skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The (world famous) pianist Krystian Zimerman also had his concert grand destroyed by customs while on tour:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krystian_Zimerman#Criticism_of_...
Most people are not Jefferson, MLK or Marx.
Show HN: My year in open source and side projects
While I live in the city and love it, his comment about not being able to make meaningful friendships made me think along the same lines as you did. I think he'd find parts of Oakland or Berkeley to be much more appealing. There's a younger vibe there from the proximity to the university and the lower housing prices that I think would work better for him. You do have to work a bit harder to feel "at the center" of the tech scene (i.e. you're less likely to hear conversations about startups and programming when you're out at dinner and tech meetups are much less convenient), but it's not that much harder. The east bay also has nicer parks, better weather and it's easier to get away on weekends (this past weekend, it took me 90 minutes to get from my home in SF across the Golden Gate Bridge).

Still, I understand the compulsion to live in SF proper. It's like living in Manhattan or the city center of a large European city...illogical in almost every way, but with that "je ne sais quoi" that makes it feel wrong to live anywhere else. It's an alternate reality wherein the pains of living here select out the people that we wouldn't want to spend time with and what's left feels like a community built on kind of shared suffering that gives us a form of pride...we can sleep through anything, tap dance around shit on the sidewalk, find a parking space where there are none, eat food from a random food truck without getting sick and walk everywhere. It's bizarre, dysfunctional and yet oddly compelling.
I really wish there was an "undecided" option for that particular question. I said "yes", but only because I think having backward compatibility trumps cleaning the language up.

It's like any software project. It's always tempting to throw everything out and start fresh, but that always takes about 100x more work than what is budgeted for.
Part of the answer might be that environmental regulation will add costs and regulatory complexity to Chinese manufacturing, and make them less competitive.

Many western manufacturers moved production to China to reduce costs.
Now the whole Bluehost is down.
There are a handful of airports in the US, SFO among them, that were/are part of a program that used private security contractors that operated according to TSA SOP. If I remember right this was just a pilot program that was discontinued, but the existing airports were grandfathered in.

That said, I haven't been treated any better by Covenant Security's (the contractor for SFO, aka "TEAM SFO" as you see on their shirts) people than I have been by actual TSA employees elsewhere. Seems like a nominal difference to me.
6 months residency is more than enough time to become acclimated to the cities problems and be a champion of fiscally acceptable infrastructure solutions, right? No. It is not.

It's not. But it's more than enough time to start investigating local governance beyond "must be" statements if it is a thing you care about.
My built PC is pleasantly quiet. It's also almost .00008% as sexy as this little Mac Pro.
Sorry, can't find that bill. I pay taxes and I regard any class action funding from the DoD with the same skepticism as the Iraq War. No one is paying for it, not in dollars. We've spent many trillions in Iraq and the government just charges it to the fed who kicks the can down the road.

I'm sure I might pay for it one day. I'm fairly sure my kids and grandchildren will pay for it.
There's plenty of value to the going-slow approach and Python should embrace that identity and the value that comes with it. However, having two incompatible versions of the language itself--and all of the confusion that comes along with that--is a major barrier to adoption and improvement of the language.

The mistake here was breaking backwards compatibility to begin with. But since that's long past us now, the problem that needs to be solved is how to reconcile the two versions. It's unrealistic to keep both 2.7 and 3.3+ around forever. How do we get to a single version of Python to keep the language and its community healthy?
Chris - this argument seems compelling, at least on the surface. It brought up two questions in my mind:

1) You say "You'll converts to and from USD occasionally but not on every transaction" . Sure you wouldn't need to exchange on every transaction, but when you do the conversion, the 1% applies to $ amount not the number of transactions. So if I convert $200 into BTC, I pay the 1% (+ exchange spread) on $200. It doesn't really matter if I do this over 1 transaction or many small ones. Am I missing something here? Are BTC transactions really cheaper?

2) Whats the actual advantage for the average consumer to pay with BTC? Do you see merchants offering discounts if you pay them with BTC? If not, whats the mechanism that compels me, the average consumer, to pay with BTC over say Visa?
That's because most inventors are not great salespeople and great salespeople are busy printing money to be peddling ideas to developers.
This is very interesting, thanks!

The warm-dark color scales have a slight emphasis on the warmer colors though. They are not exactly of same lightness.
While it's true that we're approaching the deceleration of shrinking chip size, there are still plenty of ways micro and nano computing will be optimized. Some of the more interesting developments are happening in the world of graphene R&D. This article is a little dated for such a fast-moving industry, but it's semi-relevant:

http://graphenewire.blogspot.com/2012/10/extending-memory-be...
Technically SFO is one of the very few airports (and the largest one I believe) that contracts out its airport security to a private company. The company and its operations are regulated by TSA, and for all practical purposes offers the same experience as any other airport, but the people who look at your bags and such are not TSA employees.

See: http://www.flysfo.com/about-sfo/safety-security and http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/airports-who-opt-out-of-tsa-scre...
>Creativity != originality. Its been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, but plenty of Disney's works are not original. That doesn't detract from the quality of the work or the creativity involved in adapting the story.

I agree with you. When I said "create your work off another" I am referencing a 1 to 1 copy or at least a work that results in a finding of infringement. If you create a derivative work that does not infringe on a copyright, more power to you - but the point is you would not need to have a work in the public domain to create a derivative work that does not infringe.
Bamboo instruments are agricultural products. So are the cotton and wool clothing I am wearing.
Yup, the real wedge was wrapping a free service in a really slick interface. Points are just icing.

Another poster made a very good point about voting ring vandals and spammers, but I'm concerned about "expiry dates". An increasing number of the top SO results in google are answers that were correct but are now wrong. Things will trundle along for another few years, but at some point the correct results will become un-googlable.
NSA paid RSA 10 million US-Dollar to use Dual_EC_DRBG in their products, a standard they forced into the standard with lots of known problems, NIST did it anyways.

So yeah they force backdoors.

If you still think you need to defend the NSA, you are not stupid or naive. You are evil.
Hitting ramen profitability and being able to click the "donate" button on many of the gems and plugins that helped us get there.
It certainly will depend on the actual product A LOT.

A vector editor is very complex compared to the typical CRUD-based with a little business logic that lots of SaaS products are in the end.
Never noticed that.

Pretty sure it is January.
I too am fascinated by Bitcoin and still in learning mode. I think there's one important distinction to add here though. Credit cards can charge 2.5% because they're awesome Some guy in Arizona can set himself up online, sign up for Stripe, have no set fees, and accept a payment from someone in Germany (or NY or Australia) that afternoon. That's amazingly empowering and 2.5% doesn't seem to bad for the people running those rails to collect (fraud, global movement etc)

So let's not come at it from "credit cards and payments are a bloated gouging industry" I'm not buying that and it also is too merchant focused (vs consumers who really decide what a merchant will do in terms of payments) Now, there are some really interesting fringe cases that Chris touches upon that can open the door for Bitcoin. Micropayments are broken when it comes to credit cards. It's not the %, it that's "+ 30 cents" that is brutal. So Bitcoin could play a roll there. There are disbursements and marketplaces. I suspect TaskRabbit would probably like to have the ability to move money from buyers on their platforms to the TaskRabbiter's with a reduced payment friction than today. There might be 5% margin businesses (Chris' example sounds like the founder of Dwolla) that really are motivated to drive you to Bitcoin.

So what happens over time is Bitcoin focuses in on those areas where it has a strategic advantage over cards and ignores those where it doesn't. It uses that experience to become a legitimate, scaled set of payments rails. Solutions are implemented so that consumers are comfortable with using and paying with Bitcoin. Then at that 5 - 15 year mark it's ready to take on mainstream payments. Assuming issues like fraud and settlement and wild fluctuations are worked out.

EDIT: I am definitely thinking out loud and on the fly so am ok with some serious rebuttals.
While far slower, touring bikes are still an option. I also doubt that motorcycles are going anywhere anytime soon.
> Saying that it's 'shockingly un-apple-like' that the outer case can be removed, shows that the reviewer is handling his first Mac Pro.

Or that he's insightful enough to recognize that the Mac Pro is an anomaly in the Apple product line.
Right, and I could see getting myself a $30 Casio sport watch so I have a basic watch / alarm / stopwatch.
I've lived in a few tech cities, and SF is pretty high up thee for not sucking. Lots of jobs if you have skills, areas around the city have less horrid rent, pretty warm without being too hot, and neat culture.

I'll give a slight edge to Seattle, because I like the geography a bit better. It's where I'll land next. But for now I've spent half a decade in Boston. Good .edu jobs, lots of startups, and Pharma jobs too. Nice folks, and living in Cambridge or Somerville is on the subway and more reasonable for housing costs. Yes we have snow, but I grew up near Philly, so this doesn't phase me. I tried NYC and Austin, but too packed (NYC), and too damn hot. (~105 in May in Austin, and rarely lower...)
Every country has export/import regulations at their borders. They usually don't check that what you take out is permissable to bring back in.

If he didn't have the proper documentation or follow the rules, he's only got himself to blame. We'll have to wait for the whole story to come out.
Do note that if you look at income data a little bit closer, you will notice that people with _only_ a bachelor's degree represent roughly 20% of every income bracket, which implies there is no significance to just having a degree as it relates to income.

That's probably not the right way to look at the data -- too many weird factors (what is the distribution in the brackets, how are the brackets defined, etc...).

The best study that I've seen that breaks this out is a bit old (2002), but still probably relevant is from the US Census:

http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p23-210.pdf

It shows that over a lifetime there is a significant benefit in having a bachelors. Furthermore, having a bachelors sets you up to get further degrees later in your career.
It doesn't matter what they say. If they had, the law requires them to lie and say they didn't.
Or Google could tune down the wifi on their bus? How powerful does it have to be?
I email myself my encryption passwords so that I - and any interested government agencies - can log in without me needing to remember them all the time.
Cool hack: You can re-create these emotions by hacking the body sensations.

Neuronal connections are bi-directional ("Neurons that fire together wire together"), so if you want to experience happiness, focus on feeling sensation all over the body just like the emotions maps.

A really easy (though not necessarily fun) one to try is disgust. Right now, just focus on the sensations in your neck. If you have any body awareness you should feel some yuckiness there. If you are unable to feel it, you may be a habitually hyper head-oriented person and may be totally disconnected from your emotional body. If this the case, I highly recommend learning to meditate to fix the issue.

For larger body sensations like happiness, just focusing your attention may not be enough though since your concentration may not be high enough and will naturally flit around. So in addition to focusing attention, move those parts of the body to generate sensation.
> t's possible that people could feel that a 3rd party product is endorsed by Disney.

No it isn't, that isn't how the world works. If you take public domain material and utilize it in your own way there is no semblance of reason to think the original creator of said material endorsed you. I don't know if you are talking about how we are now living in a world where basically nobody alive has experienced material entering public domain, but it isn't a nebulous area.
Shame appears to be the spiderman emotion. Interesting.
The biggest problem is that there doesn't seem to be any professional risk when customs agents "get it wrong". It seems that the agent could decided that your Sony Walkman is an agricultural product and take it from you and there will be shrugs all around.

With no downside whatsoever for overstepping bounds, added with the kinds of people that are attracted to this sort of job, its almost inevitable that bored agents will start hassling people when things get slow.
I doubt it; wristwatches have origin in the military need for a readily accessible chronometer for coordination among forces in different locations, and I tend to think that their having become popular in civilian life is an accident of history resulting from millions of soldiers having worn their watches home from the two world wars. We're now roughly two and a half to three generations from the latter such war, and wristwatches have been largely reduced to the status of niche fashion accessory; even in my own childhood, a wristwatch was still considered de rigeur and I had several growing up, but now not even anyone in my own generation much bothers with the things, to say nothing of my generation's kids.

Absent some repopularizing event, a category for which "Apple and Google would really like to sell a lot of smart watches" fails to qualify, I see no reason to imagine the trend spontaneously reversing itself.
So the problem is that it's really hard to get started for many people. That is one of the major things that divides the successful and the failures.
"(civilian vernacular: mm/dd/yy or mm/dd/yyyy;[165][166] other formats, including dd Month yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd, are common or prescribed—particularly in military, academic, scientific, computing, industrial, or governmental contexts. See Date and time notation in the United States.)"

My money is on January.
> An important note here, is that if you don't have a lawyer, people can threaten to sue you for anything.

People can threaten to sue you for anything if you do have a lawyer, too.

A lawyer obviously helps evaluate the threats.
*512MB. This is not an Apple innovation... I believe all SSDs have caches hanging off of the controller, used for both write and read. Flash memory is very much slower than DRAM when writing. This DRAM cache is why many SSDs have better burst performance than sustained write performance. Only the most high-end datacenter-oriented SSDs have backup power, typically supplied by supercapacitors rather than batteries though. I don't see any backup power on this Apple SSD.
Consequently others can ignore laws and licenses clearly out of line with the reality around them. I often find that to be far more effective in living life than seeking squeaky clean legal alternatives.

We really do only have one go around. I'll buy all the knock-off Mickey Mouse crap I want.
You can accomplish the same with Bitmessage broadcast addresses, and it solves the spam issue with proof of work.

https://bitmessage.org/
Analogously, pg's essays being very popular with a number of people in no way translates to other standards of quality :-) They may resonate with people, but without solid grounding in reality, they may be no better than "pop philosophy".

Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what artists sell. Yet those essays were extremely popular simply because they confirmed people's biases (hence "pop philosophy"). However, if you check the so-called "blogosphere", you can find many others who have posted well-reasoned criticisms of those (and other) essays.
A bit disappointed by this. As mentioned by ceejayoz, don't upload your .pem file anywhere!

AWS has tons of weird/interesting quirks - I thought this article was going to be about those.

Here's my 5 tips for AWS...

- SQS: encodes messages by default! plan accordingly if you are going to be sending large bodies (265K max).

- ELBs: they need time to warm up if you get a huge traffic spike. ELBs won't start scaling unless that traffic is sustained for a certain time (usually minutes).

- S3: watch out for "eventual consistency" if you're going to upload lots of files and try to access them right away - they might not be available immediately.

- Cloudwatch: set up alarms to make sure your billing never goes over threshold X in time Y. If someone compromised your account (because you uploaded your .pem file in cleartext to dropbox) and is mining bitcoins on your machines, you'll be notified.

- VPC: if you're going to build a services-oriented infrastructure, consider using a VPC! Unless you need to have all your services exposed to the public internet, it could save you a lot of time and security configuration trouble.
2013 Retrospective From An Education Writer
Gutenberg.org is great. In the same vein, gotta give honorable mention to librivox.org & archive.org.
Oh, come now, I thought it was pretty impressive, on the whole.
Marketing as a Business System eBook Giveaway
So glad you posted this, I was doing something similar and gave up on the idea because I noticed Amazon doesn't even want you keeping their ASINs in a database. But I kept thinking maybe I'm just being paranoid and they wouldn't care.

Glad you made some money off the dev time you put in!
This is where your failing to understand what bitcoin is, makes you look like a fool. Bitcoin first and foremost is a PROTOCOL.. just like TCP/IP.. it is not the coins people are trading. The idea behind bitcoin and the ledger system was that it would be used to create further technologies that relied on the bitcoin PROTOCOL not the currency.. It also solved the two generals problem which stumped computer scientist for decades. The currency was just the first use of the bitcoin protocol.
No, you're right. She just randomly makes stuff up in that article as presents it as fact. Like, she tries to claim that the minimum monthly rent in San Francisco is $4,000. No. No, it's not.
Why do people keep reflexively voting up any story about "Customs does something bad"? There's nothing particularly interesting or hacking-related here, it seems some people just want to promote the view that customs is out of control.
See http://bugs.python.org/issue3982 that's linked elsewhere in these comments for the kind of things that don't work on bytestrings
Seeking Open Source Projects for 2014
I'm looking for open source projects I can contribute to over on the PHP subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1u3wps/seeking_open_source_projects_for_2014/) and would like to extend the concept across multiple languages.

If you run an open source project and are seeking assistance with code or documentation, please comment with your project details so we can all give back in 2014!
A Whole in the "Cascading" of CSS
Worry not, I'm sure the US government would just go straight to AWS. No need to get your private key from you.

Edit: Please don't just downvote when I rebut sarcasm/snark with fact. Discuss!
On the last point, just use a VPC, period. I believe Amazon has now made this the default for new accounts, in fact. They come with no downsides and lots of benefits - being able to change security groups on the fly, elastic IPs that stay with the instance when stopped, etc.
I think there is subtext to the main thesis of the article - that all of these really smart and rich people concentrated in one area can't even solve their own immediate and noticeable problems.

Side note - it sounds like the author is specifically talking about SF proper, not south bay / peninsula.
I'm not aware of any exchange charging 1% for a one-way exchange. That would be very high. Most tend to be around 0.5-0.6%, with some as low as 0.2% Actually, many of the Chinese exchanges are currently 0% to trade, though they charge to bring money in or out of their systems.

It's also worth noting that many of the exchanges have fees that get lower if you trade larger amounts in a given time frame. If you're a high volume trader, the difference can be significant.
This is a very strange reading of history. From the time I came across linux in 97, there were always different groups within the linux world with different goals.

Yes, there was a large group devoted to the linux desktop. They never really succeeded at large scale.

But there was also a large group devoted to linux in the embedded space fighting the likes of windriver, qnx, etc. A sub-branch of this was the realtime linux folks. In the embedded market linux is pretty widely used. Even in real-time. Not dominant, but no longer a "WTF" level competitor.

A different group was focused on taking the server world over, at the time a "serious server" was a Sun box runing Solaris or something from HP running HP-UX. Occasionally Irix was used. Lots of things were serving from Windows NT. These days server tends to mean "Linux box".

Related but different was the world of HPC - at the time the big computers were running all sorts of OSes, IRIX was pretty popular, as was Solaris, and other forms of unix. Similarly supercomputing and cluster computing was proprietary OSes, but linux wanted in there too. Now they mostly run linux.

The argument you are making at it's core is that the thousands of people and companies that use and contribute to linux have a single unified goal. This is not true, nor has it ever been. Well, I guess you could say the goal has been "make it useful for my case", and that is a truth, but generic enough to mean anything.

In fact I would say that other than the desktop, an arguably mobile, linux has pretty much dominated the fields it entered.

I say arguably mobile, because it is still questionable if Apple dominated for technical reasons or fad reasons. There are lots of people these days I talk to who say stuff like "I'm thinking my next phone won't be an iPhone". It remains to be seen what will happen.
Programming Your Quantum Computer