skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Centralized vs decentralized is not a box to check, there are major costs associated with it.

Imagine for instance someone suggesting that a supermarket offers coupons on a distributed ledger. Sounds like a good idea? No, it's dumb. It's dumb because you trust the supermarket to honor the coupon anyway... there's no credible threat model here.

OK so we've figured our supermarket coupon system can be run on a centralized database. Well, you suggest, sure we can, but why not just have it decentralized if we can?

Because it's expensive. It's expensive in terms of engineering to interface with the blockchain, it's expensive to wait for blockchain confirmations, it's expensive to rely on the non-malevolence of a few mining pools. And did I mention there is about no benefit?

However, this is not the most offending use of blockchain technology. You know what, maybe that supermarket gets to federate their coupons to other stores and you can start to see an engineering case. And maybe you're running this in Argentina and there is a credible threat that the government might want to meddle in you coupon scheme, maybe for price control. OK, then maybe you have a case. No, the worse use of blockchain technology is when there is no need for a global mutable singleton.

The whole idea of a cryptocurrency is that you need to have an irreversible consensus. This is the crux of the double spending problem, you need to dissipate heat to be irreversible (yes actual heat). This heat could come from "overwriting" your key, but that's hard to prove, so instead Bitcoin uses the heat from the ASIC. I'm simplifying a bit, but this can be made rigorous.

However, I've heard many proposals where there is zero need to maintain such a consensus. You mentioned medical records, that's one. People have been talking about running webforums or websites on top of a distributed ledger. Most of those proposals are braindead.
What do you need the full friend list for?
Plot twist: By day he's the US' envoy to Brussels and by night he's secretary general of the UN. He is..... Speak-on-Behalf-Man!
You don't see all the bikes not weaving through traffic, because they...aren't weaving through traffic.
I agree with you but if this was a thing in America this:

> doesn't apply to corporations because they aren't people.

could be a problem post Citizens United couldn't it?
The strange world of computer-generated novels
If I was paying someone $100k, I'd expect them to have just ever so slightly more than a tiny amount of experience in a single language.
I will get off my high horse if you get off your high horsepower smog machine.
No, they aren't. The only thing "first-class" in Java is classes. They added lambda expressions in Java 8 but they still must be defined inside of a class method. It is still illegal to define a function outside of a class in Java. And Java methods are still not lexical closures; there are some tricks you can do to sort-of emulate this but closures are not a language feature.
Offline Web Apps with Meteor
"Android is destroying iOS in market share in part due to having an easy to submit to app store"

For instance, they are absolutely CRUSHING the "flashlight apps that utterly pwn your privacy" space.
The idea that our jails are full of pot-smokers and prostitutes appears to be totally unsupported by the facts. Each state keeps statistics on the crimes for which its incarcerated population is held. Look up the stats for your state. I think you're going to find that it's not prostitutes keeping the numbers up.
And you can't blame them. Look at this guy: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/peter-orszag-citigroup...

He went from making probably around 200k (my guess) to 3 million+. I would probably sell out for that money too.

The pay differential between banks and the rest is just too much.
Since when has what Yahoo Mail does become relevant again?
ZenPayroll (YC W12) is hiring PMs, designers, engineers, and more
Generate $315MM of Economic Impact by Wishing People an “HT” Today
A great time to play "bicycles in the media" comment bingo:
http://i.imgur.com/UUafNzZ.jpg
He wants his website because he wants to have two main sections - one for his photos and one for blogging about photography. I think he intends to let other people use his photos for free as long as they don't claim they took the photo or something like that.
> The bug in that CVE is that the function call got the parameter order wrong. The declaration was correct AFAICT

Actually if you look at the patch to fix this issue, they swap the identifiers in the declarator. Of course when something like this happens, you're free to choose whether the definition or the callers should be changed.

https://www.FreeBSD.org/security/patches/SA-14:11/sendmail.p...
OpenCL in pure Python
Why? It's a term that applies to the concept in question. The other things you mentioned are, in contrast, scaremongering.
I'm really happy to see a post like this on HN. Pulling off creative in-camera shots like these are a million times more rewarding for some reason than creating/editing them in post. There's something visceral about getting the shot right in the moment.
Number 10 is tricky. I solved it by using the fact that when you remove mass the center of mass moves away from the mass you removed, so the minimum will occur when the height of soda matches the height of the center of mass. This gives the equation:

(1/2 c + (1/2 h) (h f)) / (c + h f) = h

Where c is the mass of the can, the can has height 1, h is the height of soda remaining in the can, and f is the mass of the fluid when the can is full. (Incidentally, I wrote this equation wrong like eight times because I kept missing a factor of h in the fluid's center of mass height.)

Working the equation:

c + h^2 f = 2 h (c + h f)
f h^2 + 2 c h - c = 0

Oh hey this will get simpler if we just look at the ratio:

let r = c/f
h^2 + 2 r h - r = 0
h = -r +- sqrt(r^2 + r)
h = sqrt(r^2 + r) - r

Well that's kind of gross. I'm actually surprised it's in the right range based on how it looks (but plotting it shows it is in fact in [0, 0.5]). Maybe the values from the problem are nice:

r = 1.5/12 = 3/24
h = sqrt((3/24)^2 + 3/24) - 3/24
h = 1/4

I guess that's okay..
> The short answer is that bicycle riding in cities sucks.

Depends on the city
Slightly related, but what are thoughts on using internet harassment for extortion purposes or personal attacks. In many ways, the technology and policies we'd use to prevent this harassment could be frightfully similar to technology that allows censorship.

Interesting related article: http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/11/ransom-is-new-black-increasi...
So is Idaho wrong, or are the laws elsewhere wrong? I don't think the potato surplus changes the nature of traffic.
I actually use xterm's tek4014 emulation for plots, I can keep them going off to the side at 15Hz just drawing over the top of each other until I change something in the main text window, then I erase and repeat. I tried to do similar with gnuplot but I could never figure-out how to keep updating continuously like that, so that's why.
I can see a case for a very limited "right to be forgotten", restricted by:

* Time. You should only be able to request the removal of information that is old -- like, perhaps at least 10 or 15 years. Forgetting takes time, after all.

* Scope. Anything that's a matter of public record should be completely off limits to have "forgotten". If you want it to go away, you have to get it removed from the public records first.

* Target. High-profile individuals (celebrities, elected officials, etc.) live highly public lives by choice. They should be fully exempt.
Publishing: The peer-review scam
I'd say to them: learn Java.

Java is in high demand, and if you know either C and/or PHP I'm sure your friends will pick it up. Although there's some competition, you don't have to worry with competing with the 20s kids as long as you are an OK programmer. I believe there's enough demand for your friends to get hired, and theres a ton of resources on java stuff. Better yet, if you can manage to get Oracle certified, I'm sure that no recruiter will put you aside.

Consulting is rather easy to join (comparing with the other IT stuff, such as startups or reputed companies, consulting, etc), provided you can cause good impression with the recruiters. Technical interviews are normally easy, and there is scarcity on the supply side. The hard part is really getting the interview.

I helped a friend of mine who didn' finish his degree and was working in a music shop to enter the consulting industry. The plan was basically a) get some skills and b) bombard alot of recruiters to try and get interviews. We rehearsed some interviews so that he could feel the stress, and I pushed him to study some github projects. He got hired within a month or so, and he's on his second gig.

If you (or anyone) want my .2c, let me know.
I feel like this is bad advice. Zero experience + a 3 month course in JS does not get 100k job, certainly not at a 99% rate. Maybe it could lead to a 45k entry-level/internish job, then after a year or so coupled with SERIOUS chops and a few projects, maybe, maybe a 6 figure job, in SF. There are so many of these 'hacker schools' that are churning out grads, you'd better have a good degree or interesting experience to couple with it and be competitive(I had a TS security clearance and prior IT background). These courses are great to get people started but they generally make extremely good entry-level candidates, not seasoned devs out of the box.

Experience: I attended one of these 6month bootcamp courses and later went on to get a CS degree.
People who are baffled by:

* "what Facebook could gain from this?" (must be an evil ploy, yada yada)

* what seems to be a wordpress blog

* the free photo (in spite of Facebook's stock photo deal)

* the G+ icon on the iPhone

* etc

are missing the simple fact that Facebook is not a single giant apparatus of propagating the One Way from top to bottom, but it's instead a conglomerate of regular Joes (and Joannes) like you and me, except smarter on average (probably). It's a good sign I'd say that some of these people care about startups, and get OK'd to start scruffy 20%-style projects such as this.

As I always say about Facebook: I deeply dislike their product‡, but the company is friggin' awesome.

‡ too much noise and unethical shit to put up with for questionable value
From past experience, there are two danger points when growing: 25 employees and 50 employees.

At 25, you stop meeting everyone every week. i.e. Random encounters no longer guarantee that every person in the company keeps good contact with everyone else.

At 50 pax, you stop knowing everyone. i.e. You may know the list of employees by heart, but you don't really befriend them anymore.

Of course, these are soft trigger points. You start noticing something different at 20 people, and are sure of what is happening at 30. It is definitely not the fault of the 25th hire :-)

The remedy is always the same: Company culture. Growing slow is a good ingredient towards a good culture, albeit not the single ingredient.
Does being "Swiss" mean much in international terms, for something like this? That is, if I, as an American citizen, have a server with these guys, and the USG comes knocking wanting to image my instance, are they going to offer any more resistance than a US (or German, or South African, or Mexican, etc.) provider?
Likely because /net was done before the coding standard and by some 3rd party contributor -- and doing non-functional whitespace/formatting commits is a no-no in most large projects.
That's essentially it. The whole, "yeah but the library may not handle exceptions properly" is essentially a C++ problem, not an exceptions problem.
They travel 500 miles. They start 1317 miles apart. The distance afterward is 1317-500.
No not cloud Foundry. LXC containers with the right orchestration.
I also use the wired SpaceNavigator. For a long time they weren't usable at all outside 3D apps. Prior to v10 of the drivers, they were adamant that all software developers should support it natively instead of letting it emulate joysticks and other already supported devices. Definitely got more useful when they added that.

It's a fairly different piece of equipment though, I'd compare the SpaceNavigator to a joystick or thumbstick (with 4 extra degrees of freedom) moreso than a knob, despite looking like one. I've never had much luck getting a balance of speed and accuracy with it, movement either feels slow, or you crank the sensitivity up and it becomes hard to do small motions accurately. Kind of like a gamepad as compared to a mouse; you have a quarter inch of motion and a few degrees of tilting to work with, and you can't map all of the different speeds you'd like to move at into that space.

I like knobs because they allow for a great mix of speed and precision. I know what half a turn does on my computer's volume knob, and I can do it a lot faster than "push the spacenavigator sideways a bit, hold it there until the volume is where I want it, then let go."

Which isn't to say the SpaceNavigator is a bad device. It just serves a different purpose.

IMO Flow's biggest competitor is the touch wheel on Wacom's Intuos line. Among professionals who spend time in Photoshop, they're extremely common. No such wheel on a Surface though, and having a few shortcuts that I can map without hooking up the keyboard would be a nice addition. Hoping this pans out!
what is the point of such a long sentencing? 440 years?
> I would probably sell out for that money too.

It's good of you to admit that, but I have to ask: why? Why is 3 million so different from 200k as to be worth being willing to set aside ethics / become antisocial?
Postgres Tree Shootout Part 2: Adjacency List Using CTEs
I would almost term it as a permanent research platform for FreeBSD. Never would I recommend someone run it in production, but if I'm looking for cutting-edge parallel OS techniques, Dragonfly is definitely on the short list. Come to think of it, it might be the only one on my short list—OS innovations seems to be driven by virtualization, container, filesystem, and network concerns more than anything these days.
'Interstellar' Science: Is Wormhole Travel Possible?
Beautiful. A few of them almost look like something you'd see through a telescope.

I've been looking forward to a glass of Macallan to kick off the holidays, I'll be thinking about these while sipping on it. Thanks for the post and cheers!
It's too bad that most of the problems when scanning barcodes are related to the missing auto-focus in browsers. I really hope this gets sorted out in the near feature.

I just tried your app and reading QR codes works really well. You are using an emscripten version of ZBar, right?
My Experience Launching a Course on Udemy
When a serious legal topic comes up here on HN, I start missing Groklaw again.
They're rather vague about the details, but it looks like it's all about advertising credits on Facebook.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, and while it's just one data point, building a career in software developing without formal training or education is what I have been doing for a few years now.

Anecdotally: I attempted to get into a degree program in CS from my local university after having taken the required prerequisites, and getting mediocre grades in those classes, and was rejected. So I resolved to keep studying on my own, get Tech Support jobs and learn on the job, and keep applying to programming positions.

I worked two fairly low-level tech support jobs before I applied (internally) and was hired on as a junior level programmer. It was only for about six months, until a new CTO canned me, after which I spent about a month getting hammered with job offers and recruiters' emails, then went with a great smaller company I'm currently working for.

Furthermore, I fully submit that those who have a real passion for the work of programming, who get a buzz from figuring out how the small problems they're tackling aggregate into the kinds of large, effective systems that make companies run these days, those people will do very well. If the original poster's friends are motivated mostly by getting a good-paying job with some job security, but don't derive much satisfaction from the work itself, it will likely burn them out in no time.
Show HN: Jimi Hendrix in VR
The business context of the post is interesting: IIRC at the time there'd been friction between Joyent and Strongloop (who Ben works for) and each company had two core contributors (one of whom was Ben). After the commit controversy Ben, IIRC, stopped contributing to core for awhile.
I get redirected to "http://www.alex-buono.com/how-we-did-it-snl-titles-sequence/....
Show HN: Earning Money for Being a Typist Is Awesome
#10 seems to have confused a number of people, so I'll share my thoughts.

The reason that decreasing the amount of liquid lowers the center of gravity is that you're removing liquid from above the center of gravity. Likewise, the center of gravity rises again when you remove liquid from below the center of gravity. Thus, the center of gravity is lowest when the center of gravity is exactly at the level of the liquid.

Without the distribution of the weight of the can, I don't think we can get an actual number. The ratio of the weights of the top/bottom to the weight of the sides is important.

A final unrelated point: cans of soda are measured in fluid ounces, so the proposed numbers are somewhat less accurate than the questioner seems to think.
Will Europe’s ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Go Global?
I would say the primary identifier of BSD systems are their interface with the kernel, the userland, and the license. DragonflyBSD is a true BSD to the kernel; the implementation details may differ, but you can compile most freebsd code for dragonfly with no changes and have it run perfectly (or as well as dragonfly can swing it).
With the Opera browser it takes over a second to load the GUI whenever I click something, and the overall design looks like it has been made by someone making his/her first homepage.
No wonder they decided to use something that encourage in-line HTML where code and design get entangled like a pile of spaghetti - making it almost impossible to maintain.

In the last years JavaScript has exploded with new frameworks and "compile to JS languages". But I have yet seen anything close to usable. Maybe it's because I've become "speed blind" after coding JS for over 15 years.
I do not see all the problems ppl see in JavaScript, until I look at code written by beginners that seem to use every framework out there, and over-complicate the code, and naming everything with one letter variables and the name of their favorite pizzas.
No, you don't use the proof of Pythagorean's Theorem every day. I guess you never did at all. You use some computational procedure which is developed along with that proof. For a layman it might seem there's no difference, but difference is huge. For Pythagoras himself and other people who used this simple procedure in that time it was more like physical quality of the real world, one of many procedures used to divide land on parcels (hence geometry, by the way). The "mathematical" part of his philosophy was more like religious practice with peculiar ideas, than what anybody calls "math" today.

The problem of "proof" didn't exit back then. What is proof? What looks like correct reasoning to me, that's what it is! And that was like a fine definition for every sane for a very, very long time. Have you read Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"? It was way later that Pythagoras, Kant was obviously quite smart man and his reasoning was pretty solid for his time. Now it's nonsense. Because Euclidean geometry was considered the only possible back then, and Kant indeed believed it's the only possible. Then some 100 years later it just appeared out of nowhere. That's when a problem of "proof" and "formal reasoning" was actually started to be considered. And only really became a problem after Goëdel. The whole math you use every day by making cell-phones, building atomic reactors and launching rockets to the Moon was mostly invented before that by people who weren't so concerned by proofs, the central object of mathematics today.

Similarly, you use just some formula you was taught at one point, and some semi-intuitive rules by which you can derive other formulas from it and don't really care about proofs. And although you without doubt have heard about Lobachevsky and Riemann and even Klein, and heard of "Erlang" (even if it's just a name of programming language to you) you don't really think much about Pythagorean's Theorem's proof and what it's built on, you use some computational methods you've been taught and what seems like "correct reasoning" to you. Actually, you even reinforced that by your examples, because there's many more ways to calculate a "distance" inside matrices or in a video game (and on plain Earth it's more based on physical properties you care for and would be fine even if only "proved" empirically). Because "distance" is not derived from Pythagorean Theorem, distance is defined and is one of key properties of some geometry. That is, you define geometry by introducing formula of how distance is calculated.
If you think this is interesting, there's an entire site dedicated to title sequences in film and television:

http://www.artofthetitle.com/titles/
How exactly is this insider trading? Insider trading is a fairly specific concept, and it doesn't seem to be relevant here (for example, this informal description is clear enough and doesn't apply: http://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm).

When a company trades with a bank to manage its risk, it gives information away by telling the bank that it wants to trade. That is not "insider" information at all. What it gets in return depends on how the company negotiates the price; it could get nothing at all, in which case it's a bit of a failure on its part. The bank is under no obligation to not use that information to make guesses about the market situation. That information is valuable to the bank, and the bank might even offer discounts to the client to get the client to trade with it first.

If the company believes it leaves money on the table by disclosing the information about its order flow, it's free not to deal with the bank. What you're describing is mostly market-making, there's no insider trading here.

P.S. Another thing this is not is front-running. If you come to me wanting to trade, I trade with you, complete the trade, then decide for myself that you're clever and you probably know where the price will go, then trade for myself, that is not front-running because of the order in which those things happened. If you "leave money on the table" by disclosing to me what you know about the price and I take advantage of that, conventional market theory says it's kind of your own fault, regardless of how unhappy you are about it. There are things you can do to not disclose such things, such as trading with many dealers at once. In fact, the skill of trading without moving the market is really valuable.
Say hello to x86_64 Assembly, Part 5
This video by Casey Neistat illustrates some of the problems you bring up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ
This is such a great idea that Europeans are flagging it to suppress a discussion.
60 percent of the features we build is waste.. Can we change this?﻿
Show HN: Hacker News client for Windows Phone
Is finding Clojure people that hard (honest question)?

The Clojure + ClojureScript approach has many more batteries included. You get all the benefits of reusing the codebase on both sides of the fence while the language is solving the "Transactional Store", efficient dirty checks, nice server-side concurrency primitives and many unrelated problems for you.