skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I feel that our fiscally irresponsible government is to blame. Wealth redistribution?

The irony is that (in my opinion) all of this was created because we wanted to redistribute wealth - but we did it by creating easy access to debt (dominantly, debt access for real estate and debt access to college, two signifiers of wealth that possessing them, as it turns out, does not make you wealthy), and because we wanted to grant everyone the luxury of illusory security that the rich "enjoy" without considering the upside cost of trying to cover everyone with no holes in the social service. So we got a whole bunch of bureaucratic overhead to make sure we are in compliance with artifical metrics and schemes to guarantee equitability, yet more people are falling through the holes. There's a greek word for this: ὕβρις,

Truly, our society in many ways is no better than the cargo cults.
Ask HN: What's the state of the Arc language? 
What's the state of the Arc language? Is it stable? Mature? Actively maintained? Suitable for casual every day stuff? System automation and scripting?

I'd love to start using it and getting familiar, it just isn't worth the investment if it's going to fizzle out and die.
It's a camera taking a picture, of course it can be defeated. It's a good thing the fingerprint scanner isn't... wait. These things are toys. If you expect meaningful security from any of them, you've been fooled by marketing.
"The end of Windows XP support will not affect activation, but rather security updates and phone/online technical support." has been said many times for the last few years. I agree that this is a low quality blog post.
Top Free Image Optimization Tools
ZFS is actually part of FreeBSD since FreeBSD 7, so you don't even need to install anything else!
Sequoia's Recipe
Forcible wealth redistribution is a bad thing. Worse, when it has been done, it is done in a band-aid approach. Let's subsidize subsistence as a way to chain people to job searches. No thank you.

But having said that, I think it is reasonable for encouraging a sane wealth distribution to be a part of public policy. This doesn't have to be done through taxes just for owning something. It could be taxes on renting something for example, unless that is a rent to own agreement. The idea would be simply encouraging ownership to align with utilization rather than life-long renting as the norm.

I would recommend reading some conservative alternatives like Chesterton's "An Outline of Sanity" or Belloc's "The Servile State" for alternatives that are more historically grounded.
No managers is nice, but does it scale? Who handles firing?
Building Secure High-Performance Web Services with OKWS
I think the idea is that if you have a large pile of money and take out a small portion of it each year to live on, due to growth the money will last indefinitely.

So if you have 25 years of living expenses and each year take out 1 year of living expenses, that is 4% of your money. If you earn ~4% a year then your account balance stays the same.

The 4% number matches the 4% rule: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp

Of course after the great recession now the common wisdom is that the 4% rule can't be trusted: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732416230457830...

Personally I think it would be foolish to plan on retiring with only 20 years of living expenses. However some people also plan on holding a part time job at least in early retirement.
This would never work in South Africa for example. The conditions of such a prison are orders of magnitude better than what half the population have at home. Just having food, a bed and a flushing toilet would be a step up. Everyone would be lining up to go to prison :)
Ugh, more pointless tech drama. Can we agree that this doesn't really matter and move on?
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
From the image: "There will be teams organized around business goals....and teams organized around what they do (like teaching, video, developer etc.)"

Sounds an awful lot like an executive group....(read: managers)
https://www.google.com/webhp#q=%22business+ask%22

I think you all are making stuff up. Is this some new nonsense you're trying to propagate?
Odd DuckDuckGo Search Results
> as you so childishly put it

Ad-homs do not improve the conversation.

> the consequences of rape is that the perpetrator got his jollies.

With the further consequence that the rapist has emotionally traumatized an innocent victim, and the still further consequence that the victim may demand justice. The point of punishment is not primarily to make the offender feel guilty. The point of punishment is to make the victim feel better.

Think of it transactionally. If I stole $50,000 from your grandma and got caught, you'd expect me to pay back the money, yes? Now say I beat your grandma with a stick because I thought it would be funny. As we're too civilized for the courts to have me beaten with a stick, instead I repay her emotional trauma with my own - through incarceration.

While your ethics might be different - you may think people should not bear the responsibility for their own actions - my ethics firmly hold that we are all accountable for our own decisions.
http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/9

with the exception of cellular talk time, the 5 and 5S are near the top...
Its a Verizon problem, because the FCC rules they agreed to when they bought that spectrum was that they had to allow any device. Not they had to allow devices that had the right code for their POS terminals. There's no technical reason that Verizon should have to update their POS system for every new device, they just need to sell Sims not for use in any specific device.
“To date, no holder of records who has received an order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an order,” she wrote.

So this is a justification ? None of those corrupted telconosaure complained so it is legal ?!
iphone battery size isn't much compared to android phones, but they are constantly on top of the web browsing battery life tests in spite of this. disappointing that the 5s was a small step backward here.
If you were to show both screens to a person who hasn't seen any of them, I wonder if she would be able to tell which was the improved UI.
So for Nexus to work, Verizon would have to upgrade their POS (Point of sale) system? If that's the case, seems like a Google problem

wat
I agree. I think whoever is ok'ing things like the UI changes made in the past months and whoever approved this diff really is not doing what the majority of users are looking for. I think GH provides a great service, but something is wrong.
As usual for Anandtech - by far the best review site around, at least for the technology side of devices.
don't overlook the link in Robinson's upper right page

http://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/

also:

http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07...
There are a lot of pretty unpleasant things that Verizon are doing that one could make a compelling argument for being violations of the upper C-block agreement. But, this really isn't one of them.

For instance, selling phones with features stripped from them (bootloader unlock capabilities on HTC One, for instance), is really not brilliant, and may well be a violation of the intent of the terms, if not the letter. The same might be the case for stripping tethering services from devices. (They certainly did get nailed once for asking Google to block a tethering app on their behalf; I think they caved before the FCC intervened. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; the details on that one are hazy in my head.)

But, there's nothing that says they have to sell you service (or sell you a SIM card). If you have one, you can attach it... but there's nothing that says they have to give you one for that purpose.

The "protection of the licensee's network" clause is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, by the way. They can set up as onerous of a certification process as they (reasonably) want, and indeed, they have in the past -- the intent of the regulation is just that they have to apply it fairly. The reason why these rules are there are that cell networks are incredibly fragile, and very sensitive to antenna calibration; especially on CDMA networks, the near-far problem[1] can be pretty lethal to service for everyone on the tower if just one device is miscalibrated. It wouldn't at all surprise me if they had similar extensive calibration requirements for their LTE network, and they'd be well within their rights to do that sort of thing.

I'm as much of an unhappy Verizon customer as the next fellow, but whining that you can't just go transmit on their frequencies with devices that they haven't tested is not really conducive to the cause of folks who would say that Verizon's upper C-block management is behaving in a fashion that limits customer freedom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-far_problem
Hacked POS terminals ready to sneak into shops
I just got a new Nexus 7, went into a Verizon Wireless store with it and asked for an LTE SIM. They briefly looked at my account and gave me a SIM card and I plugged it into the Nexus 7 and was on my way.

This Jarvis guy is talking about how Verizon tried looking up his device's ESN/MEID which is a CDMA thing. The Nexus 7 doesn't have CDMA. This makes me think that both he and the reps he's been working with didn't understand how CDMA and LTE provisioning works.

Edit: clarification.
No... it's both.
Over the last 60 years global energy consumption has grown exponentially. There is a strong case to be made that rising living standards globally and global economic growth are dependent on this level of energy growth.

Nothing you said can come close to meeting anything close to this level of growth and I see no reason to believe our system is prepared for anything less than such growth without great pain.
There should be an Indiegogo setup to fight and beat the trolls once and for all.
Because it wouldn't accomplish much. Verizon has been on a bandwidth buying spree and it is speculated that they are gearing up to sell off their 700MHz band, and the obligations that come with it.

So, legal action at this point would accomplish little more than rack up legal bills while Verizon stalls long enough to make the point moot.
Why? If you want the speed of compiled code you can come very close with .Net or JVM based solutions.
Disrupt Google Play
I am looking for a chance to be here at Y Combinator with you guys, before we raise our serial A. We are three guy team, two in China and one in San Francisco.
Chinese leet crackers for hire linked to Aurora, espionage attacks
Are any of these environments actually proven in more than a handful of real-world production environments?

I'd certainly like to get into alternatives but my impression was that none of these battle-tested the way Rails and Django are.
Is there a place I can sign up for updates on this?
On the next episode of "Doomsday Coders"

Programmer writes an entire operating system from scratch in case all the copies of Linux in the world are deleted.

A web developer writes his entire application in x86 assembly to prepare for an event in which all the world's compilers and interpreters disappear.

And more...
Where the hell are you that you can spend only half a Benjamin on healthcare?

Canada?
Pricing - Legos Regional Ripoffs
Buying my son some Lego. I notice this.

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/LEGO-Power-Functions-Motor-Set-8293 for $29.99 USD

http://shop.lego.com/en-NZ/LEGO-Power-Functions-Motor-Set-8293 for $69.99 NZD

If this was purely based on exchange rate, this item would cost ~$35.00 NZD! So that's twice the price it should be.

GRRR.

Fine, I'll use an address forwarding service, NZ post offers such a service http://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/youshop

After I place the order Lego sends me this charming bit of marketing speak.

"In an effort to protect personal consumer information, LEGO Systems, Inc. has elected to no longer process shipments to Third Party Shipping Vendors."

First world problems I know. But this is clearly bullshit.

"To protect personal consumer information" O RLY
To patentable, it "must be non-obvious to an expert in the field." (A friend is a frmr patent examiner.)
Here's the image:
http://media.tumblr.com/82182785894eabe40d94ac3c69f9dc67/tum...

I don't think it's one executive group; it just sounds like all employees are in teams, and that the teams (as a group) work towards specific goals.
I actually play UT99. There are some of the mods that bring some very interesting game play.

Gaming certainly helps my reflects and keeps my mind sharp.
Would love to hear your thoughts on Netrunner: Android! Been thinking about getting into it but a bit unsure if it's something my significant other can get into as well.
Downvote? Why?

Because most of these folks have probably never had to choose between rent, gas, and seeing a doctor.
I find this deliciously delightful after suffering the wrath of these stupid app developers historically on Android. I don't agree with it, certainly, but I feel some warped sense of justice.
Yes, it is terrible advice. Just like this article.

Repeats all the usual myths about Hadoop... that it's just about MapReduce, that it doesn't support indexes (hint: Hive has a CREATE INDEX command, guess what it does?) and then adds some of its own.

After seeing this, plus an article advocating web frontend programming in C, I'm starting to think this place is going downhill fast.
From what I understand, the discontinuation of WoW TCG has more to do with the relationship between Cryptozoic and Blizzard. Blizzard and Cryptozoic are competing in the same space with Hex and Hearthstone, which makes for a complicated relationship.
The contention is that the terms of Verizon's spectrum license require open access. If that's true, the capabilities of their IT systems aren't an excuse. And in any case the whole point of the SIM card design is to allow exactly what the author is trying to do. Every carrier in Europe for the last decade and a half has managed to do this, but somehow the biggest carrier in the US can't be expected to make it work somehow?
Yeah, I avoided that feeling at first, but I think its a bit of the art style being a little too cartoonish. I know its stupid, but when I see hack and slash + cartoons I just start thinking of browser games.

In torchlight I think they needed to work a wee bit harder on differentiation of the characters and places you visit. I couldn't name one character from torchlight 2. (And I am on act 2.5)
I'm assuming the citation you wanted was in reference to this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning The old testament outlines at least one example of this practice in the book of Ruth. I've heard of similar practices in other religious systems but I don't have handy citations for them.
AnandTech = reviews for engineers. The use of actual lab-bench display testing alone puts them in a category of their own.
I bought a 1-bedroom condo for $500k in downtown SF and put 20% down payment. The monthly mortgage+HOA+tax is around $2500 and I am renting the place out for $2650. So you can say it is paying for itself and 15-years later I will own the place without paying anything but the down payment. Not bad?
Selling to the enterprise: “Sell to few" vs "Sell to many"
That's well and good, but is it his fault that the government, hospitals, doctors, manufacturers, and insurance providers actively collude to keep costs high? To keep costs rising? And then to mandate payment for services (read: insurance) that basically only serve to make a bunch of investors richer? And actively legislate and regulate to death anybody trying to fix the system or implement an alternative?

No, no it's not his fault. Healthcare is fucked.
I would be curious to hear some of these stories.
Anand saw the small drop in the 5S and 5C when compared to the 5 and speculated that it was an iOS7 issue. Hopefully that's the case!
I had the idea of limited-transfer items. For example, an item can be bound to three characters; once the third character picks it up, it's non-transferable. This would let me give my friend the bow I don't need, or even sell something once, but items wouldn't be infinitely fungible any more.
A few sporadic, way out there, results and the rest are stats pages. Which is to be expected in the wake of people switching (and mentioning) that they're now using DDG as well as sites putting up links to referrers.

I wonder if anyone who works there can chime in.
Having used face unlock, it's really gimmicky. I turned that off right away. It could be a good idea in the future but, like with Samsung's hands-free gestures, right now I'd have to spend too much time aligning my face and waiting and hoping that it was going to work.

Touch ID takes what you would have done anyways (thumb on home button to wake and then type in PIN) and makes it even faster. Now you still put your thumb on and eliminate the typing pin part.

I haven't used Touch ID yet but I wake my phone a lot during the day, so this seems like a nice (but not absolutely necessary) feature for me. Something small that makes the experience that much better.
Yes, you have maxed DPS + maxed DR and a skill loadout you change on the fly as well as.... wait what were the other builds again?
EDIT: @zaphar: The person I responded to said "yet requires productive workers hand over a good chunk of their earnings". I asked for a citation regarding that statement. It was broad with no data backing it up.
I never used an iPhone 5s but I would agree with the importance of execution. Lenovo has been shipping ThinkPads with fingerprint scanners for like what? Almost a decade? (ThinkPad T43 had fingerprint scanner, it was released in 2005) Those scanners never defined anything. I thought it'd be handy to save all the passwords at one place and then just scan your way through all the websites. Turns out it didn't work. Successful scan rate was too low, having to swipe one's finger again and again made me feel like an idiot. Then there's software. That bulky ugly software that reeks of corporate. Although I kept buying ThinkPads, I stuck to my vanilla Windows Vista/7 and never installed those "utility tools".
unfortunately, 50% in mice is rather low for cancer even. You usually want to start out at 70-80% in mice for cancer. If you get 50% in humans that's a great success rate, but not in mice. The reason for this is that the mouse model is called a xenograft model, you take a human cancer and implant it into the mouse. Typically, you are running the experiment on mice implanted with the cell line that gave the best hit in your in vitro model, so it better do darned well, relatively speaking.

I could be wrong about this though, usually the xenograft is done in immunocompromised mice (because otherwise the mice would reject the human cancer line)... So there could be complicating factors.
I am seeing this happen with regular searches as well, not always but a few times randomly.
I should think the reasons are obvious:

1) Whatever language you are most proficient in, that is often the most efficient tool for _you_ to get the job done right.

2) PHP is largely C for people who should never program in C (or PHP ;-). Depending on the nature of what you are doing, and if you use some basic support libraries (and the author mentions a few), your code needn't be that much more work to get done than any other language. In reality, it's not the typing in the code that tends to matter anyway.

3) If you are, for whatever reason, interfacing with a lot of systems components or C API's, there can often be a pretty big win using C as you avoid all the pain of language impedance mismatch.

4) Depending on what it is measured against and the nature of the problem, C can often be significantly more efficient, not just in terms of CPU, but the all important memory consumption these days. Depending on the problem, that can be highly highly relevant.

5) Portability. Okay, you can stop laughing now. ;-) Seriously though, if you talk to mobile game developers who've tried it, C and C++ tend to be the best languages for targeting a plethora of platforms. That goes double or triple for embedded systems. It's really not that hard these days to have very portable C/C++ code, and platforms that insist on making C a second class citizen tend to do themselves more harm than good (even Android ultimately relented).

Now, that's not to say that I think everyone should be doing their web projects in C, but depending on the context (the problem, the available tools, and the parties involved), it might well be a good choice.
Show HN: FizzBuzz in CSS
The fingerprint sensor is not an optical device. It's a capacitive device, so it will take a bit more to fool than a photo. See page 8 of the review:

Touch ID is a capacitive fingerprint sensor embedded behind a sapphire crystal cover. The sensor works by forming a capacitor with your finger/thumb. The sensor applies a voltage to one plate of a capacitor, using your finger as the other plate. The resulting electric field between your dermis (layer right below your outward facing skin) and the Touch ID sensor maps out the ridges and valleys of your fingerprint.
Your second paragraph is very relevant to my feelings. "Same actions, new background" is pretty much how I felt when playing. I think I may have gotten to act 2.5, too.
I am using the atozed intraweb framework for web dev: http://www.atozed.com/intraweb/index.en.aspx
Comfortable C++ framework with session management and all the other stuff you need
From the article:

Some also caution that on the Verizon network, my
Nexus 7 will connect only if LTE is available; it
will not be able to fail down to slower speeds
as it could on other networks. True; that is how
my Chromebook Pixel works and I am willing to live
with the limitation for the price.
The nice thing about the mobile platforms like iOS and Android, is that they feel as fast as the Core 2 Duo era, even with lower end hardware than that, because the apps themselves and the OS, too, are a lot leaner than the ones on the PC a few years ago.
Idea: Make pg's essays into a class
I'm reading his latest essay on How to Raise Money, and I'm thinking about all the stuff he's said about fundraising... and it's a lot.

Would it be a good idea to consolidate all pg's information into a class format?
There already is a cancer vaccine. It's called "Don't eat industrialized crap".

Cancer is virtually non-existent in tradition non-industrial tribes and societies. And yes many in those culture do grow just about as old as we do.
Still an order of magnitude easier not to shoot yourself in the foot in most higher level language.

Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use? Unless we are talking about C++ here?

Also C supports unicode fine (to the extent it supports strings) and REPL can't hardly be considered a requirement for web development considering Java, .NET and PHP* don't have REPL's.

*Looks like PHP has some now.
Half of the world’s self-made women billionaires are from China