skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ugh. Another dumb article that views human beings as a machine which can be manipulated by changing the inputs.

Hundereds of years of psychology/philosophy have given humanity nothing except dumb shit like this. Man is still violent, lonely, desperate, scared. Mankind is still an enigma that it was thousands of years ago.

Time to defund this garbage.
Push notifications for emergency broadcasts. Receive only RF chipsets if absolutely required.
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673695
Believe it or not, California has plenty of water... in non drought years. That;s a aside.

Food will continue to grow in California, because the support systems for wide scale farming are present, until the support systems develop elsewhere the farming won't move either.
Creator here. It's up for me on the US App Store. It just went live though, so it's possible it hasn't made it out of all of Apple's CDN just yet.
Honestly I can't remember that part - my impression was that you were off the hook if you were fired, but I can't be sure. My original contract has been lost in the mists of time :P

Strategically getting oneself fired might be a way to avoid the clawback, though it would probably have other consequences.
'How about selling a permanent site in Greece for the Summer Olympics ? An uninhabited island would be ideal, not too far from the coast accessible by ferries as well as planes.'

'The original Olympics was held in Olympia, Greece for 800 years. The changing site is a modern phenomenon used to spread support in the early stages of the modern Olympic movement. Why not return the Games to their real roots?'

Good arguments (if ever that would even matter to the people in charge ;-) and great idea.
I can't think of anyone I'd rather hear from on death. This man spent his life trying to understand and communicate what it was to exist as a human being, what it was to be conscious, how we see and interpret the world. He wrote some of the most entertaining, but also enlightening books I've ever read. He is now facing the end of his life with the sort of philosophical peace of Socrates.
Can you explain a little more how this works? Can specific requests be routed to a specific connection in iOS, at the device level?

If it's a "hack", won't the possibility be blocked by Apple eventually?

Also, you say on the App Store page that using a big list can slow down browsing, as (I'm paraphrasing) the app has to scan each page against the list; why is that the case? Shouldn't request be redirected the moment they are made, and not before?

Great idea in any case! Will probably try it, as many sites are already almost unusable because of ads (and when using Chrome on iOS the problem gets worse; Safari must block more by default).
People just don't pay attention at all. I'm not sure which is worse.
Good. Anything that goes away from Unity is good. I dislike Unity because they refuse to make their web player for Linux. So several Newgrounds games don't work for Linux users due to Unity.

The Blend4Web Mars Rover demo here works perfectly for me in Linux btw, and guess what, the linked old Unity version says "unsupported platform", so, thank you NASA for thinking about more users :).
Ask HN: Which name is better?
1. venuevortex
2. venuezz
3. venuedaddy
4. venueminer

for the name of a venue discovery website - where users can curate venue search results according to their budget, capacity, event type etc.
Capital only grows if it can be deployed in new endeavors that generate more revenue (and as a by-product usually increase the amount of labor at work). That's part of the problem. Not enough public companies know what to do with the excess cash, and therefore don't end up creating more value.
It's very hard to move away from telecom companies. You may switch your direct services, but whoever you switch to will still use AT&T backbones and the like. All the big telecoms are guilty of being complicit with the government, what would make a difference is one taking a stand like Apple/Google has regarding encryption. That would put pressure on the others to follow suit.
Last I heard Torvalds was running Linux on an MBA so I imagine it can't be horrible.
I don't get any kind of image, they are just numbers.
How to read any Patent in a minute or less
Dividends and stock buybacks are both ways companies enrich their stock holders. But I view them as largely the same thing. When a company doesn't have new markets, then it doesn't create new products or services, so it literally doesn't know what to do with the money, so it just plows it back to shareholders, and these are just two ways that happen.
OK, point made.
I like the idea of a minimum income, but there are issues to resolve. What stops landlords and businesses from profiteering on the $1000.00 monthly checks?

In the case of landlords, what stops them from charging $1000.00 rent per person in an apartment? Do we need to create Kibbutzim to house the people collectively to prevent exploitation?
If they could afford 3 meals a day without ever having to skip a meal because of lack of money, then they were richer than most people on the planet. If they were middle-upper class in the U.S. - that's not extremely wealthy by U.S. standards but it's quite filthy most anywhere else. That's winning the birth lotto.
I think that the key generalization you could make is that once someone is shown to be engaging in criminal behavior, it's better to let that person stay free but have frequent checks than to put that person in a prison cell to rot.

It probably does work better for something habitual and detectable like alcohol use, but I could see how it could be applied to gang membership and other forms of thuggery. Maybe spending our resources on light consistent touch programs would help more than the significant resources needed for full-time incarceration.
Show HN: TipNSkip – The easy and social way to skip the line at eateries
Sounds like you really love your home :-)
>buy out the entire Alfalfa growing industry in this state and it would only cost a total of about two dollars per resident.

that's interesting - you could say that if you can convince just 10% of people in california (4mil people) to donate $20 bucks, they can reduce the drought problem by half. I'd say that should be agreeable for most, except for the alfalfa related industries...
I built a shooter with limited bullets with his. It was fun. I now encourage students to use this library. See my silly game at http://escape.bphogan.com. It should work with a mouse or keyboard.
> But here is a set of language and library features that will definitely make you more productive, and that you must learn to remain a relevant C++ developer

Yeah, that poor things keeps improving. But ditching it is still the most productive option available.
Worth reading: ProPublica (who co-published with NYT on this story) has an explainer of how they followed the trail of documents to break this story:

https://www.propublica.org/article/a-trail-of-evidence-leadi...
Show HN: Drag Country / US State / US City Outlines
Hey DDT saved countless people from malaria.

And none of those things are science per se. They are technology and just mistakes in general.

Also see Isaic Asimov's The relativity of wrong: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
My wife is an SDET there and the article doesn't resonate with her either. Most days it's a 9-5 job. Sometimes she'll work a bit late until 7 or 8pm, but only because she wants to.

Maybe SDETs have it easier? :)
Freedom of Speech is now illegal in the UK
Cases like this reinforce my opinion, that there is an increasing demand to educate consumers how to prevent getting data leaked to government institutions like intelligence services. Especially the consequences of picking the wrong service provider.

Luckily I am now in a position where I am fully responsible and aware of the routes my data takes. Yet we as a B2B ISP constantly get requests by intelligence services to provide information regarding our customers. Strangely they always assume that's totally okay to -just- ask for the data, instead of going the formal way. If we demand the judicial permissions they always rant about emergencies and so on. We can't help but follow the law, and the law disallows us to keep specific data
for more than 60 days. I am really curious about how many ISPs voluntarily provide their customer data without asking for judicial permission beforehand.

Such conversations are coming around 2 or 3 times a week.
Could Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple create a non-profit that owns their own dark fiber and parcels out capacity?

Think municipal fiber, but at a wholesale level.
FilePizza
Free peer-to-peer file transfers in your browser.
Bitcoin XT (a fork of Bitcoin Core) is released with larger block size limit
How to Get Off the Grid
It's true, the examples are nicely presented. Full game examples would be good though. The community section has some, but I couldn't find anything really impressive.

The car on terrain box2d example looks promising, but the question is, how does it perform in the context of a full game? Hillclimb Racing is the benchmark to aim for... great native app game. If we can get that performance happening in the browser with these engines then we're doing okay, but I can't help doubting these engines are up to Hillclimb Racing standards. That is, fast and smooth with lots of track loaded in memory. Even the native app suffers a slight stutter on occasion as it loads more track ahead, so I wonder how much track can be in memory in the browser. (I'm guessing these side scrolling games have a maximum window of game area available at any one time).
Fixed the typo--need more coffee :) Anyway, thanks for letting me know.
My wife works there as an SDET and her experience so far is vastly different from yours and from what the article says. Most days it's a 9-5 job. The only times she has stayed late were because she really wanted to finish something that day i.e. she was never told to do that. Maybe there's less pressure on SDETs? But she says the devs seem to work about as much, at least from her perspective.
I can see the perspective of wanting Amazon on your resume. But otherwise it sounds like an awful place to work. I've known three people who have worked there. 1 made it 6 months, another 2 years, and the last is going on 3 years if his LinkedIn profile is correct. I suspect he will stay due to H1B reasons.
Various thoughts on this technology:

+Hard drive progress has been slowing since the last major advance in the 2000s (tunnel magnetoresistance read heads, which are now maturing). Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is the most likely next evolution of hard drives.

+The main problem with increasing bit density on hard drives is as you make the bits smaller, they become less stable. You can increase their stability by increasing their magnetic coercivity, but then the tradeoff is that the bits become harder to write. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is a technology that makes bits easier to write, which will make it possible to use smaller (higher coercivity) bits.

+The idea is not new, and it even enjoyed commercial realization in the 1980s in magneto-optic discs.

+Seagate is one of the leaders in HAMR technology, but their release dates keep getting pushed back. Right now the latest word is that they'll be commercially available in 2017.

+I've heard the main problem with HAMR now is the thermal stability of the plasmonic antenna. Because the magnetic bits are much smaller than the wavelength of laser light, conventional optics cannot be used. Instead, the head has a vertical waveguide with a plasmonic antenna at the end, which concentrates the light at the bit being written. Unfortunately, a side-effect of heating the magnetic bits is that the antenna also gets hot, and they can fail after just ~100 writes. Engineers are working to solve this and I'm confident they will, but right now this is the main problem with HAMR and why it's taken so long to get to market, at least from what I've heard.

Source: I am a magnet scientist
Tails Manual Persistence
Why is Bitcoin forking?
No it is not, but you've missed the point.
I looked at phaser recently, but couldn't find any examples of successful games made with it. Are there any success stories?
Yes, thank you konklone. My primary complaint with the policy, and I'm hesitant to complain because, let me be clear, it is a good policy, is that we're now held accountable to a metric that adds engineering complexity and additional costs to our small team, and has created some confusion amongst our hundreds of customers who, arguably, don't serve content that, in my professional opinion, requires an encrypted connection to meet the needs of their millions of users.
Is this really a surprise to anyone? We've known that the N.S.A. has gotten (or coerced) support from communications companies in the past, and AT&T in particular (the article mentions it going back as far as 2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A).

Did anybody really think it stopped when the secret room was uncovered in 2006? Telecom companies make no promise that your traffic is protected. It's up to you to protect yourself.
I'm not wrong about you being dismissive of anything except what you deem to be 'scientific'.
I think this is a piece of learned trolling, satire designed to provoke us into thinking hard about what the IOC really is.

The IOC profits from the selection process as much as it does from the games. The bribes, the payments, everything involved in this horrible “competition” fills their coffers with money.

If the games were held in the same place every year, there would be no bribes to rig bids. There would be no construction companies and other contractors to pony up black bags full of money to ensure their place at the trough.

There would also be no pressure on governments to pretend the games are a success. Every country hosting the games is under enormous pressure to brag about how wonderful the games are. They spend hundreds of millions promoting the games that they spend billions supporting.

All that would go away if the games were held in a permanent facility.
After trying out several HTML5/JS game libraries, I'm pretty sure that Phaser is the best one for 2D games. It has frequent updates, great documentation and an awesome community support, too. One can learn a tremendous amount of game development techniques just be reading the source code of Phaser.
Google answers improved: when will the new daily show start
Textfiles.com is a nice piece of Internet history that goes back to BBS days and still has useful stuff. More power to them. That collection is pretty awesome. Many think the stuff is dated and useless but I've solved so many problems for modern stuff by just reading on old works that did the same. Their solutions usually disappeared for economic reasons despite being technically superior in certain ways.

People looking for manuals on old computers and devices combing for that wisdom (or just curiosity) should check out this site too:

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/
@tomkinstinch What kind of performance hit can we expect with this? (Innovative solution until iOS 9!)
My feeling is that these things vary greatly from group to group within Amazon. My wife works there as an SDET and nothing in that article applies to her. Most days she is home by 6:30-7pm, and would be even sooner if it weren't for the long commute (we live on Eastside).

A co-worker's wife also works there as an SDET and it's the same - very 9-5, very rarely she has to work a bit later. Our wives are in completely different groups by the way.

Maybe there's less pressure on SDETs, but my wife says that the devs in her group don't seem to be under a lot of pressure/stress either.
Sending e-mails to Congressmembers by reverse engineering their contact forms
It's only a hack in the sense that is using the VPN system in a way that it was not originally intended. It is only using documented public iOS APIs.

To answer your request in more detail: it makes use of a feature that has been around since iOS 7: VPN On Demand[1]. The idea behind VPN On Demand is that requests can be routed to different VPNs (or accessed normally) based on the hostname of a request. This is useful if you get an email from work that has an intranet-only accessible website. Clicking on the link could load a connection to the company VPN for only that work domain without also sending all of your personal traffic through the company VPN. In the case of MadBlocker, I just direct requests for ad hostnames to a bogus local IP, and the ads never load.

That said, while it works in Safari and in most apps, it may not work in apps that implement their own networking or DNS retrieval, which Chrome seems to do.

> Shouldn't request be redirected the moment they are made, and not before?

Yeah, that is what happens, but since every request is checked against the list (since we don't know a priori which request is for an ad), it can take noticeable time on sites that include assets from many external domains (if using the "mega" list or depressingly-long privacy protection list).

1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203743
They maybe could, but that probably wouldn't stop the NSA from gaining access through other means.

More importantly, they probably wouldn't. All those companies you previously listed have been identified in documents leaked by Edward Snowden as supporting the NSA with backdoors.
Robot Simulations Show Mass Extinctions May Accelerate Evolution
Are the downvotes not clear enough? Stop being so stubborn about wording and consider arguing your actual point. Don't call names.

I'm curious, how would you feel if unlicensed drivers were limited to 20mph?
I've been running Fedora on a mid-2013 MBA (i7-4650U) since April last year, and I love it. I grew up on RedHat, switched to Ubuntu around 2010, but after Unity I've switched back to the other camp, and Fedora has been really stable for me.

I used this as a guide to get the install going:
http://mattoncloud.org/2014/02/05/fedora-20-on-a-macbook-air...

Although, I don't use the custom packages, because most things worked out of the box. The only thing I have to do manually is update the display backlight driver after every kernel upgrade, but I do updates once a month, and it's a simple "make;make install" and an extra reboot.

I gave OS X a shot for about 2 years, but could never quite get used to some of the quirks.

Fedora on this MBA has been super stable.
Each of those companies has been implicated as complicit in cooperating with the NSA's warrantless domestic spying.
Angry eagle attacks UAV: How do drones affect wildlife?
Minimal with the regular block list, noticeable with the "mega" or Privacy Protection lists. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066131
Buybacks are much more tax efficient though. If you would have reinvested all dividends (after paying taxes on them), with a buyback you instead do nothing and pay no tax.
Ambivalence is right, you need to be bored, happy, and sad to be creative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916132
If you knew about that second business insider article, why did you reference the only the first unless to deliberately justify a biased point of view?
I am troubled by the mammogram analysis. These sorts of health care examples (mammograms, AIDs testing, etc.) are often used to explain Baysian statistics and obviously make an interesting point. But as someone below points out, these tools are meant to be used in situations where we have incomplete information. We have direct experimental evidence of the accuracy of a positive mammogram in predicting cancer, and the accuracy is far, far higher than 7.8% From direct studies of patients who get positives, it looks like about 80% of them actually have breast cancer. See, for exmaple, http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-s...

It may be that the author of this article simply go mixed up -- he reports than 1% of the population that 80% of the women who have cancer get positive mammograms, while from what I can see, evidence actually shows that 80% of the women who have positive mammograms have cancer. So the problem with the example might just be a matter of garbage in garbage out.

Mammograms, incidentally, are still controversial, especially doing them on an annual basis, because if you,for example, do a test with 20% false positives 10 times, you're pretty likely to get a false positive in at least one. But that probability is still not 92.2%, which is what the article suggests is the false positive rate for a single mammogram.

But it's disturbing to see statisticians flippantly saying things like, only 7.8% of positive mammograms represent actual cancer, when evidence shows, 80% of positive mammograms represent actual cancer. Survival rates for breast cancer have gone up and most everyone agrees early detection of cancer plays a role. I certainly hope that any woman who reads this article recognizes that, if she has a positive mammogram, the changes are much, much higher than 7.8% that she has cancer.

I've seen the same arguments made about AIDS tests. Why is it that statisticians like to use examples of life threatening illnesses and present a Baysian model that vastly underestimates the effectiveness of tests that could be crucial in saving lives?
I did, and I'm not the one being stubborn about wording. He's the one being pedantic.
Spying on the u.n. based on terrorism legislation is a revelation. Recording of all telephone conversations in the u.s. is a revelation. Recording of all emails, skype, sms, etc is a revelation.

Before discovery of that room everyone knew that there was close cooperation between the telecoms and the government, but we had no idea it was this close and we were shocked at especially the recording of all phone conversations in the u.s.
I got through 3/4 of the article and had to quit. Simply FUCKING APPALLING organizational behavior. I can say with reasonable confidence that if I had discovered those tricks being done to my reputation behind my back, there would be fisticuffs. Fuck Bezos.
The 5 steps of the Intelligence cycle
Thanks; this is a very helpful feedback and perfectly captures my own frustration with promoting Zejoop.

Maybe if I act on your summary recommendation ('focus...whole experience') with a better, professionally designed and effective landing page I'd make the process accessible enough for it to be evaluated on its merit rather than be dismissed merely for lack of understanding or interest.

To answer one of your other concerns, Zejoop is not native (yet) so there is no contact list integration (yet). In the interim you do have to enter email once for each new 'friend' you add - thereafter that friend remains in the Zejoop system, and you can invite by checkbox selection rather than text entry of address.

I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate your input here. It is golden, and actionable! Thanks.
To me, the great value of the Sabbath as a day of rest is what Sacks calls "its utter peacefulness and remoteness from worldly concerns". Keeping a day like this affirms our absolute value as human beings, which is independent from whatever value we have economically, socially, or in any other way.
I thought it supported TV buying as well, but could be wrong.
The NSA's giant database will be breached. It's only a matter of time. It could be state-sponsored (e.g. like the OPM theft), or it could be due to the NSA's own lack of internal security oversight. Maybe not this year, maybe not next. I certainly won't have anything to do with it. But it'll eventually happen. What then?
You said it was unjust because it was a right, he explained why it was just, you started the semantics argument with "Conditions would make them privileges." and then when you were proved wrong you started with personal insults.

You didn't even address the argument that "being convicted of murder triggers conditions on most of the rights we have as citizens"...

Edit: 'it' being the very concept of restrictions on rights, not really this particular variety