skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gavin, it looks great at first look, am a big fan of your work on hibernate, Seem, and Java CDI and JPA JSRs, and you and your team did an amazing work on Ceylon. feels very easy to move into it from Java, Scala or Javascript. Loved the in / out covariance / variance notation for generics, makes it much clearer than scalas + and -. Seems like a very good language (would probably have been huge if it was released 5 or more years ago...)

However, as a Scala fan (I'm behind scalatutorials.com) what do you think is a killer feature that might convince me to try Ceylon instead of Scala in my next project? (except the fact Scala JS compiler is still in very early stages)

I mean, they feel comparable (though I would miss implicit conversions) but I already have Scala, what is the biggest benefit I will get from Ceylon?

Thanks
Can anyone elaborate how the magstripe trick works? That's the only thing that I can't find, and it's kind of the crucial point of the whole project.
Dart runs in IE9 and up, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chome.
With the troubles they are having in non-US markets, along with other American companies, thanks to NSA, they need something else to survive.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-leaks-hurting-us-tech-sal...
There's a reason HUGE banks with customers who have significant existing relationships (Citi Bank - Mastercard, Visa Debit, Heloc, etc) has not done this, don't you think? Not cause the love printing and mailing plastic....
It's a design choice. I get why they did it, but it really bothers my eyes ... something about almost being able to read something make my visual system go haywire.
Well-implemented idea, as others have said. It's ridiculous that in 2013 I'm still carrying around a wallet full of junk (and keys but that's another story).

However this feels like an awkward stop-gap between the current card-payment system and online payments. I don't want to give a waiter a piece of plastic and get a little paper receipt back, give me some kind of abstracted account ID and I'll transfer you the money from my phone/laptop/smartwatch/glass (/whatever we'll all have by the time a new payment method is sufficiently penetrant to be useful).
If you didn't care yesterday, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE AND RECOMMEND YOU NOT CARE TODAY.
This is so fucking awesome. I have been waiting for this since long time.
The fact that the list exists got out, so there are clearly not enough safeguards. Honest question coming. Do you subscribe to the "I have nothing to hide" notion?
I'm already using serverpilot for a couple of legacy PHP projects and I am really enjoying it.

+1 for composer support built in.
Just because I am using coins hardware doesn't necessarily mean I need to use their software. And if it does catch on in the main stream, I doubt many people will check to see if it is your card if a check actually exists.
It isn't that it relies on it, per se. You can set it to require authentication with your phone so it can disable itself if it's lost or stolen, but it works just fine without constant connection.
Pro tip: if you're in the UK and think Chip+PIN is a really good way for the bank to shift liability to the cardholder and want to make your life miserable, ask the bank for a Chip+Signature card. That'll fuck things up for you on the regular.
The logic itself might be sound, but it doesn't matter if the assumptions are false, or possibly self contradictory. A false statement implies any other statement.
maybe the card still works but you just can't select another card.
> These are the sorts of things which should be bundled with the Python email module.

But only after they don't need to be changed any more...
The defense of economics by comparing it to string theory is a novel one, however last time I checked nobody has tried to impose the conclusions of string theory on a population, so the consequences of playing with maths in that field are much less severe (edit - unless the playing with maths proves successful, in which case all bets are off).
I was (mostly) happily using C and Python 5 years ago. Now I'm much happier using C and Haskell.
Uh, why would we want chip+pin in the US?
> Presumably when the card is away from your phone (and BT connectivity), it would disable the button

See the FAQ, It doesn't. It's designed to be standalone with only periodic checkins (once a day probably) with the phone to make sure you still have the card.
That pretty much rules out a lot of ATMs, and all ATMs I've seen outside of the US.
From the looks of it, it will handle rewards cards and whatnot just fine. If I could just store my Qdoba, Panera, Gameworks, Dave and Busters, REI, Best Buy, Safeway, Kroger, etc. cards on one single card.

Now I can keep as many rewards cards as I want, without having to stuff my wallet full of junk I don't need 99% of the time.

The money I save from rewards cards I wouldn't normally carry would probably pay for the price of a Coin, even if I don't use it for any of my credit or debit cards.
Our new SaaS tool. What do you think?
What's to prevent some (dishonest) merchant from cycling through all the cards in your Coin and charging each one?
Its actually really really impressive
I wouldn't, but I'm not sure I'd trust an economist either.
You have to take pictures of the cards. I assume it would work similarly to how I can take photos of checks to deposit them where, within some tolerance, you have the check/card inside of a "frame" allowing the check to be read. Maybe they can also sort of OCR the card name and make sure it matches your own.
Personally, I'm not into a single point of failure device. Same reason why I eschew paying with a cell phone. More convenient? Sure. But lose your cell phone and you have a lot of things to account for, doubly so if you have no form of remote wiping it.
Well, you really don't need to be a good engineer, but the skills required to do anything meaningful in theoretical computer science PhD program are more hardcore and rare than good SW engineers - from what I see, most of the people who can do theoretical CS are already doing it; and most engineering-oriented CS researchers couldn't/wouldn't cross to theoretical CS no matter what.
D'oh! I'll have to be sure to get that right if I ever meet Satya.
I'm guessing the Coin pre-order is why Protean sent me an email yesterday reminding me they exist: http://getprotean.com

Their Echo card is exactly the same idea, with some minor variation in implementation. It has not yet launched.

As far as the concerns voiced here (accidental button presses, etc.), Chris Bartenstein, a Protean co-founder, has addressed some of that in the comments on this TechCrunch story: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/02/the-protean-echo-reduces-al...
Of course you would and we should throw all those who are not proper sciences out. Come up with a new name as to not confuse and miss use.

It belongs to sociology, psychology, anthropology and so on.

Noting to be ashamed about but lets just call a spade a spade.
If you do that the battery runs down faster, and since you can't replace the battery or charge it, once that happens you are out $100.

I was really thinking of buying one but $100 every two years is too much for this.
I have but one suggestion. Unless RDS for PostgreSQL is drastically different from RDS for MySQL, you still need a DB administrator.

RDS removes remarkably little of the pain of running a database instance (most of the pain that's removed is just the up front setup), and ends up adding a lot of inconveniences for your day-to-day operations.

Also don't count on their replication as your backup.

OK. That's two suggestions, but I think it's OK.
Ruby isn't exactly revolutionary. See: Smalltalk. RoR, however, was.
I think he is referring to Hezbollah. Secretarian violence along racial lines is an issue but not a given, what really makes things explosive is religion.

I'm Israeli btw and terrified of high birth rates amongst the ultra religious here. It seems we might escape this problem as things stand but it sure does garner a lot of empathy with me.
This isn't the first car that can be remotely disabled.
Anyone know if the UUID type is supported? I see hstore and JSON are

Edit: It does, see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_P...
True, but there are cases when having the same language both sides can save some time, like validation routines for example. Not always appropriate, but can be a leg up on a project.
BitMessage: A Model for a New Web 2.0?
It doesn't mention which version of PostgreSql. I hope it is 9.3. It's got to be at least 9.2 since it supports the Json datatype.
I think you are right. Transparency rarely hurts.
Not to mention the fact that most tend to forget: copyright law in the US was not designed to create "intellectual property" out of thin air, but very explicitly "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". That's the original basis of Fair Use in the US (coming to us from British law) until it was later codified explicitly in the 1970s.

The four factors of fair use (each of which the judge discusses for this case) help balance the rights of the "Authors and Inventors" against the public's, but it's important to always remember that the primary purpose of copyright is advancing the public good.
Much agreed - it just works which is great considering how secure passwords are always hard (to remember, to implement etc)
It's a peptide? Neat!
Old ATC joke:

A military pilot called for a priority landing because his single-engine jet fighter was running "a bit peaked." Air Traffic Control told the fighter pilot that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down. "Ah," the fighter pilot remarked, "The dreaded seven-engine approach."
It depends where you are, I suppose. I live in an area with a lot of transient foreign nationals working in banks nearby, and they're used to dealing with non-chip cards at my local Tesco. The person in front swiped a Venezuelan Visa with no trouble the other day.
Not so different from Tesla's software-capped (and remote-unlockable-for-a-fee) battery capacity:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/01/tesla-model-s-axes-40kwh-...
Facebook login available for Microsoft's Windows 8, Windows Phone 8
Maybe it'd be a good idea to know what the service does before criticizing it?
I think you've misread what I wrote. It might be able to handle rewards cards, but the card itself becomes a bottleneck because it can only function as one card at a time. I'd have to select the rewards card, have that swiped, then fumble with the card again to select my payment card and proceed to pay. It seems like a ghastly hassle.

If I had this I could see myself using this for rewards cards only. But then again, I don't have a lot of rewards cards that are fattening up my wallet.
Before I clicked the link I was hoping Amazon was releasing a clone of the kinesis keyboard. Anyone else have that initial hope? :-)
Or if you don't care about performance.
Employers generally suck. They want someone who already knows, or lies about knowing, their pet 12 technologies, but then they aren't using 6 of them at all.

And there is very little brand new stuff out there. If you've been around the block a few times, you recognize the patterns of what something does quickly enough.
Concepts and good ideas being repeated and stolen is great!

However, the problem is repeating mistakes. Go's nullability, lack of generics, ... Node doing manual CPS where past work (e.g: Haskell) does non-blocking IO without forcing manual CPS on the programmer.

It would be nice if we learned not to repeat past mistakes...
Wow, i wonder if bitcoin can be integrated into this somehow
As someone who is familiar with the rigamarole of PCI compliance, I respectfully disagree.
I haven't worked in industry so far. So, cannot comment on that.

In academia however you can possibly build connections with your peers (other labs) and lab colleagues through your work. One can attend on-campus seminars and exchange ideas with potential collaborators. Being remote voids these options. Opportunities to work on interesting projects (other than research. For instance, contributing to student organizations) will be lost as well.

Edit: Regarding my research area.
On most occasions, students will have to register for classes (not all classes are offered online). Once you complete classes, it is potentially viable to work remotely. However, it again depends on the funding scenario. How a student is supported etc. If I'm a Teaching Assistant, I'm expected to be on campus and available to students. Being a Research Assistant gives the flexibility to work remotely (if advisor agrees however not all universities might allow that).
I don't know many people who aren't frustrated about the cost of rent in the city, but that might be because I'm biased towards knowing people mostly under the age of 40.

I'm torn on the Ellis act evictions. I think something needs to be done about them, but on the other hand I think landlords should be able to sell their properties. Without some form of the Ellis Act, landlords will be forever landlords. Companies like Urban Green Properties are kind of shitty, but the big problem is that San Francisco has absolutely no plans for placement or re-placement of residents.

Strictly speaking, SF has a ~1% population growth. That's 8500 people a year. Theoretically, 2/3 of that is likely non-native, but still there should be theoretically a net 2k new San Franciscans/year if you account for the numbers native high school graduates and subtract the death rate.

And I don't think it's just a nerd vs artist thing, I think it's a bit more of a new adult resident vs established adult resident (which tends to skew to old vs. young). However, the nerd population tends to make more money and larger waves, which means they're the obvious punching bags.
Because they have it in Europe.
My thoughts too. But I guess if you compare it to (what I believe to be the norm with) hostels then this concept is not too far off. But the thought of hostels also creeps me out. I'm not even that keen on the traditional B&Bs where you get a private room but share a bathroom. I enjoy my space when doing things like sleeping and showering.
Slim down your wallet with Coin
I'm a big fan of Zach Holman's talks and slides. He's a great speaker on these topics. Looking forward to seeing the video up soon.
That's like asking for an unambiguous description of what makes a language good. Even if I were to write a book it would be oversimplified and unsatisfying.

SO, OK, here's the oversimplified version... basically, if you have large amorphous chunks of data, easily denormalized so very few joins required for typical queries, then you have a document-friendly dataset. Medical records, court docket entries, things where a SQL representation has many tens of often-NULL columns and only a few foreign keys, those are probably good document-based data.

What Sarah describes is exactly the opposite: small, deeply nested, tightly joined, difficult to denormalize, nuggets of data. Expecting a document-oriented database to handle this is like expecting a SQL database to handle complex graph data: it can be done, but it's slow and the workarounds are not pretty. It doesn't make a lot of sense to complain about that.

Hope that makes sense.
Georgia Tech Flashpoint W14 Applications Open
Departures from rationality are interesting -- in fact, the Krussel and Smith paper and the related line of research does depart from rationality, even though in this case this is done for computational reasons.

The question is, how much, and what kind, of irrationality is reasonable to admit into a model? While rationality is easy to define, there can be an infinite number of ways people can be irrational, and their decision processes would change. Macroeconomics used to assume less-than-rational, empirically calibrated decision processes and aggregate behavior that would rise from those; but these models did not adequately account for people changing their behavior, including the degree of irrationality, in response to changes in the environment.
Of course it runs on the client. Where else would the generated JavaScript from the Java annotations run?
It prevents skimming and other types of fraud (less cost == lower fees).
Just stop it If you want to be happy.
i've seen people who didn't know what a lac operon was get a PhD in biochemistry.
Does your wife share her name with a celebrity?

I posted this comment in another thread, it might be of value to you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6732852

It was before, when Google had a very strict "real name" policy they were actively and aggressively policing. The actual name review process probably hasn't changed much since then though.
Choosing your salary under a SEP, SIMPLE, and a Solo 401k
This article sheds some light on your claim: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/11/07/ux-and-the-civilizing-p...
Ways to Nail Your Internship Interview
How do you nail an interview for an internship next semester? Find out how:
"Coin (YC W13) launched a universal credit card"

Title is incorrect here, Coin hasn't yet launched anything besides a pre-order website.

GIGAOM's title here is "Meet Coin, a startup creating a universal credit card"
In many cases there is no recipient of the money because we're talking about the bottom 80% in terms of wealth who typically just end up leaving the money in some form of savings account or paying down some debt.

That is probably a wise decision for that individual, but it's not going to boost the economy.

Your obvious example may be obvious to you, but it is not a typical example of savings decisions. That was my point: You have to distinguish clearly between savings decisions and investment decisions. Also, typical cases and averages are what matters when you look at the macroeconomy, and that's what you were talking about in your first comment to which I replied.
Part of the reason we don't have as many 3 and 4 engine airliners anymore is ETOPS[1]. Modern turbine engines are so reliable, powerful, and efficient that there's not as significant of a need for the additional redundancy provided by a third or fourth engine.

---
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
A script for generating image assets for various Android/iOS screen densities
Models help you understand why you disagree
I have a money clip, and only carry my most pertinent cards - ID, ATM, and CCs. The remaining cards, like reward cards or library cards, are in a tin can in my car - which I drive to wherever I'm shopping, and just remove the card I need. I can't imagine carrying 15+ cards in my pocket, especially if it is in your back pocket.
I agree with this analysis. One way to characterise the problem is as a lack of verifiability, which, interestingly, has been much touted recently as a problem in science more generally.

I think that the verifiability problem in economics is, however, more pernicious than that for other sciences precisely because of the subject area which it addresses, namely the economy. The standard of evidence for the implementation of some economic policy is, quite generally speaking, vastly lower than for the application of other scientific advances, and the impacts of either can be large. This means that unverified or even unverifiable policies can quite easily be implemented in the real world, and then cause significant damage, as steauengeglase mentioned.

If we are incapable of verifying that a given policy might work, because the theory it is derived from is so incomplete as to ignore the things which might cause the policy to fail, then why should we consider that policy's adoption? It is surely far more sensible to generally apply well-tested ideas, and conduct small-scale policy trials to expand our knowledge.

The obvious problem with this latter approach is that the "well-tested ideas" are very often derived from distinctly inequitable modes of thinking. I would still contend that adopting and then adapting those ideas is preferable to applying radical ideas that ignore most of the system they purport to explain.
All of those discoveries you listed were originally confirmed with repeatable experiments. In fact the the existence of black holes and the occurrence of the big bang were only hypothesized as explanations for the results of other repeatable scientific experiments.

It wasn't hard for Galileo to show that the earth orbits the sun. His methods and results would still be acceptable to the scientific community if he did the experiments today. Just because the public didn't accept his work did not make it any less scientifically valid.
When replications are out of sync...
Even though this submission was first (by five ticks of the id count)... this other one has much more traction in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6733615
I wondered about this and looked it up (leading to my other comment in this thread). NIH has a $30 billion medical research budget. DARPA is a couple of billion. Of course the $30 billion is not all directed at less profitable drugs.

Apparently there are a bunch of hard problems there.
Maybe they'll work with the banks to get the information needed to create the EMV card?
Implementing a four-bit adder with C++ template metaprogramming
> Oops, now your boss wants to know why you just paid for your groceries on the business credit card and you have to explain that you cloned your business credit card and there was a mistake!!

I'm not sure how every corporate card works, but I have accidentally made purchases on a Corporate Amex before and it's not a problem. I just pay that part off myself and don't mark it to be expensed. Don't see this as a problem.
Xamarin University - Go Mobile training course
This is very similar to the iCache Geode that came out last year. http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/13/icache-geode/

That seemed to fail primarily because of business issues. I wonder if this will do better. It's certainly a lot cheaper.
Self-healing cellphone cover
There is an ongoing litigation about this: http://www.dmlp.org/threats/tuteur-v-crosley-corcoran. The novel issue is whether sending a takedown notice requires a good faith belief that the infringment isn't fair use. If it does, then robo takedown notices become an abuse of the takedown process.
I can't wait for the Watson API.
It is 9.3.1.
Is the iPhone 5s worth it? 
With the proliferation of low cost, high function android phones, in your opinion, is it still worth paying the premium for an apple product?
Chromne Extension to replace youtube comments with reddit
Also, it might trigger fraud warnings:

> Magnetic stripe cloning can be detected by the implementation of magnetic card reader heads and firmware that can read a signature of magnetic noise permanently embedded in all magnetic stripes during the card production process. This signature can be used in conjunction with common two factor authentication schemes utilized in ATM, debit/retail point-of-sale and prepaid card applications. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe_card

It might work like a bunch of tiny electromagnets appropriately arranged on the back of the card, like pixels on your screen. These electromagnets can probably be polarized in a particular way to match the original card.
If developers are decision makers, they buy better tools
The rise of developers as decisionsmakers is changing the software industry, fragmenting the enterprise market and changing the way businesses communicate.
As someone who has zero experience in this area, but is curious about it for that same reason, I want to thank you for your voluntary transparency. The piece itself is also well-written and is an overall enjoyable read. I wish you all the best!
Your fears sound irrational to me. It's just a button, on something already in your hand. I doubt you're going to "fumble" it, or that it's going to be a "ghastly hassle" to press a button one or more times. Once you've shopped at that store at least once, you know exactly how many times to press it to advance to the card you use there. All of this should take less time than putting a rewards card back into your wallet/pocket and taking out a separate credit card, which requires more mechanical actions in which you might "fumble" something.