skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And this is why I fundamentally don't trust my smartphone.

It's a fun device. But it's a spy, outside my control, in my pocket.

I've rooted it, but haven't yet modded it (and if anyone cares to point me at a gentle introduction for CyanogenMod or another option that works on an HTC Incredible, I'm all ears).

I've been reasonably conservative in what apps I place on my phone, and several (Pandora specifically comes to mind) were removed when permissions were extended to include contacts (Pandora, you listening?).

I'm waiting eagerly for the following capabilities:

To define at the phone level what information I'm willing to share. Existing "privacy controls" make a mockery of any semblance of either "privacy" or "control" by distributing vague and conflicting access among a great many applications with no ability to centrally audit them.

To specifically grant to specific applications specific rights. My location is something I'll disclose very guardedly (I disable GPS functions on my phone). Other rights generally shouldn't be shared.

To request and audit ALL information a given application has of me in a convenient electronic format (such as a database dump accessibly by MySQL or Postgresql). Such functionality is of course a three-edged sword, as what information the vendor has and I wish to request a third party might also request pretending to be me. Or having legal authority to make the request (though that's already the case), via subpoena or warrant.

My contacts list is off limits. Full stop. Specific contacts might be contacted by way of an application if specifically designated by me, but no other use may be made of their information. Hell, it's not even mine to give.

The existing state of smartphones is interesting, but it's also a little shop of horrors. And if application authors, smartphone manufacturers, and telecom providers don't get their act together on this Real Soon Now, we're going to see some horror stories.
Travis Goodspeed and Dan Kaminksy demonstrated this in 2011 by embedding a tribute to the late Len Sassaman in the blockchain: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=BUB3dygQ
Interesting how TDD is so close to TTD.
Web Apps vs. Native Apps Is Still a Thing
The thread is closed, which links to an explanation, which is below:

-----------------------------------

[lpkane] - 5.1.13 at 1:46am

lol that got aggressive quickly

back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine

we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included

we ran the test for a few days on our accounts, decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought

fast forward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are

and the results for 48 hours of your combined efforts?

http://www.picsend.net/images/923377coin...

~2 btc, or roughly $280 usd at current exchange rates, not bad!

anyway, our bad, we just released a client update with the btc stuff removed, and your $280 is going into the s14 prize pot -- if you're still feeling sad, feel free to pm me and i'll attempt to buy back your love

but for the record, i told jag he shouldn't be lazy and run the miner in a separate process, rookie move
Test driven development.

As opposed to TTD, which is test to destruction.

Or DDT, which is development driven testing.

Or DMD, which is don't mean diddly.
For certain hardware prototypes, Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard and Arduino are good platforms to start with. They are the AWS equivalent for hardware from price point perspective.
Does being a former lobbyist make him inherently evil, though? I'm no fan of lobbying from any aspect, but it's shallow to judge his priorities off of this one piece of his career -- especially with the article highlighting his history in favor of the government regulating telecom.
This notion that industry needs regulating keeps ending us up in one disaster after another.

Who was it who said "when buying and selling are legislated, the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators?"
What are the prospects for a new bitcoin exchange?
Computers attempted various guises of "can't we all just get along".

At one time, it was cooperative multitasking and memory management. Programs were supposed to behave themselves and get out of one anothers' way. Except that, due to bugs or malice, some didn't. We called this world "DOS" (or pre OSX Macs).

Microsoft still attempts to allow vendors to install programs whereever the hell they want, and to, pretty please, not overwrite other program's infrastructure or system-level DLLs. Yeah. Right.

In the Linux world, we've solved this problem, if done right, though distro-managed, well, distributions. Any program can be included if it meets qualifications (generally limited to licensing requirements), and a sponsor steps up. Once included, the package gets the benefits of being included in the package lists, distributed over archive mirrors, and included in bugtracking and support systems. However it's also got to play along with the requirements of Debian Policy as to how it behaves on a system.

The proper way to address the issues of app privileges is to control privileges centrally on the device and grant them to specific apps. If a user doesn't wish to give an app, say, addressbook access, then they can deny it (or feed it a bogus addressbook). The app vendor can decide what they're going to do at this point, but what they can't do is override the user's explicitly stated limits.
And then that thread was closed. And this one was opened: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4...

Turns out the ~$280 turned into over $3,500. And the 48 hours turned into 8 days.
What things would you change?
First legal online poker site goes live in Nevada
The only thing I remember about Zune's reviews were everyone talking about how much the brown one looked like dog shit. Oh and how Zune is some kind of anti-Semitic slur. Oh, and how hilariously bad the tagline "Welcome to the [...ice cream...?] social" was. Hah, and I almost forgot that sharing content with other Zune owners was called 'squirting'. Classic.

It also didn't really help Microsoft that the only enthusiastic adopters of Zune were Apple haters that didn't have iPods but desperately wanted some piece of technology to develop an emotional attachment to.

I distinctly remember my friend's boyfriend (now ex-) making snarky comments about my iPod, then picking up a Zune and making remarks like "it's already more popular than the iPod," and other quips that were laughable even THEN.

Funny, I also knew I hadn't read a single good review from a reputable source, and I read Engadget a lot back then. They said the Zune sucked:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/15/zune-review/

"We've got things we like, and things we don't; rough edges to go right along with the well thought-out niceties. We came away underwhelmed and not at all surprised -- and why? The expectations were for Microsoft to deliver a "Microsoft" player and system; maybe not too shabby looking, but not very usable, and definitely bug-ridden."

Also this hilarious play-by-play where Ryan couldn't even get the damned software to install:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/13/installing-the-zune-sucke...

Oh, and that glowing PCMag review you've generated from your nether-regions?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2054204,00.asp

"When we tested the Zune market place the day of the launch, the store refused to let us log in, but the company seems to have worked out the bugs now."

"So to buy one song you need to pony up at least $5. This is irritating."

"The Zune software works pretty well, but the content offerings are nowhere near as robust as iTunes."

"We also found the battery life also a bit disappointing."

"If Microsoft can boost its battery life, broaden the video support, and make it easier to download podcasts, the Zune could provide some healthy competition to the iPod. Until then, the iPod will continue to reign supreme."

Zune failed because it failed to even be a good ripoff the iPod.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.. or when they are actually shutting down the dav services.
This is really bad for their reputation.
I think the key point isn't if an idea stupid or smart. It seems to me the key point is more like how you execute the idea.
> You mean, you couldn't care less, right? :P (Sorry, that particular Americanism is a pet peeve of mine.)

"I could care less" is an American idiom, and this is a US site. Ad hominem.
Piet Hein wrote a grook about this. It essentially says "don't look at what the coin flip says; look at how you feel about the result of the flip."
Its also true that in search, your personal data is what the company uses to make a profit. And yet, one hears less complaints about that.

I'm not justifying either approach, by the way, just observing what I regard as a strange disconnect.
> I'd love it even more if you made an API for it.

But then wouldn't you need an API Health Dashboard API heatlh dashboard?
Actually, there is a follow up to that:

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4...

-----------------------------------

[lpkane] 5.1.13 at 3:17am

first make sure you read part 1 of this developing story:

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&...

now for the more interesting news:

1. this has been running since april 14th, and definitely explains the virus warning due to the miner being a separate process

2. there were a total of 3 wallets on 3 pools set up for the test with the following addresses:

- 50btc: 1NsEeuxWB4ZvjVrxZcsmeMktDJPG5m4NCn
- btc guild: 13X5R8tTGkvZnsvFd12AHqwpF2hp34QKUa
- slush pool: 1NLy5djpAeU7uVNQ8meLQ4CweFU1hNfkQP

3. over the 2+ weeks it was apparently running, a total of 29.27627734 btc was mined, way more than 1.9!

4. daily sweeps were set up which converted btc to usd, and transactions totaled $3,602.21 (just sold the remaining btc to get a total)

so first the bad news, this is way more shady than i originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault

now the good news, as of the client update released in the last hour, all the btc stuff is out which should solve the gpu and av warnings, and in a blatant attempt to buy back your love (and less likely your trust), i'm going to do the following:

1. 100% of the funds are going into the s14 prize pot, so at the very least your melted gpus contributed to a good cause

2. every user who was premium this month will get a free one month premium code which they can use whenever and for whomever they like, and you'll find the code under manage accounts -> premium codes

once again, our bad, thanks for keeping us honest

-----------------------------------

So, it turns out, it wasn't $280 worth of BTC that was mined, it was $3,602.21 . How you can 'accidentally' mine more than $3000 of BTC is beyond me!
China is somewhat the AWS of hardware (I mean we're definitely never making anything in the US again, that's for sure)... But it is a very big problem indeed. And a totally different, human interaction driven issue to say the least.

It would be nice to have more transparency during the process.

Developing, prototyping, and manufacturing hardware (and generally dealing with China) can be a painful process even if you have great contacts and know what you're doing. Companies like PCH International alleviate quite a few of these problems when dealing with hardware and maybe we need to see more of these sprout up. The middleman is huge in the China issue.

The 3D printing "revolution" is still in its infancy, it's tough to print high-res models for prototyping certain items and you end up deferring to styrofoam and other methods of prototyping before you get to the tooling stage. But it will improve.

It's so refreshing to read articles like this and to see a hardware renaissance in the Valley and throughout the industry in general. I'm getting so sick and tired of "Hey, check out my new app, it's like Instagram and it's social" Enough of this crap.

People need to make things, it's tough, but as someone who's a few months into a hardware start up, I'll say this: it's a great feeling to simply hold something in your hands. Let's make stuff!
Path doesn’t have a registered user problem, it has a trust problem
The seminal papers in this field:

Quantum Time Crystals (Wilczek)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2539

Classical Time Crystals (Shapere, Wilczek)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2537

Space-time Crystals of Trapped Ions ( Li, Gong, Yin, Quan, Yin, Zhang, Duan,Zhang )
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.4772

All three papers appeared in a single issue of Physical Review Letters (The fancy Physics journal).

PRL also issued this Physics Viewpoint, a popular science article:

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/116
We've had some of our designers at work use this approach. I think it's quite good for illustrating intentions. But then building on top of the designed Storyboard doesn't quite work out.

Storyboards work well for simple apps with standard UI. Once you start building something custom or complex they are a poor tool. If you have a designer then they're likely going to be making custom UI which will need code (maybe lots of it). The Storyboard quickly becomes a crazy mess of placeholder views, implementation details, arrows and blank screens. The designer can no longer use it to demonstrate their ideas and you've probably completely ripped out their original work.

If your only intention is to make a interactive demonstration of screen progressions - then this is perfect. But don't think that this has the same reusability as making a HTML+CSS+JS mockup.
How to Increase Email Open Rates
...extended recording of video and audio could be accomplished through a thin USB connector wire (painted to match hair and skin color) hidden behind the neck, leading to a large external battery hidden...

If we're already to the part about painting wires to match skin color, google glass isn't the stealth recording device that's going to be on the other end of that wire.
I respect your logic, but the strawman here is valid. Facebook is a social network and now it is a big one. Pinterest (I don't even know the spelling), could be the next FB). I don't have a pinterest account, but it probably serves real value to the women who use it. Someday, it could be an FB.

also, I slur couldnt care less when I speak bc I have no idea the right way to say it!
How would the free market prevent the Fertilizer plant from exploding and killing all those people?
It's all about trusting what that company is saying "now".

They can change later and spam your list or use it for some other purpose. You can shame them publicly if you find it out. But then, it's already too late by that time.
Happy I deleted my account a while ago, loved the design back when v2 came out but..
I'm not sure whether you would consider this paper systems-oriented, but it's fun and sort of practical. "A Play on Regular Expressions" is literally a 3 act play about efficiently implementing regular expressions with code in Haskell. I've been working through it and trying to adapt some of the code for a workshop I'm giving this summer, and it's been very readable and interesting.

http://sebfisch.github.io/haskell-regexp/regexp-play.pdf
A new Peanuts Sticker Pack on Path
Voiding Your Warranty: Hacking Glass (official Google IO session)
Re: the contradictory studies… if you go with the group of practitioners who argue that there are different stages to the disorder, they're not contradictory at all. The stages argument says a person starts off with very high cortisol output (because you're under stress) and this is what causes the damage and fall-off of production later:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10633533

The 24-hour saliva cortisol test costs about $100 and should tell you a lot:

http://labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/cortisol/ta...

There are definitive clinical (non-blood) tests for hypothyroid (I mentioned several of them), there are also ways to test for FM/CFS (muscle recovery among others). They just don't get used a lot.

As for quackery -- the only quackery I read in Teitelbaum's book was about the allergy treatment and it's not any more or less quacky than acupuncture (where the research was discredited) so I consider it harmless. Every "canonical" scientist has some kind of nutty side, from Isaac Newton on down the line. (Note: Not comparing Teitelbaum to Newton whatsoever. It's just an ideal, extreme, example.) Everything else in his book is supported with research citations. I've checked them, and others, because I followed his advice.
Mirror:
http://www.webcitation.org/6GHYnetpc
and
http://www.webcitation.org/6GHYhQL72
I completely agree. Even though there are many political parties[1] in the US, there are only two that have the funds and mindshare to win presidential elections.

I like that independents like Bernie Sanders[2] and Angus King[3] manage to get into the senate, it provides a little bit of hope for change.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_th...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_King
Reputation.com has always been smarmy. It wouldn't surprise me if they sold the passwords and then claimed they lost them. (Really)

For the things Reputation.com does you have to ask why they used encrypted rather than hashed passwords. Not that hashed passwords would make me super excited to be lost, but why did Reputation.com need to keep the password around? They don't really interact with accounts, and if they do those should be stored separately from the access to the site. So the message should have been "we lost users bank account passwords" or something along those lines.

Because I know that Reputation.com is practically in the extortion business this password storing rather than hashing issue makes me think even less of them, which is difficult to do.
It sure is. Jeni's Ice Cream also does some crazy stuff with pepper (Queen City Cayenne). I know she didn't invent the concept, but she does a heckuva job in the execution.

Totally agree on the "Ben and Jerry's" comment. I want really good ice cream first and foremost. If you can add a touch of something delightful to enhance the flavor, perfect. I feel the same way about cheese cake.
Some civility, please?

> Oh, and that glowing PCMag review you've generated from your nether-regions?

The quotes were quotes, you can search them to see where they came from.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351538,00.asp
Karma, like any measurement of an individual's value is imperfect. I'd say that it's not closely tied to a user's contributions to the site. And seriously, abstracting something like it represents into one number is problematic except with gross comparisons.

A well made comment in a discussion may get 4 - 6 points of karma. A link to tech crunch article or blog post you had nothing to do with may get you 200+ points.

People upvote people they like, regardless of the value of the particular comment. This means famous individuals tend to have more karma per post count.

I'd personally love more details on karma. especially karma from comments, as separated from karma from posts.
xkcd.com/927 :)
or... take down the link.
I'm currently working on a hardware startup. The barriers to being able to do this have definitely lowered thanks to CNC (moving to 3D printing soon), Arduino, and lower component costs - not to mention the fact that a lot of cell phone components now come bundled in modules and eval boards are easy to play with (all things that were mentioned).

One thing that I think still needs to come a long way is the amount of shared knowledge on hardware design. My co-founder and I both went to school for Mechatronics Engineering, and one of the biggest obstacles we have run into so far is that there just isn't as much shared knowledge on the internet when we run into problems - unlike software.
Sorry if I forgot to say: Axillary basal temperature. That is, under the arm, measured for 5-10 minutes, with a glass thermometer or electronic one that'll let you keep measuring that long. If that's higher than 98.6, you really should be evaluated for hyperthyroidism. Doesn't mean you DO have it. It CAN be a healthy temperature. But it's a possible symptom.
And I'd like to keep it that way.
The startup culture talks the talk about "changing the world", but in truth most of us couldn't care less so long as we get our next funding round. For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, providing yet another means of idle distraction for indolent westerners.

I guess there is a subtle difference between changing the world and making the world better.

Did Pinterest change the world? I bet it did - it has heaps of users. Those people would spend some of their time in a different way if there was no Pinterest, hence - world would be different.

Now, did Pinterest make the world better?
How to plan application server capacity for an API endpoint
Would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to punch holes in my theory. Lets make the article better! Thanks!
In terms of taking down the link, I think he means on the server it is on, not remove it from the blockchain.
It's my impression that the crystal arrangement really refers to the distribution of ions in the trap. Exciting one atom does add energy to the system, but in a near-eigenstate that's quite orthogonal to the crystal's structure.

Whether the distinguishability of one ion over the others changes the quantum statistics is an important and subtle problem.

You're right to be skeptical. When the time comes to interpret the results of this experiment, you'll find yourself in good company. Doubly so if the experiment resolves T violation.
Looked cool. The progress bar that is. I didn't get past that.
Photoshop layers have all the nastiness of threaded comments plus the added complexity of "blending". I frankly can't comprehend the complexity of modeling Photoshop's layers as SQL tables.

Converting PSD's to JSON seems like a reasonable thing to do, but converting them to normalized SQL seems like a never ending shit show.
Yeah it's a bad sign when all this post did was make me hungry.
interesting to see the comments go from near ubiquitous hatred on previous Dwolla threads to more lukewarm/positive now that Andreesen Horowitz is on board
PCH International comes pretty close. They even have an accelerator program[1] to help hardware startups to manufacture their products in China.

I usually don't like to comment on rumors. I heard that some people from Amazon are already working on a AWS-equivalent for hardware too based on their experiences from manufacturing the Kindle. If you know anyone from Lab126[2], ask them about it.

[1]: http://www.pchintl.com/accelerator/accelerator.aspx

[2]: http://www.lab126.com/index.htm
No, this is "I might be interested in your product. Is there support for my device in the foreseeable future? The page didn't seem to specify."
I don't understand why people still use Path. Why do they have good ratings and how come they are still on the Appstore?
Funny how OP used that phrase, that's my one sentence summary of FabEngine.com (http://fabengine.com/get-ready-for-manufacturing-as-a-servic...). If anyone is interested, I am still looking for one or two partners to get this off the ground starting this summer.
Awesome job, Mariusz
Fertilizer plants are expensive? As are wrongful death lawsuits?

Not saying this is enough but no one is exploding these things for profit.
UI Patterns of Android News Applications