skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"you at least have to convey the fact that you've encoded something in the blockchain so that the receiver knows to look for it there. How is it easier to convey "you should download the bitcoin blockchain and run strings against it and the URL is the 352nd one you find [out of the six thousand URLs various unrelated people will have encoded]" than to just send the damn URL directly to the person you're telling where to look for it?"

So to my mind it's not that different than a search engine. The blockchain doesn't just contain URLs it contains "meta data" as well. Right now, if you want to find links related to err, certain kinds of illegal photography you just have to search for the relevant keywords in the blockchain and you'll find it and the URLs.

"I think it would be a welcome development. Right now people are too afraid to be distributors, which makes things difficult for whistle blowers and democracy advocates in oppressive regimes and others who have legitimate reasons to want anonymous censorship-resistant publication methods."

Yes, I absolutely agree with you, we live in interesting times.
> The fact - and it is very much a fact - that, off late, technology hasn't progressed very much at all.

It's by no means a fact, just anecdotal 'evidence'.

> culture, that disparages everything technological

Quite the contrary. Technological progress is the fetish of modern civilization. Society still believes that eventually all human problems, even illness and death, will be cured by new technology.

BTW, there is absolutely no moral obligation to be progressive and to embrace new technology. We should not hand over our freedom to a technocratic regime.
Wrexham call centre staff fly to New Zealand to cover night shifts
This is exactly one of the things where the cultural divide is just too far for me to understand. Do people really plan meals like this in america?
Could be a great step up from freemium applications, without needing ads.
> JS

> a fairly normal dynamic language

You call this a "fairly normal dynamic language"?

0 == '' // true

0 == '0' // true

'' == '0' // false
$49 per machine is a pretty high cost, particularly for something which is new and untested.

I'm no expert, but my gut feeling is that for this kind of tool - you need to offer a more 'enterprisey' offering. The way budgets for the kind of places that this tool would be useful are allocated, $49 for a single utility for every machine it might need to be run on is something that sysadmins might have difficulty explaining.

Bear in mind that the idea of syncing is not novel, and most sysadmins have built their servers around the current tools and constraints available. They are likely to look at your utility and think 'that's cool, but it's not worth the cost: what I have now works even if it takes longer, and I'm not paying anything for it'.

If you asked me to pay $49 for a faster version of rsync, which I then had to incorporate into my tool-chain, I'd probably just forget it. The cost of changing to a new utility is more than just the cost of the utility itself.
Can't agree enough. When I'm using Skype I almost have to stop everything else I'm doing thanks to it's massive window taking up a whole corner of my screen and constantly having to hide/unhide the messages pane.

Adium is fine as is, you can customise the hell out of it, it's tab implementation is solid. The only places it's lacking are more server issues, file transfer hasn't worked in years for me.
Fines are meant to discourage behaviour found unacceptable by society[0]. That obviously fails to work if the net outcome of a ‘discouraged’ action is still positive even after taking into account the fine (and compensation for damage, if any).
So, really, the (first) fine was not high enough. For a very similar reason, non-trivial fines[1] are usually given as a percentage of turnover or daily fines.

[0] Note that jail time also serves to rehabilitate the offender in case of serious crimes. That obviously doesn’t really work with companies, and unfortunately, carelessness with other people’s data is not considered a serious crime in many places.

[1] Basically anything above a parking ticket.
USC dictatorship
US are constitutionally a dictatorship. If one were to pay sufficient attention to USC I.7 §§2, 3 then the same should be able to demonstrate that whatever congress outputs is of no effect before the president's approval (an example of "approval" is his leaving what he was being presented un-returned too long), USC can't be amended without the president's allowing it. Neither can the pres. be ousted if he doesn't consent ("consent" as above). But there are other deductions: suicide is anti-constitutional, passing amendment I became anti-constitutional as soon as it was inserted in the USC, one can arrange for the congress to be dissolved and the president can amend the constitution. This can be rigorously proved (even formally).

"Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?" (KJV, Mark 8.18)
Not Western at all. I'm an Indian, and I tend to think of Buddhists as pacifists too. Yes, Buddhism spread with the power of Buddhist-sympathizer kings. But when I look at (what little there is of) Indian history, I see Brahmins being frightened by the spread of Buddhism, and challenging them to public debates. The loser would have to become the winner's disciple in some cases, or be exiled, or be put to death in other cases.

What I don't see, looking at Indian Buddhists, is the brutality that's typically associated with other mainstream religions.
Follow-up question: Linux gets frozen and you don't have physical access, what do you do?
Brilliant work sir.
Hi-res closeup of Curiosity (February 2013)
Bayes' Theorem is about updating estimated probabilities after receiving evidence.

For example: I have two bags of sweets. One has 10 sweets, of which 8 are chocolate and 2 are marshmallows. The other has 20 sweets, of which 10 are chocolate and 20 are marshmallows.

I offer to give you a sweet, which I will select at random. Assuming I empty both bags on to the table and choose one at random (uniformly), what is the chance it comes from the first bag? Assume that I do this where you can't see what I choose.

(Answer: 10/30, or 1 in 3 - as these are the ratios of total sweet numbers).

Now, assume that after I've chosen (you still can't see), I tell you that the sweet is a chocolate (This is the evidence). What is the chance now that it came from the first bag?

(Answer: 8/18 - the ratio of first-bag-chocolates out of any-bag-chocolates)

We have now 'updated' our probability estimates based on the evidence ('It's a chocolate'). Important to note here is that the first bag has a higher ratio of chocolates than the second bag, BUT it's still more likely to have come from the second bag due to the second bag having more sweets in total - what we call the Prior probability.

This relationship can be expressed mathematically, which is what Bayes did.

P(B|A) = P(B & A)/P(A) = P(B)*P(A|B)/(P(B)*P(A|B) + P(!B)*P(A|!B))

(Where P(X) means The probability of X occurring, P(X&Y) means the probability of both X occurring and Y occuring, and P(X|Y) means the probability of X occuring, given that Y has already occurred (or that we assume it occurs))
Doesn't this do the same as $ rsync --inplace?
I refuse to believe there is a single person on earth who actually likes the OS X Messages.app
Well. This is your choice to PUBLISH your "secret".
As you can notice usualy everybody write "secret" with quotas. Because "secret" is realy not so "secret".
We built the backend of www.healthcorpus.com in Go. It was great.
Yep. All developers around Sync are waiting for API and URI.
I'm working on a large project at the moment and am branching off quite often to get new features in place. Then once I have finished I rebase with master, switch to master and `git merge my-feature-branch --squash`. Is that okay to do?
Adium, Transmission, Textmate and Transmit are easily my faves.

Main reasons I stick with OS X, despite disliking the direction Apple is taking it.
I doubt that there was a strict causal link between your statement and your termination. (That no one was considering it, then you made that statement, then suddenly you're let go the next day.) If there was, and you're the type to read HN, you are better off anyway, even if it felt otherwise at the time.
PDF generation is a complex business... you're not going to be all things to all people, you need to choose a particular niche (at least to start with) and make that work. I can see the value prop in report generation on SF. "PDF Generation for developers" is too broad: I don't think you can do it (because there are so many different types of of PDFs to generate) and I can't see the value prop (because it's going to cost you more to provide a generic PDF generation service than it will cost me to use an existing library.)

That said, there might be a market there for developers, but you'll need to identify a very particular challenge that devs have and provide a much better solution than what they can achieve with a library in a day.
True, but even as a British working parent, I think I'd vote to stick with it though. It's expensive to offer those benefits and Norway and France, say, are rocking 43.6% and 44.6% of GDP as tax revenues respectively versus our 39% and we already feel hard done by as it is ;-) (Now if we could cull the military to pay for more social benefits, fine, but that'll never happen..)
That's either a disturbing blindness or an exceedingly good PR department.
Fair enough. I'm thinking in particular of a paper I read that used pagerank for word sense disambiguation [1]. It's actually variant of pagerank, so the high level description in terms of probabilities (which I read several of) didn't take me very far. In order to come to grips with the technique I ended up actually implementing it and trying it on some toy datasets. This definitely would have helped me in that case.

[1] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E/E09/E09-1005.pdf It's interesting research, but it unfortunately turns out that even the best results in word sense disambiguation aren't good enough for a lot of applications. I wish I had 2 years to do nothing but play around in this field.
Answering my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key#Alternate_ways_...
Meet the man who retired at 30
usually players want the games to run as fast as possible, developers dont manually hold back framerates to do other stuff on the side. I dont think this would work really good.
I had many failures when I just updated rails (from an edge version a couple of weeks old) to rc1. When I did a full bundle update it picked up the latest rspec-rails (2.13.1 instead of 2.13.0) and everything passed again.

The errors were I think caused by a change in the separation of the tests so database state was leaking between them causing failures but I haven't investigated deeply.

In these sorts of situations I never know whether it is best to 'bundle update' everything and have less information about the source of any problems or just to 'bundle update rails' and not receive the compatibility fixes straight away. How do others do this?

[Edited to add detailed version information and last paragraph].
At the other end of the spectrum, the Manchester city council site: http://www.manchester.gov.uk/

Definitely not what you might expect!
Thanks! I didn't know about this. I'll update my post as soon as I catch some time. If you want, leave me my your twitter username, so I can mention you :)
I would downvote purely on the grounds that you can legitimately rebase master the same as any other branch - it's rebasing published history that screws up, not rebasing commits that are on a specific branch.

There's nothing wrong with, say, creating three local commits on master, "rebase -i"ing them into one commit, and then pushing.

The author has completely missed the point of what can and can't be rebased.
Either way, it's disturbing blindness.
> Is it true that iOS uses a different font renderer than Mac OS?

Yes, iOS uses (parts of) FreeType. Imagine the shitstorm if they shipped their fuzzy, washed-out default rendering!
The issue is that most people buying smartphones are not die-hard Apple fans like the buyers of their other offerings, so the font rentering would be pretty hard to sell.

> I thought that the fonts on an iPhone looked pretty good actually.

That's because FreeType (with the right patches and settings) is already pretty much the best font renderer (with a few exceptions).
The trick is not hiring too fast. If you bring employees in one at a time and wait for them to acclimate, you won't have a culture shift. Most companies go downhill when they try to grow too big, too fast.
> the main problem with this idea is that cards cannot be authenticated without network access, and just spewing out money to every piece of plastic calling itself a card when your network connection has been dropped isn't really a recipe for success. Fraud is a real problem.

I believe some of the first ATMs actually worked offline (the PIN was encoded on the magentic stripe), but networked models came out a few years later. Of course, this was in the late 1960s, when card readers (and the expertise to use them) were far harder to obtain.
Responsive = mobile
Yeah \o/ We first build an original Mendel at my Paris (France) hackerspace, then used it to print my own Prusa i1, which I upgraded to an i2 over time using itself, and printed a Prusa i2 for a friend with my i1. RepRap rocks :)

More than a tool, 3D printing is really a big hobby for me. It's not just about getting 3D objects printed, it's also about how the prints go, how the quality varies given the slicing/printing parameters, and how to push everything further with the community.
Wow! That's the best looking government run site I've seen
This is a good reminder about how the "support popular browsers" approach of web development is flawed. And how sites, and thus the code driving them, live a lot longer than expected. This kind of technical debt accumulates, fixing it involves rebuilding it (probably a clean slate approach, since there are issues caused by the underlying Siebel baseline).

It's also a great comparison with the GDS Team's gov.uk initiative, the difference in quality is distinctively noticeable. That quality is based, not on the popular browsers of today, but based on the fundamental premise of the web as an open and platform neutral environment. I guess, in 5, even 10 years, this iteration of gov.uk will still be a reference example of a high quality web development build.

I know a couple of the GDS Team behind the gov.uk project are regulars here. To them, thanks for the amazing work, the attention to detail. I think this is the first time where a UK government organisation/agency is leading web development by example.

This is a great example of high quality web development being done at the fraction of the budget given to high profile government IT project failures. Certainly, smaller, agile, internal, passionate team of skilled individuals outperforms the huge contracts to IT/Consulting companies.
Talk about hateful...
Cross-Country Solar Plane Expedition Set for Takeoff
You can also link to line ranges, which is relevant in this case: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/7a22a33d4041c...
I'm proposing that we don't pretend that this is an old, unused site that someone has stumbled across because goverment IT is doing such a good job not breaking old hyperlinks.

It's still in active use and it's still terrible. Those are simple facts that doing the relatively easy job of moving a bunch of PDFs and static web content to a new site are not going to change.

Government IT (in the UK and elsewhere) has been, and still is, totally fucked up. Let's not hide from that fact because it's only by publicizing the sorry state that it's in that things like alpha.gov.uk can get any traction compared with the traditional way of doing things. But even that's low-hanging fruit compared with the regular billion pound disasters that government IT procurement regularly delivers.
Too many memes
> Obviously how rich a country is plays a part in this?

Of course it does. But not necessarily only in the direction you're hinting! At the end of the day it's not the number of hours worked, but the value created, that determines how wealthy a country gets. Having sufficient vacation and generally taking into account that employees are human beings might have an effect on how happy and productive they are.

I don't know if there are studies lending support to this, but to my mind it seems a pretty plausible thesis. I regard spending some of my tax money on my neighbour staying home with his kids as an investment. Social security is fundamental to human health, crime, education, and ultimately productivity.

To me, that is not all though. GDP growth isn't a goal or an end in itself - it is merely a (very important) means to worthy ends. It would be completely meaningless to have GPD growth if it did nothing to promote "the pursuit of happiness".
I get a 403 (Forbidden)!!1
By the time I got to school RM machines were called the Nimbus and were 86s (or possible 186).

The apps were very very good; I particularly remember Newspa and wish there was something similar for my kids to use today.

I learnt to program BBC Basic on it. Very fond memories.

I think in my final year we got a single RM Nimbus 286 and by then all pretense at custom software stack was gone; it was a windows 3 machine.
Insurance is a very complicated business. Given you've listed negotiating rates with doctors as your first bullet, I imagine you should do some reading first on just how complicated the financial and regulatory side of the business is.

You can't just "charge more in premiums than you pay out". That is how insurance USED to work. Nowadays it's all about carry on people's money. If you are posting on hacker news about insurance I think you are in over your head :(
George Carlin : The Game is Rigged
Ok, so what about the percentages of people who positively vote for political parties? Do you mock them too?

I'd say 17% is pretty decent.
5 Best Secret Service Movies That Involve Corrupt CIA, NSA And FBI Agents
I am a huge proponent of rebasing but not so much with squash. I tend to squash judiciously with rebase -i if I feel the need. But otherwise I think it's good to maintain that history of the general evolution of a feature through development.

However if it's a small feature and your commit message is well-formed and comprehensive (ie. 50-char top line and then paragraphs of description below) then I don't see a problem squashing a few commits together.
I really wouldn't bother starting down the road of trying to classify meal other than breakfast by name.
Where can I get an invite to the Stripe UK beta?
My company manages clients who do tens of thousand of sales every month - I would really love to integrate our applications with Stripe but can't find out where to get an invite from, is anyone able to help?
Manchester are on it. Free wi-fi in a number of places and MadLab. As a resident I'm not that surprised :)
Who is "mocking" anyone here? I think it's a shame, but I agree inevitable that anyone could be so misinformed as to believe that Google is altruistic.
What I never quite get…if feminism is exactly the same as humanism, why the hell invent a new word for this wonderful, 200 years-old concept?
SEEKING WORK - London, Remote is fine

British UI/UX designer and frontend developer. Previously, I worked primarily in designer/frontend dev roles for two startups in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and now returning home to London in June.

Looking specifically to work freelance/consult/connect with startups/companies involved or are very active in ecommerce analytics or similar.

--

What I can offer:

* Design - from advice to review to implementation.

* HTML/CSS/Javascript - custom interactive interfaces and widgets, works like you imagined it.

* Growth - advice from first hand experience on seo, content and social growth strategies.

* Mobile web app (aka the 1 page js app) - honestly i've only ever built 2 ever - one with backbone.js and one with screw-it-ill-do-it-without-a-framework.

Needless to say, I've gained real production-ready multiple device-compatibility experience building these the hard way and I could help you out with building yours.

--

Skills: html, css, javascript, php, python,

mysql, copy writing, seo, photoshop, ui design, ux

development, usability testing, mobile-first responsive

design, cross-browser compatibility, engagement

--

Still updating my portfolio (I'm my own worst enemy), please don't let that put you off though! Let me know if you're interested, email me jim@particlecannon.co.uk
Perhaps a better way of describing their point is "Be aware (and supress?) of your surprise."

I'd add that the intent is pretty clear in the explanation. Surprise evokes fear of ignorance.
The JVM isn't even that slow to start nowadays: a simple hello world app runs in about 0.1sec on my machine.
Agree. I always think great photography makes a world of difference to a design too.
Malaysia censors Internet before upcoming election
Quality of Google ADK 2012 code
It looks pretty swish and its responsive,
Faster Android emulator with Android-x86 on VirtualBox
There is the Modular Data Processing Toolkit[0] which allows for graph based computation. Not sure if it uses many performance enhancing tricks as in the OP though.

[0] http://mdp-toolkit.sourceforge.net/
Could you please elaborate on what technologies you've used to create the app?

Very nice movie! Is this professionally made or just home made?
Manchester City Council
"17% of U.K. consumers trust Google, the same as trust religious institutions"

This bit doesn't surprise me much. Many people I've talked to are rational, even disliking religion.
cool. is Dalai Lama an exception?
Because there's a crossover between feminism the philosophical worldview, which is arguably very close to humanism, and feminism the activist movement which has the rather more immediate goal of liberating women from the threat(s) of physical violence which apply to them specifically. Obviously that kind of thing requires a banner for people to rally under.

But you're right it's a pretty nebulous thing. I guess that's why people keep trying to redefine it with successive "waves."

EDIT: also feminism isn't exactly a recent thing either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette
Essential ingredients for growing big technology companies should mention luck
The guy sounds like a SNOBOL.
Ask HN: As undergrad, would you write a research paper under these conditions?
You are an undergraduate student. Your professor invites you to participate in a research project with the goal to publish a research paper. He does not offer you any compensation (neither money nor credit point for your studies). The only possible compensation you can get is some intellectual credit and another line on your CV. What would you do / answer him?
Building Stuff To Help You Sell The Stuff You Build