skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a definitely interesting project, but what would benefit "us" (as in, humanity, I guess) most is a nigh-free online university with respected accreditation and as much high-quality content as possible while keeping costs at a minimum.

Amazon is a good role model when you look for a for-profit giant, but I'd like the top education model to look like Wikipedia. Heck, Wikipedia is a pretty good tool for kickstarting your interest in a given field, and it has plenty of references, too.
HuffPost Brings Real Time Collaboration to the Newsroom
Like a Tor / Onion protocol for passing P2P messages?
>I invite you, sometime, to think about which services you really use, and try to figure out how much it would cost to purchase each of them if you were doing so on your own. Don't forget: police protection, fire protection, military protection, paved roads, functioning traffic signals and signs, groomed parks, trash collection (some places), up to sixteen years of education, enforcement of workplace safety standards, financial protection if you become suddenly disabled, a legal system in which to resolve disputes. I don't know what your specific situation is, but just about everyone benefits from those government services in the U.S., and you personally may benefit from many others. I'm guessing that purchasing the first three alone, as an individual on a private market, would probably outrun the total you pay in taxes.

First of all the comment he was replying to was talking about services like housing, transportation, and healthcare, which already are provided by the market and aren't really things the government has any advantage in. As for all the stuff it does pay for, at best it costs exactly the same amount as you have to pay in taxes. But the government spends money on a lot of other things with your taxes that don't really benefit you. So you would save a decent amount of money. And with no competition, the services they do provide cost a lot more then they probably could.

>You could lower the individual costs to you of a lot of these by finding a bunch of other people who also need these services, and pooling your money to buy them together. That's just how democratic government begins.

This applies to any service. Anything from food production to software development. A lot of people need those things, and they could cut costs if they pooled their money together for them.

>This is a dishonest characterization of the authority of a democratic government to levy taxes. Yes, if you don't pay taxes you owe, someone might come and take your property, and those people might have weapons or threaten you with imprisonment. But that is a measure of last resort, which will surely only be taken if you fail to respond to a long line of more reasonable measures. It does a great injustice to people who actually live under oppressive regimes to compare the collection of taxes under a democratic government to the kind of arbitrary, might-makes-right authority those people are subject to.

He was definitely using words with bad connotations, but technically it is true. Everyone pays their taxes to avoid having their property stolen or going to jail. The fact that force isn't applied unreasonably doesn't mean it isn't there.

>Like the government's other kinds of authority, it derives (most people think) from the consent of the governed.

There are people that don't consent. At best you could say the majority consent. You can justify it by saying it's better than any other system we know of, but not that people consent to it.
For folks wondering -- why yes, you can scan the entire blockchain for repeated k values. It's about O(n^2) for an N so small as to be effectively constant (n = outgoing transactions per address), and will be dominated by the time it takes you to actually download the blockchain.
My comment posted as a reply to the wrong comment. Oops.

Anyhow, I agree. My reply was in response to another comment which seemed to imply that this program was the difference between being tracked or not, which is a silly sentiment in London.

I agree in principle that this kind of tracking isn't okay. I'm just not sure that the implications are worse than the status quo in this case.
Earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194136
As far as I know that is NOT correct. The wallets in question were all -- to my knowledge -- using the Android platform-provided Java SecureRandom generator.
To put it kindly, I'd say this is sophomoric philosophy.

The OP suggests that "a more simple and elegant resolution to this paradox is that there is simply one consciousness, and that it alone observes (possibly, decides) these quantum states.".

This raises obvious the question: where does that consciousness come from? The author makes no attempt to address that problem. The answer he gives "the UNIVERSE is like ALL consciousness, man" doesn't really have substance.

There is other crackpottery, such as the claim that the material world is created by consciousness. This is unscientific (and lousy philosophy) because it's a philosophy that explains something without giving us any insight or deeper understanding.

The suggestion that "consciousness is the present moment" is also confused. Brains experience the present moment together because the present moment is part of the state of the individual brains. If two brains don't share any common input then they don't share the present moment either. Or to put it in a different way, we wouldn't share the present moment in a meaningful way either with a brain that lives in the same world as us but runs 1000x faster or 1000x slower.

I could pick this apart further, but I don't see the point. This article really isn't up to HN quality standards.
95 ways to find your first customers
But with life, everything is physically observable. How you would observe conscious experience in something other than yourself? I don't mean the behaviors associated with consciousness, but conscious awareness itself?

People do a lot of handwaving around this issue and claim we've got it cracked just because we sorta know how the brain works, and yet we don't have a way even to detect whether this thing we're talking about exists. Much less do we know how it works, or how it's created. Our supposed scientific explanations are just a lot of mumbo jumbo when we can't even measure the thing we're talking about. We can detect brain activity, but we're just assuming that's the same thing.

I think ultimately this will be resolved experimentally, but we're a long way from accomplishing that.
There are two types of potential limitations to installing software, technical and policy. Just solving the technical won't necessarily make it easier to install numpy/pandas on a users computer from a policy perspective. Being able to rely on basic statistics functions being available in a default python install would be nice.
So, do you still want to donate to ACLU instead of FSF?
mplayer and mplayer2 use the Windows codec libraries.

Playing a video usually means having to learn about codec packs like ffdshow from Google searches and random internet forums, and then finding the legitimate website for the codec pack (not a linkspam site or a rehosting company like cnet who bundle Ask toolbar into the installer), then locating and downloading the codec pack on the (sometimes intentionally) badly designed website, and giving it blanket permission to alter files on your hdd.

I don't want this to become a fanboy flamewar, but the above process is time consuming, technically difficult & also requires a broad and complex network of social trusts. Whereas VLC "just works", well at least the older versions.

---

I don't know where my responses would lead a media player developer. I don't like licensed codecs, but I understand that encoding groups will use the codecs which work best; illegally if necessary since encoding tv & movies for free downloading are all still legal and moral grey-areas. And I know people want to be paid for their art which others have demand for. And free media player developers don't want to pay to license codecs when they gain no benefit over just supporting whatever codec libraries the OS has installed.
There were such scripts already. Search for "Kindle Unswindle / Unskindle".
It is very likely that the bitcoin community would be the first to stumble onto a crypto bug in SecureRandom. Google should thank that community for their discovery.
Yes--if you turn WiFi off, your phone won't broadcast its MAC address, so there's nothing for them to track.

Nordstrom stores in the US were caught tracking shoppers via their phones' MAC addresses earlier this year. All the more reason to turn off WiFi if you're not actively using it.
She quotes the host of the show as saying "Julia, Julia, Julia. You aren't seriously suggesting that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government did not have complete, total, absolute control over the outcome of Edward Snowden entering that airport in Moscow?" That certainly sounds dismissive and infantilizing.
Thank you. I just came here to complain about this as well. I've heard the term 'mansplaining' before. In fact I even read a comment where someone was attacked ("You're mansplaining 'mansplaining' to me.") because he commented on the term. The very _concept_ of explaining is now suspect. God help us.
If you haven't heard it before, the Rule of 3 Survival usually applies.

3 minutes without air

3 hours without shelter (extreme conditions, hot or cold)

3 days without water

3 weeks without food

However, there have been documented cases of extraordinary human survival.

"Swedish Man Survives Two Months Inside Snow-Covered Car"

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/02/21/swedish-man-survives-two...
Why are we drawing the line at "cells", "proteins" and "chemical reactions", you're going to have to get to the most fundamental level to really break down the illusion.
But it's in the top fifth of per capita tax burden:

http://taxfoundation.org/article/state-tax-collections-capit...

Part of that is having both a sales and an income tax. Some states have one or the other.
Best comment in this thread IMO. Thanks! Some key parts from John Nagle's comments:

It’s not that CSS is hard; it’s that CSS is bad. (...) The worst problem with DIV-based layout is that the layout system is too weak. (...) There’s no way to relate a DIV to anything but its predecessor, its parent, or an absolute position. (...) Table layouts allow table cells which span multiple rows and columns. If all tables could do were simple grids of cells, the CSS approach might make sense, but tables are more general than that.
He's not trolling, it's just a kneejerk libertarian comment. There's a strong thread among the more vehement economic libertarians of taxation being theft enforced by the government's monopoly on force. It's a bit silly, but it's also a sincerely held belief.
English already has gender neutral pronouns, though they are so rare or new that I only ran across one a few months ago. The words are: zhe, zher, zhim. I'm still waiting to actually hear one of these come out of someone's mouth...

http://www.progress.org/fold162.htm
It does a fantastic job of pegging one CPU!
Yeah, big cause of PEA is hypoxia - delivery of this substance directly to an end organ's (brain) vasculature reliably and quickly (albeit in the absence of efficient circulation) is an interesting thought.
Maybe. But I can't see how this is related to her being a woman.
> is there any way to guard against this while still leaving your wifi on, without something like cycling MACs?

No -- the adaptor's MAC is an essential part of the transaction, while cycling MACs would be a dead giveaway and would increase attention paid to that system and its travels.

Turning off the adaptor is the only meaningful way to avoid tracking.

> Say a burglar breaks into my house with his iPhone in his pocket. Could I later prove it was him by pulling up some log on my router that was picking up MAC addresses going by?

Yes, but only in a society that would allow this kind of tracking of people, each of whom is presumed to be innocent. Usually a person is first identified as a suspect, after which a technical track can be made. But a person who is not already regarded as a suspect can't be (legally) subjected to this kind of surveillance.

> And why isn't there some software (to my knowledge) that does the same thing for surveillance - logging all the MAC addresses and creating alerts if a new one comes into the area?

Because this is privileged information having to do with privacy, and violating it would confront certain well-established civil rights that vary from country to country.
could you "breathe" a small volume of something inert in and out, and have a CO2 scrubber?
Its not social Darwinism, which is a wholly distinct set of beliefs. Its actual Darwinism, or the recognition of the fact that in the state of nature killing is morally neutral and arguably virtuous (e.g. being an apex predator).
10-Year Study Erases VC 'Smart Money' Claims
Not everybody using python is writing freestanding software for machines they control. Lots of software for example ship with a python install for scripting, automation or writing plugins for example.
If you want to play with shaders interactively, take a look at Tao Presentations. Will let you combine shaders and real-time 2D/3D animations. http://www.taodyne.com/shop/en/blog/67-real-time-stereoscopi... for an example, http://www.taodyne.com/shop/en/blog/60-screencast-building-a... for another one.
Patch staffers will be laid off and sites closed over next 7 days
I'm really hoping that it's a euphemism for the press. Unfortunately this will keep people thinking blood can be blue :/
It's trivial, and indeed you can read about this discussion in many papers. I will give you a run-down.

A naked insecure connection through HTTP has response times as low as 100ms coast to coast (US). This makes these connections look instant or almost instant. It's impossible to achieve neither anonymity nor encryption through a naked single connection - you need several, at the very least for AUTH - and this alone multiplies the latency vs a single connection. The problem is that the naked eye can notice the difference between 100ms and 200ms, so the experience cannot be the same. The speed of light is already significant in world-wide distances when you consider a number of hops and a minimum number of messages being necessary to ACK, AUTH and then provide some anonymity layer that hides both sides of the connection.

Anonymous, secure, encrypted random web browsing CANNOT be as fast as a naked open connection. The difference can be minimised over long transfers, but latency over many requests is always going to be several times higher.

You can make all connections theoretically so fast that even a 5-fold slow down is still "fast enough", but for many small transfers it simply cannot be done so fast that it's humanly not noticeable.

Alas, there's ALWAYS going to be a noticeable difference between open connections and hardened connections (to the standard we are talking about in this thread). A simple AUTH cannot be done so fast that a connection across the Atlantic is not humanly noticeable. And what we are talking about implies a whole lot more than that.
Yes I am sure there is a regulation regarding ingredent order in pet food. http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/Products/AnimalFoodFeeds...

"...and proper listing of all the ingredients in the product in order from most to least, based on weight."
He's one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter [1] because of this; he regularly tweets about stuff he's learning, especially new languages. It's quite inspiring and uplifting to see a such a figure in the industry still make time to learn on his own and candidly share his thoughts.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack
NetBSD 7.0 announced it will allow people to write kernel modules in Lua.

http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/13/02/16/2329259/netbsd-to-sup...
> So "user acquisition" isn't really a concern for us

Than why have you released the project to the public, made a nice website for it, made documentation, etc? Why do something good in the world if you don't care if it benefits people? Rather, if you've done something that you hope will benefit people in the world, don't you think you should try to benefit as many people as possible? The design choices you've made encode that goal, wittingly or unwittingly.

Indeed you are as biased as possible, which is why you have to listen to others if you hope to have any true understanding of your situation. Take what I said into consideration – it effects the spread and usefulness of your efforts whether you care or not.
> How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.

This creature is called Philosophical Zombie. Check its wiki page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie for a list of arguments regarding the Zombie.
If the story here is that Java SecureRandom on Android is bad enough to break DSA, the headline on this story is wrong; it should be something more like "Android Doomed".

Can you provide a link to something corroborating this?
What did Edward Snowden get wrong? Everything
You have fun with that, and the DOM. I'm oute
and documented doubts about those cases
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/9106...
> The school touts itself as the first elite—make that "e-lite"—American university to open in 100 years.

Olin? Too bad they screwed up their endowment and have to charge tuition now. I wonder if that will affect the quality of the student body. But Olin was definitely a try at "instant elite."
This should be formalized into some kind of internet geekery law.

> X Nazis will complain about any X, no matter what. Don't let them dissuade you from continuing work on X.

I love contrarianism and geekery, just don't get lost in the infinite correctness maze.
This is the most likely scenario. While I don't know Java technically, .NET has a similar "vulnerability" if you use more than one RNG. It uses time to seed new values and the general rule is you use this as a singleton/static app-wide. If you don't do this, all your rng's share the exact same value.

It's really awkward to stumble into as all the evidence points to the framework but when you rtfm you realize no, its really pebkac.

I'm not saying this can't be a vulnerability in the framework, just this is the most likely scenario.
Yeah, I've noticed that Chrome is especially bad since it still does very little to GPU-accelerate SVG. Frankly, one reason I had left it enabled for so long was to make a point about Chrome's bad GPU+SVG support. Why should it be necessary to use the CPU to move a semi-circle?

But in any case, I'd rather not distract from the points I'm trying to make in the blog entry, so the background is now off by default.
Also as per your information I just checked performance of Symfony2 and laravel against rails and django in multiple query section. Though those two PHP frameworks were at the bottom in single query tab, in multiple queries tab the situation just reversed http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7... . Interesting indeed.
Your comment is sophomoric, I'd pick it apart, but I don't see the point. Your comment really isn't up to HN quality standards.
Given the choice between doing what you're doing now and doing something better, what would you choose? Certainly I am not deriding the Elementary team for copying OS X. It's definitely 'not cool', but open source since GNU has always been about copying the hard work of others and the net effect in this case is that users get well considered graphic design for free (or $10 I suppose). I'm complicit in that, so we pass over it in silence. But I am trying to show that roughly copying another interface has a certain effect – beyond the inherited good properties of the original design – on the user that is problematic. Differentiating yourself from other products has a purpose beyond 'just being different': avoiding the uncanny valley.

In other words, this is constructive criticism. Don't ignore it because it's "negative" and you're doing something "positive". All progressive positive things are born out of a criticism of the existing state of affairs. Any effort can be improved. If you ignore criticism – not just mine – you are doomed to stagnation!
My take is that overwhelmingly VCs finance
projects with 'traction' where the traction
can be measured quantitatively. Thus this
measure is a surrogate for traditional
financing criteria in terms of revenue
and earnings.

The problem sponsors at DARPA, NIH, and NSF
can evaluate technical projects and fund
based on such an evaluation. Funding is
not easy to get. For US DoD projects
intended to result in something practical,
the batting average is quite high, much
higher than in VC.

Yes, a major difference is that DARPA,
NIH, and NSF fund projects intended to
have a technical accomplishment, maybe
with an actual product. VCs want projects
that make a big splash in the market,
and that is an additional difficulty.

One solution for VCs is to fund technical
projects aimed at creating new or much
better solutions for what is clearly
a "big ass" problem in the market so
that if such a solution can be found
then there is essentially no doubt the
solution will be a "must have"
in the market and make a big splash.
VCs don't like to think this way.

As reported by Fred Wilson in his blog,
over the past 10 years, on average
VC returns have been poor, e.g., less
good than the S&P. There is other
strong evidence of poor VC financial
returns. VCs aren't doing well so that
whatever they are doing should not
be well respected.

A problem with the VCs, again, is that they
can't/won't evaluate technical aspects of project
proposals, stay with 'traction', and won't
consider technical accomplishments, even
if done, even if as peer-reviewed original
research, in funding decisions. Net, they
won't fund technology, even working and
ready for market; instead, they fund
'traction'. Did I mention that they
want to fund 'traction' -- that's no joke.

For funding "people", sure, people with
a project with traction if the people
are not just totally wacko.
I'm reminded now of something that Bill Gates said: universities like Harvard or MIT shouldn't be lauded for churning out smart people... who were already smart before they entered Harvard, we should instead be lauding institutions that admit everyday folks from tough backgrounds that then turn them into smart and able people. In that spirit it is strange that the article goes to great pains to emphasize how "elite" this new university will be, and how 'admission requirements will be "extraordinarily high."' So, to sound not so negative here: I hope this experiment succeeds, but we should be focusing on where real and big problems lie: education for the masses, at affordable prices.
This is lovely, but it mostly just reminds me of how I can't wait until WebGL is so commonplace that we can finally ditch all that HTML/CSS nonsense.
Web server Bottlenecks and Performance Tuning [pycon-us-2012]
Maybe you're just confusing the facts being stated ("even if it were a difficult operation to reverse addition of 3 numbers" implies it is easy, which is true as it's just an oblique restatement of the commutative property) with the language being used. "Difficult", "easier", "even if", etc.

I have no idea how sentiment analysis works though.
Same here. I would never call myself fluent in Spanish, but then I've seen people on my level or worse who do and it's frustrating. I've seen plenty of similar arguments online about what it means to be fluent.
I wish you the best of luck. Check with the manufacturer of your medications to see if they have a coupon program, the other option is to ask your docs for a 3 month supply right before your insurance runs out.