skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't mean to start a discussion of FRB, simply consider that it's what we have, and abandoning it is an even more radical step than replacing cash with a cryptocurrency.

> But the real hallmark of FRB is that banks only need hold in reserve a fraction of their depositors' account balances. I don't see how CC would change that requirement.

My question is, what will a CC replace? If the answer is all cash and electronic transactions, will there be enough CC, with FRB? If the answer is simply cash transactions (already limited), what's the point?
I worked for Verint some years ago, still have friends that do and they all laughed at that presentation saying it's about 10 years out of date :)

The "commercial" tracking solutions are hardly as clandestine as people might think, their major consumers are the cell companies themselves. As their systems were never designed to facilitate easy tracking and interception they use those for anything from identifying cloned phones to facilitating court ordered wire taps.
For the most part the capabilities of these systems without an active participation from the carrier are minimal.

However plenty of other systems exist which require no support from the phone carrier.
e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1l1nRql7JE

I love these types of commercials for some reason the cheap acting always makes me chuckle..
The NSA is not the only spy agency in the world.
If you're referring to breast cancer, the evidence is sketchy, and both the Canadian and American Cancer Societies conclude that it's safe (with some studies suggesting that it might help, as well as a french-paradox type thing going on in Japan).

There have been other cancer-related concerns, but most of the studies have been very small and seem to conclude that there's either no risk, or that there are actually benefits.

The dairy industry is a huge advertising and lobbying machine.

What I find particularly troubling is that people avoid soy because of non-existent evidence. But they continue to drink alcohol which has been thoroughly linked to many forms of cancers. It makes me believe that, in the final analysis, people eat what they want and only pay lip service to healt (or the environment/sustainability/animal welfare); which I'd say that things like Atkins and paleo further confirms.
I would attribute a percentage of the downloads for Boris to being included in Laravel 4.

Laravel 5 is now using PsySH.
Kent Beck’s Making Making CoffeeScript
> Right, but the fact seems to remain that Thunderbird is phoning home in a way I can't obviously switch off (I use few extensions, and don't feel any need for such a blacklist) and that wasn't disclosed.

The privacy policy at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/legal/privacy/ (which is linked to from the about dialog and perhaps other places as well) does explicitly call out the blocklist at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/legal/privacy/#blo... and includes a link telling you how to disable it, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-makes-unreq....

Of course, you may have installed Thunderbird prior to the privacy policy existing in that form with those details. The specific privacy policy is from Oct 11, 2011 and the subversion log at http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.org/trunk/... suggests it was a newish thing, although I would expect a privacy policy likely existed in other forms prior to that, but that's the limits of my subversion-fu.
Unfortunately, you can't. Highbrow is a one-course at a time deal. We want you to form a good daily habit and not tire yourself out at the same time. Thus, you can subscribe to only one course at a time and take all the courses one by one.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments and many of the arguments put forward in this piece, but felt I should comment on some inaccuracies (in my opinion...)

I originally trained in the UK, which had no structured residency programs at the time, and no matching scheme. The result was the so-called 'lost tribe' of doctors:
http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/bmj.331.7514.s90.xml

Coming to the US, it seemed to me that the match was a massive improvement. The author claims that
"Students are then obligated to attend that residency program. They can’t privately negotiate with other programs, as students can for, say, undergrad admissions, or med school admissions—or almost any other normal employment situation."

However, the key to the program (the algorithm was discussed on hn a few months ago I think??) is that a medical student can only be matched to a residency that THEY listed as an acceptable choice of employer, and where the residency listed THEM as an acceptable choice of resident. Medical students are also free to try to negotiate with residencies (before the ranking deadline)...and residency programs as just as free to say 'No'. I think it's reasonable for the hospital to promise a set period of residency training, with all pay and conditions specified up front, but only on the condition that the incoming resident makes the commitment to stay for the full program.

The resident can leave simply by giving their notice: what they are unlikely to be able to do is find another residency willing to take them on, when they've just broken their previous commitment. In fact, one of my UCLA Emergency Medicine classmates, Andrew Nerlinger, left our program just 6 months before finishing, for a better opportunity elsewhere (http://www.enduraventures.com/about-us).
one word ... MikroTik
And C# has string interpolation!
Adam Tepper, Bitcoin CEO of Independent Reserve, Killed in Motorcycle Accident
No. You've mistaken freelancers with contractors.

A contractor is a replaceable cog that does what they're told (though might be an expensive cog). What you're incorrectly calling a freelancer. They get hired at a daily rate and turn up at work and told what to build.

A freelancer will usually have complete autonomy on the tech side, but no say in the business side. A freelancer is not always expensive. Freelancers are sometimes cheap consultants. A guy who builds WordPress sites for mom & pops is a freelancer. They were asked for a website, not a WordPress one. Bit also a guy who makes mobile apps is a freelancer, but it's his choice to choose swift or not.

A consultant is there to bring specific knowledge about a specific business problem or metric. They are always expensive.
The default conversation view is not a view, it's a preview.
It's quite easy to declare that anyone claiming to need end-to-end encryption has something to hide. The NSA, and by extension pretty much any agency of the US government won't stand for being truly locked out of a person's online activities, and can put extreme pressure on a foreign company through US companies, through government reach - in this case through a Senator.

And that's all that needs to be said to put one company with extreme security out of business through the use of other companies is "they're pirates, or they'd show us their files." Won't someone think of the children and whatnot.

Wasn't it nice, pre-Snowden, when you could read the above paragraphs and think "that's a crazy conspiracy theory..."
Agreed on the first two.

Disagreed on the third. The purpose of government is not to delegate decision-making to others, but to join together the power of individuals to accomplish goals that they could not together, and to protect the weak many from the strong few.

I agree that people frequently ignore issues that they perceive as too big or out of their control. Sometimes this is a rational assessment of the situation. Sometimes it's an abdication of personal responsibility.

I disagree that the position you identify as 'individualist' is associated with a willingness to debate, or to use rational arguments. Some of the most rational thinkers I've ever read were communists, and some of the lowest emotional sloganeering I've read was from self-proclaimed libertarians. Emotional and rational arguments are used by every political faction, and the use of emotional arguments is not a sign of weakness. Humans are emotional creatures and they are rational creatures, and there is nothing wrong with engaging with people on an emotional level.

I appreciate this response, even though I disagree with it. Thank you.
As a practical example, brain.js is a very limited neural network library. You can only provide a dataset and train on that dataset. You can't implement any variations like dropout, stochastic gradient descent, momentum, etc.

Whereas a good neural network library like Torch lets you work at a much lower level of abstraction. You can put together individual layers, and it gives you the internal code for doing forward and backward passes, and chaining them together.
previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8240288
I've been doing a lot of vegan baking lately (I'm vegetarian, with vegan tendencies, but my girlfriend is strictly vegan). I tried vegan baking in the distant past, and was always disappointed, but the Internet has made it really easy to find good, proven, recipes and a lot more information about the science and behavior of foods when prepared in various ways.

I've been pleasantly surprised by how well my coconut oil-based cookies and biscuits come out. My current biscuit recipe (http://foodcite.org/recipe/amazing-vegan-southern-buttermilk... ) is as good as any I have ever made...and I'm from the south. I know biscuits, and have made and eaten a lot of biscuits in my life. Cakes and brownies are another story, thus far, and it's not the butter that's the problem ingredient; eggs are where the problems come in.

I'm really impressed with their experimental approach. I've done the same experiments with curdling non-dairy milks (to replace buttermilk in biscuits), and have done several experiments blending various oils and additional ingredients to replicate butter. Because I'm lazy I ended up simplifying back down to very easy to prepare ingredients, because if there are too many steps or ingredients, I end up cooking something simpler. But, in this case I could probably make myself mix up a big batch of this for the freezer.
Yeah no problem. If you want to go into some more details about production issues my email is in my profile.
Ahh ok. That's not how he described it.
Because they were pressured by the government. Who were pressured by a different company. Who pay for elections.
I used to love XFCE for being a light weight alternative to Gnome and KDE. The last time I used it on a linux system it had gotten quite a bit porkier.

Can anyone speak to if the new release has slimmed things down or is it still, at least to my reading, becoming bulkier still?
Yay nationalism.
I understand the money supply and the multiplier effect of fractional reserve banking, but with an appropriately designed cryptocurrency you don't need it. You can literally just create more currency out of thin air and pump it into the economy like an instant perfectly efficient printing press.

In fact, you could probably utilize the increase in the money supply in much more productive ways than the current system, which primarily benefits banking institutions.
That's a good goal and when I worked as an IT industry analyst we tried very hard to steer clients away from time-based engagements/deliverables. That said, if the engagement is something like "meet with our team for a day and give us feedback on XYZ initiative" it's hard not to have some linkage between hours and deliverable. (Though we would also throw in reports/follow-up/etc. to blur the linkage to some degree.) Ditto for giving a presentation. Funnily enough though, these types of engagements were actually the ones that brought in the most money per hour spent because they involved high value in-person interactions rather than just creating a written document.

EDIT: And sometimes, billing has to be done per hour for various reasons. The time I worked on an expert witness report, we had to bill per hour because that's how the lawyers worked. (Which was fine given that the pay was good and it would have been very hard for us to estimate the time in advance.)
Glad to see that support work for a GTK3 version is coming along -- I'm looking forward to that.

I've always been a fan of XFCE -- it's lightweight, but not so lightweight that you have to make a ton of sacrifices. Plus, XFWM is the only window manager I know of that supports compositing, but doesn't have any animations or other fancy effects (on slower computers, this can be surprisingly beneficial).
> (and scary dangerous - where are the switches? where is the Earth? though the EU are also typically unswitched)

well the bottom prong on a cord is the ground and anything that is not a wallwort is polarized nowadays so that the neutral and hot are always on the right wire.

by switched you mean it has a fuse in the plug? if so that's not something that america does. we have 15A circuits going to different parts of the house and if there is a possibility of water immersion there will be a GFCI circuit breaker or outlet installed to protect all downstream outlets. overall it works well enough that there aren't a massive number of deaths caused by it. usually you have do something exceptional to be electrocuted.

edit: the kettle I have is 1500 Watts and at 120 volts it's ~12A of current.
In theory such a tool could be useful, but I would be worried about the usage restrictions imposed by the various sites. For example, many if not most freelance marketplaces are particularly concerned with any significant information about the jobs being made available outside of the official sites. Also, jobs can be posted as semi-public where they can be viewed only when logged in. To remain legal, it would be necessary to consult carefully each source site's EULA.

It would be very important to give a median score rather than a mean score. A resilient range, such as from quartile 1 (Q1) to quartile 3 (Q3) could be useful as well to mitigate outliers.

Another curiosity would be a map showing a colour gradient for the scores. I could see such a map being in popular reference.
Of course, you may have installed Thunderbird prior to the privacy policy existing in that form with those details.

By quite a few years, and apparently I'm not the only one.

But that's really not the point anyway. Burying opt-out phone home behaviour in nothing but legalese small print is a dark pattern. Having no way to disable it without going into obscure parts of the UI that no normal user (or even normal power-user) is ever likely to find is also a dark pattern.

Again, I appreciate your taking the time to share the links, but this is still a screw-up if Mozilla are trying to convince people they care about privacy. I don't think anyone can effectively defend general purpose software that includes covert, opt-out surveillance in any form in 2015. It's not so much that this particular feature is causing clear harm -- maybe it really is just an innocent feature that happens to expose a user count as a side effect -- it's the principle that doing stuff behind your user's back is OK, in a world full of malware that does stuff that very much is not OK.
Static sites are trivially cacheable. Caching gets cheaper per request the higher the volume.
Same thread (sans www subdomain in link) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9124996
> you'd be far less willing to spend any or invest ... This will reduce consumption and investment in the larger economy

Or maybe consumers will stop buying the latest and greatest just because advertisers convinced them it will make them happy. Instead, consumers will demand higher quality products, which increases overall spending on R&D instead and decreases spending on marketing. Then we will all have better products and be more productive.

I can at least dream, can't I?
> Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin...

Thunderbird can handle high DPIs natively, at least on Linux. Hopefully OS X is similar. All fonts and UI elements are scaled up. Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Config editor. Set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2, or whatever looks good to you. It's the same procedure as Firefox.
> Apple Watch will remove the fashion choice from the watch industry.

That's counter to every bit of prelaunch press circulating about the Apple Watch. It'll be interesting to see if you're right.
Well, I've had issues with pg_dump's standard format. It can't be directly used to restore a db, one must manually set it to dump a .bak or something else.
I wonder why they don't double down on Open Source. Their architectures, since the ATi merge, have been very creative, providing a lot of heterogeneous computing power but it seemed it was unusable unless you were using their Windows drivers.
Don't switch stacks. He's expressing an opinion about code from Rails developers which is about as broad as opinions go this side of saying "black people are like X" or "Asians are like Y." On the bright side he does leave the door open that Rails developers could write solid code though most don't in his opinion. The best thing you could do is continue working on Rails but read a variety of opinions on good code in different languages, read Coders at Work and similar texts on coding, and remember not to blindly follow coding trends. Generally keep your code simple and work to find abstractions to fit your domain.

I'm not saying anyone here is incorrect in their generalizations of Rails developers. I've obviously never seen the code they are criticizing. But they also aren't providing any useful information. Keep that in mind above all else. There will always be politics and disagreements. You're never going to make everyone happy and it would be a disaster to try to.
Soy's main risk for men being feminization.
Letting it cool down so I can have the thrill of boiling it again.

Seriously, tea, coffee (15-20 cups in a typical day, between two of us), plus cooking. It's often faster to boil water in the kettle and then pour it into a pot and switch on the gas than to boil it from cold in the pot.
Out of curiosity, how bad are taxes? How much of that 20k could a developer actually expect to take home?

To give an example, I live in Seattle in the US (which is relevant as many states in the US apply additional taxes on top of those applied federally). My effective tax rate is probably somewhere around 35-40% of my gross income. I'm curious if devs in the UK are looking at a similar deal, or if more than half of that 20k per month is going to evaporate into taxes... also how does that vary for contract versus permanent work (in the US it would cause an immediate 7.5% bump in my tax rate, I believe).
I'm tired of you playing semantics to try to win the argument. I would rather discuss this with someone that has some actual substance.
The livestreaming of the class is over now. But we'll upload the recordings ASAP to:
https://courses.platzi.com/classes/develop-apps-sails-js/

All your feedback will be welcome, thanks!
In many cases, freelance jobs meet your definition of a contractor. I suppose that is the problem with this whole argument, as these definitions are somewhat subjective, and the lines between them are crossed all the time depending on how desperate for work the consultant/freelancer/contractor is. That's why I prefaced my comment with "in my view". The only real consensus is that consultants are at the top of this particular food chain.
Electric kettle? Having an Asian wife, I have learned there is an even better choice, a countertop hot water boiler. It boils the water and then keeps it hot in a super insulated container so the energy use is really low and you always have hot water ready for tea, so you don't have to wait!

We unplugged it once to take to an ice rink and it was still hot hours later.
I have a PHP REPL on repl.it [1] but it's admittedly not that great because certain errors are impossible to recover from, for example a call to an undefined function just kills the process. I don't know how Boris does it but I should just use it.

[1]: http://repl.it/languages/PHP
The Lean Approach to User Acquisition
Bloated governments are grasping at straws. Look at the US with FATCA, taxing it's citizens wherever they are. I prefer to keep socking away savings in my offline bitcoin account and then exchanging it for Euros when I'm back home. Just look at all the people who had 'safe' accounts in Cyprus, or in the US underwritten by FannieMae. Bitcoin is the Libertarian's / Anarcho-Capitalist's dream; true freedom from the whims of greedy governments.
I'm not sure what's Mega's involvement in moving money here, or maybe I don't get it. It seems more of not-being-able-to-bypass-encryption issue which is probably more alarming, since I'd infer that, if the US Treasury is the entity putting pressure on PayPal, then who's putting pressure on the US Treasury?
I was actually thinking of the studies that show soy products may cause harmful reductions in testosterone in men. I wouldn't say the data is overwhelming at present, but there is concern. The soy industry isn't exactly a feather weight when it comes to promoting its products either.

The reason I mentioned this is because this article went to significant effort to make margerine sound horrible for your health when the concerns about margerine aren't any more convincing than those about soy. Additionally, the "vegan butter" recipe is based on the same oils as are used in margerines anyways. When it comes to health, how do the chemical reactions done in the article compare to those performed when creating margerine? I have no idea. Just because a chemical reaction has not been performed on an industrial scale does not mean it produces healthier results.

The conflicts people get into about food are sometimes ridiculous in their intensity. Butter vs margerine is almost a religious issue! One thing that is truly ridiculous is how people can go on a pure magic-vegan-voodoo-uber-healthy diet and wind up horribly unhealthy because they're simply eating too much. Perhaps this vegan butter is far better for pie crusts than most margerines, but that doesn't change the fact that pie isn't terribly healthy regardless of what it's made of.
Me too. It happened 5 years ago and it pushed me to start my own company (which is what I always wanted) and I haven't looked back since.
This is a case of getting what you're willing to pay for. Great work is expensive because it takes a lot of experience to do, and there are a lot of opportunities for those with a lot of experience. But if you're willing to sacrifice the "great work" part, there are plenty of people out there with less experience doing (potentially) less great work for less cost. Everybody would like above market work for below market cost, but it doesn't tend to work that way.
It was written by someone in my PhD cohort—it's available for preorder now. http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com
[SPOILER ALERT]

And look at those beautiful visualizations:

http://imgur.com/a/yaLPk

Those are the prettiest pictures about War on Drugs I ever saw.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Gmail?
Hello HN!

Let's assume that for some reason you don't want to use GMail for your emails.

And that also, you don't want to run your own mail server.

What are the alternatives to GMail, comparable in services and quality?

I think this is a general interest question, but by the way, I'm mostly interested in SMTP/IMAP access, a decent amount of space, reliability.

Thanks in advance!
This was on my shortlist when I first moved to Arch before I landed on just plain i3. Am I missing anything by not trying it?
Agree completely. The argument that mindless consumption is a good thing just because it drives the economy is short-sighted and ridiculous. If money itself is wealth-generating then people are going to be much more mindful about their spending on worthless shit that serves no purpose other than to stall the degradation of their wealth and entertain then temporarily at the cost of our environment.
What could we do with this kind of bandwidth? I can't even imagine.
Cooking them in a pan of hot oil is so much more satisfying anyway. They double in size in about a second.