skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that the UK is still considered the most classist country in Europe.. to an outsider, the confusing arrays of 'types of people' that you would encounter during a trip to the UK, as described by its denizens, lends credence to this view. "Don't talk to that chav, mate!", or "yes, she's an upper-class type, went to school so-and-so", and "well, you're an engineer .. how very working class of you .." are all statements I have encountered with random people on the street during my brief visits to the UK, and it was quite unnerving just how ingrained this mode of thinking is in the populace. British TV seems to be nothing but a war of the classes.

So I'm not sure you'd understand, unless you left for a while and came back. The British have a reputation for it - this can't be because the rest of the world hates Britain for some reason (there are legitimate reasons), but has to have some bearing in the truth of the circumstance. Classism is a very real thing in the UK - especially as a result of its education system, and in spite of many attempts at reform.

EDIT: An interesting article on the subject:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5165594/Britains-clas...

And here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2303333/Great-Britis...

.. and more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...

.. and well, this pretty much clinches it - the UK is a classist society:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22007058
Thinking about this some more; I think I can articulate my concern a bit more distinctly:

Given that I have two systems, on a network in which I know an adversary wishes to deduce the ports I am advertising (as illustrated by the paper's concern over a MitM attack), how do I distribute my shared secret in such a way that my adversary does not deduce it, and does not require a secure channel that would invalidate the need for this mechanism in the first place?

I'm no cryptography expert, but from the portions I do know, the challenge is in key distribution. I feel like that is completely missing from the paper, and without it, it limits this mechanism's feasibility enormously.
Of course they care about their image, as any arrogant group of individuals would. It's just her shock and dismay at their blunders and infighting seems a bit out of place.
This sounds a lot like mysql proxy (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-proxy.html), which afaik is not recommended for production use.

I would very much like to know what the differences are (apart from the choice of programming language) and how stable this is.
Cool to see Microsoft working together with the Tor project. I'm a bit surprised.
World cup goals by time
Designers Guide To DPI
High-level advice and guidelines for writing sane, manageable, scalable CSS
Flexplorer
Right - I can resize my browser so that the web page is most readable to me, because it defaults to full width. I can't resize my newspaper or magazine, so they don't default to full width.
why dont't the robots move at the same time? would be much quicker
In Wake of Clashes, Calls to Demilitarize Police
The sound I get when I open this page is pretty sharp, noisy and unpleasant. I prefer it when websites have that turned off by default (unless it's obvious that the web-page involves a video that I'm supposed to be watching or something like that).
FAA Bans Planesharing Startups
From the image in the article it looks to me like the researchers are using commercial software from Agisoft, called PhotoScan[0].

For free (but not enitrely OS) you can look at VisualSfM[1], which is a GUI which pulls together a variety of separate tools to generate SfM. You can run all these tools seperately too, VisualSfM just vastly simplifies things. The author (Changchang Wu, now at Google) has a couple of interesting papers on the algorithims[2].

Both the commercial and the free software largely give you the same quality of result, the commercial stuff is just usually much much easier to work with.

As always, quality of your source imagery is paramount. I can't over emphasise how much
geo-referenced images will help you. Second best is some "ground control points" (ideally with GPS locations). I've had limited success with completely unreferenced datasets but it is a slow process.

My workflow with GoPro video is to first defisheye the footage in CineForm Studio (there are other ways, but I find their defisheyeing to be pretty good), then I grab a frame every second or so from the footage depending on how fast I was flying around the object of interest. Too much data can almost be as bad as too little data!

[0] http://www.agisoft.ru/
[1] http://ccwu.me/vsfm/
[2] http://ccwu.me/vsfm/vsfm.pdf
I would actually recommend against using JS as your first, since it's so atypical.
While it looks like it's an impossible language to use in every day, I'm wondering if it could be used for science and technology. Just imagine having all scientific papers in it :)
This is why I really like learning math through MOOCS (with pause/rewindable videos) despite them having a number of other drawbacks.
So, AOL? When AOL merged with Time Warner they made the various Time Warner magazine sites subscriber-only unless you were on AOL.

Edit: Oh, and what makes you think the advertising wouldn't come back eventually? When cable TV came out one of it's big selling points was no ads. Then, someone realized: "Hey, we can make even more money if we sell ads on top of the subscription fee." Nobody is going to resist the temptation to stuff ads into every nook and cranny unless it causes them to lose more revenue from losing customers than they gain in ad revenue, which never seems to happen.
Machine Learning with the Numl Library
The problem is clearly not simple enough that you can, say, show us a CLI two-liner which will deploy a database and frontend that are unbreakable.

Ergo, I find it quite plausible that people who are doing this in their spare time chose to avoid this task.
>how can you appreciate a random piece of music for which you have no background information?

For one, up to now, it was assumed it was from some human artist. Which is the case with 99.999% of the pieces out there.

Second, it depends on the listening habits. Some people can like a piece of art, but they only get really involved when they delve into the biographical details of the artist. For them, the artist, and the intentions he has, mean more than the individual songs. That's the root cause of fandom of course...
I was interested for a source, so I found this:

http://www.greens-efa.eu/nuclear-safety-in-europe-following-...

"23. Calls on the Commission, the Member States, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and other public banks to freeze public funding for nuclear fusion, including ITER, or fission, except for the decommissioning of nuclear facilities;"

What the hell? I just don't understand the Green parties sometimes and could never support them while they still do rubbish like this.
>In summary, then… as long as people understand the ways accents vary (a body of knowledge which will clearly be one of the main influences on the system's rules, but which any Cockney already needs for communication with non‐Cockneys), there is no reason to imagine that there are any insurmountable problems here

I'm not sure how the author comes to that conclusion. Assuming, as he does, that this isn't intended to fix pronunciation, all it does is introduce a new set of inconsistent spellings.

For example, my wife pronounces "pass" and "parse" pretty much the same way, where as I pronounce "pass" in the same way as "ass", but pronounce "parse" in the same way as her. As far as I can see, there's no one consistent way to spell all of these words so that they make phonetic sense to both of us.

Or you've got "scone", should that use the same phonetic spelling as "cone" or "one"?
Lawyer here-- graduated in the 1990's. I do enjoy being a lawyer, but I have a solid job working for a government agency where my particular skills and area of expertise (a relatively obscure set of federal regulations) are valued and I have interesting co-workers. I would not want to work for a large firm, however, even though I theoretically could be paid much more.

Before I went to law school, I worked for over a year in a small law office, where I was taught the old fashioned way how to do legal research; I enjoyed the heck out of it. All my life I've been the kind of person who likes to look up stuff just for fun.

Funny what you say about LSAT test prep-- actually taking the LSAT was one of the most enjoyable, exhilarating moments in my life. For those who haven't taken it, it's basically a test of reading comprehension and logic puzzles, all taken at breakneck speed. I've always been able to read more quickly than most, and I enjoy logic and mathematics so it's not like these skills were new to me, I felt like I'd been preparing for it my whole life. It was like doing a speed run down a mountainside, but with my mind. I scored at the 99.3%.

I also really enjoyed law school, and I wound up graduating at the top 5% of my law school class.

However, it really, really isn't for everyone.
Anyone tried Kivy for game development? I'm interested in brushing up my Python and was thinking about making a game that could be OpenGL accelerated, and it seemed like a good match.
"Zero: The Bibliography of a dangerous idea" was quite a memorable book for me, and goes into some good detail on those very points - even trying to guesstimate just how damage to progress of civilization by the numerous rejections of zero at several points in our early history. http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Zero.html?id=obJ70nxV...
> I had to parse this to support man pages, and I assume the default TTY still does too.

Actually, it's less that interprets this and converts it into the appropriate terminal formatting, not the TTY itself.
"Security through obscurity"
History is written by the victors - there for those Brits who took up arms and went to fight in Spain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War ) are remembered as freedom fighters, fighting the good fight, but those today that want to go to Syria or other modern battlegrounds are (currently) viewed as terrorists. Only the future will know how we will refer to them in 50 or 100 years time...
Samsung buys Kickstarter-backed startup for $200M
Very good points here. The prevailing advice for entrepreneurs from folks like Steve Blank is that you must "get out of the building" and be physically in front of customers to interview them, but in my experience 95% of customers would never tell an entrepreneur their product/idea sucks right to their face.

As for pricing, I've found that asking people "What do you think a fair and reasonable price for X would be?," followed by the follow-up as to why, is the best way to ask about pricing (in a qualitative setting, at least).
Why is this unlikely?

Last time I worked a traditional job I would get back after a couple of weeks away to find hundreds of emails. Many were corporate spam, sure, but the majority of the rest were time-sensitive requests for my input which you may as well file straight to trash, if you can figure out which ones are now irrelevant.

Far better to have an auto-trasher and a notice to say 'ask me again in two weeks if this is important'
Faces as a linear combination of cats [pdf]
For more a startup mostly tech career fair in London there is the popular Silicon Milkroundabout. https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/ Milkround 8 is in November.
It's not banned, Raikkonen changed his Lotus wheelbase mid-season.
I'd strongly recommend checking out the book "Lean Customer Development". Will hold your hand through the entire process of this aspect of it.
Dawn Raid IPhone App Latest Weapon as Lawyers Battle Regulators
What is your preferred computer? If Windows, then I must agree with myddle's recommendation of Python.
Font Analysis in Python
Keep It Simple.

Not storing personal information now removes a whole class of work you have to do. While you store personal information, you need to spend time keeping on top of security patches and issues. It means you need to worry about legal obligations.

If you just don't store it, you don't have to worry about that. You need to spend less time per month maintaining the project. If you're a volunteer project, you might not have the time available to keep on top of it.
Law should be an undergraduate major you can switch out of when you don't like it, not something you have to invest three years and $150k into. The expense pushes people towards jobs that might not be the best fit for them. My friends doing public interest work, small law, or plaintiffs' work are almost uniformly happy. Most of my friends at large firms are counting the days until they can go in-house.

For my wife and I, there isn't anything we'd rather be doing. But we're probably in the minority on that, and frankly we had no idea we'd like the field so much when we signed up to make those tuition payments. We just got lucky. Maybe schools should just offer refunds.
Experiment on the effect of body-worn cameras on police use-of-force (2013) [pdf]
He was from one of the oldest Patrician families in Rome. I think you're under-estimating his family name and connections.
It's been a while since Kissinger said that (1974, as far as I've been able to determine). I wonder if the new stats that show that affluence (the creation of a middle class) results in a slower population growth would change his opinion.
Here's a less extensive article I read a while ago: http://fob.po8.org/student-code
Yes, that's the list I was thinking of. The linked discussion was interesting. Good find! Perhaps the GnuPG devs are right that hex finger prints are more internationally viable than English words.
I should preface this by saying that I love Project Euler--I spent a ton of time there while learning to program. I also am impressed by anyone who volunteers to create something for the community, and invests effort in maintaining it.

However, not storing emails, and thereby giving up account recovery with the explanation that it's about security is a shit sandwich.

My email is <myfirstname>.<mylastname>@gmail.com, a pattern I share with millions of people. This is public information. I could spray paint my email address on local bridges without in any way making my email less secure (cops might complain, though).

I understand that some people have reasons to have private email addresses that they don't want released (they'll give them to family, but not the general public). They should never sign up for anything with those email addresses, because the moment you sign up for things, you will almost certainly be entered in a database somewhere, and eventually be spammed or subjected to whatever other bad consequences you're concerned about.

Account recovery is a basic feature of a website (except those that contain data too sensitive to have account recovery), and they're giving it up for phantom security.
Things I see in student code (2010)
How to clean data using approximate string matching
I was thinking that this could be used similar to a session key in an application. So if you made a web server, you could allow all traffic to say: /login that then recieves the key after authentication. This could then be used to reach the secure area of your application, and anyone without the secure key cant even detect that part of the app.
Likely because the author is a math professor and those concepts are typically only covered in CS department courses.
She seems to be doing an end-run around the AMA and the states that require a Certificate of Need by installing these devices in drugstores. I think the ultimate goal would be for doctors like yourself to have one in their office.
Why finish?

I left law school in the middle of my second year to start a business. Typically, when I talk to non-practicing lawyers now, they say "I wish I did that".

If you're sure you don't want to do law, then finishing it + passing the bar is pure waste. Time is precious. Your 20s are especially precious.

It sounds like you've got a year or two left on this path. That's 10-20% of your 20s. What does it get you?
Who cares about going bear-hunting bare-chested? It's not like he's strangling the bears or engaging in close-combat.

There's not much you could wear that would protect you from a bear, which is why hunters (including Putin) shoot them from a distance with a rifle.
Highways are shit? I'm from Europe, but have drove lots in the US, and the US interstate system is one of the best in the world. Definitely not "shit".

What do you compare it to? The Auto-bahn in Germany? That's like 1/100 the length.

Heck, even Route 66 is mighty fine compared to other places, and that's not even officially supported anymore, nor the main road.
Anyone interested in creating an open source version? It could have more features - such as running the code online, and more topics - such as non-math challenges.
I got a free account and spent an evening or two trying to figure out what app.net was supposed to be, and I gave up. I get the feeling it was supposed to be something more than the ghost town Twitter-clone it appears to be, but I couldn't figure it out. Email's purpose, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.
I don't think they'd likely be way off what's available, but I also think if you're buying 5 Million drives (probably over X years) -- I'm sure you can get some customizations done. So, considering 4tb ssd drives are now arriving in consumer markets -- that does change the equation a bit. And if you plan for 16tb drives in the next 3 years?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/29/sandisk_bigs_up_ssd_...
Does George Soros know something we don’t about the S&P 500?
What led to you choosing the field of law over programming?
Robin William's Last Gift
Very interesting article. I teach at a college and have followed Minerva with interest.

> But then I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.

One point not much addressed is that, while this style of education sounds great for the top five or ten percent of students, that leaves a large number that I (and I have experience with them) wonder about. There is some bias in people who went to top schools, and succeeded there, thinking about the way they would have liked to have been taught.

If a student has not done the reading, or not done the homework, or does not participate in class, do they get an F? Currently you work with people, trying to bring them along. Changing that would be a very sharp change in the current practice of education. (Or, will this education method lead to students doing the reading? That's a wonderful and tantalizing hope.)

That's by no means to put down the innovations, which are exciting. That's only to observe that often a person's thinking is influenced by who they are, and their experience.
I don't mind at all, please do! Glad you like it.
Figuring out the truths from falsehoods is an art. Sorry, but there you have it. The so-called "Scientific Method" is just mechanics and formalities of what generally convinces people about certain claims.

apu's recommended reading and viewings (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", and Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed") are excellent starting points in your personal explorations into this.

Another worthwhile reading comes from Issac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong" (http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html ). I think he may have been an inspiration to the notion of science as an enterprise at being "less wrong", per this redacted snippet: John Campbell [Asimov's editor], who specialized in irritating me [...] told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts...
I think what is important is the LACK of critical articles out there. Where was the counterpoint in this article, or the recent Fortune article. I run a hospital laboratory in Seattle, and I am a clinical pathologist. Like Elizabeth Holmes, I studied Chemistry at Stanford, although I did graduate. Everyone in the lab world is a-twitter about Theranos right now, up to the CEOs of the big companies, largely because no one knows what they are doing. Everyone who goes and talks to them, including interviews for a job, signs a CDA, so this isn't surprising. However, there are several things we can know:
1- the big name folks on the board are Hoover Institution connections. No surprise there, I knew all those guys were there when I was at Stanford, and she was connected with them early. The person who commented about the importance for these links when it comes to FDA problems is right on.
2- what these people are doing for lab testing, in terms of technology, sounds totally revolutionary IF YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT CLINICAL LABS. If you did know, you would understand that most of our routine instruments ALREADY use a couple microliters for an assay, and that results are available in seconds to minutes. There has never been an article about Holmes that mentions this. What she has done with microfluidics is to reduce dead volume quite a bit to allow overall lower sample volumes, but this is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, change to instrumentation. It is also of dubious clinical value (more on this later).
3- the fact that they list their prices IS revolutionary, and it's the best thing about the company. I wish I could do at for my lab. Secrecy of pricing is one of the major problems with Us healthcare.
4- no one writing any of these articles about her understands that fingerstick blood is not the same as venous blood. It is blood mixed with interstitial fluid from the tip of the finger. The results of tests are different for analytes in venous bold and fingerstick blood. Thus,they need to do a clinical validation that their results are meaningful, in addition to an analytical validation to prove that they're accurate. This is where the FDA, as they did to 23andme, is going to get involved, unless Don Rumsfeld can head them off. If LAb Developed Tests get regulated in the coming years, though, they are totally screwed, just like I am.
5- many people don't know that you can already get lab tests done on finger stick blood, ie prick your finger at home and mail in the blood or take it to participating Walmarts. The reason for this, I suspect, is that the companies that do this are not headed by an attractive blond woman and enveloped in the shroud of mystery of a Silicon Valley.

I will be interested to see how long it takes before a serious "the emperor has no clothes" article will come out in a mass media outlet, and someone who actually runs a lab or knows any of the rules of running labs is asked even one question. It is much less sexy of a story when told that way, so maybe never.