skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a fantastic development, and the one-to-one model is perhaps the logical next step after establishing a one-to-many platform for online education. I have a couple of questions regarding the coaching aspect though:

1. Will the coaching group at Udacity be a walled garden, or is Udacity open to exploring a more liberal scheme by allowing experts from around the internet to help and earn some money on the side?

2. How would they maintain a healthy balance between giving constructive feedback and spoon-feeding learners? To elaborate, while I think one-to-one feedback would be great occasionally, I suspect that students might misuse this freedom. Take IRC forums for instance. It can be quite annoying for experts to repeat answers that are just waiting to be read in the docs. From the learner's perspective, it might just be easier to ask someone rather than thinking through the problem and reading the material thoroughly. As a learner, this can be dangerous habit to develop in the long run. So, I'm curious how this works out in real.

But, congratulations and best wishes to Udacity. More and more people, me included, seem to really take to the byte-sized lectures interleaved with exercises. While, the exercises can sometimes tend to be easy (I can perhaps understand why), it's problably not too far away until we have more personalized learning experiences.
Obesity, Not Old People, Is Making Healthcare Expensive
Geode from iCache - combined mobile payments (2012)
Understanding Javascript Callbacks and Use Them
What about chip and pin? Or contactless? Is it the same deal?
A stock buyback replaces dividends with capital gains directly so that's not actually an issue. AKA company can do a 5% dividend or buy back ~5% of it's stock. After the buyback the stock price should in theory not change noticeably vs the drop after a dividend however, future earnings are split among a smaller pool of stocks. Repeat for X years and you get 1.05^X years of effective growth even if earning are flat.

A lot of tech company's don't do this because they consider there stock overvalued aka P/E of 30+ and buybacks can't afford significant quantities of stock.
Roosters / lestijden - Valuascollege - Onderwijsgemeenschap Venlo & omstreken
> () Merchants will hate it since there is no physical imprint / swipe of the bank-issued card. This will lead to chargebacks in favor of the customer. So this alone kills this company/product.

Yeah I know right, this is why I can never buy anything online, oh wait.

> () Banks might change their terms forbidding customers to create digital copies / clones of their card. As per card holder agreements, if you (or Coin) has ever read one, you don't own your card. You're fully bound by the terms of the agreement.

The bank that does not enforce these agreements will have my business. Bring it on.

> () There is the issue of PCI-DSS compliance. They mention they're "in the process of earning" it but this is a lengthy, difficult and _costly_ process ($100 k). They're using a loophole to ensure consumer peace of mind but this won't last at all.

Every startup has to start somewhere.

> () Adding a card seems flawed. You're asked to take a picture of the physical card after swiping to "prevent fraud" ok but unless Coin uses some advanced image processing/OCR to validate the card with the swiped data, you can take a picture of any card. So big fail here.

I've used the camera to accurately scan my card data into 3 different apps in the past week.

> () Coin seems to access a cloud service. Another major reason that this simply isn't going to work. If you've paid any attention to the NSA situation within the past 6-months, ordinary/average consumers (not the HN crowd) are becoming weary of cloud/hosted service. Not to mention, Coin will never ever work outside of the US (or San Francisco for that matter).

Just... stop.

> () Most users are totally fine with credit cards and big wallets. It's actually empowering to them. I spoke to a guy who loves the fact that he has every color Amex card! So in essence, this is geared towards a micro-niche of tech savvy SF/NY/LA crowd.

You talked to one guy who loves that he has every color Amex card, and then came to this conclusion?

> () Selecting a card by tapping the button - great. What if the waiter taps the same button? Or someone you're paying does? So many issues with this button here.

I've had my card charged twice before, so what you are telling me is that the same thing that happened to me before might happen to me again? Thanks.

> () The obvious issue of losing Coin and losing everything. People like backups. It's a mindset.

You mean like how people lose their wallets?

> () Battery issues with digitizing a non-battery product (credit card). Be in no doubt that more than half of users will forget to charge their credit card (as if we don't have enough things to charge). So you'll see people having lunches and presenting a dead Coin. And since you don't have any plastic, well, now you're screwed.

So once every 2 years, I might have to ask my wife or a friend to pay for my meal at a restaurant, and I trade that for the convenience of not having to carry a wallet? Where do I sign up?

> Products are supposed to make life better, easier, more intuitive.

If everyone was using Coin, and then you introduced me to the concept of a wallet, it would be downright laughable.
Anecdotally, this might be one of the worst articles I've read on HN in a long time filled with ad hominem attacks, crude language, misplaced anger and trite memes to stir a controversy. The point is important but the presentation is very bad.
And this is why Apple has lost its way.

I doubt Steve Jobs would have allowed the situation to be handled so badly.

Then again I may be wrong. The concept of an app store is great for having all the apps in one place but it's prone to abuse when run by a company.

There shouldn't be any reason other quality, viruses or spyware to reject an app.

Refusing an app because its in competition with your product is anti-competitive and should be illegal.
For films, add subtitles and double your revenues
So then how did railroads do... ohhh.

How exactly is it open source?
Folks. There's no crisis of innovation. This would be a lot clearer if people understood how Silicon Valley has always worked:

1. Government pays for really big long-term high-risk core technology development. Things like microprocessors, the internet, voice analysis, lasers, space rockets, highways, etc.

2. These are mostly done under the rubric of defense spending. (This is important.)

3. Private sector steps in to commercialize the projects that bear fruit.

Hyperloop falls under category #1. Those projects take billions invested over decades with very uncertain prospects. Usually supported by military procurement. Yes, even highways were built ostensibly for the military. And Siri on your iPhone? Funded by the CIA.

That kind of Really Big Fundamental innovation is funded by the government. It's never been VCs. They focus on the "last mile".

Space X is a good example of that: bringing a foundation of core tech developed by NASA to market, adding commercial-oriented innovation on the scale of a few years and a couple hundred million from the private sector. But even at this stage, there's still many more hundreds of millions in government procurement (prepaid launch contracts).

The reason Hyperloops don't get funded is that the government doesn't have a military application (or pretext) for it.

Now we could go on to ask why Silicon Valley's megabucks foundation is military spending and not, say, direct government investment in sustainable public services. But then we get to some uncomfortable issues, like how the public might feel more entitled to the fruits of those investments. Whereas if core science and tech is seen as a kind of "military surplus", free or cheap for the taking, then the VC private sector gets to keep the profits from commercialization.
Student Finds Way to Boost Conductivity 400x by Accident
The time starts ticking (chrome beta, android)

It'd be cool if I could read the time via JS
I bet for WebRTC.
Don't think about just phone calls, or desktop sharing; but a way to connect 2 application in a P2P (when available) or forward-and-relay way.
I don't understand America's love for credit cards. They're unsafe, both for users and for merchants. PIN cards are safer, and they're much clearer about where the risks and responsibilities lie. Of course modern credit cards also support PIN, but I never see them used that way.

A more convenient way of handling credit cards is a useless idea to me. What we need is a safer and more reliable way to handle transactions. Preferably one that doesn't rely on politically motivated monopolists.
I was going to compare it with the bullet train - but that apparently runs on standard gauge rails (just welded to the sleepers instead of bolted) - I swear they told us it was a levitated magnet in school...

So maybe you're right, the hypertube is very complicated compared to a pair of rails and an power supply cable.
Hunting Art Thieves Across Borders and Time
Donut Code in Go
Arguably, there is nothing more important for a human being as an sentient organism than an endorphin fix obtained from various sources: love, surprise, food, etc.
Snapchat provides that in a form of secure ephemeral messaging allowing users to share private information pseudosecurely. That is real value.

If you find human nature horrifying I can't blame you, but saying that messaging apps do not improve people's lives is intelectually dishonest.
For me, the button font doesn't load and the background transisiotions are, as always, extremely sluggish. (Firefox 17 ESR)
> I want you to think about many brilliant scientists from the 19th and even 20th century who did groundbreaking work entirely on their own or with the help of some private money.

Keep in mind that groundbreaking research took orders of magnitude less resources back then.
> Nowadays, dividends are double taxed while capital gains are only single taxed, which means that companies mostly don't bother with dividends anymore. Investors tolerate this because the differential tax rates mean that management would be throwing away their money if they issued dividends.

Notwithstanding the fact that there are plenty of companies that pay dividends, I assume you're not familiar with REITs, preferred stock and MLPs? Dividend/distribution investing is very much alive and well.
I took Roughgarden Algorithm courses. Due date made me committed. Without due dates, I would just be lazy and might have never finished the courses.. to me it made sense to have students thinking about the assignments and then discussing it on the forums in the allotted time.
Looks great and works on Chrome. The idea is pretty nice.
Upgrade firefox :)
I have tried several times to shift to android studio for development but everytime I have to come back to eclipse. Whatever I do, it just doesn't work, it always messes up something and code doesn't work (which works perfectly fine on Eclipse). What good an IDE is, if I can't compile a simple project on it.
In the video they mention that they 'broadcast' it, I suspect that means they are actually pushing out a straight magnetic signal which seems to the reader that a card has been swiped.

I don't think it could be NFC, as most merchant readers wouldn't have NFC built in.

It also explains why they need the special case or dongle, it doesn't appear that it can work with just your phone alone.

It's a pretty innovative hack, but on the security issue, if you card is broadcasting it's data, then I assume anybody can pick it up, but they would need to be REALLY close.
Node.js bindings (compatible with levelup) have already been released by rvagg: https://npmjs.org/package/rocksdb
This is really nice, but what happens once it hits 4Chan?
The vast majority, but not all, I don't think?

Wikipedia states that the most recent atmospheric test detonation was carried out by China in 1980, although the reference link appears to be broken:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests#...
Why the tech press is ignoring Zulily's huge IPO
When I first moved to the UK, you should have seen the hassle I had to go through to pay with my Norwegian VISA debit card. Norwegian debit cards have a portion of them that looks like an ID card, with photo and birth date. While they did accept it in the end, several places thought I was trying to pay with my passport or ID card, despite the obvious VISA logo.

Given that, I'd very much hesitate to try to pay with something that clearly isn't the original card. (Of course, I won't be able to anyway, since I'm outside the US, and every single one of my cards these days are chip and pin cards)
A Belarusian start-up? Nice!
I can't get the point: someone who wants to steal private informations can already do it with photo pens or any other photo gadget, or write on a paper or even memorize it
> So now we are constantly pushing megs of JS, using insanely complicated build systems to get anything done, and for all this trouble our code runs at a speed roughly equivalent to C in 1998.

Those who care, just keep happily using plain native applications.
Lessons from Statistical Studies of Cultural Traits
I don't think that is the case. With the banking app from RBS I can perform bank transfers and even pay money to contacts. Apple surely can't be getting a cut of that.
serious question: does nuclear radiation scale linearly with explosive yield?

That question aside, the destructive power of a explosive does not scale linearly with yield [1]

> This relation arises from the fact that the destructive power of a bomb does not vary linearly with the yield. The volume the weapon's energy spreads into varies as the cube of the distance, but the destroyed area varies at the square of the distance.

The destructive effects of one big 5000-megaton bomb is very different than 10,000 half-megaton bombs. Or even worse, 40,000 125-kiloton bombs.

[1] http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects1.shtml
If SpaceX isn't a "hyperloop" project, then almost nothing would qualify. HP, Intel, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley giants -- the type of companies that the original post would probably point to in contrast to something like Snapchat -- benefited from decades of military and university research.

And if that's the case, that also suggests an answer to all of this. Spend more on basic R&D.
DNS amplification attacks, true weapons of Internet mass destruction
SlimFold Wallet
Santander UK give 3% on fuel, 2% on department stores and 1% on household bills. It looks like Lloyds are going to introduce a similar scheme soon too.
I signed up for one way back and never heard from them. Not going to bother now.
> Go is a better C++.

Only when it gets generics, real enumerations, dynamic loading support, proper dependency management for large scale projects.
I wonder why the big US banks aren't on board with driving contacless NFC payments?

Commonwealth Bank, the largest bank in Australia is very soon releasing native Android NFC support and NFC style "smart tags" that you stick to the back of your iPhone.

https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/online-banking/commbank...

This pretty much eliminates the need for any kind of "card aggregation". I wonder how quickly other countries will follow suite?
When Serge Humpich, a french engineer, found the vulnerability the yes card is based on at the end of the 1990's, he got in touch with the GIE in charge of european bank cards to warn them and propose a fix in hope of landing a job.

They asked him for proof, as an engineer he gave them proof by buying metro tickets and sending them the tickets, the receipt and the card used to exploit the vulnerability. The GIE CB then went on pressing charges and using those as evidence of the crime and Humpich was sentenced to prison, the flaw was not fixed and the whole story got in the media.

Then yes cards started to appear all over France and Europe and people would draw money directly from atms with yes cards, until all ATMs were replaced by fixed version gradually over a few years.

The amount of fraud related to yes cards and subsequent iterations was never disclosed, but it was estimated to be in the tens of billions euros per year.

In 2001 a network of gas stations got exposed for copying the magstripe of chip cards which were then sent to be cloned in other countries and the same CBCarbon surfaced, a software dedicated to cloning chip cards issued after 1999 (those including the crypto bump from 320bits to 768bits)

I suppose this is not the low hanging fruit of getting the money from ATMs as the current method is a physical attack based on making them explode using gas but I sincerely doubt chip cards are really secure nowadays, probably just not as easy as it used to be.
The Letter Is Dead, Long Live the Letter
Click http://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html to see how it works.
I don't think having a backup CC on the same card would help if your card is stolen.
Oddly, for me, the killer feature on the "Coin" card is the proximity alarm if you leave your card behind. I've repeatedly left my card at restaurants after paying, or left the house in the morning without my wallet. Err. However, I would hate to have to bring my credit card with me when I go for a jog.
How do you select?

In the US, a debit card can be charged like a credit card but the funds are obviously deducted from the balance on your bank account. It also lacks the protection and rewards that a typical credit card would have. I just want to clarify that you indeed have two separate things here on one card and its nothing like how the US does it correct?
You should check out Mass Transit Railway from HK - code MTR in the HK stock exchange. They make tonnes of money.

Westerners have been monetizing mass transport system incorrectly. You don't make money from fares. You make money from real estate + advertising. The real estate prices around areas with MTR spikes a significant amount.
Norway to bring in circumcision law
Fork'n'Roll: Imgur for audio
This ignores possibly one of the biggest reasons nobody is talking about it, they don't have any PR.

Reporters don't go get news anymore, it comes to them, that's the way the industry works.

At the same time, it's amazing that a company like this could do so well and fly under the radar.
I don't know much about PayWave and PayPass, but this actually sounds even less secure than credit cards. And it still relies on the big two. Sounds like a step in the wrong direction.

It's not about convenience, it's about security and reliability. That's the direction we need to take.
Thanks! Neat compilation. :)
OK, so where are the examples of $6B projects being funded by private money before the dominance of SV? Surely you can provide some examples from before SV had "killed major innovation", no?
Now I wonder why it's on Pathfinder on the first place and why it's stealing traffic from the original source.
I definitely agree with you. In a nutshell, Bitcoin's exponential growth is a result of hype. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - Facebook's initial user growth was also exponential, and that eventually stabilized. The question is, what happens when the hype behind Bitcoin dies.

I believe that, like you mentioned, it depends on Bitcoin's utilitarian value as a currency. If it turns out Bitcoin is more useful than, say, Paypal for facilitating actual transactions (as opposed to being a pure investment vehicle like it's being used now), then its price should encounter steady growth. If not, then things will get interesting.
Wait, there are trousers which don't come with pockets in the front/over the thighs?!
Great example of a cool trick using completely the wrong tool for the job.
Android 4.4 KitKat thoroughly reviewed
Show HN: Web Audio G-Funk synth with remote controls
Optimize cost structure and monitoring.
For those who don't know, the term "coffeeshop" in the Netherlands refers to places that sell cannabis. "café" is a regular café.
I totally agree, that said think about gold.. just a bunch of atoms that reflect light in such a way that our brain computes it into a 'shining' image..
You mean they don't always have to be "voltages". Agreed. I only wanted to emphasize that at the physical level, they are not discrete. In this case, they happen to be represented as voltage drops.
Are we are living in the matrix
Some time back I described a project to do this with a single data track (http://www.flashingleds.net/swipecards/swipecards.html)

This was a crude first pass, which is evident from the fact that the shim is a sawed off kitchen knife. In principle if you make the electromagnets smaller you could fit three. Make them adequately decoupled and you're away.

If these guys have an alternative approach I would be interested to read about it, but as far as I can tell they don't describe the method anywhere.
Anything Apples does wrong people are now saying "This wouldn't happen under Jobs". How quickly people forget the iPhone 4's antenna problem and Steve Job's response of "You're holding it wrong."
I misread your comment and thought I agreed with everything you said until I re-read it!

Wouldn't release software without testing it on a real box? We run all our production software on EC2.

Much like it does on Linux? Oh no. Oh no. You are lost my friend.
Really cool! Would anybody care to enlighten me on how the start/stop buttons work? I see that they add an anchor to the URL but I couldn't figure out how that triggers the style change. Thanks for sharing!
Bitbucket is down ...
Even standard HSR is a lot more complicated that that—you can't just put a bigger motor in a slow-speed train—but it certainly benefited from the large amount of commonality with lower-speed rail, and most of the higher-speed technology was developed over time, with real testing. [Note the first Shinkansen was a fair bit slower (~200km/h) than today's highest-speed models, and ramping up the speed from there occurred over many years.]

Japan is also building a real (long-distance, high-speed) maglev system. It's much more of a leap from standard rail than HSR was, but again, they're using technology which they actually have long-term real-world experience with.

Hyperloop, by contrast, doesn't even have a lab model. It's a diagram on a napkin, with some of the calculations worked out.

The press and the general public may not notice this distinction, but people investing large amounts of money most certainly will...
How about Israel and South African Republic?
This was news to me, but apparently China is not a signatory of the PNTBT.
Speeding up Chef Solo and Knife EC2 using AMIs
They can't

See p. 9:

"one of the snippets on each page is "black-listed," meaning it will not be shown; and at least one out of ten entire pages in each book is black-listed... An "attacker" who tries to obtain an entire book by using a physical copy of the book to string together words appearing in successive passages would be able to obtain at best a patchwork of snippets that would be missing at least one snippet from every page and 10% of all pages. (Pl. Resp. ¶ 41). In addition, works with text organized in short "chunks," such as dictionaries, cookbooks, and books ofhaiku, are excluded from snippet view. "
:target pseudo selector
Devoxx 2013 - Takeaways From The Java Keynote
Cool, you managed to untangle your hair using 5 pencils and some tape, now go buy a comb and never do that again.
Google ruling is not the first ruling,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild_v._HathiTrust
>Stop putting words in my mouth

Start being clear, then people might understand your confused responses.

> then certainly VCs who do it professionally have these issues factored in.

What is so certain about it? Doing something 'professionally' just means that its your job. People are capable of sucking at their job (which happens far too often IMHO).
The authors probably know about that, and I think it's part of the experiment. It's much harder to make giant drawings here though, because the entire thing is divided up in little patches; Drawball is only limited by your screen size.