skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has been a large divergence in purchasing power between consumer goods, permanent assets, and lifestyle/durable goods. Everything that is a mere consumer good or lifestyle good (computers, meals out, washing machines, some cars) has gotten much cheaper. Everything that is at least partially an asset or lifestyle/status good (some cars, almost all real-estate, vacation time, health insurance, possibly a boat) has gotten much more expensive.

The result is a society in which people find it quite easy to obtain what their parents would have called frivolous luxuries (sushi), but quite difficult to obtain what their parents would have called basics (an affordable house in a good neighborhood).
> ATMs are supposed to be secure, then why the hell are they running one of the most security loop-hole OSes even now?

ATMs are not internet-connected and have very restricted inputs, so that's mostly irrelevant[-1].

ATMs use windows because support, licensing[0], institutional knowledge, existing codebases, hardware drivers availability and the like.

Due to [0], as other commenters I'd see them migrating to some BSD rather than Linux, much like Sony did. If they ever switch off of Windows XP in the first place.

[-1] only mostly, if you can cut through and get hardware access, you can have fun: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173701-atms-running-windo... then again it seems the vulnerability used here is "boot from USB key" which is orthogonal to the OS used

[0] and no possible copyleft headaches
Related quote by Yo-Yo Ma: It takes three generations to make a musician; the first to leave poverty, the second to go to school, and the third to master the instrument.
Ironically I've become so custom to using backspace for navigating back that I constantly end up swearing when I use it on sites that hijack text-input like Google for instance, where pressing backspace will focus on the search-field, delete the last character and immediately perform a new search.
FWIW, my solution as a frequent country-commuter is to just have two phones.
Get a tiny 15€ nokia weighting 60 grams and just use that when abroad in addition to your main one.

It is obviously slightly less practical than a single one, but it's better than switching SIMs and as a bonus you can have both numbers "always on".
April 8 is the EOL date for standard XP, XP Embedded (which is what most ATMs run, the article suggests it too) is Jan 2016.
No. I don't believe a word of that. And your analogy undermines your own argument.

If you had said Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi ... but Tom Cruise? Really? Tom Cruise is a perfectly good Tom Cruise (a good actor) but a million other waiters could have been him.

There maybe Messi like geniuses in politics, banking, business but the idea that bankers are all paid Millions because "they are worth it" is to me ... laughable.

They are paid millions because they can get away with it.
Free Wildcard SSL for Open Source Projects
Such examples would be in the extreme edges of the bell curve though, and rules designed to suit those rarities are often not suitable for the people in the main part of the curve.

And even so, a single commentor that only has 3 comments might make valuable comments when they pipe up, but the 2000-commentor is more a part of the community simply for having more frequent conversations.

You say you have a low average and therefore aren't as valuable a community member, but I recognise your handle and have a general idea of the flavour of your previous comments. In business parlance, you have 'brand recognition' :). If some wunderkind blows in tomorrow and posts a couple of popular posts (popular gets the votes, not insightfulness) and afterwards departs or lurks forever, I'm not going to remember them or their 'flavour', despite the high average. They might have made an interesting observation, but they wouldn't be as strong a part of the community as yourself.

Besides, getting back to context, who would I trust more when it comes to this 'endorsement' process, silly as it is? Someone who breezes in and out and mostly lurks, or someone for whom talking on the site is a frequent occurence and who knows the ins-and-outs of it? A lurker is an unknown quantity, but for someone to hit [number] karma, they generally have to have chatted or posted a bit (a few exceptions, sure).
The prices may be out of control, but as a student, it was surely a delight to find that I could buy $8.00 chemistry books from the likes of Amazon and Abebooks and sell them to the Barnes and Noble on campus for a reliable $65.00 cash until they met their quotas.
I'm not sure it's a wonder at all. The cost of replacing an operating system for all your ATM machines involves rewriting your application for the new OS, perhaps modifying it for your ATM HW, testing it and deploying it. It's a considerable cost and to gain what exactly? I don't think it would have made any sense.
I would have loved to have digital copies of all my textbooks on a tablet in university so I didn't have to haul 20 kilos of books around all the time. One has to wonder how many university students look at the prices being charged these days, download illegal pdf's online, and then go to the bar to drown their guilty consciences.
There is clearly a distinction between the two, and we don't know how to use symbols to represent meaning [1]. But the fact that we don't know how to do so yet obviously does not mean that that is no way, or that our brains are not doing it right now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding
That is why student debt is so insidious.
Is it Google's format?
What amazes me in this mess is how ignorant the government (and the people running it) about methods to overcome censorship. They are, basically, computer-illiterate. Really very illiterate.

After the Tunisian revolution, there were thoughts and plans by politicians to do censorship again. This was dismissed as politicians, officials and government finally recognized that censorship can be overcome no matter what they try. Religious complaining about "porn" and that stuff can ask their ISP for a traffic filter.
> Can it be a point in a vast and complex "pattern space" and the meaning of that point is the structure of all the "paths" that map that point to other points in this same pattern space?

That's the exact point of contention, whether semantics can be represented by syntax is unknown currently, though it must hold in a materialistic world. If it can't, as some believe, then it isn't an arbitrary categorization.
If you are serious about this idea, contact me. (Chris at efficito dot com). I would love to help start such a business.
Are you seriously suggesting that Windows as an operating system has some serious holes that has made it insecure as an ATM OS? Care to elaborate which those holes have been and how have they been exploited in the ATMs?
Can someone upvote this comment for me? I accidentally downvoted. Sorry Jesse!
I don't think build a business is as easy as choose from a list.

You sure can implement every problem reported in that list but if you don't know/have the problem in first person, how good can your solution be?
With less than 2 years to go, they have to look for alternative now.
Heh, had this idea some while ago.
Anyway i can contribute? I got a bunch of great startupideas but i'm busy with other stuff and i don't mind sharing em.
Someone register startupleech
He forgets to mention the point that there are usually "international editions" of all textbooks that are sold for half the price or even less. And they are not only sold in developing countries but in virtually every market that is not north america. Coincidentally searching for them on Amazon.com even directly via the ISBN usually leads no results. I remember reading an article where publishers used copyright law against reimporters of such editions.
Both the original article and the Wikipedia page state that WebP support lossy and lossless compression. I guess using lossless WebP would not make sense for JPEG files as the result would probably be bigger than the original JPEG, but it might work well with PNG.
Indeed. Yet the article claims that April 8 is the EOL date.
Cut the BS… What matters in building a startup
New cruise ship, the Titanic II, to set sail in 2016
> Serving HTML from the server is great for search engines.

Google and the other search engines should go with the times and start to render and index single page js applications just like they index html pages. Executing js on the server and get the resulting output is a solved problem. JS is enabled by default on all browsers that matter (and very difficult to disable), I don't understand why we still have to play nice with search engines and render the html on the server as well just for them.
I doubt parent meant that literally. It was probably more a catchy way of saying "we don't care what happens in the Chinese room". Of course IBM Watson, specifically, doesn't exhibit human level intelligence.
I think support. You have to remember that the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux is from 2002. Back then, the old UNIX vendors were in steady decline, but the freshness of enterprise Linux probably made potential customers weary.

Nowadays, things are really different. Red Hat is large and has a solid track record. IBM has shown its support for Linux over an extensive period. SUSE is now in the hands of a huge IT company.

Consequently, I don't think there is a good excuse in 2014 not to seriously evaluate Linux. In fact, it should be (and often is) the standard option for embedded devices.
Is it necessary to buy books? At my university (in the UK), they have lots of copies of textbooks in the library. And if there's a book they do not have, you can ask them to buy it and they most probably will.
What good places in India?

Can you recommend some at similar price points that offer good connectivity, access to nature, the beach, etc?
Most of the US legal practices regarding the constitution are legal sophistry of the worst kind.

Take the "right to bear arms" for example, which is clearly stated that it applies to citizen militias (something important at the time it was written). Through tons of applied sophistry it was decided that it also means the right for every redneck to buy military grade automatic weapons for "self-protection"...
The beauty about Linux (and a lot of well-maintained open source software) is that security flaws are usually patched rather quickly -- with the possible exception of the disaster that is X, but Wayland is coming along nicely.
HTTPD0, simple programmable HTTP/1.0 server unafraid of traffic
Given the pocketbooks of banks and the small footprint of such a secure embedded system, I think it won't be difficult to negotiate a contract with e.g. Red Hat to provide 20 years of support. The RHEL lifecycle is already 13 years, prolonging that to 20 years for a small subset isn't outside the realm of possibilities.
thanks for the links. i hadn't read the paper. it seems like the design patterns book in that it's a good reference to, um, refer back to when looking at the latest "new" thing.

going back to the parent comment,

> I would love to learn more and avoid mistakes made during it's infancy.

you'll probably want to look at zookeeper (or some system built on top of zookeeper like storm) if you expect the thing to grow into a large project with lots of services.

and to the article,

> Should all your applications use the same language?

there are definitely reasons (library availability, runtime capabilities, the simple fact that you don't have to, and so on) not to use the same language, but i've found being able to refactor between applications very helpful.
See the manual: http://mr.gy/software/httpd0/manual.html
Sounds better than keeping your money in bitcoins
this seems rather prescient:

https://xkcd.com/927/
I came across this yesterday. Not necessarily just exploiting a Windows security hole though.

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5476_-_en_-_...
Drug warriors = soldiers.
You may be right. But on the flip side:

- I think churn on Readlang has the potential to be lower than more traditional courses, since it's impossible to exhaust the supply of novels and other reading materials, and reading is a habit that lasts a lifetime. Granted, you may not need the help of Readlang beyond a certain level, but I think that level is extremely high, and could take years or decades to reach.

- I have a fairly strong personal bias in favor of self study over teacher directed study. There are great teachers and I don't mean to diminish the work they do, but I believe that to learn effectively requires self motivation. (Good quote from Gibbon that Feynman uses in his Lectures on Physics: "But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.")

- Selling to students forces me to make the product better for reading and studying, which should be the primary goal. Selling to teachers will put an emphasis on features like the teacher admin panel that aren't directly useful to the student. (Analogous to Enterprise software, which sucks because it sells based on features useful to the administrators and not the employees that end up using it)

- If it's sufficiently good for independent learning, teachers will want to share it with their students anyway, in fact they already are, so they are still a useful marketing channel.

I'm not ruling it out in the long term, but for now, I'm sticking with individuals.
Before that, it has a call for donation to power NPM infrastructure because of lots of server cost and to help us increase. However, I think you are right about that point.

My main concertn is that can NPM run like RubyGem, be maintained by a group of volunteer. Again, NPM is great and I don't want to troll. I just really want to understand what is the greatness of NPM that make it much better than RubyGem and require much more human resouces to maintain and improve.
I saw a Windows 95 blue screen on an Siemens Nixdorf ATM with a CRT monitor two years ago.

The operators (Germany, Austria) say they are not connected to the "internet". I wonder if they use a separate telephone-line-network or just use VPN/firewall.
free startup vomit
I heard about a small business that makes bingo cards for non-technical (putting it mildly in some cases) mostly US-based elementary school teachers, created by some guy in Japan.

I don't think that having the problem yourself is necessarily good. I think it's better in many cases to go solve a problem for "real people" - those that are currently using, say, an Excel sheet in place of what your solution offers, or something like that.
> patched rather quickly

For offline equipments, not sure how likely they would be patched, though.
This is fascinating to read that they are working on an IPv6 data centre and buying into the premise that they don't want the technical debt others are still building up.

My ISP back in January remotely updated the 3 year old consumer router to support IPv6, however they have not issued any addresses to it yet. I am impressed that an ISP is taking responsibility for the router. The issues with security and bufferbloat/latency mean that these devices can no longer just be left with out-of-date version of software, ISPs need to help consumers with this vital part of the Internet infrastructure.
They did provide flexible updates, for like ~10 (ish) years. They're done doing that now and everyone should be well aware already.
I went to a talk on this paper up at Bletchley Park a few years back. Very cool, not quite what I expected (ie, not compsci theory) but really interesting nonetheless.

As I understand it this was his last paper too, before the authorities basically hounded him to death.
Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs
That is a good starting point.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/11/w...

Uprooting one's life becomes more undesirable.
Well, I reckon that if you're in the market for say 500,000 magstripe readers you're probably in a good position to ask the manufacturer to supply a driver for the OS of your choice.
So many folks here from ex Yugoslavia (author from Slovenia, me from Croatia).
Thanks, telot. As you said, it would be great if this app works on mobile too. This app works best with devices which screen size are from the iPad upward. I have trust with the mobile app version of Google Drive will do a good job for the phones here. However, if there is a need in the future, I will build a jQuery mobile version of this one.
Or "Apple & Google’s wage-fixing cartel had dozens more firms, over 1M workers"
"A public directory of publicly auditable keys? Allow me to introduce PKS (an example server) - a decentralized system for distributing public keys."

In my opinion that thought process is exactly what's wrong right now.

Just compare the two interfaces [1] and [2] and you'll see why why your average person won't be happy to use the pgp.mit.edu keyserver to verify identifies. It's cluttered, complicated and the presentation once you searched for a name is subpar. I'm not saying that keybase is the best way to do it but it's a good start to make the existing tools (Like the webinterface of pgp.mit.edu) prettier and easier to use.

[1] http://pgp.mit.edu/
[2] https://keybase.io/ (search field in the header)
Right, but if you're worried about security, using a browser that's no longer maintained isn't the answer, so doesn't explain old versions of graphical browsers.
Same for my university in the UK (most of our prestigious universities pride themselves with the quality of their libraries). I think it's more a case that there are only a single/few copies of each required reading book in the library and on loan, others miss out.
I say we go with an even more radical solution, based on the chief protection against that harm in medieval Iceland.

Let's require that the Speaker of the House recite from memory 1/4 of the federal code (including regulatory laws) every year, so that over the course of 4 years, the entire code of laws gets recited. Anything accidently omitted gets stricken from the law books.

Congress should open with this. And if one human cannot be expected to know the law, then nobody else should be either.
> On hearing intruders break in, the homeowner’s son, a disabled ex-serviceman, reached for his (legal) gun. Luckily, he heard the police announce themselves and holstered it;

There is a new tactic for intruders to use: announce themselves as police officers.

Really. That's not a way to raid a house due to "allegedly" buying things with a stolen credit card.
The current steps to switch provider are:

1. Order your card online

2. Wait 2-3 days for your SIM, sometimes a week if you're unlucky

3. Keep using your old SIM as long as it's registered to your current number.

4. On the day where it's supposed to stop working carry both SIMs until you notice your number is ported.

5. Switch the SIMs and you're on your new number

I'm pretty sure that if that process is reduced to just step 1 that it will be good for competition.
Eh this guy is patio11, he's a practically celebrity around these parts!

> I don't think that having the problem yourself is necessarily good.

First off when he started this, he was very close to the "problem". Then, for years he listened intently to almost every single minor or major feedback putting himself in their shoes, which again is very "close to the problem".
Well, there may be good reasons for multiple charges. For example, rape and murder might be tried together.

However, if we stopped allowing lesser included charges, that would be a good thing. For example, let's stop giving juries the ability to say "It wasn't murder, but manslaughter since intent wasn't proven."
Thanks, you make some good points.

Good beginner content is a big problem, I agree that recommending a stream of content with ~5% unknown words would be very cool. On the other hand, being a small indie developer, maybe it's better that I concentrate the smaller niche of advanced learners since I'm then not directly competing with Duolingo and other highly funded sites.

I would like Readlang to be more social, but haven't got around to it yet. I thought about adding disqus comments as a quick solution but they aren't ideal, requiring you to log in a second time.

It's probably more sensible for me to polish and optimise the current feature set first before adding social features.
OMG please improve typograpy. One font size/weight for introduction, one for list and another for your service promotion.
Yes, it's developed by Google.
بث مباشر مباراة مانشستر سيتي وآرسنال اليوم السبت 29/3/2014
Evil boss would read these results as we are happy when we work harder.
A simple backbone.js tastypie app
Yes. That's what I have now.

Since I have a data subscription in both countries, I bought a cheap Huawei Android phone, installed Cyanogenmod and use that.
> Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Trust me when I say that the truly deserving individuals with true disabilities do not want to sit on their asses, deservedly or not.

The part where it's "psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life" holds just as much for them as for everybody (and it's arguably even more important for them). It doesn't take a very long time of sitting on your ass to realize this, either.
> Can you tell me what is the performance and model accuracy trade off between Monte-Carlo option pricing vs. BSM vs. Binomial vs. Heston.

I don't work in finance anymore, but Heston is not a pricing method per say. In the linked article, the OP assumes that the price of a bitcoin follows a lognormal distribution (i.e: dS_t = mudt + sigmadW_t), while Heston assumes a different diffusion process (dS_t = mudt + digma_tdW_t, and d(sigma_t) = kappa(thau - sigma_t)dt+ zetasqrt(sigma_t) dW'_t) [0].

I would say that Monte Carlo is in general slower and less accurate than the other methods you mentionned, but more flexible in the sense that it allows more complicated diffusion models or payoffs (e.g: option on the max or min of a basket of underlyings).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heston_model
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration"

The list takes care of 1% part. Perspiration is fueled by passion. As long as one can strike the right mix, why not.
My comment was just observational. I agree with you completely. Especially after watching Brett Victor's videos and reading his articles I've come to realize that while a lot of progress has been made to make computers mass-accessible, there is an incredible amount of stuff we can and will still do.

Personally, that excites me. Every once in a while I still marvel at the slab of plastic and glass in my hand that does all these amazing things, even after having had a tablet for years now. Then I marvel at the thought that I, singlehandedly and at virtually no cost (that I wouldn't have otherwise), can create an app for the thing that even my grandmother could download and use.

Hell, I marvel at the mere fact that everyone around me has a computer, uses chat applications, and carries around a PDA everywhere. There was a time where I was the only one like that and even embarrassed about it in public.

We've come very far, and I can't wait to see what comes next (wearables, probably).
Many clients do the PKS search for you. Using the website is always going to be suboptimal, you have to copy keys around. Way better to let your client of choice do it.
Early ejaculation Can Go Away Along with Yoga exercises
The second amendment isn't a great example, since everyone on both sides of that debate claim that the other's constitutional justification is sophistry.
> Problem: people think ideas are really valuable.
> Solution: a marketplace to sell IP

Haha. If only there was a place where nobody would buy their ideas, they'd realize how worthless they are.