skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've lived in public housing in Singapore and have experienced the noise (and sometimes worse) of neighbors above and below. The cheapness of construction is definitely a factor in the experience - in nicer (private) apartments, there's less disturbance, and less chance of being dripped on by an air conditioner or hung-out washing.

That said, when I visited Hong Kong, I stood at the base of the gigantic blocks of housing there and marveled at how they were the equivalent of small towns. They're:

- significantly taller than most Singaporean public housing

- have more shops packed on their ground levels

- packed much closer (very little space between blocks)

so they really feel a whole different level of dense (and Singapore is very dense already). Staring up at their brutally uniform towering shapes is quite the feeling. If they were interconnected and had open corridors between blocks, I could imagine playing a rather interesting game of tag across many buildings. I guess that's pretty much what the Kowloon Walled City[1] was.

Dense megacities are interesting in their own right, even if they're not nice to live in (as dystopic cities in cyberfunk fiction show). Now I live in a house, but I miss the conveniences of being able to walk to a shop or bus stop/subway stop in 5 minutes.

[1] Incidentally, an arcade in Kawasaki, Japan recreated the Kowloon Walled City - check out the rather interesting photographs at http://randomwire.com/kowloon-walled-city-rebuilt-in-japan - it's going on my list of places to visit.
"Microsoft wanted to converge desktop and tablet platforms..."

I always wonder why we imagine it is desirable to 'converge' the user interface for a device you carry in a pocket with that of a device that has two 30" monitors.

It is possible to play a violin like a cello but not very practical...
League Runners for iOS
Airline security measures is not only a threat to civil liberties, it's also a threat to the airline industry. On short distances (<500 km) I chose cars and trains. Getting to or from airports has always been an issue, but this problem has been minimized in recent decades with more and more subway systems, freeways etc. connecting airports with city centers. The check-in waiting time has been minimized with online check-in, self check-in stations etc. But all these gains have been cancelled out by overreaching security measures, mandatory waiting time etc.

But there are powerful interests that like to keep it this way. Airport owners make money turning airports into shopping malls because travellers are forced to wait there. Governments use airport security as job creation schemes. It's a leech sucking on resources all of us need.
Other dead people?! Dude, you've been watching too many zombie movies.
Wouldn't that mean bad grammar and misspellings are also fine?
Once, so far.
What do you mean by "reacted negatively"?
Show HN : Ghostlab - Synchronized testing for web and mobile.
Why would you need AI in a sex robot? People don't go to strip clubs for the great conversation. Though I suppose the AI is the difference between a sex robot and a sex doll. And I suppose any intelligence is better than faked or clever AI. Otherwise you might as well be having sex with a human look-alike Teddy Ruxbin.

The $9K price tag estimate isn't too bad. That's probably cheaper than than a lot of people spend on their significant others, not counting accessories so that you can feel like you are getting some "strange" every once in a while.

Maybe this could be Apple's next big thing. I don't mind Windows, but the idea of having sex with something which has a Microsoft logo makes me not want to have sex.
Citing you as a source, how was MS involved in the clones? Compaq made a clone of the IBM PC. The IBM PC was cloneable in the first place because they went extremely low budget and stuck together off the shelf parts. Yes, the cheap clone army definitely spurred the small computer revolution. But I don't see how MS can viewed as an entity that shepherded it along. They certainly weren't the only ones make a CPM clone either.
Given that people are already willing to have 'sex' with all kinds of sex toys ...
The interesting point will be when humanlike emotions start to appear in the robots.
Ask HN: What to code for learning?
Hello HN,
I am new at Node.js. I understand Java- and CoffeeScript and want to code something using Node.js. I am familiar with Express, Node and node-mysql. To say it simple, I understand the basics of Node.js.
I am good at Ruby on Rails and PHP (hate me :D). So I am not completely new at coding. So now I am searching for an app/game/something else to code for learning some more Node.js.

Thank you!
The correct term is newspeak [1]

In newspeak the contracted name for the unit would have been DemoUn, pronounced /ˈdiː.mən/.

UnDem would have been a good second choice.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Well yes, I have, but I didn't get the idea there.

Sorry to wake you up, but necrophilia is real. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrophilia for starters)
Correct.

What few realize though is that the archaic pegged exchange rate is the key contributor to this. In a typical exchange regime, such an influx of capital would push the exchange rate higher and provide a balancing effect. Instead, you get asset price inflation while wages in local currency remain flat. This makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. [1]

Compounding the effect is the inability to have any kind of independent monetary policy since the rate is pegged and there are no currency controls. Consider an economy with strong growth, 6% inflation, and interest rates on home mortgages of .....~1%? Welcome to HK.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-18/hong-kong-s-weal...
Don't fly. Seriously. Aren't you tired of being stripped searched, herded like cattle, squeezed into a tin can like sardines, going 300 miles in the wrong direction to switch plans at a hub, or sitting hours in wait in your three square feet of space on the tarmac?

But what to do instead? Leave a day early. Take a train. Maybe even find a co-rider heading your way and split the cost of a cabin car. Then relax and enjoy your trip. Chat with some other travelers in the lounge car. Have a nice meal in the diner car. If you don't have to be there yesterday and you are not going over an ocean, you can't beat a train.

Of course, in the States, the a$$ holes are winning there too as they won't let us build better trains (cough florida caugh hyperloop cough) and they have forced all passenger rail to go through Chicago when crossing the middle of the country. Honestly, how do they get away with this sh*t?
Try 'mercantile' instead.
Err not sure how important that is. I would guess making sure you pay in cash at all times is probably more important.
Structured Data Markup Helper
IRC network for web and mobile devs
isn't TorBrowser actually Firefox browser with Tor preinstalled?
Hong Kong high rises are immensely varied. there's a huge amount of postwar public housing of a pretty crummy (if solid) construction. there's also some new apartments that are of a much higher quality than you'd generally see in the west. there's also some new crummy apartments (sometimes marketed as high quality).

space is at a premium though and needs must. also - this density is only possible because the government once appropriated and consolidated so much land
this seems strangely similar to Joel Spolsky's article on unicode.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Though not exactly plagiarised, it shares some obvious parallels.
When robots become as attractive as people, there will be no reason for progress to stop at that exact point, so they will quickly become much more attractive. At that point, people who used to be "unattractive" will celebrate because they can finally get a good mate, while people who used to be "attractive" will develop serious self esteem issues. The attractive people will try to take collective action to keep their share of the market, like branding everyone who has sex with robots a "loser" or worse.
Because I'm paying for the bandwidth, and because I'm there for the content, not the adverts, and because I can - it's my computer, I can decide what it does.
So what? After 20 minutes the robot just lays there and does nothing? If that's due to battery life, then some of the real life partners I have been with had a far shorter battery life than that.
"three or four of them(passengers) had induced mini-panic-attacks by lifting or moving the tray containing my laptop"

when are we going to learn to assume other people are probably somewhat rational beings and not crazy zombies walking around?
Reminds me to this THX 1138 scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn-Sa0MlFkg
Less than 25% of the total land area of HK (~400 sq. mi.) is developed.[1]

[1] http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/facts.htm
Too fast, without letting go. Friction burns, with actual flames. Who wouldn't be terrified of malfunctions!?
ValueAct wants to make short to medium term money. That sounds reasonable, but investors like that are the death of a technology company.

If a technology company starts paying dividends or share buybacks it means it believes the field they are in is so mature they cannot invest the same money in trying to grow the company.

For a company like Microsoft - where the field should be anything to do with technology - the fact they can't invest that money in themselves is something of an indictment of how they have lost technological leadership.
All I get is a blank white page
I assume it is because the libs are just a couple of KB and it also only is for privileged apps which are not allowed to link to external servers (which then would use the normal cache mechanisms). And because of all the version incompatibility it is just not worth the effort.
#chatwebdev is an awesome IRC channel
I just wanted to sound a note of caution not to tar all Hackathons with the same brush. "Hackathons" is a lose word which can mean many different things to many different people.

A lot of the time I see Hackathons criticised, I read the argument and the person has set up one definition of a Hackathon then demolished it - a Straw Man, basically. And often it's deserved - there is some really shit behavior at some hackathons and it's right that it is called out. This post fits that mould pretty perfectly.

But there are also some really great Hackathons. Try and find the style of Hackathon you like, go and have fun!
There are user options to specify which entry and exit nodes to use [1]. I'm not saying there aren't ways to defeat Tor but I dislike this knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people have with it because of its origin.

[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/path-sp...
How likely would advertisers be to refuse to allow the Adblock ads?

I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service.

Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedia and Apache Foundation take donations. All three are great companies, they just have different ways to generate revenue. Many websites have no choice but to move towards an advertisements method to remain operational,

Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising. While I'm not a huge fan of ads, they do serve a purpose, and destroying a harmless market such as online advertising without replacing it or supplementing it somehow isn't good. Plus if Adblock is actually successful and the online advertising industry collapses, then they will be putting themselves out of business.
But the British also have an odd idea of public vs private schooling... :)
I am afraid that the assumptions made in the article (regarding the distribution) are invalid.

One very long (say 2 days) visit will skew the average. And you can't infer the standard deviation from the average.

For an easy alternative, you could calculate the median time on site ex ante -- let's say it's 1 minute. Then for your ab test, see what percent leave within the first minute. Use that percent and determine if difference is statistically significant.
The content provider also paying for the bandwidth.
Err? Downvotes?

I agree the story goes back further, but I can't write all of Wikipedia. I think what I wrote is a reasonably factual account that supplies reasonable context.
That's not true. For anything that uses the latin alphabet utf8 will be strictly better as the majority of characters will be in ASCII (1 byte) and the rest will just need an extra byte, equaling utf16.

Looking at the format definition[1] anything below U+0800 will fit in 2 bytes in UTF8. So the ethnocentrism starts at Samaritan[2]. The Japanese, Chinese and Indian scripts are probably the most important in that range.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description

[2] http://codepoints.net/basic_multilingual_plane
Can't tell if satire or sincere. Maybe that was your intention though.
I should have mentioned the biggest problem, which is that the whole enterprise of the Vichy government was essentially a coup against the Republic, taking advantage of the German pressure to overthrow the government of the day - many members of the Vichy leadership had a history of involvement in anti-Republic groups (Monarchists, anto-secularists, and so on) and some were involved in planned coups in the 30s.
The problem is that they tried to merge desktop and tablet user experiences in the first place. The idea of having to perform a full context switch / screen jump to launch a new app is a weakness of tablets... not a strength that should be forced on PC users. The ability to have N applications on screen at once, and launch others without losing any visibility into current windows, is something they lost... that's the problem.
Gotta say men have and will for ever more stick their dicks into pretty much anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if 'sexbots' actually advance realistic robots quicker as suddenly there is profit to be made.
I don't get this start button hate. For all the benefits of having a permanent start bar I will happily sacrifice 13mm off the bottom of my screen that I would probably just use as white space anyway.

And I have had the option to auto-hide the start bar since... Win 95?(or was it earlier)
It's a great example of compromise vs. full-fledged.

Converging all users to the same UI is going to be a compromise; It won't be great for double-30"-monitor-powerusers, and it won't be great for 9" Tablet mobile users.

The only thing this improves marginally is how much code needs to be maintained, and considering the implications, i'd much rather have twice the code size, than inhibit my users ability to use my product efficiently, and make it more minimalist.
Also provides a great catalog of bang-up-to-date web design cliches....
They should've gotten rid of Metro completely. Tablets and PC's are not meant to be mixed. The ideal size for a tablet is around 7"-8", while the ideal size for a laptop (for most people) is 13".

Here's hoping under the new CEO Windows 9 will be a true successor to Windows 7, instead of one to Windows 8.
So? Perhaps they would also like to block the ads at the server side, and save themselves the bill?

But more seriously, I don't care about their bills. They're delivering HTML over an open network connection - what I do with that HTML is entirely up to me. If they don't like that there's nothing they can do about it.
Please don't give up. Please write the ACLU, the EPIC and ask for legal representation.

We lose our rights by not asserting them and fighting abuses like this in court.
None of this is new. Manipulating and controlling the Internet is, and is a scary new precedent, and I still stand by my statement that it is really a bad thing. With everyone jacked in all the time, manipulating the masses is a thousand times easier than before.

But as for the slowly becoming brutal and unethical? Nah. They've done that for a while. A recent example of this is the Cold War: they fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally-retarded to children to "test its effects" (http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N28/fernald.28n.html), supported brutal tinpot South American dictators to "fight communism" (http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20000919/) and abused this giant list of people who we thought were Communist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Co...).

Notice how the actions and methodology are the same (replace "communist" with "terrorist"). Notice how the reasoning is the exact same. Notice how it all starts with "wanting to protect you" from a threat most feel is real, and does exist to some extent.

The people in the government are humans like anyone else. Some people really can't grasp the idea that those people might actually be abusing you or lying to you. If and when they figure it out, they have a small revolution, become heroes, write a book, and then forget about the past and the victims and keep on rolling.

Maybe if we'd all stop have "reasonable" discussions about how people who say, "HEY GUYS, THIS PATRIOT ACT THING IS A REALLY BAD IDEA" are crackpots or paranoid when it's happening, we'd have more of a chance of stopping this...but probably not.

Systems run by people are created and exist to protect us from the nature of people.
I think you are right but I also understand OP - it's way too easy to choose the easier path. The older I get the more I admire people like Vaclav Havel and others who would rather spend years in jail instead of just 'sucking it up'... and the more I doubt I would be able to withstand even much smaller pressure - it must have been much harder than I imagined when I was 16.
give elon musk a year and he would have his own driverless car.
Award your tests
Microsoft's problem is that the marginal advantage of going with its dominant products (Windows and Office) is very low with cloud and mobile devices as opposed to PCs.

Perhaps, but I think this has as much to do with the fact that mobile just isn't a great platform for power user tools. Sure, we now have iPad spreadsheets, drawing apps, word processors, presentation tools etc, but they're very simplistic compared to what's available on the desktop. They're also generally just too cheap per unit to generate anything like the kind of revenue pro desktop apps can generate. But, as limited as these apps are, they do meet the needs of a lot of casual users.

This is a problem every desktop software vendor is dealing with right now.
People hate on the public schools (for Americans that means the very top end of private schools), but their history is that they were set up before there were any state schools, and provided education for the public, rather than their own people, so the name is apt. You had to pay or get a scholarship, but still like any other school at the time they were open to the (paying) public.
as a hardcore gamer myself I have to disagree with you. I must play competitive style games like 6 hours a day for more than 10 years now, even though it's a "waste" I'm pretty sure that gaming helped me, and friends, for a long-term: We analyze stuff really quick and have a fast logical response also. In my case (I belive I'm the most hardcore of them all, playing stuff since I was 6), I'm the fastest learner of them all and I link it directly to my gaming life.
I know that it may sound I'm just justfying my addiction but I really like to learn new stuff and it helps a lot. I quit gaming earlier to read some book (currently reading thinking fast and slow) and in the early morning I keep reading interesting sites like HN articles :)
There is an extremely simple solution: leave.

I've not lived in the US for almost two years now. I've only had to travel back twice in that time. Meanwhile, in the same time I've visited France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany multiple times. None of those travel experiences were nearly as unpleasant or stressful as my two trips to the US. Furthermore, the technology communities that are growing up in these places have a vigor and sense of excitement that rivals or even surpasses anything you'll find in Silicon Valley.
I also like a mix of different types of noise. I actually built a little site to mix ambient noises together [1].

[1] http://asoftmurmur.com
Dan did such a great job on the Stanford Crypto course, it's worth learning the basics to learn the important bits.

https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto
How large are these s-exp ? Lisp is unreadable when nested too much (I'm starring at an xml->s-exp dump and I don't even wanna try to read it), but usually lisp code and data tend to be factored into little combinators and separated specific functions. If you can, try to split them.
$30 sounds like a steal
The 20k figure would be referring to the development, which would be several "blocks" (i.e. independent buildings crammed next to each other).

The average household size is still 3 (bit lower in public housing) with average living space per person of ~140 square feet. Keep in mind that those 140 square feet are measured based on the outside of the building!
Galileo's Pendulum, CSS only animation
It's not the information that useful but how you use them. I have no study to back me up but imo if you keep playing strategy games that tell you which thing is best than another and how one thing can be beaten, it can apply to anything in life when it comes to decisions, that's the lesson learned.
"Hello, tech support hotline, how may I help you today?" [pause] "That's perfectly normal ma'am, lots of people smoke after sex." [hangs up]
I think the OP shows the opposite of your thesis, that the USG is getting worse. As much as I agree that the USG is doing bad things now, it seems clear that in any historical context things have gotten better overall. We now have lawyers involved in picking the targets of drone strikes. Contrast that with the large scale bombing of civilians in countless wars in the 20th century, and I think things, in regards to the behavior of a powerful state like the US, have improved a lot.

I find some irony in the complaining about all the spying the USG is involved in. I much prefer that they do that than go to war. The various intelligence agencies in the US got a lot of (political) grief for not stopping the 9/11 bombers, and whether it is actually helpful or not, it is understandable that there would be an institutional response to step up "intelligence" activities.

In terms of whether the USG has become more brutal and unprincipled to the suffering of our own civilians, I see no evidence of this. A simple look at the treatment of blacks and Native Americans throughout the history of the US shows this sentiment to be a false idealization of the past.

That said, I am certainly appalled by many of the current scandals. I'm just not quite as appalled as I am by the outrageous actions of the USG throughout its history.

The reason I think this matters is that the US is a complex and powerful nation. To effect positive change requires at least a roughly accurate view of the various trends, and the forces driving them.

I think you don't see the outrage because most people don't get outraged until they start to see significant, ongoing, systemic negative effects on themselves or those close to them.

For example, the injustice of the Jim Crow laws was so massive, and had a direct negative effect on African Americans, that there was a substantial number of highly motived citizens from which to build a movement.

Another example was the Vietnam War protests in the US, which were given huge fuel by the fact that a civilian draft was pulling so many US citizens directly into the war against their own wishes.

The negative consequences of the NSA spying on US citizens are nowhere near these examples.

I also happen to think that the NSA has been spying on whoever it can for a long time. The scale has just gotten much bigger because of the internet. The modest outrage we are seeing is a positive sign.