skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, that makes sense to me.. SO tries very hard not to be a forum and therefore everything that resembles footers, signatures etc. should be left out. On SO you thank people by up-voting and accepting answers, not commenting. Questions should be as "clean" as possible, they are not emails or letters. They should be free of that type of "social etiquette". Or, actually, when I think about it, the social etiquette on SO is to leave all those niceties out.

Thanks
Setting Goals; The Ultimate Measure of Success
Knight Loss Is $270 Million, Not $440 Originally Suspected
Political Prostitution, a really scary future OR for real? Ask Kim Dotcom
3D printed houses are still going to need some conventional building work -- they need stable foundations, just like any other building, which means some excavation and levelling, and piles in unstable or waterlogged ground. They need utility ducting and pipes laying, they need wiring and pipes installing after construction, and so on. They probably also need cavity wall insulation blowing in. Not to mention windows, doors, and so on. Finally, I notice that this looks to be printing in unreinforced concrete. What about some rebar for the load-bearing elements?

Yes, it's a neat idea and it may save a lot of bricklaying work -- but it's not going to automate house construction 100%: not even close.
I'm not writing them off - in fact I'm cheering up their effort. With this I was trying to say what it looks like in larger perspective. OUYA has a really, REALLY big hurdle in front of themselves in order for us to call them disruptive. OUYA being a success or not (more likely), one thing is for sure - I'm starting to like all these multi million projects on kickstarter. Big budgets and not from an investment company.
If you say something, and you're wrong, and I correct you, and you disregard what I've said because I was abrasive, you're still ignorant. I've lost nothing but hot air (or a few keystrokes).
Facebook Shares May Take Eight Years to Return to I.P.O Price Levels
No surprise here. I made a site last year that did almost the same thing as LendInk, but I decided to shut it down after Amazon made it very clear that they didn't want me doing that.

From what I understand, there were a half dozen or so other sites that would facilitate ebook lending, and we were all pressured by Amazon similarly. Most of those sites are no longer around.
I have a nutrition site I wrote for my own use (http://cookingspace.com/) that rounds amounts in a human-friendly way. Try changing the number of servings to see the effect.
They tried this idea with the zoom lenses:

"In early 2010, NASA reconsidered the VFL [zoom lens] cameras and work resumed on assembling these cameras, which will replace the FFL cameras described here if the work is completed in time and the instruments meet their requirements."

http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/Mastcam/
Last minute changes are made. Or at the very least I know of one such change in the case of Curiosity.

The dust covers over the haz cams (the navigation cameras on the belly of Curiosity) were added in the last minute. Here is the engineer who implemented them writing about the covers: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg93...

Basically, the Phoenix lander (landed on May 25th 2008) kicked up more dust than expected. They were worried and did a review for Curiosity, but found out that only the haz cams (because of their location on the belly) were in danger, so they decided to add dust covers to them (and also kept them transparent to see whether there really was a dust problem – as you could see from the first photos with covers still attached there very clearly was).

My guess is that stuff gets changed and updated a) if there is money and resources left or b) if the mission is in danger if you don’t change something.

The 2MP sensor is very clearly good enough. Any update in resolution would give you diminishing returns – so something like that gets pushed back.
Ah hah, I forgot about Fantastical. Looks like it will do the trick for quick entry of reminders which was one of the few features I was missing after Things. (Plus there's a 50%-off sale).

Using an Fn double-tap to dictate makes it Siri-esque, only more reliable :)
Here's what happened to me when I threw out what I thought an interesting question then had a little debate about it on Meta. My question got extremely downvoted.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp...

The "rule" is that you must show some sort of effort before you ask a question. I was honest and said that I didn't do anything, but I did make my question well-defined, and I thought that it was useful, in general.

Anyway, if that's their rule, that's their rule. Personally, I'm interested in seeing a "Wikipedia of Programming", where all good questions exist with good answers.

For example, "How do I do X in Java|Perl|Scala|Haskell|Elisp|...?"

I think a site with enough questions would be the perfect site to take someone from novice to guru. The big thing missing from StackOverFlow, IMHO, is that there are lots of questions for popular topics like Java (280k)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java

Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp

StackOverFlow doesn't want to be the site that connects the dots, which isn't their business model. I think another site could fill the void.
Rails for API applications (rails-api) released
Better standards are good, but without change in other areas, they won't have much effect. If kids are failing to meet the current standards, how do you expect them to meet newer, more rigorous ones? I am sure Massachusetts and Minnesota's education systems have other things going for them besides standards.
Maybe NASA will do a Kickstarter project for their next rover. :-)
With respect: if you think it's as simple as just "tweaking" to go from a ten-foot viewing distance with a controller to a touchscreen at no more than thirty inches, you have a crippling lack of perspective on games.

This "just port to our completely different model out games, no big deal bro" messaging is actually what the Ouya people have themselves said and it's a major reason I'm convinced they're not competent or want cheap, bad games. If they bothered to study what has come before,they would have looked at the difficulty of a good port from the 360 to WP7 via DNA. But either they didn't our they did and want is to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Oh--and they want to release for April 2013 and have zero developer documentation. Reminds me why these guys are seen as being on the up and up?
James Cameron takes 3-D film venture to China
"And there's more, so much more, but I can't talk about it yet."

Sounds like the statute of limitations hasn't expired yet. Should be interesting when it does!
Depends on where you are. In Stockholm I would not be surprised if more people can write decent Erlang compared to the people who can write decent JavaScript.
This is an alternative viewpoint to that in the article here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360345

In that article it is suggested that it's better not to call out to the operating system to perform tasks that can be re-implemented in your own program, thereby reducing dependencies and preventing context-switches in future readers.

But sometimes using well-known, well-tested, long-standing existing code really is better than re-implementing basic operations in your own code. Yes, if it's just "rm" then perhaps write it yourself. But when it's more substantial, and someone else has already done it, and it's there ready to be used ...

Use it.
I can't count the number of times I've found the perfect StackEschange answer to my question and it was marked as "closed as not constructive" or closed for off topic.

The worst is a question that's closed because it's a duplicate of another question that's two or three years old. These answers are not eternal, they should change over time based on the changing environment.
I also need to monitor my vitamin K because of blood thinner. As I mentioned in another thread, I wrote cookingspace.com for my own use just to learn how to estimate vitamine K in my diet.
How to Convert Your Car to Natural Gas-Popular Mechanics
I remember hacking the Novell netware setup at my school, and being surprised to see how poor all of the teachers passwords were. Almost all were children's names or street names. And the system admins super password? The name of a well known department store :)
As for panning and stitching, don't they already want to be able to point the camera in different directions?

And sensors -- they're not just looking for fancy new imaging sensors, they're looking for well-tested, radiation-tolerant sensors that can handle a range of temperatures. And then you need to redesign the rest of the circuit around it to handle more data -- all the chips driving the fancy imaging chip would have to be well-tested, radiation-tolerant chips that handle a range of temperatures.

The risk here is "use tech that's 8 years old" or "increase the chance that something goes wrong on a $2.5 billion dollar project".
Zynga's Chief Operating Officer Quits After Demotion
That is what computers are for.
Yep, it's in there!
I just found this article:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360904

It explains the process pretty well. It's really a shame it's so expensive when you really don't need that many parts or modifications.
a unique snowflake

Not at all. I refrain from these apps (and most note-taking apps) for the same reason. I dump everything from passwords to CC-numbers into my notes and todos. If I had to start thinking about what to put there and what not it would kill half the utility.

It's beyond me why the vendors don't add this comparably trivial, yet critical feature (client-side encryption).

It's a matter of time until Evernote and friends get hacked, if they haven't been already. That day you will see many sad faces, when people begin to realize that over time they've probably put more than "get milk"-notes and the latest cat pictures in there.
I love love love love Wunderkit and Wunderlist. Mostly web-based but slick Mac and iOS apps are on the way.
Actually no, personally I rather spend my time taking pictures.
The end of 9-to-5
Related: Sound recording from the Huygens probe descending on Titan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36ffV-CI3Mo
http://buddycloud.com/ looks very interesting.

A couple of suggestions

- Feature your screencast prominently on the front page.

- Provide nginx install instructions

I hope I can find time soon to experiment with it (which is an additional takeaway, I guess).
Benefit from EJB in the Cloud
I'm fairly confident this is in reference to a new startup Jeff is working on.
People get immediate value out of Angie's List: Vetted services. Angie's List has an actual story--everybody's had a terrible experience with a plumber, electrician, or other service. Not everybody has had a terrible experience getting data out of Twitter. Most people really don't care about that.

I think there's a vast, vast difference between the two.
Amazon is not stupid. If your business depends on their affiliate program or API, and they don't want you doing whatever it is that you are doing, they will cut you off.
If your camera phone sensor fails you walk to a shop and get a new camera.

If the sensor on a Mars rover fails there are thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted opportunity.

Thus, they pick something reliable that they know, and test the hell out of it, and fix the spec.

This has pros and cons.

Pros include a well known set of kit with extensive testing and documentation.

Cons include being locked into a manufacturers product line. If that product goes obsolete you're stuck searching for stock of product in various resellers inventory. I guess NASA can just buy extra stock. But I've seen the result of odd devices being used on aerospace kit, and it becomes impossible to create a sensible quote. Subcontractor A puts a request in for obsolete part, and that goes to a bunch of vendors. Subcontractor B puts the same request in, and so you end up in a bidding war for parts that you might not buy. Given that yo're quoting on something that you'll be building in maybe three months there's no chance of providing an accurate quote.

tl:dr when designing a Mars rover use components that you know and buy lots of them. When designing an aircraft avoid anything that is listed near end of life, and try to pick something that's not going to go obsolete in 3 years, and try to find something that can have alternatives.
The difference is a matter of scale. I believe the loaning of books is allowed the same way you could loan out a physical book to a friend, etc. Loaning out a digital book to n people is just not the same. Likewise, libraries, which do loan out physical books to n people (but still less than is possible with a digital loan), pay more for their books for this very reason. If you want to loan out your digital book to n people, then you are going to have to pay a lot more for it (and that is just not part of the current equation).
>The problem I see with Stack Exchange is that they are too highly ranked as a site in Google which means that the rubbish pages show up highly ranked.

Considering that before "Stack Exchange" it was a useless site called "Experts Exchange," it's an improvement.
There are quite a few baths and bathtubs in Homer, poems written a cool 3 millenia or so before TV.
But you also gained very little.
Are the physical capacities of space and time capable of getting us to scale in these technologies? Only so much energy comes from the sun per square foot. Batteries can only store so much of that. There are only so many tons of required metals on the planet to create all the infrastructure, solar panels and electric motors we will need?

I don't know yet for sure if it's possible to maintain our current quality of life given the resources we have at our earthly disposal.
I up-voted you, but there is nothing political about evolution or climate change outside the US. If you want a world class science education you need to actually you know teach science. And science is based on two and only two ideas, everything is on the table AND reality dictates your views though experimentation. Sacrifice either of them to political grandstanding and you are doing something else.

PS: Biology is so closely tied to evolution at this point that I can't help but wonder what's left once you discard it. Global warming is less important, but it's rather hard to avoid that topic for 12 years.
Why is it unfair? They (despite claims that, honestly, just don't make a lot of sense) want to be treated seriously. This is treating them seriously. Their platform, which by the way is not a "quick port" from Android if you care about user experience, has a tiny user base compared either to consoles or phones.

I'd like to see them do well, but I'm personally not going to treat it as something special until they show that it is. So far it sounds like a shovel-ware conduit to the TV and that gets people nothing.
Have you tried Toodledo? That's a pretty awesome one and they use SSL for all iOS traffic to their server. I've been using it for 2 years now and I have pretty much no complaints.

edit: Spelling mistake
I was very stupid when I didn't know better, in the days script kiddies were empowered by Backorifice I would play with random folks, mess with their kayboard and mouse.

Other nonrespectable "hacks":

- "net send *" to importunate colleagues

- wrote mIRC scripts to win at the IRC trivia games (this was actually funny for a little while)

- would call collect to my dial-up provider, learned to dial on rotary phones by "switch-hooking" -

- would connect portable phones to disabled payphones just to see if it was a regular line what I could use (it was)

- would "paint" the backside of payphone cards with graphite to fool the machine into thinking I had more credits.

- wrote a little "ringer" program and passed to my colleagues so we all ran it together and made the teacher crazy (oh the regret).

- used IDKFA in Doom.

Those are my earliest, lamest memories.
Securing against software attacks
Software is a central and critical aspect of the computer (and embedded system) security problem. Software defects with security ramifications —including implementation bugs such as buffer overflows and design flaws such as inconsistent error handling — promise to be with us for years. All too often, malicious intruders can hack into systems by exploiting software defects. Moreover, Internet-enabled software applications present the most common security risk encountered today, with software’s ever expanding complexity and extensibility adding further fuel to the fire
People tend not to understand the tracability requirements either.

Every single part - each nut, bolt, and washer, has a batch number and can be traced from the rover back through assembly, through stores, through goods in, through the suppliers, through to the manufacturers.

This paperwork alone adds significant;y to the cost.
There is no need to force me to create an account to use this service. Have a list of supported news sites and let me pick the ones I want to see, then save a bookmark to the page.

Requiring an account is a back button.
Challenges in distributed image retrieval
With distributed image retrieval, the difficulties associated with traditional CBIR are
also present, but the distributed image retrieval process is further complicated by such
factors as the context of the individual image collections and the similarity algorithms
used in the image retrieval systems
Noiseless optical amplifier
Spirit vs. letter.

It's no surprise this sort of thing would pop up. It's not unlike the problems that arise due to things like car sharing and airbnb, when insurance companies and landlords get involved.

Insurance companies are probably willing to let it slide if you let someone else who's insured drive your car, and landlords generally allow you to have guests. But lending your car to complete strangers, for money, and letting complete strangers stay at your apartment, essentially short-term sublets, are not really what they are prepared to tolerate, at least not without altering the terms and rates they charge for coverage or rent.
Amazon forces Unglue.it to Suspend Crowdfunding for Creative Commons eBooks
Personally I'd be very wary of that. As I said on another comment, this is a planned two-year mission. So if they drop-in a compatible component and later found out there was a manufacturing problem that shortens its life, that's not acceptable. I think NASA's very failure-avoidant, and I really can't blame them, because their mistakes are extremely expensive and occasionally deadly.

The alternative they chose, it sounds like, was extreme caution, using well-tested components at the possible expense of image quality. It's Good Enough.

And like others have said, macroscopic images aren't the sole or even primary purpose of this mission. At this point, it's just whiz-bang PR, since Spirit and Opportunity got enough pictures to last a lifetime. The secret sauce here is the spectrum analyzers, close-up camera, rock-vaporizing laser, etc. THAT'S the important stuff, scientifically.
Is there a reason you don't want to use a web interface? Toodledo has a very intuitive web interface and a native iOS app.
Only in america: Man orders TV from Amazon, receives assault rifle instead
Demonoid takedown prompts attacks by Anonymous
I have a very hard time believing that many football players (not least one as unproven as Griffin III) would be able to compete at an Olympic level. Because if one were to follow your argument, we would have to include all the soccer players who, themselves, could have become runners, etc., or otherwise devote more time to the Olympics than their clubs.

The pool would necessarily deepen.
WxPython: How to make “flashing text”
Could someone please change the title to make clear that these only apply to the Mozilla Developer Network wiki, and not general purpose URLs. Not everybody knows what MDN stands for.
Yep. Where I work we have a fleet of cars that do just that.
... why is there an Internet Explorer logo in the top-right of the interface screenshot?
There are many nationalities and ethnic groups that no longer have their own sovereign nation. Are they all "vulnerable to extermination by the Gentiles"?
If you're writing it in PHP, you could install the GeoIP PECL extension (http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.geoip.php).

If not just use Maxmind GeoIP. I've never heard any complaints and its updated frequently.
Sure but we are talking about something not that hard to add to the app. I was talking more about those asking for pivot tables, etc.
Pretty much only taxonomy, anatomy and cellular biology remain once you take away evolution from a biology class (before university level at least). All of them are important and insightful, but of those 3 I think only anatomy is on par in importance with evolution as far as someone who's not going to study science for a living is concerned.
You didn't read the article, did you?

The entire mission can return around 250 mbits of data per day to Earth, because it's on Fricking Mars!

Going to a 4MP camera CCD was considered and rejected because it'd result in slower image capture during time-sensitive processes (such as the descent cam) and gobble down far more of that valuable bandwidth which is shared among all Curiosity's instruments.

Going to a 4MP camera would be sensible if and only if they could have doubled their wireless bandwidth across a 300 million kilometre gap. Bandwidth is the killer bottleneck on interplanetary missions, not pixels.
What's interesting is that there are probably whole categories of commercials that don't air any more, crowded out by pharmaceuticals (and political ads).
Mitt Romney Twitter account filled with fake followers, analysis finds
Your employment with them does not reflect on you professionally or personally. You should list the work you did while employed for them and be proud of it. There's no shame in doing that.
We require accounts on web for things like news source recommendations and notifications for when we release new features. If you create an account, your sources will also sync across platforms like Android, iPad, iPhone, etc. Our mobile apps do not require sign-in, however, so feel free to download those from our homepage: http://www.pulse.me/
Yup, fixed, thanks.
Where did you find the pricing model? I don't see prices anywhere on the page. Do I have to play the video or something? I hate having to search for prices. The act of searching for prices starts a feeling of distrust of the company which builds until I find it.
Really great, it took them like ages to get the cloud sync done but I believe they have done a great job with it. I've been using the Things beta for some time now and the Daily review feature is a winner. It's a best practice to review your todo's each morning and they just made it super easy and hard to forget.

On the other hand, I feel that there is really too little to justify tagging it v2. What's really new and noteworthy? Cloud sync, perhaps but that's in no way a revolutionary feature. Daily review? Really really nice but it's more of an addon/improvement rather than a full feature. And then we have it ... next to those there isn't anything really new and groundbreaking.

I sure hope they can get their team working on some other great new features now that cloud sync is finished. Time to move on and innnovate!
Console gaming has always been full of money and overplayed sequels. It hasn't changed--you have, and the nostalgia filter is taking effect.

It's naive to expect that this project will have a disruptive impact or will even happen. Their website is up at http://www.ouya.tv and has incomplete placeholder text all over the place. From the concept to the marketing, the whole thing reeks of incompetence.
as detected by Miklos' nice bin/find-german-comments script

Don't know why, but it made me laugh.

bin/german-and-comment

would have been a great pun.