skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the future tense in those sentences were present tense, I'd be much more excited. If they were predicting that they'd have products in 3 months, or even 6 months, instead of 18-24 months, I'd be much more excited.

Lots of seemingly-promising materials technology falls down when people actually try to industrialize the manufacturing process. I don't see much sign from that article that they've actually overcome those hurdles. And those are the hurdles here -- we've been able to produce spider silk in small quantities since forever.

Maybe Bolt will do it! Someone will, eventually. But I just don't see any reason why this article couldn't have been written in 1995, which makes me wonder if in 2035, someone will write a functionally identical article, and some future skeptic will say, "I don't see why this article couldn't have been written in 2015."
Safer. Its a matter of degree.
I've read about programs for new geothermal technology and new wind technology. But most of that work is happening outside the USA.

My impression is that "Big Oil" has too much control here in the USA, and has successfully killed any innovation related to clean energy. So you have to go to places like Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland to find most innovation on clean energy.

(Just yesterday I heard about a wind farm in the USA being fought. They claimed that it destroyed too much ecosystem. But compared to oil, gas, and coal - which destroy an incredible amount of our environment - wind energy is very clean. It seems obvious to me that the effort is being funded by Big Oil - just as it has been for decades in the USA. I think it was Buckminster Fuller who said that a wind turbine on every power pole would provide more energy than we could use.)
> but the drive does not come from how they've been treated

> It's the teachings combined with...a desire to follow them

where do you think that desire comes from?

Saying "US foreign policy" created these groups isn't a great short hand for talking about the creation of the conditions that foment these groups. In reality it's an incredibly complicated situation where almost any action will have downsides that entail a lot of human suffering, but US foreign policy is an outsized input into that situation, so it's right to hold it responsible in turn for whatever those consequences are.
That seems backwards. They didn't have ongoing revenue until they proved themselves capable. Their early days were a similar situation to Virgin Galactic now, but, apparently, with even less money and doing harder stuff.
I wonder if they had put in a Yahoo! owned affiliate link, if the site would not still be operating (and self-funding) today...
GitHub: Be Social, Contribute, Learn
> In the quest for PC, we cannot speak the truth (the truth here being that she is a transgender)

No, the truth is she is a transgender person/woman/individual.

Its not the use of the adjective, in contexts where it is germane, that is demeaning, it is its use as a noun, separating the descriptor from the humanity of the person to whom it applies.

> So, how do I do an objective study (say, census count of transgenders) without being "hurtful"?

By using "transgender" as an adjective. Its not that hard to do.
The reality for now is someone has to protect the pacifists.

ISIS was born amongst the chaos of the failed state of Iraq, and covert support and funding of rebel groups to topple Assad in Syria, out of warfare, not ex-nihilo.

A far more conservative attitude to when to fight and when to supply arms might do the west no harm at all, and allow them to spend a lot of that money on something more productive.
The real problem is poverty and more generally extreme inequality. Kids stealing is a symptom. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

Part of the problem is that structural inequality is supported by primitive racist belief systems like Social Darwinism.
Five Tips and One Hack to Corral Your Mixpanel Mess
Related article in Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6239/aaa0698.abstract

New modality for population health modeling.
MBA Mondays Illustrated, Business 101 for Startups by Fred Wilson
Since nearby APs indicate where you are, I'd argue that IS private information.
I do t think he's saying remove gender from the equation. Just don't have two tables based solely on gender.
OWASP Security Knowledge Framework – Opensource – Secure Coding by Design
Calling 9/11 on a person with mental issues is liable to get them shot.
IPSC 2014 problem E looks like a machine learning problem, but the intended solution was to make multiple submissions and use the judge feedback to reverse-engineer the test data. The winning team needed only 6 submissions to hit 95% accuracy. It was one of my favourite problems from the contest.

http://ipsc.ksp.sk/2014/real/problems/e.html
The Better Than Cash Alliance
You misunderstand. They're using repeated attempts on the test set to improve their network. That is equivalent to training on the test set and that is unequivocably cheating.
Good point. When you blow-up the image in Photoshop and see the pixelation around the perimeter of the forward wheel assembly and little elsewhere it does suggest a bad hack job.
Mad enough to behead other Muslims?
Interesting. I rarely fly and truly wasn't aware this was an issue. I'll be sure to take it slow from here on out. :-)
"... thus only holds value because ... our collective agreement that it does hold value."

What exactly do you think the value of a given collection of bits is?
NSA's use of 'back-door searches' against hackers is reformers' next target
That sounds like a good way to quickly go out of business.
Not necessarily. They basically get the publicity without impacting their business.
Do you have a source for that number? I've seen recent estimates of about 2.5-3.5 million Bitcoin users, but that's the global total. I have no idea how you could filter that down to just U.S. users.
KONG Architectural choices: the API layer for microservices
Urban rail in general tends to lean more electric than diesel, especially if you go by passenger/mile. Something like 2/3s of US rail riders live in the New York metropolitan area, which runs mostly electric trains.

In terms of intercity traffic, unless there is a compelling reason to tunnel it should be level or slightly raised, with the road crossings going over or under (since road vehicles are better at accelerating and decelerating when climbing or going down grades).
Interesting read, thanks for posting. Brings a bit of relevant historical perspective given that I recently switched to OpenBSD for a project I'm working on.
I think at least 10% of active bitcoin users in the US have coinbase accounts, in which case they'd have over 15,000 accounts, over the quadruple digit figure.

Or take coinbase's number directly from https://www.coinbase.com/about, which says 2,200,000 users. Maybe perhaps at least 1% are active accounts?
OWASP Security Knowledge Framework – Opensource – Secure Coding by Design
Training developers in writing secure code

OWASP-SKF is a fully open-source Python-Flask web-application that uses the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard to train you and your team in writing secure code, by design.

What is SKF?

Over 10 years of experience in web application security bundled into a single application. The Security Knowledge Framework is a vital asset to the coding toolkit of you and your development team. Use SKF to learn and integrate security by design in your web application.

SKF is an open source security knowledgebase including manageble projects with checklists and best practice code examples in multiple programming languages showing you how to prevent hackers gaining access and running exploits on your application.
In a nutshell

- Training your developers in writing secure code

- Security support pre-development (Security by design, early feedback of possible security issues)

- Security support post-development(Double check your code by means of the OWASP ASVS checklists )

- Code examples for secure coding

More information:

www.owasp-skf.org

https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=OWASP_Security_Knowledge_Framework
Very good article, well written and persuasive. Much food for thought here.

Does indeed deserve to be at the top of HN.
I thought a perfect result on test data via overfitting was trivial (just memorize the data). What am I missing? (I've never done Kaggle and don't know how it's set up at all.)
"demos" must be a typo of "deimos".
Sorry, I have the ajax fallback mostly working. Sharing cursors doesn't work, but syncing chat and changes to the canvas does.

I'm still trying to find a reliable way to catch the error that prevents the connection upgrade. Right now, the library I'm using thinks that it should just keep retrying the websocket connection. We're already maintaining our own fork of the library, but it's a tedious process to make and test changes.
A little bit more insight into KONG and why it's being built as a completely open-source project.

To be remembered that KONG is what has been driving Mashape [1], the marketplaces for API developers and consumers, forward.

The github repo is here [2] if you haven't seen it, please do contribute, comment or leave your feedback

[1] https://mashape.com
[2] https://github.com/Mashape/kong
Thanks for your service! You've done great!
>> I wonder if there could be commercial interest in cryptographically secure garage door openers?

>Probably not. Mainly because breaking a window or crowbarring a door is a lot less expensive and a lot faster.

It's also a lot more likely to attract attention of bystanders.

Another concern may be insurance. In my area of the world, insurance companies generally refuse to pay out for burglaries unless there is evidence of a break-in (a broken window, forced door or something like that). This would likely not be covered. If this kind of device became popular with thieves like the car keyless entry hacks have, I can see there being a demand for something like this.
Another possibility is that the 85k figure is after tax. Given tax rates in CA, that would be more in line with your expectations.
2 million according to https://www.coinbase.com/about
> 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?

Incorrect. What matters is the state (or states) in which the company is "doing business". The exact definition varies from state to state, but in general having customers in WY means that you're doing business there and will (usually) need to register with the state, follow its rules and pay its taxes for your sales in that state.

Your bank is also doing business in DE and will need to follow their laws too, as the other end of the transaction is there.
A note here that SNAP at Stanford is funded by NSF grants through DARPA SMISC, which is a research group in the DoD looking to learn how to get better at influencing social media groups online for propaganda.

(Strategic Communication is the DoD term, well one of them, for propaganda)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-ne...

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=972cbc8...
Is it just me or the link is off?
Microsoft spunks $500m to reinvent the wheel. Why?
A relative of mine had to do the same. He's considering sticking those scary spring snakes in the center console as retribution.
I used a pipe that created RSS feeds from Google+ pages in conjunction with some other stuff to get all the articles I'd want to read in one document (with a table of contents) delivered to my kindle.
I'm now working on something that doesn't use Y! Pipes and simplifies the process.

We all knew it was coming, but the end of Pipes still sucks.
The government depends on Windows. They aren't going anyway else.
10 Django apps you're not using but should be
Does anyone know how good the OpenStreetMap data is? I thought I'd heard that it was pretty incomplete.
How does this compare to Project OSRM [1]?

[1] https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend
Is this a plea for 'letting the markets solve the problem' ?

Because California tried that 15 years ago with their electricity problem and history shows how badly Enron abused the 'markets' for profit.
Speak for yourself--I want a damn stillsuit.
Fractional reserves are typically only allowed where regulations exist.
We're already seeing organized theft rings using devices to unlock car doors without breaking in. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for the same thing to occur with garage doors.
30 Mobile Apps in 30 Days
Not at all. The BND in Germany have been shown to have been complicit in corporate espionage on behalf of the NSA on German companies. That's why dual key (government access) aren't to be trusted.
Usually the writeup is just supplemental to the posting's on the forum (and there is usually a 'post your solution' type deal where people walk through their process and sometimes post code) but I'm guessing it's just one of the competitions that will end up taking a month or so to gather all the interviews from the actual winners as well as BAYZ. Probably will not be too informative as they go quite into depth about the process and the linked blog post show's almost literal step by step of how to "game" kaggle leaderboards which is a huge aspect of competing (and why there is a private vs public dataset, why there are competition 'must enter by' deadlines and why people post benchmark code that will beat 25% of the current leaderboard before the competition is over and a lot of various other reasons).

Also looking at my submissions and notes from the competition (I stopped after the first week or so though) I even noted which 'groups' were most likely on the public leaderboard as it becomes easy to tell based on how your personal metric scores vs how that score results on the leaderboard since you know the evaluation metric for each competition.
Android has a lot of information leaks. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but as of last year Google gives every app you install access to your cellphone number without them needing to ask for an extra permission (READ_PHONE_STATE is now a freebie as far as the app store is concerned, it isn't listed, in fact it will say "no special permissions" if READ_PHONE_STATE alone is in the manifest).

I honestly think Android's permission system is a joke, and a sceptical Google will fix the majority of the information leaks with this up-coming update.

PS - It is "interesting" that getting your google account address requires a special permission on Android, but getting your phone number does not. Wonder why that is? IMEI too.
Coinbases numbers are all vanity metrics and numbers that will not go down even if usage does. Number of wallets isn't number of users. I have a handful myself created at various times. MAU figures are universally missing in the Bitcoin world.
California requires 100% reserves up to $7 million.[1] For a real "money transmitter", this isn't a big deal, because money stays in their system for about a day, often less. For Coinbase, which is trying to be a broker on a money transmitter license, it's a problem. They hold customer assets for long periods.

Coinbase ought to register with the SEC as a broker/dealer. That would free them from state regulation. Then their customers would have SIPC insurance. Of course, Coinbase would have to accept FINRA audits and regulation. Right now, they don't even publish financial statements.

[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fin&gr...
Ah, I think your phrasing was confusing. "IIA" is considering an attribute of the ballots, but including IIA is stronger than necessary for the theorem to hold - it can be replaced with the much weaker "nothing but the ballots".
I've seen lots of stories of people doing this and then having the window smashed anyway because the thief doesn't even try the door first.
From deep in Peru’s rainforests, isolated people emerge
please open source it, thank you!
They have separate numbers for wallets and users.
Totally agreed. While this article isn't completely clear on whether complete fabrics have yet been produced, the nature of the relationships these guys are forming with other companies certainly seems to imply that they have some semi-viable or completely viable materials already produced. A year or more before they have a product to market doesn't mean it will be that long until they have perfected the process, but rather that is how long until they hop through the numerous hoops involved with contracts, branding, marketing, and distribution. And the founders are spot on - these sorts of things always start as expensive, small batch items. It doesn't mean it's not able to be scaled, just that it hasn't been yet.

Also, there is actually already a precedent for clothing being "grown" with bacteria, including specifically yeast (http://www.dezeen.com/2014/02/12/movie-biocouture-microbes-c...). Seems to me that the unique thing in this instance is the nature of the finished material - they were initially being funded by the military so these fabrics may be more "high performance" than their current yeast-grown counterparts. Either way given that there are multiple efforts to take these products to market I would not say that it is a pipe dream to commercialize on a large scale.
So if I put 1m Bitcoin in my CB wallet, CB should have to match it with $250m? That seems rather unreasonable to me.
Try the hackernews-tagger Firefox add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hackernews-ta...
‘Tailsitter’ flying robot hovers and recovers easily thanks to new algorithm
Looks awesome! Can't wait for the alpha.
Last year I flew to Kenya for 6 months to help a friend of my partner start a furniture business.
I'm a bit confused. This doesn't seem like free software after reading the web page. It seems that the client is free, but the server component is proprietary SaaS and you have to get an API key through MapZen? I see several repositories on their GitHub account, but it's not apparent if this is all that is needed to self-host.
Csysdig – Universal System Visibility with Native Container Support
NBA Finals: Training with ‘Wearable’ Technology
For some background on why a team may wish to leave SourceForge, I found this earlier hn article to be enlightening:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2739995
A good practice is to do it the other way around: start with long-polling and switch over to WebSockets only once it's confirmed to work. Don't know which library you're using but I know some do this.
this blog post explains some of the major differences in the two architectures: https://mapzen.com/blog/valhalla-why_tiles
Java 10 is supposed to introduce value types, that will change the way we use nulls, check here: http://blog.joda.org/2014/11/better-nulls-in-java-10.html
> Note that these metrics are accessible even with system wifi and location disabled

Can someone explain this? It doesn't seem to make sense that with wifi disabled this would be possible (and the code they link to specifically has a fall through if wifi is disabled). Maybe something just got jumbled up in their explanation.
We are using Prometheus as the central part of our logging and alert infrastructure. We have collectd inside individual docker containers feeding data to Prometheus via collectd_exporter. I hate yak shaving and there's been surprisingly little of it with Prometheus so far.
Well, when over 20% of residents in Switzerland at any time are foreign born, you can kind of understand why some of them might feel that somebody needs to fight for their corner.
7 Partners: It Is Possible
1. Don't ever use the phrase "as a community" unless you carefully define it first.

2. What, specifically, about a flea market is bad. If the complaint is about quality, I'll refer you to Sturgeon's law.

3. You're going to need to explain the competitive vs cooperative comment, right now I have no idea what you are saying.

4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems.

5. I'm not sure who's making money selling pick axes to starry-eyed bumpkins, but all of the development tooling I use is free. Almost all of the online tools I use are prices such that individual use is free and corporate use costs money. Not sure what you're talking about here.

In summary:
It seems like your basic thesis is that the world isn't equal because some people are better at communication and self promotion than others. I'm not really sure why you think the world could be another way.
> they were initially being funded by the military so these fabrics may be more "high performance"

This isn't genuine spider silk though, if it had comparable performance they would certainly state so in interviews. The military probably is interested in "kevlar or better", which spider silk itself promises but has so far proved to be elusive.

Competing with regular clothing fiber such as cotton is a lower bar.
Better nulls in Java 10
Thanks. Guess I should have specified "preferably free" too :)
There is no proprietary component, if you want to self-host it's all here: https://github.com/valhalla

But there is a free hosted service (with API signup) for convenience.
>and thus only holds value because our government tells us it does and our collective agreement that it does hold value.

As opposed to Bitcoins, because ... ?
The Ultimate Guide to Tech Media – Infographic
The Middle East was peaceful until the US started meddling so anything bad that happens there is their fault.
"an acre-foot of water"

An acre-foot is 1233 m^3, or 1233 tons, of water.
California water issues really just relate to heavily subsidized water for farms which use 80% of the state’s water. When farms can't afford to spend 1/100th of a cent per gallon, perhaps the state has better uses for that water.

PS: 2k per Acre-foot would bankrupt most farms and that’s over 270,000 gallons. Of note, at 1$ per 122 gallons the state has unlimited water from desalination, but that's considered ridiculously expensive water.
Pretty inspiring - would love more details about what apps were accepted in store the store etc.
There are less than 1.5m addresses with more than $2 worth of bitcoin. If you subtract addresses with less than $20 you end up with ~750,000. I'd say thats the upper limit of users.
Why Apple should offer a $999 developer 'pro' account
LaunchDarkly, a startup that helps Companies soft-launch features, raises $2.6M
Somewhat of a tangent, but I am concerned about the MITM attack on car locks [1]. This kind of attack is being used in my neighborhood in Oakland, California and no doubt other places. I read the reports of "someone is breaking into my car but no windows/locks are broken". Then a couple other people on NextDoor chime in with the same thing and one person reports a woman who is walking around the neighborhood and appears to be the one responsible. A coworker explained a method where one can amplify the signal of the car and/or car key so that the car thinks the key is next to the car and the door unlocks.

The cryptographically secure garage door opener is still susceptible to MITM if the MITM attack is being done purely by amplification of signal, right?

It's almost like the key needs a handshake with the car by some method that is not using radio frequency. I wonder what options that leaves open? So far, I have not thought of one that is convenient (at some point, it is easier to go back to using a physical key to open a physical lock after all).

1. I think there was a post about it here already but I couldn't find it.
Airbnb is using machine learning to help hosts make as much money as possible
You should try out Echo. It works fine without a screen.
Passenger traffic in general is a tiny fraction of freight. Freight drives the conversation.