skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a retailer that has a card-to-check form of payment already, and I'm required to use that for my discount. I don't love the idea of having my checking account tied to a piece of plastic, but since it stays all in the family (card is only good at the retailer, and the only plastic card is in my wallet), I live with it.

That all said, there's no way I'd introduce a third party to this, well, party, and give direct debit access to my checking account to someone I don't know, who's security practices I don't know, and who's primary form of interaction is a freaking QR code - and I have nothing against QR, but I would never trust this to a single barcode of any kind. And the retailers are all going through all of this effort simply to avoid interchange fees and the impact ApplePay will have on them.

To me, the winner will be whoever balances security with ease of use, and ApplePay is the winner right now (and I say that having used Google Wallet). I use my existing cards and retailers I already go to, so it feels the same, but no actual, useful information is being transferred, so I'm better protected. All transactions show on my statement as if I'd swiped. If retailers shut me out in favor of proprietary systems that require work on my part, I will vote with my dollars and shop elsewhere.
I think "bleak" is just another point of view. Thinking back at how the 50's saw science fiction and the future in general, we could easily conclude that what we have was quite a "bleak" version of that vision.
The general cyberpunk point of view is just a radical departure from the established line of thought (and forecasting).
The fun thing to do when reading a cyberpunk novel is to watch for things that stay similar. And there are quite a lot. Actually, if you start pulling apart the shockingly weird things that are depicted (like for example, the SF-Oakland bridge becoming a shantytown) you notice that in the end society still works by the same rules as it does now. Which I personally find quite funny, given that one would expect technology to bring some kind of impact to cultural and societal frameworks.
Businesses like Intelsat's have high barriers to entry (literally!). If the business were easier to get into, competition would be fiercer, and the margins would be quickly erased.
I used to work on a suicide hotline, and a crisis hotline, for what it is worth. I think what people would find useful here is that there is a certain level of usefullness to anonymous counseling and microfriendships. We had some people calling weekly because they needed to confide in someone who would get to know them, but conversely never be too close to them.

Ironically, the only thing that works for me anymore is silence. I find the less I deal with others the more calm I feel, but that is probably just a reaction to circumstance.
The premise of the article reminds me of the metric of "fielding average" in baseball. A player can have a high fielding average by playing it safe and by not aggressively running to the ball in play. So, it is possible that a more aggressive player can have a lower fielding average and yet contribute a lot more value to the team.
How to Display Math and Code on Your Site
I've written a couple tutorials on MathJax and Google Prettify for putting LaTeX and syntax highlighted code on your site.

Displaying Math: http://ethanglover.biz/blog/how-to-display-math-equations.php

Displaying Code: http://ethanglover.biz/blog/how-to-display-code-on-site.php

(Bonus) Creating Static Headers and Footers: http://ethanglover.biz/blog/how-to-create-static-header-footer.php
>I don't think so. If retailers choose to not support a system then the system itself is kinda doom because this system was made for retailers.

I disagree. I think people will just wind up using their standard cards if given no alternatives that are viewed as safe by most people.

>Most banks suffer serious hacks that you and I never know about it, for obvious reasons. So don't be so sure that banking systems are more secure than retailers.

True, but regardless, the banks have won the PR war here. For consumer products, that's really all that matters. When it comes to widespread consumer trust, perception is reality.
This one. Seems to work better on mobile
It's not thousands of hours with a better-defined format than free-form text, which is obviously the case for journald. Doing that for a single format makes sense for something which would be as heavily used as system logs – it's not like people haven't spend crazy amounts of time writing syslog parsers or other hassles which go away with a structured format.
Email existed for decades before Gmail came on the scene, and it will exist if Google kills Gmail. If Google thinks they can be successful in creating a walled garden internet where they mediate all the communication, they should re-read the history of AOL.
Franklin Foer Confuses Amazon's Subsidies from the Government with Profits
So I need to use anti-TEMPEST style techniques for my printer fonts now?

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html
Comcast + Time Warner Cable: Together Is Better
And yet the NSA specifically called out the iPhone as a 'gift' to intelligence agencies in the their documents.

Yes, Apple has made some changes which mitigate some of that, just as Microsoft made a lot of changes when they were called out as the security joke of the computer world. Neither example though speak to my point.

My point, and my experience in trying to get more secure systems out there, is that regular consumers, those between the boundaries of the upper and lower first standard deviation, the folks who go out and buy most of the phones or computers or internet of things type devices like fitness bracelets do not pay more for a device with equivalent features but better security. And the people two standard deviations out who would pay extra, can't or won't pay extra enough to cover for those who don't.

There is another experiment running right now, its called the Blackphone[1], I'm watching it to see how they do. If history repeats itself they will got out of business in 1.5 to 2 years. I liked the editorial though which was "Why should I have to buy this phone to get these features?" its at the heart of my opinion on the marginal market value of 'security' in an electronic device.

[1] https://store.blackphone.ch/
There are many different things that people mean by "positive thinking".

This article seems to confuse prematurely patting yourself on the back with believing it's possible to accomplish your goals.

Consider a less radical interpretation- something more along the lines of optimism vs cynicism. Then you can easily see the benefits of positive thinking.

Imagining that you can make a difference when pursuing your goal leads you into all sorts of events and skills that a negative state of mind would keep you from.

In my mind, it's a question of what tools to apply to different layers of abstraction. Like, you want to overall have a positive, optimistic outlook. Then, use negative thinking when double-checking your work or planning for contingencies.
I thought that reading from stdin might bypass the file type analysis.
Google reader was better than GMail as an indicator of people's interests. It not only showed general areas of interest,but could gather clicks on specific articles within streams. I don't think you could get more precise targeting. At the time it was killed, they were re-evaluating their many projects, and I think some mistakes were made.
Now I get to balance how much I love learning things I didn't know with the terror of learning things that scare me more.

Thanks for the information.
The problem with infra red is that it doesn't work as well in bright sunlight. But i would love to play with a system like that for my hobby robotics projects.
I was at ng-europe last week and couldn't help thinking that the way Angular 2.0 was being talked about was rather reminiscent of the chat around Python 3 back in the day.
From what I remember, this is exactly what Detroit is trying to avoid. They have these auctions with the expectation that they will be lived in either by the owner or a lessee.
well they still did not manage to create a Dropcam outdoor version, although the market must be exponentially larger
Why did this take so long to announce?
The website: http://alpha.swarmize.com/
The GitHub: https://github.com/guardian/swarmize

The article is pretty light on content, but yay I suppose, though I suspect that the SQL midterm might prove more useful to actual journalists, this has the look of something thats focused on professional news organisations.

Still really good though.
> Together, Comcast and Time Warner Cable will make life online better for more people by bringing faster Internet speeds, a more reliable and more secure network, net neutrality protection, low-cost Internet access, and programming diversity to millions of new customers across the country.

Surely this is satire. Net Neutrality? Community Investment? Product innovation? All of these items are on the opposite end of the spectrum as Comcast + TWC.
Google Wallet launches as soon as you tap your phone to the NFC reader.
> You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment.

you have no idea. Gladiators were something like sport celebrities.
I don't disagree that competition would destroy those margins, but isn't a barrier to entry just a barrier entry? And the telcos like ATT and Comcast will still have the good fortune of being on the other side of the barrier, no? Whether it's launch costs, thousands of mile of cable, or spectrum rights, fat margins are supported all the same.
People in the US love their credit cards????
My goal was not to quantify anything - nor provide you with any answers except to the question about why would someone downvote a comment that asks "What so bad about distributing Tesla vehicles through a dealership franchise?"

To some people - like myself who have had universally horrific and expensive experiences with dealerships (and in my case the much better, cheaper, and competent experiences with non-dealer mechanics, and used car salesmen of all people.) dealers are bad and their existence should not be propagated. They are bad enough that I could easily downvote the question on that alone (without the political angle which lucio summed up nicely) if I was fast with the downvote button.

Explaining that and that alone was my goal - and one it looks like I failed at.
I actually have discovered this about myself recently. I have left my full time job not long ago so I can start a business and initially was very optimistic about the future and I was taking my time in every task and enjoying the moment but when my worries have increased I started envisioning worst case scenarios in my head and that's when I started getting things done much quicker. Looking back I also think I did well in school thanks to my worries but that also made me lose hair due to stress lol, so it's not always good to worry and a good balance is perfect.
I think you're missing the point there.
Angular is meant for complex application development.

For example, say you want to create an online assessment player for taking exams. You need a service that can maintain state for the whole application (example: time elapsed, which questions the person got right/wrong, etc.), and then you need highly modular question components that can plug into a common question model to generate common answer objects for answer submission, display of common question elements such as the question #, etc.

Say you were then handed requirements that you needed to support taking some assessments while offline and submit the answers as soon as the user goes back online (say for a self-study assessment and not a high stakes exam). All of this then has to be completed in two months, and from scratch since it would be impossible with the previous code.

From my experience, Angular has facilitated meeting these deadlines with each team I have been on (my example is a real world experience of mine) & allowed companies I have worked at to maintain a high level of quality - the clients have raved about the quality of the applications. Part of this is because Angular has allowed the companies I have been at to think about high level architecture, but the other half has been with the ease of unit testing with Angular. I have no doubt that other companies can tout similar experiences with [insert framework here], which only serves to emphasize that team work is more important than developer opinions - if most of your team prefers doing something [insert different way] & it doesn't have huge technical ramifications, then it's worth deviating from your opinions to the different way in order to keep things moving.
Is there an open source alternative to the Atlas Platform that has similar features? Thanks!
I'm going to remain skeptical until they publish more details. The report[0] linked from their homepage seems to contain more/better information, but it's not much.

What seems pretty clear is that they use a proprietary ISA and have developed dynamic binary translators for ARM and x86 code. It's not clear if it's a VLIW architecture or if the ISA has any other properties required by the hardware.

From this report it sounds like they're essentially doing thread-level speculation in hardware.

Based on the linked article I would have been tempted to think they have reconfigurable pipelines, but based on the report I'm somewhat sure it was just a misunderstanding.

I generally think it's a bad sign when a company implements relatively well known concepts from research and then doesn't use the standard terminology and tries to pitch their creation as something 100% new and original. In any case, there's no need to rush a judgment, I guess they'll publish better technical information in time.

[0] http://www.softmachines.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/MPR-1...
Bitcoin enthusiast wet dream:

Google gets behind bitcoin, integrates bitcoin NFC payments directly in Android, a la Apple Pay.
I seem to recall that Clang consistently produces slower executable binaries than gcc does, although Clang compiles quicker. (The reason a lot of people use Clang for development but use gcc for the final production build)

Perhaps the assembly it's producing isn't quite as optimized as it could be if it were carefully hand crafted.
I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments "progress" through history as the efficacious ones win adherents and the ones that don't work fall out of favor. The problem with this is that the most popular medical treatment in the European and Islamic world for 2,000 years (bleeding) was medically worthless (well, unless you happen to have very high blood pressure).

So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg).

In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.
Gibson is an enigma for me and I don't necessarily look forward to his return to sci-fi. He's a good writer and Neuromancer is definitely a groundbreaking work, but it doesn't age well. It reads like someone read a book about hacking and then made a story of it. Gibson himself has admitted to being a bit of technophobe and it shows in his work that he really doesn't understand computer technology. It warrants comparison to Jules Verne.

It wouldn't be so bad if technology wasn't so central to his 80s and 90s sci-fi titles. I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I like Gibson's worlds, characters and stories, I just can't abide the details.
Are you claiming that C is fast to compile? If compile speed mattered that much we'd all still be using Turbo Pascal/Borland Delphi, or perhaps more recently Go.
Repurposing the Titanic (startup story)
You're slightly off on your definitions - what you show in that example is dependency injection.

You are injecting dependencies into `some_func` by passing them in. See my response to kyllo below.

I think what you are arguing against is using further patterns to facilitate dependency injection, e.g. IOC containers, or what Angular uses (service locators).
Seems to be written in C:

"Marpa is available as a open-source library. It is written in C, and the C library can be used directly or via a Perl interface."

http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness-blog/indiv...
Show HN: My 50 days of the Scientific 7 Minute Workout
What platform are you aiming at? I usually browse through dribbble and try out apps produced by well-funded startups to find new ideas.
Windows 93 Anyone?
Same, I've opted out here and I still get it:

http://www.att.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=24339
The complex number contains both cos and sin components. Sine is the y axis, cos is the x. From that you know the angle, i.e. phase, right?
I wish more university students had this kind of attitude. Instead of "Let's take out the maximum amount of loans so I can get a new iPhone!"

Well done.
Despite the volume of messages on this thread about securing C or replacing it with a safer language for systems implementation, I think your answer is the only practical one.

If you haven't seen it already, you might want to check out HiStar:

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/
he's a great kid, i am a very proud investor
If the DOJ gave a damn about monopolies, you'd figure they would have broken up the credit card cartel, or Apple itself
Heathrow airport: Disruption after 'issues' with IT system
What superscalar and out-of-order processors are exploiting is instruction level parallelism, while their technology seems to use thread level speculation.

> Without knowing the details on how they compiled the SPEC benchmark it's really hard to say. Who knows, maybe they cheated and ran parts of the benchmark parallel on their cpu and not on others

That's most likely the case, but I wouldn't consider it cheating. As long as from the software perspective only a single thread is running (and SPEC CPU 2000 and 2006 are single threaded), I think it's fair game. The whole point of their project is to expose parallelism without requiring the programmer / execution environment to explicitly support it.
> Do the additional sets work better for people starting from low fitness levels?

Yes, because they cannot handle too much weight and so, their training volume is very low even on 5 work sets. Note that the body will catch up pretty quick and 5x5 will be too demanding after 9-12 of solid training.

Also, SS is much more technical because of the power clean, which is a very demanding exercise. You cannot possibly do 5 sets of power cleans without putting you in risk of injury.
When they say "net neutrality protection", they mean "protection, from it, for us".
"This last letter shows precisely why I like this book: it very readily lends itself to imagining the personal dramas occurring behind the pages. In fact, it could work cover-to-cover as a novel, a piece of fiction telling the story of a people strictly through the letters they write."

That reminds me of Griffin and Sabine.[1] Highly recommended, if you love art and letters.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin_and_Sabine
I'm wondering why Apple keeps launching in the American market first. Both in mobile and payment the US has been pretty much the most backward and conservative of any of their primary Western and Asian markets.
> Tail-recursions are the exact equivalent of loops.

Not necessarily. In the common case of a procedure calling itself a loop does wind up being equivalent. OTOH with mutually recursive procedures (two or more procedures which call each other), there is no straightforward way to convert the tail calls into a loop.
While this is true, it was a blood-sport. When a soccer player loses a match, he/she can go on to win later. If you lose a duel to the death, you're dead.
I understand your concern about Necromancer, but Gibson's essay In The Visegrips of Dr Satan provides some insights into his desire for a modern mythology, which is likely more what he was aiming for: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive...
Don't invest in a framework that does not respect your time commitment and existing implementation. They break compatibility between 1 and 2. It is most likely they will break 2 and 3 as well.

Don't be that programmer that leave shit all over the place for his/her successor to pick up due to bad choice of technology stack.
Indie Teamup Beta Released
Eli Bendersky's blog. It gets reposted on HN quite often and with very, very good reason. It's an absolute treasure trove of technicalia. I've spent many hours deep in his articles. On all sorts of cool technical topics, like parsers, debuggers, cool language features, abstract math...

And I'm sure I'm not the only frequenter of HN that loves this stuff.
Most of them were slaves. A minority became celebrities, that is, slave celebrities.
I'm inclined to agree with you here, but if I may question a couple of your points:

1. Isn't Apple Pay/the tokenization it uses is a whole new ball game? The contactless that currently exists in the UK is only for transactions up to 20 GBP, which presumably won't be the case with Apple Pay. Do we know that merchants will only be charged what they currently are for contactless?

2. Your statement that no one uses credit cards in shops seems anecdotal. Do you have a source? Most people I know in the UK do all their spending on a credit card, for a number of reasons. (Me included; I only use a debit card for the few things that have credit card fees - flights, council tax, ...)
> (Smaller, or else the algorithm will diverge.)

This is not true. The first example that comes to mind is the ridiculously over-powered one: conjecturally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture), the definition

f x | x `mod` 2 == 0 = f x/2
f x | x `mod` 2 == 1 = f $ 3*x - 1
f 1 = [ whatever ]

is perfectly well defined on positive integers `x`, although many recursive calls actually apply `f` to larger values.

(To be fair, you didn't actually say what 'smaller' meant. I think it's one of the standard term-rewriting theorems that, if given the freedom to define 'smaller' appropriately, then any total recursive function does make only smaller recursive calls.)