skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear ya. I just escaped from Academia about two years ago, where adding $country to everything counts as cred. It's especially powerful when multiple countries are combined. I cringe when I recall the false delight audience members experience when presenters start with something such as "We got an artist from Greece on board and a physicist from Austria, even some magicians from Latvia." These statements have absurdist, Babel-ish, and feel-good value, but are by no means indicators of practical success. More likely, it's a bunch of bored people from around the world uniting briefly to achieve a highly idiosyncratic and quickly forgotten result.

It's fun to imagine statements like: "We put together one developer from Connecticut, a graphic artist from Rhode Island, and -even a web hacker from Massachusetts-". This contrast shows how the practice of making something exotic and worshiping it takes place. It's one form of how we Americans inhibit ourselves from greatness - when we tell ourselves that people from $country are automatically more skilled, wise, experienced than us. Their introductions should lead with their benefits, not where their parents knocked boots.

I have also been on the mailing list of more than one musician who lists countries to build social proof with statements such as "I received grants to perform in Belgium, Holland, England and Germany." It's really only a weak form of imperialism to be invited and funded by a single individual or a committee, rather than to have populist acceptance and/or paying customers. Surely some national funding is key to maintaining the freshness within any culture, but confusing top-down support such as cultural grants, which inevitably introduce artisans from @countries with public support, with loyal customership is a blinding error.
Does this disappoint you more?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5917922
Very true. Being the best in an industry can give you the illusion you're the best at everything. Even in areas where you have no basis for being the best.

Once Microsoft, now Google, by virtue of their high salaries, prestige and market leadership are virtually self selecting in the candidates they attract. Of course there are plenty of poor candidates, but both companies essentially hire based on brand, either that of the candidate's past employers or alma mater.

I'm glad this useless technique is in the recycle bin of history. Now if only they started making people write code in interviews then we'd be getting somewhere (maybe they are? are they?)
I agree that they don't have the right to do this, I just don't think it amounts to tyranny. The Soviet Union was a police state because the national security apparatus was used not just for national security, but also for mercilessly squashing political dissent. A policy enforced with an iron fist by unelected oligarchs.

As an analogy, consider how Americans view gun ownership in relation to gun crime as opposed how Europeans might view it. Crime is the telltale of a criminal, not having a gun.
Congratulations SO! 5 years is a big number :)
The Talk: Birds, Bees, and iOS 7
I respect the effort you've obviously put into developing this site, but in all honesty I can't see why I, as a user, would want to use your site in its current state over Rightmove or Zoopla.

For me, the most important thing is knowing I have access to a large pool of properties and can filter them appropriately. On the latter, it's nice that I can filter by crime rate (if I don't know the bad spots in an area), but it's missing a few key filters such as furnished/unfurnished, term of let, garden, etc. The lack of properties is, in my opinion, a much bigger issue. When I do a search on your site and see 8 properties to let in BN1, but hundreds on Zoopla and RM, I'm probably not going to come back to your site (if you're relying on direct feeds it'll take a lot of time and effort to build up your database and keep it clean).

While there are a fair few bugs and UX issues I noticed, overall the site looks quite nice. You have a couple of neat features not present on the major sites such as combined map+list view, but I'm struggling to see the real USP at the moment.

Rather than a big bang launch, I think you'd do much better to grow and iterate slowly and consistently. Reach out to and work directly with property agents - I'm guessing your main revenue stream will be lead generation, so at the end of the day the agents are your true customer.
I get exactly the same thing with the chest. But put it on a blanket and it overheats. Arg.
Having only read the linked article, I have no opinion on how valid the research was. The primary concern is that people have died in a way that points to the research program in question having been a contributing factor, and the fact that there wasn't even a cursory investigation to make sure things are on the up and up.
How can this be done when the average tourist visa lasts for anywhere between 15 to 90 days? If I can only make a pick out of the countries that offer a working holiday visa, that cuts out a majority of countries. Or is there any other way to get around this?
SEOpocalypse: The Dangerous Virus Sweeping the Industry
Booth Babes as Economic Indicator
One would hope, but by the press and the American people...
I agree that it's highly dependent on personality, but for me I think
"living" somewhere has worked well so far to broaden my perspective.

I recently moved from San Francisco to Berlin, and have been living here
and learning (at times, rather painfully) how different cultures can be,
even between two of the dominant western nations. To say it's been a
worthy experience doesn't do it justice. Having to restart your entire
social life — with deflated self-confidence — is a fantastic learning
experience.

One key aspect of it, in my opinion, is there's no flight home. You
just left, and you don't plan on coming back. When things get
challenging, there is no comfort that your plane is waiting. There is
no plane. You have to pull yourself together and make it work.

Many folks who visit this website are blessed with a skill-set
rooted in distribution. Generations before us simply couldn't
imagine moving around the world and still being comfortable and happy
with their work and their means of providing for themselves.

If you have this opportunity, to leave your comfort zone, challenge
yourself and not have a "home" to go back to when the journey is over, I
recommend you take it.
> To me, "silly rich" would suggest...

What's really silly is debating exactly what "silly rich" means.

How about discussing this?

> A big chunk of the $100 million has been earmarked
> for... [opening] its collaboration tools up beyond the
> software kingdom. The company has already seen
> designers, legal teams, and public relations pros using
> its technology. "It has not been optimized for those
> things yet, but it works for them," says Preston-Werner.
And they can continue to read it as long as they're pretty sure a crime of any kind has been or may soon be committed.
Well, a "dose" of GHB is more like 1 gram or less, so I'm not talking about equivalency by weight. Now I really am blowing up my spot ;)

I should also note my experience was back in the 90s when it was still legal in my locale
Actually that's in TiB. TB is metric.
Just comparing quantities isn't all that useful. Availability needs to be compared, and how much one would "usually" take.

With 7 grams being potentially lethal, it's roughly similar to Tylenol (not recommended to exceed 4 grams), caffeine (foolishly extrapolating the LD50 in rats to a human puts the lethal dose at around 10 grams), aspirin (similar to caffeine), and a lot better than capsaicin (foolishly extrapolated lethal dose around 2 grams).
Okay, cool
I find nothing capturing about a European hipster running around the world trying out jobs. Especially when I add in the thought that the idea was so clearly jacked from someone else.
The 200+ pmi range sucks, but is pretty normal in places like Beijing. Thankfully it's spring and we are under 100 most days. In the worst of winter, we were at 700+, think 2.5x as bad as Singapore right now.
I've placed Stackoverflow in my "mostly useful" list of programming sites. Mainly because the over-zealous moderation, the gaming of karma, and lack of elaboration/quality on many of the answers.
I don't think anyone is completely devaluing images in communicating things; they just assign images to a lower priority in the communication order, one that is supportive rather than primary. Without the context of buying shoes, pictures of shoes tell me nothing. I can fill those shoes with all sorts of stories.

(Static) pictures usually don't have implied ordering of information, unlike words, and videos, which require serialized focus to perceive.
"401 Authorization Required"
What is username and password?
WSJ: FAA will soon ease in-flight restrictions for some electronic devices
NSA's Bluffdale, Utah data storage facility is apparently already online and operational.

Does the interview mention how someone who left the NSA in 2005 would know this?
And when it reaches 100,000 they have to pardon him!

Or the number 100,000 is arbitrary and asking for legally meaningless things, like a "pardon" when he hasn't even been charged with anything, isn't going to impress the executive branch.
We expats abroad are not protected. I guess we're just not loyal enough.
Stack Overflow is not a bargain-basement alternative to Elance, Odesk, or rent-a-coder.com, whereby people can get code snippets vomited at them for free. As was made evident in the comments, the OP of the question needed to show what he tried.

Also, closed questions can be edited. That's the main point of closing a question: to send a signal to the OP that the question needs to be edited and improved.
Do you mean automatically? Inkscape can certainly save an svg to different sized outputs. Perhaps there's a plugin for this use case (Inkscape is scriptable with python)
Generate your QR codes with style
There comes a time in a company’s life when a plain QR code just won’t cut it. Ours came when we were about to stick them on 4,000 meters so you can pay for parking by phone. Why not add some style to that QR!! We looked around for an open source library. Nadda. How much was this going to run us? Too much. Being the frugal team we are we stuck Steven on the project.

We have used a lot from the open source community and finally found something cool we thought everyone could use and improve on.
To get security clearance, yes.
Damn, you must be one hell of a guy! I am so happy people like you are around to give great advice!
Ask HN: people outside the USA, will NSA issues help your economies?
I am just curious. I live in the USA, and I worry that the so-called "Patriot Act" and NSA issues on privacy will hurt our economy.

Turning this around, do people in vibrant tech communities outside of the USA see this as an opportunity?
What do Startups and the Miami Heat have in common?
That's fine. There wasn't enough outrage the first time around.
And what? Your font looks like crap, line-height is not nice for me to read either.
Or better yet, spend $30 on a rubber mask and get a couple hundred hours out of $10 worth of filters. As a bonus those type of masks are usually N99/N100 grade filters also.
stress all around.
This shows investment banks are scum: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/03/11/where-banks...
It's not so much the getting out, as the not having to do anything - you get 90 seconds of HN time!
Heh... as serious as they may be, the idea of one of those hypothetical ethical issues science fiction authors have written a million almost-but-not-quite-plausible takes on finally becoming real makes me giddy. I suppose it has already happened for certain issues, but nothing so dramatic as considering a simulation conscious!

Then again, it will likely be many years still before that actually comes up.
I cannot begin to understand what point you're trying to make. The person I was replying to was explicitly comparing the potency of GHB to alcohol, both depressants commonly encountered in a highly concentrated form.

Making this about caffeine or any other substance that can be lethal in small amounts seems a non-sequitur.
Interview with Miriah Meyer - Microsoft Faculty Fellow & Data Viz Expert
Yeah, $22k sounds crazy. I'm planning a 3 month South East Asia trip for around €2-3k, can be done for sure...
Just noting if you're new to this you don't have to add a salt, by default password_hash with bcrypt will add a random one to each password.
What 180 on Gitmo? Obama's stance on it has never waivered, congress blocked his attempts to close it.
Off topic, but explain to me the gratuitous use of a French word in the headline. Is this some kind of slur on the French, e.g. the NSA are being so duplicitous they are almost French?
Wikipedia is not a source~
Taiwan is as rich as Japan. I've seen a documentary on Taiwan this week and considering people's fashion style, the high-speed trains and other cultural signs, I was totally convinced that it was a documentary about Japan.
Hum, you could use something like sed -re "s/[Tt]herefore[,]?/\\\Therefore/g" on your .tex before compiling it with the 'therefore' package. This will not allow you to choose which 'therefore' you want replaced though. Then again, if it's just for fun you probably don't care :)
I've done 4 week trips every year, but this year I'm looking at going away for a year or longer.

A question I have: Does anyone have any experience being a landlord while traveling abroad? What's it like?

I was thinking that investing in an apartment before I leave might be a great way for me to get some low-maintenance income while traveling.
Why I should use publish/subscribe in JavaScript?
Since you and threedaymonk both seem to be making a similar argument that makes absolutely no sense to me in context, I'll just point you at my reply to him.
There are a few who stand at odds with the party line, for example during the congressional hearings in the past couple of weeks Senator Tom Udall (D, New Mexico) notably has been very active in discussing NSA programs rather than attacking Snowden's credibility.

https://twitter.com/SenatorTomUdall
It seems like every other issue of Private Eye has something almost exactly like this in their Ad Nauseum column. A lot of marketing companies are stealing ideas from old viral videos and art projects.
Could not agree more. Very good paper!
Scott Hanselman wrote a similar article last year [1]

[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14Oth...
If you really have to reclaim YOUR battery when you come back, that means the swap place has to keep that battery in storage and ready to go (fully charged) for the next time you come back? And they can't re-rent it out.
Aside from the top end A8s with upgraded engines, they get 18MPG city and 28MPG highway. Simply saying that the A8 gets 15-18MPG is deceptive. So, if we are talking range, an A8 will get upwards of 560 miles on a tank.
Lt. Gen Michael Hayden (Ret) was the DIRNSA at the time Russell Tice is alleging these wiretaps occurred.
I feel safer already. /sarcasm How can citizens reverse these sort of intrusive policies?
Love how most games were mainly a one man show back in the 80s. Jordan Mechner, John Carmack could be used as aliases for the games. Btw, I read a very similar article about Doom / sometime ago about the Magical Square Root Implementation In Quake III, another interesting read[1]

[1] http://www.codemaestro.com/reviews/9
Could someone please comment on Foxconn's overall strategy here?

They are trying to take on Apple AND Google/Android AND Amazon AND Microsoft?

With no previous experience in the field?

(I'm sure most of the 3000 hires are for app development - that makes much more sense.)
I'm currently in Singapore and to be honest I can actually smell the wood in the air.
I've went to two pharmacies and couldn't find a mask as they're all sold out.
Battery life is about the least meaningful spec there is, and it's insanely difficult to calculate. That and it's a small company so I'd imagine that'll just open up liability.

They do list the battery as 53.28Wh however. Let's do some back-of-the-envelope.

At 2.0GHz the 4750HQ TDP is 47W. Chipset TDP is 2.7W. SSDs are damn near negligible (typically a few mW idle, less than 1W when active, but they sleep/wake very very fast so they're mostly always idle). I couldn't find a datasheet on their panel, so I'm going to guess the display consumes around 5W at full brightness. RAM maxed out will cost around 3-6W.

Assuming awful power management (or just running the thing full bore), you're looking at a worst case of somewhere around 45m to 1h. Assuming decent power management (5W idle with screen on at less than full brightness) and occasional spikes due to light use you're looking at 8-10h, or 6-8h just to be safe if I was way off about the display. If you're really worried about it, the extra battery is very well priced at $95.

Edit: Nevermind - see a comment above that lists 3-4h of battery life.
arc was invented for hn
How do you get a 6 month tourist visa to Thailand?

I thought you could only get a 30-day visa that's valid for a 6 month period, and spend a maximum of 90 days in Thailand within than 6 month period if you count re-entry. Going for visa runs very four weeks can't be that fun.
Catchy title... ;)
This is indeed true, however there's nothing indicating that those programs have stopped.
I'm utterly baffled then. I've never seen the error reporting do more than take a memory dump and ask me if I want to send it in, there has never been notable waiting.

Also you really want your original file affected when you cut a paragraph with the intent to paste it somewhere else, or when you're doing some analysis and destructively sort the file?
This is why recruiters are jackasses - undercover video
Facebook is like Samwer brothers of US, lame, boring, me-too company
I wonder if the losses Singapore's tourism and medical costs are enough to buy all the Sumatran farms, or at least to require other forms of clearing land.
I also found that part very dramatic as someone who has a GHB prescription for cataplexy. Does the drug have a checkered past? Yes, but a lot of the public sentiment towards it is the result of journalistic histrionics.

For years it was sold over the counter at GNC to body builders because of its impact on prolactin levels in the body, and AFAIK it is the only known substance that mimics natural sleep. It improves REM sleep and stages 3 & 4 of slow-wave sleep.

I myself have one of the few known cases of very very mild cataplexy, so I don't absolutely have to have GHB to function, but for most people who also test positive for the HLA marker DQB1*0602 and have severe cataplexy, GHB is an absolute life saver. These people don't really experience and long term psychological effects as would be implied by the scare words used in the paragraph describing GHB. Yes, it has powerful CNS depressive effects and can be lethal in high doses, but those effects are pretty much only applicable while under the influence of the drug and not after your body has metabolized it and flushed it from the body.
If I remember correctly, the ported game does need a memory extension, which would've been a no-go back then. Wonder how much you would have to cripple the ported effort to fit in in there, if at all possible with the same approach...
That makes no sense what so ever.

Pinging your loopback address just shows that your localhost is still there.

If you were to write a script that instead pulled the local IPv4 address you are getting - that might be a little more sensical?
Yes, he said an insider sent him a coded handwritten message on a basis similar to a one-time pad.

He also said that he could not read most of said message due to misplacing the key-code.

EDIT: My original reply likely butchered terminology, sorry. The relevant audio can be heard verbatim at 1:03:11 in the interview recording.
Interesting probability model used by the NBA to analyze games
I feel that may be high, when you factor how far are charging/swapping stations, and if the driver will run the battery to the full range.

BUT (grammar aside), I think the high margin may be the push for a franchise model for investors for charging/swapping stations. Especially when you consider BMW, and Toyota are both consulting with Tesla, and Elon may be aiming for a more affordable ($40k I vaguely remember hearing) vehicle to add to their lineup.
I'd love to hear some perspective from people doing this with small kids. Almost all of these posts are from people young free and single!
So they would have pulled a page out from FBI's playbook. It would not be surprising.
> 'salt' => password_hash("MySalt",PASSWORD_BCRYPT)]

This is really, really dumb and pointless. In fact it makes absolutely no sense, it tells password_hash to use a bcrypted "MySalt" as a salt.

Not only is there no reason to explicitly provide a salt unless you already have bcrypted passwords in a non-standard format, (in which case you'd pass the existing $salt directly, you wouldn't bcrypt it) this is an inane way to generate one.

If you want to generate your salt by hand, don't do it. If you really, really, really want to, use mcrypt_create_iv.
I ordered one of these things the other day, after quite a bit of research.

Basically, the "catch" with these laptops is an abysmal 3-4 hour battery life. If you're never more than 4 hours away from an outlet, it's perfect for development.
| It's fairly common knowledge in the Apple community

Since at least the PowerPC days.
I think we can help the most by clearly communicating with family and friends what the issues (as we see them) are.

I just spent about 40 minutes crafting a long email that I sent to about 40 family members and close friends detailing why I thought people needed to contact their elected politicians, sign the https://optin.stopwatching.us/ petition, etc.

Seriously, if we can, as individuals, each change several people's minds on this issue, that helps.
nice work... Thanks for contributing!
How Web mail providers leave door open for NSA surveillance
> By the time the 2014 elections roll around, this issue will be all but forgotten by the vast majority of the electorate.

I sure hope you're wrong about that one. It's only a little more than a year away.
Not elected officials like the President. They are exempt from the OPM/USIS investigations.
My MacBook Air fell into the camp smackfu is talking about. Big thread on the Apple website about the problem, no public acknowledgement of it from Apple. However, when I brought my out-of-warranty laptop in, they replaced the faulty parts free of charge. I ended up pleasantly surprised, and will buy Apple again in the future.

Most businesses do everything they can to get out of warranties. Apple seems more like a high value add business to me now, and less a seller of commodities like many of the other computer manufacturers.
The whole site is down, which makes me wonder if they exceeded their bandwidth due to coverage of this. If so, at least the story is getting attention.

Another possibility is that they were advised by council to take it down, but it does no good to speculate.
This is a horrible, convoluted workflow - with good reasons for being that way. Like many I’ve seen graphic designers engage in.

Their tools suck, badly, and are just letting them down. I know the difficulty of replacing those tools is high - but man it needs to be done.
Security clearance involves being wiretapped these days?

And how would that remotely explain Powell, who would have been cleared to the highest levels decades before this program?
bad ass! great job getting this going.
Russia’s ‘SOPA’ Passed By Lawmakers, Site Blocking Begins "In Weeks"
This is pretty bada%%
I remember the BBC's Dirac codec uses wavelets. i don't know how it performs today, no one has adopted it.
The NSA pulls all data going in and out of Google without their permission. Being the man-in-the-middle, they intercept all communications even if encrypted.