skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, that explains it, I was about to post "wow, this code snippet does a pretty poor job at convincing me to learn Python" :-)
As far as I can tell, people only wonder about this if they assume that consciousness has some kind if supernatural aspect to it.
Honest transparency? They've announced the move quite clearly, and have even given a timeline for its shutdown. You can still access your data and export it through Google Takeout[1].

I don't see what's untrustworthy, dishonest, or non-transparent about this. I am disappointed they're discontinuing a service I enjoy immensely, but it's their prerogative - they're not required to continue to offer a service if it's not in there interests to do so.

[1]: https://www.google.com/takeout/
Scams like this are the source of my support for vigilante justice.

I hope that whomever just scammed you out of ten euros gets swift, repeated hits to the knees by baseball bats.
A daily email digest of HN, sent to the user on a specific time he/she wishes, with all of the links (including Ask HN), sorted by points.
I made the very same observation when Jesse Noller first blogged about it (apparently as my very first HN comment[1]!).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842906
No matter how severe a crisis, once the dust settles, gold will always be worth something, for reasons I don't understand.

The reasons is simple: gold has specific physical characteristics which many people for a very long time have regarded as suitable for use as physical money: principally, it's durable, rare but not too rare, recognizable, and easily divisible. That widespread subjective assessment is unlikely to change.
Where's the "mirror" option? I'm not seeing it anywhere in preferences.

For what it's worth I'm very intrigued by Bitcasa's Infinite Drive and really think that's the future of cloud storage. Though I've emailed them weeks ago without a response as well.

http://i.imgur.com/s67x3Dq.png

http://i.imgur.com/F1TPvJR.png
The Irony of Digital Resurrection
Thanks, glad you liked it :)
Introducing Google Keep
That is outdated.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/31861/windows-up...
:) Nice.
The World’s Best and Worst Cities to Live in 2013
There was a comment that a lot of russian mob money is held in Cyprus banks. I wonder if this is actually an attack on them in an effort to take the money from the russian mob.

I also predict acts of vandalism on the banks. Where the goal is to cost the banks money to repair their facilities given the situation.
This is a totally brilliant way of illustrating the cost of social media. It's interesting how many people are calling this blackmail and completely missing the point.
Thanks for the pointer! We'll definitely look into Channel Advisor as we start taking on more power sellers.
The original Planet Money podcast episode is a bit longer and has some more detail, by the way:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/13/156723516/episode-...

I've been listening to Planet Money since it started during the 2007 meltdown. It's been a great resource for explaining some of the tougher financial stories in an easier fashion while keeping it interesting. Definitely a recommended podcast.
> As the article says, the technology for a return trip just doesn't exist; the technology for a series of one-way trips does.

Implying that we won't come up with that technology by the time we get people there.
Corruption. Remember that if you go to one of the 20 poorest or tyrannical countries of the word, you will probably go to one of the 20 more corrupt countries in the word. So while creating a successful business you will be "asked" to share a part of it, and I hope you can keep enough to create the ripple effects.
The obstacle of going to Mars has long since been a problem of desire and not technology. Obviously better radiation shielding, drugs that reduce the negative effects of zero-g, nuclear propulsion, and other technologies would reduce the risk of failure but at the end of the day going to Mars is a massive engineering and logistics problem.

A good analogy (I think) would be the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Sure it is trivial to build today with our technology, as (I hope) it will be trivial to travel to Mars in the distant future, but the reason its a great wonder of the world is because, despite a lack of modern technology, it was built as a national engineering project that spanned decades. Just like a mission to Mars, it was a daunting task (one that required a generation or two of slaves perhaps) that was pulled off through pure grit.
Glad you mentioned this, the point often gets missed...Colonel Sanders didn't start KFC till his 40's. Dangerfield didn't get into comedy(again) until he was in his mid 40's. I wish we could find some examples in the tech arena, to break this under 30 stereotype... Actually one person comes to mind, Larry Ellison, he found Oracle in 1977 ~age 33.
There is a growing realization that cognition is fundamentally _embodied_ cognition. If you think of the mind as an ethereal entity removed of its physicality (or at the very least made out of a different substance from the body - that is to say, substance dualism) then it is easy to imagine the following scenarios. Containers are unimportant, so minds can be uploaded and downloaded, whether machine or human the housing is unimportant.

If we come to accept cognition as fundamentally embodied then it becomes less sensible to compare cognition across differing architectures - human cognition will always be quite unlike any other type of cognition except itself. I think machines will have consciousness (why should they not be able to, what is so special about us that would limit this phenomenon to us?) but it will be a machine consciousness and radically different from ours.

I think we're going to have to get a lot more fine-grained about how we talk about features and functions of brains whether human or machine. You've already put "smarter" in quotes which shows that already you're aware of how blunt and crude our terms are.

Does this all seem reasonable?
There's two angles I see:

1) Business travelers can expense the checked bag fee, so they don't care.

2) Other travelers still have a free option: the carry-on bag.

I always board my flights last for various reasons, and I've noticed how people are literally hanging over the ropes to get in the boarding line when their section is called. It started making sense when the staff would announce that ALL overheads were now full. People were packing even more into those carryons.
I had a largely positive experience when I began charging for a site I created.

Initially, the site was free, but from day 1 I made it clear that we were going to charge a membership fee at some point. That, I think, was the biggest thing.

I also gave the first several thousand members - who had already become the most vocal and most dedicated members - a chance to earn a free lifetime membership if they completed certain goals that would help me to test the site's functionality. Things like sending ten private messages, making ten forum posts, things like that.

The business wasn't a smashing success, but this part of it was, I think. Some members left once we went for-pay because they simply weren't willing to pay for things online, basically. However, there was no rancor or anything.
On the one hand, yes.

On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive

Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation.

There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.
You can always look at something like LiveScript, which has the syntax !-> which prevents default return from functions, I started using it over CoffeeScript lately.

http://livescript.net/
Cool idea. One question: why focus on Chanel? Since Chanel has been using holograms for years, isn't there more opportunity in focusing on brands that aren't as easy to authenticate (e.g. LV which does insane volume on eBay)?
Right click on a folder in the Finder. There should be a couple of options for mirroring (ongoing) or copying the folder (one time) to Bitcasa.

http://cl.ly/image/2T1n1R0X0B0Y
All you gotta do is try.
Tutorial I wrote on how to setup* BURP using OSX.

http://www.acloudtree.com/how-to-configure-burp-and-chrome-f...
Sorry, that was sort of an inside joke. A guy at work told me a story of how his nephew wanted to be a garbage man when he grew up, since they only have to "work one day a week".
I would pay to be sent to Mars. I would not pay to be dropped into the Pacific.

That difference may not make sense to you, but it really doesn't matter if you don't understand it. Nobody is trying to convince you to do it yourself.
You wouldn't be waiting to die. You would be the vanguard of a possible independent arm of human civilization. Your work there would be critical to figuring out the viability of colonizing Mars.
Show HN: Put.IO - Stream torrents from your browser
I'm not concerned about finding another RSS reader, or about the impact on "RSS as a standard." Mostly, I'm concerned that blogs I enjoy which are "at the margin" of traffic profitability will be killed when at least some of their subscription base stop following them on Reader, and then never start following anywhere else.

Ask any company who makes money from an email list what would happen if everyone suddenly became unsubscribed and they had to just sit and hope they would all subscribe again. Listen for the wails :)
> they're attached to their Twitter feed but dontcha-know-it's-just-not-the-same thing as Google Reader

I need to have a Twitter account to follow someone's feed. But I don't need to open account anywhere to subscribe to an RSS feed. The blog owner doesn't know who the subscribers to his RSS feed are. RSS anonymous and private. That is the difference. Twitter is like centralized VCS. RSS is like distributed VCS.

Ironically, this is also the reason why Google shutdown GR - they want everyone to "follow" others on Google+. So that all your posts are hidden in some megacorp's servers, creating a "lock-in" situation.
Interesting. I've been asking them to flatten the number of information bars sinc ebeing a Chromebook beta tester. When you start counting from the outside of the browser window, some Google services had 7 layers of toolbars - tabs, browser nav, bookmarks, Google Nav, Document, Menu, toolbar (this has changed since then).
Building a native Google Now To-Do experience
Definitely the first people on Mars shouldn't do so merely to live on Mars, they should be the sort of people who are going to build Mars up. And if that's the case then it's unlikely the novelty will wear off quickly. There is a lot to do on Mars and a surprising amount can be done with fairly small amounts of capital equipment. Within the first few trips there could be enough equipment to bootstrap a Martian industrial base with production of Water, Oxygen, Methane, and Carbon Monoxide from the ground and the air. Which means you can provide resources for living, of course, with water and Oxygen, but also you can provide rocket fuel (liquid methane and Oxygen), and fuel for combustion powered surface vehicles (compressed methane and Oxygen), and resources for growing plants, and resources for smelting Iron (CO). In a few short years a Martian colony could be producing food, concrete, Iron and steel, even plastics, all from local materials. And in not many years after that it could be producing everything from fully functional Mars habitats to microchips to spacecraft.

For people with drive and know how there would be as much excitement as they desire.
People across Europe will react with horror to this latest development in the Eurozone crisis. This will not strengthen the case for stronger European integration but turn many more against it.

Notice too how the supporters of these measures attempt to frame the debate around wealthy foreign tax evaders while minimizing the plight of ordinary Cypriots.

This extract from an opinion piece in The Guardian says it all

"..the debt burden has been transferred from the banks, where it properly belongs, to households, who had no part in their lending decisions.

As part of that propaganda campaign, the focus has been on Russian oligarchs and tax evaders who have been laundering funds through Cypriot banks. In fact, among those caught in the upper savings bracket are bound to be pensioners for whom this represents their entire life savings, and others who have recently borrowed enough money to buy a modest home. But even if only oligarchs were affected, this is surely an admission of guilt by the European and international authorities, who are responsible for the global regulation of banks and co-ordinating anti-money laundering activities. Their own failure can hardly be a justification for expropriating the small savers of Cyprus."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/17/savers-h...
Both of your grandfathers have been to Mars? How come we never heard of this before?
I understand the statistics, I was just responding to "they have to earn a lifetimes salary". I was under the assumption that the reason for College sports eligibility requirements was so that athletes can have the ability to support themselves after their sports career is over. In fact, I've often run across people in various professions (such as the guy at the car dealership) who were former professional athletes.
Embedded hackers of the world unite?

Everytime u-boot barfed on me or I messed up the serial port I ended up having to scan through screenfulls of ASCII junk scrolling by at full speed to get my commands and results out.

The closest I ever got to -real- blonde/brunette effects was when I was debugging the output from a H264 streamer. I could figure out video resolution and slicing properties from the tcpdump trace scrolling by :)
Restaurant chains flash freeze, then microwave their entrees.

I don't see what "innovation" and "quality" has to do with anything but their many ways to utilize HFCS and massive calories/portion sizes. Supply chain, perhaps. But the food output is absolutely terrible in the international chains. Cheesecake Factory, TGIFriday's, Bennigan's all make consistent dishes, but consistently ~bad~.
Google Nexus 5, first rumors...
Natas: Web Security Wargame
Previously on HN, only with a '/' at the end of the URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5338761
As one of the 200 incompletes mentioned, I gotta say Sean Devlin at
Matasano is top notch. The puzzles are fun, possibly too much fun. It's
easy to wander off into the weeds and spend a lot of time thinking
through and testing the non-puzzle implications. I hope to get through
the puzzles eventually, but I'm terribly slow and it will take me a very
long time. Even if you're a sec-idiot like me, the puzzles are a wonderful
way to spend time learning.
No, I got the point he was trying to make. His point is incorrect.
> A real hacker would not whine about missing code. Hackers see missing code as an opportunity to build. Hackers like to build.

Fuck you and fuck your "no true Scotsman" bullshit. Who appointed you to be king of hackers?
Ah! I did not know this! This may make a few things simpler for me...
Musk himself said he would like to die on Mars: "“I will go if I can be assured that SpaceX would go on without me . . . I've said I want to die on Mars, just not on impact.” (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2013/03/elon-musk-die...)
There is some confusion here between RSS and Reader. RSS isn't being canceled. Anyone can download any feed any time they like.

You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous and not so private.

Once again, RSS != Google Reader. They are not even the same type.
It's an entire crony bankster program. Those who lent money to Cyprus’s banks by buying their debt rather than by depositing money at the banks, will suffer no losses at all. Those who lent money to the insolvent Cypriot government, will be paid off at 100 cents on the euro. In other words, the banksters are protected. Only depositors with banks will suffer losses in this International Monetary Fund engineered plan. It's as blatant example of who the IMF really works for.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/03/what-to-keep-in...
Wow I love that investor connection graph, especially the colored/labeled one. Any way you could release a super-high res version that would let me zoom in and actually read all of the names?
Has anyone got any links to "influential" tech bloggers claiming RSS is dead? I know there has been a lot of fuss about it with google touting "dwindling users", yet I still haven't seen any such claims laid out in this article. Did I miss the boat / was I simply oblivious to such nonsense?

I also question google and their trite "dwindling numbers" excuse. They've downplayed reader ever since the bootstrap-esque debut of their "stupid bar" its been in the dropdown, even though it is the only thing I ever used/use the "stupid bar" for. This may be my tinfoil hat speaking but something tells me this spring clean has more to do with promoting google+ / fostering real page views (ad views) than anything else.
These are awesome, thank you!
Really, really motivating. I relate to the OP in a lot of ways. Thanks for posting this, Ed.
Chanel is still very difficult to authenticate for most Chanel admirers. We wanted to start off with the hottest most recognizable bags, shoes and dresses.
I gave early members free membership to my site if they completed certain beta-testing requirements.

I think it was a net positive, though it's hard to measure. Statistically, these grandfathered members have outspent other members. However, it's hard to say whether or not they might have spent even more had they not been given free lifetime grandfathered access.

A lot of these members have gone out of their way to buy perks for themselves and memberships for other members.

I should mention my site was essentially a community site, so there was a strong connection with other members - they wanted their favorite members to remain on the site. Additionally these have been the most active members when it comes to referring new paying members to the site.

To additionally complicate things, by giving grandfathered memberships to excellent community members, I think that these "anchors to the community" attract members in ways that would be completely impossible to quantify - I don't know how to measure the number of people that joined the site simply because they saw it did have a core of dedicated members.

To sum it up, for a community-based site, grandfathered community members quite possibly do more than pay for their grandfathered membership status.

I'm sure the returns are far less for other types of online businesses. You might join a community because you see that it has dedicated members, but I wouldn't necessarily be more likely to order a sweater from an online retailer because a bunch of people have grandfathered free shipping upgrades or something.
It's "St. Paddy's Day" not "St. Patty's Day"
I'm not the OP, and most certainly I do not believe there is any "supernatural" aspect behind the human mind, but what will really, really convince me that the Singularity would have arrived will be the moment when robots/machines will have understood humor. Them, the machines, being able to actually make new jokes will be the decisive proof that we, humans, are not the only "intelligent" entities on this planet.

And even more OT, this reminded me that I don't recollect any "robot jokes" in any of the science fiction books I've read. Granted, there weren't that many (just the basics: Asimov, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, some Stanislaw Lem), but I'm curious if any SF writer wrote "robot jokes", more exactly jokes that us, humans, think will be made by robots in the not-so-distant future.
It is blue, but at least it's a colour, and not a bad one. The problem with gray is that it looks very, well, gray.

I had similar thoughts about the white part of the drop-down menu changing sides.

FWIW, I think it's a really significant improvement over the current homepage, which always feels like a list of mostly-irrelevant news links to me. This one has a code snippet which is a great idea (though I hope the content of the snippet improves!), and big links to downloads and docs.
This. The headline is insanely misleading. Sure, places like Saison and Alinea are innovating, but 99% of restaurants are just microwaving the same crap over and over.
Have you ever worked on a government R&D project? The bureaucratic overhead is very low.
From the comments on that article:
"My late uncle, Kenneth Hand, a captain of the 111th combat engineers, wouldn’t tolerate criticism of Red Cross canteens or their personnel.

In 1944, he led a recon mission to find a river crossing for our army in southern France. He came under extremely heavy German machine gun and mortar fire and was forced to advance through a minefield to get his men to cover. In the process, he stepped on a mine and was severely wounded, losing his leg. Their mission being vital, he ordered his men to leave him and find that crossing, which they did. Although they sent a medic to recover their officer, upon finding him the medic refused to give him morphine, saying that he didn’t have enough to waste on a man who would die in a few minutes anyway. He was then abandoned and listed as dead.

Some time later, a Red Cross doughnut wagon happened by. One of the two person crew noticed Kenny laying unconscious in the minefield and went to check if he was alive. Finding a pulse, they brought him to the doughnut wagon, which was cleared out and converted to an emergency operating room. These two Red Cross canteen workers performed major surgery on the spot and saved his life at the risk of their own.

What’s a few cents for doughnuts compared to that?"
The End of the Hangup
One thing I learned early on in business is: it's always easier to lower your prices than to raise them, so set your initial valuation high; you can always drop it later if you need to.
This is reading way too much into it. Google happens to have a very nice confluence of money, data, people, and interesting applications at the moment. But there is and always has been back-and-forth of ideas and people between academia and industry in machine learning and all other fields.
"After five years of bailouts financed largely by austerity-weary European taxpayers, wealthy nations like Germany and the Netherlands have decreed that from now on when a bank or country fails, it will be bond investors and perhaps even bank depositors who will be forced to pick up a big share of the bill."

This is so incredibly stupid that it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. They're basically telling everyone in the Eurozone that their money isn't safe in the bank, and that if you want to make sure it keeps being yours you should wthdraw it and move it to a safer place. Either under your mattress or outside of the Eurozone.

They're basically asking for a bankrun across the southern European countries. Didn't any of these geniuses take econ 101?