skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, Eric Schmidt is blinded by his desire to maintain power. His greatest fear is losing his power... He says private drones should be banned and mentions nothing about the commercial use of drones by companies, especially his own company. And then he uses a small isolated example of drones being used for evil as to why they should be banned...terrorists? come on! Nothing is mentioned about drones being used for search and rescue, global natural resource tracking, travel, or even space exploration! This is clearly an attempt by a frightened individual to maintain control.

What we should start considering and making plans for is pooling our resources together in order to setup a system of public, open-sourced drones whose data is freely available to everyone, with an official, central repository backed up and stored at the NSA (after we open-source that and get a public API working).

Google's street view cars would no longer be needed. We could have a real-time digital duplicate of reality running using the NSA's resources. Anybody can plug in and 'teleport' anywhere in the world. Any crime that would happen would be recorded live, and emergency broadcast systems can be implemented.

Unfortunately, no person or company could profit from this publicly available data. Any monetized analysis tool would be duplicated and hosted publicly for free via the NSA web services. All open source and anyone can view and improve the code and master pulls can be voted on by the community.

This is great for location and mapping data, but what about taking it a step further and maybe we could use these drones as a sort of 'opt-in' activity tracker. We've heard of the military using gait detection from drones to track 'terrorists'. Well, how many people can one drone track at a time? Also, can it measure heart-rate, steps taken, breathes per minute, O2 levels, etc... There goes fitbit and fuelband...

This is just getting started, there's still traveling and shipping that can be freed and open-sourced...
Right, I have no issues with China using nuclear, it just highlights how much we aren't.
I'm assuming you have access to a search engine. Why not use it before spreading doubt? Are you unaware of both the controversy and potential damage? Did you read the article we are discussing?
Somehow your comment manages to be both smugly self-assured and also clear as mud. Bravo!
The allegations are a whiny slant on the facts: if you breach antitrust - which is in fact a pretty grievous offence against free enterprise - you get checked in considerable detail. None of this is unusual.
Elligator: Elliptic-curve points indistinguishable from uniform random strings
These are not personalised — so everyone gets the same list?
Bitcoin Tanks After Baidu Suspends Usage
This looks nice but it's missing one feature that's stopped me from adopting services like this after having tried a couple of them - let me download the VM!

There are I think two fundamental problems with remote IDEs. One is of course offline mode, and I don't think "sync your code later" is a solution unless it also lets you "test your code now". The other is remote resource restrictions that mean you can only use a remote IDE for some of your projects and still have to maintain a complete local environment for everything else.

Being able to download the VM means local hardware for projects that need more hardware, and real offline mode for people that need it. Going open source allows for this but it still leaves all the work of setting up each box which can be a real PITA (cloud9 is very hit-or-miss) and that can probably be monetized especially with the added benefits of remote access for when that is better or necessary.
There are many competitors, our IDE will be released as an open-source project in the coming weeks so that you can use it on your own laptop or server.
This would be an appropriate comparison if they had restricted all competitive games (although the Hearthstone ban is fairly damning), but given that they didn't, I think it would be more enlightening to ask if pro sports leagues prevent their players from participating in other leagues for the same sport.

My knowledge of professional sports is pretty limited to the US, where there is essentially a monopoly in each sport. Does anyone know about this? I suspect soccer or cricket, both fairly international sports, might have good examples?
Reminds me of Shanks law: "Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal."
They should offer and option where 2-4 apprentices are paired up with a mentor and split the costs.

2-4 is an optimal size for tutoring/apprenticeship.

As an experienced developer would be more than happy to drop money for private 2-4 person courses on specialty subjects.

i.e. 2x to 4x per week for three months on subjects like:

machine learning
distributed systems
database design
hardware product hacking and design
devops

etc.

On top of that, I think there are many companies that would be happy to spend money to train their employees this way. It would be awesome if for example, you knew your startup had a need for machine learning stuff in the next few months. Just pay to train 2 of your employees with a mentor, where they go meet with the mentor 2-4 times per week in the evenings after work.
A contract is how we formalize promises.

Every contract is formed in the shadow of its governing law.

Municipal bankruptcies have been a part of the law of the United States since 1937.

∴ no promises are being broken in a meaningful sense.
>but its so far from the aims of educators //

My eldest's year 1 [5 -6yo] teacher had a phrase "do it first time". She drilled in to the pupils the necessity for absolute and immediate obedience to her demands.

I find that sort of behaviour abhorrent as it denies the individual the right to express their own will. Yes, some conformity is required in order to make school work but certainly not to that level - this is a common trait throughout [many] schools in the UK.

Indeed I was lecturing a 4yo this evening, with some trepidation, as to why absolute obedience of an authority figure is not essential to welfare and can cause the loss of much that is of value. "There must be a good reason for Mrs. REDACTED to make that rule, otherwise it's a bad rule.".
Oh my god, I imagined it and it exists! Today is a good day.
While I appreciated the article, another one of his caught my eye and I thoroughly enjoyed it: http://www.jefftk.com/p/teach-yourself-any-instrument
cool, would be happy to see if there is stuff we can make use of in our own product:)...ours is not an official open source product but the source code is included for end-user modification.
I'm talking about a sudden catastrophic global effect. To some extent we got lucky with Chernobyl and it was contained, have yet to see with Fukushima.
Interesting idea for a service. Not sure if it would've solved my problems when I freelanced though, since the biggest time sink wasn't finding leads, it was all the communication before even starting a project to determine what they really needed in the first place, breaking it down by scope, priority, timing, etc.
I used the most basic setup possible to get started... which turned out to be gumroad and campaign monitor, so I haven't done any custom code yet.
Voting Pools: How to Stop the Plague of Bitcoin Heists, Thefts, Hacks, Scams
Sometimes.

As noted above, there are clauses placed in individual contracts in an attempt to limit injury.

The UCI (pro cycling sanctioning body) also prohibits the top-tier cyclists from racing in events that lack a UCI sanction.

This has been a large problem in US pro-mountain biking, as most long-distance races are not UCI sanctioned. In theory, pro racers wishing to participate in these events risk fines.
Which is worse? Taking money from the young (who already have bad prospects) and giving it to the elderly? Or "taking" money from the elderly and "giving" it to the young? I say "taking" in quotes because a pension is a contractual obligation, not a god-given right.

Ultimately neither solution is a good one. This is class warfare at its finest.

Personally I think the social contract of the US is starting to break down, as is societal cohesion. We're all super civilized when we all have good prospects and everyone's life is improving. As the prospects deteriorate so do people's willingness to participate.
Bill Gates’ Children Mock Him With ‘Billionaire’ Song
From a business point of view, I think the service could be a good idea, but only if provides service in exchange for value. What troubles me is the approach, seems weak, and it narrows the possibilities.
If this works as advertised, it's pretty cool! I have a few questions though:

How exactly do you find the leads? Did you write software to do it (and if so, how does it work?) or are you manually searching for leads?

Does everyone get the same leads? That is, if I were to sign up for the web developer leads, does that mean that every other person who signed up for the web developer leads gets the same 5-10 leads per day/week and I have to compete with all your other customers for them? Or do you have a big pool of equal quality leads and randomly select a small number to send to each person?

Also, friendly typo alert: "I'm an independent designer who's worked with startups, ad agency's" should be "I'm an independent designer who's worked with startups, ad agencies"

Overall, this looks pretty cool. Good luck!
This isn't information retrieval. This is data processing. Information retrieval is a subset of data processing.

Retrieval specifically needs an algorithm to determine document relevance. Everything you're learning is to understand how different parts of that algorithm affect the results. It's a very difficult problem, even if you assume that the corpus isn't sapient.

Stuff like n-grams are more about reshuffling in order to expose patterns. It's a little bit like regressing some noisy data to see the trend of correlation.
No offense, but you seem quite ignorant of the "non-anecdotal" data. Almost to the point of unbeleivably so.

(1) Lack of Personal Security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_security_industry_in_S...

The private security industry in South Africa is the largest in the world,[2] with nearly 9,000 registered companies and 400,000 registered active private security guards, more than the South African police and army combined

(2) White flight, wealth, brain drain (1990's):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africans_in_the_United_K...

According to the 2001 UK Census, 140,201 South African born people were calling the UK, although most recent estimates put the population (including those of South African descent) at over half a million. Unlike South Africa itself...The 2001 census showed that 90% of South Africans in the UK are White

(3) Objective measures of Violent Crime:

UNODC murder rates most recent year

South Africa	31.8	/ 15,940

UK	1.2	/ 722

But to the broader point also for context:

Subregion	Rate	Count	Region

Southern Africa	30.5	17,484	Africa

Central America	28.5	44,997	Americas

Eastern Africa	21.9	69,344	Africa

Middle Africa	20.8	25,330	Africa

South America	20	79,039	Americas

Northern Africa	5.9	12,276	Africa

Northern America	3.9	13,558	Americas

Western Europe	1	1,852	Europe

Australasia	1	268	Oceania

SA is basically an ~order of magnitude more violent that north america or western europe base on these data. Furthermore, the variation withing the African data from the sub-saharan regions to the north african ones is quite discernable.
That is some excellent marketing copy. If you'd said "it's just a freelance job posting aggregator with a newsletter as its interface"[0], I probably would have closed the window pretty quickly. Instead, you spent that space talking about the value proposition it provides (maybe a little too in-depth), an only brushing on the features. It's not too vague that I don't know what I'm getting, but it's not too specific that I think "$40 seems steep for a mailing list."

I don't even freelance, and I almost want to subscribe. :)

[0] That's what I got out of the pitch, anyway; I could have misunderstood.
I guess I'm not asking about the implied cap from the future conversion into preferred, but the EV stemming from the mere ownership of, say, a million dollars by the company. We use restricted stock that vests by lapsing a right to repurchase, since it's cheaper for the employee (no cost associated with the option itself) and it starts the long term cap gains clock right away. This makes them a direct shareholder, though, and if the only stock outstanding in the early days is common, it seems like the cash-related EV would have to be attributed to it, right?
Gamers understand that Riot has no way to shorten the queue time dramatically, and that's ok. That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is Riot's attempt to prohibit players' behavior to the point where people would consider to be way too invasive and way out of the norm.

With this event going forward, I just hope that the progamers get paid more for agreeing to this clause. This is pretty ridiculous.
This is a shameless plug, but you may be interested in getting involved with famo.us early next year when we launch. We are very interested in attracting people who will be building not just themes, but widgets and whatnot. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Email in profile.
Riot's side of the argument would be something like: how do you think Nike would feel if Tiger Woods decided to switch to Titleist balls next week despite having a contract that pays him to use Nike golf balls?
Clicqo, a Premium Content Platform, looking for publishers
I'm not personally a huge fan of SSI, however, it's simple and understandable, and things do what you think they do.

What I like about it is clean separation, a few command for common things, and if SSI doesn't directly support what you want you just hand it off to another program.
DotA-like was fairly common in LoL's early days, and still seems fairly appropriate. There are not, to my knowledge, any games that compete with DotA for creating the genre.
I learned about n-grams in a natural language processing class in uni.

A related (but more interesting, imho) concept is the Hidden Markov Model, which is used for things like part-of-speech tagging and areas of speech recognition. It takes a sequence of "observations", like sound vectors or words, and uses a probabilisitic model to match them with "hidden states", like phonemes or parts of speech.

I got a job with a part-of-speech tagging website I made as a pet project for that class :)
Verify Software by Playing Games
Frank Shoemaker would call this noise.
Murder has a specific meaning, and is distinguished from other forms of homicide by the presence of intent. None of the many links you have provided concern murder charges.
Phew! I always thought I was the only one who thought Paxos was incomprehensible. I also recently learned that Google's version on Paxos is much simplified and similar to Raft (mentioned as an aside in talk about Spanner as same conference[1].

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spanner-distributed-googl...
Generally speaking, life gets massively better from one generation to the next. There are exceptions, of course, for nations collapsing in war, and there's pollution and whatnot posing a lurking threat, but overall:

If you had the choice, and had to pay for your decision, how much would you pay to live in the 2000s instead living in the 1900s?

The elderly deserve their pensions. The young get Modern Progress.
The notes have proliferated because they are quick and easy (no transaction costs, etc.) so it's the way many startups like to raise money. Priced rounds are fine too - they just tend to take more time and involve costs. YC and others have open-sourced streamlined equity financing documents, but so far, nothing has been as easy as raising on a convertible note.
Unless previous civilizations deliberately left no trace a la Star Trek Prime Directive. Or we're unable to perceive their interactions because of some perceptual blindness. Fun to think about.
Scammers in a Public Wi-Fi Wonderland
But how do you feel about the story itself? Lots of journalism has inaccuracies, but I'd rather know what you think about such a weird and intriguing phenomenon.

Most people here understand quite well that primes are not closed under multiplication, by definition, and it wasn't really central to the story. Neither was their weird understanding of Tor.
This article proposes that we close the barn door after the horse is left.

If my employer offered me a pension I'd laugh in his face. In 2013, a pension benefit's market value is $0. Who actually believes the money will be there when the time comes?

After 30 years of private sector firms refusing to fund pensions and passing them off to the PBGC, the public sector is finally getting into the game. No one should surprised.
I signed up a few days ago. The leads are good, but there aren't that many (5-10 per day). Do you see the number of leads growing? Eventually the leads you send will get pestered to death the larger your list grows, unless you can scale your list as you scale your customer base. I can see that really biting you. Based on your pricing, I can't see it being viable unless you can at minimum 10x'ing your leads list.
0 is important, but it's not true that without it we can't have the number 10.

In written form, for example, we can represent 10 and 20 without 0 easily, as the 0 is just a syntactic placeholder:

- Roman Numerals: X and XX

- Scientific Notation: 1e1 and 2e1

- Base 16: a and 14

- Set theory: {{{{{{{{{{}}}}}}}}}} and {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

But more importantly, the existence of the number 10 is independent of it's representation. Mathematically, the existence of the natural numbers depends on a "unit" (which we often represent with 1) and a method for incrementing or inducing the subsequent number.[1]

0 ensures the existence of groups [2], and by extension many important mathematical structures. I get your point though, and I wonder what would be an accurate, but still relatable, reason for a young person to grasp the importance the number 0?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_infinity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)
Every debt is a promise that should be held. But in a bankruptcy that's not possible, so it only becomes a question of which promises will be broken and by how much.
No, but because the initial development was a crash-priority war time project. The later generations of fission reactors were privately funded.

General Fusion (lead vortex compression) is venture backed. Bussard's fusion company is private, although the get lots of funding from government contracts.
That seems like quite a lot for 100 characters. I'm guessing they are mostly numbers?

EDIT: wait, you actually ran code produced from this?
If the test was given as a list, then I suspect a large number of the results are skewed just by the nature of people's desire to think in terms of pattern-breaking (e.g. Would the results be the same if it was the five male samples followed by the five female samples, or if only one sample was provided per person). Of course, talking about people's "nature" is itself conjecture and probably warrants it's own study.
Beeline Bikes Is Like A Homejoy Or Uber-For-Bike Repair
Currently not offering personalization but leads are outnumbering members 26 to 1.

Also personalization is in the works, however that WILL require some coding =)
High frequency? MtGox, which is still the second largest exchange, has something like a 5 second execution lag.
This is a little tangential, but this thread made me think of this:

> Well, Professors Kimball and Smith, welcome to journalism, where “bad at math” isn’t just a destructive idea — it’s a badge of honor. It’s your admission to the club. It’s woven into the very fabric of identity as a journalist.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/matt-waite-how-i-faced-my-f...
Ask HN: Is Bitcoin split possible
Similar to stock split. Seems both the sellers and buyers have the incentive for such event to occur. Can someone comment on how technically possible/impossible for that event to occur? And how would it impact the x-coin eco-system?
You're missing the point: in many cases, choice of C is not ideological but practical. I love Modula-3 and OCaml (and ML's incorporation of Modula's module system in general); yet I'm using C++ for the project I am working on. From even the purely technical point of view, despite all the features OCaml has that I enjoy, building this system wouldn't be feasible -- I need shared memory concurrency and multi-core support, for example.

On the other hand, memory leaks occur just well in memory-safe languages (looking at Modula-3, I see a WeakPtr type -- which is there for this very reason). Finally there are also many reasons to want to have manual control over memory -- which when using high-level languages, ends up looking very much like C programming (e.g., Unsafe module in Java). However, you're essentially on your own when doing this.

By the way, memory debuggers are just one example -- plain debuggers are another, tools for tracing the code execution, performance tuning, etc... are another. As are mature and universally available libraries.

I don't mean to disparage high-level languages: I greatly enjoy programming in them and would like them to expand. Yet we're talking about existing code -- and in this case, C's maturity and universality (as a "lingua franca" of programming) are unrivaled. Nothing stops one from using -- and enjoying -- both advanced high level languages and C.
Well, other than it not actually working, its fine. I click 'start editing' after setting up a box and it prompts me for a username and password.
That may be true, I've never used Elfster, but the design of this landing page is far superior and more festive in my opinion. I probably wouldn't use Elfster after seeing this based on appearance alone.
Is that supposed to be some kind of HN easter egg? I mean, who has quick enough access to that character to accidentally write it instead? And if he's using some esoteric layout, I'm sure he knows his keyboard well enough not to mix them up!
but the number of people who read the story and get notably upset is very small compared to the people watching these streams

I don't know about that...the player communities of "MOBA" games tend to be pretty stubborn, indignant, unruly, etc. It's definitely a weird little world of abrasive man-children (I've put many hours into DotA and HoN). I see this as exactly the kind of "oppression" that the pros (and thus their followers) would complain about and subvert until it gets reversed.

From the reddit thread:

QTpie on riot contract: "Riot can suck my dick" - QTPie stream 2013, while playing FF X

Diamondprox after reading this: Good. Time to break some rules. opens Hearthstone
try ours (crudzilla.com), it is downloadable and multi-language..and if you are in an enterprise environment, java should fit right in.
Android game steals WhatsApp chats and offers them for sale
Assuming that you're willing to maintain inventory at multiple exchanges, you could still absolutely do arbitrage inter-exchange.
Looks pretty nice, however the $40/month seems a bit pricey to me in my current situation (3 month contract coming to an end - may or may not be more work, so I want to keep my options open). Have you thought about taking a commission of jobs you fill a la recruiters?

Edit: Also great marketing copy!