skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Read the article, thought that it was something interesting but probably not that applicable to me because I clear cookies on (frequent) browser close, don't enter my details into many sketchy sites, use multiple different (isolated) instances of my browser for different purposes.

Today, I get an email from a site that I visited yesterday and haven't heard from in 6+ months. It's too much of a coincidence for me to assume it's random so I dig into their website a little and they're using one of these services.

TL;DR: even though I'm relatively paranoid with giving out details online, one of these networks seems to have successfully identified me and provided my email to a website that I visited, who then reached out and tried to sell me shit.
New SARS-Like Virus Infects Both Humans and Animals
Ask HN: I'm visiting SF next month, can I drop by your startup?
I'll be visiting San Francisco next month (Jan 12-17) and would love to drop by your startup and learn more about what you're building. Why you ask?

Well, in 2003 I started BestTechie, it started out as a fun thing to do and gradually grew into a business. Now that I'm out of school, I'm working to turn it into the ultimate tech resource which includes covering tech startups.

So if you have something cool you're working on, I'd love to see and talk about it. I'm also hoping that these conversations will lead to articles on the site.

You can check out BestTechie here: http://www.besttechie.com
Ah okay, thanks. I figured I was missing something obvious.
Because it really isn't. I think that most Java haters are very young web developers with but a few years of experience. Having said that, there are quite a few languages that are much more productive than Java, and are a better fit for, say, run-of-the-mill web development. But very few languages can beat Java's performance and tooling (especially when it comes to runtime monitoring and profiling). More productive JVM languages make the best of both worlds, though.
Gravity powered lights, cheaper than solar
I think it's more important that it's prohibitive to play around with it or produce open source software.
The nexus 7 has a high density screen.
I think the overall difference in our thinking is based on a few base principles:

- You believe that rights exist outside the state (i.e. there are property rights without a state), and I think they only meaningfully exist within a state, however primitive (tribal chief + social norms, etc.).

- You believe that natural law (however divined) is a fully correct basis for statutory law, whereas I see statutory as something that should reference a natural human tendency, but not be beholden to it.

Am I understanding your view correctly? If so, we can go point by point, but until then we're arguing over the falling action and not the premise.
Apple Color Emoji. Look at this in Safari (or the Adobe BrowserLab)
It has always struck me as odd that people dismiss the singularity as a nerd fantasy. They latch on to one view of it and make up their minds about the idea itself.

The people I know that take it seriously are much more afraid of it than anything.

They think that it will be an extinction event rather than the nerd rapture.
Uh... I would not take that graph as some sort of gospel. The truth is that even now we do not have an effective known path to economically viable fusion power generation, and if nothing else our computer simulations are indescribably better than anything they had in the late 70s. Had we blown billions more in the 80s, we probably would simply have blown billions more in the 80s and still have no fusion today.
The point is that whatever trait drags the US average performance down probably lives in the student body rather than the school system.

If so, there isn't a lot we can do about it.
Christopher Nolan is only producing this film. Wally Pfister, Nolan's longtime cinematographer, is directing.
Facebook Helps FBI to shuts down Butterfly botnet theft $850 millions
Please, no backticks. There are a whole bunch of keyboard layouts that don't have this.
You're thinking of "business model" too narrowly. Think of my use of the term as being metaphorical if that helps.
Where does this leave MonoMac? http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac states that Xamarin.Mac has broader API coverage; does this mean MonoMac will continue to be developed, but just remain as a (free) subset with LGPL portions?
Symfony makes PHP about as elegant as Java.

I've never heard anyone argue that Java is elegant.
Google image search currently blocking explicit content in the US
> if Cook is being altruistic... So what? Apple has tens of billions of dollars in the bank. If they wants to spend $100M on PR, I'm sure the people reaping the rewards won't care.

Stockholders will care. No way he's just being altruistic. Your other ideas are much more likely.
The question to ask is, how is it that pilots made the switch from "cowboy style" to more reliance on machines and protocols? The answer is probably cultural.

Which brings me to another thing that occurred to me: Is medicine ready for "5 whys?" Checklists aren't going to work until the culture of the medical profession is ready for it. I get the impression that doctors are treated as "functionally infallible" (so long as they consult with other doctors when they need to) and mistakes are treated as flukes and aberrations. (If not entirely swept under the rug.) It's pretty clear that medicine's capacity for self improvement is not entirely mature from the performance of infection control. There are still hospitals that spread infections. (http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/washing_hands.htm)
Yes, I should have more carefully stated that the correct category for comparison would be non-immigrant Europeans of African descent. Which is a very small fraction of the population.
Why do I have a feeling that for the majority of CS students, Shakespeare would be a less intuitive language then Brainfuck?

Some more programming and CS errata for those interested here, a collection of esoteric languages, algorithms, and an operating system: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/

Piet is actually quite beautiful, and just about all of those are quite humorous.
I don't know. I spend most of my time working with NetBeans on a mac, and it's just as pretty as Keynote, while more responsive and stable. So, yeah, NetBeans, a huge Java Swing application, provides a better experience on a mac than Keynote.
Well, don't panic. Grass is not greener on the other side.
France nº1 is a phone provider, nº2 football and nº3 is the French equivalent of Big Brother. The presidential election is not even in the TOP 10.

Oh, and yeah, McDonalds is nº5. So much for French gastronomy...
I agree completely, but the OP is talking about a handful of Linodes and he's looking at cost so I would think he fits the bill there. I don't think a start-up should spend their time on Colo. A small business - maybe - the question should be, how big a part of your total expenses is your hosting and bandwidth. For some businesses like a very busy blog, hosting may be a very big part of their total costs (and a meaningful number in absolute terms).
I agree with primatology; it is not ugly. Maybe not a shining perl, but it is easy on the eyes.
I normally don't like HN negativity, but can someone play skeptic here and tell me why this probably won't give me 78% partial rendering performance gains in a real app? Or if it will, why this isn't standard?
Hopefully you're only expressing disdain for people who treat it as a scientific inevitability, rather than a science fiction trope. As a sci-fi trope, it's pretty darn cool.
Lumi: a Useful Web Recommendation Engine
Whilst I don't like Linode because of their security issues I definitely wouldn't choose them if I was based in London. Why wouldn't you go with Hetzner and use the massive price saving to move to SSD ?
There's an odd obsession many whites have with Asians.
I'm huge fan of Xamarin but somehow missing how is this different from MonoMac?

For anyone who is thinking to start development of cross-platform GUI app in .NET, I encourage to check Eto project - https://github.com/picoe/eto
Yup. I really like his more "normal" roles-- like his lucid moments (which were most of the movie) in "Secret Window" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363988/
I'll throw in the NYTimes because it is well worth the small pay-wall. More often than not I find quality content there. Additionally, I've noticed that aggregation sites, either manual like http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/ or automatic like Google News, often end up selecting a few articles a week from them.

Slate.com also comes to mind, but it really isn't a source of news as it is more often a counterpoint to the news you've already heard. For example, instead of reporting on the person pushed in front of the subway train, they report on what is recommended around the world a person should do in the same situation.
As a developer of a downloadable desktop game [1], this change really hurts me. I distribute binaries for OS X and Windows via Downloads. The entire build and upload process is automated, and has been working great for the last six months. Switching over to S3 is going to cost me quite a bit, and it going to be difficult to justify for a open-source video game that will never make any revenue.

[1]: http://projecthawkthorne.com
The Repo Less Forked
An attempt at a parody on git and Frost
Mathematica is much more than a language. People buy Mathematica for system, the language is just a small part of it. (And it's crap, just like MATLAB language is crap, but the full product itself is massively useful).
Public Buses Across Country Adding Microphones for Surveillance
Show HN: Flow, a WebRTC/Web Audio HTML5 experiment.
What do you mean? FB Year in Review becomes much more fun if you go to:

http://www.facebook.com/yearinreview/<insert_friends_use...;
Why do you put 'unhealthy' in quotes??
Genuinely curious: why is this any better than a web client?
I can totally play skeptic :)

So like I mentioned in the description it really all depends. If your cache store is already really close to your application like on the same server, you aren't likely to see much gain since fetching from Memcached doesn't even go across the network. But using something like Heroku where your Memcached server might even be on another network that's not Amazon's you'll see some nice benefit not having to connect to that Memcached server sequentially.

Also I rendered out 50 items from Memcached in the test app. Your use case might be a lot less, or even a lot more.
You can never guarantee that no other student is cheating in some way.

Well, you can, but it involves you not being a student.
"Witch hunt" generally refers to persecution of someone without any regard to whether they're innocent or guilty, so I presume the comment was intended to admonish against guessing which ad companies may be using this technique.
There's a distinction to be made between AWS and Heroku. If you're hosting on AWS you still need to have someone who's able to maintain a server. With heroku, you don't. So the advantage of AWS over Colo is mainly scalability and the reduced need for expensive hardware. Depending on your apps load behavior, spikes can require that you keep 10 times as much HW than you'd need on the average, that's where AWS really shines. But in the end, the instances you buy at AWS are virtual servers that need a real admin.
Canvas-Driven Backgrounds in CSS
The analysis in the article is completely retarded--it takes the hourly rate of private firms and uses that to come up with a $2.5 million number. But the government doesn't pay outside law firms to do an investigation like this. They have lawyers on staff, and those lawyers make civil service wages, not private firm wages. 6,000 hours is basically three people working full-time for a year, likely for $80-$120k. Not exactly "making out like bandits."
Google Preventing U.S. Users from Disabling SafeSearch
I really do not understand why people keep recommending Linode on here. Apart from their woeful and disgraceful security policies some of their data centres e.g. Fremont is very unreliable.

I would recommend http://www.webhostingtalk.com as you will find out much better options for your specific needs.
Here's a page I created years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Davidson

This is an article about an individual non-famous executive at a tech company.

I've never once had to defend it (it's been more than a year since I even looked at it). Why hasn't it been deleted by roving bands of "deletionists" trying to score points?

Because it cites sources and makes a clear statement of notability, as the Wikipedia project asks.

Does the Wikipedia project make mistakes and delete articles it shouldn't? Sure! All the time. But, for the most part, if you do what Wikipedia asks you to do, the system works fine. If you write an article about an algorithm that cites the academic literature, it'll most likely survive.

On the other hand, if you write an article about a well-known algorithm but fail to cite sources or include a single-sentence lede about why the algorithm is important, it is somewhat likely that some Wikipedian patrolling new articles will nominate it for deletion. Why? Because it'll be a member of a cohort of similar-looking articles most of which will be the CS equivalent of cold fusion research, and without citations, Wikipedians will have nothing to judge it by.

To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that.
(disclaimer: I work for Continum Analytics)

Anaconda Community Edition installs very easily on windows, linux, and OS X, and is very easy to uninstall without breaking your system.

> No, we can't all compile from source. We're not all C hackers, that's why many of us use Python in the first place.

EXACTLY!

This is the whole idea behind Anaconda and the idea behind our beta cloud product Wakari. Wakari gives you multiple python versions, multiple numpy versions, interactive plotting in your browser, and the wonderful ipython notebook built-in. It's still in a closed beta, but people usually get approved for access the same day.
Human Driven Development
Google Is Now Blocking Porn (NSFW)
C#'s okay and all... But what's wrong with Objective C?
I think the notebook will eventually support other languages behind it.
hetzner is known to be very strict if one of your hosts misbehaves. Your network is cut off immediately, getting the box online again take quite some time. I just witnessed a case where that took 5 VMs on one host offline because one got hacked.
This would be a lot more impressive if it didn't just come from a dump prepped by Wikipedia. MediaWiki has an API, you know.
Google Hangout to discuss making a 'better email'
Related thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890858

We'll be doing a video chat tonight around 9pm PST.

If you would like to join in on the conversation, ping me at willthefirst@gmail.com.
Still waiting on that Ian M. Banks Culture movie. Or miniseries. Or TV show. slow droool
Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable.

Similarly vector icons appear more blurry than pixelled ones especially at lower resolutions. Extremely scaled images are unimpressive due to loss of detail.

Vector art often works well in a certain range of resolutions. The "infinite scaling" promise should be taken with a grain of salt.
> Ignoring the third of the world without electricity ... "in the future, being rich and white will be even more awesome"

There is a portion of the "Singularitarians" pushing for the Singularity because such a large segment of the world is so disadvantaged, they want humanity to move forward. Their line is more "in the future, being human will be even more awesome".

(For the most part, this group has a fairly low opinion of Kurzweil and his accelerating curves or whatever he calls them.)
I'm not sure, but let's assume they are. Doesn't respecting do not track reduce their value even further? I'm not arguing that ad companies shouldn't respect so not track, just considering the incentives and disincentives in front of them.
Summary: Video Codec based on vectorization of images rather than pixel encoding. Slow, but highly parallel. Not much info. Developers hope to have a codec for commercial use in some number of years.

PDF of authors' previous work on still images: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/47879/1/ID47879.pdf

Still too long?: "Mona Lisa in 50 Polygons[1]" Grows Up.

␄

[1] http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut...
It's always annoyed me how slow Ruby/Rails is at rendering views and partials. I don't know why, but some of our small partials that don't do any network calls take a long time to render. Profiling them doesn't really seem to help. Possibly it's GC related.

If template rendering was faster, it wouldn't be as necessary to worry about caching, which brings tons of headaches and complexity.
Hey everybody, we're going to do a hangout tonight:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911943
Awesome. Every business could learn from this. I know Facebook does A/B testing.
Linus Torvalds To 386: “I’m Not Sentimental, Good Riddance.”
<style type="gangnam">
The most important line in the article is this one towards the end:

Ultimately, though, I think it will take a lot more than a new codec to kill the pixel.
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.

Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.

BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
That's the point. Americans don't usually call Spaniards and Portuguese "Hispanic" any more then they call a Blond haired, blue eyed person born in America, but who's parents were born in South Africa "African American", which is to say rarely and usually in a comedic or anecdotal manner.

When he's referring to "Hispanics and African Americans" he is trying to refer to specific "racial" (insomuch as the concept exists) groups.
He was trying to create a sentient computer. It's like trying to make a blue car: just adding blue paint to a (previously) brown car still counts.
How does Britannica's coverage of block cipher concepts compare to Wikipedia's? My guess is, Wikipedia "roflstomps" it, to use Patrick McKenzie's favored term.

I think my kids are far better off with Wikipedia than they would be with "real" encyclopedias.
I will be writing a bot to buy me random things from musiciansfriend.
Intel Haswell CPU Range Leaked
lol Who doesn't?
Well meaning people inadvertently lie to you.

"Sure, that looks great! I'd buy one"

So you go off and make it only to be greeted by tumble weed when it comes time to sell. Cure: retrospective questioning.

What steps have you taken to solve this problem?
How much have you spent?

They're not going to unintentionally mislead you with those questions.
Besides the "Mono wave" on Gnome seems gone. Now there are some guys pushing Vala, and it reminds me the time when Mono was the future of Gnome.

https://live.gnome.org/Vala

Several Gnome applications have been rewritten in Vala and, having contributed a patch to Déjà Dup, I find it's a language easy to hack coming from a C/Java/C# background.

I always found interesting that Mono could have been a good thing for Gnome and because of the Microsoft influence in the language (or .NET platform, I'm no expert) it never happened.

EDIT: ate a word
>I am not a Nolan fan

I say this in all seriousness: how? I can't imagine the last 12 years of film without Memento, Inception, and the Batman trilogy.
Things I Didn't Do For the MCM Lab Exam
Well firstly the OP would be crazy to go with Linode.

Secondly there is actually little difference between the amount of time spent managing a VPS versus a dedicated or colo. Hardware failures aren't going to be your biggest concern. It's going to be services going down, database misbehaving, OS misconfigurations, general scaling issues, network dropping out etc e.g. witness all of the AWS/Linode outages almost all of which are due to DC power/networking.

And the fact is that my Mac Mini has an equivalent Unixbench/disk test as the Linode instances + AWS m1.xlarge. So it gives you an idea of how much better performance and value you will get from a dedicated or colo.
Rare color photos from 1930s-40s Pictures
Just be careful, several of the auditors here are wrong
A good compromise is renting a dedicated server. I usually prefer Linode, but I'm planning on taking this route for a current project that requires a disproportionately large amount of disk. I'm currently looking at gorillaservers.com and ubservers.com. (Advice welcome.)
My old music teachers favourite claim to fame was that he is in the choir who made the soundtrack for that movie.
I doubt that StackExchange would be willing to assist here, but if they were, they could share the email address used to establish the account.
HN-ers, I'm new at this whole A/B Testing, Copywriting, "testing your hypothesis", and the whole "trying to sell something" + "MVP" (or the Lean Startup).

I recalled yesterday I saw a link to Intuit methodology that also do a similar A/B Testing to decide what to build: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/09/04/intuit-the...

Could someone connect the dot to me or point to me to somewhere that I can make sense of the whole thing?

How can one come up with many pages so quickly to test? and how one could decide what the content of the page to test is?
>But the Nexus 7 wins one use case: fitting in pant packets

People with big hands can hold the Nexus 7 in what I will call the "beer-can grip". The mini's extra half inch or so of width makes the beer-can grip a lot less comfortable or a lot less reliable (secure).
Does this allow you to develop Windows Apps using a Mac? Or is this mobile app specific?
I assumed that by "working" he meant "on my free time". Spare time goes down the drain whatever you do.
Intel Launches Low Power Atom To Counter ARM
Yes we support Linux at our shop and testing/packaging is difficult. Doubly so for embedded customers that frequently want to use old/obscure distros (probably due to a cross tool chain requirement).
JIRA web-client is harder to use, in my opinion.
http://serverbear.com/benchmarks/ssd-vps
Sass's inline-image function for automatically base64 encoding images