skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kinda tough to find what's applicable from this list:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverusedSciFiSill...

But there are a few clear standouts.
6. The patently obvious design flaws in a vehicle or weapon system go uncorrected during the entire life cycle of the system in question.

The original humvee had issues with passenger armor back in 2004 - they could have been purchased with the armor but weren't.

13, Computers, when shot, explode as if they had been stuffed full of Roman candles.

The videos of laptop batteries catching fire are pretty sparkly. Not sure how that would actually interact with a gunshot.

25, On-board computers always know exactly how long it will take for the malfunction to blow up the ship.

The Tesla roadster battery stories seem to give warning and force drivers to stop and get out.

31. A robot that can't climb stairs is deployed in an area where stairs are common.

Roomba?

At the very least, we can make an existential argument about sci-fi cliches actually being accurate. I couldn't think of a good way to get historical science fiction cliches. But the thing about the future is it's unknown. some of Jules Verne's stuff worked out, like submarines and travel to the moon, and other stuff didn't, like time travel.

I guess the rational response to "the singularity" is to stick a number on the likelihood of that actually happening - and then getting on with your life.

I think you're thinking about the future in a funny way, you should give Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan a read.
2) In some ways, the Chinese have the advantage there, because the state perceived that a new political party with a few thousand members might have been a threat to their power. In the US, you can form as many new political parties as you like, but not one of them will ever get anyone elected. Tanks do not show up at organization meetings because they are not necessary. Change is prevented by other, less visible means. No one dies before the cameras.

3) The problem is that private and usually harmless behaviors have become increasingly criminalized. As Cardinal Richelieu put it, a devious prosecutor can find a capital crime in as little as six lines written by an innocent. When the state records all that you do, the only thing required to destroy you absolutely is a reason to look you up in the index.

We have good reasons to value privacy and pseudoanonymity. I, for one, would like to be able to pick my nose and scratch my balls sometimes, without fearing that someone is watching--or even recording it for my later humiliation.

As for those antennas? They can be aimed via computer algorithm, without ever involving a human. Beyond that point, no one needs to know where my phone is. Even in the most lenient scenario, where the company actually needs to analyze patterns of phone locations to provide service, it is not necessary to uniquely identify those phones or connect them with a person.
I use this app every day and it is just awesome. I can respond to situations with a GIF almost instantly, it allows for true reaction GIFs. I also really like the Github insert feature for commenting on Pull Requests. Check it out.
Does the singularity concept actually require some sort of quickly growing or even asymptotic curve for intelligence improvement? I don't see why that would be a requirement. Even if AIs are only slightly more intelligent than humans, it seems like many of the effects associated with the singularity could occur. If AIs were more intelligent than humans to the same extent humans are more intelligent than the next most intelligent species on Earth, surely we would consider that to resemble the proposed singularity.
Just have to wait longer for the trickle down to reach everyone else.
RAII can get rid of that one try/finally, that's true. I was writing standard Java/C#/Python-eque code, however, which requires all those try/catches.

Here's what you get if you have some magic RAII file-closer object:

try {
f = os.Open(filename)
}
catch(Exception e) {
throw new Exception(string.Format("Failed to open config file: %s", e.Message))
}
try {
callFunctionThatMightErrorOut()
}
catch(Exception e) {
// handle error
}

Still not great.
I know plenty of people in the trades and there is no shortage of people do 90% of the work out there. Now, if you want someone to do precision welding underwater that's another story, but there is not a lot of those jobs, and they tend to be rather dangerous.
Can someone give a quick overview of whats going on with this code? I'm feeling a bit lost on how enums are being declared and used in swift.

enum ActionToken {
case NoAction(source: Int, value: Int)
case Move(source: Int, value: Int)
case SingleCombine(source: Int, value: Int)
case DoubleCombine(source: Int, second: Int, value: Int)

// Get the 'value', regardless of the specific type
func getValue() -> Int {
switch self {
case let .NoAction(_, v): return v
case let .Move(_, v): return v
case let .SingleCombine(_, v): return v
case let .DoubleCombine(_, _, v): return v
}
}
// Get the 'source', regardless of the specific type
func getSource() -> Int {
switch self {
case let .NoAction(s, _): return s
case let .Move(s, _): return s
case let .SingleCombine(s, _): return s
case let .DoubleCombine(s, _, _): return s
}
}
}
> markets are thin and difficult to safely short

I would be happy to lend you Bitcoin you can sell short (if you post sufficient collateral, of course).

How much do you want?
I don't see how "this is what we have now" is a refutation of anything. The status quo is not optimal.

> How is the acronym "Digital Rights Management" inappropriate for this, without bringing up fluffy sentiment?

That's like asking why the acronym "Structured Query Language" is inappropriate for a new language for making queries to search engines. The problem is that it already means something else.
Monitors are getting large enough for many to be productive using just one.

A single monitor can also help one be more productive by not having always-on distractions in your periphery. Putting the inbox away is a very effective way to be productive. (There was an article about this on Slate but I can't seem to find it.)
AFAIK NDA's can't cover anything that's publicly available. Apple announced Swift at a publicly streamed press event and they have made a Swift language guide available publicly on iBooks. My guess is they want people using it so that if people do start to switch to it when iOS 8 comes out there will be help available on the usual places (Stack Overflow, forums etc.) and people can find bugs.
That chart is labled as "A chart showing miners revenue divided by the number of transactions."

Revenue, not cost. The cost depends on the amount of energy expended multipled by the price of energy.
Ah, OK. Thanks for the explanation. I wish there was some compromise where I could tunnel a local port in such a way that didn't require a server.
> The machines are creating wealth for the owners of the machines which isn't being (re)distributed to the former workers at all.

Isn't it? You're right in that I have yet to hear someone laying off staff and then paying them because machines do all the work, but on the whole I do think everyone profits. At least in the Netherlands you get money during the time that you are looking for employment.

> we are sentencing a huge number of people to live in poverty

Last I heard we are still free to start our own farms and live off of those, but it seems people rather like having things like cars, power, the Internet and other luxuries of the past few decades. And most people living in "poverty", as you say, have all of the above.

Those won't be the best cars or the fastest connections to the Internet, but I never heard about a "huge" number of people being laid off and then having to go without all of that. You'd think they'd be in the streets rioting against the machines if it was that bad.
Lima Raises $2.5 Million For Its Personal, Subscription-Free Dropbox
Apple be trollin’: A visual history of the company’s public spite
While the particular measure of poverty may be in question, and in general poverty may be a tricky intuitive concept to nail down, the entire conversation is not thrown into doubt: We can quibble all day about the meaning and quantification of terms, but the underlying intuitive concept is what is important. I think we can agree that poverty in the US has not been eradicated -- although theoretically it seems possible given increases in productivity.

Has increased productivity and economic growth really 'trickled' down as some would argue? It would seem not, as wages have not increased proportionally with productivity [1]. It is at least worth thinking about the author's conclusion: "You also have to devise strategies that make the benefits of a stronger economy show up in the wages of the people on the edge of poverty, who need it most desperately."

[1] http://economics.stanford.edu/files/Theses/Theses_2007/Sachd...
That's fair pushback re how "standard" deep learning is. That said, those methods are rapidly establishing themselves as the go-to for applications in speech, vision, and text. At least for those outfits that can afford the substantial dev costs.
As always, someone talked:

A confidential informant tipped the
FBI off to the syndicate administrator's
email address...

Humans are the weakest link in any crime machine...
It's in the chipset of the cellular radio (3G/4G/etc), whose source is generally not available to anyone. And, more to the point, the code running on the chip can deceive the operating system.
Based on some events of this sort in my area, as I understand it organizations that get that sort of direct access and control over their bank accounts do so under a strict set of conditions the bank lays down. I.e. an isolated computer that no one's reading email on, which prevents the sort of spear plishing detailed in Haysite Reinforced Plastics experience with PNC Bank.

After such an event the bank will investigate, and if the org violated their conditions and that led to the loss, it's on the org. And I suspect org insurance policies have "we don't make you whole if you're an idiot" provisions.

Or at least that's how it went down here when e.g. a school district was sloppy and lost 6 figures of their bank balance.
This is pretty important for a network service which is inherently inline for all your traffic. It isn't so important for something like a video cache (which I don't think CloudFlare even supports), but for DDoS protection and services like that, I don't think I'd want to use a non-PCI certified service even if I weren't required to.
Even if we never figure out a formal computational design for human-level AI, I find it hard to believe that we wouldn't be able to achieve the same ends with genetic engineering and computer interfaces to biological computers (i.e. brains).
The Post-Snowden Surveillance World: Network Effects, ...
"hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars." is quite a large range when talking about money.

My comment was specific to the example given in the article, where to amount was about $195,000. While not a tiny sum of money, the amount of man hours spent to unravel those transactions, to ultimately get to recoverable sum, would be close to if not more than the original amount. And getting to the amount, may not guarantee that you can recover the funds anyway.
I knew the news yesterday was to good to be true.
You are questioning trust in the markets connected to the Bitcoin network. You make it clear that trust can't be regained by saying it's irreparably tainted for you.

I agree with the assertion there may be things plugged into the network which affect price in either a (unnatural?) negative or positive fashion. /r/bitcoinmarkets has been talking about China intentionally pushing the price down for months now by way of implementing marketing sentiment, China style. However, I believe there are far more positive connections being added to the network (as you mentioned in your comment) and these connections will bring added value and stability to the market by acting as dampener to value manipulation.

Overstock has real sales with BTC. Sure, they aren't much, but it's a good start for what is essentially the world's largest startup. The only reason we're not all circle jerking each other over Bitcoin like we would something like Instagram (photo sharing site sold for $1B? really?) is because of what cryptocurrencies in general represent for humanity: computed trust. Trust implemented by a thing that we all run and none of us can stop except maybe for the devs, which requires consensus. That's a POWERFUL and scary tool.

When something messes with trust, interest and fear, you get the AWE response from humans. This results in either great joy from trusting and being interested it, or anger from fearing it. This is why discussions around Bitcoin are so polarizing.

Killer apps bring trust in a widespread way. Killer apps for powerful tools aren't invented overnight. It takes conviction and hard work to figure out opportunities and it usually requires lots of experimentation. Resenting or judging based on the fact some will fail in a given time range is illogical. I do hear you when you say you think the blockchain is the real story. I agree, but in a much broader sense of any type of computed trust.
There are a lot of error handling libraries out there. On Juju, we're working on one right now. This is the preliminary version: https://github.com/juju/errgo

Basically you just call a function every time you would return an error, and it automatically records the file and line number and lets you add on some context to the message, plus it gives you the option to mask the type of the error (to hide implementation details from your callers).

I wouldn't use errgo right now, it's still under heavy development, but it's similar to a lot of other error handling libraries out there.
I can get by on a 27" display (full-resolution, not upscaled 1080p) alone, but for certain tasks having a second screen is almost imperative.

If you're doing development and need to see the output window, some logging, and are watching your performance monitoring application, you'll run out of real estate in a hurry.
17 U.S.C. § 105 only bars the Federal government from holding copyrights on works it created. Case law, however, holds that states and local governments may retain copyright.
How do you even quantify "how far away from that goal we are now"? Do you have a percentage?
Yeah, but if you use weasel words and change poverty to "relative poverty" you can massage the figures to make it appear that nothing ever improves.
Full-stack and Ops Engineers – Swiftype is hiring
>> Still have no idea how to make things private, public, or protected. In Objective-C you could hide internal details away in the .m file. In Swift, everything is exposed by default.

I think it just hasn't been released yet. It's part of the Known Issues section of Xcode 6 release notes[0].

[0] http://adcdownload.apple.com//wwdc_2014/xcode_6_beta_ie8g3n/...
You mean that the number of transactions grows faster than the mining capacity? I've covered a similar case in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7846564 (it's #2). In general, if you want more transactions you also need a better security, which leads to increased mining costs.
If government teaches us anything, it's that there's no correlation between money spent and reliability of the system. :/
Alright I'll sign up, seems better than the folder I keep in my filing cabinet
I like this cost/benefit analysis. Often people forget that, when building a product, there are tons of features wanted, with different costs, and different benefits. Its not easy todo the right thing.
Yes, and what in the world does such nonsense have to do with rewarding open source developers? I feel like its a hobby business but everyone makes their own decisions.
That sounds awfully like a DRM wrapper around the content. What happens if the virtru keystore goes down or is unreachable (temporarily or permanently). Do I have access to the messages I sent/received?

Can the sender retroactively change access to the content?
A true socialist would say that inequalities are themselves unjust.
Depends entirely on the judge whose bench it ends up before.
See, continuous ups and downs may be seen as kind of a failure.
It's a zero-sum game. Revenue = cost.
The ability to reliably identify sarcasm, with a low false-positive rate but even with a very high false-negative rate, would likely save the Secret Service a significant amount of money and a very significant amount of bad press.

Also, your daughter is much more perceptive than the vast majority of the people I know.
>'How is it notable?'

I'm not sure I follow.

Has this been some sort veiled 'Why is this on the front page?' gripe from the start?

Anyway, each is notable as an effective hello world program [1]. A starting point that concisely demonstrates the conventions of the 'language' and provides the opportunity for a new user to intuitively build from it.

Someone can take your C example and change the text, add another print statement then a third leading to a natural discovery of control structures and whatnot.

Someone can take the gaudi example and change the parameters, add a second container then third leading to an natural discovery of configuration and automation functions gaudi is trying to promote itself for.

It's pretty straightforward with the notable difference of a C being a well-established language that wouldn't generate the same interest as something relating to Docker (about a year old) or gaudi (less than a year old).

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program
Fab Is Going To Shut Down By The End Of The Year
I don't see how "this is what we have now" is a refutation of anything. The status quo is not optimal.

My point exactly, and it doesn't have to be that way. Also, why does it have to be a refutation? I've met a few great minds in my time. They are the ones who create a small cloud or tree of meanings from what they hear or read, and try to make them all work out of curiosity.

The problem is that it already means something else.

"Means" in the sense that people feel a certain way about it, or means in the sense of the definitions of the words? That's exactly what I mean in terms of fluffy sentiment. Back to great minds. Great minds try to refute things by trying as hard as they can to make them work, even challenging their own assumptions to do so.

Also, aren't you a member of TX/RX?
For me (also EU), it was down for around 10 minutes.
People in the future are going to be so confused. "If the Americans were the first to systematically limit government power in a written constitution, why did they just start ignoring it all of a sudden?"
Google Launches Partner Select
> Can you recommend a password manager that works on all browsers/devices that you trust?

1Password works on iOS, Android, and Mac (as confirmed by me) and they claim Windows, too. Browser-wise, I can confirm Chrome and Safari. That works for me, as it covers all of my use cases. YMMV, and it most certainly will if you're running Linux.

Downside: good $DEITY is it pricey by the time you cover all of your mobile devices and desktops. The amount of hassle it saves me probably pays for it, but covering all platforms at my house is bumping up against $100 (not including a couple of paid upgrades along the way).
I would love it if it worked like on android. What i mean is that when i press a chat head i want the message ui to appear on top on the web page and not in a new window. Also i would like it if the chat heads did not dissapear after responding to a message so that i could keep all my active conversations in chat heads
The ACLU needs a "let me donate but don't send me a pound of mail each year" membership option.
Pure "cold calling" isn't the only way (but I've been there too) predictablerevenue.com/book changed the course of my first company by helping us fail faster. We built some internal tools to support the 'Cold Calling 2.0' process he lays out in the book and when we realized our product wasn't sellable, we pivoted our company around the tools we built.

6 months in, we're doing more revenue each month than we did all of last year.
The article simply makes the case that they aren't making more money, but it doesn't make the case that they're not better off.
> Facilitating P2P debt may help make debt cheaper by crowdsourcing the "overhead" of evaluating creditors. I believe there's a site that does this but can't recall the name.

I'm not sure if it's what you're thinking of, but www.wefinance.co is a new startup in P2P debt, hoping to do exactly that.
Are you by any chance channelling Doug Lennat?
In general, you are right to complain, audio in the web is always a problem; the only debate is about just how much and in how many ways it is broken.

In practice, you probably want to take a look at Howler.js - it's pretty comprehensive library that tries its best to overcome the various limitations and problems.
It looks and acts like a normal cell phone tower... so there is no good way to provide protection against it.
Seems cool, but a bit risky. A modest decline in value of a bitcoin would likely cost you much more than the wire fee, no?
It could match on c1, but I believe since most (all?) regex parsers parse left-to-right, it will match the a, look for another a-z character or a digit, find b, repeat, find c, then find 1 which completes the pattern.
But you do get haplotype worship.

I think there is a cultural disconnect on both sides here. As a yank I
think it is absolutely preposterous that Australian, British, Canadian,
Dominican, etc citizens and members of the military must swear or affirm
an oath of allegiance to some lady, "her heirs and successors according to
law" simply because of who her daddy was. But that is because I am not
intimately acquainted with all of the symbolism and tradition.

Similarly, I think that subjects of the commonwealth miss out on an understanding of the symbolism and tradition
behind the "support the president" quote.[^1] The support in this case is not about the individual but about the
office of PotUS. The support of the office is an acceptance and affirmation of the outcome of a free an fair
election and in no small part a complete and total rejection of the chains of haplotype worship. In the US oath of
allegiance citizens swear or affirm allegiance to the Constitution and instead of swearing or affirming allegiance,
individuals must renounce and abjure any allegiance to princes, sovereigns, etc.

[^1]: I say "I think I understand the sentiment" but I have never heard of
it phrased that way (and Google only gives three results yours being one of
them.
Doesn't work in Desktop Chrome on Windows Version 28.0.1500.71
How much do you actually save when you include selling them on an exchange and getting cash into your bank account?
Criminal underworld personalities are heroes. Some are known nationwide.

There would be news of such and such crime, and while most would be terrified and disgusted, a segment of population (younger delinquents for example) would be very impressed. They also have funny nicknames to add to their "brand". Things like "black bone" or "the green one" etc.
Swift's enums are like Rust's enums, so they're much more powerful than C's enums:

In C an enum can assume one of multiple predefined values of type `int`.

In Swift an enum can work like that too, but it can also assume values of types other than int. This is similar to the behavior of the unions in C, but more high level, with proper safety checks in place.

In Swift enums can also have methods, so there are two methods to return fields from the values contained in the enum —regardless of the actual type being held at that time.
Imagine if this worked for handgun manufacturers. "I'm sorry, but I can't say if I shot him or not; the use of my gun is covered by an NDA with the manufacturer."
Just truncate to the first 10 characters of course.