skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- Flexibility in changing the files (hence create a different animation programmatically)?

- Alpha blending (which GIF doesn't have, only has simple transparency).

- More than 256 colors (which GIF doesn't have. You have to dither to get a semi-acceptable gradient and the like).
I've got flashcache running on a 20GB SSD partition fronting a 120GB spinning disk partition, on a desktop at home. It feels (anecdotal, subjective) as fast as a pure SSD for all normal desktop things. I also ran a small MySQL db through this setup for a few weeks, and that improved noticeably over a single spinning disk, especially when there was IO load from other processes.

The install procedure is a little rough around the edges, so I'm looking forward to having that more polished.
The trick is to start the compilation when you start showing the comment box -- and only show the "reply" button once it's done. This way, for nearly all comments, it will be done calculating before you are done commenting (this has already taken me more than 20 seconds!), and it retains its hard-to-spam properties.
It's kind of funny that unions are anti-immigrant: I think this (along with their past tendencies to be anti-black, etc) have hamstrung a lot of them. Immigrant laborers and American-born laborers have a lot more in common than not: they should both be pushing for higher-wages, more job availability, and better working conditions. As such, the unions should be embracing, rather than rejecting, new immigrants, and making sure that laws are passed to protect the immigrants' interests (such as eliminating the H1-B in favor of more green cards, say), because they are essentially the same interests.
Ironically, when it first came out, SimCity was seen as very left-wing because of things like the dominance of public transportation in the model.
I'm seeing the same thing. This is my first real Mac experience, got it from/for work, wasn't sure if something like this was "normal". (I'm a long-time Linux user, so I'm used to putting up with a lot of bullshit from my desktop.)

I've found a handful of forum posts and support requests, but no solution other than "it's probably a hardware defect and you should return it".
The slightly different statement "young folk use technology the best" is closer to the truth. Just the other day I was saw my cousin's toddler pick up her father's iPhone, unlock it, and pick the game she wanted to play. Even at 4 years of age, she's a decent user of technology.

But they don't necessarily understand the technology they're using. For example, teenagers these days are addicted to their cell phones, and texting is such an integral part of their social lives that taking away their cell is tantamount to locking them in a room for all the social isolation it causes.

They are expert users of technology, yet they don't necessarily understand the technology they use. As an example, if you give a teenager a URL for a page with information they need, instead of typing/copy-pasting it into the address bar, most will type 'google' into the address bar, put the URL into the search box, and click the first link.

Just being a highly proficient user doesn't make you an expert. Young folk are highly proficient users of technology, but they're not experts unless they've deliberately learned how the technology works.
Certified compilation in Agda
2 months go by fast, you'll be back on your startup in no time. When you do, tell us about it! :)
I dislike that this kind of discussion lumps everything in STEM as one big amorphous blob. STEM covers a lot of really diverse fields which, big surprise, means that some fields within it are doing well while others, not so much.
After googling some time, I found couple of sites in the same area and thought could be helpful to fellow hn'ers.
Codiqa, Appery.io. Thanks.
Thanks a lot for those links, they are very enlightening.
MailChimp Launches $1 Million Integration Fund
Take it to another store and just say you browse facebook all day and you don't know why the battery's deteriorating.
What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?
> "The American people have traditionally viewed the classroom as a revered sanctuary that should not be sullied by any form of negative influences either of an external or internal nature," it says. "Regrettably the safeguards which were initially put into place to protect the sanctity of the classroom didn't evolve with our dramatically changing society."

These days, it's rare to find a quote in traditional media that directly and succinctly addresses the main issue in an honest fashion. The religious language being used is especially revealing: "revered" American "sanctuaries" have been defiled, and the "sanctity of the classroom" has been compromised. To address sins of this magnitude, the high priests of the Church of Safety at All Costs are willing to go to any lengths, including hiring former Secret Service personnel to train teachers, strap students into military grade armor, and lobby for armed guards at the entrance to every school.

> "It's like you find life jackets on ships or planes in case they go down," he says. "It's no different to having a seatbelt in a car."

Presently, only a few schools have taken it this far. But the cavalier attitude with which they are able to discuss these changes shows the degree to which America has accepted its post-9/11 militarization. Bulletproof vests for children are now thought of as no different than seat belts or life jackets.

People spend so much time and money preparing for the astronomically low probability that their child will be involved in a school shooting or a terrorist attack, yet I routinely see parents do things like talk on their cell phone while driving their kids around town. Or buy their kid a car at 16 without making sure they know how to drive it well. Or not allow their children to get a flu shot because vaccines are dangerous and/or a conspiracy.

These parents are subjecting their children to a subtle, prolonged form of psychological abuse. They are teaching them to be afraid of basic activities in life instead of equipping them to honestly and objectively prepare for realistic risks. They are not maximizing the safety of their children, they are minimizing their own fear.

It's time we stopped conflating well-intentioned parents with good parents, because the road to a needlessly militarized world devoid of personal rights and privacy is paved with their good intentions.
This article makes a big mistake in conflating software development with STEM in general. It shows a stock photo of a guy looking through a microsope (btw why is he looking through the lens if the microscope is plugged into a monitor? Seems redundant...), when the focus of the article is Microsoft, Google, and Facebook wanting to raise the H1-B visa cap so they can bring in more cheap coders from India.

Is there a shortage of STEM graduates in the U.S.? Absolutely not. We graduate far more STEM students (especially in research-oriented sciences like biology, chemistry, physics) than we have jobs for. These research jobs are mostly funded by government grants, and the government is cutting back due to unrelated political issues with the budget, of which the root cause is mostly failures in the finance sector.

Is there a shortage of programmers in the U.S.? Perhaps. There is massive, and growing, demand in all sectors for software developers, and our universities aren't graduating them faster than demand growth, and as a result software dev salaries are rising (or at least not falling).

But programming is not STEM, and these jobs are not scientific research jobs. They are mostly jobs building commercial software products or automating business processes. These companies have figured out that they can squeeze a little more profit out of their business model by bringing in Indians who will write code for less money and can't job-hop because they're indentured by their visa status. So when they whine about a "talent shortage," they really just mean "American programmers are too expensive" because the relatively low supply/demand ratio means they still have to actually pay them a livable FTE salary and benefits--unlike most other job categories where they can and do hire commodity temp labor. (There are several entire companies dedicated to temp/contract staffing for administrative and QA positions at Microsoft.)

These companies will pay lip service to the concept of improving the US education system to crank out more highly-skilled STEM graduates, make our country more competitive, etc. But really, it's just whining about microeconomic factors that hinder their constant efforts to trim their HR budgets. They just want cheaper coders, period.
At Harvey Mudd College 40% of CS majors are women
I know a good developer on the market as of 3 AM this morning. Looking for remote. My email is in my profile.
It probably wasn't his first pass at the problem. :-)
>The fact that you have had few complaints may reflect the fact that people are courteous and do not like to get into arguments.

Not 'few' complaints. NO complaints. In 2+ years of regular use. The two cases where I've been asked to stop using them were from people who felt it was their job to do so, not because of any complaint.

>they almost certainly harm people around you although the harm may be less than that of secondary smoke.

[citation needed, really. I'd love to see it.]

>if smokers can smoke e-cigarettes in places in situations where they cannot smoke ordinary cigarettes, that very well may result in an increase of smoking.

I think you're confused about what electronic cigarettes are. Electronic cigarettes do not produce smoke, so it's impossible for them to increase 'smoking.' They produce vapor. It's like saying that the steam rising from your coffee cup is 'smoke,' so all people with coffee should only be able to drink coffee in places where smoking is permitted.
Big fan of you and Buffer. Thanks for the tip. I am actually focusing on that now. I don't have much idea about guess blogging, any tips on that like how to pitch a blog for guest blog?
NBA player Jason Collins comes out as gay
Apple Care, as far as I can tell, is just an extended warrantee and support contract. Why should they replace hardware that is acting as expected? That's how galvanic cells work, get used to it.
I don't think that's quite an apt analogy. The different software development methodologies would be more like different medicine school programs or individual medical students' learning styles, not the end production of the doctors (which would be akin to the shipped software product).
And GATDs and dependent types are pretty old too by now. E.g. Martin-Löf Type Theory was first published 1971-1972. :)
Trouble With Venture Investing
You could maybe change it to be the same as your home address.
What a skew prospective! I am not considering myself converted to objectivism philosophy (I only saw "Atlas Shrugged" movies), but this "snowpocalypse" is not much of an example against the Ayn Rand's point. The fact that there are people (with equipment) ready to be deployed to plow the streets if needed is an example that there is at least one capable person that thought about such future problematic scenario, developed a strategy, and designed a system to deal with that problem. I challenge one to contemplate about another very real, present world's scenario - Indian cities. Omnipresent garbage and misery (even crap on the streets) and it seems that nobody do much about it, even if all live and "enjoy" the same public environment. That state of affairs may literally exist EVERYWHERE unless out there wouldn't be capable people among us that yes, deserve appreciation. Deserve appreciation starting from just having potential they happen to have (this is a tough one, rarely happens even if people are glad that problem solvers exist), then for their effort of developing that potential, for applying their hard-earned capability on solving problems (including the social ones) and in the end - for helping others to grow and further develop/maintain systems in our world. We happen to see from the Rand's view point the same things very differently.
Right, but in the context here, on iOS, it's just search as far as I can tell.
Blackberry PIN encryption keys
I know that in every profession, each passionate practitioner thinks that no cheap hire can possibly replace them. And yet I think this case is especially true for the developer of custom solutions. If you believe that the majority of time spent on software is in its post-release maintenance and iteration phase, then hiring mediocre developers to build the product will only result in massively increased product lifetime costs. And throwing more mediocre developers at it won't fix the underlying issues.

It's hard to think of other building-type professions where one person can have so much sway over a company's initial success. And no, this is not because programmers are inherently more vital than civil engineers or doctors...it's because programmers have so few limits and regulations to deal with...as has been said on HN many times, just about anyone can spin up a Heroku dyno, load up incredibly powerful FOSS, and attempt a worthwhile product with little cost beside time and effort. Whereas a doctor, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, you're going to have to jump through a lot of hoops and pay a lot of dues before you can fully develop your revolutionary treatment.
Google Now Comes to iOS
I came up with this way when I started programming (and apparently had the gall to assume nobody else had done this...):

/*/
test
/*/
test
//*/

Just add or remove the first asterisk.
Shape-Changing Mobile Devices
With google forking webkit, it will be good to have safari back on windows. I could not understand their decision to quit safari development on windows. Integrate and share data between a good safari desktop browser on windows and an iDevice would be nice.
Not necessary, but the top 10% of any of those countries (even third world countries), will be better than the average US dev. (not necessary better than the top 10% of engineers coming out of US).

That means that bringing the top 10% of the rest of the world here, will bring the average up, which means harder technical stuff gets done, which by itself opens up more jobs for the economy.

Any good immigration policy should make sure to filter, and bring in only the best, and making sure that they are not underpaid.
One way to do that is not to tie the visa to an employer, and making sure a engineer with lets say 5 years of experience coming here has a job that pays more than the average of a engineer with 5 years of experience makes, and remove loopholes on this

This will reduce H-1B missuse from the indian/chinese consulting companies, and allow the H-1B holder to switch jobs as they choose and not to be tied down to one employer.

After 3 years of working under this visa, an H-1B holder should be able to get the green card, and have ultimate freedom on their lives.

Making these changes will just both allow best engineers in, and reduce the abuse that may happen due to the current rules on tying an employee to a employer (intenured servitude in the 21st century).
Agreed that the articles reasoning is weak surrounding the "takin' o'r jerbs!" arguments; the cost of a lousy developer is insurmountable. However, the comparison with H-1B and indentured servitude is what is all to accurate in my personal experience. It's stomach churning to watch an individual, often a friend, be squeezed into an uncomfortable situation by an employer because of the conditions of their visa. H-1B visa's tip too much of the balance in employer/employee negotiations to the employer's favor.
Detector in South Pole’s ice cap spots rare high-energy neutrinos
Ajax started with Al Gore, without whom the internet would have never been invented :p
There appears to be no attempt to correct for survivorship bias in this study, making it at best highly suspect and at worst, worthless.

For all we know, people who are good at getting karma on Stack Overflow stay on the site simply because they're good at getting karma on Stack Overflow.
Single crystal uranium-lead dating is one of the best all-around methods and gets used a lot for vanilla geological applications of Earth rocks; any rock that contains trace amounts of the mineral "zircon" can be dated with this technique. Zircon is special because it tends to incorporate a lot of uranium when it crystallizes while excluding lead. As time passes after the zircon crystal cools, uranium decays into radiogenic lead, and by measuring the relative abundance of these two things in the crystal we can estimate the time since that zircon crystallized (with no lead inside) and get an "age" that tells us how long it has been since that zircon crystal was formed. Zircon is common in many types of igneous rocks, which are rocks that began in a molten state. The zircon crystals in an igneous rock are resistant to weathering (compared to feldspars, another common igneous constituent), so sometimes they end up as grains in sedimentary rocks and we can use a variation on the technique called "detrital zircon geochronology" to estimate the age of sedimentary deposits.

Other systems (like samarium-neodymium) are most often used when trying to date things older than the Earth, e.g. meteorites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
The Reason Google is Terrified of Facebook
I don't think that programming is where medicine is, so I find it difficult to emotionally buy into the idea that Pair Programming is like a Medical School program.

But I accept that if you think we're further along, you'll make that point.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. :)
I'm halfheartedly excited. Now was a great android feature, but it will only be amazing in ios if it can be hacked to run outside the app like Facebooks chat heads were recently.
You may want to resolve this with WOT -- with the Firefox WOT plugin, I get a big warning that I have to click through in order to visit your site, not to mention that there's derogatory comments & marks for your site. Check out the link I posted above and follow the resolution procedures. Someone is bad-mouthing your site / domain if it's not true...
To be honest, I don't check at all, and most normal people probably don't.
I think they're really easy. For example: http://crapcha.com/show/#0rPMqgcbmt
> stores /currency/ on consumer service

> doesn't have physical access to servers

> "budget" provider

> hurr durr why are my buttcoins gone??!?!?!?!

People are going to draw parallels between buttcoins and /real/ currency, but they're not the same. However, they both hold value. Therefore, people with big buttcoin wallets should value their stash, and get some physical servers and host it in their own locking cab or somewhere more secure.
Busting KDevelop Myths
CO2 levels in atmosphere reaching 400ppm for first time in 3 million years
You Don’t Have to Pay to Play
Just to update this, the kernel should now be in AOSP on the "glass-omap-xrr02" branch of the kernel/omap project.
So I was all aboard until I looked in the iTunes store and saw a bunch of in-app purchase items. No deal.

I want to pay for an app up-front, or maybe get it free and pay one fixed fee. Anything else and I will not even try it. I realize I'm in a minority right now, but I think this trend in games needs to go away.
I never understand this blind hated for Sony. The OtherOS thing was a reaction to the Geocrap clown. The people who design the phones have nothing to do with that anyway. The Xperia phones are awesome and Sony is actually one of the few well behaved manufacturers in the Android ecosystem.
Also they didn't collect the information or share it with third parties and well it was a bug. I don't agree with the OP but I think it's unfair to contrast what Apple did with anything that also wasn't a bug. It would sort of be like comparing what Apple did with security vulnerabilities in Android; the user isn't informed, notified and permission isn't asked for on the other hand Google and Apple weren't/aren't doing so purposefully.
Why not advertise on hn whoishiring?
"and at the very least, the slave trade was one of the primary contributors to our capitalist development"

You're going to get the amateur historians all wound up with talk like that.

A better explanation was the Whitney cotton gin enabled mechanized processing about a century before the Rust mechanized harvester was invented, so you had explosive growth in a couple strategies for providing human cotton pickers ranging from ownership pre civil war to indentured servitude / peasanthood after the civil war. The gin wasn't enough to kick industrialization into high gear, although I'm sure it helped a tiny irrelevant bit. By the time they (the people) were made obsolete by the Rust Harvester, and shipped up north to the factories, we already had the worlds biggest factories to ship them to... so much for that argument. The south has never amounted to anything from an industrial standpoint until very recently and even that's a bit of a stretch.

Or if you were alluding to the earlier triangle of unhappiness (whatever it was called, triangle of something miserable anyway) then we had pretty much maxed out molasses/rum/human transportation well before the industrial revolution. The limiter was like how much land can you cultivate in the Caribbean and how many slaves can you ship there, they didn't have industrialization in the new england rum distillation industry as a limiter to growth at that time so there was no pressure for improvement. Distillation is not much of a motivator for industrialization anyway. Every couple years I alternate between brewing/distilling doesn't get enough credit for industrialization and thinking they already get too much credit.

A pretty good argument overall, other than getting the relevance of slaves in capitalism all wrong.
Guess it's time to stop using Opera
Unions are not terribly interested in overall productivity/output. Their goal is to maximize the value to their constituents (either through wages or working conditions). By decreasing/holding stagnant the supply of labor available, they are able to force wages to be higher than they should be. Of course, as economists understand, this causes all sorts of problems.

Unions really aren't that different from corporate lobbyists...

What's more impressive I think is how vehemently anti-immigration (and to your point, anti-black at various times) the Democratic party has historically been (mostly driven by union influence) and how quickly that seems to have been forgotten by most.
I vote for Sabertooth.
That's quite a claim there--would you mind elaborating on your reasoning?

Perhaps it's just due to my current existence in a very productive city, but STEM (and vocational training) seem to be both very much in demand and rewarded.
Guardian falls victim to Syrian Electronic Army, 11 Twitter accounts compromised
There's a slightly less-interesting Lua analog as well:

--[[
Code block one
--[=[ Explanatory comment here ]]
Code block too
--]=]
Not everyone that has put money into bitcoin is a cypherpunk.
> If the mail can find its way to the right point, so can this type of URL.

What in the world do those things have in common with each other? Mail gets "resolved" over a period of days and involves a small army of people, many with local knowledge. It also frequently fails and needs updated (postal codes change, street names change, etc).

> having to look up lat/lon first in order to pinpoint an address on a map seems not convenient at all

Who has to look up anything? We're talking about a URL--the software does the lookup and the user just sees the correct map.
> As shown in the EPI graph below, in 2009 less than two thirds of employed computer science grads were working in the IT sector a year after graduation.

How horrifying!

Now present the relevant statistics for history majors, economics majors, or English majors.