skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Terrible article, it basically boils down to hipster garbage. "Adventurous Startup", give me a break. We're such free, weird unencumbered souls lol! Eat pray love!
Policy into Practice Video Series
Founders should choose the correct location that gives them the maximum possible advantage. If you're selling to the oil industry, build in Houston. Finance, NYC. And so on. Sometimes geography doesn't matter, so a small fishing town is just fine.
Astronomers crowdfund for African space mission
I am shocked, shocked that an unlicensed taxi firm has problems with its drivers.
I guess the way to approach it would be to compare the statistics of sexual assault by driver of taxi or similar travel for hire with the statistics we see in the case of Uber and try to discern whether they are meaningfully different.
Nürnberg isn't that small if you count in the other directly adjacent cities (1.2 million inhabitants) or even the whole metropolitan area (3.5 million inhabitants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Metropolitan_Region
And you are in 1 hour 20 minutes in Munich via train.

So I would argue that this is already pretty central
All the Java 9 JEPs to date: which ones are top of your list?
That implies that all 570 validly deserve patent protection. Going to go out on a limb here and say that a large chunk of them, if not a majority, should not have been granted.

Look at the BS in the software patents world.. it almost certainly extends to other fields.
Bubbles are about prices, not ideas. Prices affect things in at least two ways:

1) The idea may be something people are willing to pay for, but when given an inordinate amount of money with which to execute it, people go overboard on spending and create a business that is unsustainable if the money unexpectedly goes away (even if the idea itself would have been sustainable if they had started off with less but more predictable resourcing).

2) The idea may be a thing that people want, but costs more to execute than customers are willing to pay (and thus can only be financed in an irrational bubble).

In both cases the ideas are for things people want. You can't judge a business by the idea alone.
The Quiet German
This sounds a really interesting read. Though system biologists seem to disagree: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R1JC09V3NPULY3

Any thoughts on that?
Grow your confidence as entrepreneur
"Predictable" then.
I would just like to point out, that the crimes aren't necessarily under-reported (i.e. 706 reported), rather, there was not enough evidence to convict.

I would still argue that there is a high amount of under-reporting because people are embarrassed, just want to put it behind them, etc. However, I also feel a large number of the reported cases are skewed due to angry ex-girlfriends, intoxication, etc.

Specifically, in this case if he was not convicted it's not the responsibility of Uber to disclose that information (instead it's the driver). Uber (in the U.S.) cannot even disclose if someone was accused of rape (unless there was a felony conviction), conversely it is the drivers responsibility to share any convictions upfront (though a background check should still be done).

Overall, I believe this has more to do with Uber's business practices. The rape wouldn't have even been an issue if Uber was capable of helping the police or explaining some basic questions.

In other words, if Uber was able to say, "We did a background check, and he wasn't convicted" then there wouldn't have been an issue. However, Uber couldn't even be contacted, and was breaking transportation laws.
Cortana protocol reversed
This is actually a pretty good idea man!
Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon for me. It's a quick read perfect for my short attention span. It packs a lot of practical advice without the fluff.
Two books that aren't mentioned, surprisingly, are:

The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz

In my humble opinion, these two books alone, have the ability to change one's life.
Prototyping an iOS app for Charles Darwin
Getting a trainer is going to be better than trying to DIY from a book, at least to 'show you the ropes'. It's not like following a recipe or something where it's obvious if you have the right amount of ingredients; you might think you are doing it right when you are doing it wrong and have no way to tell.
I've expressed an opinion about bitcoin (and any other cryptocurrency) that isn't popular, but I haven't heard any compelling arguments against:

It isn't a currency, it's a transport mechanism for currency.

If you approach it from that perspective, the current value of bitcoin is irrelevant. Sure, if a business wants to be paid in btc, then they'll have to dynamically price based on the current value of btc and then immediately convert to fiat...

That also makes it a pretty awesome way to do cross currency conversion without much overhead. Want to pay euros for a product priced in US dollars - (somewhat) easily done with btc... and without (some) of the overhead/fees involved in traditional banking/credit cards.

Now, if you're looking at it as an investment - well, enjoy the ride... I could have bought 15 btc in Feb 2013 but instead I bought a bitcoin asic miner - that was promised to be delivered by May... and it showed up in October. If I had bought the btc, it and sold it in Nov/Dec 2013... well, I would have been much happier than I was simply breaking even on the miner. (120x happier, in fact) :)
If you enjoyed "1984", read "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, and then "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, which is a good comparison / critique of the two books and authors.
Totally. Their in-the-ground infrastructure was built to serve a completely different kind of population. I'm just thinking even longer term.

This Planet Money episode[1] does a great job painting a picture of the back and forth between residents having their water shut off and finding ways to turn it back on.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/08/08/338068996/episode-...
The website will have a bunch of tools such as a free CV creator with top tier graphic design, a job board, even a website creator for freelancers and such...
Intro to Manufactured Spending
Did the FBI Break Tor?
Not all problems have solutions. The military has been applied to an unreasonable and impossible task. They may be no way to "get better" at doing that.
Just in case http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=https%3A...
How clbuild influenced Quicklisp
High Quality Object Detection at Scale
I don't think anyone is dismissing quantum mechanics just because it's intuitively weird. They're continuing to work on it, which is an optimistic strategy.
I'm using DNS Made Easy for a few of my domains. There's a couple of good alternatives.
Thanks for the considered response. I do think we could have done a better job editing Code Words. We'll try to do better next issue.
Great idea, you could operate on a sliding scale that reduces the fare based on freakiness of the driver.

Make real killing by hiring a driver that torutured small animals and chronically wet the bed as a child, because although it has no real correlation with adult psychopathy you still save 8Rs/Km
The choice of GPLv3 for a license doesn't make much sense to me. The bottom of http://we-io.net/whyWeio.html seems to allude to embedding it into end-user devices in production. With GPLv3, wouldn't all your custom source code also then have to be open sourced?

As for battery life, the AR9331 SoC is used in the TP-Link MR3040 uses a lithium battery similar to old Nokia ones, and it lasts for about 5 hours. So this product could certainly work well with larger batteries, but really no chance with AAA or AA cells.
Mysterious Politician Steps in to Buy Bitcoin Startup HashFast’s Assets
Node.js is forked, not fucked
I'd heard of this before, but I never knew it now has a name, "manufactured spending", with forums [1] and subreddits [2].

[1] http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manufactured-spending-719/

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/churning
Shift your focus to being a problem solver, not a retainer of a massive knowledge bank. Then go solve a problem. A singular problem. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The Road to Reality, by Roger Penrose:

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...

This has been a really refreshing book for me to read. I studied mathematics in college but haven't really exercised that part of my brain since graduating and working as a programmer. Although this book is probably inaccessible to someone without some formal mathematical training, it's still one-of-a-kind. Nobody else of Penrose's stature has ever attempted to go from zero to string theory in a single volume, with all the physics and mathematics explained and very little left out.

For me, it's really been nice to finally satisfy a lifetime of curiosity that had built up about quantum theory. My fascination with it has never been enough to drive me to be a physicist, but it was enough for me to feel uneasy about not really knowing the underlying mathematics.
C works just fine on all of the (non-web) platforms you mentioned. It might be a little long in the tooth for some, but it still gets the job done.

In my spare time by myself in the last 4 years I have built a complete cross platform engine from scratch for Desktop and Mobile. If one person can do it their spare time in 4 years, a couple of programmers working full time could do it a lot more quickly (I also deliberately reinvented the wheel in a lot of places I did not need to).
Really nice post. Shortcat is really great!
I agree, as long as you find a good trainer. Most personal trainers are teaching extremely poor form.
This is a pretty big and complex attack. We have a ton of DDoS mitigation in place but it has taken some time for the filtering to become effective.

We are mitigating this as fast as we possibly can. I and we share your pain and frustration at the inconvenience this causes.
In Dynamically Typed Language, Is Returning Different Data Types a Bad Idea?
There's this thing called C++ which happens to work on all mobile platforms. I could understand having difficulty making a cross-platform app that needs deep OS integration but a game is the very definition of cross-platform.
Docker Says Absolutely Not to Collaboration on Standard Container Specification
It's an improvement because the smaller scale allows higher densities and more storage per chip.

Yes, that's the usual explanation but I don't think it makes much sense here since the ostensibly "better" memory can produce visible errors that the older generation didn't. I see the word "tradeoff" being used often in situations like this but I don't agree that this is, since at some point on the reliability scale it just stops being memory completely and devolves into some weird approximation of it.

From the paper, the strong implication is that a user running unprivileged code on any modern computer can corrupt memory outside of their process

Indeed, that's the big message I get: a tiny and innocuous-looking piece of code can easily corrupt memory. I'm not someone who believes in conspiracy theories much, but this looks like an amazingly good backdoor or constituent of one to me. If memory controllers implement workarounds such as the one described in the paper to reduce these types of errors, they also naturally will have options to turn them off for testing/debugging purposes, etc. For the great majority of the time if they are turned off nothing unusual will be noticeable, but then the system becomes vulnerable to the specific access patterns that trigger the fault. Since the documentation on the latest memory controllers is largely kept secret, a firmware update that silently changes this setting wouldn't raise much concern - memory initialisation code usually uses lots of undocumented registers and values anyway. Then all it takes is a tiny piece of user-level code (possibly obfuscated/concealed in some other mundane application), maybe with some cooperation/knowledge of how the OS's VM mapping works, to enable relatively precise corruption of certain addresses in memory. Although largely (publicly) undocumented, it wouldn't be so difficult to reverse-engineer the row<>address mappings either. The results could range from DoS to bypassing access controls, depending on what gets targeted.

The subtle nature of this approach is what makes it all the more scarier; the access patterns that trigger it aren't so unusual, and it's just reading from memory. I doubt it can be easily triggered (never say never...) from compiled languages like JS but virtualised environments appear vulnerable (unless the hypervisor constantly moves the pages around, incurring a significant performance penalty).

although the problem is real, the paper is a bit alarmist about the prevalence

The paper assumes exactly knowledge of the row<>address mappings and hammered the DRAM with that, whereas MemTest's implementation might not know the exact mapping used by a particular controller+configuration. Their estimate is 5-20% (a huge range), under "less optimal" hammering, which is still cause for concern.
If they settled on Unity, why not make a PC version? It shouldn't involve ground-up rebuilding of everything. In fact, they've already targeted the most restrictive environment, so it's relatively downhill to produce. They could easily get it on to the Playstation and Xbox platforms as well.
Why not use cloudflare? It is free and has ipv6 baked in.
You could definitely send me an email to discuss the project. If I cant take on the project, I'm glad to recommend someone who can. My email is in my profile.
How to Find Quick Wins in A/B Testing
Agree. Motorcycle accidents (another major cause of death for members of the armed forces) are likely completely unrelated from war. I find it implausible that suicides are not correlated with the wars. To say that suicides have topped violent deaths in war is a way of saying that method of causality has changed, but it doesn't mean that the cost of war has faded.
If you are going to bring up something as a "lets not forget" point, why Palestine?

It is not the highest casualty conflict of this year, the last 5 years, etc.
Questions to ask at a startup interview
For those who don't know Matthew Russell is part of NameCheap.
> Heck, they even elected quite a few convicted criminals to lead the Government

Can you give an example of a "convicted" (not accused) elected member from India?

>For example, a small search on Amit Shah and his fake encounters

Amit Shah has not been convicted. The case is ongoing.

>To me all this showdown to ban Uber seems more like an attempt to squeeze a little extra dollars from an American company.

By banning Uber they are trying to squeeze more dollars from it?
Explore how people in the U.S. aged 18 to 34 have changed over four decades
The postscript on disowning Lisa was that he reconciled with Lisa in her teens, she lived with him and he paid for her studies at Harvard. Yes, he was an asshole for rejecting her when he was younger but if he was a terrible person in his 20s, he was less so later in life.
We're not talking about plane customers here, we're talking about the pilots. Finding trusted drivers in a situation where safety is important because people are in a unique position to trust that driver with their lives, with a startup that has to be extra-careful to prevent major controversies while they are under a heavy spotlight doing ambiguously legal things (or in the case of Portland a few days ago, just outright, unambiguously breaking the law and then trying to pass the legal buck to their drivers).

The notion that women are filing police reports and potentially going to court over something so serious is not really something I would describe as a simple way to ruin someone's life. Nor would Uber rejecting an application due to a sexual assault allegation really qualify to me as a life ruiner.

Law very often fails justice, particularly in sexual assault cases. When laws don't work, it's the job of a company to recognize when and how that failure occurs, and manage that risk. Uber failed to manage that risk, and most disturbingly, I can't even figure out if they care.
I am based in Cairo. Other than the rare revolutions, occasional bombings and frequent elevated security situations, it is a perfectly suitable place to try starting up your startup.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Mortal-Medicine-What-Matters/dp/...
I was wondering the exact same thing.

EDIT: Here's what they are saying about Unity:

"We never had a Unity port for Frontiers. Origins is coded in cocos2d, like all the other KR games. By the time Unity became known to us, we gave it a try with the Steam version of Kingdom Rush. This was mid 2013... Frontiers was almost ready by then.
Early 2014 we started working on Origins and we used the old engine out, sine the effort of adapting the old games to new platforms wasn't exactly good to us.
Origins is the last game that will use our old and loyal cocos2d engine. As we define what our next game will be, we are very much aware that it must be multi-platform."
Can you provide evidence for that?

It seems common sense that a GPS unit, even one that cannot be disabled, would only be useful as evidence to follow up on after an alleged crime took place. I don't see any way to use it to prevent a crime happening in the first place.
You can outrun your customer base pretty quickly. Regardless of how good your ideas and execution are, you are limited by how fast the status quo can change.
Understanding Java pass by value
How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers (2012)
Game co's often hire out the porting, so they can still exploit a platform without splitting their focus. Aspyr has made a living porting popular games to the mac.
Ok, here are just two items of recent history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki... and https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_roo...

In the days after the rootkits were exposed, Thomas Hesse, president of
Sony's global digital business, was quoted on NPR as saying, "Users don't
know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Network_outage#Crit...

Credit card data was encrypted, but Sony admitted that other user information
was not encrypted at the time of the intrusion.[44][58] The Daily Telegraph
reported that "If the provider stores passwords unencrypted, then it's very
easy for somebody else – not just an external attacker, but members of staff
or contractors working on Sony's site – to get access and discover those passwords,
potentially using them for nefarious means."[59] On May 2, Sony clarified the
"unencrypted" status of users' passwords, stating that:[60]

While the passwords that were stored were not “encrypted,” they were transformed
using a cryptographic hash function. There is a difference between these two types
of security measures which is why we said the passwords had not been encrypted.
But I want to be very clear that the passwords were not stored in our database in
cleartext form.

Bottom line is that Sony haven't helped themselves in the last few years. Whilst they build pretty good hardware, building software systems (especially to support things like the Playstation) isn't their forté. Worse is that when they do screw up, they are arrogant and disrespectful to their customers.

Their arrogance has irked a generation of hackers and script kiddies, who see Sony as a carte blanche target. The recent hack shows both their arrogance and negligent attitude to the security of their customer and private company data. Investors should be punishing Sony and calling for the heads of the board.
Legalizing weapons will lead to more women being raped. AND then shot. Which group do you think will be using arms more - 20-30yo uneducated, poor and agressive men or 13yo children and mothers of two.
I'm getting a WordPress login. :-(
Total rubbish. Small towns insulate one from other ideas and other people pidgin holing oneself.
"Shipping for free" is a slippery concept, since it just means that the cost of shipping has been moved out of a line item called "shipping" into another one. But there are certainly people making money today shipping big bags of dog food for not much money. Amazon alone is full of them, to say nothing of these new retailers starting up. (I'm curious what they expect to offer me over Amazon, but that's a question for another article, I suppose.) It doesn't seem to me it was a "bad idea" so much as "one whose time had not come yet". Pets.com couldn't afford to set up Amazon-scale infrastructure for mere pet food, but now, Amazon-scale infrastructure exists. Even if these new businesses go under, the idea is frankly already proved to some extent, since people are already doing it, and I wouldn't expect them to stop.
re finding forks, what about Github's network/members "chart"? github.com/author/repo/network/members
From the very beginning, Uber has been fiercely proud of its eschewance of local regulations; and it's business model has always been, in a nutshell, about maximizing profit while offloading risk. So while I have no doubt that Travis is genuinely horrified by what happened, he shouldn't be in the least bit surprised, either.
To be fair, it's extremely likely that our conception of quantum mechanics is incomplete. Same with general relativity. One big clue is that we cannot reconcile them with each other; another is that there seem to be vast quantities in the universe--dark energy, dark matter--for which we do not have a solid theory.

That said, these problems are probably not going to be resolved by HN posters thinking about things abstractly. They're going to be solved (if they are ever solved) by subject-matter experts working very hard.
Here's a nice way to do Docker builds with Ansible, which allow using the template engine and all of that good stuff:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible-docker-base

(Disclaimer: wrote Ansible)
> incredibly boring manner. I'm not sure if its purpose

I very much miss the style of writing in which the entire point is given in the first paragraph. The remaining paragraphs then expose the story. I was taught that way and it makes it easier to understand what to pay attention to.

Writing in this style has come into vogue. It begins like NPR stories, with no foreshadowing, just a large number of mysterious statements like, "It's 3 am. I'm hearing tinkling sounds. John Wayne had several unusual hobbies. 80s arcade games had references to screen doors." Then, they pile on details until eventually, you hope, a point emerges.

I have no idea what parts are relevant and which parts are merely building suspense!
Often the driver is someone other than the official Uber driver, so you lose that advantage.
C++ also happens to be the quasi standard language of game development. Even the typical scripting languages (Lua, JavaScript) are supported on the major platforms.
It's not for everyone clearly.
When you actually spend more than a couple of weeks, you stop getting that need to discover and talk to people, and get to work super productively (one of the reason is: you can't wait to go back to enjoying the place). This solution works if you have a 100% online product, or if you opt to travel at the right stage for your startup (when you have had networked for now, when you're pivoting etc).
The thing that I'm pointing to is that there is more crime in the US than Morocco.
I can fully recommend Point (https://pointhq.com/), haven't had a single problem yet and support thus far has been very good. The web interface is easy to use and they offer both an API as well as the ability to export zone files.

My only gripe would be that the claimed support response times as well as the 'call-me-back' button don't work as advertised.
Grumpy Cat’s Owner, Formerly a Waitress, Says She’s Made Nearly $100M
Google App Engine Plagued by Tens of Vulnerabilities