skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't Google's Translate app already do this?

http://www.google.com/mobile/translate/

Does Mantaphrase work offline? I think Translate requires a data connection.

I can't really think of another use case, though.
White House: ITU Treaty Blurs Infrastructure With The Info That Crosses Over It
Thanks. I'm left-handed and I've never been happy with hand-writing. My death-grip on the pen inevitably results in a vicious cycle of hand cramps and messy handwriting.

I've been looking to change things up by taking hand-written notes (less distracting overall, more focus), but I'm back to the same old. A better writing instrument might help.
if the only place where you display your most popular visual brand element is the footer and the favicon, you are doing it wrong.
The Team Behind RoughDraft.vc
Ahh, after I signed up for PyCoder (curtailed Python newsletter every Friday), I thought of doing something similar but tailoring to college students. You beat me to it! Awesome project bcjordan :)
United States Says It Won't Ratify UN Telecom Treaty
Ask HN: How many options should I ask while joining startup?
I have an opportunity to join early stage Startup in key developer role.
What compensation should I ask?
How many stock options should I ask?
Major Tech Trends in Promotional Products
I think fred is right and barry (author) is also right. There is a general bias by VC's to ad supported startups, and they can be overly enthusiastic about the latest "business model" to emerge.

From the startup perspective - both ad based revenue and subscription or direct e-commerce models are hard, but the old adage applies: built something people want.
I've been using m.facebook.com in the browser because the Android app is just so horrible. But I refuse to get my hopes up.
My understanding of the middle class is that they were the mid-small businessmen - merchants - of Europe since the 1600s. Checking wikipedia, it agrees with me.

There's also the idea that the middle class is the high-school degreed people who make "decent" money, perhaps by being in the trades (i.e., plumber) or working in a factory. Edit: this idea is not unique, I've heard it in a variety of places.

These two ideas don't really connect too well (although business-minded tradespeople can grow their business to be fairly lucrative).

I have no particular comment regarding Marc's statements, but I wanted to point out the varying definitions.
Not just this year.

Few years ago Mark Simonson, its creator, was the first type designer with balls big enough to let go of a tight control over PN's distribution and embrace its online use. Back then uttering "Cufon" or "embedding" on Typophile would give you strange looks at best and a flame war centered around lost profits and piracy at worst. He was also one of few designers to extensively hint fonts for on screen use _in smaller sizes on Windows_. PN was basically the first non-OS font that looked great on Windows in 11px. The last contributing factor was that in all caps PN looked very close to Gotham, but it was also few times cheaper. If you ever looked at Gotham, you know how well it works as a heading font. And PN was the only online-friendly alternative.

In other words, the position that Proxima Nova enjoys now is directly related to the liberal license that Mark released it under and the hard and focused work he put into polishing it for the online use. Props to him.
Article framed by someone with an anti-Microsoft ax to grind.
The article could have spoken about MS continued dominance in the PC market, or the 400% rise of sales in the phone market but instead the article blended a bunch of markets together to produce the result they wanted to speak about.

something anti-Microsoft.
For half of the music I listen, this is true. The rest it just doesn't get.
What does it do that the google translate app doesn't?
I'm the one bringing up Alex Jones, as a way of being
derisive about people who equate the US and China on the
auspices that "the US has made policy mistakes and China
has made policy mistakes so what's the difference?". I'm
sorry that I accidentally implied that you, specifically,
were regurgitating Infowars points.

No problem. I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't.

Yes, this is a clusterfuck.

That's something we definitely agree on ;)

That's a problem. But it's not a sign that the US is gradually
turning into a dystopian hellscape.

At the risk of sounding crazy myself, I've seen too many recent videos of "peace officers" dragging peaceful protestors into the streets by their hair and group beating them with batons before handcuffing and arresting them, to believe that myself. But that's my opinion. And I really do wish that was the case.

I don't care, except for two things. First, when people bring
up the NDAA, they set off a "someone's wrong on the Internet"
sensor that, as a nerd, I am unable to suppress. Second, as much
as Internet psuedo-activists do not want to hear this, the "NDAA"
issue is in fact a corner case in US policy. Indefinite detention
of political dissidents in China is not a corner case. It is a daily
fact of life, as it is elsewhere in the world.

I don't have any examples of the provisions outlined in the NDAA and documents prior being used, so I can't speak to that.

You can make millions of dollars spinning conspiracy theories
about the evils of the government and big corporations in America,
and the reality is, nobody really cares. Try doing that in Russia;
see how long it takes for you or your coworkers to end up dead.

"Try doing that in Russia; see how long it takes for you or your coworkers to end up dead." Let's be fair, you could make that same case for the death of Andrew Breitbart.
Scientists Believe This Is the Oldest Object We Have Ever Seen
oddly, just entering "pier 39" gives the correct result while "pier 39 san francisco" doesn't. OTOH, if you clicked on the "report a problem" and gave this feedback you could count yourself the saviour of the hapless millions who would have been lead astray by Apple maps and mugged or killed.
Anyone want to speculate on how many years it will be till we see a similar announcement on a trial program for e-hailing self-driving Uber cars in SF? The future is a cool place to live.
I live in KC and did a Startup Weekend about a month ago. One of the guys on my team crashed at the Hacker House for the weekend and swore by it.

I believe one of the other teams all stayed there as well, and spent the nights hacking at their startup @ the hacker house. Heard nothing but good things.
Lessons learned from not selling my project or why I turn down $18k offer
Thank you so much for doing this! Really excited to solve problems and improve my programming chops!
Sadly, the author of this package was unaware that Dr. Jones was denied tenure, and is no longer on faculty.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/back-from-yet-another-glo...
Pretty interesting stuff... have to wonder how much of that is necessary (especially the native bitmap stuff) considering Google+ for Android appears to be all java code and runs exceptionally smoothly.

a) Reducing Garbage Collection - Very standard, not creating new objects in tight loops should be in the 'very obvious' category, regardless of GC or not.

b) Writing a Custom Event Bus - Would be great if they released theirs so we could compare it to the existing ones - https://github.com/greenrobot/EventBus - http://square.github.com/otto/

c) Moving Photos to the Native Heap - Feels like this would have very heavy costs in transferring the photo back into the dalvik VM for display? Possibly control of allocation/de-allocation + absolute memory tracking makes this net positive for the Facebook app - but what about multitasking? Will the Facebook app free up this memory when swapped to the background?

d) Writing a Custom ListView Recycler - This one is genuinely interesting, and hopefully Facebook can commit this back into Android AOSP! If not, hopefully some Google devs can take a look at the default recyclers and see if they can implement the same improvements.
square
shopify
Does the app work offline?
Charlie Stross: Unpacking the Zeitgeist
nokias app has the whole world mapped for you without any internet access needed?
Am I the only one who was put-off at the first paragraph calling Yegge and ESR "gifted essayists"? Some people genuinely are gifted essayists. People who write incredibly long-winded essays that jerk wildly to and from seemingly random topics are not among them. I'd say PG actually does qualify, his essays are generally well thought-out, and able to convey a concise, clear point. How does one possibly group PG and Yegge into the same category as writers?
This isn't true on Android - if you've done a full backup, you can restore Google Authenticator without disabling and re-enabling the service.
AA is actually about exactly what I'm talking about, they're about talking openly about your problems and receiving sympathy from others who either have similar issues or have overcome them without fear of being judged or looked down upon from others.

That being said I think scientific evidence-based solutions are generally a better option than AA. Don't get me wrong - I'm not disputing that AA certainly has helped a lot of people - but the statistics aren't looking great either.
I've never met Markus Persson, but its obvious from reading his tweets and posts that he is a good person. If anyone deserves the success he's had, its him.
This argument applies equally well to most things.

Defending a country is a hugely complicated mess, and moving battleships over here is going to have ramifications over there. Policing society is difficult and complicated - we try to cut down on crime by targeting something over here, and it causes problems over there.

Clearly, we should call the whole thing off, and allow international affairs and society take care of themselves - all the way through invasions and murder?

Evolution doesn't need biologists, but people who need to make decisions dealing with the consequences of evolution on epidemiology sure do!
Samsung Exec Admits to Using Apple Products
Using The Wp_Editor() Function On Theme Options
Absolutely Agreed. One of the MMT founders ( Randal Wray) was a student of Minsky who himself was very anti-finance.
My understanding is Steve Keen has changed some of his views based upon MMT literature. In these Video's you've got Steve Keen and MMT professors in the same room presenting to each other.

On point 6) the government has statutory control of the banks. Its just that the banks have captured the government.
War-hawk generals getting control of our foreign policy would be the analog.

edit: video of steve keen with MMT profs
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=steve+keen+scott...
Pontifex followers prefer cocacola over pepsi
By measuring followers in common between two or more different Twitter accounts (politicians or celebrities compared against brands), we are able to infer some curious facts about the particular interests of these different audiences. In this example, we are analyzing @Pontifex followers and comparing them with @Pepsi and @Cocacola.

A curious fact that we can discover is that the Pope’s followers prefer Coca-Cola (@cocacola) rather than Pepsi (@pepsi). This is the result of analyzing the percentage of @Pontifex followers which are also followers of @Cocacola or @Pepsi. As seen in the graph below, the 1.17% of @Pontifex followers also follow @CocaCola while the 1.06% of his followers do follow @Pepsi. This is even more remarkable considering that Pepsi has more followers on Twitter than Coca-Cola (1.074.321 vs. 645.562).

For example, if we applied the same analysis to the followers of @JustinBieber versus Coca-Cola and Pepsi: the result is the opposite and there is a preference to follow Pepsi (1.3%) versus Coca-Cola (0.75%) among Justin Bieber’s followers.

This study published is based on the analysis of a sample of 50% of followers of all @Pontifex official accounts.
This is interesting, I've never considered using an alternative app for google 2fa tokens.. mostly because the app Just Works. It's literally one tap and it shows the token I need to type into the website, I'm not sure how it could get any simpler.

Since the authy guys seem to be around, if the only 2fa I have is on my Google accounts, what is the advantage of using Authy over the standard Google Authenticator app (on Android, fwiw)?
Can this be used inside other apps that rely on maps? Otherwise only half of the problem is solved.
For all their effort, it doesn't look like they even bothered to read Google's design guidelines.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4913939
I was really astounded to see so many negative reviews. And after Google switched reviews to G+ people are more careful to leave reviews too... Anyway, looking forward to see the new app.
Most university researchers aren't so results oriented they take a job with an organization that has the explicit purpose of pushing a single agenda.

And yes, I generally ignore what people at think tanks say. Life is too short, and I prioritize the views of people whose credibility isn't compromised from step 1.
Japan police offers first-ever reward for wanted hacker
I just saw a piece on the news about this, congrats!
(btw, this is Sam B.)
Ask HN: Where to see the Vegas Tech scene
Hey,

I'm going to be in Vegas next week and was wondering where to go to check out the Vegas startup and Tech scenes?

Any startups cater to visitors? An events between the 20th and 24th worth going to?
So, the beginnings of an Alternate Reality Game, perhaps?
An entry on the antennas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
Their site says it does
I wish they would make their stuff look better on mobile.

I guess I'm the only sick person who looks at code while in my bed on my iPhone. I really should read a book instead.
Yep, just found it too. Awesome.
I too lost my Father, but at a young age (12). Deal with your emotions as you can, and take time for yourself. That is the only advice that I found is portable across different people.

Its been 15 years for me, and it gets easier with time. But recently I hit the 15 year mark and just lost it. For some reason that number was bigger than any year previously. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I have lived 55% of my life without my father around.
Looks very nice! Will try it out for sure. Quick question, is there a option to use plain js instead of CoffeeScript?
I'm not sure what you mean here. Everything is stored locally, so it's not like it's going off to a website to get your token.

Are you saying that because the device is networked it is by definition vulnerable to hackers and so cannot be a high quality 2FA device?

If so I completely agree, except to point out that if I use a couple of banks (some are better for cards, some are better for savings), and Google and I play WoW and I (insert other service that uses 2FA here) then that's going to be a lot of physical doo-dads I have to keep track of. It's an unfortunate reality, but having all these things attached to one 'smart' device is the only real way of making them viable after you get more than one.
1Password v4 now on the App Store
I just found http://www.reverbnation.com a while ago. Not sure yet what it's worth, but I will give it a try.
As someone who doesn't use AirBNB, when can I expect a check to compensate me for the risk you expose me to buy running a hotel out of your residential dwelling?
I created something similar a few months ago to send out a interview question every other day. The time constraints of maintaining it got to me though (I'm a university student myself) and I recently stopped sending out question of the day. I have plans to revive it later but for right now its in 'hiatus' mode so to speak.

Check it out at: www.InterTechTion.com
The first real library I had to learn to use was GSL. The first framework I ever learned to use was ROOT. I also had to learn how to use FFTW and all sorts of other math libraries. I've had to hack fortran a bit, but mostly just know how to read it and compile it with g77 and stuff because that's what my professors would program in. In my only real course in programming at a university I learned how to link C to fortran libraries. I used Maple way more than matlab, and all of this was the majority of my programming training before I graduated from college.

If there is a divide between fortran and LISP hackers, I'd have to say that Python is going to be the adopted parent/mentor, and it's the only programming language truly situated to bring them together. This is why projects like PyPy get me excited. Other projects like Julia are really interesting as well.

I have to agree with the premise of the article though. There is a divide between mathematical hackers and non-mathematical hackers. I don't think it's anti-intellectualism per se, it's possibly more of a result of the increasing stratification of backgrounds in an industry which has increasingly focused on products, services, and most importantly consumers and "social".

I went to a talk yesterday by an veteran applied mathematician who does research at HP labs. He mentioned something that really resonated with this notion: The days of academic style research, of Bell Labs and the like, has disappeared. This isn't to say that research and math has disappeared from the industries, but as a researcher you have to justify the research by explaining how it can contribute to a bottom line for the company. There's a few companies with looser restrictions on this (Microsoft, Google), but typically this kind of research is best done at companies that are monopolies with high profit margins. In that case, a company like Apple would be best situated to conduct research on the level of the Bell Labs of the past, but it's evident that they don't. The mathematical hacker started falling out of vogue sometime in the 70s. If the mathematical hacker ever becomes vogue again, it won't be because of Apple. It will be because of big data, autonomous cars, medicine and bioinformatics.
Towards a Common Ruby definition
Are you guys talking about dildos?
The more I learn about social data, the more I learn to appreciate traditional values and wisdom.
Got the same gist (harhar). With all of the super user-friendly updates they've been pushing out lately, this homepage makes it look like a service those types of people wouldn't think of using. And it is boringly Bootstrap-y looking.
I'm one of the USV dudes who made it.

It's comprehensive, but we're only listing the initial investment in each company.

We like to follow-on with each investment, but I couldn't think of a good way to visualize that on a timeline. Any ideas?
Advertising based businesses are 100% about scale because making money with ads is about math. Take a CPM of $10. To make $10,000,000 you need 1,000,000,000 page views. Figuring each user views 10 pages (which is probably high), you are now down to something like 100,000,000 user sessions. Now, figure each user visits your site 10 times a month (which would be a pretty site), you're now down to needing 10,000,000 users a month to make $10 million a month. That is a per user value of $1 per month or $12 a year.

Now, compare that to a SAAS that charged $25/month/user. You're now talking per user revenue of $300 per year. It's a lot easier to build a company at $300/user/year than $12/user/year.

To make $10 million a month at $25/user a month you need 400,000 users. That's still a big number, but it's probably easier to reach 400,000 customers than it is 10,000,000 users.
In that case it isn't clear why an app named "child books" should be on top. It's a very generic name.
Become a pro web developer in 9 weeks
Different thing. Mantaphrase appears to provide pre-set categorised phrases for you to select, which you can then show/say a good translation of to the person with whom you're conversing. It then intelligently provides follow-up phrases you might want to use afterwards. And yes, this all works offline.

From what I can tell, it's the modern equivalent of a 'phrase book', which makes sense and is a pretty good idea, imo.

As someone else has posted, it would be interesting to know how many users are out there actually using it in the real world. The statistics seem to suggest that there have been a lot of people download it and play with it a few times.
No Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. I can imagine having a list of email addresses with people interested in getting coding interviews could be interesting to the right people with enough money.
Same thing happened with Gmail back at the start. I guess it goes to show that web searches are a very specific kind of search, and just because Google is good at that doesn't mean it's good at anything else (relevance on the web is one obvious way it deviates from pretty much anything else you search)
So what happens if the price of natural gas goes up again? Isn't this just another example of a lucky break that won't last forever (much like the history of cheap oil)?

Granted, it doesn't at all take away from this being a good year, but the original article seems to imply that things are getting better and will always get better.

It's during the good times that you're supposed to think about and prepare for the bad times. But too often, it seems like people just want to sit back and congratulate themselves. Ant vs grasshopper, I guess.
Yes I read it. Apparently the only reason they do the useless and manipulated web poll is for clicks and hits.
Actually, there is a good chance that this is temporary.

I imagine they took some base stable version of android, and built their services platform on top of that. They have their own ridiculously huge Web Services platform that they want to provide that at a system service level to application developers.

To do this quickly, they had to throw out a lot of hardware support both at the system level for things like gyros, hardware buttons, GPS, etc (all the things the iPad and Google Tablets have), to be able to undercut the manufacturing price to an attractive retail market value.

There is a good chance their video streaming leverages system services built off an increasingly "Amazon" branch of early stripped down Android code.

Once they have their platform, they can focus on rolling back in the hardware and services to support a larger eco-system.

Ultimately, I think they are trying to enable a hub to provide all of their web technology through a mobile device. They've chosen android to safe themselves a lot of time plus they aren't OS guys.

Now they are the awkward cousin that doesn't have a fully realized value proposition and is semi-cross functional with other devices and more enhanced platform.

In fact, developing for Kindle Fire would probably feel a lot like porting an Android app (that was originally written for iOS in Objective C) and designing around the current hardware peripheral limitations (and the fact that "Google" intents would be completely ignored).

What they could be betting on is the shear technical force of their infrastructure and web services. If they can bring high-quality content to their users consistently, people will feel the comfort of Amazon more than other eco-systems.

This puts Amazon in a weird position because they are competing with Google more than Apple, really. Especially since they chose Android. Google expected making and distributing Android would increase the gravity to their platform, but its totally possible they understimated Jeff Bezos and his ability to leverage it.
The problem is: the only way to detect this, as the article points out, is for them to stop doing their job well intentionally. You either wreck the perfectly good situation you have locally, or you find some other place where everything is terrible, and you compare the two. This is one of the reasons why scientific methods are hard to apply in non-experimental situations: you can't necessarily destroy the national economy 'to see if it would really work'. It's the same as informed consent in medical experiments, just on a larger scale.