skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what is even more annoying?

The web is a regression in the art of typography; not a single browser proposed to stop all this absurdity such as pixel based measures. Not a web page respect the rules of typography, not a single font is "nice", we have to drop accents.

Typography are sets of rules that are well codified, but the we put the burden of enforcing typography not on the computer, but on web designer (line spacing for instance).

Web is WYSIWIG, it should be What You See Is What You Mean, and computers that have so many CPU power should do their job of automation and take care of the part of the presentation that is both hard and that can be automated: typography.

The web is archaic. A web page is just a stupid port of the stupid "physcical page with boxes in which you put content". The abstraction of web page is a shame compared to all we could provide: automatic versioning, true separation of the content and the styling (yes I think of latex or wiki), something to make bibliography when quoting an URL automatic and complete (who, (c), legal conditions for reusing, scientific informations, related articles...).

The web concept is conservative yet progressing irreversibly towards a de facto standard that brings less advantages than a pure paper system (think of the cost of conservation of the content over time and the cost of maintaining server operational+permalink).

At one point, we will have to erase data from the web, and the knowledge will be lost.

What will have been the benefit of internet when you see you can still consult the first book printed by Gutenberg
Agreed although presumably our hypothetical simulators have sysadmins and could simply ratchet up the fidelity around anyone who is looking.
On the other hand, any traffic that needs to cross the Atlantic, via the Apollo cables, takes a detour via GCHQ Bude, which is funded by the NSA (http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/USA-spent-millions-Bude-spy-...). I suspect a lot of non-US traffic goes via London, too.
Finding a random document in MongoDB (with benchmarks)
its not greater risks..

Its placing bets on those risks that you have better information on or informed about.
Well pointing out that large implementations thought they had a transaction ID, and that the transaction ID can just change later -- that's some decent technical-level "FUD".
Heuristic vs algorithmic approaches
The barrier to entry for a non-incumbent candidate is so high because of the amount of money incumbents are able to raise. Therefore, a new candidate entering to pose a real challenge is pretty unlikely, and it shouldn't be.
Unlike 'mozilla' or 'persona', firefox is a household name. I think people would be willing to sign up for "firefox identity" to use around the web, and the persona project should capitalize on that.

People use fb connect because of the combination of ease-of-use and trust. Persona has the ease-of-use but users don't recognize it as trustable.

What is needed to push it further is a landing page to "create firefox identity" and a campaign to push it as "the nonprofit, safe authentication provider". Instead of trying to make the protocol completely transparent, it had better be promoted as a recognizable identity provider

Couple that with spreading persona servers as far away from the NSA as possible and transparency that guarantees that data are not being logged by mozilla, and i can see "firefox connect" being a legitimate fbconnect and twitter-sign-in killer
It is a little crazy to run a startup without having an accountant, if only because your personal taxes are going to get complicated, and you're now solely responsible for dealing with them.
from a less cynical POV:

this might just be the ONLY way to do your hypothetical idea.

if you're in Disney's accelerator, I'm sure that comes with better access to their copyrights.
What you individually care about as a shareholder is really not as relevant as you may think. Unless you're holding onto your Apple and Microsoft shares over 30+ years you're not looking at the health of the company from the same perspective as the CEO and Board should be.

Their job is to look out for all shareholders, not just the ones that want to see their portfolio's value increase in the next 5 years.

It's true that the amount CEOs are paid is relatively unimportant, but you're absolutely wrong if you think how they're compensated isn't important. The difference between giving vested stock options vs cash (for example) gives you very a different incentive structure.
Looking at the README under "Stuff that is stupid":

> bup currently has no way to prune old backups

Thanks for the rdiff-backup shout-out. I'm looking for a nice way to do system backups to my NAS of large VM images without having to install Crashplan. Bup and rdiff-backup both look pretty good.
Ding.io
So you would also find it perfectly normal if in the pre-Internet era the US government would open each and ever letter and parcel send from outside the US.

I'm old enough to remember regimes in which that was common practice back in the day. I know people who grew up in them.

We did not refer the them as either friendly or free and democratic nations.

But congrats on being a sovereign nation, and good luck with that. In, say, 20 years time you may find yourself on the wrong side of the modern electronic version of the iron curtain.
Why are foreign government owned corporations allowed to bid in U.S. bankruptcy auctions? I mean that, seriously. Taxes and investment are not really two of America's weak points.
While I can certainly agree that people can have relative value, and even agree that a disparity of four orders of magnitude might just be possible on occasion (though overall i'm skeptical of that claim), I think we're confusing skill/value to society vs value in terms of money one can extract via their skills/etc.

Generally, at the high end of skill, skill increases linearly, but financial reward can sometimes increase exponentially with it.

While someone may be 100x more skilled than someone else, this can result in them making 10,000x as much money as them. Is that fair? I'm not sure. Certainly some amount of potential reward is helpful, as it may drive some to pursue skill and benefit society as a whole, but I think It's grown out of proportion.
Used to be a much greater proportion than it is today, largely thanks to the growth of places like the Amsterdam Internet Exchange.

At one point there was a building on the Isle of Dogs (former island in the Thames) through which an absolutely terrifying proportion of the network traffic for western Europe travelled.
If done fast and at the right temp, you can manage up to 10mm flat bridges with very little sagging.
I think it also serves to give a visual confirmation of just how much bullshit "transaction malleability" is when used as an excuse for the theft of 4,500BTC from SR2: http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitc...

Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234010
You could just always do a hash using SHA1 then feed that to bcrypt. This way you only have one code path, for all users.
I feel like this misses the point of people who no longer buy cable. I don't personally know a lot of people who do it to save money (I'm sure they exist). Everyone I know just prefers the convenience of watching when you want and not having to have a single dedicated device (a TV) where you can watch things.

This isn't really any different than people ditching land lines in the late nineties and early two-thousands. It wasn't a question of cost so much as it was annoying to have multiple lines, numbers, and bills, not to mention one of those phones was only usable in a very specific way and the other could be used anywhere, whenever you felt like it.
Show HN: thwiki
which is the elephant in the room when income tax rates are discussed particularity in the uk where the line is "on noes entrepreneurs will flee if the highest rate income tax goes from 45 to 50".

NO real entrepreneur cares about his salary after a certain point its all about capital gain - the fantasists and Muppets on dragons den are not real entrepreneurs.

That is the trouble thease days where the political class go from uni straight into the political machine with no out side job (until they get a few director ships or quangos)
My experience is only anecdotal, of course, but I don't have a television (and I haven't for some seven or eight years). I don't watch cable or local TV, and I don't have furniture or equipment arranged for "ten-foot" watching, so I have no reason to purchase something that's inferior to the not-quite-4K monitors I already have. (If I want to watch or play something on the other side of the room, I pull out a laptop.)

It would take a truly absurd deal (a) to tempt me through the hassle of going out and buying a TV and supporting equipment, and (b) to overcome my instinctual distaste at the thought of rearranging all my stuff to have furniture positioned for actually watching one.

On the other hand, if a cable company were to offer an Aereo-alike with assorted live television available over the web, I would probably pay for it even if it cost more than a cable bundle because it would be fundamentally more useful to me than screwing around with specialized hardware.
Probably they'll have you over a barrel if you're successful enough to need further funding and an extension of your rights to the relevant Disney copyrights though...
The author is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=apenwarr, though it looks like he isn't the most active maintainer nowadays.
could you not turn the google doc into a poll here on HN - keep it in the family as it were?
Remember when they said filtering would just be for porn?

And then just for pirates and porn?

Now coming to you based on being an extremist in the eyes of government!
This isn't my thing, but I found it and thought it was pretty cool.
> Once you have $10M, it's not too hard to turn it into $15M if you play your cards right.

It's even easier to turn $10M into $1M. Happens all the time. I'd like to hear how to make 50% without a commensurate risk of losing all/most of it.

> that are taxed at low capital gains rates

Capital gains tax rates are much lower for low income brackets, in fact they are 0%. You can open a brokerage account and start investing in stocks for less than $100.

> The rich have access to so many profitable endeavors (that are taxed at low capital gains rates) that most of us will never get near. Meanwhile the guy with $50 in his checking account pays a $15 fee for being too poor.

BTW, my bank has free checking, even if you've only got $50 in it.
Cameron promised a referendum. I hope they get out for good this time.
Self-organizing robot armies produced
>> falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world")

> That's not what falsifiable means.

You truncated the original, cut out an essential word, then argued against the edited version. Here's what I said:

> Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, psychology cannot produce empirical, falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") to supports its claims. [emphasis added]

In point of fact, empirical, falsifiable evidence is the only legitimate basis for theories that should be discarded if reality disagrees, and on which the notion of falsifiability depends -- that's how it's defined.

The meaning of falsifiability is that a reality test decides whether a given idea has merit, not philosophical weight or rhetorical argument. And if the reality test fails, a scientist discards the failed idea. A pseudoscientist may elect to discard reality instead.

> Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works.

Yes, and on that basis I can claim that my idea is falsifiable. But until I take the daring step of trying to explain what I have described, I haven't crossed the threshold of science.

That's why I use this example -- it has empirical evidence, it is falsifiable, it is replicable by dispassionate third parties. It has everything that psychology recognizes as science, except the crucial element of theory, of explanation. Because psychology is satisfied to describe without making an effort to explain, so am I.
This is about as reasonable as asking whether they got hacked a year ago, did nothing, and didn't tell anyone. Only now do they tell us that law enforcement informed them. Read between the lines, man. Inhales.
I seriously doubt that Merkel's intentions are pure on this. For starters, we know that Germany has given some degree of cooperation in NSA spying, including allowing the US to build an army base that will be used by the NSA[1]. Secondly, we know that the BND used the NSA's systems for its own intelligence purposes[2].

Something tells me this is as much (if not more) an attempt to put European users' data within reach of European spy agencies
as it is about protecting European users' privacy. I suppose the upside is that it ensures that peoples' data is in the hands of their own governments rather than being in the hands of governments they have no control over.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/edward-snowden-acc...

[2]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...
The last major study on US inheritance that I know of was done in conjunction with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics ( http://www.bls.gov/ore/pdf/ec110030.pdf ).

That study considers inheritance for all Americans, with some notes on the wealthy. It can be complemented by other government studies, such as the Survey of Consumer Finances, which shows wealth distribution, of what sort (stocks, bonds, home equity) etc.
Not the author either, but I've made that decision based on profiling the code. It's generally easy to see which functions are slowing down performance and can be refactored to a more performant language.
Except that for some people, you only have a SHA1 hash, and for others, you only have an scrypt hash. Since they (I hope) weren't storing the plaintext (pre-hash) passwords alongside the hashed versions, the only time they can change the initial hashing mechanism is when passwords are provided to them during a password change or user login.
> The BBC has also been told it has proved difficult for the government to act against sites hosted abroad, both in the Middle East and in the US, where freedom of speech is protected by the constitution.

As a European, I'm a bit jealous of US free speech protections.
With respect to Fermat's Last Theorem it says:

And although Wiles’ proof is highly regarded, he needed a
computer to figure it out.

This is simply wrong.

Mathematicians are still searching for a simplified argument.

That's always true when hard theorems are first proven.

So that leads us to the real question: How did Fermat prove it?

Consensus is that he didn't. There was something that at the time was generally thought to be true[0], but turns out not to be. If that thing were true then a proof would follow that's similar to the n=4 case, and that would be pretty, and elegant. But it's wrong. Fermat probably thought he had a proof, realized quickly that it wouldn't work, and never erased the original note.

[0] Unique factorization over certain domains. Often, but not always true.

With respect to saying whether or not 1 is prime, this is a decision one can freely make, and is a matter of convention. Various mathematical statements are easier and cleaner if we declare 1 not to be prime, and so we do so. If not, many statements instead of saying "For all primes ..." would have to say "For all primes greater than 1 ..." The statement of unique factorization would similarly become messy. It's not an absolute.

There's more, but I can't be bothered gong through it all with a fine-toothed comb. Read it by all means, just use it as a starting point, and don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Including this comment.
I can use Go and C++ today without fear that code I write now won't be able to compile next month, due to significant language and/or library changes. The same cannot be said for Rust.

Since I can get perhaps 90% of the benefits of Rust today using other languages that I can actually use seriously, I might as well just use them. Had Rust been more stable in 2012, maybe it'd be a different situation today.

And you can read my original comment again, if the big picture isn't clear to you. I hope it's obvious then that this is far more than just a few bad UI decisions involving Firefox. That is an issue, of course, don't get me wrong, but it clearly goes much beyond that.

Almost all of Mozilla's major projects, from Firefox, to Thunderbird, to Firefox for Mobile, to Persona, to Firefox OS, and even Rust are suffering from some pretty serious detachment from the needs of their users. This is resulting in a decrease in adoption, like in the cases of Firefox and Thunderbird, limited adoption in the case of Firefox for Mobile, or basically no adoption in the cases of Firefox OS, Persona and Rust.
The science behind a happy relationship
Thanks! And updated to try to clarify.
I interned at Disney last summer and met with 1-2 of the people on the list (after cold emailing them). I think many of the upper management of Disney are super-sharp.

It's interesting to see such a broad list of execs. I'm guessing not all are super excited about this (due to 100% participation), but I think the majority would be engaged.

I would add that you probably would not want to visit more than weekly - I work at a big tech company and the CEO (who is famously hands on and detail oriented) and SVPs only meet with key projects 1-2x/month tops.
Am I mistaken or does algorithmic in this case simply translate to actually formulating a model that accurately represents your problem? I agree that the heuristic approach might be quicker and is great for filling gaps in your formal models, but actually getting a good description of the problem does seem like the smart thing to do.
Don't get me wrong; as I mentioned above I've found his lectures on both introductory physics and gravitation to be extremely enlightening, as did many of the Caltech students he taught (who were, by the way, just normal intro physics students, albeit at a selective university). His teaching can be highly effective when matched to the proper audience.

But that's just my point: there is no 0 to 100 scale of 'goodness' in teaching. And Feyman, regardless of his brilliance, doesn't sit at the top of hierarchy of teaching excellence. It's about fit between the student and the delivery the instructor. The Feynman lectures in video form can not be the pinnacle of physics instruction because they're fixed, not adaptable to the needs of different learners.
I was just reading the history of the EU. So UK was part of the outer 7 European states. On the enlargement of the pre-pre-cursor of the EU to the pre-cursor of the EU in 1960

"However, then–French President Charles de Gaulle saw British membership of the Community as a Trojan horse for US interests, and hence stated he would veto British membership."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Six)

Ha, he was probably right. But you will never get rid of us now!
Yep, I had almost exactly the same thing using a different password manager. I had to find another copy of the password storage file on a different machine and bring the old password over from it.

Note to Kickstarter: It is not good UX to ask for the new password, and then the old password. But that's likely the least of their worries right now.
You sound like a 10 year old in a school playground :)
Personally, I'd rather my information be in the hands of the United States rather than my own governments (the United Kingdom -- unfortunately it's with both!) Your own government can do more against your interests than a foreign government can.
I work in the IT business - there are plenty of times when weekend work is the only way to get something done (don't get me started on broken architecture that precludes rolling weekday rollouts). I just take the time away from some other day. And I'm not averse to overtime either, in exceptional circumstances. But for me, salaried means that I do my job as efficiently as possible, and if there's nothing to do, I don't work.
We forget so soon. Labor movements within recent memory were fought at great cost to secure the possibility of shorter working hours. People were killed at factory gates trying to get labor laws enacted, in part to reduce employer demands for long working hours.

One argument in favor of capping work hours: unrestricted overtime discriminates against workers unable or unwilling to compete. A race to the bottom is not in the long-term best interests of any participant or the society.

An imbalance in society might show up as (under|un)employment in groups outside the core demographic -- in this case, anyone who is non-20-something, non-male, or non-white, who is not "crushing it" at work after nine on weeknights.
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

You heard a lot of stuff from governments around the world in the last two weeks, but not one statement that consisted of “I regret subjecting my population to these procedures.” The German Chancellor, though triumphantly reelected with not a cloud in her political sky, is in no position to say “I agreed with the Americans to allow 40 million telephone calls a day to be intercepted in Germany; I just want them
to stop listening to my phone!” The President of the United States is considering the possibility of not listening to
thirty-five mobile phones around the world. The other several hundred million people we listen to are stone out of luck.

You understand what a charade this is, of course. The leaders of global societies do not conduct their classified business over their personal mobile phones. Our listening there is not gaining us important military intelligence. The President of the United States is publicly considering not listening to conversations that leaders of other countries have with their spouses, their siblings and
their children. But the conversations nine hundred million other people are having with their spouses, their siblings, and their children remain fair game.

Nobody is talking about that; you’re not supposed to think about it.

Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999
> China kicking out Google doesn't seems so crazy now. The American government is a worldwide aggressor that cannot be restrained.

You're touching on something here. What you're saying is that Google = American government [1]. With the rise of open fascism in the US, the merging of strategic corporations (mostly the technology, entertainment, and banking monopolies) with government interests is become more and more obvious - and scary for that matter.

[1] http://cryptome.org/2013/08/assange-google-nsa.htm
It references a generic 404 page?

Very funny.
About like you'd expect, he shrugged it off and went on with his meeting.
Libernet: Cryptocurrency-Powered Decentralized Alternative to Internet
I have used lastpass for years, and recommend it to my friends.
It's easy to use, has a free options, though I opt to pay, and is a good combination of friendly and secure.
Having come across it I submitted that, and then someone pointed out the original source, so I submitted that instead

Why?