skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another perspective, from the War Resistors League[0]:

Where your income tax money really goes:

* Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion

* MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion

* NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion

"'Current military' includes Dept. of Defense ($653 billion), the military portion from other departments ($150 billion), and an additional $162 billion to supplement the Budget’s misleading and vast underestimate of only $38 billion for the "war on terror." "Past military" represents veterans’ benefits plus 80% of the interest on the debt.[1]

These figures are from an analysis of detailed tables in the "Analytical Perspectives" book of the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2009. The figures are federal funds, which do not include trust funds -- such as Social Security -- that are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or don’t pay) by April 15, 2008, goes to the federal funds portion of the budget. The government practice of combining trust and federal funds began during the Vietnam War, thus making the human needs portion of the budget seem larger and the military portion smaller."

[0] - http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm

[1] - "Analysts differ on how much of the debt stems from the military; other groups estimate 50% to 60%. We use 80% because we believe if there had been no military spending most (if not all) of the national debt would have been eliminated. For further explanation, please see box at bottom of page."
He needs to add anonymous payments and a method of placing non-destructable (or hard to destroy) blocks.

Some people would pay money to place a giant swastika or similar 4chan style trolling. Others would work hard (or pay) to remove that.
Using latest (of today) Firefox Aurora (22): Web Worker took 15 seconds, compared to 4 seconds without

Using Chrome 26: Web Worker took 5 seconds, compared to 6.8 seconds without

Using IE 10: Web Worker took 13.5 seconds, compared to 14 seconds without

It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.
That's assuming you could get your hands on ASIC hardware. None of it has shipped to customers yet, and once it has, the difficulty will skyrocket.
Five of the Most Annoying Things About the Linkedin Interface
Tips on selling your first startup
PROGRESS QUEST.

Caps lock because it's that cool.
I'm not sure there's $1.2M worth of ASIC hardware made yet. Also, for that amount of money you could do a lot of malicious things, even to traditional banks.
Hey, this looks like it would go well with what I'm currently developing: http://www.getinstabot.com/. I'll give it a shot, congrats!
If you're importing from a CSV, there's a workaround that, unlike the Microsoft recommendation linked in this article, doesn't require adding a spurious apostrophe to the front of your data: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/165042/stop-excel-from-au...
I get what you mean when you say these guys had way too much time to make some kind of an escape and I agree then that there is an absolute need for a much better software. Having said that, I do not think it would be wise for government to build and use an "image crawler" to search and store images of citizens...it would provoke widespread criticism concerning privacy of millions of citizens. On top of that in this particular instance, the police commissioner points out that "both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases"..the software failed to make a match.
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And yet, in your heart of hearts, you know mutagen's point to be true.
7 Reasons to Start a Blog Before Shipping a Product
You know, I am a big fan of capitalism. Having started 5 companies, I'd have to be.

But MBA-style capitalism is a technology for producing short-term wins and substantial profits next quarter. If you also care about long-term wins or negative externalities, it's an insufficient technology to apply on its own.

And of course, we hackers know that. Jeff Bezos has been telling the quarterly-profits people to go fuck themselves for 15 years. And he has been right to do so. AWS, Amazon Prime, the Kindle, and now their local delivery stuff: all impossible to achieve if you're more interested in beating quarterly profit predictions than reshaping the world.

Health care is another area where it doesn't work so well. Consider, for example, these graphs: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/2...

I should note that allowing pharma companies to advertise to the public is a relatively recent change. 1997, I think. And the US is one of only two countries that allow it. We could change it back.
I just set mine to 212121 and, rather topically, now I can't make out from the top right corner how much karma I have. I suppose that could be used to remind a person that they've got work to do instead of checking if anyone has upvoted their stuff.
It has but only that first batch. The author also makes the mistake only that first batch sold at they rate the new batch is priced at 75btc.

Interesting to know how much it would cost to build your own machines only reasonable solution at this time.
If the bar is that low, this does suggest that, contrary to some conspiracy theories, governments aren't really out to destroy Bitcoin, since they could've done so by now if they had really wanted to.
"At 4352 you get to get to post a jokey self-referential comment without anybody complaining that Hacker News is turning into Reddit."

[url=dwight.jpg]FALSE[/url]

I'm at 7595 and I got called out for this just recently [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542609 ].
If you wore Mission Impossible style masks, there's no reason why the facial recognition would be able to pick you up from underneath. You might alert the suspicion of people around you more though, as they don't ever seem to be perfect.
And of course you forgot that the difficulty would increase?

Who sells ASICS 66GH for $1250? That page is outdated.

Avalons are going for 72BTC that's over $9000
I think longest blockchain attacks only apply to double-spending, so you still can't "compromise" coins that are not your own
How Women May Have Shaped Men’s Penises
The great personal insight is when one finally discards prejudice and bigotry and realizes that a thermostat is intelligent, and that a neuron is a "molecule" of intelligence.
I watched this lecture recently http://youtu.be/-IUe3ce_29I which talked about how hard it is to do image recognition at low resolution. One solution is a "fovea" system that scans an area for interesting items and zooms in on them with a high resolution camera automatically to get better recognition.

I wonder if this would help in similar instances. A system that uses facial detection to isolate faces and then zoom in on them very quickly seems feasible. I'm assuming it would be overwhelmed in a scenario like a marathon of course, but perhaps it would help in other situations.
You should be able to prove you will be valuable - probably like blogging and contributing to open source
Then you may be able to get sponsors on a web site, but not stickers on a laptop
This One Microsoft Excel Error Helped Spark Mass Riots Across Europe http://www.policymic.com/articles/36071/this-one-microsoft-e...
There's A Boom In Teaching People How To Code
Because Reinhart and Rogoff was such a massive deal.
I was "to kind" in the review so that potential scam victims may actually read the post. I am hoping it helps some people avoid getting to involved, and getting pulled down the cognitive dissonance rabbit hill try are so prone to taking :(
> massively scraped every social network

Funnily enough, if you download your information using Facebook's tools, you get a copy of your facial recognition data too. Presumably US law enforcement has access to that for their own uses.
About ten years ago some guys from Saudi Arabia made it their goal to strike terror into US of A.

I would say that they have done a pretty good job.
There is another possibility: governments just want to control Bitcoin. The same attack that allows double spending can be used to deny transaction confirmations, which effectively denies transactions from happening at all.
This also might be in the time where computers would normally take up an entire room, and cost insane amounts of money. No one really saw the miniaturization of the transistor as having the effect it did on computers. It's why a bunch of non-established players one the personal computing war (Apple, Intel, Microsoft) instead of someone like IBM.
"I'm not sure there's $1.2M worth of ASIC hardware made yet."

I am pretty sure a large government could make its own ASICs...
Trade a tweet for a product or service
I am curious how would you feel if you could trade one tweet for a real product or service? Would you be willing to do it? Or would you consider it as spaming your social network? Thanks for your answers.
Another comment asks,

why are we seeing so many articles about Excel?

The main reason is that Excel was recently in the news because a paper about economic policies for countries was found to have been based on data kept in an Excel spreadsheet that was poorly documented enough that errors in the data weren't found right away. (This is the highly condensed version of the story.)

These stories resonate here on HN because many, many, many of us have had occasion to use Excel as a tool. Members of the general public who share information with me (for example, contact lists for youth soccer teams) have learned in a corporate environment to treat Excel as the "universal" data exchange format. So I will be dealing with Excel spreadsheets for years even if I never create another one.

One expects Excel to operate like a tool, a way to manipulate data in some straightforward, well defined ways. I don't expect Excel to do what is described in the article submitted here: treat any text data value with certain embedded strings as special data types that the program can rewrite without explicit user command. That turns Excel from being a tool in the workplace to being a surly co-worker who habitually messes up other workers' projects. I intentionally minimize my use of Excel because I don't like its artificial intelligence turning into artificial stupidity while I try to get my work done. To find out that Excel is actually actively impeding medical research by rewriting data cells in spreadsheets is a dismaying example of why I can't treat Excel as a useful tool, so of course I was glad to upvote this informative submission.

AFTER EDIT:

I shared the link that opened the thread here among my Facebook friends, and one friend commented,

"This is (luckily) old news and no bioinformatician worth his keyboard uses Excel any more. It's just too much of a wild card."

He followed up after another friend's comment with

"Microsoft is squarely in the wrong here. The tool aggressively reformats highly technical data fields and the behavior is remarkably hard to keep turned off. I've been working in this specific field for 15 years, and I can guarantee that the power users do know their tools. What they know these days is to go use R or even one of the OSS applications like LibreCalc. Unfortunately, more naive users new to bioinformatics analysis routinely get tripped up by this and other overly assistive features of the Office suite."
How does it stop me from saying "Bank of America's public key is <my public key>"?
I'm not saying that you don't use word order. I think you must to some extent if you are doing a comprehensive semantic analysis of the keywords and websites. I'm saying that your users may not use correct word order because they are lazy and because they are used to the behavior of search engines that don't require it but still give okay results.

Perhaps you have solved this problem, but I just don't see how you can offer better results than Google on average (without having a similar sized index) when users are just throwing together a bunch of words related to what they are looking for. It seems to me that if we want to take advantage of systems like yours for search and if we want to get better results than Google, we need to change users' behavior; they need to learn to give more precise queries.
What is a "winter traveler"? On searching for the term, I only saw websites about travelling during the winter. Is it a sufferer of seasonal affective disorder?
ASICminer is a company producing their own, and from what I've read they certainly have the capacity to overwhelm the network if they wanted.
Ask HN: Trade a tweet for a product or service
I am curious how would you feel if you could trade one tweet for a real product or service? Would you be willing to do it? Or would you consider it as spaming your social network? Thanks for your answers.
You can also prevent transactions from being confirmed.
It's a "broken damn" effect. Once the first one got through, it resonated with everyone's previous knowledge.
Bottom line is that it's nearly impossible to exactly match facial features to anyone beyond a set distance when there's too much ambiguity between distances and rubbish quality CCTV video.

Matching gait may be a more effective means of identification at a distance (and, in this and many other cases, at odd angles).

http://www.am.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sagawa/pdf/accv06.pdf (PDF)
Avalon has had units shipped for quite some time. They're up to their second and third batches now.
Silicon Valley companies quietly try to kill Internet privacy bill
Have you seen ticgit? https://github.com/jeffWelling/ticgit

All the tickets are kept in a branch within your git repository. It offers a Gem-based CLI, "ti".

It wasn't quite as frictionless as I like my issue trackers to be (especially for personal projects), but it does what it says on the box.
How is this different from RHIPE?
http://www.datadr.org/

Also some "big guns" on that project.
Hahaha. OK, point taken!
If a few agents start double-spending, that creates a strong disincentive for anyone to accept bitcoin at all, which can doom the entire currency.
There's other things they could be doing.

Bitcoin isn't intrinsically anonymous, so maybe they're just keeping an eye on anyone not being anonymous.

Wait until someone sells polonium or uranium on Silk Road to see if Tor / Bitcoin stand up.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.sto...
Met korting naar Bellewaerde en zijn familiecoaster Huracan
Person with mild mental illness that results in clearer perception, e.g. depressive realism, and often better character. (When your biology is difficult, you don't get to fuck around the way most people do.)

Traveling through the forest during summer is much more comfortable, but you can't get as sharp a feel of the landscape because the trees are leaved out.
"Between the "average karma" statistic (I used to care about that and avoid posting non-primaries; now I don't care) and reply-delays, HN penalizes nested discussions, and that's probably a good thing for most discussions but it does have drawbacks."

Interesting. I don't think I quite follow how "non-primaries" (which means..."replies"?) harm one's average karma statistic, and how the average karma statistic + reply-delays penalise nested discussion, could you clarify?
Of course Tesla could not have predicted the military industrial complex and the gun lobby in the US.
You and the other guy are of course right. Maybe I've just clicked on too many Ask HNs recently that had to do with things about how HN works.
Why is that New York picture in Black and White, and the Moscow Metro empty?
The one genius thing about the body scanners is that the TSA have persuaded people who don't like them that they can protest by opting out.

Opting out isn't a protest. I have no idea why people think it is. You're given a manual search that is just as invasive as a body scan.

If you want to register your discontent with the searches at airports, don't delude yourselves that opting out does anything. No one notices. No one writes it down. No one cares.
Thank you for knocking down the Gödel canard. People who say humans are not similar able have a vague faith that humans are far smarter than they really are.

The existence of "Uhprovably true statements" is less of a weakness in logic's ability to organize the universe, and more that there are always less meaningful yet constructible statements, like "This statement is not provable."
Anti-Piracy Chief Pleads Guilty to Drug Trafficking
While I agree that a program could be made to build sort of counter-countermeasure, I think that we are still not conscious of all the information we get from our environment thanks to our brain.
And as we don't have this knowledge, we can't give it to our products, like this program.

Now, let's say that we have such a program, able to reach its target most of the time.
In that case, people would still have to focus on higher level tasks as you said, like global offensive strategy.
Even for this task, I think that a spirit forged with mathematics will certainly be more efficient, with better logics and intuition.
But my opinion might be influenced by the fact that in France, our best military schools do have high maths expectations for the entry exam.
No one wants a police state, but modern Americans lack the discipline and knowledge to prevent it from happening.

Americans can read about police state atrocities in other countries and be horrified while not understanding that bit by bit, piece by piece, they are constantly trading individual sovereignty for government power.
Matching surveillance camera images is always possible no matter how bad the image quality is. The only matter is how many false positives show up.

Facial recognition algorithms always give their best matching candidates, with thresholds to skip those not quite matching ones. Your article makes it sound like no such results were produced at all, which is unlikely how recognition is supposed to work.
All those times I've had to sit through unskippable anti-piracy ads on DVDs that I've bought, telling me that PIRACY FUNDS CRIME, PIRACY FUNDS DRUGS, PIRACY FUNDS TERRORISM.
I don't expect this to happen, ASICs will be pretty widely distributed before anyone can pull this off. However there is a contingency plan for when this happens: switch the hashing algorithm (for example to scrypt, or something memory hard w/ lots of random flow control). This puts all ASICs out of the game at once. Miners will not like it, but if the other alternative is a non-functioning currency, they will likely cooperate.
I have always opted out as well. Recently the agents have started informing me that the new machines are safe, but they rarely answer my follow up question satisfactorily ("Great! Where did you get your degree in biophysics?").
As far as I can tell, this is a different vision than that of Wakari. This effort seems to be about building a souped up parellel ML-oriented calculator around Hadoop. There is an R binding, there is a nascent Python binding (that "doesn't include the Python scientific frameworks because [they] are not that familiar with them"[1].

Wakari is an infrastructure for doing repeatable, collaborative analytics with Python. Our existing tools include a simple browser-based environment for code editing, IPython notebook, and sharing of plots and workflows. Our goal is to support multiple applications on that infrastructure, and not necessarily all written by Continuum.

[1] https://github.com/0xdata/h2o/blob/master/py/h2o/h2o/cloud.p...
Previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579047
I can understand that recording live footage with very high quality is a problem, but how about capturing quality stills to complement the video with lower quality.
Its not really the advertising that is a problem. That is the symptom of the short time frame most drugs need to pay for themselves. Quite a lot of them only have 3 - 5 years to make the money back.

So, either we figure out a way to make drugs cost less or we extend the timeframe for profit. Killing the advertising just means the number sold will be less and much higher for those buying it.
This article was published in 2004. I would hope that bioinformatics researchers have ways of dealing with these issues now.
How to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology
http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/02/facial-recognition-camoufl...
I started with C++ and thought I was just good at picking up languages because I picked up Java and Python in a day or two. Then I realized it was because they were so similar. When I learned Common Lisp I had to do some real work even though ny then I had been programming for 7-8 years.
"Primary" means a post that is primary in the thread. I suppose it would have been clearer to say "reply" instead of "non-priamry".

Your average karma gets hit because primaries tend to get much higher karma than replies-to-replies-to-replies that few people read. My primaries probably average 15-20, but I have a lot of 1-pointers in nested discussions that I think are better than the 50+ primaries.
This would not disrupt Bitcoin for too long. I'd just move the blockchain to a different algorithm and BOOM your ASICs are worthless and Bitcoin will still go on.

$1.2M will shutdown Bitcoin for, at most, a couple days... and then you're left with a bunch of useless ASICs.

And all that assuming that nobody else will get ASICs, which will make the attack more expensive.

It's just not worth it.
I think it would be great if app.net succeeds, but personally I had to stop using it. Just too many of "Nick Burns, your company's computer guy" for me.
This article is from 2004, but I suspect that the problem is still present in the last version.

A few month ago I had a similar problem with a list of usernames. One of them was something like julio-90 (In Spanish, "julio" is the name of a person and the name of a month.) and Excel changed it to the date jul-90 (i.e. 1990-07-01).
Step by Step: Creating a Typographical Logo
Interesting to see articles promoting adding more surveillance cameras for all their flaws (bad angle, resolution trails behind phone cameras, etc). I would focus on acquiring publicly available photo data in real time at dense events and scan them. I.e. crowdsourced surveillance. I'm sure someone is working on that.
Not just facial recognition, the "terror watch list" failed (after a warning from Russia about the older brother) lack of background checks on the AR15s they owned failed, the secured perimeter failed (the teenager was outside of it) the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown).

In the end it was mostly dumb luck, dumb criminals, and the fact the poor victim who lost their legs managed to survive. In fact that was the success, that more wounded people didn't die thanks to fantastic work by the hospital and doctors.

Instead of patting law enforcement on their backs, how about thanking the doctors, where is their applause?
Circumstances won't allow me give it away for free. Thanks
Don't you have to get all other bitcoin users to also migrate over to this new algorithm?

And even if it's just down for a couple of days, that's terrible. Bitcoin is still pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but imagine if regular money stopped working for a couple of days.
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Ask HN: Amateur Radio, Cellular and Commerical Radio Towers Mapping?
Hi, I'm Brennan. I'm a ham radio operator, general class.

I'm finding that it is incredibly difficult to actually pull a list of all Radio/Cell/General-purpose radio towers within the radius of a zip-code. The information I am finding typically lists a registered owner with a far out-of-state address.

Does anyone have any ideas?
Not impossible though. Given that such software is used to steer the future efforts of the investigators, it is possible that the software does say "no match found" if the probability of a real match is too low.
The FTC would take a very dim view of this. There would have to be full disclosure. I've also noticed that over the years the number of people participating in contests on Twitter that require something to be RTed has dropped greatly -- at least in my timeline.