skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have trouble with this story. I'm also a foreigner, and around approximately the same time (+/- 1 year) I made a mistake on my return and ended up owing some small amount like $150 or $200. They sent letters. I called them on the phone, and I mailed the check to an IRS office. They've also sent letters other times when I didn't owe money but should have filed with a different version of the form, and another time when I overpaid.

On general principle, I never deal with anything financial or legal over the phone. I listen if it seems legit, and then say 'Can you put it in writing? I like to have these things on paper.' I hope the call you received was an experiment which has since been abandoned by them.
So how would you rate a PhoneGap UX compared to a native UX? I agree the latter is better but I don't see the former as significantly worse. If you have limited resources, you've usually got the choice between supporting multiple platforms with a decent UX or a limited number of platforms with a great UX.
If the caller ID says "anonymous" or "unknown", I don't answer. I refuse to talk to callers who won't identify themselves. That gets rid of most of them. For the rest, if there are a few seconds of silence after I answer, it's a robocaller and I hang up.
iPhone X Futuristic Concept
While you don't have to plant them (because they're weeds and volunteer), you do have to harvest and it is a challenge that we're working on. Economic sustainability/feasibility is extremely important.
I moved from a rural to an urban location.

It's quite a lot of work digging dandelion roots; washing them; roasting them. And it's not that tasty. And I'm gently worried about the pollution - I live near roads and I have no idea what the soil is like here. The nettles were a by product from clearing a path to the wood hut. That path had to be cleared so using those nettles was good.
Cyber Insurers Dictating Cyber Security Standards?
I agree - I find it quite hilarious, which is why I originally installed it. I'm still waiting for your discussion, beyond the ad hom attacks.
See http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1.... Lacose tolerance apparently allowed middle-eastern nomads to wipe out and replace the native european hunter-gatherers, and set up an agricultural society in their place.

"In a 2004 study, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”."
The cost to design and print the field guides was much more than we expected. We're hoping that the $15 will cover the guide as well as put a few dollars toward other components of our project, such as toxin and nutrition analysis (which are quite expensive). We're working on getting the (free) digital guide up soon and hopefully in the future, we can obtain grant funding to make the printed guides dramatically cheaper/free!
I don't see that effort as helping anybody get closer to the truth.
GNU APL 1.5
Yes, heavily-adopted things are often pressured to grow to their logical conclusions. One logical conclusion of a commandline+commands is REPL+procedures.

One critique of the worse-is-better [1] philosophy (Unix), is the design starts cracking more as it's pushed to scale to its logical conclusion.

Of course, maybe the worse-is-better essay is inapplicable (and the author himself argued both sides under a pseudonym or two). And good design is a matter of degree; we could all critique the-right-thing representatives. But here I think it's a useful model to describe what's going on.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
There's some information about there about nutrition, but not much, which is why we're working on it! Also working on the digital field guide, but for now we have the printed guide with a $15 donation to Berkeley Open Source Food.
> probably because 'count' was too similar to a rude word.

Now that's a theory I've not heard before: you could well be right.

However, the Wikipedia article on the word in question says that it's not attested in English before 1230 (though it has cognates in Old Norse -- which contributed a lot of vocabulary to English, via the Danelaw settlers -- and in other early Germanic languages), and that as late as Chaucer it was not considered obscene (though by Shakespeare's time it was).

But I suppose it wouldn't have to be obscene to cause problems: puerile humour appears to be part of the human condition, and we can imagine the sniggering today if a conquering foreign power tried to impose a governing class with titles that sounded like "buttock" or "scrotum".

[Edits: improve phrasing; fix spelling & random capitals.]
I meant a distribution with "discrete" probability, i.e. a distribution where the probabilities of singletons are all equal and nonzero, so that a simple Bayesian argument could possibly be extended. My bad for not being precise enough.

Perhaps I should have stuck to natural numbers in my previous comment, otherwise yes, you can have uniform distributions with respect to some additional structure of the probability space (like [0,1] with the Lebesgue measure you suggest).
I remember this scene pretty well: I was a Mac guy in that era (i hated the rectangular pixels of the Amiga) but I had many Amiga friends (amigos) who would always show me these demos which blew me out of the water. Something to keep in mind was that these demos came out before Doom and many featured 3D graphics. The other cool thing about the Amiga was the ability to display 4000+ colors with the HAM chip (this was when you'd be overjoyed to get 256 colors on Mac II):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify
The target is 0 days. The target is that I don't have to have a job.
Yes, you definitely have to be extremely careful!
SSL does nothing to guarantee the integrity of code you download and run off the internet.

I'm not worried about MITM attacks, SSL provides adequate protection against those in most cases; but if someone gains access to the coreos systems SSL would not help.

In this case, I have a GPG key saved for the coreos image signing, which hopefully is done offline and I got that through a third party which I have a certain amount of trust on (github), and I can always verify it on other channels.
Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy
I have a friend who's Chinese. Until she was about 10 she grew up in the U.S. and drank milk like every other kid. Then her family moved to Hong Kong and until college she stopped drinking milk and eating dairy products. When she returned to the states she was lactose intolerant. Even a bite of dairy would cause her all kinds of trouble.

A few years ago she married a Caucasian man who loved his milk and cheese, she simultaneously went to cooking school (and you have to taste what you're cooking) and constant relentless exposure to small amounts of dairy seems to have made her tolerant once again as she can now freely drink milk and eat cheese.

My wife is Korean and dairy products are relatively popular in Korea, she drinks milk, eats ice-cream and cheese without trouble and ice-cream, cream in coffee, milk, and cheese (increasingly) are becoming commonplace in her home country. I only know of one Korean off-hand who is lactose intolerant. Here's an example of a fairly common dessert you find all over Korean, mostly in coffee shops. https://www.google.com/search?q=korean+honey+bread&espv=2&bi...
Why New York City Is the Best Choice for European Startups
Thanks!

Yes, you're right that we can use a class here and instantiate an object of the class. I thought I would skip the intermediate step because all I care about is the upcast type, MySet[A], and not the actual derived type.

But it's very much a matter of preference!
Complex Numbers [pdf]
The first example is typical with badly designed stateful APIs. You have no idea what state their state machine is in and it really is pretty hard to track that in your head - so you try your best to get it to the desired state before proceeding.

I think we're too quick to shift blame to the API user. Perhaps the designer is to blame?
It's been almost 8 months since this blog post. How's it been since? Is the CPU released already? (whatever that means for that kind of decidedly non-consumer-grade hardware)

EDIT: The CPU is 'scheduled to be available sometime in calendar year 2015' according to http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/sparc-m7/index.h... So, barring rumors and insider information, I gest this is it.
We actually had a problem in Berkeley County, South Carolina at Christmas where the sherrif engaged in a drunken hit and run and then a high speed chase. He was charged and released for the reason that only the coroner has the power to arrest the sherrif.
5 Lessons from the SHA-1 deprecation
- All the white bears live in the arctic regions.

- How do you know?

- Well, have you ever seen a white bear roaming around?

- True.
It's a shame more people don't know his name. He postulated that the primordial universe was hot (mostly energy/radiation), described how that radiation condensed into matter, and gave us stellar nucleosynthesis - the science behind, "we're made of star stuff," in a paper attributed to Alpher, Bethe and Gamow.

Who doesn't love a cosmologist with a sense of humor?
We did read the same article, but I don't think it was very consistent throughout. Their opening statement is this:

> EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work.

So I see "inspect" as read access, "repair and modify" as write access and I think what would we do if we had read-write access to our cars? Relly think about that one for a second.

I disagree with the "regulation will be enough" idea in the same way I understand the law regulates people from entering my house but I still lock my door.

Later in the article they go into why the DMCA is the wrong tool for the job and they're probably right, this shouldn't be done in the name of ending music piracy.
Have you tried the Wikibook? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming
Is it any good?
That doesn't matter to an individual developer. Why should they care if the set of all in use USB PIDs has collisions? It's only becomes a problem for them if their PID suffers a collision.
Someone should start an SSL verification service for official phone calls.
The ACLU is a better/bigger force, I would argue.

The EFF actively misrepresents and lies about issues to convince folks to give them money. It's just too blatant, and they represent themselves as technically savvy, so even if it's unintentional, I can't forgive them for those kinds of errors.
I told you: in the very next sentence. Here is the second sentence of my previous post, again:

Also, it won't affect people in terms of legal advice, plea deals etc. because it only applies to people who launch attacks on critical infrastructure from outside the country, and thus beyond the reach of US police.

Sorry if this doesn't clear things up for you, but how much simpler do you expect me to make it? It is a pretty straightforward sentence, even though it does contain a small grammar mistake (it should read '...and are thus beyond the reach...').
Libxo: generate text, XML, JSON, and HTML output
Why is it called a paradox? The introduction on wikipedia states that it's two different conclusions; one arrived through inductive reasoning and the other arrived through intuition. The page seems to imply that that only the conclusion arrived through logical induction is correct. Unless the definition is stating that both conclusions are correct, I see no paradox.
1) Do you know of an instance of someone asserting >$20 damages and 7th amendment right to a jury trial being denied?

2) It may or may not be how it works today, but that is only because I have not made the argument (likewise, no one has asserted that I violated their language).

> If the website is set up to require

If a company wants to take the argument this far, they will have to produce all their code, including the code that was running the day they claim I assented. They will have to prove that it is not possible to use the software without assent of the user to their language.

1) Most companies will not produce their code (and likely won't be able to produce the code that you used) and will fail on their claim.

2) Most companies will not be able to prove that their code requires a user to assent before usage.

3) I can't imagine anything short of video evidence of a user staring at a screen, scrolling through all of their language, then considering their options and making a decision as proof of assent. The claimant just doesn't know what happened. Because, well, they weren't there and took no verifiable record of it.
At least on an intuitive level, the propositions seem paradoxical because there's a piece missing. After all, we know that from a distance, it can be hard to tell if it's a raven or a crow. I'd put it this way:

1. All ravens are black.
2. Non-black things are not ravens.
3. Not every black thing is a raven.

With the addition of the third statement, it appears all cases are covered. But maybe that's too simple, or could be I'm not understanding something...
Unrelated, I am curious if anyone knows if anyone is doing or has done a paper on Bitcoin and explored the idea on how it is or isn't similar to a Ponzi scheme?
Bit of a late reply.. I've actually been following through the Washington University course from them directly (not via coursera). I guess it's similar if not identical as this also does SML, Racket & Ruby. Well worth the effort.
Why I Chose a Bootcamp Over a Master’s in Computer Science
Well, for me it is more about recognising fallacies.

How often do we hear variations on the Black Swan fallacy, and how often do people fall for it,and repeat it in discussions?

Your regular bloke down the pub finds Schroedinger and chaos theory rather pointless as well (And to be honest "Just make the damn box out of perspex" is a fairly sensible response to Schroedinger.), but that does not make the study of theoretical concepts and logic pointless.

For example, I am fascinated by the philosophy of science, how people got to thinking something, and what was going on around them that influenced them. I am also fascinated by the anthropology surrounding the formation of religion. Both relatively pointless, but ultimately understanding why we think something helps move us forward.

PS: I still think "If a tree falls...." is very baffling ;)
Searching for "ipfs collisions" returns this IRC discussion, in which joeyh makes the same point: https://botbot.me/freenode/ipfs/2015-03-05/#33399953 (search for "collision" if it doesn't appear immediately).
Comparing Eventually Consistent and CP-As-in-CAP Stores
I just wanted to say thanks for this idea. I'm porting my old cell number to Twilio, sending all calls through Google Voice to get voicemail emails with transcription (Twilio charges extra for transcription), and getting a new number with no voice service through T-Mobile.
Those are reasonable points, but ones which I think rely a little too heavily on an assumption of bad faith/worst-case scenario as opposed to a mechanism that works well most of the time but occasionally fails, eg people have been mistakenly added to the SDN list and had trouble getting off it, but the bulk of the entries are legitimate. I think it's important to weigh the non-zero potential for abuse, which we should absolutely take seriously, against the equally real and arguably much greater incidence of actual malfeasance, against which we have an entirely legitimate interest in protecting ourselves.
Given that earth seems to be just a random planet in the universe that happens to have developed life, or more specifically ravens, it stands to reason that any random planet has a non-zero (but extremely small) chance of developing life which evolves into ravens. Given an infinite and reasonably uniform universe there should be infinitely many planets where life formed which evolved into ravens, and where at least one raven is alive right now.

It follows that both the number of objects in the universe and the number of ravens in the universe are infinite.

Alternatively we can stay on earth. The number of ravens on earth is finite, but so is the number of objects on earth.
Great idea - but with with what verification level? admin@domain.tld email verification?
These scammers have been hitting me with a phone call per day for the past 3-4 months. They always use a different phone number, and only twice did they leave voicemail (one was a recording, one was a bunch of guys chatting as if they forgot to turn on the robot). The recording says something like "the IRS is suing you."

For the numbers that weren't blocked, I tried checking them using Twilio's Lookup service: https://www.twilio.com/lookup

While the numbers are often in my local area code, the Twilio API shows the "Mobile {Network,Country} Code" is typically in South America or Eastern Europe.

How did they get my phone number? I replied to a Craigslist ad a while back that turned out to be a scam :( I wish there was a way to get rid of the calls ...
Kudos and smart thinking on Amazon's part to vacate these fees. If you heard the opposite story (about how people were filing for bankruptcy as a result of this), there's no way I'd take the chance of using the service, and I would feel hesitant to recommend their services to small businesses I work with. 5k-10k for some of those groups is their entire operating budget. (mostly volunteers)
Ask HN: Uniforms
Hey guys, I stumbled on an article about people who wore the same outfit (Jobs, Einstein, Zuckerberg) everyday and the reasons behind it. As far as I can tell there are three reasons for this:

1: To reduce the amount of decisions a person must make in a day in order to retain cognitive ability.
2: To save time deciding on what do wear.
3: To establish personal 'brand'.

The more I read into this the more it appealed to me (Reasons 1, 2 more so than three) and I'm wondering if people could share their thoughts on the same. Or, to make this a more pointed question:

If someone wore the same outfit every day and you were unaware of their reasoning what would you think?
I'd be tempted to string them along. If you pay your taxes, these people are basically stealing from you by increasing fraud and decreasing the willingness of others to pay taxes, as well as stealing from other people.

I'd be fine with IRS CID spending $100 to catch $1 of criminal predation on taxpayers, here.
I see bitcoin as anarchy. It is just your opinion that a democratic solution would be better than bitcoin.
Hypothetically speaking, how could one go about retaliating against this? If one could identify the source numbers, could one set up a network of counter-robodialers and effectively DDOS them?
Those ones "have" : http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclus...
Workbly, like uber but for jobs
That's well articulated - sometimes looking at pictures you almost forget how real reality looks and feels.

Incidentally, the color gamut of screens should hopefully improve somewhat with next-gen screens targeting Rec. 2020. But where it really gets interesting is if the next-next-gen starts approaching the full range of human vision. At that point maybe the colors and textures available in digital art will become a strict superset of traditional paintings.
This site is still totally unreadable.
American Express Card Data Stolen by Cyber Criminals
React and Meteor are compatible! I just gave a talk on this at Meteor Devshop SF last week:

https://youtu.be/puoD7b4Ow7k?t=1225

[I know you said comparable, and on that count, you are right. But this seems like the perfect spot to plug my talk :)]
Bitcoin isn't a ponzi scheme because nobody is being promised a gain in wealth.
I did wonder if that was the Normans reconnecting with their Viking roots, as it was the Danish kings of England who first used the word as a title for provincial rulers, in its Norse form jarl.
If you have limited resources perhaps supporting multiple platforms from the start isn't a good idea.

One well done app on a big platform may be much better than three decent/acceptable apps on three big platforms.
I love Python, and was eager to read some great measurements for 3.4, but I am having trouble comprehending this chart. I read the chart:

Python 3 used what fraction? used how many times more?

Time-used	|-	|---	25%	median	75%	---|	-|
(Elapsed secs)

±	±	5×	27×	51×	77×	77×

to indicate that even the 25th percentile Python application required 5 times the amount of time to complete as its Java counterpart. It seems that only the pidigits implementation required less time to complete. How does that lead to the conclusion that Python is -approximately- faster?

Edit: fixed chart.
> My summary is that I think he's a con man who figured out how to insert himself into art circles and game rich pretentious patrons into parting with their money, who then justifying the purchase of trite oversized dentist office paintings by building a minor cult around him. Then to complete the image of the tortured artist, publicly lamented the fad that had grown around him, insisting that nobody "got it" that nobody "understood his work" yet refused to provide any coherent explanation of what it was about.

Thought experiment: what if Rothko and other modern painters were the ones being conned? What if wealthy people, lusting for something different with which they could lavish themselves and the world (in their name of course), just needed a few naive but hopeful people who considered themselves artists or painters? What if, in exchange for money and acclaim, they were pressured to produce but never clarify for fear of losing their livelihood, feeling disgraced, or lost after spending so many years exploring a certain path?

I don't mean for any of those to come off as loaded questions, just riffing on the topic while curious about how people here have approached the topic themselves.
When I was a child I ate weeds. It made everyone stop talking to me on the playground. It was pretty great.
I have been starting to learn how to write mobile applications with Xamarin to contribute to a friend's project and had not heard of Xamarin University until I saw this comment. Now that I have looked at it, I'm a little confused. I can understand charging for 1-on-1 help, interactive classes, and certification exams, but why wouldn't "recorded class videos, class labs and materials" be free? Don't you want it to be easy for people to use your software so that people will? Charging $1995/year for learning materials seems pretty steep.

The learning investment is what makes me most hesitant to use Xamarin. It was supposed to be less of a learning investment because we all have C#/.NET experience, but now I'm not so sure. It now seems like we're going to have to dive deep into learning iOS and Android specific UI concepts anyway, and on top of that learn Xamarin concepts and quirks, and if we want to continue using Visual Studio when the trial is up we'll have to pay $1000/year. Maybe we're just not the target market.
The guy has loyality. "I wanted to hope that things here could get better,” he said. He was young and couldn't predict the future. It has happened to so many of us.

What stuck out is you can have a house over your head at $400 euros/month? In the United States, unless you get lucky(section 8, low income housing, family) at $435/month you are homeless.
A visual programming environment to program your Arduino board
I love seeing unedited programming sessions because it shows how you'll have to problem solve on the fly and how sometimes things don't work as expected. Nice job!