skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is anyone else tired of hearing about the dangers of interplanetary contamination, particularly from the Earth to Mars? I want to see the whole place terraformed and I can't imagine that we'd be so successful in our lifetimes that we'd wipe out whatever scientifically interesting traces of extant Martian flora there are. Whether or not there was life on Mars is a fascinating question, but I think the more important one is when will we expand life on Mars?
Kudos for the cover letter replacement.
Maybe you could state it clearer on the website?
If true, this is huge.
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edit: I believe the phrase would have been "50 stars", not "50 stripes". THAT would be a flagrant error in the test :)
Exactly. I make it extremely clear that my time is limited, and that my available time is during off-business hours during the weekdays, and on Sat/Sun.
I thought source maps were in Chrome now?

I rarely have to debug on anything other than the full source so I haven't really tried it out yet.
I like how they say he "cheated" on the entrance exam to the NSA by stealing the questions and answers from their servers, as if that doesn't just make him more qualified for the job..
yowsup sounds interesting and worthwhile because people in the real world use whatsapp: basically all of my non-techie friends, for instance.

Make a secure alternative and convince normals to use it and I'll gladly switch.
FDA proposal: antibacterial soaps must be more effective than plain soap & water
Much though I love the idea of extraterrestrial airships, wouldn't an airship be even less effective than heavier-than-air machines in an incredibly thin atmosphere like Mars'?
The article might be a bit of interesting history, but the title is incredible bullshit. I understand that the US right loves kicking Jimmy Carter around, but framing it as if JC actually said, "Hey, I've got an idea," is ridiculous.

This is the same writer whose recent column on the NSA the EFF just called "misleading and error-filled": https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/wall-street-journal-co...

The court he's referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_...

That was created by an act passed April 2, 1982: http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/landmark_22.html

Which means it was the 97th Congress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/97th_United_States_Congress

So the Senate was Republican and the house was Democratic, with the bill being signed by Ronald Reagan, who also, I'm sure, appointed any new judges. But yeah, it's all Jimmy Carter's fault. Totally.

Lord knows what else the guy got wrong, so I'm stopping there.
Pixate Freestyle - a Bootstrap for non-Web, Native Mobile Apps
How to Avoid Common (but Deadly) MySQL Operations Mistakes
So, question: what sits in memory below the bottom of the framebuffer? It seems like if a sound interrupt occurs while drawing the lowest-address tile, you might corrupt something below there.

Edit: Oh! Just got to footnote 2. Thanks, author!
More like those who use persuasive hate speech.
Unintended consequences, ahoy!

I think most cyclists main fear is an accident due to collision with a vehicle -- I wonder if self-driving cars will ultimately result in fewer car trips because more people are riding their bikes, not wearing helmets.
As far as I can tell the content of the update is never sent back. I just went on FB and started typing a status update. The status box expands, and loads some extra assets. But you can type and erase repeatedly and no extra HTTP requests are sent. I get the feeling their methodology was "Did the user request the status update assets? Did they subsequently post a status update?".

On the one hand, FB isn't doing anything evil. On the other hand, it shows how much clever stuff you can do by looking at people's intent based on information you already have.
This is my life right now. About a month ago I took on ~4 reports, but still need to maintain my previous productivity levels. It's really hard to both be available for them / our client and still get into my groove.
I see your point, but I think you may be making too coarse a distinction. There is a difference between gathering intelligence on certain high-value foreign targets and en-mass foreign surveillance of the nominally innocent.
Further, I am not convinced that the agency has made a proportional contribution to counter-terrorism in proportion to its budget. Stopping a few questionable donations cannot ever justify building such a dangerous infrastructure -- which will inevitably be abused for political purposes.
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5 hot mobile trends for 2014 - what you can expect
I think the article you're referring to is called The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Article: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...
More technical information and screenshots available here: https://github.com/Pixate/Freestyle
I sometimes get the same feeling, but at the same time, they obviously convert readers. (Otherwise they wouldn't be so common.)
I was joking; apparently people are shocked that autocomplete requires a website to log your keystrokes.
Yeah, of course you can do it and no you don't need to lower your expectations - £1000 is easily doable for nearly any city/conurbation. If you need money now (which your post implies), get yourself onto Jobserve and start chasing all those PHP/JS contracts. Some devs hate recruitment agencies, but they can be a contractors best friend for cash flow; hard to do less than £250 per day in the UK, great for getting cash.

Also, while its hard to swallow long term esp. if you have a family, there is always the option of relocating for a couple of months.
Show HN: My company's holiday mini-game for charity (code in comments)
It is also a good way to help friends because usually you give a lot of value to others very quickly.

In the same way, I also helped a birdwatcher to download thousand of bird calls. My own rant: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-call-of-the-web-scraper/
Sure it can. There's also a php API which I linked in one of the older comments. You can use either of these to create your own web client.

Someone ported the php implementation to Nodejs and made a working web client but it's broken now and is no longer maintained IIRC.

http://whatsapp.filshmedia.net/

You can take a look at its github repo and fix it yourself if you're familiar with Nodejs.
Thanks - we are still trying to figure out the best way to describe this. We'll work on updating the copy to better reflect that :)
Ok, although I fundamentally tend to disagree with much of American military policy - if there were people on that bus who had ties to Al Qaeda and american intelligence knew this...and those people were to cause further destruction if they weren't killed...then I just don't know.

I kind of imagine this like all of those movies about drug cartels where these incredibly rich families are leading semi-normal lives and then during a normal family event like a wedding, are attacked by the rival drug cartel. It sucks and looks really bad, but if you got involved in something illegal like Al Qaeda or the drug trade on a massive scale...didn't you kind of bring it on yourself?

Either way, more evidence needs to be shown for these kinds of attacks and why they are necessary?
It was our first try with Meteor, which was fun. Code's here: https://github.com/foraker/foraker-climb-meteor
Live Bitcoin price aggregator now supports 13 indexes in 7 currencies
I've updated BitcoinIndexes to support a greater range of indexes and currencies. Let me know if there are more you'd like to see.

http://live.bitcoinindex.es/
I have a Rift dev kit and while it is really cool saying they "mastered" virtual reality is link bait hype.

The Rift is awesome but it has a very long way to go before anyone should use the term "mastered" to describe it.
> “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no traitor.”

No hero? What does it take for you then?

Actually, he's not a hero, he's more like Jesus of our times, giving away his (perfect) life for us (who - of course - don't even appreciate his sacrifice, let alone act).
U of C has an endowment of about $6.6 billion. Much of the job of the President of the University is to raise money for this fund. In any other context, $3.4 million/year for the chief fundraiser of a $6.6 billion fund would not cause anyone to bat an eyelash. Since 2000, despite two major economic downturns, U of C's endowment almost doubled, from $3.8 billion. About half that time was during Zimmer's tenure, and his fundraising activity undoubtedly had a major impact on that growth, especially given the impact of the downturns on investment returns.
Yes - so long as the payload was very light. We're talking maybe 35kg here[0].

[0] http://eoss.org/eoss043/EOSS43summary.pdf
I agree wholeheartedly that there are parts of the anti-smoking lobby that seem immune to facts, but calling them an "industry" seems a little excessive. They're strident but generally well-meaning public health activists, not lobbyists for some shady cabal of corporations.
> The fact that most of the workers are not on strike proves that they're satisfied with their jobs.

Or alternatively, that most of the workers on a wage low enough that missing a day of work isn't a viable option for them.
You are on the correct track and another problem is substitutions.

If bicycling is made illegal for safety reasons, at least some percentage of current bikers will simply take up running, and running is very hard on the knees. So the total aggregate of knee pain will increase by X vs the decline in bike injury related pain Y. The relationship between X and Y is unclear and probably unknowable, but also probably "about the same magnitude". So all the social engineering and gnashing of teeth would not improve the overall human condition.
The median base salary for private was $301,299, the median base salary for public was $441,392. The slant the headline suggests is not well supported by the actual numbers, carefully hidden in the last paragraph. (The article itself is useful enough, I'm specifically criticizing what I feel is the slant they are trying to convey.)
Purposefully? No, but I'll admit that during undergrad I mistakenly obfuscated code. We were competing in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (igvc.org), but I didn't really understand the "meat" of the problem very well. Instead of focusing on machine learning and simultaneous localization & mapping I got way too focused on the "multi-threaded architecture" of our robot and basically rewrote protobuf poorly rather than actually solving the problem.

I've improved in those areas since then, but I slap my forehead whenever I think back to those days about how stupid I was. The worst was that the whole time I thought I was so smart, too.
I think the key part of this research is that this adds significantly to the evidence that there's liquid water deep in the crust of Mars. We know that there is water in the form of ice in lots of places on Mars but the idea of subsurface liquid water is exciting because there might be life in there! If it's gushing up to the surface periodically, we might even be able to sample it and see if there's signs of life! There's been previous evidence of these streaks before - but researchers had generally thought that was due to ice melting during the planet's warm season. Now they've found "streaks near the equator, including in the gargantuan Valles Marineris canyon". Any subsurface ice here would likely have sublimated. So it's looking pretty likely that this is subsurface liquid water that is leaking out from time to time.
An alternative explanation - dust avalanches - was offered when the same scientists unveiled their initial results back in 2011. With the observation of so many streaks at the equator now the simplest explanation appears to be groundwater welling up to the surface. Similar streaks on Antarctica are known to be caused by water.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455799 for ref.
So, you're claiming this, despite 0 people having ever been sent to prison due to this?
Show HN: lith - generate HTML using Javascript object literals
Opinions can also be wrong, depending on what they're about. As far as I can tell from the article, this is not one of those cases. He is simply relaying a story about one supposed advantage of the radio communication dark ages. But if you go from there to "Things (universal qualifier) were better before cell phones," then you have a problem. That often does happen in articles like this, although not this one.
How to Convert Any Photo into Snow Falling Animated GIF using Google+?
Honestly I think a lot of this is nostalgia - I grew up with the c64, never had a NES. I enjoy chiptunes but none of the NES stuff really does much for me. I think you have to have had this stuff embedded into your brain by repeated play. I've listened to NES music and haven't had an urge to listen to it enough to learn and hum it, but I could totally hum the eerie opening theme to Parallax, the driving pseudo-Jarre of The Last V8, the electro-rock of Oxxonian, and more.

I'm not entirely sure it's all nostalgia; the c64's sound chip was a bit more flexible than the NES's, and there was a real culture of musicians on the c64, so I may have just gotten used to a higher level of musicianship as a base.
Education in Germany is mostly free except a (unfortunate) selection process after 4th grade (most states). So people have access to education, and Germany made some great steps forward towards easy business creation (new limited company types, standard contracts, lower costs, ...) in the last 10 years [1].

So what's next?

[1] That said the common idea is in school and on television since around the 70s: The coolest guy is the one with the worst grades - every celebrity boosts how bad they were at school. And living on welfare has become a verb ("harzen") and is the live goal (perspective?) of many young people.
The good folks at ScotteVest will sell you one.

http://www.scottevest.com/v3_store/SHSK.shtml
The government's workforce is made of of a very large percentage of contractors 50%+. The article makes it seem like he was a unicorn but that probably wasn't the case. Contractor employees often get paid more than a government counter part doing the same job[0]. If I had to venture a guess as to why this is I'd say it is because those contractors turn around and make political donations where as many government employees are limited in their political activity, especially in the defense sector.

[0] http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3311:guess-what-it-is-che...
Perhaps the programming analogy is more similar to a language such as Logo or G-code used in CNC machines, that is used more to provide instructions to build something rather than computation and logical operations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code
The article does mention "Presidents at 42 private colleges scaled the $1 million annual mark in total pay and benefits in 2011". So while the base compensation was 400K, the total comp. touched a million for most of them.
How would a private company "milking" science be any better?
But, wasn't the drama exactly the point of the article?
FBI’s search for ‘Mo,’ suspect in bomb threats, highlights use of malware
I think you are greatly exaggerating how clustered programming jobs are. There are excellent opportunities for programmers in almost any major metropolitan area.
By the premisses of that article, I suggest bicycling should be taxed about $5/mile [0], to properly internalize the risk of death. Not just to counter ignorance/apathy, but because of the external costs of death to family, other people, and the broader economy. And maybe a separate surcharge to account for social health costs treating preventable injury.

[0] using the article's valuation of $50/micromort; 10 miles/micromort => $5/mile
>NASA needs to stop milking the "water on mars" thing.

Perhaps. I'm inclined to cut NASA some slack though - they are in a tricky catch 22 position: To get spectacular results they need funding and to get funding they need spectacular results. So I'm all for them milking whatever seems viable.

>its near monopoly on space exploration.

When it comes to space exploration I tend to agree with Nike & their slogan. I really don't care whether the US or the Chinese does it as long as someone acts. Same thing with costs...humanity as a whole needs to get off this rock to have any hope of long term survival. If it takes X billion USD...who cares? Raise some notional debt ceiling if you must...
I believe I say in the article that if you have 5 of the 7 things that you're in solid shape. You certainly don't have to have any of these things, but having them helps...

/the author
The latter often describes civil disobedience.
Web scraping is nice to learn and when you hit that wall where it starts getting really complex - i.e you need to login to a page, have cookies, etc.. there are really good tools available, lite Outwit hub that uses the whole browser as a scraper.
If programming languages were religions...
This is a nonevent. In the US, on the advice of my accountant, I have been treating Bitcoin gains (for "sold" BTC) as capital gains for tax reasons for over a year now. I don't think the IRS would have a problem with this.
How can you tell from that statement that his impressive act was 100% not security related.... All you can really say is that it wasn't necessarily security related.
I imagine public universities can't pay out the same kind of bonuses and the like, because of state rules, and have higher base salaries to compensate.
>The idea of property can be thought of as "obligations between people", but it's not the same as the idea of the social contract. For starters, it's between individual people

Well no. If we're talking about capitalist property, it's between a single individual and the entire rest of the human race at once. Or, if we want to be realistic, it's between an individual and anyone in shooting distance of that individual.

>Another difference is that the "system of property" actually works to everyone's favour

No, it works to the favor of property owners and creditors (who are, essentially, fractional property-owners in people).

>imposes no other obligations on you than to not aggress against anyone else's property

Since the entire world is thus privatized, this "one simple trick!" becomes totalitarian.
Having gone to a private university with a highly paid (probably not 1M+) president, this is unsurprising to me.

University presidents and the vision + fundraising prowess they bring to these schools can be pretty amazing. The school I attended was quite small with a mediocre array of programs and athletics. After 10+ years of the current president's shepherding, the school has undergone a transformation in student body size, program depth, and athletic accomplishment.

All of these things mean more students in the future and an increased alumni pride - both of which mean more revenue to the school.
Janty has had something similar for a while, their Mid series. Hook it up to USB and you can program it in all sorts of ways, save/load profiles, change the puff LED colour to any RGB value, etc. It even has a joystick(!). http://www.janty.com/en/mid-series
As I said, it depends on what you consider part of the system. And over large time scales the randomness 'blurs' such that other factors become more significant (e.g., your DNA is not a random sequence of nucleotides).

Here is a question. Do you agree or disagree that survival/death decides which of nature's experiments work?
RethinkDB raises an $8M Series A
I knew someone was going to say that...

The only point I wanted to make is that someone using a protocol (variant or original) that someone hasn't seen before is not inherently damning in and of itself. Mine was a general point, and yours is a practical one, which I mostly agree with.

The parent comment seems to imply that there is a pre-written solution for all cryptographic problems that can be dropped into place, and I also felt they were conflating high-level protocol problems with low-level cryptographic primitive problems (i.e., "rolling your own crypto" being used in a general sense). I think it is reasonable to compare two "non-standard" systems in that context, especially given how modifying an already-trusted protocol can go haywire if something is done wrong.

Whether or not an extension or protocol is reviewed, has a public spec, comes from a cryptographer, started from a more trustworthy protocol or has other practical elements that make it appear trustworthy on the surface, is another matter entirely. It 100% matters in practice, but not for a more general point.

I understand that Telegram is doing everything from the ground up and that TextSecure started with OTR, and that the ratcheting extension wasn't pulled out of thin air. I am not claiming in practice that Telegram and TextSecure are comparable (I did not mean to take anything away from TextSecure or the ratcheting scheme), and I personally would not touch Telegram in light of further snooping about and comments posted in this HN thread.
> you've got to call it something

It's not quite like anything else, so why pigeonhole it? Call it a "decentralized cryptocurrency" or just "bitcoin" or "a perfect simulation of gold in electronic form"
The problem, though, is exactly what fidotron describes: without independent validation, we must trust the credibility of the source of a leak, for that leaked information to be considered valid.

If Snowden were a character if ill-repute or questionable morality (outside the question of the morality of leaking intelligence secrets to foreign countries), it requires that you question whether any of the leaked information may have been tampered with.

Once the relevant leaked-upon agency admits to the validity of information, then definitely the messenger's credibility becomes decoupled from the truthiness of the message.
I think having simple and direct denotational semantics necessarily means having relatively complex, indirect operational semantics (e.g: Haskell). Having a simple and direct operational semantics necessarily means having complex and indirect denotational semantics (e.g: C).

C makes performance easy and correctness hard.
Haskell makes correctness easy and performance hard.

The trick is, in most programs, you only need performance for a tiny subset of the program. You need correctness throughout the whole program.
What makes you think the Justice Department wants to go after Clapper?
You get social welfare money if you have no job. There is a discussion if it is enough or not, but the state pays your rent in Germany and noone needs to die because of hunger [1].

[1] There are quite some people living on the street though - especially in larger cities - who for various reasons can't or won't claim their social welfare money.
You're not actually giving an intellectual argument, for the most part. You're just... "erm"... asserting the opposite of what I said in a hand-wavy manner.

What is profoundly immoral is condemning everyone to barbarism via a system that will lead to massive rights violations, which is what you are proposing.

I don't actually need my neat little trick. Even before I realized the truth in that, I advocated for the minimal necessary taxation, in order to otherwise establish a rights-protecting society. That is the practical thing to do, and therefore it is the moral thing to do.

You cannot justify the claim that taxation is immoral. It is a floating conception (i.e. it cannot be induced from or reduced to reality).

> Otherwise everyone is a threat all the time, and that's just not a rational idea, is it?

Yes, it is a rational idea. In a state of nature, everyone is a threat to everyone.

> But you rationalize it with that neat little trick that actually falls on its face right away, upon closer inspection.

Come on man, I'm not a moron. The idea doesn't fall on its face. That is just an assertion you are making.