skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This had me twitching right from the start:

Increasing what scientists call the planet’s albedo, or
reflective power ...

What scientists call? How about what everyone calls when they need to measure reflectivity.

I don't know if this is just unfortunate choice of language or the author exhibits an bit of an us-and-them attitude towards science.

I really hate the term "scientists", the way it is used is like they're this abstract homogeneous mass of not quite people who hand down decrees from on high. Instead of what they really are which is a very inhomogeneous group of hard working people working in a very broad number of fields with a vast array of ideas.
Why are parental controls even on this list? Is this really such a pressing issue? I think he should have taken a different angle on this, seemed to me like he just ran out of things to criticize.
I haven't used R nor Pandas. How does the two compare? Why do people use R and not Python?
I think most people have enough processing bandwidth to cope with external libraries using a different convention to inhouse code.
I think it's good that Amazon is not disclosing any information about anybody without a court order. I'd be worried if they were disclosing their customers information to any police agent without a warrant!
The thing is, Mercator was never actually intended to be used as a map, per se. What it was supposed to be used for was a navigation chart, and it's extremely useful in that context: straight lines on the map correspond to straight lines in the real world, the compass directions are the same no matter where you look, and so on. Other projections distort these things, and there can be good reasons to do that depending on what exactly one wants to do. If you're trying to find single points, it really doesn't matter so much. But when the reason you're using the map is to find a route between Point A and Point B, Mercator really is the most reasonable projection for the job.
It's buggy. Maybe just on Chrome 24.0.1312.52 running on OSX?
It's an open source project, you are free to do so if you have the time or the need, and contribute back any corrections.
Those people were provably wrong, as the Earth is bathed in high energy particles from the Universe all the time and particle collisions on the same scale as in the LHC have been happening routinely for the entire lifetime of Earth with no catastrophic effects.
Are you implying The Matrix didn't really happen?!
Yes, e.g. http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/demos/CompositeMapProject...
"Clearly the pills made for pharmaceutical are incredibly dangerous, even when taken as per the instructions. That is why they are prescribed."

Nope. Simplistic, backwards thinking.

There's nothing dangerous about taking a valium to help you sleep once in a while, unless you have a specific allergy. And that is what you would be instructed to do if you were suffering from insomnia or panic attacks.

They are controlled because they are dangerous in large amounts and addictive if used frequently.

Some antibiotics are controlled because people see them as a magic cure-all and would take them for everything, which would even more rapidly lead to resistant strains of bacteria and make the antibiotics useless.

So sure, some drugs are dangerous when used as instructed, but many are only dangerous when abused, and some have wider implications for society.
In fact for a while you could only have adhoc views, but my knowledge is 6 months out of date.

Yes definitely do that. I bundle the sqlite in the app store updates and then mount that as an external db and pull from itself - its a bit awkward but it worked. I had to write the external db stuff, but it was pretty easy.
Ask HN: Would you pay a monthly subscription for automatic gas?
Would you pay a monthly subscription to have your car tank filled up automatically when its running low?
This is awesome.

Suggestion: I thought the progress bar was much longer, spanning the total lower part of the modal, up to the buttons, because there is so little contrast. If I were using it as a real wizard, i might have aborted, thinking there were maybe 10 times as many steps involved.
So you don't think the Asus Transformer represented any sort of hardware innovation? The Asus Padphone? The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon? The TouchSmart 9300 Elite? Really?
That shouldn't be the case. So many linux machines are doing fine with swap disabled.

Regardless, there's no reason for hibernation and page file to be different. They can (and should) be the same file.
I hate this sentiment. It's counter-factual and absolutely poisonous.

Go live in a hut in the middle of nowhere if you're so concerned about resource use.

For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier, as I am today. Can live comfortably and look forward to sumptuous and delicious meals instead of living in fear of starvation or disease or war.
Compare your Firebird server performance on different hardware, OS's versions
Pretty much everything in Bootstrap is gray-scale , with the exception of things with semantic function: red=error/danger, amber=caution, green=success.

The only exceptions are "primary" buttons (which was blue by default but based on the link color the last time I checked), info which is pale blue, and code samples which are pink.

I'm not in the slightest way artistic, but I feel if those (incredibly easily overriden) usages hold you back from expressing yourself with color then you're probably best not to bother and so it's a net-win either way.
I'm just going to leave this here ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U

(Tim Minchin's "Storm")
I'll tell you what happened to LEGO. They stayed in business.
Of course. The best population control method in history has proven to be...

wealth.
GDB is okay once you get the hang of it, but it's seriously less productive than with proper IDE integration.

How do you make a breakpoint? 'break Filename.cpp:1234' or 'break FullClassName::FullFunctionName'. I have to go to my editor, lookup the file and line number, go to gdb and enter a command. Remove a breakpoint? I always forget how to do that so I need to lookup the manual every time. Urgh. I just want to be able to click on a button next to the line to insert or remove a breakpoint.

The command line interface has its uses, but there should also be excellent editor integration. I don't care about IDEs; integration with Sublime Text is fine. Unfortunately every project that I've come across that tries to implement that is half-baked.
The article probably written for non-Linux user who looking forward to switch side. Hardware compatibility, [almost]malware-free, software center (heck, just say repo), backup and migration, those shinny things mostly become concern of migrating user. I remember few of my friend going crazy and try Arch after they see my setup (mouseless workflow, mpd, tmux), and end up installing Ubuntu because the learning curve was too steep.
That being said, despite poor decisions that being taken lately, I still consider Canonical and Ubuntu to be fairly successful embracing new user.
The Surface RT is a tablet (that also happens to run Microsoft Office). The Surface Pro is a PC (that also happens to work as a tablet).

I can understand consumers being confused (though I have no evidence that they are) but surely it's not too hard for HN readers to understand...
The problem I have with it is that it lowers the bodies natural ways of dealing with pain. You become more reliant on it, rather than just handling the pain yourself.

This works for non extreme pain, of course.
I'm not sure Amazon can give away your personal information without a court order. I think it breaks their terms and conditions and could get them in legal trouble. Unfortunate but really not Amazon's fault.
Failed to find it :(

It is a veeeery old thing.

And so simple that I found lots of more or less similar stories, but not this particular one. (but found lots of interesting stuff on google...)
I would have hoped when i got my kindle stolen to have a way to declare it stolen at amazon and block it maybe ?
after all it's paid with my account and my credit card, it's quite easy to find out.
So fucking true. It bugs me no end when I read news reports that mention "scientists". Do we read articles where "policemen say" or "politicians say" or "priests say"?
Scientists don't really understand how clouds affect climate (some clouds cause localized cooling, some clouds cause localized heating, it's complicated), mostly they just include an empirically determined fudge factor to account for it.
Google must extend payments across Europe for use of content
Minor nitpick: there are no anti-DRM clauses in the Apache license and the one in the GPLv3 only refers to DRM preventing replacing of the GPLv3 software.
If there was no "affiliate" thing ever, the companies would have found other ways to promote. A big company will contact most influential bloggers and more and offer them a sum of money to review the product. They have that money and they hope on a good return on investment. Smaller companies or individuals can also go to bloggers to promote them but they usually don't have money to pay them.

Affiliate Marketing makes it easier for small companies and individuals to promote their product, giving the ones who promote a small compensation, only on real results ( after they get money too ).

You know that on the highest profile blogs ( like techcrunch or gizmodo ) the big players are paying for the content. If they use affiliate links, they may be able to promote products from smaller companies or from individuals.

I have a product: http://autoaffiliatelinks.com/ and I don't have the budget to pay bloggers to review it. The only thing I can do is to give a comission to anyone who promote it.
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This is incredibly simplistic. The last 100 years has seen the expansion of the car industry as well, I guess there must be some relation to out quality of life as well. Even though cars are responsible for over 100,000 deaths a year.
JS1K 2013 spring edition announced
You should take a look at info-beamer. It supports displaying video via FFMPEG, you could show browser content via VNC, and the best thing is that you can hot-swap the animation code while it is running. It's a bit like Processing, but much more lightweight.

Out of the box it doesn't solve your array problem, but maybe you can hack something up. For example, you could have a huge virtual display on your control laptop, and show parts of it on the Raspberry Pi's via VNC. Or you could have a "crop" parameter in all your animations, so that every Pi can render a different part (required perfect timing, though).

http://info-beamer.org/
It will not be clear: You can replace the first line with the following two

String[] sents = {"the quick", "the slow", "the blue"};
Iterable<String> s = Splitter.on(" ").split(Joiner.on(" ").join(sents));
> Civil Disobedience means accepting that what you are doing is illegal and dealing with the consequences. Period.

Why? So they can thoroughly stomp you and nobody else get the idea?

So many moral demands for the little guy and not for the huge all-powerful blind mad machine that crushed him.
Good idea but never worked for me got my location right but not the tweets
I'm working on a bootstrap 3 based project and tracking their development. They've been making fairly large changes (e.g. badges are gone, replaced with counters, labels are MIA as well but they're supposedly coming back) over the last month or so and have more to make on their roadmap.

If you're not having any problems you must be very lucky and/or are only using a subset of the tools they provide, it's not going to be a drop in update for most people, hence the 3.0 version.
I understand that Mercator isn't the most accurate representation, but seriously, "greater good?" There are a lot of things that I think Google can do "for greater good," and changing how they show a map isn't even in the first hundred pages.
Ah, old but good:

"Alternative Medicine has, by definition, not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. You know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine."
Define "automatically" - where? how? I don't quite see the use case.

In a city (where gas stations are abundant): indicator lights up, hey look, I'll be passing (any) gas station within five minutes. Outside a city, let's say I'm an hour's drive from a gas station - now what, a gas truck drives up to me? That might be somewhat expensive...

Now, if this included periodical check-ups (lights, various fluids, pressure etc.), this might be interesting.
If they work 4h/day it's still 10 commutes per week

So instead make them work 8h/3days (or 2.5days if you'd rather) then you only have 6 commutes per week

Or just work remotely
Flickr Is Back, Letting Us Go Home Again
It's not unusual for this to occasionally happen in English-speaking countries, though it is not ubiquitous in the way it is in Spain. Also note that the two names don't necessarily come from her 2 parents; it's quite possible (indeed, likely) that she inherited that name through several generations.
> Rather, I think's saying that there are interactions and compounds in drugs we use that we don't (yet) fully understand.

Unless there is evidence to support that position, that's indistinguishable from magical thinking rephrased to sound scientific.
We start with the global emancipation of women. Unfortunately we barely seem able to get that going in the most developed country in the world, which makes doing it in the poorest a lot harder.
Asus Transformer & PadFone - perhaps. I'm far from convinced though.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon - what is the innovation? Carbon Fiber?

TouchSmart 9300 Elite - an iMac clone with an external power brick?
I don't think I could work any less than I already am, but I agree with you.

I am also convinced that in order to "do more with less" in the future, we will need to actually solve the basic problems that keep prices high on food, clothing, shelter, and knowledge. I'm not sure how to do that when science is a prisoner of copyright, for example, and education costs as much as a house, for example; I just don't see how to solve the physical problems, even for myself, in any big way when we can't collectively solve even the self-inflicted/social ones like copyright (and superstitions, and violence, and, ...). I think working less would be a sign of success, but I'm not sure how to get there from here. People won't do it voluntarily (nor should they be forced to). The government can always tax the wealthy and redistribute, but I'm leery of promoting that and just giving the government more power. (Now they want my guns too.)

It doesn't help that the U.S. defaulted on it's gold debt in the 70's (brilliantly calling it "going off the gold standard") and now U.S. money is just an interest-bearing loan (as opposed to you, the government, just printing paper...), which means people pay interest on public debt, the rich get richer, keeping the pressure on and prices going up. (Most of the world's currencies are U.S. dollar backed, so it's not limited to the U.S..) It's musical chairs: ie, every now and then someone has to lose big (one chair is removed, in the form of interest payments), and the pie gets divided among fewer and fewer (and their children). No one's going to work less with that gun in their back.

That's why, as unpopular as it can be around here (hey, everyone has to make a living), I think we have to fix this idea that we can charge for knowledge (or patent it, or copyright it), because we're really not (IMHO) going to be able to get to the important stuff if we keep fighting over the "how" (most food plants are sterile for goodness sake). I can't justify giving an inventor, even if it's me, a monopoly on an idea if it just means the whole world needs my permission to solve their own problems.
"And so simple that I found lots of more or less similar stories..."

It is a hallmark of urban legends.

This story seems to originate with the case Bodine v. Enterprise High School, which involves a 19 year old on the roof of a high school who fell through a skylight covered with tar.

Your tale seems more likely to stem from the 1990s movie "Liar, Liar": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119528/quotes?qt0372695
It would be less frustrating if they said this in the first answer and don't let the customer run tho the police (twice).
> Humans evolved consuming only organic material from their very beginnings up until about 100 years ago.

Humans also evolved to have a dozen or so children and see four or five of them make it to adulthood.

The reason you see life expectancies as low as 35 for past European cultures isn't that the people were dying in early middle age: Adults could and did live to see 70 or more. It was because they had horrible infant mortality rates combined with horrible death tolls from childhood illnesses.

The only thing keeping everyone from going back to that is chemicals. The modern First World have-three-kids-keep-three-kids lifestyle is entirely artificial. It depends on artificial things to keep it going.
Seven is not the magic number where things go bad. The pH is dropping about a hundred times faster than at any time in the past 20 million years, and that's already affecting sea life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

"Corals, calcareous phytoplankton, mussels, snails, sea urchins and other marine organisms use calcium (Ca) and carbonate (CO3) in seawater to construct their calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells or skeletons. As the pH decreases, carbonate becomes less available, which makes it more difficult for organisms to secrete CaCO3 to form their skeletal material." http://www.ocean-acidification.net/FAQeco.html
I had always wondered what market the window debugging was tuned for.. Building by bug fixing in a debugger and then shipping it to someone without a debugger does seem to be the norm both on windows and in the game industry.

I worked for a UNIX vendor and our gdb style commands were ideal for business and government customers and products.

The time spent diagnosing bugs during production is not nearly as important as the ability to diagnose bugs remotely with limited amounts of data collected (and in many cases read and redacted) by a customer running a machine with sensitive data.

For live debugging we really relied on truss and dtrace. There are ports/copies of them in Linux, I don't know how complete..
Control over the program counter allows return-into-libc or other ROP attacks.
I think that AGPL requires you to give source code to the users of the program. If you use a modified version internally then you'll have to give the source code to your employees. That isn't as problematic as sharing with the whole outside world.

Or maybe I misinterpret the license?
> The last 100 years has seen the expansion of the car industry as well, I guess there must be some relation to out quality of life as well.

How many people would die if not for ambulances?
Like aspirin, for example.
Well, the guy has a obvious leftish slant in some of his opinions.

But excluding his pontual opinions on some issues, he is mostly correct.

And that is very unfortunate.

But what else can we expect?

Democracy, is only good as the people voting. Take a look at what happened in Egypt, people wanted democracy, removed the dictator, then the sunni majority of the country obviously elected those they wanted, a sunni guy.

Then he changed the constitution a little, the constitution is almost the same, and in most areas improved, there are one thing that is very questionable:

Instead of the laws being "inspired" by Sharia, now they are "inspired" by Sharia according to sunni islam.

Bang, there you are, the other half of the country, mostly non-sunni muslims and christians, are very upset, and screw democracy, now we want you to come out of power because if you don't we will throw molotovs in your palace.

EDIT replying the guy below, because I got seemly slowbanned or something (I am getting the message "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."):

Oh, I am from Brazil, to me US center is right...

(I say that US has two parties: right, and even more right).

But I am referring to gay marriage (it is a traditional point of the left, specially if you are a follower of Frankfurt School or of Gramsci) and drug decriminalization (Another point that the left likes more than the right).

I am personally against gay marriage (actually my opinions in marriage are quite complex) and pro decriminalization.
I'm not sure that overstating your case is a sensible approach to argument. Lenovo is not the only company with good PCs, and a handful of PC companies sell more units than Apple, so clearly people do buy them. More than 300m a year of them, as a matter of fact.

However, your point on crapware is well made. Unfortunately, Microsoft can't do anything about it (because the DoJ sued it into the ground and specifically prevented it). Also, crapware brings in money and this is significant in a market that buys on price. I don't see it changing in the near future.
The original purpose of copyright was censorship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_...

"The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers.[6] Before the invention of the printing press, a writing, once created, could only be physically multiplied by the highly laborious and error-prone process of manual copying by scribes. An elaborate system of censorship and control over scribes existed.[7] Printing allowed for multiple exact copies of a work, leading to a more rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information (see print culture).[6] Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books and in 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time.[7]"

Later it was extended as a way for governments to grant money to special interests! Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Automated followup email for startups
Nice post. I am sympathetic to the idea that there are some important cures to be 'discovered' in existing traditional medicines. However, I have a few issues with some parts of your argument.

1) You say that the bias the mainstream medical establishment is a bigger travesty than chemophobia. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis but if we're going to compare them we need to have some idea of their size or import. This strikes me as requiring some rigorous study so I am skeptical of any estimates without some sort of backing. More importantly to me, why is it one or the other? Maybe they are both problems.

2) When combining chemicals the effects may certainly be different than when taken separately, but is the difference always beneficial?

"The hope, then, is that when taking something more "natural" as opposed to man-made is that that natural product will inherently contain a wider variety of compounds that taken together create a more potent, but gentle effect on the patient."

I think this is optimistic.

3) "... so many people have taken natural products for hundreds of years without ill-effect ..." How do you know they have taken them without ill-effect? Even with rigorous clinical studies and modern statistical methods this can be difficult. I'm not saying no useful knowledge has been gleaned this way, but I would think that it would obtained much less efficiently. It's only the sheer length of time that has resulted in some useful outcomes.