skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Loose coupling is awesome and dogfooding your public API is smart as well. However, it seems like there is a lack of strong technical leadership and a lot of big decisions are being made without thinking them through. For instance, "We were constrained by the same rules we enforced on third-party applications... It was not possible, for example, for a microservice to notify users about activity on private tracks". This type of constraint should be immediately obvious to the person/people making large architectural decisions. Throughout the article there are a few examples of "we tried this but shortly found out it wouldn't work". I may be wrong though and this whole post was actually the result of an hour meeting to discuss new architecture but phrased to sound like you actually tried all of those approaches.
Ruby Security Tools and Resources
HP bets it all on The Machine (memristors + silicon photonics)
Indeed. I used to catch tons of shit about not understanding cars from a mechanic friend until his laptop died and I helped him recover photos of his kids.

Now we're both content to be wizards of our own domains without talking down to each other about it.
OK- Look at people trying to make 3D games for the web. GPU performance is a concern, but if you can't even run the physics simulation or cull your object database fast enough to push triangles to the GPU, your performance will be hurt and the GPU will be idle. People want games based on WebGL to have comparable performance to native apps -- well, you're going to need to take all of the libraries that games use and convert them too. This is a good solution to allow such SIMD optimization that have been present in native libs for years to have a chance to surface in JS libraries.
I've been using Moniker since 2006 and the change has been pretty frustrating.

I also noticed that they changed the pricing for privacy from the $1 I've been paying for years to $4. All the reps that got me the pricing are long gone and no one from support has responded to my request to fix the pricing.

I'm nervous to transfer a few hundred domains to a new registrar but given what I'm seeing I don't know how much longer I can tolerate what Moniker is doing.
Yes; this happened to me. They didn't come asking questions so much as having a search warrant...
http://bit.ly/seizure1111
Looks like the post is too old, and I can't correct it anymore. On my defense, I was quite tired when I wrote it.

You don't have to go very far looking for examples. The fictional Nautilus submarine was named after the animal Julio Verne copied its depth control system (the same one all real submarines use till today). Also, the first submarines' shape copied whales, a design that was adapted (but not completely replaced) because it does not work as well witout also copying their propulsion system.

By the way, birds wings are better than planes ones in several important ways (but worse in a few others). We don't copy them because we don't have good enough materials, not because it's not a good idea.
I would be pissed too if I would be tightly regulated, but my concurrent wouldn't be because "they are on the internet". It strikes me as deeply unfair, Uber is basically a cab on demand - no difference in service to a regular cab.

Why shouldn't they be regulated ?
No, he means that the restriction is that the bot is making it "easier on itself" by claiming to not speak English well. It reduces the expectations on itself by that trick.
US here, and I'm laughing at the name too. We did have Tom Green's wonderful Bum Bum Song a few years back, after all.
wasn't that ATM at Fosdem last year?
With public transport there is this concept of service, the service exists to get people from A to B in a timely, affordable fashion. There are wider benefits to society and the economy for doing this.

With this Uber protest and the way this battle is working out there has been remarkably little discussion on how technology and tradition can be aligned to move people from A to B more efficiently. It should be possible to have people have a step change in service thanks to modern technology with cab drivers able to profit more than they used to by being able to take more passengers. We could also cut down on the amount of cabs rolling around looking for rides.

We actually need some strong leadership in London to cut a deal. A deal where getting a cab is easier and cheaper for normal people, where taxi drivers make more money than previously (and still get respect for doing the knowledge), where the air quality is better and where tax revenue for London increases too. This is a problem that can be solved. If government had any technical competency then they would have seen this off a long time ago with their own 'uber' app, one where the 5% (or whatever it is that Uber get) goes straight into government coffers as taxation. Such a public sector app - had it been written - could have been shared with cities all over the world that are having problems with Uber.
Same here with Firefox 30.0, can type but can't read what I'm typing.
Problem is as soon as you buy it you lose money. The reason being that if you want to sell it back you must go to a dealer he will low ball you and you will have a hard time getting the actual value of the gold.
It is not like $100 bill that you could just spend on whatever you want, you are stuck with something that in order to cash out you must take a cut by selling it to a dealer.
You can now embed Sketchfab 3D models in Unity forums
Notes from the Road
Until computers can think with the same levels of cognitive problem solving and emotional complexity that real people have, the turing test will not be passed. 2029 is an aggressive date.
It is unknown because nobody checked. Why nobody checked? Because it is too simple so nobody thought that it will work until now.
What regulations provide what safety precautions? I'm genuinely interested.

I have a feeling that technology completely solves most of these problems. For example, there's a monopoly on the word "taxi" to prevent impersonation and kidnapping / mugging. But with technology your phone can tell you exactly what car is picking you up, from the model and color all the way down to the licence plate.
That's actually exactly what this is. Currently coal is the cheapest electricity you can get. However, as the price of coal, oil, and natural gas goes up, and as the price of cleaner alternatives (through research, scale, etc.) goes down, we will eventually arrive at using much cleaner energy. The big problem with this is that those two prices aren't moving fast enough to avoid a global climate disaster we will be facing within several decades.
> The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now

Slow maybe, but unlikely? No, not really. IPv6 internet has grown fairly steadily (and afaik at a growing pace) since its inception and I don't see any reason why that trend would slow down or stop. There hasn't been any real opposition or alternatives for IPv6, mostly just indifference and ignorance. More and more new gear supporting IPv6 natively out of the box is being deployed on the field, reasons for not enabling it are dwindling. XP just got deprecated, most end-user stuff probably already supports IPv6. Old network engineers retire someday, and new generation is well aware of the issue at hand.
How making $200 in one hour at 17 years old changed my view on business
No garlic scapes in the database? Seems like it's a bit limited.
> And if you never had problems with FATXX then you most likely never used DOS or old Windows seriously

Ah, the joy of "ghost" folders that ended up containing themselves...
> Kurzweil seems to say that the bot lying is a restriction

I think he means that placing it in a limited domain of humanity, specifically one that would be expected to make lots of basic errors, is a restriction, since it makes things much easier on the bot.

What really gets me is that, on top of that, they arbitrarily declared that success was a 30% pass rate instead of 50%. The rest of it is bad enough, but how on earth did anyone think that was acceptable?
DDOS is always handled by the upstream by definition.
When did "design" become more important than "works." Namecheap did a big redesign as well recently & while it didn't "break" anything, it didn't really add any value besides a new coat of paint.
How about we make a wifi tax so that everyone pays for it and then have open networks ?

How about WiMax?

How about asking the ISPs to implement the free WiFi and flat subscription rates with no tiers?

How about asking the mobile companies that already cover urban areas to make HSDPA/UMTS/LTE free?

Plenty of more efficient ways to do this than this open network movement. And yet you're asking the individual who has like the smallest bandwidth fraction of all these players and the one one who pays the most per MB of bandwidth to make it free? Not. gonna. happen.
I think your assumptions are somewhat unfair. Despite his bold and often fanciful predictions, he's a really smart guy with a history of impressive technological contributions. He's gotten a bad reputation in recent years for his outspoken certainty in the impending singularity (which, as seen in Transcendent Man, is somewhat tragically driven by the loss of his father and the hope of somehow reanimating his father's persona through technology), but he hasn't "lost it" or anything. I fully expected him to be critical of this test.
So, not a flying tramp? Not an evaporating derrière?
UberX is about 50% cheaper than cabs in Boston. Uber Black is about 30% more expensive.

Source: I've been using Uber almost daily for a year.
The Rise of Growth Hackers.
Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics, not CS.

Don't get me wrong: cybernetics is for real (see Norbert Weiner). Just clarifying Warwick's field. He currently publishes stuff on brain-machine interfaces, mostly.
Which Uber service did you use? They have several you can select from though some cities only have the original Uber, UberBlack. There is UberPOP, UberX, UberBlack, UberSUV, UberVan, and UberLux.

UberX is the service that competes with cabs on price. Uber Black, SUV, VAN, and Lux are comparable to calling a limo service. Uber Pop is a low cost service offered outside of the US.
> ... they asked [us] to wait outside while they conducted a preliminary search ...

Is that legally enforceable? They have a search warrant, not a warrant for your arrest. How are they in a position to demand you leave the premises?

That's some scary stuff either way, thanks for sharing.
It's interesting to think what announcement like this have in aggregate on the price of bitcoin. Counter-intuitively the price of bitcoin should face downward pressure as merchant adoption of this sort increases. Expedia doesn't hold any of the bitcoin they receive. The bitcoins are instantly converted to dollars on a market exchange. This means that holders of bitcoin, especially those who are sitting on large capital gains, now have a new outlet to realize their gains.

On the other hand merchants who choose to accept bitcoin using Coinbase (or Bitpay) and who also choose to keep some fraction of their profit in bitcoin (thereby exposing their profits to currency volatility, which may even be a good thing for growth of their profits) will tend to increase the market price of bitcoin.

Overall it seems like most merchants accepting bitcoin are not holding any of the bitcoins they accept. It would be great to see more merchants choosing to keep some fraction, however small, in bitcoin itself.
Not much has changed because the people, companies, and institutions capable of making such improvements are now focusing on things with actual real world application.
> I love Evernote, but I no longer trust my data to cloud providers.

Give https://turtl.it a shot as well. Aims to solve this very problem: Evernote with data privacy. (Disclaimer, I built it. Disclaimer2: not nearly as advanced as Evernote).

That said, Magpie looks really cool.
I don't think it's better, but the signs are that the typical consumer does. If Uber wasn't perceived as better by consumers, it wouldn't be experiencing the tremendous growth it is and it wouldn't be a threat to the cab industry.
>> The 30-pin dock & then the lightning connector. Not exactly industry standard at both ends

This was before the iPhone. They switched to USB on Macs at least. At that time they were using other proprietary connectors like ADB and Firewire.
I'm not advocating banning them, please read what I'm actually saying.

I'm saying that utterly free markets mean that many people are left behind and suffer, because it takes time to adapt and re-train (and often people are too old to do this).

So, we should facilitate evolution in such a way that accommodates human beings.

Perhaps if we replaced the cars with driverless people and the farmers with automated farms, these people should not have to work, because the work is done for them?

Except in this world, even if every part of our lives was automated, we'd still have to work for pittance (or even compete with the machines), because the machines would be owned by private entities.

This is the nature of exploitation - a job is seen as a gift, and the more we automate, the less jobs there are to do, and it becomes a race to the bottom. When things get automated, we don't allow the people who previously did those jobs rest, because everything has to be "earned".

Whilst technology is amazing and has led to unparalleled productivity and efficiency, the owners are the ones who have benefited massively disproportionately to humanity as a whole - any positives to everyone else are just a side-effect.
Our startup is failing, but we have a powerful team
Posting from a throwaway:

Our startup is failing. Or at least it will if current acquisition talks fall through. We're working for a niche 3-year-old social network with a well-developed API and platform for web, iOS, and Android. Our userbase may have peaked somewhere around 60,000 unique users. W've built some great software and iterated at break-neck speed, but the business model may just not be good enough. We all know one thing works extremely well in our company: the dev team (including our great designer/co-founder/CTO). We are lean. One UX/UI designer, one API dev, one front-end web dev, one iOS dev, and one Android dev. We're all cross-disciplined and can help each other. We've all got a good eye for platform-specific design. We work extremely well together, and our first choice if the business fails is to somehow stay together as a team.

My question to HN: In the real world, what is the best way for a great team to stick together? We've talked of potentially starting our own LLC and doing client work until we can build the next great product, but I don't know if that's a realistic option. I feel like we would be a great fit for new businesses who need a full modern platform built out for web and mobile, but my fear is that client work will cause us to become fragmented, essentially drifting apart as we try to scratch together a living as individual freelancers.
Win Free Ticket to Black Hat USA 2014 Briefings
That guy sure has an awesome job!
TweetDeck’s been hacked: Here’s how to keep yourself safe
But if there was technically nothing they could do to access the data, they could not be forced to do it. If I encrypt data on my machine and upload it to s3, Amazon cannot be forced to do anything other than provide the encrypted data to the government. They can't be compelled to give my key because they do not have it. It is very hard to operate e-mail this way, because the server cannot send your e-mail other servers in the encrypted form, unless you limit correspondence to users that are using your encryption and key-exchange system.

Not all cloud services have this limitation. However I suspect that there will always be some metadata that the government will be able to request from the cloud provider, and this legal question will still be relevant.
When I first read this I thought, why would they start with hotels? may be because the big profit they make out of reservations?

Then I remembered what an accountant friend once said to me: "Hotels are big portals between the black and white worlds".

So you may have black money in bitcoins (and a Hotel which is your "legal business"), and want to "wash" it? now you can do it through Expedia (they having a bite in the process, hence their motivation).
They've got a long history of quirky short-term things like having a food truck come and give you a burrito. http://blog.uber.com/uBURRITO
I agree. The only proof you have that I am a conscience being is that you believe that to be so because I conduct myself as one. You can't really prove that I am or am not conscience. You can only observe that I act like a conscience being.
That's why the current incarnation of Capitalism (finance-based, quarterly-results oriented) is broken beyond repair. Kicking the can down the road sound like a hell of an option if you can be relatively sure there will be a different guy doing all the eventual cleanup.
No, but mergesort can easily fall back to dumping its sorted contents to disk, for later merging; this disk-based merge sort was invented by van Neumann in the 1940s, and is how the unix utility sort works (dozen-way merge of sorted shards of a file).
ELIZA comes from the top of my head, and did impress me at that time ( '94 ? ). Lately I found out it had a psychologist side in it, as per original design and the answering with a question.

Better? Maybe, maybe not. But after 20 years, to show no real progress at all? Baffling.
I was expecting airbnb but for bums (vagrants).
Here's an example of where the philosophy helps. You would probably agree that physics is a clear science and that its methods—philosophically reasoned about—produce (or discover) genuine truth. But would you agree that a "softer" science—say, psychology—still has enough methodological rigor to produce genuine truth? How about sociology? Economics? The more observationally ambiguous—the more abstract, profoundly complex, or "fuzzy" a science's subject is—the less confident we are that it's really a science, that it really produces truth. So how do you reason about what sciences or individual experiments are productive and which are flawed, uncertain or, frankly, bogus? Philosophy!
Sorry - What's the point you're making about your girlfriend?
The key quote:

"In the words of HP Labs, The Machine will be a complete replacement for current computer system architectures. There will be a new operating system, a new type of memory (memristors), and super-fast buses/peripheral interconnects (photonics). Speaking to Bloomberg, HP says it will commercialize The Machine within a few years, “or fall on its face trying.”

Helion cloud play[1], and now The Machine? This article almost made me believe this ExtremeTech lifted an Onion piece by mistake.

[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/h-p-makes-1-billion...
You can get 40% taxes on high income? thats nuts.

The cost of living in SF is crazy, 40k in Argentina , in terms of nominal value, after taxes are probably around 32k/y, 2600 net dollars per month.
Rent of a 1 bedroom place in a decent neightborgood=> 400 U$S a month. Grocieries, living costs, going out,etc,say..250 U$S?
Lets make you a party animal and big spender at 400 U$S a month for that.

So after takes and expenses, 40k a year in argentina yields you 1800U$S a month.

In san francisco, a 1br for yourself is 2k a month at least. Work often provides food, but if it doesnt, at 10 dollars a meal avg you get 10 x 30 x 2 = 600U$S in food alone. Restaurants, shows, going out, drinks, add 200 U$S a month, if you go out weekly.

That ends up being about 2800 U$S per month only on rent+food.
To be able to nominally save 1800U$S a month, you have to make 4600U$S pre-tax, which at 28% taxes, ends up being about 70k annual income.

The point of this exercise is to measure the impact of cost of living on salary: it definitely makes a dent(you need 30k a year more in San Francisco for the cost of living difference). However, its very easy to make 100k+ in the bay area working for a startup (and more if you work for facebook or google), which means you will always make way more money working in a startup in the us,than any income bracket in uruguay.

(assumption: cost of living in Uruguay ~= Argentina)
SQL Injection Attacks Haunt Retailers
Kurzweil's and Mitch Kapor's rules on how to judge a Turing Test are well thought out ( * 1), but I'm finding that it's actually biased against the computer (and therefore unfair to Kurzweil). There's a significant chance that a computer with a breathtaking performance will lose by probability alone.

Look at this rule: The Computer will be deemed to have passed the “Turing Test Human Determination Test” if the Computer has fooled two or more of the three Human Judges into thinking that it is a human.

Suppose the Computer is absolutely perfect its responses (i.e., it should pass the Turing Test). The judges know that they're speaking to 3 humans and 1 computer, so if the judges are chatting with 4 equally-good subjects, they'll decide that one of the four is a computer on a whim. There's a chance that Kurzweil will lose just by arbitrariness.

It's like being asked to sample 4 glasses of wine to pick the worst. Unbeknownst to you, all 4 glasses have the same wine. Even though they're equally good, you'll reject one glass by some arbitrary measure. Maybe you felt an itch on your neck while drinking from the second glass, so that one is the bad wine.

( * 1) http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-the-rul...
I think it is missing the point - the protests are not against digital innovation, as much as Uber would like to point so. There are countless taxi applications out there that will allow you to get a taxi at the press of a button - nobody is having a beef with that.

Uber and the other apps provide the same service - you get a car to transport you from A to B and you pay for the service proportional with the distance and time you sit in that car.

The essential difference between Uber and the other apps is that Uber uses unlicensed drivers, while the other apps use licensed drivers. This creates a big handicap for the regulated taxis. Uber skirts around the law to avoid regulation, and the difference in cost of operation enables them to "win".

The playing field is simply not fair and not equal to all players. Either we start regulating Uber drivers as equal to other taxi service providers, requiring expensive licences, or we eliminate regulation for all drivers.

Let's not make a technological poster child out of Uber's skirting of laws.
They need to know who is the real owner of each IP for tracing purposes.
Maybe a better question is why should the black cabs be regulated so much?
Using NGINX As An Intelligent Proxy and Web Server
I think we agree. And I think Turing's point in choosing a conversation as the test was to pick something that would indicate the vast range of human experience. If a computer could pass a strong version of the test as you describe, then I would agree that we would have say, as you do, "if it looks like a duck, .... then it is a duck."

But I don't agree that it renders the concept of conciousness meaningless (or at least any more meangingless, depending on what you think about the concept now). On the contrary, I think we might have to say, "this computer is probably concious", and afford it all of the rights that we do for humans.

BTW I don't think either Turing or Chomsky would say that
>Things like free will, love, or consciousness are apparently outside of the natural world

I obviously don't speak for either of them, but I'm pretty sure they both subscribe to the theory of causal determinism and computational theory of mind.