skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, there is. There are a lot of Share the Road signs, window stickers, etc., as well as other things that are either intended to raise visibility or have the effect of doing so (e.g. the bright green NiceRide bicycles everywhere). The City of Minneapolis and the Met Council (metropolis-area inter-city council) are heavily invested in biking, and there are additional movements such as Bike Walk Twin Cities which engage in regular outreach, visibility, and education activities.

In general, the Twin Cities are doing an excellent job of addressing bikeability from many angles.
The problem with appliance design is that people think they want and need all these features, but they never use them.

Appliance makers sit around all day thinking of new ways to entice people to buy new appliances, but in reality they know that the complexity comes back to bite them eventually and the majority of users just use the microwaves for heating water and making popcorn.

This whole "scan the UPC" thing? Not disruptive. It's been done before:

http://www.smarthome.com/13041/Beyond-Microwave-Oven/p.aspx

So the question is, do you really need disruption in this area? Are people really clamoring for an easier way to heat up their Lean Cuisine even though all they really need to do now is push the "4" button?
The people that work at DFAS get paid a lot more than the people at Walmart do also.

12,000 employees divided by $1.3 billion budget equals $108,000/employee. Yes, they have capital costs, but you can bet that there are some bloated salaries in there. Considering that they are headquartered in Indianapolis, the cost of living is incredibly low there.
The tech writer in me is losing his shit over how cool this is.
What's the threshold (risk score) you use to consider a transaction as fraudulent?
The War on Social Science
It might sound like scaremongering to you. To me, the reality is every network I've worked on have had devices that I can not install and run arbitrary code on. Most non roll-your-own routers for example does not give you a shell where you can install arbitrary applications. But many of them do have tools like ability to telnet to help diagnose problems.
Yes. They are cycled out after a week. Our data is useless after then as most of it is real time. Audit logs are kept offline in gzipped daily text files per client and these are handed over to the company and deleted.
Here's the ironic thing: If Snowden had done the more courageous thing and stayed in his country and released this data he'd be viewed as much more of a hero and would make it 10 times harder to prosecute him. To me that's the difference between a true patriot vs someone who wants all the glory but none of the consequences of their actions.
Slapping a copyleft license on your project doesn't mean that people magically won't use it where that use would be "infringing". It only means that you can sue, if you should learn of it.

See this recent talk by Rob Landley, of BusyBox fame, on how casual and widespread GPL infringement is in large corporations, and why he no longer advocates the use of the GPL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0

Landley's the guy who started the infamous BusyBox GPL lawsuits that then spiraled totally out of his control, so he has more skin in the game than most.
Yet another way to have clickable short-cuts for opening SSH connections using OS X (Safari only): OS X understands URL schemes like ssh://username@hostname.tld:port. Throw it into the address bar or even save this as a bookmark. Safari asks for permission before opening such non-http protocols nowadays and transfers you to Terminal.app. Pro: Less clutter in menu bar. Con: Safari only. (As for me, I prefer ~/.profile and 'alias').
Yeah egoism/illegalism is fun and all, but until you can get a significant mass to participate, you're actively harming those who may be sympathetic, yet don't want to violate their own country's laws. This harms the organizing you'd need to do in order to bring about meaningful change.

I am all about direct action, but you have to pick your battles. This one seems to me to be all downside with very, very little upside. Especially, as my sibling states, when you just say 'public domain' without mentioning your politics.
I disagree with your last line, if you know what http chunked encoding is, it is a 'simple ascii delimited binary thing' - it just doesn't have a 'stream id' in it, but there could be. Of course, people always forget to check the chunk length is <0 which makes for a constant stream of security holes over the years, but you would have the exact same problem in binary.

I think it's sad that HTTP/2.0 is primarily just trying to multiplex TCP and the rest seems like pure micro-optimizations (the one exception being server push; I haven't read a lot on that yet). It seems like the wrong layer in which to attack the problem, and is basically a huge 'meh'.
sigh

So I think we all know by now that what the NSA is doing is technically "legal", and Snowden's actions are "illegal".

However what the NSA is doing is unethical, and Snowden's actions are ethical. That's because the law is unjust, and (apparently) violates the US constitution. Also a lot of people are very upset about the secret "interpretations" of the law.

See also: Gandhi, Mandela, Luther King Jr, et. al.

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

- Thomas Jefferson
I am a big fan of LINQ but it gives and takes away complexity at the same time.

It makes a 'whole class of things that you would have to do with loops' go away.
Once you are comfortable with the syntax, it makes code a lot more readable.

But you lose track of when and where things are getting executed.

For example, it is easy to make something that you intend to execute inside of
SQL server run inside of C# code. And then, all of a sudden, string comparison
is case-sensitive.

You wind up having to context switch between procedural and set mentality without
the same kind of visual cues you used to get.
Okay, I read the link. What's the point you're trying to make?
Amazing, wish I could do things like this. I bet if this was made by a common microwave manufacturer, it'd be advertised as the microwave of the future and cost $3500!
As a Dota 2 player, this is underwhelming

> Dota 2 Linux Minimum System Requirements:

> Ubuntu 12.04

> Dual core from Intel or AMD at 2.8 GHz

> 4GB RAM

> 4GB Hard Drive Space,

> nVidia GeForce 8600/9600GT, ATI/AMD Radeaon HD2600/3600 (Graphic Drivers: nVidia 310, AMD 12.11), OpenGL 2.1

> OpenAL Compatible Sound Card

I run Dota 2 at 720p on my Windows 7 PC with substantially lower spec hardware - A Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel IGP GMA X4500 (G41 chipset)

This proves that the Source Engine on Linux isn't exactly efficient as its Windows counterpart as Valve claimed a few months back.
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.
Don't get when people say you should always push for more equity. Why? I'd rather not play the lottery.
My mothers microwave has a pretty bad UI. You cant just start punching numbers and start - you must first select from a grid of vague looking icons - and then specify the time. I got used to it after a couple visits but I was left scratching my head in the beginning.
Yes, just like twitter/FB/new shiny thing, everything should be a spoke pointing back to the hub, a host (or at the least a domain) that you pay for, and therefore control.

You could make the same claim about email. What happens if/when gmail starts charging? All the folks who are using google apps can move, but the people with gmail accounts have fewer (no?) options.
I agree with you that Microsoft is becoming more closed, and that that is a bad thing. However, when you say "full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg" it is so over the top that I can't take your comment seriously. Similarly to how I pretty much write off any comment that uses the terms M$ or "Cupertino idiot tax" unless used ironically.
All in all, the child athlete training regimens here don't sound all that more narrow or rigorous than what other nations have done for their Olympic aspirations in other sports...but the OP is particularly interesting, I guess, because it seems to be fueled by the upper-middle class acting out of their own initiative, rather than just a top-down mandate. It's as if golf is the new race for those who would otherwise want their children to be famous surgeons and engineers.

The abandoning of school just to practice golf is...off-putting...at least there's the consolation that there's huge money in professional golf, unlike all the other niche Olympic sports (weightlifting, field events) that nations invest in just to rack up a raw medal count.

Also: obligatory section that directly relates to HN-type discussions:

> A few years ago, American golf academies seemed poised to flood the China market. But several famous ones that opened branches in China — run by golf luminaries like David Leadbetter and Cindy Reid — have closed, often after disagreements with local partners. It’s a pattern any foreigner doing business in China would recognize: Chinese firms tend to nudge out their foreign partners once the technology has been transferred and the local company has built up its own strength and know-how.
I look forward to being annoyed with a Moto X ad every time I use a Google service.
This article is inaccurate, and I've been corresponding with the author.

It's predicated on the data being in the laptops.
As well, even by the author's own wild story, Snowden would "feel terrible, and remember being drugged and losing the information"

That doesn't jive with:

1) Snowden and Assange & Appelbaum (who likely are advising) would NOT make the rookie mistake are carrying the data on one's person. That'd be like Assamge carrying the original Wikileaks dump with him at all times.

2) Greenwald has talked by phone (Snowden called him) on Sat and again this Tues, and Snowden told him no such drugging story. Indeed, his spirits are high and he's satisfied with the global debate that's ensued from his actions. He said specifically he's never been in China or Russia authorities' hands.

The #FoutLaptops are for Snowden to get online securely. There's even that hashtag on Twitter to debunk the silly rumors about the laptops.

NYT is spreading a false, wild speculation.

NYT is also responsible for the earlier "while in HK his laptops were compromised" rumor (wrong-he was in a hotel provided by his HK media and parliament contacts).

That rumor was "quoted" by the New Yorker reporter in Beijing and that's the genesis of how it spread. I contacted that reporter (who I know tangentially) and told him not to publish the NYT speculation the day he posted it. Now that its even more refuted, I contacted him again last night.

Snowden (and Asaange/Appelbaum likely advising) are much too skilled to make an unprofessional infosec mistake. Everyone knows the security is both "physical" and "electronic". That's 1st grader knowledge, and the NYT apparently has little infosec training.
They would probably be more encouraged and happier to develop even more because they would understand HTML, which is a simple but powerful concept of block markup, and not some random pile of characters in angle brackets.
Short answer is you can trust building block type components like CPUs if they're designed by a company that is in the camp of the same nation state/alliance that you align with as well. Very similar to the thought process you would use when deciding if you can trust that guy over there with a gun.

Theoretically the answer is no if you're talking about gear (say highly integrated Socs) designed and fabbed in a country that has demonstrated a trust issue or two with the folks that issue your passport.

Practically though this is one of the last things you should be spending time worrying about assuming you're not currently engaged in global politics or things that have a blast radius.

You can pretty much hide a semitrucks worth of nastyness inside any modern chip these days. And while it wouldn't be impossible to find, it requires a well financed effort to try.

But the real answer is you didn't really ask the right question. Computers (and phones/etc etc) are so inundated with security holes between the endless streams of bugs, opaque supply chains, exploitable design errors and a pervasive belief that better security = less sales that there's simply no need to go after the cpu, it's far cheaper and provides credible deniability to all involved.

While I have no doubt there are at times intentional flaws introduced into big name chip designs, any use of such things would be limited to extremely unique circumstances as the blowback if discovered would be pretty damn apocalyptic if you're talking say intel/ibm/oracle.

Anybody that's going to get at your data is ether going to convince you to give it to them, or spend an hour or two and beat your software stack.

Even when the NSA testifies in congress to convince them to block telecom mergers unless they get a clause barring zte/huawei gear it's primarily the software stack that they're worried about. Even listening devices need point releases from time to time.
Life is not binary.

Imagine you're in a room you can't get out of. By the nature of aerobic respiration, you're slowly transforming all the oxygen into carbon dioxide. Now imagine there is a running car in the room with you. Do you first shut off the car to prevent it from filling up the room with exhaust and carbon monoxide, or do you give up because there's no point in life?

You can either give up by selling all your belongings and begin to live on the street as a non-tax paying citizen, or you can do something to stop the things that are taking away your freedoms and liberties, or at the very least, do something to make it harder for those that want to take away your freedoms to do so.

I suffer from depression and have had times in life where suicide is a real option, yet I can't imagine how anyone can think "welp, I better give up now because there isn't a point in trying!" There's always an option. Exercise that option.
Together they are.
Thanks! I think this is a great way to put it. Database locking and such powerful features are incredibly important in multi-process apps. What better way to make critical sections that transcend processes or machines than using a mutex on the data itself (duh).

Having said that, there are times when you just don't care, performance trumps correctness (caching or other fuzzy indexing).

Cool thanks for the insight.
This was my first thought too, but then I considered the case where I'm already using the mouse and want to open a terminal and ssh to an app server. With this it would be two clicks, where without out it requires a move to the keyboard, a hotkey, and two keystrokes. However, moving to the keyboard is necessary after the SSH anyway, so that step doesn't really count against the latter.

Is it for me? I'll try it, but I don't think so. But I think it serves a need for some people, and I can always get behind ideas that serve or improve--successful or not--workflow/dev needs.

Great work Trevor!
Here is quick way to release your project in the public domain.

Add this to your README and to your source files:

This is free software released into the public domain (CC0 license).

See the COPYING file or <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>
for more details.

Then

wget http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.txt > COPYING
The headline is rather sensationalist, but the lead corrects this with "for a few specific tasks." Interesting effort - even simple regexes can be surprisingly useful, but their syntax has a steep learning curve.

(I seem to remember "You can program _our_ computers using English," English(TM) being a COBOL variant ;))
Ask HN : Balanced Payments or Paypal Adaptive for Marketplace Website?
Hello All,

I am trying to develop a marketplace website and need to implement payment processing. Does anyone have any recommendations for a provider?

Up vote the below answers to indicate your preference
Ask HN: Received proposal from German company, Ruby developer
I just got a proposal from a German company. I'm a senior Ruby developer and i would like to know HNs opinion. What's the average IT salaries there? How to properly compare my salary here in the US with the one there?
I had no idea you could execute commands from Alfred that way. Top tip! Thanks.
Dating |
BTW, Wikipedians considered Microsoft's stack ranking notorious enough to provide the date they started doing it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Microsoft): "Starting in 2006 Microsoft has used a Vitality Curve despite intense internal criticism." Which I've noted elsewhere is the year in which Bill Gates stopped his day to day roles at Microsoft.

I could talk about how Ballmer himself is a significant problem, but then again these "simple fixes" would surely require removing him from an position of direct power in the company.
We saw with the treatment of Bradley Manning that it is very unlikely Snowden would have been treated well. Yes, there is merit in the argument that being willing to go to jail for your beliefs improves your moral standing. But there's also the argument that Snowden could do more good as a free man who (when he arrives somewhere safe) is able to speak freely about the issues and participate in the public discussion, which he would be unable to do from jail.

I don't really see any upside, for him or the public, to him being locked away.
I've got the key shark and love it: http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/8325
Paypal Adaptive Payments
>So Gordievsky believes Snowden would have gotten roughly the same treatment that the KGB spy got back in 1985. “They would have fed him something to loosen his tongue,” Gordievsky says by phone from the U.K., where he has been living in exile for nearly three decades. “Many different kinds of drugs are available, as I experienced for myself.” Having been called back to Moscow, Gordievsky says his KGB comrades drugged him with a substance that “turned out his lights” and made him “start talking in a very animated way.” Although the drug wiped out most of his memory of the incident, the parts he did recollect horrified him the following morning, when he woke up feeling ill. “I realized that I had completely compromised myself,” he says.

Some conspiracy-minded speculation: Can it be assumed that the CIA has parity with the late KGB when it comes to pharmaceutical interrogation technology? It's known that the CIA experimented on subjects with LSD, and it's safe to assume the full extent of those experiments is not known.
Hey, nice of you to dredge that up. At the time that I owned a Robotron machine, I worked at Adobe and had easy access to a ROM burner so joe and I pulled the ROMs and joe wrote a disassembler. We spent the next few weeks idly reading and commenting code on a shared text file. One of the the really fun things was spotting the bitmap images the output. They were 4bpp, so 2 pixels per char - they were surprisingly easy to find and once I did, I dumped the raw data from one set into a file and managed to convince PhotoShop to open it. I set the colormap entries and I was looking at Hulks on a Macintosh IIci.

A year later, I wrote an emulator for the sound board and on the Mac I had at home it ran at about 60% real time (this was a 25MHz 68K based machine). That's a great number for code written in C because it means that with some careful attention, I could easily getting it running better than realtime, especially if I wrote some of the routines in inline 68K and took advantage of the condition codes of the 68K matching up nearly exactly to the 6800 (thanks, Motorola!). Before I started that task, I ported the code to a PowerPC machine at work and it was running 4x real time, so I decided that Moore's law just won and assembly was a waste of time.

The model of execution was, again, fairly decent for the task at hand. The sound board was set up with either 5 or 6 data lines (depending on the rev) coming in to a latch. When the host game wrote to the PIA, it would latch the value and cause an interrupt on the sound board. The sound board (which was a 1MHz 6808 with 128 bytes of ram) would be lodged in a WAI (wait for interrupt) instruction. When it got an interrupt, it read the latch and then ran an enormous switch statement to decide what sound to make. The output was an 8 bit D/A converter, but it looked like most of the time they treated it like a one-bit, by either writing 0 or FF. Most of the sounds were made by using frequency generators to drive other frequency generators - FM symthesis (more or less) - and the individual sounds would just set up parameters and kick off the sound generator. Most of them were designed to make sound forever (or close to it) or until they were interrupted by another request for a sound.

The two that really stood out in that set (and there are a ton of sounds on it that are not used in Robotron), was a crowd cheer, which was white noise with some envelope modifiers with some whistles mixed over the top, and a peal of thunder. You can hear each of these by dropping credits into a Robotron until they come up. IIRC correctly, Jarvis was particularly proud of these.

Eventually, I modded the code to run as a CGI script and had it running on my website as RobotrOnline, which would let you set up the hardware lines that modeled the lines going in, let you set how many seconds you wanted and when you submitted the form, it spat back a wav file meeting those parameters.
And if everyone called Zappos for them to do their dirty work it literally wouldnt work.
This is only possible because it is the exception, not the rule.
What Samsung's New American HQ Says About the Korean Giant
Fooled twice, shame on who? Problems with Mechanical Turk study samples
This seems simplistic to me. Doesn't Valve, your favorite poster boy for open allocation, also stack rank? There seem to be several sub-organizations at Microsoft that are harmonious, at least to an outsider's view (e.g. Azure since Scott Guthrie's involvement). As I understand it there's not too much pressure to hit the stack ranking curve until you get up to the several-hundred-report levels.
If snowden stayed in the country he would be locked in solitary, and wouldnt even have a trial scheduled for 2 to 3 years. And his trial would have been 'classified' and the public would have no knowledge of the precedings.
Windows Phone is more of a walled garden than Android.
And ditto to us Americans as well. WWII was filled with errors, and yet our ideals have remained strong.

A brief history lesson: Office of Censorship, Atomic Bomb (historic Kyoto was on the list of places to utterly demolished... fortunately the Japanese surrendered before then), Napalm-based firebombings against a civilian population (Japan). Blatant racism in the form of the Japanese Internment camps, etc.

The existence of these programs are in direct contradiction to many principles that America stands for... especially the Office of Censorship. But we don't hold any ill-will towards our Grandfathers during that time. At worst, we recognize the specific faults in the specific laws in the context of the time period, and then write laws to ensure it never happens again.

Same thing will happen here. "Feds" in general were not related to this controversy. Showing ill-will to such a large group of people is straight up bigotry. We have the intelligence today to focus our energies on specific departments, specific people... specific regulations that have gone wrong in this case.

And that is what law is about. Figuring out the root of the problem and eradicating it. Painting entire groups of people (aka, "The Feds") with a single brush is wrong.
I tend to think of this as integration stinking right up until it doesn't.

I suppose another way to put it is that "these things can work together" is far worse than "these things work together".