skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because Thiel is famous for his libertarian views. Though having heard him discuss his thoughts on the roles of government and private enterprise in person, I was surprised to find that he's much less ideological than he is commonly portrayed as; he expressed support for a moderate amount of regulation but preferred that it be more personal and accountable than (ie based on the judgment of experienced civil servants) than legalistic and systematized.

I think he has a good point. Japan and Europe have more 'hands on' regulatory regimes and even though regulations are stereotypically more onerous in Europe, it's arguably more results-driven and less of a procedural minefield. Of course the downside of this is that there aren't as many avenues of appeal and if the judgement of a regulatory authority goes against you then you may have to just grin and bear it; that's problematic for startups which don't have a history of successful commercial operations behind them and may find compliance more difficult and expensive.
Show HN: iOS Property Validation Built on KVC
How much did she make from radio stations playing her music for free?
How Grindr Is Changing the Way We Connect
The study you linked to found that kids read text set in Arial and Comic Sans at the same speed.

The kids did indicate they found Comic Sans most attractive, but their options were limited to Times, Courier, Arial and Comic Sans. I'm willing to bet that if Comic Sans had been substituted by any other cartoon or paintbrush font, the result would've been the same.

Because kids can't read at high speeds yet, sans serif fonts at large sizes work best for them. That's why so many K-8 schoolbooks and illustrated children's books use Gill Sans [1], a much better font for the purpose, in my opinion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_Sans
Strongly disagree.

> As far as they're concerned they get money from Google now, plus all the fees from everyone else.

They get money from Google now (presumably, but we don't know the details), and they get money from h264 users- but they do not get anything from any other VP8/9 users. H264 users are now paying for something that VP8 users get for free.

Just when h265 is nearing release, MPEG-LA is effectively giving up all claims to the competing technology- VP9. I see no way that this does not eat into h265 adoption and h265 is going to have to be technologically far superior to VP9 to justify the licensing fees.

> doesn't mean that there are winners and losers

There's a clear winner- you and I. There's now a completely free alternative to h264.
Exactly! Nearly any concerted focus on a difficult engineering problem (ex: NASA) will yield positive externalities in the form of engineering improvement (manufacturing methods, chip design, solar, etc.).

If your engineering challenge is putting filters on pictures, you're probably going to have less positive spillovers - not that you wouldn't be solving a real problem, but it's a different kind of thing.
The cached version worked but the site kept giving me 403 errors.
Unfortunately I know so little of music/keyboards that I couldn't really tell the difference between this and any other keyboard.
No I did not notice that they were in the process of laying down additional tracks. Here on Sunday the site seems to be down but the youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM) it still there. Listening to the upper register track (the 'white' room) I still feel the mis-match between my ear and my eyes (ignoring the base line). Its not a big deal I just noted it. There has been a lot of 'fakery' in the synth market and so that twitch is perhaps stronger than it would be for other things.

When I had a Yamaha DX-11 for a while I also had the Yamaha breath controller (trying to recapture my trombone days I guess :-) but was never really satisfied with it. Later I really wanted to try a Morrison Digital Trumpet [1] but really really had a hard time spending $4K on something I might not use more than a couple of times.

[1] http://www.morrisondigitaltrumpet.com/
I'm sure that's all just anti-PRC propaganda. </sarcasm> I'm waiting for the PRC state workers to astroturf that on in the comments.

Well, there ya go right below you :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352254
The regulars of #python have known about this for a while; here's a decent writeup: http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201206/eval_really_is_dangerou...
yeah those classes are not new.
I've guess I've just been horribly misled by going into Google Play on my Nexus 7 (which I preordered) and searching for Firefox.
TL;DR: rich man moves to NYC, adopts NYC culture
Reading status.github.com over the last few weeks, I found it interesting how often little things were broken at Github. It's like every few days, a small part of the site is unavailable or the sysadmins are investigating this or that connectivity issue. I guess when you're as big as Github, keeping your site live and operational is completely nontrivial.
Why are engineers treated like peons in the startup world?
Yeah, but I'm a broke high school senior (1-man team), so I'm sort of forced to take advantage of free stuff like Bootstrap and the free year of Amazon EC2.

Bootstrap is definitely useful if you're just tinkering - it makes a minimum viable product look sort of legit ;)

But I would certainly invest in specialized developers to make a lighter-weight, in-house UI if I were really serious about a website.
A million plays sounds like a lot when the payment is only $167, but compared to the old method of listening (radio at its peak) the rate is not massively far off the mark, assuming you can adjust per listener. The article below attempts to compare the UK radio PRS royalty splits with Spotify payments and if I'm reading the numbers correctly the middle estimate comes to around $300 per spin per million listeners (I'm using the estimate of £0.0001870 per spin per listener).

http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/13/uk-radio-versus-spotify-a-c...
People have been sounding the alarm of destructive new technologies for hundreds of years, but somehow the most technologically-advanced nations are also those with healthier, longer-lived populations. It seems that people and societies adapt over time to new technologies in ways that mitigate possible harm, while the benefits tend to remain.

And what's the alternative? Are you going to ban human inventiveness and forbid innovation? Good luck with that.
> Now you're just making things up.

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/expert-panel-discussion...
Morozov is generally a person you'll want to follow. He's a great modern intellectual.

His TED take-down is pure gold, too: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/1....

I submitted his book review a while ago, if people want to discuss it at length. I imagine it'll ruffle the feathers of no small amount of people on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346781. :)
You personally may not care which term is used. However, if you want to get the law changed, you probably need to get a large number of people interested in the issue. One way to do this would be to force the use of the word 'licensing', so that many oblivious consumers who assumed they were 'buying' goods are made aware of the difference.
BSDTalk episode with a blind BSD user[1]. It's about many things, not how blind people deal with computers, but it offers some great insights nevertheless.

[1] http://bsdtalk.blogspot.co.at/2008/03/bsdtalk143-bsd-hobbies...
It would seem that capitalism has done a great job solving problems where value-creation yield a sustainable level of value-capture: farming, manufacturing, etc.

However, there's a lot things where there's a ton of value-creation without enough capture. This is where collective action problems must be solved. This could be a consortia like an IEEE standard, gov't funding like the NSF, or something like a city. Many options, but none purely capitalist in the traditional sense of the word.
Snapchat password length inconsistency
How I learned to stop worrying and love vinyl
Most people use screen readers because it is much much faster than braille displays. Especially since most blind users speed up the screen reader speech rate very high.

If you are an emacs user check out emacspeak:
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

Windows there are many options.

NVDA is the most used free one: http://www.nvda-project.org/

JAWS is highly used but expensive: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-pa...

For mac there is voiceover (included in OSX): http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/

Chrome and ChromeOS have chromvox: http://www.chromevox.com/ but that is more for web.

Linux the most popular is orca for gnome desktop: http://projects.gnome.org/orca/
Given how little is known of Musk and Tesla in general, this continual public airing must be one of his cheapest sources of marketing...
You could breed bacteria in the presence of important antibiotics in order to select for and perfect strains that are multidrug resistant.

Then again, you could accidentally do this at massive scale for the purpose of fattening cattle.
>I care about design, but I don't care so much about learning fancy CSS

might just be me, but I don't think you care too much about design if you rely on standard bootstrap for style. Not that I don't understand the appeal of having something that looks good out of the box.
Lets make it illegal to start a photo/location/$%^ sharing startup. That will clear the space upto 80%. I am just kidding, please don't down vote me if you are running such startup.
Well, what are some citable sources on Paul Lutus that don't principally pertain to his having authored Apple Writer?
michael, I agree with most of what you write, but I'm unsure what you would term a lifestyle business? Life coaching is what I'd term a lifestyle business, and I can't think depressed people would be great at it. Could you give some examples?
It's not the antibiotics being used for evil in your scenario, it's the lack of them. It's like saying water can be used for evil by depriving people of it. That's not at all the same thing as a technology which really can be used for both good and evil, like nuclear power.
The artists are a commodity until they are stars, the scarcity at the early stage is the set of people that can make the system work (promotion, marketing, producers)... thus they reap all the profits. Artists are not forced to work with major record labels. Once artists prove themselves not to be a commodity (i.e be stars) they reap great profits and have much more negotiating leverage over labels. I don't understand this rant.
You're right, but I never use the grid stuff anyway; I only want to invest time in learning about something if it's not framework/vendor-locked, so to speak, so I'd rather just use the elements and do the scaffolding myself.

Glyphicons are probably my favorite part, though.
I hate flying in large part to the security process. Imagine the boost to the economy if flying was easier. Think of all the people that would fly more often.
The example in the solution sketch leads me to believe the author is misdirected. URLs have different attack vectors than HTML and have different escaping rules. In the solution sketch given, the HTML might be safe, but I can easily put any parameters I want into the generated URL.

When designing systems like this, each security boundary should be handled separately. Create a URL class that supports escaping fields safely. Create an HTML template engine that supports escaping contents safely. URL.toString will give a guaranteed-safe URL, which can be inserted into a guaranteed-safe attribute later on.
Good point. Maybe this could be used as an anti-captcha then, to prove that you are a robot (although i can't think who would want that)
I like this. People always seem to say we need a law for this, that, or the other thing.

I don't see much of a difference between having a law to make something legal and having no law to make it illegal.

I suppose the difference might be that having a law keeps them (unspecified person/company) from doing something outrageous and then just saying 'well there isn't a law against it!'
Because you can ban water bottles, and sell them in the shop that's after security checks, and that won't turn many people back. But banning laptop batteries would harm business travel really seriously - it would really stop very, very many business travellers.
The server side component is not solely drm. It is similar to WoW and League of Legends in that it actively correlates between different cities and does some of the processing.

If the servers were just DRM, do you really think this would be melting them because too many people used cheetah?
They are killing the promise of Internet-as-a-platform... and open APIs trust.
http://apijoy.tumblr.com/post/40831434657/twitter-api-and-it...
I wasn't sure whether to respond to this comment or the ones further up the tree...

Long story short, I agree. maxerickson's idea of labeling is a good one, since the point isn't really the mechanism so much as the principle of stipulating the contents of the contract in detail. If the game industry decided to standardize on only promising a year of service, I suspect that would be fine: it's explicit, it's well-known, and the game-maker will almost certainly run longer than that if their product is remotely successful.
> Maybe I came from a different era, but the party that pays is generally considered the loser

Or maybe you're talking absolute nonsense as you clearly don't understand what the agreement is about.
Well, the reason that wouldn't work is because the primary objective of the IPO is to raise $$$ for The Corporation and not the "existing shareholders". The "I" in IPO is the critical part of the equation here since it is this initial exclusivity that lures large institutional investors from wanting to get in before suckers like you and I do. In turn, they swallow up very large amounts of shares guaranteeing the issuing company a large amount of money on the day of their IPO.

Furthermore, the Founders/VCs/Employees just don't have the reach or the technical know-how to appropriately price the stock to maximize their potential gains - the investment banks have both but, as you read in this article, they often use their expertise to their own advantage.

Lastly, the Founders/VCs are in fact able to sell off their shares during the IPO for their own personal benefit so long as there is no clause in their IPO terms stating that they cannot. This will enrich them personally BUT it is highly advised that they don't because the signal they're sending to the market is "cash out early!"
Despite being on nature.com, the journal this is in ("Translational Psychiatry") is not a prestigious one; in fact, it's an online-only journal and you have to pay to get your article published in it. It is suspicious that they couldn't find a better journal to publish such an amazing result in, so the science is probably bad. The statistical significance of p=0.01 is unimpressive.

Honestly, as non-scientists we should just ignore new papers like these. If it's really important, first it'll be published in an excellent journal, then it'll be replicated successfully, then there'll be meta-analyses that confirm how reliable the technique is, and it'll get cited and built upon a bunch of times, and then it'll actually be something that we should consider as anything other than "probably wrong". Which is what it is right now.
TLDs were originally going to communicate something to the user, they never actually did.

Now they represent... how many wasted keystrokes per day? If Berners-Lee agonizes over the second slash after http, then ".com" has to be one of the biggest failures of usability in history.

TLDs were designed by folks who guessed most of the internet would be used for governments and non-profits, and commerce would be this token side niche. Now that nearly everything's .com (or under a quirky country domain to sidestep the whole system), it's lost any significance.

We should scrap it as soon as possible.
Well, I suppose I'm a lazy aesthete.
Your example won't even compile. You're confusing functions with lambda expressions. Lambda expressions look a little like a function but they are something different. Lambda can be compiled into functions at run time and that's often what they're used for, but they can't be implicitly assigned to a var. Doing it you're way would look like this:

Expression<Func<string>> func = () => "foo";
func.Compile()();

That's hardly better, and it's still not anonymous! You probably like Lambda Expressions because they make things like LINQ elegant, and indeed they do. But a lambda expression is confusingly similar looking to a func (indeed a mistake you made) but when you try to do something more complicated like this:

Expression<Func<string>> func = () =>
{
string foo = "bar";
return foo;
};

That won't compile because a lambda expression can't have a statement body, it can only contain (a single!) expression.

Now the cool thing about lambda expressions is that to the end user they are simple and elegant assuming you know that they are not the same thing as functions, but on the other end of it; consuming a lambda expression you get to see the guts of it and realize what a hack it is on the language. Sure, in the context of a compiled statically typed language it's rather powerful. It's how they are able to compile a lambda expression into a SQL statement, because you can inspect lambda expressions which you can't do to functions.

Now you asked about Java and I'm not going to defend Java or predict what their intentions are, but I'll just say that Java is being much more conservation about sticking to what it is; a statically typed compiled language. C# is attemping to be everything to every body.
Did you get a screenshot of it?
Just like Levchin, we can find this article inspiring, but neither has hard numbers to back up their claim. Sure, we see a trend that there are a lot of innovations in the ways we communicate, share, and connect, but does that necessarily mean we're lacking "deep" technological innovation?

Personally I think web & mobile startups are getting easier to create so more people are becoming entrepreneurs to take advantage of that; the pie is getting bigger. I believe there are still plenty of "deep" tech innovators out there along with investors who believe in them.

Perhaps these "deep" tech innovators don't get much media coverage because they don't need it, therefore we don't usually hear about them.
The source of the $167 number seems to be a Guardian article linked below. Assuming it's talking about the UK system, then the artist almost certain does get paid for radio plays (which might not be the case in the American system, I'm not sure). My understanding is that most UK stations play a flat annual fee which is magically divided up among artists based on a formula, but for big stations like BBC Radio 1, the exact number of plays will be monitored and royalties will be paid out accordingly.

https://www.prsformusic.com/users/broadcastandonline/Radio/P...
I haven't done any kind of scientific survey, but it seems the best government projects are those without any kind of expectation of anyone profiting or making the money back.

Not that I don't like profit motives. I love them. But if there is a profit motive, you have to really really question why private industry isn't doing it instead.
It is not HTML5 - I am using a browser that does not support HTML5.
SETI: The Artificial Transit Scenario
Stone Age headline:
"Critics decry new bow and arrow technology: Say it will destroy camaraderie among spear-wielding hunters and breed cowardice in the younger generation"
The parent poster seems to imply that Word nowadays is not intended for the "write it, and then print it" market anymore - while it was aimed for that a dozen years ago, currently MS is deliberately targeting it more towards creating non-printable documents.

I.e., it's not the design choice that's wrong, but the assumptions about who Word is now intended for.
Microsoft's original legal defense of its browser monopoly was that it was an intrinsic feature of the OS (a bunch of graduate students proved this to be false and most viewed the claim at the time as disingenuous -- MS had sewn IE into as much of Windows as possible seemingly with this defense in mind). The user benefit of security (which Microsoft did not use) could be used by Apple today as a far more legitimate defense.

Also bear in mind that the case against Microsoft showed a pattern of behavior including its treatment of Java, QuickTime, Borland, and so on.

Next, the only significant platform for browsers was desktop computers. So it wasn't a case of MS owning one category of platform among many. It owned the only game in town.

Further to this, Netscape had been the dominant player on the Windows platform, and Microsoft had undermined it. Apple has closed its platform to rivals who give away their software on other platforms. Apple doesn't stop Google or Yahoo or Bing from making money from advertising on iOS, all it blocks is, essentially, middlemen.

Finally, Netscape was a browser vendor who suffered material damage from having its commercial product undercut by MS bundling policies. No-one sells browsers any more.
Don't try to become a rock star if this bothers you. Problem solved.
Is it just me? I'm seeing this blog theme turn up more and more, and the "pop-out" on the right overlays the vertical scroll, making it really, really inconvenient to read.

Do people simply not care about usability, and instead care more about how gorgeous and lush everything looks?

Bloody annoying.
Through the use of screen readers and braille displays.

In terms of OS's:
OSX has a built in screen reader - Press Command-F5 to activate it, and follow the tutorial for more details.

Chrome has a screen reader called ChromeVox (http://www.chromevox.com)

Windows users have access to NVDA (free), JAWS (paid) or WindowEyes (paid).

EmacSpeak is available for emacs users.

However you'll find that each of these screen readers have a slightly different model that you'll have to learn.

What OS are you currently using? Being able to apply your existing mental model of how the OS works will reduce your learning time exponentially.
I agree, and think big innovation can result from simple goals - adjusting my lights or heating via a smartphone app is a 'small problem' but an 'internet of things', ie an ecosystem of tiny and cheap embedded computing, will be important in multiple ways, from energy efficiency to AI.

that said, there is an awful lot of wank about. I console myself with the thought that it was probably always like that; for every invention like the telegraph there were three people flogging 'galvanick spirit communicators,' questionable beauty treatments, or silly toys. For every Atari there's also a Chuck E. Cheese :-)
They're not necessarily using it for what the bottleneck is. They might do raw compute there, but are locked on a DB query or write that's hosted internally or that just is taking awhile to properly partition.
Seattle bar bans use of Google Glasses
Just check out the css, everything starts with the 480 media query and builds on top of that. CSS is added to the base mobile CSS (which is incredibly simple) to work as the width goes up. Check v2, it's (almost) completely the other way around. Again, it's not a specific thing, it's everything.
DARPA is amazing, at least for their history and what has come from them.

Dies any other country have a DARPA equivalent? Or, more specifically, did any other country have a DARPA equivalent 40+ years ago?
Yes, a HUGE assumption for access to the chess forums of a chess server...

Indeed, nowhere does it say it is a general CAPTHCA solution.