skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice - but don't you mean Atomic Number, not Atomic Mass? The atomic numbers (i.e. the count of protons in the nucleus) are the nice non-overlapping integers 1-118, whereas the masses are all over the shop, and has overlap with isotopes of other elements.
Phones aren't relevant in 2013 - so why am I forced to pay for one?
Europeans are not morally responsible for spreading diseases to the Americas that killed the natives. That was inadvertent and in many ways inevitable.
Connected devices for pets and their owners
I've always been curious how people do integration tests on things with multiple servers (like SOA stuff), it seems like it'd be dreadful, unless you use Vagrant to (quite slowly) spawn a new VM every time you want to test.

Anyone with experience care to enlighten me?
I use Xero.

I showed it to my accountant and we now regularly use it to cooperate on my accounting. I don't have to bring a MYOB file in to her, I just send her an email with a question and she can log in to look at my books.

She's now recommending it to her other clients.

(n=1)
this looks interesting, but it appears to have been removed from stack overflow (for obvious reasons - SO is not an article publishing platform). do you have it written up anywhere else?
I wasn't familiar with this, but Wikipedia knows of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell

There are many excellent reasons for remaining anonymous or pseudonymous, both online and offline.

That being said, there's a vast difference between inventing a disruptive technology and advocating (even in jest) the killing of government officials.

I'm not taking the position that governments never unjustly harass disruptive technologists. Nor am I taking the position that the treatment of this particular jesting assassination advocate was fair or proportionate. Nor am I taking the position that government officials are incapable of crimes worthy of a death sentence [1] (think of the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War 2).

I'm simply saying that the situations of Satoshi and Jim Bell aren't really comparable.

[1] Although, even for people who really deserve it, I'd really rather not have death sentences recommended and carried out by the totally lawless process Mr. Bell jestingly advocated in a country I have to live in.
every ODE that has one and only one solution has an exact solution

Upvoted, but - is that a particular theorem, or are you just basically stating the definition of "having a solution"? Wouldn't your statement be true of any system of differential equations, not just ODEs?
From an Euler problem (412 IIRC), I had played around with Young's tableaux, counting which also gives rise to the sequence 1,2,42,24024. More numbers here: http://oeis.org/A039622

Am I onto something? Let's see if the next moment is 701149020.
The IMF is talking about global monetary policy - if all countries did implement tax on high net wealth individuals, then it could have an impact.

Or they can penalize countries who operate tax havens - it's not like tax havens represents a significant amount of either trade or GDP.
When developing an API, I like to practice "documentation-oriented design." The first thing I do is write documentation of the API, and then I write APIs to fit that documentation (iterating both in parallel once I start writing the API).

I figure that the documentation is the first thing a developer faces when using an API, so it should also be the first thing I write.
Now you're just beating up a strawman version of my advice.

As I noted elsewhere, most legal relationships, transactions, events and conditions exist without ever being noticed or cared about. That is as it should be.

But in cases of high risk or uncertainty, go see a lawyer.
I think having a large physical calendar works better for some people, but there are many excellent apps for using this technique too.

Web:

http://www.joesgoals.com - http://www.42goals.com/ - https://chains.cc/

Phone Apps:

Streaks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/streaks-motivational-calenda...

(Free) Goal Master: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/goal-master/id347105327?mt=8

http://wayoflifeapp.com/
> All these deals are done in secret, and anyone who is party to the deal will apply severe spin to any announcement...For an example of where terrorists may have got considerable concessions see Northern Ireland.

So let me get this straight. You claim, that despite all the observable evidence, the proof of your game-theoretic claims - which postulates the rationality and basic utility maximizing behavior belied by all the other empirical results - your theoretical mechanisms really do happen, but you can't offer any evidence because all these deals are done in secret, and then you have the chutzpah to immediately claim Northern Ireland as an example?

I'd like respond to that, but you have made your claims unfalsifiable.
Twitter pays engineer $10 million
I am not worried about criminals... they are a danger to everybody else.
That issue was fixed 3 years before (Jan 2004) and from what I can see only happened in configs which use +x bit or config values to turn php engine on and off, and didn't really depend on load on these too much either - it's just load made it more probable you will hit the right sequence in the same process randomly, but if you know what to hit, it could be done on any load. So it would be correct to say "there was a bug 3 years ago which in certain configurations made mod_php serve source after certain sequence of requests". It was never happening just "due to high load", as far as I can see. And as far as I know (and nobody so far presented any evidence to the contrary, AFAIK) Facebook case had nothing to do with it anyway. It would be really weird for Facebook to run random 3-years-old PHP in production too.
Without a piece of paper saying so, you can only prove your level of knowledge through successful actions. Otherwise, how else can it be proven? This is what I have observed.
I understand that Fred Wilson is an important voice in the startup / ycombinator world... But is this really the quality of content that really deserves to be on the front page here?
I don't know about that. I bet if you asked random 100 people who "Charles Steinmetz" was you would get similar dumb looks.

And Steinmetz blows this guy out of the water.
> Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan project) in 1989.

Something like a fifth of the American population will die of cancer, without ever having worked on the Manhattan population.
Litecoin developers are currently doing an AMA
Jim Bell is out of prison after 10 years and remains defiant and is posting again on one of his original fora, cypherpunks. The archives has Jim's recent posts:

http://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/

Subscribe to cpunks: https://cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks

Then there is CJ, Carl Johnson, who was sent to prison for supporting Bell. He is on Twitter among other places, also still promoting AP defiantly: https://twitter.com/pro2rat

Neither are interested in remaining anonymous.
Your arguments are quite flawed as they could be applied in favour of feudalism or plain cattle slavery. Also, "Communist" China has raised quite a lot of people out of povert as well. Should we therefore attribute this to state-communism (or state-capitalism)? Of course not.

For me, this is fundamentally an ethical question. Is this wrong and should one work to change it? I think that when a wage labourer barely, if at all, earns enough for food and shelter it is not much different than slavery. As such, I think it's wrong and that it should be changed.

Furthermore, I can't accept the notion that one has to have a thoughout solution to a complex problem to be able to express ones views. A good start to achieving change is to express when one thinks something is wrong and to build from there. The process of achieving change is naturally much more complex than simply expressing ones view and as such it would be irrational to have that as a requirement to speak.

Fundamental change, which may or may not be needed in this case, is often deeply political and such solutions, even if detailed and serious - albeit subjective, is too often just discarded without any thought or arguments.
I first read about "Assassination Markets" in this brilliant book, that delves into the old 90s cypherpunks mailing list (members which included Julian Assange and most likely the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi):

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Kills-Secrets-EmpowerWhistlebl...

I still haven't read this full article, mostly just a summary, so here are my rough thoughts:

It seems like something straight out of an idealistic anarcho-capitalist society, but it seems to be dangerously crossing the line out of "non-aggression" and from skimming the article, seems full of flaws. For example:

> Satisfying as it might be to declare war on asinine pop singers, Bell has a more civic-minded suggestion: Let's kill all the car thieves. He reasons that a very small number of career criminals are responsible for nearly all car thefts. If one million car owners in a given metropolitan area contributed just four dollars a year, it would create $10,000 a day in "prize money" for the "predictor" of any car thief's death.

Is preventing property theft really worth killing a bunch of petty criminals? I highly doubt it. This tough-love approach to preventing crime (especially to this extreme) has been a complete failure in the USA (see their full prison system or the war on drugs).

I'm all for preventative self-defense, but most of this enforcement bulldozes over root causes of issues (socio-economic, mental illness, etc). The goal should be compensating victims (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice) and long-term solutions, not creating some esoteric possibility of safety/morality via threat of violence.

Not only that, and just google "wrongful convictions" or "wrongful convictions death penalty". Accuracy of information needs strong information systems and due process (maybe the article discusses this?) but just having target lists + bets is wildly insufficient.

There has also been a lot of literature against private law enforcement (counter to many anarcho ideologies) such as by Novick in his book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia":

http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/...

> TLDR: Protective agencies (judges/police) would be competing against each other. That competitive nature combined with their intended role of protecting us (and themselves) would lead to "an endless series of acts of retaliation and exactation of compensations". Also he demonstrates why the nature of both of the businesses would already create natural monopolies in each local jurisdiction.

So even though I personally lean towards libertarian/decentralized ideas, public courts/judges is likely still the best solution and anonymous assassination marketplaces sounds dangerously flawed.
since eric young?
Ask HN: I thought of an idea but I think Microsoft has it patented. What to do?
I was thinking about writing a payment gateway abstraction layer to allow for developers to be able to change their payment gateway (Auth.net to Stripe, for example) without having to change their implementation code. Basically do for payments what PHP's PDO or Ruby's DBI does for databases.

A simple Google search to find if one existed discovered this patent by Microsoft: http://www.google.com/patents/US20080086417

What should I do now? The patent seems to be exactly what I thought of but as far as I far as I've looked, nothing was ever written. Can I still write one? Could I be sued for infringement? What if it was open source, does that change anything?
Yeah, sorry, elementary, not evolution... Way to embarrass me with facts! : P
Arduino Controlled RoboGarden Frame Update
This is hilarious. Well done, U of Cologne.
Saul Goodman never had a lawyer.
We heavily utilize Akka clustering for our backend and we do this using Akka's multi-node testing feature.

http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.1/dev/multi-node-testing.ht...

For the most part we only spin up multiple JVMs on the same machine but it's not a huge leap to use multiple machines. We don't do so regularly because, as you said, Vagrant takes forever to spin up a new VM. Our Jenkins server does spin up multiple JVMs for our integration tests though.
The problem is lack of protocols. I can easily switch between GitHub and my laptop for hosting repos with changing just the remote. I can't do that with Facebook, which is very frustrating.
Hm... I guess I got a little carried away. I still don't understand why a security instructor or an engineer would be considered management. I'm sure there's a rationale. Somebody want to help me understand this concept?
You can move. But the most important part is to not be stopped by trivialities such as being "stuck" at the wrong latitude. Most people could move toward the equator for $500 or less if they put their mind to it.
We are happy to announce that we will freeze Jessie at 23:59 UTC on the 5th of November 2014.

Is this a typo and it is actually meant for the 5th of November 2013, or is Debian really another year away from "freezing" for their next release?
Expecting a "WPP acquires Wrigley" headline.
Are you referring to something similar to: http://spreedly.com
In government's eye, at least in the US, you most probably already are a criminal:

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
http://threefelonies.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx
From an obit, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05...

Walter Schirra; Fifth Astronaut in Space

By Patricia Sullivan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Walter M. Schirra Jr., 84, one of the original seven astronauts and the only man to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs....

[...]

[His second] mission was delayed a second time when the Titan II engines beneath the space capsule ignited at countdown and then shut down.

For several heart-stopping minutes, Capt. Schirra and astronaut Tom Stafford, sitting atop a highly explosive mass of rocket fuel, chose not to pull the ejection handle, which would have scrapped the mission. It was a calculated risk. Capt. Schirra trusted that the booster rocket would not explode and that the first attempt to rendezvous with another spacecraft, Gemini 7, could still occur. The risk paid off, and three days later, the launch was successful.

Asked later what he thought while sitting on the launchpad, Capt. Schirra replied, "This was all put together by the lowest bidder."

E.g. the story of the reasearch and developemtn of the legendary Apollo Saturn V first stage engines by Rocketdyne, first for the Air Force and then for NASA, is also legendary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_(rocket_engine)#History. They used explosives to debug it! That's got to count as a hack....
Skull&#39;s World of Mayhem  10/13 by The Wacko Network | Comedy Podcasts
it's sunday afternoon. this is pretty normal sunday afternoon HN content. If you want something more insightful, come back tomorrow morning.
A friend of mine is still using an original iPhone.
A bit of a stretch, but each GitHub wiki is also a git repository
He does not seem to be a freeloader and I agree that it's silly to ascribe outcomes based on someone's perceived potential, but it does appear that the guy left his wife and kids. That's an asshole move in my book regardless of how much of a beautiful snowflake you might turn out to be. It is unclear to me how he helped support his children as he pursued his unique lifestyle. If he did support his children in a way that he and his former wife found constructive then that's a good thing, if he left her holding the bag to raise two kids on her own then he is a 'Dead Beat Dad' and an asshole. Anyway, if someone has a less superficial analysis of how he handled is obligations in order to get to a $5k/year lifestyle I'd appreciate it... living like he does is certainly inspirational, especially if you can do that without screwing over your wife and children.
I don't bookmark in browser because I use lots of devices and don't want to be tied to one browser. If I find something I want to read, on whatever device, I send it to Pocket. If I want to keep it longterm, I star it and IFTTT sends it to an Evernote notebook for me. It works great for me, and if you want to know the one feature that would stop me ever swapping Pocket for your service, it'd be if you lacked IFTTT integration.

So really, I see the read-it-later service as the logical, device-agnostic development of bookmarks. That's not to say they can't be improved, but I don't have a suggestion offhand that hasn't been posted yet.
Nielsen Norman iOS 7 User-Experience Appraisal
I think they vagueness of this points to part of the problem. There is no real specification of what makes an amateur performer in a musical event. I would assume since he was not contracted to receive a payment for his performance, it would be acceptable.

And just because there is a cover charge does not count as work. The cover charge is collected by the venue and does not mean he will get paid, which was specifically the case here.
XAuthorize.net sold a similar product for a number of years. I'd think that (not having done more than skim the patent) it would count as prior art in the event MSFT wanted to protect that IP -- assuming that it could pass the non-obviousness test.
Language is not a platform, it is a way to describe a computation. In this particular case, the researchers discovered that using a relational language to describe state transitions in a distributed systems helps to reason about the distributed system and reduces the amount of code required to describe it's behavior significally. It is in no way dependent on any particular platforms, as it is some kind of libary you have to plug somewhere, it is a /language/.
The elephant in the room is moving out of London for the schools - less "ethnic" kids
The idea of the assassination marketplace as I see it is to provide some means to balance the power of politicians. There's a powerful asymmetry at work in politics. Prosecutors can knowingly wrongly convict people and face no consequences. The President can authorize a temporary (or perhaps not temporary) war possibly resulting in thousand of deaths and the worst outcome he faces for it is not getting a second term.

Given that voting people out of office is not a powerful enough disincentive to cause them to behave morally I welcome new thoughts on providing better incentives. I'm not saying that Assassination Markets are necessarily good but there's an interesting idea there: how to provide the mass of people recourse to politicians in a manner other than voting.
Yes the wiki is a git repo, but the percentage of people who have a (current) checkout of their project wiki is probably below 0.1% of all users.

Larger project have a domain and a mailinglist but github hosts thousands of small projects which do not exist outside of it, and in theory it should be trivial to keep a second remote and put it in the readme or sync it over git in some way.
Is this getting rid of Flash, though? Many sites will still use Flash, and EME will not work in all browsers, because EME DRM plugins will only ship in browsers that manage to strike deals with Netflix/Hollywood/etc. - in particular, not in open source browsers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
I pretty much reject the entire premise of any sort of quantitative "statistical generalization", when it comes to "terror", because terror is an arbitrary qualitative generalization to begin with.

So, here comes this analysis that attempts to state facts as:

1. Terrorists only target civilians

2. Guerrillas only target uniforms holding weapons

...and never the twain shall meet!

These kinds of generalizations in social science are flawed from the outset, but now we try to plot the numbers anyway?

I don't buy into the idea that a heterogeneous mixture of non-state, civilian-killing groups can be boiled down to bald numbers. I think it's a mistake to even try.

I don't think targeting civilians is a rational goal, so how are you going to apply ratios to it?
Show HN: My shiny new personal website (v1)
unbelievable Banksys best piece of work yet
No, I don't believe so. This is just done as a courtesy, for the audience to show their appreciation. It isn't even barter because there isn't a deliberate plan to exchange a good for a service. I suppose he could preemptively say, "I plan not to accept any free food or tips," but what good would that do really?
Ex-Communist country, you mean. The only ex-USSR countries in the EU are the Baltics (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia).
There's a link on that overlay to "close and continue reading" if you get out your microscope. ;)
Perhaps the answer is a kind of confident non-confidence. "I have studied this problem and am about 70% confident that the answer is this, and I am confident there's not enough information available to be more certain than that. If anyone tells you they know the answer for certain, they are probably trying to sell you something."
You've identified the issue around transition. It's not good enough to be simply better, it has to be great for the accountant and the transition has to be easy.

Xero figured it out - although it 2-3 years after they launched (they are now 7 years old). Their key to paid customer growth is not the UI (which is great) but that they focus on helping accountants improve the way they do business with their clients. Their marketing focuses on the accountants, and includes extensive training and so on, and they offer free practise management software. It changes the relationship accountants have with their clients and creates evangelists.

To help in the US Xero has just launched a Quickbooks --> Xero tool.

Of not for HN is the comprehensive and rapidly growing ecosystem of add-ons and complementary cloud products, many out of NZ, but many (more?) from offshore. It's a very fast growing area with a lot of opportunity.
The problem you're talking about, which I agree exists, has more to do with readers than with the author because I really didn't read any of that in the article. The author just seems to offer admiration for the guy's drive and resourcefulness, and doesn't at all advocate not attaining formal qualifications.

What I wanna know is how this guy put together an effective and cohesive curriculum instead of the scattered and unfocused one I tend to fall into when trying to self- educate.
Morally, our personal share of national debt should be related to how much wealth we have. $52k sounds like a lot of money to most of us not in the 1%, and especially someone who is poor, but really, it sounds like a lot just because we have such a small share of the GDP.

Practically speaking, ya, it would be a challenge to make the system fair. But either the rich will pay, or there will eventually be some kind of destructive revolution to bring things back into balance (probably by making everyone poorer).
If the theaters stop selling popcorn and candy they will not be able to stay in business as almost all their revenue comes from concessions --most of the ticket sale proceeds goes back to the movie makers.

Not to mention the fact that concessions are almost the only unique reason to go to a theater anymore.
What’s a “Shark Tank” Appearance Worth? A Top Spot in the App Store
Are there commercial applications done using Pharo? If so, what? It'd be nice to see some examples of companies successfully using it.
Europe won’t save you: Why e-mail is probably safer in the US
There is a webtool for that: http://www.joesgoals.com/

I used it for awhile, then gravitated towards GTD lists, which, are, of course, not that good for periodic tasks. Maybe it's time to try Joe's Goals again.
Probably meant ironic because of the nature of the specific art piece: a man pasting a "Cancelled" sign over some fake graffiti that says "Follow your dreams"
You go to the theater for the "unique" concessions? I guess stale nachos and overpriced M&Ms are "unique", but I'd debate if they're a reason to go to the movies. :)