skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Couldn't some form of proof-of-work system be used to increase the cost of sending a message without it having much of an economic impact on a casual sender? Was that what he was alluding to with the "burning bitcoin" reference?

The idea seems to be that you provably "burn" a small amount of Bitcoin to get an identity. An innocent person can then carry on using that identity forever without doing any more computation. Meanwhile a spammer will ruin that identity's reputation almost immediately and then have to pay again to get another one.
The Cult of Jeff Koons
Yep! Sounds like a pretty big problem. With 10,000 scanning processes taking 5/sec per IP, it'd take less than a month to scan all IPs. It should be easy for a powerful adversary to scale this up and finish in a day or two. It'd take more work if all ports need to be scanned, but restricting to just known hosting blocks could shave a bit off. As could eliminating well-known good sites from a first pass.

It would surprise me if the FBI isn't already doing this for all known onion sites, just to have the info around.

At any rate, sounds like a real basic Opsec101 failure on The Silk Road. Not that hidden services are that safe in the first place. The Tor folks have written about how hidden services are quite vulnerable to some attacks. Not something I'd want to rely on to save me from a 30 year sentence.

Edit: If someone had to run a hidden service, it might make sense to setup another onion site (on another Tor instance) and expose that on port 80, as part of misinformation tactic. Reading several incidents, it seems attackers will use circumstancial evidence to help narrow down the possibilities. By intentionally leaking things (like offhand comments about the weather, using reports from another city) one might be able to gain a few more bits of anonymity back. Of course someone doing such a thing wouldn't setup their illegal site on a public IP in the first place.
Reminds me of a parable in I think an old Hardy Boys book. First, pound a bunch of nails in a board. Now remove the nails. Now remove the holes.
The golden steps to success
You think spammers aren't going to read it too?
The thing is that it's much worse everywhere else, the Scala devs just work with it in a more transparent way.
Dude. Have you even read what I've been saying? The MTA are ripping YOU off! They are thieving from you!
When people decide to change the law.

If you think drugs should be illegal, then justice was served here. If you don't think drugs should be illegal, then it wasn't.

Either way, Shrem's behavior seems pretty idiotic to me, from start to finish.
Having worked in the front office at a JPMo competitor for several years, most people around me certainly hate IT.

This is because our IT is diligent and wants to do things correctly and follow standards and practice. But there is no effort to educate the money makers to this effect, they just want results yesterday. So they bitch and wine about IT being a blackhole where requests go to die. And I agree with them in many cases as someone who's sort of midway between these people.
Apparently it supports 10 bpp input, so raise the bandwidth required by 25% for a 10bit workflow.

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/news_archive/31.htm#dell_up2715k
Not knowing much about it, I'd guess that companies are valued generally not on their assets, but their potential for future profits. Assets like cash are just a small piece of what will determine their future profit. Unless they don't have much prospect for future profit, then the cash would become a bigger deal.
Most people replying here will be as sarcastic as I was - but there is a serious question here which i'm certain Ulbricht's defense will ask and challenge. The motions filed leading up to this FBI filing have all been about cornering the FBI into revealing this information specifically so they could challenge it (knowing the information wasn't obtained with a warrant).

On that note it seems like his lawyers are performing well, they have challenged absolutely everything in pre-trial motions and there have been some interesting rulings (they've lost almost all of them).

Warrantless surveillance of foreign servers plus the domestic "general warrants"[0], "bitcoin isn't money"[1], his hacking charge under the CFAA[2] and now a likely challenge to the server evidence that was found by "manipulating inputs" (which is interesting to contrast to Ulbricht's own hacking charge).

Both the motion to dismiss and the judges ruling are interesting reads:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/215745393/USA-v-Ulbricht-motion-to...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/233234104/Forrest-Denial-of-Defens...

I'd be interested to know what an experience lawyer or trial specialist thinks of how it has been going so far. I have yet to find a good opinion piece on the topic.

[0] http://freeross.org/feds-silk-road-investigation-broke-priva...

[1] http://www.wired.com/2014/07/silkroad-bitcoin-isnt-money/

[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/judge-denies-silk...
I would like to find a Bluetooth keyboard in a folding case, that when opened up had a recessed spot to hold the phone, and a big magnifying (12 inch?) lens in the front. Possibly a Fresnel lens, if it can be made so that the ridges doesn't distort the screen image and cause weird patterns.
Yes, people do it here a lot. The Wall Street Journal comments section, for example, is unbearable because it's simply full of negative comments. I don't mind people being critical because sometimes negative people are actually well informed. Unfortunately, there's too much fire and forget without any accountability. Anyway, we just need to figure a way to raise the bar in such a way that real information is passed on rather than unadulterated opinion.
more likely that they were under staffed and didn't have funding to hire a compliance officer
The wget command (Win32) didn't work for me until I removed the backslash in the URL.
This is great news for people that want to sell their startup to Yahoo (who will be flush with cash), or are seeking capital in general. Many people who will be getting a huge payday at the IPO will be flush and soon looking for their next investment.
> So if they will never pay dividends, why is their stock worth anything?

Because stock is a claim against the assets in the event of dissolution, so it should be valuable as long as the company is expected to have a positive net worth.

Dividends are simply a mechanism allowing stockholders to realize value prior to dissolution. Of course, so is simply selling stock.

Further, if Amazon runs out of good opportunities to funnel operating returns into expansion, then it would make sense to start returning some via dividends, its just that its not there yet and that situation isn't even apparent on the horizon -- its not that they'll never pay dividends, its just that it doesn't seem to be the optimum strategy for the foreseeable future.
Make sure you read the DNSBL rfc if you implement that :)
This sounds a lot like DCC. Have you considered adding it into your filtering layer?
Neo-Luddism's Tech Skepticism
I suspect that spammers already have their own.
Heh +1 to `trailing commas! I think that's the only "feature".` I don't know why they were removed in the first place.
Ouch. In retrospect, seems like they could have almost brute-forced it, if they had a narrow enough block of IP addresses they thought it was in. Fetch the root page on all the IP addresses looking for something that looks like SR.
Indeed. But that's their own claim, not supported by any cited independent source.

They may be at 15% of some undefined subset of farms (e.g. wheat, corn, or soybean farms larger than n acres) or something like that.
Yes, the 3D gimmick is arguably a bad move (I don't know enough about consumer statistics to comment).

But my point is the goal of Amazon is to sell media/software and everything about the phone is designed for that. The goal of Motorola is to sell phones, and to a lesser extent push the Android platform's market share(due to momentum from time under Google if nothing else). So the Motorola phone is going to have good cost/value, and the Amazon phone is going to have gimmick, gimmick, gimmick to surface more of their products and services to you.
This comment counts as a shallow dismissal, I think. The tell-tale sign is the combination of generic boilerplate and dissing.

Generic comments alone may be low-substance, but at least don't poison the atmosphere. Dissing based on specific knowledge may be negative, but at least adds information. Put the two together, though, and you have a shallow dismissal. We don't want that in discussions here.
What about the unidentified high school kid who will be the next Gates or Jobs? Let's not repeat La Serrata of Venice.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Council_of_Venice
Websrvr – Deploy your websites to a CDN using Dropbox
I leave you with this: "very similar" is subjective. most people who actually care about fashion would not find these items "very similar".

I definitely see the use case for "so cheap it's nothing like the original", but you need to provide a service for people who actually care about fashion. because if you don't care about fashion you wouldn't be on this site in the first place.

this is why i recommend "forking". show me 10 jackets that are "very similar" of varying prices. so I can match on budget but also on how particular I am.

even if I were not privy to fashion- my first reaction would be "these are not the same sunglasses."

I could find sunglasses at my local grocery store that are cheaper and look more similar to zac's than the pair you recommended. what do I need your site for? rebuilding a look for cheap is not the problem. rebuilding an authentic look for cheap if the problem.
Just to be clear, "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail" (Crypto 1992), by Dwork and Naor, invented the idea of Proof Of Work, suggested it for fighting Spam (before the term was even coined!), provided actual functions, and more. This predates HashCash by half a decade. [Edited to de-obfuscate.]
Not only that, there is this wonderful technology known as a hyper link. Why, in the name of all the heavens, doesn't anyone make that asterisk a link, instead of making you search for it? It drives me insane.
The drug war is clearly a farce because of the focus on dealers. If there was a serious desire to reduce usage we know full well from history what "works." You very severely punish anybody caught with stuff, regardless of "intent to distribute."
It could mean that if there's no other viable choice. How many software shops build mobile apps for farming. I would guess not many. Yet.
While what you say is true, it would at least be a step in the right direction towards better privacy.

It would provide protection against passive snooping (NSA/GCHQ) even if it wouldn't prevent active attacks.

Edit: Typo
I agree. Regardless of one's stance on drugs and their respective online black markets (the latter of which I had a sizable knowledge), I don't really see what Shrem's expected outcome of this could have been other than, well, what happened.
How does this compare to nltk, opnnlp or mahout?
> For the buyer to be informed requires only that they know what they're getting (probably this rounds to three trips for $9 in the minds of most, I'd wager) and what they're paying (clearly marked)

No. 'Complete information' as it's called includes anything that would materially affect the buyer's consumption decisions. The article author sought out full information, figured out what was going on, and adjusted his behaviour accordingly. The fullness of the information he uncovered was so novel, in fact, it made to #1 on HN.

> Suggesting that the buyer should be incensed

I didn't, I spoke for myself alone

> only in a way that didn't affect what was being sold and for how much

This is a very shallow analysis. The point is that the passive consumer thinks they've paid $1 to cover the cost of the card and the rest of the credit is their 'property' (or asset, at least) when in reality it's highly likely that another ~$2 of said credit will fall into the ownership of the MTA. The effective price of the card is > $3 in that case. The moral problem arises if the MTA designed it this way, which the article suggests they did, and I'm inclined to agree.
Because the one thing Scala is missing is more ways to do the same thing.
He gives a few hints on the github page and in the many presentations he's been giving these past months since he left Typesafe.

The short version is that he lost trust in the Typesafe team and he thinks they are not competent to carry Scala moving forward. Like he says, he tried to change things from the inside, he couldn't, so now he's trying from the outside.
Windows Security: Tips for Windows 8.1 Operating System
As a programmer that lives in the middle of Nebraska. I am really intrigued by this company.
When morality is down, the law is up. So, no thanks to the author?
Smalltalk is dynamically typed so it's a non starter for most of the Scala and Haskell folks. Same for Lisp.
Your print shop dream is basically a reality already - you can install the Fedex Office Printer, click print, and it prints out there. I believe if you get enough printed, they will deliver as well.
First consider thumbnailing these in the fly as they're requested by the user. But if you must mass convert them, this job must be parallelized among many compute nodes; overly tuning the processing of each conversion probably won't be very fruitful.

You probably want to move these images to AWS S3 and run compute jobs and upload the resulting images back up to S3. You could create AWS Simple Queue Messages with the S3 URLs of each of the images and pop messages and autoscale EC2 instances based on the depth of that queue. What's the plan for these files after they're processed?

I am local, have deep AWS experience and have next week off if you'd like some pro bono advice.

50TB S3 ~$1500/month
SQS ~$0.50/million messages
GoFundMe removes abortion fundraiser following anti-choice protest
I'd actually be interested in some kind of direct comparison of the single core atom in my 2007 era netbook compared to whatever is in this phone as well as to my note 3.
Couldn't agree more. The OP seems to only be doing this to keep peace with his/her own OCD. I somewhat empathize with the pain; it used to drive me crazy too.

Here's a much better way of "outsmarting" it: buy an MTA EasyPay Xpress card[1]. The card will be linked to your credit card, so you will never have to worry with insufficient fare again.

Plus you still get 5% every $5, with the convenience of auto-refill, and full protection if you ever misplace your card.

Way better than spending time counting pennies.

[1] http://web.mta.info/metrocard/EasyPayXpress.htm
I was in Damascus around 6 years ago, and I noticed that most major downtown intersection are basically "shared" roads for cars and pedestrians alike. In my head, I was making a joke about how North Americans should learn "co-existence" from these streets where everyone has equal rights to access the street.

I have no stats about accident rates, but it seemed that somehow everyone manages to make it "work out".

I don't think this was due to any vision about how to make roads safe ... it was just ad-hoc city planning.
Certainly having a custom attribute that bundles multiple styles is novel.

...but having single attributes for color, font size and base styling is what attribute styles in early html were.

I think its disingenuous to suggest this is fundamentally different because these are custom style attributes (am-font) instead of hard coded style attributes (color).

The point is that presentation and data should be distinct in markup, and this use of custom attributes muddles things.

I can easily imagine some css framework providing css attribute classes that get used just like the old html style attributes, with all the same markup clutter and maintenance issues.

oh, want to change a style? now you have to change the markup attribute instead of the style sheet <--- this is why multiple display classes (btn--big) and custom attributes are fundamentally an anti-pattern.

Markup should be tagged with meaning attributes (btn--buy) and the styling done via stylesheets.
Am I wrong or are Adafruit, Makerbot, Sparkfun and others are?
Recently I have been asking some companies like Adafruit, Makerbot and Sparkfun if I could become a distributor of their products in my country. Amazingly (or not?) I have been sort of rejected from all of them. For example in a trending company such as Adafruit, I asked about the requirements to become a distributor and I told them that I had the intention to develop an online shop to resell their products - They told me to contact them again once I had the online shop up and running and taking orders from customers.

I replied that if all companies asked things like these, there would be no companies at all. Which company would be the first to let me sell their products without having already a prosper business?

Anyway, the stories are similar with the others. With Makerbot for example, they told me that I had to invest $250,000 USD to become an authorised reseller. Please correct me if I am wrong, but don't you think that a company that started like Makerbot should be the first to understand how businesses develop? Please! $250,000 USD? Of course they would let me buy "a few" printers if I wanted (well thanks a lot...) maybe with their permission I could do that!

The less frustrating experience was with Sparkfun, where they told me they "already feel very well represented" in my country. At least this could be understandable since there are probably deals in place with the current distributors, but even so, if somebody comes to me asking to sell my products, it wouldn't matter to me to have another sales representative, but again, maybe that's just me.

I don't pretend to have the truth, but I would be very happy to hear what other people think.
> For instance, why can't I install a local print shop as a system printer?

I'm pretty sure that FedEx Office (formerly FedEx/Kinkos) has supported doing that for many years. I suspect they aren't alone.
Spec: JavaScript Shared Memory, Atomics, and Locks
I'm curious how they are counting 15% of farms. If they have $11 billion worth of crops under management, I'm not sure how that is 15% of the market. According to the USDA, the total US crop value is like $166 billion in 2013. Simple math would indicate that they have closer to 6% of the market under management. That's assuming 2013 numbers, 2011 and 2012 numbers were higher and I don't know what 2014 were. I'm not sure that 15% number adds up.

If the 15% number is real, that would mean they have 330,000 farms under management by the 2.2 million farms number. Otherwise, if you take the 187,000 that account for 60% of crop sales, then 15% of that number is A LOT lower in terms of user count, more like 30,000 farms.

I've totally written software that was used by that many people. I've also written software that is as complicated as Farm Logs. My point was not to get in a pissing contest over who has the most users or who writes the most complicated software.

My point is they are giving away their software in a market where farmers routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment, seed, land, rent, fuel, etc. and they are charging $0 for it.

It's sort of the equivalent of giving away enterprise software. I'm not sure what the long term vision is, but I don't think free is going to be great for the farmers long term and I don't think their free sales model aligns FarmLog's goals with the farmers' goals.
> That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest.

This is exactly the message that Paul Phillips has been spreading these past months.

Personally, I hope he decides to just create his own language, I would be extremely interested to follow this.
Any such broad overview will necessarily apply subjective filters & analysis. E.g. compare these two diagrams from 1931 and 2014:

4000 year histomap: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/08/12/the_1931_his...

5000 year timeline: http://www.usefulcharts.com/history/timeline-of-world-histor...
Same things? I don't know what you mean, It was a language feature back in the 2.7 days I think? I was a long time ago, hard to remember when they got rid of it. It's really nice for this:

val color = List(
"Red",
"Yellow",
"Green",
)

If I want to add a 4th element I just ctrl+alt+down, I don't have to go back up and add the comma at the end of the last line, I spend too much time juggling commas in lists for my liking.

Some programmers work around it like this (which breaks head-inserting, but that's typically a lot less common) :

List("Yellow"
,"Red"
,"Green"
)

Which is pretty ugly (to me). It's one of those minor QOL improvements where I don't see what the downside is.

Frankly I wish every language had this feature.
Ctrl-KB Ctrl-KK Ctrl-KC
> It appears to be a fork of the compiler not the language itself.

They are the same thing. There is no spec for Scala (no recent one anyway) so the specification is the Scala compiler. And based on everything that Paul has been saying these past months, the compiler is very close to being unmaintainable.
Can you see why people would be frustrated by Gates spending so much money to mandate a form of education for the commoners while providing his own children with something that he presumably considers to be much better? Consider especially that the Common Core is regarded by many as contrived and stifling while a more "free" curriculum allows children to put more of their efforts towards things they care about and have talents for.

I'm not trying to present a qualified opinion on why one approach is better than the other or even to describe them in much accuracy-- just trying to provide the perspective of those who are upset.
$9, full rotisserie chicken, whole foods, union square manhattan. I can't imagine how anyone can justify a more expensive super market rotisserie chicken than that.
Monsanto already owns Climate Corp which offers similar service, with monetization. I could see John Deere picking them up though.
Amazing to see Anand stay in the game for so long. I remember reading his first few articles about memory very hazy - I think Pentium 100Mhz CPUs. Look where he is - persistence works.
Ummm, that's the paper referenced in [2]…
Great project, thank you Josh. I am donating to your project and will also offer $100 to help fund the creation of an apt-get deb package, if you or anyone here would like to commit to creating it.

I run mail servers with Postfix and much of the same setup, to enable custom domains, scriptable responders, message tagging, and the like. Using apt-get to install Mail-in-a-Box would be wonderful.
You're correct, it's 15% of row crop farms (corn, soy, wheat, etc).
I live in Nebraska and I've worked on ag related software previously. I've not heard great things about FarmLogs from farmers who used it when it was a paid product. I've never used it so I can't personally say if it's good or bad.

I've worked with people who worked on similar or even competing products and I know firsthand that when you are selling a product and charging money that your perspective and priorities change A LOT.

In my mind a free product for farmers feels like applying the silicon valley mindset to a Midwestern business and that it really feels like a misunderstanding of the market and the customers.

There is HUGE opportunity in farm software and technology, it's incredibly terrible, but I don't feel like FarmLogs' approach is sustainable long term. That is just my perspective as a tech geek in Nebraska.
Fastmail costs $40/yr. You can get a half-decent VPS for that with a few bucks to spare on Tarsnap.