skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Actual international-conflict geopolitical risk will not bubble over in 2014. Stupid saber-rattling in Asia, insurgencies and wars in Africa, but nothing critical.

2) Security/privacy will become something normal people and businesses ask about, and ask fairly superficial questions about, during many transactions (e.g. people are going to stop being fucking morons and just relying on "the cloud" for sensitive data without questioning it; they may still end up using the cloud, but will want to make a more informed choice.)

3) Snowden, Manning, and Assange will remain in the same positions on 31 DEC as they started on 1 JAN. weev will remain in prison. aaronsw

4) Zerocoin will launch, and will be a lot more interesting than Bitcoin to many Bitcoin early adopters. Alternative digital currencies which are NOT purely proof-of-work will also start to be interesting; not necessarily USD backed, but maybe equities, or debt instruments, or whatever. Some may be based on bitcoin. Either Open Transactions or a strippled-of-XRP form of Ripple, or something like it (blinded tokens). BTC/USD will remain between 250 and 2000 on 31 DEC, even if it has excursions. If I had to bet, I'd bet today's price/no net change as the most likely center (the "most likely" single price is of course 0, but plenty of other prices are also likely)

5) Apple will continue to slide into irrelevance; the vanguard of most-technical users will move away from iOS and OSX, if not Apple hardware, due to Apple anti-freedom policies

6) Someone will actually put together a credible packaged solution for secure CPE (wifi-wifi, wifi-ether), secure basebandless pda thing, secure laptop (a modified chromebook or something), server solution, and network services, in a way which can be verified down to the metal, for pro and enterprise/intl sales, at semi-sane price points (i.e. not Crypto AG prices)

7) A non-US location will emerge as a serious startup location specifically due to NSA/USG policies. I'm betting on Germany with German/Swiss arbitrage -- people living/working in Berlin on dev and ops in Switzerland. Maybe other non-EU/EU splits.

8) US mid-term 2014 elections will consist of "fuck the incumbents", independent of political party.

9) Yahoo will continue to slide into doom, and will be revealed to be the biggest collaborator among major non-financial, non-travel, non-carrier companies in the US. Alibaba will remain their only real value.

10) China will start to try to take the "moral high ground" on issues as a counterpoint to the US. It won't be universal, but it will hopefully cause US politicians (and electorate) to rethink things. They may offer to help in Afghanistan post US-withdrawal, in the same way they help in Africa today -- economic support, little political involvement.
I get the same value out of MOOC providers (more Coursera than Udacity to be honest), and find it fantastic to be able to learn about something without any financial obligation.

Also would like to see how they are going to survive financially, and if the universities will keep supporting them.
- Coup d'état in North Korea, with civil war between pro-democratic forces and loyalist forces. American, South Korean forces entering North Korea from the DMZ and Chinese troops entering from the Yalu river. North Korea is divided in half. China declares a large buffer zone, forcing South Korea to concede 25% of the peninsula. Japanese Self Defense Force clashes with Chinese Navy in a limited naval/air battle which results in Chinese loss. Both sides declare victory.

- Another dot-com bust. Facebook is delisted from stock exchange after share prices crash and investors lose confidence in rapidly declining user-base. Amazon crashes, Walmart takes over the space left behind by Amazon after being acquired. The idea of valuation from future profits in technology stocks is wiped out with the major market correction. Warren Buffet addresses it in his annual shareholder's meeting.

- United States announces return to the gold standard angering China as the treasury notes become worthless.Global recession many times bigger than the 2008 market crash soon follows.

- Bitcoin is made illegal as it is discovered the Founder of Bitcoin turns out to be Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road. Cryptocurrency is banned in United States and other nations follow.
I doubt there are any books specifically on the subject of how to build an online OCR service. If you're interested in the underlying technology of OCR or the orthogonal question of the mechanics of building web applications in general you may find something.

The most basic workflow would be to implement a simple web app that allows uploading an image file, save the the file to local disk, run the Tesseract program and generate a new web page that displays the Tesseract textual output to the user.

There is going to be much more CPU utilization per query than for a typical web application so if you want to scale you'll probably need some sort of distributed load balancing architecture with multiple (possibly virtual) servers.

If you don't care about scaling and just want to test something out you'll at least need a hosting provider that allows you to compile and install software. That probably means a virtual server like EC2 or something similar.
- Okay thank you for the knowledge tgflynn. I really appreciate your time and patience.
Here is a video of guy hacking SnapChat and finding out Mark Zuckberg's logging info like phone#, email. The video was posted on Dec 26th. How come they did not fix this..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEWugKX98P0
We will see a one-man startup/app/product valued/acquired at north of $100M.
What you didn't know your phone number could reveal - hackathon project
Challenge HN: Think of one reasonable product or service idea per day
Sometimes there are those moments where we realize some behavior that we may be engaging in is starting to be slightly limiting, if not self-destructive. This could be anything from watching that extra episode of tv, checking reddit for the nth time today, or having the extra helping of dinner. I realized that I was partaking of social voting websites [hn, reddit, metafilter et al.] and blogs [anandtech, engadget] way to goddamn much this year, and as such have decided to channel that 40 minutes a day into something just a bit more productive.<p>I am launching a blog where I attempt to conjure up one reasonable product or service idea per day for the rest of 2014. Now why would I do this if ideas are essentially worthless and implementation is damn near everything? I am doing this because there is tech out there that I don’t have the time resources to implement, but I think that the community could implement it and it would benefit the implementers immensely. Look in my submission history about the ‘unserved underclass’ and you will see that there are many people who would like to use some of the services that have only been allowed to the wealthy. If you only make $0.20/user off of this market but there are tens of millions in the USA alone that is still a sizable amount of money. It will also have any other interesting ideas I dream up on my daily perambulations, and all are encouraged to take anything I come up with, build it, and make money off it. There is tech that I want made and there is money for anyone that can make it. The blog is ideasglaore.com (blogger ideasgalore1.blogspot.com until DNS updates) and I will be adding one idea per day for the rest of 2014.<p>And i am 127.0.0.1 hn. See you guys in 2015.
However, everyone learns differently. I have found greater success in learning without that kind of interaction. Such contact may be essential for a subset of students, but certainly not all. I find the potential of MOOCs exciting because it finally moves us away from believing the one-size-fits-all model serves all students equally.

The future of education is probably not MOOCs alone, or brick and mortar schools alone. The future is allowing students to learn however they want to learn without barriers. That will truly be transformative.
> The most important thing you should do is the thing that's most important to you.

I had to go google this exact statement to see if you were quoting somebody else. What a profound observation that is.
Here it goes:
Behind a ISP-wide cache.
Any 'traceroute' passes by transtelco.net (ISP used to have their own infraestructure for voip services Megafon) now i have 5/6? DNS jumps! and all my traffic going to Transtelco.

traceroute to news.ycombinator.com (198.41.191.47), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 customer-GDL-**-***.megared.net.mx << 177.230.**.*** Dynamic IP, GDL is the city of the company
2 10.0.28.62 (10.0.28.62) 8.939 ms 8.941 ms 8.935 ms
3 10.2.28.195 (10.2.28.195) 8.912 ms 8.903 ms 8.891 ms
4 pe-cob.megared.net.mx (189.199.117.***) 8.878 ms 8.866 ms 14.201 ms << COB is the user city
5 10.3.0.29 (10.3.0.29) 23.494 ms 23.483 ms 23.408 ms
6 10.3.0.13 (10.3.0.13) 22.842 ms 19.609 ms 19.596 ms
7 10.3.0.10 (10.3.0.10) 19.560 ms 19.555 ms 19.536 ms
8 201-174-24-233.transtelco.net (201.174.24.233) 19.527 ms 20.650 ms 19.468 ms
9 201-174-254-105.transtelco.net (201.174.254.105) 34.239 ms 31.793 ms 31.268 ms
10 fe3-5.br01.lax05.pccwbtn.net (63.218.73.25) 31.792 ms 31.736 ms 33.533 ms
11 any2ix.coresite.com (206.223.143.150) 32.834 ms 33.221 ms 33.429 ms
12 ae3-50g.cr1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.124.113) 41.288 ms 41.228 ms 41.231 ms
13 ae2-50g.ar1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.127.142) 42.632 ms ae1-50g.ar1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.127.138) 35.192 ms 33.860 ms
14 as13335.xe-11-0-6.ar1.lax1.us.nlayer.net (69.31.125.106) 35.143 ms 44.714 ms 44.666 ms
15 198.41.191.47 (198.41.191.47) 37.638 ms 37.239 ms 36.997 ms

I don't know how normal or ethic is this type of cache. No download limits, I have the 10mb and get 20mb(2000-2300kbps) downloads, for uploads is limited to 1mb.
2013 Rise of VPNs against the fall of Online Privacy
For a lot of these links, I am not able to find the pdf as they are behind signups or paywall. sad state of affairs
Then why am I getting it for free?

That's the point - it's not free. You don't need a currency for "free". You need a currency for things which have value.
Way to espouse its benefits
I'd suggest BitTorrent Sync - it has a file send mode which works with QR codes.
Your predictions got more and more outlandish as the post went on.
Woah there, let's not be radical.
1. Litecoin to the moon!

2. This guy is going to be very wrong...
http://www.businessinsider.com/williams-bitcoin-meltdown-10-...
>> I predict that Bitcoin will trade for under $10 a share by the first half of 2014, single digit pricing reflecting its option value as a pure commodity play. Miners/speculators will be best served to acknowledge the meltdown has begun, act quickly and take fleeting profit off the table.

....or, if he turns out to be right I will buy $5,000 worth of BTC and be a millionaire by EOY 2014 when the price spikes back up.

3. Snowden leaks will reveal something super-duper-crazy-out-there; e.g. AIDS invented in a lab or 9/11 really was an inside-job. Something almost beyond believable like that.

4. Blackberry will shutdown, be acquired or start making enterprise security phones. i.e., Blackberry will be to the mobile phone market what box.com is to the file-sharing services market.
Thanks for putting this up. So the dump didn't include the last two digits?
Why do women cheat more than Men?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhGYdBry19E
Contraband? Contraband?!??

If one wished to bring digital contraband into the US, why oh tell me why would anyone ever bring it physically over the border on a machine?!?

We invented a network of networks that makes this rather easier to securely do quite some years ago. :@ why would anyone think that contraband-based searches make sense here?
> Everyone revises their work, many times over. But yes the great authors do as well.

You state that as if it's some universal truth but it's certainly not. We know that Asimov only ever wrote a first draft and a final draft and Heinlein wouldn't even create a first draft most of the time. Neither of them is a Nabokov or Hemingway but they certainly fall into the category of "everyone."
This functionality was in etherpad, which was also YC-funded and also demoed their software with a playback of a pg essay.

While etherpad lives on as an open source project the original company/team was acquired by google and this resulted in google docs getting real time cursor movement and edits shortly thereafter (google docs originally updated via polling and often had collisions).

I think it's a shame that google never implemented more of the core ideas from etherpad, such as playback and contributor text highlighting. It's still the best online collaborative tool I've ever used. I had experiences writing letters to politicians in real time with dozens of anonymous strangers who we gathered via twitter, and collaborative grant proposal writing sessions that I can only describe as thrilling. It's also been fun to use etherpad to collaboratively take notes during conferences, and truly fascinating to replay and see how largely anonymous editors quickly start taking on certain roles without any prior discussion--one person gets very interested in fixing spelling mistakes, someone else gets really good at finding relevant urls for background information and links to slides, someone else just barrels ahead with whatever the presenter is currently talking about knowing that the others will fill in the gaps. A lot of the innovation happened in subset hardier, but etherpad made it way more accessible and this useful.

Etherpad deserved all the attention that google wave was receiving at the time because it really delivered on the promise of a truely flexible tool for collaborating and communicating more effectively than email.
Some time ago there was a post on HN about the difference between a system and goal driven behavior. A system driven behavior applies a strategy over and over endlessly with improvement at each iteration. The goal driven behavior is a sprint based evolution.

What the OP describes is a system which he acknowledges improves his expertise in the studied knowledge.

My opinion is that system has the advantage over goals in that it is an automatic and permanent drive to stick to some rule. It can be learning, exploring new ideas, do fitness, healthy food, keep a good weight, etc.

Goals require a boost of effort and focus wich can only last for a limited duration. You feel good if the goal is achieved and bad if not.

If you work with goals and sprints, there is a high risk of burnout. So better go into system mode for the long run.

The change of topic of interest is something I saw my self and was also puzzled about. I attribute this to some "fatigue" of the brain where it's learning capacity is kind of saturated. Changing topic of interest, changes the neurons and connections in play which let some of them to rest and activate others. Learning is also a matter of repetition and pruning details. You get this by switching back and forth between topics and forgetting the details in between.

Another benefit of having different topic of interest is that at some point we will make the connections between them. We'll use the knowledge gained on one topic on the other. This is powerful and by the combination of topics explored it will also make you most probably unique.
Look at it from this way:

I couldn't expect to have access to courses like Probabilistic Graphical Models and Neural Networks by Hinton at probably any of the universities in my country. By popularizing science, by being able to reach such a massive population, even if it inspires a 1% of those taking the course, it is absolutely better than Hinton or Kohler teaching a course to 50 - 250 students at UoT and Stanford per semester.

This is long term we are talking about. Yes, the whole thing must be sustained by business, but I find a moral objective too here.
I wonder if this is real: "65039076XX","larrypage","Mountain View"
You actually used it? It was a clever hack, but it was always just a bit too much hassle. If I wanted to share something with someone (via mobile or otherwise), I found SMS/email/IM was faster, easier, and understood by everyone. And no extra apps to fumble with!
"typical CRUD-based with a little business logic that lots of SaaS products are in the end"

Isn't the market for that sort of thing getting crowded by now ?
Who hasn't seen that one coming after the Google acquisition.
More importantly: NFC happened anyway.

Pretty much all my local merchants have machines that accept NFC payment taps - to the extent that the Commonwealth Bank has an app for the Galaxy S4 which will emulate a debit card tap and be accepted by any machine.

The only time I end up keying a pin or signing is usually when the staff themselves don't realize that I can just tap my card (the machines have big NFC icons on them, but they don't offer the machine to me to tap).
Download links were broken for me so I've mirrored them here (converted from zip to bzip2):

CSV: http://evilrouters.net/schat.csv.bz2

SQL: http://evilrouters.net/schat.sql.bz2
Deeply concerned their involvement came out?
It probably did, but the site is attempting to provide some level of privacy.

Interesting decision. Sure the dump is publicly available, but this is much more accessible.
Not everyone who goes into illegal endeavors is the criminal mastermind you fancy that you would be if you turned to the dark side.

Hell, there are plenty of people dumb enough to video themselves or friends breaking and entering, beating up people and stabbing people, stealing cars, and the like and POST THESE VIDEOS TO YOUTUBE OR ON SOCIAL NETWORKS.

People do in fact cross borders with ridiculously incriminating things on their laptops and phones, such as photos of the kiddie sex tourism, email or logs of chats from the person who talked them into carrying drugs, and things like that.
First thing to learn in 2014: Remember to read the subtext under the Ask HN entries. :)
The dump does not include the last 2 digits (has the same XX at the end). The original site mentions this.
Yeah that must be why people aren't losing Bitcoin and having it stolen every second week...
And yet it will still remain infeasible for real-world use due to no IE support.
Apple Anger On The NSA iPhone Hacking
Steam coming from Fukushima Unit 3 reactor building
You never have to type anything with bump, and you get the entire contact info, image and everything. No way does SMS or typing out an email do the same thing. Even typing in bump into the app store and starting it for the first time to send a contact is less work than writing an email. Touch app store, touch search "bu.." there it is, install, share address, touch phones boom done. It probably takes about as many touches just to get into the email composer.
Re/code is a pretty weird name for them. Allthingsd was a mix of Walt reviewing Apple products or comparing non-Apple products to Apple products and Kara's Yahoo! drama column. Nothing about coding, ever. If I'd never read a single Allthingsd column in my life, I doubt it would have been much different than it is now.
Computational Journalism on a Stick v2.0.0
OK, but you should know that Pike likes Linux even less than he likes OS X.
One may like helping the people generally, but real-time monitoring of unanswered questions for posting the FIRST answers.... that's something different.
The diagnostic regulations are too stringent . They are preventing people from getting information that they want to pay for, 23&me is willing to provide, and that 23&me can justify. It's not like they're taking information straight off of SNPedia, they survey the literature on the alleles of the henes they test.
Conversely it's illegal to take money which wasn't intended to be sent to you.

Let's say you accidentally type in the wrong BSB (which my father actually did once) and it happens to line up with an account number in that bank (fortunately for him it did not). Even if you send say, $150,000 to that person....it's not legal for that person to accept it. Nor spend it.

See, while they could claim to have spent a portion of it unknowingly the courts would probably view that as fair, they couldn't go "hey I'm rich!" and buy a house that they would be allowed to keep.

I mean, you might not get all the 150k back in the end, but they would definitely not be keeping any of it. And through this process, you'd generally find your bank would be fairly enthusiastic about getting that money back, since as long as it's not on their ledgers they can't lend against it.
503 on download links
Makes me proud to be a nerd. :)
All you need is a bad connecting flight through Dubai and you're in the poop.

For this kind of scenario, I have a 2011ish MB Air that is too small to do anything (4gb RAM) and gets re-puppeted fairly frequently to test the system. When I worked in China, I took my iPad, Bluetooth keyboard, and strongvpn account.
EU citizens do too: http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/
I have a weird issue where, after upgrading, opening the Activity Monitor causes a process called 'systemstats' to balloon to >1.5GB memory and peg the CPU. Doesn't seem to be just a startup thing, because it does it indefinitely until I kill the process (closing Activity Monitor doesn't fix it). Googling around turns up some other people with that issue but no obvious diagnosis.
Bitcoin being deflationary, the value will never settle. No government wants deflationary money, and you don't either because no one who doesn't have it has any reason to accept permanent servitude from a deflationary currency.

Or as I like to put it: why do you think you should get wealthy for doing literally nothing? Not investing, not loading, not accepting any risk, not working?
Well, I'm glad they're sticking together. I like the duo in the D conferences and interviews.
I feel the same way about MOOCs and I suspect most of the audience does.

I'm curious why these organizations are pushing a sort of virtual class model at all. Wouldn't it be more useful to provide lecture series on topics alone? Perhaps add some social interaction but in a way more fitting of the medium.

Right now, I went to investigate your behavioral economics class and found that I wasn't able to view the lectures until some time in the future. Why hobble themselves and their users? Is it about a monetization model they envision in the future?

It's quite frustrating because there is some real value here. I'd love for MOOCs to start making big institutions sweat just a little.
NB: "For now, we have censored the last two digits of the phone numbers in order to minimize spam and abuse. Feel free to contact us to ask for the uncensored database. Under certain circumstances, we may agree to release it."
How long until somebody releases an updated snapchat database linking pinterest profile pictures? I mean if you chose a very unique username, and went to http://pinterest.com/username, you'd be able to discover what they possibly look like. It doesn't end there, their email address is probably username@gmail.com too. simply googling the username results in connecting their twitter? facebook? myspace? linkedin? full name, more pictures, your friends, your interests, your likes. All in all, I would have to say, this can be potentially a far bigger loss of privacy than just your Snapchat account.

Damn that 3 billion dollar looks good about now.
Bring a chromebook and they can then use Google.com to search its contents.
Full list (limited paging per IP) with partial number check: https://dazzlepod.com/snapchat/
The NLTK site says the Python 3 version is still alpha.
Any suggestions? I would love to try out some new things.
20 Months of Freelancing
I really think we need a word for that thing where a successful startup sells itself to a major corporation which promptly kills it and leaves the user base out to dry.

I'm struggling for some kind of reference to Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish," but it's not really the same thing.