skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, the remote-wipe ability is a killer app. Currently, when I lose a physical card, I have to go through a painful get-a-new-card procedure that involves going to my major websites and giving them my new card #.

With remote wipe, when I lose my card I just remote-wipe it and order a new one. Also, this card will warn me when I'm too far from it so I won't be as likely to leave it behind.
It is more easy than you think. If the lamp only last 15000 hours instead of the advertised 25000, you never buy from the same brand again.
I hope that to be the case as well. The way the data model works is pushing data updates back to the client through the mongodb cursor and this db solution should be able to provide that data update functionality
The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell

No offense, but Marcia Angell has a tenuous grasp in terms of knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry. I would take her opinions with a grain of salt.[1]

[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/12/14/marcia-...
Very cool, but why not update the design a bit, while you're at it?
To the degree that it allows invalid types, it's weakly typed. That's fine as a compromise (no type system is perfect), but the same impulse that says you should type in the first place also says you should only allow valid types. It's a challenge type systems should aspire to solve.
>> case class has 22
>Works fine for me:

You know quite well that the removal of this restriction is brand new and it would be very easy to encounter it in the wild.

Why do you go out of your way to use smarmy tactics to argue against anytime someone who has a legitimate complaint? It would be way more productive to acknowledge the weaknesses and then tell the good story of Scala.
I posted this 4 hours before jashkenas (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420560) - why the duplicate?
How is that different from incandescents? I switched my garage to LED lighting because I never get anything remotely close to the claimed lifetime of incandescent bulbs in the ceiling lights, no matter what brand I try.

In any event it doesn't matter whether or not the actual life testing has been done. Product manufacturers do accelerated life testing to estimate the lifetime of the product. It's similar to asking how they know that a new car shouldn't need warranty service for 6 years when it's only just been released.
Who is behind this? Is it really being run by USAID? If it is why is it on a .net domain?
Well unfortunately there's no Firebase SDK for Windows Phone/C#/WinRT, and the WebSocket API is undocumented.

EDIT: After having played with the JS SDK a bit I'd like to add that it is indeed incredibly awesome.
They didn't stop. The industry term of art these days is "embedded advertising" and it's used in television and movies far more than you would think. Hear a character mention a current brand name seemingly off-hand? Yeah, not an accident.
Premature optimization is also not a true waste of time (IMO) if it's part of the learning process.

Man, did I ever 'waste' a lot of time on optimization when I was first learning to code (in C), but:

a) I learned what the low-hanging fruit was, so that I was eventually able to make all my code fairly fast without explicit optimization.

b) Man, where some of those early programs I wrote blindingly fast... especially compared to the higher-level python/numpy/scipy stuff I write a lot today. It's also nice to repurpose some of that old code (ie as a library) for new applications since every potential bottleneck has already been ironed out.
> If our autopilot software decides that a pilot is trying to land an A320 when he's trying to climb and the plane crashes into a forest, the pilot goes to prison, not the programmers!
And, we get this complete autonomy and immunity without any education or certification!

True, but flight software itself goes through very rigorous FAA certification processes. I'd rather have that than be told that the programmers who made the software have Ph.D's!
Smart move using Firebase. This instantly gives developers traction with the API and as a big API client guy, I love making clients but also very happy we'll have all the tools we need to get started using the API right off the bat. Considering Firebase doesn't have rate-limiting too, this means that the things people can build with this API are limitless.
Amazon Announces Picking Challenge for Robots
That infrastructure is called bottled water delivery.
Has anyone received their Coin? I ordered in December and still have yet to receive it.
Oops, Application Error. You getting the HN effect?
Experiments with Redis and other databases have been done, so SQL support will almost certainly arrive at some point.
"In my IDE I'd have no trouble"

But if you were reading the code on github, on a blog post, or in a chat you wouldn't have that advantage.
You're not exactly impartial in this situation.
Why can't a civilization have tap water that's suitable for everything except drinking, and let bottled water be delivered on the free market? If that's the most economically optimal way to handle things, that's a more advanced society.
Alien Life 'Inevitable' and We Could Detect It Within 20 Years
Why Bitcoin's price is irrelevant to its success
To exactly match daylight you would need all the visible light, plus infrared and UV, and a total power of 1 KW/square meter. The good thing is that the lamp would also work as a space heater.
be for it. Exploiting the software that runs the game, however, isn't fair.

That is clearly nonsense tho', and that's easy to prove. If you are playing poker with a person, then that is all about exploiting the flaws in that person, this ones timid, that one's reckless, this one has a facial tic, that one drinks too much and so on.
Test your JavaScript with Jasmine
Life after Sony: Vaio shows off hybrid laptop prototype
I have just redeemed the code in my DO account and it worked on the first attempt. I think they have fixed the issue. To any students out there: try first before reaching out to support, they are busy men/women.
Very cool. Would be neat if changes were more pronounced when they happen. Will the posts change order in this demo if they change on the homepage?
no one suspects the social engineer that is illiterate and wears shoes 2 sizes too large
I prefer paying with cash. But I don't keep the cash in my wallet--I hate wallets. But for my ATM card, various credit cards (used for large purposes), and driver's license, I'd go without a wallet. The one I currently use is a small one anyhow, intended as a business card holder.

Pick pockets aren't as common as they once were, at least in the U.S., but I never use my back pockets for anything. Even disregarding pick pockets, it's much easier to lose stuff that way, like when getting on and off a bus. So pocket space is at a premium for me, especially after I relented and bought a cell phone, which keep getting bigger and bigger. (And I would never keep my financial data on a cellphone, even if they promised it was safely embedded on a crypto chip... I just wouldn't trust them to have done it properly.)

Frankly, I think Plastc seems quite useful, at least superficially. The devil is in the details.
I'm also curious whether it removes some of the limitations of the Algolia version; I wanted to download my content for some statistical analysis (notes at http://www.gwern.net/HN ) but I discovered that it seems there's some hard limits to how much of my data I can reach: https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/pull/36
They are targeting women with this device. Look at all the marketing materials. Female main characters, a woman is in the facial recognition part, 'you shouldn't buy this for yourself, buy it for your female wife', clothing shops & restaurants, etc.
The obvious solution is this: the fruit bat seems to be the villain in the piece, providing a host and vector for Marburg and Ebola.

Two solutions: 1. some way to mass vaccinate/introduce fruit bats with genetic ability to stop passing on bad things to humans.
2. Kill all the fruit bats (but then don't eat them - that is provably what got us into this mess in the first place!)
>Voters will only demand it if they are informed.

By and large the public know about the Patriot act and support it, you may disagree but don't pretend they don't know about it.

>Voters will only be informed if both social and traditional media are able to provide actionable, verifiable and non-biased reports.

The reports are there yet the public has yet to be swayed.

>Media will only be able to provide quality information when political, intelligence and profit interests have less leverage than an educated purchasing public majority.

Media can and do provide quality information.

>Political/intelligence interests will only have have less leverage if we pass meaningful enforceable legislation to curtail the use of selective privilege, story seeding and psychological operations to achieve policy goals.

Rolling back freedom of speech is a non-starter.

We need to convince voters that the Patriot Act is bad not pretend they have been victims of mind control.
So you're reducing the number of cards you have on you by 1/20.
Winning with Mobile Payments: User Experience, Industry Adoption, and Trust
The API can be used to create a mobile friendly site, since the official one is not for some odd reason.
LOL. My first thought was, "That's kind of a dick comment." My second thought was, "Oh, it must be tptacek himself." :-)
>If, on the other hand, I must constantly look out for potholes [then I am not in civilization].

I guess civilization isn't possible in North America above 45°N then.

The other poster is right, your comments are better suited for Reddit.
Blue LED Inventors Awarded Nobel Prize
I think this challenge has the potential to be useful. We launched a similar effort last week geared more as a hackathon [0], and we have some really interesting projects in the works. Even just simple visualization and analysis of the data hasn't really been done yet, but there are a lot of insights that can be pulled out [1, 2]. Similar civic hacking projects were launched during Hurricane Sandy, and some useful things came out of it [3].

This outbreak really is one of the greatest public health disasters of modern times. I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.

[0] https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/computing-for-ebola-...

[1] Data available for download: https://github.com/cmrivers/ebola

[2] Examples of ebola analyses: http://www.caitlinrivers.com/blog/category/ebola

[3] https://civic.mit.edu/blog/hidenise/hurricanehackers-project...
It's hard to get good figures since it's not something they generally break out, but according to some guesstimates from Asymco, Apple took in 5 Billion in revenue and made 1.1 Billion profit in Q4 2012 from selling PCs.

http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/16/escaping-pcs/

This is more than the top 5 Windows vendors combined, and about as much all Windows vendors combined.

Microsoft on the other hand (though interestingly they actually made an overall loss that quarter as they wrote of a 7 Billion company they purchased a few years before) made about 4 bilion revenue and maybe 2-3 Billion profit from consumer Windows sales directly and that's not counting servers, or business licences, or Office each of which is roughly of the same magnitude.

Intel's PC client group took in 8.5 Billion that quarter. Possibly half of that being profit (overall gross margin was 58%.)

So Apple makes a lot of money from PCs, Microsoft and Intel have always made more.

Note that from selling iPhones and iPads Apple recently made more profit than Microsoft, Intel and a few others combined. But for desktop and laptops, Microsoft and Intel have always claimed the vast share of industry profits unless you go out of your way to exclude these two companies from the industry.
I mean in a bitcoin economy. The only reason that example works is because the input fiat does not have the transparency of a blockchain behind it. If you were end to end using bitcoin, ie, drug dealer gets paid in bitcoin, then if you know its drug money you can blacklist it forever because its always traceable.
It depends on what you mean by "deal well with heaps that large". You can certainly set them that large with no problems. But given your memory patterns they can cause dramatically bad GC times.
You can get a 'prettier' version by removing .json entirely:

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek
How does this connect to an API? Does it read Swagger? Or is all the setup (paths, parameters, etc) done manually?
Credit card companies could incentivize merchants to do so by offering better rates on chip and pin, or by only offering worse rates without it the next time a contract is renewed.
Here is an alternate link on usaid.gov: http://www.usaid.gov/grandchallenges/
New experiment will beam neutrinos through 500 miles of Earth’s crust
I'm pretty sure comparing the addition of 'fucking' as a crass emphasis on the seriousness of someone's medical condition, with saying it excitedly when happy about a product or service you're enjoying, is drawing a flagrantly false equivalence. But heck (fuck?), that's just a reasoned, logical, non-PC take on this - three things that are sadly absent from much of the population these days.
An interesting thought I ran across once, is that there is no such thing as "no design":

> Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. -- Douglas Martin
> Health care workers need new tools to win this fight.

Do they really, though?

It seems like what health care workers in West Africa need more than anything is money. Money to build the kind of hospitals and health care infrastructure that makes it possible for a country like the U.S. to clamp down on early cases before they become epidemics. A long-term investment over many decades.

I mean, I'm all for new ideas, but if the big problem is "not enough money" it seems like the easiest way to solve it would be with money, no?
Could've changed it to "friggin'" for the PC folk who get appalled by casualness. That's what I usually do when I'm unsure of how stiff is the other party.
I don't travel a ridiculous amount, but TripIt is great and very sticky. Easing the pain of travel makes it worth your while. And knowing when I happen to be in the same city as a traveling friend is invaluable.
"We shouldn't increase the minimum wage because employment will go down".

Appeal to consequences. Try another.

Did I get the right level of condescension?
Small tidbit: In English, it's spelled with an M, not an N! Comfortable :) But you probably knew that already.
I'm not sure it's a matter of frequency, but rather a matter of value that the service ultimately provides.

Biggest concern with Google's business model initially was that they are "just a search engine" meaning they don't get as many page-views as portals. However Google managed to make more money than portals because ultimately they provided more value to the adviser (less impressions, but more targeted). At the end of the day, Google's service was intrinsically valuable - if they charged an annual fee to access the search engine, lots of people would pay up. The business model extracted that value, albeit in a different fashion.

You can't monetise trip planning with advertising indeed because there aren't enough users to make that model work. But if it's a valuable service - you should be able to charge a small fee for it. "We'll help you plan your trip for $10. Or $20 if you want us to put in some human effort". Given that it takes X hours to plan a trip, and a user's average wage is $Y per hour, some number should make sense. And of course the service would generate leads and other commissions.

Would anyone pay $10 for a service that planned a trip for them? I'm afraid not many people would, which means it's just not as valuable as people believe it is.

Up-market travel agencies plan trips for wealthy clients for free - there's plenty of commissions to go around - so that model works. Trip planning "software" however doesn't seem to provide enough value in its current form, but that doesn't mean it isn't feasible. If someone booked my flights, hotels, restaurants, tours, sight-seeing, theatres etc for a 2-week journey for me, they'd probably have a decent revenue stream from commissions alone (hotels pay 15%). Hell, I know a guy that plans trips for high-net-worth individuals and takes 10% of everything they spend.

I think the problem is that too many startups are afraid of the human element involved - having people make recommendations doesn't scale - they say. However a semi-automated approach, that gave you a real PA / concierge service throughout your trip would actually provide sufficient value imo. I know many wealthy people that would pay significant sums to have the whole thing planned (and booked!) for them in advance. Monopolise the up-market niche of VIP travel planning, before going mass market and you have a shot at a profitable business.
Right now they don't have a clue. In my world, the effect
is the only existence of God--until proven differently. So
believing strongly in something isn't as foolish as some
"Intellectuals" would berate?
> Ever tried to integrate Django or Celery into a project whose configuration comes from .ini files or some other method? You end up writing your own configuration layer to get something that Django approves of.

I'm doing exactly that in my current project. It wasn't so bad, just a couple lines in settings.py. ConfigParser FTW!

> In the end, convention over configuration (just put your files in the magic locations, for example) is just another term for developer arrogance: of course my way is natural and everyone will want to think like me!

I'd argue that Flask or Pyramid encourage a form of that too, just in a different place. Yes the Django devs have decided where you should put many of the things, but if someone new comes to your project already knowing Django they'll know where to look for things, whereas a Flask or Pyramid project may have its own idiosyncratic layout.
When everyone === lucky to have a supported platform.
Sweet Jesus that was an annoying promo video.
Much of the law does seem odd to me, although I don't think that's why.

As far as I can tell, the law is based on a collection of ideas we collectively identify as "justice". In no particular order: that punishment can reform a person so they no longer commit criminal acts, that the threat of punishment can cause a person to refrain from committing criminal acts, and that punishment as revenge is just a good thing.

None of this has anything to do with "free will", whatever it is.
readme looks awesome.

What made you set the free trial to "till you launch" ? Don't you think some would use it for internal docs for there own reference or am i missing something ?
Show HN: Hacker News implemented using the new API
They are rolling it out very slowly. You should've received details in your email about the rollout. I have a friend who has received his already.
I can't even begin to parse what you're trying to say or how it relates to my last comment.
Things that are counter to the market can absolutely be good for individuals. I'm just saying that you would not see the entire food service industry improve from the perspective of the retailers themselves through mandates and regulation if that mandated behavior were not inherently beneficial and as such would be practiced in the absence of such regulation.

Simplied question: if it is beneficial to restaurants to be forced to conform to food safety guidelines, inspections, and public ratings, it would stand to reason restaurants would naturally seek to self regulate and have their own common rating board if doing so attracted more business than it cost them to maintain said ratings.

Obviously it does not, since restaurants do not naturally do that. I'm not saying the idea of food safety mandates is good or not, I'm just saying the industry would implement it themselves if it was fiscally beneficial to the restaurants. And since it is not, that implies their rates are higher, they are less competitive as a result, and that consumers are paying for something they (in a natural market) were not willing to fork money over to see happen naturally (by way of not favoring publicly rated restaurants).
How to build strong master passwords
Animation should augment UI, not steal attention away from what the user should focus on. In case of popup alerts, popup animation itself does what is needed.
Right before the EU banned light bulbs, there were big sales everywhere and people (including my parents) bought carloads of them.

Of the bulbs purchased by my parents in those last days, so far about half don't make it to the 6 month mark. I'd say that the companies manufacturing those bulbs offloaded their throw-outs on EU consumers right then and there.
Sure, that's product placement, and it is very hard to do well. Remember the Cisco placement in CSI, or Omega in Casino Royale? Utterly cringeworthy.

Subliminal messaging is flashing something up too quickly to consciously register, but still leaving an impression.
The history behind ADD medications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obetrol) is also troubling. This is a drug designed to induce weight loss in adults and today it's widely given to children and even toddlers (http://www.today.com/health/thats-nuts-10-000-toddlers-get-d...).
You end up with cases like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U....
The Buried: Excavating the Egyptian Revolution (2013)
You should check out Elliptic Labs instead http://player.vimeo.com/video/108101901
The way to defeat stealth is instead of looking for the size of the object look at speed and trajectory. The B2 famously has the radar cross section of a honeybee. No problem. I would just build filtering software for my radar that said show me all the objects of any size (even Bee size) heading my way at over 300mph. I'm sure this has been done, and it's alluded to in book Skunkworks (good book btw).
I will put in my idea. This outbreak will not be solved like past outbreaks. This needs to go to the UN security council to obtain authorisation to allow invasion and enforcement of strict quarantine across the outbreak and surrounding regions. Those countries with the ability (in practice mostly the USA) are going to need to move to full scale mobilisation of the military and maybe even conscription of the needed health care personnel (this might not be needed if we can get enough volunteers, but I suspect we will need to conscript). If this is done in the next couple of weeks then we might just be able to get on top of this outbreak before it gets too big.

Of course I expect none of this will occur until 2015 by which time it will be too late.
Totally unrelated, but the model from the Facial Authentication video has beautiful oceans for eyes making everyone want to drown in them...
What about making existing technologies cheaper so that the money they currently have stretches further? Tons of progress here with everything from cheap microscope lenses that can be attached to iphones to prosthetic limbs that can be 3d printed.
Steven Levy on starting Backchannel