skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it risks classifying hosts as hotel operators

But why is that a risk, or a negative? I'd be interested to know what obligations hotel operators have. If it's putting in fire extinguishers and ensuring emergency fire exit access, then, well, sign them up.
this title makes me giggle.. ok, I know...I'm too lazy to even open this link..
Is it possible to identify 'plankton' except in hindsight?
> It'll likely throw off the marketers, at least for a while

Nah, you just get adverts you care even less about than those which have a chance of being some measurable fraction of relevant.

Most of the adverts I see seem to be based on what my contacts have "like"d, or otherwise interacted with, more than what I have done (though this could be in part due to me providing fb with a lot less info to work on than some of my contacts do) so providing fake information about yourself will make little difference there unless your contacts all do the same.
Hmm. I might be a "the internet is altering the course of human evolution" person. But it depends on what you mean by "the course of human evolution".

Do you mean "human evolution" in the typical biological sense, like talking about our genes and our physiology? Or something broader?

I'm pretty convinced that using the Internet has somewhat (not necessarily dramatically, but somewhat) already altered how I think about the world an dhow I see it. Certainly it has altered how I behave and spend much of my time. It also has clearly altered (I'd say dramatically) how we communicate, who we communicate with, and thus also who we consider to be part of our "in-group" (I'm thinking about Peter Singer's expanding circle). That has a huge impact on our moral attitudes, even. Very central changes to what we're like. Some people (I think rightly) consider this to be an evolution, in the broad systems sense of the word.

As for actual biological evolution, I guess that's less obvious to me. But it sure doesn't seem impossible. Yes, the beginning of the Internet is in some sense a consequence of our nature, not a cause. But now that it's here, it can interact with us; it is part of our environment, and could affect our biology. This idea isn't strange to ecologists, who typically refer to it as "top-down" forcing.

So my attitude to this is that, no, the existence of the Internet doesn't only "make our true nature more apparent". Or rather, it makes our true nature apparent in the same way that the elongated shape of some flowers illustrates the nature of hummingbirds (http://www.rubythroat.org/Article860629.html). From that article: "It's obvious that a hummingbird's long narrow beak is an adaptation for feeding on long narrow flowers, but the corollary is also true: There are species of tube-shaped flowers that are adapted for being pollinated by organisms with skinny, tapered mouthparts." I want to say something similar: "Yes, there is an ecological relationship between us and the Internet, and thus the Internet reflects our natures, but it's also its own thing, a part of our environments, alongside which we should expect to evolve."

One interesting advocate of this view is the science historian George Dyson, if you're interested in exploring the idea more.
That's racist. How do you know he's white?
...If there is no difference to him between a small and medium, doesn't that instantly explain why he's trying to upsell them to a big bag even though it's so difficult?
That refrain, while correct* as a matter of corporate law, increasingly sounds like our era's version of the Nuremberg defense.

Also, who is to say that moral behavior isn't in the long term interest of shareholders?
I'm in total concurrence with you. I think the major advance was the telegraph or maybe the telephone. Reducing communications latency from 3-5 days to milliseconds.

Technology is great, but people dramatically overestimate how much impact it has on social organization. Look at cities. Cities are the archetypal expression of civilization. How long have cities been built in more or less the same way? They have been recognizably modern for a century (people were coming down from Westchester to work in midtown Manhattan on electric trains 100 years ago), and have been structurally similar for hundreds if not thousands of years.

People were sitting around complaining about taxes and oligarchs during the Roman Republic 2500 years ago.
1/4 million Discount Card For All Crew
If we want to limit climate change to +2°C, we must leave 80% of hydrocarbons into the ground. This option is not showing in the prices of energy companies. It's just not going to happen.
It's also fair in the sense that Europeans in New York are going to be on vacation, therefore quite likely to be drunk.
The ideal is to avoid shared passwords on role accounts -- have individual user accounts with user-selected passwords (and ideally MFA), with the ability to then selectively upgrade access to role accounts.

I generally use 1Password standalone, but it's a bit weak for sharing.
Hitting someone with a wrench may well be, but leaning on them as part of a plea-bargain would not be.

It's naive to think that if the FBI want the private key they don't have legal ways of pressing you to hand it over.
Give them credit. Marketing teams don't generally know how to code. They're probably still learning...
Bitcoins are no different, even if you're considering them a proxy for real dollars.

As mentioned in the article, even after acquiring the wallet file, the FBI is still unable to perform transactions with that BTC. There's no bank they can order to transfer it into their account, no briefcase full of cash they can deposit, etc. As I understand it, the only way they're able to deprive Ulbricht of them is by not letting him keep a copy of the file. With the "brain wallet" strategy (not sure how viable that really is), they wouldn't even have been able to get this far.
How Many Meetings Does It Take To Close A Deal?
Commenters bemoaning US running out of resources sooner or ruining the environment by increasing usage should note that US oil demand has essentially peaked[1] and will likely drop in the coming years due to a variety of factors including demographics and the increasing viability of alternative energy sources (solar power + Tesla et. al.) In this context, the US gas/oil energy boom is a wonderful thing, a last hurrah of cheap energy to supply the economy before the alternatives are finally ready to compete. Furthermore, it's not even bad for the environment in the short term; thanks largely to the natural gas boom replacing the even dirtier coal, US CO2 emissions are at their lowest in 20 years[2] I admit I'm probably a little too optimistic (Edit: fracking may be less than "wonderful"), but even correcting for my bias I strongly suspect it's not nearly as bad as many seem to think.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WR...
[2] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012...
Oof, sorry! Didn't think about spoiler tags on HN.
You understood; the journalist didn't.

It's scary to see how clueless mainstream journalists are, as soon as they touch a subject we're mildly knowledgeable about. Imagine the amount of BS they spread when talking about complex stuff such as macro-economics...
> Sure, he re-used a few login names but I don't know how many people could've successfully gone without doing that over a 2.5 year period.

That is the difference between a professional and an amateur. An amateur tries hard to get things done, but doesn't really pay attention to methods or details. A professional knows that methods and details matter more than knowledge... and uses best practices to get things done.

If you're running the worlds largest illegal market place, the primary goal should be security and privacy. He re-used login names by accident, or maybe even just laziness.

A simple way of avoiding the above issue is to have a "personal" computer with personal accounts and activity, and a "work" computer, with work accounts and activity. Never use the work computer at home, and never use the home computer in the same place you use the work one. There's no way to confuse identities or traffic patterns.

I think Silk Road is proof of just how good Tor is. It can protect you from governments who are trying to find you. It can even protect someone who knows nothing about programming or security.
Ask HN: Who's going to VMWorld Europe 2013?
Not if you then make them legal retroactively!
I see you've been following my projects. :)

https://github.com/rmccue/WP-API-Client is an example of using Requests with the API (and the reference client fir the API), but it's not secure authentication, it's just a secure connection. The way to do that is to a) enable SSL on your site, and b) point the client to the HTTPS version of your site. That's all you need to use the security features in Requests.
> It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

The obvious way would be ambiguity about the final fate of his bitcoins, and centuries' worth of hacker legends about the lost treasure of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Exactly. I would have loved to see an overlay of consumption over production in the article.
Lastpass Corporate is fantastic.
See also:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/commentary/alttex...
You can't trust that the seller isn't an FBI agent nor that they'll delete your address nor that they won't extort you, but as a basic matter of fact, the seller isn't an FBI agent and hasn't held onto your address (whatever good that would do) nor will extort you. There are thousands of sellers over time on SR, and how many turned out to be FBI agents busting a buyer? So far, it seems like maybe 1, and that was personally targeting DPR/SR staff and not any other buyers. There have been a handful of address leaks, with minimal consequences. Extortion was so rare I can't think of any examples.

And it may seem risky, but that doesn't matter: we have the numbers. We have the statistics. The FBI has kindly told us exact numbers based on the SR database they seized. You can calculate the risk pretty easily. Take the number of sellers and/or transactions, get an estimate of number of buyers busted (for example, count instances in http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#safe ), divide. This is like worrying that flying on an airliner might be really risky since the plane could fall out of the sky or be hijacked - certainly, but the worry is wrong, and you can go to faa.gov and look up the exact numbers and see for yourself how risky flying on an airplane is.
prerender.io uses js(bootstrap) for the tab switching. So the prerendered page doesn't do anything because it doesn't load that javascript.
> All this is only worsened by the ‘black box’ nature of the optimization level switches.

JVM switches like -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=70 -XX:SurvivorRatio=2 -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseParNewGC -XX:NewSize=2048m -XX:MaxNewSize=2048m (taken from real recommended settings for an open-source project) are, of course, not opaque-to-the-average-user at all :)
Yea, it would be awesome to give the government another vector to pick winners and losers based on "contribution to society".

I'm certainly not for more taxes, but I'm definitely not for more tax rules and exemptions.
Sweet. I've added archive.is to my archive bot.
Solar Challenge Infographic - 2013 edition
Australia is the biannual location of the most prestigieus solar race out there: the World Solar Challenge. The 2013 edition will start in Darwin on the tropical Northern coast, before heading down south through unforgiving deserts and extended arid areas, before arriving in Adelaide: 1877 miles away! The Netherlands has an excellent reputation to maintain, and its three participating teams will surely strive for their first victory since 2007.
Maybe.

Exactly.
I don't know that it's a routine thing but NY State has requested (and received) sales data from Amazon in the past.
IBM acquires The Now Factory
Because chips fabbed in China would never be compromised?
Just imagine Breaking Bad with Bitcoins
We need more options for the future of humanity than Aspie Montessori Naive Google vs. Aspie Megalomanic Socially Depraved Facebook.
My tennis racket is supposedly made with graphene. So I guess I have some in my house.
Check out Canada's share of the world's fresh water sometime...
1Password 4 introduces password sharing over iMessage/email and also supports shared password vaults.

https://agilebits.com/onepassword/mac#sharing
Can you say more about why? I assume it's a cost or environmental thing or both.
A noteworthy side-effects is that it dramatically increases the incentive to reform the 5th amendment (or reinterpret it, which is the usual cowardly way to achieve the same result).

From a strictly technical PoV, the concept of having several copies of the wallet, all equivalent, where whichever is spent first cancels the others, is very interesting and novel. It has a funny quantum physics vibe, too.
I've used passpack as part of a team and the workflow is pretty much spot on.

I have doubts about the security (cryptography in javascript) and the long-term prospects of such a small provider; I worry about them disappearing one day with all my passwords.
Exercising prosecutorial discretion is appropriate when you're talking about enforcing laws against having sex with the lights on or some such thing. Not when you're talking about enforcing laws that probably only a vocal minority actually oppose. There's a small group of property owners who want to rent out their places on AirBnB, and a much bigger group worried about what the constant stream of short-term renters will do to their neighborhoods.

This investigation is clearly political, but not in the shadowy anti-competitive way implied above. Property owners are the most important constituency for state and local governments. To a great extent, those governments exist to protect the interests of property owners. An AG pursuing a pro-owner position is hardly to be considered the result of political corruption.
Absolutely true, the zsync client operates on a single file and doesn't manipulate file metadata. But this is a solvable problem and I have written wrappers which will deal with file hierarchies approximately as efficiently as rsync. Here is one I developed to drive a CM system comprised of many small files most of which are unchanging: https://github.com/yahoo/cm3/tree/master/azsync

The additional process is to generate and send a list of filenames and metadata attributes (which rsync must do as well) and to invoke zsync per-file only if an update is necessary. For large trees of files which are largely unchanged this is very efficient - much moreso than fetching a zsync manifest per-file.

The file path is generally the largest amount of data sent per-file, prior to sending the zsync manifest. This is similar to rsync.
Cracker, as in someone that "cracked" the DRM (which was done a while ago I believe).
Nearly every prominent climate scientist disagrees strongly with you, and sees the current move towards fracking as climate suicide.
All regulations at least partially benefits the customer, obviously. But you also have to consider the ways they also harm the customer, typically by favouring entrenched actors and limiting competition.
>They're trying to extradite Snowden from Russia but Russia says, "Too bad we don't have an extradition treaty".

Let me translate that Russian for you: "We'll trade you Snowden for Poteyev."
Here's how to get MNIST, from the sklearn docs:

>>> from sklearn.datasets import fetch_mldata

>>> mnist = fetch_mldata('MNIST original', data_home=custom_data_home)

I think the handwritten digits dataset used in the presentation is just a subset of MNIST; MNIST is 28x28 and the handwritten digits are 8x8.
The Mendix Microflow Engine: How does it work?
The real issue is insurance. AirBnB is living in a vacuum in that space. I would bet less than 1% of hosts have proper coverage for subletting out their living space, and 99.99% of landlords have specific exclusions on their policies against subletting. So you have an instance where a potential loss to the insured (the landlord), the host, and the consumer is completely uninsured.

Now multiply that reality across the entirety of the AirBnB hosts in NYC, and you have a recipe for a financial nightmare.
Rent control and rent stabilization are controlled by New York State. City politicians can stamp their feet all they want, but the laws are state, not city laws.

Both sets of laws will (in theory) lose effect if the city drops below 90% occupancy for a year.
I believe it was mostly landlord dodging, but the fake address was also a better location.
GOTCHA: CAPTCHA Replacement Using Randomly Generated Puzzles
What if he'd done the deal in USD, and then invested the proceeds in BTC?
EA lost me as a customer because they treated us as a hostile agent that was somehow infecting their project goals.

The condescending attitude toward what we all knew was one thing. Refusing refunds was another. But when EA started to threaten banning customers from their Origin accounts (an EA only app store in which customers may have made multiple purchases) that was it for me.

EA took what was once a source of immense enjoyment and nostalgic memories and twisted it into one of the few battles I went nuts over.

It will be a long, LONG time before I consider purchasing another EA game (despite my addiction to sports games on the consoles).
I assume that the people illegally subletting their apartments don't just work in the tech industry.

You are right to make the technical distinction between NYC's "rent control" and "rent stabilization", but both have the same negative consequences for housing maintenance and creation.

According to [1], in 2011 about 47% of NYC housing units were rent-regulated.

[1] http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/HVS_Rent_Stabiliz...
At the normal, and expected rate, minus the bitcoins that are being lost.
Argh. You can't use Open Sans Light as a body font...
Two raids don't make a policy.

What happened recently is that 3 countries that happen to be in Africa became frontlines in the War On Terror.
Which side are you referring to? Is the AG shooting first by subpoenaing rather than having a discussion, or AirBnB shooting first by building a business that's probably at variance with tax law rather than working to reform the law first?
#1 People still install toolbars, that's crazy to me.

#2 Google has so many popular products (search, gmail, youtube, maps) that it makes sense that they're that big. It's equivalent to a person having a bank account with $1bil in it. Just leaving that money in the account and raking interest, you just continue to get bigger by being. In google's case, there isn't strong enough competition to stop them from "being" and gaining more share based on their prior efforts.

#3 Could a new US based search engine compete with Google? Or are they just that big that the task is a fool's errand?
"A Randomized Experimental Study of Censorship in China"
Here's the correct answer: Bitcoin is BOTH inflating and deflating.

The money supply of bitcoins is inflationary because bitcoins are still being made.

The purchasing power of bitcoins is deflationary because its buying power has historically increased (making other goods decrease in their bitcoin price over time.)

Since the deflationary element has predominated in the years since its creation however, it is more sensible to call it "deflationary" in the whole.
"Interventive Gerontology 101.01: The Basics"
Even if the FBI is not able to transfer the money, merely having possession of the wallet file itself is enough to prevent the coins being spent.

Ugh, no. Having the file means you can transfer out the bitcoins. Anyone having the file can transfer out the bitcoins, so the FBI securing that wallet doesn't lock down those bitcoins.

The FBI cannot properly "seize" the bitcoins unless they use the wallet to transfer the coins to a fresh address they make and control. And I'm not sure that traditional seizure laws allow that, because AFAIK we've never had this scenario before.
If the FBI cannot manage to successfully steal these Bitcoins, then it might be quite the advertisement for the overall security of Bitcoins, no?
Words don't make libertarians – actions do. The Dread Pirate Roberts may have talked like a libertarian, but he acted like a thug.

Don't call it "Cyber-libertarianism" when it's only "cyber-drug-dealing".
Croatia? SERIOUSLY? Croatia is a member of NATO, for one.

For two, there is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Croatia. For three, the only reason I listed Croatia was because it is so often referenced as a place to flee if the U.S. government is after you:

http://nakedlaw.avvo.com/crime/how-to-rob-a-bank-and-flee-th...

http://www.policymic.com/articles/48417/where-is-edward-snow...

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/06/11/best-countries-no-ext...

Hopefully that's enough - I invite you to use Google to decrease the level of your incredulity in regard to Croatia being a haven to hide from the U.S. It might not be the best place but a lot of people seem to think it is.
The ability to play offline is far down the list of improvements they could make to this game. For a start, the inability to create any meaningful regions means players just end up building a few specialised 'neighbourhoods' separated by a couple of miles of grass or forest.
The highways and railways only seem to link up 4 neighbourhoods at a time so your 'Metropolis' ends up being more like 4 seperate, non-connected towns, each consisting of 4 little neighbourhoods.

EA massively missed the goal posts on SC5. Players enjoyed crafting a whole world of their own, micromanaging it down to the nth degree. I didn't spend hours and hours playing SC1,2000,3 & 4 thinking "if only my city could be smaller and it was compulsory to play with strangers who don't share my design ideas".

The only thing they got right, in my opinion, was the graphic refresh and bendy-roads.

I did buy the game when it came out, even had to buy the Windows 8 upgrade pack to play it! I don't know what I was more disappointed with, SC5 or Windows 8. I can't remember to be honest because, after 1 week of playing the game, I booted back into Linux and haven't restarted since.
Look closely. In many cases they don't actually have good social skills. That's the thing about being an asshole. It covers that up. Blind raging assertiveness is not good social skills anymore than banging on something really hard is craftsmanship.
Empirically, it seems to work so far. My likes are quite eclectic, too, but that's by my design -- my homepage gets feeds related to Machete Kills and Oscar Wilde because I actually like both. Most of the ads are obviously wrong (hair conditioning products and club wear; I'm bald and hate clubs).

I honestly don't care about targeted advertising. Irrelevant advertising works fine for me.
I was going to say that it's not really that much of a problem - until I got to page 7 and couldn't scroll down to see the code because I'm on a laptop. Instead I have to Select All - Copy - Paste into editor. That's unforgivable.

Edit: on closer inspection it's just the last couple of lines that I'm missing - but it's still very annoying.
This isn't possible for every service. For example, our company Twitter account. Twitter doesn't allow any way for individuals to have their own passwords and post to the account. We have a social media team, all of whom need to be able to post to the Twitter account. There is no way around sharing a password for that (and it's just one example of many). It's great to be idealistic and say don't share passwords, but in the real world, it's not always possible.
First Text Message Sent By Molecular Communication
I hope that killing citizens WITH a court order is also illegal. A death-sentence requires a conviction, then a sentencing.