skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Those attacks were rather less lethal than the ones involving guns.

2. It focuses the conversation on achievable solutions. No country on earth has managed to solve the identification, treatment and care of mental health issues enough that would prevent one slipping through the net. Many, many countries have managed to reduce gun deaths to very low numbers indeed.
> ... says a guy who, in the wake of a tragedy, rushes to say that we need more gun control.

Given that these things happen with a depressing regularity, it's hardly rushing to judgement at this point to say "we need to have a discussion about guns".
There are many, many companies making millions per year selling themes and plugins for WordPress, even those that acknowledge they're GPL licensed. Those that want to make a deal of it put in license terms that while their code is GPL, the other assets necessary to use that code -- such as stylesheets, images and JavaScript files -- are commercially licensed.

Those that don't just don't mention it, like WooThemes. They're one of those millions-a-year businesses. You won't find GPL or any license terms mentioned on their site or during checkout unless seek out their "Terms and Conditions" page yourself -- a link they hide as much as possible -- black text that doesn't look like a link under the logo in the footer, apart from even the other footer links.

In reality, the licensing issue isn't a big deal. There are over 50 million active WordPress installs -- it's a huge market. If you provide an awesome plugin, and you support it, people will pay you for it, even if they could download it off some warez site and you'd have no recourse to go after them.
iCloud was doomed from inception. Apple simply cannot create a service like Dropbox due to strategy taxes:

http://arstechnica.com/staff/2011/03/the-apple-strategy-tax/
My login to the Bug Reporter is currently broken but I'll definitely report it. Thanks!
> Spree killings still happen without guns (see the similar school attacks in Asia where bladed weapons were used.)

compare the number of people killed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_Schoo...
You moved effortlessly from "app" to "content I want to consume," as if apps are mere passive content delivery channels. But they're not: they're tools. A well crafted tool is a pleasure to use, while a bad tool can make any task miserable.

Tools matter even for content delivery! Hulu recently migrated their PS3 app from native to something that's apparently based on web technologies, and the experience became much worse in almost every way: slower loading, laggy scrolling, more confusing interface. Hulu ships on many devices and I think they hope to share aspects of their front-end, but with their new app, watching TV became more difficult and less pleasant.

I don't believe you when you claim to not care, that you would rather live on the lowest common denominator in perpetuity than be faced with a transient zero.
If the game is so bogged down that the fixed timestep cycle is slowing down the game is broken for so many other reasons. Objects will start tunneling through other objects.
Seriously, I'm pretty damn solid on the need for gun control, but this plan seems pretty half baked. Trying to regulate the primary components of a bullet seems like it would be a practical impossibility. You thought the war on drugs was a losing battle, try the war on gunpowder.
Doesn't 'arms' include both the weapons and ammunition though?
How would we regulate bullets? People have been packing their own bullets since guns were created.
The Atlantic is being deliberately misleading here. Pay for Software? I think they should have said, "Why You Should Pay for Internet Service."

That is, unless there's a way for you to download Instagram's entire service as a package and install it on your own infrastructure (not likely), you aren't ever going to pay them for "software." If you pay them, it will be a subscription to their service.

I think the real culprit here is actually Google, who can (and do!) release all kinds of useful free services. They then actively support the misconception that all online services should be free – this helps them because consumers then make the error of assuming that this is reasonable; meanwhile, Google benefits as consumers turn a blind eye to their data mining, advertising, etc.

I suppose it would be fair to blame all the large cloud providers competing in the same space (Microsoft and Yahoo for example). However, Google was the first to try this and arguably the most successful.
That article is utterly unimpressive, and its attempt to be smug at finding a "loophole in the constitution" is absurd.
This make a wildly naive assumption that paying for a product somehow makes it less likely that they will monetize your likeness. The truth is large companies with any swath of investors are expected to grow, thats how money is made. This means that there will need to be constant new revenue streams added on.

TLDR: Paying for any app just delays the inevitable monetization of content as the company is forced to expand and create more revenue.
I am sick of hearing this argument referencing the spree killings in Asia with knives. In nearly every case, fewer people are killed when the weapon is a knife. Clearly guns are much more deadly than knives.
I wonder if the author would defend so gleefully the idea of the government restricting access to newspaper ink? Anyone promoting the idea of subverting the constitution through perceived loopholes should really question their principles.

Also, the word "cartridge" or "ammunition" is what the author means to be talking about here. Bullets are only the metal part that flies out of the gun, not the whole cartridge.
Oops, yes, sorry guys.
If you don't destroy the firearms you aren't destroying the demand. Everybody who has a firearm will probably start by hoarding existing bullets and this will create a black market for ammo. When the local cache is over, it's obvious who is going to fill that need.
The author of this article seems to be under the impression that 3D printing a firearm is easy while loading your own ammunition is difficult. With the proper equipment (less than a thousand dollar investment), loading ammunition is only slightly more difficult than baking a cake.
Nobody said he shouldn't be happy. The point was that bragging about them in public (as opposed to around friends or family) is unbecoming.
I'll bet instagram never thought of that! If only they had these guys coming in to tell them that they could charge for software. "Guys, if you charge just $5 a month - you'll have $300m a quarter!" Genius!

Great reporting Atlantic, I'm normally a fan, but this is quite poor.
You're being downvoted because Travis Oliphant, the original author of Numpy, is also a co-founder of Continuum Analytics.
with respect (i am speaking retro-introspectively)- i cannot understand how recognizing that your feelings would change with perspective isn't enough in and of itself to change them.

to me, admitting your feelings would change with perspective is admitting you simply cannot relate to what these people are going through. if your lack of empathy is derived from the inability to relate- that seems awfully selfish.

but at the same time, "i cannot pretend to relate with what these people are going through" sounds refreshingly empathetic if you ask me.
Its not about statistics. If it were, we'd be contemplating things like taxing food in inverse proportion to its nutritional content and glycemic index.
It would be great to eventually have a GPU version as well (as in the cases of Matlab and R). I saw a brief demo of Matlab on a Mac Retina Pro 15 where the GPU version ran 30x the CPU version.
I would think they have rules about smoking in the workplace :)
Interviewing Children. Really?
Ask HN: Programming projects for a teenager?
Hey hacker news, I'm a 15 year old currently in high school, and I need a programming project. I don't really want a project euler type thing, or something small, I want a big project, preferably a web service that I can build all the parts of myself, and show to potential employers at some point. The problem is, I have no ideas. Thanks in advance.
And the author used the term ammunition and cartridge, so...?
Well, that's one off the list:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/news/...

Listed in the category "2012—2022"
" Drones will protect endangered species. "
This story is extremely thinly sourced. Unnamed "industry sources" quoted in a publication I've never heard of that, according to its homepage, is being shuttered for good in two weeks.
An Amazon phone is only interesting if it can do something interesting with phone plan pricing, but with all the strides that have been made in prepaid phone plans, Amazon could really do something interesting.

A $200 phone with a $10, $20, or $30 plan would probably do well. They could resell AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, or even Verizon like Straight Talk, Net 10, and Virgin Mobile USA so.

Prepaid is starting to hit a much more mainstream audience with smartphones, so Amazon could time this really well.
Absolutely. It wasn't my intention to represent that deaths don't occur. Rather, I wanted to preempt the argument that training makes guns 100% safe.
Is an app that you have to fight with really better than no app at all? If it didn't exist, at least you wouldn't have gotten in a fight!

There's many sites that I consciously avoid on my phone because they work so poorly that I don't even want to bother. These sites do mobile users no service by existing. An app or website has to at least meet the "user will tolerate it" bar.
GPU support is definitely planned and already supported in NumbaPro[2]. Here's a video of Travis Oliphant's talk about targeting CUDA through Numba:

[1] http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/26973799

[2] https://store.continuum.io/cshop/numbapro
SimCity Developers' Reddit AMA Swiftly Turns Into WTF With The Online-Only DRM?
If markets are working more or less efficiently, digging natural gold must still be cheaper. There's a lot of toxic stuff in landfill and it's usually located close to population centres.

Gold-harvesting nano robots would be awesome. Just don't let those suckers loose downtown...
"However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world's tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalum
Signed up, submitted a few reviews, received a few. So far so good.

It would be great if I could:

- see the history of the reviews I submitted;

- contact reviewers of my site;

Time spent on a review isn't very helpful. I got distracted by kids at least twice, which resulted in two of my reviews taking very long. On the other hand, another two reviews took equally long, but it was actual writing and editing.

Are you going to let reviewers and submitters communicate directly or are you going to profit from not letting them do it?
The article does a decent job of discussing growth hacking just after Sean Ellis wrote about it in 2010. You can find most substantial content on tactics and best practices else where.

I am glad the importance of growth is spreading to the mainstream but people need more meat these days.
I'm pretty sure there isn't much gray area in defrauding the postal service.
It all feels a little like handwringing, doesn't it? We think we can solve the problem by gun control but then you realize there are too many guns out there already that it won't work (or at least not for many years).

So we go for the bullets, but then people who grew up around sport shooting can tell us it's nothing to sit down and create dozens of rounds in a free night. My own experience reminds me of loading a dozen shells with my Dad when I was 10 in just a couple hours so we could hunt the next morning. So the idea of limiting the bullets (or at least shells) won't work unless the materials are also regulated.

The mental health aspect seems to be one of the best ideas but then that might just depend on universal health actually being put into place. Without it, many people will go without due to the expense of mental facilities.

So yeah handwringing. We want someone to do something and fast but none of the options seem easy, quick, or realistic. So we might need to pick the one or two that will work eventually, maybe 5-10 years down the road, and take it from there.
Hack/Make
Many people have been in a rush these last few days.
I wasn't trying to be mean, I just chuckled when you said, "Beautiful."

I'm grateful for the love and care you've put into libraries like 'requests'. When I've been toiling away at a program for hours and it winds up resembling something like spaghetti mixed with beer shits, I find that if I stop and study some of your code, I am instantly a better programmer.
I don't see "cartridge" anywhere and he misused the term bullet repeatedly throughout the article. It's like an article on technology that repeatedly refers to applications as "source code" or something.
This article's claim (even stated in the title) is not that Instagram should have charged, but that users should demand to pay. The article is not written for Instagram: it is written for users.

> Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.
There is actually a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as "anchoring," which is to say, people will be subconsciously influenced by the number they first see.

Car dealerships do this all the time with the MSRP numbers they put on their vehicles (which are, typically speaking, wildly inflated from their cost basis). Seasoned negotiators do this, as well -- anchoring either high or low, depending on their objectives.

I would be willing to bet that an A/B test of a higher suggested price and a lower suggested price would yield better returns from the higher suggested price.

Anchoring is especially effective in cases where people have no real sense of the intrinsic value of something. For instance, if I offered someone a bar of palladium, they'd generally have no freaking clue what they should pay. I could tell them $2000, or I could tell them $200,000. The $200,000 offer might not actually get any takers at $200,000. But it would generate a much higher negotiated price than the $2000 offer would, because people would mentally start at $200,000, and then try to work down from it.
Ask HN: What resources are there for Search/Information retrieval?
Other than going through the source code for Lucene/Solr, what books, articles or any other resources would you recommend that go over the theory/math/design of a Search system?
Google's Winter cleaning
What id don't understand is, wouldn't this be only half more correct? I'm not really sure if my question makes sense.
I wonder if they could have made more by using Humble Bundle's model of unlocking an extra if the buyer pays more than average. Keeps the attractive flexibility of pay-what-you-want, but actually incentivizes people to pay up.
Take a look at the "Twttr" photo. Kevin Systrom (of Instagram fame) was babysitting.
Agreed with a caveat:

People could prefer services that have some sort of contractual agreement for perpetuity to never do anything creepy with your stuff. Those services would by definition have to have some sort of paid angle or make due with dumb ads. Now most people don't care but it's possible someone could, in DDG fashion, try and leverage the "don't be creepy" angle.
Actually, both the OS X and iOS calendars do support flipping between months with a swipe. Arguably, the leather effect at the top aids in this by reinforcing the physical-analog affordance, though the torn edges are a bit much.

Now the address book, that's a nearly perfect counterexample. Once again, on both iOS and OS X, it has "pages" that invite a swipe – except here, swiping does nothing. A dead affordance that only serves to frustrate and confuse the user.
Good to know. The only Indiana Jones movie I have seen is the Crystal Skull one, so I'm not up on my Jones.

"Something I hadn't previously considered is that given Disney does its own distribution, they probably have no need to use 20th Century Fox on the new Star Wars movies. Having a Star Wars movie that doesn't open up with the 20th Century Fox drumroll is going to be downright weird."

I didn't think of that either. It would be weird, although, I don't think I'm going to see it anyways. The story has ended and I'm content.
"Spirituality is in the here and now."

For what it's worth, I see that as being one specific piece of advice with regards to your relationship with time. That is sort of the traditional spiritual path of buddhism, but others might legitimately think differently, e.g. those who find solace in the canon of western lit.
Video platforms design and development tips
I watched a doco a while back about a bloke named Damien Mander, who was ex-SAS and served in Afghanistan/Iraq, and was now living in South Africa training wardens to protect the elephants and rhinos. He said that the one tool he wished he had access to was predator UAVs like the ones they had in Afghanistan, because the amount of ground it could cover in one flight was huge compared to troops on-foot (or even in ground based vehicles). He had hooked up with a Melbourne based aviation engineer to design a UAV themselves, with thermo imaging equipment etc. The problem for me was that it was essentially a radio controlled plane, complete with the buzzing sound of the little nitro engine. Seemed like an easy target for a poacher to just shoot it out of the sky.

I really hope Google are putting a predator style UAV in this guys hands.
Hey, let me tell you about my startup
10 years seems a bit steep.

Wonder what Scarlett thinks of this; someone read her email, and is now in jail for 10 years.
So what happens when the OS doesn't return to your process in dt time?

The whole point of dt is to deal with variable framerate.
Boxes, packages, letters etc. can get ripped and shredded by processing machines and conveyor belts and truck doors, etc.. I've gotten remnants of destroyed letters delivered before. Given the huge amount of mail moving through the system, even a small percentage experiencing accidents can amount to a large number of damaged items. The insides of these things don't always stay inside all the way through their trips, basically.
But then:

> Here's an alternative version of what Instagram could have done
define:arms

arms plural of arms (Noun)
Weapons and ammunition; armaments: "they were subjugated by force of arms".
Poor bastard. He did something that is unquestionably highly unethical and illegal, but he was also an awkward, messed-up nerdy guy who arguably just needed some real friends and a chance.

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201205/chris-chan...
Great and exciting use of technology, happy to read about Google doing stuff this. Really hope they publish the effects of it good or bad
No one was killed in the latest "spree killing" in Asia. Try again.
Unless/until there were a revolution, increased automation leads to increased inequality rather than a 'post-scarcity society', though.
> Anyone promoting the idea of subverting the constitution through perceived loopholes should really question their principles.

What is the purpose of the Constitution? Is it like the 10 Commandments that have been passed down from the sky and now we have to worship it unquestionably? There are large numbers of people in this country that seem to believe so.

So take the gun issue. Why is that in the constitution? For hunting? Protecting from bears? Foreign invaders? Maybe. Would it make a difference now if anyone attacked us if we all carried guns? Probably not. We'll probably use our drones and tanks to fight back. Maybe it was for people to protect from an abusive government? Is that realistic today? You'd need to be able to bear tanks, helicopters and fighter planes if this hypothetical militia is ever to even register as a blip on government's threat radar. So why even bother both defending the idea or trying to find a loophole to bypass it. Both seem rather pointless to me.

Are people defending themselves better with guns? Canada and other countries have legal guns and don't seem to have issues with such crimes as we saw recently. Some countries outlaw guns and experience much worse violence. Is there any credible study that shows a linkage between legal arms position and violent crime?
CSS Baseline: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
This is a cool initiative, but when happens after the poachers are "exposed"?
The Unfinanced Entrepreneur [1998]
Apple is reportedly in talks to boost its maps service with data from Foursquare
Didn't he also publicly release nude photos of her and three other women? Still maybe a bit extreme on the sentence, but it wasn't just "reading e-mail".
Part of why I thought this was a good match for HN was that it not only lines up with the monthly recap of "ideas versus execution," but it also reinforces Patrick McKenzie's spiel about "your creative work is valuable, demand appropriate value in return for doing that work."
Correct me if I'm wrong, there is no reason to numerically integrate this. This is not a differential equation. The integral solution is a simple function that can just be evaluated.
The Jester Forces School-Massacre Twitter Feed Offline
Sinatra.io does something similar, also built on Firbase. I believe their code is on github if anyone is interested in implementation.
They may be hunted down and shot.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10992502
It isn't that they cut the interval by half. It happens that for constant acceleration, this midpoint happens to lay on the actual solution. Notice that there is only one summing of position, and two of velocity.
Yeah; I really like my kindle, but I got it with advertising, 'cause I'm cheap, and hell, even from a "how I'm seen" point of view, I don't want to be seen as the sort of person that would pay $40 extra to change what is on my kindle when it is turned off.

But I'm pretty sure that amazon is targeting their ads... not to get me to actually click on them, but instead to embarrass me into paying the $40 (you can pay the money you saved buying the kindle with ads and turn off ads later.)

I mean, my kindle is full of technical books, and has a bunch of project gutenburg history texts, too. A smattering of sci-fi. And I get ads for "Dove for men" - or "twilight"

Yeah, only thing I can figure is that they think that I'll pay them because I'm afraid of that girl in the coffee shop thinking I'm some kind of fruit.

Or, maybe it's just that technical books don't have marketing budget? who knows?
Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning, Raghavan, & Schutze is my favorite. Available here: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/
Now when we discuss the legality of NSA having wide open access to citizen emails and other personal data, we'll have a good reference point on what happens when regular people do it.
AT&T's 1970 Schoolhouse Rock-style defense of regulated telco monopolies [video]