skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good one, but actually scarier would be facial analysis software.

Clearly, the kindness of one eyes, or the prominence of one's chin plays a big role in the results people get (at first) in say a sales job. Imagine if to get a job at Macy's you either passed or didn't a facial algo for trust-worthiness.

To make it even creepier, a big use of facial analysis right now is to create the perfect "average" face of different ethnicities, and it does work - for example I don't really understand what the difference in appearance between North-South India is, but hwen I saw the composite, then I understood for people I know where they fall on that classification.
Really ? I found it cool. Are more people with the same feeling ?
The nicest thing about it being in HTML5 is that messing with it's variables it's really easy. To make it harder, you can (for example), load the page, open the developer console, type

ZType.WAVES = {EXPERT: {
wave: 0,
spawn: [],
spawnWait: 0.3,
healthBoost: 0,
types: [{
type: EntityEnemyOppressor,
count: 3,
incEvery: 4
}, {
type: EntityEnemyDestroyer,
count: 5,
incEvery: 2
}, {
type: EntityEnemyMine,
count: 10,
incEvery: 1
}]
}
}

And then start a game on expert mode.

You can mess up with the values to make it harder/easier.
Awesome, I really like that.

Our hour daily private lessons for two months, this is worth more than anything else you could give to him.

We were talking about this in another HN post, I'm glad to see someone is actually doing that.
The Health Risks of Resetting Our Clocks Twice a Year
"For anyone who has worked with another OS, Windows is fundamentally broken."

Amen to that.
Great suggestion to improve open-source licenses
Ok, but you will lose the plugins support and will also have to change the Visual Studio Express with you want to work in another project type (web, mobile and so on).
The whole ripped and huge muscles thing isn't my primary goal. I'm 40 and started taking them for general well being and getting my hormone levels back to "normal" levels. And, I noticed an instant mood improvement with the test (well, not instant since the ester was E, but like three weeks later I noticed motivation back and some slight anti-depressant effects).

And the needles are literally zero problem. You draw with an 18g, you pin with a 25g or 23g and you don't feel anything. I mean that, you don't feel anything. And I take Test E so I only pin twice a week. The GH is not IM so you shoot into your stomach fat, which doesn't hurt at all.

All that being said, if you take even moderate amounts of each, you'll notice body composition improvements. And, if you take care to change up your diet a bit, lift a bit, you notice dramatic improvements.

I waited until I was 40 to do my first cycle. I wish I didn't wait this long, tbh. I should have started when I was 30.
Thanks for the feedback! I have exactly the same feeling. I have so many boxes of things that I've collected ...and moved with... but never use.
PRAM + Pushchair
KirKos: App Development Under 24h
I called it recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6564469

and of course the reaction was denial & vitriol.

It bears repeating: the world's governments can be divided into exactly two groups -- those that are monitoring the internet, and those that are trying to. Vigilance must be applied to all of them, not just some.
The "Plot Keyword Oracle" is a story idea generator that randomly selects five keywords from IMDB's 32,000 plot keywords from all its films. This oracle makes for a fun story game where you are challenged to make up the shortest description of a film that contains all five plot elements.

http://random-generator.com/index.php?title=Plot_Keyword_Ora...
And my point is that I fail to see how you go from your own mistake (not responding to the claim) to you being scammed by Amazon. I take issue with your post mentioning scam at all. You dropped the ball from your own end and you came up on the short end of the stick. You weren't "scammed".
I'm the same situation, love C# but the TCO is higher than other languages and we have the Microsoft controlling each step.
Exactly. Even in places that are generally enamoured with free markets, you never see this. It would be fun to see market-priced parking in places like Manhattan - what would happen?
I wrote a related article about a year ago that discusses a major threat to Canada's identity: A Big Reason Canadians are so Happy (and Why it's at Risk): http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians-are...
They're only open source in the sense you can view them, but you definitely cannot do anything with them, edit them, compile them, etc (from what i can determine). Its purely for reference, not use.
Ask HN: Can we monitor our hearts rhythm with a simple bracelet?
A question for all of you hardware hackers out there, is it possible to have a simple bracelet to continuously monitor your heartbeat? something slim and wearable all day long (like the Fitbit flex for example).

I've seen a bracelet where you have to use both hands to get a heartbeat measurement, but I am looking for something that constantly measures the rate, monitors the rhythm, and detects any abnormalities.

I have proposed the idea on quirky.com/invent/677338 - with alernative things you can do with a smart bracelet - but I would love to hear some validation or invalidation about the heartbeat monitoring part of it.
Edward Snowden AMA
Yeah, there's almost no way to tell the difference between certain letters if you're at a comfortable distance from the screen.
ctrl+space ?
Lots of money?
Author of the game here.

It's quite interesting how damn near impossible it is to balance a game like that. When I first released it, it had no expert mode. I tried to make the normal mode challenging for most people without making it too frustrating. The feedback I got was mostly "it's way too easy", but I also got a few comments, particularly on Kongregate and other sites that appeal to younger users that "it's way too hard".

I also got a few emails from school teachers wanting to use the game with their students. Even the normal mode can be extremely frustrating. To please everyone I would need at least 3 or 4 different settings, I guess.

tl;dr: The touch typing speed among the population is fantastically diverse.
THIS is really impressive! The most accurate representation of my chicken scratch I've ever seen. Why is it little usability improvements like this take so damn long to incarnate?
I was an organic chemistry TA for a professor who was notorious for having the hardest organic chemistry class at our school, but it was also widely considered that surviving his course meant that you truly understood the subject matter.

He was unapologetic about the subject matter being difficult and believed that teachers who didn't teach it hard and try to really force undergrads to understand it were cheating themselves.

He was especially adamant about it because many undergrads taking organic are trying to go to medical school and didn't like the idea of letting lazy or stupid people become doctors on his watch.

When we were grading tests, he would laugh as he marked errors and delivered low grades. "Hexavalent carbon? WRONG. Saving lives... Saving lives..."
neat, and thanks. looks like a useful library to keep around. i've been doing this sort of stuff in python for quite some time, and in C, so some C++ is welcome.

thanks! i didn't know about libtins before.
Same, I think if the ship was placed in the center of the playable zone, and the words came radially towards it, that I would be slightly better at it.
Did you read the article? The entire thing is about all the "whistleblowing" Snowden did on how amazingly good our foreign SIGINT is. Codenames of programs and names of targets in Afghanistan included.
True believers are scary -- on any side.
Another thing to start with would be unsupported software like Office XP or Win2000, most of which was created before the GS cookie even existed.
Did you seriously create a new account just to troll this thread?
For someone living in a city with reasonably clean air and no smog problem, does filtering the air in their living space provide any long-term health benefits?
3in1 Baby Stroller
Have you seen https://grandst.com/p/pulse ?
genius, apart from the automatic smoothing correction that changes what my real signature would look like... oh wait..
Maybe dmazin finds the thought alone tiring!
OpenPGP Best Practices
"The new default in Git 2.x is ‘simple’. It means that when doing a git push without specifying a branch, only your current branch will be pushed to the one git pull would normally get your code from."

Hello? Why wasn't it called "current" instead of "simple"?

Why are these unintuitively named options so frequent in git?
I can't say you're objectively wrong, but my experience differs dramatically.

I am a really lousy cook. I am not handy; I'm fairly certain my relatives laugh at me behind my back. And I did high school chemistry lots of years earlier. In short, a background which promise pain when studying organic chemistry.

I was so stressed in the lab, that when a small fire started between me and the exit (a student used a poor way of evaporating she'd learned in a previous course), I just thought "Ah, the fire extinguisher is by the exit with the other students, someone else can stop the fire, I'm too busy.". Luckily, someone did. (This fire was a minor scandal; could have really damaged the accident statistics.)

That said, the organic chemistry and lab work was incredibly fun and giving. It really surprised me that I loved the subject.

You needed protective covering, built interesting stuff, used vacuum to evaporate, boiled stuff in oil baths to get much higher than water temperature. You could read the "things I won't work with" blog ( http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with... ) and shudder at the FOOF formula.

Much more fun than biochemistry lab. Much more fun than sitting on a chair in front of a screen.

If I hadn't been sick (unknown food allergies and bacteria infection in a tooth, both of which made me tired), I might be a chemist today. I got through the course but had to quit later.

Edit: I might add -- my present back problems from sitting in front of a screen for decades might force me to an unpleasant/dangerous operation in ten years.

Edit 2: Half the reason I liked Org Chem was probably that the subject had to do with reality, it was such fun after just studying/working with totally abstract concepts my whole life.
This is a legendary article that brought these vulnerabilities to the spotlight, but it's somewhat outdated by now.

You can read it for the cult value and as a general reference to have, but for someone really looking to get into it, I'd recommend Corelan's exploit tutorials, Open Security Training's courses and The Legend of Random's articles on reverse engineering.
I would like to see IAM as well, but I would say that the solution right now is using a seperate account and using AWS MFA:

http://aws.amazon.com/mfa/

A new account doesn't have all AWS services enabled by default, so the impact seems minimal to start with. Not sure if you can lock this down further as I haven't looked into it.

All in all this is not perfect, but "securer".
I just wrote that seed for the OP. My NaNoWriMo concept is a time-travel fantasy that I am struggling to flesh out.

Now that you mention it, I wonder if I should ditch my current concept altogether and try this one out instead. Very tempted... :D
This is soo impressive. The signature looks exactly like my real life signature.. (which isn't a trivial one).

I've forked. I plan to republish it as a tool that allows you to create arrows and save them to transparent PNG files to overlay as images. I find it really tiresome when I need a specific angled or specific sized arrow and I think this tool just performed perfectly...

AAAS. (Arrows as a Service). :D
You get more attention using the word "scam" falsely then by using a watered down approach to writing a blog post headline.

I won't even mention the word that is used to describe this since it is so well known AND I'M GETTING TIRED OF IT.

Said OP of course knows this just look at the root website erica.biz.

Anyway forgetting for a second the OP's admission of "guilt" (by not responding) I will mention that the many times over the years that I have won something it's always been because the other side a) doesn't present their case well or b) is to lazy to even present their case. c) presents so much detail they confuse the decision makers. d) more things which I don't have time to get into right now so that's a short list.

Keep contemporaneous notes, facts, data so when the decision makers in a dispute need to make a decision they have what they need to decide in your favor. My experience with this dates back prior to the IBM PC btw. It has won me many "battles".
This is definitely a good idea, but way harder to implement that it looks on the surface.

I already spent about 40 hours tuning the game to what it is now and it still sucks. Tuning a dynamic difficulty system would take even more time, mostly testing.

And then of course there's the question of what happens with the highscores. If one player is presented with a simpler game than the next, scores are not comparable at all. So a ranking to "prove you're typing hacker" would be difficult as well.
Strange. I'm not a git expert, but every time I try to push outdated commits to the origin, it says that I'm behind and need to pull first.
Yeah, I always buy directly from Oreilly and everyone else should to. In my case, it's an ebook that is only available from Amazon.
The difference between this circumstance and the civil rights circumstance is that there is no party that is strictly better off with the NSA limited.

African americans are strictly better off when having the right to vote as opposed to not having the right to vote. Same argument applies for women.

The terrorist threat argument cannot be ignored, and it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US. Likewise, the privacy argument cannot be ignored. So in this case, we have a classic tradeoff.

To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?
> Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.

> “I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
No, the hardware team is pretty small and all of that work is done out of the NYC office.
I don't think anyone is surprised that governments monitor the internet in some way, and would target individuals or organizations under suspicion. They would also cooperate with each other, see for example Interpol. The issue is collecting and storing information on the private actions of individuals for whom there is no reason to suspect an involvement in anything criminal.
That's beautiful. I love the varying thickness; very fountain-pen-like. I've been using Bradley's code for a paint app in Android, but this is sweet.
If you had the `-f` (force) flag, it overrides any sanity checks and simply accepts whatever history you give it.
1. sounds extremely interesting for a short-story. Maybe, 8vll try my hand at it one of these days...

2. sounds hilarious and difficult, especially given that I am not all that well-versed in Biblical mythology. Maybe with Indian mythology...

Haven't seen either of the films you mentioned, but they sound very intriguing. Will check them out one of these days, thanks! :-)
It must have been fake, because the mods removed it. Something like that would've been on the iama Calendar so that the mods can be aware of it.

Also, I have a feeling like something like this isn't going to happen. I also wish people would focus more on the issue than on the person that revealed it.
Germany, France, Spain carry out mass surveillance: Snowden files
> To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?

That assumes the NSA is keeping me alive. I'm not convinced.

Also, it's supposed to be the FBI that investigates domestic security and crimes. And whoever's doing it, it's supposed to be specific, not everyone.

One might ask, are you better off watched, or Constitutionally free?
Yes, it should be random but the salt is public information.

Exactly because you need it to calculate the hash and compare it.
There is not 200 bucks of anything in it.

http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Fox-W1746-Fine-Filter/dp/B000QD7Y...
is a good choice if you want a single large room done.
There are definitely some very advanced 5 year olds and some very talented teachers, and it's great that kids can have the opportunity to learn advanced stuff. However, a "core curriculum" has to be designed to be usable by average students and average teachers.
I know what I'm hunting for the next time I am at the bookstore! Not much of a graphic novel reader but this one certainly deserves a read... Thanks for the suggestions! :-)
It would really depend on your situation and experience. E-mail me and we'll discuss.
HTML5/Canvas games are mostly bound by drawing performance. Modern browsers use hardware acceleration where available, but it could very well be that your GPU is black listed for missbehaving OpenGL drivers. Intel GPUs are the worst offender here.

If you have proper hardware acceleration, a game like this should run fluidly even on low end systems. Case in point: the similar looking X-Type ( http://phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) runs with a steady 60fps on an iPhone4S.
Your guess that gases are also an issue is correct. For example, ground-level ozone and sulfur dioxide typically also have negative effects on the respiratory system. In the U.S., the Air Quality Index (AQI) is computed from five components: ground-level ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. Of those, particulate matter is the one that's easy to do something about in a DIY fashion, since it can be filtered indoors with relatively low-tech filters. So it's worth doing if you live in an area with poor air quality, even if it's only a partial amelioration.

As far as I know, there is no practical way of filtering out the other AQI-component pollutants using consumer-level technology. It's possible to filter them: power plant chimneys have devices called "scrubbers" attached that filter out things like SO2 [1]. But I don't think there exists a device you can place in your living room that does so.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue-gas_desulfurization
That's not a direct quote, but consider that git subcommands are split into 'plumbing' and 'porcelain' and take a look at this chapter of the git book: http://git-scm.com/book/ch9-1.html
Along with the game being quite enjoyable, anyone else enjoy the nice instrumental in the background? Quite relaxing while trying to type like a mad man.
Copy-pasting the contents of rot8000.com/info in and hitting cypher twice ends up scrambling the contents quite a bit..

It also bypasses 32 control characters, technically making it rot7968, sometimes with an additional offset.

->

It also bypasses ⋍2 control characters, technically making it rot⋏⋬68, sometimes with an additional offset.
Starbucks "Tweet a Coffee" potential security vulnerability
Starbucks has recently implemented a program allowing you to tweet @tweetacoffee to @... (https://www.starbucks.com/tweet-a-coffee).

This in itself seems innocent enough, but given the frequency with which Twitter accounts are hacked, this seems a potential security issue.

As a hacker, if I scrape Twitter for anyone who has ever used this functionality (basically anyone who has tweeted @tweetacoffee), I can see which account are tied to Starbucks, and subsequently target those accounts.

If I gain access to even a single one of those accounts, I can then send myself, or anyone really, money. Up to this point, when your account got hacked on Twitter, you basically just had to deal with embarrassing tweets or phishing attempts. Now hackers have direct access to your credit card.

Does anyone else agree with this, or am I totally out there on this?
A magical place to create your own photo contests
It all hurts now!
I thought it was going to be a weird job posting, actually. And it really did take more than 10 seconds for it to load even 50% for me.
Find the other side of the world
He actually made the point right in the book that the code was obsolete from a use perspective. The relevance (even today) was in understanding how the computer works so you could make tradeoffs. I still remember the video 7 story at the beginning of one of the chapters.

Those are lessons that are still relevant today.
http://willowsystems.github.io/jSignature/#/demo/
That's awesome. I got to level 35 with 95.8% accuracy and 45 wpm. I need to practice...
Mechanical Turk is Amazon's Google Reader. I had to write a whole guide[1] on not getting screwed over by scam requesters because all the tools for it don't exist as part of Mechanical Turk. I don't think Amazon has touched the service since they launched it.

[1] http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mecha...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_care#Abuse_and_negligenc...
I think you might misunderstand. Typically there are at least a midterm and a final exam, and sometimes homework counted into the grade. So, depending on the respective weighting of each exam and the homework, a B on the final with an A- in the class is entirely plausible.
What's your point? Are you arguing this wasn't an article about foreign SIGINT just because of one sentence we've read a thousand other times? There's not a single instance of domestic surveillance in this story, yet immediately the same shopworn comments about the NSA having "transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA" start hitting hn. There's nothing in the article to support that claim.
Errr - this is expensive for what you get.
Among other things, the CFM is so low that it takes hours to reduce the particle rate any appreciable amount, as their own tests show.

You'd do a lot better with a standard high velocity fan (also 35 bucks, and you can get them cheaper): http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200361823_200...

You want to be changing the air at a much higher rate than they are.

They quote a 13.5 square meter bedroom. This is 145.313 square feet. If they have 8 foot high ceilings, it's 1160 cubic feet.

In order to be changing the air so little as they are, my guess is this box fan is ~40CFM, giving ~30 minutes between air changes.

For 30 bucks, you can get a 2000+ CFM fan (see above), and put the filter on the intake side rather than the output side.
This would change the air in the room roughly twice a minute, or roughly 60 times faster. There will be some loss of CFM due to static pressure increase, but ...

They also probably want a cheap, washable, electrostatic pre-filter so you aren't wasting the filtrating on easily caught particles.
Otherwise, you are just going to go through this hepa filter really quickly.
Reality is an illusion – .NET OSS is hard
That is cool, does it auto-read the heartbeat or do you need to use your other hand?
You might enjoy one of my favourite time wasting websites of all time (Windows kind of required at times though but in the age of VMs that's a nonissue). The +XXX folks were basically my reversing education, makes me wonder if the identity of +orc was ever figured out :)

http://3564020356.org/

I really liked the hash-maze, cool idea.
Like gasoline.
Just wanted to say love your post. It was fun and educating. ;)