skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been curious about how to track down scammers -- just a few days ago I got a quite convincing call supposedly from Bank of America; they appreciate my reliable payments and would like to lower my interest rate... they'd just need to verify a few bits of info, then pass me off to an account manager to handle the rate change.

First, do I have the card with me? Can I confirm the expiration date, so they know this is the current card?

Next, they just needed the card number, starting after the (here he listed the first 4 digits accurately). This was when I belatedly realized this was of course a scam attempt -- the initial digits of a credit card number just identify the bank, so he could pretend to be confirming that he was legit while at the same time collecting my entire credit card number.

What if I hadn't known that? I know perfectly well I shouldn't trust an incoming caller's identity as a general rule... but he called in the middle of my workday, I was wrapped up in other things, and just thought "eh, I can take a minute and accept a lower rate" without even paying enough attention to realize he hadn't even addressed me by name. Embarrassing, really....

Once the game was up it didn't last much longer -- though I played it safe and pretended I didn't realize it was a scam.

But what can I do now?

The incoming number was reported as 703 237 2680; but I have no other info on who the caller was beyond that, and I believe caller-ID is fairly easily spoofed.

I wish I'd had a honeypot credit card to give him; that would have been at least somewhat useful, though tricky to really use. From what I understand, stolen CCs are tested first (via a small purchase from any online service), then good ones are sold.

A honeypot cc (generated by someone with the power to investigate its data) could be used to attempt to track down the people testing it, and whoever buys it, but the former use could be useless (if the scammer can cover their tracks), and the latter only gets the downstream bad guy, not the original scammer.

And... the honeypot cc would need to pass the test to be sold, which would cost money. A chargeback (to that initial test) would of course be possible, but the whole testing process is already brutal for whatever merchant they're using for that.

I'm curious about other ideas on the most useful action I can take in response to this kind of thing.
Likewise with the memory thing, but I think they were brewing it at the National Coffee Association recommended temperature.

Anyways, I don't think the 'greedy' angle has any merit to it. One pack (mcdonalds coffee comes in these premeasured packets) is good for exactly one urn of coffee, and you (and the customer..) will instantly know if you reused it because the result is terrifically light and unpleasant to drink (but this implies McDonalds coffee is pleasant to drink in the first place...)

As far as customer complaints go, McDonalds themselves had hundreds of complaints about hot coffee and burns for many years before this case ever saw the light of day. Those hundreds are a statistical rounding error when you consider how many cups of coffee the restaurant does in a single day that don't result in any problems, let alone years.
Design cannot win, because there is always more talent wanting and willing to get stuff done.
Is that why the bookcase keeps falling off the wall?
Pick up odd jobs on elance or odesk or something like that. With zero reputation you'll have to bid on work cheaply, but there's plenty of junior-level work available; $200 in 3 days is not unachievable. Or have you already tried that route and had no success with it for the past 4 months?
Longevity gene may boost brain power
That coffee you carefully sipped on probably wasn't as hot as the coffee she spilled on her lap. It's pretty unlikely it was hot enough that if you'd spilled it you would have required re-constructive surgery on your genitals.
If you say no and they say 'get out of the way', you better get out of the way though, you can't physically prevent the police from searching your car if they decided to do it anyway. All you can do is hope your lawyer fights any evidence they get that way.
I think one fact that goes ignored is that McD's whole MO is selling coffee to people in cars, a higher risk situation. I think the reasonable temperature to serve coffee in that situation isn't the same as for when you're in a cafe.
Or...you could simply use the World Bank's website and free API that already offers much public data to download in various formats: http://data.worldbank.org/

A similar data repository is available from the European Central Bank: http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/
I was saying that US requires people who naturalize into US citizenship to take an oath to renounce their original citizenship. This is just a fact and the Supreme Court did not say this is unconstitutional.

Plenty of people have been naturalized into Chinese citizenship, at least in Hongkong. Here is the requirement http://www.gov.hk/en/residents/immigration/chinese/naturalis... and I do see that it requires abandonment of foreign citizenship although it does not say what level of documentation is needed, if any. If it were an oath then it would be symmetric with US. With China ruled by the CCP it is also understandable that the demand for naturalization may not be that high in the first place.
Haha the worst I've gotten is "Okay, S-T-U-W-A-R-T?". I suppose there has to be some downside to having some royal Scottish blood.
Here is a link to Donald Knuth's eulogy for Bob Floyd:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/floyd.ps.gz
Before you quit your job to become a developer, go down this 6-point checklist
See also, this Harvard study on medical malpractice. http://archive.sph.harvard.edu/press-releases/2006-releases/...
Well, the readme links to a PDF.
> Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. As I very carefully sipped my fresh Starbucks coffee today at the mall,

Starbucks coffee is not served anywhere near that hot. By their corporate guidance, the normal acceptable range of temperature for coffee served to customers is 145-165F. If you poured that in your lap, it would be very unlikely for you to receive third degree burns. The burn risk of water goes up very rapidly as temperature is increased above that. This is the entire point of the court case -- nearly everyone else in the country served coffee ~30-40F cooler than Mac, due to having found the risks too great, yet even after hundreds of complaints, MacDonalds decided to keep their temperature higher.
Indeed. I have no problem with dated. My shovels and hammer are dated.

For certain applications, I have newer shovels and hammers, but these are specialized applications requiring specialized tools.

Most times I need a shovel or a hammer, one of the plain old centuries-old designs do the trick just fine.
There was a project proposed in Switzerland about a vacuum metro a couple of years ago. It never made it out of the concept phase because of the costs. The goal was to make a city to city connection with a speed of 800km/h. The project website contains techical details too: http://www.swissmetro.ch/en
One really cool part of this supercomputer that is left out of this article is that it uses the Intel Larabee/Phi co-processor, at least 48000 of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
Yes, I was perhaps a bit harsh.

Are there enough YC company names to repeat this result with statistical meaning?

I wonder if there is any correlation between domain name prices and the QWERTY effect?
Ask HN: I will hack on your startup for a place to sleep
Hey HN,

I'm a hacker/CompSci student studying at a top 3 school in CS (easy to guess), and feeling a little adventurous. I don't have much planned this summer other than side-projects and research, and have been rather bored in school. I want to do some real work and build something. I don't need money; I just want to work with smart people. All I need is a place to live (preferably in the bay area). If you think there's a place for me, I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers,

intx
Your opinion isn't unreasonable per se, but the jury which evaluated the merits of Liebeck's claims disagreed, and it's as simple as that; the opinion which matters, from a legal perspective, is that of the jury which considered and ruled on the case.

It's hard to blame them, too, given the facts of the matter; even the Priceonomics article considerably understates the severity of her injuries, as is common even in the most sympathetic recountings of the tale, because phrases like "external genitalia essentially destroyed" aren't pleasant either to write or to read -- or to imagine; of all the places on the human body where it's possible to sustain full-thickness third-degree burns, that's got to be the most awful. (Which says nothing of the expenses involved in surgical repair and follow-up care; given the extent of both which Liebeck's injuries required, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that her total medical expenses were pretty closely comparable to the total figure awarded her by the jury.)

Had I been on that jury, I feel certain I'd have argued for finding in Liebeck's favor from the start. Had you been on the same jury, perhaps you'd have argued otherwise -- or perhaps not; it's awfully easy to play Monday-morning quarterback on stuff like this, when everything looks so much simpler than it does from within the jury box.
maybe he's drinking on the job? might be a good way to pass the time.
I just tried it, watching the auto-complete. The word "Sambisa" resulted in two choices, both in Nigeria, the second one being the Forest Reserve.
The downside of cases like this is, if they stand, we end up with cold coffee. We end up with no products or services that have any risks. We all get treated like morons because of liability reasons. And we will have to pay a premium for any product that can be misused.

Thankfully, coffee is still served at the same temperatures, and the only change was added a warning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
Well, you know, you can get away with poor trigger discipline for years on end without hurting anyone, and then one particularly careless day you negligently discharge your firearm into someone's head. In what way does the former make up for the latter?
Interested in creating a National Coding League (NCL) for hackers? 
HackerRank's programming community is growing really really fast. We've 500k+ hackers solving challenges in different domains of CS - AI, ML, Functional programming and many more domains to come.

We're looking to create programming as a sport starting off with schools in US. The idea is to create hackerrank clubs in different schools and conduct practice & tournament coding contests in various domains of CS for a period of x weeks, culminating in a grand bot contest at the end (like super bowl). We are refining this idea every day and we'd love to brainstorm with you on the specifics and the implementation.

about the team:
we are a team of 38 people, based in palo alto with $1m+ in revenues, funded by khosla ventures and growing super fast.

If this sounds interesting and someday you'd like to see your name on the wikipedia page as the creator of NCL, e-mail us: hackers [at] hackerrank with your online profile and how you can help us.
I generally agree with the article, but it gets one thing wrong. It says:

the evidence does not show an epidemic
of frivolous lawsuits winning jackpots

My counterexample is patent trolls availing themselves of the hospitality of the "United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas".
This makes me sad for the people who get scammed. Wonder why we can't do more to help them.
Why can’t SMBs adopt SaaS ERP from companies like Workday and NetSuite?
Yes, we are. I wouldn't say re-inventing, though. Hypervisors are effectively an optimization of microkernels: modern ISAs (e.g. x86-64) have special instructions to make "hypercalls" faster than plain-old context switches, so any modern implementation of a microkernel would be forced by practicality to act as a hypervisor.

Though, there's another advantage that comes specifically from thinking of each process as a separate "machine": each process gets to participate fully as an Internet peer, with its own unique, public-routable IPv6 address.
You don't always require a shell if all you need is info about the system. Such a logging process can easily be compiled into the application and that data regularly pushed elsewhere. If you need to change what's being logged then adjust the code and recompile/deploy a new Unikernel. I have a version of my website being compiled as a Unikernel and the workflow is very simple [1].

My point is that the whole workflow of creating and deploying applications becomes much simpler as the final VM can be an (almost) disposable item, rebuilt at-will. This is pretty much what the configuration management tools are all striving for but Unikernels work this way by design. Therefore, our notions of managing such systems will also change.

[1] http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-li...
As a shameless plug, permit me to direct your attention to the bottom of p. 211.
The article makes a good case for why agriculture could be more important than sunshine: the sun doesn't care about the Yangtze River as a border.
Many on HN may not realize, but there are miniature NSA groups in most every organization in the USA. Universities, non-profits, small corporations, local governments, etc. If they have an IT Security group, then they are likely spying on IP connections.

They use Bro, Snort, Suricata, Argus and other tools to record metadata about every IP connection that comes into or leaves their networks. Some of them terminate SSL connections and forge certificates. A few of them even drop encrypted protocols that they are not able to decrypt and inspect.

They use taps and/or SPAN ports to do the spying.

Most of them try to keep this activity quiet. This mentality is pervasive and it is everywhere (especially in USA based organizations). Everyone should be aware.

No one is safe from this spying, even senior management and tenured faculty connections are being inspected and recorded for later use if needed. They just don't know it.
This looks interesting, I will have a look at it now.
In my experience there is a substantial subset of programmers/computer scientists who don't even consider any dynamically typed language as worth their time. In their view, these are at most for beginners or small projects. This bias is like a huge blind spot...
Nobody knew about the zero-day exploit employed against Tor browser,
for example, and there are almost certainly many more tricks like that
up their sleeve.

I had actually been patched already upstream, so it was not really a zero-day. I'm not sure if it a patched Tor Browser Bundle had been released and people just hadn't upgraded, or if the patch hadn't made its way to the bundle yet.
Bsert – "better" asserts in Python
I've been getting phishing attempts to my cell phone in the past few months. They leave message that say, "to collect your $100 AT&T rebate, go to www.phishingwebsite.com", which looks like a standard phishing site.

They always come from different phone numbers and list different variants of the web site. It's odd because I've seen plenty of phishing emails, but this is the first time I've gotten them via phone.
The haskell-mode manual
Bonding seems like a reasonable solution. If each individual's bonding risk showed up as cost to a PD, there would probably be a sudden interest in body cams and training on how to deescalate situations.
MF: Is Bodacious really a good shepherd? I mean, he’s a cat.
SC: That’s a hard one to answer.
MF: He can’t, you know, herd them, right?
SC: Well I suppose not.

CAT IS NOT A SHEPHERD. Just another companion. I have cats. I like cats. But to think cats could herd anything is beyond inconceivable.
For people interested in this I recommend the ACM article on Unikernels [1]. It's a good overview of the approach and the benefits/trade-offs. Then take a look at http://nymote.org to see the kind of things we want to start building with this approach.

[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628
If I had to give any advice, it would be to run through ideas quickly. If they're not gaining traction, or they're a struggle to grow, drop them and move on to the next idea.

This isn't going to be true for everyone, but each of my successful projects was a success from day one. I posted them online, pointed a few communities towards them like Reddit, and ended up with a few thousand registered users in the first day. That then dropped to a few hundred daily registrations and went up from there for the coming years. They've still been a lot of work, but I knew I had something the instant they went live.

Every project I launched that was difficult, never went anywhere. There were a handful of sites I started where I was working hard to build traffic and it was always the same, a spike, then nothing a week later. Some of these I worked on for months, one project I developed over the course of a year. My two or three successful projects were built within a week or two. They were rough, but provided something of value, and I could build them from there.

No one hits a homerun every time. Look at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft struggle. These are companies with unlimited budgets, and some of the best in the industry. They fail. Often. It doesn't matter if you fail 90% of the time though, you just need to burn through those ten ideas to find the one that works. If you get hung up on the first idea, and devote all your finances and time for years, you'll never get to the good one.
This seems not quite right to me... you need probable cause to get a warrant. You can't skip the warrant just because you think you have probable cause.

However, there are 'exigent circumstances' where the police can enter your house without a warrant. I think that comes down to things like hearing screams for help, preventing destruction of evidence, etc.

tl;dr: Probably never try to physically or even verbally stop police
from searching your house, car and person and property.

Actually, my understanding is you should always verbally explicitly refuse to consent to a search. But if they search anyway, of course you do not physically try to stop them. They will probably claim you gave consent and misplace the recording, but it's the best you can do.
Hrm....

My first impression on watching this is that it's not quite what I'm looking for (tabs open, list grows, they stay loaded) ... but the ability to close tabs then re-access them looks promising.

The outline part is useful.

OK, this might actually be helpful.

The labeling feature would be handier if I could tag/label sets of tabs.

I'm giving this a shot.

Thanks!
Mapbox hears user feedback, improves Openstreetmap attribution recommendations
Nice try, but Yangtze River happens to be at the dividing line of north/south, not strictly but close.
Linkbait title. Pretty well written. Good to know action is being taken. But is there a take away? Most insightful part I felt was how cheaters will lower the value of a degree from their university. Morally I believe cheating is wrong, nice to see some logical thought put in.
Okay, so let's say it's 165F and I spill a cup on someone. There's still going to be an injury. Scalding burns can occur at temperatures down to 125F or so.

Whose fault is it?

Does Starbucks have to lower the temperature of the coffee they're serving to maybe 115F in order to avoid responsibility? If I spill it in someone's eye, that may still cause an injury. Does Starbucks need to serve their hot coffee at 98.6F?

I don't know. It just starts to sound ridiculous on how sellers are supposed to completely protect us from ourselves when we misuse the products we buy.

WalMart sells guns, and those can be horribly misused quite easily.
Solar Panels Could Replace Roads
Thanks for two mentions on this esteemed list :-)
Off topic but every time I see ExpertsExchange not capitalized I almost do a double take. :)
I hate this article. It's about some fine reporter who opens with some tear-jerker piece about pay-day loan scams, then transitions to "Mike" who, in so many deliberately picked words, is a loner hacker character with no credibility just in case this article doesn't pan out, and then...

"Mike casts his hands over the keyboard, and makes like God."

Seriously. That happens in the post.

Unfortunately, as I page down, I noticed that author mentions "lead generation." Which most of us can relate to, so I read, nay, struggle onwards. (this is parody)

Mike turns into a criminal phishing character in pursuit of an elusive quarry. The article tapers off into a stalemate.

86 points?
Amazingly functional site for working with Latex documents! For example, I am working on screencast re: containers/docker right now, and created several diagrams using their editor, see: http://i.imgur.com/NlYuaXp.png

If this type of stuff interests you, make sure you check out http://texample.net/tikz/examples/all/ & http://tex.stackexchange.com too. Also, if you want to try and play around with it, use the "Create A New Paper" link @ https://www.writelatex.com/docs?template=paper

Here's the code I'm using:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=.9,every node/.style={minimum size=1cm},on grid]

\begin{scope}[
yshift=-83,every node/.append style={
yslant=0.5,xslant=-1},yslant=0.5,xslant=-1
]

\fill[white,fill opacity=.9] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
\draw[black,very thick] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
\end{scope}

\begin{scope}[
yshift=0,every node/.append style={
yslant=0.5,xslant=-1},yslant=0.5,xslant=-1
]
\fill[white,fill opacity=.9] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
\draw[black,very thick] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
\end{scope}

\begin{scope}[
yshift=90,every node/.append style={
yslant=0.5,xslant=-1},yslant=0.5,xslant=-1
]
\fill[white,fill opacity=0.9] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
\draw[black,dashed] (0,0) rectangle (5,5);
\end{scope}

\draw[-latex,thick] (6.2,2) node[right]{$\mathsf{Web\ Server}$}
to[out=180,in=90] (3,2);
\draw[-latex,thick](5.9,5)node[right]{$\mathsf{Your\ App}$}
to[out=180,in=90] (2,5);
\draw[-latex,thick,red](4.3,-1.9)node[right]{$\mathsf{rootfs}$}
to[out=180,in=90] (2,-.5);

\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}
I dare say that if you spilled even 130F coffee in your lap while driving down the freeway, you could easily cause a fatal accident.

As a society, do we expect McDonalds to make that decision for us and just not sell coffee in the drive-thru?
To be fair though a huge difference is that the deaf community is bound together by a common language. Language is hugely important in human social groups. A "free fix" for members of this community comes at the cost of the eventual annihilation of their shared language. This is why you typically don't see the same reaction from medical advancements in vision from the blind community, whose impairment has no effect whatsoever on their primary language (and just to be clear Braille is simply a character mapping to the readers native language while sign languages such as ASL are actually distinct languages).
Online education and Online degrees are dead
about the same type of difference is between western europe and slavic people, and even inside the slavic people themselves there is the same gradient - the more eastern ones, like Russians, are more "communal"/less "individualized" than say Polish. And my personal impression is that further east you go, beyond slavic part of Russia, an individuality gets even less respect/recognition, and in particular North Chinese being more individualistic than South, still noticeably less so even than Russians.

A theory that something requires more cooperation in the east vs. west and what applies gradually and across the whole Eurasia continent - what can it be?. I think there must be something else beyond mere cooperation behind the phenomenon of the "a person is nothing" principle getting stronger with move toward the east.