skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The collective action problem sounds good in theory, but the concept breaks down when you realize that the formation of a government (at least a democracy or republic) is also a collective action. The idea is that we can't form a market to efficiently create certain things like roads, but that somehow we can form a government which can efficiently create those things. Market failures, like the failure to produce a public good, are not defeated or circumvented by forming a government, because government is also a public good.

> It's rational for a private company to insert a road into a system to benefit itself at the disadvantage to others (cf. negative externalities). Indeed it's rational for several to do this making ad-hoc modifications to the network, the net result of this is significant inefficiency.

It's also rational for a government to insert a road into a system to benefit "itself" (i.e. politicians, construction companies that are "friendly" with government, etc.) at the disadvantage to others. What is your response to my environmental argument? That's an argument about specific negative externalities that are produced by government that I would not expect to be produced by private infrastructure.

> The moral question then arises: we have these single-points-of-trust, do we have any democratic control over them?

It's just as reasonable to ask that about government roads. Does government's decisions about roads reflect the desires of the population? I haven't seen any data, so I don't really know, but I would suspect the answer to be mostly no. But markets often do have the quality that their products reflect the desires of the population.
The creditor could dump the bonds on the open market, and depending on the level of pain they were willing to feel, could crush the us bond markets. The fed can only stand in and defend for so long until we have to go inflationary to defend the dollar. Its actually a good thing that china controls a large chunk of US bonds, they can't dump without taking a huge hit themselves, MAD (for you cold war buffs). The countries you need to worry about dumping are ones with large amounts of hydrocarbons, Russia. They could theoretically dump, and then they have the hard asset to trade (oil) if they truly wanted to cause pain, however doing so to the US would send the entire world in to a free fall and they would probably end up worse than before, however everyone would be worse than before. It would be a large global reset.
So does this mean no-ip.com is no more, or only a subset of their domains?
HTML5 aims to specify how to parse broken HTML as well (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...), and there should ideally not be any differences between different parsers.

The HTML5 specification explicitly asks you to not think about this yourself: "for security reasons, it is imperative that those rules be followed precisely. Differences in how invalid byte sequences are handled can result in, amongst other problems, script injection vulnerabilities ("XSS")".
Just when you thought it had been a long time since Microsoft was last evil.
Asteroid air burst over Siberia – The Tunguska Event –
And what do you do about sites with an infinite number of pages?
I mean, sure, you can use OCaml... unless you want/have to interop with .NET, then it doesn't matter how much you like OCaml, it's not going to solve your problem.
That wouldn't be a problem for me, provided that the baseband processor didn't have DMA access to all of system memory.

If I could be reasonably certain that the baseband only communicated with the rest of the phone via a limited modem(/similar) protocol at the hardware level - which should be possible - then I'd be happy provided that 100% of software running on the main CPU was Free Software, with sources available.

That means the bootloader, the kernel, all drivers - including video drivers, zero binary blobs - the display manager, and all provided apps, need to be Free Software. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Blackphone doesn't even do that. (But I'm not 100% sure. I can't find that much info about the core OS software/drivers anywhere.)
What is a "Pivot Wave"? Do you mean "Pilot Wave"?
A quick search shows exactly what he means. No elaboration necessary.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1235995

http://www.organicweb.com.au/17240/internet/cloudflare-secur...

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/the-new-normal-200-400-gb...
The entire premise of this completely unsubstantiated blog post is refuted by the well-substantiated Flynn effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Let me increase the hype from 33% to all 100%: "Read the best tech bloggers in the best app on the best platform on the best phone in the best language of the best country."
Link? I've never heard that, and the very first draft of the whitepaper (hosted on a now dead filesharing website) was also a PDF.
Twitter Acquires TapCommerce
Wait what?

If I have a domain with no-ip.com will it continue to work? Does Microsoft effectively own them now?
thanks, it was a mistype, i guess i see "pivot" much frequently than "pilot"
afraid.org is a good alternative.
C = A + B in Rx is just a combination of 2 observables. One way of doing that is with "combineLatest":

A.combineLatest(B).map((a,b) => a + b)

Of course, you may want to cache the last emitted value for "a+b", or a default value in case no items were emitted yet, something that would be a hot multicast observable, roughly:

A.combineLatest(B).map((a,b) => a + b)
.multicast(BehaviorSubject(default))

And the underlying framework can optimize for this use-case, with shortcuts and whatnot. In Scala, nothing would prevent you from having a sexy macro, akin to Scala-Async.

All that matters is the underlying abstractions are Observable (the producer, characterized by its subscribe method), the Observer (the consumer, which is really a single function split in 3) and the communication protocol between them. I don't see that as a regression, I see it as the foundation - in the end, no matter what you make of behaviors, it's still a producer/consumer pattern.

Actually my problem with the original Rx implementation is very different. I'm also working on an Rx redesigned implementation for Scala, with back-pressure baked in by design in the protocol [1]. This is because when events are passing asynchronous boundaries, you can have streams that are producing more data than consumers can process and (compared with other abstractions for processing streams of data, like Iteratees) the consumer doesn't signal demand back to the producer. And this issue becomes even more relevant when events are sent over the network.

[1] https://github.com/monifu/monifu/wiki/Rx-Contract-and-Design...
Hurricane Electric: https://dns.he.net/
'Traffic jam' is not a good concept to talk about. You need to talk about utility. In more concrete terms, you need to talk about travel time. Talking about whether or not something is a traffic jam or not is simply losing information.

I'm not interested in the definition of a 'traffic jam'. I'm not interested to know if I've ever been in a 'traffic jam' or not.
While F# was definitely strongly influenced by OCaml, their features have diverged significantly. For example, F# has type providers, active patterns, and units of measure (though you're also right that OCaml has lots of features that F# doesn't, like first class modules).

Note also that this blog post is about accepting contributions to the Visual Studio IDE components for F#, not for the language itself (which has been open source for many years, and has already been accepting contributions from the community for a little while).
I actually use Google Spreadsheets for signing people up to a newsletter. This way, if they want me to send emails through my mailing webapplication (alpha use, so i'm using it only for myselve right now). I only need to download the spreadsheet as *.csv and i can upload it right in my webapp. The spreadsheet doesn't need to be a specific structure fyi and the app supports multiple languages {{isEnglish}}my English message for {{FirstName}} {{/isEnglish}}{{isDutch}}mijn Nederlandstalig bericht voor {{FirstName}} (=my dutch message){{/isDutch}} in both subject, message (text) and message (html).. So it's quite flexible, i'm just not satisfied with my current layout...

I also tried to use it as a CMS. Using an 3rd party app in Google Drive for editing HTML files and then including it in my website, but i had problems with connecting the webapp with Google Drive OAUTH (spreadsheets was a no-brainer fyi). The problems were with a combo of Google Drive, OAuth and the .Net library that Google released (API V2. i suppose) :-(

I now use a file based database in Asp.Net MVC for my CMS. I'm updating it with every new website i have to create (if the client wants a CMS, off course).

I'm kinda curious what their backup method is when Google Drive goes down? (i thought about caching and a button for the client for cleaning the websites cache, so they could see their changes. )
Thank you so much for the kind words! We decided to start with just Twitter and

Facebook. Will soon be adding in Linkedin and Google+ as well.
I think the difference is in the perception that roads are static and once built just sort of stay there for everyone, whereas public transit has a lot of running costs. Sure roads have a lot of upkeep cost as well, but it's not as obvious.

Then again, the roads I've seen in the US are so shitty I'm [almost] certain there's no upkeep being done anyway.
you do realize that people like dragorn are part of the black phone project, right? someone with that kind of clout doesn't really just get pushed around by (insert state agency here)
They never had a good name in the first place to destroy.
Ask HN: Tips for a very early stage start up pitch deck
I have a very early state start up in the hardware industry. It's a cool concept, but we don't have any numbers. We haven't been able to afford the engineers to design electronics for costing/manufacturing.

I've been asked for a pitch deck.

Every deck I've seen has some hard financial component, weather it's costs, growth projections etc.

How do I design a pitch deck that lacks this major information and still gets taken seriously?

Thanks!
The next big growth engine could and should, if the Congress were to choose to emprace it, be a large infrastructure and public works budget (especially given the current low interest rate environment, and the large number of people unemployed and underemployed). Our bridges and highways and air traffic control system could really use it. Of course, keeping the waste, fraud, and abuse in that budget down to a minimum would be difficult, given current Congresspeople and their priorities and agendas.
How We Convinced Your Coastal Tech Worker to Move to our Flyover-state Startup
The more a country is in debt (especially to other countries) the more their foreign debtors have leverage over what policies the debted country can enact.

Not necessarily, because national debt (eg bonds, t-bills, etc) can be owned by anyone, not just foreigners. In the case of the US, as it happens, most national debt is overwhelmingly owned by Americans --think your IRA: whatever percentage of bonds you own is government debt to you.

The confusion arises because one particular strategy of hedge funds in the past has been to buy up huge controlling amounts of dollar-denominated bonds/debt from small export-dependent countries so that, if the country's economy slows down and they have to devaluate their currencies to boost exports (and thus growth), they end up unadvertently increasing the amount owed to the hedge funds in dollars. This can easily get way out of hand, thus causing the well-publicized financial crises of the 1990s, Argentina's, Greece[1] etc. But this scenario obviously does not apply for countries that do not issue foreign-currency bonds, like the US.

[1] The case of Greece is even worse because they cannot even devaluate "their" currency to boost exports, so all they can do is intentionally depress or deflate their economy to make everything (salaries, land, inputs) massively cheaper; or refinance their debt with EU-backed loans.
Microsoft May Prioritize The Desktop In Windows 9
http://xkcd.com/1361/
Nice article but I don't think it's greatly relevant to most of us. I use the oven a lot, cook most days, and don't cook above 220C. I don't think our oven goes above 250C.

If you're into molecular gastronomy I can imagine you'd want to play around with the stuff mentioned in the article, but outside of that ... m'eh.
"A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers." "Let's use them to build narratives!" --http://xkcd.com/904/
Haters gonna hate :)

But really functions are first class citizens in Swift and it is designed to be a hybrid between OO and functional programming language. It doesn't implement some of the common helper functions like pluck, difference, intersection, etc. This is where this or another library comes in.
Ask HN: Facemash for Startups
Would the HN crowd be interested in a service that pitted Startups (even concepts, ideas, demos) against others in a format similar to Facemash (i.e., 1-on-1 voting), ultimately ranking the Startups?

Does something like this exist? As it seems it would be useful to a community such as HN for identifying new Startups, funding opportunities for the startups themselves, and getting a product distributed to potential users?
Interest payments as a percentage of GDP are actually much lower now than they've been in the past:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYOIGDA188S
A simplified example of what happens when trade deficits occur over a long enough period of time:

Squanderville versus Thriftville (Warren Buffet) - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1053684/posts
> On June 26, the court granted our request and made Microsoft the DNS authority for the company’s 23 free No-IP domains, allowing us to identify and route all known bad traffic to the Microsoft sinkhole and classify the identified threats.

Something about this bothers me. So the courts granted MS the rights to essentially take over No-IP's DNS in order to "identify" ... "bad traffic?"

The implications of this are... chilling. As much as I want to reserve judgement, this makes me uneasy (malware aside).
Well, I mean, I'm on your side, I don't think that self-driving cars are going to cause a huge spike in people using car services because having a car you don't have to personally drive is not new technology at all. This may be somewhat cheaper than having a person driving you around or something, but I really think that on balance people will end up having their own personal vehicles.

All I was responding to was that if you grant the parent comment's assertion that people will move to car services, it's very likely to me that rush hour will be the one problem that is very easy to solve, because you would have such a large volume of people all going to the same place. Even the issues with personal space and shared vehicles aren't that big of a problem - self-driving cars don't need to look the way they look now. You could have 4 separate compartments in them, so that it's not possible to touch or interact with the other passengers, for example. (Also, I've participated in casual carpool in both New York and San Francisco, and it works remarkably well - many people, including young women, do travel every day in the car of a complete stranger that they don't know - and it's even more dangerous, because it's controlled by a human driver!)

My guess is, however, that in the future the hardware costs of under-utilized vehicles will be considered to be much lower than the "inconvenience costs" of not having your own vehicle, and rates of car ownership won't be dramatically affected by the advent of the self-driving car.
Here is a chart of that percentage over time:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYOIGDA188S
quantopian looks nice. I'm glad someone is in this niche.
Whoa, he.net is alive and kicking. These guys used to run an efnet server back in the day.
PI... principle investigator?
The plan is to implement extensions as well.
Unless I'm at work, I exclusively use my phone to check emails, read news, do anything online, etc. I use Instagram for photos and Volley for articles. Having one app to read, share, and comment on stories just makes life so much easier for me. I use volley mostly for the 'sharing with a few exclusive friends' aspect, but appreciate getting my favorite writers in one place as well. Also, the bookmarklet they have for your desktop browser makes volleying interesting reads you might come across during the day at work super convenient.
People adopt Google+? The only thing I've seen on Google+ is Google employee posts.
This calls for a very simple response: "rotfl!"
Loads of self-congratulating tripe. Microsoft why don't you simply provide free OS upgrades or fixes for the millions of XP computers out there? They are not going anywhere soon.

Next thing we know your lawyers and lobbyists are going to come up with some legislative wheeze and you will be running the biggest botnet in the world. You created the problem so fix it yourself.
"On June 19, Microsoft filed for an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) from the U.S. District Court for Nevada against No-IP. On June 26, the court granted our request and made Microsoft the DNS authority for the company’s 23 free No-IP domains, allowing us to identify and route all known bad traffic to the Microsoft sinkhole and classify the identified threats. "

How can this be legal? Does this mean that if I get malware from a hotmail.com address, I can file for a TRO against Microsoft and control their domains?

I honestly don't understand why Microsoft should be given this ability.
Well, first, Keynes created an interesting theory, where time couldn't change anything, and real wealth don't actually appear. It's no wonder people want to ignore it, yet it successfully teaches how to solve one kind of problem.

Our current problem is that, since we learned that one piece of tech, we started applying it to every economical problem we saw. Thus since the 40's no economical crisis could by solved by keynesianism; if it could, there wouldn't be a crisis there.
I've looked at them before, but I don't have $10k to tie up on what is just me playing around.
> It is somewhat good news for online anonymity that we don't know who Satoshi is.

Only if you believe that none of the identified candidates are him. Personally, I think not as much real effort has been spent as you think; I've found some pretty breathtaking stuff which no one has posted about publicly.

> Last best OPSEC move Nakamoto made was to disappear - removes so many options in tracking him down. Hanging around and living off the credibility you've built with your anonymous persona is likely only going to breed complacency and the odds of slipping up increase each day (you see this in many cases)

Yes, DPR comes to mind as an example of what happens when you don't know when to quit.

> I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).

I disagree. Given what the Snowden leaks have revealed, I think the NSA, and possibly lower-level entities, could find him even now. They can attack gmx.com, AnonymousSpeech, Digirock, the Californian IP & Freenode, & the P2P Foundation looking for direct IP leaks or other information, either through penetration, legal demands, or their extensive databases of metadata; governments are the main sponsors of stylometric research (either code or writing), which are another excellent attack vector; and of course, they can simply do tailored attacks on major suspects, in the same way they've already individually gone after security researchers. For all we know, they've already done any of this - Snowden's info is dated.
Yes, Altman's point #2 is essentially the Reinhart-Rogoff fallacy that was widespread a few years ago, before being debunked.
Ask HN: Whats your stock portfolio/gains look like?
My portfolio: http://i.imgur.com/aDJPg6Z.png

Held AAPL since last year. Got lucky with my NFLX timing. I bought GPRO mid-day on its first day, its the stock I'm least sure about so I may sell on any negative news.

AMZN and GOOG I guess I bought at peak prices, but I believe in those companies so I'm fine riding them out.

Yours?
The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong
The Standard Model does not concern itself with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. It can, as of now, neither verify or falsify any of the interpretations which, consequently, are not scientific theories or even hypotheses, but firmly on the side of philosophy of physics. The interpretations are attempts to answer why Nature works as it does, within the framework of the Standard Model which only appears to answer the question how.

Yudkowsky certainly hasn't invented the many worlds interpretation, which was originally formulated by the physicist Hugh Everett in 1957. Even though originally scorned, in the more recent times it has gained popularity among physicists. The series of blog posts by Yudkowsky are (in my opinion, at least) a persuasive argument in its favor against the competing interpretations, and are very much recommended reading for anyone who would like to better understand the issue.
Fortunately $[ was disabled from v5.16.0 (released in 2012).

ref: http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5160delta.html
The Eternal Conflict Between Apple and Customers: iPhone Cases
Thanks, what I searched for didn't really bring anything up.
Get More Retweets On Twitter
In all 3 links this is the only relevant part I've been able to find regarding them being malicious:

> Heck, if the DDoS for hire services protect themselves against DDoS attacks by using CloudFlare then CloudFlare must be damn good!

So they protect their customers from DDoS attacks. All of them. I see nothing bad in this. Saying they shouldn't is like saying a government should put all criminals together in a village and then have them perform criminal activity on each other.

The link to Kreb's is basically the same: people protecting themselves. Should CloudFlare play for judge and ban people that do not violate their terms? Because I'm sure they boot people that perform illegal activities on their network or otherwise harm their network from within, but I can see why they don't proactively take down any website mentioning "we offer DDoS attacks". Like I said before, that person A kills another person doesn't mean that another person may kill person A, at least not within our current laws. Even if it did, is CloudFlare the one who should be calling the shots?

Finally your first link is someone complaining to CloudFlare about LOIC (or related perl scripts launched from VPSes) and cloudflare responds that they see no harmful traffic and that logs or other details should be attached. Merely saying "hey I'm having trouble" has never gotten anyone further in resolving issues. That's why we have logs so that CloudFlare can check their own logs to see what happened. Perfectly reasonable.

So yeah elaboration is necessary. I do not see why CloudFlare is harmful.
Mercedes diesel hybrid travels from Africa to the UK on one tank
Google's New Clothes (2011)
HowAboutWe likely to be acquired by IAC (owns Match, OkCupid and stake in Tinder)
How Long Could You Endure the World's Quietest Place?
Stanford University – Technology Entrepreneurship online course