skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They want people with assets with something to lose, an aspect of the AML logic.
because the browser scrollbar doesn't work well enough?
Handbag-Backed Loans Tide Over Hong Kong's Wealthy
''escape reality (i.e. video games, films, alcohol, and drugs''

...TV, YouTube, Hacker News, works of fiction...
My grandparents on my father's side managed to pay off a mortgage in seven years, twice. And that on a professor's salary and sending two kids to college with no loans. Of course, the argument can be reasonably made that wages haven't really kept up with inflation . . .
People are doing all sorts of great things with Scala.

Scala Notebooks, which can be classified as a learning resource https://github.com/n8han/scala-notebook/ - It is an in-work conversion of iPython notebooks using d3 instead of matplotlib.

Another great analysis resource is Saddle, a scala data munging library (analogous to pandas, around the 0.8 revision). http://saddle.github.io/
Hardware RNG in Via CPU
This article is so annoying I don't even know where to begin. I have a hard time believing this is on the front page of Hacker News.

If you are going to reduce the revolution of the information age to Instagram well then yes you might have a point. Let's ignore the most important innovations our society has seen that have come about in the last few decades.

But the truth is, is Hyperloop even the right solution? Would it really make our lives that much better? Do you need to travel nearly as much as you used to? I actually actively avoid travel, communicating remotely if possible. If Hyperloop was a UPS style service, then I could potentially see the use for it. Get your package in hours. But as a consumer transport? I don't think it is nearly as innovative or revolutionary as most people seem. But I am just a software engineer, who am I to discuss these things.
The Truth About Spike Lee and Kickstarter
Unlikely and perhaps wrong under most perspectives, but as soon as I read Greenwald's account I thought "shit, he's caught the bait". The government and those detaining his man were wholly aware of what a shitstorm this would have caused. I would have LOVED to see the alternative scenario, where Greenwald tells Miranda "Don't tell anyone else.". The police wouldn't and couldn't speak publicly, no-one gets to know about the event, the political game of those who had this brilliant idea is now in pieces.
The gov's option at that point would have been to further escalate their offensive, exposing themselves even more. Instead what we got now is a lawful, yet badly-intentioned use of the law, which is grave, but likely insufficient to warrant & spark any significant tectonic movements.
Users are well within their rights to do just about anything, including insult the developers mother. The issue isn't what their rights are, the issue is with etiquette.

Politely requesting features from developers you are not paying is not a breach of etiquette. Saying "No." in response to those requests is not a breach of etiquette. Making demands of developers that you are not paying is a breach of etiquette.
Having gone to the monthly Start-up meetings at CU and talked with Brad in person (great guy, only VC in Colorado really) I can sympathize. Boulder is a great place to recoup and also a great place to go to the max. Especially in the winter months, you don't get out a lot, it is pretty cold at a mile high, and the mountains cause pretty early sunsets. You gotta go skiing just to get out and about in Boulder in the winter.

Its very healthy that a high up guy like this is open and talking about mental health issues. It leads us all to talking about them. In fact I realize I need a break now too. Thank you Brad, for checking yourself before wrecking yourself, and making me think about it too.
At one of my previous jobs this was the network admin for me. It's not that I felt that network administrator was a useless job. It's that there are 5 of them and only one of them doesn't have their head up their ass. If anyone in the building ever needs anything done they know the 1 person in that department that can do the work. The rest are barely capable of staying up late to push the "go" button, calling the competent one if anything goes wrong. But it's a big corporation with egregious HR policies, and the manager is valued by how many people he oversees, and we value tenure over usefulness.
It's like there's a Law of Conservation of Bloat: browsers are hugely fast; computers are hugely fast; even broadband is getting to the point of usability (in North America) -- how can software tumors metastasize? Where is there an opportunity to slow things down and make them shittier?

It sort of puts paid to the idea of progress.
EMoney co Skrill sold to CVC Capital for 600 million euros (~$800m)(
Are the mobile editions of Chrome and Firefox far behind in their Javascript support? I was under the impression that those two were pretty much up to speed with their desktop versions.
I've been a HarmonyCentral reader/contributor for a while. Maybe this is what you are looking for? http://www.harmonycentral.com/t5/Forums/ct-p/Forums
I can't speak for civil engineers, but in mechanical engineering no one uses FEA to solve a cantilever beam. That's like using a supercomputer to calculate 3 times 4. Cantilever beam has bean studied for centuries and there are easy-to-use (and easy-to-prove) formulas for calculating its stress and strain.
Pyzzer  - A new tool for creating Python-runnable zip archives
Probably the original parent and I should not have been directing our comments at Hackers & Painters so much as your set of essays on startups before How to Convince Investors. You've served as a source of inspiration which accomplished a net good overall, I simply feel I (and others) went all in with un-calibrated expectations on closing investment. This explains why realism on the topic (your recent essays, alex's article, etc.) is being well received.
Interesting take away: 60% of a purchasing decision is completed before engaging the buyer.
Microsoft restores Outlook.com after three-day outage -- sort of
Yes. I love the typography. It's my favorite site to read articles from when I'm on the move. It's perfectly responsive and fast enough to load articles.
They're the only folks in NYC with a worse reputation than investment bankers, Patriots fans, and the teachers union.
That's brilliant! I always find myself looking at the scroll bar to see how far I've gone, but this is much more convenient.
http://en.lichess.org/
What Exactly Did The US Government Ask Lavabit to Do?
wow, that's simply amazing. One thing I can't find though, is: Who will own the patents?
Bitcoin: A Primer for Policymakers
Personally held bitcoins are not regulated in the same way that personally held cash is not regulated. That is to say, it is regulated... but (depending on how you acquire/spend your bitcoins or cash) it works on the honor system.

Think of waiters receiving cash tips.
Amazon was down
Amazon is down 11:49 AM west coast
Ask HN: Idea for paid q&a for programming problems
What do you think about an idea where anyone can submit short programming questions for a $1, and then get it answered in 'real time' from the community.

I often have a problem with some tech things throughout the day. For example I might be working on a regex driving me insane, only to solve the issue maybe an hour later.

This would be different than forums and stackoverflow where the goal would be to get the tech question as quickly as possible for those who are programming.

It would be kind of similar to fiverr.com, but more focused on the programming community.

Ideas/feedback?
Is it also a ploy to keep people away from credit cards? Cash? Gift cards? It's an interesting novelty for now, with almost no legal strings attached. It's almost like paying for things with rubber bands--cool and interesting at first. But as soon as it's trying to play with the big boys (credit cards, gift cards, et. al), its use has to follow the rules, and suddenly it isn't so novel after all. That'd be my prediction.
I've said this before in other contexts, but it doesn't have to be a conscious decision or conspiracy.

A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration.

It's a common natural phenomenon responsible for much of what we see in nature.

In political and economic systems you often get stable attractors - systems which aren't specifically designed but where behaviors and interests align in ways that are mutually reinforcing. Sadly often with deleterious consequences.

Another way of looking at it is the Wisdom of Crowds viewpoint. Large groups of individuals making small individual decisions based on limited information have collective effects which can be seen as a computer, where regulations and restrictions on the decisions they can make become the programming. The more people making up the system the better the machine is in making collective decisions that achieve its goal.

The core program of our system is interest on capital. This underlies everything in our economic system. It's a simple concept but our markets are built around it, our government funding is built around it. Our lives, pensions, mortgages etc are built around it.

The machine that is our economy with such a large number of people it's very effective at returning interest on capital. As capital is owned by a dwindling percentage of people it's not surprising that this leads to a concentration of wealth. Basic arithmetic shows that in a system where all capital flows through a machine returning interest on capital it eventually becomes more and more concentrated in those who started out with the most capital. Without redistribution of wealth downwards through taxation and policies this is inevitable.

As the author says. Therefore decision making becomes more concentrated in the owners of most of the nation's capital.

Long story short this is an inevitable feature of the capitalist system. It's not a criticism of it per se. If you look at the advocates of capitalism from the beginning they've assumed that government and policy will place regulation and restriction to prevent the overconcentration of capital through this mechanism.

Unfortunately part of the stable attractor at work in the US is the confluence of money and politics. More than any other western nation the US political system is heavily influenced by money, and as a result once capital becomes sufficiently accumulated we get regulatory capture in the financial sector.

No conspiracy. The author doesn't suggest a conspiracy. Just a stable attractor. Which is in itself far more nefarious because it's far harder to remove from the equation.
I think the problem with the warp drive is topological. His drive relies on expanding space behind you and contracting it in front. OK. But what happens when you turn the drive off? Assuming all this squashing and stretching doesn't involve discontinuities, at best you're back where you're started from. At worst, you're in some kind of weird messed up crappy nook in spacetime where you're a long way from your starting point and your destination.
I like this, very cool
Just wondering why the design is based on TeamTreehouse? are these the same guys.
I thought the second insight was the teaching/learning dichotomy:

I had an intense insight a few weeks ago when a friend told me that as one gets older, the line between learning and teaching blurs. This is consistent with how I think about mentoring, where the greatest mentor – mentee relationship is a peer relationship, where both the mentor and mentee learn from and teach each other. With this insight, I realized I needed to stop separating learning from teaching in my motivational construct – that they were inextricably linked.
while i mostly agree, it does make it clearer that it's your progress across an entire article: with just the scrollbar you never know if you'll be facing "page 2, 3" links at the bottom.
I mean – unless you have in mind some complicated relativistic effect, in which case my answer may be a bit naive, it feels a bit like you are overlooking the fact that, as you go back, you will kind of receive double your share of photons from the planet and play fast-forward on everything you missed on your way out.

As I said, I suspect this is not how it would end up happening, as I remember reading somewhere some weird stuff about how the speed of photons hitting you was always the same regardless of your speed.. But that gets too weird for me to comprehend.
Yes, I was talking about expensive infrastructures in general. It would be crazy to start building the Hyperloop before some working prototypes have proven that it works. But the high-speed train has low risks of loosing money if highways and airlines are saturated (i.e. if the demand is there, which can be predicted by studies).
New E-ink Display is Literally Powered by NFC
well - by libertarian leaning, I meant "fiscally conservative, socially liberal". But yes, his Great Leader fixation would disqualify him from being libertarian in the philosophical sense (versus the political - as in policy - or Political - as in Party) senses.
TextRazor Features Enhanced Language Support In Open Semantic Analysis API
I don't think so. As more sites move away from full page refreshes toward just changing the DOM (using Angular, Backbone, Turbolinks, etc.), I think we're going to see way more of these.

The problem is that you can never rely on a load being fast. If you trim the fat on the app side and get a pageload down to 100ms, it might load almost-instantly for you on a 100Mbit/s connection.

But it still won't for someone on a 768Kbit/s DSL connection. In that case, you can't just let them sit there for a second or two with no feedback. A loading indicator is necessary for those instances.

I agree that sites should trim the fat and make pages load as quickly as possible so that a loading bar isn't really necessary. But you have a) instances where you're not in control of load times, like when you're relying on an external API (like Facebook, for example) to return data, and b) even if your app is blazing fast, you're still subject to slow connections that necessitate a loading bar.
GoDaddy Acquires Merchant “Finder” Startup Locu for $70 Million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Mass.E2.80.93e...

| In 2012, physicist Harold White and collaborators announced that modifying the geometry of exotic matter could reduce the mass–energy requirements for a macroscopic space ship from the equivalent of the planet Jupiter to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (~700 kg)[5] or less,[19] and stated their intent to perform small-scale experiments in constructing warp fields.[5] White proposed changing the shape of the warp bubble from a sphere to a doughnut shape.[20][21] Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warp can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more.[5] According to White, a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer could test the idea: one of the legs of the interferometer would appear to be a slightly different length when the test devices were energised.[19]
Hack on github.com with Kyle Neath
You can download a free version to try. I would say it varies a lot. For me Minecraft was fun the first two weeks and it died off a lot after that.
I've had good luck with a similar setup (somewhat inspired by IMVU's) doing integration testing on an Ember app: Chromium + chromedriver inside a VirtualBox Vagrant instance using Xvfb + ratpoison + x11vnc. My tests run from a modified version of Wai Yip Tung's HTMLTestRunner (Python unittest module underneath) so reloading the tests tab in a browser on my dev machine reruns the tests. All of the tests are written in Python. If something gets stuck you open up a VNC client and poke around manually. It's a bit of work to set up and the tests can be a bit slow but I'd recommend it when you really need to test in a browser.
Say we are having a swimming race and both leave the same starting side at the same moment. I get to the other side of the pool and return to the starting position before you reach the opposite side of the pool. Just because I lap you doesn't mean I travel back in time.
Ask HN
AWS Services experiencing issues? Has anyone else noticed issues with AWS this morning? We can't login to the console and other features.
If you notice a discrepancy, isn't it more likely that one laser was "slowed down", rather than sped up? You'd get the same effect by shining the laser through a thick pane of glass: it arrives out of phase on the other end as if it were slowed down.
You're arriving before the light arrives, not before it leaves. The light takes a certain amount of time to travel that distance: you take less time, not negative time.
There is a difference between reality and academic physics. It is trivial to say engineering knowledge is derived from reality, and it's wrong to say it's derived/derivable from purely theoretical/academic knowledge of physics -- especially because good engineering requires knowledge of man-made safety standards and such.

Engineering is a corpus of knowledge that has been slowly and with great difficulty hewed from the raw rock of real experience over hundreds of years. It is not just a branch of math derivable from axioms. Show some respect.
Medium is not even the worst, it’s quick and I’ve never seen that progress bar. Blogger/Blogspot is my most frustrating online experience when I have to read text: it’s very slow to load even on a fast connection and shows fullscreen spinning cogs, breaks Safari Reader on desktop and mobile, overrides gestures and makes me lose track.

Really, you don’t need Javascript to load a page of text.
Just like when scientists use words like design and God - it's not literal it's figurative. The author's pretty clear he doesn't think a committee of plotters sat down and mapped out our road to ruin.

See my earlier comment. He's merely describing a stable attractor. A feature of the system which creates local maxima which are hard to escape from. An involuntary alignment of interests which means that individuals acting on their own behalf reinforce a system which has less than ideal characteristics, without themselves either thinking through the larger collective consequences or supporting them.
Tell HN: Ecological Open Farm in Turkey
I am planning to start an ecological farm in Turkey modeled after this farm www.dedetepe.org.

If possible I would like to buy land near them and join their network of eco farms (called TaTuTa http://www.bugday.org/bugdaygil/Tatuta/)

The main product of Dedetepe farm is olive oil but the owner is also involved in alternative energy and other interesting projects. They accept volunteers to work on the farm in return for free stay. This video is in Turkish but it gives a good idea about the place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUciqlokl0. Check this out too in English: http://turkishjukebox.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/farming-in-kucukkuyu/

I am looking to find persons who are interested in living and working in an ecological farm. I estimate that we will need to put together about $100,000 for the land with enough olive trees in it (Dedetepe farm has 200 trees).

If you are interested let me know. No knowledge of farming is required. I don't have any experience in farming either.

If you are interested and want to read more here's a mission statement that I drafted: http://ecofarmproject.wordpress.com/mission/
Thanks.
Because the browser scrollbar indicates where you are in the page, not your progress through an article.
Here's the GitHub issue that made GitHub reach out to Balanced about doing a case study:

https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard/issues/29
AWS seems to be okay via this status dashboard. Nothing on the Amazon twitter feed either [2].

[1] http://status.aws.amazon.com/

[2] https://twitter.com/amazon

UPDATE: Site appears to be responding now, but there is a maintenance message. AWS dashboard also shows the following updates:

AWS Management Console: 12:14 PM PDT We are currently experiencing
elevated error rates for the AWS Management Console

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia): 12:11 PM PDT We are
investigating increased API error rates and latencies for tagging
related API calls in the US-EAST-1 region.
That depends on why you feel the need to keep playing a game.

Most games sort of pull you along. They want you to finish the whole thing, so there are various incentives to make you want to keep playing and progressing the game's storyline, or your character level or whatnot.

Games like Minecraft are more of an environment to push against. You keep playing because you want to finish your castle of doom or lake of lava or whatever.

Either type of game can suck you in, it just depends on your personality type. Personally, Minecraft doesn't do much for me; I'm much more vulnerable to the "just one more level" attraction of more linear games. I can't speak for you, though.
Not quite sure what you mean by "planning decision". Do mean actively recruiting people with backgrounds and knowledge that are substantially different from your existing group? Do you mean from the individual's point of view whether or not to learn as much information as possible and become an "expert" before contributing? I'm assuming you have minimally sufficient knowledge of your field, otherwise you wouldn't have been hired in the first place.

I'm just saying that it can sometimes be advantageous not to spend all your time learning as much as possible about the way things are normally done at your new job/activity and approach the job from your own strengths and knowledge. In that way you may surprise yourself and others with solutions that they hadn't thought of because they couldn't see outside their box. You will become an expert eventually (if you want), but you may delay contributing if you wait until you reach that status before trying. And although you may look foolish or stupid if your naive idea was wrong, in my experience you don't get fired for trying. You just get embarrassed and then spend your time steeping yourself in the field's dogma :) It's just an observation ...
Interestingly the AWS Dashboard is also down. However, it at least comes up with an error message saying 500 Service Unavailable, whereas amazon.com itself just never responds.
How big a threat is state sponsored hacking
AWS console is also down. We can't login and others are reporting the same issue. Our hosted instances and infrastructure however is online and functioning.
Even with preferential treatment of LTCG, high earners still pay a disproportionate share of income taxes (which include capital gains taxes).

The real bias in the tax code is, perhaps unsurprisingly, around the median income, where many expenses that the poor do not incur to the same degree (home ownership, college tuition, IRAs) are highly subsidized, with most credits and deductions dropping off as you hit a higher income level.
I think that's tied to the lack of stimulation. He wasn't letting the teaching stimulate him. I'm sure he would have his own interpretation of my interpretation. :)
http://isup.me/amazon.com
If the article was on one page this wouldn't be an issue.
Down for me since about 2:50PM EST - was working with Amazon Affiliates API so I noticed immediately when it wasn't responding.
"Ponzi schemes" are like "pornodrugterrorists" - just a pseudo-reason to protect the monopoly in the eyes of the voters at their own expense. Maybe if people were allowed to decide whether they want to pay for "protecting" them from ponzi schemes, we would know how these problems could be solved most efficiently. However, the taxes are not paid, but extracted, so we cannot really find out what is the better way to protect ourselves.