skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "At some point, the 'bad actor' has to access 'legitimate' banking institutions to exchange the Bitcoins to fiat and that is the weakest link."

And on the contrary they can do the exchange in, say, Nigeria. So Bitcoin's weakest link is also the law enforcement weakest link, because no one has authority over the entire world, and there are plenty of spots where you can do the exchange without trace.
Thanks for the correction. It's too late for me to edit my comment, or I'd change it.

Regardless, my point isn't that airbags are a problem. They clearly save lives on balance.

The point is that car manufacturers are happy to add features to cars that buyers want even when those features might kill people. On the other end, manufacturers have removed critical safety features to save a dollar or less on production costs, and those decisions also have killed people. [1]

In this case, though, it's more like airbags, where, on balance, more lives are saved than lost as a result of the feature. At least in theory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_tank_defect
Pocket is a website that allows you to bookmark stuff to read later. You don't need an account. The person that posted that link probably made the mistake thinking other people can see his saved stuff.
Earn $1,000 by fixing a Firefox bug
Foul play on the highway
The only "playing nice" that needs to happen is that Apple needs to keep the HealthKit API around. If an EHR company has an iOS app, they use the HealthKit APIs and they're off to the races.
Shoot me an email at coreyATcoreyballou.com as we're interested in a feature of your API that doesn't appear to be publicly available but I'm sure you have in place.
Show HN: Accounts, a simple address book for iOS
I think you can safely assume "a lady" is merely descriptive, and not accusatory, unless you're searching for prose to be offended by.

If it was a man, and the sentence included "a man" I could also imagine a snide comment from some male commentator accusing her of misandry.

Can't win!
Some people made real money on the boom. But by the time your barber is talking about flipping, dead money is coming to the table. The bubble burst in October 2005, that's when sales in Florida started flagging. Easter Sunday of 2006, the front page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution had a story about problems with the condo market along the redneck riviera. That's more than a year before anyone had heard of sub-prime.

The people I know who made money on the rising tide of condo prices made it by building the things because they saw their pro forma get better and better during entitlement and construction. Then, for the most part, they lost every bit of it and more on the follow on projects they started in 2005 through 2007 because those came online during the down cycle but had costs and returns premised on the upcycle. They ran out of money and faced the same sort of dilution a startup would.
What exactly is this? A chip you put in your wrist? A contact lens?
What, like C++ comes from the US?
Who is Deis targeted towards? I'm a regular developer with little real world Ops experience. Will Deis be a good fit for me?

From the docs it looks like Deis reuqires an advanced Ops person to manage a cluster of Deis machines.
The way people like to complain about the bloat and arbitrariness of C++, but then still quietly wind up using it, reminds me a lot of the common complaints about the arbitrary pronunciation and other quirks of the English language. There is, of course, the trivial commonality that "everyone understands it and a lot of useful things have already been written in it", but at least part of the reason why languages like Esperanto or even Lojban don't catch on is that while many like to extol the virtues of a (natural or machine) language being simple and unambiguous on paper, in practice, more often than not people arrive at a point where they perceive the very un-Pythonic benefit of being able to express the same thing in more than one way (and, conversely, being able to convey more than what the words/code say at face value).

The natural language example of course being metaphor and allusion, I am thinking of practices such as indenting glVertex calls inside a glBegin/glEnd block, or overloading () on an object to convey the idea that "you should think of this as something like a function" when it is really not on a technical level.
Building a better DynamoDB throughput scaling tool
In modern c++ you can get away without it by using a combination of RAII and the various shared pointer and container features.

It's an odd mental leap for this old C hack, but it works quite well when you get into it. Bonus - no 'free' or 'delete' necessary.
Problem arises when we find "y" deep in a function, searches for its definition, and encounters "auto y = std::move(x);". Now we have to know the type of x, and if x is defined similarly, up the chain. Not fun.

foo(A * x) doesn't pose similar problem. On the other hand, if I write

auto bar = foo(A*x);

Then we can have the same problem (esp. if foo is a templated function).
In part this is because the minimal cost of development is lower bounded, and not primarily by government controls but by land and construction costs established by the free market.

Interesting comment overall, but this does not appear to be true: see The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/) and The Triumph of the City (http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...) for more detail on how height limits and parking minimums in particular prevent the housing market from functioning, especially in desirable urban areas with many jobs.
If you are a company who is using Heroku, you likely do not have the resources (knowledge or money) to set up a system which degrades gracefully when your entire hosting platform goes down. That's a hard, and expensive, contingency to plan for.

And even if they did build their service in a way which could tolerate a complete hosting platform failure - degrading a core service during your customer's business hours is enough to make heads roll. It's just stupid.
The fact they are rolling out what are effectively heavily armoured APCs to local police really worries me.

What possible use could local police have for such heavily armoured vehicles that wouldn't better be handled by SWAT or some other more specialised force?

I don't relish the idea of relatively untrained police officers operating said vehicles in riots etc..
Yeah, but, the usefulness is a function of the expressiveness.

The reason I picked C++ templates in particular was because they allow you to make very effective use of information at compile time. Other languages, at least in my experience, don't give me ways to really tell the compiler (or interpreter) my intentions as effectively as C++ allows me to when I'm using template metaprogramming. So, to that effect, C++ is superior on top of just C compatibility.

... Not that any of this takes away from your original argument.
I'm currently living in Australia, and the rent prices are fascinating. You see, to a certain extent, the housing bubble never "popped" (sudden massive drop) here. Instead of being bundled into investments or handled by real estate firms, a large portion of the market is privately owned (this was driven by "negative gearing" that gave tax breaks etc. for ownership). Sure, the market is depressed compared to pre-GFC, but property is still astronomically overpriced. The fascinating part: the rent is much more reasonable. It's like some odd market form of cognitive dissonance. The boomers refuse to believe that a crappy apartment isn't worth 5 million dollars in the sense that they won't sell any lower and list at that price, but at the same time they'll signal that the "real" value is the much more reasonable half million by charging in rent what would be the equivalent payment for a half million on a twenty year mortgage.

This leads to all kinds of odd pathological situations. As far as I can tell, purely paying agents in commission is much less common here. Combined with the unmovable listing prices this has led to what is basically welfare for real estate agents and the most lackadaisical salesmen I have ever witnessed, even adjusting for the generally easy-going culture. I'm used to having to ignore calls from agents once it's known that I'm looking. Here, it's the opposite you have to keep calling them. I only have my current place because my wife explicitly asked about it, to which the agent responded something along the lines of, "Oh yeah. That's been open for months." Since many of the property owners aren't professional (pooling the risk/cost of owning over many units) and cash-strapped, getting maintenance done is a nightmare. It's either all done by themselves (with the ensuing comedy that entails) or farmed out to agencies that still bill the owner mostly piecemeal (so that every issue is a situation akin to getting your insurance to pay your doctor).

I would like to think that when the boomers prove, despite their thinking to the contrary, quite mortal and start dying collectively in large numbers that this will correct the market. My worry is that instead what boomers die last will use the last of their block voting power to convince the government to ease restrictions on foreign investment and Australia will become much like Hawaii.
That one probably got hit by the flamewar detector, which applies when hitting a certain threshold of points, then num_comments >> num_points.
I think he means it should read something like:

auto x = std::make_unique<Foo>();

Unless you're implementing an allocation policy, you shouldn't be calling new and delete directly.
My email should be in my profile. If you can't view it let me know. We'd need to get an outline.
Giant list of Star Trek – The Next Generation Trivia (data set)
> Would a guitar amp built with these sound like a tube amp?

It would be nice, right? Most folks worry about getting vacuum electronics to simply work, so I couldn't dig up anything on the nonlinearities of a vacuum transistor amplifier. (For those who don't follow such things: The nonlinearities of guitar amps are intimately related to how it sounds. Many musicians still use tube amps because the world has become accustomed to that sound. It is the gold standard of distorted amplifiers to some of us.)

That said I'm not optimistic. A quick check of a Fender Twin Reverb schematic (http://support.fender.com/schematics/guitar_amplifiers/65_Tw...) shows that that the final amp has pentodes, different than the triode that the OP's article is talking about, and those pentodes have separated heaters for the cathode. So the temperature of the electrons coming off the cathode are going to be much hotter. (Another name for the monolithic vacuum devices used to be "cold cathode", because it acted like a thermionic emitter but without a heater.)

There's a lot that's different. Of course, the only way to know for sure is to plug it in and crank it up to 11.
You're absolutely correct, and had I read the "Talk to us" section, I wouldn't have written that comment. Thank you for pointing it out.
For example this submission [1] is certainly provocative, but it's neither spam, trolling nor dumb and it did give rise to an interesting discussion.

I'm pretty certain that people are targeting HN for forum-manipulation at this point.

Is that really what flags are supposed to be used for?

No. The prevalence of that many flags is certainly a sign of an attempt at willful manipulation of HN.
> Not to defend Wolfram, but to understand this you'll have to understand that "The Wolfram Language" is not like the traditional "programming languages".

Of course not, its a New Kind of Programming Language.
This comparison of double entry accounting and calculus may be interesting:

http://www.austintek.com/gnucash/ncsa-gnucash-talk-3.html#ss...
I have a three-hour drive I make twice a week. I can second the motion of "glazed-over" eyes.

But let me tell you: When the "collision avoidance alarm" fired mistakenly once, I was VERY AWAKE for the next half hour.

Assuming the sensors are good, and that they include failsafes that will let you know right away when they AREN'T working, it absolutely would be a net positive to have something else watch during the "boring" times and then let out a loud "Red Alert!" buzz as soon as something unexpected came along.

So no, I don't think the driver would be "impaired even more," at least not if the sensors worked well enough to throw an alarm if something unexpected happened. A set of sensors on top of a car should have a better view of the surroundings than a human, and wouldn't suffer from that kind of fatigue at all.

More, the human is not going to be hypnotized by the road if they aren't actively driving. As a passenger my eyes frequently check out the scenery; as a driver you're forced to watch the road nearly 100% of the time.

P.S. in my drive, I tend to pull over at the halfway point, so after about 90 minutes. And last night that did feel like about 10-15 minutes too long.
Marginal cost of zero doesn't mean total cost of zero. If you can't recover fixed costs, there is a problem...
I'm in your boat, but you have to realize that heroku is not targeted for anyone who is comfortable doing top to bottom provisioning of their environment. I also think their value proposition is a "grow with us" type situation: get you in the door for cheap and then as you grow you just keep bumping resources up.
Verizon makes Chromebooks lose promised 2 yr free data after just one year
Startup Breweries: Is Sam Adams Too Big to Be Craft Beer?
Angela Ahrendts on Starting Anew at Apple
Sometimes I wonder how non-technical founders can sleep at night with all the stress. It elevates cofounder risk to a single point of failure for the entire company.

Seeing through "developer bullshitting" is a dark art that is hard to master without spending a bit of time as a developer.
The 6 Biggest Surprises About Amazon's Fire Phone
Currently - nothing that needs scaling for my personal projects. However, as a consultant, it's very possible that a large client may need to scale (dealing with this right now on Azure), so I like to be prepared with options. That said, I know better than to put Dokku in production for a client - at least not until it significantly matures :)
Brazil World Cup 2014 Players Database
I love that they turned used xrays into bootleg vinyl recordings. Disrupt! :P
There's gotta be better forums design that emphasizes the content more. There's so much forum software where the chrome overwhelms the content.
@pswenson, I used Chef to automate setting up the server with Jenkins. This included automated security updates, awscli tools, nodejs, and even hubot so that we can trigger builds from HipChat (we still need to write a custom hubot listener to handle that, though).

I also took advantage of AWS IAM roles so that the server is pre-authenticated for certain S3 buckets.

PM me at josh dot padnick at gmail /period/ com with some background on what you're trying to do and I'll see what I can share. For many reasons, I can't make our Chef code repo public, but maybe I can share some code samples.

Edit: Regarding Chef, for more info you might check out http://www.slideshare.net/JoshPadnick/introduction-to-chef-a....

As far as online examples, yeah, the learning curve does kind of suck. Also, if you're starting from scratch, SaltStack may very well be a superior technology (don't know enough about it). I think the key with Chef is to learn how to read the docs, using the application-cookbook pattern (where you never touch the cookbooks you download online and instead customize them by "wrapping" them with your own custom-defined cookbooks.

It's also helpful to use very thinly designed roles, and define special cookbooks as your actual roles. This way you can version-control them.

I basically learned by reading the same material in multiple places, especially in books on Safari Books Online, and IRC was also a huge help b/c the community was VERY helpful.

I think Chef is a classic case of where the technology is somewhat inelegant and perhaps bloated, but a mature community is there and it's battle-tested so once you suffer the pain of ramp-up you get a huge benefit.

HTH
I still live in an apartment of the type referred to in the story. These are indeed quite sound-proof and I found the remark surprising in the article. I would say the main sound leakage in the default design are the electric socket holes in the wall, although not much. Still, these holes were filled with foam when I moved in and now everything is rather sound-proof.
Pay To Play: Notch On Minecraft And Monetisation
I was in the same YC batch as Nikki. The thing I remember most about her was her enthusiasm. I also remember that her presentation on Demo Day got the loudest applause and most interest. Sad to hear 99dresses didn't make it, but I'm sure Nikki will have a bright future. Few young women her age will have gained the experience and insight that comes from founding a company and seeing it fail. As Michael Jordan said "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Game programming. AAA level games require high level performance which can typically not support interpreted languages. They also are complex enough that trying to program them in C would create more problems than they would solve.

Granted, many indy games can work by using an embedded interpreter for much of the game logic, but it doesn't take much to run out of computing power at that level and still maintain reasonable (and consistent) frame rates.
What is your aversion to javascript? As a client-side scripting language, it enables us to deliver, much, much richer UX to the end user. It should not be put aside as just for 'progressive enhancement'. That's ridiculous. This comment wins my nomination for most backward of the year on HN.
Indeed. As a former non-technical founder (now semi-technical), the worst part of the fear of failure is that your "job" is keeping companies alive. If your company dies, not only is your company a failure, but your only "skill set" is called into question. Knowing that fact and simultaneously being unable to contribute directly to the product, wondering how hard you can push your technical co-founder/team (or how far is right?) is enough to drive one insane.

It was easier (and more beneficial) for me to learn how to program. I'm not the most technical one on the team, but at least I can pitch in and work instead of wonder.
I profit when I break my own leg and use my health insurance to go to the hospital. At least, the money I pay is far less than the value I get out of it.

That doesn't mean I intentionally try to break my leg, or that it's unreasonable for me to insure myself against my leg breaking.
That makes sense. Everyone's a winner then.
Peer-to-peer sports betting inside the Bitcoin blockchain
I do not know if this will "worry people", but I am already worried and planning accordingly. I send my kids to private school (strong academic quality, not overly posh) in order to give them a good foundation to start from, but the assumption is that there wont be a "college fund" and they might end up going to the State University if (a) they get a full scholarship (not the credit sham that passes for it nowadays) or, (b) they get their act together as young business man and pay full tuition on their own. My wife knows how I feel about this and is fully on board, while my parents and in-laws think that I am a cheap bastard.

Being children, I have not yet discussed this with them. However, I plan to have this topic fully explored with each of them well in advance of their freshman year on high school.
In many other countries, you have the benefit of well-defined rules, and well-defined escalation paths. Both are notably absent in the U.S.
Thank you for posting this. It wasn't immediately clear for me what Sage was though, so I'm pasting the project's description from their home page [1] here in case others were confused as well:

Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more.

Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.

Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.

[1] http://www.sagemath.org/index.html
The underlying message I'm getting is that HN applicants tend to find the "actual" problem they can tackle to make their fortunes while initially trying to solve a different problem.
Heroku is the dreamweaver of devops... but you know developers often don't have the time to spend 2 months+ learning how to do it right (hence your job title :-D). And for my small app I'll wager that Heroku has infinitely better uptime than I would manage!
I would attach a motion switch to check whether any motion was detected after the last close. If so, someone is in.
I'd love to see every market segment have its share of competition, but at this point, cloudflare comes pretty close to "doing magic" in terms of dealing with the increasing volume of DDOS, and I frankly don't know anyone else who offers the services or results they do. (my only connection to them is that they've pulled a few sites I follow out of the fire over the last few months, and getting to see the before/after more firsthand convinced me a bit more of their importance.)

Basically, I'd rather there is _some_ company that can shut down these exiting known bad actors than avoid it on the off chance that it becomes a bad actor down the road. Better to use the time that buys us to look for better ways to deal with DDOS, both policy and tech based, as other comments suggest.
It'd be awesome if there was an automation service for this. I'm sure tons of people would gladly pay to say "fuck waking up, it's already being handled."
Right so don't mock the som, mock the people buying into it, right?
Easy. Just use deis [1]. Or CoreOS [2], if you're more hardcore. In any case, with the advent of Docker and 12-factor -- not to mention openstack [3] -- Heroku is a commodity or fast approaching it, and will soon face pricing pressure.

[1] http://deis.io
[2] http://coreos.com
[3] http://openstack.org
And... you think your call is going to make an outage get resolved quicker, or what do you want to call them for?

The callcenter agent will type your inquiry into the exact same ticket system that your email would have ended up in.
Cross-bootstrapping Rust
I don't think these are intended for power-amplification purposes.
How is it futuristic? What innovations does it include? From the frontpage, I can only see a meh-looking address book with features that have been in most for a while.
I think Watsi is a great example of startup actually making an impact.
It seems like eye tracking and "hands on the steering wheel" sensors would solve this.
About the right time to mention the associated Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode.

http://youtu.be/MHx6BX3HZJc

Yeah, water tastes different from different sources. I can tell that by drinking water from my well, then drinking from the city water source. However I am also not willing to pay for that difference.