skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you recognize that, though? Your heuristic can't be "promotes comments with many downvotes" because the problem at hand is bad comments with many upvotes. If your heuristic is "promotes comments that others don't promote", how do you know you're not punishing someone for a minority viewpoint?

If the plan is for you to personally investigate promoters' promoting habits and make the call to take away the right, then I guess that would work but I don't know how it would scale. My skepticism is based on the idea that this could be done automatically.
This writer is trying to say that positive economics is flawed because of the flaws of normative economics.

It is possible to make a well-constructed argument that positive economics is deeply flawed, but this article does not make that argument.

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/12/difference-betwee...
Here’s what can go wrong when the gov't builds a huge database about Americans
I wish I had that when I was a kid!
Although it's not generally their style, I wouldn't rule Apple out of a grab for the budget sector. Rumours concerning a low end, plastic iPhone have been gaining momentum for some time now and they already practically give away the previous generation spec'd phones.
Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works Spreads Startup Religion in Beijing
Air France isn't major enough for you?

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 )
Thanks, I see :) My comment wasn't particularly relevant.
"Unicode assigns the same number to the character."

Extremely close but not quite right for some weird corner cases. There's either a cool feature or hideous bug in the unicode design, depends how you look at it, that lets you compose multiple unicode codes together into one glyph. So you can say, "Gimme the code for A with a bar over it" or "Gimme the code for A, now gimme the code for put a bar over the last glyph". Even worse you can stack compose characters, so you can write "A with circle on top and squiggly underneath" at least five different ways in binary that should be rendered visually identical.

There is the one true normalization technique that most people use to convert what they consider poor unicode grammar into a standard form. Some people don't use it of course. And anytime you give users freeform input who knows what kind of crud they'll feed you. So you can never really assume any unicode string is normalized unless you personally normalized it yourself. Even then theoretically two normalized strings, concatenated, might or might not be normalized anymore (although this is often not much of a problem). And this strikes substring manipulation too.

A fun source of buffer overflows is normalization can shrink OR EXPAND a unicode string, in theory. So if you use one of those languages without variable length strings, look out. Or if the language tries to take care of it for you, this leads to weird memory fragmentation. Maybe a DOS/DDOS opportunity?

Which leads to philosophical argument you must decide in your code, if two bitstreams don't match, but you get matching glyph renderings, from the program's point of view are they a match or not? Depends if what your program is trying to do I guess. Most languages have a library to handle this. Writing your own unicode handler functions is a "here be dragons" moment.

Composing characters are also a fun source of swear words if you're trying to count the number of characters in a file. Something that renders literally identically will have an identical number of characters but somewhat varying number of bytes.

Other fun philosophical arguments are if you read in a un-normalized string and output a normalized string have you changed the string? Well, both no, and yes. I'm sure there's crypto steagongraphy implications.

Google for "unicode normalization form nfc" and stuff like that.

The first page I found with a good faq was:

http://www.macchiato.com/unicode/nfc-faq
I love what Mozilla is trying to accomplish with Firefox OS. I hope it succeeds, and I don't want to be negative. But I'm not convinced about this part:

> Firefox OS offers the best cost-benefit ratio once you think about how much performance you have against your hardware specs. If you pick the same low-end hardware with Android or Firefox OS, Android will have a worse experience, not because Android is broken in any way, Android is great but because there are more things going on on Android than on Firefox OS. Firefox OS is just a tiny hal, gecko and gaia, while Android has a VM and lots of other things going on.

Let's look at some of the components that a modern mobile OS needs:

* Kernel

* Hardware abstraction layer

* OpenGL ES implementation and compositor

* 2D vector graphics API

* UI toolkit

Android and Firefox OS both also have a VM to run managed code, along with a JIT compiler. Android's VM, Dalvik, was specifically designed to be memory efficient in the case where several apps are running as separate Unix processes. Is the same true of SpiderMonkey?

So Android and Firefox OS share many of the same types of fundamental components, and in some cases, the same components (the kernel, some aspects of the HAL). But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add:

* Markup language processor and layout engine designed for hypertext documents, not UIs

* Parser for a poorly designed programming language (JS), and advanced JIT optimizations that in effect extract the latent static types from a dynamically typed language. By contrast, Dalvik accepts bytecode as input, and the program is already statically typed, so the JIT compiler can be much simpler

* Hacks on top to turn this combination of hypertext markup language and poorly designed programming language into a tolerable UI toolkit and application platform

So how can you say that Firefox OS is more resource-efficient than Android? Perhaps the Android platform developers have gotten sloppy lately, since they're primarily concerned about high-end phones. But that can be remedied. What matters is that, as far as I can tell, the Android platform was designed for efficiency, while the Web platform was not.

I hesitate to bash the Web platform, because for better or worse, it seems to be the best way of achieving Mozilla's mission, and I believe social ends outweigh technical means. But I believe I have accurately described the current reality.
AF447 crashed 2009 on its way from Rio to Paris. Co-Pilot error, wiped out all 228 onboard.

Armchair experts tallyho!
Porting to Python 3 — Free book available online
HTTP 2.0
Memcache is probably faster. But not as fast as writing data to /dev/null.
Finland. It's not paradise, but I had a choice to stay in the UK or move. I moved and have settled here quite well.
> I note that checked bags cannot block passengers from escaping an aircraft.

Perhaps not, but people standing in the aisle reaching to get them, dropped bags people trip over and block the aisle, etc do.
Yea! But when do we get drains for Elastic Load Balancers?
Actually, almost all of them are available on Android and on Desktop.

Interestingly, while you seem to consider that this is a weak point of Firefox, we (Mozilla) did this on purpose and we consider this one of the strongest points of the platform: _no vendor lock-in_. If you write an application for FirefoxOS, we do not place any obstacle that can prevent the developer from distributing the application on other devices/OSes or that can prevent the user from using it on their other devices/OSes.

As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all. We are now attempting to bring the same degree of freedom to mobile. And yes, this is going to be quite a fight, but if you want to help us, that will be great :)
But with this article (and I somewhat agree with programming in general), you have to become an expert at running before you can get really good at walking. Then you can start to learn about the finer points of the crawling maneuver, and when to apply it.
The People Making Real Money On Bitcoin
FlightAware has radar data chronicling the crash: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/...

The NY Times made a nice graph with it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-u...
Because each driver is not responsible for 300 lives in their cars. That's why there is so much attention to plane crashes. It doesn't kill one person at a time.

Besides, it's incredible such an accident happen when the weather is perfect, there is no wind, it's not at night, the plane is working just fine, and it's just a couple of pilots who don't know what they are doing because they don't know how to land a plan manually since they are used to pressing buttons the whole time and relyong on autopilot. That's what the news is about.

Just like the AF447 crash between Rio and Paris: Pilots incompetence at its best.
For those who haven't traveled to the big apple recently: the trash is still piled waist or chest-high on the street, albeit in trash bags. Every time I go back it seems to be trash day, but maybe that's a coincidence. Either way, DC smells like cherry blossoms and NYC smells like hot garbage.
Checked baggage is not accessible from within the cabin.
I've never heard the term "frequency-modulate" applied to software, and Wikipedia only knows about the radio kind of modulation. Can you please explain what this is?
My go to solution to this problem, back when I needed one, was as soon as the girl in question asked "what do you do?" I'd reply directly with "I'm a computer programmer - what do you do?" and should they say they are a musician or whatever I'd jovially reply instantly with "Oh well, I guess we have nothing in common then", and pretend that the conversation was over. They were always very interested to talk then, and the conversation was firmly on a flirtatious footing.

Writing this now, I realise that there is an corner case I hadn't covered in this plan. Solving it is left as an exercise to the reader, but I'd suggest something along the lines of "Emacs or vi?"
He has some great stuff on the site, and I'm thinking of using Tangle to help teach math, but I'm wondering if letting people drag numbers is really so helpful?
I can't say that I have used the Firefox OS simulator extensively but I have been fiddling around with it a little bit and a lot of stuff didn't seem to work for me at least (like landscape mode, buttons in the notification menu, scroll seem to behave very weird in lists and/or gets stuck quite often resulting in me accidentally clicking on stuff, strange text formatting so that text gets printed outside of the screen, it crashes when I turn on WIFI, can't seem to change screen resolution, etc.). So "the best" might be pushing it, especially compared to the Windows Phone emulator and tools which are really, really great (but sadly won't be used by most mobile developers for obvious reasons :) ).

However I am excited to see where Firefox OS might be heading even though I think they will have a though time fighting it out with other potential "third spot" platforms for starters.
1.1 is still the b2g18 branch, so no asm.js. 1.2 will be the version that pulls from master (gecko 26 I think?) and will have asm.js.
Show HN: Share your location using Longitude.me
I think the video is TL;DR for some folks. I wish they'd dropped more information about the software the artist wrote. Overall, I thought it was an interesting piece.
The article's statement is more qualified. "the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America since November 2001"
Rogue Employee Fired for Turning Game Network Into Bitcoin Mining Colony
Essentially yes. There's also some tweaking the CSS pointer-events property on those canvases to allow mouse events to fall through when you're not hovered over 3D content.

I envision most people will want to position their 3D objects relative to some 2D element like a div.
The current limit (0x10FFFF) is the artificial restriction on UTF-8 to match UTF-16, not the upper bound. UTF-8 supports 2^31 code points with it's current encoding. So nothing needs to change until Unicode consists of 2.1 billion code points or so.

In my mind that will only happen as a result of extreme carelessness.
The Importance of Registration Rights In Financing
The problem is that the selves bleed into each-other. For instance, making up a completely different city to claim you live in while still talking to other people from your own city is hard.

If the NSA spots half a dozen people on Crypto-Reddit's /r/boston who claim to be from San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Chicago, rural Tennessee, and Miami respectively, then it knows it has probably found six actual Bostonians.

Individuals are in many ways an expression of our context. To remove all information leakage that would tell what our context is or, more simply, who we are, you basically have to remove the person entirely. Even 4chan-grade anonymity won't cut it, since writing style and narrative threading can be used to extract some sense of pseudonymity from even a /b/ thread.
Show HN: Do you know what is happening in your web app right now?
Hi everyone,

we are very excited of this idea - simple web based event logger used for web developers. It was suggested us from one of our previous customers and now we are using it for our own purposes.

We think it could be also valuable for other web developers to be informed about all important events in one place with the ability to be alerted with SMS/email/push notifications in the case of urgent events.

Right now, we have published simple MVP. It would be very nice of you, if you have a look at it. Any feedback is very appreciated. Thanks!

http://reltrack.com
I don't think he meant to "involve the government." I do agree with his sentiment though, an inexperienced programmer should not be allowed to write critical software.

This is, of course, very difficult to implement in practice.
I think Firefox OS has potentially huge geek (read: early adopter) appeal, which Blackberry and Windows Mobile do not have - they are dead. Tizen, Jolla, and others are just obscure specks.

I am rooting for Firefox OS to be a serious contender within a couple of years. I think it has a strong chance to be #3. Likewise I don't think it has any chance whatsoever of taking the #1 or #2 spots - those are going to stay as they are for many years to come.
It makes trouble for us that DO use a "peso" as official currency.

In our countries, the US dollar is normally written as U$S, U$, or US$.
Show HN: Better SQL group by date
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Yea, I obviously put too much effort in to investigating this issue.
Right, but it's much less of a leap of faith, IMHO. Besides, if you turn off optimisations you can be reasonably sure the compiler didn't do something unintended.
Lumail - Console Mail Client with Lua scripting
> And, just as importantly, can joe/jane user do it?

Irrelevant as those users will not care and just punch in their credit card if asked.
He's an avid Yggdrasil user.

As an aside, I miss some of the raw diversity that was present in the old Linux distros. Slackware was my drug of choice due to its steadfastly BSD flavor. I guess Slackware is still around, but have no idea what its status is and whether Patrick ever moved it over to system v-ish convention in order to be more like other Linux distros. I guess that distinction is even a bit anachronistic given all the fancy changes to the way init is done nowadays.
Kroger agrees to acquire Harris Teeter for $2.5B
It looks like a great app and something I'd use (though the majority of content available likely to be Japanese?).

The only other down-side I can see off the bat is that it runs only on Windows machines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P)

Anyone aware of an OSX version?
The devices need to have a story.

When normal people buy a mobile, many choose a specific model, because:

- how it looks

- certain persons they know the same model

- there is a specific set of apps they want to have

- how the battery holds

- for whatever reason they want to have a contract and have a limited set to choose from, which fall anyway under the previous points

The question is how to bring these persons to buy a FirefoxOS mobile.

Sure a few geeks will buy them, but will it be enough quantity to keep the operators selling them?
Tangle - the simplest solution to avoid frustration from tangled earphones.
So you would have preferred the pilot author make different uninformed, speculative claims about the cause of the crash? That's the whole point: no one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet
Probably not realistic for most. Although a relay might be a better idea.
Thanks! I just love Monster Energy :D
BitTorrent over I2P exists (and is popular). A torrent client is bundled out of the box. A custom spec exists for this also[1].

As for Tor.. Tor and BitTorrent do not mix; the bandwidth is not available (BitTorrent chokes Tor relays due to model used between them) as well as the amount of data which can be pushed overall. For the most part (though this would not be relevant to a formal BitTorrent over Tor design), BitTorrent is not anonymous as most intend over Tor[2].

[1] http://www.i2p2.de/bittorrent.html

[2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-go...
EBay for the Black Market, only on Tor
A link to the GitHub source: https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov

(The article buries the link to the page with the link: https://www.healthcare.gov/developers )
Most countries just have different keyboards so they don't need any dead keys. Look to the right of P/L http://www.danielschlaug.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011...
Patrick Smith wrote the "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.com for 10 years, ending last year. His writing was always very insightful and very entertaining at the same time.

One of my favorites: http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the-exploding-to...

It seems he came back to slate.com as a one-time thing, but you can read his archived work at Salon and at www.askthepilot.com. He seems to have a book as well now.
Tried to sign up and got the same message no matter what email/password I use: " Invalid email or password. "
For me a device without native apps is a no go.

I already have a browser and for the looks of it, FirefoxOS still needs some performance tuning to reach the level of throw away Android and Windows phones.
"Don't read the design doc, it's too complicated. Instead read this cutpaste!"

The single "lock free" idlep looks like it's just moved the futex contention elsewhere. This will almost certainly bounce like crazy on a many-cored system. Would be interested to see benchmarks of the new design before considering it somehow better.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing!

(Now we just need one for Oracle, DB2, and Sybase...)
Did you read this article? And if so, do you have any more well thought out arguments against that author's point? His whole point is that this type of landing is not uncommon and there is little reason at this point that it had anything to do with the pilot's experience. It's still possible, yes, but you're making statements that indicate you understand neither the article nor the comments to which your are responding. People are explaining why there is a media frenzy around the accident, not why it's okay. Trolling, at its best.
Xen 4.3.0 is live Go get it
When I lived in DC I commuted from Huntington to Foggy Bottom. That was roughly 40 mins, with 30 min on the train and 5 minutes on each side for getting to the train station and then from the train station to work. However, I could have rented in Foggy Bottom, 500sq/ft for $1600/mo and reduced my commute to a 5 minute walk. I guess if your willing to live in a box or a box in a basement you can reduce your commute most places.
Is there lossless compression encoding like PForDelta but for floats/doubles?
This should be a blog post in itself.
NYC's street grid was made with no space for alleys. As a result, the vast majority of the city has no place to put their trash out for pickup except on the sidewalk. The commercial areas are a bit better because the high-rises have trash storage and direct pickup.

Trash pickup days are two-three times per week, but are staggered by address (blocks or something bigger). So there is always some garbage somewhere except the weekends.

As an aside, DC smells like armpits and cherry blossoms.
Kit FUI: IMDb-like library of fake user interfaces
Quantifying and reducing user frustration
Because each driver is not responsible for 300 lives in their cars. That's why there is so much attention to plane crashes. It doesn't kill one person at a time.

Right.. and this crash only killed 2 people. Perhaps one if the reports of the girl being hit by a rescue vehicle are believed; so what's your point? The real story is just how better aircraft safety has come over the years. This same accident years ago could very well have killed everyone aboard.

Just like the AF447 crash between Rio and Paris: Pilots incompetence at its best.

...and a week after this accident everyone was blaming the weird weather that happens at the equator for the crash. The point is that everyone is speculating, even you, that this this accident is the pilot's fault, but more often than not it's found to be a combination of mechanical failure and the pilot not being able to respond to it quickly enough -- which just so happens to be the official cause of AF447 crashing in 2009.
Someone below noted already that grapheme clusters are, at least for dealing with humans, a much better thing to talk about than bytes or abstract characters (code points). The statement "Unicode assigns the same number to the character." was indeed correct, though. It's just that character is such an overloaded word (meaning either byte, code point or grapheme); but for Unicode at least it is synonymous with code point.
Plus all other mobile OS allow for the use of pure native code if you really need to go full performance, not so with FirefoxOS.
> forget to eat for hours.... Then I'd get hunger pangs...

This is a typical symptom of impaired blood sugar control. If you need four meals a day to keep the hunger pangs away, you're on the road to type 2 diabetes. With a healthy metabolism, you can go all day without eating, with no discomfort and no loss of function (so long as you've been eating well in prior days).

> I'm about a month into this new regime and I'm never going back.

Study after study says that calorie counting diets work great for the first several months, up to a year.

And then by year five, only a tiny fraction of people are still doing it, and the rest have gained back all their weight and then some.

Maybe you will beat the odds. I do think that many HN readers are more likely than the general population to succeed this way -- geeks are better at living inside number-based systems of rules. Good luck.
It worked for me on mobile safari. It's actually a nice sign up process - I was immediately directed to a dashboard.
Whose? The Voice's. The ultimate truth who's always right. Wouldn't that be convenient? I'm sure if Rap Genius is going to be bigger than Google and Facebook (combined, obviously), they call pull that off.
I must admit that I don't fully do TDD, but sometimes it helps me getting my tests out first, so that I can "figure out" what to do in my real code whilst running the tests.

I see the return values of certain functions and computations, and while debugging my failing test, I can see a path to the solution I need.

Once the test succeeds, it's time to clean up the ugly code and refactor it into clean subsections, be it functions or classes.

So yeah, TDD is a great tool.
One of many in my toolbox.
This is cool. Please hammer home the C&C nostalgia - we all love it.
Really hard to read the text, but really nice homepage.