skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The moment you push any kind of culture underground you automatically make it harder and more expensive to control. So the smarter move would be to legalise the less harmful drugs but create a safe, controlled environment for sale and usage.

While some of the more conservative people out there might disagree with people taking drugs, the fact remains that people do want to get high and thus those people will always find way to do so. To me, it makes more sense not to turn those people into outlaws and instead concentrate your efforts on tackling those who turn to drugs for non-recreational reasons (eg resolving addiction and/or peoples dependency on stimulants for escapism. Those individuals usually have other real life issues and -wrongly- turn to drugs as their "fix").

This will never happen though because drugs are given such a bad connotation in the press as the roots of all evil. Not all drugs are equal; whose which are proven to be relatively harmless compared to tobacco or alcohol are given the ridiculous label of "gateway drugs" - as if anyone who smokes two puff of a joint will automatically end up on the streets shooting heroin. If we want people off the harder drugs then we have to teach kids that not all drugs are equally bad - and to do this we need governments to send a saner political message about their stance on drugs.

From a personal perspective, I've done a few "magic mushrooms" at festivals in my younger years. They made me a little giddy but at no point did I rape, steal nor murder. In fact I was more pleasant company than when I've been drinking (and I'm not a rude drunk by any means). Yet since then, the UK government has made magic mushrooms illegal. It's just absurd to think that my previous actions, which were entirely harmless at the time, are now illegal. And when kids experiment (as many kids often do) they too will learn that government legislation is broken towards "softer" drugs. Which will make then re-evaluate their opinion about their governments stance on all drugs. So the government are really just wasting their own time and our public money by continuing on this charade that all recreational chemicals are evil.

The most hypocritical thing of all though, is I bet a great many of those in power have smoked weed at some point when they were teenagers / young adults (as we saw in the UK with the amusing yet frustrating confessions a few years back where several politicians came forward and admitted to "smoking but not inhaling". sigh
Reactive Programming[1] (not FRP): Look up ThingLab[2][3]. Done in 1978 on Smalltalk by Alan Borning. Alan Kay typically points to Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963)[4] as inventing objects, computer graphics and constraint programming.

I have to admit I don't understand the hype over FRP. I mean it's great that you can now do reactive programing in FP as well, but it's not like this hasn't been around for ages.

Anyhow, what Alan does is not co-opting, it is pointing out all the great work that has been forgotten and then reinvented, usually badly, in the hope that someone will finally do a better job than what went before. See also Brett Victor's talk "The Future of Programming"[5]. Brett works for Alan now.

Others have pointed out VPRI[6]. Open Source programming languages that came out of there include OMeta (OO pattern matching)[7], Nile (dataflow for graphics)[8], Maru (metacircular S-Expr. eval)[9], KScript (FRP)[10], etc.

In terms of publishing papers: he's 73 for pete's sake. He doesn't have to publish papers, or do anything he doesn't absolutely want to. But in fact he doesn't just rest on his awards (Turing...) or patents or having had a hand in creating just about every aspect of what we now consider computing. He's still going strong.

So yes, there is a peanut gallery. You just may be confused as to who is sitting in it and who is on stage changing the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThingLab

[3] http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/videos/thi...

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

[6] http://www.vpri.org

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta

[8] https://github.com/damelang/nile

[9] http://piumarta.com/software/maru/

[10] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2509590
Too big to fail is too big. Would it really be so bad if we simply outlawed companies exceeding a certain number of employees? HSBC recently had about a quarter of a million people, which is just insane. When things get that big, nobody fully understands what is going on anymore, even at a basic level, and it does become plausible that terrible actions are taken with literally no one to blame, either because nobody is sure where the blame lies, or because the would-be accusers are scared of the systemic risk (which these days is very real).

I propose that twenty thousand people ought to be enough for any company. Having more, smaller firms will improve the job market for individuals, reduce the burden of mega-powerful interests in government acting against the population as a whole, and provide more genuine opportunities for real leadership to a greater number of people.

A gradual phase-in could be used, say max 500K employees by 2020, 200K by 2025, 100K by 2030, 50K by 2035, and 20K by 2040. And no funny business: one person cannot have a controlling interest in companies whose employee counts exceed the limit in aggregate.
RSA denies link with US spying agency
Ah Matt Taibbi... guaranteed unbiased reporting on banks.

It's not clear whether any employees knew they were facilitating money laundering. What HSBC has been found guilty of (and what they are being fined for) is lacking sufficient controls to detect money laundering activity. This is quite different to wilfully and knowingly assiting money laundering for drug cartels.

All sorts of businesses are part of the cash economy and pay in large amounts of cash on a daily and weekly basis. The worst critiscm you can level here is that a lowly-paid cashier was insufficiently trained to spot potentially dubious sources of cash that were being paid in.

Actually reading the whole article... it's just sensationalist drivel. There is no claim compliance officers were laundering money. In fact a compliance officer goes no where near money. Bonus clawback is in reponse to weak controls, not becuase they were in the employ of drug cartels.
Not a microframework, but a friend of mine committed this: http://freecode.com/projects/cgi77
When ‘60 Minutes’ Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at the Door
Not a good idea. Wal-mart has over a million employees, but is not too big to fail. Problem with the financial sector is that everything is inter-connected. Long Term Capital Management was deemed too big to fail, yet the number of employees was tiny.
Thankfully people are more interested in Lindsay Lohan latest binge drinking bout than in how some get away with making billions of money laundering...

No revolution is coming, at least as long as the people are entertained, and not too hungry.
> * have a passion for doing what they are doing, but they get held up by corporations or by people who want to monetize. *

Could those "passionate teenagers" have kept it running instead of selling the site in 2004 (why didn't they?), or would it have died much earlier if some "greedy" corporation hadn't picked it up and paid the bills all these years? It's great to have the passion to build something cool, but it's a little cooler if it's sustainable.
Useful Tips to Improve Your Businesses Brand
That was a very carefully worded PR statement. They've basically affirmed the reuters statement, to me anyway.
Lawyer here. Every time I have a new client I have to obtain picture ID, check their share registers etc. Doesn't matter that most of my clients are entrepreneurs, startups or venture funds. Doesn't matter that all their transactions go through banks that have already checked the transactions and the people involved once and that all transactions are ultimately registered in public registers such as the commerce register.

If I were suspecting that a client's transaction was part of some tax evasion scheme, European Union law would require me to report it to the authorities (although it's not clear that these requirements are in themselves lawful).

All this nonsense costs lots of time and money for me and ultimately for my clients.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the scumbags who actually launder money, do it more or less out in the open and they are not even put to jail.
Something is Rotten in Denmark.
Is there really anyone out there who does any Python/Django dev and doesn't use PIP? I'm not sure there's even any tutorials for absolute beginners that don't mention it at least as part of the install process?
This story underscores that anything goes if you get big enough.
So apparently you can get two pages of ranking, using / and /news2.
If they weren't a bank it wouldn't matter - that's the point of the article. People have had their entire homes confiscated because one of their kids was drug dealing and they didn't realise, yet when banks assist drug dealers the Government doesn't even take all the money they made from doing so.
This is not a good approach. There are companies with extremely high number of employeees, but no real systemic risk, etc., especially in manufacturing (see Foxconn) and among large conglomerates (Siemens). Correlatedness (and leverageÖ must be dealt with, not merely company size.
The judge understood this, but can't convict on a pre-crime. Assuming good faith might seem laughable here, but it does apply. Until there is proof that the gov't did in fact access anyone else's data (w/o authorization), there is no charge. There is a good analogy somewhere in there about an apartment building. 364 days of the year, the gov't can't go touching the building's master key, but the one day they have an investigation, they get a copy.
If it makes you feel any better, it's sort of not a UK bank (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation). It's only fairly recently that the company repatriated itself.
Great stuff, nevertheless the following is a surely a regression:

> Note that in Perl 6, cmp is smart enough to compare strings with string semantics and numbers with number semantics, so producing numbers in the transformation code generally does what you want.

Perl 5 had a clear distinction between "cmp" (string comparison) and "<=>" (numeric comparison). Trying to work out the data type, and thus the comparison approach, from the actual data itself, is surely going to create subtle bugs, that don't appear in testing, but do appear with live data.
Ask HN: Rackspace email addresses hacked?
We received an email this morning - anyone else? Just enough information to scare the snot out of you but not enough for you to make intelligent decisions.

====================

Urgent Information Regarding Passwords for Accounts You Administer

Dear Rackspace Customer,

We have recently corrected a potential vulnerability that may have allowed external access to some of your end-user's credentials. To be safe, we have initiated a process to reset the passwords for some of your users' mailboxes. If any of your users cannot access their mailbox, please log in to your Admin Control Panel to change the password and to allow access to your user once again. Please note that your admin credentials were not at risk.

We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you and/or your end users. As with any potential security threat, it is recommended that you monitor your account(s) for any unusual activity and recommended that you use strong and unique passwords.

====================
Apple Files Patent on Interactive Maps
... of a bank who is present in the US. That how it works - last time a big US software company got a huge fine by the EU for monopolistic behavior. :)
Angel Investing: Know (What Motivates) Thyself
I'm getting: "Could not connect to database" errors...
And is the "no charges to be pursued due to risk of endangering the world's financial stability" line an outright lie?
All the HSBC settlement proves is that prosecutors like cases where they have IRC transcripts of someone ordering hits. That's why drug cases are so popular compared to white collar cases. Its easy to prove that some guy had a ton of cocaine and that's all the law requires. Much harder to prove that someone intended to facilitate money laundering (especially in a county where its easy to get caught up in that accidentally).

It is simply the nature of white collar crimes, where the illegality of conduct usually depends on what the person was thinking, that it will be prosecuted less strongly than other kinds of crimes. This is a feature, not a bug.

Also, I love how people on here seem to think that only terrorists and cyberlibertarian money launderers deserve due process. E.g. Perlpimps comment that we should infer purely from circumstances intent that is either criminally negligent or affirmatively corrupt.
> People have had their entire homes confiscated because one of their kids was drug dealing and they didn't realise

yeah that's ridiculous, but that's the US legal system for you and nothing to do with the banks.
Sermon VIII - The Art Of Beauty
A bit offtopic:

Julia Evans finished Hacker School, so I wonder if she continues with her Rust based operating system?

https://github.com/jvns/puddle

featured on HN 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6935763
Ship it, already
As an individual, all these "know your customer" and "anti-money laundering" laws are a massive drag. When I moved to the UK it was nearly impossible to open a personal account (despite already having secured the right to work from the government--which vetting is quite substantial). The bank wanted utility bills with my residential address, but clearly I needed a bank account to get a home and utilities. It took four visits to the bank branch to get this sorted, each time resulting in more excuses about how they couldn't help because of KYC, AML, and CYA.

If they want to fight money laundering, fine, give me an account with a minimal cash flow limit or some other restrictions. But the modern regulatory regime has infected retail banking to such a degree that normal humans with good jobs can no longer open an account at all. Clearly professional criminals continue to work the system just fine, meanwhile.
London's Victorian Hyperloop: the forgotten pneumatic railway
Why is email broken?
I never understood why email needed replacing with something else, can someone shed some light?
Given that he's run off to collect a pay check in a new position created for him at Covington & Burling LLP, a firm well known for representing various major banks, I imagine they'll be getting plenty of work from HSBC in the future.
Old debate, it's a core philosophy or the language. It's a bit like complaining that there are a 100 ways to cook chicken.

Personally, I like the freedom that Perl offers. Perl 5.x is still widely used in some industries, finance and banking for instance, and it's still the glue that holds 'nix systems together (have a look at the scripts in the bin folders of any distro).

Following Modern Perl[1] best practices, you can write powerful, meaningful and expressive Perl 5 without shooting yourself in the foot.

Perl 6 is another beast, it removes many of the ambiguities present in Perl 5 and introduces more functional paradigms.

At its core, Perl remains a multipurpose tool. The fact that there are multiple ways to do a thing is not bad, whether it suits you or not is a matter of personal preference really.

So, if someone is curious about Perl, they should be encouraged to try it and find out for themselves if they like it or not.

[1] http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/
Mathematics will take up precisely as much space as it 'needs to' in computer science. The fact that you're arguing for some kind of effort in getting it more space says to me you're as misguided as the people who say it has no place. Just let it happen: If it's needed, it's needed. It's not a matter of principle. It's a matter of practicality.
Are you sure? This repo suggests otherwise: https://github.com/kch/heroku-php-pg/blob/master/index.php
Could you name some apps in the US apple store that the US government would care about banning?
I don't like it because the lack of alliteration makes it a less catchy name.

I reckon it's the real reason responsible for Ruby on Rails recognition.
I don't believe that your interlocutors are anti-bank per se, but instead they are raising concern about unequal treatment under the law. In this case, the banks are the benefactors and the individual, by comparison, would be the loser were he/she to encounter a similar situation.
I agree with him that mathematical literacy should be more emphasized for a "hacker" -- someone who solves a problem. Obviously, mathematical knowledge comes in handy for any hacker tackling on physical phenomena. That does not mean, however, mathematics is the most important tool at hacker's disposal. I think the author just wanted to say that understanding mathematics helps solving a problem, but he went overboard to make it sound like someone who does not understand mathematics is a second-rate hacker. I don't believe that hackers are sized by mathematical aptitude.
Are you sure Wal-Mart isn't too big to fail? Do you live in a place where it is dominant? A lot of Americans do now live in such places, where Wal-Mart has out-businessed smaller shops. If your choices of where to shop are pretty much limited to Wal-Mart, Costco, and Home Depot, where does that leave you if one of them does something really bad? Do you think the US would be all right if all the Home Depots closed tomorrow? It would not be all right. Twenty years ago there was no such thing.
Oh the speed...how slow it is :( .
Chute: MapReduce for PHP
Not exactly the same idea ;) but my ErlPort [1] project allows to use Erlang as a router between Ruby and Python processes.

[1] http://erlport.org
I don’t like the gamma example. In the second (4915328) previous submission, there is a comment of kenko: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4918977 . Minimal extract:

> >>> int(math.exp(math.lgamma(41)))

> 815915283247882431423526575245034982027017846784L

> [...]

> Prelude> fac 40

> 815915283247897734345611269596115894272000000000

Another problem is that lgamma runs in constant time but it’s accurate only in a finite range. To extend the range the polynomial must have more terms, so the “accurate” version doesn’t run in constant time. And for enough precision, you must use the “long” version of the floating point numbers. The complete analysis is complex and I don’t have enough time to do it.

The recursive functions runs in linear time only for small numbers. It uses only integer arithmetic that is faster. But if the number are big enough you must use “long” integers, and the time is probably quadratic.
So it’s not clear which version is better, neither for small numbers nor for big numbers and asymptotic behavior.
Let's Drup Up The Week. Issue 12
Will do, I have only read Maverick - it and the other examples were one of the reasons I took on my own startup.
Build an "Aliens" costume for your daughter
There's no place like the lab for the holidays
That's why cryptocurrencies are so good. Nobody can deny you when creating an account or moving your money.
It's the fourth or the fifth time they've been caught "lacking sufficient controls to detect money laundering activity" in something like 15 years. If that is not "wilfully and knowingly", I don't know what it is.
As someone who just went through this, an FYI for anyone else in this situation: Lloyds Bank will let you open a current account with just a US passport and a UK work visa, no other docs needed. HSBC has a similar account you can get, but, well, see parent story...
Except if you're a big and important bank, then things like 'zero tolerance' don't really apply. You then just get a slap on the wrist for insufficient controls.

Note that they chose not to indict HSBC. it's not that they didn't have enough to go on.
There is no evidence anyone at HSBC was willfully assisting or complicit in money laundering. The fines are for weak controls that failed to detect money laundering.
How many hits did Lanny Breuer order?

Even if I kinda like the idea of Silk Road, I can't help but think DPR will get what he deserved...
"The New York Times"
Actually, HSBC has openly admitted to knowingly and willfully taking active steps[#] to disable specific automated countermeasures put in place to prevent money laundering, as well as deliberately under-staffing departments responsible for AML compliance. There is little question as to their guilt or complicity.

[#]: http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/hsbc/dpa-attachment-a.p...
How would that have helped me pay my electric bill? I mean sure, if the electric company wanted to support it, OK, but they'd sooner support credit cards or PayPal, don't you think?
... or maybe build it with angular.js...
So

Who gets "the produce" from Mexico again?

How does this get distributed in the US? Is the bigger profit in production or distribution?

In which country is an exporter payed usually? (this is not a hard question)

The bank is responsible, yes, but more responsible is who put the money in there. And who provided the money in exchange for a product.
i got 'Error establishing a database connection' and i refreshed it and it's was all good then i clicked on a link and it came back!

and the animation was hard on Sheniqua [my laptop :)], just because you can doesn't mean you have to --- if the guys had spend less time on the CHILDISH animation and worked on the site properly, it would have been amazing!

for the time being am sticking with angularjs.org
Moscovo Recebe Exposição Internacional de AVAC - Aqua Therm 2014
The Great Big Porn Block is coming
Email isn't broken, if by broken you mean unusable, like a piano that's had all its strings cut.

But could it be improved? Certainly.

Same thing with just about any modern technology. I have a decent commuter car that gets me from point A to point B. Is it in working order? Yes. Could it be improved? Sure, and it has, in later model years.
Just a heads up: there's a lot of confronting and graphic imagery in that movie. It's not something you can easily unsee.

I'd still recommend watching it. Knowledge is power, of course, but in a safe state before tuning into it.
Game of Life in 3D + Source + Rule editor + Stereo rendering
I take it you didn't read the PDF? Levinson also gave a time estimate of "between 20 to 40 hours" (p114), which works out to $40 to $80 per hour. Let's call it $50 for the ease of comparison. This is an entirely reasonable hourly fee.

Verizon quoted a $50 court processing fee, which almost certainly takes less than 1 hour to do. It charges a $50 activation fee, which can't reasonably take 1 hour, and $10/day pen tap fee, and I doubt a Verizon employee is spending more than 12 minutes per day per pen tap.

In other words, those documents show that Verizon is almost certainly charging more per unit time than Lavasoft would, and definitely not "several times" lower than Levinson.
> The worst critiscm you can level here is that a lowly-paid cashier was insufficiently trained to spot potentially dubious sources of cash that were being paid in.

It seems like the frequency with which this was happening would suggest this could not have been hard to detect. Can we really blame this on a single lowly paid cashier? Am i missing something, or does this sound more like multiple cashiers taking comical cash deposits over a very long period?

Why should this lean toward being hard to detect and not willful ignorance and thus willful assistance?
> to knowingly and willfully taking active steps[#] to disable specific automated countermeasures

I can't see that anywhere in the link.
I mean, the perspective.

I don't like this system when you need a bank account to get a home and utilities. Why can't you use cash? I don't like that the bank wanted your utility bills with your residential address just to create an account for you. What for? They want to control everything. I just don't like that.