skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Afghanistan hasn't been a significant source of US heroin in decades. The majority of heroin in the US is either from Mexico or Colombia these days. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/09/24/pellets....

No question Afghanistan is a huge opium producer, it's just that the majority of that product ends up in Europe, not in the US. PDF source: https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr2014/Statistics/Opium_Her...
+1 I thought it was quite impressive until reading that comment from someone who works in the design field!
E-Mail Spam Goes Artisanal
It is far too many bits to be used for time representation. 512 bits is all that needed to store every planck time (10^-44 seconds) since the big bang until the heat death of the universe (10^100 years).
There are a few things I like in this (particularly the Finder bit), but so much of this is just a bunch of extraordinary statements with absolutely no universally-accepted justification, spoken as if they have some sort of universally accepted justification.

For example, "Panels use screen space more efficiently and are a more elegant way to multitask than normal windows."

Says who? You? It just drives me crazy when I see statements like these. It's not an effective way to get your point across. You want to make your case for something like that? Actually make your case. Present some evidence and your conclusions. Not everything has to be a Jony Ive marketing video.

edit: Last thing I'll say - I just re-watched the video, and caught the last line - "it rethinks desktop computing to help you get work done". My advice to the author - go work for various companies for 5-10 years, and then come back and see if that statement holds up. My ability to get work done would be crippled with this; in fact, my work would come to a grinding halt. "Work" just doesn't work in the kinds of idealistic ways these types of marketing-like videos always seem to show.

And don't get me wrong, I like the author's ambition. If I was in the internship-givin' business, hell, I'd probably consider him. I think this is a good way to get your name out there, even if it attracts criticism (like mine).
As I've entered the more intermediate stage as a Rails developer, I've noticed that the "magicalness" that allowed me to do so much so quickly as a beginner, is often actually getting in my way. Perhaps when I reach the "advanced" stages, I'll learn to love the magic again, but I'm in this awkward stage of knowing what I want to do but not knowing how to tell Rails to do it (or stop doing it, as the case may be).
Is 'Pink = Girly' a Myth?
> Bitcoin can currently handle about 2 transactions per second.

First, this isn't the real number and second 'handle' doesn't describe the situation, which is an artificial limitation built in as an artifact. Whether you are in the camp that believes this will be worked around in bitcoin or not is irrelevant, on a technical level any cryptocurrency can be created that can handle MANY more transactions.

Right now you could sync to the blockchain on the bandwidth T-Mobile gives for free while on international roam in 100 countries.

So the amount of data handled by every node is not even close to any sort of practical limit. Anyone with Netflix could sync to 50x the number of transactions.
My opinion is that Microsoft is just acquiring an existing community set and tools that come with it. They're positioning themselves to be pertinent.
What Jekyll Teaches You
Sound contains far less energy than you might expect.

80 decibels, ~= 0.001 watts of energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_energy_density_level

PS: And yes most home speakers ~1% efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker#Efficiency_vs._sen... At scale they can get into the 20% range, but even that suggests guitars are probably not that efficient overall.
He'd have to be pretty cold to post this if the breakup was his decision and not at all mutual. His partner, or those in their mutual social circles, would likely see this. I'm not sure I like the idea of assuming the worst in someone like that.
Something new we're trying in terms of onboarding. I would have never guessed that people are receptive to random text messages from a service provider.

For one, I get annoyed by T-mobile happy holidays text—but probably also because it's a canned text message.
Bq Confirms Ubuntu Tablet with Convergence Is Coming
I love it. It combines exactly the three things I want to see together:

- Tiling window manager - that I have (StumpWM), and it's awesome! (pun intended)

- Convenient tagging of everything - now that's been discussed for many years already, and yet for some reason nobody actually implemented it properly.

- Eye tracking - it's a feature I wanted to have since I started using multiple monitors and noticed the unnecessary input action I have to make to switch focus so that it follows what I'm looking at.

It also has one of my favourite UI patterns - wheel menu.

A great demo, IMO, and I wish someone would implement it. I'd happily try it out, and if good enough, I'd become a paying user.
Design for Developers: Shapes – Part 1
I really like OneNote and use it as professionally but I wish the Mac/iOS-Versions wouldn't be that slimmed down featurewise..The MS Original is so powerfull, it's a pitty we Mac users are kept out.

Put your documents in the notes, use the search function and order your tabs and pages.

But I apreciate the solid sync that much I trust MS with my files unlike evernote
Especially with pry existing now, the "Rails is magic" meme is tired and incorrect.

Install pry, pry-rails. Something weird occurs? binding.pry, `show-method` or `show-source` and it dumps you to the exact line and filepath of the method, be it the original or a monkeypatched method (use -a to show them). Keep digging like that and you'll eventually hit the C implementation code.

[18] pry(String):1> show-method length

From: string.c (C Method):
Owner: String
Visibility: public
Number of lines: 5

VALUE
rb_str_length(VALUE str)
{
return LONG2NUM(str_strlen(str, NULL));
}
Open Letter to Women in Design
I also built an Open Source (GPL3) facial recognition program as well, called uWho (github.com/jwcrawley/uWho). Mine doesn't need anything like CUDA or OpenCL, and runs on a 6 year old laptop at 1280x720@15fps.

I ran it at our free, ticketless convention called Makevention (bloomington, IN). Estimates were that 650-700 people showed up. My tracker counted 669 uniques, which I think is spot on.

I also wrote mine for privacy in mind. The database was a KNN on a perceptual hash of the face. The data that was stored was only a hash and could only verify a face: it could not generate the face from the hash. Considering the application (Maker/Hacker con) I wanted to be sure that this was the case. (The data only resided on that machine, and it's wiped now.)

I've halted work on the gui version of it. Now I want to make it into a client/server, where the clients are RasPis (or other cheap compute with camera) and the server is whatever good machine you have. Initially, I'll reimplement the same algo, but I know that KNN has exponential time/cpu requirements the more samples I get.
Often overdoses happen when a former addict relapses. They'll take their old dose, not realizing that they have lost some of their tolerance.
> we've eradicated slavery in much of the world and on paper.

No, we haven't.

http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-...

And we haven't for the same reason that children are sold into slavery, there's money to be made.

EDIT: And in case you don't like the first hand account
https://www.stopthetraffik.org/the-scale-of-human-traffiking

"600,000-800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year."

"At least 20.9 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide"

Eradicated indeed.
...turning? :) or have turned!
Parecon. Right now the free market idea is there are only two parties, buyer and seller, to set prices. That's totally flawed, and that's why we inject a 3rd party into this process in the form of regulation. But regulation is slow and prone to corruption, and itself rarely accounts for externalities. It's just a guy on a horse asking for his cut, not much different from feudal days.

What's needed is an innovation to inject a more reliable 3rd party to deal with externalities, like Amnesty International would be one of many possible such contra parties.

Or redistribute 99% of the top 1% wealth, and give it to the bottom x% such that suddenly there's only middle class and better. What that does is poor are no longer so poor that they always have to say yes to getting one more dime, they'd have the option to say no to things like digging in a dangerous mine. That doesn't mean digging in a dangerous mine becomes illegal, it means it becomes expensive, maybe $40 an hour instead of 5 cents a day.
Not that this is a good or well researched article, but r/bitcoin is reacting as expected: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/41oerz/rip_bitcoin...
Isn't that basically what scientology e-meters are? I didn't know they had any relation to real life events.
concepts, as in "user defined type classes"

http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/208
Tech Transformations for 2016 and Beyond (Facebook)
A megaphone and an agenda should not be sufficient tools to subvert public discourse.

I agree with you, but how do you fix this? Media companies have the biggest megaphones of them all, and their agenda is keeping those megaphones.
German+Shepard+Talks+about+It's+Last+Few+Days+Life+on+Planet+Earth+-+in+pictures
And I'm sure you'll have no more trouble proving the existence of aliens than the fine mathematician who was the first to discover a fact.

So, let's see your proof.
> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something.

Considering how much more electricity a running computer uses versus an idle one and how much faster consumer CPUs degrade under load this definitely seems like a huge waste of resources for something that has little, if any, utility.
“Alas, Poor YORICK”: The “Black Page”  in Tristram Shandy (2002)
Posts about this and related topics get heavily flagged regardless of what side they're on. I don't see the community in toto as driven ideologically one way or the other, though obviously some subgroups are.

We turn the flags off sometimes when an article is particularly substantive. For example, we did that yesterday for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10923885, because that article was factual and had historical value. When we do that, though, it isn't because we agree or disagree ideologically.
The breaker-upper generally wants to break up right? I mean, that's why they are the breaker-upper.
It does!

V8 has expressed interest in fixing the try/catch deopt, but it keeps falling behind on their list because not many people are using it.

Most people aren't using it because V8 (and in some minds, mine included until 5 days ago, all of Javascript) doesn't optimize it.

It's a bit of a catch 22, and having alternate engines where that deopt doesn't happen can be the way out.

Basically having an alternate engine makes sure that stuff like this doesn't become permanent. You'll probably avoid try/catch in performance code for the near future (and i'll most likely do it as well), but the hope is that multiple implementations will force V8 to fix that issue (if it can be called that) at some point and eventually this little bit of optimization will no longer be necessary.
High touch onboarding is definitely worth it in a service where people use it daily and there is a very high lifetime value for the customer.
Is your comment here an example of what you'd like to see less of?
That's fair. Sometimes to put decisions in context you need to be able to compare it to something else, but I do understand where you're coming from.
Except, of course, that people were also overdosing "left and right" due to the pill mills and illegitimate pain clinics...

Edit for source: http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/pill-mill-crack...
Great point. People also turn to heroin because it's simply more affordable than a pill habit. It's an economic calculation.

There are so many things wrong with drug policy right now and we're paying the price. We could use more supervised injection sites, better access to Buprenorphine[1], etc.

[1] See: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/02/practically-a-book-revi...
I know at least KDE's Baloo indexer uses tags on files when available. If I search for the word "cookie" I get every filed named cookie, anything tagged cookie, contacts, bookmarks, and any parsable text document containing cookie including emails and IM logs.

I think the broader problem is that there is this awkward question of where tags belong in the application heirarchy. Right now most media files embed tags while text files do not. Binary files certainly do not, and folders are not true files and thus are not on-disk things to put tags on, they are usually filesystem constructs in a data tree somewhere.

Your file indexer could maintain the tags database, but then they are not file-portable. They could be part of the extended file traits in your filesystem, but then filesystems lacking support (including online uploads) would drop them. Thus we are at a point where tagging is done on a per-format basis, and thus some files are just not taggable but instead require indexing.

You would probably want to throw a semantic relevancy engine on top of that to associate vocabulary with similar terms, so if i search for food i can get things like cookie as a related search term.
Very cool... interesting to see Hacker news picking up stories on VR with increasing frequency... Here's to hoping VR is the next boom! Best of luck!
It looks really nice. That said I don't see how this interface is better productivity -- unless your work consists entirely in reading mails and surfing the web.
Also I don't get why UI designers hate "folders" and want to replace them with "tags". Personally I don't think you can beat a good old file system with a bunch of tags. Of course the file system requires some effort on the part of the user to keep things organised, but then again so do tags.
That's the great thing about threaded commenting, as opposed to the typical sequential forum style- it's easy to mentally block out a bullshit thread.
> It's easy to guess that being antsy all day is nervous energy from work, but if it only happens after 4 days of 6.5 hours of sleep... the fix isn't to work on my resting heart rate via meditation, it's to get more sleep.

Holy crap. You may have just changed my life.
That's a fair point. A lot of behavioral data can be gleaned from collecting someone's shopping habits, browsing behavior, general communication trends on various platforms (directed or not to their partner).

The heart rate and biometrics would perhaps let you know the when of the event, then, and not that it was on its way. The same predictive techniques could work for other events as well (has he been buying a lot more home goods recently? maybe he's about to ask you to move in).
Exactly. I know Django and Rails... The Django admin is still a huge selling point for me even today. I can get some class of application ready and running in no time with Django. With Rails, with no built in supported admin app it would take me way more time.
A buttload of electricity
Birds and Frogs (2009) [pdf]
I recently moved from a one-story apartment to a two-story house. You can't really see it in the number of steps my Fitbit says I took, but the number of flights of stairs I did in a day suddenly went way up.
Any detail on why not? A categorical or conditional no?
Org-mode is plain text, so it's pretty much available everywhere to a reasonable degree. Since Emacs can run in a terminal, full org-mode functionality can be accessed in the cloud with a network connection...with a native VT100 interface no less.

Anyway, it's just one set of tradeoffs over another. In this case volatility and buttons for finicking and platform independence.
Can do the same thing a little more simply by sniffing phone 802.11x mac addresses and/or bluetooth identifiers.

Can also modify the idea a bit to create an "unknown person" warning system if it detects unauthorized device IDs broadcasting within range.
Yes you're right actually. Thanks for pointing that out.
Power-ups in the garage... for charging his Tesla? Sounds relevant.
I think most people in a position to spend $100k on a luxury car would not laugh off a breach of contract worth approximately $20k.
That would put SpaceX in the "hobby" group too, which I would find to be very weird.

Heck, lots of pretty big, serious companies have CEOs whose expertise doesn't line up well with the business. That's why you delegate.

It is just about how you define the word, though. It's obviously open to a lot of interpretation, and if your interpretation is one way, I can hardly say it's wrong, even if I might say it should be a different way.
Another reason we meed collapsable threads here. You'll never stop "noise" entirely, but bullshit threads that sparked by OT comments could be easily snipped with collapsable threads.
Isn't this comment the equivalent of an upvote? Or was that the point?
5 is a prime number true, but not a Mersenne prime number. The Mersenne prime number 31 has 5 as its exponent n [1].

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MersennePrime.html
Also imitated on the classic Gibson ES-335 ("Electro Spanish") semi-hollow-body electric guitar. (In all likelihood just for styling.)
Please don't post AskHN threads that aren't in the form of a question just to try to impose your personal preferences and discourage your personal pet peeves on the rest of us, because that is a stupid and immature thing to do.
> Tagging makes a lot of sense for things like photos and videos where search-by-content just doesn't work. For everything else you can just index your files and search normally.

Unfortunately, there's a lot more than just photos and videos which are unsearchable - but even with just photos and videos, there's a lot to be won by implementing this.

> What's the this-helps-me difference between a directory structure

Simply put: any time you have a logical statement (and, or, not) between two criteria, the folder hierarchy falls apart. Files typically live only as a single leaf node under a hierarchical file structure, but the contents of a file could potentially live under multiple branches.

As an example, if I have around 9,000 photos and videos, and I want to view family photos from Christmas 2015, that have my wife and niece in them... without tagging, I'm SOL.
Breakup, as captured by my fitbit aria scale
http://imgur.com/ePX7o8m

It gets better and life goes on :)
A CS degree doesn't prepare you for the developer world in certain ways that a boot-camp will, but boot-camps are just too short and crammed to really teach a developer well in my opinion. A boot camp that my housemate is in right now was required to code merge-sort for a test after three days into it, while also advertising that prior programming knowledge was not necessary before starting the program.

I would love to see something in between -- a rigorous two-year software-engineering program out there sponsored by community colleges combining CS fundamentals and good up-to-date software engineering practices on large codebases.
Numbers don’t lie–it’s time to build your own router
Naloxone and clean needles should be available cheaply and over the counter, no questions asked. People who help overdose victims shouldn't be charged with drug possession. Until those things happen, I have no doubt overdoses will continue to needlessly kill people while our idiot politicians stand idly by wondering what they can do because they're too fucking stupid to implement the tried and true, tested solutions for fear of looking bad. This isn't a news story about anything else than the failure of government to implement very simple solutions (as most stories about problems in the US). Instead, these idiots keep working on filling up more jails. After all, jailing people for everyday activities is the American way.
This is a shameless plug, but I've been developing something involving 'scrolling with a resting thumb' to bring up a quazimodal menu, intended for applications where one is creating content in a spacial context… (i.e. here's a gif demo with Photoshop: https://twitter.com/vivekgani/status/659437589896630272 ) The intent though is for folks that want some middle ground between having to remember a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and mousing out to click something. This is an actual working app that works with Sketch & PS and more apps soon - if you'd like to try it email vivek@thimbleup.com and I'd be happy to share it.

The OP had a similar thing with the radial marking menu, though I've shied away from that approach since it doesn't scale with lots of icons/options unless you do hierarchies - also I simply just wanted to try something different. One random thing I stumbled upon yesterday is an old Autodesk Research video looking testing these versus other methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHZB0d20640
That's a really great point.
That StackOverflow answer is wrong.

Rails does correctly handle `1.day.ago`, taking into account the number of seconds in a day.

`1.day.ago` is a perfect example of what DHH was saying, in that it looks beautiful, but requires a bit of work under the hood. `1.day` creates a duration. This isn't just a number of seconds, but is represented by hash, more like `{:days=>1}`. When it's time to do the actual math, Rails looks at the :days number, and actually moves the day part of the date forwards and backwards.

Source here: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activesupport/lib...
I love the EFF and what they do but I always feel like their writing style is so often... I'm not sure how to put it... just kind of over the top? e.g. first paragraph, "the charade is over" ... third "this too doesn’t exactly come as a shocker." So much of what they write about is really important but I can't help but think the writing is often maybe too hyperbolic and turns off people that should be following these things closer.
No I don't think it's a passing fad or will fail miserably - but I do know you're not alone.

Yeah - VR is expensive right now. Maybe the price will drop a little - but this is one of the reasons why it will be niche for quite some time.

I totally agree with you that I don't think many people will watch the superbowl in VR...but!

What I predict (take with pinch of salt) is that as the Oculus and Vive are delivered there will be the common realization of some of the limitations and problems with VR (motion sickness, people who wear glasses etc) and the popularity will go down a little - but long term this type of thing just has so much potential I can only imagine it growing in the long term.

Something I notice in your comment is that you seem to be assuming that you can't have social experiences in VR, I see social in VR as one of its greatest strengths. You could see your buddies in VR as legendary warriors fighting demons. Or maybe some of your buddies are the demons. There's a huge market for that type of thing (or there will be).

AR like Google Glass (HoloLens, Magic Leap...) is also going to take off. Eventually AR and VR may converge. Want presence and to be fully immersed? Switch to VR mode.
They don't sound like the kind of client I would like to deal with. I would recommend trying to find better customers and then ditching this one.
I've always seen equity/stock as an incentive to work my ass off, nothing more. They equate to nothing more often than not.
Signal to noise ratio may be causing a bias. There are some great things out there that most people wouldn't realize are unity. I think this bias might be caused by the free/communoty version and its overly apparent logos and default look. All the great work is probably paying for full license and thus that and other things minimize the "i am unity" stuff.