skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of flight time is unnecessary. The technology to more efficiently route airplanes exists, we just have not yet allocated the money to do it. If it turns out that the X-rays really are no worse than 2 extra minutes of flights, I'd rather put the money towards improving the air traffic control infrastructure. Then we save time, reduce radiation exposure, and likely reduce the risk of an airplane crash. Seems like a better use of money to me.
Software Testing Using Easy Cases
Of course not. No-one did. Nothing like a good ole' pitchfork mob.
My favorite part:

Turnaround Artist Manual – Chapter 1: Walk in with a frown; blame your predecessor; slash projects, budgets, people; lower expectations, loudly; and write off assets.
What the guys are doing at Current Motor seems way more practical but again up North you're only using it at most six months of the year.

http://www.currentmotor.com/
Its like the radio saying "we'll play your song, but we get the copyright and get to sell the CD/iTunes etc". Oh, and we're not gonna pay you ever.

Sound good?
Absolutely, I started editing in a quip about how unscalable, even for Google, to keep engineers that both want to work on hard problems and stay up until 4am to push/support them. Best time to push, first hours I'm arriving, had a cup of joe, and have had a good night's sleep to work out any further mental bugs.
Is safe, green thorium power finally ready for prime time?
"If we really want to stop young men like him from becoming mass murderers, and prevent the small amount of violence attributable to mental illness, we should invest our resources in better screening for, and treatment of, psychiatric illness in young people."

Isn't that focusing on mental illness? I thought that was misguided. Misguided title I think.
SSH public keys on a DNS FUSE
>The thing you're seeing in their ToS is an interpretation that allows for this.

Then maybe companies shouldn't amend their ToS to "allow" for things that are so utterly odious. None of the other companies that matter do this, so the claim that this is standard boilerplate is bunkola.
>Similar to hybrid cars. They are better for the environment but that isn't that offset by the production of the batteries needed for the hybrid engine?

No. The oft-cited "Dust to Dust" report has been thoroughly debunked: http://grist.org/article/dust-to-dumb/ For just one example, they assume (with no real justification) that a Hummer will last 300k miles and a Prius just 100k. Invalidating that single assumption flips the result, and it's not the only one.

There's a false equivocacy going on in our heads when we fall victim to this kind of misinformation. "One advantage vs. one disadvantage. They must cancel out!" This is why it's important to do quantitative analysis. In reality, the addition of a battery and motor only adds about 10% to the embodied energy and disposal impact of a car, which itself is dwarfed by the fuel burned in its lifetime (by about 3:1).

The interesting question for me is: why do people worry about the Nickel in their car's battery but not in their car's steel-alloy frame?
But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts.

But... but... but isn't there also overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of people with guns do not commit violent acts? I personally know a handful of people that currently own or have owned one or more guns. Not one of them has ever shot anybody. Ever.

[Edit to remove irrelevant point.]
It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use. I know that there is a lot of F77 still around, but the Fortran code I've seen at NASA is at least up to F90/F95. Someone who learned F95 or later and never wrote fixed format Fortran would be pretty lost if they had to work on F77 or, Backus forbid, F66. C, on the other hand, has changed much less, beyond the ANSI function declarations. I first used the C version that was in 6th Edition AT&T UNIX and that had some features that would look strange to modern users, such as initializers not using = signs:

int i 4;

and the assignment operators being the other way round:

a =+ 2;

The point is, when discussing the age of a language, how important is the degree of change over time? At what point is it a new language? The same is true of human languages. I can understand Shakespeare with little trouble, but I miss some points unless there are footnotes. I can get a bit of Chaucer, but far from full comprehension. Beowulf? Not a prayer. But it's all "English"...
I am connecting it to a Apple iPad charger, not to any other charger.

The only thing attached to my RaspberryPi is a USB keyboard, HDMI to my monitor and the ethernet.
What a worthless site. I searched for "gun", "homeschooling" and "gay marriage" but nothing came up.
I'm using an Apple iPad charger... that thing has plenty of power.
Advertising and the uncompensated appropriation of intellectual property are two different concepts. This is neatly disguised theft, hidden in legalese. Get over the Casablanca quotes. Here's the relevant citation:

Zuck: People Just Submitted it...

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb Fucks

See a pattern here?
I doubt you could get a price quote for under 10,000 units.

The company to ask is iSuppli, they specialize in reverse costing. http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/Pages/Headlines.aspx
I don't think comments are any kind of substitute for clear, well-structured code. In your example, "Detect collision" still doesn't give me any kind of epiphany about the code. At best, it gives me a slight hint about where to go to get more information. Chances are I'm trying to fix a bug or change the behavior, so I still need to figure what $a, $b, $ab, $c, and d are and what their purpose is.

In other words, I have nothing against good comments, especially on obscure code, but I think they're only marginally useful even in those cases.
Bump Ports Its Flock Photos App To Android
The terms are deliberately vague, and allow broader interpretation than the Verge article theorizes.
That is broadly the reason why I don't have the Kindle, for example.

EA has in its bowels made a choice that Sim City fans will become its new cash cow. They will be now free to sell you the game and turn it off when they choose that releasing another version is more profitable. They easily could have allowed the game to function without inputs from neighboring areas or could have simulated it.

As a Sim City fan I am deeply disappointed since I have fond memories playing the game from the very first release. But these days I have chosen to only support and reward companies who do not make relationship with their customers a power play.
The main issue is that basically it removes the concept of private photos. The new TOS allows Instagram to use your photos any way they want and removes any responsibility of keeping private pictures private.

Those pictures of you doing a keg stand at a Toga party which you shared only with your closest friends? Well now they are in a nationwide PSA about binge drinking.

Those pictures of you with your ex girlfriend on a beach vacation? Those are now in Carnival ad about whisking your loved ones on a cruise. Your wife is pissed and even deleting the photo off Instagram doesn't do anything about it.

If you are ok with all your photos becoming public, then sure this isn't a big deal. I think many people aren't.
I don't understand why the Costa Rica example is 3-colorable. The green province in the middle touches 5 other provinces so it seems like it should be 5-colorable.
This is certainly a problem and you are correct that it is hampering economic growth. The New America Foundation, where this report originated, does some great work on promoting high speed broadband access at affordable prices. They also have an excellent YouTube channel where you can watch some presentations related to their efforts in this area.

To the GP post, most people will not recognize the need for faster access until you provide it to them. Imagine a town with only dirt road horse and buggies. Now imagine someone builds a highway on-ramp in the town. You can be certain that these individuals are now far more likely to purchase automobiles. [Shameless plug] This is a pet issue of mine, so to spare HN from being inundated with similar articles, I post them to: reddit.com/r/bandwidth.
Definitely. I wasn't trying to say that they were a substitute. I specifically said both could have worked. In the example they cited, they couldn't even find where to begin. A small comment could have done something about it.

When you can't have both clear code and commenting, you could at least try to do one every once in a while. How can that be a bad thing?
"Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler responds. Backers are signing up to participate in the development process, including all of its obstacles and setbacks. "If you want a watch, you can go buy a watch," Strickler says.

I don't know that Kickstarter can be any more clear to backers than they are that when you back a project you are not buying an item and you are not guaranteed a successful result.
I wouldn't doubt it. I've Facebook URL of images that were "deleted" year ago, but the links still work. I'm not sure what it would take for the content to actually be removed.
I've been using Crashlytics at http://art.sy now for about 6 months and found it to be a great tool. I like the auto-post to pivotal tracker ( and that that aspect is open source. ) And the design of it all resonates with me. Every time I've contacted them with questions they've been answered quickly and with a hint of fun. I'm glad to see them progressing.

The only downsides for me is that you have to have the Crashlytics app installed in order to compile your app. Also, ideally I would prefer to have a cocoapod so I can keep all my library code out of my app code.

Good work guys, I hope at some point you make it possible to pay you, I'd rather not have feel that my data is the product.
Thoughts on default apps on iOS
Yes, you noticed that the government is not a free market.

And sustainable societies have moral hazards.

And if you really want to live in true freedom, where freedom to knock down the house around you is not specially excepted under some theory of Objetivist morality, good luck finding off the hordes.
Introducing the Crowdflower Cloud Module for Real Time Photo Moderation
The Founder Shuffle
You can skip the permission to post on facebook.
I agree. Instagram is simply going to use interesting photos of places and items to help market those places.

Someone you follow tagged a photo of a latte at a new coffee shop in town? Well, now that photo might show up as a sponsored post in the same way Facebook likes generate sponsored posts.

I generally like seeing the photos of the people I am subscribed to, so seeing them attached to a location or product ad doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Your brain seems inclined to see women's genitals in unrelated graphical symbols. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but my jaw dropped when I read the comment.
Such a massive infrastructure is expensive, and given that (arguably) the most useful open system, Wikipedia, constantly has funding drives it doesn't seem viable as a free, large-scale consumer-fronting service. I could see such a service being run as a non-profit perhaps, given some monetization or donations.
Still won't help you save your comments/photos commented on and likes all too well, though. I personally find them more important as someone who doesn't submit many photos.
Ask HN: How many of you guys sell digital products?
I'm thinking about selling a digital product that I'm going to create and wanted to see if any HNers have gone down this path (will be a theme or template kit).

Would love to see what others here have created and sold as well as any tips/insight when selling a digital product online that you may have learned.
I am likely to delete my Instagram account because of this—this isn't going to out well for them at all and not just because of licensing issues.

Legally, they will be in deep trouble the first time they sell any pictures with people in them because none‡ of them will have signed a model release.

I'm not OK with giving them resale rights to my pictures.

‡ A tiny fraction of a tiny fraction will have, but that release will be with the photographer. Tracking that down will be their responsibility.
I agree that comments should not be the "go-to approach for explaining the entire codebase." I hope you didn't think I was insinuating that in my comment. I was only trying to illustrate that in the absence of clear code, which many developers are guilty of sometimes, comments can be very helpful.
If more people are likely to die per year from cancer caused by the scanners than are likely to die from terrorists, I think that's a convincing argument that using the scanners screen passengers is worse than not screening them at all.
I think this is a bad metric. Small countries would score high. For an extreme example, it would not surprise me if the average inhabitant of Vatican City made over 50 international trips a year (many of them of less than an hour)

Also, island nations would likely score lower (a Polynesian island the size of Vatican City), as would 'virtual islands' that are remote in travel distance (due to mountains, deserts, badlands, etc)

For that reason, I would think Dutchmen will make more international trips than Germans, per head.

Maybe you should compare the probability that a one day random walk using typical means of transport ends up in another country with the actual fraction of travels that does?
"all of the parts exist to create robots". Yes, Arduino handles the software and electronics, but as I created the robot, I also realized there was another missing piece -- a low-cost open source building platform for the physical mechanics. So I created "bitbeam", too -- a Lego Technic compatible building tool you can lasercut, CNC mill, or 3D print. http://bitbeam.org/pages/about
Accessible mental health care for everyone would make society better overall, if not decrease the likelihood of these mass shootings. Yes, people with mental problems are not going on shooting sprees en masse, but whenever someone goes on a shooting spree I think by definition they aren't functioning normally.
*geraffe.

Oh wait, this is not reddit.
Maker's Row
> "language semantics since I believe that to be a personal preference"

If you start with such patently false beliefs you aren't going to get anywhere. Good abstractions are good, regardless of your personal preference. I have a very hard time programming without immutability, catamorphisms, pattern matching, sequence comprehension, varargs, fmaps/functors, partial functions, monads, predicates, filters, higher order functions, lambdas, closures, trampolines, continuations, strong types and co/contra-variance, options, actors, immutable collections, regex, combinators ( kestrels ), a dash of abstract algebra ( monoids semigroups groups rings fields ), basic math structures ( at a minimum, graphs with traversal algos baked in ), macros, implicits, dsl capability, and a mathstat library.

If you give me a language without some of the above, I will first invest time buying/building whatever is missing, so that I get that full list.

The claim is that scalability is an acronym for that list. If you give me everything in that list I give you scalability. Scalability is not about being close to the metal, gobs of ram etc...rather we are talking about the same block of code that services 200 million clients with the same sla/latencies as easily as 200 clients when you throw reasonable extra horsepower at it.

Without that list, you are essentially programming in the 19th century. You will, without even knowing, end up building various versions of these in your own pet language...for example, after writing a "for loop" with an "if statement" to vary behavior based on containment in a collection for the 100th time, it will occur to you that there must be a better way to encapsulate this logic...and sure that's what a predicate with a partial function is...but it's not like you are newton and you sit under apple tree and apple strikes your head and you get gravity out of it...these things won't come to you like magic...you have to essentially sit down and read a book on fp where they tell you why they do what they do.

The thing with scala is that you can pair it up with akka/breeze/scalaz & hit every single item on that list and then some. So also with haskell, clos, ocaml, sml, clojure, erlang...the match degree varies but you can get close to 90-100%. If you try to hit that list with a non-fp lang like c++/java...the degree is like 20% and you will have to do 80% of the work to hit that list.

Now you could say (as my manager at my former big-co did) I don't give a shit about that list above, maybe your list consists of only 3 things - personal preference, easy availability of devs from india for hiring purposes, and spending less money. Then sure, java is on the table, as is js, ruby, python, some subset of c/c++ etc.
That's true, but anecdotal data would give me at least half your peaks are still online. Definitely higher for sites like Google. Is it really worth the other "non-continuous deployment" risks to not deploy against a quarter of your base? Let's say you really have a lower-bound of half your upper-bound; what if your deploy is only going to go south with somewhere in between? Now your engineer not only stayed up until 2am PST, but he is getting woken up at 6am PST to fix a hellstorm.
The main benefit of it is universal access. Also, making backup of digital storage is way easier than preserving original copies.
Common Winter Roofing Problems: Flashing Leak Repair | NJ Roofing Blog
Wondering if it was hacked. Anyone know?
Everybody is always trying to get something for nothing.
I'm surprised they didn't. Why would MS trust 3rd party code enough to include it in their OS? Seems like quite an unnecessary risk.
Not all of CRs neighbors touch each other.
Interesting that the article didn't bring up economic mobility. It's dramatically declined in the US over that time period, and it's also a fairly U.S.-specific phenomenon. How much of the old motion was based on financial upgrades? I don't know but it's seems worth considering.
For as long as they're useful to academics who want to study the Dead Sea Scrolls or as long as they're considered a valuable cultural artefact, they'll be converted to whatever new formats become used. The same applies, pretty much, to the actual Dead Sea Scrolls as well - as long as people want them to continue existing, they'll be preserved, but without being actively looked after, they're likely to decay as well.
add the "www." and it loads. Probably something server side causing that to happen without the www
Speaking for myself, I know first-hand just how powerful a force this inner rage is, that the article talks about. I grew up in a largely similar situation where I, too, was teased and bullied - to the point where I lost control and lashed out violently.

I often see in myself the capability of performing such an awful act as Adam did. Not for any particular reason, but simply because I've bottled up immense rage over the years; rage that I somehow manage to keep under tight control. A so-called "Irish temper," if you will.

Honestly, I find it surprising that things like this don't happen more often among us "nerds;" that more of us don't lash out at society.
You'd need an immense amount of capital for the network, but also for the legal guerrilla war. Laying fiber to the last mile? What about the risk to the current lines? You get a lawsuit and an injunction while you fight it in court and prepare your impact study that demonstrates that digging a ditch on one side of the road won't cut fiber on the other, and in the meantime who knows how long has passed, probably years.

You probably have to get the city on your side for eminent domain for purchase or at the very least easement rights on a tiny strip of land everywhere so that you can lay cable, and of course that's going to take time, and there's going to be a fair amount of "grassroots" opposition (no one ever comes to municipal/community meetings, you can sway it pretty easily), and so you make your case about how it's going to benefit and bring jobs and bring X to Y group and all the while you aren't actually delivering internet and you're not sure when you'll be able to. In the meantime the existing players can build out in the town you're trying to move into and make the speeds you were promising pointless anyway.

tl;dr: Local government is easily gummed up, you have to compete in many places at once to be a real threat.
Any pipe you build nowadays will be capable of 100 megabits, so the real issue is that nobody is rolling out any new hardware in most areas, even though we're paying rates that should be able to easily fund upgrades at least once per decade.
50 Great Web Development Podcast Episodes from 2012
[Firebase founder here] This is one of the nice things about running a company that is 100% developer focused. We can communicate in clear terms with customers that actually understand the nuances of what we're building. We'd much rather be specific than hand-waving.
Yes, it would be a pretty ridiculous situation where the EROEI [1] calculation would favor gas-powered car engines vs. coal-powered electricity pumped through grids and stored in batteries.

Gas powered motors are still less brittle than grid-powered ones - it'd be tough to power a military force on grid power for example, but at that scale we should be using local fission powerplants anyway (ie, nuke subs).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
Snark like this is annoying and doesn't contribute in any way to the conversation. If you don't agree with someone's numbers, then take a few minutes and critique their data or do a little of your own research and post your findings. It's a lot more interesting and a more successful way to get your point across.
Well, I like Paul's little story, and I share his belief that God does not sow fear and hatred, and that when one is confronted by claims about what God allegedly thinks or says, asking whether these reflect unconditional love is a great way to tell how much weight to give them.
Enlightenment E17 Is Being Released This Friday
I don't know Paris specifically, but but nautilusy spiral happens (in anthropology, and also biology) when new growth happens that the position closest to the center, which is a natural goal when proximity is a desirable feature (minimized construction costs, maximize access to community, minimize outer perimeter for defense, etc)
The problem is that it's a service and they never promised they would keep providing it under the same terms forever. So when they change the terms, you can stop using it, but you can't (if the new terms are enforceable) demand to keep using it under the old terms, any more than you could demand they keep offering the service if they decided to shut it down.

On the other hand, we've all now all got always-on always-connected computers in our pockets that already have more computing power than typical web servers a decade ago, so maybe somebody will write some software and that whole personal server thing will finally take off soon.