skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are really comparing apples with oranges. Here's something you should do: go visit a farm.

" Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? " You are very removed from reality.

The majority of people, even in very poor countries have access to aspirin, antibiotics. As tragic and cruel and "modern", kids that lost limbs to landmines are, they would have died without 20th century medical care, and they are alive today.
When a decade of failures is compressed into a single article like that (with interesting links to further the point), it quickly looks pretty depressing.

If it's as bad as the article says, or worse, however remains to be seen.
Yes, there's an interesting thing on that here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
I haven't looked at enough philosophy to be able to figure out what I'd place myself as, average-utilarianism also seems to lead to morally-counter-intuitive stuff.
The Indiegogo Project Site gives you a deep insight about the trustworthiness of the producers.

http://www.indiegogo.com/SoftwareWars/

For $1000 Dollar they are offering product placement.

Independent journalism != advertising.

Very disappointing.
Great post.

One of the advantages of the bandit algorithms we favour is that you have to be explicit about your quality metric up-front. This can also be a disadvantage as it can be difficult to tradeoff different metrics, but on balance we find it helpful for our clients.

I think one of the main issues with A/B testing, which was also present in the article, is the over-reliance on p-values without considering effect size. The changes show were significant, but none of them had a large effect. The largest was a 9% increase ("Registered") but here we're talking about going from 0.46% to 0.42%, which is pretty much nothing to nothing.
Freedom of economic initiative requires the ability to perform anonymous (and in many cases this means cash) transactions (think small merchants who cannot be bothererd by the Administration). Yes, socialism is against this but the State's role should be subsidiary not omniscent and all-powerful.
The idea behind a single OS that works across devices is probably the single greatest thing that any company can do. Having said that, it's very difficult to set up an app framework that allows not only the OS maker but even developers to create a single application that works across devices. Kind of like media queries for native applications.
Niecza - Perl 6 Implemented in .NET
Wow. Really? Wow.

No. It doesn't make the Chinese factory look good. [edit: removed because it sounded too mean to me]

I suggest watching some documentaries about Asian nomads or other indigenous peoples. They live a primitive life, sure. But they seem pretty content and stress free. I'm not even sure if I prefer my own pampered life to theirs.

I'd rather kill myself than work in a Chinese factory. From what I hear on the news, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.
My Stack:

1) A jetbrains IDE (I love em)

2) Macbook, connected to large external monitor, wireless mouse/kb

3) Alfred App for quick moving around

4) Divy for resizing windows easily

5) Dropbox where projects rest

6) SourceTree by atlassian with git-flow

7) The hit list (one of my favorites because it requires little configuration, and theres hovering activity timer that keeps you aware of how long youve been working on a feature)

8) Heroku > idea to server in minutes (free addons make starting up a breeze)
I was planning on getting a FitBit this week, the main purchasing decision against a Nike Fuelband being open access to data. Does anyone have any alternatives they can recommend? I'm especially interested in the sleep tracking side of things.
Yes, or as some people say "if you survived past 5 years old your expectancy is higher"

Not sure about the actual figures for that time period, though.
Connecticut organisation is offering $25 gift certificates to destroy..
Kindle Fire web share jumped to 7.5% and iPad fell 7.1%
Our cyber-christ, our cyber-savour.
Thanks, very interesting site & content
well,

(key, val) in data

works if

data = {(1,2) : 3}
Hipsters are a type of avant-garde mainstream, that takes symbols, styles and other things from subcultures they don't belong to (e.g. Fixies are from the New York messenger culture). Because they do all this to not be in the mainstream and the mainstream adopts many of their things, they're constantly changing.
I've played soccer for years, including with some ex-professionals and I'd be very surprised if any player could hit the crossbar that many times in a row from that distance with that precision. The bit that screams "obviously fake", for me at least, is the near perfect return trajectory each time.

Hitting the crossbar requires kicking something ~8.5" in diameter at something 5" wide so you've got a 'window' of 22" to aim at. With practice you might be able to do it 3/5 times from 20 yards.

(3/5)^4 =~ 1/8

So 8 tries to do it 4 times in a row.

To get the ball to come back like that each time the 'window' is now about 1" (if that). Outside that window and it bounces down to the ground, or glances the bar and goes behind the goal, or bounces way up in the air and never returns to you. So each kick is now 3/(5x22) and (3/(5x22))^4 = 1 in 1.8 million. Good luck.
All the things you cite as the scary parts of life in the past were after the development of agriculture. The article (and my point) is that life for the average person was better in the millenia prior to that. Indeed, the fact that life was so miserably for the people that built Giza or the Taj Mahal is precisely the point - hunter-gatherer tribes of a few hundred people never did such things.

And my point about the endless hours making electronics is that if this is the best we can do for the majority of people in the world today, which is an improvement on the miserable times of earlier civilization/agricultural society, how pathetic is that compared to times of tribal societies when things were much more equal and life (on average) was much better?

And I think you answer your own question about automation - our economic system is the reason we have people starving even when we have enough food to feed everyone. Automation won't change that by itself.
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Show HN: Javascript Template Loader
FrontEndLoader makes it easy and painless to load all your client side templates up front at one time. Any commets, suggestions and pull requests welcome!
Computers have become an "everything machine", to do everything you want, you need multiple windows.

However, things are changing. Consumers have realised that it is more productive to use a tool to carry out a particular task and get the job done.

They are fed up of having to wait for their PC to boot, do any updates, fix any problems and try and remember the original task they wanted to do. It's no longer acceptable. That's even before we mention the confusion of having multiple windows (think grandma).

People now expect things to happen instantly so they can use a device as a tool to carry out a single task. (ie: I need check my bank account - switch on device, open banking app, check account, turn device off).

This type of paradigm shift means that not only do people no longer need multiple windows, they have realised they no longer want them either.

Not only that, but as we get more and more smart devices, we don't need or want multiple windows as we'll have multiple devices instead.
The first right answer is the only answer
Ha, I did the random-overnight-train-to-anywhere-so-I-can-sleep-for-free thing during my Eurail summer too. It's not a bad way to see things you wouldn't have picked otherwise.
If anyone actually agrees with this article, I would like to invite you to forgo agricultural methods and live a nomadic life, leaving the rest of society as we strive for the 'greater good' (what ever that might be).
The Bodymedia FIT, in addition to being a superior device overall(1), has an API which let's you access caloric burn and other data up to single minute detail levels. If you Google around, there are some blog posts describing how to dump data from it using standard USB serial port drivers.

API webpage: https://developer.bodymedia.com/docs/read/Home

1- The Bodymedia gives you steps taken as well as accurate sleep and caloric burn readings.
One of Murphy's laws states:

"If you build something so simple that even an idiot can use it, only idiots will."

Nobody will use an OS that meets the needs of the most common user types and stops there. Companies want to deploy the same OS across their entire install base. A modern OS must meet the needs of all its users. That includes power users. The question of whether or not most people really need multiple windows is therefore moot. Some do, so any OS that hopes to be more than a toy OS must support this feature. Full stop. End of discussion.

There are, of course, workarounds in Windows 8 that power users can use, so there's no need to panic just yet. Microsoft is certainly aware of how leery enterprise is of their tablet-desktop fusion. I'd be surprised if Windows 9 doesn't focus on being more desktop friendly.
Could you elaborate what exactly is the bug there?
Coming Soon to a Smartphone Near You: Ubuntu
Giving up 75% of your company to some huckster is absolutely ridiculous.

If you give up control the new guy in charge will always be able to get rid of you. You are basically signing up for an employee type of deal, but with a fundamentally broken employment relationship. The real owner will know that you'll be resentful rather than grateful and will try to get rid of you as soon as practical. If your deal on paper is too costly for them they'll find a way to restructure / dilute you in some way to avoid paying out anything substantial.

People get desperate, I understand that. But it should be better to just walk away. The real solution though is to plan things through and not get yourself in the situation of "needing" to raise cash or go bust. There are tons of ways to avoid getting stuck is this situation.
Agreed. And to take it a step further: the US is still a powerful force in both world politics and military might. If all the people in the US who care about these issues simply give up and leave, do you really think the remainder of the US will simply let everyone else in the world live they way they want to?

We can already see the effects of this trend in how the US tries to "harmonize" copyright/patents/etc. law in other countries with its own. Any time I'm in an airport in a country where the US deems security insufficient, there's extra security at the gate for flights to the US. These things spread slowly, but surely.
Thank you Heroku for not shoveling this in an xml file
There's no absolutely fair way to do it. As you note, the best way to do it is simply the best we can do. California's system isn't simple, but it is viable, and now that it exists, it can serve as a template for others.

It's not perfect, but here's the thing; what's doable is for better than the current norm, and is actually fairly good. Certainly good enough to mitigate the biggest problems created by gerrymandering (i.e. sharpened partisan divides, undue concentration of power in national parties, unholy amounts of leverage for corrupt corporate influencers.) Freed from these pernicious issues, I like to think that the country will reach a level of sanity that makes the inevitable need for periodic reforms to the redistricting process a normal and manageable part of governing. The really hard part is persuading recalcitrant legislators to surrender their undue power over the electorate. That's obviously easier said than done, but the process that will eventually force their hands is already unfolding.

For more on that, see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001625
Ask HN: I'm starting a free development blog. Would you like to donate a logo?
I am an experienced software engineer, many projects have gone into gathering my little book of notes on algorithms and data structures in many languages. I will be creating a blog which will cover one problem a week and will be free to read or subscribe to. I will also take requests if anyone has a particular problem which will is torturing them at any given time.<p>I don't have an eye for design though, and I would like to appeal to the community for a user here who does, andwould like to create a logo for me. I can't afford to pay for it as I am currently broke due to thankgs-giving, christmas and other financial commitments.<p>Maybe you are an up and coming designer who needs some portfolio expansion? Maybe you are just nice enough to do some free work. I have given many hours of my lif to open source development, and would really appreciate if someone could do this for me.<p>Thanks in advance.
> You can buy an extended waiver which covers only 750$ in damage. Again unlike other conventional rental companies which would happily provide you with a full damage waiver.

This part is flat out not true - I believe it varies from fleet to fleet so I won't quote you any numbers, but Zipcar definitely do proper damage waivers. Please contact your local Zipcar office or check online for the actual figures :)
Employadam.com
It's the old "fuzzy approximation of real shape vs sharp representation of a shape altered to look sharp at low pixel density" argument all over again, which last flared up when Apple released Safari for Windows.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...

If you assume the other side is simply "doing it wrong" then conversation rapidly goes downhill, it's an engineering trade-off.

I personally like the fuzzy side of things, and I thought that they'd added hinting (possibly via ttfautohint) to make them sharp at small sizes on platforms than need hints (i.e. Windows basically). But, possibly to make it easier for people to contribute, they've conformed the icons to a grid at all sizes, and for all platforms, instead.

It's possible this was done to appease the Bootstrap devs, who were very picky about small scale rendering being pixel perfect and gave that as a reason for sticking with glyphicon hand drawn pngs. But its seems those same devs have chosen to go with fuzzy vectors glyphicons for Bootstrap 3.

I'll probably go with using those, which is a shame as I like the open contribution model and new license of Font-Awesome better. (Talking of which, how can it be openly licensed via SIL, but still allow glyph contributers to keep CC-BY-SA?)
Ok, please guys, between TSA articles, drones, biofuels and so on and so forth... it's getting to be a bit much. Let's put a cap on the politics. There are other sites for that.
Hacker unlocks the 3DS system kernel key to running pirated software
Yeah, but China achieved its success by ignoring other nations' intellectual property laws. That was hardly the case with the US.

(guffaw)
You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here: I remember high school courses teaches us that nature, through natural selection, influenced mankind. Until man empowered enough intelligence and influence back its environment, through Agriculture first, shaping the lands, steering water streams and so on. Then through industrial revolution. Generating green house gas emissions. I am not sure which one of a bushman or a agriculture lead to the best ecologic behavior then. :-/
Nokia N9: Is This the World’s Most Underrated Smartphone?
Sounds interesting, let me shoot you my resume.
This sort of paean to the "noble savage" always glosses over some of the worst aspects of such lifestyles. Such as excessive tribalism and racism, lack of individual liberty, and a stultifying lack of art and cultural refinements.

It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.
One important difference was how society was organised. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherer groups were collaborators. They depended on each other to put down game and gather vegetables. The more individuals in the group, the stronger they were. That's a completely different situation from a farming community in which its inhabitants are in competition to each other. The more farmers on a given area, the worse for each of them. They have to compete with each other over the arable land.
Aren't many airports privately-owned as well?
And because he knows he can feed hundreds of people, the farmer will have a dozen or so children, most likely erring on the side of too many and negate all benefits of this abundance!

As much as I disagree with the OP, I viscerally hate crowded cities, having more than 2 people per sq km population density, oversocialization of human beings and social hierarchies everywhere and all the other crap we had to put up with to get to the current level of progress in science and technology, but I hate it even more when people forget that it is only worth putting up with all this crap because of the goal of progress in science and technology and the hope that it will in the end set us free from the "slavery" of biological mortality and of biologically limited brainpower!.
Aspirin has been known since antiquity. Health care generally refers to reasonably complete care with practicing physicians, not a few varieties of antibiotics and painkillers.

I don't see your point about visiting a farm, or your point about landmines; there's no lack of people around the world that die from things as simple as lack of drinking water and malnutrition, which I would consider the absolute minimum any kind of health care could provide.
Show HN: xlogs: logfiles for Amazon EC2 cloud
Cool, good luck with your blog, please share the URL here once you started it!

Anyway, I don't think you really need a logo right now. Just take a template that looks nice and start creating content. When your blog becomes popular - because of the content you wrote! - you can start worrying about logo and design.
10 Very Successful Small Businesses That Don't Use Social Media
You don't need a logo. Start the blog, post regularly, and if it's decent then someone will step up and offer to create something.

Not having a logo won't hold you back, so just get on with it.
100 Greatest Sports Pictures
I have 9 things open at the moment. I'm actively using about 7 of these (mail client, eclipse, software loader for embedded device, COM port monitor, device tech reference, source tree in explorer window, firefox for HN...). These are spread across two screens, mostly active working programs to the left and reference material to the right, though not all full screen.

I really don't care what the average user wants, if the system doesn't support my usage pattern then I'm not going to use it.
Bond cleaning sydney
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> a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.

Did anyone else envision an awesome zombie movie while reading this?
See his post on previous thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736009
9 things I either knew I could do online or never wanted to do anyway ;)

Still, a nice list, and presented really well (visually appelling). Thanks for compiling it!
If a tree falls on your house and splits the roof wide open, allowing snow and rain to fall onto your bed, is it giving up to go and live in another building until the damage is repaired?

There are plenty fighting back - just not in the USA, as the window for meaningful and peaceful dissent there is now closed.

If you don't see that this is true today, I urge you to research the history of the US federal government's suppression of dissent over the last 20 years.
Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.
Big Data More About Automation than Insights
What's the real problem with Google Now?
Zero Clipboard by jonrohan - copy text to clipboard via Flash & JavaScript
Is Vodafone India running a loop complaints service?
1. Macbook Air with External Display

2. Chrome visible in external, with inspector/console on macbook

3. Wireless Keyboard and Trackpad(GODSEND!)

4. Sublime Text 2 for coding

5. Bamboo for automated builds using ANT

6. iTerm2 for terminal on steroids

7. AWS for everything cloud

8. DNS made easy for low TTL Domain management

9. JIRA/Bitbucket for Issue/feature tracking connected to git commits

10. I just wanted to make the list have 10 things in it

I highly encourage everyone to try to get something like Bamboo/ANT working to automate your deployment. Its such a timesaver later.
I wonder what private contractors in Irak will do when their assignment there is over. IIRC there was many of them. Trained men with real OT experience, that used to be well-paid...
I don't its that plain black and white. The only reason why (we assume) pre agriculture hunter gatherer tribes to be well off is because they were not intelligently aware of their own selves. So no countries, no religions, no color based problems or whatever.

Of course they didn't have medicines, shelter to protect themselves from epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes. Which I also think kept their population growth in check. Imagine getting your hand or a limb fractured then! Or catching dysentery. I am sure when things went fine, they went fine- The problem is basically when you get into a trouble which doesn't a solution at the present.

Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.

Its difficult to say what is better. Agriculture is basically is mass production of a basic element for survival called food .I would consider pharmaceutical companies as mass producers of another (now) basic necessity called health care. What ever you could say about agriculture you could also say about medicine.You could say people with cancer 1000 years back war far better off, at least they would just die instead of spending their life savings on fighting a disease they can't get cured off.
I'm not sure I completely agree with this view. It's not confronting the other argument: what if we were still all hunter-gatherers, and agriculture never became mainstream?

I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it.

I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.
Review of new Microsoft Surface tablet
I believe that it has to get worse in the US before it can get better, and I refuse to use violence to accomplish my goals.

Therefore, it will take several years, and will require the vast majority of the people who comprise the US's competitive advantage over other countries leaving, first, before the true change really starts.

You don't undo things like the NSA's global wiretapping efforts with a direct, frontal assault. If they cared about the fact that it is blatantly, totally illegal, they never would have begun it in the first place.

You have to attack the roots, and that's the economy, and the tax base. This will likely not be solved in my lifetime, unfortunately.