skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Viber messaging app bought by Japan's Rakuten for $900M
So you're in fact not as liberal as they come. With a view like that you're pretty far from being liberal at all by my account.

Personally, I'd consider a place where you could be convicted for making statements like the ones he did a police state. I say this as a father of a young boy who is at school right now.

I find the very sentiment that this kid deserves the weight of the law to come down on him outright disgusting.

Was it right to investigate? Yes. They might have found someone with a stockpile of weapons getting ready to shoot up the local school or kindergarten - they didn't know the kid or the context of the statements.

But the situation should have changed rapidly once they had searched his home and found nothing, had found nothing else to indicate he was going to actually shoot up a school, and found no evidence of actual planning or specific threats. Have him see a psychologist, maybe. That's about it.
I also find comfort in C/C++, it's something about that closeness to the metal that does it.

In most other languages (recently I've done a bit of Python) you feel like your walking in someone else's shoes. But with C/C++ it's just you and the machine.
I've looked a little with Go and to be honest I thought it was awesome. It felt very Pythonic almost to the point of feeling like a dynamic language.

The only reason why i wouldn't choose Go at this point is a) it can't be linked from other languages b) can't be used for OS development c) can't be used for embedded systems (I would love to use it for Pebble or Android).
What happened here is called "arbitrary detention and release". And is one of the characteristics of dictatorships or of a police state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_arrest_and_detention
Old friend of mine launched https://sellfy.com/ a couple of years ago, wonder how he's doing now.
Because if a customer with a lot of coins flies to Japan to confront the CEO while being video-taped and _still_ doesn't get his coins back... people will believe things must be very bad.

I'm convinced that it's one of 2 things.

a) A criminal investigation + gag order.

b) MtGox really screwed up and/or got hacked. The funds are just plain gone and they're in the process of winding down the company into bankruptcy or something.
any tips on where to start learning this stuff?
(I don't want to invest a lot of my time in server management either)
I agree completely. I feel the trend of excessive "security" and hiding things from the user "because it will confuse them", removing options because they "might cause irritation", "could be insecure if misused", etc. has gone too far. Modern devices are so locked-down and "polished" to the point that it makes it much harder for users to discover how they work, should they choose to, and takes away a lot of the incentive of doing so.

Contrast this with the early days of UNIX where every system came with its source code, plus compiler and assembler, so it was very easy for users to become developers. Even DOS and 32-bit versions of Windows came with (not sure if they removed it now, but it's there in XP at least) a rather primitive but still "empowering" debugger, DEBUG, where you could write short programs in assembly language. I remember PC magazines came with listings of these programs --- they weren't particularly complex, (usually a few hundred bytes at most), but they did something useful and also make way for the more inquisitive users (like me) to wonder what all the instructions actually do, and what happens if you change them, and that's what can really motivate people from becoming just users to learning about programming and how computers work.

Now, you have to be really motivated to jump through all the hoops in place to make it much harder for anyone to just write some short and useful piece of code and share it in a form that everyone else can use. Even browsers are becoming like this. It's sad that the IMHO bureaucratic measures like code signing, overly protective OS policies, and near-paranoid antivirus/security software just get in the way of this process. They say it's all "for your protection", but if you think about it, one of the most secure places to live is in a prison. Is that really what society should be heading towards?

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
> If it were, the credit would be too much like money because a) accounting is done in it, b) it is issued by a governing body (like a fiat currency) and c) it is fungible, i.e. you can already buy things with it and if you could buy things with it AND a and b were true, it would pretty much be a currency.

By that reasoning, the Joule is the currency of the Federation.

a) The article already supposes that "the accounting is done in energy units", so a) is satisfied.

b) Energy isn't exactly "issued" by a government. But neither is gold, and this hasn't prevented gold from being money through most of human history.

c) Finally, energy is fungible, especially if you have replicators. 1KWh of electricity in your battery is as good as any other 1KWh of electricity.

It doesn't matter whether the people who live in the Star Trek universe actually call it "money" or not. If it walks like money and quacks like money, it is money.

And once there's technology to convert anything to and from energy relatively easily, a Joule does sound like a good candidate for a universally accepted unit of value. An alien species might not give a damn about some shiny yellow metal, but they need good ol' Joules just as much as we do.
7 Marketing rules from drug dealers
This should be a warning to anybody that ends up amassing X00K in a digital currency to be very very careful to keep your money secured and in your control.
My favourite thing (among many) about this article is finding out that Lunar Industries Ltd. is actually a registered company. Duncan Jones is indeed registered as a company director.

I'm not sure when filming started, but the company was registered just about two years before the film was released.

It's those small touches that make me really appreciate it.
So, what's the difference between this and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense - the OS? What other appeal does this bring?
Flying to japan is a publicity stunt, nothing more. The public statement was that all withdrawals are halted since they need to consolidate their accounting. So why would they hand out bitcoins for people that show up in person? I'd be more concerned if they gave in and cashed out everyone that shows up in person and not online.

Edit: Parent stealth-edited, so I'll rephrase my comment. Original preserved here:

And then, the next one comes and want his bitcoins on the spot. And then someone makes a video of a withdrawal online that fails. The video on youtube does not add anything negative to the current situation: Withdrawals are not possible, in no way.
Right, so thats why .exe installers for extensions will now be popping up, which is not exactly better security-wise.
There are very good procedural reasons for not paying out to random people that turn up at your offices. Try going to your bank's office building (not branch) and demanding cash. Proper withdrawal processes should be designed to protect both parties from fraud / risk while remaining convenient.

I'm not saying I think mtgox's actual procedures aren't batshit insane (they are), but trying (and failing) to operate outside of those procedures doesn't really prove anything.
Barry Ritholtz, a Wall Street asset manager, posted links to a set of research papers on minimum wage recently [1].
The first paper in the bunch (co-authored by Alan Kreuger who is mentioned in the Economist article) compared employment in fast food restaurants between western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania after NJ raised its minimum wage.

Employment grew slightly faster in New Jersey. This appears to contradict the notion that increasing minimum wage reduces employment.

Can you point to empirical research that supports your position?

[1] http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/02/minimum-wage-research-p...

EDIT: Mis-stated paper finding, fixed.
that time countdown on the side is distracting
I really like Dymant. That's an innovative approach, extremely interesting for selling luxury items.
Until it auto-updates in a few days and breaks your crack.
But how does this protect against bad extensions? I mean they are installed along other programs as AdWare anyway, can't they just install themselves in developer or enterpise mode?
That is what Valgrind / LLVM memory sanitizer are for
Some devs don't bother to put their extensions in the store, for instance this extension to play music files embedded in image files on 4chan: http://dnsev.github.io/4cs/

I doubt it violates any T&C but I could be wrong.
Part 2 – Airbnb in NYC: The Real Numbers
Part 1 is here - http://goo.gl/uTW2M0
Gumroad last year raised about $8M. How's Sellfy?
This is amazing! Well thought out and beautiful to look at.
I was looking for a way to send UDP that is encrypted and authenticated, with private contents and no replay attacks.

I use crypto_box/unbox as is, although we do do the crypto_beforenm()/crypto_afternm() as (a) our clients are known, and (b) it's ridiculously faster. The docs on NaCl mention it, sort of, but it's much, much, faster. If you can do it, you always should do it.

As for replay attacks, we use what I'll call "hash chaining" (if someone knows the real name, I'd like to know). We have two kinds of messages, ordered and unordered. Unordered messages can be replayed at any time, as they are read-only, or some other kind of status messages, such as a heartbeat.

For ordered messages, we hash the previous message and use it as input for the next message when it is hashed. Both hashes are sent with each message (we use Sip-Hash 2-4, highly recommended BTW). (One analogy would be how git works, where the previous commit's hash is hashed as part of the new commit's hash.)

The chain of messages from the device to the server is called the "device stream", and we have a second chain going back to the device, the "update stream". The system supports multiple device streams for a single users (e.g. an iPhone and an iPad), but there's only one update stream for all devices, so they stay in sync.

Both ends of the connection test the hashes before applying, which trivially prevents replay attacks, since every ordered message can only be "played" once. We store the current device stream hash when the database is updated, in the same transaction, on both the client and the server. This provides resiliency in the face of crashes.

We also use the hash chain to detect out-of-order messages. In our application, they're pretty rare, so I simply drop out-of-order messages and request the correct one from the client.

This could be bad, because playing back old messages would illicit a response. For that reason, and also because I don't want to store update streams in the database permanently, the messages include their offset in the stream. The in-memory, wire format, and on-disk format of each messages is identical, so we can lay them end-to-end on disk. When a messages comes in, we can trivially determine if it is old, and drop it that way, too. If we need to write an update stream to disk, because the client hasn't connected in a while and we want to free up space, it's a single sendfile() + known offset call, conceptually, to send the update stream since they last signed back on. That way, we don't need a separate index for streams on disk.

Hope that helps!
W3C doesn't dictate what features browsers have or do not have, they're concerned with web standards. The MPAA joined to make sure DRM showed up in HTML5, not to tell Google to take out ad blockers.

If Google removes ad blockers it will be because Google's revenue is based on ads, not because the MPAA or the W3C told them to.
But you can't get neither (1) money nor (2) bitcoins from MtGox, so what does it matter what people believe? It's not like they can do much, or that releasing coins for privileged customers would help MtGox...
As of writing this, there's more than one story of the system going wrong in the US on the frontpage of HN alone (How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help - https://medium.com/p/9f53ef6a1c10/ is the other one; I believe it was posted after your comment)

If it was one story, it wouldn't be so scary. What is scary is the ongoing stream of horrible abuses of power that gets reported.

Especially because so many of them include aftermaths where nobody gets held accountable.
A dictionary might define wealth as "an abundance of valuable possessions or money".

We who are working on start-ups of various kinds, seek wealth for ourselves perhaps but certainly if we are successful to increase the total wealth of the world.

At least the fairy dust of the dollar or euro is backed by the wealth of nations.
Does anyone know how this is supposed to protect users against AdWare and other bad extensions? I mean these are installed along other applications with a setup program anyway. Can't the installer just activate developer mode?

I guess there is a warning that shows up, but people will just ignore it (and once you've clicked through the UAC prompt the installer can do anything anyway, like hide the warning). And there is also the enterprise mode, can't the malicious installer just use that?
Firefox isn't that much better.
Ask HN: Getting back at a scammer with scammer's phone number and bank details?
My flatmate is an eBay trading assistant here in London in the UK. She doesn't get much work from it, but from time to time it helps her make a bit of extra money which helps as she is currently out of work.

A guy called her the other day with a sob story about having to sell his Macbook because he was behind on his rent and being threatened with eviction. She made the mistake of allowing him to send the package directly to the customer, providing a tracking number as proof of postage and due to being a little too trusting, transferred the payment to him on receipt of the tracking number.

Obviously she should have taken possession of the goods directly and then mailed the goods to the customer herself. Nevertheless, she is now extremely broke, being threatened by the customer, and doesn't have any money of her own to reimburse them with.

She has the scammer's phone number and bank account details. She has filed a report with the police who told her that the fraud investigation unit may or may not bother to investigate it. The bank is not being helpful either.

Given a phone number and bank account details, is there anything creative she could do (or have someone else do) to figure out who the scammer is and potentially get the money back?
Should I encourage my coworkers to share their salaries with each other?
My reading of history tells me the human hunger for wealth and power (what some call greed) would easily adjust to any increase in prosperity, no matter how large.

And some materials would still be scarce. They could not replicate dilithium, it had to be mined. So like oil is today, such materials would become the new next of power.
“The Fold” in Web Design, Explained Simply
I think the difference is that is being marketed as a longer term generic food replacement, not just an occasional meal replacement.
Switching to Android phones won’t save Microsoft
And then the Borg show up... The analogy breaks down because the Federation is still resource constrained. Why bother with planets if you can build Dyson spheres? Because they can't, they still need to find new planets and colonize.
I make roads for a living. (Well, my software does.)

Actually this has been a bit of a boon for me - whereas in the past peoples eyes would glaze over when I told them about SIL-4 practices and other such nonsense involved in keeping the trains running on time (safely), nowadays I can just point at the road and say - software makes this happen, now.

Software is boring. What the software does - now _that_ captures peoples interest!
We all have a list of things or industries that “we could make so much better”.

We do?
I recently heard the suggestion that police should carry an equivalent of doctors' malpractice insurance; so the same taxpayers that they abuse aren't the ones who ultimately pay to compensate for their abuses. Sounded like a good idea, especially if insurance companies can identify the officers most at risk of doing legally actionable things while on duty.
But it's a good idea: Sign the js. Even md5 would be enough, it's just so that when the FBINSA subpoenas you, we'll know it.
It looks like a parody to me, too.

"First of all, I can do anything in jQuery, and have full control. Full control of the selectors, HTML, the DOM. I like that."

This could be rewritten as "First of all, I can do anything in Assembler, and have full control. Full control of the stack, registers, the memory. I like that."
I dare say that if anything they can outpace established companies with technology and risk taking, that's one of the benefits of being small and unknown. What will be harder is whether they can break into an industry dominated by "who you know, not what you know" and if they can build enough of a successful reputation and useful connections to compete.
If CSS isn't supported, a website should gracefully fallback to working in plain text.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Wow. In my country (Uruguay), you can and should call an ambulance for broken bones :(

And ambulance service costs U$ 50/month and is included with 90% of the populations' health services.
Another way to look at this is to be happy that they had to ask for the password...
> Something you buy with your own money doesn't shout "privilege" as loudly as something you're given for free. If Google was handing out cars to their employees, the comparison would be more apt.

However Google "hands out money" to it's employees which they then use to by things like cars. Also Google gives it's employees health care for "free". The buses are a benefit of the job no different than paycheck or health care.
I don't think you upset anyone although it seems you hope you did. Many businesses accept Bitcoins for legal or illegal goods. Whether you think these transactions are moral or not doesn't cause Bitcoin to become a "ponzi" scheme. Maybe you're relating it to one since those who got in really early had potential to become millionaires? The same thing can be said about stocks. Bitcoin has actually gone the opposite direction of a ponzi scheme for quite some time now.
I assume this interacts with Windows in some way to make that more difficult, but I don't use Windows much so I don't know. According to the docs, the change doesn't apply to Linux or OS X.
>Microsoft- or Apple-approved publishers, because of SmartScreen/Gatekeeper.

and the ones not found suspicious by Google's safe scan.[1] I remember once Chrome not letting me download a new version of Light table because it was found suspicious. Actually it will let you download it but will delet it as soon as it is done downloaded.

[1]http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46330156/ns/technology_and_science...
I think that's a little naive. Google sells Hollywood movies and tv shows in their Play store.
That's awful and shameful that no firm would take the case. I was helped by a reporter friend that published my narrative of what happened to me, which got the word out to a lot more firms. Eventually I was contacted by several, and eventually settled on one that was focused on pursuing cases similar to mine.

I guess my two cents would be to not get down and assume no one will help. I was furious about my experience, it really shocked me on a fundamental "I don't trust the system anymore" level. I was pretty close to just becoming more cynical and just deducing to hate all cops forever. I even had some friends say "well you must have done something" to deserves it. It was a terrible blow to hear that.

But I fortunately was so upset I didn't want to just get angrier, I wanted justice. I wrote my experience down while it was still raw, and shared it with some friends, one of whom was a reporter. I really did this initially for validation, I wanted someone to know what happened to me, to agree with me that what happened to me was an injustice: because up to that point I felt like no one cared. And I wanted to do something. I had to do something. I wasn't going to just accept what had happened to me as inevitable and just part of the system. It was wrong, horribly wrong.

My reporter friend asked if he could publish it, I was frankly surprised he wanted to publish it verbatim but I guess a raw emotional narrative makes better copy than and interview. And from that I started getting emails from law firms.

I know how awful it can be to unjustly treated by the police, how helpless you are, how dehumanized you can be, how violated the experience can be when you did nothing wrong. Don't give in. Youre not alone. You're a survivor. Yes, It can be hard to fight back, but it's worth it. It's a positive experience for me now, because you realize you can help prevent this from happening to someone else. That you can get justice. That you're not crazy, that what happened to you was wrong.

Just know the process is long, and there will be set backs. The system is overloaded with cases, don't expect anyone to hand victory to you quickly or easily. The cops will close ranks, and lie for each other. The courts will let them, just keep at it. Eventually they'll either settle to make you go away to spare them the continuing costs, or you'll get your day in court.
tangible
ˈtan(d)ʒɪb(ə)l/

adjective

1. perceptible by touch.

Not all wealth is perceptible by touch.

Its value is a lot more connected to other people's trust in there being an underlying economic process supporting a value, than it is to do with it being something you can perceive with your hand.
Oh, it happens. In Germany as well: http://www.dw.de/preventing-police-brutality-in-germany/a-16...

But my impression is that it's rather less common than in the USA and the courts, prosecution and conservative public don't side with the police as much.
Wholesale Resellers and Suppliers 
Online Shopping for merchants vendors and customers abroad. Exclusive shopping where wholesalers, resellers and suppliers meet customers. Take advantage of special deals every week.
The big difference is that the cases you mentioned are exceptional and typically make the news.

From the looks of this thread, the situation with the Police in the US is an everyday, normal, expected thing... That's very bad.

Abuses will always occur. It's when they start to be normal that you should worry.
Good point about Alzheimer's.

This seems relevant:

http://goo.gl/VeQJym

An example of how an authority is trying to mandate what is normal behaviour and what isn't (presumably in response to the work of Marnia Robinson and others). Szasz pointed out that this sort of thing is just what well-intentioned theologians did historically. They decided which behaviors and beliefs were orthodox and which were heretical.

The only difference being that the psychologist is operating under the umbrella of scientific authority. But this is a conceit, since nothing objective has been discovered.
I have exactly the same problem, a little bit aggravated by the fact that I seem to be a little bit dyslexic and sometimes I type something but I read something completely different.

People tend to be nice, so I just try to get the message through and don't think too much about it :)
> only places where police is actually humane and does mostly good are Scandinavian countries

Research does not seem to bear this out. See eg this Gallup study:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/102346/many-world-citizens-trust-...

Of the top 10 "public trusts the police", only 1 or 2 are Scandinavian countries (definitions vary whether Finland is part of Scandinavia).
That's one of the downsides of unregulated market. I'm not saying it wouldn't happen in regulated market, it would be less likely.