skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good point; something I neglected in my analysis.

I would argue that since the tube sections would all be pre-fab that means that the installation cost of the tube would be really small. Rail installation costs are no joke due to the need to precisely align horizontally and vertically the two rails.

You can make tube in 50ft sections and ship them via truck without needing any special permitting and given that the highway runs right next to the planned route, the pre-fab notion is quite a good one.
>Public officials are frequent recipients of bribes, but there are many classic examples of bribes that went to other parties. For instance the Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal of 2010 involved athletes taking bribes from bookmakers to underperform.

Yes this is the case, in majority of cases the word bribe only applies to officials of public trust, which most of the time means government.

>In the case of tipping, it has been pointed out that a demonstrated willingness to tip results in the server putting your interests above those of the other customers in the restaurant. How is this any different than bribing in effect?

What you are describing is a tip as opposed to a bribe above and is normal as opposed to being a crime. The biggest distinguishers are:

1. The is person already getting paid to do what you are paying them to
2. They are non-govermentment / public trust

If both are true, it is a tip, not a bribe.
A Primer on VC Economics
This is exactly my experience with the Leap unit; I played with it for a couple of days. Then uninstalled all the drivers and put it back in the box, will try again in a few months to see if things have improved.
Go to Germany and try to use it, then you'll find out how hard or not it is
I thought the flavor this week was Julia. or Elixir. We are so fickle.
The Leap doesn't have the range to do this. My brother has one and it's striking how narrow the field of view is.
> Have more children, we have the childcare also seems like a stupid proposition. So you have the kids but no time to see them? 24h child care - great signal. So I can work round the clock for nothing?

Bullshit. "24h" child care simply means that you don't have to choose your job to fit the opening hours of your child care provider.

> I have a different proposal: pay employers for every child that a women employed with them has. So instead of being a liability, employers could earn money by encouraging their employees to have kids.

And of course there's not chance that will be abused...
If you really want to understand this you should read the paper. However, I will try my best to summarize my understanding of what is going on. (Disclaimer: I am not a professional cryptographer, but I know something about crypto-complexity).

Many proofs in cryptography start with the following assumption: assume x is a bitstring of length N drawn from a uniformly random distribution of bit strings. This assumption is then used as the basis of the proof of the cryptographic construct.

For instance in a provably secure stream cipher you start with that assumption then proceed to show that if weak one-way-functions exist then you can construct a secure pseudo random number generator that is polynomially indistinguishable from a true random source. You then use your assumed random bit string, x, as the key to the psuedo random number generator to generate a one time pad to XOR with your message.

Since the secure psuedo random number generator is indistinguishable from a true random number generator (by a polynomial attacker) the message is secure (from a polynomial attacker). However, this is all predicated on the key being drawn from a uniform distribution. If the key is NOT drawn from a uniform distribution than there may be a potential speed-up available to the attacker.

What the paper shows is that often it is assumed that words drawn from an IID distribution of letters can be treated as if the distribution of words is uniform (given a sufficiently large word size). However, this distribution while very flat is not quite uniform. They show how this can be exploited using the "Guesswork" framework to come up with a tighter bound on the time it would take to guess a chosen word. This bound is much better than the traditional bound used.

What this means is that there needs to be more margin given than previously thought when dealing with keys derived from non-uniform distributions. Such keys include passwords.
This has been my experience as well
No, you're pretty much right on point.

Sometimes I like to think of it as the problem with local minima/maxima preventing an optimization algorithm from achieving the global minima/maxima, except applied at large.

Put in the context of computer software licenses, one should simply imagine a world where all software were BSD-licensed and then see if open-source as we know it could feasibly continue. Certainly it would in some areas, but eventually if a given open-source project were consistently out-competing a proprietary product, the business being disadvantaged could fork the whole thing at once and turbocharge its now-proprietary development for long enough to supplant the old, open version.

Witness what Nokia did with Qt. They poured tons of money into it and turned it in a short time into a mobile-class toolkit that was even more the "Best of Breed". They had so much resource investment that they were able to relicense the whole thing from GPL/QPL to LGPL/QPL. That particular case has turned out alright, but it should be illustrative of the danger of a world with a weak F/OSS ecosystem.

Given all the problems we still have with software patents and other IP shenanigans I simply can't rest on the idea that the mere technical superiority of development "in the open" must necessarily and inevitably lead to a world where software is open and available to the users who would need it, without the judicious use of copyleft licenses in the mix along with BSD/MIT-style licenses. They both have their place.
Fraud and Mis-spent Funds at Raleigh, NC "Incubator"
The F-16 has Mach 2+ top speed, the Mach 1.2 figure is "at sea level", so the F-35 is significantly outclassed there, not just by the F-16, but also by most potential adversaries.

One advantage that the F-35 does have is "super cruise", the ability to go supersonic without afterburners (F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon have the same ability). Other fighters are restricted to subsonic speeds except for short supersonic dashes.

Total thrust is not particularly interesting for a fighter's performance, thrust-to-weight ratio is, and the F-35 is quite a bit heavier. The F-16 has slightly better than 1:1 "loaded", with the F-35 only getting there by restricting it to 50% fuel.

I am not sure how exactly combat radius is calculated, but the combat radius of the F-16 is listed as half of that of the F-35 and to get decent thrust-to-weight you have to halve to F-35's fuel. Go figure.

One more thing to consider is that the combat radius appears to be with internal fuel only. The F-35 being a stealth design, it has been "optimized" for internal carriage of weapons and fuel, whereas with the F-16 you probably just add a drop-tank if you need more range.
So um, Euler owns "Largest prime factor" now?

Seriously the web is big, github is big, Euler is pretty big. Overlap is unavoidable. The [thing,] I'd think would be to ask for no direct linkages. "Go ahead, share your prime factor code, but for goodness sake [do] not document it as a 'Euler Problem.'"
The problem is still there with any social support system for retirement: to work effectively, you need enough people paying now to cover the people on the rolls. If the population drops too much, the social safety net for retirees becomes insolvent. You can, of course, do the opposite of adding new workers: simply cause every new worker to pay more than the previous worker - but at what point do workers decide it's simply not worth it to work, when so much of their income is being spent paying for earlier retirees?

It's a balancing act for sure. Previously, most western countries enjoyed a population growth, which meant more workers paying in than taking out, as this trend is reversing in nearly all western countries, it will be interesting to see how each country deals with it. In the U.S. the focus is on immigration and putting additional limits on what one can take out of the system - I'm not entirely sure that this is the right response, but I don't think simply ratcheting costs up on tomorrow's workers is the right answer either.

As to robotics, well, that's a whole 'nother basket to deal with. I don't think that expanding robotics automatically creates worker revolts - if done well, it can create opportunities where they didn't exist before. Where once the only low-skilled jobs available were heavy labor and highly fungible services, we could create whole new classes of jobs relating to less fungible services (e.g. hyper-localized services), and with the possibilities of expansion off of the planet - there will be many opportunities for new work. I do believe that robotics will reach the tipping point right around the time that space exploration truly opens up. If it doesn't, my prediction that most employment will be in the armies of nations - as we fight over dwindling resources.
You're not supposed to carry it as a liquid; in fact, I believe it doesn't keep well.
Pentagon Seeks to Manipulate Social Media for Propaganda Purposes
Android Malware using Google Cloud Messaging as C&C
I know several companies in Hamburg where English is the corporate language.
Counterpoint: if you're learning a new language (or a new anything, really), it is much easier to reinvent than to invent. Just depends on what your goals are; whether you care more about the project you're working on or learning the thing you're learning.
I think we have a pretty good handle on both by now

In terms of a specific project, not really. Look at everything that goes into an environmental study: watershed/water quality, affected wildlife/endangered species, noise & vibration, soil contamination, archaeological issues, visual impacts, rodent/pests, etc, etc. On top of that, you have to consider the effects of all of those areas during construction and ongoing operations for 20+ years. And that doesn't even account for NIMBY issues.

When you're getting into the details of a specific project, it can quickly become overwhelming, especially if you have people who may be philosophically opposed to the project hammering you with those issues time and time again.

Are they factoring to build it with pollution and no safety when they estimate the cost and schedule these days?

When you look at a project at a high level, you make general assumptions, but as you get more detailed and you know specifically what kind of equipment

Take for example, tunneling: At the start of a project, your best information tells you that the sand down to 70ft below grade is clay, so you make your cost and construction estimates using this assumption. You get into detailed design and send drill crews out to collect sample borings and you find out that in much of the area where you assumed sand, you actually have bedrock coming up to 10ft below grade. Now you're plans have to change - instead of doing cut-and-cover tunneling everywhere, you have to blast in some sections, which means having to get a blasting contractor, deal with protecting nearby structures, changing traffic patterns to allow for the blasting etc. In the old days, the project would have just blasted, and if someone's foundation got cracked in the process, too bad. Today that won't fly.

edit: just saw your edit

In fact, if you read about the history of Hoover Dam there were a number of these things that they weren't legally mandated to do back then, but did them anyway.

Compare the number of people killed at the Hoover Dam project compared with the number killed during the Big Dig.
http://99percentinvisible.org/post/31907362467/episode-61-a-...

Here's a great podcast on a mail system of pneumatic tubes. Definitely worth a listen.
I don't really understand how reaching out and waving my hand to scroll a page is a step forward from simply using a scroll wheel on the mouse which is already under my hand. Even if its not under my hand, my peripheral vision is good enough that I don't need to break focus on what I'm reading to position my hand on the mouse.....

I totally accept that commenting on a LEAP with out first using one could / will make me look stupid.
That's true, but the current pro-women-child-laws also have unintended consequences - mainly that women are a risk for employers.

I'm not sure I am even in favor of such policies, but maybe at least certain vocal would get their wish (more women in employment+more kids).
If You Use Gmail, You Have 'No Legitimate Expectation Of Privacy'
Even if you don't bake it into static HTML, this is a solved problem.

I serve my homepage/blog off a small Sinatra (Ruby) app, and while that's not slow, mostly because it caches every single page in memory permanently (my written content grows much slower in size than available memory on dirty cheap servers) just because it's simple to do and makes my testing easy (it does stat to check for modifications), there's pretty much no excuse not to have a CDN or a fast server like Nginx with caching turned on in front of app servers these days, which makes the backend performance pretty much irrelevant for cases where you don't have content that needs to be dynamically generated for a huge percentage of requests.
Obviously. But one could argue that there should be a correlation between the age most people start doing something (in this case having sex/filming sex) and the age at which it becomes legal to do so.

After all, laws are typically meant to be a 'best-fit' policy for societal norms.
Sets the tone of legitimacy for the article. OP can't be trusted. :P
Assuming, of course, that productivity gains are shared equally across the population. The problem: that's not what has been happening. Instead, median wages have not quite kept up with inflation while the super rich and parasitic industries like investment banks reap the gains.
How - faking child births? If society wants more kids, it should pay up.

The point about the childcare thing is: the solution is not providing parents to get rid of their kids so that they can work. The proper solution would be to enable parents to work less and still have time for their kids.

You think catering to parents with flexible work schedules will have a significant impact on birth rates? How many people does that concern anyway?
This is very interesting, doubly so because at my last gig (retailnext.net) we were looking into shopper tracking via ToF technology.

Fine gestures like clicking do indeed work terribly on the Leap. Their own app (Touchless) uses a difficult "poke" gesture for clicking vs. some other coarse and easily-detectable gesture.

The one thing that Leap has going for it is though is that it is small and positioned under the wrist, which means that installation is super-easy, and at some point it will be built into some laptops and keyboards. This means it will likely do better in the consumer space. (assuming they can fix all the bugs, that is)

However, if your technology can detect more gestures robustly, it will do WAY better in professional environments where ease of installation is not such a big deal (e.g the surgery room, animation studios, etc). I'm sure you already know this, but just typing out my thoughts :)
Aside from the issues with perishables (of which fresh food isn't the only kind), delivery times for inputs (and finished goods to the market) combined with inventory (which has a cost) constrain response times to changing market conditions; how important this is depends on the market and the other constraints on response times in that market.
Show HN: Easy-to-use Gesture Recognizers for Leap Motion in Objective-C and C#
Upon getting a Leap Motion and wanting to hack the ever-loving crap out of it, we decided to make some gesture recognizers that allow listening and handling motions such as:

Did swipe right with x fingers, y hands
Did pan on screen with x fingers, y hands
Did tap with x fingers, y hands
Did rotate with x fingers, y hands
Did pinch with x fingers, y hands

These libraries make it easy to create a WPF or a Cocoa Mac OS X application for manipulating and using the Leap Motion. These are built on top of the Leap SDK, and a level of abstraction up. We hope that this can be the foundation for a community driven, gesture recognition abstraction layer for the Leap Motion.

Here are the links:

https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-ObjC

https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-CSharp
Immigration is unpopular here in germany.
Indeed, it is very unpopular among many people.

German politicians, in the past (60s,70s,80s), have brought in many worker-immigrants mainly from turkey. They were badly needed to fill the many vacant spots in the booming economy.

They left no thought to integrating / assimilating them into the german society.
Up until the 1990s the political parties in germany could not even come to grips with the fact that germany was in fact an "immmigration country". They were in denial.

Today germany has 12-14% foreigners, mostly from turkey, and many of them have not been integrated well into the german society.
Also, unemployment is high among this group. Education chances are depressed, etc - you get the picture.

Now, we are in a bind.
On the one hand the birth rate has been dropping for decades.
This has to do with societal trends (more women working, etc) - but is a complicated issue in itself.

Only group with a healthy birth rate, ironically, are the turkish immigrants.

Politicians do not have any idea what to do about the birthrate.
That has to with a cultural memory of nazi-era family policies, which rewarded having many children. It's a taboo today in german politics to try to directly induce families to have more children in any way.

The german economy is already suffering. The term "fachkräftemangel" has been coined for this- which means the industry is already finding it difficult to fill all the vacant spots with qualified personell.
NoSQL as a Service
Measuring Social Engagement with Ruby
Here are the clickable links.

https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-ObjC

https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-CSharp

And the nuget.org link

https://www.nuget.org/packages/MotionGestures/
Composite – Interactive prototypes straight from Photoshop to your iPhone
What are your thoughts on this? Which one you will use and why?
I wonder how radically different transportation would be today had one of these systems been built. Even if it was in the early 1900's, it be a huge leap forward in technology.
Can you help me by telling my why the way I used GOMAXPROCS is wrong, and how to use it correctly?
One of those cases where the title really does say it all.
A quote: "There seems to be a simple way to instantly increase a person’s level of general knowledge. Psychologists ..."

Ahh. Psychologists. Expectations calibrated.

"Expecting to know the answers made people more likely to get the answers right."

Ah, yes -- that conclusion should be easy to rigorously quantify, explain in neuroscientific terms, turn into a general theory, and replicate before anyone assumes we're doing actual science. But no one will shape a theory, there will be no replications, and this study, like 99% of psychology studies, will disappear without a trace, only to be inadvertently repeated years from now by someone who will arrive at the opposite conclusion.
Contrast this with the United States, where overpopulation is a growing challenge and some organizations are suggesting policy changes to achieve a smaller, more sustainable fertility rate. This nonprofit, called NPG, is a pretty interesting and reasonable one; it advocates for the majority of American women to have fewer than three children, and it calls for non-coercive tax incentives that encourage Americans to have smaller families: http://www.npg.org/faq.html
What's the development job market like in Germany? How hard is it to immigrate if you have skills and are willing to try to learn the language?
> They're ugly

It's challenging to find an objective arbiter of taste on cars. I happen to like the look.

> slow

I presume you mean something like "doesn't have as much power (and thus less acceleration) as my preferred style of car".

That may well be true, but it's completely irrelevant to me how fast a car accelerates. Most of my time is spent at the speed limit (+8mph).

> and expensive

Well that is just ill informed. Prius consistently comes out on top (it's the cheapest) on total cost of ownership studies. And that's in the US, with its ridiculously low gas tax.

The relative cheapness of a Prius is much more obvious in cultures that don't abhor Pigovian taxation.
More accurately: In big cities - no problem.
> We establish that for source words originally constructed from
an i.i.d. sequence of letters, as a function of word length it
is exponentially easier to guess a word conditioned to be in
the source’s typical set in comparison to the corresponding
equipartition approximation.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like a known and fairly trivial result.

I read that as basically saying that if you don't pick the letters in your passwords from an uniform distribution, they are easier to guess.

I don't see what that adds when people are already using Markov chains and dictionary attacks to brute force passwords, and I see no implication at all for secure keys chosen by good PRNGs.

I guess it could have some use in entropy estimation for PRNG state, but assuming uniform distribution of input seems like a naive mistake to make. Is there some application of this that I'm missing?
BlackBerry Doesn't Need to Stake Its Survival on Consumer Handsets
They are not happy with the way the last mass immigration (of the Turkish) turned out. But they have recently made a lot of concessions for in-demand skills like tech, nursing and so on.

And if you get a salary above a certain threshold, you even qualify for a "Blue Card" that allows you to work anywhere in the EU !
So does Balanced Payments for Marketplaces[1]. Facilitating transactions is a huge pain point for businesses, so it's a big deal to see another company moving in to solve it.

[1]: https://www.balancedpayments.com/
That's exactly why I hate articles like this. "Other peoples' opinions don't matter because they're just opinions. Let _ME_ set the record straight."
I was running into the same problem. So I wrote a playbook that deploys puppet agent using Ansible. https://github.com/rothgar/ansible-playbooks/tree/master/pla...
After writing that, and a few other playbooks, I really like Ansible and could see eventually replacing Puppet or at least using both in my environment.
"It was 8 hours after the launch and my launch had failed."

I know plenty of people who don't open emails until 8 hours later.
It's not really fair to translate the names back into English in this way. Finland, for instance, is 芬兰 which does indeed mean fragrant orchid, but the reason that name was picked is because it's pronounced fēnlán which sounds roughly similar to "Finland" in English. To Chinese people, these are just phonetic loan words and don't carry any meaning beyond being state names.

That said, the map as a literal translation is mostly "correct", even though it is meaningless.

I might add that "Asia" also is a loan word in Chinese. If you do a literal translation of that name, it comes out as being something along the lines of "secondary/inferior continent". This does not mean that Chinese people think Asia is a bad continent. It's just a phonetic loan.