skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have you started a company that has zero to do with software?
I just discovered Shark Tank for the first time (I know I'm behind the times, but alas). I get really inspired/energized by the businesses people are out there working on - specifically, that the majority have nothing to do with software.

Assuming the majority of HN works in tech, have you started a business that wasn't within the software realm? What did you create?
What does this mean for Wyoming customers who already have bitcoin in Coinbase-hosted wallets?
You wouldn't be able to simply; the same issues exist as in ES3 in this regard.

(I wrote about them extensively years back here: http://mikegerwitz.com/papers/coope/coope.pdf.)
US PayPal users face marketing robot cold calls
Here is a wonderful study on the costs of light rail and its efficiency versus other forms of mass transit. [1]

Here is a telling quote about why digging deep is the wrong answer.

"Seattle, however, is building an entire light-
rail line underground from the University of
Washington to downtown Seattle. When completed in 2016, the line is expected to cost $628 million per mile, yet it will not carry any more people per hour than San Diego’s original 1981 light-rail line that cost $17 million per mile.

The total cost of the 3.1-mile subway would be
enough to build almost 200 miles of elevated
busways at $10 million per lane mile. Seattle’s
first light-rail line, which opened in 2007, was
also completely separated from streets, costing $175 million per mile (nearly $200 million
per mile in today’s dollars)."

[1] http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa750_w...
Sounds like the author wants something like Mercurial's https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution. It will allow you to rebase and do all kinds of heinous things to your history, but still maintain the original commits that things came from.
Aw damn, that kinda sucks, but the project has been dead for a while now. I used it for content aggregation, but moved on to custom scripts, which were way more powerful...
I saw that, I just didn't remember all the details. Well anyway, that's a good counter-example. What if a smaller company wants to do the same?

There might be an argument that it should require knowing the serial number or something that's only printed on the disk, so it couldn't be done by malware.
I have no business dealing with "credit bureaus". I did not give them my information or consenting for them to store my information on their system.

So, I have been told constantly to "correct" my information with them - FUCK THEM! They bought/stole my personal information - I have no business with them.

Call me naive, but I wish more people would not give a damn about them either.

When I needed a loan to buy my house, I spoke directly to the loan officer face to face and told showed them all documents they needed and told them that if they need to consider my approval based on "Credit Score", I did not care.. I showed them the mistakes and mis-information they have in my credit report and -when he asked me to call them to fix it - I told him that I would not do that because I do not consent them holding my information. Two days later, the load officer called me to tell me my application was approved.

People need to do this more often.
This is exactly what we are doing at http://www.feedsapi.com , we don't use a graphical UI for the logic but keywords and RegEx to create filters... Many folks are already building their own techmeme with our API, it's however not a free service. I'm not sure if this fully fits your requirements but you should take a look.
Show HN: Refer Madness – Find random referral codes then submit your own
FSX – PMDG 737 NGX Landing at Anchorage(PANC) – REX – TrackIR
Suppressing SLF4J Logs During Tests in SBT
In his defence Russia and China don't really apply to what I said so he's got that going for him. Other than that thanks for pointing out the lack of validly articulated criticism, such as doesn't belong on HN. Even more telling is that lack of a valid response to anything you said.
Show HN: Flockport – An App store for your server
How does this even work? Meaning if I live in WY, but I bank at "Small Union Bank of Delaware" Does that mean I'm using anything with in the realm of the Wyoming Division of Banking? Would just using an ATM put me under their jurisdiction? Because if I by something from Amazon, the transaction is basically from my bank in DE to WA if there are no Physical Amazon locations in WY. Correct?
Bruce's comment is quite bizarre. Here is a slightly better quote from him in 2013:

"Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It's prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means."

The article would have been far better if they only included Microsoft's answers and ended the piece with the same line:

"Whatever you choose, if trusting a proprietary operating system not to be malicious doesn’t fit your threat model, maybe it’s time to switch to Linux."
Excellent execution. I hope you can find a niche were it pays off.
> Another issue is probably the fact that the meshes need to be composed of the exact same amount of vertices to blend correctly

These examples don't require the same topology, in fact they seem to use really quite different ones.

This should allow them to take new, unseen shapes and modify them in a similar way. I think that's what they're doing anyway but haven't read all the paper yet.
Right. My browser didn't play nice with MathML, so I missed about the part where x = 1 (i.e. I couldn't see the "1" :) )

My objection was that a tangent line, as opposed to a segment, has infinite length. I can draw infinitely many segments tangent to the curve -- and get infinitely many heights for it.
Untethered PanGu8 jailbreak for cydia download
In case it matters, a credit freeze will also prevent services like Credit Karma from being able to access your information.

https://help.creditkarma.com/hc/en-us/articles/202041774-I-h...
The phrase is rooted in a very old memeplex, the part where religious morality and sociopathy overlap. Most ideas revolving around the concept of "putting the fear of God into someone" aren't actually for regular people with empathy. They're for sociopaths. It seems that sociopaths used to be seen as just completely normal people, undifferentiable from everyone else—and much of "morality" is actually an attempt to create extrinsic incentive systems to replace the thing that sociopaths lack, so they can seemingly function normally.

That's all to say, by analogy: locks are to keep honest-acting sociopathic opportunists honest-acting.
Windows Presentation Foundation and WinForms will not likely be open sourced so I doubt it will be anytime soon. Many console applications will likely run today with a recompile.
> I can't speak for the GP, but I lived there for a month with my wife and 3 kids.

So you visited.
the long term plan for bitcoin seems to be based on the fees increasing in value to eventually replace the block reward

Arguing a little with my own post, with this quote from a Bitcoin developer: "There is no guarantee that future one-gigabyte blocks full of smaller transactions will generate enough fees to secure the blockchain...." https://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/blocksize-economics/
Thanks for the informative post! However I think asthir may be a false friend in this case. The a- prefix is used to negate sthir in asthir. Sthir in Indian languages means stable, stationary, motionless etc. Kind of like the a- prefix in English sometimes (social, asocial etc.)

But it is not uncommon for word meanings to change in such a way that they take on a meaning exactly opposite of what they used to mean (see for example the meaning of the word nice: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nice&allowed_in_fra...). I wonder if there is a name for this phenomenon.
A court order is not easy to obtain and usually investigators have good reasons for asking for one. Warrantless searches is what I worry about, plus in some countries there are laws protecting people that don't want to disclose their password, like the fifth amendment in the US.

You also have to consider that the punishment for refusing to comply with a court order may be less than the damage you may do to your case by disclosing your password and here I'm specifically thinking about people that do have something life-threatening to hide, like whistleblowers or whatever.
I'm really curious what most people do now-a-days. A long time ago I started a company with 3 friends. We were advised to divide the company basically by shares/points/option. We each got 1 point for each month we were with the company. So first month each of us has one point. Second month each has 2 points. If someone quits then in 6 month it would have been 6, 6, 6, 2 which means the 4 would own 30%, 30%, 30%, 10%. In a year it would be 12, 12, 12, 2. That's 31.5% each for the 3 remaining partners and the guy who left is now down to 5%

At the time that seemed like a great idea.

Then I listened to the podcast, Startup and I hear the Alex Bloomberg offer his partner 10%. "Seriously? You haven't actually done anything yet". It seemed to me he should have used the point system. At best he should start with 2 or 3 more points (or heck even more because he's the "talent") but otherwise given there was basically nothing to the company yet it seemed fair. If his partner puts in the time in a few years they'll be nearly equal.

They settled on some random numbers but it seemed short sighted. Maybe they'd need another partner. The points system seems to work. New partner starts, you decide on some starting points, possibly zero, just vest your points. If it was 5 people who've been working a year and you come on at the end of year 1 then in 4 more years it will be 60,60,60,60,60,48. That's 17% for the 5 originals and 13% for the new partner

The 2nd season had the same issue. Instead of going by time invested in the company they were just picking random numbers. It seems very arbitrary and unfair. Of course maybe the point system is just as unfair to some.
I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't implemented AES-XTS with REFS in Windows 10. Okay, that was perhaps an acronym too far.

REFS is Microsoft's answer to the new generation of copy-on-write filesystems, akin to ZFS and BTRFS. It checksums all data on disk to verify integrity.

AES-XTS is a block cipher mode that avoids many of the problems of AES-CBC, although neither is as bad as EBC. But like all block cipher modes used for FDE, they're susceptible to malleability attacks. That's because there's just no room in a sector to store authentication information. Enter: a filesystem that performs checksumming and performs authentication at a higher level.

It's a little disappointing to me that Bitlocker was weakened and, from the outside, it appears no significant effort was undertaken to resolve this using tech Microsoft already has. The weak link may be some NTFS features that REFS doesn't implement, as currently Microsoft doesn't support using REFS for your system drive.
Precisely. And if you are denied something based on the credit bureaus' negligently constructed profiles, sue them for libel.

Their whole system is based on an antiquated idea of singular "identity" that only worked when it was one small part; it simply doesn't scale. Some arbitrary facts about a person do not form a legitimate authorization mechanism!

The only way things are going to change is for people to realize they have absolutely no responsibility for a third party being defrauded.
Check out http://www.feedsapi.com , we do almost everything with rss feeds...
Business model :)

Just to be clear, I had not idea about that until now.
Physicals locks are poor analogies for encryption. A physical lock isn't designed to provide robust security - it's trivially easy to open almost any lock - it's to make opening it a noisy, slow, dangerous and expensive affair. And even if you have that magical perfect physical lock, few houses (or other containers) are impregnable.

A physical lock is more like an effective intrusion detection system - it's not going to prevent hacks, but it might make those that have something to lose think twice, and at least you're likely to know if you've been robbed. Just like intrusion detection, physical locks make it at least somewhat risky to even try to break in - after all, you might get caught.
HN feature request: Watched Users
Being an avid HN user, I have noticed that over time there are certain commenters that I find particularly insightful or interesting to read.

It would be really nice if I could quickly skim a link's comments and spot any comments from these users. On other platforms (Twitter, forums, etc.) avatars make it easy to quickly spot users of interest in a long list. However, HN's text only format works against that.

Ideally there would be a text field on my settings page, "Watched users", which I would populate with a comma separated list of user handles I want to watch.

These users' handles would then appear in a different color in the comments (just like new users currently appear in green).

Writing a browser plugin that does that is trivial, but it would be great for these settings to be tied to my account and persist across devices/browsers/etc.
Government access doesn't require a backdoor per-se, does it? Can't you encrypt something with two public keys, such that either associated private key alone can decrypt?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/597188/encryption-with-mu...

Multi-encrypt the harddrive with YourPubKey & SpooksPubKey, and viola. The spooks have access, without giving criminals access (unless they steal SpooksPrivateKey, but is that any more risky than theft of YourPrivateKey?)
"but most of all, samy is my hero"

Context - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
Pretty sure they are talking about this article:

http://techti.me/2015/06/04/us-air-force-targets-and-destroy...
>We perhaps don’t realise what a luxury that kind of certainty is.

It indeed is a luxury.
How to Get to the Top of HackerNews
That's pretty much all one needs to know regarding BitLocker.
THIS is exactly what http://www.feedsapi.com does, it's a paid service with a 2 weeks free trial.
Show HN: Daily email shows competitor sales for apps
Yes, would very much like to see the source. Look like they did open up an Om profiling tool they made: https://github.com/PrecursorApp/om-i
Been to Vienna once; seemed nice. Love to watch the New Years philharmonic concert every year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIPL5gxjKO4
Slightly OT, but I have an amusing story about Montana-based regulation. I work for an insurance company, and when you price life insurance or annuities, you have two separate mortality tables: male and female. Montana decided that that's discriminatory, so they mandate only using one table. So we use whichever table is more onerous (i.e. male for life insurance, female for annuities). So if Montanan women notice they pay more life insurance, or men pay more for annuities, they can thank their local regulator.
Huh. I'm about to go read the the books, but that sounds like a wild interpretation. That sounds like some odd parity reserve, rather than the fractional reserve system common in almost any other domain.
Samy's Productivity Tools
A regular expression processing library seems like a great candidate for something that could be implemented in a "safe" language - Haskell, OCAML, (Rust?), etc.
Let me get this straight. Your boss's preferred tool outputs a CSV that is rejected by your tool's CSV import and your solution is to force your boss to do the conversion in another piece of software? You being a developer and your boss being a business user doing his/her work in his/her tool. That tool being one of the biggest selling programs of all time for business use.
This is showing my actual daily sales email for my app company. The online demo also shows live data: http://apptheta.com/demo/
This is why all the data that goes to a hard drive should be encrypted before it gets there. No reason for the system to be trusting that the storage isn't malicious. If all the storage sees is encrypted data then the worst that it can do is fail to store the data. What it can't do is substitute malicious code for my desired code.
This also seems like the idea of throw away the first one, you will anyway. The experience of building it as a monolith shows you what micro-services you need. Or maybe avoiding optimization before you need it.
It means someone can take an existing model and modify it in a simple way.

Example: Download a toy plane model from thingiverse. Decide you want it to look "stealthier", this can modify it. The plane model was not one in the original training set.

The process appears to take a bunch of example models, then asks people to score them on various parameters. The algorithm then works out how to use that knowledge to modify shapes in those directions.
Yeah, sorry - you do need a bachelor's degree. It needs to be somewhat relevant to your job but doesn't have to be exactly - they also take into account your work experience.

For example, I did my bachelor in CS but I'm a designer & that was ok.

"Specialty occupation" just means anything requiring a degree really. So someone wanting to come to the US & get a job in a cafe would likely be void for example.
no one at Yahoo seemed to understand what Pipes was for

What was Pipes for?
> So following that same logic, if I know people at Microsoft who wrote the code for BitLocker, and I trust them, I should trust BitLocker.

Not entirely unreasonable [0] -- a significant benefit of open-source is that more people have access to the code of the same software you are evaluating, so its more likely that you will be able to find a trusted evaluator (or, if you have the skills to do the evaluation, to do it yourself) -- and that you will likely have more trustworthy evaluators, as well.

But, ultimately, yes, its a question of trust in people who are familiar with the code , and what Schneier describes is a not unreasonable basis for personal trust in closed-source code, its just harder to get than a comparable basis for trust in open-source code.

[0] The problem in both cases is that there are more people involved that you need to trust, although sufficient trust in and information from the people writing the software could suffice to trust the software.
The best way to do this is to create a more accurate credit prediction system. Underwriters rely on credit scores because they’re cheap, quick, and easy way to triage risk. Credit scores are riddled with inaccuracies, but because risk is difficult to model precisely to begin with, these companies are still in business because they work decently well even despite the many errors.

If you could create a system using publicly available data that is a statistically and meaningfully superior way of predicting risk, it would be immensely valuable to the asset owners that are buying mortgages, insurance products etc. that rely on credit scores. You’d have to get them to demand it enough to change their underwriting guidelines (a morass of bureaucracy), but once they do, you’d also gain some steady demand and a moat of competitive advantage.
The first rule of Mismanagement Club is you never talk about how you got into Mismanagement Club.
Any news? I still can't use it.
Okay, now this certainly feels better than my example and is much more bulletproof than prefixing function names with `_`, thanks.
Shameless relevant plug: http://www.feedsapi.com might be an option, it'sit's not exactly a replacementbfor pipes but it does a lot of what pipes did and is a work in progress
Let’s Talk About Your Referral Program
My guess is that nothing unless you let the user input REs. (Or use REs that can be modified by user input)
Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes.

That's really interesting. I think it exemplifies a problem that has been bothering me for a while: for many sites, scripting and design are antipatterns designed to corral rather than enable the user and leverage branding.
No, these 250 H1Bs are not direct petitions filed on behalf of Disney. That would've been great for Florida and the Federal govt.

What these companies do is insidious. Say, you're working for HCL in India, HCL files a H1B for you and sends you over for 6 months to the US and then you come back to India and hand over your H1B to them. Not very clear on the specifics, as I've only heard about it.

So during the time you're in the US, you don't get paid US wages for a H1B s/w engineer, which are pretty good. What you get is a stipend for those 6 months and your regular Indian salary which at the very max for the very best won't be more than $40,000 in conversion.

So these are significant savings for Disney and significant profits for HCL.
Most of what Pipes did can be done locally, in a library. FeedReader for Windows did this.[1] Unfortunately, they recently announced "Get ready for the brand new FeedReader! ... Check our site later this March for a new amazing web service, featuring industry-best RSS search and analysis.", which means it's becoming "cloud based" and probably has ads or worse. "rss.com" already went that way; they charge $6/month to read RSS feeds.[2]

Following RSS feeds on a continuing basis takes a lot of RSS polls. Most RSS feeds do not implement RSS in a way that allows getting only new items reliably.[3] The RSS "etag" mechanism is not reliable. Some sites with multiple servers and a load balancer have different etag values on each server. The "guid" field sometimes changes when the content hasn't changed. My experience is that nothing short of full text comparison eliminates duplicates properly. I wrote an RSS reader which does a MD5 of the text of each incoming message to throw out duplicates. Presumably the "pipes" system did something similar.

If RSS feed servers complied with the standard, there'd be less need for feed aggregation services.

[1] http://feedreader.com/
[2] https://www.rss.com/
[3] http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/08/rss-dup-detection
in 2010 I attended Yahoo Hack Day in Bangalore/ India. Thats where I learned about Pipes. This was the only tool needed to create a tech mashup.
They obviously will do whatever they feel they can get away with. If they feel entitled to illegally track non-users, how could anyone presume they'd give a rat's ass for actual users?
I think voice with a screen is interesting, but voice alone can be difficult. What is the last voice controlled IVR (phone system) that was awesome to interact with. I think it takes a combination of voice and something can can be confirmed with another "button", or something you can touch or push to confirm or cancel what you've "asked" it to do.

I think it can augment things well, but not be the prime time star.
Suggestion for your use case: http://www.feedsapi.com , supports keywords and RegEx filtering among other things.
The US foreign policy can destroy the well-being of entire nations, and therefore the lives of millions of people. When you come to the conclusion that your life and the lives of everyone you've known have been fucked over by a nation half way around the world, I image that can get you pretty mad.

The movie Three Kings explores this a bit:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120188/
Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that YQL was equivalent to Pipes, just that it might be able to replace the functionality. Which is why I made sure to mention the significant difference...
I was thinking the same thing. Why the hell would they say such a thing if the answer is no?