skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As for fixing famine, that I have no clue where to start.

Whilst there will always be localised crop failures and unlucky weather, true famine requires incompetent government; historically, either no effective government (through war or some other circumstance) or a government able and willing to enforce agricultural insanity. Peoples who have been farming for generations know about crop failure and unlucky weather; incompetent government is just plain stupid.

Mao's famine, for example, despite the constant claims that it was really bad weather, was an endless cycle of stupid agricultural decisions, totalitarian enforcement of stupid decisions, a horrifically useless harvest reporting scheme, massive movement of people, refusal to give people stored food as they were starving, efforts to save face internationally, on and on in a perfect storm of government created famine.

North Korean famine of the nineties; whilst it's hard to get data on government policy at the time, it seems that there was a move to implement utterly inappropriate terrace farming, which was subsequently disrupted (or indeed, washed away) by pretty normal rains, rendering those terraces useless and also causing new flooding (as the terraced fields use to be water absorbers and rain diffusers).

Ethiopian famine of the eighties; civil war going on.

Soviet famine of 1947; an awful lot like Mao's famine.

On and on. Certainly in modern times; obviously there's a lot less explanation of the causes as one goes further back, and it is in the nature of incompetent government to blame the weather.

I suppose what I'm saying is that to prevent famine, we need competent government.
Java as a poorly typed language along with C and C++? Wow. Java's type system isn't "flexible", but its far away from unsafe.
He was caught bang to rights with company property how is that different to a shop worker getting caught with some of the shops goods
I am sure a lot of it is tape. IBM sells a 900 PB tape library [1]. They could store the actual phone calls on tape, and then only put the necessary metadata for finding it on hard drives.

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts3500/
I couldn't tell what he was mad about, his premise seems to be an iPhone is not able to hold enough Goog-kool Aid for long trips in the car or something.

> I have found myself using more and more Google apps on my iPhone over the past 18 months or so. Google Maps ... Gmail ... Chrome ... voice search through Google’s search app ... Google's services are not only much more powerful but also very neatly integrated. The amazing Google Now is the best example for that.

> ... real progress can only be made in Internet-based services that integrate seamlessly with a smartphone OS. Google’s superiority in information services and Android’s general openness are perfect for that.
The numerous flaws with JavaScript (the programming language) are well-known and well-documented. A few search engine searches should bring up ample information.

As for its "greatest flaw", I think that may be the JavaScript community, and the general attitudes within it.

There is, unfortunately, a very high degree of ignorance within the JavaScript community. There are far too many JavaScript programmers who only know JavaScript, or an equally-horrid language like PHP. Having such a limited world view, they don't realize how inherently bad their tools are, and they don't realize how much better they could be.

This ignorance has many side-effects. One big one is that we see a near-complete lack of improvement of the language itself. Any changes that have happened never really address any of the serious flaws with the language.

Another side-effect is that we see JavaScript used in ways that it shouldn't be used, in places that it shouldn't be used. Large browser-based applications and server-side applications (of any size) are two good examples. Asm.js is another. Emscripten is yet another.

There are various other issues with the community, their attitude, and their ignorance, too. We could go on for a very long time about this.

The JavaScript community ends up earning a lot of animosity, if not outright scorn, from those developers who have experience with many programming languages, and who have spent years, if not decades, developing production-grade software in a much more sensible, proper manner.

I don't think that anyone would really care if JavaScript users used it solely as a hobby. But the moment they try to use it professionally, for real-world software systems, they'd better be prepared to defend themselves and their technological choices. They can't bring their amateurish programming language and ignorance to the table and not expect to be treated harshly.
If I am not mistaken you mean "steganography" and not "stenography" as the latter is the person(s) that transcribe in a courtroom. I have never seen a spell check that had the word steganography in it though.
Pretty cool. Now imagine the tools the NSA has, live satellite feeds and hi-res cameras all over the US and the world with a bunch of Diet Coke drinking zombies clicking, zooming and panning all day long.
It seems odd they'd take this approach as opposed to manual processing of the output tiles.
Ruby/Perl/Python...which one out of the three doesn't belong? I mean, Ruby and Python are definitely comparable, but Perl is meant for something else entirely.

>It's pretty rare that you can't solve a problem in one of them, even if when it's not the best tool for the job.

All of these (and most other) languages are Turing complete, so what does this even mean? I can solve any problem in assembly code also.
actually this is the next step for us, we just started to work on it.
I don't know from which world you are sucking oxygen from, but many employers don't care about open source. All they expect from their programmers is to create applications and in return will pay in some money in the bank at a mutually agreed frequency. The understanding in this relationship is that the code is a business asset.
I have several, but I didn't know Androids had offline Maps capability. Also, is it possible to use GPS without an active cellphone account with a carrier?
"Here Carmack is basically criticizing NASA for not taking enough risks [...]"

I understand your point, but I think it's important to take this in the context of what type of risk is being discussed (i.e., payload-only).

"We got to the point, where, we were scraping by, I mean, we had an operating profit, but it was doing contract work for other people, and I reached the conclusion that we just weren't going to get where we needed to go with that.

There's this tempting thought, that, if you work for contracts people, and you pick the right contracts, you'll be developing things that you wanted to develop anyways, that it will help you towards your goal. [...] It wasn't working for us. We were keeping the lights on, we were building rockets, but they weren't the tasks, the things that we needed to do."

That was about 2 years ago. They got side-tracked. They moved away from their core competency of what they needed to do, and started taking on outside work for what they thought would supplement their efforts, but it ended up moving them away from where they needed to be, and the added process requirements, as John said, "[...] it definitely slowed us down."

Clearly, when you go into human spaceflight mode, you are going to want to have a lot of well-defined, rigorous process in place. However, they were dealing in payload-only scenarios at this point, with entities that knew the "at risk" status of the launches. In John's words:

"They were sort of like, 'at your own risk'... you can put 'em up, you might get your payload back, but there's a good chance we're gonna crash. [...] They knew it was at-risk, and we didn't take their money when we didn't make a successful flight."

Given what they were doing (i.e., payload-only), this is the context in which he was saying that, "[...] NASA loves seeing all this stuff, it gives everybody that's contracting a good set of warm fuzzies to get stuff you hold in your hands on the engineering documents [...]"

I do not know this as fact here, as I am speculating, but it is possible that they were simply in the mode of iterating to their best ability, with the concept of operations being, "Let's rapidly prove what we can do in the payload launch and recovery area, and once we get funding, we can scale up the process and procedure aspects required for human spaceflight."

It would be interesting to hear John's comments on this topic, for sure... but in summary, from the context of his comments, I think his line of reasoning was perhaps, "Why are we taking on all of this contract work and getting slowed down in process for payload-only scenarios, when we could be building, launching, iterating and learning?"
Ask HN: You're a growing startup. What's your internal social network tool?
I have been longing for a really lean, simple social network tool which provides a basic people directory (and profiles), Yammer-style news feed for chatter and most importantly article and link sharing (but >good< article sharing, i.e. if you want to dig back to find something shared in the past or filter shares by tags, you can).
If you take the awful step of naming things, comprehensions are easy enough to chain. That is (in untested python...)

parts=s.split('+')
keep=(s for s in parts if s)
ints=(int(s) for s in keep)
sum(ints)

Hiding the middle steps there in a function is easy enough.

That split returns a list, but the other steps are lazy.
also the things cost pennies! For example the ATMEGA328 will run you a grand total of $2.88 in a quantity of 1.
Great that it can support Chrome on Android for analysing mobile sites.
Not really. Some stenches bother you less due to it, but they still bother you.

Also, who said people found the smell of a sweaty human unpleasant in first contant (before olfactory fatigue)?

This pressuposes an essential "badness" of the smell, regardless of if someone perceives it as bad or not. Where would this "badness" essense lie?
Its modern to store your data at NSA?
I'm not sure that Rust is really a good example. While promising, the language itself and its standard library are still immature and subject to a huge amount of disruptive change on an ongoing basis.

I've had some experimental code I wrote in Rust become essentially unusable after only a few months due to significant language and standard library changes. I sure hope that somebody wouldn't spend time on a PostgreSQL library for it until the language itself becomes more stable. They'd be wasting a lot of time and effort if they did try to write such a library now.
That depends on the person donating. if the Person as a $10 budget but only flattr's 2 project then each project would be $4.5

but if they flattr'ed 10 projects each project would only get $0.9
‘Encryption is a human right’: Wikipedia aims to lock out NSA
Because with map you can use any function and sum maps __add__. It also illustrates passing functions as arguments.

More subtly, a generator (or list comprehension) implies the order in which the results are generated and an implicit but observable changing state. If I'm trying to write (or, at least, express, since we are talking about Python) parallelism, map would be a better choice.
The HUD does not display/inject properly on our JS web app wunderlist. Wouldn't it make sense that the HUD controls existed outside the scope of the page's DOM? e.g. available in the [wtf] extension popover itself or as context menu items? Or as a dev tools tab?
I really want to test drive this! :)
I've been running the iOS 7 betas on my iPhone 4 (the oldest generation that iOS 7 will support). It definitely disables some of the features: a lot of the transparency is gone, the parallax is gone, and it's missing a lot of features like Siri and stuff. In beta 1, the performance was terrible, but it's gotten much better recently.
> you could just do that without the porn.

I think the idea is that it's something people naturally keep hidden, so it doesn't look suspicious to have handed to someone n a USB drive or sent privately. There's not really much suspicious about people hiding porn.
What I mean is:

We also need to start getting rid of the root of the problem, not only try to fight some symptoms (patching holes is OK for the short term).
Try arrow keys to pan, Shift to zoom in, and Ctrl to zoom out. Makes me feel like a super spy!
> Before people drank soda, they mostly drank beer (or other alcohol). Soda is the non-alcoholic replacement.

Didn't people historically drink alcoholic beverages because of alcohol's antiseptic properties? (Oddly enough, I can't find much reference to this hypothesis in Wikipedia.)

Soda appears to fulfill the need for cold, sugary, flavoured drinks.
Immediately bought it. Exactly what I need in a big French city where I would NOT like to leave a fixed mount on my bicycle anywhere in the city. Flexible, works with every phone model, small - I can transport it in my pocket when going out late so when night comes I can use my phone as a light, it has a fair price.

I tried already the Breffo Spider (breffo.com) but it broke
after a month of use and it was more expensive.

So I am very curious how this mount will work and how long it will last.
There's a book called "Blackout" with that exact plot. I thought it was good written and the scenario not too impossible.
But on a larger scale, I think it's equally likely that we will either become spacefaring species, or destroy ourselves - just because we are not at a brink of a Nuclear War, as long as the stockpiles of nukes exist there is always a chance of that happening. Or that we will deplete our resources before reaching deep-space travel.
Strange, it crashes my FF every time.
we deeply encourage any kind of forking of this project. have fun break rebuild!
Please be more explicit. What do you call cause, and what do you call sympton?
See also: snoopy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsn7_4qUdwk&feature=youtu.be
Yes banks tend to be considered CNI (critical national infrastructure)

the The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (as amended 1994 and 1996) seem to indicate that financial institutions are protected computers

"intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access" which this guy did.
Are you working? If not, pick a language you can get work in, work that you want to do. Even if you are in school, at some point you won't be, and you will want to have projects in your portfolio, and skills you can leverage to get work.

Other languages will be around for later. You can learn Lisp while working in python , but knowing lisp probably won't get you the freedom to master python after work.
Working with satellite data I can tell you that the maximum resolution data you are likely to get from a satellite is 0.25m resolution (i.e. a pixel is the size of a car wheel).

And that's talking about likely military satellites - the public are lucky to get hold of 0.5m resolution.

Also, clouds get in the way. A lot.

For super high resolution imaginary like you are talking about, you need something like the ARGOS system [1].

This image was made by a slowly automatically rotating camera, but the ARGOS system seems to use a whole bunch of high resolution cameras, like a insects eye.

The interesting thing about the ARGOS demo on NPR was the automatic object tracking. The system can track cars, and people, as they move around. You could go back through the data to follow a guy back to his house after he is identified as planting a bomb. Or more HN, posting something from an internet cafe.

I really think that, as technology makes pervasive surveillance possible, we need laws to explicitly limit what the state or companies can do, at least domestically.

It supprises me that people are so much more upset about the NSA gathering data, given that they willingly gave it to ad networks that want to use it to make bad decisions. The highest cost google ads are for loans, insurance, and other services where the provider makes more money if the user makes an inappropriate choice. Imagine if google put a googleX ARGOS on it's Loon baloons, and found some way to monetize it. We really need laws in place to stop anyone doing that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA <- skip to about 1:30
The article also mentions that Weev exploited a security hole in AT&T's servers; a complete misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the truth.
Perhaps the real leaker here is Tim Clemente, and not Ed Snowden? How many adversaries adapted their communications to avoid the sources and methods Clemente revealed? .. dozens?
Heh, I was going to post the Thomas the tank engine shot.

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=60.3,...

There is another train on the track.

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=-127....

Here is a Ferrari (California I think) for anyone interested. The amount of details you can pick up is pretty amazing.
Someone tried making their own clone, with a better interface and gameplay in the direction they wanted it to go. It's hard to replicate the amount of effort that has gone into DF.

http://www.goblincamp.com/
The Question is, do you really want a "social network" for your startup? If yes, then Why?
There are many tools out there which you can use to connect to your co-founders and co-workers. Like:
* HipChat for private chatrooms.
* Asana or Trello for assigning Tasks and checking on progress.

Or to make things simpler, you can just create a private group on Facebook, and add your team members.
On Design Driving Everything
Already being done. Watch more carefully ;) J/K
agreed, although most shared hosts I see are running PHP as CGI (or FCGI) anyway. But, PHP got popular precisely because it didn't demand complete access to the entire server request cycle (unlike, say, mod_perl).
Mailpile: a free software replacement for GMail
The good old "privacy is already dead" argument doesnt make sense to me.

If privacy is dead, why do organizations keep secrets from their staff? Why doesnt the public have full insight into everything the government and the military does? Why are there secrets?

How come we cant see the people who watch us on the streets, but they can see us?

Who watches the watchers?
This is also interesting building, which is (currently?) occupied by slum people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_City
Forcing them could be worse. Who would judge if they are student-like enough, and what would keep that entity from selectively enforcing the crap out of activist judges it does not like?
Perl fits in fine in terms of usage, and can do everything that you can do in the other two, and probably more. It's the employability of perl hackers vs python and Ruby programmers that suffers.
Sharing Backbone models between front-end and back-end (Part 1 of 2)
You don't need isolated processes to have better architecture and a sane plugin model.
This is the death of twitter, it will become just another propaganda machine. People who like propaganda machine will continue to use twitter, people who don't like propaganda machine will use other microblogging tools instead of twitter.
>In any other civilized country, after being caught spying, governments would be ashamed and massacrated by public opinion and politicians would review and stop their actions immediatly

Which country would that be? Because the governments do the same things all around the world, and in all "Western democracies" too.

After all, it's not something inherently American that forces them to do that.

It's them working to keep the status quo and keep the population sheepish to the tune of big private interests, an d those are international.
Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns
Prediksi Bola Valencia VS Inter Milan
So if neither intelligence committee (HPSCI, SSCI) has the clearances, who does? How many Congressmen have clearance to be even briefed on programs classified for _both_ military and intelligence 'purposes'?

It surprises me they'd so blatantly seek specific, arbitrary classifications to prevent _the legislators_ from learning the truth.
World's Roundest Object
The world's roundest object helps solve the longest running problem in measurement -- how to define the kilogram.
A kilogram isn't what it used to be. Literally. The original name for it was the 'grave', proposed in 1793 but it fell victim to the French Revolution like its creator, Lavoisier. So begins the tale of the most unusual SI unit. The kilogram is the only base unit with a prefix in its name, and the only one still defined by a physical artifact, the international prototype kilogram or IPK.

But the problem with this definition has long been apparent. The IPK doesn't seem to maintain its mass compared to 40 similar cylinders minted at the same time. The goal is therefore to eliminate the kilogram's dependence on a physical object. Two main approaches are being considered to achieve this end: the Avogadro Project and the Watt Balance.

The Avogadro project aims to redefine Avogadro's constant (currently defined by the kilogram -- the number of atoms in 12 g of carbon-12) and reverse the relationship so that the kilogram is precisely specified by Avogadro's constant. This method required creating the most perfect sphere on Earth. It is made out of a single crystal of silicon 28 atoms. By carefully measuring the diameter, the volume can be precisely specified. Since the atom spacing of silicon is well known, the number of atoms in a sphere can be accurately calculated. This allows for a very precise determination of Avogadro's constant.

Special thanks to Katie Green, Dr. David Farrant, the CSIRO, and the National Measurment Institute for their help. Thanks also to Nessy Hill for filming and reviewing earlier drafts of this video.

Music by Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com) Decision, Danse Macabre, Scissors
Guys as the author of this project one of the guidelines i had was to create it as modular and familiar as i can, so whenever I could I tried using a popular module(mongoose, passport etc.)

I deeply encourage anyone who wants to break, replace, remove, add any part of this project to go ahead and do so! Like any recipe this is just our serving suggestion.

I'd love to see an ember fork!
Dredd's future or Deckard's, dystopian futures tend to have a lot of common elements. From reading about this tower on WikiPedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_Financiero_Confinanzas I'd say more towards the Blade Runner style
Have a look at these two: fish-eye and reverse fish-eye views:

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=108.9...
http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/?v=108.9...
With every new iOS release consumers don't get to see the most important, innovative updates to the OS.

It's all in the developer frameworks. Just look at stuff like TypeKit this time around. Every release of iOS has great new and improved frameworks that will lead to a better generation of apps.

Once the API diffs for each new major release stop being interesting is when I'll worry for innovation on the platform.
The ACM has a taxonomy

http://www.acm.org/about/class/2012

____________________________

This researchers look back (looks like Brooklyn subways

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~navarroe/research/map/

___________________________

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2681

http://mocs.cs.arizona.edu/

http://people.cs.umass.edu/~mimno/icml100.html

These are clustering by different algos(sounds like SVD in the first, I'll have to read the paper later).

related: extracting FAQs

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5188

______________________________

and... all of science! http://metamodern.com/2009/05/20/a-map-of-science/
Pennsylvania Wont Renew IBM's Contract for Botched Project (42 months late)
Is there a decently populated microblogging tool that people are migrating to?