skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kelner's web site has the link (and confirms that it corresponds to what will be discussed at the ACM-SIAM symposium):

http://math.mit.edu/~kelner/publications.html

http://math.mit.edu/~kelner/Publications/Docs/1304.2338v2.pd...
Basic Web Scraping in Ruby with Mechanize
Just hit HN this morning and got the downtime message. Then I remembered this post and did a hard refresh to get back to normal. Browsers certainly aggressively cached it.
How does this differ from: "You're 100% entitled to do what you want with your own property but please consider the view that gold is an important and finite resource and should be put to good use"

Or any other commodity.
> This may be annoying, but it is not a crime.

Depends on the extent. If it is persistent, and makes you genuinely fear for your safety, it can be assault (in the UK assault does not require the person to touch you).

Which is another reason why this law is idiotic: The legal system in the UK already have ways of dealing with this. However the police generally do not want to follow up allegations related to these crimes because e.g. assault without any physical contact is extremely hard to prove for obvious reasons.

If they try hard to avoid enforcing the current laws, there's little reason to think the new law is being pushed forward to help the public.
Valve convinces 14 PC builders to make Steam Machines a reality
Federal mission creep: FBI quietly drops law enforcement from mission statement
I understand Aaron Swartz.
I understand Aaron Swartz and the other hackers that have committed suicide. As hackers and entrepreneurs we are pretty good at self reflection and analysis. We can expand our observations out and see how things will be in the future. As well, we want control of our lives. Even worse, we are generally capable people who when making decisions can see them out.

I think what ends up happening is we just see the dead end, get depressed and decide to short cut to it to spare ourselves and loved one. We make it out to be a rational decision. And maybe it is. Swartz had prison hanging over his head. Zhitomirskiy had his failure with Diasporia.

I have my complete failure at life. In 25 years time I will still have nothing, and probably have dragged my mother into financially bad position with me. In the last 13 years I’ve done nothing. After failing out of college I never recovered. I tried doing technical odd jobs when I could get work. HW hacking here, an odd program there, designing gambling devices, PC repair and IT when needed. None of it has lead anywhere. I was lazy for too long and now its too late.

I look at the success people are having elsewhere. They managed to get through school, do amazing things and have the means to move forward. But it seems to be for a select few. My friends and acquaintances struggle. I’d have loved to worked on some of the greatest projects of today and tomorrow. The vehicle automation that Tesla is doing, or the asteroid mining at PR. Google is going to rock it with their general robot and AI projects. Assuming google actually makes it accessible to non-googlers. I can’t even afford the materials for a NLP/ASR project I want to work on. No money for BLE beacons, or a phone able to use them. Or really the means to not be a drain on others while figuring it out, not that I could even get A funding.

I know the despair that other hackers felt.
Serious question: aside from data-entry people and accountants, who uses numeric keypads anymore?

As a developer, I don't exactly type a lot of numbers. And they're too far away from the home position of the hands to make the numpad efficient to use for numbers in mixed alphanumeric text.

It really seems like they are rightly turning into a very niche input product, like Wacom tablets, instead of a general-purpose one.
This is all fun and games to you until you are held liable for working for extra-terrestrials on account of destroying precious documents.

Which is exactly what should happen to those people.
For a very narrow range of software, I suppose. Not for software that has side-effects and actually does stuff in the real world.

What about software that sends emails to people, or places orders, performs billable work, or gives people directions, or supplies them with data that they then carry forward and use in decisions or in other systems?

And are you proposing that instead of writing tests you write a play-back-able-log system that can roll back state and re-apply transformations if a given component did incorrect things?

I think sensible testing is the way forward, where sensible is appropriate to the type of application, language and requirements. 100% coverage is suitable for industrial code and 1% coverage is appropriate for toy projects. But no tests at all seems foolhardy.
Cool Tool - SQL Space Map
This looks great. I'm really happy to see more frameworks being built on top of RabbitMQ. AMQP gets some deserved heat for its design-by-committee nature but RabbitMQ makes something really good of it.

I've used RabbitMQ for years in production, for the last two years with my Ruby background processing system Woodhouse[1]. One of the nice things I got out of using RabbitMQ was the ability to expose job arguments as AMQP headers and then to use headers exchanges to segment queues based on that. This makes it a lot easier to allocate extra resources for high-priority jobs without having to explicitly create new priority queues.

For the author: are the issues you had with Celluloid mostly due to your requirement to run on MRI? For a while I was maintaining a serviceable monkeypatch for Celluloid on MRI, but I eventually stopped needing it. It does unfortunately seem to be a bit of a moving target.

[1]: https://github.com/mboeh/woodhouse
Thanks for that. Is it also true that those ending in -icillin (amoxicillin, penicillin, etc) come from fungi - a major competitor to bacteria? Or am I mistaken?
The problem with numpads on laptops is that it shifts the keyboard to the left, resulting in a non-ergonomic typing position. That's much worse than not being able to type in numbers marginally faster. Also using numpads takes your fingers far from the home row, which is in contrast to your trackpoint argument.
If someone has allodial title to their property then government cannot tax it. They can only tax property they own and rent out, which is almost all land in the U.S. that hasn't been purchased or confiscated from land owners.

If record of that allodial title is destroyed or lost, then you will have a difficult/impossible time proving you own your land.
Same here, not sure why that isn't touted as a more important reason to provide the correct status codes rather than simply saying Google search isn't important.

Standards are important.
Japanese Scientists Levitate, Move Objects in Mid-Air Using Sound Waves
BASES Startup Career Fair at Stanford, Jan 16th — $100 discount for HN
True programmers do everything with alt-codes.
I tinkered around with a project and started Google's python course: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKTZoB2Vjuk
Looks totally sweet.

The "auto-scaling" is still manually controlled, right? (Dynamic scaling, on-the-fly scaling?) Or does Sneakers actually change the number of processes/threads by itself depending on load?

For the less ops-savvy among us, what are some good heuristics for deciding on the balance between processes and threads?
You're not afraid that some actual/potential users might be scared off from your product due to defects they encounter while using/trying the product?
I don't know what happened in later seasons, I only watched the first few. There was torture in the show from Season 1. Jack violently interrogates two people in the first season, later executing one of them at the end of the season. Season 2 opens with a torture scene: http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Interrogation, one of many such scenes in that season.

I don't know how many people here really remember the mood back then. I was just starting college at Georgia Tech when Season 2 of "24" came on. It was hugely popular in my dorm. And the overall sentiment was pretty violent. In the run-up to the Iraq war the next year, it was less controversial to say that we should turn the middle east into a "glass parking lot" than to argue against going to war. And this is of course among people who were relatively liberal compared to the region as a whole.
I did my work.
> Franklin County North Carolina has 60,000 people. Typically, rural historical societies are neither staffed nor equipped to handle significant archival tasks - often they are a mix of younger reinactors and artisans, and older folk interested in curating. That they did not own a scanner suggests the sophistication of the organization.

This is absolutely the typical case. Archiving various kinds of documents is hard. Professional archivists generally have a Masters degree in Library Science or a similar field. When there are many kinds of records (paper, photo, etc) it is difficult to start the process and handle things correctly.
Dog Trainers and Pull Requests
And that's a very good reason for a developer not to use platform specific account systems.

It seems relevant that the top grossing app on iPhone (Candy Crush Saga) prominently has this on their homepage:

"Start your game on Facebook or mobile and seamlessly continue your saga between platforms. Your game play will be fully synched across all devices."
i know little but i strongly suspect the artificialness of the birthday bound is specific to this situation. the bound shouldn't be there, but by using random numbers it is introduces - its 'artificial' because an idealised implementation would not suffer that problem.

you are right though, excessive jargon is a massive blocker for anything not just because its unintelligible but also because of the 'elitism' social signal it sends...

many unspectacular people can find holes in a cryptographic system - in many cases common sense or a little ingenuity is enough - but they will generally not know the term for their specific flavour of attack (attack is a term itself) or the surrounding terminology to describe it in the context of cryptography.

in short, its not complicated, its obfuscated...
I'll paste a comment I made in an HN thread a few days ago, since this seems to be the same blog post:

Not exactly the "full story" when it omits the facts that support differing conclusions. That's sort of the opposite of "full story".

Some moderating details:

* Documents were damaged by a mold that is hazardous to health

* State archivist claims the documents were of "low historical value"

* Archivist claims some were confidential, and couldn't be legally released to 3rd party

http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-frankli...
Yes. During season one, torture was a rare occurrence and was depicted in a rather morally ambiguous fashion. During the middle few seasons, heroic acts of torture featured on nearly every episode.

Remember also that producers of these shows often do have contact with members of the intelligence and defense communities who serve as official or unofficial advisors, at least so long as the depictions are acceptable to the establishment. Through these advisors, entertainment producers learn about secret programs long before the public. Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a particularly prominent recent example of how this works, and why it is a bad thing that results in "entertainment" which is very much a form of propaganda.
Improving our SSL setup
Yes, but who are we to judge?

Who, indeed.
The human equivalent of peacock feathers will always inspire at least the young to work. And grandparents like spoiling grandkids rotten, which costs money.

Eventually after carving away vast segments of the population, you're left with unabomber style nuts, hippies, the economically useless, and the disabled, none of whom work anyway. It would be decentralized and self selected rather than centrally controlled and fairly inefficient, so that saves quite a bit of money and human suffering right there.

If there's fewer and fewer jobs every year, and that seems to be the case for quite awhile, then the problem with people not needing to work jobs that don't exist, would be...
> Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that.

Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.
Not sure what you mean by "coded" tests, but I agree that most bugs can be found during development - unfortunately, my experience is that that's rarely the case. But if your development team finds most bugs during development, my hat's off to you.
So ... as someone in the OCR industry, perhaps you could answer:

I'm trying to OCR license plates from random videos (stable, but essentially random camera location that sees cars going by and stopping - and I would like to read their plates). I've tried every commercial offering under $4000/license, and -- even when manually localized and a single photo selected, I'm getting less than 95% on a single letter/digit, which translates to ~70% for full plates. (Humans get >99% for full plate on those photos).

Where would you recommend I look next for a solution?
I must say I'm probably quite biased regarding the numpad, because much of my programming is about experiments that give numeric results, which then have to be processed and/or reported... so typing lots of numbers always ends up being a part of the equation in my particular case, but not on the code itself.

Numpads are nice for roguelikes as well :)
i think it's cute when men paint their nails.
I believe I made it through the first three seasons, and I also don't remember any traditional torture. The article makes it sound like it happened every episode. 24 would have been a much better example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
Given that, an interesting variation of the problem is: what's the easiest way to transform an expression to incorporate new data? After the next election, one can toss away the result and re-generate a new one from scratch. But is there an easier way to absorb additional terms, both inclusions and exclusions?
Ask HN: Foreign entity business status in server location?
[US-Centric Biz Question]Is there any legal precedent/requirement for registering as a foreign business entity in the state where physical server hardware is located? E.g. if I have a Georgia corporation running on Linode hardware in New Jersey, do I need to register as a foreign entity in New Jersey?[/US-Centric Biz Question]
What a great show, and so relevant to this day and age. In terms of cultural commentary, it's every bit the equal of Roddenberry's best.
How much to raise using Crunchbase data
"[Diane Taylor] Torrent said she wishes the records were simply relocated[..]" That is one ironic surname right there.
I think I loved that treatment even more than Star Trek's. (The Inquisitor episode was interesting too...) In more recent shows (not that I've seen that many) my favorite treatment of torture is probably Theon's in Game of Thrones. There's no higher purpose to it, it's just sadistic pleasure taken from the torturing. The methods are more brutal too -- it's not some magic machine that just stimulates pain centers of the brain, there's pain plus body parts being lost permanently. I think by engaging the victim's imagination of what will come next the torture may be more effective...
Tracking a JRuby Memory Leak
Establishing trust in client side javascript encryption
If the cost of In App currency is the same between iOS and Android what is the incentive for the user to put down their iOS device, pickup an Android device to make the purchase, and then switch back?

Even if the developers segment their customers and make In App currency "cheaper" on Android because Android users have a reputation of not paying as much as iOS users it still sounds like a pain in the ass for marginal gain on the end users part.

I can't imagine this happening often enough to threaten platform lock in or meaningfully skew platform monetization statistics.
Fogus did a similar list of his 2013 bests : http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of...
How a TIME article led to the invention of a $100 3D-printed artificial limb.
First ever DBM trained using a quantum computer
The crazy thing is: I just tried to change my Economist subscription from print to online only since I no longer read the paper version. They wrote back and suggested I _not_ do so since the price/week is HIGHER for online-only than for print (which includes free online access).

I think what's happening is that they have only one online price while there are many ways to get discounted print subscriptions.
Has anyone read the methodology?

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/jobs-rated-2013-methodo...

Looks like they made up some list of things they think should be stressful, gave them arbitrary point values, and scored each occupation.

The authors of the study are CareerCast.com. Not exactly an authority.

No doubt, being a soldier or a firefighter has got to be stressful. But this "study" won't prove it.
> a complex vlan implementation

How exactly are they setting this up that it's complex? Isolated VLANs with VPN access are a routine solution to this kind of problem. A decent network engineer would probably have it done before you finish telling him what you want.

(If instead of a decent network engineer, I had to do it, I'd just be finding the password for the switch I hadn't logged into for a year. The configuration would be done about 15 minutes later.)
Completely agree. I didnt even think of hard refreshing until i saw the "server is back up" status on twitter.
For those (like me) who clicked because algorithms are fun but don't know the max flow problem specifically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_flow_problem

TL;DR: what's the fastest way to transport a large amount of data over a mesh of many small pipes

As someone who knows little about this problem or the laws of physics, I wonder if it could be solved using physics -- set up a series of physical pipes, pump water from A to B, measure the flow at each point? If that would work, how complicated would the mesh need to be that solving it with physics is faster than brute-force computation?
This has some interesting content and demonstrations, good on Thinkful. I wanted to be annoyed by the signup at the end, but in reality it really did give a solid idea of the advancements being made and had some great content. Not signing up for anything, but definitely enjoyed the presentation.
How We Got Our First 2,000 Users Doing Things That Don't Scale
So, cool, of course materials can be rescued and restored. Should have been obvious. Thanks for the synopsis of your job!

"How much does it cost to rescue and restore" could be a relevant question. Especially considering that the state tagged all of it for destruction 50 years ago, I doubt they were keen to spend money on hiring a team of archivists to swoop down and resurrect ledgers of old tax receipts.

Moldy old books generally get thrown away or burned. Doesn't mean there's some great conspiracy to cover up land grabs and political intrigue, as was the supposition I was providing counterpoint to.
I don't know about the culture where you come from / where you are, But isn't being in public just that? Being in public. When you get out there, you do open yourself for social interaction and conversation / nods / smiles / chit chat and even pan handling.

As long as they are not directly accosting you, how is this their problem? How do you expect an individual person to know that you have been already approached 8 times?

At least where I come from, the logic goes like this: You don't want to deal with the public? Don't be in public. YMMV.
> The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working.

That's ridiculously racist. Poverty being tied to race doesn't necessarily have to do with innate work ethic.
Split price for "smartphone and tablet" is only for people who use their stupid app. Reading via an RSS reader or even web browser is far more convenient anyway.
Or by giving the PRE element a "white-space: pre-wrap;" attribute via Firebug, Safari Web Inspector, or your favorite equivalent.
> Sometimes the subject does have the sought-after information

As far as I know this has never been the case in the history of the use of torture in US interrogations. Before you make statements in favor of torture, you should probably have a specific case in mind or it's just being gratuitously in favor of torture.
I think Burn Notice's treatment of the subject is good precisely because it doesn't glorify torture. An interrogation on Burn Notice is more likely to involve psychological manipulation instead of torture.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Startup Storytelling
Indeed, we should not underestimate the effect of police/agencies behaviour on regular citizen. It is something that shocked me when talking to friends freshly immigrated from countries like South America to London.

They have a general mistrust of cops, the more cop they see the less safe they feel. On the other hand, my wife and I, coming from other European countries are very happy to see cops around.

That said, since Tony Blair's "we can hold you in custody for a month without rights", or the we just shoot random people in the back after 7/7 bombing, our attitude is slowly changing. I'm not sure I would volunteer information to the police related to any hot topic without studying the risks first.
This seems like a case of "Is the cup half full or half empty?"

In any case, methinks your obsession with unemployment rate is one of the things that we must seriously reconsider if we really want to be objective about the merits (or lack thereof) of basic income (BI).

Let's get a bit philosophical here. One of the fundamental premises of BI is that it's OK for a substantial portion of a future society not to do anything that is traditionally considered "work". And one of the reasons we need to experiment with BI is to see whether or not this seemingly outrageous premise turns out to be correct after all.

Including the unemployment rate in your definition of "it can work in the U.S." is inherently biased against BI because it already assumes the opposite of one of the premises of BI. It's like trying to decide between theism and atheism using the Bible as your measuring stick. Regardless of what conclusion you draw at the end of the day, that competition ain't fair.

In order to make a fair decision, we'll need to go a little meta and ask, for example, about the total productivity of the society, the physical and mental well-being of its citizens, or something like that.
Except that what many of us here would consider extreme are actually pretty common. Estimates for the prevalence of domestic violence and sexual abuse are difficult to measure accurately, but are conservatively > 10% in the population at large and much higher in the deprived communities which will be targeted by these laws.
Ask HN: Do you recycle? (I recently moved to the US and...)
I recently moved to the US and one of the things that immediately stroke me was the difference in recycling culture compared to the Western Europe. I supposedly live in one of the most environmentally conscience parts of the US but we still have to throw away (landfill) a lot of plastics including plastic bags.

One thing that I appreciate, though, is the extra bin for the compostable items that we didn't have in Europe as part of the trash collection service.

So? Do you recycle?