skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While in both scenarios a crime is technically committed (I would guess something like "using a computer with the intent of accessing/distributing child pornography,") can't you appreciate how it bothers some to think that one could be convicted without any victim? Lets use a computer analogy: what if I put up a server running running an SSH-like service that would present a false shell and allow commands to be entered, and even give reasonable-yet-bogus responses, and I put up the username/password information on a pastebin and post it everywhere. Should anyone who connects to it and attempts to run "rm -rf /" be convicted of a crime for intended to destroy computer data, even when their action actually has no effect?
5 Maps That Could Help Solve Some of the World's Most Daunting Problems
The easy first step to eliminating cards is to consolidate them into one device. Then make them completely swipe free etc. Square is doing something similar. Invent a small device to handle swipes and then move to Square Wallet. IMO Coin is on to something !
Honoring scientific instruments of the past
Here's the bug, equating size with effectiveness: "a bigger resume package. A package which shows off what kind of person I am."

You have, by the way, deftly identified the fix: shorter yet better. Twas Pascal who said, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

Take the time. Talk about your accomplishments clearly eschewing all buzzspeak. Make clear what you did. Too often I find myself reading resumes desperately panning for actual contributions.

hth
I had a really hard time reading this, mostly because it's difficult for me to separate out in my mind when arbitrage becomes theft.

For example, in my teens I found a hack in the eBay search algorithm. The algorithm was very simple; it simply scanned the titles. So if I input '32GB Apple iPod Black' it would return everything with those keywords. If, however, I typed in 'iPod' it would return millions of results and be unusable. Not everybody realized this, however, so there were plenty of items just titled "iPod."

I ended up generating a 2-page long search that stared with iPod and negated all non-relevant terms (i.e. 'ipod -headphones -case -protector -battery' etc.). After entering in that term I would be given a page of everything only titled 'iPod,' and could pick them up for $50-100 and flip them the next day for $250-300. That was a good living for a 15-year-old kid.

When my mom began to probe after seeing iPods arriving at the house day after day, she started to question me, and we had a long philosophical discussion about whether or not what I was doing was "right." It was legal, of course, but was it right? - this was the much more important question in the eyes of my mom. She felt it was unethical and not providing value - I disagreed, and she allowed me to continue and not go against my conscience.

After a few interesting twists and turns the eBay hack turned into a multi-million dollar, off-eBay Broadway ticket brokerage firm. (We scalped broadway tickets at scale.) I provided no real value other than buying tickets at face value a long time in advance, and marking the prices up 3-4x last minute. I justified it by saying wall-street traders don't provide much value either. I let people wait to buy tickets, and let Capitalism decide who would get the tickets instead of who got word of the shows first or who cared the most. I appeased my conscience by convincing myself that I took the risk away from the venues, who could have waited and charged more, and profited thereby, but either didn't know it or were bound into agreements with artists/shows/etc. I still don't know how truthful that was, but eventually I left to try and start something that will actually benefit people, not just redistribute things and make money.

I wonder now if I was on a slippery slope and got off at just the right moment. I've seen a lot of my ticket broker/scalper friends end up trying to swindle casinos, get caught up in credit card fraud, etc; it becomes easy to feel smarter-than-thou when you're making bunches of money off of others' perceived negligence.

But at the same time I'm not the kind of successful where I can look back and say, "I was dumb and broke the rules and made some mistakes, but look, I made it now!" It's tempting to slip back into a world where you're not benefiting anybody and profiting thereby. So in that sense it's hard to separate my motives then from that of the author. Making money while helping people is really, really, really hard.

The moral of the story: It's difficult for me, at times, to discern when a "cool hack" becomes "criminal theft."
In the U.S., operating a child sexbot would seem to be illegal under the PROTECT Act, which prohibits "virtual child porn":

"In the United States, the PROTECT Act of 2003 made significant changes to the law regarding virtual child pornography. Any realistic appearing computer generated depiction that is indistinguishable from a depiction of an actual minor in sexual situations or engaging in sexual acts is illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A."[1]

Maybe the government could get away with it, but if independent researchers did it, they could be charged with producing child porn.

Yes, Orwell's "thoughtcrime" is an actual criminal offense in the U.S.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography#Vi...
I'm sad to see that the one line of code, with its magic number and comparatively inscrutible contents, is entirely undocumented. Please, if doing things like that: a good commit message is necessary but not sufficient. (Yes, `git blame` exists, but you're not so likely to use it as a comment in the code.) A blog post is handy but not sufficient. A good inline comment is invaluable when returning to the code later if the situation changes, as it typically will in time for such precise, empirically derived performance tweaks.

// This single line boosts performance by a factor of around 2 on GCC.
// The optimal lookahead distance i+3 was chosen by experimentation.
// See http://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/2x-speedup-with-one-line-of-code/
I don't know what's a valid source of traffic data but according to Compete you're absolutely right. I'm pretty surprised. It's also nice to see that their traffic has been trending upward.

You should have wagered.
Pretty much no-one accepts swipe-only cards in the UK,because they are a massive source of fraud, pin+chip is a lot more secure and results in a very,very,very few chargebacks for the merchants.
I find the fact that the mother who owned the thrift store would just hand donations that were "designer" to her kid immoral enough.

When I donate to a thrift shop, I'm doing so knowing that I'll help people be employed there, and also help out folks who need clothes for a decent price.

People who do this stuff always try to rationalize it, but at the end of the day they are stealing from all of us by passing the costs of their behavior onto us through higher prices.
The parent makes very salient points, I think you'd do we'll to understand rather than brush then away because they don't comport with the conventional echo chamber wisdom.
Show HN: Markov 2 Chainz
Just for fun.
Andrey Markov, and the greatest punchline rapper of this generation.
The UK has some useful law around this.

For some offences it doesn't matter if you thought the person was a certain age or not.

Compare this section:

Causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/8

With this one:

Meeting a child following sexual grooming etc
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/15

See here, where they include both tests-

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/part/1/crosshead...

> (i)B is under 18, and A does not reasonably believe that B is 18 or over, or

> (ii)B is under 13.

And there's stuff in the photography bit that means pseudo-photographs still count as illegal.
An insect-like, crash-happy flying robot
I agree with you. I think folks react to the fact that there are a set of rules that are unknown, but the penalties for violating them are harsh.
Do you have any evidence that it does?
Where did you get this form?
Are you really so blind to the fact of poverty, or the sheer numbers of people involved, that you think one computer graphics entrapment tool is driving any serious part of the "supply"? This is poor people, and victims of sociopathic criminals. And one program.
This is called a scale effect. Once you help increase scale of a potentially harmless behavior it also increases scale of the illegalities around it.
Someone who is truly self-interested will strive to live in harmony with reality and with other people, instead of trying to constantly deceive and manipulate.

They will focus on producing real value they can trade, instead of the less efficient strategy of stealing from others.

In other words, do you think the author was happy? I don't.

Religion and altruism teach that your self-interest (at least in this world) is in opposition to morality. You can either help yourself, OR be good, but not both. The truth is that they are the same thing and you can do both.
Somewhere, in deep, dark, cold Russia, an army of Hackers is already building an army of undetectable Pedophile Man Bots just to screw with these guys ..

Seriously though, wouldn't the creators be creating a virtual child designed to encourage pedophilia ? So who would they be to judge ?
1) Agree, you can't get at various bits of data that must be present in order for the card to be able to do what it does. Most likely sits in private 'files' that READ DATA can't access.

2) Yup, and combined with '1' this means that you'd have to get the banks to do it

3) You'd have to get some more cross-scheme standards about the crypto capabilities sorted out. I estimate we could have all the schemes in agreement by... 2025? Or is that optimistic?

The benefit would only be to the consumer, in the same way that Coin may benefit people, however any method of doing this with EMV would present some sort of extra attack surface and that's generally Bad(TM).
I recently used a temporary travel card at Blazing Saddles, and that wasn't imprintable but they didn't make any note of it. They may have changed their policies.
As simple as heroku. Powered by docker. Love it!
Are you sure that you aren't confusing installation with initial configuration?

The most utterly infuriating part of a new Postgres install is getting authentication set up. I shouldn't have to expressly edit a freaking INI file for basic user access, damnit!

With the tentative upsert changes made in 9.4's commitfest, the initial user config problems are my last major problem with Postgres...
privileged and a douchebag, star CEO
What is your deterministic system for determining salary?
I think he meant that swipe-only cards are a dying breed(at least here in EU) and most places don't even take them anymore. If your card does not have a chip+pin system it won't be accepted anymore, even if it's a Visa or Mastercard card.
I don't know what a cashpoint is, but in the US you swipe your card and type in a PIN number when buying something or getting cash from an ATM.

EDIT: It seems as if it's different at restaurants. Here, we give the card to the waiter/waitress and they return with a receipt to sign.
What Neuroscience Says About The Link Between Creativity And Madness
The banks don't eat the costs -- the merchants do.
My thought on ticket scalpers: They are, funny enough, actually providing a service for one group of people (those who are short on time and have plenty of money) while hurting people who have plenty of time and less money. Without scalpers/brokers, getting a ticket turns into a game of who is willing to stand in line the longest.
Editor's note: This is a satire, but you already knew that, right?

In case it's missed.
It's both parties' loss.
This article is ridiculous and doesn't even have anything to do with Coin.

The first half isn't even criticizing Coin at all -- it's just saying the author wishing there were even better things. The author says "The problem with these technologies is vendor adoption. It’s not here yet, but it’s on the way." Yeah, it's been on the way for the past 10 years, but nothing's changed yet! I don't see RFID/NFC anywhere I shop. But that's not any reason for Coin not to improve things in the here-and-now.

And the second half has nothing to do with Coin itself either, but is about Kickstarter charging in general.
This is the sort of thing you need to be aware of, in all areas of life, if you want to be successful. People have filters, and you're fighting a stupid, uphill battle if you want to get through them. Spend that time going around them. It doesn't matter if you're looking for funding from that top firm, a date with that gorgeous woman, a job in that blue-chip, or a visa to visit a post-Soviet wonderland.

Everything worth having comes from others, and a confrontational attitude is the worst one, if you're trying to get through filters, that's how they perceive you. If at any time it feels like you're beating your head against a wall, that's because you are. Take a step back and figure out what you're doing wrong.
As of today, dart2js is the only way to deploy Dart to users' browsers, Chrome included. It already performs well enough for most apps.

The Dart VM is nice but its primary purpose right now is running the Dart compiler and in Dartium which is only used by developers. (You can use it for other things but the ecosystem isn't there yet.)
Just to be clear: you are asking how a negative, critical, "this is stupid" article made it to the top of Hacker News?
And at the same time, the adult porn business continues chugging on .. I have to wonder, what the fuck are we thinking as a human race, that if it's totally ok for adults to buy, distribute and sell porn, can't we really see that some people might not understand that it's not ok to watch porn with children .. and maybe they are driven to it originally by watching adult porn.

Would we have so many men interested in having sex with children if the porn industry wasn't so big ?
There are three obvious differences between this and software DRM. One is that this isn't a piece of non-critical software. You can live with your copy of 1989 being deleted from your kindle; something not so easy with a car.

Two is that a temporary loss of permissions to play a video game won't result in potentially permanent damage to that software; letting a modern battery run dry by refusing to charge it could.

Three, you're not saddled with a $15,000 plus hunk of metal, plastic, and rubber if your rights to use the software are revoked.
We've got a winner - best solution to the "too many cards in the wallet". [1]

[1] http://www.tightstore.com/
Right, I can understand that. It's a lot of effort to put in up-front just to support Google's pet project of the day.

This is a really good reason why dart2js exists and why so much effort has been expended in making it good.

However, I think that if Dart proves to be a compelling platform for developers I don't think it's out of the question for browser vendors to put some serious thought into integrating the Dart VM natively alongside JS.

After all, Google is going to be doing exactly that with Chrome/Chromium...
Sample size of 1 etc, this is just my experience.

I personally built a single page application about 2 years ago that worked in IE8, thanks to jQuery and the ecosystem of the time. jQuery, jQuery UI, various plugins incl. jsTree & DataTables.

It flew in Chrome, Firefox and Opera, even then. In IE8 it was slow as hell. Event listeners were slow, ajax and parsing JSON was slow. Everything was crazy slow. The app felt lumpy and awful. And when I hit bugs, the developer tools just were not there.

I would never do this again.

I'd wager that for IE < 8, for any non-trivial app, round-tripping to the server will give you a better UX than using JavaScript.

Deliver something usable for oldIE. There are many people that share this view. I suggest watching this talk on how the BBC deals with legacy browsers (9m 20s):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfvMQ316hMU&t=00h09m20s
How do you explain the plethora of online stores, including massive and presumably legitimate ones like Amazon, which accept Visa and other major credit cards?
Keyboard, size, battery life
Financial Analyst (FP&A)
The original email as pdf:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz6opf7oE6B7NGxaR1JzcHIzaXM...
I still don't get how do you manage to do security-sensitive things in Campfire via Hubot :-/
This is a bad way to look at it, because you're saying, inmplicitly, either sacrifice for the "common good" and be good, or help yourself and be evil.

The truth is that constantly stealing and manipulating instead of relaxing and focusing on producing real value to trade with others is not in your self interest.

So there is an argument to be made for behaving honestly that relies on self-interest instead of calling for self-sacrifice. That is a much more appealing argument, and one I can actually buy into.
Handing over your card to the waiters is standard in the US. You are basically trusting the waiter to not skim/copy the card. In the case that it is skimmed, the fraud policies I've experienced are very favorable to the consumer.

I was surprised to see in Quebec City that all the stores/restaurants had portable card machines they brought to you. That does make a lot more sense to me.
Interesting.

> And there's stuff in the photography bit that means pseudo-photographs still count as illegal.

That's where America differs. We expressly allow pseudo-imagery under the first amendment. Logic being that the harm comes in the exploitation, but for digital representations of images that are pornographic, nobody was exploited in the process of their creation (at least, assuming nobody was exploited in the process of their creation).

The UK laws though seem to both be more tangible than the situation discussed in the article, at least assuming that 'sexual grooming' has been defined and is fairly narrowly interpretable.

I'm not the person to say whether or not pretend pedo-porn is a net good or evil for the world; but I can see arguments in either direction, but if they're actually grooming children who they then meet, clearly, that's a net bad.

Edit: I had it exactly backwards, and now I'm wondering how in the hell I remember it so wrongly. Apparently we do not condone digital representations of child porn under the PROTECT Act of 2003[1].

I would swear I knew it the other way 'round.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography#Vi...
I just switched off heroku after using it for a couple years(sorry! I wish I could have stayed). I will attest dataclips are really cool, but your guy's pricing is out of wack (and customer support is eh).
Another point. If they opt to let consumers copy their own cards without the issuing bank's permission, I'd be very surprised if copying the mag strip is not a very big violation of TOS. If they go the guerrilla route, they'll basically be asking for legal trouble. I don't like to be critical, it's innovative, but I think they'll have a tough time.
The enemy of my enemy; people will do things they shouldn't just because they don't like the other person.
Oh no, people are having fun...
This looks great, anyone know how much the program will cost?
It's very easy to be a part of the the problem when you're not contributing to a solution. It's also very easy to say a lot about nothing. I mean that in that you source no projects that have gone the way you described.
Heroku PG doesn't support isolated secure networking only within your hosts.

Though it was free test version, I surprised to see my database is living together with many other people. (`\l`)

Your database is available publicly, and you have only minimal security.
Actually, it's many Power 7 boxes (original Watson had 90) clustered together.
But it's really cool if they provide access to their hardware (via API).
My favorite part is how they are trying to rationalize their semi-recent decisions to monetize their platform, while meanwhile on planet Github...
Any recommendations for learning more about PostgreSQL's features? I use Postgres for basic web app data store kind of applications, but haven't gone much beyond that. I've skimmed the manual and it doesn't look that dissimilar to MySQL's, but I see a lot of comments heaping praise on Postgres and/or criticizing MySQL. Is there a good book on Postgres?
> Oops, now your boss wants to know why you've just paid for your groceries on the business credit card and why you've cloned your business credit card!! The first can be an innocent mistake, but the second can be grounds for disciplinary action.

What's your point? If you're not allowed to clone your business credit card, and you do, of course there will be disciplinary action. That would be true if you used this "coin" or any other method to create the clone.
If it wasn't for the quality control, I wouldn't be here...The internet is littered with poorly maintained communities, but HN isn't one of them, by design.

Quality control and ruthless modding are certainly required - Kuro5hin is a great example of such a community which turned quickly into a hellhole when spammers and insincere trolls took over.

However I've seen plenty of hellbanned people on HN who had a completely innocuous comment history - no insults or bad behaviour - just one day their comments started being hidden. Such an extreme punishment should be reserved for spammers and people who use gross insults in arguments IMO, not imposed automatically as it appears to be.

There are many other more effective ways to police a community, including just commenting when you think something is out of line, which I think serve HN better and are also part of its quality control.

[EDIT there are even some hellbanned people in this discussion]
Coin is actually a step in the perfectly fine, sideways direction. It keeps everything on the credit card rail - something where there are fees so ridiculous that Congress actually PASSED legislation to limit them - that's amazing.

Stripe, Square, Coin, whatever - they all are just more convenient ways to make fee-based payments.

Why don't we just make payments from our banks directly? Did you know that's not only possible, but extremely easy now AND feeless? What if you didn't have to even give out your account number to merchants, what if you didn't even need to KNOW your account number to make them? What if I've been processing payments like this for 3 weeks now, have processed thousands of payments, and have done so without asking the user for anything they didn't know off the top of their head?

We don't need fees on our payments - if you agree and you're a developer who takes payments, email me @ tommy@thecityswig.com and let's talk. Not gonna try to sell you anything, I need your thoughts.

This is probably the first time you've heard me talk about this, but I'm starting in the comment section here on HN to start getting the pulse. I can't wait to discuss this hear in the coming months!
Hell, whenever someone tells me something I don't know, I find it a great opportunity to both learn something new (and probably cool) and to talk to another person about something that excites us both. Win/win.
Sad to throw away the brilliance of prototypes to go back to single-inheritance classes. uck
You are responding in the context of a rather simple, factual argument ("How bad can these devices be since common sense shows they're already on during takeoff anyhow?") with first a political attack, then an emotional attack. Was this really a helpful post?
yes I can totally see my wife looking forward to an attraction park ride while in heavy labor... I'd go with the bag, at first at least.
They already have:

http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-KU-0833-Wired-Keyboard-Bl...