skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some really cool things on there! I just might have to pick something up for my wife. Thanks for sharing!
> How can you defend someone who ..

I didn't really, I just pointed out that the "wasting of resources" argument is pretty silly since he actually used very little resources, in the scale of things.

I do however think he did (try to) do something worthwhile, at a personal expense.

> Imagine if more people wanted to spend their weekend in a cell just to see what it is like..

Yeah, call me when that happens.

Also, it doesn't matter that it would be bad if everyone did it. What would happen if everyone decided to take the subway at 10.00 tomorrow? IT WOULD BE CHAOS!! Does that mean I can't take the subway at 10 tomorrow?

> the author could have achieved the same effect by interviewing people who have been through it.

No-one would read that.. I'm sure I can dig up thousands of pages of reports like that.. not exactly making the headlines.
>The Bay is one of the most desirable places in the WORLD to live

Hahahhahahahahahaha, keep drinking the flavor-aid as long as it let's you keep hilarious opinions like this and the abhorrent ones above it.
Fantastic! After all these years of watching all sorts of interesting ant behaviour, that's a new perspective.
EDM to save the world (by blocking government snooping)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da4V5vKcGl8
> Such a waste of resources just so someone could write a story about his experience..

Dude...he didn't do it so that he could write about the experience, he did it so that we could read about it. That's a qualitative difference.
I had a great experience with AirPair. It makes me feel like I can really tackle some big issues.
So, what, if people aren't using the full power of Git, the response is to remove that power? That seems completely backwards. The response should be to educate people on proper development practices.
He's complaining about a job that's paying $16/hour an hour when the article clearly states that $16.50/hour is enough for a single person to live on in the valley. He says he has to turn down hours because of his daughter, which means he could probably make enough to survive if she wasn't present. Ergo, his current difficulties are largely brought on by the irresponsible impregnation of a woman when he was not ready to raise a child.

Please. Just stop spouting liberal claptrap for a second and use your head.
XBox always ran Windows. Even the original XBox was running on a modified Windows 2000 base and kernel.
users or owners?
Reddit bans comments from global warming skeptics
All other things being equal, yeah. But while a six foot tall mouse would lose heat way slower than a normal sized mouse, people and mice have different amounts of fat and fur. It's not obvious to me a priori that mice would have a different optimum temperature range.

I mean, England barely ever has a high of 31C, and there are plenty of mice there. I wouldn't suspect that every mouse in England is immunocompromised.
I think there is an unfounded assumption that artificial intelligence implies self-awareness. I don't think that is necessarily the case and all the scary scenarios rest on that assumption.

I can't recall who (and couldn't find it through Google) the quote by the AI researcher who said something like "show me what the brain (or mind) is doing and I can build a machine to do it too". Well, we don't know what the mind or brain is doing and until we identify the epistemological principles we are just groping in the dark. Self-awareness my just be an artifact or consequence of the biological implementation of the epistemological principles behind intelligence and that an AI does not necessarily need to be self-aware.
Everyone forgets that 'libertarian' originally meant 'anarchist,' generally 'big L' Libertarianism refers to the party, while 'little l' libertarianism refers to consequentialist or propertarian libertarianism.
This ‘Hangover Taxi’ Will Serve You Noodles and Bring You to Work
Where are all the cynics making 2009-era "even a dead cat bounces" comments?
The title is referring to this article:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/world/2013/12/...
The URL should probably be changed.
Ditches need to be digged. Farms need to be tended to. People need to eat.

The laborers should be paid for the value of the work instead of receiving the slimmest of margins from the fruit of their labor.
I think this article would be improved by removing the gender-specific parts. All these things happen all too often in any gender configuration and are real problems. Sexism or its spectre is a distraction.
It's part of the definition of "Fiat currency." i.e. It's issued by fiat[1].

[1] fi·at

ˈfēət,ˈfēˌät

noun

1. a formal authorization or proposition; a decree.
Hey neilk. Just wanted to let you know you're not alone. I could copy everything you've just said word for word and it would line up almost exactly with how 2013's been for me (you're not working on an aviation related thing are you?!).

Good luck with whatever it really is and roll on 2014! :)
Higher level languages / code and abstractions.
Anti-pattern - Wikipedia
I agree with most of the post but as participation drops so does the energy requirement, so it's a bit of a feedback loop.

I suspect that hash rate will usually keep the electricity needed for mining just slightly over the price of the electricity, with the price differential made up by enthusiasm and expectation of future increased value of mined coins.
Just a small note: the fact that people upvote or sticky that post speaks nothing to how many people are actually in a position to potentially feel suicidal about it, all it means is some people think others may feel that way.
I believe the flow state is essentially an active meditation. One accesses it by stilling the blah blah thought mind and ego enough to allow the subconscious to freely flow into action. There are plenty of ways to do this, in fact I've found boring repetition is great for it (I play piano). Above all else though, meditation is probably the best practice, since that trains one to be still enough to allow deeper parts of the mind to "flow" freer whilst maintaining enough focus that one isn't derailed by every possible distraction that could arise. And I also agree with you on the "muscle" training throughout the day. This state is always available, and the trick to being a baddass at life is to be able to find it NO MATTER WHAT else is going on. The only way to train that is to do in distracting situations. This is why I like yoga, because there's a bunch of other crap going on that I have to "overcome" with focus and stillness of mind. Only then will the asana make sense and I'll access that state, and that same training makes me better at it for rest of my daily activities. Kind like how doing math also makes you good a solving problems in general, or reading/writing literature makes you more emotionally intelligent.
Congrats to them, but could a graph be more disingenuous than the one used there that shows Bitcoin prices?
i think she realises that this is common criticism against anyone with passion for their work - she is describing an irrational emotional response and basically says as much.

i'll admit i often give the same advice: "don't be precious about your code"

i would never do this infront of a client though - or even infront of other co-workers unless it is a recurring problem and i feel that a bit of shame might help give them a kick into action...
A friend of mine at hopkins (several, actually) do lab experiments with mice. Recently one experiment a co-worker was doing was continually failing even though it had been proven to work in other cases. Several of the mice tested would behave fine, but one or two were in terrible health and became highly antagonistic. They couldn't figure out why the experiment was failing.

My friend took a look at their setup. During the day there was a machine that was turned on next to the unhealthy mice. It vibrated and emanated a faint noise. He told them to turn off the machine. In a week, the mice were back to normal.

Nobody had thought about it, but mice are much more sensitive to sound and vibration than humans and it was stressing them out so much they were going crazy. There's probably lots of other things that can be overlooked (like temperature), but it's hard for us to notice because we aren't mice.
Ha! The story is of course a jest, but there's no reason why you can't look at it that way. A cup is either half empty or half full.
Innovative Philips SlimStyle LED bulb loses heatsink, gains unique flat style
No worse than buying material goods on credit, which a huge number of people do. If anything it's less bad, as at least with a gamble you might get the money back to pay off the credit. Of course, whether you value a TV or a chance of getting rich more is subjective.

edit: I stand corrected, good points below. But it is still very possible to use credit to speculate without it being a huge problem, e.g. if you could afford $x over 3 months but think you need to spend it all now to see the benefits then the slight interest on the credit just becomes part of your risk, but doesn't mean you'd be in trouble if it doesn't work out, other than losing money which is a risk regardless.
A shame - if they were given the opportunity to work or start a business right away without going through heaps of bureaucracy, everyone would benefit in the long run. As it is, many don't have a choice but to return to [insert underdeveloped country] and try their luck there...
> He made have made sure that she was using contraception, and not known that she was doing so incorrectly.

This is also being irresponsible. Don't stick your dick in crazy.

> Or maybe she had some medication interaction that no one warned her about.

Not sure what you mean by this, but if she had a latex allergy, there are non-latex condoms as well. Either way, there is no excuse for not using one.

> Or maybe they were one of the 5%.

Maybe, but then you can get an abortion. And besides, the real point of this article isn't about this one individual, but about the large segment of society that is in a similar position to him. And on average, 95% of those people who had unwanted pregnancies fall into the "lack of or incorrect use of contraception" category.
I've used Figaro for a few projects and I've found myself very happy with it. It does one thing well without adding unnecessary complexity or overhead to my app. I feel that figaro-like capability in Rails is a win for the community and for figaro/laserlemon as well.
> Microsoft nonetheless has to be happy that Nokia has blown past Motorola to become America’s No. 4 smartphone vendor. According to new data from Counterpoint Research, Nokia’s share of the American smartphone market has surged from a mere 1.4% in the second quarter of 2013 to 4.1% in the third quarter.

http://bgr.com/2013/11/01/nokia-us-smartphone-market-share/
Increasing Your Sales Using Behavioral Economics
>> Good riddance, MS. You've kept the whole industry back far too long.

Don't be so harsh. The industry wouldn't exist as we know it without Microsoft.

There'd still be 10+ different platforms.
> A cup is either half empty or two cups.

Fixed
Sorry for the curiosity, by "I 'upgraded'", did you mean you were working for NCR/Diebold, or the banks to go upgrade the ATMs?
>> Currently it's the same with BTC (higher price creates an incentive for more mining).

It's not quite the same, the act of bringing more miners on board does not feed back into the supply chain, it just increases competition for BTC that were going to be mined anyway. There's a missing link there.

>> The size of fees is regularly adjusted to make it worth their while.

The size of the fees is voluntary for the person sending the transaction. We have already seen situations where some pools started leaving some transactions out of their calculations because it wasn't worth their while processing them. As rewards for block discovery drop this will get more common and fees may have to become more generous, or somehow formalised.
Yep, we're the business model. There are lots of struggling entrepreneurs so they can charge a small recurring fee and make money. Btw, there's another "selling shovels service" for finding a cofounder too: http://founderdating.com

The problem is that most of these services don't really add much value. You get a few connections, lots of advice, and you're still on your own.
Sure, you can learn something from anybody, but often the managers don't have the time to do actual development and dive into specifics, so they end up being taught more than they teach.

A manager is essentially an organizer and decision maker.
Ah, the Maginot Line[1] argument. Given the sheer number of possible emissions channels, are you proposing they all be universally protected against in hardware? Or that there should be special classes of 'protected against $FOO' hardware for specific threats?

The concept of defence-in-depth suggests that you should take all[2] possible measures to avoid sensitive data leakage. If an attacker does get into your secret computer-bunker, but can't get past the cage or case-level defences, they could potentially still use such an attack as this. Also, how do you test that your shielding is working? The paper notes that their probable noise source was a faulty electrolytic capacitor, which presumably wasn't [as] faulty when QA'd at the factory. So you'd need to periodically retest, which could get pricey fast.

Likewise, the engineering tradeoffs of shielding everything make it pretty impractical for mobile/portable devices, or ones that might be used in unsecured areas.

The main issue I see is that if this (or similar improvements) is truly something that could be implemented with a mobile phone or small MEMS microphone bug in the general vicinity, it's potentially cheap enough to make it not just a "how do I protect against the NSA?" problem, but one within the means of corporate or organised crime espionage groups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line

[2] well, as many as economically feasible anyway.
It starts with a belief that you can be one of those successful people. That you can do this.

If you believe you are lucky, you are more lucky. Here's the study behind that (PDF): http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the_luck_f...

I also believe that, in a similar manner, people who believe they have what it takes to be successful (whatever that is in their minds) are more likely to be successful.

I went through most of my teens/20s with pretty bad beliefs about myself. I was a college dropout, a woman in a male-dominated industry, fighting with depression and (then-undiagnosed) ADHD. When the tech industry crashed in 2001-2002 I couldn't even get an interview for a job. I did not believe I could be successful.

Slowly, though the years, I started changing those beliefs, and as I did, more opportunities opened up for me. Now, I'm able to mentor others (especially women) who want to get into development. One of the things I always work with people on is believing that they can do it with what they have, that they don't need to be or do something that is "more" in order to be successful.

My inner outlook changed my external life. I had to change my beliefs before my external reality changed. Sitting where I was in 1999, I'm not sure I would have believed that--but I do now.
There was some headline about a week ago that said roughly 1000 people own half of all bitcoins.
At least it shows where the bitcoins are used
For the curious, I think this is the study:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
The benefits are too big to ignore? Would you mind letting me in on the secret then? The only benefit I see in go is fast compilation. That is hardly big enough to justify using such a primitive language.
Bypass the meter. Abnormally high readings are reported in some places.
It's obviously not the same thing. The volume of gold we can mine is virtually unlimited. And then there's the fact that in principle we can synthesize gold, who knows how good we may be come at it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals
Show how to control it.
Welcome to my world :)

I thought in the US, things might work differently though, but it seems just like "the grass is greener on the other side"
No. The attacker has control over what time period, not how many rolls.

You don't have the level of control you think. You are assuming that you will know exactly. When in truth you will only know approximately.

The human analogy falls down because we are slow. But with computers you would be controlling it from a distance, and latency would mean you wouldn't know exactly when.
This is one of the very rare HN contexts in which a comment like that is spot-on.
Jruby?
> Can you explain? I am genuinely curious as two the line of your thoughts now.

The worst forms of bias and discrimination are unexamined, because they can fester and influence thought and action without ever being questioned. It's difficult to argue someone out of a position they don't even realize is a position that is up for argument.
Reverse Engineering a Furby
No, that doesn't work since the sun is not a point source.
See my post here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929509

There are tons of micro exercises you can come up, the trick is to "catch" yourself as often as possible every day. screw the 5 times, just try to max out every day. Dont stop what you're doing, just start to become conscious of what you're doing. The breath is the key. Its tough but it works.
> It's how evolution is supposed to work: a simple organism gets some random changes and becomes more complex.

Er, no, that's not how evolution is supposed to work.

There is nothing in evolutionary theory that indicates a necessary preference for increasing complexity.

If (and this is a premise outside the scope of evolution) life starts with the something very close to the simplest form which can be "alive", it is unsurprising and consistent with evolution for evolution to produce some forms which are much more complex, and for the average complexity to increase over time -- especially if its not constrained by an upper bound on viable complexity.

But you, for instance, start with a bag of zeroes, periodically randomly add or subtract 1 to each number in your bag and then throw out any that are less than zero, over time the highest number and the average number in your bag is going to increase -- the change process isn't biased, but the selection process is.
Haha, I hardly take life advice from anybody, much less webcomics :) I have no idea what to do when I "go out" but I've been working on entertaining larger circles of friends. It's easier for me to treat people like individuals instead of generic strangers.
Hi Jason - mundane accounting question: how do you account for revenue deferral? I believe in general you're supposed to match revenues and expenses as they are incurred providing the services. i.e. Up-front revenue gets deferred over the lifetime of a contract, because you will incur costs of servicing that revenue during that whole time.

How does this work when there is no actual term?

(Sorry if this is off-topic - we're thinking through some pricing model stuff, and this was top of mind!)
Thanks for the clarification. It would be very interesting to see if anyone else adopts this pricing.

In spite of the flak you get from the HN crowd (the reason I am guessing, might be that you make it deceptively simple to hit $390,000 with 99% retention rate) it is always very refreshing to see your blog posts and the quality of your work is very inspiring. Thanks!
Self-awareness is likely to be a product of quantum-based, or even more lower-level conciousness. However, intelligence, which makes it possible to acquire
knowledge and reason, is relatively mmore easy to be built. There is a subtle yet important difference between Intelligence and self-awareness. Intelligence
gives a living-being an ability to learn and act but self-awareness personalizes this learning for self and therefore actions are directed by a desire
to benifit the self.

This opens up a possibility that once a general intelligence is built, without awareness, it can be miss-used for the benefit of its creator or who eventually controlls it.
"causes" is the troubling word there. From what I've read, in most people and animals tumors are growing all of the time due to cell replication defects, but normally the immune system gets rid of them. Cancer, as a disease, isn't "your body is making tumors", it's "your immune system isn't keeping up with your tumors".

From that point of view, anything which makes your immune system less effective "causes" cancer by making it harder for your immune system to kill tumor cells faster than they occur. Being cold all of the time, or being subjected to any type of chronic stress, certainly seems like it could do that.
Hackers who breached php.net exposed visitors to highly unusual malware
> Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.

I don't have a problem with them being mentioned together, although their cases are certainly different in substantial ways. While Chen courted attention, from what I can tell she did not specifically attempt to court controversy and profit from internet rage (though I could be wrong).

My problem is with bringing up Anita Sarkesiaan, who trolled lowest-common-denominator male videogamers on purpose to get publicity, sympathy and funding for her kickstarter project and has the audacity to claim in a TED(x) talk that it was all because she was a woman.
> Hard work should have value

No it shouldn't, at least not because the work is hard. I could spend 16 hours a day 7 days a week digging holes in the Sahara desert which are of no use to anybody. I would be working incredibly hard, but I would be producing no value, so I do not see why I should be rewarded anything. I only will and should be 'rewarded', in the sense that someone else is willing to pay me for my work, if my labor produces something of value for someone else.
Sass, Less, or Myth add all the prefixes. It's only one extra command to run.
It's a pattern I see over and over unfortunately. As soon as something is dominant, they put focus into something else allowing competition to eclipse their lead. Suddenly they are in a position of having to become relevant in the market again. I see the same thing happening now with Skype. Skype is/was the dominant voip platform, but it's stagnating under Microsoft. The mobile applications are terrible. The only "innovation" I've seen around Skype is the inclusion in Xbox One which is is actually very good in limited scenarios.
No. None are peer reviewed. Entry via mobile doesn't always work well for homophones.
Perhaps the link should be http://disneyanimation.com/technology/publications/55 (note the added /55) so it goes directly to the post in question, even if the page is updated (permalink was obtained by clicking the Twitter icon).
Ugh, let's hope Elance's CEO doesn't fuck up ODesk. Elance is kindergarten quality compared to ODesk's site.
So the piece about more women was a little bit weird. It appears that as the broader market (made up of ~50% women) begins to use your product, you experience your demographic skew towards the broader markets' average demographic. Breathtaking.
Exactly. To clarify, by talent and innovation I didn't just mean the websites that the rest of the world can build. I meant it wrt the empowerment that free MOOC's can provide when it comes to basic education (especially in remote areas where schools are not always existent/affordable) and the possible innovations it could lead to in different sectors outside the realm of software development.