skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google could technically do a similarity measure between images coming from similar links (or similarly worded emails) and then provide the cached version. But then advertisers could hide random information in the image (steganography), making two visually similar looking images but with dissimilar enough content, that Google will be have to up the ante. And so on and so forth.

But you are spot on them being "willfully dishonest". The way I look at it, they are at this point trying to push the barrier and see where users will protest enough that they need to roll-back.
Amount of sillyness in the is spectacular, though not unusual in the government. Silly name (which would be completely unsearchable and also due to work length may not display well on many system), silly idea that coding should be designated as "foreign language". And on top of that - an idea that the government should take money from people and then give them these money back through the intermediary of schools so that they would teach their children to code.

And now imagine how exactly coding would be taught in the same schools in which 25% of 12th graders do not pass "basic reading" test. In their own native language, not in hexadecimal or Greek. Where those money would be spent? How these courses would look? What forms would this "coding education" take in order to get those government money? If you think this is silly now, it'll get much worse if this ever passes.
And now I've just gotten an email purporting to describe my order, which I made through a freshly created account by virtue of never having used GOG.com before.

The email lists seven games, only four of which I've previously heard of, and none of which is a Fallout game.

What is going on over there?
I don't know if we can speak about their motives, but they certainly contribute to overall stability.

Use your head for a second.

The US government hands out millions of dollars in foreign aid to it's "enemies" - governments who are quite happy to parade around talking about standing up the US, and then holding out their hand for handouts from them.

It's quite clear what they're doing - they're basically doling out money in the hopes that it'll prevent civil unrest and nations imploding - sure, they might not like these people, and they might even be actively trying to destroy them - but the alternative is to have a messy civil war, and then have to come in to clean it all up.

The US is very interested in global stability - you can argue that's also in their own interests as well, but you can't argue they don't bankroll geopolitical stability.
You can also buy prepaid, no-contract phones from major carriers like T-Mobile. They're not all cheap; you can get a pre-paid smart phone.
> I just don't get the sentiment of "unlock my free-with-contract phone two months into my contract, you bastards!" It's not your phone.

Sure it is. You received a discount on the phone on the condition that you sign a separate contract which obligates you to pay the carrier a certain amount of money for the next 2 years, but that's a separate matter.

If you've bought a phone, you can do what you want with it. Separately, you may have to pay a penalty for breaking a contract (and that penalty would include the cost of the discount that you initially received), but that doesn't mean that the phone isn't yours.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who have two personal Twitter accounts. One is public, the other one is protected.

Most of these people use third-party clients rather than the website; Twitter doesn't make it terribly easy to switch accounts, which makes for a good value proposition to drop a few bucks onto a client.
Things haven't been stable enough for that to be true.

For example, you've put the current electricity consumption at something like $100,000 a day (14,000 kw * 24 hours * $0.20 = $67,200). The mining reward is closer to $3 million per day.
The point of a currency is that it's an agreed upon medium of exchange, not necessarily a universal one. We're accustomed to dealing with multiple currencies, as you correctly note. None of our currencies have the trait of universal.
If the goal is to post publicly, but not have the harasser see those messages, then no - that's not rationally possible.
Fidelity halts bitcoin investments from IRAs
I think that's a rather 'meta' example. A better one would be that if someone can reply to your tweets or mention your username, they can make it appear that you're (rudely) refusing to engage them in legitimate conversation. Or they can retweet you, followed by a series of their own tweets ridiculing you. I'm sure there are more creative ideas than this.

One might argue that any harm done here is outweighed by the fact that the target of the harassment won't be able to see any of it, and I find that argument reasonably persuasive. It seems that Twitter's decision has been taken in order to make blocking a 'silent' or 'invisible' action, such that the person being blocked cannot know that they're blocked. Their calculation seems to be that harm is reduced this way, because it introduces an asymmetry of information in favour of the person doing the blocking - they know who they have blocked, but the person they've blocked does not. To call that 'capitulation' is not an accurate reading of the situation, in my view.
Show HN: TraceBTC, accounting and more for Bitcoin
My company has had a Double in our San Francisco lounge for about a year now (we helped Double Robotics beta test it). About 95% of our employees are remote so it's pretty cool being able to hop in and say hi to anyone that's co-working out of our lounge that day.

It's really no different than using Skype video chat or a Google+ Hangout except that you aren't stuck on someone's laptop -- you can move around if you need to.

It's rather gimicky but it's also quite fun. Still, if I needed to talk one-on-one with someone, or even participate in a group meeting (something I've never actually done due to my company's culture), then I think a standard video chat would work just as fine.
Google was already image caching external email images, IIRC. So as far as amount of raw information being leaked, I think today's feature launch represents a step backwards.
Millennial women have seriously narrowed the wage gap with men
For WebRTC they also need an encoder. ffmpeg uses libx264 for encoding H.264, which is GPL.
>have any RPGs since Fallout surpassed it in allowing the player to truly embody an actual path?

Yes, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
My post was just an alternative to the main thread.
I do believe in hard work, and being consistent but Elon Musk's case is definitely extreme.
DataMind: Codecademy for Data Science
If subsidized works for you, go for it. There are a bunch of MVNOs that host on Verizon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_v...
http://www.coindesk.com/asic-miners-litecoin-soon/
Data Science Weekly Newsletter - Issue 3
> I just don't get the sentiment of "unlock my free-with-contract phone two months into my contract, you bastards!"

This is a reasonable thing to want if you travel overseas and want to pop in a cheap local SIM card for the duration of your trip, instead of paying the absurd roaming charges.
Perl:

print pack "H*", "416D65726963612043616E20436F646520"
Linked version: http://pri.org/stories/2013-12-12/ethiopian-village-has-gain...
His crime was being capable of displacing Kim Jong Un. Almost every monarch in history had a purge of uncles and male cousins.
Amazing Discovery With Magnets
I disagree, when IE8 and 9 came out, and within a year of their release, did many people consider them "modern browsers"? I don't think so. (Only with IE10 and really with 11 did Microsoft's browser be worthy of that designation.)

New != Modern
They should probably compensate the merchant who's photos they use with adwords or shopping credit for each photo that they use. Otherwise it seems too scummy.
So when you get a car loan and buy a car, the bank can dictate where and how you can drive and service it? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a sentiment.

The carrier lends you the money, you agree to pay it back, that's as far as their involvement goes. This is standard practice in Europe. You get a phone for cheap, you agree to pay monthly installments, you can throw the phone off a cliff or install BeOS on it, for all the carrier cares.
Indeed. And better yet (from the POV of stalkers) the change will allow them to easily join in conversations between their targets and other people in the conversation.
It depends if this is a Good news or Bad news. lol
How Gmail’s Image Caching Affects Open Tracking
Definitions of advanced and barbaric vary wildly.
> I don't know if we can speak about their motives, but they certainly contribute to overall stability.

"For the world" is speaking to motives. America isn't bankrolling "stability for the world", its bankrolling stability where it suits the interest of American decision-makers, and instability where stability doesn't those interests.

> The US is very interested in global stability

Except for those places where its interested in altering the status quo, in which cases it spends lavishly on doing that.

> you can argue that's also in their own interests as well

"Their own interests" -- that is, those of American decision-makers -- are the only factor, not an incidental "as well" factor, in the decision of where to bankroll stability and where to bankroll instability.
Still, fiction is fiction.

It's like all those questions : would you rather do this, or live all your life with this. They are fun, but they are useless as they never happened. There is no point thinking about them besides playing with your imagination.

Fiction is the same to me, yes it came from a real context, but it's still a work of fiction and doesn't teach you anything about real life.

e.g. Are you gonna learn about dating by reading romantic novels or real life stories?
Philantro (https://www.philantro.com) - working with nonprofits and in the so called "Civiltech" sphere has humbled and made me a more gifted programmer. It's the sort of transformation that can only come with coding for the heart vs the pocket. We're launching in a few weeks.
Pure liquid water does indeed freeze at 0C, but the water in Europa's oceans is unlikely to be pure. The presence of salts can significantly depress the freezing point of water; ocean water on Earth freezes at about -2C or so. With just sodium chloride alone, it's possible to knock that down to about -20C. Europa's oceans are known to contain magnesium chloride (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-082), and probably have other chlorides as well. It's definitely possible, indeed likely, that the temperatures involved are sub-zero, but I agree that -50C sounds unlikely. I'm not sure what the actual lower bound would be though, given the largely unknown chemistry of the water.
So now only Google will know everything about you...
In my view, there's a difference between programming and computer science, though I could forgive the Rep for using one as a generic term for the other. Disclaimer: I'm a programmer and definitely not a computer scientist.

As I mentioned in another recent thread, "programming" doesn't need to consist of a semester of C, or a slog through Horowitz and Sahni. My kids simply think of programming in terms of "making the computer do things." They like to play with Scratch, and have made me promise to teach them Python. My daughter's interested in math, and I've showed her how to solve equations and graph things using Maxima. We have a couple of Raspberry Pi's, so the kids have gotten comfortable with the command line, configuration files, etc.

Just find ways for the kids to do things and make things using computers, with a bias towards letting some of those things resemble programming.
I find lists like this and Sivers.org/book very useful for finding new reading material, some good ones I've read this year (in no particular order);

Who owns the future - Jaron Lanier

Canoeing the Congo - Phil Harwood

Margaret Thatcher - The Authorized Biography

Venture Deals - Brad Feld / Jason Mendelson

1000 Ultimate Experiences - Lonely Planet
The key here is Cisco is paying the patent royalties for anyone who uses their codec binaries - which will cost them $6.5m/year. They could do the same for x264, but it's probably legally safer to distribute an implementation they wrote themselves.
YouTube Productivity Hack: HTML5 Playback Speed Attribute
Ugg pas cher
ugg pas cher
My mantra:

Non-fiction teaches you about the world.

Fiction teaches you about yourself.
Works great. You can put 3 hours of 1080p24 content on a single layer DVD (4.4 GB) and it still looks great. And there's room left for a soundtrack too.
Nexus 5. What most people failed to mention is this is an unlocked $350 smartphone going head to head with $700 - $900 handsets.

If you want a smartphone that's fast, responsive and powerful, void of all the bloatware and secondary network branding and feels and looks great - go with Nexus 5. The camera isn't as great at the Moto X and HTC One but all else it can hold its own. You own the phone outright, get Android updates first, no monthly fees for the device and you take it wherever you want to only pay for service. How much better can it possibly get :)

The other phones are great as well - but no where can you find a better value than a Nexus device.
>Fiction is the same to me, yes it came from a real context, but it's still a work of fiction and doesn't teach you anything about real life.

And what is fiction based on, if not real life? Fiction is the number one way to learn how to see the world from the point of view of a completely different person, only in fiction can you leave your own shoes. I'm pretty sure that reading fiction makes you a better person, and it's proven that reading fiction improves a person's empathy [1]. Increased empathy means that you can put yourself into other leaders' heads and guess what made them make their decisions, thereby learning how the world works.

And yes, you can learn about dating from a romance novel, except that about 99% of them are not about real life.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/liter...
How does that same critique not apply to many of the worlds currencies?

You're talking as if multiple new currencies are not possible when it clear that they are. People who use currencies don't care about the market, they care that products are priced in that currency and are relatively stable.

The market will eventually level out as usage grows, anything new is going to be volatile but there's clearly room for more than one player as long as they're not identical and offer different value propositions then they'll be taken up if only to hedge against the weaknesses of their competitors.

Bitcoin has flaws, it's terrible wasteful of energy as if proof of work were the only possible solution to creating coins. Other coins offer different less wasteful ways of minting new coins, that's going to have a market regardless of bitcoin's success.
It doesn't look like they have much storage at the top of the system. An easier approach might be to dynamically control the flow through the system, restricting it during low load and returning more water to the stream as 'environmental flows' to keep it healthy.
Looking forward to the day when we're not afraid to abandon Javascript and look towards a more competitive development ecosystem in browsers.
Even if your mortgage isn't paid off, you can still live in your house and modify it as you see fit. Granted there are some conditions (have to maintain insurance, etc.), but phones represent a smaller possible loss, and thus should probably be less restrictive with what you do with the collateral (also, phones aren't secured loans, so they can come after you for other assets, unlike houses).
Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office
If you think $200 buys you an iPhone, you're sadly deluded.

At a typical retail markup, perhaps ~$400 is about right.

For those interested> Teardown Shows iPhone 5S Costs at Least $199 to Build, $173 for the 5C

http://allthingsd.com/20130924/teardown-analysis-shows-iphon...
I don't think teaching computer programming in public schools is silly and I hope I didn't imply that in my comment.

And now imagine how exactly coding would be taught in the same schools in which 25% of 12th graders do not pass "basic reading" test.

One approach to teaching a new subject might be to forget about the bottom 25% and the top 25% and focus on building up skills for the 50% in middle (2nd and 3rd quartile). If you can get a foothold there you can begin to expand at the margins.
Good info, cheers for that!
"over the last few years it's also been clear that codon bias can be evolutionarily constrained. For a while, it mostly thought to be based on tRNA levels (basically anticodons). However, it's been increasingly clear that there are other constraints to protein coding sequences than just the decoded protein sequence (aka the genetic code)."

This is a much older question than the last few years -- it's one of those "evergreen" questions that's been around for almost as long as we've been able to do statistics on codon prevalence. You'll see hand-wavy explanations for differences in codon usage in really old textbooks. The tRNA one is a particularly old chestnut -- I think I read about that one in my first undergrad course on molecular biology.
Which is why it's far from a sure thing, only a possibility. However, if an object impacts Europa directly from a heliocentric orbit it won't spend much time in Jupiter's radiation belts. With enough luck maybe it would hit just the right patch of Europa to be captured in the ice and make its way down into the ocean without much exposure to radiation. Certainly that's a very unlikely event, as is simply getting a rock containing life from Earth to Europa in the first place. However, the Solar System is very, very old and in such stretches of time unlikely events can and do happen.

Ultimately the possibility cannot be conclusively ruled out, and given the implications it's worth considering.
I hate seeing requirements for college degrees - creativity begot know-how, not the other way around.
You may learn things about the expectations of those that read romantic novels, some of whom you may want to date. Fiction is instrumentally useful insomuch as it teaches you the cultural context others are immersed in. It's probably worth it for most peoples to learn how fiction works and why it is appealing, something that can't be done exclusively through non-fiction. Spending ~10% of one's reading time on fiction isn't an unreasonable use of a rational person's time, disregarding the pleasure of it entirely. At least, this is my rationalization.
Same for me - just went back to the fallout offer page (http://www.gog.com/promo/fallout_series_giveaway_winter_prom...) and redid the "checkout now" and it then added them to my just-opened account (I was logged in at the time).
As a simple counterpoint, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a fictional book that imparts upon the reader many things about 'real life': both historical/factual (what Russian gulags were like; what the climate of WWII-era Europe was like) and personal (the true value of things; how one survives in the face of suffocating adversity).
I am sure this is true, but very specifically getting to just the level of above 40m, it can't hurt, can it? I am not saying if you fund them later they will become dropbox, just have a higher likelihood of hitting 40-50m
Unless they've somehow overlooked something, surely their terms of service will?
"Tales from Genome" course on Udacity is pretty awesome, although at times painfully anal/detailed with regards to assignments.

I think you can skip those, though.

https://www.udacity.com/course/bio110
Ah, but to hell with rationality! You think it's rational for someone to reply to all of your tweets with mindless abuse, and to encourage other people to do the same?

For better or worse (I think it's for worse, which is why I don't tweet all that much), Twitter encourages rapid-fire think-before-speaking responses to things. You see something you don't like, you hit reply and boom, you've just told that person to die in a fire. Or you've just retweeted it to your small but equally annoying group of friends. The purpose of the old blocking system, in a way, was to prevent trolls[1] from seeing things that might provoke them into action.

The goal is not actually to prevent someone from seeing your messages, but to prevent someone who is logged in to an active twitter account with a >0 number of followers from seeing your tweet. That's a non-trivial difference. I started out (in my other comments) thinking that the difference really was trivial, but you actually have to think like a troll in order to understand why it isn't. Unless they really cared about harassing someone, the old-style block would probably be enough to stop most people from tweeting an insult, if only because it forces them to 'cool off' by logging out, finding the person they want to harass, and logging back in again in order to reply.

I can't shake the feeling that neither policy is really right, and there must be a more elegant solution. But, it's 1am here and I should probably get some sleep before trying to find the solution that has evaded the entire internet for 20 years.

[1] I don't use the term 'trolls' lightly. Lots of things get called 'trolling' which really aren't, but in this case I think it's valid.
Harassers can set up another account, but they generally don't. And not seeing the harasser's messages is not the only goal - when you force the harasser to unfollow, they don't see and harass your retweets either.

The goal isn't not to be seen - people already know about protected accounts. The goal is not to be harassed.
Why federal government has to do it? There are no state governments that know these facts? Let's assume this is true for all states - but at least California has Cárdenas and Honda, right? And I assume those have some support in California, otherwise they wouldn't be elected. So if they did it in California (which, as everybody knows, has lots of money to spend on government programs) and it were a great success (as most of government programs dealing with what to teach and what not are), California would produce a lot of highly qualified programmers that could take jobs from every other state (software development is highly mobile) so other states would see the light and introduce the same programs in their states. So why it must be federal and can't be decided on the state level?
I actually tried playing this. When I left the room in which I woke up, some sort of giant angel thing basically insta-killed me. Considering that this was after 5 minutes of gameplay, I gave up. :/
N3twork: A New Tool for Curating the Unruly Web
Actually you didn't have to log out or switch accounts. If a user blocked me, I could simply navigate to their page manually and view their tweets. It only prevented me from following them.
Absolutely this. Gold bugs and Austrians like bitcoin. Keynesians call it deflationary they'll like peercoin better. The math community may prefer primecoin. Namecoin could be the base of the new DNS system as well as many others attracting the tech community. Each will attract people who prefer their rules. Customize capitalism, I like that; totally stealing that.
Former Google Exec Takes Over U.S. Patent Office
Intro to error correction: Reed-Solomon explained
> e.g. Are you gonna learn about dating by reading romantic novels or real life stories?

Well, since romantic novels aren't really about dating, I'm not sure the question makes sense. A better question would be: "Will you learn more about love from reading fiction or by reading nonfiction?" And for that I think the answer is obvious.
Google contemplates homemade ARM chips to power its servers