skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blame Microsoft for creating this problem. If you have a Windows license from one country and use it elsewhere where the nationally recognized languages are not the same, chances are you cannot set Windows to use your preferred language.

In Windows XP, Microsoft locked each license down to a subset of allowed languages based on the country the license was sold in. You can download a "Language Pack" for any language, but these only provide a half-assed superficial layer of support. A "Language Pack" only translates some aspects of the OS, falling short of being the equivalent to choosing that language as a native OS setting with the appropriate license.

A quick Google shows that "Language Packs" are still a thing in Windows 7, Vista, and 10. Perhaps they now offer complete support, or perhaps they are still a crippled aftermarket solution refusing to meet the expectations of any paying customer.

tldr; Many people in non-English countries are using Windows' licenses bought from English markets (such as the US). Even if these users know where to change the OS's language setting, odds are their native language isn't listed as an option.
Julia is better than Python for a lot of things - basically when you can't vectorise your algorithm and don't feel like writing C++.
IKVM has saved my ass a number of times. The ability to, at times, give up on the .NET ecosystem and peek into the Java ecosystem for suitable open source is fantastic.

We once had a project where some genius long ago had mandated that parts communicate via FTP. Eg one program uploads a file, another program monitors the directory. Total clusterfuck, so we wanted reliable automated tests. Turns out that doing an FTP server in .NET is pretty difficult. Full-fledged commercial libraries exist, but we just wanted a stub for testing.

IKVM, Apache Mina FtpServer solved it in two hours for us. I suspect many .NET shops use IKVM this way.

Sad to see it go, but it must've been an incomprehensibly huge one man hobby project for 15 years! If I were Jeroen I'd quit a long time ago :-)

Let's hope some shops get sufficient value out of it to maintain a fork. Jeroen if you read HN, thanks!!
Docker compose its unbelievably good.
This is pretty insanely awesome. One of the things this should enable would be a transpiler that could compile the spec into an LLVM or GCC backend automatically. Pretty cool to design a new architecture and then automatically generate a bunch of programming languages for it.

Now if we had a peripheral specification like this we could auto generate to a given HAL and that would pretty much make the instruction set architecture completely irrelevant to systems folks building things.
How Google Earth generates 3D images
This is not an easy market to disrupt... the barrier to entry for manufacturing a $200,000 tractor or $500,000 combine is high, and the market is not that large.

This isn't like coming up with a better lightbulb that cost $2 to manufacture and will sell millions. And while the large farms may cycle through their equipment in 5 years, a small farmer may keep his in operation for 20+ years, so there's not a whole lot of equipment turnover for an upstart to break into.
I wonder why they don't just pump the heated water back down into the aquifer. That would make it basically an open-loop geothermal heat pump.
The government could change the economics with a tax on cooling down the servers with water so I believe the morality can beat pure economics.
Yes, this is my new IJDGAF policy. The phone call was a losing proposition from the beginning.

However if the FBI and NCFTA were /genuinely/ interested in disclosing this in their forum for other banks then maybe my phone call with them may have been a win-win. But I think they were not genuinely interested.
I'm generally skeptical of YAML-based languages(YAMLangs as I say), but this seems to be one of the more readable YAMLangs I've encountered. I especially like how the author(s) solved the variable length/repeat fields situation.
Modifying a data: url is a feature not a bug.
and also a terrible option for non 12 factor apps (i.e. anything with hard dependencies on the underlying system or other apps, which many do)
> If I, as a citizen, register as a member of Party A, and vote in their primaries for candidates that lean toward my preferences--and then, come election time, go to the polls and vote for the candidate of Party B, as I intended to from the beginning--am I participating honestly in the political process? Or am I pretending to be a member of Party A so I can influence Party A to reduce the difference between the parties?

Political parties do not exist in the governing structure of the U.S. As proof, I'll ask you to please go read the Constitution, then come back and point out the parts about political parties. No rush; I'll wait.

Back? Ok, so now hopefully you realize that in the U.S., we elect people, not parties. Partisan primaries, as elections funded by the government, should not even exist at all--they are a corruption of the system.

So hand-wringing about how people vote in primaries and interact with political parties is silly. Political parties can't be corrupted. There is nothing pure to preserve.
Apples and oranges, really. Wind/solar/gas are best suited for peak production. Nuclear is best suited for base load production. While technology can change down the road, they currently aren't directly in competition with each other.
Li-ion battery inventor says new solid state batteries will arrive in 2-3 years
When everybody standardizes on possibly the worst implementation available for that platform, then it is worth diversifying.
Q: Assuming your new battery tech scales easily and economically for mass production and given the intensifying demand for such tech, when would you expect to see it supplant lithium-ion as the battery technology of choice for manufacturers?

JBG: It will take competent battery manufacturers about two to three years to develop a marketable product. Once the technology is demonstrated by one, others will fall into line very rapidly.

...

Q: How do you respond to critics of the new battery technology? When can we expect to see them hit the street?

JBG: We respond by demonstrating the concepts in individual coin cells. We do not do the development work. We believe that practical batteries can be marketed in about 3 years.
The original HN post in 2012. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 / https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia
If there is a less worthwhile thing for us to be doing with potable water, I can't think of it.

China recently is cracking down on golf courses in order to preserve water. I imagine the game of golf is not actually worth the cultural heritage and entertainment it provides if you want to think about the water it uses. At least the Chinese government has concluded this and it's facing a severe potable water shortage issue in the future.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/china-golf-water-land-shortages...

As well... water balloons and water guns? Baths as opposed to showers? The list goes on. Google's ads provide a service the general public finds useful.
I saw the comments here describing pricing, but all I saw was a slideshow with no text and no pictures of the cabin. I finally viewed the source and realized I had to scroll. No one else was baffled? Clearly it's time for bed...
To be fair, one was a lamb which was just following the adult, and was still alive and healthy by the end of the video.
Does anyone know what the point is of wasting floor space on a porch when the actual interior is so small? Seems to me that type of floor space that is only sometimes useful would be one of the very first things to go.

I love seeing these cool concepts for tiny houses, but why not use every available bit of floor space?
I find LED screens hard to read on for long periods of time, but I don't have this problem with e-readers.

At this point, I think the attachment that people have to analog books is purely emotional. There is no practical reason to have books over e-readers.

People mention things like the feel of the book, the feel of the paper in your hands, etc. Well I don't particularly like the way paper feels, particularly old paper when it starts to change color and get stiff and slightly misshapen. But even if you do like that sort of thing, in the end that's not what you're after, you don't read books for the feel of the paper or the smell or whatever, you read books because you want a good story or good information.

Yes some nostalgia books might be good for paper format for collectors or people who have preferences (like those people who like to vinyl instead of MP3s , but for ever-day, practical reading, digital readers are better in nearly every respect. They are cheaper, they have adjustable fonts, you can make a backup copy of the book and store it in the cloud so you don't have to worry about ever losing your book. You can adjust the font and font size. You can tap twice on any word and instantly get the dictionary definition. If you have a kobo you can save we articles on the kobo for later reading. It automatically keeps your page for you. Bookshelves take up an enormous amount of room, having that in the space of a small notebook is an advantage. It's much more environmentally friendly. By any measure e-books are better.

The only mildly sensible detraction I've seen on here is the inability to show off your bookshelf or share books, which frankly I don't care about. I don't care about showing off to other people, that's not why I read, and I can share books just fine without pulling it off a bookshelf and showing it.
Infecting IOT to protect them
Thanks for sharing, I remember seeing this before. Fun to read again!
one of my favorite paradoxes is Buridan's Bridge [1]

"Socrates wants to cross a river and comes to a bridge guarded by Plato.

Plato: Socrates, if in the first proposition which you utter, you speak the truth, I will permit you to cross. But surely, if you speak falsely, I shall throw you into the water.

Socrates: You will throw me into the water."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_bridge
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175206 and marked it off-topic.
This is good thinking. But you need iron tight wording when spelling this stuff out.

In your contact with companies you should say "Failing to fix this issue would be a violation of reasonably assumed security practices as required in LAW..."
This is really cool!

Python is my usual language of choice, but recently I picked up Go for some data processing because there was a lot of benefits to parallelising the task - which Go made easy.
If it works that way, shouldn't we be able to look at an industry and see that happening? I can't think of a good example, though I may not be thinking hard enough.

There are definitely open source alternatives to many many things, but how often are they the ones capturing most of the market?
I don't know about security but the fact that the java installer tries to install crapware or change my browser settings doesn't do much for its reputation.
Science is the process of learning how the universe works. It is not anthropocentric.

What we choose to do with that knowledge is anthropocentric because we are humans.

Science can tell us how fire works. We still have to decide what to do when our house catches on fire.
Why not?

It doesn't harm Apple's competitiveness. Apple doesn't publish source to the hire level OS X frameworks.
We have the same setup at our place. FTP communication isn't a "clusterfuck", it is the tried and tested communication method between any two large companies that aren't banks. To us, it is the only highly available and reliable one. Web services have downtimes and re-sends. Our partners practically never turn off their FTP machines.

The only difference at our place is that we assume FTP works and do our tests on the file system. We don't test whether FTP works. We know it does.
Do you have any engineers that take public transportation every day? My current company has a dedicated team to maintain a developer VM that runs on our Macs, and that has made my life much better. I don't need internet access to write and test code (except to google/SO, of course). I can also afford to take the slow train (Caltrain is twice as slow if you take the slowest one).

If your commuting employee size is low, I guess it's not important enough problem to solve. I (and a few others here) would love to see a blog (or repo) showing off your tool!
This is awesome. You should make this a service. I'd pay a few bucks a month to get rid of Disqus.
Definitely more substantial, but I'll note that "50k USD more" means "triple the price".
But apple doesn't want to sell used or refurbished phones, only shiny new ones.
>To which the response is who are Google to influence how or what people think?

But they are already doing just that. I watched a few Youtube videos related to Quantum Mechanics and my recommended queue was flooded with videos full of pseudo scientific nonsense.

It took me considerable effort in having these weird videos no longer recommended to me. I think we can just be honest about what caused it, it's a lack of intelligence in the sorting algorithm, that currently isn't able to distinguish between true and false statements.

I understand there are areas where this line is vague, but if I watch a few videos about astronomical events, why am I getting recommendations about aliens visiting earth?
> Although not in this debate, I am stepping in to point out that doesn't mean a thing to support your point.

From a research report from a local university: The institution of National Service is largely regarded as a social equaliser, which embodies fairness, equality and identity. More than 94% of respondents agree that Servicemen from different family backgrounds are treated equally during National Service, and that National Service policies are applied consistently to everyone in similar situations. [1]

In other words, it doesn't matter if you are the son of a millionaire or a janitor, in the army, they treat you the same. Beyond that it forces people to meet people from all sorts of socio-economic levels. And National Service extends until you are around 40 years old, whereby every year they may call you up to serve alongside CEOs', professionals, blue collar workers etc in the army.

Singapore is a very rich country, and it is inevitable that there are the very rich, and the less wealthy. What the government has done is made a very affordable world-class education system that allows everybody an equal chance to equip themselves to succeed in life.

[1] http://docplayer.net/17167540-Institute-of-policy-studies-su...
Yes I think so.

Even if it isn't, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that its actually true.

The bit about emojis in particular however seems completely out of touch.
Out of curiosity would you mind providing a few examples?
The article does not cite where Deere says that.

Cisco has been doing this for years. They're worse than Deere; if you buy a used Cisco router, you don't have the right to run the software. You have to go through the "Cisco Hardware Inspection and Software Relicensing Program" to get a new license.[1]

[1] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/hw-sw-relicensing-prog...
You're confusing your own motivations with the motivations of others.

Why do I read literarary works? For the information inside.

Why do I read physical books?
I like all of the things you mentioned people shouldn't care about. The look, the feel, the physical manifestation, and most of all the smell of a stale book after a few decades. It's lovely.

Books fundamentally serve a different purpose for me.

Is this preference arbitrary? Yes. Is there anything at all wrong with it? No. The only thing wrong with mass produced books is the carbon footprint. These days we don't even need to cut trees for decent cellulose paper so the argument of deforestation people like to use is only a matter of current industry practices and not the book itself.

Instead of condemning the preferences of myself and others, why not try to understand us?
Ask HN: Any lawyers/accountants I can speak with?
I am currently conducting some user-investigation for an idea that I currently have; the idea focuses on entity registration and compliance (areas that I have prior experience in).

I was wondering if I could speak with any lawyers/accountants who would be willing to share their experiences.

Please let me know if this is possible - thanks!
Yup, and longer. Heavy equipment is built to a different standard, our Compact Utility Tractor is ~30 years old and still going strong.
Thank you and I am sorry that my blog has offended your browser. Would you like to recommend a better hosting service I could use instead of the wildly antiquated Blogger?

I would like to migrate to my own domain with Jekyll or something. But I would not look forward to implementing commenting and trackbacks even though the blog is pretty modest any way in terms of using those features.
Some web users think they have a "right" to say how websites work.

Big sites take countless man hours to produce and maintain.

For the site I've worked on for almost a decade 95 of 100 user comments are totally off base and they don't understand the basics of how things work.
IKEA has 25-year warranties for their kitchens (which I guess counts as part of a house?).
I kind of better like the current Linux community without a backwards standard body, where everyone can write their own stuff and use it. It's just like early flight where anyone with a bike workshop could build a flying machine out of bicycle parts if they wanted to.
Not enough quality control
> I assume you need to own the land it's placed on, so how could it be used for vacationing?

I suppose it's just for people that can afford that. Like any beach house or holiday home.
IKVM exists because library offerings kinda suck in C#, not the other way around. I find it more likely that people will just write these applications in Java.

MS has a long, dark history with open source including attempting to kill both Linux and Java. Many of us have forgiven but will never forget.
I enjoyed this free Edx course:

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:Microsoft+DAT208x+...

Their is some pratical exercises that you do in your browser that really helps to get the grasp of it.

Don't miss Pandas, they are really cool!
> Deere's just reiterated that position to a US Copyright Office inquiry on the future of the law, joined by auto manufacturers (but not Tesla)...

Bravo, Tesla.
How H-1B visa program has become gateway for companies to replace US tech staff
That's such a great point.

The key to finding good employees is finding out what people are truly good at and the key to productivity is letting them do that.
Yes, you are correct. I am guilty as charged.

Motivation was clickbait and/or fear that people would not understand the latter.
I'd agree that, in general, you shouldn't necessarily aim for the same level of polish in feedback that you would in a piece for publication. Here, though, I think the excessive length of his comment undermines the credibility of his feedback and contributes to the sense that he's piling on the criticism.
Wait a little to buy it. There is a new edition in the oven.
Bangkok is Banning Streetfood
"Property" is a big term. This is about IP, not chattles or "real" property. The queen is human and certainly can own those types of property. You will need more than lawyers to tell her otherwise.
The ecosystem did not survive the Chicxulub event.

"Ecosystem" is not shorthand for "life exists on Earth somewhere." An ecosystem is a particular state of the dependencies between life forms.

The ecosystem that existed before the big asteroid strike was thoroughly and rapidly destroyed; a new ecosystem developed afterward. That's fine from a general "life finds a way" perspective, but it sucked for the sauropods, who went extinct.

EDIT: if you want a sense of why the indirect effects of anthropogenic climate change might be bad, look at the social unrest reacting to a couple million people migrating out of Syria. What do you think it's going to be like when about a billion people have to migrate inland due to sea level rise?
The smog generated by burning coal gives the air a rather obnoxious brown tinted reminder of human presence.
Ask HN: Architecture design for a mobile live streaming app (ex: Periscope)?
There seem to be many options for handling live streaming. From my research, popular protocols include RMTP, RSTP, HLS. Popular solutions include Wowza or Tokbox.

What are the key tradeoffs to consider regarding latency, cost, scalability, etc?

Are there any open source solutions?

What is the best way to integrate with a traditional backend (ex: Django) which will provide non-streaming data & logic?
To me it's more like wanting your city to be a clean place. You see some trash, you pick it up and throw it in a trash can, even if it's not yours.

When people have clearly wrong beliefs (e.g. a square moon), it might not matter all that much to you, but they might harm someone else by spreading the trash, or worse, connect with like-minded people and create a real danger for others (legislate pi to be 3). That mind of trash is no less a part of your environment than the physical street, and I think it's a very good thing if you make an effort to pick up the trash, even if it's not yours.
Those people existed before the Internet was widely available. They just shared information via books, leaflets etc. Arguably I'd say the Internet makes it less sustainable as they can't help but be exposed to contradictory beliefs.

However it also makes it easier for them to organize and spread their ideas...

I'd love to see data on wether this is a net gain/negative.
It's kind of like this; If I could find a guy who could build Ferrari engines and build the chassis and hammer the bodies out of sheet metal and paint them and upholster them and sell them for what I want for them I could make a fortune.
Told you so. Give a couple more years to .NET Core et al guys in reign, and they will totally destroy .NET. J Duffy I'm looking at you.
>...Nuclear costs are notoriously high,

No, according to the US Energy Information Administration the levelized cost of nuclear has been comparable or less than coal (without the massive negative externalities of coal)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Back in the day MS created a propriety native code interface for their "Java for windows" runtime instead of supporting JNI. Sun sued them for this and other BS and eventually MS settled out of court for somewhere over $2,000,000,000 . Basically, MS got caught red handed trying to break cross platform compatibility of java applications.

After this they tossed their Java runtime, added ActiveX to IE and started pretending that Java didn't exist. I'm not surprised at all that MS doesn't go near this project
Wouldn't an easier, scalable version of this be some sort of Trunk Club but specifically for high quality socks?
Maybe it depends on where they are? I think the ones in Iowa and Kansas look great, but that might be because there's not much else to look at. And if the old-and-rural endless plains meet towering-tech-wonder-behemoth aesthetic isn't your thing, there's so much nothing there that you can just drive a while and not see them (or anything else) and have that, too.