skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "terrible user experience" which adds numbers to their impressions statistic each time you encounter it?
This is a story from last October. Why is it being posted now?
Google and Microsoft both take financial hits in 2Q
Google's stumble blamed on decreasing ad revenues and increasing OPEX
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-stumbles-2q-slump-ad-202132021.html

Microsoft's stumble blamed on decreasing PC sales and Surface charge
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-profit-below-estimates-tablet-201717828.htm
U.S. to use "two-man" rule to prevent another embarrassing leak
I tend to assume the reason why we see so much advertising is because they _don't_ make that calculation.
Well, as a molecular biologist I can't say I ever saw cancer in any other way. What's so new about this?

We all know that embryonic, proliferation and stem cell associated pathways like the Wnt pathway and the PI3K pathway commonly are the ones that get out of hand in cancers. We also know that proliferation in single cells is the highest goal and that the uncontrolled division of a single cell (as it probably did when still living alone) leads to problems in higher organisms. If the fail-safes that developed to allow for multicellular organisms fail to prevent the egocentric behaviour of individual cells and a cell reverts back to a "divide as fast as you can"-state, they become what we call cancer cells.

I fail to see the news value in this article.
Make a WordPress Plugin - Setting Up Your Environment
Yes a few users reported issues while trying to update their avatar... I'll have a look at that asap!
Concerning the possibility to send "spam" to someone by setting the email address, we have had no complaints so far. Possibly thanks to selectivity of people who use the site because of the invite-only sign up.
So, to summarize:

1.) There is no other life form in the galaxy
2.) There is, but their probes are undetectable
3.) There is, but the probes hide before we reach maturity
3.) All life forms in the universe are of the same biological age as us (Moore's law)

Did I miss anything?

ad 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications
ad 2.) possible - we should find out soon
ad 3.) unlikely - if there is more than one alien civilization doing this, one of them would not have had the desire to hide from us
ad 4.) looks more and more like the real deal.
Is there any doubt that if the NSA could store 22 petabytes per day that they would do so? That they are limited by practicality to merely snooping through or scanning 22 petabytes per day rather than storing all of it is I think a really minor quibble.
It's a flawed thought, since it's only the date they complete the acquisition on paper i.e. to signal to everyone that it's permanent. This does not forbid you from working with the company for integration purposes, or why would you have such a long time span between announcing you agreed to buy somebody and actually 'doing it'?

In reality you would do a lot of work with the company you're attempting to buy. If for example Skype promised they could change the network to enable wiretapping yet they are unable to, then MSFT could cancel the deal. Or indeed for any of the reasons outlined in the original press release about 'forward-looking statements'.
How Retail Stores Track You Using Your Smartphone
How could that possibly be a good idea for them? More distractions while they're trying to fix shit?
For anyone interested in the history of the Italian mafia, I can't strongly enough reccommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Cosa-Nostra-History-Sicilian-Mafia/dp/... (no affiliate link, I promise!)

It covers, in detail, this incident and talks about how it was a major turning point in people's perception of organised crime in Italy, and the change in attitudes of Italian people towards it.
Yeah, in the summer. In the winter most people that visit think it's warm. 90% of the country has either unbearable summers or unbearable winters or both, so SF wins despite the micro-climates (also if you don't like the microclimates just relocate 5 miles in any direction).

Personally I like seasons, but there is a huge contingent of people for whom some form of California weather is their idea of perfection whether that be LA, San Jose, or San Francisco.
Good thing about decentralized version control systems is that they're decentralized.

I hope github can deal with today's issue without too much trouble, but it's not a major inconvenience to me and the rest of my company's devs. We can just push and pull changes to some convenient in-house server via ssh to sync up our work.
Well, while it is true that stories of deep significance to history and society have their place on HN, what's been posted here is a slideshow. I'd also argue that the news peg...that this is a 21-year anniversary, is a bit of a non sequitur (although to be fair, it's not any less arbitrary than anniversaries based on the decimal system).
The IT Cloud: Silver Linings
I actually own one - I was curious. It is shelfware next to my chumby.
<semi-spoiler>If "self-replicating alien probes" are your thing, I highly recommend Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, an excellent SF classic that is currently on sale on https://www.humblebundle.com/ as part of the Humble eBook Bundle 2</semi-spoiler>
Big f*ng computers.
We did ask a few of our power users to support our post on HN, but did not ask them to comment. I understand that one-word comment don't bring value to the conversation, and I'm sorry about that... But I'm happy to get this opportunity to read your feedback, and reply to it!
I'm just joking. (But who knows, maybe people would take lighter on the downtime if they could see the team working really hard to fix it).
I saw this article, and my knee-jerk reaction was to look for whatever popular fad's proliferation on HN spawned it, but there isn't any, and there's only one erlang article on the home page at the moment, so I guess this is just an actual erlang article.

Seeing that it's actually a month old, perhaps somebody can explain this?

-- When enabled on the fix_alloc allocator, a strategy
for management of fix blocks will be used.

What is the different strategy?
You didn't get his point. The submitted URL doesn't provide useful information, https://status.github.com/messages could have been used instead.

May be when the link was submitted the official information wasn't available. OK, then just wait for something useful because if the site is down and I'm affected I can see that myself, I don't need to read HN.

EDIT: oh, looks like the original comment was edited.
Do they have support for Gmails keyboard commands?
Are you suggesting they are as common in the modern society as they are in a savage one?
Well, because google lied and still lied. People looked the other way when google was caught wifi snooping on innocent people's data, customer and non-customer alike. People looked the other way when google was caught hacking into people's computers to still track them after they turned cookies off. People looked the other way when google changed the TOS out from under them, android users alike, to combine and correlate their data from the various devices and services to super-profile them.
Now google is still lying with a straight face it seems. Snowden's "hands were tied" and he still told the truth. Manning's "hands were tied" and he still told the truth.
Google is still lying through their teeth it seems and was among those parroting the standard line "no direct access" and "never heard of prism". No more trust until they at least come clean. Even now they push for a better way to spin the requests instead of just coming clean.
Bad thing about github is that people tend to use it in a non-decentralized manner. In our case, all of our deploys do a clone from github.
Stuffed Pizza Dough Video Recipe
Thank you for providing a clean itunes link.
The differences are pretty minute. It's boils down to a different default install and most likely a different desktop environment. If you're using the same applications -- and as a web dev, that's quite likely -- it's not that much different than modifying your Windows setup a bit (different start menu, theme maybe, small launcher app). Although those tiny differences matter a lot for people, so it's always worth checking it it, maybe in a virtual machine or a second PC. But switching to Mint really wouldn't change your daily work habits, and the system underneath is virtually identical.

As opposed to e.g. CrunchBang (desktop-wise) or Arch (system/packages)...
Think it is the least we could do.
GitHub's employees are massively distributed. A video + sound stream might not be as interesting as you think.
Let me also add that there is a on going discussion in Italy on the role that italian secret services had in this event.

It seems that there have been some kind of "agreement" between Italy's government and Sicily's mafia which would have resulted in the stop of mafia's attacks to civil targets in change of this attack to Paolo Borsellino.
Agreed.

If you're affected you know, if you're not you don't care.

Your comment is ten minutes old, and the site is back. Not that I noticed the outage.
Are any of those problems substantially more difficult for a computer to handle than they are with a normal car?
Why not? They likely already have a botnet, they didn't make it to DDoS GitHub specifically. Maybe they were annoyed with someone who was using GitHub, or they wanted to prove a point, who knows. All in all, the reason is because they can.
Internet content filtering is the new book banning. My local library filters Hackaday, and lots of other innocuous things. The excuse for banning Hackaday is that it is allegedly a "hacking" website. The content filter is one of those canned IT solutions that governments love to patronize. It's here to keep The Children safe, and because vagrants would obviously come to the library and masturbate if there were no content filter. I guess it works because I've never seen a vagrant masturbating in the library. There is no person at the library who has any direct control over the unbanning of content. Anyone may submit a link to be banned for any reason and it will probably be banned. Getting a ban removed is a more complicated process. I find it ironic that even among librarians who think book banning is abhorrent, there are some who do not bat an eye at their Internet content filter.
That's my problem too. They still seem to be trying to just spin the requests better and not addressing the basic over-reach assumption that everyone's info is up for grabs if there is a "51% confidence" you may be whatever their current rationalization is.
"12:44 UTC We've put mitigation in place that should deflect the attack, and services are recovering. We're continuing to monitor closely." - https://status.github.com/

And it seems to be working for me again not.
Good question!

One reason I like them is that it's easy to pull your hair out trying to figure out why something isn't working without checking an obvious (but not entirely likely) cause.
Don't forget you have a complete copy locally. Throw it in bit bucket and deploy!
Ha! Yeah that'd help alright. :-)
Exactly. Mozilla can't give this kind of info because they don't collect it. They're responsible.
Maybe they would, but I'm sure a bunch of people would also be wondering why they waste their time on putting on a show instead of fixing their core business :P
Six people falsely accused of crimes after errors in Internet data disclosure
The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs that are known to work, iterate on those designs as much as you can to improve them, charge people money for the stuff you build, and just continue doing that.

The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it.

It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.
I basically came here to say this, as that comment stuck out from the article for me. I was thinking, that it must be nice to experiment using students' tuition money. I'm pretty sure the student didn't expect to be part of an experiment when they signed up.
The question is, which spelling do Canadians get?
The _hardware_ stability definitely did, though it has improved since. They became quite dependent on Intel for chipsets when they did that, and at the time Intel chipsets for laptops in particular were of quite poor quality compared to their old PPC chipsets.
I think this is always a confusion point. Prior to the internet "user" and "customer" were pretty much synonymous. Now they can be entirely different. Users get confused when they miss this critical distinction.
I suppose what he/she means is that they are running it like a Mafia.

'was the fact they were "Italian" supposed to count against them?'

Shouldn't it? Specially in an article where uncontacted people, literally, kill people to avoid being contacted?
I know, I know who he is. It's just I am not convinced at all that the examples used are the best (or even good for that matter) in the field of code reuse etc. He's clearly just advertising his products which can be done in more honest ways.
You're probably right about the web site getting the wrong kind of attention from this. I can almost see a government organization doing this instead, either as a public service or after some open information law is passed in reaction to public opinion on NSA surveillance.

The U.S. government might just be bureaucratic and fractured enough.
How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview
Of course it is, look at YouTube it's practically unwatchable now without ad blockers.

Ads in your search results, ads to the left of your video, ads before the video, ads during the video
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that also lead to the seals we see today on a wide variety of products.
Thanks!
Obvious monetization models for such services are:
- affiliation (sell concert tickets, based on your musical preferences, which is based on your activity on the site)
- sell "music influence network" data and/or promotion services to labels / bands
- sell subscriptions to third-party music services to broaden the range of music available on the site, especially for off-line / mobile consumption, or quality of audio
Today, our focus is on building a good platform.

Our last.fm scrobbler was a quick "friday" feature, but I'm happy to investigate this issue with your help if you contact me (adrien at whyd dot com)

Genre-based communities/groups are on our roadmap. We are going to release a genre-based onboarding next week, in order to subscribe to more relevant curators.
Criticisms of these games always include references to casino games, but aren't they more just like arcade games? Most arcade games you have to keep paying to stay alive, also.

As a side note, I'm not sure how seriously one should take an article that is a giant jpeg hosted on download-free-games.com.
I am on the US AppStore and searched for it on my iPhone and found it. But none of the links worked for me.
I used to play bejeweled, the free online version, quite content in the knowledge that it was effectively a Skinner box. I was seriously in the zone of compulsive behaviour there - could play it for hours. But then they started really optimising the visual and aural feedback mechanisms and heavily pushing the money side with bought boosts and such like. At that point it just became a game of how much money are you prepared to waste. Haven't played since.

I'm assuming candy crush is the latest in this line of game?
> In reality, it would take 18,918 days or 51 years for 550 analysts to listen to just one day’s worth of fiber optic data gathered for Tempora.

This sort of statement is so misleading it hurts. It's kind of sad that people are so ignorant of what computers and modern data processing can do, that someone can go around saying this sort of things and not be laughed at.

The analysis of the citation chain is pertinent, though.
The Valley is run almost entirely by the Sicilian Mafia. You knew this, right?
They couldn't possibly abuse him while the service is down...
Sorry, this is really not a coherent comment. I rambled.

It's a fair question though. Despite the "If you don't pay for it…" mantra that people like to spout off, situations like Sparrow and other paid services shutting down tend to worry me. And I know, it's odd, considering Gmail is free and Google as a tendency to shut things down (but I don't see them shutting down Gmail).

I guess the issue is that if I pay for it, I'm investing time and money into something I want to know will stick around. And because I'm a customer, I feel like I'm empowered to believe that. After all, if a company is charging me X amount, I think that charge should be related to keeping themselves in business. I hate the idea of a company that charges not being able to stay afloat because of their low prices. It's not even giving me a choice as a customer to pay more to ensure their service remains.
You can now Uber an ice cream truck
Presumably Google would consider that when calculating the OP's comment of "how much money they make from me".
Giant Mirrors Will Illuminate Norwegian Town
Yes, they took this approach because otherwise it is a pretty monumental effort to create a C++11 std lib from scratch and they didn't have any work done on the compiler side yet.
It has to survive the missiles aimed at it.
Cuts in computer, electronic jobs drive tech sector purge
Maybe the target demographic will become so dependent on this service, that they'll be unable to hurl abuse without it.
Adding a song allows you to add it to one of your playlist, or at least on top of your profile. Liking a song just makes it show up on the "likes" tab of your profile. In both cases, the person who posted the track is notified, and their counters increment.
On the rankings (whyd.com/hot), only "adds" are counted.
Why? It's only in the promotions tab next to all of your opt in ads. What's the difference?
White House silent on renewal of NSA court order
Evolutionary psychology isn't the study of how societies evolve, it's the study of how actual genetic evolution has shaped psychological responses. The claim that women prefer pink because their brains evolved to specialize in trichromacy when gathering fruits should probably not be given too much credence.
"I would assume they have a better quality of life than the majority of the planet"

I'd agree with you that they probably have a more enjoyable day to day experience, however I also would bet that they have an infant mortality rate that is astronomical even by 3rd world standards. And that they have an average life expectancy which isn't hard to beat in the 3rd world. I'm not saying that these 2 things justify us forcing contact with them, just that it is hard for someone to justify that lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy are always positive things for our species to strive for. Its not just an issue of culture.
I'll second LWN, and have been a subscriber for years.
One of the VLC devs threw a hissy fit and had it taken down because "muh GPL"
Whyd.com supports the https protocol, feel free to use it.
> Yes, and it's a problem! We should be doing everything we can so that people finally STOP DYING.

There is a difference between dying as a result of problems in our society and dying as the inevitable result of having been born. Societies generally have fix their own issues, other people cannot do it for them. As outsiders who know nothing of the society of the people living on this island, we cannot and should not attempt to change their society to a way we feel more appropriate, that is literally genocide.
Italian mafia tested remotely controlled aircraft with bombs in the early 1990s
It was a DDoS attack. Nothing to do with their infrastructure.
Google’s Chrome App Launcher is now live for Windows users
No, I doubt it. Studio has features that don't exist in GCC/clang and there is a lot of support for older code/systems that make the newer compilers incompatible for some uses. It's just a shortcut to reuse the "easy" reusable part and focus on the compiler.
Alright, perhaps ordinary web cams on the faces of the employees involved? Just seeing the hard work and stress in their eyes would be pretty soothing. That might be an idea for any site: "We're currently down, but here are the faces in real-time of our engineers trying to fix it".
Amazing post.

I was talking to my colleague not an hour ago about how deep technology goes, and what sort of mentality we have. It occurred to me that under normal circumstances when people talk about a "big number" they mean a number that has a large whole-part (millions, billions, trillions etc.). Talk to a computer scientist and a big number is defined as how many significant digits are present (no matter where the decimal point is, milli, micro and nano are still big numbers to us). It's amazing how being entrenched in technology changes your perspective of the world - even the small things can be complex.
That's true, it's a problem when you depend on having the repository at a specific location or depend on something that's not in the repo, like wiki or issue tracking, as mentioned in the other comments.

I just wanted to express my appreciation that github being down is not as big an issue for most people as it would be if github was cvshub or svnhub. :-)
Yup, been running it in prod for at least 2 weeks. Old news.
What are the big data opportunities for the car industry?
The reminder still stands.
> The "hacker" in "hacker news" has little to do with any traditional meaning of hacker.

Well, the _traditional_ meaning would largely predate the availability of Linux, anyway...
Its also on sale on steam at the moment. 34% off.
The issue is not so much that the low-level drivers don't exist (although they are unmaintained afaik), but rather that there is almost no software available for Linux which supports real multitouch gestures, and certainly none (I'd love to be proven wrong about this) which supports finger-tracking as OS X does.

I rely on it heavily for window management and navigation, and the Linux community is sorely lacking in this department atm.
Everyone who reads a controversial book on the internet can be (will be) tracked. Poor excuse for samizdat.
Sad tradition - being down once a month. Oh, come on guys!
there's way more radiation outside earth's magnetic field, and then even more outside the solar system - I don't think the ISS is a particularly good example.

Hmm, perhaps you're more right on a second reading - "as a testbed for developing solutions" might work.
You might have a point there :)
It's a good thing git is a distributed system. In such cases, people can just switch to a different remote and push their branches there (with some care, of course).
These 5 Tactics Are Not Dead
Shouldn't it be possible to build stations where self-driving trucks can easily stop, and drivers can take over for the "last mile"? This eliminates the dangerous, boring part, allows drivers much more stable lives, but doesn't eliminate them entirely
She was never a "science news writer." Her column was about the intersection of internet and pop culture. The link title is incorrect in it's editorializing.
Any plans to add other cryptocurrencies? Litecoin etc?
Lots of people who have died from scurvy would like to debate that with you.
What does this even mean? Talking in platitudes about health and life are all fine and dandy, and yet the in US there are tremendous issues with poverty, health care access, and control of one's own body. Societies do things very differently even if they say they promote life or health, but that kind if wishy washy dialog is useless, what matters are the details.
Watch the Atlas 5 launch LIVE (right now)