skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think there's a good argument for making the Internet be an utility like electricity is, but I think that also means there won't be anymore competition effectively (at least in terms of deployment), and they will upgrade their networks much more slowly

It depends. Some of my academic work looks at network neutrality and ISP investment incentives in the long-run (as well as the effect on content providers and consumers) when the ISP is a geographic monopoly. The investment incentives (improvements to bandwidth) should theoretically improve over a net-neutral policy if network neutrality is dismissed, but it's not guaranteed to be all that great.

Intuitively, if we really wanted to see innovation, we should do away with the typical geographical (natural) monopolies we see with Comcast, et al. For example, for years Austin plagued with internet problems and (especially) relatively low bandwidth offerings compared to places like Dallas (with FiOS, etc.). However, quickly after Austin was chosen by Google as a place for Google fiber, AT&T began offering GB/S speeds (as part of Uverse? Not sure the exact name). The point is -- if we want to see improvements in the network, opening up competition will encourage firms to innovate.

A fun story to consider is how MCI started out against the monopoly AT&T.
>>> were the fodder for every economic fear monger, rightly, for literally years

You realize "everyone" and "every economic fear monger" are very distinct groups? Before the crisis struck, those fear mongers were generally thought of as curiosities or cranks, not visionaries. It wasn't that long ago, too early yet to rewrite history.

Moreover, theories like these:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.09/zeros.html
http://bullnotbull.com/archive/predictions-2007.html
http://useconomy.about.com/b/2007/01/03/2007-forecast-for-th...
http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1344
or even this one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385514344

were pretty popular. At the last one, we've got excellent review from top people at Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae.

>>> There was zero specificity in Taleb's proclamations.

Huge surprise from a guy who talks about principally unpredictable events as the basis of his philosophy. You expect him to talk about black swans and then say "the market would go down X points at day Y"?

>>> In the same way that the world is pretty certain we're going to run out of oil.

Are you sure?
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gao-recoverable-oil-colorado...
I don't like the way UTF-8 was clipped to only 1 million codepoints in 2003 to match the UTF-16 limit. The original 2.1 billion codepoint capacity of the original 1993 UTF-8 proposal would've been far better. Go Lang uses \Uffffffff as syntax to represent runes, giving the same upper limit as the original UTF-8 proposal, so I wonder if it supports, or one day will support, the extended 5- and 6-byte sequences.

In fact, UTF-16 doesn't really have the 1 million character limit: by using the two private-use planes (F and 10) as 2nd-tier surrogates, we can encode all 4-byte sequences of UCS-32, and all those in the original UTF-8 proposal.

I suspect the reason is more political than technical. unicode.org (http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#utf16-6) says "Both Unicode and ISO 10646 have policies in place that formally limit future code assignment to the integer range that can be expressed with current UTF-16 (0 to 1,114,111). Even if other encoding forms (i.e. other UTFs) can represent larger intergers, these policies mean that all encoding forms will always represent the same set of characters. Over a million possible codes is far more than enough for the goal of Unicode of encoding characters, not glyphs. Unicode is not designed to encode arbitrary data."
AngelList launches accreditation reports for investors
Markets are emergent phenomena from trading and ownership. Most cultures independently came to establishing various types of markets, so I'd argue that yeah, until we are not in a post-scarcity society, markets are natural
Personally I try to make the code work by the end of the day as kind of a motivational thing. (Like you described above.)

Also, to be pedantic, I think it would actually be a mild kind of OCPD.
I might buy their mid-tier plan and cancel my Spotify subscription. I was planning on downgrading my Spotify subscription, but it seems that their mid-tier plan (the one that cost half that of premium) is gone now.
I didn't find the Android app impressive at all. Far too many technical issues with connectivity.
I think they were being dismissive of the need to reimplement the page load indicator rather than page loading itself. I could be wrong though.
I gladly welcome more study in general. Every conversation on this topic is either anti-gentrification hand-wringing or self-victimization by oversensitive tech professionals. More data, less sensationalism.
"The call of the void" is a beautiful (and haunting) way to put it.

On an unrelated note... Wtf is wrong with Sam Biddle... Troll extraordinaire?
Roland teases successor to legendary TR-808 drum machine
As I continue to say in these threads (and it's been a long time), Balanced has terrible third-party support while Stripe dominates them.

We have this ridiculous non-overlapping issue with payment processors:

Balanced - Same day payouts (!) to WF, next-day to anyone else. ACH processing. Documentation isn't great. Third-party support is horrible. (Tickets are open on my [relatively popular] software of choice and have been for months; no timetable has been set.)

Stripe - Infinitely better documentation. Easier implementation. Outstanding third-party support. Crazy good APIs. Seven-day rolling payments (sigh).

Square - Next-day processing. Physical dongle. Easy to use web store. No APIs (for fuck's sake).

It's like each company looks at one another and figures out a way to best frustrate segments of the market, ensuring that no one provider can handle it all.

As for me, I put through low-mid six figures through Stripe and Square but I'd switch to Balanced if they would engender better support amongst third-party providers. Stripe has worked with me to cut payout speed, but it's not anywhere close to Square/Balanced. And if Square opened up their APIs, I'd leave everyone behind assuming third-party support was there.

Yeah, these guys are all better than Paypal/Authorize.net, but good god figure it out, please.
> So now what Schneier says has me puzzled about whether or not there is any level of secure room between what he calls a "regular room" and a room that a United States citizen can only enter with a very high level of security clearance.

There are. Schneier has it wrong unfortunately (or at least, was misinformed). You can enter a room approved for classified information without a clearance, you just must be escorted by someone who does have one. I've been in such a room myself without a clearance. I imagine what you were told about a special hearing room for one of the congressional intelligence oversight committees was true then and is still true now.

There is an unfortunate amount of misinformation flying around and it really detracts from what might otherwise be a productive discussion. I hope Schneier takes a but more time to double check his assertions in his next post.
I believe his point is not that YouTube's implementation isn't useful, but rather, that it's insane, at a conceptual level.
Secondhand Clothing Marketplace Twice Raises $18.5M From Andreessen Horowitz
It's not really politics. Microsoft made the choice for fixed-sized chars back when it was thought that 16 bits was enough for everyone. MS was at the forefront of internationalizing things, and probably still are. (Multilanguage support in Windows and Office is quite top class.)

Unfortunately, we need more than 16 bits of codepoints, so 16-bit chars is a waste and a bad decision with that insight. It seems unlikely that a fresh platform with no legacy requirements would choose a 16-bit encoding. Think of all the XML in Java and .NET - all of it nearly always ASCII, using up double the RAM for zero benefit. It sucks.

Was UTF-8 even around when Microsoft decided on 16-bit widechar?

Other platforms seem to have lucked out by not worrying as much as standardizing on a single charset and UTF8 came in and solved the problems.
I hadn't visited the site in a while, and within 60 seconds I found an irritating UI issue: When you're playing an "artist station" there's a slider thing from "artist only" to "adventurous" (which is awesome because the lack of this is the reason I never listen to Pandora).

However, when you change the slider, it advances the song (whether or not the current song is by the station's artist).
Even non-idiots make mistakes. Use the pre-push hook that comes with your repo: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/templates/hooks--pre-...

Then, just mark your commits with WIP.
yes
http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/13/uber-paris-confirms-attack...
About the (fictional) day that Google forgot to check passwords
The most basic answer, time and effort. It takes at least a few years to get into that market. You may be able to shortcut your way by spending large amounts of money, but otherwise it's just time and effort.

A good analogy that I like to use, as imperfect as it is, is a car company. Getting your first car takes time, there's no way around this. You can't just slap together parts and expect to be a major industry competitor right away. It takes an investment of time and/or money.

You also can't slap together parts so that it looks all nice and shinny but miss many glaring functionality. Sure I can build a vehicle with an engine, but how many people will buy my nice and shinny vehicle if it doesn't include say temperature control? Or if you can't go faster than 20 mph? Or if it has no headlights? Even simple things as not having wipers can be problematic if you don't live in a desert location.

So you have to do much like Kia and Hyundai did. It takes a large effort to get going. You build a good car, sell it at an affordable price, and continue to develop it and improve it over time. There's no shortcut, you can't just build a car over a weekend or a few months. It takes some time to get going.

And of course a lot of the lessons need to be learned along the way. Until you start, you might not realize that you can't use say part x because although it's nice in a simple car, it can't handle temperatures below say 40F, which means that although it can work in California, the car is completely useless in the northern parts of the world.

In other words you have to be willing to invest time and effort. A shinny new car will only go so far if it doesn't work. New cars that are branded lemons quickly get eliminated from the market, no matter how new they are. And those cars that are really good continue to sell year after year. They do get refreshed from time to time, but you definitely don't refresh them every 2-3 years.
Wow, no written contract for over ten years? This can't end well.
Facebook releases trending
> To have vector of characters (as what humans consider characters) is valuable.

That might be an awful can of worms. Are Arabic vowels characters? "ij" letter in Dutch? Would you separate Korean text into letters or treat each block of letters as a character?
What's so insane about it? I would say that the logic for which parts of the page to reload should definitely be in the frontend code, rather than the browser itself.
Based on bitcoin architecture, is it possible to short Bitcoin directly?
Cool. I won't then. If you want money, then (as has been pointed out quite a few times) you need to be able to give an explanation for what your hardware does.

You're expecting a medium to large size company to donate to you. Those companies have a moral and fiduciary duty to know what they are spending their money on. It seems odd that the "Open"BSD project doesn't feel the need to be open about the hardware they use!
Unfortunately, worrying seems prudent. While I suspect this move had been planned for some time, it follows on the heels of a large layoff that decimated (triple-decimated, if the 30% number is to be believed) the company.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/19/5123004/rdio-lays-off-emp...

The music streaming business seems like an extraordinarily difficult place to compete.
Funny you should say that, because I've been working on my own approach this month: https://github.com/breuleux/liso

I'm probably going to post about it soon in more detail, if people are interested.
I'm an Emacs person, via Aquamacs. I write C, Ruby, Golang, and Markdown in it. Am I using much technology that ESR contributed? Or can I safely ignore this?
This is great advice, and something I do all the time with #warning and #error (works with both Clang or GCC, not sure about other compilers) for partially completed methods or to-dos. When I'm mid-project I'll have "#warning TODO: Fix this" and the like all over the place.
That will be cool to watch.
Another satisfied customer here too. Happily paying the family subscription for my wife and I.
Probably not. The article says 200 million a day (in 2011), which seems like a huge amount, but the volume of text messages in the US alone was 2.3 trillion in 2011 [1] (I'm using US numbers since I don't know where you're from). If you operate under the assumption that they're only collecting Americans' text messages, that means they would be collecting 3% of text messages if I did my math correctly. I'm assuming the global text messaging numbers are significantly higher.

[1] http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/topics/wireless/us-text-me...

[EDIT: corrected my math - thank you kuusisto]
Health Hacks for Computer Workers
How did I find the Apple Remote Desktop bug? – CVE-2013-5135
The bridge is over a big circle. Can it rotate?
To add another example: Graph databases. I've found that one thing that relational databases/SQL really don't handle very well are graph data structures. Sure they can store them, but retrieving and displaying the data in any meaningful way is quite difficult.

Edit: not impossible, mind. Just difficult.
YC is itself a startup that produces startups, so its employees/partners are certainly executing.
I really don't like that Joyent basically 'owns' nodejs. They gain from more people using nodejs and using it in a certain way; the complex dynamic happening here is a major turn-off (Joyent controls the nodejs repo). Not to mention the recent brouhaha in which Joyent facilitated forcing out one of the biggest nodejs contributors, an individual who incidentally happened to be an employee of their biggest competitor. Do you really want to use the products of this environment?
No. Someone has to take the other side of that trade. Typically, a brokerage will loan you shares to sell short, and then you buy them back to pay back the loan. If nobody will loan you bitcoins, you can't sell them short.
> As a rough guideline, it’s good to stay in roles where you’re close to the doing.

Why? It seems to me like the further you are from the doing, the more likely your role is to be prestigious and highly paid.
It is not possible to short anything directly. Only direct actions are to buy and sell.

Options are derivative products that other people offer. They looks at statistical volatility and price their options, such that they make some $ on average. This means you can short bitcoin, just like anything else - you need to find someone offering the service.
It's one thing to blithely talk about the potential for blackmail; actual modern examples in today's "no shame" culture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7070045) would be more useful. A failed attempt at blackmail or worse harms the case you're trying to make.

I could also add "look at the Abscam aftermath" if you think these potential targets are toothless.

And of course I know what adulterated means, I've just never seen that formulation with sex; Google comes up with 4,600 entries, perhaps I'm just behind the times. However I'd use "scandalous", which is in common use, and alliterates.
I don't think many (any?) landlords accept payment by credit card. Usually these payment solutions are tied to a bank account where the rules are much different.
Reported that to rdio. No word back but ya, bug.
American Community Survey data is practically valueless. There, I said it. Symbolically, it may be interesting. When applied to cases like this, the conclusions one can draw are largely untenable.
I honestly don't think the Bitcoin market is sophisticated enough to react to events like this. Certainly, if the feds really want to sell and someone puts $0.01 on the order books for that size of a trade, and nobody else is around, it could be filled, but I don't see that happening.
LinkedIn, Wherefore Art Thou
Just use MediaHint or Hola. Boom - open web again.
The fact that the notion that "we need to go to space" is a foregone conclusion at the dinner parties this person goes to is exactly the reason I avoid San Francisco.
I absolutely love Rdio as well. It's a shame more of my friends aren't on it.
This is all true, but what if the government compels Facebook to hand over it's data about you? Clearly that is a violation of the fourth amendment?
Oversight. We keep demanding this thing. But how exactly does oversight of actions that must be performed in secret even work? Who oversees the overseers?

Let's think about the end game. Suppose the Klayman lawsuit [1] goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and they too find the NSA's metadata collection is a 4th Amendment violation. The NSA is ordered to shut this and similar programs down. They comply. They say "we've complied." But how do we know? How do we know they didn't just spin up new collection programs, out of sight even from the overseers, or perhaps even with the tacit approval of the overseers? How would we find out?

Whistleblowers like Snowden. That's the only protection I see for us here. If the government promises they've complied, but in fact they haven't, they've just doubled down on the damage another revelation to the contrary would create. And doubled the moral imperative that a principled person would feel to leak it.

Oversight = Whistleblowers.

[1] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/national-security-agen...
i really hope i'm not just part of a distinct few, that think html, and js are not the future at all, but some old junk, that is unnecessarily being blown up out of proportions, just because at the time the wasn't anything better as an alternative.
OpenBSD is developed and released in Canada. I'm not sure if they are a US non-profit or not so maybe these laws don't apply.
Is this an opportunity for financial firms?
There's no magical shorting mechanism -- you'd have to find a counterpart and enter into a futures contract. A few exchanges offer this as a service.

[0] http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/05/betting-against-bi...
I expect that most people, like myself, want to use good development tools and platforms, rather than waste time getting involved in whatever petty drama happens to be going on.

Node is open-source, and if Joyent act like assholes, it'll be forked.
https://twitter.com/Therapy4Change

On HN, I'm gw666, and I have a low but meaningful karma score of 209.

I tweet occasionally, mostly with worthwhile links on subjects like self-improvement, brain research, productivity hacks, etc.

Please check out the link above and follow me if you like what I've posted so far. Thanks!

--Gregg Williams (my Twitter summary is below)

Marriage & Family Therapist, formerly of Apple and BYTE magazine. Very interested in the brain, psychosomatic illness, how people change, technology.
Hey, thanks for checking it out.

How long is it between ticks?

This will be customizable with values in the region of 5 mins, 10 mins, 30 mins etc. We'll be experimenting with this in the beta.

How easily will it be to get money in or out of your system?

We don't hold any funds. Your exchange gives you API keys that you configure with us, so that we can make trades on your behalf.

Is there any long term storage assigned to the bots?

Yes, we plan to persist all the necessary state in case the server goes down.

The 'storage' variable is just a reference to a subclassed dict with some extra functionality like dot-notation. We'll probably pickle it (or something similar) for persistence, which should mean that it can handle a fair amount of data thrown at it.
What's wrong with it? I use it daily and haven't had the level of issues that you suggest.
I also switched from Spotify some time ago. I was Spotify user and subscriber since their beta around 2009 but in the recent years the apps seemed were more and more complex, sometimes buggy and the design just worse and worse.

Now I'm a happy Rdio subscriber. I just wish they would have real native desktop client.
World’s First Commercial Spaceline One Step Closer At $200,000 Per Ticket
I'm explicitly allowing for Schneier being a "special" person, and not escortable into a secured space, as he is a technical expert and in close and continuing contact with some people with lots of very hated stuff, specifically in loving leaking classified info. A normal person would be a lot more escortable. It is mostly up to your facility security officer and organizational policies; I don't know how the legislative branch handles any of this.
Great, so this will basically be a giant free handout to wall st because no one else will have enough money to bid on a block.
Yes he can(and probably should) buy a yacht. What you're missing though is that
by not being transparent they miss out on a lot more contributors. So it's not
a super smart move.

Also keep in mind that a lot of contributors might not use OpenBSD, yet they might
be interested in offering some small amount if they believe it's for a good cause
and they know where that money is going.
This may be a silly question but could they virtualise the process on EC2?
Soft robotic gripper uses vacuum pressure and a beanbag to move objects
> approximately $25 million worth of Bitcoin will be auctioned off soon

At least they won't sell it via usual exchanges in one go. That would make quite a mess... (bringing price down to ~0 for a while before everything rebalances)
Based on the current price it makes roughly 25K bitcoins, and using the current BUY backlog on MtGox, selling them would push the price back to $550. However such a volume will certainly create a panic wave and it could go below that.

If they are clever, they won't put everything on the market like this.
And adding onto the other reply - Nimrod's GC has a realtime mode where you can specify when to run, and the maximum time. I made a (small) game in Nimrod and called the GC every frame for the remaining time (it can be used like a blocking high-accuracy timer). Testing the GC I couldn't get it to take longer than a couple microseconds - intentionally smashing my 16GB heap to hell. Why does a 16GB heap take so little time to GC? Because Nimrod's GC doesn't scale - it's deferred reference counting. Only cycle detections scan the whole heap, and you can disable those optionally (I do, I don't like designing cyclic stuff without explicitly knowing it gets broken).