skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is something of great concern indeed. Back in medieval Europe there was this nasty practice related to mercenaries that went a little like this: An ambitious noble would borrow a bunch of money from an unscrupulous banker at high interest and use the money to fund a mercenary army. The noble would use his new army to conquer a new land. He would then steal everything he can from the inhabitants, and levy maximum taxes. He would then use this money to repay the banker. If he is successful, he may continue to conquer another land.

It was this practice that kept ordinary people in abject poverty in middle ages and kept economic growth down for hundreds of years.

If this practice is revived, there will be a lot of suffering.

This is yet another one of the screw-ups of George Bush. He recruited tens of thousands of mercenaries (hundreds of thousands by some counts) at a great cost for his Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and now these people are all over the world's problem areas looking for work.

The article mentions the possibility of mercenaries doing humanitarian work, but this is not very likely. The world's poor and weak are the ones least likely to be able to afford mercenaries.
My guess is that the "entrepreneurial" solution here would be a combination of:
- A browser that doesn't support cookies and provides the server with a client controlled session-id (perhaps a user-id also).
- Only uses SSL sessions to avoid middle-box injection of HTML headers (this still leaves the provider with the ability to inject data as IP options / TCP headers).
- A micropayment solution that allows content providers to get revenue from content rather than ads.

Anyone working on the later ?
For wired connections my zip code shows 4 providers. This was exciting since there is only 1 right now that is equipped for high speed internet.

The other 3 are dedicated business telecom companies and do not offer residential service.

It appears broadbandmap.gov doesn't differentiate between residential and business.

Looking at the wireless I was excited to see Wimax offered in my zip code according to the site. When I go the provider's map of coverage I only see a small section of the metro area covered and it doesn't include my zip code.

It appears broadbandmap.gov doesn't include the actual wireless coverage provided.
I think the decline in real interest rates is explained by the market's coordination toward systemic risk collusion:

Now that we know that governments bail out inadequately hedged systemic risk, we might as well all play a new game in which we ignore those risks entirely. Perhaps in the past we under-hedged, but now we don't have to hedge at all.
Google also read your mail to store it on disk or send it over the network.
Yesterday I read about the Warren Harding climb up The Nose in 58 and Dawn Wall in 70 which were also interesting.
The issue is that resources are being spent not to create value, but merely to ensure that HFT #1 captures it rather than HFT #2. It's a lot like wearing a suit or going to college - it doesn't create value, but it ensures that applicant #1 gets a job over applicant #2.

Unlike normal market competition, this one actually is a zero sum game.
Splitting hairs, but it's not exactly a default. It's a preselected option. The user gets some notice and has to accept.
That's a nice link, thanks. I like the writing style. Clear advice, with explanations, not too wordy.

Do you have a pointer to the HN discussion?
If you were an author (of any sort) could you claim that the transmissions of your material (text) that are under copyright were circumvented (DMCA) via a permacookie under your "moral rights" as an author to publish anonymously?
Because it's better to have broadband be many little tyranies than a few big tyrannies.
Why do people free-climb? Why do they climb Everest or K2? Why do they ride motorcycles and base-jump? Modern, peaceful life is boring for certain personality types.
Between $327 and $587 per unit or credit, is extremely common for state universities. You generally have to be resident in the state for at least a year, to qualify.

For example, tuition at Stony Brook[1] costs $6,170 annually. At 30 credits a year (15 per semester), that's $205 per unit/credit.

You'll find that tuition in most state universities are around that range, across the country.

[1] http://www.stonybrook.edu/undergraduate-admissions/cost-and-...
Blackholes I get because I've always considered them big and heard about the massive ones in the center of galaxies but stars felt different because I was used to the size of our Sun.

Not that the Sun isn't big, I just expected other stars to be relatively the same size, give or take a few orders of magnates. These things are so large http://www.kratosguide.com/wp-content/gallery/mind-pictures/...
"It's pretty incredible that so much effort was even necessary. The solution was there at the start - wash your hands before treating patients" (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)

Educated men can ignore evidence. These women likely hadn't seen real evidence, and might not even know about the periodic system. It doesn't take much intelligence to detect things that kill fast, but detecting things that kill you slowly is hard.

Also, the health benefits probably weren't obvious to these women; they just heard strangers claim there were health benefits.
> IE10 defaults to Do Not Track enabled. So sending the header is not explicitly representative of the user's wishes.

"By signing up for [insert service here], you agree to the privacy policy."

How many times did you actually agree with the privacy policy? Devil's advocate, I know, but it's a sobering reminder that pretty much anything you use gives information that is sold. Open a bank account? If so, notice any new junk mail? Pretty hard to live life without a bank account. Your information is still sold to third parties.
The hidden assumption is that by favoring, or at least not opposing, municipal broadband, you are supporting the total ban of competing networks, subsidizing network infrastructure with property taxes, five-year plans, gulags, etc etc.
How difficult would it be to split the widgets off into their own independent/standalone terminal applications? I like the idea, but I'd rather lay things out myself with tmux (thus incorporating it into my existing workflow) rather than using the included layout system.

Sorry if this seems like a dumb question; I'm not particularly familiar with Node.js, let alone this particular codebase, so the answer isn't particularly obvious to me.
> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband.

Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a city/town and that's assuming you have right of way to actually lay the fiber. If the city does that itself, then ISPs only need to connect the city's infrastructure to the larger internet...something that's significantly cheaper.

The Comcasts of the world would still be free to offer service to customers. But they'd have to compete with the smaller ISPs on equal footing and without the giant markups they have today.
Ideally these mercenaries would be used to keep order in places with poor property rights and then be paid from the resulting productivity boom, but because this looks like colonialism nobody is willing to do it.
Cheatsheet:Oracle collations
I'm not saying we have to go back to the farming practices of over 100 years ago, by plowing with oxen and using night soil for fertilizer. You're creating a straw man argument. We need to use technology like GMO to work with nature. But Monsanto sells herbicide and pesticide, so it's not in their interest do to so.

> crops highly resistant to pests.

Farmers using Monsanto's GMO crops need to use MORE pesticide than no GM crops.[1]

Our continued survival as a species depends on clean water,fresh air, fertile soil. Millions of tons of soil are lost from land degradation. It may require more effort, but we could feed 7 billion people with sustainable agriculture. And if you really cared about the future of our civilization, you would acknowledge the damage your employer is causing.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesti...
In the US, consider Credo Mobile or T-Mobile. Even AT&T discontinued this practice when called out on it, while Verizon's is flatly recalcitrant; their privacy policy says, "If you do not want information to be collected for marketing purposes from services such as the Verizon Wireless Mobile Internet services, you should not use those particular services."
This is a library, those are examples, not complete applications. You can make any application you want with any layout you want using these tools.
If it's romantic you're looking for, forget about gravity for a minute and consider the large-scale electromagnetic forces at work. The recent news about intergalactic structures in the universe (google "the great attractor" to start), our position on the edge of Laniakea and the seemingly-mirrored Perseus-Pisces supercluster, of which we are basically smack dab in the middle. Obviously not definitive by any stretch, but maybe we actually are the center of it all?
The Code We Can't Control
I think that's a difference without a distinction.
That site has... Interesting data. It seems to be granulated based on zip code. It shows, for mine:

1 cable provider

2 ADSL providers

It shows FiOS also, but I can almost guarantee that there is no residence within this zip code that can get it. So, the real question is, how much do you consider ADSL "broadband"?
Some additional research that came out today, with more details of the various things Verizon is doing / plans to do with UIDH: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/verizons-track...

(We collaborated with Mayer on this research.)

Code and data that you can play with to verify these results / do other similar experiments, using our web privacy measurement tool OpenWPM: https://github.com/englehardt/verizon-uidh / https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM
We can have for-profit companies in those industries, sure, but if the taxpayer is footing the bill for some of the research, then some of the fruits of that research ought to go back to the taxpayer.
If you are a content provider you may choose not to serve ads on your content.
I live in Roswell, and am trying to think of a reason to disagree with you....

If you really value remoteness and open space it's good. I live on a hill on some acreage outside of town and can see nearly 40 miles off my back patio without a houses or building in view. I can (and sometimes do) shoot guns from my back porch.

But, If you want to be near decent restaurants, stores with clothes you might actually wear, and people you can hold a conversation with.... it's probably not the best place.

Oh, don't let me forget the wind and dust-storms. It's blazing hot in the summer, but the winters are fairly mild. The economy is not good (except during oil booms)... wages are very severely depressed, there is not a lot of educated people nor people with ambition as they have left for the most part. The general culture reflects this degeneration. Lazy and slow and non-curious is a way of life.

So why am I here? (I'm not from here). Well... you should see the night sky for one. Far away from big cities in the desert.... you feel like you are right there in the universe and the milky way is a river of light. But truly, the desert to the south (Carlsbad to South Texas) or west of here (Arizona) is a lot more amazing as far as plants and scenery. This is is really the very far Southwestern edge of the Great Plains. (Actually... its a girlfriend thing, that's the real reason. But the sky is nice.).

This site is about 20 minutes outside town. Not too far away are the mountains.. an hour or so from a ski resort (Ruidoso... a pretty little town but not much there). It's on the very edge of the foothills as the plains start turning into the Rockies. The drive up the canyon to Ruidoso is quite pretty. The site is right off the highway (power close or right to site) and has BLM ground surrounding it. There are no trees nor large cactus... it's arid grassland with cholla and prickly pear cactus and low scrubby mesquite. There are lots of coyotes, hawks, antelope, foxes, porcupine and skunks. And rattlesnakes. I found 7 of them on the property over last summer. The soil is caliche... old ocean bed reef, and hard as a rock. You would have trouble growing anything between the critters and poor soil. A decent well would probably be around 300 feet deep and the water very very hard. I'm not sure it would be an acceptable place to live for anyone but the most hermit minded.....
Ship Your Enemies Glitter – So Funny Read the FAQ
Fuck you from Cambodia :)
Well, do you care enough to take your business elsewhere? That's really the last-ditch way for you to have any voice on this.

For whatever it's worth, I left them recently for this very reason (your choice is yours, mine is mine, no preaching or judgement here either) – I ended up having a few minute conversation with the confused (but nice) call rep who didn't understand what they were doing but seemed to empathize as I explained it. Ultimately, will my explanation matter? Probably not, but it was all the power I felt I had, beyond cutting them off from my monthly payments.

While still not trustworthy in my book, t-mobile is definitely an upgrade, at least in this regard.
That can be a good thing to process difficult emotions together.
poverty, hunger, and houselessness of all ages is an admirable problem to work against! :)
Startup Monetization Strategies
The rating scale has also shifted. A difficult route may have been graded a 5.10 when it was established, simply because that was the limit of the scale. But if it were regraded today it might have a more precise grade like 5.12b.
Hey all, Slava @ RethinkDB here (speaker in the video).

We've been working on realtime push functionality for a while and are very excited to release it in a few weeks!

I'm an Oakdale RethinkDB meetup (http://www.meetup.com/GDG-Oakdale/events/219317732/) right now so may not be able to answer questions in realtime, but I'll go through every question later tonight in case other Rethinkers miss some questions.
I noticed that "5% fee" and also a "small processing fee of about 3%" from each donation.

That's 8% from each donation. No wonder they don't need VC money.
It's easy to do. The grid layout is optional. You can give relative and absolute positions. The first code sample in the readme shows something like this (though position is implicit there). You can also read about blessed (=ncurses for node) which this project is implemented as an extention of.
Has anyone had experience training deep nets for domains in which examples are large heterogenous collections (as opposed to speech, or text, or images), like say transactional or click-stream data?
to the CPU, what's a row and what's a table in this context.
Yeah, this is the way to do it, and I hope it starts to get more common on Steam and other platforms.

Charging full price for alpha versions of your game, then putting it on sale once it's done, is a slap in the face to your biggest fans - and the people who will most likely help you succeed via word of mouth.
That is an artificial limitation. I got an allocation as a ::c001/64 and can use up to 15 more addresses, but I strongly suspect that I share that /64 with many others. I continue paying DO, but I believe they just plain don't get IPv6 and DNS want to spend the time learning. It's a shame as they are likely to be affected by the IPv6 shortage much more than the larger/more expensive providers and it would be in their interest to have more of te Internet upgrade.
Y HN become political?
Speaker here. As a redhead myself, I approve this message! :)
Correct, it is hard to find anything other than aluminum pots here.
A bit of delicate feedback: perhaps 'product' is a word that could be replaced with a differently-shaped synonym.
In a similar vein are videos from the speed-running community. Linked below is a video of an Ocarina Of Time speed-run where the guy explains a bit of what it's all about. The level of reverse-engineering is impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7IINwTFVw

But this is the first time I've heard of somebody hacking the game to highlight different aspects of the gamelplay, which is pretty cool.
People are motivated to be commercial fisherman, roughnecks, lumberjacks, and roofers. They are also risking their lives for a paycheck.
Yeah, I definitely want my government running my internet. Not only do they get to monitor all of my traffic (more/easier than they do now), but they also will be in charge of delivery.

I can already imagine it! My tax dollars paying for Comcast level quality service, at the same time I'll be receiving internet in the most "fair" way possible ("fair" being in quotes because who knows what legislation will be placed on it).

Yeah, I'm just looking forward to the day they enforce the whole Google-Verizon frequency band agreement. Or perhaps when they don't sell exclusive rights for fiber connections.

In all honesty, I'll take Comcast over the government any day of the week. At least Comcast has an incentive to make money (hopefully reducing corporate waste). The government will have far more bureaucratic bloat and either fund it with tax dollars or end up charging the same amount. I really loved how the healthcare system has been improved.
Can't edit my original post but I need to correct myself. The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris which is about 6.6 Astronomical Units wide. Our solar system has a diameter of 79 AU. So stars are big but there doesn't seem to be a known star which is as big as our solar system, yet!

Here's another video that goes into the size of things. You can mute the sound, you're not missing anything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q
> The new laws make it a felony to intentionally access unauthorized information even if it's been posted to a public website.

Ah. So that's what it's all about. It's an anti-Snowden law (among other things).
"An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment." Definition of sport says yes... yes it is.
Anyway, this smart pointer interface doesn't have to dictate any such a dialect to its users; it can just have C++ as a target. It was just a thought.

When I work in a restricted dialect of C that is portable to C++ compilers, I have better type safety: safer treatment of void *, string literals that are const-qualified, type-safe enumerations, and safer casting operators (reinterpret_cast, const_cast, static_cast) which I can hide behind macros that work in C or C++. On the other hand, I don't have C99 designated initializers. It would be great to have both!

If I had some static data that would so greatly benefit from these initializers that I cannot do without them, I might put that into a separate module that is compiled as C99. Not terribly convenient if you just want to throw a handful of static functions into an operations structure, though or whatever.

There are solutions for better initialization available when you're working in C90. For each structure that is instantiated somewhere with an initializer, you can write an initializer macro instead. The macro is close to the structure definition and is maintained together. If you need a few different ways of initializing the same aggregate, then several macros can be provided that have different argument lists and different defaulting.

When a new member is added (that isn't defaulted), the macros get a new argument. Either way, their expansions are carefully edited to initialize that member. The macro bodies of such initializer macros provide a complete initializer, covering every member explicitly.

If the addition of a new member results in a new macro argument, the existing macro calls then do not compile; they have to be maintained. (Whereas naked initializers just keep compiling and become incorrect when structure members shuffle around: the nasty problem we want to avoid.) Ultimately this functional approach is more disciplined and safer than designated initializers.

From a safety point of view, designated initializers only solve the problem of the wrong initial value going to the wrong aggregate member (that by chance has a suitable type to accept that initializer without a diagnostic). Functional initializers take a more complete approach of specifying the initialization in terms of constructor-like parameters, which are required, with the possibility of defaulting other elements to values other than zero.

The one thing designated initializers do which cannot be beaten, is that you can declare a million element array and initialize element [999999] to 42, statically. This may be a bad idea; some linkage models may actually implement that by adding one million words of initialized data to your executable image. Whereas if you leave it uninitialized, and stick in the 42 at run-time, the whole object is in the "BSS" section.
I get that this falls in line with the accepted local opinion but I thought HN aspired to be better than pandering garbage filled with vulgarity.
Not if you are on a highway with no shoulder and significant traffic. Seems like a rare case.
Overall, not much here, but I found the idea of setting up humanitarian refuges defended by private security interesting.

I've thought a bit about whether it would be technically feasible to air-drop a tele-operated fortress seed into denied territory. This could form a kernel around which to build a safe zone.

The problem I keep running up against is that it's not a technical problem. All you need is a few infiltrators to make life unbearable in a refugee camp. The security forces are likely to turn against the civilians, leading to massacres, as we've seen whenever the line between combatants and non-combatants is blurred.
If we made the penalties as severe as say, lying to congress when you're the head of the NSA, that would make those hackers think twice. /sarcasm
Researchers eliminate the HIV virus from cultured human cells
hmm, not talking about the content provider. I am saying if I am an author who was publishing something under anonymity and I assumed I was anonymous because I "cleared my cookies/Enabled Do Not Track settings" during the publication of the material - only to discover that my cookies had been circumvented via permacookie by a commercial entity - is my "moral right" of anonymity is now gone? could I claim the permacookie method was a circumvention under the DMCA?
I think there are too many liability issues for this for me to ever use a service like this.

With AirBnb, you are only renting an apartment/home for a day at a time. With Roost, it seems like this would be a much longer length of time.

-Isn't it going to be inconvenient for the person renting out their space when someone needs to come back to pick up their stuff. You can't just give a stranger a key.
-Most mini-storage spaces have insurance, protection from the weather (water damage is a big problem). Will I have this same protection when renting out a person's garage?
-I feel like theft will be a big issue. It would be difficult to trust a random person with anything of value.
Sounds like a fun mixture. I haven't used Bacon.js, but I'm a big fan of FRP.
The body is very good at conserving iron and unfortunately not very good at dealing with iron overload.

It says that the device can provide up to 75% of iron requirements, but under what conditions could it start to give >100%?
And here's ioquake3 (id tech 3-based),

http://www.quakejs.com/

and (free-)doom (free, due to copyright),

http://kripken.github.io/boon/boon.html