skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In what scenario do you trust random C code more than random Python code?

Unintentional security mistakes are much, much easier to make in C than most other languages.

EDIT: Sorry if this came off as a little harsh, but I guess I'm curious as to what you think the security advantages of C over python are, when everything I've heard says the opposite.
Logo color and its affect on brand perception
The one thing that's bothering me about this is their choice to use sapphire crystal for the screen. Sapphire is definitely more scratch-resistant than the Gorilla Glass used by iPhones and high end Andriod phones, but my understanding is that sapphire is much easier to shatter by applying pressure. That seems to me a more important factor than scratch-resistance.

(Disclaimer: I'm no materials engineer and the above info was sourced from google searching, so take that for what it's worth)
Real-time 3D animations, now twice as fast
bowlofpetunias' observation: "You are in a very small bubble. The rest of us 99.9% see it clearly." Look at some of the other comments in this thread. The entire rest of the world is talking about Snowden and the bad US behavior that he revealed.
> For whatever set of reasons, going to summit would have made Obama and the administration look weak at home.

I dunno. Cancelling a meeting doesn't exactly look strong either.
Thanks.

So in summary 500 gives you access to downvotes. It doesn't get any deeper than that unless your username is 'pg'.
You are the worst kind of HN user.
I didn't expect my argument to be taken in such bad faith.
What a pathetically misinformed comment. Core parts of their OS in Python? That automatically means it will be slow?
Also, the starving hacker price is something like $30 a year. Definitely worth it to support that kind of quality, in depth content. :)
We're working on federation support, and I think that would be pretty fair to call decentralized?

Decentralized can have various definitions; GNUNet is definitely one definition, but you might consider that the web itself is supposed to be decentralized and is designed to be able to be that way, but is moving away from that as more and more of the web is being replaced by megasites like YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr. So, MediaGoblin is one attempt to take back the web in that respect.
A good way to look at it, but you need to add "get remotely enough sleep" to your "choose 3" list. :)
Outside the cities people still cycle. It is no uncommon for highschool students in the country to cycle over 10 km to and from school (for some up to 20 or 30 km), do the same to meet friends after school, to go clubbing, to go to parties, to go to do things and so on. In the Netherlands there is no such thing as a school bus. There is no driving a car without an expensive and difficult licence after you're 18 years.

And the flatness has a downside too: strong headwinds, always it seems. Certainly, it is easier than riding over hills or mountains, I wholeheartedly agree with you, but it ain't all roses and sunshine either.

Then again, my fitness when I was young was great. Heck, I don't think I've ever seen one of my schoolmates fail the Cooper test during physical education class unless sick or disabled somehow.
Drug companies would be able to profit by selling marijuana and trivial derivatives.

I think the more persistent lobbies will be other "sin" industries - tobacco, alcohol, etc.
I don't care much about the terms, but my general test is this: would this person be useful on a small team?

A software "architect" who can't be a developer wouldn't be useful on a small team. A "UX" designer who can't create mock ups, wireframes, or actual code (certainly CSS/HTML, let's hope for javascript) wouldn't be useful on a small team.

I have trouble believing that people who wouldn't be useful on a small team would be useful on a large team.
Non-portable. While android primarily runs on ARM boxes, the same APKs, barring any native code libraries, will run on x86 devices running android, MIPS devices, etc.
The only way I can see this succeeding now is by getting some carriers or OEM's or something to back the project, and put the rest of the money into the project.

I maintain that this could've succeeded if it was priced at $600 from the beginning, and work their way from that regarding the specs. That's exactly what Ford did, too. He started with a price in mind, and then forced the engineers to come up with a product that fits that price.

Canonical repeated Motorola's Xoom mistake, by starting with the specs, and then selling for whatever price it all added up to.
Something new? This is like Old news is so exciting. And I thought there was a legal battle on going on about the usage of Courgette.
An island for one with room to share
Kivy developers are the primary movers behind Python for Android. Typically we are using Cython so that a great deal of the application is actually running in C without the Python runtime eating up overhead. This leaves a budget of about a million function calls per second, or roughly 10,000 per frame, as most of the overhead in the UI thread is eaten up in expensive function stack frame in the event system, passing around events that call callbacks that call callbacks that call callbacks...

It remains to be seen if we can adopt a concurrent model for some aspects of the main application thread(s). Going concurrent almost surely means more Cython and more speed. I'm interested if anyone has any ideas about using CPython to reduce the cost of certain nearly-always-performed functions to grease the event system. Not that it's slow, but fast is always better =)

http://kivy.org/#home
Japan ponders freezing Fukushima ground to stop leaks
Just a hype for his movie.

This all reminds me of how some famous supposed atheists convert to a religion X and then write books about it selling millions of copies.

Same shit. You're being manipulated.

We don't need a mediocre surgeon to tell us weed is OK. Any idiot with internet access knew that for the last 15 years.
Longer distances make it a bit harder, but they can work if there's an integrated cycle-path network, and ideally some integration with transit. For example, Palo Alto to Mountain View is only 6 miles (10 km), a distance that's very common to bike in Copenhagen, and yet nobody bikes it in the Valley. Part of the issue might be that there aren't great routes. You either bike down El Camino, a rather intimidating proposition, or else you have to piece together a complex route by weaving through residential neighborhoods.

The bike->train->bike option can also increase the practical bike-commuting area, but it's hampered by Caltrain not running often enough or to enough places.
> it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others

No; it's very common for people to presume to extrapolate based on their own experiences, and to presume to speak for others. But they're not actually speaking for others.
Maybe (to be even more cynical) he has come to the conclusion that the regime of marijuana prohibition is coming to an end (or at least losing public support); and as a TV doctor who needs make headlines and wants to maintain relevance in the future, he has finally taken a critical look at US drug policy and discovered that it was based mostly on sham evidence. It is commendable that he apologizes and admits that he based his previous opinion on that sham.

This Howard Samuels (a person who makes his living off of a drug rehabilitation clinic) guy is an immoral shit who appears to believe that peoples' real medical needs are secondary to his opposition of "people just getting loaded". He is a prohibitionist. I am so tired of this ridiculous and harmful policy.
Why you of course! "...we should ban M&Ms" -tptacek
Show HN: My android application to clip webcontent to anywhere
Pushtomail is an android application to clip webcontent to anywhere, from gmail, email, evernote, kindle to instapaper and more services with a single touch, please to give it a try and share your feedback. Thank you
DIY Server & Web Site Monitoring with iOS/Android Notifications
I like his distinguishing of mastery of the visible versus mastery of the invisible. This is very true, and why people who sometimes seem outwardly competent and good at routine thing struggle with uncertainty and adaptation. I also like the distinction between drilling and practice. Both are needed, but simulation doesn't build core skills or help weak areas.

Perhaps the best thing he did was share the link to the Commander's guide.
I don't understand the line of argumentation that, because one entity is (partly) very bad it can't be much better than another entity.
Cookie Forensics Display
Its not clear if the python code was compiled on their benchmarks. That might close the gap.
History shows that the major pharmaceutical companies will try every dirty trick in the book to position themselves as the exclusive producers of medical cannabis if and when the plant is descheduled at the federal level.
I guess my point was that the advantage of the cloud is that you can start small and scale as needed. If you have to buy the whole cloud yourself, you don't really get that advantage of it.
IBM Develops Foundation to Program Cognitive Computing Chips
My first test http://api.genderize.io/?name=Erin gives me "Male"
Mixpanel Vs. Goliath
It didn't come close to passing - the vote count has nothing to do with how widely supported it was in reality.
BMW has a huge bet running on electric cars with the massive investment in developing technics to build mass production carbon chassis.

They intend to build lighter cars which will benefit electric mobility.

The BMW i3 is only the first of its kind but if its lightly successful they will iterated on that.

The Quandt Family (Susanne Klatten) is a huge driver in this space.

What we miss the most right now for electric mobility is infrastructure.
Companies and employees don't "owe" each other loyalty, but the only way to earn loyalty from someone is to show it in return. If a company decides to throw its employees under the bus during tough times, that is its prerogative, but then it should not turn around and expect employees to stick by it during tough times either.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that "record profits" have anything to do with executive salaries. Salaries are a cost.

There's an association and correlation, though. It's easier for executives to ramp up their compensation if the company is profitable. So if an executive can do something short-sighted that improves profits in the short term, or even something degenerately risky that may turn a huge profit.

Principal and agent usually break (that is, their interests diverge) at the second moment (risk/variance). Everyone wants profit/expectancy (first moment). There's no tension there; who doesn't want to make money? Risk is a nother matter. Principal usually wants as little risk per unit upside as possible; agent typically wants more risk because upside leads to higher compensation but the difference between a small down year and a big one is minimal.

For example, a hedge fund manager collects 2% of assets managed and 20% of profits. (If profits are below zero, redemptions happen and that often kills the fund.) So a return of -30 and -10 have the same effect-- shit year, no bonus, everyone gets fired-- but the difference between +10 and +30 is huge. That's why a lot of these firms take degenerate bets. Someone else eats most of their losses, but they get a lot if they win.

Executives work the same way. They push for huge initiatives that add risk to the business. Big wins makes them rich, little wins make them comfortable; the difference between little losses and big losses, for them, is zero. They have no reason not to take big risks with the company.

Large-scale cost-cutting is especially good from an executive perspective because the benefits are immediate but the problems it causes tend to show up in the long term, giving the executive time to flee if the results are bad.
I don't know about that. It does seem like a pretty exciting material, but I agree a 2014 release date of a "full sapphire phone" might be a little too early. I'm also not sure if it's the best material we can use in the future for smartphones. I do hope we'll stop using plastic, and aluminum is not perfect either, and has some major flaws. Glass is terrible, too.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512411/your-next-smartp...
The blue ones were banned for a while, but that was because they give you super-powers.

edit: Sorry, it was the red ones that were "banned" for a short time. The public was frightened of red dye, even though according to Mars, they did not use the red dye that was suspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M&M's#Color_changes_summarized...
I predict that this will lead to a spike in backers from all of the people who wanted to back it but thought $800 was too expensive, but it will quickly level off. Why?

Dan Ariely did some studies[1] showing that people are much more likely to pick something when there is a strictly worse option available. $830 vs. $600 for the exact same thing is just easier for our irrational minds to compare than $695 for a phone next year vs. phones today. I think this was a major motivator for people to "buy" in the early stages of the project, especially since it was a time limited option.

I personally backed at the $600 level, and while I have a lot of reasons for why it was a good idea, I suspect that I was influenced my own irrational behavior and I am just good at justifying my decisions.

[1] http://realityswipe.wordpress.com/tag/dan-ariely/

P.S. If you haven't read any of Dan Ariely's stuff before, he does some fascinating studies showing how irrational humans are.
I also cycle my commute. When I used to cycle to the old office this was 14 mile commute on a variety of surfaces. When I initially rode on the road I would gutter crawl; cars would pass real close.

Then I read a few tips on cycling safer and realised that my gutter crawling was actually very dangerous as cars will try to squeeze past to overtake. I don't know how confident you are but for me, riding a third into the lane at all times has improved my safety as cars will now only overtake if they have a ton of room and they'll always go way over into the other lane to do it. I will also take the full lane if I feel I need to. I essentially just needed to be more confident. YMMV
Anyone can watch. The authentication is so they can get an idea of who is watching (although there is nothing preventing you from faking all the sign up info). Demo day starts at 1pm pacific but the stream might not start until 1:30pm after the intros.
I was under the impression that the primary anti-marijuana lobbies were funded by tobacco companies along with the beer/liquor industry. Medical use aside, marijuana would primarily be competing with those other recreational substances.
Streamus: A Google Chrome extension that's changing the way you use YouTube
Compile on install? Compile to something else then compile to binary? PNaCl?
On my first try I got an erroneous result on a non-Anglo name:
http://api.genderize.io/?name=krishna
returned "male". In fact god names are unisex; I've met a female Krishna.

Edit: and "null" on Vishnu. I didn't see on the page whether this is supposed to extend beyond Anglo-American culture.

And "kyle" came up "male", tho I can report a female Kyle. Whoever is populating the database may be underestimating gender/naming trends.
Apple patents tech to let cops switch off iPhone video, camera and wi-fi
In the past it has been banned in quite a few countries (including my own) due to concerns over the food coloring agents used.
Heya! So, we sometimes get comments about the branding choice of "goblins"... our goblins are actually not evil, though I agree that a lot of $STANDARD_FANTASY they're used as evil characters. Our goblins are more "build spaceships, be cute, and be awesome" goblins like http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.3.2-goblinverse.ht...

Curiously we've gotten a number of concerns about maybe the branding will push people away by thinking that the goblins are evil or scary or will frighten children, but we've never actually had anyone tell us that it actually invoked that reaction in them, just that they're concerned about it. And a lot of people seem to really like the goblins.

We do have a light theme called "airy"; there's some debate about whether that theme should be default. The choice of a dark theme isn't to invoke something dungeon'y, it's to put spotlight on the media, making the media the "light" of the scene. But anyway, maybe at some point we will switch over to airy by default... we'll see what the future brings.

Thanks for your comment!
Is there someone/somewhere you can read ranking of manufacturer openness? For instance, Sony seem pretty active in the AOSP[0] but you never even hear them mentioned.

[0] http://developer.sonymobile.com/2013/07/25/android-open-sour...
> After all even with slavery, it was something America inherited, instead of going out of their way to do.

Its true that the slave trade predates American independence, but its not as if it wasn't largely driven by the interests of wealthy Americans; it really had very little other point, which is why after the US was independent, England first both suppressed the Atlantic slave trade, and then, decades before the US did (and without a civil war) abolished slavery entirely.

> Much of Europe, on the other hand, chose to murder their undesirables, and far after when America was able to finally free their slaves.

So did the US. The Indian Wars were a real thing, after all, and ended long after the abolition of slavery.
Yes, Russia isn't particularly well-behaved when it comes to human rights, okay, I don't think many people disagree.

But please explain how, them breaking laws in self-serving, corrupted or even arbitrary circumstances, is relevant to their unwillingness to break it again just to please the US?

(there's also some very interesting implications if the US would bring up the argument you sketch)
> "Record profits" are recorded because companies are afraid to expand. They expect a macroeconomic contraction.

That isn't necessarily true. A company's expansion does not always require the expansion of its work force and increased profit can reflect many things: higher productivity, lower cost of goods sold, increased revenue from higher margin lines of business, accounting and tax events, etc.

This said, it is important to recognize that while profit describes where a company has been, head count is in many respects a forward-looking figure based on future expectations. Who you hire and fire today often has a lot less to do with what's happening now than what a company expects will happen tomorrow, good or bad.
Have you guys seen Hetzner hosting? Their servers have ridiculous hardware for very low monthly costs relative to other hosts, and the support usually gets back to me within the hour.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
Mario Kart 64 is one thing -- but if this same technique is applied to Street Fighter 2, I am honestly concerned about our Seattle office descending into civil war. Or perhaps having hard data leads to less animal struggle for dominance because the hierarchy of the herd has been quantified?
A Swiss Army Knife for your pets
Maybe the downside is that now everyone is watching him, waiting for the next update, speculating, criticizing, etc. Shooting himself in the foot may have been just talking about it prematurely.
Goes to a synology login page: http://www.genderize.io
Could you please point me to the part of history that shows that?
As the creator of another weekly newsletter, I fully support this idea. ;-)
It feels like Monty wants to be able to have his cake (the money he made from selling MySQL to Sun) and eat it too (continue to make money selling some sort of MySQL license). If MySQL was BSD-licensed instead of GPL, presumably he'd be able to pursue an "open-core" model where he could sell proprietary extensions to MySQL.

http://ostatic.com/blog/oracle-mysql-and-the-gpl-dont-take-m...
What are his pharmacology credentials?

Anyways far as I can tell his big revelation here is "yeah when i told you i looked at the facts before i really didn't but this time i did!". Makes me take all of his conclusions with a grain of salt.

Does seem clear indication that the american mainstream is getting acceptance for the idea of medical ganja though.
Here's my position:
All those factors are incentives, easier to promote biking but without a mostly flat country it wouldn't work. We could try adding all of the other factors but flatness is obligatory.

I'll have a look at Montreal as another poster mentioned it but I have doubts it is on the same scale as the Netherlands if it isn't flat.
I wonder what dataset is being used behind the scenes. Tried "Roberta" and it returned "null".
Nice design and execution. Would love to see this in the Chrome Web Store so I can install it as an app.
"...along with binary driver packages"

It's pathetic that anyone can call releasing binary drivers "open-source". Sigh.
At Cal state in the 90's I was paying ~$4000 a quarter, now [1] it seems to be $6000-7000. It's not ideal, but not an order of magnitude either.

Today, the gap is undeniably tighter between college expenses vs living wages at available jobs. If you're sending yourself through college, working or with a loan or some mix, it seems like a career ROI calc and a budget/cashflow calc for during college is in order. You also might have some hard choices in deciding not to pay a premium for prestige, and look for a solid education at a discount at a less prestigious, but still perfectly functional college.

[1] http://www.calstate.edu/budget/student-fees/fee-rates/Tuitio...
Underscore...Perl
I'm going to go with his license to prescribe drugs and his neurosurgery practice on that one.
This reflects my inception, too. Not only in webdevelopment, but desktop-apps and mobile stuff is developed in JS, too.

I even heard, that: Win8 Metro Apps are developed with HTML5 stuff and Apple is building a JS Bridge to their Cocoa APIs. But i have no sources currently.

If this is true, there will be one language to rule them all. It's not the prettiest one, but that's what meta-languages like coffeescript are for (if you want).

(Projects like ASM.js (near native speed) or Emscripten (transcompile many languages like C++ to JS) are pushing towards this direction even further!)
Specifically: the hype it is getting has been distracting people from the performance of Tesla.
How does that site work? It mentions nothing about pricing?
I won't believe it till I see him sparkle.

But sparkling John Carmack is totally plausible.
It is a little more than that, he is saying that US research has an obvious bias that he was not aware of.
This is a good thing, I think. If even establishment figures are starting to realize the destructiveness of these policies then so much the better for those who are affected by them.
@RogerL "Hollywood is filled with people trying to act like they are a great star. Almost none of them are, nor will they ever be one."

You're skipping over important nuance:
Assuming star = bundle of confident, recognized talent that brings values to any endeavour he/she is involved in, radiates this (vs "shouting") in person.

In contrast, Hollywood is filled with many people not acting like they're great stars, but projecting the peripheral benefits of being a great star (ie high visibility, rich lifestyle, entourages, etc) but they do not feel/act like stars at their cores.
It's strange to believe you can effectively determine gender from a first name - even when concentrating on Anglo-centric names, as this appears to.

How is the data generated? By hand? I can imagine this might be somewhat useful if it gave a non-binary result.

"Paris" is "male".