skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just remembered a potentially tragic event as we were getting our CNC machine shop installed and running. The CAM software vendor sends me the pre-processor for the Haas VF3-SS. I loaded it and programmed a simple square pocket for a test.

First thing the damn pre-processor does is a rapid traverse in x and y to the center of the pocket, WITHOUT raising the tool to safe "flight altitude". I was lucky in that I was using a vacuum chuck and a block of machinable wax for these tests, otherwise it could have been really ugly (broken tool and potential collision of the spindle with clamps leading to torquing the column out of vertical).

Fun stuff.

As a programmer who's used nearly every computer programming language from machine code, Forth, APL, C++, ObjectiveC and everything in-between I have always felt that G-Code is stuck somewhere in the Mesozoic era. Sure, it works, but one could certainly talk to these machines in far better ways.
This reminds me of the ban on regular light bulbs in the EU. People are basically forced now to install so called energy saving lamps, which contain and emit highly toxic mercury and phenol. Most people even don't know about the risks and would let their children sleep in a room with a broken lamp.
> Do you aim private life meetings or not only?
Sorry, I don't understand the question.

HumanamuH is about meeting people right? Will people meet other people like they would in private life - friends, love etc, or like they would in their non-private/professional one?

There is a distinction between the two in the real world. So if I seek to meet people in a non-private mode with HumanamuH, which is what I thought was the point because of its design, I don't want to see any sexual things in it.
In other words, I will not want to meet, let's say a software engineer, with a profile which say: "I'm not looking for a sexual partner right now.".

Concerning what's tedious to me, I think the precise thing is the splited registration process: first the email, then check it, and after I have to re-enter other informations.
Maybe: enter register informations and then just check the email would be ok.

[edit: change/update professional by non-private]
What kids need to learn is grit
Apple Shifts iPhone Chip Suppliers
As Heroku Boss Flees to Olive Farm, Where's the Platform Cloud Going?
Not sure about the definition of climbing. Seems to me falling might not be healthy for babies? As for hiking in the mountains, sure, why not.
Notice that those are tools which specialize in specific domains (e.g. linear algebra), not just a general purpose programming language. And those tools are even higher priced without the academic discount.

No one has ever built a significant business on a new general-purpose programming language. It doesn't seem to be due to the relative lack of IP protection on languages either. It may be that it's simply not a problem worth solving, there's no solution worth marrying a vendor over, or there are too many language designers.
i have a lot of confidence in reeds law and over time i think facebook will demonstrate how powerful it is (provided they keep things together well).

the fb business model may be fairly simple today but in the future it will expand and expand
Not sure why you've being downvoted, you actually have a good point!
I saw a different story today about a judge's ruling that sniffing open Wi-Fi networks is not considered a wiretap.[1]

The implications therein could be far-reaching, should this precedent be applied to other, similar areas:

- Are civilians now responsible for their own security if they value their privacy?

- Does this overrule "unauthorized network access" in the criminal code?

- Would an administrative subpoena, such as those in the OP's story, allow offensive cracking into civilian or corporate networks?

Technology is changing, and the combination of warrant-less data gathering and invasive networking is sometimes frightening.

Bruce Schneier had an interesting quote on the subject from his book Secrets & Lies: "It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/sniffing-open-wif...
Statistics don't count in medicine if you are the one who gets the disease.
Twitter Mac hadn't been updated in over six months. I think it's fair to say they discontinued development the day Loren quit the company.
Though a case can be made that this is mostly irrelevant in Waterloo's case, as for all intents and purposes, everyone in Waterloo who might be interested in what Waterloo has to offer is a student at Waterloo.
Americans either write a single vertical stroke or an upward hook with a horizontal base line. Europeans (well, Germans and Hungarians to my own knowledge) write just the upward hook - to distinguish this from a 7, they cross the seven.

This font rendered fours (Chrome on Win 7) without the horizontal bar, leaving something that looked like a 1, to me.
FWIW you can get the ClearDB or Xeround addon (MySQL) for free on Heroku.
If even a modicum of this attitude can seep down into all of the customer facing departments at PayPal, it'd be an awesome thing. I hope they pull it off.
Could you provide a TL;DR of your expose? Thanks!
After the foam in cushions described in the OP, the biggest source of human exposure to flame retardants is probably consumer electronics. Particularly, most televisions and computer monitors are encased in a plastic housing which by law must be resistant to catching fire, and the universal way that is achieved is by mixing flame retardants with the plastic while the plastic is still "liquid". I read once that flame retardants make up up to 20% of the volume of the material of the housings.

When you remove this toxic plastic housing, there is another housing underneath made of steel, which holds the monitor or TV together just fine on its own. The exception is the buttons for adjusting brightness, etc.

Last year, I removed all the urethane foam from my home and the plastic housing from my monitor. There is a row of buttons for brightness, etc, that now hangs by wires, and there is a button near the top of the monitor for power which now hangs down the back of the monitor by wires. Now that the buttons are no longer held in place by the plastic housing, it is much harder to press them, but that is OK because I never adjust the brightness (preferring to use OS X to "switch black and white" at night). And I never use the power button. (The monitor draws one watt when it is on but not receiving video input).

Except for the small and not particularly noticeable row of buttons hanging by wires from the bottom of the monitor, the monitor has a tidy, trim appearance and does not prevent me from feeling proud of how my computer looks.

I recommend these home modifications to almost everybody.

The way the flame retardants get into the human body, by the way, is by attaching to dust, which gets ingested in small amounts. Consequently, after removal and disposal of the housing, I recommend cleaning the area under and around the device.

Or get a recent Apple monitor, which has an aluminum housing.
Acid was pretty ground-breaking at the time it came out, I think a lot of beat-matching features in modern DAWs was inspired by what Acid did. It was made buy Sonic Foundry who then sold it to Sony - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/acidsoftware

I have an unusual amount of knowledge about Acid since a friend of mine originally created it (he left Sonic Foundry to work on audio software at Apple the last time I talked to him) and I used it to produce two albums back in the day.
Here's the context for those curious: http://storify.com/goodonpaper/how-twitter-rescued-me-from-p...
A good reason to verify ownership of an email address is, for example, PayPal, where money is actually attached to an email address.
LeBron James teamed up with Khan Academy
The Mac client is what made Twitter useful for me. It has a dedicated place on the desktop and I can peek in any time quickly to see what's new. Like a personalized news ticker. In contrast, I can't stand using the website. So this might reduce my usage drastically and turn me into a mobile only user.
Agreed. I hope the policy and attitude can change. I do a lot of business with PayPal because my customers prefer it. Certainly not because they have provided much value other than being the most commonly used service.
Bonus: getting outside gets you away from your carcinogenic couch.
IE users should get the standard-compliant pure-HTML version which is sure to work on every browser. Only developers who neglected to start there have a problem.
These kinds of situations will require, it seems, legislation to fix. There are too many contra-indicating pieces of the puzzle to fix through judicial review. Its not a partisian issue, at all. This is fundamental bill of rights stuff. This is what happens when, on the one hand (a) the executive gets lazy and wants to do XYZ but circumvent the legislature; and (b) what does go into the legistlature is driven by burecratic and financial special interests. The benefits are concentrated, and the costs are dispersed. To reverse, the cost are high (the dispersed public must come together) and the individual benefit is low (as a single citizen). But the value of being a citizen is degraded without the Bill of rights, privacy, etc...
Hackers who hit Google continue string of attacks
Stackoverflow Is A Difficult Community to Participate In
> the ones who are working 60+ hours a week, and who are about to kick your company's ass, because there's no place on Earth they'd rather be than in that garage.

Because they're 20 years old, and they'll do that only for a limited time anyway because even the energy from youth won't protect them from burnout. This is nice, heart-warming story we like to believe, but this is anecdote. In general, people work efficiently about 40 hours a week for long periods (months or years).

By the way, old asses like me have had their fair share of being in the office from 9AM to 22PM and you know what? While you're congratulating with your co-workers on what a bunch of hard-working supermen you are, you aren't actually getting anything done. It's incredibly hard to get things done 7 to 8 hours a day, it demands incredible energy and commitment; I don't pretend being even capable of this more than once or twice a week. Yes, I think that programming efficiently 40 hours a week is already nearly super-human, unless you're incredibly passionate and it's incredibly rewarding.
Ahhh! I couldn't see the difference between 'mkdirs' and 'makedirs'. Thanks.
Speaking as a foreigner living in the US, anecodtally I find the presumption of guilt built into the US system to be incredibly disturbing.

Example: I have to disclose, every year, all foreign accounts I have or have an interest in or have signatory authority over. All in the name of fighting "terrorism". What happens if I forget a retirement account? I can be charged 300% of its balance and be criminally prosecuted.

US residents and citizens can live and work overseas, have not been in the US for 20+ years and still be required to file the same report and additionally they need to still file US tax returns.

No other Western country I know of does this.

Immigration and visa issues have been frequently covered here. The same "atmospherics' apply.

Eric Schmidt was once lambasted and misquoted over his comments on privacy [1]

> If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

which is further clarified with:

> But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

That there's the point. Any US company you use is subject to such "administrative subpoenas". All of the hand-wringing around privacy is, at least to some degree, a distraction from the very real issue that the government can get what you're doing at any time with little to no justification.

Like it or not, US companies need to comply with US law no matter how screwed up it is.

If you want to jump up and down about privacy, you should be jumping up and down about that.

They hysteria over terrorism, child pornography, drugs and money laundering has been used to erode due process and judicial oversight. You can be detained without cause, have your records seized because some official believes it'll help an investigation and have your assets seized at the behest of the content industry and other interests that have bought and paid for the American government (eg Kim Dotcom and Megaupload).

Thing is, witht he ratchet effect I really don't know how you turn this around. Revolution seems to be the historical agent that wipes the slate clean every so often. That seems unlikely with a complacent and apathetic populace.

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-priva...
I hope this is a view of the transparency we'll be seeing in the future from all levels of the org.
The single best way to protect your home against fire, by far, is to have a fire sprinkler system installed. Unfortunately, this can only be done when the house is built. So if you are planning on building a house, specify a sprinkler system.

It'll be the best money you ever spent.
There's some more detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Substances_Control_Act_of...

The situation is somewhat better with chemicals introduced after 1976. Any chemical that was in use prior to 1976 is grandfathered in, due to worries from industry that passage of the Act could suddenly call into question many chemicals then in use. Therefore anything that was already in use at the time is presumed safe and not investigated, unless significant evidence first piles up. The chemicals being described in this story (e.g. the PBDEs) are pre-1976, and hence not investigated.
Right! I was pretty surprised by that! Hopefully YouTube doesn't pull the video ;)

Well done and fair play Steve..
I assume flame retardants are mainly only needed for couches of smokers (I've never randomly put a flame onto my couch for fun to see if it would burn), so even if fire retardants save 100 people from fires they caused through voluntary negligence while subjecting 1 additional person to cancer or other illness due to chemicals, I'm not sure if it's a fair trade. Saving firefighters might be a reasonable argument, though.
I'm sure there's at least one technical person high enough there who is aware of how inefficient their implementation is, and how much better it can be. And I suspect that person is unable to do anything about it, despite being in a way better position than anyone on the outside.

But ... the real question, is even if I brought it in a turn-key and backward compatible setup for them (that is, they pay $3M, I install stuff, we flick a switch, and everything just works) - would it be worth $3M to them?

I suspect the answer is: Not worth any kind of risk or hassle to save $10M/year (or however much it would save them; if it is more than $10M/year, I'd be surprised).

I don't know how they spend their money, but I'm willing to bet that running the service is less than 10% of their expenses. (Of the money spent to get e.g. win95, or a new drug, to market, r&d costs are usually no more than 5-10%)

I think Twitter hasn't been a lean organization in years, and they took too much money to "reboot" themselves as a lean.

I think Twitter is already dead, it just won't acknowledge.
The Mathematics of War (Predicting War Conflicts)
Really?

Fire is dangerous, and we know it kills a bunch of people.

Fire retardants may be dangerous, they may harm a bunch of people, but we're not sure how many, nor how they are harmed. Research is sometimes conducted poorly, or good research is interpreted poorly by reporters.

We need to balance risk and cost. People dying in fires is bad. People getting a bunch of diseases is also bad. We need to find out which is more likely.
I'm gonna write an article about the fact that I'm changing my blue car for a red one, just because.
I'm getting tired of hearing all of this HN bashing and complaining lately.
sorry to hear that - perhaps the motivation/about you was too short? We have some pending applicants because of the short or vague information provided ..at any rate just drop me a line at dotgeek at 1 dot ai and I will activate it asap.
Two things I really like about this social network: it's simple, and it's oriented towards connecting interesting people.

I love that people get to post their intentions. Intentions mean people are doing things -- and can meet and help each other. This site is not for photosharing narcissists who are scared to venture outside their circle of friends, it's for adventurous people who want to meet more people to "enrich their lives" as the site says.

I'm excited to see HumanamuH take off, and I'm looking forward to using the "enriching" social network.
That kind of behaviour from a CEO is not seen enough. Good on him!
Which is hard if like me, the autistic side of your brain likes to have things always in the same place just because that way of organising undeniably gives you the fastest way to get something back.

To which I would ask: are you doing that out of a need to have control and order or because you really think it is a worthwhile use of your time?

I’m not too dogmatic about it though. Sometimes it just feels good to get everything nice and organized. And I think it’s also important to feel comfortable. The time to question these things is when you think it is a bottleneck in your overall performance. Any person dedicated to being a great programmer should seldom worry about how they are packing the fridge unless its affecting their ability to program, for example.
I guess some people on Hacker News don't have a thick skin. Some are actually scared of things that seem trivial to me, like writing a blog post and submitting it. They don't like being called on it. Oh, well.
Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.
FWIW, the new Tweetbot for Mac client is pretty great. They took down the alpha link from their site, but if you can find a copy of the DMG, you can still register into the alpha.
Two reasons:

1. Smiling for a camera is something you do because you want to be remembered that way (happy) -- it is like positive propaganda of yourself via media. Now, figuring out a way to spread a positive image of yourself via the photographic medium is actually a culturally sophisticated trick that we learn by imitating a social habit -- but someone sometime had to invent that habit first. What you are looking at are photos of people taken before that trick was invented (and even if the trick was already invented, the people portrayed wouldn't know about it because they likely had never seen a photo in their life).

2. Even if people knew that they will be remembered more positively if they smile, it took about three minutes to take the kind of photos Prokudin took, and they had to hold absolutely still. It is hard to hold a grin on your face for three minutes without changing it and thus ruining your portrait.
Great email.. one of the most convincing and sincere high level apologies I've read. Perhaps, for once, the future is looking bright for Paypal. I could have done without the "forwarded from my iPad" at the bottom though.
So bloggers with enough pull to get the CEO's attention will no longer have their funds stolen by PayPal. Now how about the rest of us?
Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account).

It's good that this executive (President, not the CEO as indicated in the title) is taking initiative to fix things at PayPal. But until things are fixed, PayPal is still a business risk.
Twitter Mac hadn't been updated in over six months.

Yup. I really like the awesome crashbug if you hit escape twice when closing a picture pop-up. Makes my day, let me tell you.
Why now? Why this situation is it finally hitting home?

What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.
More Choice, and More Confusion, in Quest for Healthy Eating
Why now? Why with this story?

I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service).

Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?
Why can't you retrofit fire suppressing foam in the kitchen, like one does in a commercial kitchen range hood? I've seen this done on kitchen remodels. There are residential range hoods (Viking, Wolf, ...) which have a wall-mounted button or a pull which 1) kills the fuel source and 2) smothers the range area with fire suppression (class BC or K) to put out the fire and prevent re-ignition. Totally ruins your food AND needs to be cleaned off promptly since it's corrosive.

Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.
Media storm brews, someone high up responds and resolves issue. Nothing new. It'd have been news if a random support person did the right thing.
> emit highly toxic mercury

Do you have a source for energy efficient CFLs "emitting mercury"?
Every service goes thru the following cycle:
New ⇨ Exciting ⇨ Necessity ⇨ Annoyance ⇨ Irrelevant

Twitter skipped necessity for most people, went right to annoyance, heading down quickly to irrelevant.
It says right there: "I'm driving a lot of changes at PayPal (I took over 5 months ago)"
Google using reCAPTCHA to crowdsource digitization of scanned media
Most people I know who use a Mac desktop app for Twitter use TweetDeck (which was acquired by Twitter last year), so it wouldn't surprise me if they're deprecating the Mac Twitter client in order to make TweetDeck their standard desktop client across platforms.
Actually it would be 'life saving'. One of the reasons the payments space is flourishing is because PayPal has been a poor service provider (creating pain). And it has to come from the top, and you have to look into success metrics carefully to insure the folks in your organization aren't doing more harm than good to get 'good' ones.
What features "missing" from vim caused you to switch? With nerd-tree and fuzzy filename searching, ctrl-p or Command-T (I'm on MacVim,) ack, VimClojure for the repl, minibufexplorer and the rest of the Janus bundle for autocomplete / syntax highlighting I have everything I need.
> I’m looking for mobile makers that aim for the stars, giving us brilliant innovations—like the Retina display—before others in their class

I stopped reading there. Devices with similar and even better DPI existed before, and even if they did not, is that a "brilliant innovation"? That's the kind of thinking that is ok with patenting every tiny little advancement as an "innovation".

Increasing the DPI on a screen - especially if it's been done before, but even if it hasn't - is not an innovation, much less a "brilliant innovation". It's expected progress.
Eight hours per day came out of studies of rote assembly line labor. Has there been evidence that's also the optimum for a creative desk job?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483710

http://allthingsd.com/20120907/paypals-new-president-faces-t...