skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry for going completely off-topic, but I'm slightly annoyed at the overuse of adverbs like "hauntingly" and "wildly". "Hauntingly" might be tolerated here even if it is very hyperbolic, but "wildly low-cost"? What does that even mean?! Why can't the headline just be "Beautiful, Low-cost Solution to Clearing Afghan Landmines"?

Oh, and another one that has been popping up a lot around here lately is "vanishingly" (I've noticed Patio11 likes it a lot!).
Age is easy - start of epoch! Jan 1 1970, every time.
As someone who is currently living in Japan, but only working remotely for companies in the US/UK I'm kind of interested to know how you find work here? Is it hard to get contract work? Where do you look? What is the pay like?
I also wonder what happens if you sit with laurax for an extended amount of time - are you more able to make out the differences?

There's many cases where our senses are "designed" to notice changes, either over time or from the norm - which AFAIK is why you don't generally notice your own smell, and why after a few hours in a meat packing plan you stop noticing that smell as well.

An additional question is whether the naming of different laurax mixes increases your ability to distinguish them - the same way that having names for more colors appeared to literally let you see more colors.
whatever you said pg,its true.
I completely agree and should work on problem which we are facing. We is more natural to realize where we missing to provide solution and in what way.

@pg, why dont you upgrade your design ? You have so much money . You can hire best designer . If you say,i can contribute my design to you .
> edit: Sigh, at least tell me why you're downvoting so I know what to address.

Sorry for the meta comment, but this the second comment and all the replies are speculation why it was downvoted. Maybe someone misclicked, maybe someone wanted their own comment up so they downvoted all other comments. Many of the top comments in a thread get downvoted first.
Object membership – the core structure of OOP
++++++++++[>++++++++<-]>--. N
-----. I
------. C
++. E
<++++++[>------<-]>. !
Well writing it for the sake of promoting yourself most definitely is.
Did you respond to the e-mail? One way to find out if it's a phishing attempt is to ignore the e-mail and try to log onto your HN account with your usual password. If your password isn't changed, then chances are the e-mail is a phishing scam to try to get you to go to a copy of the HN site and enter your old password, after which you lose control of your account.
No, stay on alert.
Woman Uploads All 12 Million Pictures Of Her Vacation To Europe On Facebook
Couldn't disagree more. I hate aggressive ads and long to see them die off entirely. If a site wants to be paid for their content then charge me to view it. I have no obligation to look at your ads.
I used to start pitches by telling people we're fixing rating systems, that was usually enough to get people's attention.

I think you're talking about Yahoo and the J-curve, couldn't find anything by Bezos.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, we went through a phase of pitching ourselves as "Disqus for ratings" but the problem was it's hit or miss with people.
Ban ‘Killer Robots’ Before It’s Too Late
but because of the low cost we can create a lot of these and let them run over a long period of time.
tl;dr
Corporations are used to email and see no reason to change it, email (Outlook) just gets more plugins as new things emerge.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I see no point in trying to replace email. It is an app just like everything else and any serious application should have some form of email integration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
How do you suggest to crush a non-practicing entity? Having a war chest of defensive patents can be a useful deterrent against, eg, Apple or Samsung, but not against people whose business model is to reach a settlement in Eastern Texas.

It's a systemic issue.
I've made two chrome extensions (the latest one just a couple of days ago (went by unnoticed :()):

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-favourite-users...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-unread-comments...
http://www.numbeo.com
That's not true for N=1,2 or 3. If you mean as N approaches infinity, coverage approaches 97.8%, how do you figure that?
I'll definitely need to take a day to improve our SEO before we launch. In the mean time, you can sign up at http://tinj.co
Couldn't agree more. The Yipit landing page may as well be asking for credit card details.
Show your users some value before you rape of their email address - offer them something they want and they'll happily give you an email address.
The goal isn't to collect a bunch of email addresses. It's to have active customers. You're losing potential customers by not showing what's on offer first.
I'd love to be paid $100/hr for formal resting. That would be sweet.
Anonymity vs. Pseudonimity vs. True Identity
An important point missing from this article is that Python speed can be measured in two distinct ways -- how fast the code runs, and how fast the code gets written.

If a program needs to be up and running yesterday, then the fact that it's not as fast as C/C++ may not actually matter.

I think this issue should be mentioned more often in discussions of execution speed -- the time required to write the code in the first place. For that, Python excels.
Better sheep than the children who get blown up in the absence of sheep.
Typically large companies won't bother sending a lawyer if you sue them in small claims court. It's not worth the trouble for them. So as long as you are coherent and have a reasonable argument you will win by default.
Etherpad v1.2 arrives.  i18n, nice app "store", looks good for devs
If he were in the states I'd say he's just trying to build up a case for an insanity plea, but I'm pretty sure he knows how well that will go over in Belize.

Hoax or batshit crazy, or a little of both.
It's not that hard
Like others have said, all the process you observed was equivalent to when you "build" your code (pun intended). And the compiler probably took a lot less than 6 months of time to build your code ;)
Hyperloop - dream on: land-accelerated vehicle (a rocket-like) that is "slingshot" to the destination over the air.
Acceleration even above Mach can be achieved on a maglev circular track gradually with ability to "switch" track and shoot the vehicle in the air.
Land it to a maglev(!) landing pad in the form of a funnel or simpler - with a parachute-like system.
I've recently been working on the firmware for an embedded system [1]. My criteria were a little different:

1. Needs to be monospaced/bitmap. The tiny embedded control has no scope for rendering Truetype fonts!

2. Needs to look reasonable at character size of 16x8.

3. The license requirements need to be clear! And I need to be able to distribute the product under and open source license.

Really what I wanted was to use something like Helvetica. But while it's obvious that I can use text typeset with Helvetica, it wasn't so clear to me that I could copy the entire font into my codebase.

I'd love to see an article on the technical and legal aspects of using fonts. In addition to the ones I've mentioned there are a bunch of issues with Unicode coverage in web projects etc.

[1] The Kickstarter Geiger counter http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seanbonner/safecast-x-ki...
Where the developer lives has nothing to do with what they cost (at least it shouldn't). Cost is a function of value. So if you get a really cheap developer then either you've found someone who has no idea what their market rate is (what else are they ignorant about? Anything that will hurt your product?) or they're just not as good as someone more expensive (the majority of the cases, though people don't want to believe this. They want to think they've found "a deal").
Because you're on the 15th page by then?
e-cigs are already a big disrupter to the cigarette market. Until recently, these were completely detached from the tobacco companies. I think only in April of this year a tobacco company bought one of the manufacturers.

They are a massive improvement to burnable cigarettes and while the reliability of them is a pain it is improving.

Originally they all tried to look like cigarettes but that leads to compromises like small batteries. The newest models all look a lot less like "analog"s and have bigger batteries and better longevity.
Australian version of Cyber Monday has massive failure
Only very slightly.

Also, it suffers from the same problem as the Mine Kafon, in that it's a more-or-less random walk and you won't know whether the whole area is cleared.
We need a way to pierce the corporate veil in very frivolous lawsuits. Like, "did prior art exist that didn't require extensive search to find? $1 million damages to the defendant from you, personally, Myrvolds."
The real question is it any cheaper to de-mine 100m^2 with 50 land mines in it, than it is to de-mine the same area with 100. My expectation would say no.

This method won't make the land usable safely, so the reality would see a bunch of cheap partial clearances with no real benefit - the areas will still be no go zones.
It would be much safer for me to adopt Elixir if there was elixir2erlang source to source compiler, which produces readable Erlang code.

This is what makes adoption of CoffeeScript and TypeScript no brainer - you can always get back to plain readable JavaScript.
Nice, but I should note that JITing does not improve performance greatly. Many basic arithmetic operations take O(n) or O(n^2) time, and as you cannot access arbitrary cells in the arbitrary order so most memory access operations also take at least O(n) time. There are handful optimizers that can optimize them provided that the program uses only a fixed amount of cells, but AFAIK there are no such optimizers in general.

If you plan to implement an optimization, I recommend a pointer propagation. This is very simple and still lots of optimizers ignore it. For example,

mem += 3;
while (mem[0]) { mem += 1; mem[0] -= 1; mem += 1; }
mem -= 4;
mem[0] = 0;

becomes:

while (mem[3]) { mem[1] -= 1; mem += 2; }
mem[-1] = 0;
mem -= 1; /* you can safely ignore this at the end of file */

where every relative memory access has been adjusted. Since it only affects the relative memory access, it is safe to apply the optimization to unbalanced loops as long as you keep the stride (a net pointer adjustment) at the end of the loop body.
Asia a black hole in Startup Genome's ranking of startup ecosystems
This is a topic I know next to nothing about, but I have two responses for your question:

1. Is it really useful at all to only clear half the landmines? I would assume the area is still too dangerous to be useful even with only 40% of the landmines remaining.

2. Given #1, it would follow that additional (expensive) land mine clearing technologies would always be needed in addition. I don't know how these work or are billed out, but if the cost is per square mile or some similar area-based unit (instead of say, per mine), then clearing out 60% of the landmines first would not affect the supplemental cost. You've still got to cover the same area to catch the other 40%.

Anyway, you've had my disclaimer at the top, and I could be totally wrong about this :) Just some thoughts.
I'm confused why one of my Apple IDs has one security question/answer, and the other has 3. One is iCloud, the other is iTunes/developer. (both are long random strings as answers, though)

The whole Apple ID thing is pretty obnoxiously structured. Merging MobileMe (then iCloud) and non-iCloud accounts isn't possible, so you need to maintain two.
Turns out that the Dutch armed forces agree[1] that it's not so easy either:

"The Mine Kafon has just been tested by the Dutch Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit, which has concluded that it is not suitable for mine clearance (which requires a more systematic approach), but at $50 each could be used as a cheap and safe way to identify dangerous areas that need demining."

[1]http://australia.icbl.org/index_htm_files/May.pdf
Rules of the seat-acquisition game on the Overground
Cheers - there were no links in the email, just:

New Hacker News pw: fqvXXXXX (not the pass they sent)

On Chrome I remained logged in, so I tried IE as I'm not logged in there, and yes I needed to use the password they sent. I've changed it again now.

I guess either someone was trying to hack me, or they mistakenly thought my account was theirs. Be interesting to see if this continues.
Actually, he was apparently misquoted: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/270776170184847360
$10k sounds crazy cheap. Your offer wasn't "reasonable", it was a steal.
When they're handing out jobs, I sure hope I'm not the one assigned to drive these stakes and run the ropes through the minefields :)
Boeing Commercial is essentially multinational for production (especially on the 777 and even more so 787). Huge amounts of work are done in Japan, other parts from other places.
As current student trying to come up with a good resume at the moment, this would be extremely useful.
I had yet seen any benchmarks of reviews of such indication. Ruby 2.0 is a tiny steps in performance and GC. It would be nice if you could point me to some resources.
Yes. This can certainly be done. It's not ideal but it can be done.

The problem is that this a standard complaint everywhere, and that this is the standard response given everywhere.

In doing everything they could to force Metro down users' throats in Windows 8 (which is a decision I disagree with, but can understand), Microsoft completely failed when repeating that same judgement for a server OS.

Server-admins doing RDP does not want Metro. They have nothing to benefit from metro. They will never use metro. They will not install "apps" on their servers.

This decision has done nothing except harm Microsoft's perception among people who would normally be the proponents of their technology.
Surprise, surprise .. 'authorities' are 'doing it better'.

Well, this tech is not for the authorities. Its for children to use to help clear the danger away from their villages. Its a tech that anyone can apply, not just those with access industrialized manufacturing facilities and the 'mine-clearing economy'.

99% clearance rate? I think most villages would be happy with being able to clear a safe path for their kids to walk on, at any rate. This cheap, useful, easy to apply technology allows that to occur. Make 100 of them, let them loose for a few weeks, and suddenly 99% seems a lot more doable with this method than any other - especially for the resource-lacking Afghani villages who are left with the war liability that the imperial, authoritarian states, have given them ..
> Only very slightly.

Just to be clear, are you saying that it is only very slightly better for a sheep, rather than a human child, to be maimed by a land mine? That seems to be what you wrote, but I'm having a very difficult time reconciling your world view with my own, so I'm hoping that I am somehow misunderstanding.
Things Entrepreneurs Should Be Tweeting About
Not suitable - for military purposes. DEODU is a military organization, and any conclusions it makes must be viewed in that light. Mine-clearing is a war tool as much as it is a peace tool.
Ask HN: Angelhack, San Francisco, Dec 1st, anybody wants to team up?
I already have a full-time job as a software developer for a major brand-name-company in Silicon Valley, but I keep getting lured to the idea of hackathons and startups like moth to a fire... Any true-blood hacker here wanting to team up with me to win this thing? Angelhack is in San Francisco, Dec 1st and 2nd (24 hr hackathon). My skillset includes iOS, Hadoop, zeromq. Email me nicoleschulte94 at gmail.
I found one bug though, if you enter a wrong password against someone's username a few times and then click the "Forgot password" link, the user's current password gets invalidated. And it usually takes more than 5 min for the new password email to appear, sometimes even more.
Horns implanted in head to stretch skin to remove birth mark.
I came here hoping to find exactly this. Cheers.
Absolutely.

And it should bother you.

You being bothered by this is a sign that you care about your work. These people, it would seem, do not.

It sucks that these people might trash your work, just refuse to ever work with them again.
I strongly recommend that one who plan to buy hosting services or register domains to visit http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ few times

You will get a better understanding of the hosting and domain business

The key point for me was, there are so many resellers, and most resellers are terrible and dont live long
That's beside the point.

He claims the app store doesn't work at all, not that it doesn't look like the apple app store.

He may be a liar, but that is a different offense than what you accuse him of.
Do you think there is a market for teaching this? I've taught a couple of courses on this stuff "professionally" and have been debating for a while if I should create some nice online course on the topic.
Bayesian analysis in javascript
Performance of RESTful Apps
Yes, but if you do hire somebody else to setup your domains make sure the domains are associated with a registrar account that you control. If necessary delegate nameservers but not the domain itself. Best is to do the registration process yourself.

When I was doing websites, the number of times somebody had a previous domain "registered" by their previous web developer who had the domain associated with his godaddy account.

This means of course that when you want to stick the new website up you can't without contacting the previous developer who is either very uncoperative or has flat out disappeared.

The process to resolve this is such a pain and has to be carried out usually by the person who will be the benefactor of the domain who has no idea about authorisation codes, DNS delegation or any of this stuff.
IOS has the best apps, period. Apple needs this to always be the case.

Until they opened up maps for other apps, this wasn't the case. Siri also doesn't look like a world beater yet. 3rd party app quality is still high, but it's disappointing how they let new core apps be so bad on release. I'm not saying software like that is easy. But I think they took a bit of a black eye by releasing software that seemed so half-baked.
21-year-old girl in India arrested for Facebook post
This is a somewhat close possibility barring comments, as elixir produces erlang AST.

However, the AST it produces won't be perceived fully idiomatic style-wise (because of how some macros expand) so there might be not much value in this.

Also, without Elixir stdlib, such compilation would be useless as idiomatic Elixir normally includes use of Elixir stdlib.

For me, what makes it safe to adopt Elixir is the fact that worse comes to worse, I still have my .ex sources, they compile to valid beams, why should I care?..
Show HN: I wrote a Twitter bot in a weekend
I wanted to write something silly over the weekend. I've toyed with the idea of a Markov bot, so I found a Markov chain in C#, fiddled with it to make it a little more... logical(?) and made it start spitting out text.

It currently talks to twitter as @hacking_ebooks, using some loose bits of a bunch of RFCs (SSH, X11, TCP, IP(v6), telnet and BTMM).

source: https://bitbucket.org/indrora/markov-talky
Speed and memory specs revealed for Nintendo's Wii U console
That's not a bad question. Thing is the organisations that perform thorough civilian demining already start off with cheaper methods such as mine rollers to get some of the mines, and the ones they use are arguably cheaper to use because they're strong enough to require fewer replacement parts. For instance Mechem has a CASSPIR armoured vehicle with steel wheels that'll happily trundle over anti-personnel mines all day without needing repairs (though anti-tank mines necessitate a wheel change).

And as another poster (codebeaker) pointed out, it's also far worse for demining teams to have random shrapnel spread over a minefield, as it makes the job of identifying mines much more difficult. That's one of the reasons why demining teams use systems that are less likely to break and leave pieces on the minefield.

So it's unlikely that this product will save any money.
Children’s Day
Children’s Day is celebrated on various days in many places
around the world, to honor children globally -
http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/20/google-marks-universal-childrens-day-with-a-doodle/
Children’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/20/google-marks-universal-childrens-day-with-a-doodle/
All these measurements should be considered in the same light: what is the projected TCO of the software? And this includes a number of metrics:

- programmer productivity

- hardware costs

- speed

- flexibility

- ease of maintenance

- barrier of entry

- interop with other software

How easy will it be to maintain the software in ten years? Wrt to Python, it's a fantastic language, but I've become scared of large codebases in dynamic languages.
I believe that studies (which I cannot find citations for now) determined that this device makes the sutation worse, as it scatters metalic debris over a wider area, and that human mine clearance teams have to work an order of magnitude harder, cleaning up tiny bits of shrapnel. Before an area can be marked clear, it has to be devoid of all unidentified metalic shards, and of course, all mines of other materials. As a result, it was the determination of more than one agency that this device makes things worse.

With that said, props to the designer for working on a solution to a difficult problem, but perhaps more domain knowledge would have lead him to a more suitable solution
I'm planning to move back to London in January after a year abroad. I've been watching this since it was posted here a couple months ago and I'm really looking forward to using it to find my next rental.

Just wanted to say thanks, it looks great!
Very good points (indeed, I totally agree on each and every of them!), but there's the risk that someone writing a software just for sake of the task will just argue «I'm not interested in doing this, but in the task».

This is exactly what happens for many users when you suggest them to install GNU/Linux and enjoy freedom. They say: «I don't want to learn another OS. I just use the computer to get things done». Then they'll keep using Excel.
Blind orchestra auditions better for women, study finds

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/

Employer's replies to racial names

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

One thing I personally like about these surveys is that they appear to tell us people do these things subconsiously.

You don't want my help or to be condescended to. I (and other white males) don't want to be called out as racist and sexist.

There always will be people who "beat the odds". It sounds like you have. I am from a poor background, yet I went to Cambridge University. My wife is one of the top AI researchers in the UK, if not the world.

My wife also brings in another perspective to me. Having helped run a couple of conferences, we didn't have to lower our standards to be more diverse. We just had to look more widely than we might have done if we were lazy, and just asked our close friends.
Recursive fun expressions in Erlang
A review of MailChimp
You're getting downvoted because civilian requirements are higher than military.

If you manage to clear a field such that there is a single mine in it, it will likely become safer to march through than avoid - there are plenty of other things that can kill you, and they must be triaged in war time.

However, if you take that same field after the war is over and put a farmer on it, it's basically a matter of time until he steps on it. His only chance is that an animal blows it up, or the mine is defective.

Therefore, if it's not suitable for military clearing, it is even less suitable for civilian purposes (except for figuring out what needs to be cleared, as they say).