skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What am I missing about QR codes?
I like to think that I am relatively smart guy, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how using QR Codes in advertising, on business cards, etc. is better or more effective than simply using a URL to point to the same information. At least a URL is explicit and something that I might have a chance in hell of remembering. Do any of you really whip out your smart phone, load a QR Code reading app, and scan the QR code, and then immediately consume what the advertiser is feeding you? What am I missing?
I forgot to point out while the discussion was still active that "proprietary encryption" is a bit of a misnomer. 90% of people who use that phrase mean "we use a super-secret algorithm and if we tell you how the algorithm works the bad guys will break it", aka, a weak and unaudited security-by-obscurity algorithm.

OCB is no more proprietary than RSA was when it was still under patent protection (throughout the '90s, I believe), the reference implementation is public, and Mosh incorporates the reference implementation into its GPL source. The algorithm is well-documented in the research literature, and the implementation is available under a free software (though strong copyleft) license.
play android games on the handheld, and steam games via local network streaming
Funny thing is, I originally joined Twitter to try to get customer support when it looked like the company I was trying to contact (Vonage, if I remember right) was replying in minutes on Twitter when their email support never got answered (and phone support kept getting rerouted to people who didn't know any answers). Then, I used to do tech support for Metalab's Flow, and we used Twitter for customer support via Desk.com daily. It works good for rapid response to simple questions in my experience, and I'd recommend companies take advantage of it. There's no reason Tweeting for customer support is more entitled or demanding than seeking customer support via any other means.
This is not an immigration issue. There is no place for common sense in government matters. Some day computers will take over the decision making and we will have a joyous experience coming in or happily avoid this country because the decision will be known.
>How is any of this better for consumer freedom than just Windows 7?

Ecosystem. This is a limited function device, which is bad, but anything you can do on it you can also do on a full Linux distribution. Which means that anyone who can get by with such a device will have no barrier to switching if they are ever inclined to do so.

That is the difference from a Windows machine. Because if you have Windows then you start accumulating Windows apps and you become accustomed to their interfaces and your files are in those formats, etc. etc. Windows locks you into Windows. ChromeOS doesn't lock you into ChromeOS; you can switch to a full desktop Linux distribution whenever you want and everything still works.
Show HN: Ohzshvim: Make Getting Started With Zsh and Vim Easier
It's possible, because you aren't a mathematician, that you aren't aware of who Terrence Tao is. He is one of the most celebrated mathematicians of our time, and a prolific one at that. His goal is emphatically not to explain what dimensional analysis is, but to provide a basis for a mathematical formalism for it that does not fully exist yet.
Sweet app. Downloaded and ready to use tomorrow in NYC.

One thing: kerning. The 'A' in the wordmark is in no-man's land! T and G are friendly letters, and I'm sure they'd be more than happy to snuggle up on that A.
Well, sure, for their current audience. But they're not getting capital to maintain their current audience, they're getting it to further expand into other demographics. Those demographics are likely to be less impressed by the content which currently dominates the front page.

Plus, going that way isn't necessarily a solid business model for the future anyway. Remember the Cheezburger network? Failblog? 9Gag and 4Chan have both had huge drops in traffic since their heyday. Reddit is the shining example of an internet culture site which has continued to flourish over time, and even then, I think they will hit critical mass with their current target demographic soon.
Not completely unambiguous, though. I've seen plenty of software with negations in their dialog messages ("Don't delete x?") Particularly egregious with driver installations. Everything considered, buttons with actual verbs seem the most foolproof.
Looks great!

The problem with all blogging platforms though is that we always focus on making the writing experience better rather than making the audience experience better.

Give me this simplicity, plus a built in way for me to get eyeballs and I'm all yours!
Well, not really. Most European countries are interconnected and EU aside, could easily operate as independent states.
The more the merrier!

State of California used to allow 5 in healthcare reporting: male, female, indeterminate, unknown, and other.

The first two are largely self-explanatory, self-identification issues largely not considered. "Indeterminate" means that evidence is present but it's not possible to distinguish. "Unknown" means evidence isn't present (and hence it's not possible to make a determination. Example: unidentified human remains found and either grossly mutilated or partial to the point of not being able to determine sex. "Other" means that evidence is present, and it's possible to make a determination, but it doesn't fit any of the previous categories.
Most likely it is the 'not very tech savvy' crowd which is buying these laptops for themselves or others without realizing that it's not a fully functional Desktop OS.

I can imagine a loving grandparent buying this affordable "Laptop" for their grand kids thinking this suits my budget.
Or someone thinking sure this thing is like the one I have back at home.
I can't tell which viewpoint this author is taking. It's dripping with sarcasm and it seems to dilute the point he's trying to make.
Malan truly is a fantastic lecturer, isn't he? He's also been leading the charge for free, online education—his course has been on MIT's OCW since 2007 [1].

Did you find that the lectures provided enough basis to complete the problem sets? A number of students I talked to struggled to actually piece together code after the presentation of mostly concepts in lecture.

[1] http://cs50.tv
Here's one Linux user who'd love to see Civ for Linux.
It works perfectly now, thanks. Great article.
Localhost3000.de - Cashing in on Rails development.
Great seeing new plugins from Tpope. Everything he does is worth trying out if you are a vim user.
> In this case, the ISP kicked things up a notch. If their users don't like it, they can always switch providers.

this is often not an option, thanks to governmentshaving granted isps and telcos local monopolies in return for their laying the physical cable.
You've never had anything in the same Linux distro break after years of use? Seriously? Somehow I find that hard to believe. Even the most skilled Linux users have had things break on them. Just to name a few, PulseAudio used to (maybe still does) have tons of issues such as sound simply not working anymore after a reboot (I had to just uninstall it, so it just used Alsa all the time), package managers get messed up after version upgrades (apt-get vs aptitude) and give you unresolvable dependencies (happens often when libc is upgraded), X window servers get busted all the time too (even just using tmux will mess up your DISPLAY variable sometimes). Google any of these issues, and you'll see tons of people having the same problems. Maybe you're a genius and can fix these problems right away, but not everybody is like you.

You also talked about OSX's new security features. You don't need to do any of that if the App is signed, it's just double click install (though most are drag and drop). For Apps that are less popular, yes you'd have to disable gatekeeper, but that's not much worse than having to add custom PPA's on Linux (those cause a lot of issues too oftentimes).

I'm all for Ubuntu becoming an awesome viable desktop replacement, and it's come a long way, but (for me) there's far too many annoyances for now so I'm sticking to OSX for my main machine. I do think it's probably better than Windows now though.
Also a smelter essentialy only has two variables that control its profitability - the price of electricity and the price of aluminium. A smelter wants to have a long term futures contract for electricity supply, and matching long term futures contracts for selling aluminium on the commodities market.

They have some control over the price of electricity - the control is via:

* long term electricity supply options (e.g. the New Zealand government gave a smelter here a special decades long contract, so a company would set up a smelter in NZ, even though the bauxite is mined in Australia and shipped thousands of kms).

* possibly owning their own generation capacity (the NZ smelter had a large hydro dam built for it, and they had contractual control over its power).

* most importantly to optimise where to put the smelter to best take advantage of long term cheap power (cheap base load prices, supply reliability, political stability).
That's pretty direct to me.

I'd guess that late-night delivery is not part of the standard service, and they only did for the fear of upheaval on twitter.

Anyway, the blame is not on the customer, the company could have scheduled delivery for early next morning and that would be absolutely reasonable.
On the other hand, it's an incentive for devs to log and fix minor issues they might've otherwise ignored.
> One of the most valuable lessons I've learned as a developer is learning how to learn.

Not just valuable for programming, but for anything in general. the skill to learn how to learn something should be taught in high school, not learnt via osmosis, or intuition at university.
Missoni CEO on plane missing in Venezuela
Personally, I think a lot of it is impressive, but the cube animation gets old really fast.
I'm quite glad to see that the "uh guys, you might be privileged" meme is attracting enough attention and mindshare to draw this sort of opposition. It shows that the efforts of the parties that have been pushing it are successful at reaching the people they need to reach, and more importantly, working to change the shared perception of standards in various communities. You'll note that he speaks as a minority viewpoint trying to claim that the majority is crazy, not like a person in line with the prevailing views of the community who's quieting a lone crazy voice.
Will be very handy! Good job. I wonder why it isn't part of HN already.
Would love to use it on my Firefox.
This is flagged by Chrome/Google Safe Browsing. ("braveball_run.exe appears malicious." shows up in the Download bar.)

You might want to check out why that's the case.

MSSE doesn't have a problem with it, though.
Machine Learning for Dividend Growth
Which also means that they can switch to a Macbook or a Windows PC whenever they want instead of a Linux machine. How does that help Linux?
Not what I was expecting at all! I was expecting an article about customer service fragmentation by giving disproportionate emphasis on social media rather than brand-specific infrastructure - something I have seen and experienced often.

That said, while I understand her emotional perspective, I tentatively disagree with the sentiment. If the use of social media does produce efficiency gains that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible to attain, then everyone benefits, including the company gaining a competitive advantage, perhaps ala Theory of Constraints.

Of course, there is more than one way to use social media. The company could have used it only for information broadcasts. I presume if they set it up to actively seek to improve their customer service, then they are happy to accept all the consequences for it too.
Quite a lengthy article for a couple interesting anecdotes. Not worth the read.
You can use "/statusbar prompt disable" (and "/save" to make it persistent).
Nvidia will save us from Intel in the long run. Intel just doesn't get multi-core processors.
Why is different distros a problem? I never understood what was missing in *nix that was so game-changing.
You can store gas, you can't store electricity.

So it's very easy to buffer gas for things like this.
This is actually my first public 'project' I've submitted in quite some time. It's nothing big, but I'm posting it in here in hopes that someone interested in making the jump to zsh and vim will find it useful.
Noticed it as well, had to Shift+Ctrl+T to get back to it. Oh well, I can't take any more of "it's her fault" style responses from the HN community this week after the last volley of posts on this matter (which incidentally resulted in the woman's website being DOSd.)
> The answer is not "because it has a developer switch on the back to install Ubuntu"; you can do that on a Windows PC as well.

Not for $249 and not on ARM.
I wonder why. (Not sarcastic, btw.)
Real-time HDR is great! Hope everyone gets in that bandwagon.

At some point HDR processing should become part of the hardware pipeline in every sensor, and we'll simply have a selectable dynamic range.
> Intel just doesn't get multi-core processors.

Would you like to qualify that statement?
Good observation, now that's attention to detail!
None of those things are desktop settings either.
Too bad the explanation of how it works was indistinguishable from technobabble.
Nvidia Announces Project Shield, Android Based Gaming System
Lego mindstorms ev3
Actually, it's not. Apple does sell Macbooks through Amazon. No iPhones or iPads but Amazon has been selling Macs forever - http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2423178011
Michael kors purses
this is an awesome device!
More likely she was upset after discovering the human cost of getting what she wanted.
From the comment section: "Oh my god, New York is going to eat this nice lady alive."

It's not a problem with twitter, it's a problem with the store you're buying from. Next time buy your ac unit from a place that treats their employees right. If you want to take an even longer view of this, you'll probably run smack into the economy at large and the desperate situation that minimum wage big box stores can force upon their employees as a result of the unemployment rate. They treat you like dirt and hold you responsible for failing to meet goals that were never possible in the first place.

An alternate view TFA could take would be that since you've discovered that public complaining via irascible tweet seems to be effective--tweet again about your horror regarding their treatment of their employees. There's no reason they shouldn't have some sort of infrastructure in place to deal with this sort of thing if they are going to attempt immediate reparations brought to their attention via twitter.

The store could have offered over time pay to stronger employees willing to volunteer the next day, perhaps; the salaried managers likely didn't receive any compensation for their after hours efforts. I'm sure the AC unit could have waited another 24-48 hours.
Similarly, I don't understand why people named Aaron always make unfair generalizations.
Seems like one of the psychopaths figured out strategies from Neil Strauss' the game all by himself.
"Venting on a blog" is most certainly considered action in a democracy. That's basically what the Federalist Papers were.
I just finished my first year without it. First few months were pretty hard, but I got over it. Saved a bunch of money, got more confident in social situations, lost some weight. It was good enough, I've just started my second year...
Not always true - see Wall St circa 2008.
Let me guess. In the UK you are promoted based on years of experience, in the US based on competence.
I'm not sure about Home Depot, but when I worked [generic retail job] and witnessed my manager drive to customers' houses after hours to help install components— even going with her on occasion— it was clear she wasn't getting "paid nicely to go through all that trouble." She did it because she knew if she did that extra bit, those people would be way more likely to come back and spend money at the store. But there was never a guarantee, and almost every time was additional stress she really didn't need.

What the author experienced is something a lot of the tech community seems to lack: empathy. She realized that an elderly couple went far out of their way to deliver a heavy AC unit to a person who might not ever come back to their store. She realized the only reason they were out there was because of her, because she didn't want to wait two weeks.

Any normal person would feel like crap.
That was effortlessly the worst keynote I have ever sat through, with the added bonus of a grotesque "gamer babe" interlude that saw a married 49 year old CEO pretending to hit on a model at a tiki bar. Rancid 1993 puke.

All that said, their Shield handheld console looks pretty spectacular, if vaporous.

5" ~retinesque~ touchscreen clamshelled onto a full-size game controller with all the bells and whistles. Outrageously powerful, has HDMI, USB, headphones, and holds a 5-10 hour charge. Runs pure Android with full Google Play access and a specially curated library built for the console itself. Can also wirelessly stream games off of a PC, including from Steam Big Picture. Cloud storage of game state comes free.

Not announced: price, storage, availability, who's making it, sales channels, or anything. So whatever. But this -is- the Sony PSP slayer, and it is another sign that all roads lead to Android+OpenGL ES on ARM as the future default game platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Another fascinating journey on the good ship Wikipedia.
Government employees in certain agencies, as I understand it, are practically impossible to fire. There's so much red-tape and bureaucracy that you practically have to burn the building down to be terminated, and even if that happened, the employee would probably sue the state - which would settle the case for undisclosed millions.
Here's a nice little noise filtering rule for fellow HNers - in the spirit Betteridge's law of headlines;

If you ever see an article where a person's age precedes their achievements, then whatever they have achieved is not worth your time.
The other side of the story. I would call it- "Great customer support".

Why didn't they wait for delivering it next (early) morning? Would that make a huge difference?
First, there are lots of types of diversity of background, viewpoint, education, experience, and the like that you can't get without making sure you have diversity of race, gender, class, and so forth.

Second, there's a question about what the point of diversity is; nobody is claiming that reducing homogeneity is, in and of itself, a worthwhile goal. In CS at least, it's obvious to me that there's no particularly good (in the sense of intrinsic) reason that there are way more male than female, white and Asian than black and Hispanic, etc. people in the industry. This means that my industry is missing some two-thirds of the people who could be in it -- drawing from a pool that's artificially limited to maybe a third of what it could be. I work for a company that's having trouble hiring, and I use and contribute to several open source projects that are having trouble finding volunteers. If we can triple the pool of involved folks, my life gets personally better.

Meanwhile, it's not at all clear to me that it's the case that CS as an industry (or design as an industry) is missing a bunch of folks who are perfectly capable of contributing except that they have the wrong background or viewpoint. Background is very easy to fix (if you're motivated and have the right opportunities available to you); work-relevant viewpoints tend to actually be important, like whether you value being a stickler for style, and I think there's plenty of diversity in work-irrelevant viewpoints.

Relatedly, there's a question of accounting for privilege. It is entirely too easy for me to geek out with people who have all been programming since middle school, which can be legitimately intimidating to someone who's just picking it up and afraid of asking dumb questions (instead of merely seeming precocious). Class, and to a lesser extent race and gender, influence privilege and what opportunities are available to people. Things like viewpoint, not so much, and things like education are an effect, not a cause (since they're fixable, and since it's a good thing not to have diversity of education and merely to have everyone well-educated -- tying back in to what the point of achieving diversity is). Going out of our way to include people who didn't have the opportunities we had is a good way to counteract the effects of that unfairness.
Aye, they were just some guys blowing out their frustrations.

Or not.
I agree, it is easy to spend way too much time on a post - as a rule I spend no more than 3 hours on a post, and I kind of embrace mediocrity. At some point (often way before hitting the full 3 hours), the value of publishing and starting a conversation become greater than producing a perfect piece of writing that may come from more time spent editing and refining the post itself.

A lot of the posts I spent the least time on did the best on HN, and some of the ones I labored over and loved the most linger in obscurity.

The best thing that happened because of my blog this year, at least external of my own personal happiness at self-expression, was a woman approaching me at a conference who read my most popular post, quit her job, and started a company. It's hard to explain why that's so valuable a feeling, because she was probably nearly ready to make that decision and my post just came at the right time, but it gives me a sense of connectedness with other people that I think a lot of Internet citizens are missing. Mediocre writing, first rate conversations and happiness.

I hope in 2013 you'll lower the bar on the writing and publish more, you might really enjoy it.
If that's really a concern:

if (a):
arg = b
else:
arg = c
foo(arg)

In my experience, trying to optimize for brevity at the expense of clarity is almost always a bad idea.
I really love y'all and you'ze - because the grammatical construct exists in other languages such as Spanish.

Those words are used by some English speaking cultures because they are useful.

I wonder of the usage is emergent (independent rediscovery), or a cultural meme transferred from another language?
Well actually Android widgets are not too different, and in fact richer in at least some ways. Bad analogies are like bad analogies :)

And even it doesn't matter if they are making a point that is too narrow to be interesting to you as they are not making false points as it is interesting to others and that is probably why it got upvoted.
I Ad-Block, but specifically white-list sites I frequently visit. If I'm just cruising around some no-name site and will never be back, and I'm not going to click your ad anyway - I feel justified in my decision to block those ads.

Same as if I'm channel surfing - if an ad comes on, I change the channel. If I'm engrossed in a particular programme and ads come on, I generally don't change the channel.

I think ad-blocking software should encourage the use of white-listing more. Perhaps by 'packaging' domains that people may want to white-list during the install.
I can't see anyone pining for any good old' days of Web advertising. Please sir, may I have some more popups?

What will really happen in the scenario you outline is either users will stop using the site (as much or at all) because of the escalation in the ad arms race, and/or wait until ad-blocking software stops those kinds of ads, too.

I think users are more forgiving of advertising that obeys the social contract (they get something out of allowing a marketer to have some of their precious time and attention).