skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "In real life groups CAN be argued to have certain characteristics to recognize members from non-members, hypocritical members, non-practicing members, posers and "fakes". So the "no true scotchman" fallacy breaks down when you're dealing with such nuances."

On the other hand, where this most frequently pops up^, there is frequently no authoritative definition of what constitutes membership. Where there is, there is frequently no authoritative interpretation of the definition.

^ Any internet argument involving religion. The best you can typically manage is membership of particular sects which happen to have an agreed upon defining body. If the Pope says that you are not a Roman Catholic, you are pretty much by definition not a Roman Catholic. However if I define "Christian" in clear unambiguous terms, then point to my definition when asserting that somebody who claims to be a Christians is not a true Christian, then really I have said little of interest. That person may very well be a Christian by a definition other than my own (for instance, according to their definition), and I have justification for asserting that my definition is the true definition and theirs is false.

The issue here is not quite that there is a true Scotsman fallacy going on. Rather it is a failure to agree to the definition of terms before engaging in the discussion.
Video: VC A Bad Lip Reading
Most of the time I see No True Scotsman called, it's because they were using ordinary imprecise language even though their group is real and the word they used for it is reasonable. Not because they were proposing a 'true' definition.

Such as 'no vegan eats meat' 'what if they had fries at mcdonalds with secret meat in the oil' 'okay no vegan purposefully eats meat' 'ha! you narrowed the group! no true scotsman! you lose!'
But there are various safeguards in place for who can get database extracts containing personal data. The typical case is that all patients affected first need to sign a consent agreement. They charge a fee to cover the cost of processing the application.

In general, I'm kindof annoying with whoever submitted this URL to hacker news. I guess there are various complaints one can make about this system, but showing the price list in isolation seems calculated to just cause outrage without understanding...
He actually has a rule of not investing personally. Granted I don't know if that's explicitly true, but I haven't heard of him investing personally since 500 was founded.
Well, I am a techie and I know how this works behind the scenes and I see it obvious. The system saves what you send but filters what receives, so the display:none or visivility:hidden is ripped out. And thanks god for it, scamers are very creative.
Amazon's advantage in this space is not what is once was: You have to factor in that we now get charged sales tax in California. Also, no-hassle and no time limit return policies at Lowes, Costco, Bed bath and Beyond, etc, and internet price matching, Amazon purchases are not as appealing to me as they once were.

Example: I can buy Nest Protect on Amazon for exactly the same price as it is from my local Lowes. However, with Lowes I get the ability to return it at any time for any reason, in person, without the return shipping price or hassle. I'm going to buy it from Lowes, where in the past I would have just used my Prime account to buy it from Amazon.
Roko's Basilisk itself is fine. An interesting idea that is fun to consider. The notion that the idea is too dangerous to discuss publicly is rather cultish.

If I understand correctly, such violent reactions to Roko's Basilisk only come from a minority of LW people, but a prominent minority...
Ask HN: How do/would you teach a second language to your child?
For those of us who speak more than one language, how do you handle this scenario ? For example, my daughter was born in the US. She is going to be a "native" English speaker. I am not, neither is my wife. We both speak a different native language even though we have been americans for a while. I would want my daughter to at least speak some of it and be able to converse with her grandparents. How do parents handle this ? I don't want to force anything on my kids.
A CRM that doesn't require any typing
I used to do independent consulting. I don't right now. I had already been informally doing this these days for taking uncertainty out of things. I think I am going to do this deliberately for all work related matters. I seem to get better results (getting shit done, people think I communicate better).
Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things (Dot Tumblr Dot Com)
Why do credit card forms ask you to enter the credit card number without spaces between the clusters of digits, when it's simple for the machine to parse with or without them?
hi fiddlosopher, we love Pandoc! We use it extensively and find it to work very very well with most TeX content. The only problematic part is tables (e.g. captions do not render in the latest pandoc version).
Yeah, I saw the MN combined with ND and realized whoever researched it (I do believe the original map is a Russian professor) has no real clue on modern American and is looking mainly at immigration patterns.
If you want to appear to have done a lot in a hardware hackathon, you need to do as little hardware as possible. Take a few preexisting modules and start writing software as soon as possible, because developing new electronics - even simple circuits - is hard and incredibly slow paced. Even once you've got 4 or 5 figures worth of lab equipment stacked up next to you, you're still going to be tearing your hair out because something isn't working like it should, and the tools available are very, very limited.

I suppose it might be fun to spend a weekend combining a few of the cheap sensor chips available with an rPi to make a web-enabled sensor of some variety, but the scope for what you can do is so much smaller. The novel stuff will inevitably be in software. If you want to do something really interesting it will take weeks or months (and often years). Chips will die unexpectedly. That seemingly simple power supply circuit won't work. You'll short something out and the blue smoke will taunt you. It can easily take most of a day just to connect up a fairly simple prototype board. You can spend a week slowly building a wiring harness.
merger? both are pretty damn cool.
They boasted that they signed up 1 million new Prime members in the 3rd week of December. I wonder how many of those people signed up for the free trial with the intention of cancelling before the end of the free month? I know that's exactly what I did last year when I still needed to buy a few more presents a couple of weeks before Christmas.
There's Patoline[^1], which is still in a somewhat early state, and its language is quite LaTeX-ish.

[^1]: http://patoline.com/index.html
Yeah, I'm a bit torn on these bills. They sound awful, but there are issues that all the tech-sites seem to ignore. I'm all for competition, competition, competition. We need more competition! But when municipalities get into the mix, you have at least the potential for unfair practices. A city could give itself free access to utility right of way, condemn properties in its way and hide the true cost of running a network by lumping some expenses in general utility categories. And you might end up with a very poorly-run network that every single citizen pays for via higher taxes whether they want it or not. Since citizens have to pay the city taxes no matter what, they'll drop the potentially superior commercial Internet offering instead of paying twice. Likely? Maybe. Maybe not. But worth a discussion.
Yup, as noted in many other threads that external monitor is critical and the chair, comfortable keyboard and my shelf of reference books are pretty critical, as are ear plugs and headphones.

I floated the idea to a couple coffee shops of buying some Costco 23" monitors and renting them for $4/hour, but nobody bit
Their reversal of position on Internet sales tax was a big mistake, imho.

They believe that having a product in-hand tomorrow is worth the 8.5% extra charge for tax, but that's rarely the case for me.
Upon reflection and more comments read, yes, I think you're quite right.
A huge number of bills are done on the "Written by industry, submitted by sympathetic politician" model. It's pretty much ALEC's whole deal, and they're really good at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
I have to say, I disagree with him the two are separate disciplines, they need to be distinguished properly.
Relevant: http://vertx.io/

Polyglot, async, actor-like concurrent JVM platform.
You can always use something like bstring. It will always be compatible with other libraries that take a pointer and a length.
Patch lays off employees via conference call
Why not prohibit this outright for the YC partners ( instead of the 3 week/500k numbers).
Can I check my logic:

Our OP has acquired BTC through thrift and hard CPU pounding. And has a desire to drink much caffeine. So he realises that he can pour dollars held in starbucks cards out of person A's card and onto (his starbucks card?/his bank account? Not sure how that works as not got a starbucks card)

Anyway, he thinks he is onto a good deal, getting a latte at 30% off. However 10,000 dollars worth of latte requests later, and our OP smells a rat? Someone has bought starbucks gift cards with stolen CC details and then found a BTC owner willing to swap those gift cards for nice anonymous BTC.

I think that starbucks here is at least one money transmitter - they are taking payment at the NY branch, and guaranteeing the funds to our OP when he gets the card number.

However, there are a number of betwix and between issues - how do you buy a starbucks card with a stolen CC number? Is this a walk round the stores process? I would assume no-one saw his site and then went shopping, which implies that quite a large amount of starbuck's float will come from stolen CC - can anyone verify that?

But this one looks like everyone is in breach of some law some where. Starbucks, the OP, the credit card thieves. Unless Starbucks has a license as a money transmitter (transfer service for us in the UK)

There is a nice idea here - if you can automate throwing 5 bucks from one Starbucks gift card to another, you can invite someone to have a virtual coffee. How did you do that?

edit:

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the U.S. Treasury Department requires MSBs to register.[9] It is also a felony to engage in money transmission without a license in any state that requires a license to operate.[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_transmitter

I would give those guys a call - but probably after calling your own lawyer. IANAL, but this is a sticky situation, and probably unique to date. Hope all goes well.

I expect intention will count for a lot here.

Edit: according to random site on inter web (http://qz.com/166193/why-a-start-up-coffee-company-is-now-ac...) Starbucks cards can only transfer balance to another Starbucks card, and be redeemed at Starbucks for goods. So I think they still need to be considered a money transmitter. Anyway the upshot is that about 4bn is put on these cards yearly and 650m was left as cash on the cards at end of last year. Which is nice for Starbucks.

And I think the "have a coffee on me" idea is quite workable - I could happily sip a latte and join a webinar if you paid for the latte. maybe not - sounds a bit cheap.
I'm with John Young on this one, instead of being applauded the Guardian should be ashamed for not dumping all of the files publicly.
Mostly it's because of PCI DSS and dinosaurs in the market leaving very little customizability of the iframes they provide.
I don't know, exactly. I do know that Florida has its own Fark tag. It was northern Florida. The rest stop was curiously crowded for the amount of traffic on the road, compared with every other interstate rest stop I have ever pulled in to. When we parked, a sheriff's deputy--not a state highway patrolman--adopted a position near our car, and he was making eye contact with people near us and shaking his head "no".

I can only assume that we were at risk of involuntarily auditioning for Deliverance 2.

I have absolutely no interest in finding out more about what it was all about.
Working for nonprofits and church's, I know we do it because AMEX and others charge higher rates per transaction than say VISA, thus some clients only take VISA and giving a select list of options, lets the user know to use that type of card.
Checks are typically very simple, no regex-ing involved.

First, names are not really checked.

For addresses, usually only the number (and sometimes just first three digits) are checked as well as the zip.

Generally the processor tries to decline as few txns as possible and instead deliver the information to the merchant to make a decision. The merchant can usually pre-configure error codes that it would like the processor to decline. This might be preferable to the merchant from a cost-saving standpoint as well as not needing to "void an auth" in order to free up the cardholders spendability.

The idea behind CVVs is that merchants are disallowed from storing them so they are far less likely to be included in stolen credit card databases. Thus, requiring them significantly decreases fraud risk. And, yes, many gateways/processors charge more for missing or incorrect CVVs.

It's harder to "steal" a chip card since the information is not sitting on an easy-to-read mag-stripe. It's not clear that chip cards would have avoided the Target thing since the fraudsters infiltrated the terminal software. I'm guessing more current terminals/software is simply harder to compromise. "Chip & pin", as is widely used in places such as Canada and Europe, might help a bit since you would need the PIN to shop off-line. But it would have minimal effect for online shopping since PIN is typically not requested.

The reason we still sign receipts and yes, you still see a carbon copy here and there, is mainly because it protects the merchant if the cardholder does a "chargeback". Merchants typically store the receipts and only turn them over if a chargeback is received. Showing the signed receipt to your processor will usually absolve you from any loss.

I think the above is accurate or close to.
I'd like to see an A/B test between the 2 options. It sounds plausible that a less-sophisticated buyer might see the Visa logo light up after they've typed the first digit of their card and get confused ("WHAT WITCHCRAFT IS THIS").
I think that the term software engineer will replace the common term programmer and coder. Due to how complex everything is becoming. Plus people love their titles.
Slavery was also legal not so long ago. Being gay was illegal not so long time ago. Alcohol was illegal at some point. Weed is still illegal in most places these days.

Something being a law doesn't make that something justified or moral. It just allows certain groups of people to benefit from it while lying to others that it's for their own good.
For such smart people, some of the people on hacker news are just stupid.

I prefer the term that came back into vogue when the Tea Party started up: useful idiots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Texas already has these laws. Thank you, ATT.
>You're effectively doing what occurs in nature.

Remember, the alternative I'm comparing it to is restoring the land to a forested state (specifically one with much higher food production).

>draining much of the run off into large basins

…from which it evaporates, leaving the salt. Not a great plan.

You have to design for the desert: evaporation > rainfall. That means getting the water shaded asap. Further, run-off is not a given. It's better to design for in-place infiltration instead of run-off by remediating hardpan, imprinting, contour earthworks, etc.

>water ingress likely far outpaces whatever could be pumped out of the ground

The Ogallala aquifer is currently pumped 6x faster than it's being recharged, and that's not even a desert yet. http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Blog/2013/08/28/Ogallala-Aqu...
The name on the billing address is handy if you need to contact the person making the purchase.
This came up in a training course along with why do some sites prevent characters like * / ( & from passwords. The reason is the same:

Poor Input Validation

Basically whoever was behind making the site couldn't be bothered dealing with those cases and just made them illegal options. Makes you wonder what other corners were cut.
I'm going to guess that the most likely reason is that a terrible progranmer or manager was behind the decision of making the customer do the extra work instead of the development team spending a little more time to parse it.

I doubt there's a reasonable explanation as to why a CC field can't contain dashes or spaces. I'd love to hear one but I doubt there is one.
Ad Hominem is grossly 'over-diagnosed' on the internet. I would say that the vast majority of the time that somebody claims somebody else is using ad hominems, what they are actually doing is merely insulting the other person.

In other words:

"You are wrong because of X, Y, and Z. You fucking idiot."

not:

"You are wrong, because you are a fucking idiot."

The first will typically get cries of "ad hominem", but it isn't. The second sentence is not being used to logically support the assertion in the first sentence, it is just a tacked on plain-old insult.
Satya Nadella as next Microsoft CEO
Is there a good resource to find Hardware Hackathons? East Coast?
Not taking Amex for cost reasons is almost always a bad move. First, it annoys the person giving you money (always a bad move). Second, Amex cardholder spend way more than average (frequently a bad move). They may still spend as much when asked to use Visa instead, but maybe not.
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A Software Configurable Processor Architecture
I made my own markup language (post: http://breuleux.net/blog/quaint.html, docs: http://breuleux.net/quaint/, source: https://github.com/breuleux/quaint) and I think it could eventually fit the bill. I designed the syntax to be extremely regular, easy to extend and to stay out of your way. You can embed Python code to extend it (I don't get why you'd make a formatting language Turing complete instead of just embedding a real one). It generates documents in multiple passes and lets you specify what parts depend on what other parts, so back references are easy to implement. Unfortunately, I'm the sole developer and I've only developed it enough to be useful to my own purposes, so it only compiles to HTML and lacks a lot of features.

I'm not sure why you want the ability to embed LaTeX formulas. LaTeX formats math gloriously, but its syntax is not any less horrid for math than it is for anything else. I'd rather write "sum(i <- 1..10, frac(t_i, sigma^2))" than "\sum_{i=1}^{10} \frac{t_i}{\sigma^2}" but maybe that's just me.
“I’m not trying to tread upon your First Amendment rights,” she said. “All I’m saying is: Couldn’t you have run those First Amendment rights past the legal department first?”

Welcome to modern America.
Well, then you'd need to ask for their email or phone which I've never seen.
Hertfordshire, also Hillingdon Borough except Uxbridge.
Well it's a step up from electricity at least.

The currency equivalent value is securing the chain of BTC transactions and discovering new blocks, making the system work at all. New blocks have a currency equivalent value and doing transactions has a currency equivalent value too.
Why Windows Vista (SP1+) is Better Than Windows 7
Discovered this old post after some late-night browsing. The post highlights some interesting points on how Windows Vista with SP2 and its subsequent updates is actually far superior than Windows 7 (possibly 8) despite the bad press it receives. He also challenges anyone to list 7 reasons why Windows 7 is better than Windows Vista. Love to hear the community of HN's thoughts on this.
Wealth can be consumed and destroyed. If you consume/destroy more than you create and/or trade for, you have a net loss which isn't anyone else's fault.
thanks! I did come across substance.io a few months ago. Seems like they made a lot of progress. Looks beautiful. It's time to get in touch with them again.
I went Virgin.
Love of vodka is killing Russian men
People misunderstand ^ and ~ and semver in node.js/npm
This is extremely rare in my experience. But I suspect it's just lazy or poor programming. It's usually kind of humorous because the coding to identify the situation and display an error message could have simply been spent removing the spaces/dashes/etc.
Is being uncomfortable by religious fundamentalism racist?
Good point. You can get a desk in London, UK for £200. In Shoreditch.
I think it's one of those things where convenience for those looking at the underlying data has bled over into the UI. While you can deduce the type from the number, it's not easy for humans to do that at glance while looking over SQL query results. I could be wrong, but often, we ask users for more input than we need to because elegant UIs take lots of work.
This is really cool! I am going to use it! :D
Many years ago, I worked on an online donations form that did not ask this (wasn't a requirement). But soon after launch, users asked if the form was broken or missing some important part, so we added it to make them feel more at ease.
Thought experiment: What would happen if Apple allowed all these infringing games to stay in the appstore? They'd get a fine? Get sued? What if they then CONTINUED to let the ganes stay. Making a stand on trademarking... I mean, Apple can pay any fine thrown at them and the governemt can't really close them down... Can they? "Yo Cook, shut it down."

How does a state handle companies richer than some countries?
Because they probably have tons of endpoints on the 5.0.0.0/8 range. BT does the same in the UK for their router management interfaces, just no a slightly different range.