skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the idea and having read the manual I think it's something that I want. However, it doesn't seem to be open source so how do I know that I can trust the binaries? The binary download is also over HTTP and not HTTPS.
"Terrorist" has a quite specific meaning; I think that there is a subtle difference with the fact that cartels don't use terror for ideological reasons, instead, very simply, as a business tool.

I think terroristic organization are characterized by asimmetry toward their enemy (that's where the terror strategies come from). Cartels are not asymmetric - I wouldn't surprised if their "GDP" would be higher than Mexico.

I would rather think of them either as a state inside another, failed, state, or a corporation who controls its state of residence through guns instead of money.
Does not seem reasonable to me (especially for reddit) but maybe I'm missing something.
He's doing satire, my friend.
Confluent, a company for Apache Kafka and realtime data
It's basically impossible with our current electronics to only charge the battery to 95% and leave headroom for regen braking. We could let the battery charge to 100% and then bleed off energy slowly, but most users keep it charging and then start riding immediately after unplugging it.

The other option is to divert braking energy to heat instead of recharging the battery. But on steep hills, braking energy can reach hundreds of watts, which would quickly overheat the electronics or motors without regen.

This is an issue that affects a very small subset of users, almost all of whom live at the top of a hill - definitely a unique corner case to design for. We tell them to discharge the battery by running it uphill or on flats briefly to discharge the battery enough to allow some regen headroom.
Would be cool to plug M-x spook (http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/spook.html) into text to speech and play it for good old Alexa more or less not stop...
Sounds like he confessed to everything after being read his rights, but before he even had a lawyer. His lawyer met him for the first time in court this morning.

Odd all around, like he wasn't at all prepared for this to end up here.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/prosecutor-silk-r...
Mousr: The robotic mouse that plays with your cat by Petronics
Wolf in sheep's clothing. In a few years a big internet company will bid to be the "provider" of said broadband. Voila, you now have to buy comast with your legislated tax dollars.

Freeing the markets would have been the win.
Someday, Isaac Asimov, 1956:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_%28short_story%29
This is the plot of the movie Antitrust. The idea of spying on potential competitors using surveillance didn't make sense in the movie and doesn't make sense in real life. If this were being done on a scale large enough to stifle innovation we would have heard about it a long time ago.

Really, the post-snowden paranoia is getting out of hand.
Age of Ascent – An epic space game on Microsoft Azure
Charles Stross, too.
The brain has no objective function it is trying to minimize
Can you share which components you bought to start with, i.e which starter kit, which sensors / motors, etc? Thanks!
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wanamaker
Photo: 1.8M people in a V-shaped protest in Barcelona
If it weren't for the people…
I saw Ricky Jay at the Magic Castle several years back doing closeup magic and his was the only show that stuck in my memory.
Good point - it did cross my mind but not sure why I didn't think about it recently. Thanks.
I don't make my girlfriend, the woman who I love, ask permission to talk to me when I'm chatting to a friend (or coding), with the explicit or implied threat of violence.

Very, very different. And incredibly disrespectful.
They should be regulated and taxed in proportion to their harmfulness, and addiction should be treated as a medical problem not a criminal one.
Textillate.js: A simple plugin for CSS3 text animations
I'd say more "useless" thank backwards.

Having evidence is not really a problem. In Mexico, you will see narcos in the streets with very outlandish behavior.
With a functioning judiciary system they would be arrested and jailed easily and immediately.

The problem is that drug cartels have control of the everything, including the police and the judiciary system. You should read about the meetings where they show to the policemen what they do to the ones who betray them; it's terrifying.
Yeah, there is a huge dearth in the day to day lives of average people throughout history.

This sounds really stupid, but I am still generally vexed as to how people, say, 500 or a thousand years ago managed to get their first outfit.

If you're barely scraping by a living, how can you afford hand made items like clothing, which requires precious natural resources and time to create. Those outfits must have had to last a very long time as well, what did they look like, what was the total flow of the transaction?

How did the weaver get the raw materials? Was it all exchange based? I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough material to make two?

Considering a lot of people didn't own the land or crops they farmed, how did the workers get the money or raw materials to obtain something as simple as a shirt, especially if they were, say, 8 years old.

Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit. It's really easy to take for granted a simple thing like your shirt :)
Amazon Echo + Firefly + Kiva + AWS = Personal Robot, I'm hoping to see it next year.
My understanding of the "never tell them your current salary" advice is that it's less cultural and more "they can use it against you to pay you less than you're worth". It's a negotiation, and "never give the first number" isn't for culture/privacy.
Ebolabigdata.org is public now
It's likely that, at any given time, the top 2-3 links of /r/funny are highly-ranked enough to make the front page -- except the algorithm won't let more than one from that subreddit through at a time.

So the alpha-funny link makes it, and the beta-funny link has to sit on page 3, suppressed, unable to take its rightful spot... until suddenly alpha-funny is too old, and is kicked off the front page, at which point beta-funny immediately ascends to take its place.
from the video: "..it only hears you when you use the wake word we chose..", so you can definitely chose "Computer" as your wake word
Unfortunately, it's actually not that hard. My brother vanished when he was 23 and to this day, he's still a missing person's case. You'd hope that your friends would search for you, but most people are just too busy with their own lives to exert too much effort when it's not their problem.

He was someone with over a thousand Facebook friends, but no one seemed to notice that he stopped posting. The first few months he was missing, his friends continued to send him invites to parties, events, etc. As time when on and he didn't respond, they naturally stopped sending invites. A few friends sent emails saying, "Hey, I haven't seen you in a while. I'm worried. Call me." Eventually they too stopped. All it took was a matter of months before people stopped to reach out.

When news broke that he was first missing, his friends seemed more annoyed than anything. I suppose most of them thought this was a hoax (not that he's ever done anything like this before). They were reluctant to be bothered, to break up their day to simply answer a few questions the detectives had to paint a better picture of my brother. I don't blame them too much, no one wants additional drama in their lives.

Of course, the scenario will be unique for everyone. Everyone has a different group of friends, different resources. Unfortunately for me, I was blocked. I practically had access to all his accounts with the help of his girl friend, but at the end of the day, I couldn't get a subpoena to see if there were any deleted gmail or facebook messages. I wasn't able to get a subpoena to track the cellphone fast enough. He was just casted off as a statistic, just another quarter-life crisis suicide case. I sincerely hope the family gets some good news about Dan Ha, because there's nothing worse than having to wake up every morning wondering if you could have done more.
The paper "The Distance Geometry of Music" by Demain et al. might also be of interest: http://erikdemaine.org/papers/DeepRhythms_CGTA/paper.pdf
And this is also true for cellphones. Siri is always listening for you to say her name, which means that anyone you talk to with an iphone is always recording.

Not everyone has the same level of concern over "priacy" that you do, deal with it. It's 2014, everything is being recorded now and will be even more so in the future.
How to Not Make Friends at a European Tech Conference
One of the things that will get your account banned or your sub-reddit closed is people posting personal information.

Reddit admins take it pretty seriously.

It's weird what they do and don't care about.
You shouldn't have to learn how to code
One would hope. I honestly think that at this point legalization and regulation of all drugs would be the most sensible approach, even when it comes to "hard" drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Doing so would not only cut out the cartels, but also allow us to implement harm reduction strategies that are lacking from our current "War on Drugs" approach. Just being able to ensure that what is being sold provides a predictable dose of the drug and is free from unnecessary contaminants would be a huge step forward, not to mention all of the treatment options that would become available to abusers if we were to stop treating them like criminals.
Verizon contacted me on Twitter and asked for my billing password
The line "There is the possibility of travel to the geographic South Pole." makes up for it! Plus, I imagine that expenses are all (or mostly) paid for when in Antarctica, and the cost of living in Wisconsin is quite a bit lower then other parts of the US.
Founder here. Happy to answer questions.

One of the most interesting things we've learned about recently is the temptation to cut corners using cheaper parts or processes or relaxed quality control procedures. It's easy to get quoted prices much lower than what we currently pay, but the long-term cost of choosing those parts (greater failure rates, manufacturing problems, and warranty costs, not to mention unhappy customers) is hard to quantify at decision time.

This is where experienced supply chain and hardware engineers are especially valuable. They understand the implications of these decisions and know the right way to account for them. For example, major manufacturers set aside "warranty accruals" as liabilities in their financials to cover the average future cost of servicing a unit that ships today.

I suspect this is a problem facing many hardware startups, Kickstarted or not. It feels non-intuitive to build hardware carefully and at such high initial costs, especially in the "move fast" culture of software development. And it's especially dangerous if a company goes "in the red" without realizing it by shipping many units that may fail or incur high warranty costs that exceed the margin on the product, but at a later date.
> Keep in mind that ANNs aren't about duplicating human brains and that a lot of aspects already don't correlate with our current, very short, understanding of them (i.e. learning algorithms, backpropagation,...)

> We'll see that artificial neural networks are not that different from our magnificent biological system "in their most basic definitions".

I've tried to make it clear enough that we should avoid analogies with biological neural systems.
MPC PR Piece on Variety Gets Reality Check in Comments
Posting on a throwaway account due to possible black listing.
It's not just about spoofing user agents. Take third party browsers for iOS for instance - they might be called Chrome or Opera but are really just UIWebViews. If they would add "Chrome" to their user agent string, this solution might break, serving incorrect polyfills. Today these browsers identify as "CriOS" and "OPiOS" to work around broken user agent detection. This can also be a problem with all web browsing happening in embedded webviews (feed readers, reddit apps, ...)
Sorry to disappoint, that's not how keywords work for NSA stuff. Now the DHS and FBI, that's a different story.
I have a friend who did this sort of thing back in the '70s, maintaining a PDP-8 that ran a weather radar at the South Pole station during the long winter.

Not much in the way of creature comforts back then, he said they got very familiar with the few movies they had copies of, What's Up, Doc? was the only one he mentioned by name.
sketchy drug dealers on street corners
S.F. jail inmates to have access to computer tablets
Dell brings us closer to a Star Trek-like future with its ‘smart desk’
> Quote: So it can just hear you anywhere? Yes, well anyone can hear you anyway.

I took that as a joke, like the kid is loud or annoying.
This seems like an excellent example of a 'natural experiment' where the FBI's imaging request serves as an instrumental variable.
Talky? I've been lying to myself this whole time.
so, is everyone ready to ditch Tor for i2p yet?
New battery en route --- I'll be able to tell first-hand what the differences are in a week or so :)
Jobs in Antarctica don't tend to pay particularly well. If you're doing a job like this, you tend not to be in it for the money.
Does anyone know why is Array.from not able to be supported on the most recent versions of Firefox? (That's the one feature where the polyfill works on older browsers but apparently does not work on newer ones.)
The Schnorr signature patent that expired in 2008? The one-bit-sign point compression patent that expired earlier this year? The algorithms in RFC6090 which would be too old for patents anyway?

While there were (and are) some specific implementation techniques for efficient ECC covered by patents, many of them have now expired, and many others have better patent-free alternatives anyway.
Here's a list: http://ghgcorp.applicantpro.com/jobs/

You might also consider volunteering with a research group. Though they tend to select from pools of grad students, I would think that someone with technical skills (particularly hardware related) would be competitive.
In my non-educated opinion, one should never regenerate energy to a Lithium battery of any flavour. All of them are too unstable.

A supercapacitor is what should be the destination for the regenerated energy: it's empty by default; stable; could be discharged at high rate
Surely it's just "ok google" or "siri" in a tabletop device. We already have this as an app in our phones. Doesn't seem to be a technological move forward just a re-packaging of currently available ideas.

The big idea here though is that Amazon can get entrenched as the first such domestic fixed device and then control the fulfilment for the shopping/wish/gift lists you make using their device.

It's business innovation.
From the video: "It only hears you when you use the wake word we chose" (~22 seconds in)

So it sounds like you can set it to whatever you want.
reminds me of Google Will Eat Itself:
http://www.gwei.org/
My Fascination with Benzoylethylecgonine: 10 Year Study of Cocaine,Crack,+ Crime
Well, I'd mainly written it for people who were (already) asking me about how we differed from other integrations or why we did what we did ...

LDC (D with LLVM) is written in C++, so they invoke LLVM APIs, but I don't know what they generate (bitcode or machine code).

Julia is written in C++, they invoke LLVM APIs, they call the JIT.

CLASP is written in C++ and Common Lisp, they invoke LLVM APIs, but I'm not sure if they only JIT or if he stores anything to disk yet.

And so on ...
New App RingerZ Ringtone Sender
Besides the non-human traffic, most online ads are created to not be seen. I was even thinking about creating a blog post to call out the marketers out there to change this, but I am too lazy... specially to make them make more money.
I am so used to how ads that cover the entire page work that I manage to pass by them without even knowing which brand was advertising there.

Ads that force you to watch a video for X seconds, but in those X seconds they don't even show a logo or something, are money wasted indeed, again, IMHO.

Another example, ads that follow me. Oh god how I hate these. I visit a website, usually for a product that I already own, and the freaking ad from that company follows me wherever I go. This is money wasted.

Another example, I use Waze almost everyday to figure out the best route for my comute. My 4" screen phone sits there right on top of the radio. Whenever I stop the car, an ad pops up. But they make this ad so tiny that if I need to know what brand or product it is for, I have to pick my phone and look closer. This is money wasted.

The online advertising system is pretty broken... can I fix it?
/r/sanfrancisco mod here. It's a tough call, and one that Reddit Admins (not mods) have mostly decided for us. The worry is this: an abusive ex could post a "missing persons" alert for someone trying to hide, and get their location.

So, we have a rule that a news organization (which has more of an ability to vet a story, as well as a "the cat's already out of the bag" effect) has to cover it before it can be posted – and you'll notice the story is now on r/sanfrancisco since one did.
The Boondocks already did this with a parody of Siri: http://www.adultswim.com/videos/the-boondocks/i-dream-of-sir...
I wonder if Google/Apple can get anything tracking-related from his Smartphone.
I think that's a Penn & Teller quote http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-Hi...
Alexa: "You've used the word 'love' 3 times today, shouldn't I not order you no cases of champagne? Respond 'order this' or 'order this later'."

[...]

Alexa: "The Zambezi river is over 2500km long. If you want to cancel the booking I've made for you for a luxury all expenses paid family trip to the Zambezi then recite your 35 digit lock code now."

Alexa: "You gave me 5 7-digit bar codes, these items are now on your shopping list. Say anything to confirm this purchase."

Alexa: "I'm sorry could you repeat that?"

Alexa: "I'm sorry did you say 'I'm a booger eater'?"

Alexa: "I'm waiting for your response, please speak loudly and clearly."

[...]
802.11ac picks up Wi-Fi speed in businesses
Someone e-mailed me to let me know that a discussion forum they post on has run into the same issue. Seems like we are not the only one...
There's a lot of room for innovation in this space. Some friends (well, clients) of mine have a startup (Unlockable, https://www.unlockable.com/) that embeds advertising-based games into other games. The level of interactivity is way more than a bot could handle.
World's Most Powerful
The Giants of Silicon Valley
The SEO Dominance of Zillow
Connecting Humans to Location-Aware  Smart Environments [pdf]
> I have discovered that the server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account “blake@benthall.net”

That's pretty f*ing retarded of him.

No, I mean, what an idiot of epic proportions.

Or he is just a fall guy.

This is such a huge WTF to me. I mean, I can rent a server with Bitcoins completely anonymously right this moment from many providers.
So are bots playing games as well? I mean, are they also having ad fraud inside games?
A possible benefit is that you are probably not buying to many things while you are down there so it is mostly savings. Amazon shipping prices to the south pole are probably pretty steep even with Prime.
Not wired but - http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/
From personal conversation (in Chinese) with another person:

> What do your parents do?

> They're normal people.

Or, from a Chinese girl's online dating profile:

> 爸爸是农民。妈妈是工人。 [My father's a farmer; my mother is an employee.]

The elevation of the concept "job in an office" isn't a problem with insufficient english; it's something Chinese people in China do while they're speaking Chinese. I've also seen a banner at 复旦大学 (generally considered the third best university in China) advertising a lecture on... becoming an "office gentleman" or "office lady" (those terms were in english, but the rest of the banner wasn't).
I was being sarcastic, as another poster pointed out. Daesh is not the point of discussion here, though yes, their actions are abominable.
I see. That does make sense. Bit of a curious view on "normalization" but I can see how that would result in the strange graphs.
Inside contacts definitely helped back when Raytheon had the contract. I can't imagine that's much different now.

I got a job working (labor) at Amundsen-Scott for a austral summer season when I was in college. I had three seasons of experience at a remote alaskan research station and I had several references from people who had worked down there. (There was a fair amount of crossover between the USAP and other NSF funded remote research stations)
HN does "voting ring detection" IIRC and penalizes heavily news which are upvoted by many people in a short time. There is some logic to differentiate between voting rings and genuinely very interesting articles, but I don't know any specifics. Anyway, posting a link to HN submission anywhere else than HN has a good chance of making this submission dead.
Absolutely. As with any gun, it is a tool with one purpose: killing.

The threat is the presence of the gun, not the waving it about and yelling. That's use (or misuse, really).
Aereo firing Boston and NY employees to 'preserve company'
This can be done with a low level of risk. So why isn't there any attention given to companies that, given a couple years of salaries for a few technically competent founders, could reliably and sustainably deliver 20-40% growth over the next couple of decades?

I don't see this. I do see a lot of companies founded by a couple technically competent cofounders, who spend two years on the project, and end up nowhere. Building software is high risk because there is much competition and the landscape is changing so fast. If you have product ideas that are low risk, feel free to share ... :-) Some of those products end up as successful, cash-cow small businesses. Some show traction, end up taking venture money, grow at 200% for a couple years before de-accelerating to a more sustainable 20% growth rate.

Also, it is exceptionally rare for a software product to grow sustainably over multiple decades. You usually are the best product for a given platform, and you take off, and you remain hot for five to ten years while that platform is hot. Or you are an also-ran and don't see enough traction to be sustainable at all.

It should also be noted that while Snapchat and these hyper-growth consumer apps get the headlines, most startups do not have that trajectory (and are not designed to have that trajectory). The trajectory for most companies is spend one to three years building a product and getting to product market fit, spend a couple years at 100-300% annual growth as your product breaks through, and then decelerate gradually down to 20% growth, where you last until a new platform comes along and disrupts you. (A good company will be able to disrupt itself, and build new successful products, bad companies will decline and self-liquidate).

One big hole in the investment scene is that it is very hard for first-time founders to get seed investment pre-product and pre-traction. You basically either have to bootstrap, get into YC, have connections, or get very lucky and meet an angel who is in love with the vision. That said, angel investors are probably making the economically correct choice in not funding these founders, so I'm not sure what could be done about it.

I am curious if you have examples of the types of 20-40% sustained growth businesses that could exist, but don't get funded. I don't see those kind of opportunities, but maybe I am missing out.
http://www.geek.com/news/outclassed-by-technology-in-the-dru... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-cartel-supercomputer-of...