skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep forgetting that this whole mess is still ongoing. The articles seem to come in waves -- there'll be a new exposure of how useless the scanners are, lots of noise around that, and sometimes articles about changes to actual policy.

I actually had the impression that the silly Rapiscan (what a lovely name!) scanners had been retired a year or two ago. Then this summer I went back to the US (first time in several years!) and it was worse than ever. In the one visit (involving 4 flights including my arrival to the US and departure from) I twice had to turn down the millimeter wave scanner -- apparently having a baby in a sling on my chest wasn't enough to exclude me -- and so I got to experience (twice) the uncomfortable manual pat down process, including the by-the-book warning that they're going to slide a hand up my inner thigh until they meet "resistance".

On the other hand, I have some fairly ugly memories of arriving in JFK in the past (and going through immigration difficulties), and the airport remains horrible (their computer system went down for a half-hour while we waited to pass immigration...), but the people working there were impressively kind, especially to a family traveling with small children.
That's exactly the way to do it.

I'm really curious how you did that image processing stuff but I suspect it is not in any public repository :)
Doesn't count PAC money. The top of the corp rarely gets attributed for the money the move around. The FEC accounting only applies to worker class.
Show HN: Automate the way you keep your girl happy
https://www.google.com/search?q=socioeconomic%20effects%20on...
No discussion of beam divergence in his calculations?
I think that most people greatly overestimate the sample size needed to achieve statistical significance.
Comments like these make me think that the pro-privacy crowd is officially a cult. I just don't see the argument about anonymized data that you can opt-out of being such a threat to the end user. I love these types of analysis, especially the ones about dating from OK Cupid. Tivo used to reveal all sorts of interesting things about viewership that was very enlightening. I'd hate to lose this data just because a minority think its a threat to their civil rights. There's a reason why no one outside of reddit and HN knows what the EFF is or cares about their mission. It doesn't fit in with most people's politics.

I really think the privacy advocates are holding us back at this point. They refuse to make reasonable concessions and while they think they're fighting the good fight, they've just marginalized themselves to the point where only a tiny extremist minority is engaged because moderate voices are shouted down as "selling out to the man" or the NSA or whoever the villain of the day is.

Its also sad to see a arguably progressive community like HN fall for this stuff. Not only are we doing this stuff all the time, the current fad of health devices, smart watches, etc are going to make this a lot more common. We're like cavemen throwing spears at an enemy with machine guns. Its a fight we've long lost. I think its better for us to focus on privacy issues that are legitimately victimizing instead of railing against anything and everything that kinda sorta rubs us the wrong way.

If anything, the cult of privacy is hurting us because its created a "boy who cried wolf" situation which is now a political liability. How am I supposed to tell Joe Midwest Voter that X is harmful when he keeps hearing about how tracking cookies or Tivo stats or iPhone policies are harmful and didn't give two shits about those either.
Given SpaceX technology, I doubt the government would let them move.
Tag sorting looks really useful, as well as better alias completion.
Google “Knowledge Vault” to Power Future of Search
This is great. You should have an offer a combined zip file with all the mp3's as a $5 download. I would pay for it.
There's a MOOC going on that explores the "learn how to learn" theme:

https://class.coursera.org/learning-001
Gnome sequencing? Follow these three steps:
1. Steal underpants.
2. ???
3. Profit.
The captcha was introduced to Project Euler a few years ago in response to someone spamming the site with requests to check an answer.

Apparently, someone had trouble with a question, so they wrote a script to submit every possible number.
Nice audio site. Let us know if you would like us to feature your site in our gallery. Email us at developer@bestbuy.com to discuss the process.
Leap.it Wants to Open a New Front in the Battle for Search
A possible solution is prepaid, which is followed in a lot of industries (ex: telecom)

With Uber, you can prepay per month a certain amount with all the two factor authentication and just use it. I understand the complications like how can we authenticate the user when he/she boards and make sure the account has (enough) credit, etc. But I think they should be workable.
I would try to buy enough land to start building cities or compounds in various places.

Ultra efficient, lots of solar power and initially strong infrastructure, health care. I'd fail a time or two and might not be able to do everything at once, but i*d surely try. Living there would cost a portion of income, but included would be internet and housing and electricity and health care and things like that. Possibly healthy food if I can figure that out.

Yeah, definitely a dream :)
Attempt to make money very efficiently, in any way reasonably practical and moral, particularly ways which are hard to duplicate absent having a billion dollars in your back pocket.

Give it to someone who had demonstrated ability to turn money into positive charitable outcomes, in preference to giving it to the government or typical NGOs, who mostly have demonstrated ability to turn it into sinecures. Better yet, give it to many such someones in parallel, because portfolio theory exists.

Continue maximizing on my comparative advantage in wealth generation as opposed to being comparatively ineffective but personally involved with charity, for the purpose of impressing people in cocktail conversation. Charity is, like heart surgery for my children, something I value highly enough to leave to very expensive dedicated professionals.
Step by step guide to extract insights from free text
Why should he have to be subtle about working for atlassian? Unless he's actively trying to sell us something I don't think it matters.
I'd try to fund a network of after-school/summer activity centers for the west and south sides of Chicago.
In a big comanies all three roles need a very different skill set, because of politics, splitting saying and doing and so on. In a start up environments skills needed for all three roles are very similar.
Consider that programming doesn't have to be linear - while legal documents need to be printed on a piece of paper. Granted, they have limited non-linearity (references to prior pages, pointers, etc.) but it generally has to be readable on physical paper.

For natural language programming to work, computers simply need to be capable of making prudent guesses - so long as we show the information clearly, we can always fix those guesses. We can allow for limited instances of constructed languages, rewiring connections between words, etc.
Software developers have slight advantage: compilers, unlike judges usually have consistent interpretations of all the rules and laws.
Teaching machines to read between the lines
The counterpoint would be Inform 7 [1], a natural language-based programming language for interactive fiction.

[1] http://inform7.com/
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I think my point still stands though. I'd be more inclined to believe there's a serious terrorist problem if something like that was happening once or twice a year.

As it stands, if you live in the US at least, it seems your child has a greater chance of being gunned down by a classmate at school than blown up by a terrorist.
Why is the bar lower for juvenile detention?
The same could be said of "natural language contracts" and "natural language laws and regulations". Lawyers get hounded for "legalese" but its just a form of code--based on but deviated from natural language--to try to overcome the inherent inefficiencies of natural language.
Validating the idea with early adopters. Our experience with Betalist
That would require us to first create "Strong AI" and it is still not proven whether that is at all possible.
Yeah, it's actually very logical once people drop their emotionally charged attitude towards "the corporations". I'd rather see US corporate cash in US bank accounts to be spent on a mix of continued innovation, local job creation and dividends to investors.

There's the other side also - the US would effectively become a corporate tax haven. That in combination with our long standing excellent legal system, would likely be an impetus for foreign companies to incorporate in the US opposed to say Hong Kong or London.

You'd think the attitude of the "land of the free" would be "open for business" instead of so adversarial.
Why not support a common online/mobile billing system for regular cabs?
Agreed. If you or I were to detain someone against their will for an extended time, its called 'kidnapping' and is a capital crime in some states. Definitely imprisonment is a violent act.
Famo.us support in Atom.io
It looks like it should actually point to http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/shutting-down-uber-...
An encyclopedia of pollenating insects, with repositories of all the research about those insects.
I've been working with a natural language conversational agent for the last few months, creating a simulated personality from a novel, as a promotion for the novel. Natural language opens up a huge host of unreasonable expectations from the user, but more interesting is the utter gibberish people enter thinking they are conversing. When I say utter gibberish, that is exactly what people enter: sentence fragments with no subject, no verb and no correct spellings outside of "a", even "the" is most often spelled "teh". I suspect "natural language" makes people relax, but even when we hook in ASR (automated speech recognition) to get away from the gibberish spellings, the "sentences" people enter do not make sense. To some degree, I believe people are testing the limits of the natural language and knowledge base backing it, but too many of the "conversations" reveal an expectation of unreal super knowledge, like "you should know what I'm hinting, even though I can't spell or describe it"
One can argue for payment reforms in India. But Uber, by knowingly ignoring the norms, had gained an unfair advantage over local services (Olacabs, Taxiforsure, Meru, etc). This levels the playing field.
It's sad to see him buying into this silliness:

> Remark. As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate.
Here's a talk by Geoffrey Hinton back in 2007 about Deep Learning neural networks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M
It's been in mainstream news for about that long, perhaps. The term itself is considerably older.
Haven't you heard of Russian toilets?
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/02/article-2550427-1B...
"But a mere million dollars for the lives of thousands of people? That makes a human life worth < $1000 per head to this judge."

I expect he was telling himself that these kids weren't great kids to begin with, and probably basically deserved to be in juvie anyway.

(I'm not sure that makes it better, and it's atrocious regardless, but it is a slightly different perspective).
BURN HEEEEM!
Why do you want to compile the unit test separately?
Yeah I think that attitude partly comes from the cultural idea that once you have children, you're supposed to sacrifice everything for their future (financial) prosperity. So there's an extremely high emphasis on education. The idea seems to be, work as much as possible and make your kids study as much as possible so that they can get into the best schools, and so that you can afford to pay for it. But the result is that the adults are so busy working and the kids so busy studying, that they don't spend nearly enough time together. There is no time left to enjoy each other's company, or enjoy life itself. It's just an endless grind.
Tried to visit gogs demo page, but "502 Bad Gateway", so I'll stay with Gitlab for quite a while.

A lot of people mentioned that Gitlab installation is painful, but for me it was rather simple albeit a bit long. Probably the "IKEA effect" makes me love this awesome project even more.
This guy made an attempt - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

Reading 'round trip' translations via Ithkuil is interesting.

Our father in heaven

hallowed be your name

May the [metaphorical] environment which fosters/sustains your rule eventually [metaphorically] permeate us

As for your aspirations, may they be made real

on Earth, not just in heaven

please be one who enables us to eat and drink our critical sustenance

And forgive us in regard to our moral transgressions in the way we grant and receive forgiveness amongst each other

may we successfully avoid having desires [that are] against our better judgement)

and be one who enables us to successfully avoid ideas associated with the Devil).

Without poetry, things are more clearly weird.
Digital Health Is Y Combinator's Next Hot Area of Investment
Well, it was a bad move in the first place to play around with loopholes on part of Uber. Though its services are a win-win for Indian Customers,.. Uber started on a wrong note in the first place.

There are hundreds of MNC operating in India, including global giants like Pepsi, MS, etc. Though they are not entirely clean themselves especially when it comes to factors such as environmental clearances, at least on paper none of them messes with RBI's financial guidelines. It is the RBI's job, to check anyone who is playing with the financial rules in place in India. Had Uber tried to negotiate, and negotiate hard.. it wouldn't have ended up shutting down.

Uber had a good chance to learn from Paypal, and what led to its demise was exactly the same thing .. avoiding the extra precautionary measures in place in India. Instead of giving in to RBI, taking a stubborn stand. The CEO was supposed to innovate the strategy at this point.

Amazon had previously kept itself away from the same tangle, and for years Indian e-commerce was dominated by ebay, until recently. Amazon re-entered the Indian market, albeit on attempt 3 or 4 now as Amazon.in

Now that is done and over, Uber's re-entry would become much harder, cause as they say "first impression is the last impression"
New CEO of Yandex (Russian Google)
Dijkstra is wrong on this one. Siri and Cortana have already achieved this for trivial classes of programs, and they will only improve.

People comparing natural language programming to EULAs are missing the point entirely: natural language input guides a search process for formal programs, it isn't literally "the program" itself.
It isn't too tricky finding places use Scala. Most of my dev work is done in Scala.
How to become famous
This reminds me of Inform 7. The source code for the language is pretty much plain English. I like this because programs are read more often than they are written, and it's usually very easy to read a program and see what's going on. But the syntax is still pretty limited, and it only understands certain ways of expressing things. So you still have to learn the syntax and very specific semantics, even though the language looks like English.
I've noticed the limitation of natural language frequently. Sometimes, its just the inability of natural language to deal with levels of abstraction precisely. Sometimes, its the large assumed domain context that accompanies the use of natural language when describing procedures.

I had clients once where both of these limitations prevented us from being able to produce a product for them. They where incredibly successful Wall Street types. They wanted a software system written that would automate some of what they did. They were traders, but not interested in high velocity trading. After a weeks of meetings about high level goals, we had a meeting to finally get down to specifics about the procedures and functionality that they wanted. They simply couldn't describe in precise language what they did! They had been doing it for years and years very successfully, but we couldn't help them because they couldn't describe what they did. It was very odd.

They worked with sophisticated mathematical models and strange rules of thumb, the morning news, and the perceived level of activity on the exchange floor. Some of them used fancy interactive graphs while others relied on a simple printout of a spreadsheet full of numbers.

The universe they worked in was very complex and involved decision making that, apparently, was hard to describe in words. Imaging a world class boxer trying to put into words the algorithm that he used to win a match. It was a bit like that.
"When you finish a taxi ride, between two to ten minutes are wasted in dealing with the payment."

How? On what planet? This takes about 30 seconds, tops. Why is the driver digging around for change? Are you too cheap to round the tip to the next bill?

To solve the problem Uber solves please read the following handy tips:

1. Carry cash, in your wallet, if you're unfamiliar with it, you may obtain it at an ATM.

2. As you're approaching your destination look at the meter, this will be roughly the amount of cash you'll need. Move the decimal to the right one digit and multiply by 2, this is the tip. Add it to the amount on the meter.

3. Select the closest amount of bills to this amount eg. 20.57 means a $20 bill.

4. Hand this to the driver, say 'keep the change' and get out of the car.
It reminded me of some of Rob Cockerham's experiments as well.
Why support a middleman?
> parsing out the man pages

https://github.com/idank/explainshell
Told you it was a cop-out argument. I'm just telling you what my experience was when encountering this topic, and then my conclusion after revisiting it many times over the course of a dozen years or so.
I find it curious that in one tweet, they state something along the lines of "you cannot find me, i am god". Attributing yourself to be or have any qualities of a god is a big no-no in Islam. Some sects will go as far as to proclaiming new prophets and whatnot, but calling yourself god is out of the question. These kids are definitely not ISIS, Muslim nor l33t.
If some people reading this would like to make a positive contribution, but donating an entire kidney is a little too much for them, I highly encourage you to sign up for the bone marrow donor registry: http://bethematch.org/
Burger King in Talks to Buy Tim Hortons
I'd been curious about this one since it was released in the early 80's. I wrote an emulation in python to satisfy my curiosity. (https://github.com/deadsy/py_z80) My general conclusion was that the hardware wasn't good enough (monochrome competing with the ZX Spectrum's color) and that Forth didn't offer enough advantages over BASIC to warrant significant usage. It's an interesting design though, and it's good to see how they built their Forth system in an 8K ROM.
I agree. I'm just repeating, and adding a little commentary to what I get told whenever I ask why any particular position requires a degree.

Want to be a tech writer? Samples aren't good enough. Gotta have a degree - any degree. But you have to have a degree.

So who ever made that rule had a reason at the time: expediency, prejudice, ignorance. But it's a widespread practice, and describing it does equate with condoning it.
The title of this post is clickbait. Uber is not being shut down in India.

The RBI rule requiring a one time pin for all online transactions is unwise, a huge barrier to good UX, and should be removed.

Having said that, Uber is not being shutdown in India. Even if no changes are made to this rule by the Oct 31 deadline, which of the following is more likely: Uber leaving a country with several hundred million potential users, or Uber (and every other company who does online transactions) changing their UI flow to accommodate the RBI requirement?

Disclaimer: My company Summon competes directly with Uber.
Payment Regulations, Innovation and the Case of Uber in India
Published Papers of Michael “Not the Singer” Jackson
1) We do degrade restarts over time.
2) There is hierarchy (so it will start linked containers).
Teaching robots by scraping the web
> Accordingly, I'd argue that this is a more accurate representation of market cap (view by total supply): http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/market-cap-by-tota...

That one is going to be fun if we (Ethereum) decide to premine 2^200 ether into a few standard-library contracts (eg. ecrecover, bloom filters, data structures) to compensate people a few microcents per call for the mismatch between their gas cost in a naive EVM implementation and their actual execution cost...

Edit: although I suppose you could argue that currency units which are existent, but which cannot be accessed for 1000000000000000000000000000000 years because they are locked up in a contract that no one can open up at anything more than a trickle rate, actually inexistent. Will get complicated in any case.
When people gain a certain authority by being very smart in a narrow field, they often use it to talk about the problems of society in general.

Because though they are an expert in their small field, but no more informed or unbiased than your friend at the pub, they end up sounding dumb.

In this and some of other writings, he would do well to think and gather data about social issues, or talk mostly about algorithms.
OpenStack can stand on its own, whatever happens to Rackspace
OTOH, If you can communicate to me in a certain way with euphemisms and idioms, then all the information that I get can be gotten from that communication.

It's not an impossible task, just a difficult one.
Hmm... interesting idea, I have a feeling this startup may have the technology you're looking for.

http://www.moneyfactory.gov/
This hard http://www.illinoisherald.com/articles/2014/q3/illinois-gop-...
Well, sometimes we get things like C++11's `auto`, which do let you trade formality for brevity.
It's helpful sometimes, but can cause misunderstandings, just like natural language pronouns.
This is the chief reason I'd support the "Anyone can learn to code" programs suddenly en vogue. We need our business owners - ideally customers - to be able to consider what exactly they want and don't want. We never need a line of code from them, but as long as they have the ability to consider their domain accurately, a good developer should be able to extract it from them.
RunAbove instances and object storage users benefit from 3Tbps+ worldwide network
I always marvel how our legal systems manage not to collapse given the imprecise language they use. So while they have similar problems it seems to me that they are just ignoring them for the moment and let somebody else figure out what the precise meaning is if the necessity arises.
Old versions of Windows, such as XP, (mostly) no longer have security patches. That is a Big Problem™, not just for someone running it, but for anyone on the same network as anyone running it.

If you think there hasn't been an apocalypse, all that means is no-one's found a tasty-enough wormable exploit yet. But it's going to happen, and when it does, please forgive me if I point and laugh at you.

Please let it die, already.
How Cisco Rescued a Startup from a Nasty Dispute Over a Website
Car collectors actively work to keep their pride and joy in tip top condition.

People don't actively work at keeping their WinXP computer in good condition.