skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why aren’t bots selling your house yet?
I got into BBSes when I was in maybe 8th grade. Because we didn't have call waiting, and thus it would tie up the phone line, I could only do BBSing at night. Until I got a long extension cable from Radio Shack, I had to move the computer ( Commodore 64 ) to the dining room table every night when everyone had gone to sleep and I could finally BBS!

I wish there was some way to convey the excitement of getting online back then, and to recapture that magical feeling. Try to imagine sitting at your dining room table in the dead of night, and it's completely silent, except for the (muted) sounds of your modem. And then holding your breath in the hopes that the BBS answers, and you don't get a busy signal. And then finally when those colorful characters started scrolling across the CRT screen... It was magical... I don't have any other word for it.
The interesting thing about git is, that while it is heavily criticised for begin difficult, it is such a huge success.

Most of the time, criticism of git can be summarized as "Bad user experience", which is often blamed on git exposing its implementation details. I.e. most git criticism proposes that the backend of the VCS should be "private" and the user should see a carefully designed UI, that is optimized for workflows.

I think we don't need to redesign git in such a way, for the mere fact, that we already have a mature, distributed version control system that has a carefully designed UI and has a core that is opaque to the user: mercurial

In fact, given mercurial's age, the availability of github-like hosting services (bitbucket offered mercurial hosting for years) raise a very important question, that I would like "git-reformists" to answer as part of their critique: Why has git won more market share than mercurial?

My feeling is, that part of what makes git hard to new users is a "killer feature" for intermediate and advanced users. I.e. having a basic understanding of how git manages its data makes hardly leaves me with situations and repository states that I cannot resolve. Whereas in mercurial, I feel pretty much lost when I want to do something that has not been an implemented workflow.

Maybe, now that we know a lot more about DVCS workflows than we did at the time when mercurial and git were young, a new workflow-oriented VCS might make better workflow choices. Until then, I happily stay with git.
IIRC, they changed their policies and APIs to being much more restrictive against 3rd party apps. Something to do with rate limits maybe.
Being obsessed with the MBTI personality theory for months
Exactly. Which begs the question of why bother with the decentralization part at all of long tail / unpopular content?
It doesn't. You have to provide the ROM files yourself.
Stop Believing the Lies: There Is NO SUCH THING as “Fat-Burning Foods.”
Are you aware if eMMC firmware is signed?
JavaScript. Hands down.

And here is my reasoning. I was trying to learn Python btw and can agree, it appears to be an easy language to learn, but being as I gave up on it I can't comment further comparatively. What I can say is why I changed and you can decide if my reasoning suits you too.

Firstly JavaScript is super easy to visualize. When you code something in Python it remains something abstract. Like how do I take data from a form? Well you need to build a front end (HTML et al) then you need to install stuff, run an Apache server, etc. This is all just to get some visual clue to coffee you wrote.

Secondly, there is largely one version of JS and it's the JS that every browser uses, sure there is ES6, but 90% of the videos out there are on the previous versions that make up basically everything that's not bleeding edge.

Python has two distinct versions and they are different and the books that are designed for newbs don't (usually) communicate which version they rely on and teach. Totally crap if you are new and forced to make a largely random, but substantial decision right away. Frustrating too when you buy (and realize afterwards) that your two beginner books that your are pouring through are teaching two different versions that aren't compatible in many many ways. That's hard on a new user for sure.

Lastly there are a ton and I mean like maybe hundreds of thousands of videos and learning resources on JS. It's crazy! Plus there are some seriously big organizations that are sinking some serious bills into adopting and extending it in the server and browser. For instance Facebook and Google; mortal enemies, even collaborated on a platform that materially solves problems for the developer community.

It's crazy what's going on in the language and from a search point of view it literally crushes everyone else.

Honestly I'll tell you this; I don't care a JS about JS, but I am keen to learn and I'm super keen to make progress and to me JS seems to embody the now and the nearish future for many careers and opportunities in web/software development.

Also FYI you can build stuff fast with Ruby on Rails (RoR), but as was pointed out, there is lots to know afterwards. That being said I'm learning the pieces of software language structures eg. For loops, etc through JS then I'm onto RoR so I can launch some basic ideas very quickly and see what happens ;)

Good luck in your choice and hey don't sweat which one you pick, but don't be an outlier either, not for language number 1.
After years of being increasingly hostile to 3rd party developers, Twitter finally decided that you needed their permission to have more than 100k users of your twitter client. That announcement was bundled with tightened rate limiting and stricter controls over how you could display tweets. This was the final stake in the coffin for many Twitter clients.

https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-o...
Alfa Ebooks Manager: EBook Library Organizer
See, I do believe from what I have read that the icelandic banker's convictions were mostly a political move to keep the very small (and thus very easily rally-able) Icelandic population happy after their savings (which always do carry a risk - that's why you get interest) were lost in the icesave collapse.

Just like them essentially declaring bankrupcy and not paying their debts afterwards was.

And I do not think criminal cases should be influenced about what result is politically preferable.
Simulating a brain is not aliens. Or maybe it is an I'm hopelessly naive. Lots of smart people are working on simulating brains and there estimates are that's it's not that far off from being able to simulate an entire brain in a computer, not at the atom level but at least at the functional level of neurons. At the moment there's no reason to believe they're wrong
The comment I replied to was marked [dead], which usually indicates a ban. It's alive now since I vouched it. Is there another way to know?
I think that would work just as well and would have been my first idea too, but IMHO it's kind of an elegant solution to do it this way. The recipient can very easily find the exact version used and they don't have to maintain that information somewhere else. Especially if they add specific patches -> I know that they often modify the game binaries, but maybe they have custom DOSbox changes as well.
You can auto-unlock an Android phone with the Pebble via stock Android. (no passcode required with a Bluetooth connection to a certain device)
I had a very awkward date there once; at least I thought it was a date -- she brought a friend.

That and what I remember to be uncomfortable cafe chairs and super sweet Turkish coffee, (and possibly egregiously large mediocre hummus plates) will live on in my memory for a bit longer apparently. Makes me so nostalgic!

This also reminds me of the watch store by the Harvard Square T main exit closing suddenly -- the owners were reportedly spotted on planes to another country with large suitcases of watches.. So in the canon of Harvard Square shop closings, Algiers is probably not in the top 10. Still, an institution.

EDIT: The Handa family story is pretty interesting. Boston Globe had an update in 2012: https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/04/21/return-alpha...
Grand Rapids Art Museum. Anyone?
The European (PAL) ones are sharp. The American (NTSC) ones are accurate (or very very slightly flat).
Though this isn't necessarily true if the trademark was originally a made-up word. You couldn't open a burger restaurant called "Microsoft Burgers" and expect to get away with it because Microsoft isn't in the restaurant business.
Childhood mortality has to have imposed a tremendous selective pressure, on both the immune system and general congenital defects. I've been reflecting on what lifting this selective pressure means. Also on the fact that this lifting is nonuniform across cultures -- infants in less-developed nations are still subject to most of these effects.

That said: most of the improvement is through public health measures (clean drinking water, sewerage systems, municipal waste collection) and nutrition. Heroic measures are very much the outlier. That may be an even stronger argument against them -- other than as a learning experience, the resources they consume relative to providing much more basic, and effective, outcomes interventions is difficult to defend.

From the CDC: Infant mortality in the US <1 year was "up to" 30% in 1900. Maternal mortality was around 0.8% in 1900.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm
It's not what the article is about. The article is obviously talking about native ES6 features, otherwise it would advertise es7 features as well and advise to use transpilers.
Gram is a stupid word to trademark. There is a lot of companies that is named <something>gram including an appliance manufacturer in Denmark that has existed from around the same time the telephone was invented. Not to mention that it is an SI unit and commonly used word.
Yes, but in theory some sort of MAC could stop it from accessing important files, or anti-virus could detect it and stop it too. But once the password leaves the computer, it's going to take a lot more effort to mitigate the damage. Also, your browser is on your side for protecting against malware, so for example if you have Flash disable, that's a whole vector you can just ignore.
Apart from killing their third-party ecosystem, I think Twitter's biggest failure has been their inability to monetize their huge celebrity and brand base, and I wonder if this partly has to do with their "verified account" system. How to charge celebrities/brands without pissing everyone off?

Top-tier celebrities and brands can and would easily fork out high fees to use Twitter. But Twitter can't just charge some blanket fee to verified accounts because right now, "verified accounts" are not exclusive enough. They also include "key influencers", bloggers, industry people, other hangers-on (let's call them Group B) and they can't/won't support the high fees and would revolt.

Twitter could try and create a new way to categorize celebs/brands, but that would confuse things and may make Group B users feel less elite: so they'd revolt as well.
Many things that emerged at Facebook during recent years can be attributed to the influence of Haskell. React, Immutable.js, GraphQL, etc. Haskell is extremely powerful but allow me to rephrase Euclid "There's no royal road to functional programming". If you want something more pragmatic, yet still quite expressive and powerful - try Clojure and Clojurescript. Especially Clojurescript - it's probably one of the best languages out there to use for front-end and mobile app development.
> That means if you are "stable", and the central bank has its way, you are actually shrinking at 2% a year.

No, inflation means, in aggregate, the price businesses charge goes up.
wrt. Telegram, wouldn't it be kinda like prior art?
Man those were the days. I was just barely old enough to be able to get into them before they died. Anyone remember the door games?

I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases.

And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...
> Why has git won more market share than mercurial?

Because Git is used by Linux and was designed by Linus.

Those facts alone are good enough for most people to choose git over something else, not the technical ones.

Just like UNIX and JavaScript, technically better is not always what wins.
Love this post. If you're ever in Austin you have a fellow mystic to jam with. Keep on with the good vibes man.
Yeah I don't feel like I lose because of Torvald, Stallman and van Rossum...
For anyone else who didn't know that "normal" flight from JFK to Heathrow is just over 8 hours.

Googling for this helped put the sub 3 hour 1996 concorde flight into perspective.
Props. Didn't know you were no longer involved. Sale? Is this why it got super expensive?
But there's nothing special about the 1k signal either, because a second is arbitrary. The original signal might have been 878 Hz instead (or equivalently 1000 cycles / 1.139 seconds which is no more or less privileged than 1000 cycles / 1.000 seconds) and then the gating to 439 is easy.
No, no, no. Bill Clinton got the grocery prices correct when asked in 1992. There was folklore that George HW Bush didn't know how much milk cost, but that was not confirmed.
See
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=89861
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/110131351/
This computer (or one very similar to it) was described in the great WW2 submarine yarn _Run Silent, Run Deep_. Amazing to see the actual manual for it so many years after imagining it while reading the book. The book is well worth a read, although as you'd expect it does have 1940s-era white-people sensibilities about race and gender.
I second using Mercurial as they've also got selective commits in both simpler and more flexible way: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/CrecordExtension#For_Merc...
>you can never remove things. It wouldn't make sense to do so.

This seems like one of the few instances where that might not be true. Does a quick screenshot deserve to take up space on IPFS forever?

It seems like an optional expiry timestamp could be useful.
I would pay money to buy a image to text software (text recognition) if it was as good as Microsoft's and I could run it batch on my images.
Katie McGinty’s Controversial Past
That's pretty uncanny, swift has a fairly sloc to time ratio too. The memory usage although is significantly less.
AFAICT there's 2 paths to A.I.

Path 1 is understand how the brain organizes info. Recreate those structures with algorithms. This path is 100+ years away

Path 2 is just simulate various kinds of neurons with no understanding of how they represent higher level concepts. This path is < 20 years away by some estimates

You probably believe path #2 is either also 100+ years away or won't work. I happen to think it will work the same way physics simulations mostly work. We write the simulation and then check to see if it matches reality. We don't actually have to understand reality at a high level to make the simulation. We just simulate the low level and then check if the resulting high level results match reality. It certainly seems possible A.I. can be achieved by building only the low-level parts and then watching the high-level result.
Well, yea. One of them is an actual good candidate and the other is Trump. The media is just trying to make them look competitive so people keep reading stories on the election.
WebVR coming to Servo, next-generation modular browser runtime
Here's my funny BBS story: I was a heavy user in the early 90s, but in 1994 I got recruited into the military and was sent to a remote corner of the world where we had one official-business-only phone line for about 250 people, so no BBS scene. I came back in 1997, met up with an old friend, and inquired about where to get a current BBS list for the town. And of course he laughed and said there was no such thing anymore. So basically, from my perspective, the online experience went from BBS's, telnet, and FTP to full-blown web pages overnight.
Nope - the obvious choice for a functional language on JVM is not Scala and not Kotlin - it's Clojure.
January 9, 2001: "Apple Introduces iTunes — World’s Best and Easiest To Use Jukebox Software"

"download songs to popular MP3 players from Rio and Creative Labs with plug-and-play simplicity with no extra software or complicated driver installations required."

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/01/09Apple-Introduces-...
No, the Scoville test is based on a comparison of diluted samples. Trials are rerun with increasing dilution until the testers cannot detect the sample, and the level of dilution determines the score.
Semi-relevant... It's a little bit weird reading these historical articles sometimes and realizing <X> actor in the story is dead, in this case, Jobs.
I think this comes down to making sure your advantage is inhouse but outsource the other stuff.

For the vast amount of companies where ML isn't in any way core, this is great. For example we've got a little internal app that includes a profile picture.

Currently we pre-crop photos before uploading. Obviously not the best solution. Putting together a little javascript thingy to allow the user to crop is somewhere deep in the backlog. Now this exists I'm very tempted to implement a little feature to auto crop around the face on upload. Nothing there to steal, definitely not worth rolling our own ML system to do it but a very nice thing to now be available in our toolkit.
Personally I wish the MacBook had 2 ports,

Me too, but I have come to appreciate the whole product experience. I went from the MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook 12". I cycle to work nearly daily and take my MacBook in my backpack. Yesterday I had to connect my wife's MacBook Air 13" and then I realized that I forgot how heavy it is.

If you need a laptop that is so light and thin, something's got to give. If removing a few ports and a CPU fan brings you there, it's like it is.

(Before someone says that you have the extra weight of an USB-C to display/USB-A adapter: the MacBook 12" charger is also smaller and lighter than the MacBook Air charger.)
Haha yeah I could have explained better. I wrote code to play a solid tone where I could adjust the frequency via keyboard input. I played around until it matched what I heard internally. I have some musical training and know I can do that pretty well.
I feel like a takeover is only a matter of time. If you're Alphabet or Facebook you're probably interested (I'd say Alphabet should be more interested, for Facebook it's probably mostly a blocker play). The question is how long do you let them "rot" to drive down the acquisition price?
Right, but at least "Windows" was somewhat unique in the area of computer operating systems.

The word "gram" is much less unique in the areas of communication and delivery. After all, it's derived from telegram. Instagram is not only something-gram communication service. (And it's not the only insta-something either)
It's ok to resubmit stories after some time has passed, but this one was submitted four weeks ago with significant discussion alongside it. I'm totally ok with stories like this being resubmitted after 3-6 months, but one month is too soon by my mark.

Resubmitting stories that don't get initial traction is fine, but this post had a lot of traction when it was submitted last time so it doesn't fit in that category.

> I don't think this would be considered a dupe.

Have a look here, dang clarifies what is a dupe in this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 . It should clear up why mods marked this story about german nuclear scientists as a dupe. Plus, the try submitting http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf and you'll see it gets caught by the dupe detector.

Note that I didn't mark this post as a dupe, the site moderators did that.
That's completely wrong. Its a lost cause to try to explain economic theory on a forum but suffice to say that central banks factor completely arbitrary variables to get the number they want.

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaitem.htm

>The CPI is calculated using prices for a fixed basket of goods and services through time. While the basket is periodically revised to reflect changing consumer expenditures, some items being priced in the sample come and go from the marketplace, making collection of these prices from month to month difficult. When an item is no longer available in the marketplace, a similar replacement item is selected. Often there are no similar items from which to choose, and as a result, a less comparable item is selected, potentially introducing quality change and an associated price differential into the index. The hedonic quality adjustment method removes any price differential attributed to a change in quality by adding or subtracting the estimated value of that change from the price of the old item.

That toilet paper you used to buy costs twice as much? Well the FED says the new toilet paper is of a higher quality, so it is actually counted as being lower priced then the toilet paper you bought for half as much last year.
One thing you usually can't do, though, is rearrange walls. While very much a proponent of renting vs. buying (I'm in Germany), sometimes the layout of flats is atrocious. We have a tiny kitchen with barely enough space for a single person to work in, a gigantic living room with mostly windows and no walls to put shelves against, and despite it being 90 m² it's only three rooms which will likely prove problematic once we have kids above a certain age.

Sometimes I wonder how such layouts are created. Presumably by people who don't have to live there. Or live a very different life (eating out vs. cooking, maybe). That's one thing you can do better when building a house, although when buying one you could probably change it at great expenses as well.
Hacking GSM A5 crypto algorithm by using commodity hardware
11 to do list tools for more productivity
Netflix Culture (2009)
How do you reconcile this view with a life or death situation where you must kill or be killed?
Rich culture is better than poor culture when you're rich. When you're poor the decision of the poor are often more rational.
> The interesting thing about git is, that while it is heavily criticised for begin difficult, it is such a huge success.

I think it's only difficult to use if the company/people using Git don't have good Git policy.
Artmarq: Bloomberg for art business in making
> (stocks and bonds, which enable companies to raise money to start new projects, create jobs, etc).

Interestingly, us Germans do not like those much either - mostly because of the associated risks and the Notion that "the small guy" cannot win that lind of game.

There was ... some enthusiasm about the stockmarket in the 1990s, but after the Dotcom-Crash and many people who invested in "save, large, local businesses" like the postal service or the Telekom losing a lot of money, that has waned.
Chinese firm admits its hacked products were behind massive DDoS attack
Show HN: Foodglad.com
Foodglad.com is a small passion project I just built. As I am getting older, I think it is time to be more aware of what I eat and how active i keep in the next part of my life.

How to use: Basically, just start typing in a food, choose one from the choices offered, and find out some useful/interesting ways to burn off the calories.

There is also a 'Five health stats in 1' calculator page (http://www.foodglad.com/health-stats), and lists of healthy food for various ailments. And there is a variation on the Food calorie burn calculator (http://www.foodglad.com/food-calorie-burn-calculator) as well as a METS value finder tool (http://www.foodglad.com/mets-value-exercise).

I hope Foodglad is of some use to you all.
Yeah, I mean the space marine runs at something like 80mph, gravity is the least of the realism problems.