skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've tried to register every night this week, and the site has always been "down for maintenance" so I can't even begin. Tonight I finally got to the 2nd screen in the signup process which asked me for a username/password, but every possible input to username was flagged as invalid.

It says: "The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-". At first reading it sounds like an email address would work as a username, but that failed. I then simply tried all permutations of 10 character usernames with upper/lower/numbers/symbols and every attempt rejected as invalid. Nice.

Since I haven't been able to seen it first hand, please correct me if I'm wrong..

This is a website which collects total household income, zip code, and age of each member of household. Then looks up a set of plans for those inputs, and displays them on the screen?

The Medicaid eligibility check is gratuitous, but not complicated either. It's just some boolean logic being run over < 10 user inputs. Yes, it's slightly different for each state. But determining if someone qualifies for medicaid is not black magic.

Also, you don't need to prove someone is a citizen to check their eligibility, you just need to ASK if they are a citizen. Just like you don't need to prove their household income by querying the IRS, you just ASK. If they lie, worst case is they are told they will get a subsidy, but in fact the IRS will deny it when the time comes.

Shopping for health insurance is pathetically simple once you remove the need to screen for preexisting conditions. This is a weekend hackathon project. Please tell me what am I missing?

Since the government has clearly completely failed here, they should just open-source the pricing matrices and let us implement it for them. We'd do it for free over a weekend, but if they could provide a few cases of Redbull, we could probably finish in 24 hours straight.
Would be intresting to do something like

"The central zones of $CITY are self-driving only". You could still use your normal car to get to parking lot near the city and switch to public transport but if you want to get INSIDE the zone then you need to be self-driving.

(On sidenote, you could have self-driving electric taxis that ONLY serve inside the zone as well as zone-only buses)

Then gradually expand the zone.
An interesting upgrade to Google Protocol Buffers: http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/
Except, counter to your assertion, several other actual arguments were made:

- People care about Twitter, but not Google+

- Twitter has achieved the "network effect"

- Twitter could be a hedge against Facebook

- Combined with Google's data needs, the value could be much higher to Google than the price

Nowhere does it suggest "because it would be cool". All of those are concrete arguments.

Also, you seem irritated at the perceived pretentiousness of the idea that Arrington might think Google will listen.

I don't think that's the point at all. I can't put words in Arrington's mouth, but he's been writing his own thoughts about the industry -- both reflection and speculation -- for years. I'm sure part of the reason he does it is to simply create a conversation -- like we are having here.
Yes, sort of I do. I check the FB-Pages. ;-) Sorry, but something like this seems to me to be the reason, nobody really cares about NSA spying on him (at least here in Germany).

We all do it. We all give in to our voyeuristic urges. We all "spy" upon our neighbors, spouses, friends and so on. We do not get the scope. We do not know, what it means, if states do this. We do not think about different hierarchical power levels and so on.

We just do Facebook and feel, that it is more or less the same, what the NSA does. At least, that is what was being said, when I asked around.
At what point do monopolies become a worry? Or do they at all?
You're confusing the cause and the effect. Google± is not being juiced up with integrations to make G+ popular, but rather those integrations are the reason for why G+ was created in the first place.

Google simply wanted a universal Google account for YouTube, Google Play, Blogger and so on. As to for why the wanted that? Well, Facebook is proving that there is value in collecting people's likes and comments, and then using those for serving ads.

On the active G+ users remark, I disagree. Every YouTube user is now a G+ user. Every GPlay user that wants to write reviews is now a G+ user.

So the point that their growth is not organic is rather moot.
That's not how alliances and trust work. In this context, suspicion is a form of accusation - and it is wholly inappropriate and wrongful for the US to accuse Germany or France of plotting against it's national security interests.

Otoh, what this establishes is that in fact, the US is quite willing to consider actions that may damage the national security interests of its allies.

In short, this sort of spying is a significant disruptor of any sort of lasting trust between nations. If everyone behaves like the US, there are no "allies", only temporarily convenient partners who may be betrayed at any point.
I don't understand why he cites Google's market cap since that doesn't really support the purchase cost as "pocket change."

Google has a free cash flow of ~$2.8 billion [1], so no, it wouldn't be pocket change.

Twitter's data worth tens of billions? Well, CNBC is saying they've sold their data for +$47 million [2] but I don't find any clear indication of that on the SEC filing [3]. A part of me doesn't believe that data would be worth billions to Google's search team seeing that they made ~$13.8 billion just on their own data.

Personally speaking (as in I have no data supporting the practicality of these thoughts), where Google could profit in buying Twitter is in using tweets for machine learning conversations, connecting geography with social interests & economic impact (Japan loves anime, US loves football, etc), and asset acquisition.

[1] Pg.8 - http://investor.google.com/pdf/2013Q3_google_earnings_slides...

[2] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101103596

[3] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001193125133...
Why did your parents, who only let you use the regular computer for homework, let you use your calculator for programming? Is it possible that your identity-building time spent creating SimCity for the TI-82 was not something deliberately enabled by your parents' somewhat closed-minded attitude toward technology, and was, instead, a "waste of time" that they simply failed to realize was happening?
If you read the whole article, you'd see that every single bit difference is accounted for; none of the bit differences
occur in the actual code.
Ask HN: My laptop has a bios level keylogger my security is at threat help
I have the following laptop - http://www8.hp.com/in/en/ad/ultrabooks/intel.html

I have been encountering suspicious activities and private data getting out.

It has been informed to me that,its either a bios level keylogger or a virus that catches your camera is creating trouble for me.

I searched the net, could not help myself. I formatted the laptop, scanned bios still things are not safe.

Please help!
I'm surprized that we are so bad at protecting our privacy, especily state leaders.
I know little of that business, but isn't that just "if we buy that space, none of our competitors can have it"?

Also, they could better point customers to special offers, etc.
I prefer mapping those to page up and page down.
140 character reviews.
Erm. OK. So what do you want to do? Sit and whine about your real world problems? Cause I have done that tons and tons of times; it is useless as shit. The "self empowerment bullshit" is simple: figure out what you can do to solve your real world problem. Say for example getting fit. Then go solve it. If you can't, STFU and go on with your life.

P.S: You come off as patronizing as fuck to point that someone getting a job is not an actual real world problem.
Lest we forget that Twitter has DENIED Google's advances, on multiple occasions, for a purchase.

Twitter would have been sold a long time ago if Google really wanted to pay what it was worth.
This. I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's three robot rules.

I am also led to wonder, who will be implicated if an accident happens? What if the auto-driving car has a bug? Or if it was infected with a virus or hacked? What if the driver deliberately modified a self-driving car to cause injury to a target?
I wonder about performance - will this new storage protocol be at least as performant as current standards (ATA, SCSI) ? We need better performing drives, didn't the datacenter sort of already took care of itself?
Neuroph - Java neural network library
What's wrong with Vuze? I'm using it (occasionally) and it's never done anything suspicious that I'd notice
When they are an ally.

Its how the US expects it's allies to behave towards it. Or do foreigners now have every right to assume the US never, ever plays straight and equally massive surveillance budgets should now be turned towards the US by its own allies?

Honest broker or not?

See, its seems to me this is the core of the arrogance accusation the US gets. The US holds its had high as a champion of democracy, truth, justice and the American way. Oh yeah? Really?

We are expected to buy that and treat American as such. Now we know different. American is hostile. All the smiles, hand shakes and slogans, but underneath, not the same story.

Im afraid America is killing its self, cut by cut. The rest of the world is learning what the American dream really means.

Its actually very, very sad.
You can probably set that up in .inputrc. Pressing Ctrl-V in a terminal before pressing your ctrl+left or ctrl+right arrow will type the initial escape character literally so you can see what the key sequence is (e.g. something like \e[1;5D).

Alternatively, you could change your workspace bindings to Control+[some other modifier].
Well Bezos is interested in controlling the media.. :)
It is both a measure of Internet companies strength & weakness that multi-billion dollar acquisitions are taken so lightly. "Spent 3-4 years building a product which didn't become a winner? No problem, buy someone else!"

"Strength" because compared to other industries, integrating two Internet companies is not that tough. Strength also because of the speed at which startups build scale and become world dominating. And the sheer amount of finance at their disposal to make these acquisitions.

"Weakness" because all of it seems so ephemeral. All it takes is a few years and a leader is often a laggard. Conversely, if you don't sell out before your bubble pops, you're history. And of course there's the network effects curse - if you're not among the top few players, you might as well sell out or close down.
I use WidgetLocker.
The Bruce Lee’s Definite Chief Aim in Life
How could the Segway panned out differently? (Serious question). I was quite exited to see it at first, but realistically it doesn't have many advantages over a bicycle, and a lot of disadvantages (biggest one is price).
Did you intend your question about knowing Mike Arrington in a serious or sarcastic manner? I couldn't tell, though the sarcastic one makes more sense.
You know you're allowed to use your own thermal paste right? Intel won't mind.

If you plan on overclocking your CPU it's probably a good idea to get a slightly better CPU cooler than the standard one anyway.
Does anyone think that self driving cars will lead to increased traffic? I think they're an amazingly good idea, but a lot of people live close to the city center and take public transportation because a long driving commute is a pain. If you can work or surf the web while commuting, why not have an hour and a half commute both ways? This could actually lead to way more driving and way more petrol burned.
It's important to note that that $450bn isn't just ploughed into the ground each year. That's the wages of taxi drivers, truck drivers, mechanics, engineers, and all their associated support. While losing all that will be a net win for the economy, we're talking about millions of people becoming unemployed.

This is not a new problem. Automation has already rendered a very large part of the world's population economically unnecessary.
Maybe reflash your bios? Have you considered that it might be your network?
Which makes his youtube analogy more apropos.
I'm not wasting money to try to prove an improvable point.

It's very easy to play "specialist" and come up with theoretical scenarios, like the idiots that think it's possible to attack git using SHA1 collisions

In the purely theoretical sense, RSA is also broken, since you "only" need to gather a lot of computers to factor a key.
Rule number 1: It's ALWAYS about the money.

The agenda is the protection of excessive money/wealth.

Which tells you where to look for "who's behind it": Rich people, very rich people. Also: The military-industrial complex.

And I honestly don't know how one can take down such a power structure that's in such an advanced stage.

I think it's like terminal cancer: it will only die when the host dies.
The first time I heard about attacks on crypto that monitored processor power consumption, I was pretty skeptical. It seems crazy to me that it could work. But of course it does.

Same thing with timing attacks, til I learned how to code one for myself.

It's funny how very very careful you have to be.
That's assuming DOS had the right drivers for your card loaded, and that your card respected that option... I came across many that didn't, esp. the "cheap" knockoffs of the leading brands.
What you think is a security threat and what they think is a security threat are not the same thing. That is the essence of the problem.
If the conjecture of being normal is true, yes.
A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography
I think the legal problems of YT were pretty clear even if you were outside of it.
BWT is mindblowing. So many applications; e.g. it's used by pretty much all popular biological sequence alignment software to compress genomes so they fit in memory during the alignment :D
Playing with Parse.com API
"Über alles" will be primarily associated with Hitler's anthem of the Third Reich by most native speakers of German who know some history. Not a good choice for a title.
I think you've got to look at the motives of the developers too. P2P apps appear to be more susceptible to falling to shady partners, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6607661
Ask PG: Are these YC Enrollment projections official?
I couldn't help but notice that the ATD piece on PG (http://youtu.be/6h8o_GEEEtw) had a chart (http://imgur.com/EoqIpqF) showing historical and projected YC enrollment figures till 2015. Are these official YC projections or just something the producer inferred from the YoY growth (~55%?) in YC applications and PG's comment about a 3% acceptance rate?

Just curious.
Information is power and power is money. They can use it to protect themselves and control high-ranking officials to ensure, for instance, that they will always be well-founded to be able to continue unfettered in their mission to acquire even more information and power.
That's like saying the DoD has a job, which is to go to war with foreign countries.
A (different) introduction to elliptic curve cryptography
yes, I thought it would be some storage reinvented by Aryans
I started to sign up for this to see what it was all about. It looks exactly like a credit card to me, backed by a bank. Here's the introduction to the standard terms and conditions you get with any credit card application:

> Prior to applying for a Dwolla Credit Account, Comenity Capital Bank requests your consent to provide you important information electronically.

The APR stated in my "prescreened" offer was 24.99%, which is staggering compared to my existing revolving credit accounts. There must be some subtle feature that makes this product novel, but I don't know what it is.
Radical simplification and IMO this is great. Remains to be seen how this will fare in comparison with RAID. I'd wager that google would be very interested, if they already not doing something like that in their data centers.

Nerdy me likes idea of POE hub and bunch of drives doing their own thing.

Also pretty good time to start writing stuff to support this into Linux kernel and developing support apps.

my 2c
nice one, EFF--you guys are bad ass. EFF has of course also for the past decade, been a relentless warrior against Patent Trolls. i don't know, but i would be willing to bet, that the new troll-killing bill is in part due to their efforts as well.
Print version - no ads: http://www.embedded.com/print/4396040
Makes sense as to why Obama flip-flopped on reigning in the NSA. Blackmail.
I can't wait to explain to my grandkids someday that back when I was young we used to let humans drive big hunks of plastic and steel at breakneck speeds, with nothing more than our laughably slow reflexes standing between life and death. They'll rightfully think it was barbaric and tragic that we let thousands of people died each year in accidents caused by distraction, drunkenness, exhaustion, and plain old human error, all at the hands of people granted the right to operate killing machines by way of a test passable by the average teenager.
Did you even read the post? They specifically mentioned sharing things in private. Of the friends I have who use Google+, most exclusively post privately.
Yes, I heard the same story from these friends as they were telling me this.

One of them works for a travel agency.
Lawsuit against Silicon Valley hiring practices gets class action status
Does reflashing it guarantees removal of keyloggers or laptop camera mismanagement?
diminoten from sibling comment, you are hellbanned, not sure why, I suggest emailing to admins.
I have some doubts about the CEO.

It's very common in these kind of scenarios that either a) the same criticism / suggestions have been made regularly over a long time by people inside the company which have gone ignored, or b) the company has a culture in which that information never reaches the CEO, either out of fear or because of middle management layers.

In both those cases, the CEO is actually mismanaging the company and completely undermining the motivation and loyalty of his employees.

I've seen this happen time and time again. CEO's and managers don't accept internal criticism or suggestions, don't give their people the freedom to take action themselves, but some outsider swoops in with an impressive Powerpoint presentation (or dress) and suddenly they see the light.

It's the opposite of taking risks (you can blame the outsiders if it fails), it's actually cowardice.
Yahoo has been doing these "Search Distribution Deals" for many years, as long as I can remember in fact. Bing was at one point paying $20+ per toolbar install when they were trying to gain market share. Google has done paid toolbar distribution as well.

The reason it is still around is because it is so damn effective.
Uh oh, Los Angeles School District’s $30 million iPad program falls flat
Is there a good reason that the Python project didn't just adopt a new command name and file extension for Python 3? It seems like that would have made the migration a lot less painful.
It gets used a lot in Europe for tourist group rounds around the cities. :)
Please note, "overtake" and "overtaken" do not mean the same thing. Also, your writing style feels off... almost like a turing test?
I really like the "its just a server that takes a 4k key and stores and retrieves a 1M value" approach. I'm not so keen on the physical drive "repurposing" the standard pinout of existing hardware unless they are prepared to gracefully fall back to the old block device standard if it gets plugged into a "muggle" device.

This has real promise so long as it stays as radically open as they are claiming it will be. When I can grab an old scrub machine, put a minimal debian on it and apt-get seagate-drive-emulator and turn whatever junk drives I've got laying around into instant network storage (without buying magic seagate hardware), I'm sold (and then might think about buying said hardware).
...and wouldn't it be nice, if we could actually stop this kind of problem before it became something the courts dare not touch, spoken of only with rare whispers. Those types of situations historically end up rather nasty for all involved.

It's probably a bad sign when the sane legal solution to avoid a rebellion (or worse) seems like fanciful wishful thinking.

edit:
As other have said: Thank you, EFF!
In this context? No. PC sales per year a few hundred million. Amazon total headcount 100K (including warehouse workers)

In case you didn't bother to read the parent comment, the user was referring to Amazon forcing its users to install Linux instead of Windows.
I Bought Bitcoin In Person And Here's What Happened
I'd say that's the Police having lowered the barrier-to-entry to the lowest possible point: high school drop-outs with no education and/or thinking skills whatsoever. Sad and dangerous.
however, we can write a non-infinite computer program that generates arbitrary digits of pi, meaning we can compress it infinitely better than the Shannon Entropy of the actual baseN representation - because it is a special case (most data can't be defined by a few words of mathematical definition).
The biggest reason IMO is lack of expertise - the average startup engineers will be less likely to have Oracle experience and skillset.

Another reason is that there just doesn't seem to be a reason for the average startup to use Oracle HW. Oracle doesn't seem as 'agile' for startups. It's far cheaper and quicker to iterate using commodity cloud solutions.

If you're an established business with a common problem domain that can be solved with an off the shelf commercial application backed by Oracle hw, go Oracle. This however doesn't fit the use case of most startups.

Plus, if I was an investor and someone told me they needed $X funding for Oracle HW instead of a scalable cloud-based solution, they'd really really have to prove it. I'd probably tell them they're overengineering except for very specific industries and use-cases.
Yes, in media buying, this is known as brand protection. It ensures that customers who already are searching for your brand and are therefore more likely to convert don't disappear off to a competitor.

Hence ironically companies will often pay more per click for these results than on more unrelated keywords.
My 2009 Core2Quad with 8Gigs of Ram and an SSD still feels faster than the latest and greatest with a normal HDD. It even runs OSX beautifully ;)

SSDs just changed the game, and it was about 2009 when that started.
What if it had a dial that I can set to (at least) +10mph on the highway

It seems simple to give the user control of a 'speed adjustment factor', and hence transfer liability to the user. Should be no different from adaptive cruise control letting me pick a speed. Cruise control doesn't stop working at 100mph.

Personal liability for operation of your automobile, regardless of the level of digital augmentation, must be very hard to relinquish.

I mean, they are willing to take over steering the car, but oh no, they can't break the speed limit while doing it?

More realistically, they don't break the speed limit because their error tolerances fall too much when they do.
Show HN: Make your app handle going offline
> The rest of the laptop market is hindered by shipping with Windows only and the difficulty of getting pre and post-sales driver support for the developers and students who require an environment like Linux. The industry has really fucked themselves trying to keep to the model of the glory days.

Quite good for those of us that work across multiple OSs.

Just install GNU/Linux on VMWare with CPU virtualization enabled and get two OS in a laptop with the minimum of fuss.