skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it amusing that he uses G+ to write about it.

I agree that cost is important. $500 is probably way too high, considering what $500 buys in fun gadgets.

They should also have a visible light to indicate when the camera is active.
reminded me of a book:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Soccer-Explains-World-Globalizatio...
As they say, "what gets measured gets managed." If you build your site around gamification, don't be surprised when your users try to turn it into a game.

(I say this clutching my own HN karma...)
The concept of a struggle session might help understand what's going on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

Also, Moldbug: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...
Interchange is by far the biggest component. The second biggest part is the processor markup. The card network's cut (e.g. Visa itself) is extremely small in comparison.

Just to define these terms for our fair readers:

Interchange is the cut that goes to the bank that issued the consumer's card. That is standard and you can see Visa's rates here: http://usa.visa.com/merchants/operations/interchange_rates.h...
Processors are the entities that connect merchants to the card network. (These are often also banks, or another org working with a bank.) One of the most important things they do apart from that technical function is vouch for their merchants. They guarantee that consumers are protected from bad behavior on the part of their merchants, like selling counterfeit goods or running tons of fraudulent cards. So that's why it's often a pain to get a merchant account, and why easier-to-get merchant accounts have higher rates (because they have more fraud).

So, yes, processor markup varies. But we don't need a new currency system to drive competition in the processor space. That's orthogonal. That could happen 100% on top of the current system.

So I'm not sure what else you're referring to as "network fees". Visa/Mastercard's slice? Visa's net income last year was $3B, which is not small, but hardly a major share of GDP. There's also decades of worldwide expansion costs (incl. massive marketing spend) that's gone into that.
> I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro

Especially with the gap in Mac Pro releases over the past few years, I have seen many people deciding between Mac Pro and a custom built hackintosh. For the stuff that really justifies a Mac Pro, these were the only two options for some time (short of moving off of an OSX stack). Sure, someone custom building a multi thousand dollar work station is not your typical consumer, but neither is your typical buyer of a spec'd out Mac Pro.
"Steve Gibson was saying recently in one of this latest Security Now podcasts that what FIDO is trying to do is inferior to his recently launched SQRL protocol"

Of course he was. He's Steve Gibson. He's a shameless self-promoter and he loves to make over-dramatic claims of finding security flaws in things.

His only saving grace is that SQRL actually looks pretty sound to my moderately-better-than-amateur security experience. I hate to admit it, because if it catches on as a standard, he's only going to become more insufferable. The guy is a kook, except he's a kook who maybe have actually done his homework this time. I'd still like to hear what some actual security researchers have to say about SQRL, because I'm sure as hell not going to take his word on it.
It's very similar to a "Hibernate for Python", and I believe it started out that way. However, it has since surpassed Hibernate in capabilities, and presents elegant APIs that cover a more substantial fraction of "things you'd want to do in SQL".
4 tech trends that will transfix your curiosity in 2014
Thomas Hughes' books take a wider view than most of the others mentioned so far: American Genesis covers 1870 - 1970
and Rescuing Prometheus discusses the SAGE computerized
air defense system, the Atlas missile, Arpanet, and the Boston central artery/tunnel project.
As someone doing GPGPU I just hope that they'll release an NVIDIA option. Scientific GPGPU heavily relies on CUDA support, OpenCL just isn't there yet, if ever.
Taught to be a hacker? lol.
This has kind of been the claim for years now, though, with a burgeoning market of compute apps just around the corner. Only it isn't so easy, and compute applications only apply for a specific set of problems, not only because of the GPU geared restrictions and architecture of these designs, but because of the islands of memory forcing endless memory copies back and forth. Unified memory should go a long way to making compute more generally usable, though of course that does nothing for the person paying $6000 for this unit.
That's fine, as far as John Q Layman's life is concerned, cutting through false positives with minimal effort. There will be false negatives with any rough filter. It sucks for you, but that's your fight to fight.
To me scoble is an attention whore.
Does anyone remember this image of Scoble wearing Google Glass?
http://sitegoals.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/904635_10201...
How is iOS insecure?
I noticed your gists used time.h. Coincidentally I have just been fooling around with sys/time.h because I find the former to be unreliable. From what I have read on the web many other hackers share the same sentiment. I'm surprised to see you using it in code like this, or have I missed something?
As a ISP when we were considering using Aspira they claimed that no referral tokens would be replaced and that the only behavior was injecting a popup coupon window.

I decided not to proceed with it because it seemed like a support nightmare and tampering with non-malicious subscriber traffic crosses a line.

Their marketing affiliates (such as Cash4Trafik) are always reaching out to CEO types at small ISPs and the money they bring (particularly when you are small) can be hard to pass up.
I don't think you are. I came across this a number of months ago and looked into building one myself. You could pretty easily start out with a couple of sheets of acrylic and make a grid to separate them. Then you just have to drill a lot of holes. I think getting the grid right would be the hardest part as a DIY project, but you could pretty easily imagine a machine cutting slots so it all fits together nicely.
My bet is on Google Glass going the way of the Segway...

...that is to say, ridiculed by the general public, but finding a bit of a niche in certain industries. The police, postal carriers, etc. @cstross did a pretty good job of convincing me that some form of augmented reality would be very useful for the police. There is a real-life push right now to get police wearing cameras too, I think this sort of device could compliment that trend.
Engagement data was particularly outstanding, adoption rate across an entire university was super high. Parker could see the big picture and how Facebook was solving the important "real identity" problem of the internet.
>So how can you guys roll out a product in 3 months? How can you quickly pivot?

Tooling. To elaborate, if you're hand writing code to call an API, then you're doing to much. This is a 15 minute task at most, and that includes production level validation, security, etc. on both the client and server.

Also, basic code quality checks should be running non-stop in a separate terminal and automated tests should also be running. Plus the core automated tests should themselves be automated.

Developing an API is again a 15 minute task.

To be totally clear, proper tooling will take you from prototype to (early) production. Obviously, tooling does not write your application for you, but standing up a basic app where you can use the UI and move data to/from the backend needs to happen with a minimum of effort. Once the core design/structure is done, you can spend your time on value add activities such as UI customization, custom business logic, and so on.
I've listened to a few books this year (Audible saves me time), but I read/listened to a book that actually changed my life in the summer of 2012 (close enough). I had wanted to become an entrepreneur, but then I read The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. He described some of the things that I really don't want to do deal with: hiring non-engineer employees, using the services of lawyers, marketing, and other business responsibilities. It wasn't that I hadn't heard these themes before, but he said it in a way that made me recognize what I don't want. I just want to be a great engineer. I didn't give up on a dream; I found a better one.
> Isn't it worth it to purchase the Applecare warranty for $250 which extends the warranty period to 3 years?

payoff * Probability of payoff = EV

3000 * Probability of payoff = 250

3000 * P / 250 = 250/250

3000 / 250 * P = 1

12 * P = 1

∴ P = 1 / 12

You require 8.3% of the computers to fail in years 2 and 3, and for the failure to cause $3000 worth of 'damage' avoidance, and for it to be something covered under the warranty terms, for your gamble to make sense.

Judging by the fact they offer the warranty, I would imagine the fail rate to be somewhat lower than this, or for the failures to be vastly less expensive than that - else they'd be losing money.
That sounds like an awesome type of interactive visualization. Great idea.
Right - and this is why you take one of the drives out every now and again and replace it with another one! Provided you do that, I don't see why it isn't as immune to the listed problems as any other type of irregularly-made backup.

It might well prove quicker to use an ordinary backup program (my 2 x 2TB RAID1 system takes about 10-15 hours to rebuild, while Acronis will back up the 1.2TB of used data in about 5 hours). And there's a bit of inconvenience, in that you have to shut your computer down and swap the drives. But in exchange, the backup is guaranteed to be atomically that of your computer in its shut-down state - at least on Windows, I think this is difficult to guarantee otherwise.
APIs are eating software
Still, SO has managed to build up a mostly competent community that provides relevant answers to most questions;

if SO manages to loose this community then signal to noise ratio will further increase, the site will go down the drain and new competitors will appear.

Are people really that motivated by points and badges? I think these are similar to toy money/monopoly money. if a person does not like the process of investigating a problem then this will not be a sufficient motive for participation; if its not fun then nothing will help here. Career incentive? I doubt that, for a real job they will look at other things.

Still SO has a dilemma, like wikipedia it is a huge amount of text and it needs some meta moderation, and then some meta meta moderation too; so monopoly money is probably supposed to move a person up along this hierarchy. The problem is that a hierarchy of moderators will eventually piss off at least some competent contributors, if not all of them; this problem is common to most sites: slashdot, wikipedia, SO, HN - over time they all run into this problem.

Its like in real politics; nation states need bureaucrats, but these can also turn into a mortal danger to the state
Wish You All Happy New Year 2014 • vlogg.com
Is there a way we can choke companies like Apira by making a concerted distributed effort to disrupt the referral programs they exploit (either by reporting them or by feeding them false referrals somehow)?
The affiliates are getting hurt hugely though. Affiliate profits are supposed to be for helping the purchase - through marketing efficiency. The ISP is doing none of that, they are simply mafiosoing affiliate dollars through hijack. Amazon would not like this, the ISP gives exactly 0% efficiency boost to the e-commerce process, they're just a gypsie snake.
Collection Equality is Hard
The ISPs that I've heard of using this claim to be getting low to mid thousands per month in revenue from it. I'm not sure if that counts as a significant amount of commission, but...
Thanks for showing your confirmation bias. Keep asking questions you don't want to think about.
Totally agree lol. Reading his final email felt like I was watching Erin Brockovich's ending again... f yeah! haha
I use a MBPr for general development, have an imac close to top specs and have a beefy windows/linux box. Of the 3, my imac gets the least use, and I will probably be retiring it fairly soon. For development, I really do not need a power house machine.

I code with a focus on TDD and small unit tests, so even though I do mostly statistical computing work, my development tests use small amounts of data and low computing power. When I actually need to run big production stuff, it goes off to the Linux box or a Linux server cluster.

My beef with the imac is that it is not really that much faster than my MBPr, but has terrible heat management. When I am running big jobs on it, it gets a few degrees off from a toaster and heats up my office. A 2.5k linux box would not have this problem and would be way faster.
I don't think The Information comes out of this looking bad at all. I think that PG was being somewhat disingenuous in "What I Didn't Say".

Read
http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-information-and-h...

and the things I wrote elsewhere on this thread.

ValleyWag comes out looking terrible, of course.
You can't fork a BSD project and relicense it as GPL unless you are the copyright owner.

"Route around GPL" is the tendency to avoid GPL license on new projects (or to change the license on existing projects - see VLC and jquery). Since project owners are free to do that anyway, the question is why is the BSD license trumpeted as a feature of the product?

Let's take the example of LLVM: there is no problem using GCC on MACs since GCC itself can be used to build proprietary systems. However, LLVM is promoted as "this is your dream compiler - fast, feature full and free from GPL restrictions".
In addition to what others already said, the nature of what "Disney" is can very quickly change due to aquisition. Like Marvel comics? Well, now you "like Disney". Like Pixar? Well, now you "like Disney", etc.
"In fact, if you strip away its technological trappings -- the encryption, the peer-to-peer networks -- and Bitcoin closely resembles these earlier private efforts."

In other words if you strip away everything that makes BitCoin different and unique from its predecessors, BitCoin looks the same as its predecessors.
I think if someone can succeed at putting similar technology in normal looking glasses it will have a much better chance of success, otherwise I agree.
Introducing Standard Analytics IO
Haskell is catching on. It's extremely popular in academia, and it's growing on e.g. Github: http://ec2-54-224-80-201.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8888/langua...

But you're right, examples like this are extremely poor marketing for Haskell. It's really not how you'd write most Haskell programs. A lot of the Haskell code on sites like Rosetta Code is deliberately terse to show off.

I changed the indentation a little bit, to make it more clear:

queens n = foldM
(\y _ -> [x:y | x <- [1..n], safe x y 1])
[]
[1..n]

safe x [] n = True
safe x (c:y) n = and [ x /= c
, x /= c + n
, x /= c - n
, safe x y (n+1)
]

main = mapM_ print $ queens 8

'queens' is essentially a for loop that concatenates the elements between 1..n that are safe, and 'safe' is a function that returns true if it's given an empty list, or if the input satisfies all of the predicates in the other list (notice the recursion that's possible because of laziness.) The function 'and' that it calls takes a list of bools and returns true if all of them are true. 'main' prints each list that results from running 'queens 8'

There is some syntax and convention you have to learn, e.g. what the _ in mapM_ means, what a list comprehension is, or what : means, etc. but once you have it's a fairly elegant solution (compare to the code snippets from imperative languages.)
IBM would gain a bit if computer architecture conferences were included.
Mozilla end-of-year fundraising jumps from $750k to $1.2M in three days
https://fundraising.mozilla.org/
Hardly anyone gets Bitcoin, yet. But I am pretty sure that they will, eventually. It takes a long time, even for smart people, to really figure it out.
Are you debating nomenclature? One of the GPUs is effectively dedicated to compute, while the other is architecturally chosen to optimize compute. These cards are geared to compute and not graphics.
pg actually posted this himself, 1769 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336
That would help, but I am not confident that it could be made as socially acceptable as for example smartphones.

People who prioritize utility over fashion are prime candidates though. Even nerds who claim to be all about utility are typically more fashion conscious than they want to admit, but when you are on the job being all about utility stops being a fashion faux pas. Utility belts are perfectly acceptable for people to wear when they are working, but you never see them otherwise (well, maybe the odd cellphone belt-clip..). I think that people who wear utility belts for work are a great target audience for this sort of thing.

I think they should focus on industrial use. That has the potential to be a stable market for them that they can use for widespread testing of hardware and applications. Use police to keep the ball rolling until they figure out a way to get the general public on board.
I don't see Bitcoin as an alternative currency. I see it more as a bank account held in a foreign currency. These exist today.
Yes, and those vanishingly rare cases were the most expensive ones.

My point was that the latter was partially caused by the former along with every other mechanism of dumping undesirable patients on the open market. I suspect the major one is the exploitation of the fact that most people will underestimate the extent to which high health costs correlate with decreased income and a higher rate of premium lapse. It won't be counted as "rescission" even though the industry benefits from it (and the people hurt because of it) in exactly the same way.

These mechanisms might not constitute the entirety of the central issue, but they certainly account for a healthy chunk of it.
As a mostly-hobbyist 3D artist, I'm already feeling really left out when I look at my relatively poor GPU vs. the capabilities of the rendering software that I use. If this fever has already started to seep down to my level, I certainly wouldn't predict against continued growth of the GPU computing world.
Jesus e eu
Everybody who wants to comment on this story should be aware that there is a mismatch between title and content.

The content - the interesting part that should be taken seriously - is about whether basing our economy on Bitcoin is a good idea or not. That is a serious economic question that has nothing to do whatsoever with the technology of Bitcoin.

The content concludes that Bitcoin is a bad idea economically and, unfortunately, the title then highlights the (possibly erroneous) conclusion that this means Bitcoin is necessarily doomed.

It is unfortunate that these different questions surrounding Bitcoin tend to be conflated. Let's try to avoid that here.
Super shady stuff. I never rely on any ISP provided DNS servers

Doesn't that mean that you don't benefit from nearby CDNs? Perhaps worth the tradeoff anyway.
Don't agree with your tone, but agree with your point.
I don't think it's there yet. And it's mainly due to population and resources.
True. Even though, first I got confused between papers and patents (they have a tradition of submitting lots of them) and last I wonder if they didn't slow low level research, if not then they keep it quiet, unlike a few years back where they'd talk about they latest PowerPC feats.
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are anycast.
Someone needs to come up with a safe and VERY convenient way to keep one's private keys around. I haven't found a convenient way yet, even a USB key is going to be a hassle for most non-techies.
Configuration is kind of joke. 16GB RAM and zero free slots on high end desktop?

My PC had the same price three years ago, but it has 5GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB on SSDs and 5 TB on spin HDDs.
The $1/day figure was actually the estimate minimum survival income calculated for a number of poor countries then averaged and rounded. It's not perfect but not arbitrary either. In fact it is now usually quoted as either $1.25 or less frequently as $1.20. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on some of the complexities involved[1].

If you use a $2/day threshold (aka "moderate poverty") instead, the declines are not quite great but still pretty damn good - down 41% - from 69% below $2 in 1981 to only 41% in 2010 (calc from data here [2]). It is not flat! And it is also not an all or nothing proposition - the entire distribution has shifted! The distribution was graphed in Economist article above.

The issues with PPP are more complex but everyone involved is aware of the issues you mention[3]. While biases can occur it is not generally considered to be a problem for the global aggregates. Dig into the World Banks's ICP website for the details on PPP in poor countries[4].

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

[2] http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

[4] http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPEXT/Resources/ICP_2011...
DNScrypt only protects from your host to your nameserver. Your nameserver can still be poisoned as it queries other nameservers.

dnssec protects mostly from poisoning between nameservers. It does little to protect between a host and their namserver.

But in reality dnssec is not a solution, it's a problem. It will never be adopted in a meaningful way without major overhaul in spec.
So what is "becomes aware of a link"? How is that different than the copyright holder sending a notice? Because without the copyright holder (and even courts) it's not very clear.
Most server software is emulated but I suspect there might be instances of leaked server software.
Yeah, if I was writing the essay there definitely would be many more pauses between each sentence.
Did we read the same content? What I saw was some interesting history about the nationalisation of currency in the 19th century, and an unsupported assertion that states will once again succeed at defeating a private currency.
It would be nice to know if all of the people hyping up and talking down Bitcoin own any Bitcoin.
Ask HN: What would it take for you to switch to Python 3?
Judging from the numerous other threads it seems like the primary complaint has been lack of third-party library support. Now that Django, SQLAlchemy, Numpy, Matplotlib, BeautifulSoup, NLTK, and PIL (as Pillow), support 3 it seems like this just isn't a valid complaint anymore. If library support is still the issue, what libraries need be ported to 3 in order make the switch palatable for you?

The other common complaints seem to be against the GIL. Which from what I've gathered, there doesn't seem to be any adequate solution for yet.

Python 3.4 comes with an intriguing new asyncio library, as well as new enumeration and statistics libraries. These seem like they may be tempting enough to coerce some users into making the switch.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is supposedly shipping with Python 3 as the default version. I personally think this is what it will take to garner wide spread adoption.

So, what will it take for you to make the switch?
Really? I just clicked 10 random link and all Google Scholar searches redirected to a http://dl.acm.org/ paywall. Maybe I'm missing something?

edit: Ah, I just noticed some searches have a direct link to the PDF next to the main search result "[PDF] from domain".
The U.S. BRAIN Initiative Boldly Begins
Linux-based controller remotely pilots a "Bond Car"
Would you expect a refund for the cost of WoW when they shut down their servers in 2032? Of course not. It was an online game. You played it for years, and it's now over. You don't get take-backs.