll numbers likely he is taking them out of context and extrapolating tepid support for one element to majority support for the entire project. This happens a lot in the media analysis of polls. You can't take what the results of a poll question were and assume that 100% of the respondents in favor even:

1)know what the project is

2)favor it over alternatives

3)have judged the the disadvantages and are prepared for them

4)support it because they believe their party supports it

5)have faith in the political system

This isn't about the wording per se. Context matters.

To take a recent example: polls shows that Americans favor Obama over congressional republicans on economic issues. However, they still are (generally and marginally)opposed to his handling of economic issues and a strong minority of those who oppose the republicans do so out of a belief that they aren't cutting government enough. In other words, disillusioned republicans don't favor either party but aren't likely to support obama under any circumstances. You can look at the same polls with regard to china and democracy. Chinese both are satisfied with the direction of their country and want more democracy. If you aren't willing to consider context you can choose either poll to support your position.
The original title of this HN submission included 'Official Whitehouse Response'; HN mods changed it to something much less informative.
I think the first successful VR you'll see will be closer to an arcade machine than a home console.
You can find the most recent focus fusion paper here: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...

It was published in Physics of Plasmas last year and shows sufficient temperature (1.8 billion C) and confinement time for boron fusion, and also that the fusion is occurring in the confined plasmoid, not the beam, which is a necessary condition for this approach. The remaining hurdle is sufficient density. They think they can do it but we'll see.

I was not claiming that a complete working design exists, which obviously is not the case since they haven't yet achieved net-positive fusion in the lab. Nobody has managed that yet, but focus fusion's ratio of neutron count to input power compares pretty favorably with other approaches so far.

I don't think it's silly to make an informed speculation about what a power plant would look like, if the basic idea turned out to work. NIF for example has been doing a lot of that with their LIFE design, to the point of sourcing specific components.

In the case of focus fusion, most of the power is released as a pulsed beam of charged particles. You can get energy from that by aiming it through a coil, no heat engine required. The rest of the energy goes into x-rays, which can be captured photoelectrically by a foil "onion" around the reactor core. You also need some good switches, a pretty substantial capacitor bank, and cooling. When I said "not Mr. Fusion" I was meaning to imply this would definitely not be something you drive around town in.

Focus fusion certainly isn't something we can "plan" on, any more than a poker player can plan on winning a particular pot. But that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile bet. The investment is low, the pot is really large, and the odds don't look that bad.
I mean, I think that's what some of the caching plugins do now , but in my experience they require a ton a configuration (e.g. a 100+ line .htaccess file). Plus I'm just not a fan of WP in general.
Darius Bacon and I have spent some time trying to figure out a buffer data structure that can scale to large files while guaranteeing predictable latency for basic operations like typing a character. (What's "making find call"?)

I think you mean "soft real time", though. A hard real-time system is one which is unusable if it fails to meet a deadline even once; a jet engine control system, say, where failing to meet a deadline could result in engine parts penetrating the fuselage. A "soft real time" system is one where failing to meet a deadline is a failure, but tolerable if infrequent; say, once every million keystrokes, or every 7 days of video play time.
And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manned_Mars_mission_pla...
Ugh, no thanks. The system you describe is more like cash. I have to actively dole out the necessary amount, and then receive change that is counted at each transition. I abhor these types of transactions.

Not in this case. There's no reason the merchant can't send a request for a specific amount, encrypted using your credit account's public key and signed by their private key. Your credit authorizing device (smartphone, desktop app, phone call, whatever) then asks you to confirm the amount, and that amount is sent back to the merchant. I'm sure there's some way of cryptographically tying the request for funds to the transmission of funds so that it's clear what transaction the funds are for, that the amount sent matches the amount requested, etc.
Looks great! Congrats to the CodeSchool team. Hopefully this will be a great resource for years to come!
Well, Rich used to use Common Lisp (I know because I used to use his very neat LispWorks to Java bridge stuff).

Clojure really does hit the sweet spot combining a concise agile language with good practical decisions, similar I think to some of the decisions that went into the design of Scala (like a generalized seq API for lots of data structures).

Except for some personal serious side projects, I am now retired, and I chose Clojure over other good possibilities (e.g., Common Lisp, Racket, Gambit-C, Scala, Smalltalk, or Ruby) because it is a practical language and still lots fun to code in.

Now that I don't have to worry about staying up to speed on all of the languages my customers used to like using, I find that just using a single language really saves me a lot of time. Some advice for people still working: perhaps choosing a single practical and extensible language like Scala or Clojure is a good strategy; I used to like being a polyglot programmer but that requires a lot of overhead!
I find the math behind any consumer apps that depend on online advertising very depressing...

Let's say you get a million visitors a month. With a CPM of $5 (very optimistic), and each visitor = 5 pageviews, that's just $25,000/month. Great if it's just a lifestyle business. Depressing if you're trying to build a company around it.
wrk or weighttp are my preferred tools.
That has nothing to do with anything I said, try to respond in context. However, they have an amazing diversity of people in Nordic countries, and there is also amazing diversity among "whites", as well as similarites to "non-whites".
"make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.""

Hence this research will have to be made available freely.
AUG. 24, 2010
In addition to what DavidAdams said, indoor air is typically less humid when a heater is running. This can improve virus survivability. Spending time outside keeps your sinus moist.
Sure! I hopped in your IRC channel.
Both solutions are lazy. While ReQL requires .run(), the Django ORM requires you to do 'list()' (or probably other form of iterator over it). I'd say the only difference is that one is explicit and the other one is implicit.
Identical Mutations in Seperate Populations Found Over 1,000 Generations
GameSpy: Goodbye, And Thank You From The GameSpy Team
Wow, what an informative comment!

It's clear to me that the advent of push liability opens the lots wider for no-fraud payment systems, I.e. bitcoins. Evidentially, that situation is only two to five years away. Which is plenty of time for mobile wallet startups to help me get rid of my annoying leather wallet!
I'm inclined to disagree. When I'm in class or working and I receive a notification I almost always check it. In most cases I wouldn't say that this is because I'm "addicted," but rather because I have a class of notifications that need to be handled quickly (job and fellowship applications, questions from my boss or the PI in my lab, etc). Most of the time I end up pulling my phone out and seeing that it's just a dumb text message or an email from a mailing list. With Glass I would be able to immediately see if any given notification was something that needed my attention.
Does LinkedIn make use of Play's async response features for anything public facing? That's a feature that I am very curious about.
Good and amazing picture
Sometimes it is hard to understand something if you don't pay enough attention to it. Like in this situation.
Awesome stuff man! mine is very boring: http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=chinchang :P
Google I/O Registration Date Leaks, Be Ready To Sign Up On March 13
I have the same experience hiring. Fizzbuzz is one of the best filters I have personally used.
In the former case you're creating a query (similar to SQL insert) that puts data into the database. You can then take advantage of indexing, sharding, durability guarantees, caching, a specialized query language, and all the other benefits of a database system.

In the latter case you're creating a data structure in the host language (which of course is immensely useful, but completely different).
Consumers will want facebook integration. If it isn't on the glass, there will be other products pretty soon that will have it
Also, it depends on which language you're using...

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> a = 1
=> 1
irb(main):002:0> b = 2
=> 2
irb(main):003:0> b, a = a, b
=> [1, 2]
irb(main):004:0> puts "#{a} #{b}"
2 1
=> nil

(obviously this has the same flaw you mention, the interpreter is doing stuff for you. It follows the letter of the 'no intermediate variables' only.)
If you read the reply again, they allowed you to use a username, then required facebook, then reintroduced the ability to user a username. You probably were using a username, before they started requiring facebook.
How so? I'm not fond of the liability shift to the merchant/consumer, but the bar for technical fraud is much, much higher than for stripe cards.
Second this; while they don't have a camera or the Glass software, they are goggle mounted (choice of goggles) and have barometer, thermometer, plus are Android devices all on their own. Also, they don't cost as much, plus, you know, you can get them now.
No, it's much broader than to make the agencies publish the results of their own research -- they're to make sure the results of the research they fund is available. That covers the vast majority of scientific research in the United States.

The journals might still have paywalls on their own sites, but what's the impact of a paywall when the exact same paper is on the open web where Google can index it?

The allowance for a 12-month embargo is a bummer -- I'd rather research be available to the public immediately when it's published -- but there's a ton of research out there more than a year old, so this is a great advance.

A sibling comment linked to Peter Suber's reaction: https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJe... Suber has been following this issue for a long time and written more about it than anyone, so his interpretation carries weight.
In the US, when spotify first opened up to Americans you could sign up without facebook credentials. About a month later, they decided to go facebook only for new setups.
Fitness tracking companies: here’s what I really want
If you wanted a child to be abducted by a stranger, you'd have to leave him alone for something like 7000 years on average before it happened.

Almost every "child abduction" report is actually a custody dispute. Fearing that your child will be stolen by a stranger is ludicrous.

I recommend reading the "Free Range Kids" blog/book, by the way. It may help you see past the media distortions.
Lots of practical problems don't have clean, elegant solutions. Maybe part of it will be a beautiful algorithm, but some of the logic will probably be fairly clunky. You have to be able to solve those problems too.
Because most people care very much about social relationships, and like it or not, other people just naturally tend to be put off by things that look strange or unattractive. You might decide you genuinely don't care what anyone thinks of you, but realistically speaking that's a somewhat unusual stance.
Yes, intrusive -- that's the point. Asking questions like she did be annoying if that were an organic conversation among 3 people, but the point of a TV news host/interviewer is to frame the conversation for the audience, including basic questions, and keep everything in context. And to keep things moving, make sure the right points are covered, etc. (You absolutely wouldn't want an extended digression about the origins of index funds or details about one specific investment, or excessive self-promotion by a guest.)

She's actually quite informed about the tech industry and startups, vs. some other news anchors who just read from a script and have no idea about the content.

IMO it's harder to run a good panel or interviewer than it is to be a guest; converting a talk to an interview/panel is something a competent conference organizer does when he knows his guests are unprepared or not good at speaking.
or companies who want a sticker that says they "go out of their way to improve the lives of gay people who work for them".

That's really the point of these things, to provide capitalist incentives for such behaviours.
I am reminded of a Max Headroom episode that covered the character Edison Carter's loss of one of those devices. It was also his key to personal property (house, car).
He works at an SEO agency. He's making a big stink about it for publicity.
I might be willing to pay. What would your editor offer that the free, powerful, well-established editors out there do not?
I was baptized during a pretty bad cold snap in Trysil in Eastern Norway. The outside temperature was -40C/-40F, and the caretakers were able to heat the church up to 5 degrees Celcius inside. I've been told that I slept in the stroller outside, even though my parents did check on me quite often. Was also supposedly wearing an incredible amount of clothes.
If it had a 3G radio, the cancer risk would be exactly the same.
Agreed. But that's at odds with the OPs assertion that " head-mounted-display virtual reality is a huge missed opportunity for next-gen consoles."
Years ago I maintained a popular ad blocking hosts file. I got a lot of complaints when I switched from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0. Some TCPIP stacks just didn't like it. Others had little webservers running on 127.0.0.1 that quickly served up 404's for speed or black jpegs to make things pretty. Someone out there maintained a little httpd for windows that did just that. If it saw a GET for blahblah.jpg it would serve up a black graphic of some random size. It sure beat the default FF or IE error message.

Honestly, there's no need for this stuff in the age of browser based ad blocking. I gave up on it when I saw how easy it was to write rules and wildcards in ad block plus. Interest in it fell. I'm surprised to see one still maintained.
This is so obviously untrue that I'm really curious for further explanation. What are you talking about?
I would love to be able to create apps for a device like glass. There could be many vertical applications for it. The ads don't provide any information regarding apps as they are focused in taking photos and videos, doing hangouts and interfacing Google.
> I wish people would start treating text editors that they are developing this way.

IDEs. Most of the things people do in modern IDEs were done in Smalltalk (albeit, with uglier interfaces and some manual steps) over a decade back. One of the differences, though, is that these things were mostly highly responsive, because they were bloat-free. (Can't speak for IBM VisualAge. Also, one could rightly complain that they were feature-poor in their stock configurations.) This is in stark contrast to other IDEs and app server frameworks, which would take forever to start up, or forever to restart, or forever to complete an operation. One example, Extract Method, was always instantaneous. It's still lugubrious even in modern IDEs like XCode4.5.

The same rules that apply to Web Apps also apply to programmer's tools. Delays are yuck. Responsiveness is yum!

I'm also a musician, and from what I've seen playing around in Audacity, 5 milliseconds is definitely inaudible, even to some of the most talented, golden-eared musicians I know. I suspect that 20 milliseconds is going to start to bug some people, though they won't be able to say why.

Also, awareness of subtle modulations of very small variations in rhythm and how they affect the feel of music seems to be an indicator of intelligence and aesthetic awareness. So often, the difference between blah and great involves things that are subtle and hard to put your finger on.
Should we consider that a particular set of genes allow for only a particular set of evolutions, maybe much more limited than expected ?
Change XMLHttpRequest - HttpRequest
Why do we use such a retarded class name? "HttpRequest" - sounds perfectly reasonable and meaningful.

Maybe we introduce alias now and get rid of "XMLHttpRequest" in, say, 2025?

I don't want my kids in 2040 to use this class name. No way.
Wow, cool idea! From what I understand, you guys use cash incentives after a particular job/work/behavior is done or result achieved.

Building a technolog like yours (sort of a foursquare for developing countries) could have awesome implications for these countries. Keep us updated on HN please. This is great!
CBC Hamilton WebCast: Our Show
When the objects being stolen have GPS, wireless, and cameras, with even a modicum of well-designed anti-theft infrastructure it should really become criminally stupid to steal them.

It's kind of sad that you can steal a smart phone and get away with it.
I think the concept of mass surveillance of one other has been a concern of wearable/ubiquitous computing for a while now. Google "sousveillance" for more writing on this.
AKA - How to spam app stores with crap.
The campaign to make unlocking & jailbreaking permanently legal continues