skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've traveled to Vancouver, BC probably averaging at least once a year for the last 16 years -- by car and plane. I've always found Canadian customs to be exceedingly polite and friendly -- to the point of joking around even late in the evening/early morning (on a couple of my road trips). That said, coming back into the US, of the roughly 20 trips, I think the US border agents have been friendly once, polite maybe twice, borderline rude/surly the remainder.
The sensational headline seems to have worked. I'm not sure if I've heard of this specific project, but to me it didn't sound all that novel. It reminds me of the semantic web.
I actually work for one of the institutions cited in the article; yes, we have recently received the largest HIPAA related fine to date. It seems to me, as indicated in the article, that the governments agenda is to enforce compliance/increase security by way of increasing penalties. If you look at penalties levied to date there is little correlation to the amount of people effected, but rather the ability for the institution to pay. I actually think this is a reasonable solution for the government to implement. Too often we have seen various industries scoff at low fine amounts. A sliding scale is more likely to get executives attention.

In truth, the institution is taking this very, very seriously. There have been and will be many policy changes coming down from management. Outside consultants/auditors have been brought in (KPMG). Mandatory reporting and audit for three years by HHS. No solo (re. rogue) IT/developer personnel will be allowed to deploy changes to production without oversight, ie. change management oversight by a central board of peers. Complete endpoint encryption campaign. Employee education. Re-evaluation of business associate agreements. And on and on.

All this will, of course, drive costs up but hopefully necessarily so - if implemented properly. The idea is that on the other side of this the institution will be a lot tighter ship with less leaks and possibilities for information leaks throughout. It will also act as an opportunity to educate executives as to the importance of security. The down side is that process can be implemented with a heavy hand grinding all progress to a screeching halt. If they can implement process while maintaining progress it should work itself out.

My personal hope is that the institution invests not only in process but people. As others have pointed out, there has been a complete underinvestment in technical resources, re. people, to run the enterprise in healthcare and that has to change.
Indeed. Well, perhaps it is a bit of a lost art in the sense that an EE curriculum nowadays has to sacrifice so much deemed fundamental perhaps a few decades ago in order to squeeze in all the digital stuff... I for one am glad I still had subjects on transmission lines, basics of FEM modeling of electric fields, impedance matching, low power analogue electronics and a whole pile of signal analysis/processing stuff even though I wasn't in the RF stream.
I'm just thinking, let's say McDonald's was putting something in our food to alter our emotional state and measuring the outcomes.

Would food industry people be coming out in support of them the way it seems half the people here are fine with what Facebook is doing...? "Hey, it says Happy Meal on the box, and they're delivering!"
ACM and the Professional Programmer
Yup, that's the big issue in my opinion. Their TOS never had research as condition that you accept. When Reddit decided to use their data-set for research and make it available, they had a public blog post explicitly calling it out and had an option to disable your data for research. Naturally I opted out. I was informed of the change and I acted on it. Those users on Facebook never agreed to the research component of the ToS (because it didn't exist yet), did not know they were involved, and were included in a PNAS study that had Cornell researchers involved.
I'm skeptical that a small in-home generator of any type could compete with the efficiency of a commercial power plant, even if that plant burns natural gas.

A small local generator will certainly be behind what a big commercial generator will do, but if the waste heat is also being harnessed ("Combined Heat and Power," or CHP), combined efficiencies of 60%-80% are possible. Commercial electrical generation is typically around 40% efficient, so CHP really can offer very big benefits.

Of course, there's nothing fundamentally efficient about a single family living in a huge mansion with a 10KW energy demand and a big heated swimming pool.

I would have guessed these things would be most attractive to hotels, universities, airports, truck stops, apartments and condos, and other institutional-scale places that have a significant round-the-clock demand for electricity and hot water.

I wonder what it says about the device and the market that they're planning to sell to well-heeled homeowners first.
If they adopt an attitude like that, they'll run out of countries to remove themselves from in not long.
Why do we need cars when we have horse carriages?
I agree. If said person does disseminate private information, and it's illegal, that's on the receiver.

In any case, I don't trust Goldman Sachs. They lie [1] with no hint of limit or shame. Did they leak client information, or incriminating evidence?

Sure, it's conjecture, but the last thing I'd do is violate someone's privacy or hand over personal information on Goldman's word.

[1] http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldma...
"If a lowly undergrad is expected to get consent before administering any sort of dinky survey, why is Facebook exempt?"

The researchers had IRB approval. And this whole 'scandal' is really just a media experiment to manipulate the emotions of dumb people. If these media reports were phrased like 'Facebook conducts research into affect correlations of user-generated content', which is probably more or less what the original paper actually said, I doubt anyone would care.
For those of us who can only count to one, what does this thing actually do? Or, perhaps the better question, what can one do with this kit?
Seems like Uber is such a company - I can see how "this could potentially create 1 million jobs" would be a conduit for "this could potentially be a win on a scale yet unknown"
To me the point here should be that Goldman can't control their data and a simple typo can lead to a "massive" breach of "highly confidential" information.
Everything you've said is exactly what I do, and it works brilliantly for me, despite being self-taught :)
I'm more interested in knowing what repercussions are for the recipient of the email if they were then to forward it on or make it public in some way.

Just since someone emails you something, does not mean they have granted you ownership over that information or permission to share it publicly. But that said, show me a corporate mail server which doesn't add 40 lines of disclaimer at the end of the email anyway.
That's probably where flight research would currently be if a few of those approaches hadn't achieved stunning success. Those successes would have silenced any groups that were holding out for artificial birds.
> used shared links to files (like via Dropbox or equivalent)

Wait, wouldn't that be sharing their data with Dropbox? If data is so sensitive, I don't see why is Dropbox necessarily more trustworthy than a random stranger with a gmail account.

I if got a random email from GS with some brokerage account mumbo jumbo I would assume it is span and delete it. So would my mom and most friend and most people out there probably.

Presumably if this "stranger" is random, one can make an argument that data would be safer with them then with a big cloud data aggregator (as that would be a single targeted point of attack).

Ideally they should probably set up their own file sharing service with the ability to explicitly share some files externally (taking all the necessary security measures).
The Trough of Despond
The same sense dinosaurs are extinct while their progeny still walk/fly on earth.
Yes, I know that, but in familiar cases (like an internal combustion engine) the heat sink is mainly just venting exhaust to the atmosphere. The heatsink exists as a part of the environment, almost an accident of the design. It's a sort of implicit heatsink as opposed to an explicit one.
> Hold out until you have customer feedback and have refined it sufficiently. Then, the leads you get will be infinitely more valuable.

I think what you're getting at is suggesting that people do a soft launch or a private launch of their minimally viable product. (I agree with this).

You can't get "customer feedback" unless you have "customer(s)".
Resources and Tools to Implement Rich Snippets Effectively
Finally A Real Competitor To Raspberry Pi
I am surprised that the information got out. In my company any email attachments to addresses outside the company domain were automatically zipped and passworded at the mail-server.

We would then receive an email with the password which we have to then inform to the original recipient (usually by forwarding the email... MITM? What does that mean).

And this is for a company that is nowhere near as regulated. How did GS let this happen?
The authors do have a comment on the Github project that code needs to be allowed to run for a while so the JIT can kick in, although I didn't see any statement of how they did that. The paper also mentions a decision to turn a loop body into a function to allow a JIT to optimize things.

But, generally, I'm not interested in whether "for" loops run faster in language X or language Y. I am interested in whether some languages encourage code styles that happen to be easily optimized (I'm also interested in whether some languages encourage code styles that are easily maintained, easily extensible, or easily run into a ditch).

This paper is meaningful to somebody, but it's clearly written by people who spend most of their thinking about things other than programming. That's not an insult; it's a simple fact that a lot of programs are written by people who are experts in other fields. I happen to work with a former physicist who has experience writing programs to run on one of the nation's largest supercomputers. The depressing thing (to me) is that while he knows how to write numerical programs that run close to a computer's theoretical maximum speed, that information is only well-known among a small group of people (namely people who have to show that if they're allowed to use a supercomputer, they won't make it run wasteful code). I wish it were shared more broadly.
No tax love for open-source software
The psychological research community doesn't care about their work actually working or proving something valuable nearly as much as their care about maintaining their status.

I was nodding my head and prepared to take you seriously until this sentence. Turns out you're just another HN reader angry at the academic community because you once had a lazy professor or something.
Preparing a presentation? Here are some tips
You can get some of the best fonts from Google Web Fonts here http://brick.im/ with ligatures etc.
Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit
I think AoE is one of the best textbooks ever. Some of the sections in my edition (from 1983) are dated, but the basics are very well presented.
The problem with these questions is the time scale in which they expect the answers. When dealing with a difficult problem, most people don't immediately come up with the right answer and adding in the pressures of an interview only makes it worse. As a development manager, I always ensure that my direct reports know all about the issues they're going to be working on at least one week in advance. I've found that the solutions they come up with are markedly better when they've had a full week of thinking time prior to writing any code.

The alternative interview technique that I like to use when hiring engineers is to send them the questions I'm going to ask a few days before the interview. I ask difficult questions, but there's no surprise. I don't really care if they talk about them with other engineers beforehand...there will always be follow-up questions that I ask to get them to defend their solution that will uncover those that haven't understood the problem fully.
I don't think there's any particular outrage. Unless it's along the lines of not having the systems in place so that this doesn't occur. Whether this is outrageous (others in the thread have pointed out solutions) it's definitely a reason to be news worthy.
> Enough of this closed source, proprietary, snail's pace AI development.

Eh?

http://www.cyc.com/platform/opencyc

Also: "Cycorp also offers a complete version of Cyc, including many more assertions and additional NL capabilities, under a ResearchCyc license at no cost for research purposes."
This is gorgeous and seems to work very well. Thank you!
So there was a press conference about this. It was streamed somewhere.

If anyone has a torrent of the video I'd love it's url! Thank you very much
Aaah super game boy. I think Nintendo has a chance of doing something similar with the DS and Wii U... that would be awesome for the Wii today.
It's also harder to tax Bitcoin transactions than M-Pesa transactions, which could provide financial incentive to use it.
Any major Indian city has this kind of informal unregulated public transit system, which is a pretty big business. Nothing fancy and cozy like those Vans though. But you will see 7 seater auto rickshaws, Tempo travelers, Vans, and discarded old second had buses given some make up and reused.

The price is generally lower than the government public transport system buses.

I was/am generally a frequent user of these means of transport. Largely because of the price and frequency of availability and they just work. They will even stop by places the metropolitan buses wouldn't give a stop. The city outskirts have this almost as their default means of transport. I've even been autos with goats and calves.

One more great thing about such buses is they generally stop at places where there are a lot of hawkers. So you can also get to buy cheap shirts, socks, slippers, FM radios, miscellaneous toys and other cool stuff. Which are also like some kind of a under ground market, they operate evading and running from the police- Generally when they get caught a bribe of 100-200 rupees comes handy.
I've often wondered if some lost arts represent niche opportunities. My username is apt. I'm keenly interested in analog, particularly precision and low noise circuits. I have a side business that makes a niche market product based on an analog circuit.

At my day job, I'm one of the few people left who is capable (or maybe just willing) to compute a formal noise budget for an analog circuit. At least in the instrumentation business, there will always be a need to get the analog signal from the sensor to the analog-to-digital converter with dignity. And understanding analog issues is sometimes vital to resolving those issues using digital processing.
This Startup Can Plot Your Dance Party's Data On A Chart
Cybercriminals May Have Stolen Billions in Brazilian 'Boletos'
"During the 2013 fiscal year, the Taxi and Limousine Commission impounded more than six hundred illegal vans, two hundred and forty of them in Brooklyn."

Imagine the uproar on HN if this were to happen to, say, Uber drivers...
You can revoke access to a shared dropbox file. You can also disable the shared links.
> I have yet to try a Kinesis Advantage because I don't know anybody that owns one. [...] I would empty my wallet backing [...]

You would empty your wallet backing a Kickstarter project but you won't spend a couple hundred dollars on a Kinesis Advantage? I don't understand.

I have two Kinesis Advantages and I plan to buy another when the new version is released.
1) That is where a significant portion of their revenue comes from.

2) News feed has been around for a long time in a form beyond what's newest. This has been well publicized.

3) Every company with durative engagement tests on users. If they don't, they don't have the interaction with users they desire.

4) Much like how the music in stores example is reminiscent of the CIA used music torture in Guantanamo. Or maybe, just maybe, there is some nuance to discuss?

5) This is the most valid of your points, but it's not uncommon for legal documents to be updated for more general coverage and doesn't necessarily imply the activity is unethical.

6) Gmail does. It's called spam filtering.
Right?

If they were asked to "keep quite" maybe we don't know about it huh?
Perhaps not entirely surprising, when you consider how much better Tibetan high-altitude adapations are when compared to Andean people's. So the idea that they evolved in the span of 3,000 years seems suspect. Very interesting that they seem to have picked them up from a relict population - perhaps this is related to the Yeti stories?
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate you reading!
>I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs.

The world is going to have a hard time pursuing "creative endeavors" while homeless and starving - which, if you hadn't checked, is what happens when you don't have a job and people around you support conservative economic policy.

It is not possible to hold this position without being legitimately fairytale-villain evil or a socialist.
I cannot recall in which book I read this, but there was a similar experiment completed before. (Possibly an NLP book)

A University professor asked students to solve an anagram. After they were done, they had to walk into the professor's office to tell him the word. In his office he'd be pretending to have a conversation with a visitor.

The words the the students had to solve were either positive, negative or neutral.

The result was that students that had a negative word, were far more likely to interrupt the professor's conversation with the visitor more quickly than students that had a positive or neutral word.

After the students told the professor the word, he asked the students if they believed the word had an impact on their emotion. All of the students said no, but the data showed the negative words had an impact.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spies a giant cave on a giant volcano
Why did Facebook conduct this expressly as psychological research, publishing it in a psychological research journal?

It seems to me that the appropriate ethical framework to apply is the research context it was conducted and presented in, not a looser one outsiders wish to see it in. That disparity /conflict of interests is a symptom of the problem here.

I'm setting aside the questions of how this experiment even furthers facebook's business interests. My guess is, it doesn't really.
How can I programmatically generate Heroku-like subdomain names?
This will go down as a case study on how to not publish a study for the mainstream. The reality is that companies are running experiments similar to fb all the time in order to optimize revenue. But most companies don't publish their results like fb chose to do.
> 1) Facebook is not an advertising company, although they are trying to be (and so far have been unsuccessful).

You seem to be accusing Facebook of having no business model. I believe virtually all of their revenue comes from ads, so it's difficult to say what they are if not an advertising company.
Shameless plug: https://www.purplerails.com/

(1) Saves an exact copy of the page also.

(2) Indexes the text.

(3) Encrypted (search occurs on your computer).

Been in beta for a while. Thanks for feedback.
> The real issue seems to be that providing the work without illustrating and tracking who uses the software (so that you're being charitable and helping the less fortunate) means you aren't being charitable...

Seems like a pretty shitty reason to deny a possible open source company non-profit status on the grounds they aren't tracking their users.....
No salt?
>The company would still create the same value to society

Ok, I'll bite.

It would still create the same value to its investors.

No for-profit company ever creates value to society except by employing people or by having secondary effects that result in more/higher-quality employment.
That's the first time I've heard of that sort of setup. Very cool.
Dean Kamen is one of my heroes, actually. In particular, his effort to make water purification machines for poverty-stricken areas is likely to have more health impact than anything currently doable. Given that some significant fraction of diseases are water-borne.

This is what we as engineers should be doing.
I like Heap's (https://heapanalytics.com) approach - capture everything, query later. Depending on your needs (Heap is front-end UI oriented), might not be the right fit.
> How did GS let this happen?

It was a glitch.
Clearly someone in their infosec department just got fired. In the financial industry (I work in tech for finance), the "DLP" aka Data Loss Protection segment is very busy.

A few ideas:
https://www.verdasys.com/solutions/eip.html

http://www.symantec.com/data-loss-prevention

http://interguardsoftware.com/sp_dlp_lnd_v6.html

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj150527(v=exchg....

DLP software is what keeps sensitive software inside the confines of where it is supposed to stay. Funnily enough, DLP software like exactly the stuff in those links is what was not installed in the base Edward Snowden was at in Hawaii because it used too much bandwith.

The Federal Reserve uses Verdasys to prevent digital copies of the plates that print money from making it out (I know a guy who works in their tech department). It is scary to work at a place where they don't always trust even their administrators who have root/Administrator privs.
Stop whining and come to Canada.
Google bans porn from its ad network
As someone who is very annoyed about interview process in general, I'm not sure what you think offends some people about giving them a realistic environment and time to work. What is annoying is when a false equivalence is drawn between stress and difficulty on some ad hoc interviewing task and "even a basic knowledge of skills".
C# has implicit conversions. It doesn't have pattern matching, but it does have proper sum types.
... Using wifi in airplane mode is a great way to save battery life or prevent calls while using wi-fi. I do this all the time.
You can try it yourself (just turn on airplane mode, then turn on wifi) or read more from Apple: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1355

It seems in worrying about wifi, you missed the point of the exhibits submitted, though. You can read the rest of those here:
http://www.rezlaw.com/News-Events/06-30-14_Complaint_with_Ex...
The electronics lab course that we took (in the physics department) placed some emphasis on designing circuits that were forgiving of the issues such as you cite. This led to circuits that were not as sophisticated as e.g., a modern op amp chip, but forced us to think pretty hard about how the circuit should behave.

Also, maybe the breadboard was a rite of passage. ;-)
Witty Comebacks in the Face of Ignorance
Please also look at https://www.purplerails.com/

I tried address the privacy angle from day 1. Data is encrypted and only ciphertext is sent to the cloud. Index is stored only on your own machine. Searching occurs on your own machine.

A couple of cool features are that it also saves an exact HTML copy of the page including images and stuff if you read a page "long enough" (currently 90 seconds).

Been in beta for a while. Thanks for feedback.
What exactly is it that you think chemicals do when consumed by humans?
They wouldn't literally use Dropbox. There are similar services like ShareFile from Citrix that offer secure filesharing.
I've always thought this, so thanks for the extension, looks pretty good. It would be nice to have some geek stats like a top x list of your most visited sites.
You can make sure that Coinbase has none of your bitcoins if you transfer them to your own wallet as soon as possible.