skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had the same idea a while back. I bought the domain webcamcovers.com. After researching the market for a bit, I came to the realization that people didn't really see the need. Those that understand the potential risk (the HN crowd) choose to use a post-it or tape. Everyone else doesn't give a shit.

I did find there was a potential market. For the domain name. I sold it for a few hundred dollars. So, I've got that going for me ;)
Lowes in Canada still doesn't have chip and pin yet. They are one of the last stores in the country that hasn't switched yet. Their readers don't even have chip readers, at least at the stores I've been to.
The Best New Chrome Extensions For The Mobile Office
If someone has unrestricted access to your PC webcam, they probably have unrestricted access to all of your PC. You already will be keylogged, and risk losing usernames and passwords.

This is already probably a lot worse than a few photos of yourself staring at a screen being leaked.
Notice that they are all just libraries, dedicated changes in Perl’s core: 0.
Logic circuits are frequently modeled with four states: 0, 1, X, and Z. X means unknown, or "don't care" in some contexts. Z usually means high impedance.
Just to play devils advocate here:

It sounds great, except for the fact there's a kind of product gentrification going on.

http://www.thecannabist.co/2014/07/30/colorado-marijuana-bla...

"In this light, taxation is seen as a blunt instrument of exclusion, driving precisely the groups most prosecuted in the war on drug further into the arms of the black market where they remain at risk for arrest or robbery. In one Denver dispensary, a $30 purchase of one-eighth of the Trinity strain of cannabis includes $7.38 in state and local taxes — a near 33 percent rate. As Larisa Bolivar, one of the city’s most well-known proponents of decriminalizing marijuana nationally and opening a true free market, puts it: That seven bucks buys someone lunch.

“It’s simple,” she says. “A high tax rate drives black market growth. It’s an incentive for risky behavior.”"
The WiFi switch on the Thinkpads is not a "hard on/off" that switches power like you think; it's actually just a signal that the processor in the card can ignore if it wants to.

On the topic of webcam covering: I agree with others that a separate cover is overly complex of a solution for such a simple problem: a sticker or other opaque material will suffice to block the lens effectively on computers that have integrated non-removable cameras. For a removable webcam, the simplest and safest solution is to unplug it, or if that is inconvenient, aim it at something of little interest like a blank wall.
Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing this afternoon. The absence of physical switches for wifi/microphone/camera is probably due to a mix of lowering manufacturing cost and cutting on "my computer no work" maintenance calls, but I really would feel somewhat safer if I had them.

Fun fact: when I bought a hard drive for my computer (one of those old MFM 20 MB drives, it was the late eighties), I found it very noisy. The hard drive was internal, so I engineered a physical on-off switch by routing its power input through the otherwise unused turbo switch (remember those?) that was on my computer case. When I wanted to write in peace, I would turn the drive off, before turning the computer on, and boot from a floppy disk. I just had to be careful not to turn the drive off when it was already spinning, and I never did.
I find it alarming that they don't have a competent network engineer of their own on staff. Note the following:

"We are working very closely with our networking partner to understand the nature of the failure, assess the chances of a repeat event, and to begin planning architectural changes for the future."

"Our initial focus was on verifying the configuration so we initiated a line-by-line configuration review by engineers at our network partner"

Yikes. You get what you pay for.
Chinese Communist Party-Backed Tech Giants Bring Censorship To The Global Stage
As long as an academic researcher's personal career progress (and pocketbook) depend on a seemingly never-ending flow of "novel" and "significant" findings this will continue.
The way we dealt with that was for storage systems like Dropbox we store originals there but cache all of the thumbnails in an S3 bucket. It also didn't make sense to store thumbs in a user's Dropbox account.

All in all we treated every storage system independently but it was easy for us because that was the design from the beginning.

Even in our case the vast majority of consumers use storage we provided. We even support migration between storage services and that got some good use but nothing of any significant scale.

Drop me a note when you're in the Bay Area. @jmathai on Twitter or contact info in profile.
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IMO If 'they' are covertly using your webcam you have bigger problems than them catching a glimpse of your naked arse.
Coincidentally I wrote almost exactly the same post for Ember today: http://alexspeller.com/server-side-validations-with-ember-da...

At the bottom of that post you can see that rendering the errors in rails can actually be much simpler using respond_with
They should have integrated Bitcoin.
Japan has a fairly relaxed visa system at least if you are from the western world. If you are under 30 - a working holiday visa may be good to start with:

http://www.au.emb-japan.go.jp/en/visa/visit_japan_workinghol...
I tend to worry more about microphones, for which there is seldom an indicator light, and which cannot be shut down by a piece of tape, than cameras. Cameras are visible and you need to be in front of them. Microphones are sneakier and one microphone can record a lot of people at once.

Many security cameras (e.g. in public transport) now have the capability to record sound as well as video.
Does anyone know the cost of living in ¥ at those locations?
A craze for 'loom bands'
Actually many of these are genuine problems with Linux specifically and Unix in general. This is one of the reasons Microsoft Windows dominates.

For example, cryptic non-English commands like grep, ls, rm, etc. make the Unix command line difficult to learn, remember, and use.

One exception:

Despite their faults, the Linux/Unix file paths are far more human readable than a Git SHA (hexadecimal code). The issue with Git versus RCS-style version control systems is that a RCS-style sequential numbering scheme such as 1.2.3 (major release number, minor release number, patch) is much more human readable than a SHA (a3fee20). The analogy in the satire misses the mark.

Linux actually has suffered from a fanatical cult-like following mesmerized by Linus Torvalds that often was (still is sometimes) unable to recognize and acknowledge weaknesses of Linux versus Microsoft Windows. Linux has had to play catch up to provide a comparable GUI, installers for software packages, and other usability features in Windows and the Mac.

Sincerely,

Bit by Git
Show HN: CommandLine – A pure Swift library for creating command-line interfaces
C is weakly typed, because you can cast or set any variable to be a void *. Since C is weakly typed, then you can write a C++ program that is also weakly typed.
I see this type of refining activity on our payment gateway logs. I can only imagine what it looks like at a major online retailer or SAAS service. It just goes to show how fundamentally broken is payment card processing at the moment, and how ripe it is for disruption.
This is quite cool. What is the difference between raw and disambiguated? I have an educated guess, but I would appreciate a definition.
It's unfortunate people are down-voting you without explaining the problem with you comment. Basically, if the CIA/FBI/ABC has sufficient control of your computer that they can enable your mic/webcam remotely, they have more than enough control to do anything you yourself can do on your system (with software). That includes the ability to stop shush or simply toggle it.

This is why people are talking about physically covering their web cams. What software can disable, software can enable, so this problem can't be solved by software. No about of FBI software can give your camera the ability to see through solid objects however.
The idea and product are sound – your device seems to have a clear advantage over duck tape and stickers.

However, your site looks like a blog post. Use less copy (like 90% less). The Gif is good. Make it larger and front and center. Make your value proposition in one short sentence in a bold header.

Also, I wonder if my laptop would still close if this were on it. You might want to address that somewhere...
This too, http://jdh.hamkins.org/category/math-for-kids/, which featured on HN a couple of months ago.
Interest among businesses and institutions has increased and to an impressive extent. Interest among users seems to have stagnated.

If you can show any metrics pointing to an increasing rate of adoption among users, I would be greatly heartened.

Instead, we seem to be reaching a wall between the early adopters and early majority. This is a well-known chasms in the technology adoption cycle, and I'm a bit concerned about Bitcoin's ability to jump it, particularly given the current "hodl" mentality of most users of the coin.

On the other hand, if there's another big jump in price (not unlikely), then there will likely be increased interest among users. So I'm not saying Bitcoin will never gain majority adoption. I'm just saying that at this point, things don't look as promising as they did a year ago.
Am surprised no one with the coding skills has put up a graph showing the value of a Stellar over time. A rudimentary beginning could be a derivative of these values: http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl

Which is currently around $0.000353USD/STR ($2.05/5800)
Cigarettes are highly taxed and there doesn't seem too be much of a black market for them.

Edit: Looks like I was wrong, but the black market is buying legal cigarettes and driving them across state lines which is a bit different from growing your own tobacco.
BloomReach - Mountain View, California

H1B, Intern, Full-time all welcome! Remote is possible.

Apply at http://bloomreach.com/careers or send an email to dGFsZW50QGJsb29tcmVhY2guY29t and mention Hacker News.

BloomReach helps online businesses get their high quality and relevant content found by their consumers. Our big data marketing applications deliver personalized discovery to visitors between devices and across channels. We've raised $41M from Bain Capital, NEA and Lightspeed.

Our services just came in #9 in this year's Entrepreneur's 100 Brilliant Companies:

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Check them out at http://bloomreach.com/what-we-do/

We have open positions in Engineering (we could still definitely use a few more Frontend Engineers), Data Science, Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Product and Engagement Management. If you don't find a position that interests you, fill out a generic application and let us know what you want to work on- we're just looking for smart, talented people to help us continue making BloomReach an amazing place to work.

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I understand - just asking because I ended up reading the entire article, and thought you may be more familiar with it. It was an interesting read.

Not that I doubt the point being made in your original comment regardless.
I would say that it's typically assumed that there are confounding factors in any experiment. An experimenter has to try to minimize that, but you're still not going to be able to replicate a full experiment.

If you have more than one researcher administering a test in a stereotype threat experiment, that'll reduce the likelihood of that being the confound. If other studies (not replications, but their own experiments, with their own, different approaches to study the problem) agree with the first experiment, the effect is likely real.

I would also say that you're viewing the entire system far too antagonistically. Nobody goes into academic psychology to get rich off of it.
Thanks for the response. At the same time, I remained concerned by this idea that an increase in value of Stellars would slow down the rate of distribution.

After all, new users are a limited commodity (particularly after the honeymoon period). So almost by definition, if you chose to decrease the amount of Stellars distributed because the price is increasing, then you're slowing down the rate of distribution.

Which is exactly what Ripple has done.

I'd be happy to be proved wrong on this one, but I'm definitely taking a wait and see approach.
Bootleggers in the old American cities didn't suddenly stop serving their clients after prohibition ended either. Legalisation is very new and there aren't enough dispensaries to bring the price down. The article itself mentions :

As more legal recreational dispensaries and growers enter the market, the market
will do what it does with greater competition: adjust. Prices will fall.
The illegal market will shrink accordingly.
For Gifu/Nagoya, it really depends on what kind of lifestyle you want, but I'd say anywhere from about ¥120,000 to ¥200,000 a month if you're single, or ¥200,000+ for a couple.
Ask HN: My Startup is floundering. Pivot, persevere, or pull the plug?
Hi guys. I spent the better part of this year developing and launching my unique take on a theme/template search site.

The result was Themebeacon (www.themebeacon.com).

I launched a trial Adwords campaign several weeks ago, and the results thus far have been pretty discouraging to say the least. The short version is that for every dollar spent on PPC, I'm making only about 10 cents back in actual sales.

Is the concept itself flawed? As a semi-regular theme buyer, I find myself reverting to more conventional theme search websites rather than using my own creation. I can't tell if this is because the concept itself is fundamentally flawed, or if the ux just needs a bit more refinement.

Any feedback or advice would be most appreciated.
An Android app that collects Mag-Stripe data and CVC3 codes from PayPass cards
I know of a few people who successfully found a position through the Who is Hiring. Here is one blog post for someone talking about it.

http://www.jaretmanuel.com/blog/thanks-hacker-news
Thanks Hacker News (2012)
My guess is you're talking about the logs from your business site, Ringio.com. The "refining" problem (testing stolen credit cards) is much worse for sites that generally receive small, one-off payments. One of the hardest hit groups is non-profit organizations who accept/solicit donations. They regularly get clobbered by charge-backs and other issues.
And, perhaps surprisingly, most mathematical work in the real world is spent figuring out which assumptions are useful to model the problem and which are not. You sound like you are claiming that modeling the problem is not part of the problem, but somehow "before" the problem is posed. It sounds like a fantasy to me.
Note: Overrated means something is widely regarded as good ... but isn't.

A version control system should be very simple, hardly noticeable like the original RCS.

1. checkin the current version after each change.
2. if a serious problem is encountered, checkout an earlier version to see what happened and find when and where bug was introduced.

That is about it and RCS does it with a handful of commands.

The obvious question is why can't a distributed version control system like Git hide most of the complexity of managing a network of distributed repositories from the developer, at most adding a few network commands, e.g. clone, pull, push? Where do the 148 commands come from?

Why not just use the standard RCS command line interface with a small number of additions and let the back end deal with the distributed repositories? Extend the RCS/CVS/SVN sequential ids with a suffix to identify something like repository/branch to keep track of local changes?

Sincerely,

Bit by Git
If you're representing error conditions as part of a mathematical type, you're definitely doing it wrong.

The correct way to do this is to have a type that explicitly deals with errors, and use this to wrap the mathematical type.

This type is usually called Maybe or Option. For example, in Rust, you can have a `Option<bool>`, which can have one of three values: `None` (which might represent an error), `Some(true)`, or `Some(false)`.

The important thing is that you're not making some weird, poorly thought out kludge type. You're composing two clean and simple types in an obvious way.
Interesting, seems rather important and big news.

Currently (22:39 EST) no mention of this on major news sites:

Let's see what they have:

* CNN: "Lt. Goldin killed in battle, Israel says" -- really CNN? Here is a major US city declaring water emergency today and they are putting in bold on the front page the name of some Israeli soldier I don't care about.

* CNBC: "Trek Bicycles has managed to hold onto some domestic production. Inside their Wisconsin headquarters." company makes something in US. Kind of good, at last US related. Still not sure if it trumps water emergency in a major city.

* Fox: "Libertarians could cause problems for Republicans in key Senate races" -- top story. But buried down below the scroll line in small font: "Ohio city tells residents not to drink the water". That that is something at least.

Meanwhile on http://www.reddit.com/r/news/ this is top story with 4600+ upvotes. Granted there are stupid comments at the start of the thread. But also plenty of discussion about what the problem is, how it started, what to do if you drank the water.

I don't know, I just kind of thought it is an interesting study in what media thinks is important for people to know and what people actually want to know.
Ironically, a big jump in price is of of the negative things that can happen to Bitcoin. The best thing that could possibly happen to increase the utilization of Bitcoin as a medium for transaction, as has always been the case, is that Bitcoin gets pegged to normal a bucket of Fiat Currency, (USD, INR, EUR, GBP) and then flatlines.

And, I don't know how much you use Bitcoin to buy things, but Bitcoin is about 20x more useful this year than it was last year in terms of making purchases, particularly now that Apple lets you put a wallet on your iPhone. Purchasing from your smartphone is going to be the way 99%+ of people use bitcoins on a daily basis, so that change is huge.

The metrics that really need to be tracked are: What percentage of people have made a single, transaction from a wallet in the previous month, and, 2-5, 6-20, 21+ transactions a month. That will give us the best understanding of Bitcoins growth as a transaction medium.

And, of course, this all ignores other innovative uses of the Blockchain, upon which Bitcoin as a currency might have just been the Trojan horse in enabling.
You're just using the terminology imprecisely is all. (Indeed, two things being countable does not mean they have the same cardinality; finite sets are also countable)
OK, I was just in WA, and let me assure you WA is where the black market will continue to thrive. The CO market is taxed, but is actually cheaper than the black market in CA from what I hear.

WA, however, has a state tax, county tax, city tax, and thus, prices are double that of the black market. Plus, the state really clamped down on growing permits, so there are now shortages driving prices up higher. WA and CO will show very clearly how to do this right (CO) and how to do it wrong (WA)
On most SQL servers you have three values for bool, TRUE, FALSE, and NULL. There is either nullable or non-nullable types of bool, but at some stage you'll need the nullable one so it is useful to have the triple implementation in the language (particularly for an entity framework implementation).

For example C# now supports this via their (bool?) type (i.e. nullable bool). However the default language construct is just a two value bool (bool).
Link to the paper and supplemental information:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~gordonw/VisionCorrectingDisplay/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/20/ho...
Probably because there's no nearby place to get untaxed cigarettes, and there's not enough profit in growing tobacco and making cigarettes from scratch.

When I was in high school, back in the early '90s, the difference in taxes on cigarettes between Ontario and New York was a few dollars a pack - enough to cause a huge black market in smuggled cross-border cigarettes. I didn't buy a legal pack in four years.

Now, amusingly, taxes in New York have been raised so much that they're the target of smugglers. (And in Ontario, the Indian reservations that used to do all the smuggling got into the direct manufacturing business, since they can sell on the reservation tax-free.)
There certainly is a black market for cigarettes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/25/w...
There is a black market for cigarettes (to skirt local and state taxes) but I doubt it leads to any significant risk for end-users.
...but the optic nerve of a 20 year old is the same from a scientific perspective in almost all respects to the optic nerve of a 30 year old. Maybe if that optic nerve signaled some horribly deep work of literature like 100 years of solitude, the older brain behind it would interpret it differently, but that nerve is the same.

When you remember the amazing swelling feelings of being ~adult~ you had when you last read 100 years of solitude, your semantic and episodic memory systems are, functionally, identical to what they were when you read it the first time. Maybe your fluid intelligence is a little less fluid, but that doesn't really start until you've aged a lot.

I'm sure you've changed as a person. I'm sure you have a wealth of new experiences and are entirely different from your past self. This is irrelevant to the physics, chemistry, and psychology of your body.
We have very competent network engineers, but it never hurts to have a second opinion. Verifying that there are no subtle interactions that we've missed is simply prudent.

At our scale, partnering with our vendors is a necessity. We often operate in areas that, while they are technically within specification, are toward the higher end of the range.
Primarily because it's a big 1 time total system cost to change due to old technology that is current. In such circumstances, no one bites the bullet unless some outside regulatory body enforces it & in the US, regulators tend to have close links if not prior & post tenure employment with the industries they regulate. It's not as much of a habit change issue as much it's an incentives issue of who wants to pick up the one time cost .

In a developing market like India & I'm seeing the big transition to chip & pin happenning right now mandated by the reserve bank. I also saw the transition to securecode additional verification for online payments happen years back similarly - that has still not happened in the Us. The decision makers there are all primarily career economists in Government Service even though there's a lot of secondment into policy framing working teams that happens from the financial industry.
You're conflating a number of ideas, but the overall trend in your post is towards a debunked theory of science called positivism. You should research that.
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