skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that the behavior itself is rarely viral. What's the difference between this and, for example, gotomypc?
To Hell And Back With Video-Streaming-as-a-Service
Plus pen testers could argue that they legitimately need any tool a hacker could possibly use in order to test the security of their systems.

nmap was one example I remember hearing would be considered illegal under Germany's new law.
Yes, they are generated offline. It's the most time consuming step when generating the terrain.

Doing the lighting and shadow generation in real-time (during tile initialization) is a very interesting problem! The great advantage is the bandwidth reduction and the ability to move the sun of course. A Web Worker can (probably should) be used for that purpose. The problem is that in order to correctly light a tile, you need access to its adjacent tiles as well (since peaks near the border on their side may be casting shadows on our tile).

All in all, very interesting and certainly doable!
Agreed on all counts; It would be great to see these things toggleable on a basic settings page for the extension.
"Why do people insist on foisting "software literacy" on the general populace?"

Because what 'we' do is the most important thing in the whole world goddammit, and if only everybody else was more like 'us', how much better would the world be! Imagine if only everybody else was exactly like us, that'd be true utopia!
One thing I've got used to in Chrome is the syncing between devices (well desktop machines anyway). I remember seeing some stuff a few years ago about this in Firefox. What is the state of it now?
My dad with asthma has severe problems in the winter because everybody in his village heats with wood - in the middle of western Germany (they do have other heaters, but like the wood, is what I mean). So definitely not just a third world problem.

In Germany the heating with wood was extremely on the rise in recent years, even in big cities you smell it on the street in winter. And in the countryside it is much worse, which is a shame given that people move there for the clean air, among other things.
Show HN: Markdown editor plugin for eclipse
"Someone" == EA's entire target market? If this is really the logic they are abiding by, perhaps their problems are even worse than we thought.
> Discussing gun policy with a friend, I mentioned the Freakonomics statistic that having a pool on your property is 100 times more dangerous for your child's welfare than having a gun in the house.

That is nonsense, the way Freakonomics got that 100x more dangerous figure makes absolutely no sense.

Don't get me wrong - pools likely are more dangerous than guns. I'm just arguing that they aren't 100x more dangerous than guns.

In 2008 there were 376 deaths of "children" (aged 14 and below) by gun. In the same year there was 791 deaths by drowning (all sources).

So drowning is is roughly 2x as dangerous as guns but that is drowning from ALL sources, so that doesn't imply that pools are 2x more dangerous as guns since that ignores other sources of potential drownings (e.g. boats, bathtub, etc).

This data is all from the CDC's own web-site (http://wonder.cdc.gov).

What the Freakonomics guys did was take the above numbers and then use the total number of guns and total number of pools, and then abuse those statistics in order to try and get this 100x more dangerous figure.

In interviews he has essentially said he is a pro-gun advocate so that is something to keep in mind too...

As I said at the start, drowning is MORE dangerous than guns (2x). It is just not 100x more dangerous unless you're trying to measure the danger level of each individual gun rather than by measuring the risk to a fixed population (i.e. the danger from the average US child's perspective).
Yes, that has been a feature of the original Pascal design, since the 1970s. Very useful for catching out of range errors.
Sometimes I wonder how comprehensive these comparisons actually are. This is what I currently have open in Chrome:

3 Chrome Beta windows, with 17, 14, and 1 tabs open.
1 Chrome Canary window with 2 tabs

A good number of these tabs have not-very-light applications open like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, and some YouTube vids.

If you say to yourself, "oh, let me go check out Firefox compared to this," and launch it with one tab, do a quick Google search, and then determine, "hey, this is way faster," well... yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Not only do you not have multiple windows and tabs open, but if you haven't used it in years you've probably got a pretty small cache not bogging you down.

Personally I've never actually noticed Chrome's performance to have any issues. Maybe because I have 12 gigs of RAM and an otherwise decent setup. On a more constrained system perhaps problems start to show themselves more easily. But are you sure that those same problems don't also appear in other browsers, given you're using them as intensely as you've been using Chrome this whole time?

I'd really love to see some browser comparison stats that go in-depth on this. Basically the only numbers you ever see these days are javascript rendering scores, and I feel like that's a really poor way to determine a browser's overall speed and efficiency. It doesn't account for how long it takes to open a new tab (like .01 seconds vs .3 seconds, which IMO is a big difference), scroll lag, startup time, etc, and it certainly doesn't account for how and if browsers become bogged down by real-world use.

I fear that users may be making similar snap judgments by comparing on the basis of quick open-and-go tests, instead of actual in-depth testing. First impressions are everything. You may find yourself five years from now using a browser that is actually slower than you were using previously, but you maintain your use of it because one time five years ago you opened it and loaded a page and it was faster than the encumbered incumbent.
The Venus of Willendorf Is widely regarded to represent an exceptional, ideal image not a typical person. People who are short of food idealise a food surplus.
FRESH LAPTOP: VOIP questions
If I don't care about the location of said ranch, I just found several options that I could buy for basically the same price as my current 650 sq ft. apartment.
The introduction would have been better on a concrete example.

This algorithm is often used in a search engine to detect near-duplicate web-pages and to remove them from search results.
Do you need to be a developer to install Intercom.io?
To create an email triggered from a signup or download i need to create 'custom data' and add their code to my site, fair enough, sounds easy...

Is it straight forward to install? Is there anyone out there that has used Intercom and can share their experiences, or can share an example of the code they've used to add custom data to their web apps?
Does C++ still have endless opening and closing braces? :)
On google.com.tr "Paniğe Kapılmayın" (in Turkish)
Better than chrome, in my opinion. I switch between my tablet, my phone, my desktop, and laptop, and have access to all my bookmarks, passwords, etc. I don't have tab sync enabled, but that's just personal preference.
I was speaking a tad facetiously here: those feature requests come from myself. Seriously, I am an avid user of this thing who cannot live without it, and there are missing features that I absolutely want.
Ex-girlfriend/boyfriend posting nude photos of their ex.

I think Moore claimed it was legal if the person submitting the photos actually took the photo, as they held the copyright, and even if they didn't he was protected under DMCA.
I use Firefox Sync to access tabs on other computers. I haven't tried the mobile version though.
"after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation""

Not true unfortunately - here in Germany wood burning has been trending in recent years, even though alternative means of heating are readily available. In fact most house owners probably equip both - gas/oil heating for the baseline comfort and wood for the coziness.
Am I alone in feeling uncomfortable at the article's consistent use of "slaves"? This is very different from slavery, and if it's the perpetrators' term then it seems like buying into their worldview.
I switch back on Linux every so often, feel refreshed and stay for a few months. Then I switch to Chrome, feel refreshed and the cycle continues.
I wonder if these stats hold up when looking at modern stoves (which have burning efficiencies upwards of 70%). Bundling open fires, which are highly inefficient along with these stoves seems a little unreasonable.
Lots of modern stoves, in the UK at least, come with defra ( http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/) exemption, meaning they can be used in smoke controlled (i.e. built up urban) areas. These controls are more to do with air pollution, rather than direct human harm, but the two measures must be somewhat correlated.
I would like you to add a facility to let us see the linked web page on the right hand side.
I'm posting new links to our site now.
I have a friend who uses a wood burning stove to heat his home. This article is so long on claims and insults and so short on facts and references that I would never show it to him if I wanted him to change his behavior. The only reference is behind a paywall. If you want to insult two populations (religious people and fire burners) under the assertion that science tells them they are stupid, at least have the sense to include good public references. At least then you can show the facts are indeed on your side.
Ask HN: who in Europe is expert at customer development?
I'm writing a short series on my blog (http://whiteboardmag.com) about European experts in customer development.

The idea is to make a very practical guide for founders who do realise they have to "get out of the building" but need some tools and tips to do it right.

I'm looking for European founders or experts who talk well about the subject of customer development and elicitation, and who are willing to share their experiences and insights.

Thank you for helping out!
I've recently switched back as well and I find that it's back to a much better experience. Firefox was horrible for a while, but I think the team have been doing an excellent job of optimising it.

My only annoyance is the development tools - Chrome still whips FF here - and they are still no where as good as Firebug, which continues to be the most required extension - but I believe work is being done there too.
This is the same fallacy that makes people who are afraid of flying say they feel safer driving (in) a car because they are 'in control'.
It doesn't change the fact that in reality they are orders of magnitude more likely to get hurt or even die while being in a car than while being on an airplane.

Not having a gun when someone armed threatens me will most likely increase my chances of survival/getting out of the conflict unharmed.
Maybe with a gun I have a better chance of retaliation but I'm also more likely to die.

The bottom line is: any weapon you /add/ to a conflict rises the stakes for /all/ parties involved. And vice versa.
In Sweden bringing your own lunch to work and eating it in the lunchroom is quite common even among more 'white'-collar workers. At the last two engineering firms I've worked at, I'd say that roughly half the employees do that.
Incidentally, writing standard business apps in VB instead of C or C++ makes complete sense to me.
There is something I keep pointing out when inevitably the conversation turns this way: Bootstrap (and Foundation) are UI widget libraries, not just prototyping helpers. They are the missing rich widget set that browsers should provide by default if they were proper application runtimes and not the patched together mess they have grown into. A good comparison would be Sencha ExtJS, but for markup instead of full JavaScript: you have layout elements (the grid), a set of reusable controls, and some helpers (typography, etc).

A lot of web applications -- line-of-business but also consumer-oriented -- should NOT be visibly unique, and styling your own buttons not only is a big waste of time, but also reduces usability. Look at the WinForms/Cocoa/GTK environments to see the value of a single visual language in action (including their respective UI guides that help with a consistent experience). The popularity of Bootstrap tells you the need is still there -- for both the millions of developers who need to get the job done without reinventing too many wheels on top of broken hypertext, and for the users who appreciate not having to figure out a UI for the millionth time (just ask your boss/customer what they think of your boring Bootstrap app, they probably love it).
One of my friends spent his 2 years of military service in Israel playing chess -- up to 2 dozen chess games simultaneously, blind folded, against soldiers in the Israeli army. After his army service, he eventually ended up in grad school and later on became a professor. But more than his research papers, it is his chess playing that I remember.
Possibility of Visa transactions via Mobile Money(M-Pesa)
Hello HN,
My name is David from Uganda, Africa. Now here, we are so alienated from the global market space because of several factors one of them being the lack of viable electronic payment systems that people can actually use -- specifically credit cards. A very small fraction of people here use credit cards and yet most of the transactions online need them. However, what people use here is Mobile Money transfer services supported by the local telecoms. With mobile money, all the user needs is their phone and number number plus a registered account with their telecom to transfer funds electronically from one phone number to another. There're scanty Mobile money enabled services online that use the service to process payments electronically.

Now, my question is, how can i enable these mobile money account holders to process payments that require Visa credit cards? How can i create a system that will create virtual Visa credit cards on the fly that i can credit once the user allows to transfer some funds from their Mobile Money account to it?

Thanks for the advice.
Except instead of making a "flying first" car from scratch you start with your existing car as a prototype to build your first "flying first" car that you plan to give away for free and open source it.

Then all the of flying community come out of the woodwork to cry bloody murder it isn't flying yet when you just strapped on some wings and aren't finished. Then you start to wonder if it's worth sharing both the process and the product in the first place when you have to deal with all the kids out there who cry as if their lollipop was stolen.
First of all Firebug and million other addons are good reason to stick to Firefox ;) Welcome back!
Firefox also syncs bookmarks, passwords, etc. The nice thing about firefox is that it also syncs history, which chrome (last I checked) did not do. History sync is great if you use a site like HN on multiple machines; you can just visually skip all the visited links, or focus on the visited ones if you're looking for something you saw before.
I second that.

The best bookmarking in-browser. I am really convinced it's better than most others out there - even those dedicated "bookmarking" services e.g. Delicious, Pinboard(which is a disappointment other than when I look at my li'l bookmarks in a browser window in its webapp) etc - with its sync.

I am planning to plug my own server to Firefox sync service so that I can have it wherever I want. Great if I could just stumble upon sth good ready to deploy.
My story is similar but goes further back, I tried Chrome shortly but soon learned that its only two noscript-options were flawed in various ways, mainly they loaded all the javascript once before they blocked it.

So the only reason I use firefox today is due to noscript.
I'm listening to an NPR podcast on thus exact topic. Wood burning stoves are particularly dangerous where there are inversions, but not so much in areas that have good air supply. The air quality impact of the particulates from fireplaces and wood burning stoves is measured by the EPS, and is unhealthy in places like Fairbanks, alaska.

With all that said, in some places (Fairbanks) wood stoves are the most effective way of keeping warm, even for people who have oil furnaces.
I would love to switch back to Firefox, but, to be honest, the rapid relase cycle really annoys me. I would love to head back, if Mozilla switched to a more stable release cycle - or at least to updates, that don't interupt me everytime I start the browser up.

But I'll give it a try.
It is decent. Although the browser is not exactly impressive since it needs a lot of memory, hangs sometimes and has a weird UI. I really hope they get it together, because page rendering is, apart from font-weirdness sometimes, actually really good.
Good article. I always check my iMac and MacBook LEDs. Can never be too careful. Sometimes I wonder if the Internet is all Travis Bickles doing pull-ups and yelling at their monitor in the dark. There are some desperate and lonely people out there.
http://cnp-keythai.com/speaker-mesh
I bought your book way back when Borders was still a solid company and devoured it. As an impressionable young teen, "Hacking the Xbox" inspired me as much as 2600 ever did. Looks like it's time to re-read it, again.

Thanks for everything you've done, not least of which is serving as a powerful role model! We may have lost one of our own, but your leadership by example shows we can become stronger for it.
NameTerrific Introduces Two-Factor Authentication to Protect Domains
You can use Firefox ESR, also by Mozilla.
How to Research Social Media
[Gif] When my boss surprises me on Hacker News
As depicted in the review, the argument boils down to "a lot can change in 10,000 years". I'm happy to agree that this is true, but it doesn't mean that a lot must change in 10,000 years.

The fact that evolution can move quickly does not indicate that it always will. Nothing in this article refutes the proposition that we may be evolutionarily maladapted to the typical modern western diet dominated by highly refined sugars and gluten grains.

Is paleo maybe a somewhat precious and slightly extreme reaction? Maybe. But that doesn't invalidate the core insight: that we're filling our pieholes with vast amounts of crap our bodies aren't optimized for. And given that the metabolic syndrome of disorders thought to be associated with this diet tends to develop later in life, often after the prime reproductive years, it's perfectly plausible that an evolutionary adaptation to this diet might be particularly slow to develop.
"Add this certificate for free porn!"
Does it always have to come down to killing ?

It depends on what the intruder /attacker has in mind.
"the fossil record of the Stone Age is so small and necessarily incomplete that its ability to tell us about paleolithic society is severely limited."

Actually there are still people who live as hunter-gatherers, or there were until a couple of years ago, and that is where a lot of the information comes from. It was also possible to watch what happened when such people entered civilization. There also apparently is a marked difference in the fossil record concerning health of hunter-gatherers vs agricultural societies.

I just read "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond, and he also touches on some of those health problems. Western people are actually less afflicted by them than those hunter-gatherers who entered 'civilization' in their lifetimes, so Diamond also says that Western people probably already evolved to some degree to deal better with the abundance of grains, salt and sugar.

That doesn't imply we are already perfectly adapted, though, especially if some diseases clearly don't seem to be prevalent in traditional societies.

Unfortunately he isn't very specific about the traditional diets, for example, and trying to look up paleo diets it seems to me a lot of time they are mostly an excuse to eat lots of meat and many books are not that well researched. In Diamond's books he mentions that many tribes actually ate mostly starches and meat only on special occasions - unfortunately he didn't mention the actual frequency, or I missed reading that (once a week? a month?). Also obviously humans adapted to lots of different environments, there are probably tribes who ate 100% meat, too (like in arctic regions where nothing grows?) - so maybe you can take your pick, or you just have to experiment...

That lactose tolerance seems to have increased fitness a lot certainly makes me wary of just accepting "pure paleo" as the best path.
How about doing actual benchmarks? How about pin pointing how exactly google tracks you more or better with chrome than with ff?
Very good question! Actually, I can't increase the maximum without going to two bytes per elevation. All of the (top) plateaus are at a height equivalent to 255.

Q: OK, why not put them a bit lower than that, with some variety between peaks?

A: I already have. If you take a closer look, you will notice that there is another layer of flat surfaces, lower than the top.

Q: I'm not convinced. Why only two layers of 'flatness', one at the top, another a bit lower?

A: In the end, it's all about the dynamic range that you have to work with. When using a single byte, there are only 255 distinct height values. The key point is to understand that these values must not differ by much (i.e. they cannot be scaled by large values), since this will affect the appearance of the rest of the terrain (think very, very sharp, unnatural triangles everywhere). On the other hand, the scale factor must be large enough to allow for distinct terrain 'features', avoiding the appearance of a deflated terrain. Two layers of flatness, safely away from each other, was the best compromise.

Q: I'm still not convinced. Just vary the top layer by a small amount between peaks.

A: Using a small value wouldn't make much of a difference. If the amount was large enough, the distinction between the two 'flatness' layers would be lost and the terrain would lose that specific character that it currently has.

Going to two bytes per elevation (and thus be able to use a small scale factor) would allow me to keep the style intact (of some specific geological procedure that has formed the terrain), while varying the peaks and keep the rest of the terrain smooth.

I hope this made some sense. However you're right, it is noticeable! I just didn't think it detracts that much from the overall feel, while it still has advantages, so I went with it.
No, they are not. Plenty of airports in Asia do not require the removal of shoes.

Source: me. I fly a lot too.
If you really care about your customers instead of your product, and they are more than happy with the "professional" Bootstrap UI, you have no reason to mess with it.

What is always good to have is a designer or at least a developer with an eye for aesthetics, to use the Bootstrap elements in an elegant way. Otherwise, what would you "hack" about HTML/CSS? Either reimplementing Bootstrap, or playing with the latest and greatest that won't work in anything else but the latest Chrome (see the IE6/7 discussion).
14 is older than the age of criminal responsibility in many countries.
Finding myself using Firefox more often again. Chrome is not as snappy as I once felt it to be.
Weekly Digest 4 - The most interesting links from .NET community
That's pretty disingenuous. Maybe there are places where it really is cheaper to hunt food with a gun than buy it, but America is not one of them.
Wow Firefox bookmarks are terrible imho.

If you click the star on a website and you want your bookmark to go in the bookmarks menu, you need to press the star TWICE, then choose "Bookmarks Menu" from a dropdown, and then click ok. That is 4 click too much. And where it puts it after clicking the star once is useless.

Then, the bookmark menu itself. So many useless things in there first before your actual bookmarks start.