skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Wider SVG support in favicons would be welcome.

I believe SVG still has no support for hinting (or not enough to be worth talking about).

Because of the resolution range, either extremely strong rasterizer hinting (supporting not only pixel-snapping but the complete addition or removal of features and the like) or multiple bitmaps is necessary to avoid getting either blocky output at "high" resolutions or a blurry and unusable mess at low ones. You can see the issue by comparing OSX's actual Pictures folder icons[0] with what you get just by scaling the biggest icon down[1] or the smallest one up[2]. [0] looks good and recognizable at all sizes, [1] is a blurry mess from 32px down and [2] looks terrible above 32px (and not too good at 32px either).

And even at constant resolution, different densities (and thus different physical sizes) require different levels of details: Opera puts 195px in up to 4.5~5cm (as far as I can see by opening Opera, maximizing it and looking at the speed dial screen) where an iPad puts 144px (152 in iOS7) in about 1cm (not measured as I don't have one, if somebody can provide the exact dimensions of app icons it would be great). You can't[3] put precise information in an iPad icon as most users will be unable to see it, whereas a huge icon and nothing else would be a waste of space on Speed Dial.

[0] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l456vgN8oa1qz50x3.png

[1] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lurpsf1owX1qz50x3.png

[2] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lurpyq9FPu1qz50x3.png

[3] well you can, and it makes for great easter eggs, Apple's icon designers — amongst others — are known to have great fun with that[4], but I'm sure you get the point

[4] http://gigaom.com/2009/07/27/a-closer-look-at-apples-icons-s...
Interesting point between English and Italian - when I was diagnosed with dyslexia the specialist at great ormand street commented that if was an Italian I would have had much less trouble with writing and grammar as Italian is a very regular language compered to English
It seems you can send a crafted URL to request the deletion of images owned by Person A, to Person B. Cutting out any interaction from the original owner.
Totally disagree with that.

As someone who was once a non-programmer but became one, and as someone who as taught and witnessed former 'dumb guys' as you're trying not to verbalize transform into productive programmers, I first-hand experience that contradicts what you're saying.

The data from Khan Academy also suggests there's no 'dumb people' out there. Time and again, they've found formerly incompetent learners to catch up and often exceed the class. (Salman Khan himself taught his niece from behind the average level grade 8 to university level within 2 years).

The real culprit is a bad education system, and we should applaud the pioneers attempting to destroy the failed system.
Maybe now we can delete our own facebook photos...
Mighty No. 9 - Japanese Side-Scrolling Action Game by Keiji Inafune Raises $900K
It's not so hard. I think that most college freshmen find it so is because the quality of their prior education is so low. Many high schools still lack any programming curriculum.
US pronunciation is generally rhotic, ie. they will pronounce the r's distinctly in those words. Most of the UK (the southwest being the largest exception) is non-rhotic, as are Australia and New Zealand, and in those accents those words generally would be indistinguishable.
Why Limit the Format of a Password?
If sports were fair, then everyone would win.

The way he's using "fair" is more like "If sports were fair, then the guy who works hardest would win." Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
I somewhat disagree, and I've seen some examples.

My opinion is that it depends on what your startup's value proposition is.

If you're building Groupon, the example's Sampleboard, or any startup where the development work is standard, I'd say the technical cofounder isn't essential.

He/she can prevent contractors from pulling a fast one, but you're being too biased - most contractors will build to specs, probably not as polished or complete, but more than enough for an MVP.

OTOH, if your startup's value proposition depends on leveraging new technologies, or a complex stack, or delivering something where tech is critical, you need the technical founder/cofounder.

I've seen a Groupon clone founded by a lawyer of all things :) and the outsourcing work was shoddy but the first technical hires patched it up.
Why do so many people who want a career involving intellectual curiosity study philosophy or mechanical engineering, when CS also gives you interesting problems, and happens to pay much better?

Because pointers and recursion are hard!
As a data nerd, and scientist myself, I love to see so many people talk about how they apply the scientific method to business and starting something new. There are even businesses out there all about making landing pages to see which get more traffic etc. Dig it!
What Paul needed is some one to have taken his shovel away when we was up to his neck in the brown stuff instead of digging himself in even deeper.
Willingness to learn a new skill is a requisite for any kind of skilled work. If that skill is a new language or a way to master your craft doesn't matter, what matters is that there's no excuse for avoiding work needed for you to make the best out of your time.
Berlin, Germany (No remote). No German requirements necessary. We develop mobile games for real gamers. Currently team of 7, expanding quickly. www.staradmiral.com

* Unity3D developer: front-end deve
* Server developer (C#/Windows)

Email the founder: felix@hardscoregames.com
By "our enemies" you mean enemies of the USG, I assume.

I agree with your point, but do you think they'd force widespread cipher switch across government bodies? Or leave other government entities using broken encryption so they can more easiler spy?
Translating requires to master English in the first place (at least understanding), so I guess it's back to square one...
I think he's a great at explaining stuff and a terrific teacher. Maybe his next venture should be an online school teaching general computer science or more languages/frameworks. Hopefully his burnout is with Rails alone and not teaching in general.
That just gives out the same info as https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/, unless (I speculate) you already have a Facebook account and are logged in.
>Can you mention a couple of key things that make your product diferent and desirable, instead of Flash?

It being built on standard web technologies, instead of in a proprietary engine, with a proprietary authoring environment, horrible security, subpar performance and CPU utilization and crappy or no GUI support (so you have to built everything on your own).
For the former, that is what I meant. There is no protection to uplift you from poverty if the value of flesh bodies performing unskilled tasks isn't worth what it costs to keep you alive. That is why wal-mart employees are given food stamps applications when they are hired, it is also why upward mobility at the bottom is nearly impossible - if you make 10% more, you get 30% less resources because of tiered or biased welfare programs that cut you off at fixed intervals. It demonstrates that situational targeted welfare seems to trend towards exploitation by either side of the aisle when possible.

On the second - that is an education problem. It wouldn't solve itself in the short term, but I imagine culturally wasting that money and remaining homeless will be less prominent over time. Right now, there is a hyper-consumerist culture of spending everything you have and then some on immediate pleasure, which isn't sustainable regardless of what fiscal organizing of society you have.

You can't fix fundamental problems with aid - which is just short term gifts. BI would be a raw wealth redistribution with no addons or exceptions, you just implment, say, a 10% exchange tax on all monetary transactions, and divide the proceeds amongst everyone. The poor pay less, the rich pay more, but it isn't a situational game of "for 3 years, we will provide X resource to impoverished people Y". It is bigger than that. I'd argue it is probably the best way to simultaneously have socialism and capitalism - if everyones basic needs are taken care of, you eliminate the worst part of capitalism - needs based wage exploitation - but you also eliminate the worst part of socialism, because the means of production are still in the hands of those who play the game (or their descendents, but I won't go on a bender about the absurdity of inheritance here). It enables massive deregulation because you don't have to fear exploitation of the workforce if people are employed to meet their wants and not their needs.
Another cool project is bam[1], a constant key/value server built on similar principles. A single input file (in this case, a TSV file instead of the SPL log file) and an index file. The cool thing about bam is that it uses the CMPH[2] library to generate a minimal perfect hash function over the keys in the input file before putting them in the index file.

[1]: https://github.com/StefanKarpinski/bam
[2]: http://cmph.sourceforge.net/
Leap Touch
I worked in the auto industry for 10 years and I can tell you that, before the industry crash, I knew a guy who put the owner's manual in the glove box and made over $100k/yr. This was not uncommon and the guys that worked a lot overtime were millionaires. I remember one gentleman who was 72 years old and still working 7 days a week. I can tell you a lot of stories about the automotive industry that you probably won't believe.
Japan's maglev train runs test at over 310 mph (with video)
The lack of privacy is a bug which needs to be fixed, I don't believe the OP means a users right to privacy is a bug.
> How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only 日本語 documentation?

Funny story: Ruby took a while to catch on outside of Japan because its docs were all in 日本語. The Pickaxe was created by basically ignoring all the docs, reading the C, and playing around in the REPL.

Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
Not locally: in the browser. He wants to connect it to a LOCAL db (on his desktop).
Of all the cliches, I've hated "This" ever since I started seeing it on other forums years ago.

The only one that bugs me more is "tl;dr". People have become terrified of writing long text, so they apologize beforehand. Either stand by your long text or shorten it so it's not long. I skip every "tl;dr" summary. It adds nothing.
We know that subpopulations of humans vary drastically by phenotypes relevant to athletic performance. The Dutch average adult male height is the highest on the planet at 6'1". African pygmies separated from their Bantu relatives 4,000 - 5,000 years ago, and have since evolved to have an average male height of 4'11". Others are intermediate - the Japanese have an average male height of 5'7".

Within a breeding population, height tends to follow a normal distribution. Depending on the standard deviation, there will be a few Japanese taller than the average Dutch. But there will be far more Dutch than Japanese among the very tallest men. This is a simple example, but in a sport where height matters, like basketball, there will be far more Dutch who are good at it than Japanese, and far more Japanese than pygmies.

Certainly culture matters, especially in sports where intelligence matters more and raw physical talents matter less. But genetics also matter.
Facebook Removes Social Fixer Page Without Warning
The article is about fairness in terms of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. It's not luck if one identical twin trains more than the other and thus can run faster.
Gladwell seems to be making the point that doping in sports is a sort of reverse Harrison Bergeron, with the have-nots needing to "cheat" to get to the same level as the genetically gifted haves.

What happens, though, when the most innately talented (Armstrong, Rodriguez, Barry Bonds) also go in for enhancement?
Concentrated learning for English accents is effective. From personal experience (through acting) I can tell you that sitting down with a professional accent coach 2-3x per week can have you speaking and understanding heavy, hard accents (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZU...) quickly. A month of lessons will get you understanding, and fooling some people who don't have that accent. A few months is required to fool people who have that accent.

From this experience I learned that the process of learning a new accent is totally separate from learning a language as most people do it. You need to master IPA as well as carry a mirror to watch your own lips and have good close-up reference material. As evidenced by all the mediocre accents in movies it's not a foolproof process, but it can certainly get you much closer to your goal.
I'm surprised no one else has really stepped into his space and made much impact.
I imagine these arguments usually come from a perspective that the US should be as weak as it would be with all its cards on the table; possibly coupled with the idea that if we're spending $500b/yr on defense, going down a few rungs on the power ladder still leaves us above everyone else. It's a very populist idea--that we can trade tactical power (the kind you get from having secrets) for strategic power (the kind you get, supposedly, by having the average voter participating in the decision-making process.) Let alone that the military isn't under congress...
But there's no way to downvote an article. So I upvote the dismissive comment instead.
Suite B does not contain RSA.

EDIT: To your latter point, some people would consider this to be a telling fact.
I am not the one trying to define (or use) the concept of productivity in this discussion. So I don't think it's remotely straightforward. I'm not sure how useful it is either.

A career in law is largely dominated by the "partner track", which in modern software circles is equivalent to getting hired by Google or Microsoft. The bar is pretty high to get in, few ever get fired, and the pay is good.
Yes. Here in San Francisco, there's a push for food stamps to be accepted at higher-end restaurants as opposed to just fast food. It's slowly becoming a "right" to not only eat out, but to dine well.

So, to recap, poverty has gone from starving => hunger => food necessities => fast food => fine dining.

I really don't mind the push for this. It's just calling it "poverty" that grinds my gears.
This, pretty much.
"Cancel" is always going to stay [kuh-ntseh-l], "OK" [oh-k] and "Delete" [deh-leh-t].
Good software for a links directory?
I'm looking for a good piece of existing, open source software for gathering links to the good stuff, describing them and then sending out in email. The link points to my blog with more lengthy description. Please let me know if you know of anything like this. Thanks !
> '...the researchers noticed that the molecular motors moved with slightly different speeds, dependent on the bottle of solvent used in the experiment.'

This is why reproducibility is crucial in science. Always look for confounding factors.
This seems like a case of people choosing to do something terrible than someone designing something terrible on purpose, though.
Installing Citadel on RPi
The concept of greater effort only holds for amateur sports, and only at the low levels of the sport. Professional athletes all (well with the exception of primadonna athletes) work as absolutely hard as they possibly can. If there were a way to work harder to have a better chance victory, they would.

Sports are fair in the sense that everyone has the opportunity to do everything they can within the rules. The rules are numerous enough and vague enough (being that they are written by people in human languages) that there are a variety of interpretations and paths through which one can play. No one person can explore the entire depths of the rulebook.

But it is not fair in the sense that any one particular path through the rulebook will be as effective as any other path.
They are. This would lead to the conclusion that Linus Torvalds is fairly middle of the road, etc.
There tends to be a lot of demonizing and blaming the victim in general on HN for people who won't learn new skills. I've coasted by for a couple decades really only having two "tech" skills. I'm really, really good at systems analysis, and I'm pretty good at translating user requirements into code more or less on time and more or less with few bugs. Sure the tools and techniques have changed a bit, but much less than some would claim. After you learn your 5th or 6th language the 7th isn't a big deal. I really don't see any deep need to learn new skills beyond those two as long as I stay in the field, after all, its worked very well so far... Eventually due to ageism I'll have to do "something" else. Maybe learn the skill of management, or sales, or something like that. Donno. What does a good techie do when no one will hire him for non-tech related reasons? Maybe start a tech company, thus the interest in HN...

On resumes the "no new skills" crowd knows you can just make it up in six months if you want. For a software dev who's any good, how long does it take to learn something, contribute to an OSS project, etc? Not very long, thats for sure. New stuff comes along at every job I've ever had, and I have to implement it in a month or so. Not hire a new guy, not go take a class, production code. Its so not a big deal. There's no point in learning a new skill and telling anyone at work about it, unless you think its funny to get escorted out... after all, why update the resume unless you're looking?

The other big mistake is virtually none of the detroit workers had the skill of making cars. There are people who have the skill of making cars. I have a cousin with that skill, who's a large diesel mechanic who has a hobby of tearing down cars and rebuilding, all by himself, bare metal components up, including (obviously?) engine assembly. He's stripped and rebuilt two classic corvettes and a ancient jeep, so far. Virtually no autoworkers can do that other than coincidentally as a hobby. They can tighten a bolt on a line, or align an assembly, or insert/stack partially finished parts, or press a e-stop button if the robot goes nuts. They suffer from HR doing "keyword selection" just as much as we do now. Oh look he worked on a car line, well he is totally unqualified to tighten the same bolt on our truck line. Anyway, none of them can build a car. Once, a long time ago, I worked in IT at a large regional printer. That doesn't mean I was a "press worker" or I could do much of anything with putting ink on paper other than program ethernet switches for embedded control devices. "autoworkers" are the same way.
The "average" (on your user page, seemingly over your last few comments) seems to matter more for how high your posts appear. I've found myself deliberately not replying when someone makes an interesting reply to a comment of mine a few days afterwards, because posting that reply brings my average down. Which is definitely a bug.
I admire him for sticking up for his principles[1]. You give the thought police and inch and soon they'll be back for another. There is no theoretical limit to how warm and fuzzy they can make the world.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
When logged in, it shows the test account dashboard: http://i.imgur.com/Wh72kJF.png
microsoft should understand that mobile is a battle they can never win, they should count their blessings and focus entirely on the enterprise side of their business.
Looks really interesting. What is that node based editor shown?
In the browser is local. Local, as opposed to remote.
You should expect the US to spy on foreign governments, because they'll certainly try, but you should not wish it or support it, because history shows that millions of innocent lives have been made miserable by US spying.

If we spied only for defense it could be a different story. Instead we spy so that US corporations can maximally profit, at the expense of innocents.
I think genetics has a lot to do with the success of Kenyan long-distance athletes. There are forty-two ethnic communities in Kenya, yet pretty much every long-distance runner you have ever heard of is from the Kalenjin community. If it were a matter of the country loving the sport, there could be a wider spread among the communities in Kenya.
Those drop out rates are appalling!
>Every country spies on every other country.

No, they do not. Most countries wouldn't even dream of spying on other countries (with the exception of their direct enemies in their periphery), and even if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with the information.

A lot of small countries not only do not spy, but they voluntary let other large countries spy on them and handle over their citizens data.

The countries that do spy "on every other country" are large countries, those with foreign interests that they take care of. The kind of countries that push their business/trade/diplomatic etc agenda to the world. Somebody really believes that, say, Belize spies on Germany? Or Nigeria spies on the UK?

Second, while they do do it, even large countries are not supposed to spy on their so-called allies, and not at the level of the wiretaping their head of state.

>Welcome to being a grown up.

That's not "being a grown up". That's being infantilized, accepting the status quo because "that's how it goes".

One could imagine people saying the same thing to blacks fighting for civil rights: "Well, of course you don't count as much as whites in this country, duh, welcome to the grown up world".
Nah... RP is the accent all us inverse snobs snigger at. In all seriousness, there are more "neutral" and aurally-pleasing English accents than old-fashioned RP.

It's interesting to see the effects of varied accents in modern British television programming on largely self-taught English speakers in relatively isolated communities though: Burmese Cockney has to be my favourite.
Let’s start a fight on the Internet
I guess you and the author are sensitive to different kinds of abuse than I am. What annoys me more are wild claims, and I often go away feeling it's not easy to counter this much reliance on misinformation. I am not very active on HN, and read only about 1% of the threads that make it to the front page. Whenever I saw [citation needed], I felt it was apt. Also, I did not get the impression that it was passive-aggressive behaviour.
Why do so many people who want a career involving intellectual curiosity study philosophy or mechanical engineering, when CS also gives you interesting problems, and happens to pay much better? Why don't people switch? Unlike with ME, CE, etc., you don't have to take the PE and get all sorts of licensing to find work. You just need to be able to pass some interviews. I met folks at Hacker School [3] who switched from econ, ME, OR, and other quantitative fields to CS, because you have more freedom to pursue ideas, can do more without being part of a huge team that makes you a tiny cog in a giant machine. And, by the way, it pays twice as well. But, it's still not common to see people switch.

Because CS is seen as a bunch of unprincipled, flash-in-the-pan geeky bullshit by most people, not everyone has the talent to be a good programmer (the industry has too many already, the last thing the world needs is more mindless morons plugging libraries together without the foggiest idea of what is going on) and people pursue what interests them. CS has a bad reputation from both ends - the more pure subjects like Philosophy and Math view it as intellectually-inferior (my Analysis professor, who was probably at least 75, obtusely claimed that programming a computer is "easy" and "trivial") and the more concrete, practical subjects such as Electrical, Civil and Mechanical engineering tend to make fun of the CS people (and harbor resentment towards them) for making millions off of websites that foster self-indulgent behavior while they design airplane engines, artificial hearts and power grids.
Test Tube Tomato