skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been fooling with it for a while, and yes, the rate of change is pretty painful. For example, there have been two significant changes to iterators recently: first the relatively minor change to (internal) iterator functions to return bool, allowing them to be nested, and then the complete revision to external iterators.

The libraries are also in a high state of flux, with stand-alone functions being replaced by trait methods and some functionality disappearing or being replaced.

http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2013/07/letterpress-cheating-in-...
How? Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S, ICS, locked to my carrier, unrootable. I've been wanting to get rid of it ever since the phone started running out of space all the time, app info gives no option to remove it. Is this a case of my manufacturer/carrier are more annoying than yours, or am I really missing something?
I think this might be a good example of how to communicate software architecture to non-technical people. It was informative on that level. And by the end, we saw a full-blown process diagram, with even a loop, of Facebook waiting to create a shadow profile.
Yes, Research in Motion (RIM) re-branded themselves BlackBerry back in January: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/30/rim-renamed-blackber....
[reposting my comment from a lower level]

"Traditional" nitrogen fixing bacteria make their way to specialized nodules. Basically this is because the nitrogenase enzyme is incredibly oxygen-sensitive, and it's quite difficult to shield the interior of the enzyme selectively against oxygen (oxygen and nitrogen look awfully alike from a physical perspective). Inside a nodule, the plant maintains an anaerobic condition that protects the bacteria from oxygen, which for some reason plants like to produce. Not surprisingly, these nodules tend to be in the roots (which, from a naive design point of view would not necessarily be where you would think of grabbing nitrogen from). Added efficiency is critical, because nitrogenase is already a VERY inefficient enzyme. 16!! ATP + N2 -> 2ammonia + hydrogen! There are often enzymes in these bacteria whose purpose is to recycle the wasted energy from the hydrogen produced from nitrogenase.

Upshot, without some serious plant engineering, at the very least using aggressive husbandry techniques, it's likely this tech will hit a hard ceiling in terms of usefulness.
There are a lot of tactics you can take to come up with things that are novel (in minor ways). I found that if you write you'll discover new things along the way.

* Write up samples of old ideas in new languages (e.g. X in Scala)

* Write up samples using new libraries (e.g. from the Show HN posts)

* Combine two random things together (e.g. PDF.js + Lunr.js = ...). This works well with new libraries, because people like having their work used.

* Thought experiments can work well (what's a feature of language/tool X that you don't like, and how would you fix it)

* Write up sample code that fills the gaps in some libary's documentation (if you work on a tool and have trouble googling the results, this works well, or if the documentation doesn't answer questions in the way you formulate them)

* Find a CS textbook on a subject you find interesting, find interesting problems but apply them to something you're familiar with. I've had good success with this with an NLP textbook, but apply the exercises to data I have access to so they are novel.

* If you look at language based subreddits, a lot of the smaller ones are starved for content. You can find popular examples from language X and rewrite them for language Y.

* Find a book of puzzles (soduku type things) and write up puzzle solvers.
About that oxygen... that triggered mass extinctions for hundreds of millions of years until life found a use for it.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-o...

Let's hope we'll figure out something useful to do with all this excess carbon we've released into the atmosphere in a slightly shorter time period.
I found a domain i liked on your page, but godaddy.com charges 5 bucks more then namecheap.com and in general not very friendly to clients. So I had to go to namecheap.com and buy it manually..
Still, both are examples of corporate leaders standing up to government thugs. They're only different because of how american culture treats those two different topics.
Listia (YC S09) is hiring Full Stack, Mobile and DevOps Engineers
So, basically, the solution to "hyper social" is even more social data, automatically gathered and funneled to company X, so it can be more context-sensitive in what it shows you.

Forgive me for not leaping for joy at the prospect of this future. Imagine if FourSquare were always (literally) on, and tracking literally everyone you meet. And then they started selling your data for advertising, as they're doing now. Or they get hacked, and someone dumps the data / performs enough queries to make an extremely detailed ID-theft of a handful of random people.

I'd rather not have all my past, present, and future eggs in the hands of one anything, much less a for-profit company.
I just started playing with Elixir this weekend, and it was a ton of fun. Ruby syntax + macros + Erlang semantics + UTF-8 strings is a great combination. And the Programming Elixir book from Pragmatic Press was a good introduction, too.

But I especially enjoyed Erlang's concurrency model and OTP. In a few hours, I was able to go from basic message passing, to a simple OTP server, to distributed processes communicating between multiple VMs, and finally to a supervised OTP server with automatic restart on crash. Erlang provides an awful lot out of the box, and Elixir makes it quite friendly-looking.

However, it's not a mature environment yet. The tools are pretty good for a young language, but the ecosystem is still small. Nonetheless, there's some cool stuff out there already:

Experimental web framework: https://github.com/elixir-lang/dynamo
Mnesia distributed DB wrapper: https://github.com/meh/amnesia
Heroku buildpack: https://github.com/goshakkk/heroku-buildpack-elixir

I'll need to build a larger system in Elixir, but the my initial impressions are good.
I was being sarcastic. I'll probably never rid myself of the damn thing.
Kind of nitpicky, but is there actually any correlation between introversion and public speaking anxiety? I'm pretty introverted, but don't have much difficulty with public speaking or job interviews or whatever. For me, introversion is all about personal relationships - business conversations are a completely different animal, at least in my brain.
Blackberry -- And Nokia's -- Fundamental Failing
> except cancer, which is exactly what it was supposed to be a metaphor for

To add to that: cancer works by tricking the body into continously feeding it. It's not an appropriate analogy to what these bacteria add to the process.
It is open sourced under Microsoft Public License:
https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js

According to the Free Software Foundation, it is a free software license but not compatible with the GNU GPL.
The Government Wants the Media to Stop Covering Barrett Brown
Your brain can't track millions of people and remember them all forever without breaking a sweat like computers can.

The difference is the scale and the permanence of the data.

And yes, the mobile companies shouldn't be collecting that data even though they are.

When I visit my dominatrix, 15 illicit children or go for my ballet lessons, I want it to stay private from my 3 girlfriends.

There are numerous organisations that could take advantage of that information to blackmail me into doing something I didn't want to, like support pay rises for all the head police officers.

I'm being silly, but what the hell does anyone need this information for, the only possible thing it can be used for is for nefarious purposes. It doesn't really stop crimes, it rarely catches criminals and it doesn't make our lives better. It's expensive, degrading to individual humans to constantly spy on them and is an enabler for horrific crimes against humanity.

Just say no.
You can buy underwater / splash bags for cameras that are basically very thick zip-lock bags. They're much cheaper and lighter than a true (rigid) underwater photography enclosure, but they're basically airtight above water and will keep the dust off your gear. You won't be able to change lenses, however, and zooming might be difficult or impossible, so you'd probably be limited to just putting on a 24mm lens and shooting that all the time.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/547694-REG/DiCAPac_WPS...
The Wrong Lesson From Detroit's Bankruptcy
As New Targets for Hackers, Your Car and Your House
I'm working on a book, and wanted to do some editing and writing when I went on holiday a couple of weeks ago so I took my iPad and a bluetooth keyboard with me.

Whole experience convinced me that if I was do do it again I'd get something like a Chromebook or Netbook.

There's no real way to drive the iPad using only a keyboard and you have to reach for the screen too many times e.g. flicking between document being edited and a reference PDF or presentation.

Pages on the iPad has some really weird quirks that I've not got to the bottom of e.g. copy some text from a table cell, paste it into the document elsewhere and it's still a table cell with no way to remove the formatting - eventually copied it all out an stuck with markdown (but need to port it back at some point).
Kind of reminds me of Ghost in the Shell philosophy[0]:

What good is electronic surveillance when people who can run scripts and programs to imitate other people to the point that it will be indistinguishable from the real thing?

Thinking about this stuff gets me excited about the future. I'm deff going to be involved making stuff like this happen, haha.

Edit: Already getting myself involved with it now…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_She...
What's the value in responsive web design to the end user?
Dammit, it's really easy on my rooted Touchpad, but this thing's horrible for it. It'd be fine if it had storage space, but nope.
it seems like it is always answered on SO.
> Next experiment: To consume content primarily on a non-tablet non-phone for a week. (It will fail a comparable way.)

Why? I broke my Iphone at the end of last year (dropped on floor, no visible damage, severely damaged touch sensor). I didn't repair it until March/April, and used an older regular cellphone. I did quite alright, and found that for me most of my Iphone usage is unnecessary. The old phone handled talking and texting just as it did pre-Iphone.

I did repair before a short holiday. I wanted to use it as a point-and-shoot, a gps tracker and a means to get information from the internet since I went without a computer. Therein is, for me, the greatest use of an Iphone. When I'm home I have no trouble moving from the couch to the computer (yeah, not even a laptop).
Ask HN: Thinking in terms of customers vs users?
How does this affect the way a startup approaches their target market?
If tablets are ever going to come into their own as productivity tools, we need some input device innovation. As it stands now, touchscreens and styli don't afford as much utility to the user as the mouse/ keyboard combo for the sort of precision most productive work requires.

The big limitation is the number of unique single-step interactions that can be performed by the user. With mouse + keyboard, you have ~100 keys, >=2 mouse buttons, and enough screen real estate to afford at least several hundred unique clickable areas. On a touchscreen, our fat fingers limit the number of unique tappable/swipable areas to, depending on screen real estate, maybe 50. There just isn't as much information that can be expressed in one interaction, and breaking the task into multiple interactions causes cogitive overhead and discomfort for the user.

I wish we all had really small hands so we fit an appropriately scaled keyboard in the footprint of a smartphone, or something. But that ain't gonna happen. So, I guess... Innovate or die! But here I have a fear that modern keyboards have so much lock-in that when better input devices arise, people will be afraid of switching to them.
First thing to do on an Android is to go under settings/apps/All and disable the privacy parasites such as the facebook apps(4) and google+.
Truck driver has GPS jammer, accidentally jams Newark airport
It happened to me before I created an account on facebook, that there was a profile with my name but the photo was of another guy.

Later I googled "him" (or myself) but found nothing except that photo about "him", it is really weird.

Some of my friends already had facebook accounts, so maybe it has something to do with this, maybe it was my not-so-invisible profile...
Reddit and HN (and DZone) can be seeds for other things - e.g. there are a bunch of email newsletters that pull content from there. I've had good luck with some of the programming language based subreddits, because they have a decent size audience but don't always have a lot of content. Usually there are big Google Plus groups of similar size.

Twitter is useful, because you can contact people directly (e.g. people like it when you write something using a tool they built). It's also a good way to connect with people at conferences because there is often a conference hashtag - I met a few people writing up summaries of talks. It seems like a lot of people use it as an RSS substitute as well, so it's a light-weight way for them to follow you.
When you can buy something that looks like a decent(512MB, 4.5",dual core) android phone[1] at less than $100, and many similar models are coming from china , why bother with this phone ?

[1]http://www.pandawill.com/simdo-d98-smartphone-mtk6577-dual-c...
You can use the "links" buttons on the top right of the site to change where the links go (there's an option for namecheap and name.com). It'll even remember your choice for next time :)
"Need"..
Consider "must" versus "should". Must? No. Should? Probably.

For extra credit, consider "can't" versus "won't", and cases in which "can't" is used to mean "won't".
Half the problem stems from the apps used, and while it is about the apps, I feel that's an unfair test of the iPad itself, and more test of Google Docs and WebEx on the iPad.
I thought it was the company responsible for the bins doing it. My bad.
10 Simple, Science-Backed Ways To Be Happier Today
A few shotgun shells landed a man 15 years in federal prison
The convergence of the PC and tablets is inevitable.

Far from it. I've been watching major companies try to converge them for 20 years, all to abject failure (tiny niches aside). The iPad succeeded precisely because it avoided "convergence".
Changing the way people write - Wriber
I knew you were joking it's just that up until this point I didn't intervene in the whole NSA debate and I was a bit stirred to see the thing creep even in an unrelated post, but hey, it was a joke, I get it ;)
I agree w.r.t. the 1970s, but the Lisp Machines were having cost-competition issues even before the Intel/SPARC machines caught up, due to the advent of lower-cost, smallish minicomputers that could be used as single-user machines if you had the budget. By 1985 you could get a MicroVAX II for ~$20k, plus another ~$8k for a copy of VAX Lisp, and have a quite reasonable Lisp system, with the downside of having to store a reasonably big cabinet (but not full-VAX kind of big).
I've found that type of goal can be really helpful once or twice, to force yourself to think about how to finish projects in a timely manner. Every time I do something like that I fell like it gets easier to write, and my writing gets more effective.
>They're too large; they're public. They have to do what's economically rational, not what's moral.

This is weird. Why should size dictate whether one should act morally or not. It's a very slippery logic.
Tony Abbott's office denies purchasing Twitter followers after numbers spike
RIM changed their name to Blackberry last year.
+1
I like to refactor just names of variables and methods, instead of writing comment what it actually does.
Customers pay. Users might not pay.
As far as I'm aware, the country of which I am a citizen does not take an adversarial approach to other countries. If I learned that it's spying on people of other countries, I'd be just as concerned as I am about the NSA/the USG. None of that changes the fact that the NSA and the USG have a us vs. them mentality and it's only natural that Americans look at their government with a corresponding us vs. them view.

I can understand the USG watching a tourist, since they might commit a crime on US soil. But I'm a not a tourist. I'm not on American soil. My data is flowing through servers in the US, American-developed routers and American-developed OSes only because of the historical accident that the US loved globalization so much that its corporations now dominate the world and made the technical standards the whole world depends on.

If I could limit my exposure to the USG, I would. I want nothing from them, just as I don't expect an appendix removal from the NHS.

The line drawn between foreigners and American citizens stands on very thin ground. It's fraying. Think about it: who are the people with the greatest power to commit a terrorist act, the people who are already inside the US or the people who are outside?

Americans will be spied on. The NSA merely collects all data, and the magic of parallel construction will distribute it to the FBI or your friendly corrupt local authority.
I just added a few thousand six-letter domains, enjoy :)
Introducing Cornelius
Edward Snowden's Dad, Lon Fires Back At Obama
I find this very creepy, but I think that fundamentally, the idea that my contact info isn't mine, once it's "public", is correct.
> It's not just that it triggers anxieties in some situations, but even when it doesn't, it is exhausting

Yes. For me, it's that small talk is so boring. Even not-so-small talk gets dull to me. Like, I recently took a trip to Vietnam for two weeks. Obviously everybody wants to hear about it, which I know at some level is because they like me and are interested in my life, but I am now just sick of talking about it! I've been telling the same stories over and over, and it just wears me out now to talk about it.

So I think extraverts love the opportunity to tell stories, even well-trod ones, whereas we introverts just abhor it.
What I hated about Android was that almost every app wanted access to my private information. Unlike iOS, on Android, you have to grant permission at install-time, and afaik there is no way to deny certain permissions selectively. Other than that, I like it a lot, it has come a long way, and it certainly looks nicer than the mess that is iOS 7.
(First, thank you so much for the Beeminder plug! This is a big day for us, thanks to you!)

I like just forcing blog posts to happen on a reasonable schedule. Like tomorrow is an "emergency blog post day" for us on http://blog.beeminder.com

I also think having the thumbnail in the sidebar like that makes for a nice "ETA till next post" for your readers. And there are a couple ways to automate sending the +1 to Beeminder each time you write a post.

PS: Another more explicit example of the "ETA To Next Post" thing: http://daily.muflax.com/ (Looks like they burned out on blogging there for a while but are committing to get a post out 20 days from now...)
I actually just reviewed my friend list, deleted a few but still have about 150 friends. Mostly family/extended family (in-laws, cousins, etc). I'm a dancer on my free time so I have a group of dancers from over the years. I have another group of people I've met and do keep in touch from: church, school, and D&D. I have a few select from work (past and present). In review, they are people I like to know what's going on, but in some cases would never be able to have face to face interaction. Many are on the other side of the country or, for a few, the world. I don't add strangers or and I'm getting picky about acquaintances. I give this as an example of why your idea that of using it 'wrong' isn't looking at other situations.
Not in SF (LA) but happy to chat about a job internship etc at our startup. If you're interested email is in my profile
I've been using an iPhone (3 different generations) every day for 5 years, and I still type at maybe 30% of the speed I did on my Treo before them...

So, I tend to just not type.
It is not like you can implement collision resolving system ad hoc as a plugin or extension if base code does not offer you some proper foundation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalist
Let's think of a typical use case where a "shadow profile" is useful.

Let's say my friend Jane is on facebook. She has my phone number on her phone with my first name. Facebook notices that this phone number is not linked to any other accounts, therefore I must not be registered.

Fast forward two months, and I decide to sign up for facebook. I put my phone number in (as a form of password recovery I believe) and it automatically asks me if I'd like to add Jane.

"Shadow profile" sounds scary, but in actuality it's just the modern web at work.
Hi, Can you explain how it works in some more detail?
This is interesting in understanding user behaviours and maybe can be used for modelling responses to some interesting problems.

I like the concept. Also, like the chrome ext but not able to sync on mobile platforms.

Gautam
me@gautamanand.in
It's not go. It's the fact I work with admins and analysts that are not formally trained developers. Python and PowerShell are their tools.
We tried to give portrait photos more space by using column layout @ http://www.thephotoduel.com/top-photos
No, as a moment's thoughtful speculation would make clear. The public information we have about Blackberry neé RIM is entirely sufficient to explain why they're floundering.
> Microsoft

I don't see anything that says that this is a Microsoft product. It looks like a side project by a Microsoft employee. (full disclosure: I work at MS.)

> Not open source

Looks like the source code is available at https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js under the "Microsoft Public License" which has been certified by the Open Source Initiative as an open source license.
> 4) Podiums were invented by some sadist who hates introverts.

The same goes for the more modern 'laptop that is being use to display the presentation.' Hiding behind that can be a very easy trap to fall into.
Ask HN: How/where should I host my personal site?
I want to set up a personal site, with a blog and a way to host an online cv + some of my projects, etc..
I'd like to host it myself, but I'm unsure of the best service to use. I live in the UK (if that matters), I've just started a career as a web developer about a year ago. I'd like to host it as cheaply as possible, I'm also not averse to buying a domain name and hosting separately.
I also don't mind what language/platform to use (I'm happy to learn anything).
Do you guys have any suggestions?
As you should know surveillance is used for far more broadly than for preventing terrorism. It is beyond comprehension that you can ignore documented abuses, even ones that have recently been reported.

You cannot justify arbitrary powers simply by pointing to the fact that (US and ally) citizens may be safer from terrorism. Otherwise you should be advocating for more invasive surveillance.

> Being investigated does not mean you're an enemy.

No it means I lose my autonomy and therefore my freedom. It means I can never have goals that meaningfully oppose those who surveil me.
Yeah, unfortunately Godaddy commissions beat NameCheap by about 10x, but there's an option on the top right of the site to switch the outgoing links to NameCheap, if you'd rather use them.
Yes, it works great on Chrome.

Regarding the missing collisions: ThreeJS focuses on the 3D part of a game engine only. If you want collisions, you need to add a physic engine.

There's a couple of them out there - I would recommend CannonJS and there is a working ThreeJS FPS with WASD and collisions here: https://web3dblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/source-code-of-th...