skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's mostly right to my reading, but FinCEN letters are not laws. They're clarifications about regulations published in the Federal Register which are themselves clarifications about laws.

FinCEN has published other letters that distinguish between money transmitters and "payment processors," the latter being companies that work exclusively on behalf of merchants to facilitate payments. Even though this interpretive ruling has the effect of a federal regulation, state agencies such as the California DFI choose to actively ignore these rulings and make up their own.

So, what is California's interpretation? We don't know, because as Commissioner Barnes pointed out last Monday, the DFI hasn't issued any of its own interpretive rulings about the Money Transmission Act, ever, and before it does--even though it plans to--the legislature will likely amend the law, which means they'll delay some more.

Now multiply this mess by 47. That's how clear it is.

If you really want the details, my comment letter to the legislature is a good place to look.

http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/download.html?id=3131374...

P.S. I'm not a lawyer. Don't listen to me.
I have the feeling that he was already an exceptionally gifted individual.
Show HN: Forked and updated the Chrome RSS subscription extension Google removed
Quantity of users is a really bad metrics.

People really disliked being treated as numbers, they'd rather be treated as human beings.

It gives the impression that it's about finding a justification to an arbitrary already made decision.

IMHO a more sensible way to tackle the issue is to make usage cases and find a way to address what ever arise from this scenario wisely.
From the nfs case exposed earlier, a "I'm on nfs with quota" checkbox would make more sense than forcing cache manually to 0.

Instead of removing features and hiding options, wouldn't it be preferable to provide options that make sense and make them usable ?
Anyone acting as a BTC broker dealer, exchange, wallet, mining pool, speculator or miner that sells BTC has been put on notice that they're required to comply with a bunch of regulations including licensing, transaction reporting and suitable checks to ensure your counterparties aren't terrorists or people laundering money.
After reading the first Soylent post, I felt inspired to try and come up with a recipe for a "nutritionally complete" soup. I used an online tool that calculates the total nutrients for a recipe and came up with this:

3 potatoes
1 onion
500 grams of wild alaskan salmon
1/2 cup of mushrooms
3.5 tbsp of olive oil
30 grams of sunflower seeds
1 tbsp of dried parsley
2 tbsp of ground thyme
50 grams of parmesan cheese
3 cloves of garlic
20 grams of sesame seeds
1 medium oyster (from a can)
1 tbsp of ground mace
1 tsp of cod liver oil

To cook it I just added everything to boiling water in order of cooking time, starting with the potatoes and onions and ending with the salmon.

I tried making it last night and ate it for dinner and breakfast, and it was delicious! I also feel amazing. I guess I should track the effects of the recipe on quantified-mind.com. :-)

I was actually surprised by how hard it was to fit all of the daily nutrient requirements into a recipe with about 2000-2500 calories (while also avoiding nutrient overdoses). It would be great if someone would create a website for "nutritionally complete" recipes, especially recipes that are cheap and easy to make with a good blender or crockpot.
I think if you get caught driving with out insurance the cops will arrest you.
Sales tax is an unrelated issue. My local corner store has to collect sales tax, even though it's just a user, and not a transmitter, of dollars.
Quick hack to reduce time spent sorting through emails
Recruiters from Hell
Ouch. Can it handle things like conditionally swapping two values or does any conditional assignment break both values? Is there an escape hatch?
How I Use Foursquare Checkins to Beat the Crowd
Dropbox did implement this one in their password strength meter; try typing any of the passwords from the xkcd strip :).

See also:

https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-s...
b = a moves a to b, so it would be an error to use a after that point.
Reinstating commit history of a cp'd-in codebase
Hi Guys

Like many on the list I'm a heavy chrome and rss user. Though the demise of Google Reader is no great surprise I was grumpy that Google removed the RSS Subscription extension from the Chrome webstore.

I've forked Google's extension, updated it and loaded back into the Chrome webstore.

Added support for Feedly, NewsBlur and The Old Reader. Removed Google Reader, iReader, My Yahoo

Also code is now up on github

* https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-e...

* https://github.com/justinkelly/chrome-rss

Cheers

Justin
Numpy status update and developer announcement
To be completely clear, the script both explored URLs and added a User-agent header.
There is a swap operator built into the language, so that specific example would work (I think; I haven't checked the code).

The escape hatch is to use the generic "Cell<T>" type in the standard library, which gives you dynamic behavior much like C++11 move semantics. The nice thing about the static analysis, though, is that the checks don't have to be performed at runtime if the compiler can prove that the value is always moved at the end of the block.
https://icbit.se/ is a Bitcoin Derivatives Market and Exchange. It's probably got the most liquidity available. I think more and more merchants and miners will use icbit for currency exchange hedges.
Are you sure it applies to speculators? Can you quote that part?
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And it also appears users converting BTC to USD (etc) need to be MSBs. As a (non-MSB) miner, one can use their BTC to buy anything but dollars... What a strange regulatory limbo to be trapped in...
> A single change in a base pair can dramatically alter the protein created, and easily account for the differences between our two species [human and chimpanzee that is].

Not to be picky, but I seriously doubt that. ;)
Hopefully moving to San Francisco in a few weeks. Very keen to get in touch and try it out.
I'm one of the guys who uses gemcanary for one (open source) repo and so far I have to say I'm impressed, was informed some time last night about the new vulnerabilities and already updated the project. Thank you for the service!
AT&T has a very important role in national defense to fill. This criminal is luckily he didn't get lined up and shot for treason.

Sure, we can say that AT&T is a telecommunications company that should try to protect the customers that pay for their service, but we all know that AT&T is actually a government intelligence agency with all the expected bureaucracy of a military sect. Protecting their customers is #1, and their customer is US Gov.
Does this guidance also apply to video game virtual currencies as well? My initial assumption was that "convertible" means it only applies to currencies that can be exchanged back and forth with fiat currency, but I don't explicitly see that stated.
Read up on the hunt brothers and the silver markets. Essentially, they would buy up contracts with brokers to buy 1lb of silver on july 1st for $10 (or whatever the specifics happen to be). Then, in June they bought all the silver, like some ridiculously huge fraction of all the silver in the world. When it comes time for that broker to find that pound of silver he owes the hunt brothers, the hunt brothers get to set the price, because they're the only ones with silver. So this broker, he has to come up with how ever much the Hunt brothers demand, he is really over a barrel.

Just one memorable example of market manipulation and unlimited exposure.
Compiler error; since a might no longer be defined, it's an error to access it here.
Insofar as such currencies can be converted back and forth to "real" currency, yes, they're covered. I think that's what the document is trying to get at when it discusses "centralized" virtual currencies.
This 100%. The U.S. Government just effectively legalized Bitcoins and other virtual currencies in the document posted above. This is a huge development, much more important than Bitcoin going over $50.
Cutting edge research isn't cheap in the 80's I worked at a place that brought a single item of HP instrumentation kit that cost the same as a small house.

This was before HP started to suck obviously.
I think you missed the point here, doctor, lawyers and otherwise supposedly busy non-advanced users will not delve in about:config at all, hence cannot waste any of their time there.

It's only the advanced users who are willing go through this path because they want to tweak a settings. And the question would be, is it really worth making such an impractical tool out of about:config and thus wasting time of advanced users when it was designed for their own use, for the sake of keeping non-advanced users out this setting panel.
Parent said "modern", not "paleolithic". You are not a paleolithic human, and if you are, welcome, time traveller.
All of that work improving the spec and the query language should make it that much easier to make a decent driver. I'd say around the time of it being "production ready" as you put it should be where you have a version that keeps the same protocol so that drivers can be written and not have to be updated for every bug fix?

Am I wrong in thinking that?
Can drive a big rig through that loophole though, if it's that simple. i.e. convert to Euros and convert that to dollars elsewhere - or buy something of value and then sell it on ebay etc etc.
This seems a bit of a landgrab or an exploitable (regulation-sense) ambiguity:

In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.

So, if you only exchange virtual currency, do you now fall under US FinCEN rules or does, say, virtual currency not count as a "substitute" for currency?
And how would that work if, for devils advocacy sake, someone hires an ec2 with gpu's instance in (say) Canada and mines using that computer ?

Is that not a 'foreign exchange' ? Is the de-centralised currency then 'taxed' on the location it was mined, from the initiating location or the final destination ?

This headache has only jst begun..
Bernie Madoff would have loved to have you on his jury.
They don't require the runtime (the "embedding Rust in Ruby" post, for example, uses them), but they do require some implementation of malloc and free.
"Do please cite evidence for this claim about the Affordable Care Act. I've been a long-time advocate for MMJ and have lobbied for it in front of county lawmakers, and I don't find this very credible"

Is the combination of the administration's dealings with the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying group, PhRMA, and the fact that during the same period of time that those deals were being made the administration became more aggressive on marijuana raids, count?

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/us/politics/e-mails-revea...

http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/12/bummer/singlepage

Unfortunately, the extent of the administration's deal-making with the pharmaceutical lobby remains undisclosed. Why the public has not been given access to their emails is anyone's guess (I suspect most people would guess the same thing). Maybe in a few decades, when the full details of this administration's activities become public knowledge (assuming such things even happen), we can figure out if the simplest answer -- that the administration attacked marijuana in a quid-pro-quo with PhRMA -- is indeed the correct answer.

"Also, your claim implicitly assumes that the number of dispensaries was static, when it was anything but."

Are you actually claiming that nearly overnight, the number of medical marijuana dispensaries increased by more than a factor of four? That somehow, the number of suppliers in California simple increased by pure coincidence in 2009?

This administration has been one of the most aggressively anti-drug-law-reform administrations in the history of the war on drugs. The President has publicly (and falsely) stated that it is up to Congress to legalize marijuana. He falsely claimed that he would suspend raids once he ejected Bush administration holdovers from top DEA positions, only to appoint Bush administration holdovers to those positions and increase the number of raids.
Microsoft delivers first public preview of its Hadoop on Windows Azure service
This faintly gives me nightmares remembering the difficulties the US government caused converting poker winnings back into US dollar payouts. If something doesn't outright break current laws, we have a tendency to just legislate it out of existence. I want bit coins to succeed but this seems like a real possibility.
And in this manner, he could still keep a job and perhaps add value to society. Sending him to prison is a net loss for everyone, because of the cost to society of keeping him locked in a cage, and the difficulty of him finding employment following the prison sentence, in which case he might continue to drain on society. Prisons should serve to prevent violent people from inflicting harm upon others, and not strictly as a method of punishment.
Not to be unfair, but my point at least was that it isn't okay. This is what a large chunk of us do for a living. What difference does it make by whom or by what mechanism our work is compensated?
It doesn't mean the product was actually good, it simply means it lacked a better alternative.
The movie glossed over some details. In the book, Soylent was a variety of different things, with a soya and lentil base (hence the name), and only Soylent Green specifically was the problematic one, it being the newest release. (I haven't read it myself, just summarizing what was discussed in the last thread.)
It occurs to me now, that the gag order might actually prevent them from testifying as to why they took down the notification.
"tubas" should be replaced with "tubers"
Can you sell me some software that will let me bypass my IT department that's on "our" (I feel we have a relationship now) second ticket to fix a recurring bluescreen because they insist on trying to troubleshoot it and fix it (see: second ticket) rather than just issuing a new laptop and troubleshooting it on their own time?
Funny you should say that, because there is definitely a trend of decentralizing science (see: Science Exchange) that is making it much cheaper. Science is no longer a large ominous "too expensive to do" undertaking.

I would reference this paper (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492034a...), but it's behind a paywall. lol.
Re: Why we stopped using Drupal for our platform
but the question is: is it a guitar? Or is it a choose-a-phone? It's got a lot of stuff! How can we tell if they're frets or if they're miles of random patch cables?
Journalists accurately report the actual sentences given to convicts. That is pretty easy to forget after hours of police aggressive interrogation, when you are presented with the choice between a quick guilty plea for a few years or a trial with a maximum sentence remaining on the table. You might think that you'll be sitting there in an interrogation room, ready to stare down the cops when they threaten you with decades of jail time; it's a different matter when you are actually under arrest.

The tactic works because of human psychology. Being in an interrogation room is terrifying, and people have a natural instinct to try to get out as soon as possible. The police interrogators are trained to extract confessions and play on those instincts and the general fear their subjects experience. The problem is not the press, it is the interrogation and plea bargaining process itself.
+1 for me as well on Kindle!
Conservative British Member of Parliament Doesn't Understand Google Adsense...
Top Powerful Groups that Dictate the World
1) Not for violating the contract with the car dealer.

2) It's not the same insurance. The law typically requires you to carry liability insurance, which covers third parties you harm. The car dealer wants you to insure against damage to the car, which the law may not require you to insure against.
There are performance improvements, but the graph is actually pretty extreme.

If you read the full discussion on twitter he reveals that it isn't a web server, but a server running CLI scripts constantly. It is entirely possible there was a performance improvement in one thing that was constantly running and it may not actually be an accurate representation of overall performance improvement in PHP 5.4.
If you terminate your agreement then you "aren't bound by a service agreement or other obligation".
If there's a Muji near you, check out their spiral-bound sketchbooks - I use the A4 version[1] and really enjoy it.

1. http://www.muji.us/store/art-and-craft/sketch-book-a4.html
If you'd like to learn more about CISPA, the EFF has a great FAQ page

Why wouldn't you read the bill yourself?
Isn't this a project for archive.org? Doesn't archive.org hopefully already have all of this content?
I am sure Steve jobs wasn't referring to the quality of code produced. I would say he was talking about the results that where produced. So the tool you use might make it easier to work with. But if you are creating a highly optimized useless product it is a waste of time.
I don't much like him, and from my politics (generally left) I guess I'm supposed to be angry about the underprosecution of white-collar crime, but I don't see a great case for actually imprisoning him. I mostly take a view that imprisonment is a last resort to physically restrain people from harming society further, with alternatives being preferable, if at all possible. Is imprisonment really the last option available in Madoff's case? I think just banning him from investment-related jobs and imposing some kind of probationary oversight would be sufficient to keep him from reoffending. In addition, of course, to confiscating his wealth, plus perhaps taking some portion of his future earnings as restitution.
There should be more like that. Get in, say it, get out, STFU.
I don't dispute any of that, but in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn't need to convert to USD. Obviously the Bitcoin economy isn't at that point yet and people need the USD to peg "value" to what a Bitcoin is. But eventually, if Bitcoin becomes more widely accepted, shouldn't the economy settle on to what 1BTC is "worth" regardless of what other currencies are doing?
Neat experiment. If the cod liver oil's for vitamins, I think cooking will mess that up.
To be fair, this is a threat of violence against his employer if they do not comply. Also, another way to look at it is forced taking, which is also violent.
What would you do: Part 2, the Island of Surpyc — Crooked Timber
Craigslist's elegance exists in it's utter simplicity. This site does not attempt to be visually simple; it intends to be conspicuous and eye-catching, and does so in a way that might come off as annoying or excessive.
The bigger question I had was whether they will be sued, see Patent 8396808, "Method and system for transferring an electronic payment" - Claim #8

8. The method of claim 2, wherein the step of communicating identity confirmation information includes sending an image associated with an account ID, wherein the image comprises a photograph of an owner of the purchaser account, and receiving confirmation from the merchant terminal that the image associated with the account ID matches that of the purchaser.
This comment disagrees with your profile. One is a typo. Fix it.
According to this site, CISPA would "end" online privacy; it urges you to send letters to Congress saying "this bill would have given federal agencies unlimited access to virtually any of my personal data and online communication-- without a warrant."

But of course, CISPA does nothing of the sort. It is:

* An opt-in measure that can't be forced on a private company by the government

* Restricted to "cyber threat information", a term carefully (relative to any other online legislation) defined to apply only to attacks on the confidentiality/integrity/availability of systems and applications

* Specifically restricted from applying to Aaron Swartz-style ToS violations, or, for that matter, to intellectual property misappropriation

* Written to exclude "individuals" from "protected entities" to avoid any reading that would permit ISPs to use it to hand over records for individual targeted customers

And, while it exempts private companies from suits for good-faith attack data sharing (that is the point of the measure), it deliberately makes the government liable for any damages from misuse of shared information.

As Declan McCullagh pointed out in another thread here recently, private companies operate under a bewildering stack of regulations that make it legally dicey to share even innocuous data during attacks. In addition to ECPA and SCA, the two omnibus federal electronic privacy laws, there are a number of domain-specific laws ranging from HIPAA for medical privacy to DPPA for drivers records. Companies who handle protected data currently either don't share attack data, or incur legal risks when they do, or incur legal expenses when they have their sharing practices reviewed.

CISPA is a straightforward (and short) bill that attempts to remedy that problem. I don't support it (I don't think it will do much to help), but it's not evil, and organizations that try to fundraise off the idea that it is are playing games with your attention.
As far as my non-lawyer view takes me, that line is simply meant to catch the case where you exchange a de-centralized virtual currency for something (anything) else of value that's meant to substitute for currency in some context (i.e. what if you traded BTC for gold? For certificates that represent gold? For another virtual currency like WoW gold?).

That is, FinCEN is saying that you're still a money transmitter if you accept Bitcoins for anything else the Treasury considers to be equivalent to currency (which means, roughly, it can be readily converted back to currency), but not for goods and services. That way, you can't claim not to be subject to the rules just because you don't exchange Bitcoins for dollars.

Remember, the idea here is to make rules that allow FinCEN to track large flows of capital and generally prevent money laundering. So they're concerned with the situation where I give you bitcoins for gold and then turn around and sell the gold for clean dollars.
"It is not as though the contract is for free service plus payment for the phone in installments.

Who ever said it was? Arguing with you is turning out to be a colossal waste of time; every time you run into problems you gin up a straw man and attack that. This is my last contribution to this thread."

You are the one who claimed the people do not own their phones while under contract. If the contract is not an installment plan or a line of credit, then what property ownership do you think the companies have on the phone? Well, I guess since it was your last contribution to the thread, you will not answer.

"The administration has expressed its support for people being able to unlock their phone when its out of contract"

That is not in any way related to what I said. I said that the problem is that the DMCA forbids unlocking regardless of the contract. You can enter into a contract that says nothing about unlocking, and guess what? Unlocking will still be illegal.

Stop pretending that this is not a special protection for the cell carriers' business.