skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Welcome to India, a BBC TV programme, shows people making money by sweeping dirt on the roads of a jewellery district in Colcuta and recovering the gold. (Indian housewives have a staggering amount of physical gold.)

When those sweepings are running thin they go into the drains to gather sludge. Gold from jeweller's bodies and on the floors get washed into the drains. This sludge requires a lot of processing to get the gold, so the sludge is sold to a business with the man-power to do it.

They need to grind and dry the sludge. They then slowly wash it over ribbed troughs - the gold stays in the ribs while the dirt washes over. The gold-rich sludge is processed with mercury, glass, soda, and ash. This is melted in a crucible, to give you a gold / silver / mercury blob, which you then process with acid to get gold.

Later I'll put up some short clips of the video showing the various processes because my description isn't good and the programmes are no longer available online. But here's the BBC page for it. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8278)

If you don't mind travelling to Ghana you could surely do better than they're doing in Accra - Here's a snippet from a UK TV programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie. It's pretty depressing. There's no kind of sensible plan to recovering useful stuff. Seeing a boy smashing polyester / polystyrene capacitors off an old PCB with a rock is just grim. I guess by this point you just treat it the ground like ore - dig it up and process it.

(http://videobam.com/rcEUM) (Apologies for the awful video host. Any suggestions?) Here's a link to the original programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)
In 20 years all taxi drivers will be unemployed due to self-driving cars. So who cares?

Robots don't need health insurance and never strike.
yeah. I don't think the abundance of Yahoo emails would fit the Bit coin user base.
GCC 4.7.3 released
I don't know how but the Homebrew project print a pitcher of beer somehow in my iTerm2. Most likely unicode but it was not listed in the page you linked.
The first table in the Wikipedia entry uses UN estimates which have Bosnia at 13 deaths per 1000 births.
Discover the genuine Algarve
Ah... I had wanted to play that, but unfortunately it doesn't work in Istanbul (where I live).

Also, I was asking more specifically about platforms. That might not be the correct term, but what I am seeking to do is put content onto a mobile app, so that it's easier to share with players. The games I design could easily be done on paper, and as I indicated, they are location specific.

Think of a geocaching adventure, only the locations are only revealed as the game is played. So, I need something that allows for the player to reveal the path as the play. SCVNGR did this quite nicely, but that's a defunct option.

Any ideas in that regard?
Notice that the fix was to use "Schrödinger’s Cat" instead of "Schrödinger's Cat". The fix was removing the single quote, as the script checked if there were characters that would run afoul of string escaping. The problem as it is has nothing to do with Unicode and was actually fixed by using a Unicode character.

That doesn't mean that there aren't any Unicode bugs in other tools, but that wasn't the issue in this particular case.
That part of the article made my day :)
Prototyping App POP Joins Avos, The Company Led By YouTube Founders
I agree with you, that the delays are a pain.

Recently, though, I've stop listening to most of the "productivity advice" and warnings about multitasking, splitting your time into chunks, and the myriad of other approaches.

The best bit of advice I have heard is just to get on with it, work hard, and stop procrastinating about it. Too much meta is not good.
I'm not sure why it's useless. If you're going to account for value provided by external sources then account for all sources, not just the ones that support your argument.
A js anti cat photo-bombing library! My cat likes to get into every pic we take around the living room (not sure why). I hope this and other technologies could help serve as a strategic deterrent against him - we're on to you :)
A quick message queue benchmark: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, HornetQ, QPID, Apollo
Please consider changing the name, it implies something that isn't true (that it's a web interface to Jabber) which is really annoying.

Plus the Jabber trademark is owned by a company, so you'll probably have to change it anyway.
Was just writing pretty much the same comment but you beat me to it....

There's a short clip from the BBC programme on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-dsGzgjkjA
Foursquare raises $41m round
The Try it out button takes me to a windows azure page
250 requests per second is high?

Maybe they should start to use an SSD and some decent software.
I love it. Hopefully I'll be able to integrate it as chrome extension so I can block all cats on reddit and other sites.
Any data about rice in the Philippines?

My family owns a farm in central Luzon, and I know that the majority of farmers there doesn't use irrigation from streams but instead uses a kerosine-powered pump deep-well system.

I know this might sound anecdotal, but for more than 20 or so years I've been visiting our farms every summer, even farmers near the River streams uses deep-wells and rain water, and the irrigation that runs along the farms are from deep-wells.

Also, here's a recent article about the Philippine rice are certified arsenic-free 'http://ph.news.yahoo.com/philippine-rice-certified-arsenic-f...
🍺 Beer Mug - Unicode: U+1F37A (U+D83C U+DF7A), UTF-8: F0 9F 8D BA

You can find all of them in the Emoji section of Special Characters through the Edit-menu, as described in another comment. They work in the classic Terminal application as well, along with most other applications using standard OS X API:s or ones that have specifically added support.
It was a joke, dude.
Why not use appropriate gear? You'll go faster/farther more comfortably.
I just went through chemotherapy. It was god damned awful, basically the worst experience of my short life. That said, my doctors are pretty confident that it worked, although only time will tell. Statistically the specific treatment I received (orchiectomy + 3x BEP chemo) is 95% successful.

I think it's disingenuous to lump all cancer and all chemo together. There are thousands of types of each, some more effective than others. Cancer is a horrifically complicated set of diseases.

Also, would I have gotten cancer if I didn't eat GMO food? Who knows. There's zero evidence that that's true.
Looks like someone is trying to surf the panic wave and get some money from it.
It's not nearly the difference that it would appear ... Think about the per capita incomes of both countries and you'll find the drug is prohibitively expensive in both countries. If you look at it from the drug companies perspective; it's a case of maximizing their profits in both markets and competition is just one factor in doing so.
Inferring Facebook's Mobile Use Via Bit.ly
One point I haven't seen explained is why the Indian companies don't manufacture the drug based on the molecule described in the expired patent.

If what the courts are saying is true and the new patent covering crystallization is trivial, the expired patent should be just as effective and free to use? If it's not as effective, that seems to make the case for the new Novartis patent.
The Big Comeback: Is New Orleans America's Next Great Innovation Hub?
From the tool creators the write up: http://www.teehanlax.com/labs/hyperlapse/
Somebody had multiple bots, which were selling and buying at same time. Everyone ignored them, but they still boosted price up since "last trade" was always higher because of this micro transaction manipulations caused by bots.
I always thought "protocol" was a more appropriate term for such internet-based APIs. SMTP and HTTP are clearly protocols, and even APIs built on top of HTTP are generally referred to as protocols in the standards world. For example WebDAV (RFC4918) and AtomPub (RFC5023) are both considered protocols.
Ask HN: Is there anything like Code Academy for music theory?
I've been playing guitar for about 15 years now and I'd really like to take things to the next level. I'd really like to learn how to read music, more about time signatures, chord and note relations etc etc. I was really impressed with the baby steps approach that Sites like Code Academy take and I was wondering if there is anything similar out there for music.
> What a good hash function should do though is ensure that small changes in the source guarantee a completely different output hash.

Not always true. For example, see locality sensitive hashing [1] which relies on similar inputs being hashed to similar outputs to quickly look up similar items.

That's where I think the really interesting aspect of hashing algorithms comes from - what the different characteristics are and what applications that has (speed for checksums, slow for passwords, similar inputs giving similar outputs for similarity searching)

[Edit]
The key characteristic of all hashing functions is it produces a fixed size output. The fact this makes a one way function is incidental; though crucial for many applications like password storage, it's not really that important for things like checksums [2] or hash tables.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_sensitive_hashing

[2] Though it can be useful if using checksums for security.
This wouldn't drop the price. There were just too many transactions and their engine couldn't handle it. So:

-> Lag
-> Panic
-> Selling
-> Price drop
I agree and disagree. If everything had unicode support, we'd still probably want to limit the codepoint set used for identifiers that are supposed to be unique. Lots of characters have visually indistinguishable glyphs ('x' could be cyrillic kha as well as plain old x) and this already causes problems - see homoglyph attacks.
I recently installed an IRC server on my pi to satisfy my 15-years-old me wishes to operate an IRC server.

None of my geeky friends tried it out, I ended up writing some bots to have a chat with :(.

Seriously, configuring and securing correctly an IRC server take more time that I would like to admit. And it's a bit ugly on the screen and people don't want to learn '/' commands and authentication when skype/msn allow them to do funny things in a much easier way.

I should have installed a jabber server.
Reyclebank[1] comes to mind

[1]https://www.recyclebank.com/
That's sort of my point, yeah. Think of your mailspool (protected by a password and login, at the very least, and oftentimes encrypted via SSL-IMAP or the like) as your postal mailbox and the analogy I was aiming for makes perfect sense.

Sure, it's easy to snoop emails in-flight, but once it arrives at its destination, it ought to be hands-off.
How easy is it to host an ASP.NET application on Linux? I believe it can be done with Mono but I have no idea how.
...or even better, just not travel as much. Most current travel is either unnecessary or inefficient.

Citation: I live on a fairly busy road in London, UK. I just watched 45 cars go past my living room window with only one person in, followed by a double decker bus with about 5 people in it. Hardly efficient!
The Eiffel Tower: http://hyperlapse.tllabs.io/#48.856680000000004,2.29355,48.8...
Wasn't this also on HN a few months ago? Or a year perhaps. I definitely remember some sort of cat face detection in Javascript.
Right, so someone with supposed access to tens of thousands of bitcoins is going to sell that access for 1 bitcoin?
Because it's so much work for so little return.
A better way to conduct remote interviews
Or in molten salt nuclear power plants.
We had to lock down the settings on the site to make it as light as possible. Consequently, you're limited to 75 frames. It's basically built for very short routes spinning around objects. If you want to do long routes or crazy camera movements, grab the source (https://github.com/TeehanLax/Hyperlapse.js) and roll your own solution. The API is really simple and versatile.
You might ask why shell scripting and string escaping are so bad in 2013 as well. Those have couple of decades more history behind them after all.
I think when the UK paid 1/20th of the cost to R&D Trident 2, but got 1/5 of the orders, I'd say yeah that was pretty heavily subsidized by the US to have an ally country with stealth-nuclear capabilities.

I also think you have absolutely no clue who international politics works by your blatant naivety. There's a lot more at stake than "access to oil". FYI Iraq showed oil reserves far superior to that of Saudi Arabia, and FYI Saudi Arabia has a military far exceeding most European states (UK, France and Germany obviously excluded due to the amount they do spend, but the Saudi Air force exceeds the UK for active combat air planes). Iraq with more money than Saudi Arabia and an intense hatred for the US/Europe would have been a massive fucking deal. Saudi Arabias royal family however is on good terms with the US government, and I'm sure the US didn't want a regional war between Iraq and Saudi Arabia locking down all Middle Eastern Oil production to ever be a possibility.

The War in Iraq was less about getting our hands on Iraqi oil, but getting their Regimes hands off of Iraqi oil. Had they been left alone since before the first gulf war, allowed to buy Russian hardware and build a military superior to that of Saudi Arabia, the region would be under their thumb and so would a massive chunk of the western worlds oil supply for military purposes. Not to mention they would have been well within the budget range to develop nuclear weapons without ever having to test like North Korea.

The US also didn't sit around and leave Europe high and dry in conflicts like the Kosovo War, because following your logic why should the US be dragged into a purely European conflict. Basically, because the US gives a shit about keeping its allies in place and stable and their enemies crippled and weak, which is what the rest of the world is trying to do too.

So when NATO countries have a vested interest in keeping a country down (Iraq) because it developing a military will support an old adversary (Russia), you can bet they'll tell the public whatever they fucking want to justify a situation like the Cold War never gets the opportunity to arise.

It's a sad state of affairs that crippling the development of foreign countries is in our own best interest, but personally I enjoy my way of life and the world isn't a John Lennon song.
Almost all of this article, importantly starting with the "background" material in the first paragraph, is wrong. It is so wrong that I wonder: is it intended as a joke?
Influence of repressive legislation on the structure of a social media network
Yes, but it's a lot easier to buy the rice as white rice than it is to remove the part of the plant that is harbouring the toxin at home. Even in plants, different tissues do different things.
Because prices are determined by what the market will bear? I thought that was the stock answer for any pricing question.
Rendering KittenAuth obsolete

http://thepcspy.com/kittenauth/
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/04/6554-2/
The non-BS way to create a profitable blog
I'm not claiming that my dictionary function has all the attributes of a good one way function, it's illustrative.
Horwheel: Scroll horizontally with mouse wheel.
Thank you for correcting me, I should have said "properly multithreaded or multiprocessing browser like IE or Chrome". Since a properly designed multithreaded applications shouldn't suffer from UI non-responsiveness as badly as FF does. Of course separating the user interface process from the content processes also would have fixed this issue.

I'm glad to hear the electrolysis project has been rebooted. That plus a working silent update( see bug #711475 ) would go a long way to making Firefox relevant again.
In the past week, I've experienced a fairly epic failure in the launch of a project of my own. Perhaps you can learn from it?

I wanted to run a fundraiser for Syrian refugees, and I spent a lot of time with a mock-up product that fit my sense of humor (and that of several friends). I got the first 10 donors lined up, so I thought, now I should launch.

I used GoFundMe for the project (http://www.gofundme.com/2d64j4), but I did very little initial publicity. I worked my email lists of potential victims and shared it via Facebook. Well, many of the original donors decided not to contribute and I only heard from two random donors that found my project via the FB shares. Out of 115 visits, I have three donors, whereas I originally only contacted 20 people, out of whom I received 10 orders.

So, I would say that this is not the best way to launch. It's possible that I planned the entire project poorly, and I'm currently trying to think of other ways to tell the world about it.

With tourist season starting here in Turkey (where I live), I would suggest contacting hostels and pensions that are advertising online. Pitch them directly and give them a trial.

In my experience, there isn't a lot of planning ahead and I have been shuffled around as part of a hotel managers efforts to juggle their availability. Larger hotels surely have a solution for this, but small and mid-sized venues clearly don't. I encounter lot's of ledgers kept on paper, and little to no automation. Meanwhile, the owner has a laptop open on the desk displaying FB or an online game. So, I think you have a market here in Turkey, if you can convince them to pay the price. That would probably mean getting into the local language though.

Good luck,
-s
How I got robbed of 34 btc on Mt.Gox today
To those who are confused by the name, this is not a Jabber / XMPP service. JabbR started as an example chat app for using SignalR[1], an open-source, realtime signaling library for .NET written by David Fowler & Damian Edwards. Think of SignalR as Socket.IO but for the .NET world (and Mono compatible).

This has grown into a more mature self-hostable chat. I just threw a version up on AppHarbor 10 seconds ago and I have to admit I'm surprised by the amount of features this thing comes with.

Side note - If you're curious about how scalable this is, SignalR is built on .NET's IAsyncHttpHandlers & TPL (async made easy). I suggest you take a look at the source code.

[1] - https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR
Food Recovery Network | Fighting Waste, Feeding People http://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org
Look at JabRef as a front end to bibtex. I had a bit of a learning curve, but was so frustrated with the Microsoft toolchain that I switched to R/Sweave/LaTeX/bibtex/git and am quite happy. Everything is Open Source and in general community support has been better than commercial support. Since all these are text based, they play well with version control (git). Also makes for a reproducible workflow where an entire analysis and report can be reproduced by a single click on a shell script or command file. The same toolchain works on my Linux, MacOSX, and Windows boxes.
Electric cars are a form of self-denial. We think we're doing the environment a favor when in reality we're terrified of a future without cars.
I forgot to mention it was EV that got me into programming as my career. I got so tired of being limited by the demo, I started to try to make my own EV-like game, and got into trying to make games. Thank you, Ambrosia.
There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way. They likely experienced a DDoS and either didn't want to say it or didn't recognize it and actually believed it was because of their 20K new users. Either way, given the issues they have had and the ~$1.2 billion market cap loss just from this one incident, it begs the question: Should this company be at the center of something as important as Bitcoin?

These types of issues have been faced and solved by myriad other companies, many of them with fewer resources. It seems that every major player in the Bitcoin space has trouble conducting themselves as actual professional businesses and are just fine with causing losses ranging from thousands to billions of dollars in this case. If just a few decent companies came together to provide the services that Mt. Gox and other current "leaders" are failing to provide, Bitcoin could quickly become a much more powerful force than it already is. The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them.
1. The name is just fail. Jabber is well known and established. Reminds me of the Python name confusion some company started very recently. Seriously, what do people think when they name their products like that?

2. There are many Jabber OSS implementations for self-hosted chat systems, even for corporations. Why another new system?

3. Website looks awful in Opera.
Ask HN: Would anyone use a command line task manager?
For personal use I have a small script that I run in command line while I am coding and that tracks the time I spend on a task and what tasks I do. The thing is I do not really like to use a web service because I do not like to have 2 many tabs opened, I just want to have tabs specific to work(application, stackoverflow pages). Most of the time I am working in the terminal commiting and pushing code to git so I find it easy to also log my work time in the terminal. I really think this is a better workflow than having to constantly switch between terminal and browser after finishing a task so if anyone else feels the same way and if people are interested about this I can improve my little terminal tool and release it.

Edit: based on good feedback I will clean it up and share it...also I am thinking of making some improvements so feel free to request a feature if u want something added...for example I am thinking right now that it would be cool to integrate it with Basecamp and other project management tools like Jira so I can log the tasks right from my terminal, not sure yet how it would work but it is just an idea of mine to make everything more efficient.
> target audience

This is a very valid point.

Certainly the learning process for children can be improved a lot. Really, a lot. But I think it is important to integrate it with the actual notation from the beginning, as otherwise you will hit a wall when you want to play a bigger variety of music that's only available in that format.
Mass transit really isn't that effective unless you live near both ends of a system. Need to transfer, it gets worse.

You can try and make people feel guilty so they use mass transit or you can actually help it make their lives better. Which way do you think will be the most effective?

Bottom line: solve for time.
Humid waste is hugely untreated in many countries. It seems like the way to go because it doesn't burn well and it's 30% of the urban waste.

Tech is there. Issues are mostly:

1. Margins. Transporting this stuff with a low volume/value ratio around too much will make you unprofitable very fast
2. Politics and mafia (yes, mafia, try collecting garbage in South Italy)
3. Capex and investment payback

I think that due to points 1, 2 and 3 you need:

a. Small plants that can be profitable with waste from 2000 inhabitants up
b. To provide some sort of benefit for the inhabitants. If you go in a country where the tax on waste is managed by the city hall you have a go there
yes! That would be good. Do share
It can stop you, but odds are it doesn't in many cases. IMO this is one of the biggest benefits of git over something like Subversion or CVS: its distributed, so you can continue to work locally while the origin is unreachable.

I can't tell you how many times in my svn past where I couldn't get any work done simply as a result of the repo sever going down or having some other issue affecting its reachability.

At least with git I may not be able to pull commits from origin, but I can still commit locally which is typically enough to keep me productive during outage periods.