skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ebola is in the various fluids discharged by coughing and sneezing (its in the article). The problem for the urban areas is that ebola seems to persist (as long as its in a fluid) and its so infectious (small threshold exposure). The two may conspire to create an issue that 99.99% clean isn't clean enough. Thus, discharged fluids even in small amounts may very well transmit the virus in trace amounts (again, in the linked piece). From there its purely semantic about whther or not 'water vapour' or 'aerosolized liquids' are equal to "airborne". As you allude, eath pathogen may be airborne in various ways (the air has many pollutants and impurities).
Maybe they can put the new renderer on a different sub domain for a few weeks after their 3 week deadline. One to beta test the interface and two to give devs a bit more time to convert.
Self-published ebooks spread fear, few facts on Ebola
This piece of soft is cool. I like how it is inserting images and footnotes. Please, continue.
This is a very good news. Made my day. Thank you.
What do you use to query a relational database, if not an ORM? Do you build your SQL with string concatenation? In my experience that gets messy very quickly for complicated queries, so you end up needing some sort of SQL builder abstraction.
Slot machines are programmed with a table of payouts based on a rate, typically between 80 and 99%, such that the statistical expected payout overtime will be compounded at that rate. In some jurisdictions (e.g. Vegas), it is legal for the casinos to program a machine at greater than 100%. They do this to attract the players, who will attempt to find the winning machine on the floor. Random numbers still work, so not every payout wins, but over the course of the day you can get a payout. So you may have just walked away from free cash.

Source: I used to work in casino gaming (I wrote the Megapot server used for multi-casino progressives in France)
Great article, impressive attention to detail. It sounds like a situation that would benefit from a compiler cache, such as the one found at https://ccache.samba.org/. Is there any benefit to be had there or is the storage tradeoff too expensive?
Risk assessment != allowing someone to steal from you. Surely the casino knows that any game can be fallible and they could take a loss from it. I guess banks know that their computer systems could have problems and they can lose money from it. But what if I noticed if I exchanged a certain amount of money between my checking and savings account a few times, it doubled my balance? And then I repeated this many times knowing that there was an error in their system?

Now the bank if I had gotten away with it and could not be detected would then chalk it up as a loss and part of the calculated risk of having computerized banking. However if they knew I did this on purpose and took their money should they chalk that up as a loss and allow me to get away with it? No they would want that money back from me and possibly have me arrested for fraud.
Best tip was that you should be on the look-out for criminals pretending to be security cameras!

"Be on the lookout for social engineering attacks by criminals who may be masquerading as inspectors or security alarms, security cameras or other devices on premises."
Some sites actively punish scrapers by constantly, purposely changing their markup. So giving them an API and 3 week head start is leaps and bounds above and beyond what can be expected. When you operate a scraper, you are always on the defensive when it comes to site updates suddenly breaking your app. They should be so lucky to get this 3 week notice. It is all on them if they can't turn it around in time.
Ehh... maybe, but I highly doubt it. It was probably 10 years ago now and less then $1,000, and on an Indian reservation (not sure jurisdiction there). I did actually checked the statute of limitations for both California and Federal felony theft before posting. It looks like almost all theft is a 3 year limitation.
> Without that, how would they validate who is a student vs not?

What? Why would they need to?

Those "perks" are only appealing to somebody who's learning or a hobbyist. They are absolutely worthless to a professional. I will burn through them in a week.

Github is just trying to market this to kids. It has nothing to do with learning or providing a better value proposition. It's all about hooking them into your brand early. Nothing wrong with that, but that's what it is.
This looks nice but $60/mo seems incredibly pricey when there are also nice, and similar, open source solutions such as http://ricostacruz.com/flatdoc/

What extra value am I paying for?
It just worked for me and I am Canadian.
I would argue that regardless of the democracy's functioning, informed investment in long-term infrastructure projects is unlikely without an adjustment in incentives. People (of which voters are a subset) value short-term payoffs much more than long-term ones. Politicians hope to be re-elected, so projects which will not mature before the end of their term are unattractive.

Neither group has great incentives for good long-term investment in infrastructure. The Olympics are desirable for emotional/patriotic reasons, and at the same time happen to set up an incentive structure which supports infrastructure investment.
Mozilla is also using ReadMe for Brick: http://brick.mozilla.io/
If you run the cheapest one at $5/month then almost 2 years.
Glympse: send live updates of your current location
The competition between Apple Pay, Facebook payments and Google Wallet will be fierce. Although, I don't see Coin or Plastc wildly succeeding, but they will set the tone for what's to come with mobile payments (flexibility and convenience).
Latam has lots of public (free) Universities, they all give you some sort of email.

Besides you need some easy way to check if someone is a student or not and the most easy way to delegate this job is to require an email from an institution.
Founder @ Koality here. As far as "how do we make sustainable money," that's part of the reason we're at Docker now. We're not planning on being a hosting company.

There's quite a bit that's misleading/not quite correct in the TC article, but we definitely have a solid plan in place for sustainability.
>The exploration of modern programming is a big factor keeping people out.

Is that a problem? From a professional perspective, it seems ideal to not pollute the field with people who are uninterested in such things, as they would very quickly run into issues keeping their knowledge up to date. The field has been and always will be in flux.

From an amateur perspective, I think it's fine if people are dissuaded, amateurs should do things they find enjoyable. If learning about your hobby isn't enjoyable, programming will offer little utility beyond minor entertainment.

While having a multitude of choices can make choosing difficult, it can also make it very easy, just pick anything. With not preconceived notions about how you want to program, all of the popular languages and frameworks are essentially equal to you. As you actually start to program, you'll be exposed to new concepts that you may or may not like. If you don't like them, you be able to trivially search for alternatives with your newfound knowledge of knowing what you like/dislike.

>...or magazines that teach you programming from start to finish with code samples included.

There's a stupid amount of free and non-free literature for getting into programming. Searching for just about any popular language and/or framework will get you at least one book on Amazon and an amazing amount of tutorials/walkthroughs/guides/etc from Google.
How does High Frequency Trading pervert the market? They are acting as middle-men.
Since I've had 3 replies I'd like to clarify a bit.

- Github has a large enough network effect that I can ask for another student's Github account and expect that they will have one. That lowers the friction to getting a new project started.

- I have moved a repo from BitBucket to Github, it is about as easy as the comments state.

- That said, I haven't needed more than 5 private repos at once, and the ability to visit one site (and one interface) to view all my work is easier than visiting two sites.
I'd suggest you look into hypnosis and hypnotherapy. There are quite a few things the mind can do, given the right suggestions.
I work/contract for the US Army have to go on base a lot. One week I posted in a conversation about meta-data. For the next 9 days my car was search at the gate as part of "A Random Check" I was told.

On top of this I sent an update to my boss a day I was off site 7zipped, and encrypted (7zip uses AES). The next day all .7z extensions were blocked by *.mil mail servers. On top of .exe which made shipping auto-install updates fun.
If you are using their $5/month plan than you get 20 months [1]. Obviously backups and other things will add a little to the cost but realistically easily a year of free server time.

[1] - https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
Interesting. Thanks for the info!

Re: Megapot server. I've always wondered if those incrementing jackpot banners are actually tied to a real server of if it just increments based on an average. Are those incrementing numbers actually coming from a server in realtime?
It's to attract the players. If the negative house edge increases the return across your park of machines, and it's legal (e.g. this is illegal in France), you do it.
This article is a very good background explanation of the rationale for this year's Nobel physics prize and a good overview of LED technology and its history. I learned a lot here about the economic and manufacturing trade-offs involved in promoting use of LEDs for indoor lighting rather than incandescent bulbs. A worthy read for a day when LEDs are very much in the news.
> The government played no role in establishing this system, which worked remarkably well. Social scientists often cite it as a success story among developing-world megacities... Brilliant!
ARRL investigates a web server breach
The names are a bit confusing here, and I might petition to change them.

The `drop` here is just a simple library function and isn't technically related to the `Drop` trait, which is implemented with magical compiler pixie dust and allows you to define a destructor via a `.drop` method. Anything that goes out of scope has this `.drop` method called automagically.

You're correct in that if you were calling `x.drop()` explicitly, you would need to have a `Drop` bound on `T`.
Are you sure dynamic types have nothing to do with static types?

"Static type" does not really mean "class of values." That is a common use of static types, but they can also be used for things like tracking what resources are available/released or describing what exceptions a function might raise.
Thanks for the interesting read. I'm not 100% certain splitting the companies up would be the best alternative, but this definitely makes me ponder a bit. It makes sense to split up, but who would make the actual call? The shareholders? I'm assuming any CEO figure of the company would prefer to keep it growing so they can maximize their collective resources rather than splitting among smaller ones. Or maybe I'm missing some other incentives?
Experts said that the current outbreak would only be a couple of hundred people. Then they said it might be maybe 20,000. Now they're saying it could be one million.

It's frustratingly hard to steer the course of taking it seriously while not giving anything to the over-reactors.
Yes, see my previous comment. Bankers gave political contributions and laws were rewritten. And regulators were weakened.
"In February 2015, the four manuscripts will be brought together for the first time in history for a special 3-day event, which will allow further academic study of them side by side..."

Maybe I'm being paranoid but it seems risky to bring the remaining four manuscripts together in one place.
About 20 months of their $5/mo plan: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
>The concept was proven in 1995, when one of the GCB's own staffers, Ron Harris, went bad. Harris modified his testing unit to covertly reprogram the EPROMs on the machines he was auditing. His new software commanded the machine to trigger a jackpot upon a particular sequence of button presses—like a Konami Code for cash.

This is actually a really interesting story that I saw on one of those "Vegas's Biggest Criminals" type shows. This Ron guy was given the job and created a device that would plug into the slot machine and check for tampering. He programmed it to check the device, mark it as clean, then insert his own code. This code allowed him to instantly win jackpots. He would have to bet a specific combination to open the jackpot. For example he had to bet 1 credit, bet 3 credits, bet 4 credits, bet 1 credit etc. I believe the sequence was like 50 steps long. He would obviously have friends play the machine to win.

Benefits to this system was that his team could spread out among many machines. If the casino wanted to check the machine, they would send Ron in and the machine would come up as clean (he developed the software to check it). The sequence was so long that it would take someone a lot of work to recognize it, and no one was likely going to stumble upon it by accident. It was really genius, however I can't remember how he got caught.
Would love to see a TL;DR summary. Long academic PDFs are frustrating to read.
Can someone help me understand if this is a big deal?
At a minimum, we should quarantine travelers from that region when they arrive. We should require them wear a tracking device to be sure they are staying in place.
It would be expensive but worth it if it catches a few infected people.

As a result of the spanish nurse's infection, I think health care workers need to be quarantined too just in case the protections don't work as we expected.

BTW, did you read the article about the Canadian experimental medicine that is available but not being shipped because the US exclusive distributor doesn't yet know how to handle the distribution. It is scary that a company that stands to make a huge profit, if the disease spreads to a first world country, is holding back the distribution of a cure.
I've censored things I've wanted to say, but usually out of wanting to be a decent human being rather than any particular fear of the US government. On the flipside, there are things I have said that make me wonder if they'd alert various intelligence agencies or put me on a list.
I use Fedora, because it has the best SELinux support of the desktop-oriented distros.
"Rich Hickey's transducers talk gave a nice example of how patterns of polymorphism which humans find comprehensible can easily become extremely hard to capture precisely in a logic."

I haven't watched his talk, but Rich Hickey also commented on /r/Haskell with the types. It doesn't seem like it was that difficult to capture. There are also other comments that approach the types from different angles and achieve some success. Maybe this isn't a good example for this thesis?

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2cv6l4/clojures_tra...
'Instagram for doctors' to be launched in Europe
It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.
i guess that is what differentiates a student from a working adult.
I've seen so many people having problems with the cowbell. I don't think it holds true. :)
From what I could gather from the article, the bug happened even if the user never used the Double Up feature. But the bug disappeared if that feature was disabled.

My guess would be that, for the Double Up feature to work, the program saved some state (or delayed clearing that state), so it could double the payout (I'm guessing that the "Double Up" feature is something used after a win, something like "flip a coin to choose between 2x or 0x payout"). Some other part of the program expected that state to be cleared. Without the Double Up feature enabled, the code skipped saving that state (or cleared the state earlier), which is why disabling that feature prevented the bug.

That is, something like the classic "MissingNo." bug in Pokémon, where there was a strip of terrain which didn't setup the random encounter table, and the space for that table was also used as temporary space to copy the player's data during an event in the game. Trigger that event, go to that strip of terrain, walk until you get a random encounter, and what was on the player data is used as the encounter data.
We'll probably start with logged out home to a percentage of traffic and work our way to updating the rest of the site and handling the full traffic over a few weeks.

If people need help converting their apps, I believe the Firebase guys have offered to help. Contact us at api@ycombinator.com and we'll connect you.
How You Make Decisions Says a Lot About How Happy You Are
I want to emphasize here a common misconception of 'free'. Your education is not free, some may even argue it is more expensive than the US system. Myself included. You pay an extraordinary amount of taxes for the 'free' education. You pay for it regardless if you decide to attend university or not. Letting the 'rich' pay for it is not an economic solution either. Hence the outrage in the US of moving toward the European socialist model, most do not want anything close to it.
(Not original poster, but some suggestions) :

- Use a local credit union as opposed to big national bank. Yes, there may be minor inconveniences in service, but in this day of online banking, they should be minimal.

- Invest with a financial advisor you know and trust, who will pick up the phone when you call and explain things to any level of detail you desire (or who will bring in experts to do so if you won't). Barring that, invest in index funds for broad asset class exposure with low fees.

- Don't believe / vote in / listen to anyone (economist, politician or otherwise) who touts "free markets" without further explanation of how that market's regulators & insiders will work.
Build a bank
We’re in a new era of banking...and it demands a new, full stack, approach to wholesale and commercial banking. A software first approach, not a people first approach.

Why?

Because we've learned a lot about banks and we've walked away shocked at the state of their technology, their culture, their "innovations", their complacency...and the potential to do better.

We're building a bank that focuses on slightly different things than other banks. Focused on building a great product, a great platform, and a great experience. Banks legacy limitations make it hard to run a technology business with a financial component. It limits the potential of products. It makes the world a worse place.

We're putting APIs, developer tools, automated fraud detection, and data at the center of our product offerings and security, distributed systems, data analysis, and scalability at the center of our architecture. We are building the bank technology that should exist and the products we ourselves wanted.

First, API banking. Then wholesale banking. Then commercial banking.

We are a startup who will have a bank charter. We're both persistent and clever - we know that banking isn't as complex as it's made out to be. We don't lack for ambition or problems to solve. If that sounds interesting to you, email us at ycombinator.bank@gmail.com
Cancelling the alert? That doesn't even make sense.
This Digital Thermometer Will Tell You the Optimal Time for Baby-Making
> first-line ADHD medications (the stimulants) work in roughly 70% of cases

What do you mean by 'work'? The research cited by Anatomy of an Epidemic shows that there is no affect on grades or other academic outcomes. And that while concentration itself improves somewhat in the short term, after 2+ years it is worse than if the person were never given the drugs to begin with. See also:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732336870...
Ask HN: What are successful ways of implementing “innovation time?”
I'd like to find a solution which offers our software engineering team a system that encourages innovation time. Google's famous "20% time" is one model that I'm aware of but am curious if members of the HN community has experience with other successful models.
I think a lot of travel sites focus on saving money for travellers. What if money is not that important.

My friend came up with this idea. I think it will help many people. The idea is that one put in how much they want to spend and how much time they have. The site will show various travel or activity options that are possible. One can further limit by parameters such as road trip only, out of state destinations, in town activities, etc. Almost like travel agents.

I have been looking for something similar but haven't found it. My friend is a great traveller and he and his wife have run out of places to visit. They just want to explore new places.

On other hand, my wife & I are not so great travellers, we never know where to go. We end up picking top destinations from TripAdvisor, then we find those a bit too expensive or require too much travel time, etc. Sometimes we just want to get out of town and not worry about where we are going.

For now, I have solved this problem for us by creating a spreadsheet, with a list of places we had picked and estimate cost, best travel time, and ideal # of days to spend there. But of course, this is for places we researched and could not afford at the time.
UNIX time is actually much easier to parse and more accurate. Almost all platforms (even Windows[0]) have a way to convert a UNIX time into a culture specific local time.

What you're asking for is a string you have to parse. That's a lot more work and there is a lot more that can go wrong.

[0]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/249760/how-to-convert-un...
This is great. On an unrelated note, I wanted to give GitHub a big high-five for their non-profit organizational discounts. Tech companies that provide non-profit discounts really help non-profits where technology expenses are often under-appreciated and underfunded.
I clicked on this thinking "surely this is some NY Times article from their archives." Nope.
I run https://www.menutail.com which makes nutrition facts labels.
"Rust achieves both of these features without runtime costs (garbage collection or reference counting), and without sacrificing safety."

If it is freeing everything at the scope boundary it is incurring a huge runtime cost relative to garbage collected languages. GC scales with the number of live objects during GC while this scheme scales with the number of allocated objects. It is far more predictable than GC but I don't believe that it isn't more expensive.
Anyone from Alameda/Oakland Attending Startup School?
Looking for a car to ride-share to/from Startup school this coming weekend. If you're attending from alameda/SF/Oakland and are open to providing a lift, please contact me.

Thanks!
Love the staged roll out idea. You could probably also use user agents to recognize scrapers from real users (could also be helpful for slowly rolling out to older browsers).
The last discussion of this case on Hacker News (May 2013):

Use a Software Bug to Win Video Poker? That’s a Federal Hacking Case

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638894
Many school/colleges outside NA/Europe (eg: even topmost science/engineering colleges in India) don't necessarily provide an institutional .edu email ID but you can still verify using college/library ID cards and say semester exams marksheet or such. So is this pack available for such students?

Nevertheless kudos for an awesome bundle!