skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, I think the approach we (as in, that's how I learned programming, too) learned with is the correct one, really. Computational physics is less about programming and more about the constant tension between the demands of efficiency and accuracy and the inherent imperfections of the methods (e.g. difference models) and underlying machine representation of numbers.

Physics isn't just about punching numbers into a computer or solving math problems, and I think a shift toward more programming centered learning of physics needs to be heavily tempered with that understanding.
Obama did actually say that terrorists are not existential threats to the United States.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/02/01/obama_we_s...
Pegg'd CTO
CTO for Pegg'd, Full Time in Palo Alto. Launched IOS and Demo Site. Full Stack Developer, Architecture, API, Social Integration, Database, Backend.Currently Raising Seed Round, email abc@peggd.com for details. http://peggd.com/
Greenbits, a new Bitcoin wallet for Android
I found it strange as well - sometimes the images popped up again and covered some text.
Yep, there were some proto-laws and practices pre-9/11 that were simply enacted/expanded after it was politically expedient. For example, the "Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995"[1] by Joe Biden and how Bill Clinton[2] was actually the first president to authorize extraordinary rendition to countries known to torture suspects.

[1]: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d104:s.00390:

[2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/arrest-bill-clinton/2...
I think we're talking about the same donation. It's recent.
This looks really interesting, and I love the simple unobtrusive look of the product.

My bit of feedback (not that they're asking) regarding the website and product, I'd recommend a bit of graphic design work. For a product that is touted as reducing stress, improving concentration, improving sleep, inhancing focus, etc. etc. The logo of zenVibes is quite jaring. It's a shouting brain with a 'staticy' font which grows larger and louder as you read it in bold with a drop-shadow no less (making it more in your face and louder).

I'd want to see a logo that is more focused, considered (and considerate), making me feel like putting on the device is going to bring peace and joy to my life, at the moment it looks more like injecting heavy metal directly into my brain.

Also, the first photo on the website of a very pretty girl wearing a wired swim cap made me wonder if that is what the product looks like. Of course, it doesn't but I didn't know that at that point. I wonder how many people get that far and think, "I'll never put that ridiculous thing on my head".

Just a few thoughts, but looking forward to the campaign.
Firstly, "object" as a term is really hard to stick a pin in. It's slippery and hard to talk about, so I'm kind of trying to avoid it.

Secondly, "objects" can imply open-recursion which can be used to implement inheritance. That said, inheritance isn't the only thing open recursion is good for and inheritance can be implemented without open recursion.

"Object"s can also imply codata like structures as compared to data like structures. The distinction is blurry to the point of indistinguishability in essentially all languages, but it's important in theorem proving and math and thus shows up in dependently typed languages.

Thirdly, dynamic dispatch is one way to achieve open recursion but it's not the only way. I don't know if dynamic dispatch is useful for things other than open recursion, so offhand I would say "dynamic dispatch => open recursion is being used" but not the other way around.

Clojure's multimethod system, given that it's an implementation of dynamic dispatch, implies open recursion and thus has at least one factor which some people associate with objects. It's immutable (at least to the degree which Clojure is immutable) so I'm willing to call it an "immutable object system", yes. But with all of the caveats I just listed!
And the reason OpenSSL and OpenSSH and, I don't know, every other open source project that has spare-time developers have developers committing code for free would be...
It's always good to think about what evidence would convince you that the other side has a point.

I lean towards the side that thinks that the central and money center banks (not faceless multinationals) are suppressing the price of gold via fractionally-reserved lending of physical gold. What would convince me that this is not the case would be a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve's books and gold holdings.

You?
Gratipay. Unfortunately their execution has been a bit poor, and it's under-delivering. There's too high a barrier to start donating and there's no clear option for one-time donations.
That's somewhat better, but wake me up when one of our current political leadership tells us not to fear them at all.
This is a great reminder, thank you so much. I am definitely guilty of considering HN-level programming a standard that it is not.
HIV and syphilis biomarkers: Smartphone, finger prick, 15 minute diagnosis
It was an online poll, not a real poll with a uniform sample of the population. The "poll" was attached to a new of a moron that crashed a drone into the White House. I'm really surprised that only a 42% of the votes were against private drones.

If we can't have a serious poll, I'd like to see the result if they repeat the same "poll" but attached to this news:

* "Mom with broken leg found 3 years old kid lost in the forest using drone"

* "RC airport cafeterias drop the price to 1/3 using drones to distribute the burritos"
Municipal broadband got outlawed in NC after the town of Wilson demonstrated that it was a real threat to the incumbent ISPs. New community broadband projects can't get off the ground until the FCC officially preempts the state law, which they'll be voting on later this month.
I think we've all seen this coming for a while. But where does one go to find random electronic parts offline now? :(
You're right. The problem is though that it's not always that easy to distinguish between beer and freedom in this context. Depending on the software and the industry those two might be intrinsically connected.

Besides, you might need a large number of lawyers anyway, for example if a company decides to simply disregard your carefully crafted open source license.
Possibly everyone who upvoted this post or shared it one way or another.
Subdomain of Arizona Army National Guard Website Hacked by 3xp1r3 Cyber Army
The correct link for this is http://www.tonysheng.com/blog/losing-my-mindfulness/
RadioShack Files for Bankruptcy
> There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year.

Too bad OpenSSL wasn't one of them until after the big "heartbleed" incident.

The core infrastructure projects don't seem to get as much funding as they ought to, especially given almost everyone relies on them (even if they don't realize it).

Prior to Heartbleed and the industry rallying to fund critical projects, OpenSSL only received an average of $2,000 USD a year[1]... that's pathetic.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-g...
This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood (2014)
GCC5 and the C++11 ABI
Or that they would offer 32GB as the starting option for their phones, especially considering that their OTA updates don't really work on 16GB phones.

There's a lot that Apple does that makes people go "hmm". But they're a case study in getting some things right enough that nothing else matters.
Ugandan innovators use smartphones to detect malaria
There are only really two ways to scale an agency, as far as I know.

1. You can charge more.

2. You take on more work in parallel.

The second is usually a thing to some degree, you add devs etc., but it doesn't drastically increase your earnings per head so there tend to be diminishing returns - network costs of a larger team, the need to sustain a flow of more and larger deals. This requires some drastic changes to the company itself, how you work, the type of deals you pursue...it can be profitable, but it's a mess.

Which leaves #1, increasing the value of deals you take on with roughly the existing team. What is stopping you from doubling your next quote? Skills gap? Type of project? I'm betting it's more "type of client" and "sales process" than needing another developer, since (from a once-over of your team section) you seem to have the major bases covered already, and perhaps more so than you'd need with a more narrow project type & target customer.

Re: specific roles you asked about...

There are technical writing specialists & sales engineers. A good sales engineer is expensive if they're any good, and very likely overkill for a small agency. It's usually up to the person or people running the agency to learn sales. There's a spectrum of skill involved, but even the shallow end makes you VERY dangerous in comparison to the median sales-averse developer.

As to a technical writer...how much does documentation affect your deals & billing rate? This can probably be better addressed by process, make improving doc quality a real priority by setting aside time for it every week & comping for training materials on better docs and copywriting.
Huh? That's pretty much exactly what it means.
Adam Curtis just came out with an incredible documentary titled 'Bitter Lake' which details the origins of the United State's relationship with Saudi Arabia and how the terms of that relationship have impacted the development of terrorism in the Middle East, especially Afghanistan.

It's an intrinsically relevant part of this conversation (especially considering Saudi Arabia's adherence to and history of practicing wahhabism) and I'd encourage others to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXcpDO8_3qU
Irony alert! Note their conclusion:

" It may well be that other organizations -- smaller firms and universities -- are making up the shortfall in investment in research. According to this interpretation, what is happening is a reallocation of research from large corporate labs to more efficient cient organizations."

The suggestion that universities might be more efficient than private corporations at anything is almost comic.

But this isn't an error. There is actually something quite profound at work. It is indeed the case that "smaller firms and universities" are more efficient at commercializing new technology than most large corporations. But it's not the smaller firms and universities independently; it's the smaller firms and universities together as one super-entity.

In Silicon Valley, the grad students quit and found a startup. Their advisor joins the Board. The university creates the IP. The startup commercializes it.

The puzzle for me ten years ago was this: Where is the licensing revenue for the universities? If they're creating the IP, then how come they're not getting anything back?

The answer is that they are, but in the form of alumni donations. :-D
In string theory isn't Gravity the only force that can go across branes? I thought that might explain:

-why gravity's relatively weak (distributed) compared to the other three forces, as well as

-dark matter that we have an otherwise hard time observing apart from gravity
The PDF you linked is about how farms are much larger now. The family thing is what you responded to, but the actual pdf does state that small farms have gone or are going away.

The previous comments were about small family farms, not just 'family' farms.
I'm not a gold bug.

Banks still hold gold, they do so while ignoring other precious substances. Maybe it is a barbarous relic.

But some of the vaults this stuff is held in... they've got much less of it than was believed. Where is it? Why is no one concerned? Why are there no plain and verifiable answers forthcoming?
I once got to walk through the engine and gearbox(?) workshop/factory at Maasey Ferguson in the UK. It was like nothing else. Row on row of machinery, which at the time stood still. A haze of machine oil through the factory so you could not see the far wall. It was like being on a set in the movie Brazil.
I agree, and hope new high-level but efficient languages like Rust could help here.
To be extremely cynical and pessimist: I guess it makes sense to bring the gold home in time for WW 3

(not only Germany is bringing their gold home, from the article France, Netherlands are doing the same)
I don't see the benefit in having all of your country's gold reserves stored in your country?

Firstly, there's the the invasion risk the article referenced, to which I'll add internal political division (talking generally, not just about Germany, although 1989 was not that long ago in geopolitical time). Having all of your gold in the central bank sounds to me like having all of your eggs in one basket, waiting to be plundered.

But there's also the functional use of the gold. While I can't imagine these reserves being spent anytime soon, in the wider 50-100 year timeframe it's more likely that they may be needed for emergency purchases or as security. In that situation, having at least some of your reserves offshore, particularly in the US which is likely to be your wartime creditor based on history, makes more sense than having to ship it back in a time of crisis.

Repatriating it all just sounds like paranoia or nationalism to me.

TLDR: A good backup plan for your data involves an offsite copy. Why not the same with backup gold reserves?
The Bill and Warren Show (1998)
Key words:
(1) programming language
(2) academia (CS/PL)
(3) industry

The title keeps changing, but these 3 keywords aren't kept. The words chosen mean something totally different on each revision.

Just wondering – why couldn't we keep the original title?
Hi,

That's an awesome feedback ! Thanks, at this stage this sort of insights is invaluable, we'll definetely take it into account, even though it would be near impossible to change the logo at this stage...
Saudi Arabia did not have direct government supporting links to Al Qaeda as Afghanistan did.

The relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is quite strong and close, for all the obvious reasons: the US needs SA's oil, and SA benefit greatly from US military support. The fact that Saudi Arabia is paid in US dollars also gives the country a substantive interest in how well the US and its financial system do. It's a relationship which dates to FDR and King Saud at Great Bitter Lake:

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-08-09/news/mn-388_1_king-sa...

This doesn't mean that there aren't elements either within Saudi Arabia or originating from it which don't look kindly on the US. I suspect you could find similar qualities within the US itself.

It's also helpful to keep in mind that in his 1998 fatwa against the U.S., one of bin Laden's points was "support of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan". That is, bin Laden was aligned against the Saudi government.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver

And yes, what the Saudi government and the Saudi street felt was somewhat at odds. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan cover this in their Vanity Fair article "The Kingdom and the Towers"

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-201...

What did happen in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and I remember this, was that the US contacted the Afghan government, then the Taliban, and effectively requested bin Laden's head. The Taliban refused. The US attacked.

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/

http://web.archive.org/web/20010922035810/http://www.pbs.org...

Pakistan, while yes, supporting the Taliban in many ways (and still), did lend government support to the US aim of rooting out bin Laden. How sincere that was (particularly given where bin Laden turned up) is open to question. But Muscharraf didn't pull the same move the government of Afghanistan had in refusing the US's requests.

So, no, actually, most of what you've claimed here is extremely mushy-headed bogosity.

Is it possible that there was significant Saudi financial support for bin Laden? It wouldn't surprise me. Could it have included members of the Saudi royal family? Again, quite possibly. The Saudi royal family is comprised of thousands of members. Around 15,000 according to the BBC. This isn't some small nuclear household.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

Are the contents of such a report likely to be both contentious and yet more conspiracy fodder? Yeah, probably.
It's hard to judge what is more secure... a promise of essentially the U.S. government that the gold belongs to us (Germans), and would be available for sale, or storing the gold in Germany, where it can be seized by an invader, and maybe even ordinary criminals or corruptions. And it would have to be moved again to be sold in bulk, because once Germany needs to sell vast amounts of gold, nobody would trust Germany to just write IOUs.

Times have changed. Invasion has become unlikely, despite Germany having borders to several foreign countries, with a history of centuries of conflict in Europe. Even corruption is unlikely today to take away significant portions of such a gold depot.

Still, the only purpose of this gold is as a currency, and as such it doesn't matter that much if it is stored in Germany or in some country you would probably have to trust anyway to make use of it.
I think a dinosaur lives in the subways under Manhattan. I would be convinced otherwise only by a full audit of all subway tunnels conducted using a dinosaur scanner (which someone will need to invent).

But seriously, there are lots of things that are hard to prove wrong, but that's hardly a good reason to believe them. In your case, what motive would the Fed have? Has an employee of the Fed (or any other central bank) ever blown the whistle on this massive international conspiracy? If there's no good reason to think something, there really isn't much good reason to spend time proving it wrong.
While I fully agree that for video type media, I find that Flash is still pretty important for online games. Sure, those games could be remade in HTML5, but until then it's nice to be able to play them with comparatively little issue. I do, however, like your solution for needing flash on the odd occasion.
The Best of a New Breed of Mattresses
People should really try and understand what makes things valuable beyond the beanie baby pokemon hype bandwaggon.

Gold as a raw material is useful to a degree, just as diamonds are, but artificial scarcity [1] [2] and wild speculation create a mess of distortions.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...

[2] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond_pr.html
It would be better if they offered discount pricing on something more mature and broadly used as well, like Altium.
The purpose of money is to facilitate trade and represent a relatively stable yardstick for valuation, not to be an investment. You don't need a gold-backed currency in order to invest in gold -- just invest in gold.
Haters gonna hate. You do good, keep it up.
Thanks for the links. So I wonder if you could charge for cloning a repo in Github. You know put your code there, but git clone (or fork) doesn't work unless you feed it a onetime key, so you goto Github, "buy" your key, then pass it into your git command line

git clone --token=0x1515151 <repospec>

and git allows the clone to happen and tags it with the clone token. No token and you don't get to get a copy of the source.

If that would work it would be an interesting way of selling your software.
Twitter earnings beat expectations as revenue grows
IoT Gateway Runs Linux on QorIQ, Accepts Arduino Shields
Here is how gold works: it doesn't matter if it is really there, as long as everybody agrees that it is there.
Shenzhen?
> I feel like that's scaring away lots of people who would otherwise do just fine.

I am much in agreement with this. I know that the guidance counselor on staff when I was in high school would heavily steer people away from going into computer science/programming if they hadn't completed the entire catalog of math classes available at our school. Her assumption was that you needed to be some sort of math wizard in order to be successful in a CS or programming degree.
The big research universities also absolutely have technology licensing operations. However, in the case of MIT for example, [1] it seems as if the net direct profit they make is fairly modest. (They bring in about $80 million a year but a lot of that seems to either go to costs or paid out royalties, etc.)

[1] http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/about/faq.html
I thought all of the German gold was in the Philippines.

Disclaimer: I'm currently reading Cryptonomicon. It's a history book, right?
I have an anti-dinosaur stone I'm willing to sell for the right price, it's very effective. Notice there are no dinosaurs around the vicinity of my stone.
I said I think it's a bad idea to tax copyright ownership, and you responded by claiming I'm against income taxes.

I wasn't actually claiming anything. I was just asking based on your reply to innguest's post. It wasn't supposed to be an argument related to the tax on copyright. But fair enough, I apologize.

In any case, I still think you've stopped reading the second part of my post too soon. I wasn't saying you were arguing against the general idea of taxes, but against a tax [on copyright]. All I meant is, even if the tax is bad for poor people, you can simply make it only apply for people with higher incomes and corporations. It's not actually a good argument against a tax [on copyright].
I am developing financial software and need to keep customer data and other secrets secure against OS compromise. Servers will have keys stored in a hardware tamper-proof USB. All such data will be strongly encrypted. When possible, the data will be used in its encrypted format, and if required to decrypt, the plain text will be transient within the program.

What am I missing?
Adding up wealth is a silly way to measure inequality
Open Source Ecology is interesting in this context. It is less about ecology and more about open source hardware, including farming machinery.

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Agriculture
Show HN: CreditBitcoins – High-volume Traders Can Buy Instantly on Credit
Or gold was in a bubble that collapsed.

The Depression proves that the gold standard doesn't work. There was no stability; there was deflation.

Since the concept behind the gold standard means "gold always..." - a universal quantifier, one needs only show a counterexample to blow it out of the water.
You can have whatever file structure you want on iCloud Drive.

https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/icloud-drive/
Yeah that was what I was about to say, fusion, solar, and other centralized energy tech (if we every readily deploy them) should allow us to trade more energy for more of the materials we need, and then as other commentators have said, the trash piles of the world start to look like just a bunch of raw materials.