skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That has been true in theory since the Industrial Revolution with the advent of mass-production and I believe it's still only a problem in theory. As evidence I point to the fact that the majority of countries still fail to meet the basic human needs of their citizenry.

We have drought and flood resistant crops, we have assembly lines, we have heavy machinery, and yet the majority of the world's population lives without clean water and regular meals. There is a huge reservoir of work which needs to be done but because of the degenerate governments, is not getting done.

On the other end of the spectrum, wealthy countries are expanding the definition of what basic needs are. Just last month, Finland declared that broadband internet access is a right of every citizen [1]. All of a sudden you have, by government mandate, a new service which must be provided to every corner of the country.

So on the one hand you have all this latent potential and on the other hand you have ever growing demand for services. I just don't see the artificial jobs/services limit ever being an issue, even though we've long had the means to cloth and feed every man, woman and child on earth.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.rights/i...
This is the standard course of action for security professionals. Perhaps the author was just unaware of industry practices. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what I would have done, and I even know about vendor disclosure. I probably wouldn't have given it much thought and just assumed that I missed something. Then maybe posted something to see what my flaw was. Then if I happened to be right I would have run afoul of vendor disclosure.

If you're not a pro, it's easy to lose track of best practices.
Meeting basic needs is the beginning of the human story, not the destination. We don't need "work". We need imagination. Work will take care of itself.
I don't know. I've had some great lecturers deliver stuff via PowerPoint, and because I wasn't concentrating on dotting the is and crossing the ts of the equations, I could make copious notes around them and truly absorb them. My experiences learning from maths professors with terrible handwriting on OHPs (oh yes! there was a world before PPT!) were universally terrible, so perhaps I'm biased. Watching e.g. the Game Theory 101 lectures from Yale online makes me realise some lecturers actually seem to engage with written material...

I tended to take separate notes on paper alongside the slides and annotate slides, to get over the active learning go-to-sleep problem. Also, a bonus of bad lecturers and Powerpoint handouts is you don't need to turn up once you've sussed the first lecture.

One course that worked quite well for me had a handbook (so no scribbling, but no falling asleep) and the lecturer used very little in the way of visual aids. I wonder if that goes hand in hand with him being the best lecturer I had in terms of engagement and charisma...
I'm not so interested in an agency for conferences, since most of the conferences I speak at can't afford to pay their speakers (or if they can, don't pay them enough to make it worth having an agency involved). I'm interested in an agency that gets bookings for private talks at companies - really sort of one day consulting gigs.

In my case, I'd give a talk at a conference like Webstock and note at the end (probably just in text on a slide, no need to say anything out loud) that I'm available for internal talks at private companies. If anyone in the audience asked me about this afterwards I'd put them in touch with the agency. The agency negotiates pricing / travel / etc, and also actively sells my talks in other media (taking out adverts in "CTO Monthly" promoting the 20 or so speakers and topics in their stable).

I'm pretty confident that the niche of companies that want to engage technical experts for a combination of tech talk + a day consulting in the office is big enough to support something like this. I just have no interest in doing it personally - the reason I want it to exist is so I don't have to negotiate / market / coordinate the above points myself.
I love how, this being Hacker News, everyone is tearing the security flaws and so on apart.. while not grokking the obvious... guys, he implemented a secret knock! How cool is that!
This.

I use Chrome and Firefox. I keep work related sites in Firefox, and personal sites in Chrome.

I'll often open tabs of interesting things in Chrome to read when I lose focus at work, or need a break. Sometimes I can have up to 30 tabs of crap, at which point I need to decide which ones I'll actually read, and which one's I think I'll read, then close all but the ones I know I'll actually read.

If I have to read a lot of interrelated articles or am doing personal research, I'll pull a Chrome tab out and keep it as a separate window.

The thing I love about Chrome is that with the "restore pages that were last open" option is that it opens all tabs in all windows, not just the main window, and if for some reason it doesn't reopen all the tabs, it has a list of recently closed tab groups you can open with a single click.
I don't think so. A high noise shot scaled down still will have a bunch of noise in it. Double the pixel sensor size and you get a much better picture, in my experience.

For example: HD video cameras. They look like crap in the dark, even at YouTube dimentions. My Flip video SD beats them hands down.
I like PayPhrase. I stumbled into it today and it suggested I was a genius.

(On a more serious note I bet you I can 100% predict exactly what my close family members, and probably close friends too, would use for both phrase and PIN. Egads, this is terrible.)
Chemical Engineer Solves The Capitalism Problem
The idea of collaboratively editing a session transcript and backchanneling in real-time actually hadn't occurred to me. Genius.

I see two major flaws: provision of reliable Internet access at conferences is still Not Done Well; and the drawbacks of the current Wave UI implementation do not really encourage this sort of thing. (Oh, and trolling, yeah.)

I mean, we could have collaborative transcript wikis at conferences already, right? Add Twitter and what value does Wave really provide, especially given the discoverability problem? Why don't we have transcript wikis? Perhaps that is something to address first.

I'd like to see (and wish I had time to create) a universal backchannel solution and this is certainly one platform that could well be worked in, but you gotta get over that offline barrier somehow.
This is no longer true as of a year and a half ago.

Another change in Massachusetts is that everybody must submit proof of health insurance with their tax return, or else pay a penalty.
Kosmix is not hacking up Google Ads. It is getting ads in an XML Feed and this kind of program is available to publishers/websites which have traffic beyond certain threshold. Lots of large websites have this kind of relationship with Google.
There is a viewpoint, and it is strongest in Europe, that human rights extend to the basics of civilized human existence; that food, shelter and medical care are basic necessities that a society must provide for it's citizens if it is to be considered civilized. The purest expression of this can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (see section 25) but it is also enshrined in national constitutions the world over.

At the root of this viewpoint is the understanding that the citizens of a nation depend upon each other and have a duty to each other.

This is clearly at odds with the modern American viewpoint which declares each individual to be utterly responsible for his own welfare. As Americans we are not in this together, we are each struggling separately.

And it is readily apparent that we are willing to sacrifice any principle on the altar of our individualism. This country (my country) openly condones torture, the bombing of civilian populations, extrajudicial imprisonment and the murder of political dissidents; all in the name of Individual Liberty.

It is less surprising that we cannot do what most of Europe regards as the sane and sanitary solution to ensuring the health of the nation; and more surprising that we aren't busy legalizing the hunting of the homeless and the use of the indigent as pet food.
"This is a high quality crawl of top web sites, using AWS’s Elastic Map Reduce, Concurrent’s Cascading workflow API, and Bixolab’s elastic web mining platform."

so two questions. what exactly is a "high quality" crawl? and who is going to be the judge of "top websites"?
Actually, the penalty is a fine... I've heard everything from $750 to $4000, but I can't find any solid numbers (and I don't make a habit of skimming monstrous legal texts)

This penalty is apparently supposed to be a source of funding for the bill, the logic being that many people will choose to pay this fine rather than buy (presumably more expensive) insurance.

This seems contrary to the purpose of the bill... it can only be properly funded if people aren't covered, but it's goal is to expand the number of people covered...
Turning Cellphones into Microscopes
"Now an engineer, using software that he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes."
What makes you think there should be any reason we would give a crap about your little publicity stunt you call a blog post?
I live in a country with universal health care (Romania). Being forced to pay insurance is annoying, in theory. What happens in practice is if you don't pay it and need insured medical care you have to pay for the last 6 years, with penalty (about double, in the worst case). That would be the "fine". Not being employed I was able to delay paying for about a year, without penalty and being insured in the meantime.

What you get for it is the knowledge that you'll never have to budget for medical expenses. I did have to pay occasionally, like when I wanted a better yearly checkup, but it's never been an amount I couldn't just take out of my pocket.

Anyways, I always felt that if there's something worth paying for it's a healthy society. At least as much as all the other givens: police, military or emergency services.
Is Photoshop vulnerable now? I wonder what a scrappy start-up could do in this space. What are the major technical challenges? Marketing challenges?
thanks, this is brilliant, gonna try it and see if it has an effect. (for me it would be google tasks)
The three counter-arguments that make the most sense to me:

1) One proposal was to allow insurance companies to compete across state lines. This would allow smaller contenders to make their offerings on a larger scale, and sidestep the Alabama issue you mention.

2) The point here, I think, is that your brother shouldn't "have" to pay for insurance at all. Allowing individuals to receive the same tax breaks on insurance as businesses do would allow people to choose their own plans, open up the market more, and allow more consumer choice.

3) This is the first I've heard of this one. I find it hard to imagine not wanting to cure a disease... even in the nastiest, greed-driven environment, I think the byline "We cured colon cancer!" is worth more money any amount of incremental profit from treatments. So yeah, going to go with the conspiracy kook option on this one. :)
Perhaps there is a case for creating a tag that can be added via flag for non-hacker news news, which is easily filterable as off topic, and is filtered out by default?

This could potentially have worse effects on the dynamics of the site than these articles themselves, but I am interested to hear what this community has to say on subjects like these.
If you want to drive, but this would require health insurance simply for being alive, the alternative to which most of us do not consider an acceptable option.

It's also noteworthy that in most states, you can demonstrate an ability to pay for a certain amount of damage in lieu of car insurance.
> That said, is it possible that dcurtis would have believe Mr. X if it wasn't from an aa.com address? I don't know the answer to that.

How does dcurtis's possible skepticism make him culpable for Mr. X's desire to 'reach out' (to the point that he was willing to use his company email to do so)? Mr. X is still the one making the choice to respond to dcurtis. He's still the one that decides the level of risk to his job that he's willing to take in his dealings with dcurtis. I don't see anything here that could be faulted on dcurtis other than his opinions and writing style.
I'm pretty sure someone went to a playground and directly observed "skilled practitioners of the art" independently discovering the methods. I think there might have been some prior art on a few million 8mm film reels in people's attics as well...

It would seem immediately apparent to most 2 handed children. I do find it interesting that the patent missed out on the method of elevating one's ass by pressing outward on both chains. Now that's technology.
Yes, it is different. Taxes are taken out of money I make or spend. This is funded by fines I owe whatever I do.

And yes, I'm required to get car insurance if I want to drive. Driving is optional. Living is not.
Great, now I have buy into the screwed up healthcare system or become a felony and goto prison and lose all my rights. What kind of country do I live in now?
I setup a knock sensor on my door too! His solution is much cleaner though. You can all learn my oh-so secret knock for it at http://varenhor.st/idoor
would be great to know at least the order of magnitude of the amount of traffic considered big enough to warrant an AM and possibly be able to get this kind of partnership?
I found the system won't treat you without it

I find this assertion strange... my wife and I lived for several years on a cash-only basis with little trouble. Granted, there were no catastrophic expenses, but we never had any trouble paying cash for ordinary doctor's visits and the occasional minor emergency.
Nope. Quite the opposite. If you quit your job, you'll be required to buy the government health care.

Who needs to add value to the economy and satisfy your customers when you can just point a gun to someone's head and say, "buy my product or I'll just take your money anyway, and then strip you of your other rights."
Strange, I get full coverage anywhere I go (including other countries).
MongoDB in Three Minutes
I had the exact same idea a few days ago.
I upgraded from 9.04 and it's working out pretty well
Seriously? We have cars that drive themselves. The realm of tasks that only humans can do shrinks every year. We're not close to computers equaling humans, but we are nearing it.
This looks very similar to the way SubEthaEdit/Gobby have been used at conferences for distributed note taking for the past several years.
There's also the option of the way the UK does it. You pay insurance. It's even called that - National Insurance. There is no alternative. Not having a National Insurance number is like not having a SSN. If you are in specific situations (student, low income, self-employed below a certain threshold etc) you become exempt from stamp, but it's still insurance.

It's so well-entrenched and forgettable (comes out along with tax and student loan repayments - but I shouldn't stir that hornets' nest!) that hardly anyone realises what it is, or its origins as, quite descriptively, a nationalised form of healthcare and unemployment insurance.
This is clearly at odds with the modern American viewpoint which declares each individual to be utterly responsible for his own welfare. As Americans we are not in this together, we are each struggling separately.

I understand the point that you're trying to make, but you're misrepresenting things. American culture is decidedly more individualistic than Europe's, but its unfair to characterize us as "not in it together", either as a whole or when referring to the libertarian argument that you're attempting to refute. There's no honor in being forced to watch out for your neighbor, and in the long run, it creates problems of moral hazard where you expect that someone should be taking care of whatever problem you have at the moment.

This country (my country) openly condones torture, the bombing of civilian populations, extrajudicial imprisonment and the murder of political dissidents; all in the name of Individual Liberty.

This is where you really lost me. Those things have not been done in the name or spirit of individual liberty. Quite the opposite: they represent an egregious breach of the individual liberties we're entitled to under the Constitution. Not sure how you managed to twist this issue up to be an example in your mind of the supposed dangers of individual liberty.

...and more surprising that we aren't busy legalizing the hunting of the homeless and the use of the indigent as pet food.

Thanks for making my point about over-the-top rhetoric. Have you been to Europe, by the way? I lived there for years, and they've got their own set of problems, I assure you.
What I was trying to say is that the algorithm is the obvious consequence of wanting to assign a sequence to random places in an array. I wanted it because I was programming a game. I think the same must have happened to many people. Anyway, no biggie - of course the world doesn't end because now the algorithm has a name.
Even though I haven't used it in a few years, KDE was the reason I started running Linux on my desktop (actually a laptop) all the way back in 1998, when I gave them a donation. I remember thinking, "wow this will be great to have a nice KDE desktop, plus Linux, and I'm sure Wine will be finished pretty soon so I can run all of my Windows programs..." :) Wine didn't really develop super fast, but it's amazing to think that the last copy of Windows I ran was Win 95.

As a side note, if I recall correctly, Gnome was started in response to concerns about potential licensing issues with QT at the time.
To clarify, my position is far from the Republican party line on the issue. I agree with most of the new regulations in the bill that I'm aware of, but I would vastly prefer a bill without a public option.

1) The scenario you described isn't as damaging because it's just a single state. If doctors are underpaid by the dominant insurer in Alabama, they can move elsewhere. Even if they don't, losing money from just Alabama isn't going to set progress that much. Losing money from the whole nation will.

2) They shouldn't, and regulation is necessary to fix that.

3) I don't think insurers and pharmaceutical companies hold back cures for diseases, but they definitely do push forward treatments that will lead to long-term revenue. This is why non-profit research funding is an important part of the system.
In a strict sense, it may not be, but how a government might fund itself without taxation is a subject for another discussion. It took a constitutional amendment to legalize a Federal income tax. Regardless of any moral objections, the income tax is about as legal as it gets[0]. I'm not sure what legal theory would justify mandatory health insurance under the Constitution.

[0]I'm aware of various claims that the income tax really isn't legal, but I don't think any of them attack its constitutional authority.
Probably, but PS users are notoriously conservative about the behavior and interface of the features they use, and more tolerant of new additions.

For a competitor to be successful, it would likely just have to copy PS. I'm not sure cleaning up the UI would work for a startup beyond just unifying the sliders and widgets and buttons under a common scheme. But they'd all have to be in the same place and do the same stuff.

(it's not like the space isn't full of competitors right now anyway)
I'm not connected with the site.

I've emailed the author with link to this submission.
You need to be prepared for tough questions.

There, the entire post in 1 line.
Western Europe is a pretty small slice of the world, and they've had peace for half a century, which on the scale of multiple centuries, is hardly cause to celebrate the dawning of the age of aquarius. I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe.
On the other hand, the only way to force a company react promptly is to publish the exploit.

In this case the exploit was apparently self-evident to nearly any technical mind -- I think that even I understood how simple and naive the bug was -- so you could safely assume that loads of fraudsters would've been milking the system while the bug report would slowly snake through the internal organs of Microsoft before eventually landing on some engineer's table.

It's only saddening that the first reaction is through legal department. Or did Microsoft say somewhere they fixed this already? Or take down the Bing Cashback until the issue is resolved?
I'd introduce another perspective on rejection: having a rejective state of mind significantly reduces one's ability to analyse the situation at hand.

It's about prejudices. We all hold a large amount of prejudices even though we would consider our selves open minded. Prejudices result in cognitive responses where one rejects an idea at hand before one even starts to evaluate the pros and cons of the idea.
>I find myself wondering if youth support for the bill would drop somewhat if youth realized what was being done to them.

Probably not since:

a) The youth are the least likely to have insurance.

b) The least likely to be able to afford it (they usually have jobs that make less money).

c) Since they meet both a & b, they'll likely be eligible for the credit/handout that they can use to buy the insurance (if that's still in the plan, hard to keep track of and I don't feel like reading through 80 different versions of a 2000 page bill).

Thus it's more a transfer of wealth into the insurance companies. Even with a public option (which I believe in the last rev of the bill, states could opt out of), most people will probably just end up with private insurance.

> So it is possible this provision could be struck down, but leave the rest of the bill intact, committing to massive outlays with no way to pay for it.

This is probably where this will be in 3-4 years. Which will give lots of opportunity then for the opposition to be able to point out how expensive this all is. sigh Not a really helpful attitude towards engineering a solution, but the GOP hasn't been on top of this issue at all in the last 30 years while every other industrialized country on Earth has at least given it a good go.
Not sure about the future of a product most people think is a joke.
I'm reminded of how badly I want an Eames lounge chair :)
This is the beginning of a long-term trend, from a physically present combat force to an army of remote teleoperators.
How to Get Rid of Morning Breath – Expert Advice
I think there is more to the post than that.

In addition to preparing to tough questions one should also write down the questions. The process of thinking the meanest and yet constructive questions puts you face to face with the problematic aspects of your idea or project.

Having merely the mind set of preparing for tough questions is not enough. You have to actually face them in order to gain more insight.
The most numerous and stable jobs of tomorrow will be those that cannot be offshored, because they must be performed on U.S. soil, and also cannot be automated, either because they require a high degree of creativity or because they rely on the human touch in face-to-face interactions. The latter are sometimes called "proximity services" and they include the fastest-growing occupations, healthcare and education.

I don't think that jobs that can't be automated will in demand unless they also add to US competitiveness on the world market. If healthcare or education is just about bloat, it's not going to grow forever...