skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What would be the point of dumping tax dollars into amputee research?

Helping real people that need help now.

> We invest in space because we think it is worthwhile, and still mostly unprofitable (that's changing).

That doesn't help real people that need help now.

Remote-controlled robots on comets, versus more affordable and better prosthetics for all. If the whole country could vote I doubt they'd choose the former over the latter. So who is "we" in "We invest in space because we think it is worthwhile"?

I'll turn your next line around:

It makes sense to let the market decide how much to invest in this research acoording to the size of the space exploration and satellite launching market. It frees up the government to work on other things and gets rid of the HUGE inefficiencies when it comes to the government trying to accomplish anything.

I like how you say "and still mostly unprofitable (that's changing)." You're deluding yourself if you think new industries go through a "not yet profitable" stage where they need help from the government and then afterwards they can be set free.
Nor in mine. I worked on some codebases in Java 6/7 with a team who yearned for functional programming. They used various libraries that tried to support a functional style - Guava for the moderates, FunctionalJava for the zealots, lambdaj for those who liked to be different.

None of them really worked well (for functional programming - Guava is excellent in other ways). Java just doesn't let you write the function-like classes concisely enough for it to be worth breaking code down as far as you need to to call it functional programming.

Plus, no higher-kinded types, so no functors. And what's functional programming without functors and their kin?
VPNs, Security and Healthcare Integration
Always knew he was a smart man.
Hey @patio11, hopefully you'll lurk a bit later...

Congrats on the kid! Balancing a newborn and any amount of business is no joke (source: I have two startups, a software company and an 18 month old).

I wanted to ask about this:

> To build out that software and get the team spun up, I had to actually sit down and document our business processes

I'd love to here a bit more about how you went about that. You've got a great approach to documenting your thoughts and I'm sure I could learn a thing or two. I'm scaling our app http://www.staffsquared.com in 2015 and working hard to share knowledge across our growing team.

Keep up the great work!
I've collected quite a few CRC32 methods and compared them all, it would be interesting to do the same for CRC64 to get the whole range of options too.

The results are here: https://github.com/baruch/crcbench/blob/master/log.i3-2330M-...
Stopping Programs from Starting at Logon
Most detailed description is here: http://www.supertcp.com/the-fundamentals-of-a-killer-reliabl...
And Unix, when it comes to O_CLOEXEC stuff. Everybody loses!
With 25 examples on which the systems asks the labels (and unknown number of unlabeled examples).

... liked the progress on reverse computer graphics approach. A bit of personal perspective here, from the data that I saw (and labeled!), while working on hand gesture recognition project the reverse computer graphics felt like the only approach that could bring human level gesture recognition from 2d data. And I was really exited at some point when Nvidea had started a computer vision / gesture recognition group. It felt really right that a photographic-level computer graphics GPU company would try to do reverse computer graphics processor. Too bad it didn't go anywhere.
There was an EMD (Exact Match Domain) update in September 2012 to fix this.
Many amputees are (ex) military. The government probably should fund cost of treating amputees if they lose limbs in service of their country.
Show HN: Back to the future hoverboard in your browser
I lost my ROM, but there are copies on the internet. (I pulled all of the chips when I was in middle/high school, intending to build a computer of my own design, but never completed the project, dunno where they ended up.)

I also had a book with very thorough documentation on the hardware, but I don't know where it is. Dunno if my parents still have the tapes. It had the tape format documented.

It looks like "MESS" supports the interact, dunno how well though. After writing that post I looked it up, got it to run "Add-Em-Up", and let my toddler play with it. It appears to have a french keyboard mapping, however, so I'm guessing it's a modified Hector emulator.
>It is not merely the uneducated who can subscribe to extremist ideologies.

Indeed. And I'll happily concede that point. I (and many other) are just surprised at the thought process...physical hardware attack in (presumably a western data center)...and the thing that comes to mind is the ISIS??? Really if you tell me Russia I would have bought it. Same for China, Korea, Turkey etc...but jumping straight to the cliched CNN "terror org" that is the flavor of the month...please...
True. I was so confused when I got my token — it didn't come with instructions, and there was no activation link on the site.

I ended up calling support to figure out how to set things up.
Procedural text generation with JavaScript
Buzz is tired. Buzz is so tired of these moon-wisdom questions,
nearly a half century of the same questions about feelings that
leave him feeling inadequate. He is a man of science. Next time
NASA should send up a poet, he wrote in one of his books, a
philosopher, an artist, a journalist. He wasn't being flip. He
thought mankind clearly needed to send up people who know how to
translate feelings.

A lesson most of us in "tech" could use to learn.
It is, oddly enough. Partly it's that -- I love talking about things and having AR be the exception made me feel phony. (That's irrational, but there you go.) Partly, in recent I finally feel like I know what I want from having that business in the portfolio and I have some idea of where it goes from here. Partly that frees me up to think "OK, aside from fatherhood, what happens next?"
Time for some shale driller bailout planning. If it breaks OPEC it's good for everyone. The unholy amount of funding that supports global terrorism will take a big hit.
Not all of the price of gasoline is derived from the price of crude oil. Some of the price is from taxes, transportation and refinery costs which have not changed. (The exact ratios vary depending on where you live).
All of my websites using Rackspace DNS where down for around 9 hours.

It was not a good start on a Monday. And it was even harder to explain that your websites are up, but not up to a client lol, and there is basically nothing I can do.

So yah this marks the point at which I will be using R53 and RS DNS servers.
$100 to $60 is a 40% drop in the price of oil.

The price of gas is only partially due to the cost of oil. Taxes make up a pretty chunk of the cost of gas. On average $0.50/gal.[1]. Don't forget the cost of refining and transportation. This chart says 62% of the cost of gallon is due to crude oil costs[2]

So based on your $3.60/gal, $2.23/gal is oil. Reduce that by 40%, you get $1.33 and add back in the other stuff and I get $2.70/gal now.

Not far off huh?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States
[2] http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/gas-prices...

The cost of the raw crude oil is only part (but a significant part) of the pump price.

It's more 'fun' in the UK where fuel duty and other taxes (VAT) form the majority of the pump price:-

http://www.petrolprices.com/the-price-of-fuel.html
For anyone doubting the claims you can go right to the Senate Committee's report: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-tort...

Page 10 is the start of the findings and conclusions.
Great point. 40% drop in oil prices vs. a 22% drop in gas prices. Bottom line is that gas distributors don't have to precisely reflect the drop in oil prices at the pump because they can make more money that way.

There's also the fact that the oil prices generally reflect future prices. Gas stations need the physically delivered commodity. There's some small fluctuations there.

I don't have a deep understanding of how gas stations work, if anyone else has insights would love to hear them.
The difficulty is that 'content' in Literature/Language study is less valuable than various language related 'skills'. Do I necessarily care that my students have read Jane Eyre? Not at all. Nor, would it acceptable to expect that as a piece of 'required' knowledge for advancement. Instead, I care that they can interpret, analyze, and create based upon/in reaction to that (or any other) piece of literature. Even those discrete skills cannot/should not be defined linearly because they are (and should be) repeated, refined, and made more sophisticated over the years rather than being prerequisites for other kinds of knowledge (i.e. to provide evidence for your thinking is a very different task at 12-years-old than it is at 17-years old, but they are still fundamentally the same task).

Another concern is that while a mastery-based education system could be wonderful for middle/high-performing students - it is likely to lead to a huge mass of underperforming students in the lower and middle grades. "Oh, you haven't mastered exponents; Then, you cannot move on to...". The reasons that these students fall behind may have nothing/little to do with their classroom experiences and yet they would not be allowed to advance. Considering the costs - there is no way we're prepared socially/fiscally for a huge backlog of low-performing students in these grades (particularly when they begin to drop-out en-mass once they get tired of failing at "little kid work").

At the extreme, if you refuse to move a student forward to higher-level content are you impeding their right to an equitable education as their peers? There is civil rights precedents for this question with regard to special education students being refused higher level academic work because they could not (by some metric) prove themselves "competent" to move forward.

Further, is the content we require our students to learn truly necessary knowledge for adulthood? It had better be if you're going to refuse moving an 18-year-old to the eighth-grade because they cannot write a "properly" formatted paragraph.

I agree completely that this is problem, but unless we decide that fully educating every child is the actual, explicit goal of compulsory education - and accept the significant costs that will be associated with that goal - then there will always be a purge valve for underperforming students. Currently, that is moving them along despite low performance and obvious gaps in knowledge/skills.
I'm usually logged out, so I only upvote if it's worth my typing in my password to log in.

I don't have enough points (263) to downvote. I should probably engage more.

(I logged in to upvote the Schwab post. This comment was secondary.)
Because USB VIDs and PIDs can't be spoofed.
At least, as long as they stay in the US. I've read that a few countries will be arresting and prosecuting any participating agents the second they enter their borders. Not that that will solve problems here though.

Correction: The UN has said that anyone can if they want to.

http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/12/cia-agents-who-tort...
500 Greatest Rock Albums of All Time
If you look at it from the perspective of a city like Houston, where a big chunk of the local economy is driven by the oil industry, you can see why it's a big problem for some people.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/As-o...
but can it sort Skittles?
North Korea’s Internet Connections Disrupted, May Be Under Attack
FAA drone approvals bedeviled by warnings, conflict, internal e-mails show
Build a spy camera inside your coffee cup with Arduino
This may be a unpopular opinion, but this guy needs to cofound a company with someone else. He is one of the smartest dudes I know for optimization, but seems to have some of the most tame/boring ideas for 'startups' (if you can call them that). Bingo card creator? Appointment reminder? He needs a cofounder who compliments his skills. Mainly, good ideas and good sales skills.

The bottom line is you can only optimize so much via a/b testing and whatnot from marginal ideas at best.
I am a huge fan of yours patio11, you have gifted us so much useful knowledge.
How do we ever repay you? =)
Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses
> The only time in recent memory I used it myself was when a Redditor asked for anti-Bitcoin bingo cards, a request which I am unquestionably the best qualified person in the world to answer.)

Apropos of nothing, it seems that if you're interested in piquing the interest of someone busy, discovering the venn diagram for which they're one of a small population in the intersection might be the way to go. Or, it might just be really creepy.
I feel his $ numbers are shockingly low given his obvious calibre.
Congrats on the kid & move to 中目黒！
I'd put the stuff out there, and as you grow, save copies and such so that you can show the humble beginnings and have a laugh.

Everyone starts somewhere

WWW
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.next.announ...

Beginning of Amazon
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mi.jobs/poXLCW8udK4/_G...

Larry Page asking for help while building a web crawler
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...
And here's an attic wrapper script I wrote that makes it easy to use: https://torsion.org/atticmatic/
“I've been having a hell of a time trying [to purchase an Odroid C-1]”
GoJS - Interactive JavaScript Diagrams
Like many others, I just filed a support ticket as well. I'd like one of two outcomes: 1. A public response and plan from Schwab, or 2. An alternative bank/brokerage company that a) takes security seriously and b) is easy to move to.
I had previously moved from San Diego to the mountains of Central Arizona - no problems finding good remote work before the bubble burst.

Afterwords there was not much work for a short while until I took a 6 month development gig (writing a Sharepoint clone) for a company in India at a not very high consulting rate, but by the time I was done the job market was better for remote workers.
Lisp (Clojure, ...) reader and pr would do this, no?
Obligatory: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-...

Happiness is different things for different people. Don't be condescending if you do not understand another person's way of life.
I don't get a sense how the first machine actually does the physical separation, but the second one seems to be an air jet or something?

That second machine seems to have quite a lot of false positives, but I guess better waste some blueberries than have to deal with customers finding beetles in their berries.
Former Bitcoin exec to spend two years behind bars for Silk Road transactions
A new attack, could be effective on several known cryptosystems [pdf]
Isn't this a bit parasitic? I thought hotels generally reserved a particular number of rooms in these arrangements, so if you take a room, that's one less available to someone genuinely interested in the event.
How BitShares Works
Orgoglio italiano!
I just called Schwab about this, and hand to whatever deity you believe in, this is what he told me:

Representative: "One of the things we were trying to do with these passwords was make them different from other providers. So we know that they allow multiple character types, and are case-sensitive, so we decided to make them different. That way, you can't use the same password you've used elsewhere and it kind of forces you to come up with a new one."

Me: "...that is... I can't even explain how terrible that is."

Representative: "Well, Schwab does care about your security and as far as the 8-character limitation goes, the reason you can enter any arbitrary text afterwards is so that if someone is looking over you shoulder they can't tell that it only accepts 8."

Points for thinking on his feet?
It's the same for Wells Fargo. I can type random characters after the password and still login.
I never said he shouldnt be happy. I said if he intends to make lots of money, he needs to come up with better ideas and have better skills at being a salesman. This is the classic programmer dilemma. They built a great product and dont understand why its not winning in the market. Its VHS vs Beta Max. Sales is so important for this (as is having a good idea) - He seems to fail on both counts.
Repaired with gold
My response to fraud monitoring: "I have an alarm on my car, but I still lock the doors."
Why does the author keep saying "If OPEC doesn't interfere"? Is the author in favor of price-fixing? I thought all sane human beings understand that a monopoly controlling the price of something is bad.

That's why the author did not mention the reason that "OPEC doesn't interfere" is that the Saudis are waiting for this new price level to bankrupt the Shale enterprise in the US.
The ending of the interview is really disturbing:

Is there a lifetime ahead for a 34 year old writer who’s just delivered a thousand page bomb on us?

David Foster Wallace:

I think assuming I drive carefully, sure.

Christopher Lydon:

Please do.
Tip: If you're using >=2 providers to survive DDOS attacks, it's best to use no more than two name servers from any one provider. That's because resolvers will generally try up to 3 different name servers before giving up.

The "no more than two nameservers" rule means that those attempts will always span at least two providers.
+1 for Prosody.

I run it on a much smaller scale with imap authentication and it works flawlessly.
Sadly, h-farm does not really play in the same league of even third rate incubators in sv, both from cash and expertise perspective... And it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon
If someone managed to steal a database of credentials from Schwab, they could possibly decrypt the passwords (all these limitations clearly point to them not hashing properly).

If someone stole a database from a provider that implements passwords correctly, the best they could do is get some low-hanging fruit passwords.
Ask HN: Good JavaScript introductions for experienced programmers?
Have lots of experience with back-end programming, but am starting to dip my toes into some front-end engineering.

Do you know of any good resources intended for this audience? Most of what I see are more "first intro to programming" flavors.
Ahh, but he only reads the first eight letters, so all he got from your email was "Greeting"
A bunch of mildly (or not so mildly) suggestive PNGs. Not really emoji.
N Korea suffering Internet outage
I totally get that. Not odd at all.
Amazon by default gives 4 nameservers, can you only use two?
Basically, many economies suffer from the "Dutch Disease" where the easy profits in oil and gas crowd out all investment into other parts of the economy. The massive export economy props up the currency as well to the detriment of other exporting businesses.

When profitability is hurt by lower prices, these natural resources firms all pull back at the same time and there is no other industry that can take up the slack. The declining capital investment, jobs, and tax base all lead to pain..

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/11/ec...
Thank you for sharing your story

> I’m taking my own advice to charge more, and re-aligning those numbers with actual customer behavior rather than the numbers I guessed four years ago.

How do people normally handle this?

1) Take it or leave it price hike

2) Give a X month grace period before new price

3) Grandfathered in and price only changes if they need to
upgrade

4) ??
The answer is yes, in the current form of human economy. A non-psychopathic personality type has approaching zero percent chance of meritocratic reward beyond a certain glass ceiling. There are, of course, exceptions, but they do not make the rule. The rule is that the overwhelming majority of the most "successful" beneficiaries of current and past human economy have all been far more psychopathic personalities than not.

The ironic thing is that it's one of those things that is so blatantly obvious and right in front of people's face that they can't see it; the proverbial forest in spite of all the trees.
I would expect that "publicly available plans" excludes enterprise offerings, where i would anticipate a considerable income given his past posts.
It's nice having cheap/free DNS from people like Rackspace and Amazon, but situations like these make you realise that it's sensible to use a company like Dyn (http://dyn.com/) that are experts in highly-available DNS, rather than something that's a small part of a hosting provider's services.

It's easy to forget that you can have redundancy in your load balancers, web servers and databases (replication, multiple data centres, etc), but DNS is how you're found by the rest of the Internet.

No DNS resolution = no one reaches your expensive, lovingly-crafted infrastructure.
All this solves nothing.

The 20+ million in North Korea who never even heard of the internet still are starving while this petty "war" goes on.
IE10 uses a substantially different interim spec syntax that is conceptually different in a couple of key ways.
Oracle Acquires Datalogix
That's a myth. It "reduced" the bonus, but the bonus clearly still exists. But I love that others think that domain name is no longer relevant for SEO. Keep thinking that. :)
One of my favorite David Foster Wallace essays is this Esquire piece on an obscure but top 100 tennis player named Michael Joyce (who later coached Sharapova for a while) http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-079...
The very least that I expect out of this is for the International Criminal Court to convict them as war criminals. Whether those convicted will actually do any prison time is another issue. However, US will have to live with the shame for decades that it's harboring war criminals, and it may even impact its dealings with other countries in the future.

US will be in the history books as a country that not only allowed, but keeps condoning torture by refusing to punish the torturers. Brennan even implied that he's not ruling out the use of torture in the future.

Maybe eventually, some new US president will decide that it's time to prosecute and imprison them so US can have a "clean start" in its international relations.