skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>This is a clue to why microfinance does not reach the poorest.

I have worked with the poor in developing countries. I am highly skeptical of the claims made by microfinance. This work described here is VERY interesting because it does not involve debt and it ADDS education.
This looks like a decent one-stop guide. http://www.theverge.com/a/online-tv-stream-price-guide
You can do this if you right click and do play song/artist radio.. but in my experience it sucks really bad, and has only gotten worse over time. Use to, it was kinda useful. Now it's complete garbage. I'm not sure what they changed in their algorithm but typically when I do this I get 5 artists that are only marginally related, and then it proceeds to play music from those 5 artists in a loop and the "dislike this" feature seems to do nothing. I've actually disliked a song and then it came on about 20 minutes later.
It's a classic moral dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). If you knew 100 people would die this year but you could do something that would save them all at the expense of killing 50 other people, what would you do? The coldly logical choice is to "disregard individual rights in the name of overall efficiency" and prefer 50 deaths to 100, particularly if you're a government - isn't it?
4 Factors to Unlock the Big Data Promise for the Oil and Gas Industry
How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
We have full admin rights on our computers in our company. The benefits outweigh the risks as long as the users are remotely competent.
if a tiny piece of metal is on an orbit with an equal distance between earth and a tiny fridge magnet will the tiny fridge magnet really affect that metal more than the earth does?

If I hold a tiny magnet 5 feet above the piece of metal, and the earth is 5 feet below the piece of metal. in which direction will the piece of metal move. In other words while I don't think my examples are any great ones, I don't think the example you're quoting really makes much sense either.

On Preview: I see there's an explanation for why being far away from the magnet makes the magnet have less effect than being far away from a gravitational object https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10727977
Was excited to see this, I did hit a lot of composer and npm problems (as I somewhat expected) here's hoping the bug reports I've filed can be easily resolved. At the moment I'm using groovebasin but that needs some serious improvement around it's installation dependencies.
This is not necessarily true. In may pub quizes I've been part of, there are multiple rounds of 5-10 questions each where the answers are given after each round. This keeps teams engaged and heightens the mood since there are running totals for each team.

Had the captain been better, he could have picked out which teammates (presumably, Linda) had been better predictors of the correct answer. Instead he chose confidence as the metric.
Looks like ExtremeTech is using some kind of adblock detection/injection suite to inject ads, despite adblocker rules, after the page is already loaded.

Quite ironic, considering that I classify attempting to work around client software like uBlock, just as shady of a tactic as boot sector malware.
I had the same experience and only started using Spotify when Pandora left Europe.

Discover Weekly is a very good replacement, though, even if it's not the same.
What hourly rate should I charge as a freelancer?
Just dropped the TV service. Still have Cox for internet. $60/month for 50mb (not really). But, it's enough for my two kids to stream youtube while I stream from netflix, so I can live with it.
If the testing isn't automated, I'm not sure it should really count.
True. It has to work as intended too.
My Learning Curve Kills My Deliverability
Just a factoid I find interesting: Drupal never really caught on in Germany.

German CMSes used to be dominated by Typo3 (if you're not from Germany or Denmark you likely never heard of it before): https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=drupal,+wordp...

Drupal started gaining traction in Germany around 2008 but was rapidly displaced by Wordpress. Even though Wordpress now dominates the German market like everywhere else, Typo3 is still stronger than Drupal.

Things get even more interesting if we add Joomla:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=drupal,+wordp...

Compare that to the US:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=drupal,+wordp...
Totally agree. But, as usual with "nice things", this one doesn't align with Spotify's best interests. If it did, this would have been solved a long time ago - it's not like they haven't acquired the tech/skills to do so.

Those nice little lists Spotify helpfully shows are almost guaranteed paid-for inclusion (apart from the chart-style lists, to a degree, but that's another ball game). Labels/Record Companies/Promoters etc are almost certainly paying for inclusion there as it drives huge awareness and subsequent merchandise, ticket etc sales. Much like radio airplay, where the station controls the programming, this is where Spotify gets access to the same revenue stream.

So giving me perfect recommendations filtered through an exclusion list for which, let's be honest, the maths and data science for have long been sorted out via standard ad-tech and e-commerce recommendation engines, is simply not going to aid in the value proposition for a nicely curated list they can charge to be in.
Based on what? Heard news on Sky that someone had died riding one - that happens on many modes of transport. I think the battery melting is more worrying.
> Now my wife and I have to think - what do we want to
> watch? Did it come on yet this week? And is it on Hulu
> or Netflix or Amazon or...

I feel like this is where streaming still fails to be better than piracy. I pay 16€/month for a dedicated server, pay nothing for an RSS feed of TV show torrents I'm interested in, spent a couple hours whipping up some scripts to automate transferring the shows to my home and putting them where Plex expects them to be...

And when we fire up the TV, it just tells us which shows have new episodes available to watch. Don't care what the schedule is, which service has it, doesn't matter if the Internet is being uncooperative, and I don't have to deal with DVRs sometimes missing a recording or having some other problem (I think I've gone through every DVR solution that isn't tied to a cable / satellite provider).

I keep paying for cable and streaming so that someone is getting paid for the content I'm consuming but I'm longing for the day that some box and combination of services can give me that level of just not having to give a crap about the details. After 10+ years of trying different things I finally have something that "just works" all the time, but I'm still responsible for it and I'd rather pay someone else $50/month so that I don't have to be.
Splice Machine CEO's Big Data Prediction's for 2016
The yellow on that homepage is painful.
Just got this in my email, here's what I pay in Massachusetts for Comcast/Xfinity:

====================

Xfinity TV

Digital Starter $69.95

HD Technology Fee $9.95

DVR Service $10.00

Additional Outlet $9.95

Additional Outlet $2.99

Additional Outlet $2.99

Xfinity Internet

Performance $53.95

Modem Rental $10.00

Taxes, Surcharges and Fees $11.69

====================

The fact that I pay extra for a DVR/and HD made sense in 2005, not so much in 2015.
Graph Isomorphism Algorithm Breaks 30-Year Impasse
Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Last time I was in Australia (around a decade ago) the country's most well known new entrepreneur was someone who opened a Jamba Juice clone.
What's funny is my parents, in their 60s, cut the cord about 2 years ago - long before me. My father is technically savvy compared to most his age, but for them saving money was far more important.
What are you freelancing in?
They'll blame technology, but for me at least, it was the "worst in the world" customer service from time Warner cable. Also, the desperation that they employ trying to prevent you from cancelling is enough to ensure I'll never go back.
In contrast to the Google/Martinis stuff, which is full of substance.
Aside from sports there is no reason at all to pay for cable. Most paid services can get you the same content without also having to watch ads.

It just seems absurd to me that a business model can exist in the Internet age where you pay to see ads and still have no control over your content aside from switching channels.
Ha, yes definitely. Thankfully the state-of-the-art in hash-based crypto has progressed a fair bit since the original lamport signature. The stateless "SPHINCS" signature scheme is looking quite mature already: http://sphincs.cr.yp.to

Although if you are working with an Event-Sourced architecture you may as well just implement with OTS (One-Time Signature) chains.
you can also check this little "similar artists" spotify tracklist generator I've built, based on last.fm api: http://verdisco.yebsoft.com/
Just before quitting Facebook, I made a point of adding friends' birthdays to my iOS contacts, which are shown in the calendar on my iPhone. However there is no option to be automatically reminded of all birthdays, so I still sometimes miss them. I feel like this should be available as a standard feature of iOS.
I'd pay for an app that would simply read all the birthdays from my contacts and create a calendar reminder for each one. Not a monthly subscription, but definitely worth paying a few pounds for.
The "Clojurians don't like testing" meme probably has more to do with Rich Hickey's famous "guard rail programming" [1] comment than anything else. Of course, even at the time, the joke within the community was, "Yes, Rich Hickey doesn't need to write tests....you do!"

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy (15:30)
Good content.

The layout with the list in the bottom right corner confused me because the article meta-data/abstract appears directly below the arrow for "Top 100 List".
> We're talking companies like youtube, facebook, google, poof gone.

You do realize that the internet and even the web existed way before all of those companies, right? And while you might not have been around then, it was great back then. Not saying some things haven't improved, but all things considered, I think we would be better off if none of them had ever existed.

> Once google is gone, who are you going to use to search the web?

Another search engine?
Fire is always a threat. The question is how fast the burning spreads and the structural capacity during a burn. Fire retardants which are pressured into the wood, begin to react when the temperature approaches normal wood burning points (around 275 C) the chemicals convert the wood tars to a carbon char which provides insulation from direct heat while also allowing the water to evaporate out of the wood as it more slowly heats. This gives you a much longer horizon to get people out and firetrucks in. You would need a sustained burn for a couple hours, at which point an exposed steel building would have fallen anyway.
It seems the most reliable way to talk to a human at Google (if you don't already know one working there), is to complain on twitter or your blog or similar.
I'm strongly considering this. I've experimented with Plex and it works very well. Haven't done the scripting bit yet, just manually adding some things to try it out.

I would also keep paying for Hulu/Netflix/etc, just so that the content creators get paid. But, if I went this route, I could also rip the bajijllion movies my daughters have and no longer worry about them getting their jelly covered fingers on them...
That's the rub isn't it?

If we let Congress decide then we'll likelier get what we have with gambling where the biggest players are still getting people hooked on the high of winning but the smaller folks are the ones who get tossed out. Then you got genres and approaches which shouldn't even be considered equivalent (like DLCs and expansions to single player games and the like) being regulated the same way. Frankly, at this point I'm going to say let the suckers get hung out to dry and let some class action suit form to deal with this problem. At least then the question of liability will be settled by case law w/o the concern of Congressional overreach.

I hate saying that too since I do genuinely believe this matter should be under regulatory review, but Congress is too ham fisted and idiotic when it comes to technology (their current nonsense regarding encryption proves that right all too well).
Well, devs generally admit that there's a spectrum of coerciveness and intrusiveness. It's just that all the devs I've talked to generally believe themselves to be on the "not as bad" end. So it's not purely A) devs don't think they're doing anything wrong or B) they don't care. It's the usual cognitive dissonance of "those other guys are doing something wrong, but we're not as bad, and we need to pay the bills."

There is a real problem -- 98-99% of people will play your game but won't pay for it. So, that other 1-2% has to subsidize everyone else.

Some other points that I rarely see discussed...

Game developers don't have some inalienable right to make games AND be financially successful (unless we as a society decide they do and regulate them and the market).

Here I'm drawing an analogy to other jobs that HN readers may be less sympathetic to, e.g. cab drivers or fishermen. They got disrupted. There's no reason why technical creatives are immune to disruption.

Second, there's a black-hat / white-hat argument. Humans shipped with mental bugs. Many of these are exploitable. The gambling and game monetization industries basically identify, study, and exploit these bugs. Individuals have a choice to make -- do I work for the black-hats, or do I work for the white-hats? What about studying these mental bugs and inoculating users against being exploited? I know there are some resources for this out there, but this post is long enough and I'm getting too lazy to link.
The problem is that then noone would click on the ads any more
I'd like to nitpick a little. I'm bit of history buff and weapons buff and as a result military history buff.

"Lethality" of weapon could be defined in many ways. You could claim that lethality has not increased significantly since Hellenic period. Depends entirely form definition.
Hire a designer before dev then create the user journey in screenshots as part of the requirements detailing out the contract and export all the assets. Also agree on fees for out of scope elements that always pop up.
How Can Mark Zuckerberg Give Away All That Stock and Still Control Facebook
Only a guess: The strength between the grains of the steel has less variation than the strength between the grains of the wood. So as you increase the cross sectional area the likelihood of splitting goes up.
Thanks for the read. I definitely agree, and that's where I was going near the end of my article / rant. People don't care if something is sponsored as long as it's what they want to read about. If you're trying to force something down a user's throat, they're not going to respond well to it. It seems like common sense, but apparently we're in the minority of the subject.
Well yeah, that's what happens when you bring food aid without sexual education.
American here and the only reason we have cable TV is because it's nowhere near that expensive when bundled with internet access.

Since cable is our only option for broadband where I live, it breaks down like this:

Just internet access for $70/mo

Internet access plus HBO and several channels and a tuner/DVR rental for ~$110/mo

Now, there are some limitations. On HBO, only the "main" HBO is in HD. The other HBO channels are only SD. Same goes for other cable. The "big" channels and network re-broadcasts are in HD or SD but many of the more niche channels are only in SD.

Additionally, with the phasing out of unencrypted QAM, you can't easily use your own tuner. I used to use a simple Hauppauge card in a PC along with a software tuner/DVR program to handle all of my channel flipping and recording but now I have to use their crappy cable box. In theory I could get a different PCI or USB card/box and rent a CableCard to handle the decryption and use my own tuner/DVR but CableCard is very poorly supported both in terms of software compatibility and cableco support.

In the end, we decided to keep cable for now even though I watch maybe one or two shows on traditional cable every week. The vast majority of my watching is done on Netflix or HBOGo. Still, my gf likes the convenience of just being able to flip through channels and she does a lot more "casual" watching of stuff that wouldn't be found on Netflix. If we swapped cable for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, and whatever other OTT subscription services, it wouldn't save a whole lot of money and you'd be stuck dealing with various apps and websites to find the specific thing you're looking for.

If it was just me, I'd probably skip cable TV but since it's both of us, we have to balance the actual savings against the very real issue of convenience, usability, and options.

I think a main issue is that there's not always an easy way to find the cheaper cable plans. They aren't well advertised and we typically get these offers after specifically asking for them from a cable customer service rep.
Same as avoiding swindles in any other use of money; research the specific options before committing resources and don't have blind faith in whoever is seeking your money.
Was this before or after Blizzard turned WoW into the semi-F2P crapfest?

Because I'll admit I love MMOs and certain other games (single player mostly) where I can spend most of my weekend stuck in front of my PC clicking away like a fool (Damn you, Minecraft!) but I've never had 'shakes' or anything close to a withdraw symptom. Maybe I'm the odd one out here in this regard.
why GNU grep is faster than FreeBSD grep
Investor Profile: Andrew Parker – General Partner at Spark Capital
Tile Risers - multiplayer 2048
I get the same feeling, and it's pretty much not isolated to just NYT.
Mediatoolkit Introduces New User Interface and Powerful Analytics – Mediatoolkit
Adding "Show HN: " to the front of the article title or resubmitting with it included would allow it to show up on that page.
Interesting that this debate always centres on current bandwidth capability. I think the two biggest economic advantages of 'fibre to the home' are actually lower latency and future upgradability.

On latency, the round-trip time for a packet between Sydney and LA is about 2-3x slower than one would realisticly expect from the transmission medium. Why? It's the routing hops that introduce the additional latency. So it stands to reason that FTTH == fewer routing/repeating hops == lower latency. This is in contrast to 'fibre to the node', which requires additional routing hops, more resending and error correction, and, if you want to use fancy technologies like VDSL 'vectoring', more active processing of communications in transit (to calculate the correct cross-talk cancelling noise to push down all lines). In addition, wave-division multiplexing with latency at 99.7 per cent the speed of light in a vacuum has been achieved on fibre (admittedly in a lab/academic setting) over a distance of 310 metres (source: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45).

Why is lower latency desirable, from a national economic perspective? Because it creates larger scope for distributed computation of non-parallel processing and higher IO for geographically distributed storage. So data-centres can be located on cheaper land, further away from the CBD. Perhaps in future it also means someone in Darwin could utilise the idling processor, or spare hard disk space, of someone in Sydney via something like Etherium. All of this becomes harder and less efficienct as latency creeps up. For general background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comp...

On future upgradability, I'd argue we're reaching the upper bandwidth limits of what copper can provide (as a real world, fixed line infrastructure). This seems to be around 100-150mbit non-symmetric under the most ideal conditions, using some pretty fancy tech (on both the carrier and consumer ends), although the hypothetical maximum is supposedly around 10Gbits (achievable in LANs, unlikely to be achievable in WANs with current copper assets). How long until this is not 'enough'? In contrast, for single strand fibre, NEC have achieved 101Tbit/s over 165km, and NTT 69.1 Tbit/s over 240km.

Cisco projects the volume of global IP traffic to grow at a compounding annualised growth rate of 23% between 2014 and 2019; in other words global IP traffic volume will triple in 5 years (source: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-pr...). Keep in mind this is strictly global IP traffic. Alcatel-lucent and Bell Labs, factoring in 'metro' (non-backbone) traffic (e.g. office to datacentre, consumer to CDN), forecast a quadrupling of bandwidth volume between 2015 and 2020, with an apparently exponential growth rate (source: https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/site...).

By opting to 'destroy' the original NBN, our government has knee-capped Australia's future economic prospects. Perhaps Lee Kuan Yew was right and Australia is destined to be the 'poor white-trash of Asia'.
Best Holiday Apps to Help Make Your Season Merry
This was a contest entry for Ludum Dare 34. Made with Three.js and Node. Source here: https://github.com/etodd/ld34
Hey Jacques, author here. In a way, you're sort of right - I hacked the affiliate program a little bit, mostly to be compensated for my work in ripping apart the pedal and ohming out the PCB. But mostly, I wanted people to know that there's a cheaper alternative to "boutique" electronics that are sold at an outrageous markup. The fact that these are easy to modify is a plus.

Also, I kind of liked the idea of showing off the workings of a Chinese product that's so clearly a ripoff of an American product. (Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, if you're curious.) Granted, that was also a ripoff of the TS808. And, I'll admit that something is lost in the spirit of the effort, since no one in China gets hung up when you take their design, improve it, and resell it.

I appreciate the critique; thanks for reading - I'm a fan of your blog!
I didn't mean to imply that I really thought Johann30 supported Trump or islamophobia. Rather, I used that example because I thought it was such an extreme and obviously false example of similar logic ("I have no idea what X truly believe and I don't even care too much") leading to wrong results. I realize now that my last sentence could be misinterpreted as being literal rather than rhetorical with an obvious negative answer (as was intended by me).

And of course there is possibly a distinguishing principle that Johann30 used as an unstated premise - that's just a flaw of natural language. But I realize I could have been clearer in allowing for that possibility. I'll try to be more literal in the future.

I understand you want others to stop being provoked by my comments, but I can't really control that.

What is the concrete action you'd like me to take? Will being more literal and explicitly requesting the elucidation of unstated premises/stating that I obviously don't think the person believes the contradictory conclusion/etc be sufficient? Should I include an explicit disclaimer that I'm making an argument by contradiction? Or are arguments by contradiction now explicitly disallowed (only constructive logic, I guess)?
As an American I think it's absurd too, which is why I don't do it. I get 120 Megabits/second internet for under $100/month and use netflix, etc. if I want to watch a show or movie.
The employees shut inside coffins
The fact that they charge for extra outlets always makes me facepalm. Charge for each box you are forced to rent, sure. It sucks but it at least makes logical sense. But the cable wiring in your house? That's yours! Why would you need to pay for that?