skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another example of government creating arbitrary policies that just waste time and money, and probably kill us.

Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting.

Who decided on 12 seconds? Why the inside of furniture rather than the outside? Who does this benefit? Why is there even a Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation? Why do government agencies like the EPA exist when they can't say anything about the safety of chemicals that are in couches in probably in upwards of 95% of homes in America?

It wouldn't surprise me if a flame retardant manufacturer was behind the law to begin with, which is even more disgusting.
This only makes sense some of the time, like in your OpenBSD example. Native compile for an embedded app brings much less benefit and significantly more pain.
Great article and well timed for me.

I've been toying with the idea of trying to bring a Go program up on the following (as I have a couple lying around):

https://www.olimex.com/dev/lpc-e2468.html

The only problem is that it doesn't support "normal" linux - uCLinux only.
Your risk isn't far off from your risk of getting struck by lightning, and a tiny fraction of the risk you'll get in a car crash.

There's no limit of the ills that might befall you, if you're willing to dip that low (honestly, I've no idea why the article is written as if this is a big deal); so you can save your paranoia for something a bit higher up the scale. :)
I hope that knowing what people intend to talk about and intend to do makes meeting people online a better experience. Especially in combination with predictions.

After reading online profiles, I often feel that I'm still missing something to decide whether I want to meet that person. Knowing about favorite movies or brands or whether someone is bad at describing himself, doesn't tell me much.
Minor copywriting note: The autoresponder email says "your hosting space request is now under approval.", instead of "under review".
Wow, just wow. If it's real. If he really means it. But still.
Talk is cheap, PayPal.
The phrase ("смех без причины -- признак дурачины") makes a statement on a cause-less laughter only, and knowing if there's a cause for it hence out of its scope. Speaking culturally, in a country with a "historic code" built around Mongol enslavement, Napoleon struggle (200 years to Borodino was just yestreday, btw) and crushing Hitler (losing around 25 million people, both civil and military), only a slightly off-his-mind person would laugh w/o obvious reasons :) [in spite of a smiley, I'm dead serious]

Many (if not most, actually) not-that-cheerful old men and ladies in the streets of StPetersburg remember Leningrad blockade, for example (like my grandma), and memories like that never make one too eager to smile w/o feeling a real cause for it.

We (Russians) just usually lack a "polite" smile a western-world person is used to; being perceived as honest to others is graded much higher when being formally polite, correct, or tolerant.

So do not panic next time ;)
Spotify To Launch Browser-Based Version
Chemtura Firemaster 550 is "just starting to be analyzed"? It was introduced in '05-'06, and here's its 2006 MSDS:

http://www.busbrp.org/cireeh/uploads/Main/FM550msds.pdf
Why does it take a story to make it to front page Hacker News to get attention, to get a "direct channel" to the executives when things go wrong? It ignores the all the horrible complaints and stories from everybody else. It's inequity in itself when the only way you will get attention from big companies is from making posts on Hacker News.

Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?
I agree with the point you raise and add more, folks without any business or negotiation skills are in for a hard and bumpy road when trying to get financing. Of course the hard way is not always the only road, there are other factors such as luck and getting a skillful partner, minder or simply paying for consulting.
But my original point was that in my own particular case when negotiating, I was taken by surprise, to say the least, by the requirements of my counterparts - due to NDA I can't talk about the deal nor mention anything remotely related to it
Villainy - a sbvtle inspired Octopress theme
Ask HN: Laptop coders, your setup?
Anyone here using a wireless keyboard + mouse instead of their laptop keyboard/touchpad? And for monitor: Laptop monitor + external? External only? Laptop screen only?

Logitech has a really nice solar powered bluetooth keyboard: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/keyboards/keyboards/Wireless-Solar-Keyboard-K760-for-Mac

Wondering what the ergonomics and productivity benefits are.

Thanks
> perhaps from the northern half of the Korean peninsula

Or the central portion of the North American continent coughStuxnetcough.
The latter part is a major thing that really should be fixed, I agree. In many of these cases, it seems fairly clear that the invocation of trade secrets is pretextual (the goal is not actually to protect a valuable secret from competitors), and the real motive is preventing third-party investigations into chemical safety.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to build a Twitter client. They’re simply not interested in putting in that kind of work for a third party’s product/service, without incredibly strong incentive.

I believe the last time they did anything like this was on the iPhone, when they built custom apps for YouTube and Google Maps—but they did that almost out of necessity for the user experience, since there were no usable alternatives for those services. (Additionally, with the YouTube app, Apple wanted to encourage adoption of "HTML5" H.264 video, because the majority of video content still required Adobe Flash, unplayable on the iPhone.)

This is all besides the fact that Twitter is now strongly discouraging clients, which apparently now includes their own…
"And let’s not forget the health risks, which are rumored to possibly exist. I’ve heard that even a small amount of marijuana can impair short-term memory function. It might also affect short-term memory function."
Over $274.5 Million Has Been Raised On Kickstarter For U.S. Projects
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere.

This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter".

Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
The single most annoying thing I encountered was the inability of ID3 to handle multiple albums. Every artist sooner or later releases the exact same piece of music on another album. WHY DIDN'T THEY THINK OF THAT?
Do we know that anyone has contracted cancer as a result of flame retardants used in furniture? I re-read the article looking for clear evidence, and what I saw on close read was weasel-wording: when direct health effects are being talked about, the subject of the sentence becomes "flame retardants" rather than a specific chemical; when lax investigations become a topic, it's the EPA's laxity (the EPA isn't solely responsible for evaluating chemicals).

The closest the author comes to accusing a specific flame retarded is chlorinated trisphosphates. You can go to the EPA and look up the safety record of these chemicals; long story short, you can give rats reproductive and kidney cancer if you feed them chlorinated tris every day for 2 years.
Last weekend, I was a little irritated when Southwest Airlines charged me an extra $5 to get a glass jar in my luggage bubble-wrapped when I would have preferred to save the $5 and take the risk of it breaking/leaking. The Southwest agent's explanation boiled down to more or less the same point as this article's. Kudos to her.
They certainly emit mercury when they're broken, and the instructions for cleaning up broken CFLs call for several hours of ventilation, which implies that the mercury vapor escapes into the atmosphere. (See, for example, the cleanup instructions at the bottom of this page: http://www.epa.state.il.us/mercury/compact-fluorescent.html)

I'd guess that a large percentage of people who buy CFLs are totally unaware of how to deal with these hazards (or are even unaware that the bulbs contain poisonous material).

Also, the rise in the use of CFLs means that more people will be exposed to mercury while mining it and while assembling the lamps (probably in places like China, where occupational health laws are fairly lax).
20K is too less coming from Google. They have thousands of developers benefiting from the ide and Android + Google tools use eclipse as well.
DanBC, take a look at the packaging for any CFL. They describe in great detail the procedure for cleaning up a broken bulb.
Lightning Fast PHP Server With Nginx, eAccelerator, and Varnish | Travis Berry
That's irrelevant, it's either ripped from one or the other, and that's the information that should be there. Lookinng up on which albums a song has appeared should be a database / wikipedia lookup. Think about it, is it relevant on which christmas compilations "so this is christmas" has appeared?
Snooze the alarm for 30-45 minutes, leap out of bed at last minute, put on matching clean clothes, tie hair back and dash out to work. If I have extra time I'll put on some makeup.
"I can run a 3 man startup and change things in a week! Why can't a public traded company worth billions with thousands of employees change things in a week?"

Check your ignorance and entitlement at the door, please.
I just graduated from a mid-size university in the midwest. Engineering students pay $300-$500 per year (based on engineering credit hours) for "tech fee" which gets us unlimited printing and lab access basically. Open labs are virtually nonexistent with the exception of 2 small 24-hour labs around the printers. Engineers have 24-hour swipe card access, but other majors do not. It is not especially known for research, but about half of the professors are actively performing research and most are willing to talk to you about anything.
Simulate Fabric and Ragdolls With Simple Verlet Integration
Not much at all anymore ... our processes try to be a lot more refined ;)
Keeping a Programming Journal in Markdown with Marginalia
PayPal is second only to the TSA in reflecting the futility of asking for such things.
This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise.

The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.
I am sure that you can have much cheaper type inference. However, if you turn on the compiler profiler for Scala, you can see that most of the time is spent in type inference. They don't do HM.
I realize you are being cynical, but the e-mail says the CEO wants to make radical changes to fix issues for all customers. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but if we take him for his word this isn't just for a subset of users.
...or we can assume that the guy isn't an idiot and has selected C# as an object-oriented language for getting shit done. The only one who said "play" was you, and it makes sense because there's not really a lot of getting-shit-done using Smalltalk on modern systems. But he didn't say "play", he said "use", and a reasonable person might think that he said "use" because he has shit to get done.

If hopping up and down and yelling about your pet likes when they don't really fit the topic is your bag, more power to you, but...
Unfortunately sometimes smart people believe dumb things, and Dr. Sprott is one of these people.

When you read the reasons why his "research" has been ignored you hear things like "vested interest", "cover up", and "politics".

Dr. T.J Sprott has a book, and several products for sale.

His "statistic" is bogus; the NZ authorities stopped recommending mattress wrapping in the 90s; he has no idea if babies slept or died on wrapped mattresses; yet he claims it as fact.

His paper was awful. That's why people didn't listen to him - he has weird ideas, he can't write them up, other research has tested his ideas and found them wanting.

He claims that decreases in SIDS are because of his mattress wrapping programme. He cannot explain why SIDS is dropping in countries that don't practice mattress wrapping. He cannot explain why SIDS was dropping in NZ before antimoney was addedd to mattresses.

Don't forget that he's not a medical doctor. He is a chemist.

People like Sprott are evil. They come up with some plausible sounding theory, and then they try to publish. No scientific journal wants it, so he self publishes, and publicizes. This creates fear and uncertainty in parents. And so children are at greater risk of death, because parents don't follow current best practice (which is still not perfect but at least is evidence based) and decide to try the advice of a wingnut.
Winter? That is surprising. Do you know why a season is a risk factor?
Marcus Aurelius once remarked that "the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Maybe it's not the making the mashup that's scary but sharing something you're not experienced at and not very confident in with THE ENTIRE world that he may have found scary. I know I would have.
So in summary, no content? See, that was easier to see from your TL;DR than from the long comment.
I don't really understand the need for a desktop client to begin with. The site works just fine and there's no extra software to install, just a web browser. That said, I also think an official Twitter Mac client is redundant now that Mountain Lion is out. The built in sharing and that thingy that swipes out from the right of the screen and lets you Tweet work fine for making posts then the site itself is just fine for consuming them.

I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really. To me they're just a waste of space, one more app to have running, and a constant distraction with all their alerts. My phone alerts me enough as it is. I'm on my Mac to get stuff done most of the time. I don't know, maybe I'm just an old fashioned 26 year old. To each their own I suppose.

Now, that last bit in the post I didn't quite get - "out of spite". Is there some political reason that Twitter would be spiteful toward the Mac platform? If so I don't understand why especially since Twitter is now built into iOS and OS X. Can someone explain that please?
My home setup is my MBA plus my couch. The ergonomics are terrible but my productivity is pretty decent and I dont use it this way for very many hours a day.
will fix it - thanks for the feedback. Just approved your application :)
Your environmental risk of cancer is probably not dominated by scary industrial chemicals, either; aflatoxins are probably much more carcinogenic than chlorinated trisphosphates used in flame retardants, and mother nature does just fine producing those on her own, often in our houses, and often in our pantries.
You're evading the question. How many more privacy breaches have to occur before you consider FB reckless? I'm not talking about security breaches, I'm talking about code being pushed that breaks expected privacy functionality.

This is especially pathetic considering they're "enterprise". You would think they engineered some kind of security test to check for these things. Why it's not in the build-process points to negligence in my eyes.
Understood, I really don't think you know what you are talking about. I am not "asserting," I am describing how black and white images are represented as color. These images are BLACK AND WHITE until they go into PS. Get it? The color of a landscape today or 100 years ago is no different. The fact that you could record monochromatic images in 1912 is not news. In fact, the larger formats favoured in the era (viz, weston, adams, etc) blow away a 16 megapixel digital sensor. The REPRESENTATIONS of colour look contemporary because they ARE they are litereally using 16bit colour spaces and colour gamuts (adobe 1998, prophotoRGB, etc) that are less than 20 years old. The images are not airbrushed but the Colour, saturation, contrast, sharpening (localized contrast) that give these images their "look" are about as "Real" as instagram on your iPhone. In fact, you could put instagram image filters on top of these files, pretty easily. To get that "Retro" look? Ironic, Eh? There is no secret to it. Its just odd that a with so many computer-literate people here there are so many comments that beg-the-question if people understand what they are looking at. There is a simple, genius technique at work here: shoot a BW image with a colour filter. That is not at all high tech, was not even in 1912 (see y/b sky filters, eg). Its very interesting to do some legwork on digital colour if you are unfamiliar with it. The images are, for all intents and purposes, similar to what we are looking at from MARS. Hope this helps. Your tone is slightly misplaced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
Standard templated linked lists are suboptimal. Simple C lists ala Linux's list.h are simpler and more optimal, behavior-wise.
To ask for a "tl;dr", receive it, and then assail the author of the condensed summary for lacking details is an especially clever kind of troll.
"They describe in great detail the procedure for cleaning up a broken bulb."

Are you talking about packaging in the US? The packaging in the EU, I saw so far, don't even mention the mercury, not to mention cleaning instructions.
Wifi Sniffing Should Be Legal
You dream it, they will film it: The Sleep Project
The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none."

This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
Congressmen and bureaucrats, mainly. You?
Given that TweetDeck seems fated to be abandonware, I highly doubt it. Their Android client became all but unusable soon after the acquisition, and I've heard iOS was dropped completely.

TweetDeck was mostly a defensive acquisition to begin with (they had a huge market share, and deck.ly was a perceived threat).
Honestly, that's the job he took.

Apparently he was ok with that, and I'm sure he's being well compensated for it.

PayPal has built up a lot of ill will, and no, it doesn't just go away with a promise to change. It is in fact going to take time.

Let's keep in mind that this offense just happened. It's not the distant past.
Sure, a broken bulb will release an amount of the 5 mg of mercury that a CFL contains. But it's not harmful unless you breath it, which is why you ventilate the room.

Lignuist's comment made me think they were talking about intact lamps.
Ask HN: Why is wikidot.com blacklisted?
I tried to post two text on HN, but they did not appear. As I checked later, it is probably because two are on my sites at wikidot.com. Is there a possibility to bypass it (more civilized than placing texts/redirects on a different domain)?

FYI: One on Open Science and Science 2.0 and the other on gifted education (read: teaching geeks).
Yesterday, someone submitted "Welcome to Linux From Scratch":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488162

I expect that tomorrow someone will submit a link to WordPress for Dummies or the Wikipedia article about Web 2.0.
The EPA is not the primary investigator or regulator of industrial chemicals!
Simple BM&FBOVESPA command line client for the TCP Recovery functionality.  
Understand the functionality, implement the requirements with this simple project
Even the email says that this is only the first step.
I've always wanted to have a spreadsheet or something to keep track of the "HN effect" in which companies respond to public outrages because of their publication here. Though of course they might also get attention from Reddit and other online outlets as well.
1) These aren't civil suits or investigations

2) "Subpoena" does not imply that a court is involved - merely that one is compelled by the force of law to provide testimony or evidence. The whole point of this article is that, indeed, there is no court oversight.
Will someone please find out where we can get that Occupy Mars T-Shirt?!!!
Kids can get cancer too. If you had billions of dollars, and you lost someone dear due to cancer, wouldn't you try to fix it?
How would one go about showing either a) or b), though?

For example, b) is really absurd in common cases: smoking out in your backyard or tripping in your living room really doesn't matter to the public, storing copies of songs and sharing doesn't hurt anyone, and parking the wrong direction on a street doesn't usually cause any real issues--yet we are to assume that the government is looking out for the public good by interfering with these activities?

I'm not sure we can assume as much as you suggest here.
To this day I still hate the fact that wrong spacing causes a compiling error.
It's not irrelevant. If the exact same recording of a song appears on two albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies of the song. An easy way to think of it is a normalized relational database. If the song has an id of 5 and is on two albums with id 2 and 3, then there would be an AlbumSong join table with schema (album_id, song_id) and two rows: (2, 5) and (3, 5). It should be irrelevant which album you ripped or downloaded first.
Packaging in New York state to be specific. (I think a lot of these consumer warnings are mandated at the state level. )
PayPal is starting to feel the pressure of all these new payment startups (eg. Square, Stripe) springing up around them. They know that if they're not careful with their brand image they're going to quickly lose their lunch in the next few years.
On the other hand, they already added the Twitter integration to the right-click menu, and there were rumours recently that Apple were in talks to buy a large stake of Twitter Inc.
You just shared a comment with THE ENTIRE world. For all you know, it could be picked up by this Twitter account that has 7k followers:

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

Is it that scary to post your work on the internet? Imagine that you were drafted to go fight in a war with a 30% chance of dying tomorrow. Could you still consider posting a mashup scary?
Engineers: Stop running away from advertising
You've bribed a congressman to get something done?
Oh come on. He can't "win" by solving one person's problems. Will he give his personal email to everyone who has got his account frozen or large chunks of money taken away by PayPal? I doubt it.

This is a non-solution, which is almost worse than doing nothing at all, because it's active disingenuity.
Well I didn't say you had to use std::list. One can implement exactly the same behavior as Linux list.h in C++, but type-safe and namespace-scoped.

But some managers prefer #defines. To each his own.
"Real bad boys move in silence" --KRS One