skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to rain on the parade but this effort is badly misguided. The reason physical signatures work is not that a pen allows you to render subtle curves more easily than a mouse, but the fact that the laws of physics can be used to bind a physical signature to the thing being signed (because a physical signature can't easily be moved from one piece of paper to another).

The reason electronic signatures are broken is not that the signature doesn't look right, but the fact that nothing binds the signature to the thing being signed. Once I have your electronic signature it is trivial for me to transfer that signature to any document I like, so the presence of an electronic signature proves nothing. Hence, electronic signatures are useless. And good-looking electronic signatures are worse then useless precisely because they look so much like physical signatures but without the actual benefit that physical signatures provide. Nice curves don't make an electronic signature useful any more than an image of a shiny padlock makes a web page secure.

The ONLY way to sign documents electronically that has any actual utility in the face of disputes (which, if you think about it, is the only situation in which signatures matter) is with cryptographically secure digital signatures.
I agree with you here - there are tons of real world problems with almost all public transportation systems. And I can't speak from a lot of experience, but I've spent a lot of time in London and I found that regardless of where I was there was always a walkable market and a walkable supermarket nearby. But, the further you get from the city center then the more difficult it gets. Here we need open-air markets ,farmer's markets, and these sorts of things. Even then, there are issues with transportation. However, I think a bicycle-focused transportation system is a good idea.
Don't buy the ePub or PDF only versions of books. They do not give you files of either format. They're some weird Adobe DRM that can only be opened in Adobe Digital Editions.
I joined the project and made the same suggestion. Brad likes calling it Bribe so we are going with. It may make it more interesting and get more attention this way.

The bottom line is we want this to be a system that helps people. I've been at the mercy of open source projects which don't stay on top of known bugs which I am not always able to fix myself. I personally would love to task someone who is better prepared to take on the work to take on the job and I can focus on what I do best.
Why would there be a soul bubble? Well maybe an outbreak of religious revivalism on Earth has restricted the supply of souls available for Hell's consumption. Oh, and some new processing method is making certain demons very rich and pumping too much capital into a market that's fundamentally supply-limited.

This also lets you make jokes at the expense of religious revivalist movements ;-).
Wow, that's faster than Barbara Blackburn who holds the Guinness world record. You should compete :)
Thanks for these ideas, I will try them out. In the meantime I have contacted Cloudflare and await their response.
>"Please note: Macaw v1 for Mac OS X should be ready to roll in January 2014. We have already started on a PC version, but it may take a couple extra months to polish up." //

Bah. Pet hate - Mac OS X runs on PCs.

Presumably they mean an MS Windows [8?] version? Wish people would be upfront about this it's silly having to hunt around to find if they're supporting Linux.
There may be improved oversight.

They'll probably change all the internal names for various projects.

They might work harder to help people who are moving towards whistleblowing, to try to avoid it.

> They are backed up both by the strongest economy

Wait, what? The US is no longer AAA, merely AA+. There are a few other nations rated better. Maybe you meant largest economy?
> The mining of rare elements isn't constrained by resources, only cost.

Ok, I am not an expert on the topic of REE mining, consumption and recovery, but I would say that availibility and access of mining sites are a strong factor e.g. at some point of rare earth element consumption the parties mining these elements might be able to dictate prices. I am pretty sure that RE mined in China might have a special tax for export.

Might be interesting to look up some cost information regarding the recycling and mining processes.
Both of those links require a browser plugin that I'm not going to install. From the url's I'm guessing this is about piping functions? I'm not asking about that, I'm asking about piping commands (programs), something any shell scripting language needs to be able to do.
Your chocolate looks fantastic! I’m not a bacon fan, but I do love chocolate…and I agree. The site is pretty terrible. My goal is to just get some sales upfront and improve the site with the profits. I’ve gotten some sales, but it hasn’t been great. Much still to do.
Those are two things that don't have anything to do with each other. You seem to think that every single web service and database works the exact same way.
I love UTC, but I think it's a bad idea to implement it instead of local time. You'd have a very difficult time teaching kids how to read clocks.
Agile is not some magic bullet that guarantees success. To say that something succeeded or failed because of some particular method of project management is is simply absurd.
Telecom infrastructure is entirely too important to a region's sovereignty to allow any foreign company to own and operate. I hope AT&T is slowly excluded from every single market outside the United States. They don't deserve to operate anywhere else. Heck, given their complicitness in dicking over their their customers, they don't deserve to operate in the US either.
It has beta testing
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
No process can compensate for an unsufficiently qualified/talented team.
Except that marriage rates in Europe are also far lower.
OP here, I have actually not read TAOCP at all. It's just a derivation I sometimes use to pass a few minutes while waiting/bored and I thought I'd blog about it.
Somebody needs to do a best practices for pseudoanon OpenPGP like being careful not to upload your key to a keyserver in the clear, unmasking yourself. Not using any identifying info while generating. As an example look at political or blackhat forums sometime and just examine the public keys posted: hotmail addresses and traceable user nyms. Also avoiding anybody who sends you a BCPG bouncy castle key or OpenPGP.js in the version header, because they are probably using some ridiculously insecure browser encryption addon.
This is a fun example. The formula's easy to prove by induction, but discovering it is less obvious and this is an interesting way.

It's the tip of the iceberg though - generatingfunctionology is worth inspecting thoroughly.
All that wankery to literally say nothing at the end of the article: "What does this all mean? For those aspiring to found, work at, or invest in future unicorns, it still means anything is possible".

Oh gee? Anything is possible?! THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW!

Sigh this is just more public startup masturbation as far as I'm concerned.
You don't have to rank based on single game scores. One way to do this would be to have levels that are replayable (ie there is a number n that uniquely identifies each set of level parameters) and use chess' Elo ranking system for both players and levels.

This gives players a ranking score that is comparable, and over time your players will rank your game levels for you. It also makes it possible to matchmake players to levels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
Having actually worked with NSA programmers, I can tell you that while they tend to be absolutely brilliant, that doesn't necessarily make them any better at making things "easy to use", "intuitive" or even necessarily "good".

When it comes to algorithm design, reverse engineering, or crypto, I know exactly who to call when I need help. When it comes to a layout that works, or in many cases, even just coding up some fairly simple HTML with CSS, my NSA buddies aren't in the top 50 of people I'd call.

Yes, they're brilliant. The best of them though, produce websites (if they're capable of coding on the web) that look more like stallman.org than anything like healthcare.org.
Nexus 5 vs Galaxy S4 - Camera Test Comparison
CSS3 Light Show
But J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the past did all the sort of things your worried about the NSA doing but unless Snowden is keeping something really juicy back are not?

So you would trust a proven bad actor against one where there is no evidence as yet ?
I'm used to HJKL for movement.
You should design a native app.
Responsive design, screens, and shearing layers
Insightful article, but it leads right up to the author's blind spot. (It's always easier to see other people's blind spots than my own.)

He asks why not more OSS in C#? Then he makes a case for VS == C#, which he defends well enough, although there are some counter examples. He argues that the answer is that adding VS components is hard, so it's hard to add things for C#.

I think he's very close, but still missing the elephant in the room. Hackers often write things for themselves first. We tinker with out editors our environments our OS --everything.

People who love C#, generally love VS. Which means they aren't as interested in customizing their editor, or really their environment, and the tools and environment actively discourage it by becoming unstable when you monkey with it too much. Then how do you fix it?

You don't have the source.

That's the elephant in the room. OSS has difficulty spontaneously starting in the C# community because people who love C# are more likely to be OK with not having the source to their development environment, OS, applications etc. It's just not a priority.

Most people who want to tinker are likely to wander out of the MS planned city and go build their own hut out in the wilderness. We've just learned to build some very nice huts. :)
To quote myself from Twitter:

Aaaaand here's the reason why Z-Type is extremely slow in Safari 7 http://phoboslab.org/crap/html5audio/pause.html - surprise, it's an <audio> bug. sigh

~ https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/396732243273453568
> It means the exam must be limited to material that is taught, rather than limiting it to known knowledge in the universe.

To turn that around, grading on a curve means that the test can have nothing to do with the material taught in the course--and so cannot be used paired with a pre-test to calculate the effectiveness of the course (and of the professor) in teaching the material. (Not that such things are even measured in Universities, especially for tenured professors...)
Healthcare.gov was not built in an agile manner. Sure, some items that are labeled as artifacts of agile-based software development, i.e. user stories, may have been utilized, but that doesn't make for an agile process. Heck, even an agile process doesn't make one agile.

To say it failed "despite agile practices" misses the mark. It's like blaming a roof for leaking despite the use of hammers. Process is a tool, and if used properly, it may be a solution. But pixie dust, it is not.
The irony is that running all of these filters is consuming electricity, which in turn means more coal-fired power plants and even dirtier air for everyone. Beijing should move to clean up the environment.
what's the reason for poor twitter seo?
You're right, I think I meant we have the most, or at least one of the most, influential economies.

I read somewhere that there's software that watches people and can tell how satisfied they are with their work. I wonder if this sort of tech is/will be employed at the NSA to watch for possible future whistleblowers? Sort of like a Pre-cog HR department?
Day 5 : GruntJS : Let Someone Else Do My Tedious Repetitive Tasks
Well, it's kind of inevitable given how interconnected the world is today. It was a lot simpler to distinguish between foreign and domestic 40, 30, even 20 years ago before cellphones were ubiquitous and when control of bandwidth was in far fewer hands - and even at that, the NSA still worked within the US monitoring things like communications between foreign embassies/consulates. Not only are global communications more intricate, but more people have personal foreign relations thanks to the affordability of travel and the globalization of communication, news, etc.

What's happening at the NSA has many analogues in the private sector and is to a large extent driven by technology.
British Accuse David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's Partner, Of 'Terrorism'
They're too busy stealing your emails, man. They don't have time to spend helping anyone.
Reacting mostly to the link-baity title..

Corporations act like using the word 'Agile' instantly brings the benefits of flexible planning and proper management to a team.

Most people never really interact with a proper agile process - its kind of a unicorn in the development world.

The failure is not necessarily the process but the managers not understanding that it isn't a silver bullet. It is often used as an excuse to delay requirements gathering or understanding of requested features from stakeholders. This leads to churn and failure.
You are correct on the technical aspects- it's certainly trivial to take the digital signature and apply it to something the signer didn't actually see. But we're all already signing on the POS pin pad with a pen on a touchscreen.

It's going to take someone actually transporting a signature to another document and a resulting lawsuit to see the practical impact of accepting physical signatures with a digital medium.
You can't portray self-improving AI and not wind up destroying the planet.
New York Venture Capital Almanac (112 page pdf)
For what it's worth, Julia supports setting rounding modes in a way that works across both native floating-point types (Float32 and Float64) and BigFloats:

http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/stdlib/base/#Base.get_ro...

This stuff is incredibly important for numerical work and it's really a shame that mainstream languages have effectively rejected this key piece of functionality – that the hardware supports.

There's an open GitHub umbrella issue tracking support for all of the pieces of functionality that Kahan advocates:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2976

I'm not sure about signaling NaNs though. There have been rumblings that future hardware might not support them.
Not always. In the past holistic review was to keep Jews out of the Ivy League. The minority being targeted will probably be different 50 years from now.

That said, I do agree that soft skills are probably valuable for doctors.
Adobe's engineering is often pathetic. This is entirely in-line with what I've grown to expect from them.
Nothing new, really. Methods and tools can help you, but do not guarantee success. Saying that some project failed because they used/didn't use something dosn't make sense to me. In the end, it's all about developers and overall project management.
Nice idea. I think it's extra interesting since I remember reading a debate here on HN about "bribing" OSS developers.
Extend the issue out, when I want to call my mother around the world, how do I know she's not ill today, took the day off and went to bed early?

You're creating an issue by extending something to absurdity.

Specifics like that aren't going to be communicated with any system, but removing timezones removes the general idea that is communicated with 9am or 7pm.
> If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed.

It's so cute when people put statements like this in the future tense. Why do you think J. Edgar Hoover was never replaced from the founding of the FBI to his death? How has the CIA gotten away with decades of documented criminal activity? What really happened in Dallas almost 50 years ago?
If I had to guess, your IP is banned by HN, and CloudFlare interprets our closing the connection as a connection issue.

Since you've not listed your IP, I can't check, but if you want help, feel free to email me.
Try play it in dvorak, colemak or workman instead.
Rather than rotating through the entire BMP, I would suggest instead using Unicode's localized collations, and just rotating every character that's part of a fully-orderable "alphabet" set through that set according to those orders. (This means, for example, rotating Japanese hiragana, but not kanji.)
>Slightly odd other idea: some new AI technology is developed, massive leaps are made. Everything seems great until the AI start developing in odd, sometimes psychotic ways. Turns out the 'Artificial' Intelligences were originally humans, with parts of their brain slowly replaced with electronic alternatives until no meat was left. Because the process has to copy the original subject's brain so closely to work, some human characteristics are copied over and can emerge as the system matures. It turns out the original experiments were violent prisoners, and more recent, 'stable' ones were done on small children. Cue ethical catastrophe.

So.. basically... the backstory behind Portal?

> Dystopian society. A new, incredibly accurate set of psychometric tests (something like IQ/MBTI on steroids) is discovered, and society as we know it is restructured into a kind of pre-emptive meritocracy. Perhaps even a different angle where the people tested are prisoners of some 'free' society and are used for its advancement.

Because of course everything has to be a bloody dystopia nowadays.
thank you! this is great to know.
thanks, great to know!
That's what I was thinking too; instead of a one-on-one, what if you could have 10-100 bots that operated with different strategies and worked together? I think it would so cool to have multiple teams of players all competing at once.

Sort of a programmable MMO/RTS, where the fun would be the strategy development and extra-game political aspects.

Where I'm getting hung up is on the exact game mechanics; I want to make it so the simulation runs for a long time, but I don't want a single player or team able to develop an insurmountable advantage. I'm thinking to start you get a robot in a sandbox world where it would gather resources and you could test strategies, and when you're ready you can transport the bot to the real world to compete.

I was writing this in C++ so the memory overhead per robot was just barely over 64k. A server with 8gigs of RAM could run a simulation in memory with about 100,000 bots, periodically saving the game state to disk in case of a failure.
How is the OP's article not open source? They tell you exactly how to make it using parts bought from a local hardware store.
It's possible to measure the heart rate optically at the wrist. A few consumer products already exist:

For 24/7 monitoring: http://www.mybasis.com/

For sports: http://www.mioglobal.com/ and http://micoach.adidas.com/

The Basis comes quite close to what you suggest.

There's much more information in a heartbeat than just the rhythm [0]. I don't know what exactly the Basis can record, and whether more information would be useful for automatic diagnoses at all. For example, some Garmin and Suunto watches also measure the time between heartbeats to estimate the "training effect" of a workout. You should ask a cardiologist what kind of data is required to detect certain abnormalities.

Also, you will probably get a lot of false positives. If you search for "heart rate monitor spikes" you'll see what I mean.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_cycle
Dvorak, a superior keyboard layout
All I can find on their developer webpage that they appear to support is Skype URIs. It's basically HTML tags that register the skype: service to send commands to skype. The functionality appears to be completely one way. The app sends a message to skype and skype takes over from there.

Skype API appears to be the same things as Skype Desktop API which is the ops focus.

SkypeKit which allowed developers to create a headless skype client is no longer accepting new developer registrations. https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA12322/what-is-skypekit

I can't see anything at all about hardware that supports skype. This is probably through some enterprise BD channel. Hopefully they aren't being abandoned too.
Cool language learning app
I want to know:

What problems the company is solving, what problems my team is solving and what I would be solving.

Work habits / structure of the team that I would be working for.

I am attracted to ads that feel like they were written by a passionate engineer (or technologically inclined manager). These ads have specific details about the technologies being used, and the problem being solved that only a hands on engineer would really know. When a manager / HR / recruiter writes in generalities, it gives me the impression that the team does not really know what they are doing and they don't know who the need / want.

Only list required skills that are actually required for the job. And don't be afraid to be specific. I always like to see the phrase: Experience with SpectificSkill(tm) or willing to learn.

I think the key is be know what you want and to be honest and realistic in your ad. If you want to attract the right people then be specific! You want the people applying to have confidence in your company. Ads with: "Super hacker ninja who dreams in code needed to deploy web-scale technologies to our next-gen social site in the cloud" only tell us that the person who wrote the ad actually has no clue who is needed for the team. You are not going to get the right talent with an ad like that.
I think the dynamic scaling (difficulty multiplier?) could just be the levels advancing faster like somebody else said. If you solve a level too fast you could get a "wormhole" advancement that just gives you points automatically for the levels you skipped over.

I think this is awesome, not just as a typing tutor but as a spelling tutor. I think adding phrases and word combinations would help teach grammar too. You could also do a synonyms level, an antonyms level (I think even adults would like these) then verb levels, adjective levels, etc.

Here's another idea. A convoy of words come at you (as a sentence) with the verb out in front and you have to shoot the verb first.

Or, totally different game, fly/shoot your way through isometric Zaxxon-like "sentence diagram" landscapes.

PS: This is how I learned my times tables back in the 80s, very similar game on the TI99 ;-)
>And not being able to guess passwords is an assumption that any and all password-based systems have to make

The difference being that you're not testing against everyone's password at the same time. Also using an extremely strong password means a large number of people are going to forget and thus completely lose access to their wallet. I'm not sure this is a solution to the problem of barrier to entry to bitcoin.
My worst was an issue where a load-to-register, followed by a jump to the register, when the jump was on the last word in a cache-line, would about 1 in 10 million times jump to the value that was in the register before the load. It was a race-condition in the hardware. That took many, many months to track down, localize, and then convince the HW vendor was an issue.
Could you tolerate only ever working on a 10.6" screen?
I particularly like chapters V and VI.

(snark-free version: that book would be a lot better if it was finished... note the last edit was over a year ago)
it's almost certainly yet another case of "dumb people in, dumb results out"

dumb + agile = agile dumb
bribes, or bounties, or prizes, or whatever you want to call it work on the extrinsic motivations for people to act. In many cases, open source projects are a product of love, that is, intrinsic motivations. There's always a risk when introducing extrinsic motivations that they'll crowd out the intrinsic.