skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine you were a US intelligence officer with an extremely in-depth knowledge of socioeconomic momentum around the world. You are aware that oil is a relatively irreplaceable dependency and that most oil is controlled by foreign regimes that are not allies of the US. You realize that if things keep going this way, those in control of oil will have huge advantages in the future. You have the ability to recognize that perhaps in the long term, this could result in these countries overtaking the US economically and culturally. These regimes have religious connections to organizations who are militarily anti-american, too!

But the society is not familiar enough with the threat to fully grasp and take seriously. Do you wait for the threat to play out and take your chances with the society sufficiently changing its attitude towards it in time? Or do you galvanize things with a false flag operation that will cause less damage than the real threat but induce the much needed urgent action against it? Almost like a vaccine. Innocent people will die either way.
Thank you! God I hate Wired's writing so much.
Ask these guys:

http://www.o9a.org/
Learning anything new is all well and good, but the thing that's actually valuable to society and "america's future" isn't really more coders, it's people who are really fantastic at what they do; whatever it may be. I'd rather someone dedicate their life to becoming the best preserve-maker in the world than fixing bugs in groupon. The preserve-maker may not reach billions of people with his/her work, but based on my own observations, I've found that the relative quality of one's achievements in a field has more leverage than the scale.
Except I didn't say "all republicans" anything.
I prefer full control over dynamicity of scaling.

In other words if cloud allows control from fully manual to fully automatic - it means the cloud is ready for all kind of clients.
There were classes like this at my school at least.
Added to Mashape! https://www.mashape.com/community/http-status-cats

(Disclosure: I work for Mashape)
Of course Steve learned it from his various travels and interests. The trick is getting people to agree with you.
If this were true then we'd be hearing less and less about coding education, not more. There would be less "I have an idea and need a programmer" people, and not more.

More people want to learn how to code now because they realize they are at a fundamental disadvantage in manipulating these things that are entering every facet of our lives. This is the dominant force, not the slow marginalization of the utility of writing source code vs. well established problems like those that can be solved by Excel. In any case, programmers are currently proverbial priests who are the gatekeepers to enabling this effective use of computers, which I think explains a lot of the resistance to this stuff.
It actually is not an absurd statement if you take in to account the entire quote, "…as a means of exchange." 10 million companies using bit pay is good for raising awareness of the general public, and may in fact lead to more widespread adoption.
However as a means of exchange the most important characteristic is value. These companies are intentionally not using bitcoin as a measure of value, which is the next major hurdle that the currency needs to overcome.

"To be widely acceptable, a medium of exchange should have stable purchasing power (Value) and therefore it should possess the following characteristics:
value common assets,
constant utility,
low cost of preservation,
transportability,
divisibility,
high market value in relation to volume and weight,
recognisability and
resistance to counterfeiting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange
But then again, to push the conservatism to the extreme, not much of the actual original SF Ohlone native culture is still remaining.
I suspect it has more to do with problem-solving and analysis. In theory students should gain this kind of knowledge from mathematics, but I don't think that seems to work out in reality for most people.
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag
Even if you have a bunch of young people in one area, it doesn't mean they will mingle with the rest of the city. Stanford for example keeps within it's own bubble for the most part. There are PhD students who never even go to university street in Palo Alto for example. A Stanford alum I dated for a few months confirmed the same thing. It's only been relatively recently that many tech startups have been moving to SF. It used to be the south bay where many startups lived.

You live in SF/Berkley as a single person, you move down to the south bay to raise a family in stable suburbia with 'good schools' vs. the dice roll that is SF. That is the pattern. More tech companies and mostly male tech workers wont solve it. Downtown SJ is already a bit dense as it is.
Steve Jobs in one of the Bob Cringley interviews:

"I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer--should learn a computer language--because it teaches you how to think. It's like going to law school. I don't think anybody should be a lawyer, but I do think going to law school would actually be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way, in the same way that computer programming teaches you, in a certain way, how to think. I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something that everybody takes."
I haven't been in high school for over 14 years; are they mandatory/required?
As per the referenced link, I'm not surprised those sorts of deals backfire (where the founder takes money off the table) you lose a lot of urgency when 'rich' is assured (for some definition of rich).

I would hazard that it is unusual for the founders to take a 'soft' exit like this but admit I don't have any numbers to back that up. I know the Groupon founders did and got some harsh press but no long lasting damage.
That was my first thought. Based on the novels I've read, I would interpret it in a couple of possible ways:

- You receive a message, but the system can't tell you why your received it nor what you should do. (The Trial)

- It's not a distributed messaging system with bugs. Actually, you are the bug. (Metamorphosis)

As an aside, I went to a tech conference in Prague two months ago and visited Café Slavia, a hangout not just of Kafka, but also author Milan Kundera and president/poet Václav Havel. I had a glass of absinthe in their honour.
I personally think it has to do with wealthier people doing what they want regardless of what the community wants.

Similar outrage flared after the Sean Parker wedding. Regardless of what he actually did at the site, regardless that he paid a fine after the fact, regardless that it created jobs (I know a guy who worked for the lighting company) he pulled the ask-for-forgiveness-rather-than-permission stunt and did what he wanted to do, community & regulations be damned. He got what he wanted: a magical wedding in a beautiful, protected area of Big Sur.
Yes, "not ready" is exactly right. And this is one of Bret's points: Engelbart wasn't actually interested in technology itself. He was interested in sociology: creating groups of people who were ready to do transformative work by collaborating in new ways. Whether or not this model would work is up for debate. But that collaboration, not any particular piece of software, was what Engelbart was after.
I stifled the urge to say the same thing, but then realized that I'd lose the evening to defining what "mainstream" meant, after people dredged up random examples of snake oil from Schneier blog posts; not to mention the inevitable rehashing of the "beware custom algorithms and 390244 bit keys" thread, which is going to have to happen now because bringing up crypto truisms from the late-90s makes people feel smart.
F*ck you LinkedIn. I Don't even have an account there, and they keep spamming me with invites from people. I thought maybe these were coming from some phisher site, but seems that they are actually doing it themselves.
Hard at work in a sexcam studio?

Honestly is this SFW and is it a video or article?
This Clinkle thing is going to end up being one of the big laughingstocks of the current bubble after it goes down and the bubble bursts. Similar to Pets.com and Webvan and such.

This actually gave me a flashback to a website I had completely forgotten about. Does anyone remember FuckedCompany.com?
Plenty of places (in the U.S. at least) charge a credit card fee, or require a minimum transaction. Also, as the grandparent mentioned, the cost of processing credit cards gets inevitably passed on to the customer. There was an article a while back about a local business owner who had fought the necessity to process credit cards for years (http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/07/northwe...). Businesses that don't process credit cards presumably don't have that cost to pass on, but could still accept bitcoin as a non-cash method of payment.
Obesity isn't as much of a factor as you might think. With proper technique, very obese people can swim (at least 24 yards, which was the bar used for that statistic) without much effort.

Adipose tissue (fat) has a density slightly lower than that of water, so the primary concern is really keeping your head above water and not panicking (both of those are mostly technique, not really 'physical feats'). Once you've got floating mastered, an elementary backstroke will get you moving slowly through the water without much caloric expenditure.

Swimming ability seems to correspond to family income (and therefore access to pools) rather closely. Increasing the swimming skills of the general population would mostly be a matter of ensuring that school districts have pools, and making swimming lessons in PE classes a higher priority. Kids don't die because they don't know how to play badminton, but people do drown...

(Disclosure: One of my jobs through highschool and part of college was working as a swimming instructor, which is part of why this issue has my attention)
I second that motion.
BitTorrent Sync 7 Times Faster Than Dropbox
Mutliple State Healthcare Exchanges Vulnerable to Wi-Fi Attack
It is SFW and is in article format.
I don't get the objection. It seems to me that while the buses may cause disturbances to transit, they're better than the alternative of having a bunch of private cars on the road.

Think they would do that for your parking tickets?

If those tickets were for behaviors that are actually socially beneficial, shouldn't they? And if they wouldn't anyway, how is it Google's fault?
Google's Eric Schmidt wants a ban on Amazon's drones
>stop and think about possible sources of contamination

One great one from my Machine Learning professor was an assignment where we were required to normalize our data to [0,1]. After doing this and then going through the typical cross-validation cycle, he had us try and figure out where we contaminated our validation sets. As it turns out, we all normalized our data before splitting it up, which meant that training data influenced testing data.

It's a simple fix, but if you've done that and gone to run a large convolutional neural network for a week only to find that you made a stupid error like that, it can be pretty painful. (Especially since the bad generalization error might not be obvious until you use it the model in production)
From the article:

>>"As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960′s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings."

I know I'll be 65+ years old; retired in a Nigerian village eating some Obe Ata Dindin. Suddenly someone is going to show me a breaking-news article about the real truth of 9/11. Based on this, I see it takes about 55 years before the truth comes out. Anytime you read something about seemingly insane 9/11 truthers talk, keep this bit of info in the back of your mind and consider that they just might be right...
How Ramen Hacked The Worlds Largest Hackathon
Surespot depends on a bunch of google play services and is officially distributed on google play. Is there a way to install pre-compiled surespot apk outside of google play for those that don't install proprietary google code on their phone? I noticed that the open-source android apk repository F-Droid can't distribute it for this reason: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/surespot-encrypted-messagin...

(Side note: moxie prohibits TextSecure on F-Droid as there is no forced auto update like google play. I currently have to download and compile the TextSecure source code myself, which is no biggie, but as a CM user, I'm definitely excited about this integration!)
The west is losing faith in its own future
Can you explain what Vagrant adds on top of VirtualBox? When I tried it it didn't seem that different than just using VirtualBox directly.
Italy doesn't need false flags anymore. We believe whatever the TV says since 30+ years.
There's already iZettle in Europe which does Chip and PIN, and they started after Square so they've had plenty of time.
I dropped off and picked up my wife at the bus stop by 24th Street BART every workday for over a year and never had anyone challenge me about it.
I think this message is not targeted at all Americans, I think this message is calling on the younger generations to get back into the hacker spirit.
Just curious, why the "lol" for income inequality?
Fact: XRP is a fiat currency created by Ripple so they can profit off of when it increases in value. They control a majority share of it and can pretty much destroy/affect the value of XRP by market manipulation.

I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to discuss facts. XRP is not a fiat currency—only a government can create a fiat currency—you know, fiat currency exists because of government decree.

Yes, Ripple Labs hopes to benefit from the increase in value of XRP over time; they've been quite public about that. Unlike you, I have no problem if these guys get rich for disrupting and fixing our broken and fragmented payment system.

The flip side is that all of us with XRP stand to do pretty well too, which is also okay.

The fact that Ripple Labs holding the majority of XRP now is no different than when a company goes public and holds on to shares. Sergey Brin has over 27 million shares in Google, but nobody believes Google is a scam.

You thinking that Ripple Labs would destroy the value of XRP is conjecture and speculation. Unless you have any proof otherwise—which you don't—there's not really much more to say.

They have started publicly that they are going to give away 55 billion XRP; only a tiny fraction so far have been distributed. Again, unless you have proof otherwise, why should we listen to or believe you? You're just making shit up.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to benefit from using the Ripple payment network and the increasing value of XRP.
> "If this were true then we'd be hearing less and less about coding education, not more."

I don't think that follows. My hypothesis is that lots of programmers think that programming is more important than it really is, and politicians wanting to get tech on their side, humor them.

You know how rural farming towns often have strong 4H clubs? I think this "teach kids to code" stuff is the tech equivalent of that. Everyone wants little jimmy to grow up just like daddy and mommy, because daddy and mommy consider their line of work to be uniquely important or special.

Those communities think it is very important for children to learn how to raise cows, or drive a tractor. Ours thinks that it is very important for children to know something about computer programming. I think that either suffers from tunnel-vision and is is trying to put children into a box.
According to Piaget's theory of development while we grow up we have different experiences from which we acquire new information. If we lets say, are naive with no experiences or memories at all, otherwise known as a "tabula rasa" stage, then we will start learning this new information and grouping it into correlated structures of knowledge, known as schemas. For example, different types of dogs can be one schema as they share characteristics and they are correlated knowledge..As we learn we not only create these schemas, but we also adapt them when new unknown information arrives. For example, if I only experience dog in my life, then when I see a cat I know that this is likely to be an animal and share characteristics with dogs, as this is similar to dogs and will most likely belong to the same or a similar schema..And that's how I personally believe we learn and interpret new information that arrives...

Of course there are many different theories, but that's my favourite.
as a "real engineer"(tm), (more usefully, someone who codes both for a living and as a hobby) let me give a very concise answer (I'd be willing to be more verbose, I have a lot to say on this matter, but I really think the core point is braindead simple Edit: don't mean to imply braindeadedness if you don't see it, but that once I saw it, it seemed elegantly and stupidly simple.):

Programming is more than any language, tool, or algorithm, it is a way of thinking.
What I believe is implied is that since Google employees pay more in taxes than the average bloke, they are due more of that public infrastructure (privileged access to bus lanes, in this situation) — which is not how things work.
> What the fuck is this shit? They really pumped billions in marketing!?

I work for Code.org. "Billions" couldn't be any further from the truth. We operate on a shoestring. Everybody in these videos participated because they care about education, not because we paid them.
Any chance to release the source code to people reuse this using another languages? I'm kinda interested.
thanks for the edit. Indeed, my wariness of Google has increased as they have moved more and more of Android out of AOSP and into closed code that ties so closely with the Google mothership...
How do you properly cook a steak? The rule of thumb.
"An audio jack provides no power."

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/pubs/papers/kuo10hijack.pd...

Really? It seems it's inarguably a crappy power supply but these people were able to extract over ten mW continuously from an iPhone 3GS's headphone jack, more than enough to run i.e. a commodity RFID chip.
Maybe... but nobody really thinks of it that way, any more than they bother to worry about what fair market value of the assets (the other part of the purchase price) is for an early-stage tech company. They just care about the overall price, and they leave splitting that into FMV and goodwill as an exercise for the accountants after the deal is done.
Ask me anything about Bitcoins and I will have an expert answer you
It's bizarre to read how right-wing view things. "Fire the city workers, shrink the government, then the homeless will get the care they deserve!"

The poor conditions have to do with the budget constraints, which the GOP is actively pushing for.
Google's mission is "Dont be evil". They have since crossed this line, and will again. I do not trust google either.
I've assumed the quote was sarcastic. My sibling-comments made me question that, now.

Note: I never bothered to research the context.
I don't think this is an actual issue though. The vast majority of people are not using private buses. Even if they were. And if they were, well there would be a decent private system in place and it still wouldn't be such an issue.
Really? I'd think "Broke" would be a much better word than Stealth. What, are they trying to sneak up on a dollar?
There are "sex cam studios" in every country, including America. There are several in Arizona and Nevada. They're just like the coworking spaces us devs/designers have available to us -- space to work in, a solid internet connection, and a network of people in the same industry as you, some of whom will pair up to serve "clients" whose needs are too much for one "contractor".
Yeah, we've known about these tactics for decades. I wouldn't be surprised if 50 years from now, 9/11 is also revealed to have been a false flag operation.
Ton of people are downloading music and movies without paying, and no one challenge them. Does that mean it's legal ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy

I'm confused now..
The point is, this data exists. The NSA has all of it. What are they doing with it? Probably nothing good.
Why'd you leave IBD/VC?
You are surprisingly globe-trotty (I don't know who you are; but, you do seem to ping around a lot), and you seem to have an interest in either riding trains or driving long distances. Are you a consultant of some sort?
> Considering things in this perspective, is it so far-fetched to at least consider the possibility that 9/11 was a false-flag attack?

Yes, it would be completely far fetched and cretinous. You would have to completely ignore the history of bin Laden's interactions with American and the CIA, the attack on the USS Cole the year before, and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
> "intuitive morality"

> It's all very simple when you allow yourself to see it.

there's your problem. you're refusing to truly reconsider property rights as a use of force, and appealing to instinct rather than actually thinking about the problem.

to take something out of the public domain and not allow any other people to make use of the object is force, plain and simple.
I work at a company that sells applied machine learning services, so I'd like to add a few more tricks to machine learning:

1) Have lots of data

2) Accept the possibility that your problem domain cannot be generalized.

I always find, whether in academic literature or in message boards, a desire to fit every round peg into a square hole. The reality of real world data is that sometimes, it's just a 50/50 coin toss. This might be because the features that really indicate some sort of pattern can't be defined or they can and the data can't be reliably retrieved, or the humans running things have a poor understanding of the problem domain to start with.

TL;DR: There's no magic
What are you asking here?

The brain contains/is the model. It is trained by a range of inputs and by definition it generalizes outside those inputs.

If you're asking how does the brain minimize out-of-sample error? It does that by the virtue that it's model isn't too complex for the training set, just like what you do in machine learning. If the brain had a model that was too complex it would overfit and poorly generalize just like machine learning would do with a too complex of a model...
Whoops: "Not allowed to browse Adult/Mature Content category". Foiled again.
FBI able to secretly turn on ‘laptop cameras’
Google Lunar X Prize Leader Board:  Barcelona Moon Team Leading Astrobotic
JavaScript Developers: Stop Being Cute and Clever
It's pretty obvious that Ripple is buying back XRP to support the currency, despite its obvious scamware-nature.

There you go again making shit up. Again, Ripple ledger is open and available to anyone to look at, just like the bitcoin block chain.

Please show us where Ripple Labs is buying XRP. Oh yeah—you can't.

Like any currency, the price is based on supply and demand. We can see that buying and selling of XRP has increased dramatically in the last few week. That ain't Ripple Labs buying XRP but China certainly is: http://www.ripplelounge.com/1/post/2013/12/the-new-normal-in...