skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Growing up in a very small rural school in Texas, I've seen, and been a victim of, the attitudes surrounding sports. In my school, if you didn't play football or basketball, you weren't a man (track didn't really count - it was just pre-pre-season for football). I played basketball (badly) and did UIL competitions (well), but no one really gave a damn about the scholastic stuff - you couldn't letter in it. Game night would come around and there was literally nothing else to do in town (also, you didn't call anyone during Monday Night Football unless you wanted an earful of colorful invective). The coach was the highest paid, yet least qualified, teacher out of any of our instructors (he usually taught the Health class - we actually got more sex ed in the Ag class (don't laugh)).

Of the colleges I've attended, they spend more money on the sports programs than any two or three other programs collectively, even though very few players would be able to move on to a higher level than college football or basketball.

It's maddening and frustrating to be surrounded by that culture and unable to convince anyone that a little bit more emphasis on academics would pay far greater dividends. I'm not against sports for the health benefits, but beyond that, it's mostly luck and I just don't buy that it's worth it.
I don't think the comment you replied to suggested that gzip is not valuable, only that there's specialized compression available for a special case (alphabetized data).
Web servers have multiple connections so this isn't so applicable. Maybe special purpose ones zipping large datasets on the fly?
I think you're not in sales, then?

Yes, of course there are a few other things to talk about, but even "news and weather" is dangerous, because some think Louisiana is currently showing us the future of global warming, and others think it shows that people who choose not to insure their property should not be rewarded with a bail out, lest there be moral hazard.

Sports is the safe bet.
Gizmodo India... yeah
Turns out the Help To Buy FAQ was edited to include this information recently.
Current site: https://www.helptobuy.gov.uk/help-to-buy-isa/faq/
Site in May: http://web.archive.org/web/20160507184401/https://www.helpto...

I can't find a mention of this information on the site as it was in May, something you would think would be pretty important to clarify.
You don't need "all the money". You need a few hundred to maybe a thousand to make most situations go from really awful to much less awful.
Faster Image Loading
My Dell XPS 13.The high resolution screen and touchscreen have issues. Keyboard still takes fiddling. It's a Linux supported laptop that ships with Ubuntu on the lower definition screen.

So yeah, driver support. It still sucks, just not as bad as 96. Honestly, I remember it better in 96 since the hardware was simpler you could usually get everything to kind of work.
For the non-americans here, could you elaborate what 529 is? It reminds me of something called 401k? No idea what that is either.
I think 529 might be some new http error code...
I use this extensively in schlepping data around for analytics work. Any data that moves over the network going into or out of a data store gets compressed with pigz.
> unless you think that multiple HN users are acting on behalf of the government

It would be naive not to think that multiple HN users are acting on behalf of the government, and I am not talking about the US government only; all governments do this on every popular site.

The question is whether there are enough users, or users with a significant impact so that any of this matters.

My personal opinion is that this is the case here, at least when it comes to stories about the NSA, surveillance, Turkey, Russia, etc. There are quite a few prominent members of the community which I personally consider government shills (and no, I won't name them, make up your own opinion).

I won't even say this is necessarily bad thing. It's inevitable, so don't take it as a criticism of the site and/or community (more than someone can criticise that water is wet).
Obviously. That doesn't change the observation of where commercial sports actually adds value in current society, does it?
How is sports more safe than weather or current events? Not everyone keeps up with sports as a whole and much less keep up with the specific sport you would mention.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
The law has been in place for several years now. Definitely not a scam! If you're in Tehran you can check the place out.

Email me on (my username)@gmail.com and I'll give you more detailed address if you're interested.
Combining Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning to Predict Poverty
Unsurprising; one of the key benefits of Erlang is its robust pattern matching [0]. When you're dealing with protocols, the ability to match specific cases and automatically assign matching variables without convoluted nested spaghetti logic is a huge benefit.

[0] http://learnyousomeerlang.com/syntax-in-functions#pattern-ma...
It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back shortcut (2012)
I love hacker news. Some personal anecdotes soon summaries into neuroscience theory, and sticks to it
Sport exists because it's a simple human desire to push oneself and compete in entertaining physical games and activities. I think the natural instincts at work here transcend anything invented or as simplistic as your description.

Commercial sports often go way too far in their excesses and lack of criticism, but many, MANY people enjoy watching the highest level of sport like any other art. It may not be your cup of tea, but saying it's wasteful to me is the same as tossing out any great artistic or creative endeavour.
Initial fee of 2-3% of the balance to transfer, then 0% APR for a 1 to 1.5 years normally.
The problem is local governments are awful at planning for growth, especially in nice areas (where people actually want to live) as they tend towards no change.

I think the best solution is still planning at a local level but there should be approppriate rules from a higher level to ensure it works - usually including a growth target which must be planned for and minimum densities (allowing for some exceptions) for different kidnds of locations (greenfield, around train stations, etc)

On your other point - in my experience states tend towards the opposite - being developer lobby driven much more than nimby
There are plenty of other forms of entertainment that provide as much or more mental and emotional enrichment than sports, but as a society, we don't put any emphasis on them, or we stigmatize them in some way.

Pretty much any music or drama student has had to endure years of being some derogatory term, only to find out that when they graduate, society expects them to starve, while athletes can get by quite easily just on former glory.
Learn the Cockney Accent with Jason Statham
Agree on that. And it kind of becomes too obvious once you start reading HN regularly.
继续 21 strokes
jixu 8 strokes
Personally I would never skip a subject just because someone might disagree. Are sales people really trained to be as superficial as possible?
Steve Wozniak calls Tesla biggest disruptor
I feel like English speaking people have come a long way to understanding Asian writing systems since 1999.

Edit: After reading the comments here I take that back.
In today's mobile world I'd guess most Kaby Lake boxes are sold to enterprise customers, who care a lot about Windows 7. It's just a guess though.

Porting/using as reference Linux drivers (a lot of which are written by Intel people anyway) to Windows just doesn't seem to happen very often. Technical difficulty aside, which is significant (I've written both Windows and Unix (although not Linux) kernel mode drivers for years), nobody seems to care about such things, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Different sets of APIs[1]. For example Socket, USB are only App APIs. Though I guess they could roll app APIs into extensions… hopefully. Socket API especially.
My First Python Project is a Bot
Fortunately the ground is already a giant ground plane.
Sport exists because it's a simple human desire to push oneself and compete in entertaining physical games and activities.

That explains why people play sports, but I don't think it explains why so many people watch them. Most sports fans don't play the sport themselves.
Yep. We talked to the judge after the case and he said that the punishment could range from probation to 12 years in state prison. The defendant has no criminal history, so I would imagine the sentence will be relatively light.
Abu Dhabi sexy girl +971507475118
Happens all the time. It only takes a handful of people to flag something early for it to get blown down the rankings and effectively consigned to oblivion. Some of the more interesting and technology-focused stories do appear to rub some cohort the wrong way and disappear rapidly.

You could get tin-foil-hatty, and think that the NSA or CIA has a handful of interns that are paid to watch reddit and hn and influence opinion. But it's probably just as likely that there are enough civilians whose livelihoods depend on inconvenient discussions not occurring.
This must be a slow news day.
Put an end to apartment rent for the time during the day when you aren't home
You have a hard time processing Chinese, mr. rocket scientist.
> Who does that? Most people learn only their own language.

In 2002, the AP reported that 66% of children worldwide are bilingual. There are probably fewer people who speak a single language than 2 or more.

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/06/19/language.glance/index.h...
Grew up in Texas and went to a 5A high school that got easy electoral approval for (at the time) a ridiculous stadium, but did give letters for UIL academics and band. In fact, there was a banquet each year for the top 3% GPAs. Everyone at least feigned interest in football, but at least among the college-bound bunch, being good at a sport was a feather in your cap, but not a social necessity.

Our football coach was still grossly overpaid, though.

Life was less pleasant for non-sports guys out in the 2A and 3A districts - I was able to switch to my big high school from one of those semi-rural "white flight" ones, and I'm so glad I did.
You're missing my point. Yea, you could take the time to choose the right formula, find all the right ingredients, buy them, measure the right amounts, mix them, remember to buy more of each when they run out, etc. OR you could just have cases of it automatically shipped to your door each month.

I agree with the "something less than the sum of its parts" sentiment for the original Soylent, but Soylent 2.0 is vastly better, and I hear Coffiest is actually good tasting.
The Go bitch threads are becoming so predictable that they can be autogenerated. Can HN implement a labor-saving device that deletes comments like this and just links to some canonical repository of gripes?
Show HN: The Nostalgia Machine – Get your childhood jam on
Numbers vary depending on the survey and most surveys only include maybe 1/3 of commercially managed hives, to start.

Overwinter losses are probably around your number for the last several years but all-year losses are much higher. The USDA stated for 2013-2014, for example, higher summer losses than winter for the first time, for an annual total of 42.1% *

Regardless of the exact number, my point is still valid in discussing your original question.

[*] http://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2015/...
> But in turn why is it that there are so few syllable sounds in Japanese? It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them.

Please don't make up facts just because they seem plausible to you. A quick internet search reveals that the Japanese language predates any writing system for it:

"Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. During the 5th century they began to import and adapt the Chinese script, along with many other aspects of Chinese culture, probably via Korea. However the Japanese were aware of Chinese writing from about the 1st century AD from the characters that appeared on imported Chinese goods."[1]

Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds before there was any way to write them down, so their syllables can't have been limited by their script (at least initially).

> Just look up Japanese people who have learned English from grade 1 to 12, and see how great their pronunciation is. It's so damn hard for them to make the sounds.

You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese...

[1] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese.htm
Everyone should at least try writing their own OS. Not necessarily their own kernel, or even the lowest-level utilities - things like Fiasco.OC with Genode are decent enough if you're not interested in register fiddling - but their own model for how things could work if they got to design a system for programmers and users to use from scratch.

Capability systems? Network transparent message passing? Dynamic load-balancing of running processes across machines? What if you tried to let users script their workflows in a less ad-hoc way than they can now? How about trying to replace the concept of a filesystem, at the same time as trying to encourage applications to share data with each other?

OS development research died a couple of decades ago, and now we have an entire generation of developers who believe the Linux/POSIX model to be the one true system. But IMHO, that's just a quirk of fate, and a local maxima, and it keeps people in the dark about alternative solutions to their problems. For example, capability system advocates will point out that their system almost implements Docker/containerization by default. There have been tons of experiments with efficient message-passing under microkernels which would likely benefit anyone attempting to design Yet Another IPC Framework in the Linux kernel. And so on and so forth.
Do volunteer work. Start a new hobby. Read things different from what you usually read. Etc.

You need to a) feed your mind/feed your creative engine and b) put yourself in contact with new problems.
Can someone summarize this article and shed some light on how this can be useful.

I tried reading it but I had a hard time just parsing sentences.
Yes that much is known. Then what happens to that money once it's added to the Treasury's balance sheet? How is allocated or apportioned? We are talking about billions of dollars a year. Nobody knows. Its a black box.
> The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system. Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens.

Unfortunately the same system was later exported to other countries and adopted by their citizens, although these countries did not have the same 'free' space. As a consequence the drawbacks of the system are even more perceptible (and the individual benefits are lesser) in these places.
> while the highest ranked men are all quite comfortable

After 2010 I spent some time homeless. Using some of the UK definition for poor I count as poor. I currently rank between 40 and 30 in https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Others on that list have their own experiences - I think Gwern might have some stuff to add.

You might want to stop making assumptions about people you've never met.
Five Actors Who Almost Played Aragorn (2015)
the loose specifications of json types is my biggest gripe as the maintainer of a json library. if json mandated that all strings be representable as utf8 byte sequences (after resolving escapes) and that all numbers be representable as ieee 754 doubles it would be much easier to provide sane and consistent defaults for encoding and decoding. as it is all implementations have to make explicit choices as to how to handle things like escaped strings that represent invalid utf8 byte sequences (like `"\uD800"`) or numbers unrepresentable with a double (like `1e400`). there isn't even any sort of consensus on how to decode a number representable as an integer. some implementations produce integers, others floats
I actually use backspace a lot. I don't know of another hotkey on the keyboard that I can use to go back a page. If I space backspace it seems to alert me to do Alt + Backspace, but that doesn't function either.
Great that they're finally getting around to doing this 3 years after the order was signed.

Shouldn't it be a law that any research done with public dollars should be made available to the public for free? Any costs associated with the publishing should be built into the funding.
Just talk about food, or drink, or the weather; maybe you'll actually learn something about them instead of a common, pointless language that costs the taxpayers billions a year.

Quite the subsidy so that some people can break the damned ice, don't you think?
FWIW, the patents on blinded signatures have come and gone. E-cash based on blinded signatures has the critical property of untraceability that Bitcoin lacks. However, the system must be run by a real-world institution ("bank").

It's quite clear that the existing power structure "wants" to hinder anonymity, whether deliberately for more control via Orwellian crimes like "money laundering", or just emergently where no party wants to get stuck holding the bag in our defective soft-money banking system.

Cash is basically what we've got in the medium term. I've personally gone back to using cash for groceries and other various sundry purchases, because pushing back against the government+corporate surveillance panopticon is the right thing to do. This idea of anonymous e-payments is completely hypothetical until eg a proper replacement for Bitcoin arises that has untracability and can withstand nation-state attacks.

I'm under no illusions about its anonymity though - every note has a serial number right on it. It would be prudent to assume that banks record the serials of bills that are withdrawn and deposited. I don't actually think this is happening at the consumer level just yet, but I'm sure the diktat has been drawn up and is just waiting for the right 24 hour tragedy.
Too late, this article is flagged to.

Thank goodness for http://hckrnews.com/
It's not saying alt+backspace, it's saying alt+left-arrow.
Sort of and sort of not, it is an infinite (for all intents and purposes) a sink for charge, but its conductivity is low and its dielectric coefficient fairly high. As a result its reflectivity to electromagnetic waves is mixed. If it were to become much more conductive, its reflectivity would become much much higher and more uniform. RF energy would just bounce back up into the air on its way.
Maybe it's just the incredibly amount of money to be made as an athlete, or from athletes? Many different people have a very real investment, and the rest have come to have a psychological investment and act as human shields.
> with a $20 billion budget this year and roughly 4% of the US GDP during the Cold War

Just a minor note that it wasn't 4% (of US spending, not of GDP) for the bulk of the Cold War. It looks like it was only above 3% of federal spending for 4 years :

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-b...
Why is it there are 100 articles on how to hire engineers for every 1 article about what to do with them afterwards?
Eleven Reasons to Be Excited About the Future of Technology (Chris Dixon, A16Z)
Twitter says it shuttered 235k accounts linked to terrorism in 6 months
Honeybees are indeed a non-native species to the US, but that doesn't mean there are not feral honeybees. They can survive just fine in the wild without us, as they did before they were domesticated, and they continue to do so as descendants of domesticated apis melifera and other species. This is the same as the wild boar which has existed in a feral state for centuries in the southern US, originally from domesticated pigs brought from Europeans. Calling apis melifera 'not wildlife' does not seem anywhere near accurate.
>There is no vaccine for Guinea worm, because the parasite induces no immune response.

The lack of immune response could be interesting to investigate scientifically for designing implants. I'm sure the Save the Guinea Worm guy would be delighted to play host as you suggest.
> By that logic, we ought to have parentheses around every mathematical expression as well.

Yes we should. Some math notations are simply crazy; they make it hard to follow the semantics.

The one thing that turns me off math is the notation.

A lot of math papers don't explain their notation; that's another problem.
Please don't do this here. We ban accounts that create sockpuppets to violate the guidelines with.
The Holy See (the Vatican) still publishes Acta Apostolicae Sedis (Latin for "Register of the Apostolic See") in Latin. [1]

I don't know if they converse in Latin, but they do write in Latin.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/atti-ufficiali-santa-sede/inde...
Ridiculous is the culture that advocates taking Adderall to get ahead. You should encourage these smart people to stop doing stupid things.
That's a very nice quote. I feel the same way when other people that have my nationality win a sport event or do something that's not common, and I'm supposed to be proud because of it, and he put the name of the country in altitude. I'm like wut? I don't know him, and never will. I seriously don't understand nationalism.
That's so over, as NBC just discovered the hard way. Millennials aren't watching the Olympics in large numbers.[1] In the 18-to-49-year-old age group, the audience has been 25% smaller than the London Olympics four years ago.

NBC CEO Steve Burke described his "nightmare" before the Olympics: "We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent. If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it." That almost happened. Ratings were down 17%. NBC/Comcast has prepaid for the Olympics through 2032. That looks like a bad deal now.

This is happening for other major sports. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53. Baseball is a dying industry.

Of the top 100 high schools in the US, 67% do NOT have a football team.[2]
In 1998, the top 10 had only one school without a football team. This year’s top 10 has seven.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-b...
[2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/americas-most-ch...
> Funny to see that 'Latin' is not in the list. Sure there are plant names with names in 'latin' but not the same Latin as the Romans used.

Seeing as it's actively used by members of the Catholic church and taught all over the world, it's clearly not extinct.

Botanical latin is/was used not only for the names of plants but also for the formal description of the species in taxonomic publications (although, as of a few years ago, this is no longer required). BL is grammatically latin, but with some specialized vocabulary.