skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people use credit to buy MORE than they need, and MORE than they can afford. A new car instead of a gently-used car, a larger house that just becomes a sink for their income.

That doesn't mean credit is bad - it can be used as a leverage to do more with less - but people with money problems tend to use both cash and credit badly.

If it was 25k in credit card bills from vacations meals out plus a 5k jetski loan, I'd be tut-tutting too.
Pro Gamer Lucyyfurr Chooses OH/FE08/NP DXRacer Chair
GP is talking about a long-only flash-crash arb strategy -- so assuming you're not buying on margin you don't have the need to have capital reserves to "survive" until the recovery.

Of course, especially these days in the markets, whatever can be leveraged, will be leveraged...
The situation is not analogous, as one thing is vital for life, while the other thing is not.
Talk about missing the point.

Firstly the reference to Putin points to a different article, whose focus was not on getting hold of "inconsequential minutiae" but on how much money the Pentagon is spending on this "inconsequential minutiae". If it is indeed "inconsequential minutiae" then that is absolutely in the public interest.

Also, if these reports really were inconsequential minutiae, then presumably the effort expended for the Pentagon to hand it over would be maybe half an hour for a low level clerk to look up the (unclassified) report, confirm it can be released, and pass it on.

(And if the Pentagon spent money on reports on what Batman really think about Superman, you don't think it would be in the public interest to know how wasteful they are?)

But the issue raised in the article actually linked to here is the much more serious issue that in a lot of cases these government departments do whatever they can to avoid release of documents they are often legally bound to, and/or try to extract concessions out of the people filing the requests that they have no right to, and in the process severely reduce the kind of transparency the FOIA was brought in to provide.
In theory, there are similar restrictions. In practice, there's a whole micro-industry to help you get around them.
They are teenagers in tin shacks and caves with yesterdays cell phones.

I imagine what would happen if you dropped high end cellphones and tablets in these parts of the world; mobile phones equipped with super fast free internet connection, and a library of great videos, content, knowledge. Both fun and educational obviously.

My point is that once a man is learned and cultured, it becomes harder to get him to hate another regardless of their differences.
Show HN: Anythings – A Smart Devices Search Engine (featured on Product Hunt)
There's a whole group of expats called Grumpy Expats on FB discussing such issues. https://www.facebook.com/groups/784454428295368/?fref=nf
I am surprised by this, from what I understand, employment-based immigration to Germany is is one whole order of magnitude easier than to the U.S.
That's what Good Samaritan laws are for, but unfortunately they're not universal...
pipes creator here: sad to see pipes shutdown. i am surprised it lasted this long -- it was abandoned years ago. on the positive side, it is nice to see it mentioned in the same sentence as y! maps which used to be a big deal back in the day.
Web portal Lycos is releasing a smart band/ring
I don't, but here's a few articles that may be of interest:

http://dcn.trappinteractive.com/2014/07/29/direct-trade-myth...

"Vega says that while farmers are paid less than $1 a pound for their coffee, specialty coffee companies are selling their coffee for upwards of $20 a pound. This is, unfortunately, not exactly true, because it actually gets a whole lot worse."

http://coffeelands.crs.org/2013/11/372-is-the-coffee-busines...

"But price is only one of the ills ailing the coffee business. There is a long list of other challenges at origin that we know about–limited farmer organization for the market, low productivity, low quality, rising input costs, limited access to agronomic and financial services, limited investment in research, diseases like CLR, gradual loss of coffee suitability due to climate change, seasonal hunger in coffee communities, etc. And there are, most likely, other challenges at origin we don’t yet fully comprehend."

http://dcn.trappinteractive.com/2014/04/25/its-the-market-st...

"In my experience, growers tend to share the market’s rewards for high-quality coffee with roasters but bear the risks of quality-oriented production alone."

"I have written extensively about this issue here in the context of our work in Colombia, where farmers who believe that the Caturra variety produces higher quality in the cup are replacing it anyway with the higher-yielding, disease-resistant Castillo hybrid. Why? Because even as the market tells them it wants Caturra, it is not paying them enough to compensate for the added risk associated with traditional varieties that are susceptible to coffee leaf rust and other diseases."
Use umatrix instead. It's much more powerful than adblock and noscript.

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
Why doesn't Mr. Leopold realize that our superiors in public service know what's best for the country and act accordingly, and shouldn't have to waste their time responding to plebians? /s

Edit: because it seems to have been lost on many, the "/s" above indicates that the preceding is sarcasm.
Now, I realize that, as an intelligence agency, NSA's core mission is to spy.

Funnily enough, the NSA has a dual mission: spy on their communications, protect ours. Now that everyone uses the same tech, one of those missions has overshadowed the other. Makes their weakening even harder to stomach, eh?
In an alternate universe not too dissimilar from our own, Pipes is an independent startup and this announcement is Yahoo buying it for 8-9 figures
With regards to replication and remastering - that was fixed in 9.3 - https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...
One data point:

I used it for the first time 2 weeks ago.

Meetup.com has calendar feeds. You can get a calendar feed for all the events you've RSVPed "yes" to. You can get individual calendar feeds for each group's events. But there's no way to get a calendar feed of all the events happening in all of your groups.

I'm a member of something like 40 groups. The thought of manually adding each feed as a separate calendar in Thunderbird - and the thought of Thunderbird then trying to cope with the result - was... unpleasant.

So I set up a pipe to combine all the feeds into one. Very cursory googling suggested that Yahoo Pipes was the easiest way to accomplish this.

Fairly slick UI. Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes.
I met a guy at a party who started a news outfit[1] trying to simplify FOIA. He had stories like this galore- such as meeting gov't employees in person at conferences, saying his name, and seeing their eyes grow big. Apparently frequent requesters become notorious.

[1] https://www.muckrock.com
Wunderlist joins Microsoft
I think it really shows how powerful the bureaucracy really is that they'd write down an essentially illegal ultimatum, confident that the consequences would be essentially nonexistent.
'Crazy' people need help too.
They made a joint venture with Geocities
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Depends

Technologies: Mainly Java but have worked on C, C++, Delphi, Oracle, Weblogic, JBoss, REST Api's. Also recently been adding new technologies via side projects like RoR, Android etc.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/muhammadali

Email: muhammadaliamin[at]gmail[dot]com
rhyming slang for "wrong"
Gawker’s Editorial Staff Votes Overwhelmingly to Unionize
It seems a little odd to write code intending for it to do nothing. If that isn't a recipe for obfuscation...
Aerosolve: a machine learning package built for humans from Airbnb
Might be worth adding the YC class designation next to Songkick (YC S07).
Their argument for not showing it in the UK is indeed hilarious, but after accessing it through a VPN I suspect that the real purpose of blocking this content is to protect the BBC from damage to their journalistic reputation.

This is a completely vacuous piece of tourism marketing full of stereotypes and cliches. I know Vienna pretty well. This is not it.
> Even when attempting to do research on this, the political backlash could destroy any scientist's career. No official evidence will ever be collected because of this.

This is really offtopic, but I think you're wrong. There are two ways to do such research - the proper one and the racist one.

The proper one is to link specific genes to specific behavior. This presumes that you screen individuals in the study for those genes. Then you are not being racist, because existence of those genes is rarely 100% coinciding with culture or skin color. Research like that is quite common, if there is a reason to think there is indeed a link (for example there is a genetic study of above average intelligence in Ashkenazy Jews, they were extremely homogenous group and yet they don't all share the genes that has been shown to have the link).

The racist way is to match skin color or culture to behavior. This is scientifically useless, because you don't show any actual genetic link, and it only serves for stirring racial hate (you could pick any indirect attribute from many, like eye color or facial hair, so why pick skin color?). Such studies are rightfully being rejected by real scientists.
That explains why something like IIA is a reasonable intuition about how individual preferences should behave, not why IIA is a reasonable criterion for how systems of aggregating preferences should behave. (Unless you introduce the premise that "a social preference aggregation system should make society operate in a way that would match intuitions of a single actor".)
Rhyming slang - "it's all gone wrong"
Copyright infringement is not stealing - it's infringement. Any use of "theft" or "stealing" with respect to copyright infringement is just a propagandistic usage. Turcke should be ashamed of her sloppy usage.
It's interesting we're getting near the computer hardware equivalence to a human brain point - Kurzweil suggesting 2019 for a $4000 computer. I think he may be a bit optimistic there. He has brain equivalence at about 10^16 flops. Hans Moravec who also did some calculations figured about 10^14. I see present tech is around 7*10^12 for the $999 Nvidia Titan X GPU. So 15 of those just now for the Moravec number I guess.
You're correct. Insulin is the storage hormone, cortisol is the teardown hormone (putting it all very simply).
> Alright say there is a pretty decent leader who has a personal trait which would make them unelectable to the public, but really shouldn't in any reasonable situation effect their ability to lead and make decisions. Is it in the public's best interest to know about that trait prior to the election?

Yes. Elected officials are representatives of the people. If that personal trait really does make the candidate unelectable, it means that the public does not want someone with that trait representing them. It's therefore in their best interests to not elect that person, since said person is not an accurate/desirable representation of the public.

> but really shouldn't in any reasonable situation effect their ability to lead and make decisions

Then why would it make them unelectable?
"they could not hire enough Americans at a reasonable wage (obviously, the meaning of "reasonable" is hotly debated, but at the time, it meant slightly higher than minimum wage)"

So as long as you're trying to get more than minimum wage you are being unreasonable? Even though your skills are in high demand/short supply?

This is basically a way to say "You Americans who have valuable knowledge/skills, do you really think we're gonna let you take advantage of demand and supply to make more money out of them? F-you, we're gonna pass some laws to allow us to import people from 3rd world countries to replace you".

I'd like to see these companies' reactions if we did the same with imported goods and abolished all taxations for products manufactured outside of the country.
I agree I think that dynamic could definitely play out... I'm less sanguine about how orderly such a shift would be in practice however, and the level of complexity in financial markets today I am skeptical that destabilization would be limited to holders of distressed bonds (even if it was, those bondholders are probably major institutions whose problems could lead to more bailouts, derivatives being triggered, etc)
Are they also shutting down YQL? I think YQL queries can do everything pipes can, you just have to write little scripts to do it instead of the UI.

Still has the Yahoo problem, but it might be the easiest short term.
Yahoo Pipes was the backbone for ProPublica's first news web application in 2009: http://www.propublica.org/article/changetracker-howto

> ChangeTracker watches the White House’s web site so you don’t have to. Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov changes, we’ll let you know — via e-mail, Twitter, or RSS. But ChangeTracker is not a piece of software. It’s the output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly connected over the Internet. Here’s how to do it yourself so you can track changes on any Web site on the Internets.
indifferent rankings already indicate ties, and what does a 'strong preference' value amount to here? I'd suggest that it only makes sense if you try to understand the "score" as being a relative ranking of N imaginary alternative candidates in addition to the actual candidates.. So a 1 to A and 99 to B only indicates 'strength' in that it suggests if there were 96 other candidates you'd put them above A and below B.. but now we are back to orderings over candidates. At any rate, you ought to be suspicious of quantitative assignments of preference..
What about private functions? For now I just add `_` in front of their names, but the code would look so much cleaner if I had some kind of a `private` keyword.
Huge shoutout for Muckrock. I use them extensively, and have worked with Michael (the founder) a bit. Can't say enough nice things.

Please please please check out their site if you're doing FOIAs. There is a cost, but its minimal, and worth it. They'll help you manage the FOIA process, and whatever records are returned become public on Muckrock's site.

Example: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/
"It's all gone a bit wrong", but normally in a dramatic way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_Gone_Pete_Tong
Is that because their servers are in the US? A bit different in that case.
why OrientDB left out ? I would love to see the comparison.
Talking Machines: The economic impact of machine learning with Baidu’s Andrew Ng
Because ElasticSearch just assigns index settings based on the first value it gets.

For trivial values such as numbers, that's usually okay, unless it happens that the field is polymorphic (not a good schema design, of course).

But it doesn't know how to set up any of the mappings; it doesn't know whether something is a full-text field (which often requires analyzers) or an atomic, enum-type string.

It also doesn't know about dates. If you index pure JSON documents, it will simply store them as strings.

This would all have been a non-problem if updating mappings in ES were simple, but it's not. A mapping is generally append-only; if you want change the type of a mapping, or its analyzer, or most other settings, you have to create a new index and repopulate it. Schema migrations in ES are a lot more painful than, say, PostgreSQL.
It was really freaking awesome. Thank you!
First entrants to videogame Hall of Fame
> There might be a better solution, but I haven't come across one yet.

An Option type (and/or an Either type as well) is a good base, but if you can create a null object itself it's still better.
Dow off nearly 200 points as US stocks drop
And how is that a justification for blocking it in the UK?
Announcing Facebook Lite
Ugly truth of Pebble #FreeOurPebbleTime campaign
It fits the tenets of OOP though, you ask an object to perform an operation, the "null" object just ignores the request.
A lot of sexist ads as well.
Sounds cool and everything, but this is one of those perpetually five-years-off technologies.
Who the hell cares? Instead of "posting profits", Amazon reinvests its massive EBITDA into itself, and has shown continuous growth because of it.

Not focusing on shareholders sounds great to me.
Indeed, some state FOIA laws even have provisions for dealing with "frequent requestors." (And to be fair, not all frequent requestors are acting in good faith. There was a push recently to bury the NSA in FOIA requests as a protest against surveillance. Not a great idea.)

Muckrock is awesome though.
If GitHub is hosted in the US, and a repo that is hosted by GitHub violates US law, they probably cannot continue to host that repo in the US and serve it only to non-US clients.
Facebook vs. Twitter: Which Is Better?
"ArangoDB is OrientDB done right"

How are you backing this ? I am sure Luca from OrientDB will have some comments.
Meanwhile, Seattle can't figure out how to dig their tunnel more than a couple hundred yards without everything breaking down.
Foolish woman. VPN isn't used to circumvent copyright; it's used to circumvent Byzantine region-based contracts. I don't have a contractual agreement with the studios, thus I am not violating any law when using VPN. It isn't illegal to watch content from other countries. That Bell Media woman can shove it. It's one thing to complain about piracy. It's quite another to complain about a customer's rational response to the fact that geography is a meaningless construct invented simply to make middleman distributors richer. Netflix has such a critical mass now, they ought to tell the content owners that it's worldwide or nothing. Sort of how iTunes initially told record companies how it was going to be.
Drawing conclusions from a sample size of 1. Never a good practise
It’s not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It’s phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there’s nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away.

Final lines from "The Day I Started Lying to Ruth: A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer", http://nymag.com/news/features/cancer-peter-bach-2014-5/
I would think that using the name Lycos would hurt the company.
Are you originally from the U.S.? How is the scene out there? And how long is it acceptable to work at a startup if I don't want to stay there long term? Meaning, is 6 months too short?
Steam Controller Pre-Purchase
The real problem I want them to solve, that they are in a unique position to solve, is that of the super-annoying robocallers like "Anne" or "Rachel" or "Barbara", that claim to be from a credit card organization, and claim to be able to lower your credit card rate. I'm pretty sure that these companies are using hacked PBXs to do their work, but at the very least, they're spoofing caller ID information, and doing things that verge on fraud. Oh, and calling numbers on the "Do Not Call" list.

The FTC seems powerless to stop Cardholder Services, or perhaps is actually in cahoots with them. None of the phone companies care, they're still getting their monthly payments for your cell phone, so they'd almost rather have "Anne" robocall you. It's up to someone outside of the telecom system, and it's captive regulatory apparatus, to stop Cardholder Services. Who better than the NSA and their domestic tools, the FBI? They can find the hacked PBXs, track the boiler rooms, and send in SWAT teams to make sure the boiler rooms are shut down, and salt is plowed into the ground there. That would be a real problem they could deal with, and not even reveal their Sekrit Teknolgie!
This is correct under the current interpretation of law.
Yes, MuckRock is a great service, not least of which for the window it provides all non-customers into how our government FOIA works. By default, if you file a request, that request -- including all of its updates and resulting response -- is publicly viewable:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/

Before FOIAing an agency, I'll sometimes check MuckRock to get a better understanding of what to expect, including who to direct my letter to and an estimate of how long I might wait...or best of all, examples of precedent to use to bolster my legal standing ("On June 3, 2014, you fulfilled a similar request for James Smith via Muckrock").

Hell, you don't even have to be in the FOIA-writing mindset...just reading that list will give you a veritable shitton of ideas of the kinds of things about government that has piqued the interest of other reporters, private investigators, politicians, and hedge fund analysts. Analyzing the metadata alone would make for a very useful service.
Please suggest alternate. You built a good thing. RSS overall is becoming history.
SoundHound Speech Recognition Tech, So Accurate and Fast It Will Blow Your Mind
Then we're not talking about a microkernel government, but instead talking about microkernel socioeconomics.

If we stick to the former case, though, then it's not accurate to say that the economy is the kernel of this hypothetical operating system. The federal government very much is; just because it's susceptible to a multitude of security-related bugs doesn't mean that it's no longer the kernel, much like how just because the NT kernel is susceptible to a multitude of security-related bugs doesn't mean that it's no longer the kernel.
SIMPLE and INTERACTIVE Guide to Startups
Swedish is definitely easier to learn than Finnish, I'll give you that much.
I'm the CoderPad guy. Besides RI's obvious ripoffs, they really should change the name if for no other reason besides: http://codepad.org/
So true. I once lived in an apartment block where a lot of the other apartments on my floor were burgled one day.

The locks did.. nothing. The thieves simply kicked the doors until they splintered at the lock. In fact, one door even snapped clean in half, so it ended up looking like a stable door, with a lower bit no longer attached to the lock which was now opening freely.

I'd wager it took them a similar amount of time to do this as picking a lock would have taken for someone experienced, and with far less training.

It taught me a very practical lesson about security. You can spend a lot of energy engineering the perfect lock, but always be aware that there will likely be obvious (once they've happened at least), perhaps very course, hacks which make that brilliant lock totally redundant.

The parallels to software security are obvious. To loosely quote Richard Campbell, it doesn't matter how strong your password is, if a truly determined bad guy wants to get at your data, they'll just use a wrench ;-)
Competitive eating (including stuffing 110 hot dogs down your throat[1]) is popular in Japan. Is "unhealthy fastfood pretty entrenched in Japanese culture"?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeru_Kobayashi
Still has the Yahoo problem, but it might be the easiest short term.

The Yahoo problem being that it might be shutdown in the near future?
I think you are a bit confused. What would Arrow's theorem explain? There is no empirical phenomena that we are puzzled about that Arrow's theorem solves (unless you are wondering: Why is it so hard to come up with a voting system that doesn't have the potential for goof-ball results? - Answer, because it is impossible..)

I don't know what you mean by the "trinity" in which "satisfaction of all pre-existing preference" is a part.. That's obviously not relevant; we aren't interested in a system that satisfies preferences. What we are interested in is a system that (1) isn't a dictatorship, (2) is fair [i.e., everyone counts equally], (3) allows us to decide any kind of potential matter _as a group_.

If you look at the conditions this way it should be glaringly obvious what this has to do with the (possibility) of democracy..
Who is working on a pipes replacement and where can I sign-up? Maybe this will be like when google killed Reader and RSS replacements became a hot area...