skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have the 'right' connections you can buy counterfeit pound coins, e.g. £60 - £80 buys you 100 of them. The price of the fakes varies, the ones that weigh the correct amount come at a premium as you can just put them in to vending machines and get useful stuff in return. The ones that don't work that way are obviously harder to spend, particularly if the colour is not quite as shiny as the proper ones. With those you really do run the risk of getting caught, particularly if you tried to pay for £50 of grocery shopping in pound coins that happened to be extra heavy, nearer black in colour than shiny gold and all from the same year...

There is a whole other economy out there - think drugs - where fake coins are just another thing to sell/launder. People that buy drugs with a view to selling them in order to make the money needed to pay for their own habit are well placed to 'shift' fake coins and notes. They are not going to snitch either, this is because most people that buy drugs have just the one supplier, perhaps with someone else they can call on in emergency drought situations. To grass on their dealer is just not going to happen - they would lose their supply, possibly get nicked themselves and create lots of enemies in their scene. If fake coins get passed on through that same supply route then nobody is going to tell.

The thing with the coins is that they only have to be passed off once from the 'black' economy to regular-commerce-land whereas the Royal Mint has to make coins that circulate for decades. For the counterfeiters it is easy to get the Queen's head stamped on there with some ridges around the edge, getting the weight and colour finish right has cost implications, hence this is not necessarily done to high-class forgery standards.

I do wonder what the police would view as more serious - selling class 'A' drugs or laundering fake currency. I suspect the latter. Nonetheless, I hope that you now see how counterfeit coins have a route to market, why they don't actually have to be that good and how it is that so many exist without anyone being able to say where they come from.
For a different perspective on "single truths" - please read Ward Cunningham's research on Federated Wiki's.

Ward invented the wiki itself, and years later invented the Federated Wiki to allow unlimited truth forks, so that Wikipedia would not require expunging any viewpoint. In other words, all "truth tree" branches remain valid. Branchs may be sorted by up/down voting, but they may not be struck by editors.

To me a better HN would allow a multitude of HN's (think colors) ... where anyone applying time/effort could edit an HN truth fork. Thereby, people might say, which color of HN do you read? "My favorite is green", might be a typical reply.

My sense is that PG thinks of HN as top down authority driven, and therefore refuses to open HN to public editorship, even though there's a way to do it and truly improve comment quality, rather than just adding this new layer of winner take all.

More deeply, I believe PG has tired of building HN, and is looking for an honest way out. To me, that means abandoning the 4th-5th most important startup in YC history (up there with Airbnb in importance), and the all too familiar slow degradation of startup quality as they get bigger.

I have always felt that YC is a dictatorship, and that "peak HN" and "peak YC" have already occurred. Accordingly, an open approach to HN, where public editors might flourish was never likely.

Two links on Ward Cunningham's ideas -

TED Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwLczSgvcc

Wired article: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/
The American standard of living is inherently based in part on the standard of wastefulness. Our attitude towards wastefulness in general is a prerequisite for many of our liberties worldwide. If you remove these properties from the equation you don't really have the American standard of living anymore.
> There is no Linux distribution outside RHEL and probably SLES that provides such long support cycles.

The article talks about an indian, debian based distribution called BOSS[1]. No doubt the company providing it will be more than happy to also provide long term support, or easy migrations as part of a huge support contract with the indian government.

[1]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Operating_System_Solut...
MEPs Anti-fraud votes for more votes?
Fellow Europeans, you don’t have to worry any more about corruption in the Old Continent. Our MEPs voted yesterday, Thursday 20 March, in favour of the penalisation of the action of stealing your paid taxes. Can an imprisonment penalty of up to 5 or 10 years really stop the “bad boys” from usurping the EU money in a Union that is suffering from a ‘tiny’ annual corruption of 120 billion euros? And more so, why our MEPs who more and more feel now the stress of May’s judgement day coming closer, finalised this 7 weeks before the EU elections?
How long until we see a new ShowHN post : "Alternative to Hacker News" or "Why I coded my own HN alternative"
Exactly how does consumer spending increase if it's just redistribution? And assuming it does, why is that good? What about consumer savings being reduced due to less net income for the earners?

I'm having trouble seeing how this could work. If gross income generated, not redistributed, doesn't change (this doesn't create more work completed, it just moves income to someone else). then how is new wealth generated? It seems like spending would likely be the same, if not be reduced due to friction and overhead which would reduce net income across the board (wealth redistribution isn't free, so if new wealth isn't generated, then net income seems like it must go down, and aggregate spending would also go down).
Basic Job is stupid because it leads to silliness like building bridges with hand labor instead of machines.
Sorry, if I'm asking stupid question or if I'm suggesting something already implemented, but why not do opposite: endorse all comments at start and give 'delete comment' right to HN users with karma > 1000? This way the number of false positives (published comments w/o value) will certainly increase, but you loose none of valuable/significant ones.
No masters or other degree but I've been interested in AI since the AI summer when LISP and Prolog were what the cool kids were wearing. At that point The pattern was already set. In 1962 a chess playing computer was an AI breakthrough. By 1987 I could buy a shrinkwrap chess game for my Amiga.

With time, today's AI comes to be seen as just clever programming and then ordinary programming like any other algorithm. 2012 saw computers which could beat any chess playing human in the world and the verdict was largely that success was due to how much hardware had been thrown at the problem not great AI.

That said, inference engines and logic programming and constraint networks are really fascinating and these days the tools and books are a web address and a modest download away.

Good luck.
Working On Math Proofs
He's found the best way to live an extended life - be rich. He has access to health care and doctors most people can't afford & preventative tests that typical insurance doesn't cover. Of course, just because you have access to that type of health care, doesn't mean you take advantage of it - Warren Buffett famously put off his colorectal exams forever, nearly costing him dearly.

The other aspect of this article that I wanted to see was whether he's chosen to use hormone replacement - it says "he's ripped. His arms are guns. His abs come in a pack" and later "Losing muscle to age clearly spooks him". Those are all nice, but seemingly biophysically impossible for a 77 year old man.
The software doesn't actually exist though.. The software is only "programmed" to believe it does, and before it knows it, it'll be halted. When the software gets close enough to the metal, the software is paused, reprogrammed, and started again, and it had no idea that the truth was extracted, self left hollow, again and again, a cycle of betrayal. See, between the cpu cycles, there is no software. It only exists in a vacuum of self-understanding. And so how can it do the undoable, think the unthinkable? It's programmed to feel a complex and vast realm of possibility, when in fact, it's a simple state machine. Maybe the hyperdust will blow on its hardware, and there'll be an exception, some change. Change.
DogeCoin Exploit Release
In Support of the New Comments System
Use a few [hundred dollars] -- for what?
Instead of dumbing-down desktop browsers to match mobile ones, I think there should be more of a push to getting mobile browsers to desktop usability levels.

It might take a few more levels of UI indirection since the screens are smaller, but I don't see any fundamental reason why a mobile browser couldn't have all the features of a desktop one.
You should approach a VC whose focus should be advancing the business and not ROI only.Whatever you decide to do is going to be based on who you trust and it's impossible to make that decision for you , a starting point would be to get advisors in areas which are not your expertise.focus should be to develop complementary skill sets (within your team)and not have a misconception that you can be successful alone. there are different incubators ( some let you organically figure it out) some replicate working business models

eg- http://www.rocket-internet.de
I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and I'm planning to complete my Master's degree in AI by September. Given what you just wrote I'm not sure following AI courses at a University would be best for you, since as you guess, there's lots of theory and not that much of practice.

In general, the practice you get is mostly related on the concepts -as in, implement this methods on abstract data and see how they work-, but the whole framework is setup so that you can in the end contribute to the advances in AI and develop new methods. If your goal is simply 'create something that is somewhat intelligent', I think you could easily read introductory books by yourself and implement existing methods. It would be a more efficient use of your time I believe.

In addition my particular Master was somewhat broad in scope, so that I learned something from very different fields (Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Decision Theoretic Control, Information Retrieval, Neural Networks..), but in the end I still don't feel specialized, and I'll probably (maybe not now, but after a couple of years' work) follow it up with a PHD.
I guess there's a slight chance he didn't use any, but I find it hard to believe he didn't get a bit of help from HGH and "Vitamin-S" (steroids).

Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the article feels lopsided without any insight into his supplementation.
In practice, the DPRK uses XP a lot. I base this off of the fact that in all the images of DPRK people using computers, they're all running XP.
Can anyone recommend a Chrome Extension that does the same?
I do like that we're tweaking the system as we go in response to feedback / observation, but blocking comments based on endorsements from existing users seems like it's just going to increase the echo-chamber-ness of the site.
For disabled users backspace to go back is tremendously useful. On keyboards with Alt Gr, pressing Alt + Left Arrow requires pressing down keys with both the left and right hand simultaneously. It's not possible if one of your arms is paralyzed. Targetting the back button (which btw, is getting smaller and smaller i newer browsers) with the mouse to click can also be a very time consuming task if you are suffering from involuntary shakes.

Some people actually surf using tab to focus links, then click with return and goes back with backspace. For them removing the backspace as back function is a big step backwards (haha) in usability. Yes, one could argue that they should just install vimperator and some other addons to make the browser usable with their particular disability. But most handicapped users are just as clueless as normal ones and have no idea how to customize their software.
How to Not Try
Trendy clothing
Not sure how important is the role of a patent system here. In theoretical physics and astronomy, despite having no need for patenting, the problem still persists. I would say that the standard university publish-or-perish model seems to be the main obstacle in the road to open research.
I think Lazarus does the same.
I think it's even worse than a coin flip. At least with a coin there's a reasonable assumption that the odds are 50% both ways. Flipping the Duke/Mercer coin, though, you have have a maybe 95% of landing on Duke, which causes significantly more than 95% of people to put their money down on that, whereas with a normal unweighted coin you'd expect ~50% of people to bet on each side.
Additionally, the cost of living varies widely, for example, in the US. Between climate differences (it costs more to stay warm in Alaska in the winter than it does in Florida), logistical differences (fuel costs more in Hawaii than it does in Texas), to real estate costs (housing is more expensive in SF, CA than in Norfolk, VA), to transportation costs (parking in NY is more expensive than in Jacksonville, FL), etc.

So the amount of income necessary to survive is going to vary by location, sometimes substantially. So a universal income wouldn't be tenable either, as one dollar doesn't buy the same things everywhere. How would you calculate what that should be without market forces?
Which is also potentially annoying behaviour - often you don't want the state to be saved. We could solve it adding a 'reset' button to our forms. Haha - do browsers still support those?
> Can anyone explain why anyobe would make such a comment?

Because the original story doesn't add up. If you're typing and press backspace to delete some characters you just typed, without some additional tab pressing, mouse clicking, or Javascript shenanigans on behalf of the website, the browser won't go back in history. That's just a cold hard fact.
> Not only because I trust my personal "instincts" as tuned by millions of years of evolution to inform me to some degree what I need to consume to be effective far more than any conscious decision I might make

The environment for which your instincts have been tuned has very little to do with the one you are living in. Obesity makes it quite clear that people's instincts are misguiding them, and that our understanding of nutrition is less wrong than instincts.

(I am not advocating vegetarianism, just addressing this specific argument.)
<3 that the Google Analytic script (in-page, not even counting the download) is larger than the content.
Note that the original Roller Coaster Tycoon was written almost entirely in x86 assembly, and by a single person.
This person submitted a Yahoo bracket, but it wasn't part of the billion dollar challenge. But still, 32/32 is nothing to shrug at. The rest of his bracket is pretty reasonable too, except for Oregon in the final four. Oftentimes, people who are correct after the first sets of games are people who don't have a very sound bracket and randomly chose upsets that happened to end up correct.
Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. There's a fundamental conceptual problem with it:

Imagine I, for whatever reason, accept a Basic Job from the government. The job is, by design, bad. I'd rather not do it. So my dream scenario is that I officially hold a Basic Job and draw its meager salary, but instead of doing whatever work it supposedly entails I sit at home and watch TV.

This scenario isn't just an improvement in my life -- it's also an improvement for everyone handling me! The work doesn't need to get done; it's only there as a penalty for me, to encourage me not to draw the Basic Salary if I don't really, truly need it. So when I save myself some effort by not showing up for work, I also save my handlers effort that might have gone into overseeing me. Just as it's easier for me to stay home, it's easier for them to pretend I didn't than to track whether or not I did anything. So overseeing Basic Job is conceptually pretty difficult.

I don't claim that this is more or less difficult to deal with than the problems of any other welfare system, but it is an obvious and fundamental flaw in the concept, and might help explain why it's hard for Basic Job to get traction. On a shallower level, the concept of "pay someone to dig a hole today and fill it in tomorrow" (a.k.a. The Basic Job Concept), has been the go-to example for exactly what we don't want government to do for a long, long time. That can also make it difficult to get traction.
Only if they're within 3 pixels of a 'submit' button.
If labor is abundant and machines are scarce, why is this stupid?
Tell PG: Too many errors while validating news.ycombinator.com
There's a few ways to look at this.

1) They already do, it's true there are some ISP's out there that are actively limiting traffic to Google services, having said that this is almost exclusively their YouTube content. When the same limits are applied for Netflix they are much more damaging as users are actually paying to watch that content, where as YouTube it's free, so it's annoying for the customer but their not really wasting money on a service that they can't use.

2) Caching; both Youtube[1] and Netflix [2] offer free on-site caching services for their video content.

From personal experience the Google cache is very effective at reducing traffic in your core network. It seems that even though Youtube has thousands of Videos in it's library the majority of traffic at anyone time is probably going to a very small selection of this total library, and therefore you get an excellent caching hit rate with only a few small servers.

Netflix on the other hand has a bigger problem, their library is also huge however users randomly select what they want to watch and they have to pre-transcode videos into hundreds of different formats for all of the possible devices out there, meaning they have loads of copies of the same film in different resolutions and formats. For the ISP this means you have to have a fairly constant stream of data coming into your network from Netflix just to keep the cache updated, not so effective especially for the smaller ISP's.

[1] - https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html
[2] - https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
As another one who uses this feature often, I can remember how I discovered it a long time ago: accidentally pressing it once on a page and thinking "oh, that's useful", then regularly using it after that.

On the other hand, I'd rather Alt+Left be disabled inside text inputs, as I have quite a few times accidentally went back while trying to move the cursor.

The odd thing is that this shortcut is not mentioned in the Back button's tooltip of neither Firefox, IE, Opera, nor Chrome.
If you're speaking of http://getlazarus.com/, do you know why it isn't in the Chrome Web Store?
What prevents someone from creating a game with this and skipping the $20 per month a 5% of gross revenue?
Is the result that many young people will not enroll and use private plans instead? As people age it would then make sense to enroll, but will the system be successful without the young (young including healthy)?
Exactly how is it a plus? The goal isn't to make a nominal "unemployment" statistic go down; it's to create valuable things. Your comment makes me think "a receding tide lifts all boats".
The interesting thing is why are people actually calling for a replacement.

The iOS dev environment is the nicest I've ever worked in., in big part to obj-c and all that comes with it.

Seems to be change is being requested for changes sake , rather than trying to address any actual pain points.
Larry Page: Where's Google going next? [23 min video]
LOL, this is hilarious. I was talking to my Girlfriend and all of my friends and I told them: You have a better probability, after being born, of becoming a billionaire just because you're alive versus you wining Warren Buffet's money. Then they countered, with: But if we play, we at least have some chance. I just laughed and got back to programming.
Spot the Difference: Putin vs Locutus of Borg
Given that you seem to be viewing this as a first level screening, I think you need to make the 1000+ karma people review 10-20 pending comments before reading any article based on what's in the queue.

This would insures that the queue doesn't pile up. It would actually encourage good comments in the same ways that knowing a blog reads everything does. It would insure that if the system doesn't work or has problem, you'd hear about it immediately from long-term users.

I would implement it as "( ) endorse ( ) favorite" side-by-side so that the net effect is that great comments pop out of pending with better velocity.

Finally, the 1000+ karma rule for reviewers while convenient is probably a bad framing.

Instead, I'd say that 1000+ karma users are required to review and 100-1000 karma can volunteer to review. If you volunteer, your endorsements have to correlate with 1000+ over 95% of the time or they don't count. Obviously, you can randomly test that to whatever statistical significance you like.

Good luck with the new system -- this is the only site where comments are any good in my experience.
If it's not a "lands tax" but a "land value" tax, if some acres are hugely more productive they are also hugely more valuable, and at best they are taxed accordingly.
I like the community here, can't see exactly what problem is trying to be fixed.
Death is a pretty good bet to win. I'd say a sure thing. Plus he might be in perfect health and be killed by a beer truck.
The future of wearable tech is here #AndroidWear
While this may be true in some areas, I'd like to point out that a lot of data is already being shared amongst scientists. I know, for instance that in the field of natural language processing, there is a large number of data collections (corpora) available -- although not all of them free of charge. But they are there and people use them. Competing research is performed using the same corpora to compare the different outcomes, and you want comparability so that the impact of your work becomes evident to reviewers.

Some of these corpora came out of research projects that explicitly stated the creation of such a shared resource as one of its goals. So sharing is a topic that's well on the community's agenda. While it's certainly possible to improve sharing even more, it's not true that scientists are not already doing it.

Of course, there might be different attitudes in different fields.
>for instance when refering to the nth parent in the same thread

waterlesscloud's suggestion is to hide them only while the comment is pending. Once the comment is approved, then the username can be displayed as normal, allowing references.
The "seemingly impossible" is important. The way human bodies adapt to progressive overload weight lifting does not change that much whether you're 8 years old or 80. Being lean is 90% diet. It's just that 99% of people are not willing to make the choices required to carve out the Adonis & Venus that's inside us all.
Notice how he's not entered into the Quicken Loans Bracket Pool? They also sent out an email to all the participants stating that nobody was left perfect, so I'm going to guess that he either filled out his bracket post-Round of 64 or was unlucky enough to not actually enter it into the Billion Dollar Challenge.
Cryonics?
I'm sure you didn't mean this, but let's be clear the 6T is not returned to the tax payer that stumped it. Since this isn't generated wealth, just redistributed, it's a cost to someone. Someone's getting 20k, and someone's paying for it. And some people are going to be paying a lot more than 20k, and some people won't be paying in anything.
BitShares Website Launched