skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the key assertions of the story is that he had no reason to believe that the people requesting he show is hands were police officers. It was dark and they hadn't properly identified themselves or used sirens when arriving at the scene.

We can't know the state of mind of the victim, but there's every possibility that he believed he was pointing his tazer at a group of assailants. It's incumbent on police to properly identify themselves before making demands of someone they expect to comply.
Scrollbars are invisible in my mobile browser until I scroll the box. It just looks like a badly-formatted quote. Something to keep in mind if you're a ddveloper.
Its replaced smoking as a quick shot of dopamine and an alternate reward system for a lot of people I know.
Spreadsheets are optimized for data entry. Try entering CVS data manually using a text editor.

Without Excel there would be no way for my sales/marketing team to give me valuable data to process at the backend.

If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry.
Aside from filtering based on moral/taste/etc grounds, I've often thought it would be interesting to filter for the sake of time. Could you conceivably trim a 3hr movie down to 90 minutes and have it still make sense? It would be an interesting experiment.
Not censorship when it is not forced upon you.

If I choose to skip a chapter in a book I'm reading because I'm not interested in that chapter you wouldn't call that censorship.

BTW, this has already caught on as the service http://clearplay.com/ seems to be doing well.
It might be for finding out your country ?
There are examples of successful freemium models: Warframe and Path of Exile. In those cases, point #1 is mitigated by the customers themselves keeping a very close eye on the game's development. If they feel like the developers cross a line they are very vocal about their displeasure and the developers will tend to roll back the change. That "line" is usually when you have to pay to accomplish a thing at all, rather than it just speeding the process along. If the slow/free path is too arduous, then there's a problem.

The key point here is that the developers want to maintain a healthy and positive relationship with their customers. They're not just churning out a product and expecting people to give them money for it.
This is another example of something that works great in Japan and wouldn't work at all elsewhere. In other countries (esp. anywhere in the Americas), this would never work, because there's no shortage of someone willing to buy something that may be stolen.
The worth of a brand
It's more a rough aptitude test for creative problem-solving and persistence than anything else. Of course you need the strong technical background as well. But enjoying these sort of puzzles can be an indicator of sorts. I also work in cybersecurity, and most of my colleagues and I get a kick out of these sort of challenges.
Tell that to guix container.
The best method of transit is walking.
A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school.

No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.
Gallium3D provides a unified API exposing standard hardware functions
> But really this is the fault of the closed source browser manufacturers, who prefer to attempt lockin over and over again through incompatible features rather than converge on common improvements.

There's currently a single major browser engine that is still closed source, EdgeHTML (And with the current trend of open sourcing things at Microsoft, this might change very soon)

Plus the standard bodies were created to prevent that. After a significant stagnation in the mid-2000s, that was ended by the WHATWG, we're getting amazing progress.
A bit of feedback: you should have a link back to your dashboard on every page. That seems like the most important page to me as a user, but if I am changing my notification or account settings, there is no way back to that page.
It is a problem with HN, I agree, but it's also a symptom of a larger problem with Western Civilization, generally. I blame "The Simpsons". Or maybe "Seinfeld".
How do you apply your rules considering what's available today? Which services are you using? It sounds like it would be a big headache to orchestrate the automation among all these different providers.
Ditto with Guix. Reproducible builds FTW.
I'm very disappointed in the creators' choice of font for their landing page. Practically unreadable, my eyes burned.
The most successful game I made was my first and simplest but it was Nov 2011. By mid 2014 I was outmarketed as an indie dev.
They have build args for this in now. Thus, you'd do something like:

docker build --build-arg OAUTH_TOKEN=blah -t example .
But if they answer those questions, you won't buy support/use it...

Have a donut and look at our marketing spreadsheets.

I'm so tired of "seamless" "effortless" "simple" distributed database lies. There's mathematical theorems as to why there is no free lunch.
The two most recent technical previews for Windows Server support containers natively. You don't need a VM to run containers on Windows.
I prefer the tune at 90bpm as opposed to 45bpm.
This is what npm/github is! Rather than having comments in one thread you have them spread in issues and pull request.
I've got a 3rd gen and I like except for button-less mouse, the weird touch-strip for the function key. They fixed both of these with the 4th gen though.

I use Arch and pretty much everything "just works," the camera, sound, wireless, etc.
I use this https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/
2015 U.S. Population Winners: The Suburbs and the Sunbelt
I think one reason people don't like it is because it's not "fair." Bunch of freeloaders get stuff, people with too much extra money get taken advantage of... We need to get over it. Paying-big-money-up-front is even less fair because you have to shell out cash for a game you may or may not like. Plus, you can only get people to buy games this way with a huge marketing budget.

It's strange that so people people whine about mobile games being freemium but nobody mentions League of Legends: A completely free PC game that has made an obscene amount of income on little more than avatar skins.
Sure, would expect nothing less, but I'm also sure they have some sense of the range they are looking for. Such a range could help developers to establish whether their use case is viable or not.

As is, the ambiguity is a deterrent from too much time investment.
Tangent but:

I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.
If I drive at 90 mph, I'll still hear the song, but up an octave, correct?
When I played games I realized it was for those rewards of accomplishment. I felt good about myself for a few minutes when I beat some hard level. Its worse when you are not getting those rewards elsewhere in your life.
The quote doesn't assume you need carbon, the quote says that carbon is much better at the sort of chemical processes we associate with life than anything else. Nobody thinks all life absolutely must be made out of carbon.

But if you're looking for life, it seems very likely that most life is made out of carbon; possibly nearly all of it. You might as well start looking there. We have limited resources, after all.
PostgreSQL 9.6 – Parallel aggregation
Isn't the freemium games on other platforms more of the same? I play a few and there never seems to be a game without those few who buy up every perceived advantage they can. If not advantages then every special item or unit.

I remember Mechwarrior Online coming out with GOLD colored mechs for some obscene price and seeing them in game. I want to say they were like five hundred bucks. Wargaming also follows a similar model but I haven't see individual tanks or ships cresting a hundred bucks but there are enough that are in the fifty range and they are plentiful in matches
Google Fined by French Privacy Regulator
Kinda surprised they didn't just wait 7 days and announce this at Build with Microsoft.
One of the problems being ignored here is that, even if you only charge $1 for a game, I still have to trust you enough to give you my credit card info.

And this trust is actually far easier to earn if I am making larger purchases, not smaller ones. I'll spend $100 on something if I think it's a high-quality, one-time payment. But I won't even spend $1 on some seedy, risky experiment.
Unless the todo list app is fully integrated into your daily routine/one of the apps you use at least 20% of your time, they just end up a a brain-dump tools, which is not a bad practice by the way for making your mind more organized.
Having said that, I would repeat and emphasize a recommendation I wrote to another user in this thread-> check apps which DO integrate into one of your existing tools and doesn't require you to open a new window. Actually, I find this extra click on a new tab or an icon in the system tray is a REAL barrier to adopting those endless lists.
This stencila thing seems to be a marriage of the two: you enter your data in a spreadsheet type environment, and then you can write a reactive document backed by that data.
It seems C++ approach is quite good: you have a very stable (if a bit too stale) standard library, and you have Boost, which is a cutting-edge batteries-included extension to stdlib curated by much the same people as in the standardization committee. It serves as a great _inclusive_ counterpart to the _exclusive_ stdlib and a sandbox for stdlib extension proposals.
I also have qualms about distributing changes to non-copyleft license code under a copyleft license, but it seems strange to make this the "slap in the face" moment - wasn't distributing them under a proprietary license even worse?
Well this is meant to be a bad example, really all the babel stuff would be dev dependencies and ideally you'd have some watch task to compile and auto-reload.

In production you'd only have a bundled/minified version transpiled JS so there's no need for a runtime.

Ultimately with web assembly this gets even better.
Here you go: https://api.left-pad.io/?len=0
The reason is maintenance. Once you set up yet-another-repo-mirror (after your apt, rpm, nuget, pypi etc mirrors), someone needs to keep it up, back it up, secure it, refresh the packages, etc etc.

It's "cloud culture": rely on some else's maintenance effort and just work on your own problems. Like all things, it has drawbacks.
To all the top level comments about browser extensions, I want to use HN on mobile without an app. It's not possible due only to collapsibility. Comments sections are effectively top-comment-only.
Requiring the key fob to be activated in some way would prevent a good number of these attacks. For instance, a capacitive sensor could be installed on the fob that would only begin transmission when picked up by someone's hand and cease wireless transmission after some timeframe, say 2 minutes. This would at least stop many of the burglaries that occur at night when people are at home.
Exactly. Freemium is an attempt to maximize revenue given the following parameters: 1) 99% of the population won't pay more than $0.99 for a game, regardless of its quality; 2) 1% of the population will pay a fuckton.

So what do you do within those parameters? You try to make a game that relies on #2 to subsidize #1. The alternatives? Release totally free games (where's the business model?). Release ad-supported games (everyone hates ads!). Release games on a flat subscription model. Or accept that the whales are your actual paying customer base, and make games explicitly for them.

By and large, the mobile gaming industry has concluded that the latter approach is the optimal way to run a profitable business. The result is the shitty, manipulative, cookie-cutter approach to game design that has become so dominant today. But unless and until some of the 99% of us decide that games are worth paying for upfront, this seems to be the world we're stuck in.
Crash protection, that's why. A new car will let you walk away from a crash that your 20-year-old car will maim or kill you in. Crash protection is that much better now.
As far as I'm concerned, this is exactly the doomsday argument but applied to size and habitat rather than time.

I accept the doomsday argument, but I had heard that it is controversial, so I expected more debate here.
Apple designing own servers to avoid snooping
As a side note, if anybody wants to support a couple awesome indie devs (and play a sick mobile game) check out http://subterfuge-game.com/

Just started playing a week ago, already in love. Found out on their forums & reddit a couple days ago they're already planning to stop development because in the 3 months they've been on the market they've lost $40,000.

EDIT: Also, their freemium is non-intrusive (Which is probably why they're sinking). Play for free, upgrade for $10 to be able to play multiple games at once and play rated games.
A certain portion of programmers seems convinced that currying offers a huge amount of power, and we just haven't unlocked it yet. But I don't think I understand why they feel that way.
Citus can parallelize SQL queries across a cluster and across multiple CPU cores. How does it compare with the upcoming 9.6 version of PostgreSQL which will support parallel-able sequential scans, parallel joins and parallel aggregate ?
this is fantastic! What is your stack? Are you NoSQL or relational? Redis? What is your test coverage? I am sure you hiring only trendy developers. I see huge potential in your service, do you accept private investments? I would like to get in now, before Google or YC snatches you! again, keep up good work and - can't wait for right-pad next year!
Oh. Are you interested in security? Deployment? Or "idiotic practices that are apparently widespread but only coming to light in the wake of a disaster"?

Because that's what that story is actually about.
Harnessing Indoor Agriculture to Ensure Global Food Security
Starboard launches proxy fight to remove entire Yahoo board
From the article: "What are those guys up to?"

The answer seems to be "not very much". Google bought all those robotics companies but didn't get them to work together. All the companies are still in their original locations. Nobody has a product. Even Bot and Dolly, which had a product, no longer seems to be selling it. Boston Dynamics is being sold because they don't play well with others.

The whole robotics exercise seems to have been a hobby of Andy Rubin, and when he left, nobody had a clue what to do. Google/Alphabet, through mismanagement, may have added negative value to the robotics industry. Google's secrecy here seems to be more about hiding management failure than protecting intellectual property.

Martin Buehler, the brains behind BigDog, is now at Disney, and I expect we'll see more mobile robots there. Disney has wanted this for years; around 2000, they hired Danny Hillis to work on theme park robots. They got some improvements to their anamatronics, and a dino robot that pulls a cart but gets its balance from the cart wheels.

The next killer app in robotics is probably really good bin-picking. Kiva's mobile platforms can bring the shelf to the picker, but a human still takes the thing out of one bin and puts it into another. Amazon is working on solutions to that.
Perhaps its important to determine if there are flaws in the example before using it as an example.
I would love to see similar statistics for gambling and taxation.
Lotus 1-2-3 got people to use computers. One could argue that spreadsheets are the single biggest business innovation of the late 20th century. I don't think they're going away that easily.

I know people who type whole letters in Excel. I know an accountant in particular who I showed how to use MS Word for writing letters, but he prefers Excel. He writes full documents in Excel, prints them out and mails them.

Laugh if you want but spreadsheets are not going away in my lifetime.
I use this
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
Hi, I made the Etch-A-SDR. Found this thread after seeing the stars on the Github project jump (Thanks HN!).

The hardware used is:

- Acrylic sheet

- Odroid C1 (There are more powerful Odroids now, either the C2 [0] or XU4 [1])

- RTL-SDR

- GY-521 6DOF

- Teensy 3.1

- Rotary Encoders (adafruit)

- Push buttons (adafruit)

- 10.1" TFT screen with speakers (adafruit)

- Ethernet / USB bulkheads (adafruit)

- MCX to SMA bulkhead (ebay)

- misc parts ( screws, stand-offs, etc from home depot)

- Knobs from a real Etch-a-Sketch

I presented this at the monthly Cyberspectrum SDR Meetup [2] in San Francisco, the slides, which include pictures of inside the Etch-A-SDR, and an overview of the hardware/software can be seen here [3], and a live stream recording here [4].

If you're just getting started with SDR, I would suggest setting it up on regular computer vs starting with running it on an ARM type board, SDR is very resource hungry, and runs better on a normal machine. There is a big community over at the r/rtlsdr [5] subreddit. SDR is a lot of fun, and opens up the huge world of RF, and it is very inexpensive to get started.

[0] - http://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-c2

[1] - http://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-xu4

[2] - http://www.meetup.com/Cyberspectrum/

[3] - https://github.com/devnulling/etch-a-sdr-presentation

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG70c3Zadek

[5] - https://www.reddit.com/r/rtlsdr
PgConf.US and the community pavilion
Umur from Citus here. For purposes of this question, I’ll bucket traditional data warehousing (DWH) solutions like Redshift, Vertica, Greenplum together, although there are many nuances among each of them of course.

First, Citus is not a traditional data warehouse. We position Citus as the real-time, scalable database that serves your application under a mix of high- concurrency short requests and ad-hoc SQL analytics (i.e. think both random and sequential scans for a customer-facing analytics app). The default storage engine for Citus is the PostgreSQL storage engine, which is row-based. This is in contrast to many data warehouses, which often use a column store and/or batch data loads, and are focused purely on analytics. The trade-offs you get are:
- Citus vs. DWH performance: DWH and Citus both have a similar parallelization for analytics queries (multi-core, multi-machine), but most data warehouses typically use a columnar storage engine instead of a row-based one. Columnar storage is designed for faster analytics queries, so that makes columnar DWH generally faster on longer running analytics queries. However, this comes at the expense of (1) concurrency and (2) short-request performance (think simple lookups, updates, real-time data ingest) vs. Citus' row-based storage. If you've tried having 10s of concurrent connections to Redshift for short lookups, or performing 100s/1000s of inserts/updates to power your application, these limitations will be familiar. This is to be expected, as Redshift is not designed as a real-time operational database, but an offline data warehouse.

In essence, the two classes of products are more complimentary than substitutes, even while they have some overlaps in their analytic capabilities. Something like Redshift will give you fast offline analytics, after you move your data in batch (via S3); Citus will directly power your analytic apps in real-time; without ETL'ing your event/user data back and forth between separate OLTP and OLAP databases. Both can be extremely fast: Redshift can run complex data warehousing queries that take an hour in a few minutes, Citus can scan and aggregate 100 million records in a few seconds, while simultaneously ingesting your events in real-time.

I hope that provides some clarification on the workloads. There is a lot more, including columnar storage and product approach (re: implications of extending Postgres 9.5 vs. forking Postgres 8.x), and I’ll dive into those in separate comments as well.
Hacker News Enhancement Suite works wonders https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
Everything we buy exists to make money; everyone is interested in making money. But some stores actually do a better job stocking theirs shelves with things I will actually enjoy.
I actually didn't know that, thank you! Completely makes sense.

I know it created some friction after a while when the company realized that calling users a synonym for fat, even if internally only and without that intent, was a bad idea (their game also targeted girls making it worse).
And Dallas's owner, Jerry Jones, has stated that it's "absurd" to say there's a link between CTE and football.

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25527187/jerry-...

Was the absence of Dallas Cowboys data truly a mistake?
Odoo thinks it is viral over the net? I've never seen that argument. It was only viral to modules running on the Odoo server. If you used XML-RPC to talk to it over the net, I don't think Odoo S.A. would claim you had to distribute your code.
You would be surprised how many people have done this. The average office worker doesn't have a development environment on their computer, but they have Excel, and they have a coworker who was a whiz who said, "Did you know you could do this?"

They just kept automating task after task, silently, without the IT department ever knowing. 90% of them never thought of it as coding, and 10% realized they could make more money as an expert who knows how to coerce excel combined with their domain knowledge than they could as a programmer.
Beautiful HN Chrome plugin UI, supports:

- Improved readability design

- Retina screen support

- User following

- Super fast inline replies

- Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames

- Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user

- Endless scrolling

- Collapsible comment threads

- Direct link to Google Cache version

- Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...

(not affiliated in any way with this, just love it)
AFAIK all the parallel work done in 9.6 refers to parallel operations on a single node (but multiple cores).

This would be complimentary to what Citus does, which is distributing the load across multiple shard instances (each with their own cores, benefiting from the parallel work in 9.6).
Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible.
I wonder if the same applies to say... Google. That they're kept afloat by less than 1% of their users.
The solution in the future will be driverless cars, shared driverless vans, etc. These should improve overall commute times, since there will be fewer accidents and denser transportation. Also people will be able to spend their commute time reading books/news, doing work, watching videos, or other recreation, rather than driving the car.