skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd guess the use case would be someone trying to send files through a network that's mostly locked down (think: corporate network using a transparent proxy for HTTP, etc), but allows outgoing DNS traffic.
13? Is that a statistically significant number?
Definitely, check out www.sohacks.com!
I'd definitely suggest listening to this freakonomics podcast: http://freakonomics.com/2013/09/26/would-a-big-bucket-of-cas...

You could also make a similar point as the podcast by looking at the experiences of modern lottery winners. So I would say I'm pretty skeptical that something like this would be effective for the vast majority of people.
How to take good Instagram photos when you travel
That's Fantastic! Keep Up the AWESOME WORK GUYS!
The Console Market Is In Crisis
Thanks! We love HS hackathons!
Depends on what you mean by efficiency. Building a widget faster means nothing if there's no buyers.
Can this imply that there should be some reasonable threshold for the kind of documents you give to someone in a certain context?

Personally, I wouldn't give up my passport unless it was for the government or a government-certified service.
http://hammerprinciple.com/therighttool/items/c/ruby

Straight questions for people to compare two things they know.
An impressive beta. Nothing yet that makes me want to switch away from sublime text.

I do think they will create a very cool eco system for editor extensions.
Everyone in your train to work that plays with his smartphone paid for it over the last years... some people got rich over it... this has nothing to do how to have a good society

But isn't that part of better society. People keep grinding on the fact that wages have been stagnant etc, but everyone has a smartphone and a wall-sized TV when before they didn't. Is it worth letting some people get obscenely wealthy if everyone gets to have a smartphone in recompense?

What really seems to be happening is a blind spot when it comes to housing and healthcare that's preventing those sectors from keeping up.
Is it actually good to be encouraging hackathons at progressively younger ages? I believe we generally agree here that hackathons are not good for generating maintainable code or encouraging best practices, and teaching high schoolers to pull long hours and not follow good practices is tantamount to teaching them how to burn out of programming later.
Constructive Empiricism sounds like real science where "science" in general or scientific realism specifically is more like a religion. By applying the scientific principle, in principle, to science itself, you end up with a meta-science that is intuitively more correct.
New Starter Apps from Rails Composer
Hmm, a PDF hosted on a random personal web site at a University in Brazil. Seems legit.

Can we please not post links to stolen (presumably-)copyrighted materials here?

If you'd like to compensate the author, consider buying the collection it's published in: http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang/dp/193...
It's one of those things that gets people into coding. It may not be a viable learning strategy, but it's enough to get someone hooked.
Wait... A 2013 blog entry about the Two Generals' problem which repeats several times that there's an "impossibility result" in an unreliable distributed network for that problem and not a single mention of Bitcoin.

I thought that Bitcoin's major technical feat was precisely that it showed that you could solve the Byzantine Generals' problem (which is a generalization of the Two Generals' problem).

So which is it? Impossible result or not? Or does the article talk about something else (but then a mention of Bitcoin, what Bitcoin solves and why it doesn't apply to what's described in the blog entry would have helped)? I'm confused now...

As a sidenote I'd say that writing about either the two generals' or the Byzantine Generals' problem in 2013 without mentioning Bitcoin even once is a bit weird.
So what's the deal with Python these days? Do people still write for 2.7 which is the default "python" in most (all?) Linux distributions, or is it safe to write for python3 now?
The discussion here is terrific. With high
irony, this discussion misses the larger
point: The NYt is part of old media. As
for all old media, they are in the ad
business. As has long been common in old
media, the purpose of a 'story' is to grab
the readers by the heart, the gut, and below
the belt, always below the shoulders, never
between the ears.

In particular, the NYT wants story 'themes'
so that they will 'condition' their readers
to accept that 'stories' in these themes can
be realistic. Then the NYT can write silly
stories in the themes, have their readers
take the stories seriously, and, thus, have
some special and especially effective ways
to grab their readers by the heart, the gut,
and below the belt.

One of the themes is the 'environment' and
a morality play of evil humans destroying
the environment. That story goes back to
the Mayans who killed people to pour their
blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across
the sky. Old religions of nature worship
were similar. It's a special case of good
versus evil, of sin, transgression, retribution,
and, maybe, redemption, likely via sacrifice.
Kill a lamb. Give up cars and walk. Etc.

In this story it's the evil, and dumb and
greedy, farmers 'messing around with powerful,
dangerous, hostile
forces of nature with consequences they
can't possibly understand' and, thus, being
a threat to all of us.

So, the NYT pumps this stuff out. They have
some conditioned, devoted readers who lap
up this swill.

It's not science, news, reporting, or
investigative journalism. Instead it's
just a nasty manipulation.

Here at HN we would be fools to take such
swill at face value and argue against its
logic and science. The NYT doesn't care
a hoot about logic or science but just
the NYT manipulation and, then, their ad
revenue.
As much as the idea of every passenger being able to eject in the case of an emergency amuses me, I don't think that's going to happen. Ejection seats are expensive, can themselves be dangerous (they are basically a rocket-propelled chair), and pilots in aircraft that use them need to be specially trained for their use. That's not even mentioning how you'd be able to sever the whole top off the fuselage quickly enough, and if you could, what if that system malfunctions in normal operation...!
I saw an explanation somewhere for the ghost cities. The CCP realizes that construction labor there is currently very cheap, land is cheap (in terms of political capital to displace people --- wealthier citizens will make it more expensive to displace them), and materials are relatively cheap. As they develop further, all three cost inputs will only get more expensive. So the CCP is deliberately allowing the rapid development of these projects in anticipation of the massive shift from rural to urban population migrations over the next several decades. If the CCP is trying to stem catastrophic inflation when the mass migration hits a peak, then these ghost cities can in retrospect appear a prudent, long-range measure.

There are also also quirks of the Chinese property market [1] and mass media's penchant for sensationalism that might more reasonably explain the ghost city phenomena.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/09/24/chinas-ghost-c...
You mean like Symfony, Laravel, etc? Frameworks that a lot of PHP developers use these days...
> I wouldn't give up my passport unless it was for the government or a government-certified service.

I wouldn't either, but Mt. Gox wouldn't send my bitcoins back without it, so I was forced to send it to them. And then they managed to lose my bitcoins and my documents.
Crawl | Powerhoof
Monadic lifting in C++
For the past 20 years I've been hearing how China was going to take over the United States in everything. Invasion of Taiwan would happen whenever they wanted. I've never heard anyone say their economy was about to imminently collapse.

I'm surprised any one thought that China's "bailout" was doing anything more than kicking the can down the road? It is the end of the road now, and they get to deal with unserviceable debt. There are many options. All are ugly in unique ways. For who and when are the questions left undetermined.
I recall hearing about this around 2-3 years ago. Unfortunately, I am unable to find the source.
Requests aren't guaranteed to be received in the same order to reassemble the files.
It's interesting to see what doors Roslyn can open for us in the craft of software development.
And I'm also really looking forward to seeing some of Bret Victor's ideas implemented [1]

[1] http://ermau.com/making-instant-c-viable-part-1/
This is a prime example of a covert communication channel [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel
SF and Oakland CA land spot in the top 5 cities for biotech funding
"I got yelled at for it and they didn't let me do it."

Sounds like banking corporate culture. :-)
You're still paying for the service. Basically this is talking about making free services non-free to support the creation and growth of the service.
I LOL'ed.

Once you realize that the USA is probably behind in terms of "spying" when compared to the Soviets, you'd be a fool to accept that without a response.

It is the height of narrowmindedness to think that Nation-States operate within the same plane as ordinary individuals.
This trope is just not true, but people keep bringing it up when discussion of China's enormous debt growth comes up.

https://twitter.com/prchovanec/status/442838642974007296
I like to tell people stuff. Jesus told & Hid.

God says...
fabulous What_are_you_doing_dave I_can't_believe_it why_didn'_you_tell_me
Watch_this who_are_you_to_judge fer_sure Mom manufacturing
It_grieves_me SupremerCourt laziness this_might_end_badly
are_you_feeling_lucky I'm_not_dead_yet smack_some_sense_into_you
figuratively harder_than_it_looks frown Oh_really Venus
fight guilty dignity I'm_God_and_you're_not fight you_know_a_better_God
grumble play not_a_chance_in_hell what's_up I'm_God_and_you're_not
awesome I_can't_believe_it you're_nuts envy choose_one
in_other_words gosh Yes_you_are middle_class how_come
failure_is_not_an_option Bam how's_the_weather do_you_want_another
sports over_the_top think_you_could_do_better what_luck
white_trash incredibly do_not_disturb fer_sure I_didn't_do_it
beep_beep stuff Isn't_that_special why_is_it Oh_really
don't_count_on_it liberal exports Moses kick_back goods
beam_me_up impossible abnormal doh youre_welcome awesome
boss I'm_impressed hold_on_a_minute overflow what_luck
choose_one you're_out_of_your_mind check_this_out hilarious
fight look_buddy Greece hate WooHoo I'm_God_who_the_hell_are_you
praise boss drama Russia astronomical completely kludge
pardon_the_french services
I've done a lot of NY->Bos trips. The trains are much more reliable. It's a hair longer on the train, but it's all productive time. On a plan you're lucky to have an hour productive. There's also a NY->Bos overnight.
> Who the hell thinks it's OK to store non-encrypted passwords in this day and age?

The post gave no indication how Cricketer was storing the passwords. They may very well be stored encrypted.

You can send plain text passwords back if you've encrypted them, you just have to decrypt them first. There's no point at all in returning the results of encrypting a password if the clients don't know how to decrypt those results. Given that the API uses plain text HTTP, I doubt that the passwords are encrypted.

What the passwords are not stored as however, are hashes. A hash is not the same as text that was encrypted. A hash is a difficult to reverse unique identifier for bit of text.

Having said all this, it is funny to see your post, and all its replies making fun of security incompetency while also being incompetent in themselves.
Hey, back in 2007 someone wrote:

Every year, for the last 20 years, many articles say that we can be sure of an imminent housing crash. Then every year they are proven wrong. This is just one more of these articles.

... Bubbles are bubbles until they pop. A lot of infrastructure in China is under utilized, and let's not even get started on empty shopping malls and apartment buildings, even here in Beijing!

Whether the government can pull off a soft landing is up for debate, but every year with people, local governments, and companies become more leveraged, not less, I think a hard landing is more likely.

Now, if that happens, this doesn't necessarily mean that the government collapses, but many of the bandits who are making out on this have gotten their money out of the country, and a correction is more likely to negative effect those who didn't really benefit in the gorging. And if that happens, the CCP (many whose relatives have already fled abroad) is going to be facing a lot of pissed off nongming.
Also true for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123, the event happened "at near cruising altitude". Although I wouldn't say a plane once cruising is entirely steady state, there are winds and such. But, yeah, as you climb stress on the pressure vessel increases and that's when you'd expect a flaw to manifest.
Bitcoin in two years – worth 1000x or nothing
I... what? What does that have to do with radio wave propagation & the ionosphere?
> Do people still write for 2.7

Yes.

> which is the default "python" in most (all?) Linux distributions

Most distributions ship both 2.x and 3.x at the same time. Ubuntu ported most (all?) of its tools to 3.x already.

> is it safe to write for python3 now?

What do you mean by safe? It's been stable for a long time now. As long as you verify all your dependencies work, you should be fine. The only annoying thing you may run into is a situation where only one of the versions is provided: for example if you want to drive ufw (3.x only) from salt (2.x only), you'll have to resort to some kind of IPC instead.

There was a poll about the current state a month or two ago on HN.
That's how I "learned" regex.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid... and https://www.debuggex.com and lots of patience :)
The US has done large scale stimulus operations since 2008 (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/113986/kkr52%207tofussti...), just not to the scale China adjusted to respective GDPs.
I agree with you, I was just trying to answer his question while at the same time trying to clarify why he felt like a non-commercial clause was necessary.
A lot of this opportunistic construction isn't done very well, and often its just a form of money laundering (build this, charge a lot, do a very crappy job, lots of pockets are padded). Many of these buildings will be torn down before they are ever used; every few months there is a scandal where this actually happens.
#Selfie
The aspect ratio on that link seems a bit off. This one showed up in the suggested videos and has the correct aspect ratio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUSjMnmS5lI
Yes. Like any other Python 2 releases, there are always new syntax and function additions. I think the only major Python library people use not available on Python 3 is Twisted. (edit: I think Mercurial is also not compatible with Python 3 IRRC due to byte-string and unicode incompatibility). Even Tornado and pyCurl works with Python 3 (according to pypi and doc).

Before you start writing in Python 3, make sure your dependencies will run on Python 3.
Inequality is not a problem. It's a symptom of a society where the decisions you make have an influence over your life. I should have thought that was obvious. Did you read the article?
I use Xcode for development and it already warns against assignment within conditions[0]. gcc also warns against it[1]. Python just errors out all together[2]. I don't have my Windows instance up with Visual Studio but I'm fairly certain that it too notifies you of assignments within conditions.

So the question is, why would you sacrifice readability to help solve a non-issue?

[0]https://www.dropbox.com/s/sjtefd55mwigq3y/Screenshot%202014-...

[1]https://www.dropbox.com/s/yx01tdeykpkespv/Screenshot%202014-...

[2]https://www.dropbox.com/s/ex9dskab82n52qf/Screenshot%202014-...
Deaths.

31 accidents directly caused by the faulty parts. I had a similar powertrain issue a few years back.
Many of these are the sites sending users generated passwords which doesn't necessarily indicate that the passwords are stored in the database as plain text. It's reasonable that the passwords are generated, the email is sent with the password, then the password is hashed and stored in the database, and the plain text version deleted.
Isn't subliminal message marketing illegal now? I remember a hubbub about Pepsi a while back http://globalelitetv.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/pepsi_sex.j...
I don't know about Eastern China, but I was told first hand from a relative:

a) General lack of maintenance in all buildings. At the most basic level this includes keeping things clean, at a higher level fixing things when they break.

b) Air pollution causing external wear.

c) Individual was surprised when told a stadium was 6 years old. It looked decades old due to pollution and lack of maintenance. The locals were just going to build a new one to replace it.
The level of financial impact from that equation is enormous. It's not just LTCM. Every bank in the world now uses derivatives to hedge risk. Every mortgage is dependent on people being able to offload the risk.

Saying Black-Scholes is imperfect is like saying Newtonian mechanics doesn't account for Relativity. Black-Scholes was the formal starting point for pricing derivatives, or the offloading of risk. Everyone has advanced well beyond it. Blowups not withstanding, without Black-Scholes our lives would be very different.
There is no such thing as intrinsic values in any currency Fiat, digital or crypto.

The value in a crypto-currency is determined by how much the "nodes" trust the network. This trust takes time to build as we are seeing with the various alternative CCs coming out these days and thats just ok.

But keep in mind that the currency is only one way to use the technology. You could in theory have an ebook be based on the technology.
FWIW, Somalia developed excellent cellphone coverage - better than many of its neighbors - during a time when it effectively had no government.

https://www.hiiraan.com/op4/2007/mar/2432/the_phones_keep_ri...
Here's a writeup by David Auerbach on the Wolfram Programming Language:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/ste...
on the other side of the coin is what we hackers face more often - Analysis Paralysis

Underlying analysis paralysis is often tunnel vision or lack of flexibility with regard to figuring out cost/benefit. Taking a piece without realizing there was a better move is not being flexible with the cost/benefit analysis. So is interminably spending time getting the optimal solution in 12 different dimensions.
Twisted is a library you might want to use if you want to write non-blocking code. So you would care a great deal if this wasn't python 3 if you wanted to use python 3.

Mercurial is an application you use to version control your source. I'm not sure I understand why any python developer would care if Mercurial was written in python 2 as long as it worked. Maybe if someone was writing a Mercurial plugin or patching Mercurial they would care.
The BBC are gonna call dibs on this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision
In my opinion, the Schrodinger equation is by far the most important. It provides an accurate prediction of almost all earth-scale (and smaller) phenomena except gravity. Although I suppose some of the heavier elements require KG or the Dirac equation to account for relativistic effects.
Ask HN: How can I securely install Truecrypt on OS X?
I want to download an install Truecrypt on OS X 10.9. Unfortunately, the Mac installer available on the Truecrypt website is not signed the way that OS X installers are normally signed. Instead, I need to use the PGP method described on this page:
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/digital-signatures

So the problem then becomes: How can I securely install a program to check PGP signatures? I've come across 3 options, each with problems:

1. Download the GnuPG source zip file and check the SHA-1 checksum as described here:
http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.html
But isn't it possible for a 'man in the middle' to tamper with the download while still producing the same SHA-1 checksum?

2. Download the Mac installer from this site:
http://gpgtools.org/
But it is signed by someone called 'Lukas Pitschl' who I've never heard of and so cannot trust.

3. Download the Macports installer and install GnuPG as described here:
http://www.mattnworb.com/post/16019918033/how-to-verify-a-pgp-signature-with-gnupg
But the Macports OS X installer is signed by Robert Mercer - again, this is someone I have never heard of and cannot trust.

So how can I install Truecrypt securely without trusting someone I've never heard of?
Maybe it would be more subtle if they didn't change the face of the DVD and subtly let you go "Hey, do you smell pizza" to whoever else is in the room?
Lookup your Mt. Gox Balance
Are there any statistics of buildings collapsing? I've seen the "tipped over building" picture, and heard some other sketchy stories but its all anecdotal.
That's an interesting perspective. And it's a perspective that would be familiar to any student of cybernetics and social systems theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics so-called second order cybernetics. Fascinating stuff I think.
I enjoyed reading this. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describing the worst poetry.
If someone say it for long enough, they're bound to be right one day. It's the same about the decline of the US.

All we can do is judge them on a case-by-case basis.

In this case, it's really hard to judge because the threat, similar to the US credit crisis, is hard to measure. China has a really sizable foreign reserve that some people think will buffer any economic crisis. However, some estimates of the shadow banking system puts it well beyond its reserves. That said, not every loan in the shadow banking system will go bad. It just means the loans were made off the books. One can reasonably assume that the lender did his work and made loans that have a decent chance of success. Also, I don't know what falls under some of the definitions of shadow banking. The Chinese have been loaning each other large sums of money for generations. This "tradition" is one of the theories put forth in the rise of overseas Chinese communities and their dominance in business in those areas. Anyways, my point is that it's not all doom and gloom. The threat is there but don't panic yet.
Or you assume that someone spilled pizza on the DVD and you are angry at the vendor for providing a dirty dvd
> this is talking about making free services non-free to support the creation and growth of the service

Naval (author of post) already did this with Angellist, in a way. They systematized the introduction of founders->angels. Which was happening freely over email beforehand. The service inbetween can add value over free methods.

Nothing wrong with that really as a starting point. Centralization is sometimes needed for trust. The angels may need to trust some escrow, dispute process, or software stability if they want to invest money this way.

But agreed it could technically be decentralized/free.
Thinnest house in the world
"Net Neutrality" is still at this point essentially a hypothetical problem. It's people hyperventilating over how companies might conceivably act, even though the companies have essentially no actual financial incentive to act that way (and to the extent that they do, it'd be pro-consumer to let them do it).

"NSA surveillance" is the sort of problem that comes from giving government too much power and money; doing an end-run around governments probably reduces the potential for invasion of privacy - it means you have one fewer actors trying to deliberately undermine reasonable security standards.

Any other candidates?