skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thus spoke our prophet:

Let me tell you one of my pet peeves: space solar power. Okay, the stupidest thing ever. If anyone should like space solar power, it should be me. I got a rocket company and a solar company. I should be really on it, ya know. But it's like, super obviously, not going to work because, ya know, if you have solar panels - first of all, it has to be better than having solar panels on Earth, so then you say, okay, solar panel is on-orbit, you get twice the solar energy - assuming that it is out of Earth's shadow - but you've gotta do a double conversion. You've gotta convert it from photon to electron to photon, back to electron. You've got to make this double conversion, so, okay, what's your conversion efficiency? Hmm. All in, you're going to have a real hard time even getting to 50%. [The solar cells are better.] It does not matter, put that cell on Earth then. See, that's the point I'm making. Take any given solar cell, is it better to have it on Earth, or is it better to have it on orbit? What do you get from being in orbit? You get twice as much sun - best case - but you've got to do a conversion. You've got to convert it the energy to photons - well, you have incoming photons that go to electrons, but you - you've gotta do two conversions that you don't have to do on Earth, which is you've got to turn those electrons into photons and turn those photons back into electrons on the ground, and that double conversion is going to get you back to where you started, basically. So why are you bothering sending them to bloody space. "I wish I could just stab that bloody thing through the heart." BTW - electron to photon converters are not free and nor is sending stuff to space. Then it obviously super doesn't work. Case closed. You'd think. You'd think case closed, but no. I guarantee it's gunna come up another ten times. I mean, for the love of God.

From: http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-panel-bta-2012-...
Fiat currency does not have to be issued by a government, and does not have to be legal tender. And Bitcoin certainly meets one of the "various" definitions given in the Wikipedia article. There are plenty of other definitions of the term it meets -- at root, a fiat currency is simply a currency whose value exists because someone said so, rather than because it's tied to something else. And... well, Bitcoin has value because people say it does, not because it's tied to something else.
from my experience it's not everything or nothing. In fact I would say i have never done a XP project where we did everything, but we almost always add tests (what %, simply depends on the project), and they always gave us tremendous insights, we did some level (mostly very little) paring (on either super hard or super critical code) and it always helped get thru the code or provide what mgmt needed, more then one person to understand something that was too critical to leave to only one person. people need to enjoy what they do, and employers need to understand if you want strong talent you need both to work as a team (not shove "do it this way" down people's throats) and XP requires BUY IN. - BTW I am a CTO who has been pushing XP on all dev projects for the past 5 years and I don't code :-)
>As can be seen on the 13" retina MacBook Pro, Apple is willing to make icky tradeoffs in favour of less logical resolution (despite being their top of the line 13" it has a lower logical resolution than the non-retina 13" MacBook Air).

The 13" MacBook has always 1280x800, so it wasn't really a tradeoff. The Air is the higher DPI version and has been all along.
Yeah, I was thinking that as a web/java developer I don't understand what this means.

Does this mean that, essentially, we only build for iOS 7 onwards?
Get ready to experience the internet at 56kbps again.
On what, the universe's part? True, it doesn't particularly care what you think, but you don't have much choice but to deal with it. Math simply is. If a cryptocurrency can be made to work, it will be made to work. Contrariwise, if it can't be made to work, it will collapse, no matter how vigorously BitCoin advocates yell the contrary.

Again, I'm not the one making it this way. I still think collapse is the more likely outcome. I'm not lifting a finger to help or putting a single shiny penny into BitCoin or anything like it. I assume you're trying to reassure yourself that you can dismiss my statement as arrogance on my part, but I have nothing to be arrogant about here.
Know Your Company grows up and moves out
Any JSLint plugins that work will in 3 yet? Last time I tried 3, I couldn't find one. (It's been a few months).
> Playing loud music when encrypting/decrypting/typing in your password will defend against acoustic attacks, right?

Probably. The answer to Q11 says "The interesting acoustic signals are mostly above 10KHz". They don't say what the high end of the range is. But I would guess that sufficiently loud music (which usually contains frequencies up to about 22kHz) would mask the sound generated by the CPU.
> As green as it gets

The massively polluted by oil derivative combustion atmospheres of L.A., Mexico City and Beijing beg to differ.
>If you are a regular vim user the keybindings in Sublime vintage mode aren't anywhere near adequate.

I find them perfectly fine, and have been using Vim since the mid-nineties, in things like SunOS and HPUX.

You don't have to take advantage of every key command Vim offers to be productive. In fact, focus on the code.
Any sources for that? I stil haven't fount any info if you can update old versions of your app
...and then in the sequel they show up millions of years later when the war is over, only to find that sentient creatures have evolved and have almost entirely used up the oil reserves :)
Shareholders have no greater responsibility to pay living wage, than you have a responsibility to top up the income of some randomly selected low-income person.

Let me ask you a question: where does the moral responsibility to pay higher than market wages come from? When I started my work, I had no doubts that my employer would rather pay less than more. However in my case there was competition for my skills that drove up the price of my labor. In the case of people earning minimum wage, there is not enough competition to drive the price above minimum wage. But in both cases the market is setting the price, and I don't see how the term exploitation applies to either.

The fact that some people don't have the ability to earn more than minimum wage is a property of those people, not their employees. And the appropriate response is to transfer money to them via the tax/benefit system.
My personal gripe has less to do with the non-technical or business cofounder not knowing how to code but rather they know nothing about any other skill set, including the business side, yet often times think they do. This, in my opinion, is a bigger problem than whether or not they understand code.
I think git-subtree is a better approach than what submodules are doing. Adding a submodule breaks things. E.g. `git clone` stops working as it should. In contrast, git-subtree doesn't break anything, because it just merges another repo history into the main repo:

https://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree

(also in git contrib/)
No, because Guerilla Mail would just have told the investigators the time the mail was queued up to send.
I suppose he could have claimed somebody else was using the computer he was signed into because he left it unlocked while going to the bathroom or whatever... but in this case, (assuming he is indeed guilty) then I'm fine with it.

It's a dick move, and I'm fine with him being caught and punished.
The original ipad can only be upgraded to iOS 5.1.1, I think.

There are a couple implications. First of all schools (like where my kids go) that bit the apple and deployed ipads to all the kids can't install or upgrade software after February. So if you're selling apps to kids, get your profits while you can. After february if they spend all their budget on upgrading ipads to the latest hardware so they could eventually install apps, they're not going to have any money to spend on apps, so that is a double whammy on sales. Something tells me no one told the accountants and administrators that the depreciation period was so short; much like elementary schools reuse textbooks for 20 years I think they were a wee bit optimistic about ipad usable lifespan.

Another implication is if you have a use case for app-less (web based) ipads, the market is probably going to absolutely flood in a couple months with cheap ipads that can't run modern native apps. So if you're trying to develop an ipad app for cheap people, the wise choice at this time would be web based not native. Also a web based solution could be sold to android users or desktop users or whatever.

The TLDR is native iOS apps are going to die pretty soon. Which is too bad, it was an interesting technological idea.
Michael Dickerson: The invisible man behind Obamacare's tech surge
I am related to computer refurbishment charity company. We get also old stuff from other company's and it is always in contract, that hard drives must be at least destroyed mechanically.

No rewriting or deleting. Mechanical only.

We remove platters, break them. After that, the value of data is far less for these things than the cost of recovering.
The Making of an Underclass: AOL
I don't believe that helicopters are specifically sent out to look for hot roofs in the UK without a reasonable suspicion.

I believe that the power companies are more likely to be of use in detecting cannabis growers. I am sure that in some areas a mini arms race has gone on for decades with cannabis growers taking electricity from the 'other side' of the meter, so that nothing shows up on the bill. I am sure that electricity companies have also worked out how to compare electricity supplied versus electricity charged for in order to detect this, at least to street level, and, after that, the infra-red camera can come into play to detect the hot-roof, either by themselves or by the police.

Given a choice of stealing electricity for cannabis or bitcoins I would be surprised if the latter was more profitable. That said, bitcoin miners probably do arouse the suspicions of the authorities. Therefore it would be quite convenient to have a 'server farm' downstairs with a 'cannabis farm' in the loft. Therefore, when the authorities come round there is a plausible reason for the electricity usage.
As my computer science lecturer once said to me: "there's nothing wrong with computers; humans on the other hand..."

I think the future of computing is the same as the past, hopefully without as many mind-numbingly deep abstractions. I'd settle for that.
I understand that... but aren't you still going to have smoggy cities with biofuels? Even if they are net carbon neutral, they suck up carbon while being produced and then are burned in cars driving in the city, thus creating smog in the city... smog which has all kinds of health problems.
iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth.

There are two reasons for me to be angry about this:

* Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they done that, they would have ended up with a fragmented ecosystem, and unable to brag about how so-and-so-many percent of users upgraded to the latest iOS.

* There is no good reason for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus, because there are very few animated effects, and I switched off whatever I could anyway. The only reason every iOS release is slower than the previous one is because Apple does not care about optimizations. They can afford not to care because every new hardware device is much faster than the previous one. But that means some users get royally screwed.

I should have stayed with iOS 6 (there is no going back now), but more importantly, Apple should not have claimed that iOS 7 is supported on my device. For all practical purposes, it isn't — the experience is really bad. I've just compared it to an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2.1, it's more responsive than iOS 7 on iPhone 4.

So, this forced migration to iOS 7 is something that makes me angry, because I'm that part of the userbase than is being dragged into it kicking and screaming.
This doesnt discuss things like, which backend did they use for slf4j. Also, concurrency should have a huge affect, as log4j has some locks in it, and iirc log4j2's main claim over logback is in speed in concurrent environments.

Really, you should always use slf4j, because all your libraries will be a mix of log4j, JUL, commons logging, etc, and slf4j will give you control over them all. It also comes with features some(log4j) of these dont have natively, like passing objects in args to do printf style replacement only when the log will be printed, instead of concatenation that always happens. Then use whatever backend you prefer, probably logback.
I have a separate problem with stored procedures - it's pushing more and more work into the single hardest piece of software to scale - your database.
WYSIWYG editor for Bootstrap
Have you tried the Vintageous plugin? I'd be interested to know if it's any better.
From the article:

Noisy environment. One may expect that placing the machine in a noisy machine will foil the attack.
However, the energy of noise generated in a typical noisy environment (such as outdoors or a noisy room)
is typically concentrated at low frequencies, below 10kHz. Since the acoustic leakage is usually present
well above this rage, such noises can be easily filtered out during the data acquisition process using a
suitable high-pass filter (as we did in our experiments). Also, the signal would be observe during any
pauses in ambient noise (e.g., music). Note also that the attacker may, to some extent, spectrally shift
the acoustic signal to a convenient notch in the noise profile, by inducing other load on the machine (see
below). Thus, a carefully-designed acoustic noise generator would be required for masking the leakage.
Everyone in my office has a workstation under the desk. Note that it's a workstation not a server.

So people do care about form factor, power usage, and acoustics.
6 Characteristics of Truly Creative People
Animating Modals in Angular.js
I don't think this comment is responsive to anything I wrote.
Steve Wozniak Just Backed This Awesome Computer Kit On Kickstarter
I doubt most people doing bioinformatics are doing their number crunching on the machine in their office. They're probably using a cluster that's maintained in a server room.

Keep in mind that these are workstations, not servers. They are intended to be used by an individual who, for whatever reason, has interactive applications with large compute requirements.
I would think that this is exactly what's expected in an experiment like this.
Actually, there's a whole niche market selling pallets of food like that to Mormons, as they're obligated by their faith to have a year or so of food/water/supplies.
Because there's lots of overlap between people interested in Tor and interested in cryptocurrencies. Because they figured no one was watching.
That's...yes...that's a boob!
Gini coefficient is applicable because bitcoin is a currency (or aspires to be one anyway). Sometimes commodities become money-ish, for a short time period, but they don't generally aspire to permanent status as currency.
People have to be able to move in and out of cash via BTC instantly. It currently takes days for most people.
Nevermind, it looks like there's been an update to the plugin I'm currently using in 2. I didn't notice that support for 3 was added.

https://github.com/darrenderidder/Sublime-JSLint
I have this notion of sewage plant workers: they NEVER get sick while working over multi-year/decade periods at the plant. It's all anecdotal, because it was from a quote in an article, and you don't know if the guy was telling the truth, but it stuck with me for some reason. Who makes a claim like that and then connects it to working at a sewage treatment plant? I think originally I read about it in a NY Times article about the sewage treatment plant workers' union a few years back but I currently can't find it.
> by thinking how we can make the power computing technologies give us available to everyone. the rest will follow automatically.

But that's exactly what we are doing. What do you think iPhones and iPads are? Those startups that are making it easier to book holidays? The very thing they are doing is making technology available to everyone. We've been doing all of this the whole time with the very goal of making technology available to people by creating ready made interfaces and tools that others can use.

There seems to be the idea that it's possible to leapfrog all of this hard, technical stuff and let everyone do it. Obviously that's not going to happen because those little technical bits are the difficult parts that need actual intelligence to overcome. You can't sandpaper them away.
This was originally presented was in 2004, but since then has been refined in a number of ways. The detailed paper that includes the full key extraction attack was only released today, coinciding with the GnuPG security update that mitigates against the attack.
Generally, when I'm working on a specific task that affects a handful of files, I'll have all of those files open in tabs. This provides a visual cue for each file (i.e. I know the "main" file is in tab position 1, the class that it calls is in tab #2, etc etc).

Furthermore, I can switch between tabs quickly with cmd + 1, cmd + 2, etc, or via cmd + option + left/right arrow. This can be quicker than fuzzy matching (which sublime text supports, btw), and it requires less mental overhead of remembering what the file is called when you want to switch to it.
Ask HN: Bitcoin vs USD - which is better to drive donations to a site?
I'm building a site, and I'd like to maybe get some money out of it without resorting to ads - is it more effective to have a bitcoin donation address or just a regular donation system? Are either of these effective at all?<p>Thanks
Or not. http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1948208,0...
The Mac Pro itself is a niche machine and priced as such, though. I mean, it uses a Xeon workstation/server-class CPU - how many computer users need Xeon and wouldn't be just as happy with a much cheaper high-end desktop CPU?
I totally agree. It doesn't make any sense. Now people who buy Mac Pro need to buy 4k monitors from Dell and/or ASUS.
Not gravity unless they're studying mice in space with some expectation that the subjects are unaffected by the vast different in gravitational pull.
Deployment targets earlier than 4.3 require armv6 libraries to support all devices, which Apple no longer ships. One can build an armv6 slice using an older toolchain and lipo it with armv7/armv7s slices built against 7.0, but it's not clear if Apple will accept such binaries as App Store submissions.
"Thus, a carefully-designed acoustic noise generator would be required for masking the leakage."

Like dubstep.
Yes; but that's largely irrelevant as most people don't have $250k in their bank accounts (and if they do, it's probably in stocks/bonds as opposed to a bank account with a low interest rate). It was just an example, anyway; the FDIC is only one part of a larger financial regulation framework. But the core point remains: lack of regulation around financial instruments is often a bad thing.
How can you defend someone who repeatedly vandalises a public space just so he can prance around a cell and say how horrible it is? It is easy enough to find people who have had these experience and document them.

I am sure the math could be done on the actual cost of this persons misadventure. The cost of reporting the incident, trawling through CCTV, looking for the person responsible, holding the person responsible in a cell, processing the paper work, the courts time, cleaning up after him etc.

It is likely to be tens of thousands of dollars when everything is said and done. Such a waste of resources just so someone could write a story about his experience..

Imagine if more people wanted to spend their weekend in a cell just to see what it is like.. its rediculous and takes the police and prosecutors away from dealing with real criminals.

Granted some light has been shed on the state of the system in this article but the author could have achieved the same effect by interviewing people who have been through it.
They also offer machines that go over this.
The single coolest thing in the paper (other than Shamir's name): "On many laptops (e.g., most Lenovo ThinkPad models), the chassis potential can be easily reached by a
human hand, through metal connectors and conductive coating on metal surfaces. Thus, an attacker can
measure the chassis potential by merely touching the laptop chassis with his hand. Surreptitiously,
the attacker can simultaneously measure his own body potential relative to the room’s ground potential,
e.g., by having a concealed differential probe touching both his body and some nearby conductive
grounded surface in the room. Perhaps surprisingly, even this circuitous measurement offers sufficient
signal-to-noise ratio for the key extraction attack."
Thanks for posting that. I keep a throwaway hotmail account but it's the principle of the thing.
Fail a test, no big deal. Send a bomb hoax, ruin your life. Interesting choice. I thought Harvard students were supposed to be smart not just arrogant.
That link doesn't send the right referrer for me (I also get the sign up).

If I click through from here I get a silly question and the content:

https://www.google.com/search?q=China+bans+new+Bitcoin+depos...
>The RAM limits on laptops are nearly understandable. But on a machine like this, it seems like obvious greed on the part of Apple to give this machine a maximum life span of 3-4 years.

Or, you, know, basic market research that shows you're some freaky outlier, and not even 0.1% of their customers will ever attempt to add that.

Not to mention, adding tons of RAM (for multi thousand dollars) and complaining of the machine having a "maximum life span of 3-4 years"?

Why would a pro that has an actual need for a Mac Pro saddle himself with it over 3-4 years? 3-4 years are like forever in tech. There'd be new memory speeds, new CPUs, new GPUs, new SSDs, new buses and such. If he's doing stuff the Mac Pro demographics does (video, audio etc), he'll want to update anyway...
Legislators are bad at math. Didn't you know?
It all depends on how you look at it though. For Venezuelans, the US dollar is an investment.
It's also illegal in the UK to reinvest your student loan.

Update: I can't find a link to back this statement up and at least one UK Bank (Barclays) seems to encourage it. My evidence is therefore purely anecdotal — I remember it being noted in the terms at the time.
Just experience. If you try and download an iOS7-only app on iOS6 you get an option to download a previous version.
Apple showed off Mac Pro with 4k screens, and advertised that the machine supports 3 4k monitors.

They have to ship their 4k monitors soon.
Have you tried http://downgradeios7.com/? I don't know if it really works, but I've heard that people have had luck going backwards — not sure how though.
Because that is what TDD advocates sell at agile conferences, design by coding.
Non sequitur. The parent comment simply takes uncontroversial facts and follows them to conclusion. Solutions to the problems raised by Bitcoin are good solutions to other problems as well.
Worth noting that first generation iPad, the current model until March 2011, will only run iOS 5.1.1 and has essentially been obsoleted by now.

Yes, it is theoretically possible to support earlier versions but Apple makes it practically very awkward: around half of the top apps don't support iOS 5. Apple's own apps apparently don't support iOS 6.