skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the book isn't one of these guys http://cdn.movieweb.com/img.news.tops/NEdgXRU4ZlbPhg_2_b.jpg trying to climb out of you, then the book ain't gonna get done whatever happens.
Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro
Shareware was a business model. Bootstrapping is the best current term I know of, but I've also seen it used by startups saying they didn't take a seed round in advance of Series A. I would love to bring back some of the vibe of the Joel on Software forums.
This means that Haskell doesn't have an object representing a function blocked in mid-operation. The difference is one of abstraction (obviously all languages can ultimately express all computations), which affects composition and mental overhead. These, of course, are empirical effects, and so their merits cannot be justified on any theoretical grounds (theoretically, monads and continuations are the same).
> I'm not going all men's rights or saying anything is acceptable but if you took a (painfully?) stereotypical set of physicists, technologists, etc. they would probably be male, on the autism spectrum/socially awkward in general, and likely have spent the majority of their time around the same types of people (smart, socially awkward men/boys). Could part of it be from social cues they may not have learned along the way since they likely spent a good portion of their time out of the 'normal' stream of socialization

If this were some sort of low-budget situation comedy, maybe, but we're talking about the real world here. Go read about, for example, Geoff Marcy:

"""“He would stroke my arm or my neck while going over information, standing very close,” Borland told BuzzFeed News. He would also play with her hair or brush up against her with his legs, she said, “often resulting in his crotch touching me.”

Because Marcy was a vocal supporter of women in science, “it was contradictory in my head that he could have bad intentions,” Borland said. “But at the same time, it just felt so uncomfortable that after a few times I had to tell him to stop.” """

(note I haven't read the buzzfeed article as I've been following this story on astronomy blogs such as http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2016/04/sexual-harassme...)
This sounds to me like the "uncanny valley" of music. It's close to being pleasant, but it's very discordant and hard to listen to…
My point is that determining what constitutes "too far" is fraught with ambiguous subjective analysis. Who is the arbiter of what is too far in terms of comedy? Pretty much nobody has an issue with "an innocent joke" by definition, but sexually explicit comedy often tows the line of "innocent" (which is usually what makes it funny), and attempting to disentangle the clever sexual comedy from the inappropriate sexual comedy is a pandora's box not worth opening in the workplace. Just keep sexual jokes and commentary to yourself in the office.
There's a long-standing overrepresentation of women in solar astronomy. Why? It was previously thought unthinkably inappropriate that women should spend the nite in the observatory alone with men. So, to do astronomy many were pushed towards daytime astronomy, which pretty much restricts you to study the sun. Even today solar astronomy is largely dominated by women, demonstrating that historical biases propagate into the modern day.

It's disappointing to think that female astronomer's fear of sexual harassment is well-founded and persists to this day.
Ambiguous names are an endless source of confusion and waste of time.
"descended from" is kind of a common misconception about evolution. Birds and Dinosaurs have common ancestors. Earlier researchers thought they were closely related to reptiles, but more recent research has shown they have a lot more in common with birds.

It's still somewhat of a mystery as to why dinosaurs went extincted. A very large asteroid did hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous. But there was a lot of other thing happening on Earth at that time. Pangea was breaking up and major waterways/oceans were opening up at that time, so there was likely major climate changes occurring, incearse Volcanism, etc..
Marketing and Technology are two ways to solve the same thing - information problems. Technology is better at it.
Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors
Belgium maybe, but France and German have very strong industry relying on the production of petrol cars, so you'd expect them to offer strong resistance until they field more electric model than petrol ones. It is the same industry that victoriously lobbied against the liberalisation of the personal vehicle market.
I have a macbook with command line tools installed and I have homebrew installed. I think I installed Python on brew, but which git tells me I'm using /usr/bin/git for that.

Is there a list somewhere of dangerously old software Apple have shipped to me that I should reinstall with brew immediately?
Gas and Diesel Cars to Be Banned by 2025
> There's a reason that app store purchase bottom tier of pricing floats around the $1 range and not the $0.01 range.

I can't speak to Android, but on iOS the reason is that Apple has decided $0.99 will be the lowest price tier [1].

If they wanted to let people have an even crazier race to the bottom, I'm sure we'd see $0.49 apps and then $0.10 apps and $0.01 apps. With password entry there was a nuisance cost, but "scan your fingerprint" is pretty close to frictionless. Tapping the download button is the most difficult part of the transaction.

[1] https://www.macstories.net/stories/a-beginners-guide-to-app-...
Several of the completely new bridges were built with single track capacity as well. I suspect the government thought they were being a bit clever forcing Network Rail to shave a few million off the cost this way, but actually just not laying the second set of rails doesn't really save much so actually the savings came in places where they will cause a lot of pain later
And inbound marketing is now used to refer to what used to be called SEO if you have seen as may mistakes as I have a competent inbound marketing person can improve your site.

I wont mention any names but I saw a mistake with canonical tags cost a major UK company 1/2 a mill in less than a week.
Hard to put my finger on it. Robotic, soulless?

Like pretty much exactly what you'd expect coming from an an entity or a thing that thinks music is just about notes and mathematical patterns... and not about emotions, or an experience that you feel in your body.

On a less handy-wavy level, I suspect there are issues of tone and timing embedded in human-generated musical expression that these algorithms don't begin to capture. In the same way that - no matter how much they keep tweaking their markov chains and phoneme scales -- we can always tell that a machine-generated voice sounds "off" somehow, literally within tens of milliseconds.

As the saying goes: it don't mean thing if it ain't got that je n'sais quoi.
Astronomy is currently going through a series of very high-profile covered-up sexual harassment cases. Have you not heard about them?

http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-...

I don't know why you think you would notice sexual harassment happening. The obvious explanation for incidents like the ones we're talking about is that abusers are good at hiding it from the people they aren't abusing!
The best part is that the resultant "jazz" sounds more like vaporwave[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdpP0mXOlWM
If you were living at a time when motorways were seen as the way of the future, then why wouldn't you bring someone into government from that industry? It's like Michelle Lee from Google becoming head of the patent office.
Rooftop Solar Panels Could Provide Nearly 40 Percent of Electricity in the U.S
Are these the promised glories of socialism, comrades?
> you can't run an empire without breaking a few countries.

I don't know. It hasn't been tried before.
Here's One Thing That Could Kill Tesla Motors
You're right, I have no idea where I got that figure. Editing.
as a kid in the late 80s, the news convinced my grandma that DnD was training me to be a satanist w/ suicidal pacts around the characters and all
> Amazon's anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he'd released them and run a marketing campaign

That part probably seems far more relevant as an Amazon customer than it does to me as an Amazon employee. It'd be like saying "I got a parking ticket the day after I filed my tax return."

It's a shitty coincidence, but only that.
It's a shame that Git uses GPLv2; this would not be permitted under v3. Unless, I suppose, Apple does actually provide a means of replacing these programs.

Of course, the overall issue of not being able to modify the software on your own system still holds.
This is one of the most disturbing parts about modern existence. We're built to forget, but the rest of the world is increasingly built to never forget.
In other words, the charge is to incentivize people like nateberkopec to do exactly what they did: compress their JPEGs better.
If this is correctly documented, there is no reason why Amazon would not have to pay out all the truly owed royalties to authors.

Fraudulent methods of measurement are a real issue in online marketplaces and you can't just say oops when you are sued.
Pst to mbox converter
CS in VN (2013)
> installing a new version of git is not in any way blocked by either Microsoft or Apple. If you install git with homebrew, you get the newest version, which will take precedence over the Xcode variety unless you mess with your $PATH

Sure, but the fact remains that OS X deliberately hides things from you, and you have no way of knowing that you've found all the hidden things. And for a developer, I think that's unacceptable. I want full root access to my development machine, not a dumbed down version of "root" that doesn't let me mess with certain things. This is one of the key reasons why I will not use a Mac as a development machine.
The debt was crushing.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/mar/14/past.educati...

1956: "Britain itself was only beginning to emerge from postwar austerity, its public finances crushed by an accumulation of war debt."
D&D set off a moral panic in the Christian community... better wordage or just hand waving?
No one downvoted the OP because they thought the music was good - they downvoted because the comment was garbage and didn't express any reasoning. It was a useless "-1" reply.

Your comment on the other hand (aside the complaining about downvoting, which is discouraged in the HN guidelines) was fair and interesting - and I personally upvoted it.
Ready to innovate on the next generation of cloud computing
How would you have fixed it?

Assuming you implement the obvious thing -- tracking each page of a book the user has opened --

(a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode?

(b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service?

(c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period?

(d) If Kindles don't already track page views this way, how do you update the software on all Kindles to start tracking this way? When do you switch your billing script to track purchases like that?

(e) If you're QAing a Kindle and you spot this loophole, how do you do all these fixes? How long are you willing to keep the software from shipping? How certain are you that your theoretical solution is better than what's already shipped?

Product development is hard, and it makes me angry when people handwave it as "gross incompetence" from a position of ignorance.
I've smooth.business does that qualify?
I dabbled in subscribing to Kindle Unlimited, but quickly realized that most of the material there was just trash. It was like the literary equivalent of tuning out to some cheap reality TV show. Hearing that authors are paid per page explains a lot.
Or seen the decline of old school yellow pages companies - something changed there
My comment wasn't meant to knock C++; it was to point out that Linus' opposition to the language is well-documented, and an official git-rewrite in C++ is very unlikely.
I don't follow this line of thinking.

Almost any idea in any industry can be copied. Facebook was copied (and the copiers executed well), despite FB having "exceptional talent". Groupon was copied. Most new products are just copies of past products.
Off-topic and out of curiosity: What software/hn clone do you use ?
> Based on your description, it sounds like your wife has experienced a decent amount of harassment.

It seems to matter quite a lot to people whether harassment is characterized as gender-based or not, and we don't have any apparent evidence that it is.

Though I've never really been sure why being a jerk to someone because they're a woman should be any different than being a jerk in exactly the same way for some entirely different (yet no doubt equally stupid) reason.
I suppose so. But they're still charging 10x what I pay per MB for my cellphone. I use Ting, which runs on the same Sprint network as Whispernet, and I get 4G.
Coachella post office warns: Don't send your taxes from here
Kukla Futbol Ligi Hile Mod Apk İndir – Ferhat Özal – Hile Apk İndir
That's jazz for you.
I don't necessarily think that it's his fault... But try asking 100 random people on the street what it means when you ask a girl out and she responds that she is busy, and she does not suggest another date. I'd bet that at least 98 of them would say that is means she is not interested, and she is letting you down nicely. I'm kind of surprised some men don't understand that.
Buffett paid almost seven million dollars in federal taxes in 2011, that's a huge absolute amount for a single individual and whatever the rate that is for him, I'm finding it really hard to frame him as a moocher compared to almost half the country paying literally 0%.
> Whether it's RCA ripping off Farnsworth

You realize Farnsworth ripped off Braun?

Also, if you have a patent, you can always sue. That’s not an issue.
Show HN: Fisherman 1.5.0 released
I rescued a kitten, drove a train, and flew a mech at Japan's first VR arcade
It assumes that "80%/year" failure rate implies something like exponential decay. In this model of business, they behave something like particles decaying; the business environment might be treacherous enough that failures are due to factors that are essentially random and unmanageable.

While others (and you) have pointed to the deficiencies of this model, or at least to its assumptions, it is not fallacious, per se. The presence of other models--for example, that the first year is the most treacherous because the new owner lacks experience--does not make the current model, nor conclusions drawn from it, fallacious. Indeed, the implied size of the population, "all businesses," is a warrant for some pretty strong claims. Additionally, treating a saying as data, rather than respecting the context in and modality with which it is offered is probably fallacious in itself.

So, quoth the Bard, "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes/and other science facts/la la la/repeat to yourself, "It's just a show,"/"you should really just relax!" :D
What comes with it?
> It's more like a private company has privatized at no expenses the only access road to a public park and is now charging you to get there.

FTFY.
It’s not clean room, but the ECJ has allowed it one time already. Which did set an interesting precedent.
More specifically, GenJam:

"GenJam (short for Genetic Jammer) is an interactive genetic algorithm that learns to improvise jazz."

http://igm.rit.edu/~jabics/GenJam.html
the system is still bad even without a malicious party, as said in the article, if the user go back to page 1 after reading the book the system will count the book as unread and the author will not get paid.
Try numpy record arrays
"Oh, Dr Beeching what have you done?
There once were lots of trains to catch, but soon there will be none,
I'll have to buy a bike, 'cos I can't afford a car,
Oh, Dr Beeching what a naughty man you are!"

Dear, darling Doctor Beeching. The UK is still trying to claw its way back to what it had before that fiasco :-/
Disable javascript, problem solved.
Office romances are fine. Even in the military, relationships between coworkers are accepted. It’s part of life. What’s not accepted is hitting on or dating your subordinates. One, it’s inappropriate since the subordinate may feel forced to comply with the advances for the sake of his or her career. And two, even when it works out and isn’t harassment, team dynamics are about to go into the toilet. Who gets the next promotion? Who gets the next good deal assignment? When the boss is dating one of the team members, any decision will be suspect. The whole thing is entirely unprofessional. An office romance between consenting coworkers is different from harassing/dating people you have power over.
Maybe in America... where people (which includes scientists) don't really have a social life. Anyway, if America becomes too hostile for scientists, I'll be happy if Europe and Russia become more attractive to people who don't want deal with bullshit and lawyers.
Titanic Sinks in Real Time
Stop Using Std::endl [video]
> so if I pay, why do they ever give files back?

If they won't give you your files back, future victims will know that the
files are lost regardless of whether the ransom will be paid or not and this
way of extracting money will stop being effective.
No, whenever this is said "80% don't survive the first year" it's specific to the first year. Infant mortality basically
Why should it surprise you? We celebrate people who cloister themselves for 10 years, from the moment they go to college until they're 28, and you wonder why they have such a loose grasp of reality? They haven't participated during the most formative years of their lives.
> If you automate the obfuscation and just stick it into the publishing pipeline, you effectively stopped >0 people with ~0 effort. So why not do it?

Because automated obfuscation can also be solved automatically. Heuristical deobfuscators like JSnice.org are already getting more popular.
I agree that once it has worked out for folks, it's hard to say, "You shouldn't have done that." But aren't there still costs? Everyone else in the company now gets to wonder whether the lower-ranking person's raises and promotions are due to merit or just because they're in a relationship with the boss.

Beyond that, the bigger issue to my eye is that it doesn't always work out. If your boss flirts with you and you aren't interested, that puts you in an awkward position. What if saying no makes them upset with you, or just negatively colors their perception of your work in the future? (Human beings being what we are, it's hard for a negative feeling about someone in one context to be entirely compartmentalized away from our judgement about them in another.)

Also, whether it works out or not: If romantic attachments between supervisors and subordinates are an accepted part of the culture of this workplace, what are the odds that the boss's attraction to you factored into your hire? Are your colleagues aware that the boss is attracted to you? Does that undermine their confidence that you got your position based on talent? Does it undermine your confidence that you got the position for the right reasons? (Might the boss think that you owe them some sort of sexual payoff for the job? There's a comforting thought as you try to do your job.)

I'm not saying that any of those suspicions or worries are justified in most cases! I'm sure that most people do a decent job of separating their work responsibilities and their personal lives, even in these sorts of circumstances. But a culture that accepts supervisor-employee relationships invites this class of concerns in a way that a culture that prohibits them would not. (And maybe my thoughts here really are influenced by thinking about this in a grad student context: Ph.D. advisors have a truly astounding amount of power over their students' futures.)
Here's the thing with Wired:

http://i.imgur.com/ONOt88S.png

Fight Internet coercion -- boycott Wired. Don't link to their articles, don't visit their site, don't accept their coercive behavior. Ad blocking is not a crime, it's a right.
We run a small microsite service for designers and once enabled single page view tracking metrics - we had at the time very few customers and yet manage to smash trough our 50k keen.io event allowance in a single day. Can't imagine it on sonething where books have hundred pages and users running in the million
Only Bernie Sanders can break the power of capitalism in the US
Easy A: Alpha to Beta
It seems like this is an issue with most operating systems. Regarding Python in particular, RedHat/CentOS seems particularly "bad".

My take is that the OS-installed tools, such as git or Python, are generally for use by the system and not for use by me for software development.
Maybe I've spent too much time at a terminal, but I find monospace fonts quite readable and aesthetically pleasing (especially Anonymous Pro, Droid Sans Mono, and Source Code Pro).
Paying per page and requiring exclusivity seem like a recipe for terrible content.
The experimental diet that mimics a rare genetic mutation
Here's a screenshot for anyone who didn't get a chance to see it: http://i.imgur.com/om0vvJV.png
Here's the thing with Wired
Here's the thing with Wired:

http://i.imgur.com/ONOt88S.png

Fight Internet coercion -- boycott Wired. Don't link to their articles, don't visit their site, don't accept their coercive behavior. Ad blocking is not a crime, it's a right.
Yeah, Venezuela is the new target of the media that brown-noses with Washington...
I know some past male coworkers who were general assholes to both men and women. But out of those, the women got it much worse. Like in the article, these men were often in some kind of "good ol' boys" club - friends with important people, etc. So yeah, it happens (IT/CS field).
Broadly true but there are some pretty big provisos.

The 1950s Modernisation Plan was British Railways' biggest misstep. Intended to bring BR out of the steam age, it was hobbled by politics, internal rivalries and short-sightedness: famously, dozens of new locomotive types were commissioned rather than standardising on two or three. To a large extent Beeching was a reaction against that ("you've had your chance") rather than an attempt to develop a successful railway for the 1970s and beyond.

Beeching did make some methodological mistakes (and again, there's much hindsight involved here, but many were pointed out at the time). I think the most infamous is not fully accounting for the traffic that branch lines fed onto main lines - a broad assumption that closing the branch line will save all its costs without impacting on the business elsewhere.

And BR under Beeching had an unwillingness to consider new ways of working that would have made the railway more economical. Eastern Region under Gerry Fiennes had great success with Paytrains - i.e. you remove the staff from stations and expect people to buy a ticket on a train - and in running short multiple units rather than full locomotive-hauled trains. In 2016 this is how most rural railways in Britain are run. But Beeching's BR refused to consider it on a national scale.

(Fiennes' book, "I Tried To Run A Railway", is an engrossing read and worthwhile for anyone interested in this part of history.)