skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot of user customization possible with the steam controller though. e.g. This guy is trying out layering inertial control on top of the touchpad for aiming. Generally I do prefer using a mouse to aim instead of a controller for first person games, but I will try this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKuO9M0WuMg&feature=youtu.be

(disclaimer - I work at Valve but not on the steam controller so this technique was a surprise to me)
The Curious Case of Uganda’s Technology Ecosystem
Evolution of parents:

1. first kid - sterilize baby bottle nipples

2. second kid - run nipples through the dishwasher

3. third kid - rinse nipples under the faucet

4. fourth kid - hold out nipples for dog to lick clean
Is there a set of questions you'd particularly like to see answered? I'd be happy to ask Ben and maybe there could be a followup, or just post them here.

(I do agree this post was pretty light on content. I think it's because he and everyone else is busy. Bio Q&A posts are second to funding announcements in inherent boringness, though -- so you could also just wait until there's a more substantive post about e.g. the new KV store or luajit optimizations or something from engineering -- although there's also generally a desire to have the individual engineers who worked on a project post about it, rather than the head of engineering.)
Sunscreen is also carcinogenic. Vitamin D deficiency is also harmful. And staying indoors with little exercise leads to a whole host of other conditions.
I can understand the sentiment

However, for those who want to work in Berlin (or somewhere else) can apply for a German Blue Card (usually you apply for jobs hen the company gets you one), shouldn't be too hard
I think you're seriously overestimating the reliability of drones and at the same time underestimating the reliability of hair dryers. Also, ignoring for a moment that no commonly known type of drones would work in the martian atmosphere, stationary solutions have much more leeway for building it to NASA standards - better coils, more solder at joints, etc. I'm willing to bet that a simple blower hooked up to the energy storage and a timer mechanism could work without intervention for a hundred years or more - if made in the way they did it 40-80 years ago, as opposed to today, where all consumer devices are as crap as producers can get away with, on purpose. Contrast with (hypothetical) service drones, when every gram of additional reliability is cutting into the flight time.

As for what kind of drones could work on Mars... well, leafblowers on service rails or on wheels are the only things I can come up with that make sense. Magnetic field flying is probably too energy-intensive, and quadcopters won't work in martian atmosphere.

EDIT: I think the Sahara and Mars threads got mixed up...
"Horrific" enough to have our population approach the carrying capacity of the planet, though I guess that doesn't take the danger away on an individual level.

That said, I think "just ignore it" is the proper thing to do in this case.
This has the arabic and persian(I think?) versions. It confused me why it would be in english at first.
How to play a sound in your Swift iOS app using Chirp
Oh, so in a discussion specifically about the Macbook Pro Vs. Surface Pro, they randomly decided to drop the Macbook into the discussion which is smaller, and less powerful, just to show, what? That things exist which weigh less in general? They could have used an iPad for that example. Would have been less confusing/misleading.
Optional (either JDK or Guava) is not perfect but is infinitely better than hand-checking for null. Among other things, it expresses the intent of the API writer that their method may or may not return an absent value and this is expressed via the type system. This is in stark contrast to using null as a primitive, which has no such transparency. For instance, there is no difference in Java's type system between a method that intends to always return a non-null String, and one that intends to return a null String under certain circumstances. Thus it is impossible for the user of the API to determine when to build conditional logic to check for null or when not to bother.

In any case, the concept of null as a primitive is fundamentally broken. Due to Java's backward compatibility requirements, it's too late to resolve this in that language. However, newer languages don't need to make this mistake. However, there are "interoperability" requirements for new languages interfaces with legacy runtimes that tempt language designers to build escape hatches. These escape hatches exist in Swift, Kotlin, Rust, etc even though they're not recommended and their usage presents edge cases.

Ceylon and Haskell seem to be the only two languages to get this completely right. Ceylon expresses optionality as the union between the present value type and null, which is an actual type separate from Object. An optional String is therefore a String|Null, or a String? Haskell accomplishes this with the Maybe type.

All this to say that null should not be a primitive but should be banished to its own corner of the type system with clear compile-time semantics for dealing with the absence of values.
Show HN: Mini_gzip – embeddable, minimal, in-memory Gzip API
I understand now, thank you.
So do I
Don't forget that living expenses are higher (in "richer" EU countries), too.
The title is a joke. Yes, it's provocative, but give the guy a break: he's a small time economist at a second-tier university in an island nation who is saying some of the most interesting things about economics in the world today.

You would be doing yourself a disservice not reading his stuff based on a blog post title.
So let me get this straight. The guy who headed the NSA--an organization so secure that a 30 year old contractor was walking out with classified documents on a thumb drive during this guy's tenure--wants companies to buy his product? I don't think so.
When it was built or after? This plant was built in the early eighties. The article doesn't state if it violated the ideals of then or more recent knowledge.
One comment on the article cites a recommendation that young children not consume honey because it might possibly cause 90 cases of botulism a year. 90 cases out of several million is not really a significant thing to worry about. Sucks if it happens, but it is really unlikely.
There are plenty of games besides Calladoody that are playable on both PC and console, many of them even non-competitive. I'll be especially happy to be playing Fallout 4 at 60+FPS on my PC instead of 30FPS on my PS4, and now I don't have to choose between playing it at my desk or on my couch.

That is very fun.

As for local co-op on PC, it could use some improvement, but there are already more local co-op PC games on Steam than Wii U.

http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Local%20Co-Op/#p=0&tab=...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_U_software
My impression is that it does for crimes committed against people the assailant is not related with.
Writing something (that is worth reading) in simple words is very hard. I believe that clear thinking plays a bigger role than semantics. When I am confused about a topic, I tend to write about it using complex arguments with long sentences and long words.

PG speaks and writes about startups with more clarity than most people. It is because his thinking on startups has greater clarity/conviction than most people. From my perspective, there seems to be no shortcut or semantic trick to clear writing.
For error messages I think it helps if you put them in quotes, to mean "these words are needed in that sequence".
[Sigh] Before parts of the comment section turn into a flame war, I'd like to ask that those with inflammatory opinions at least attempt to stay politically neutral here. I'd rather not know about the contentious political positions some of my technical peers have.

Please save any sweeping generalizations for Twitter/Facebook/Reddit :).
I'm sorry to be that guy, but the lack of contrast makes this comment difficult to read.
Why Israeli high tech marketing sucks
You earn less than 200€?
I am Israeli, lived in America for 1/2 my childhood. My nephew grew up entirely in Israel, and has peanut allergies. Ironically in the context of this article, we didn't find this out until he first had bamba and my sister had to rush him to the hospital. There have been a number of his classmates with the same allergy. Only going by his classmates from nursery school until 8th grade now, the stats don't look so great.

Obviously this is anecdotal, but like all things, nothing is 100%. I am not sure what sample size or data was used in these studies, but in just my circle the number of people with peanut allergies that are Israeli is decently large compared to many other people I know. Unfortunately peanut allergies can be pretty annoying, serious, and hard to deal with, so it ends up a big topic of discussion a few times a year in our social circles.
All this statement means is that your pensioners should be getting more money, not that refugees should be getting less. Likewise, you should be making more money than you do, if your income is lower than refugee support money. I see this argument repeated ad nauseam and it's really upsetting, because it's basically saying that other people should have it worse for the sake of having it worse.
Case and (as someone mentions below) punctuation have never been part of google search. You could search with those in Code Search, but sadly that's long gone :(
Clickthrough: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ex-NSA+Chief%27s+Cybersecuri...
I made a quick tutorial with this in mind. Most of it is JSX based, but it has 3 lessons without it. Maybe this helps :)

https://github.com/kay-is/react-from-zero
I think this is an important point: most of what people verbally say is redundant noise, because in speech you have to account for people who only started really listening partway, or who need something said repeatedly in different ways to understand it. In text, the reader is free to stop and think about something, or just go back and re-read. This means that even if you're writing conversationally, it's easy and not too burdensome to compress long, rambling sentences into succinct ones that convey the same information.
The NFL has considerable experience streaming and they are quite good at it: The NFL has been streaming games for a while now, via Game Pass (available on AppleTV, e.g.).

What's different here is that someone else licensed the rights to stream the game, i.e., Yahoo.

I cancelled cable years ago and would dearly love for the NFL to sell me what I want, but they won't, at least not yet: Game Pass allows the customer to stream the regular Sunday afternoon games, but not the evening games (Thursday, Sunday, and Monday) and not playoffs. I cancelled Game Pass when I realized that (yup, failed to read the fine print).

(What about those Sunday games? Well, I have an OTA antenna, and get a full Sunday afternoon's worth of NFL for free, even if I don't get to choose the games - which I could do with Game Pass. I also get many of the playoff games, at least for now, since they tend to be carried by the major networks, and not the cable-only sports channels. (I'm in Canada.))
"" always works for me, but the annoying part is how often I have to use it these days, because Google so often second-guesses my queries.

I suppose for the average person this "fuzzy searching" is an improvement, but I wish I had the ability to flip a switch somewhere that says: "Please only use exactly the words I gave you, always."
The overdue and opportunistic push towards diversity in comic books
At first I was gung ho about web components. I was so excited I used Mozilla's X-Tag for one project and Polymer in another project. I am now no longer in favor of using them and it makes me sad, actually.

Web components are simply too heavy. They add latency to download (yeah you can combine them but I've never found tooling (including Vulcanize) that worked very well). Also the shadow dom's separation makes styling more difficult across multiple components requiring awkward shadow dom hacks in the CSS and / or duplicating / adding more CSS to components themselves. Same with using JavaScript and third party libraries not expecting to use the ShadowDom though this isn't so bad.

When I'm working on something that needs to be optimized for low bandwidth / high latency I go as lightweight as possible and I concat as much stuff together as I can. I want web components to work so badly but they're way too slow for me to use anytime soon.
I believe you'll find that many who would consider freedom to (more or less) equal capitalism have settled on definitions of all relevant terms that cause "freedom = capitalism" (for their definitions of both terms) to be a tautology. "Freedom", "capitalism", "coercion" and others will have been stretched in some places and narrowed in others, nuance and odd corners trimmed off until it all fits together, nice and neat, pleasing to the eye in its simplicity and certainty.
They had (have?) a security team entirely larger and more competent than I'd expect (or, honestly, really choose to seek to have) in an org their size. I think they were just lucky to get a couple great people early on and doubled down.
This generic critique doesn't seem to apply here. According to the article, the researchers were able to reliably reproduce the inherited stress response by artificially injecting a zygote with the extra RNA they suspected was responsible for the observed effect. That is a pretty compelling causality result.
Come on, don't be a dick. You're exactly like a child that cries because the others get "more" and it's so unfair. Boohoo.
@smt88, apologies. 1. Will keep this in mind in future. 2. InTouchApp is evolving into a Personal CRM. My point was that a smart contacts manager is your Personal CRM. InTouchApp aims to be a superior replacement to stock Android app (btw, > 70% of Android phones DO NOT carry the stock Android Contacts app!).
Have you tried "Verbatim" mode? It's under the Search Tools drop down along the top menu bar (where News, Images etc. are), then under "All results", and basically seems to minimise the amount of clever business Google does with your search (synonyms, "did you mean?" etc) and so can be quite useful for technical searches
Decommissioning costs are generally around a few hundred million $ - not more than 10% of the capital costs generally [1]. And there are very strict regulations around it - many firms are required to have a trust or other type of fund built up during operation of the facility in advance of final shutdown and decommissioning. And as others have stated, uranium price is very small part of total nuclear energy cost.

[1] http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/de...
First kid - "be careful he doesn't trip and fall"

Second kid - "Oh, he tripped and fell. are you ok?"

Third kid - (BAM CRASH Cry from upstairs) - "oh, he's fine. crying means he's fine."
Insecticide maker wins global award
This might be an unpopular opinion around here but having an MBA under the belt or at least some form of entrepreneurial intuition and business shrewdness is an indispensable skill esp. when you're planning on taking on a new category or market.

I know that this analysis is bit skewed to justify and reinforce the conclusion placed in the title and repeated throughout the piece, and as they say hindsight is 20/20, but I still think that the founders made big rookie mistakes when it came to structuring a viable and sound business model for their venture and securing a recurrent revenue stream that they would have avoided had they been equipped with professional business education, knowledge and expertise.
I think that "A*" (the algorithm) has started to work only since recently, even without quotation.
Domain Registrar Spear Phishing Attack Happening
Hello privilege assertion.
Analytics Startup SimilarWeb Raises $25M at $400M, Wants to Be a Better Alexa
All of those points apply equally well to any self-employed person. Should self-employment be abolished too?

To the extent that there's a problem, it's in the fact that the law doesn't treat the self-employed/other-employed spectrum sanely, such that employer incentives don't align with social goals. We should fix that, not demonize business that optimize for the current broken system.
If you're aware, then why lie, and say they didn't know what happened? Why make up a fairy tale about "violent, righteous riots" and an injured police officer? I can't tell you how it affects your point because I apparently don't understand what your point was supposed to be.
Well this is the problem any country with a large illegal immigrant population faces. Far too many in the political establishment don't want to be perceived as mean spirited and deport or block the illegals yet the unintended consequence is that those who seek legal immigration are harmed as are those who already are either citizens and recent immigrants as the pool of assistance monies and goods is diminished.

This is also a result of the current view to not interfere enough to fix the situation these illegal and legal immigrants face at home. Nation building has fallen out of favor and the result in anarchy is many parts of the world. Violence goes unchecked and with lax to no enforcement people risk their lives to get somewhere else and will try to get where the best support system exists.
FB has had somewhat of a revolving door with NSA security, though [0] -- so given your negative perception of this, how do you feel about what FB does and the NSA does that overlap enough to have employees come/go between the two?

http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/06/facebooks-former-s...

Old -- but there are other articles about it as well...
> finally, apply actual software engineering principles to building websites

I've waited a looong time for that.

It does seem like we're getting close to being able to work on the web like I did on my Mac in 1990!
Or the 1-3y pre-employment background screening, involving things which would be illegal for a private employer.
That's not necessarily true. Kids might be dying of food allergies frequently in poorer countries but it's simply not reported or the local hospitals (assuming they're taken to a hospital) might be unable to diagnose the cause of death.
Israeli startup Everything.me shuts down
Maybe we could use something more readable? What about:

if posts.comments??.likes??

or

if posts..comments..likes

instead of

if posts.?comments.?likes

That would mirror the usage of ?? as the nil-coalescing operator in Swift.
> Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.

They are not baseline power, but they provide diversity of sources into the mix, and would serve to defray any single source failure from causing a domino effect.
Making Sense of Dell and EMC and VMware
Not all sunscreens are carcinogenic. Just the externally pleasant ones that leach into your skin.
The necessary sub header from the article: Actually they’ve done no such thing. But they do effectively assume that it’s unnecessary all the time.

This article is just a short rant about how simple, traditional, econ 101 models from the 19th century assume purely rational actors whereas the author has decided that not everyone is a "Nostradamus" with infinite knowledge and wisdom.

Nobody believes the rational agent assumption to hold at the individual level, but it is sometimes a useful approximation that can build the foundation of a macroeconomic model that sometimes makes sense. It's also a necessary stepping stone on the way to more complex models. An unnecessary article with a clickbait title.

That said, his book Debunking Economics is very good and I'm glad that he's advancing the state of modern economics by relaxing traditional assumptions and building better models based on more realistic heuristics. But I don't think this should be getting voted up HN.
Free-market thinkers embracing radical-sounding ideas to shore up capitalism
Absolutely incredible. I really hope the Freedom of Information Act requests get somewhere and we get to hear how a screw up of this magnitude happened.
Law firm bosses envision Artificial Intelligence to replace young lawyers
Gamepass doesn't stream at 60fps though, has more ads.

p.s. Sign up for Gamepass using VPN with an endpoint in another coutry (you can arbitrage the pricing too, some times the cost in another country is $50-80 cheaper). Then all you need to do is login under your VPN, start streaming, and then turn off the VPN once the stream has started. You can watch all the games, including playoffs. No blackouts.
> As long as I can remember my father would work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, wearing a suit to the office. I’ve always wanted to follow his example.

What!? This is not something to be admired!
He fails at getting the most he can out of every dollar since he overpays Mary according to the rest of his quote.
English is probably the best "common source" that things are translated from/to
Show HN: AnyAPI – Documentation and Test Consoles for Over 150 Public APIs
There are actually a lot of languages that do it in the same way as Ceylon does. However, Haskell goes a step further than most other languages by defining Maybe as a monad in the standard library.
I had the same problem about a year ago, then I just bought this and swapped out my existing wall switch. Beeps a warning and autocloses after a minute.

http://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-888LM-Security-Upgrades-Pre...
...precious.

Sure, ESR is kind of silly, but I don't understand the animus here on HN. ISTM he isn't making anything worse. Somebody wanted NTP "Classic" improved, and they decided to pay ESR to do it. It's not as though his patches or those of his collaborators would have been incorporated into ntimed anyway. Maybe some people think that work like this should only be done by a PhD with the approval of a committee of PhDs. ESR has been pretty consistent in all his voluminous writings, that he does not agree with that development philosophy.

However I sympathize with everyone in this thread who runs ntpdc on his Lisp machine.
Indeed, and most accidents can shown to have been preventable "if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings."
[the article]

But claims would seem to be little more than a thin gloss on the unbreakable unobtainium[1] of your hindsight.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
Given that contracts can call other contracts and, presumably, set up new contracts, I wonder if it's possible to set up self-referential loops of never-ending contracts. Denial of service?
The entire thing is worth a read, but here's a short summary:

John Bordne claims that missile launch crews in okinawa received nuclear missile launch orders via calm encoded voice comms, which seemed suspect, since they were given at defcon 2, not defcon 1. According to the claim they ended up contacting the sender of the codes and requested codes to either stand down or upgrade defcon, at which point the sender issued stand down with considerable stress in his voice. Bordne also claims that to his knowledge no real consequences for this ever happened.

He's asking for corroboration to help with his own old memories and to straighten out history.
Financial technology is seen as a competitive threat to Wall Street
Is that a kind of privilege escalation?
Totally agree with this, I've come up against this problem in the past week. I've found that I get the same list of results regardless of how I phrase a search term involving two JS frameworks. It's like it only matches those keywords and ignores the rest of the words.
ES6 in Webkit
pdfx will output json if you use the -j flag!

pdfx -j <file-or-url.pdf>

jq looks neat btw.