skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're doing well to be charged £100. We just renewed our tenancy, and got charged £120 by the letting agents to process us signing the same agreement we signed 12 months ago, and update their records to show we're not due to do so again for another year.
This example illustrates the very slippery slope we find ourselves on today. The problem is that it's really no ones business unless and until I break a law. I shouldn't have to justify may legal actions to anyone, regardless of what they do and don't understand.
was that last sentence the opposite of what you intended to type?
I have a feeling that the problem is students show "If the equation is true, then 0=0" instead of "Note that 1=1; now, we derive P".

Even if all facts used in the proof are true "in both directions", it's still a serious breach of modern mathematical style to start with what you're trying to prove.

It's also possible that they don't explicitly note that the facts they're using are "true in both directions". edit: to be explicit, in that case I'd still consider the proof wrong

Anyways, if a student presented a proof like that, I would at least take a couple points off for the awkward style unless it was explicitly justified somehow.

It's also kind of a weird proof technique to start with 0=0 or 1=1 and bother to explicitly state this fact...
This article couldn't miss the mark more completely if it tried.

Distopian sci-fi is just a mirror of our current political climate, and fears that already exist. Human fears, that don't require fictional technology.

You don't need a time machine to see militarised police, imprisonment without trial, apartheid, terrorism, corporations influence over government, ethnic cleansing, privacy stripped bare, perpetual war, 1% of American adults incarcerated, etc. These are human problems, human politics, human fears. Sci-fi is just a sandbox that avoids polarising people.

Even if I humour the author and talk about new technology, it's rational to be concerned about how technology will put more power into the hands of people who are already adequately demonstrating their distopian leanings.

It's not the technology we're afraid of.
> Apparently somebody was still worried about the idea of a realistic nuclear attack simulation game. Reminds me of the time some kid was arrested for making a Counterstrike map based on his high school.

This is even more ridiculous. The kid could reasonably obtain weapons and bring them to school. The likelihood of obtaining an ICBM is nil.
I don't need to find a nuclear missile guidance system that is destination controlled by a freaking mouse click, because that is not what is being argued.

What is being argued is that it is not out of the question to expect that such a system may or could exist. It's not unreasonable to think that it could.

Occam's Razor. Are all of our nukes controlled solely by systems that do not involve a mouse, or might there be a computer sophisticated enough somewhere in that launch process that it might make use of a mouse?
One thing that I am curious about: What does it mean by "the expanding plasma is converted directly into electricity" ?

Directly how? No boiling water driving pistons, no intervening steps at all? It seems a bit like "and then a miracle occurs" to me.
This is really well done. Nice work!
One big problem is that people take the idea of "better safe than sorry" as a way to avoid thought. Don't analyze the situation, just pick the option that appears safest after a glance!

What it should mean is that you should take both probabilities and costs into account when deciding what to do, as it's often worth doing something easy to reduce the risk of something unlikely but catastrophic.

But that doesn't mean you can just avoid thinking about it! "Often" doesn't mean "always". For example, it's worth checking the tire pressure in your car on a regular basis, because incorrect pressure could lead to a blowout at high speeds which can be most unpleasant, and checking it takes little time. But it's not worth checking the car for bombs every time you drive it, at least not for most of us, because the odds of being the victim of a car bomb for most of us are indistinguishable from zero.

A little thought reveals that this case is clearly in the second category, and thus calling the police is just a waste of public resources. But if you're incorrectly using "better safe than sorry" to mean "pick the option that appears to be safe without any analysis", you're not going to apply a little thought.
When you don't have a Jeep, don't take the shortcut that runs through the jungle. You're goal should be to keep moving and not get discouraged when you get stuck on something. I would learn a language that lets you take the highway instead of the shorter but trickier jungle road. Ruby, Python, Basic, and Javascript could be considered "highway" languages while C, C++, Java, and most other languages could be considered "jungle shortcut" languages.
Depends on what you mean by "perfectly fine" ... if the student understands that they deduced the desired conclusion from the true fact 0=0, by a series of steps of the form "our current statement is implied by this next statement, which is implied by the next, which is implied by ... 0=0, which is known to be true", then I guess it's ok other than being an obfuscated/roundabout proof technique.
This book is awesome! Really glad to see someone mentioned it. It has just enough about design so you can make something that doesn't look terrible. :-)
Brit chiming in here. The contempt that estate agents and landlords have for your privacy, well-being and life in general is almost indescribable.
He also states:

"As a tenant - a student tenant, no less - your rights are virtually squat."

This is patently false.
I think it's more about the algorithm and the proof of concept than those robots and that swarm having any application. It's a step forward in the domain, not necessarily a finality.
Objective-C patterns translate into Swift
Oh balderdash. Sci-fi makes us think about the possibilities that new technology will present, dystopian or not. Many of them are positive. Many of them are negative. To simply ignore the negative aspects would be folly.

I suppose George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin were just big ol' downers who wanted us all to be miserable?

No. They just mused on what's possible.
In the Battle for the Connected Home, Stakeholders Are Lining Up
Every time I try to scroll down to read the words, the page flicks back up to the top. Web design is in serious danger of disappearing into its own precious cleverness.

(Opera on Ubuntu, which yesterday had no trouble dealing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172365 where other combinations were having trouble - welcome to the fragmented web; let us party like 'twas 1999)
advert paid for by 'castlight', apparently
There is no best solution for MySQL sharding at all, so many people develop the proxy for their real scenario.

Maybe MySQL Fabric is a silver bullet, but I always think that sometimes proxy is enough.
Impossible, Microsoft's EULA surely prohibits use by terrorists.
You are not a good developer, and if this is really your attitude, I would never hire you. Learn to pick your battles better.
I'm speaking through my hat, but I believe many of those behaviors are inspired from the animal kingdom, which could explain why the result looks animal.
Ya know, pretty soon you might live in a country right inside Russia. :(
Glad someone is pointing this out. I just wrapped my biomedical engineering undergrad at Johns Hopkins.

Theranos' technology is likely not going to blow my mind but I have to give them a lot of credit for incredible PR and (depending on how good the product actually ends up being) execution.
Works perfectly here (Chrome on Mac)
Most accurate Bitcoin graph ever
Do such contracts actually make a difference, though? You can put anything you want into a contract, but that doesn't mean it's enforceable. An apartment lease can say, "Tenant waives all renters' rights under the law," but the tenant will still have all rights granted him by law. Is the problem simply that people believe the enforceability of their contracts beyond what is actually true?
How about "Ancient Aliens" on "History" Channel?

Let's face it - the idiots are a better market.
Finding the Perfect Tech Stack
I think "cautious" is a better word. What aspect of this story was sensationalist?
Perhaps the argument could have been better phrased, as it could be read to indicate that science fiction is a good predictor, whereas in reality, science fiction has always been not only a bad predictor, but actually worse than you would expect from random chance.

The point the article is trying to get at is that science fiction used to inspire. Sure, we never did get hyperdrive, terraforming or sentient robots, but people raised on such stories gave us weather satellites, flu vaccines and cell phones. What will people raised on more recent science fiction give us? I hope the answer doesn't turn out to be a world where we bicker over politics until we run out of fossil fuel and sink back into the mud.
Ask a designer friend to send you a big PSD file and use it as a textbook. You can learn a ton just from examining the set up of spacing guides, layer groups, folders, font sizes, shadow effects, etc.
The draft uses the MD5 compression function (not even real MD5), and it "hashes" more data and than fits in one invocation by arbitrarily xoring pieces together.

This wrong for so many reasons. Here's how to do this sanely:

Pack all the input into a fixed size. Hash it with a decent hash function. Truncate the output.

MD5 is not a decent hash function.
"Spy" on people at a public event where there are thousands of people taking pictures and posting it online. Also, it was IBM doing the test, the BPD just let them run the test and evaluated it for the future. BPD is not using this system yet as it not yet released by IBM.
Digital Privacy Reinvented 'NSA-Proof'
Of course the argument made is disingenuous, and of course the author is saying we should ignore the predictions he doesn't want to hear, he's a venture capitalist & has a vested monetary interest in us not looking too closely at the negative effects of some technologies
I don't get why Internet can't be funded the same way as Kickstarter campaigns. No ads, but only the people who want to pay actually pay.

I run several non-personal websites. I pay for them because the cost is simply not significant to me. (Getting time to do administrative stuff is much more costly, but that's moistly a matter of bad tooling.) It's not because I'm a billionaire. It's because running a website, even a website with thousands of registered users, is dirt cheap if you it efficiently. When you get to the scale of hundred thousand registered users things begin to get more complicated. But only a fraction of the Web really needs to be that big.
I know Terry, and saw him read this with fellow writer Jack Womack years ago. Terry was the enthusiastic describer of these weird biological critters, and Jack did the "Meat?" responses with a perfect voice and wonderful tone of incredulity.

It's a lovely story, but everything Terry has done is worth reading.
>Rational person might make the assumption that this guy is not actually whiteboarding an ICBM launch from a rented apartment

In my mind the real problem is that there is nothing wrong with "whiteboarding an ICBM launch". Me or me and my friends have every right get wargame 1980 or 2014 global thermonuclear war. Its seems like it would be a fascinating intellectual exercise. For that matter why can't people wargame terrorist plots, apply game theory, etc.

Between first amendment rights and the need for academic freedom, people should and do have every right to do this. In someone saw this can became concerned, they have have every-right to investigate, but in my mind, so long as it doesn't involve anything official or contacting the people involved without tangible evidence.

After all, if I talk about what might happen in a car crash, it doesn't remotely imply I intend to go out and get into one.
iPhone 6 Photos Leak
Could you achieve some level of realism by introducing errors randomly at various input/outputs? Likely it wouldn't be as good as a hardware PoC, but I would expect it to be good enough.

Is this something used in simulations? I would think so.
CEO Archetype #5 – Sheldon Cooper – The Nerd
The Front Lines of Ferguson
On OS X switching from 32 to 64 bit also means no longer being able to use many Carbon APIs.

I would imagine that cross platform software is more likely to use the Carbon APIs because they are procedural and often a bit more low-level than the “modern” Cocoa equivalents.
Load testing with Locust
I think this is the key point. Security for relatively obscure and unimportant sites isn't really about those sites, it's about other sites. People reuse passwords a lot. They shouldn't, of course, but you can shout that from the rooftops all week and it won't change the fact that a lot of people do. If you suffer a significant breach, then a decent percentage of users will have their bank accounts put at risk from it. You can simply put the blame on the dumb users who reused passwords, but it's reasonable to want to do more.
Why JavaScript is the language to learn.

http://scripting.com/2014/08/15/whatLanguageToLearn.html
I've been thinking a lot about roles in life in the past couple of years.

You are enabling others who feel more compelled to build the environmental dreams by making sure their information is relevant and clean. Garbage in, garbage out. Humans can clean up garbage. Robots can help us clean up garbage faster than we could ourself.
Websites are free to choose either one, both or neither. I think it's a good setup.
Sounds like a geat idea! Thanks!
Taking Art Back -PechaKucha video on inaccessibility and tech possibilities
They seem very slow, given that the videos are 40x. That's not frustrating for students?
I dropped out after my 1L year last summer and could not be happier with the decision. I landed a job working in compliance and have time to teach myself to code or whatever else. Law school is the worst.
Ask HN: A mechanical major, which language to start from scratch and how?
You could teach students HTML/CSS and whatever else you know in technology. You may want to find high school students at first and see how it goes. Or find another audience if you don't want to work with kids. If it takes off, then come up with an e-book or video course. Good luck!
Ohh I'd say about 13 years ago.
isn't think an iOS specific design course?
As we become more powerful as a species I find nothing wrong with proceeding a little more judiciously; a little caution might provent us from going extinct afterall, all at least perhaps encourage a more equitable world and make us better stewards of the planet we live on.

The purpose of sci-fi as always been to provide ethical/moral thought experiments to provide insight regarding possible innovation. Sci-fi is just doing its job.
Check out Before and After Magazine. I think designers literally see differently than non-designers. He covers general design principles that helped me see things in new ways.

http://www.bamagazine.com/
Well ..

""I am the product of a state school, so I am jealous of grammar/scholarship kids, and generally dismissive of private/public school kids.""

.. this is precisely an example of the factors - class-derived - which I believe limit expansion of the student/technology scene in the UK.
I feel the same, almost all resources I know are stating the basics but don't iterate on how to use them.
Maybe you should also post this question on Designer News https://news.layervault.com/ ?
Because their notation is optimal on whiteboards and onerous on computer screens.
In the long distant past I did a stint in TV, dealing with people that sell commercial space during breaks. They could tell you how likely someone was to take out a loan suggested to them during an individual slot on an particular channel, and actively cultivated such audiences to increase revenues. At that point I decided to get out.

It's been saddening to watch this approach spread out of the old media world and take over so much of the tech industry. (See also the Atlantic article on the front page now).
Processor Independent Embedded Platform
Thanks, I didn't know that swift requires the optional to be guarded against.
Thanks. I didn't expect much to be there which is why I did the solar system instead. That and I couldn't pinpoint exactly where it was. Maybe next time.
Ask HN: Betting Game Concept
Hello Fellow Hackers,

I've got an idea about a gambling game on the web. I'd like to learn from the devs about any technical/legal difficulties which I may face while developing such a web-app.
I'd like to have multiple parallel betting scenarios. There would be an incentive for the winners but no (cash) investment for players.

Please advice,

Thanks
And then you'll never be able to rent again. At least through a letting agent, which is how most rentals occur.
I understand your point about other laws overruling contract law, but for housing (and I admit I haven't read the Housing Act(s)), I believe your rights under those acts are dependent on what kind of agreement is in place and the housing situation.
I have been Producing a very large game project with Unity. We have a large team, at times 50+. Our graphics aren't as state of the art as they could be but the performance of the Unity engine does not seem bad. The cross platform compatibillity is very strong. The third party tools are very strong. It's worked out well.

Unity seems like it was built with ease of of entry as a first consideration. As people do larger and more ambitious projects with it they are hitting some of the tradeoffs and limitations. I am sure UE4 is a good choice as well.
Yeah, wow.

"Join not supported
Subselects not supported
'group by' not supported"

At that point you might as well be using MongoDB or what have you.
As a grahic / fine artist that has moved into webDev (JS, java, grails) there is no short cut or easy answer to be an all in one coder / designer. You need the basics of graphic design first: COLOR, DOMINANCE, LAYOUT

COLOR: a good color palette will take any project up a notch
http://www.colourlovers.com/
http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-the...

DESIGN STRUCTURE: much the same way you create Classes that can be extended, you can do some in design. There are Dominate objects in your code that you use to create other object.
----dominant, subdominant, subordinate Design
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/dominance/

Also, if you create a dominate visual design feature, repeat that element(color / pattern / shape) else where on the site, to build consistency

Also for Page Layout, rules in Photography can be a great help. Looks that the Rules of 3rds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds

The most important part of creating anything is inspiration. Pinterest is great for looking at designs, picking what works for you and what doesn't.

You have to understand that all of your early stuff will look like crap. Much the same way we've all said "Wow, that code I wrote 6 months ago is a pile of junk. I'm surprised it's still working."

Alos, buy a sketch book and put it next to your bed. Draw before you go to sleep. Even if you just doodle.

Advanced Typography is not something I recommend right off the bat, as it can lean towards fine art at times
http://www.fromupnorth.com/typography-inspiration-753/
There is also other criticism of Esperanto that's worth reading (imho). Here's a linguist and former Esperanto-proponent's opinion on the community surrounding the language.

http://www.christopherculver.com/writings/esperanto.html
My understanding was that, roughly, if you pay a regular payment as rent for a property then you have an AST - whether the contract says so or not.

This is mainly in the context of house/flat rentals though; I realise that perhaps per-room rentals may have special cases.
At least for now, there is no technology capable of blocking all possible ads in a web page. If somebody wanted to include unblockable ads on their sites, they would. Yet, most sites keep displaying the easiest ones to block, because they violate their readers privacy, and advertizers pay for that violation.

If used ad-blockers, we'd be in a situation that's much more similar to radio.
Show HN: Kiwi for Android Wear – Control your phone with a wave of your hand
As a native English speaker who learned French, I would have to say that pronouncing written French is easier than pronouncing written English. Indeed there are sounds that are very hard to distinguish ("en dessus" versus "en dessous"), but these sounds are a function of your native language. If you are a native Spanish speaker, the sounds you find difficult will be different than those for an English speaker. However, reading French amounts to pronouncing what is written on the page. Granted it is a far cry from Italian, which I've been told has no exceptions concerning pronunciation), but there are many fewer exceptions than English.
Blink won’t implement pointer events
To be honest, I've never desired to be well off. I'm a minimalist by nature and the less I have to worry about, the better. I make enough to do what I need and want to do. I'm content with what I have. I am fortunate enough to have marries a woman with the same sentiments, so we neither want nor need much beyond the basics -- and decent espresso and interesting travel.
Heisenberg Ipsum Generator