skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He does not know, nor do I.

Yes, but there are level of beliefs that can be assigned to arbitrary hypothesis. Consider the fact(s) that

1) the scientific consensus agrees that most human being are almost equivalent in skills and intelligence to form decent social structures

2) Africa has a billion plus human being, the scale at which laws of large number dictates that their overall behavior should be close to human mean.

3) there have been advanced cultures in Africa in past, as recent as just before European colonization.

Keeping that in mind, reasonable people would agree that Africans are not inferior merely due to continent they are born upon. Is this the scientific level of proof that matches the 5 sigma precision coming out of LHC? No. But it is reasonable to expect so, and no proper scientific resources are being devoted to this micro-study, after most of Science has already has rejected idea that one large group of humans could be statistically inferior to other large group.

As a side note, you might not have realized it, but similar arguments have been used (and are still being used) by people who want to raise a rhetorical question, like how do you know that evolution explains x,y,z fact? More often than not, these people do not have intention of genuine questioning but rather want to show that ignorance of one detailed thought experiment is enough to discredit entire field of scientific evidence. It is thus not surprising that people would think that you belong to one of that group.
My Name is Roger, and I'm an alcoholic (2009)
Simple Event Analytics with ElasticSearch and the Twitter River
According to the Spanish Wikipedia, "with the mentality that the wealth of a country depends on its citizen's labor, the use of these blinds was discouraged in some countries, to the extreme that Benjamin Franklin even proposed that church bells should ring at dawn so that the people are ready to work from dawn to dusk".

It cites no sources, but some Googling uncovers this letter by Franklin:

http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.html

which in fact contains the remark about church bells, and also proposes that "a tax be laid of a louis per window, on every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light of the sun".

However, that letter seems like very scanty evidence to say that using that kind of blinds was actually "discouraged" anywhere...
Server down. I'm not a hacker, so I need to sit down and figure this out :)
Sure, I agree and I understand things go wrong, so we've monitoring tools (munin, pingdom, pagerduty etc.) and we check them often or they post notifications often. There are at least two folks on-call 24x7. Based on present workloads we've calculations on how much time it would take to exhaust resources and we plan our servers accordingly, this buys us time to react.
I do mostly biology, where everything is 1, 2, or 5

As an engineer working in medical imaging this I loved!
Imagine screwing in a screw. Rotation makes lateral movement. Imagine pushing in a sharp-ended screw into something soft. Lateral movement makes rotation. What I believe is happening here is that one screw is being rotated, generating a lateral force on the other screw, rotating it.
Here [0] are some, together with development history (I hope OP won't mind me posting it).

[0] http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21997.0
Moonman v0.4 in video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM
I just got spam via a Google calendar event. Basic 419, location in Syria and lots of weapons and money was involved. Followed the link through Sandboxie, ended up actually at Google Calendar, marked as spam and went on with my day.
A mysql reset seems to have fixed it.
Thanks, will try it out, but wrom tutorial vids it looks more on the CAD side than handdrawing side.
Myths Surround Breakfast and Weight
In some jurisdictions they can force you to give that up, too. Or hold you in jail until you do. UK comes to mind.
I assume you need some flexibility in choosing a nothing-up-my-sleeve number, in case the first number you try has properties that are bad for the algorithm.

Imagine if the super-official, international standard nothing-up-my-sleeve number was 1. Any time you need consistent but arbitrary bits in a cryptographic algorithm, they must be ...000000000000001. That doesn't sound like it would work very well.
Apple to revolutionise global personal health and medicare
Yesterdays Apple event did not pass unnoticed. With small emphasis on the new iOS7 — it simply just swooshed by.Apple however made big emphasis on the new chipset. So trying to see the bigger picture I’ll lay down a thesis. let’s begin.
So.. why did you want to advertise your game for five year olds on porn sites?
Thanks guys. Sorry about the server crash! Follow me at https://twitter.com/eigenbom for news about the game in future.

[D:]
Beestar launches centimetric motion tracker for teams and individuals
I saw that documentary too[1]. They will see this discovery not as 70 years of clean drinking water, but as 70 years of huge profits. They will do whatever it takes to buy exclusive rights and then pump it out as fast as they can (with little care for the environment), put it in bottles, then cleverly market and sell it to the local people who live there, for prizes that only the middle and upper classes can afford.

They make billions that way. Sickening.

Let's hope the government there will do good and keep multinationals like Nestle from ripping this water off the local people.

[1] http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1364866 (dutch)
WordPress Theme Development Resources
Best creative I've seen in a long time.
Tim Ferris can be entertaining, but this is just total blog spam. It lures you in with "you can do it in three months!".

It apeases people like yourself, who adds it to their list, another hack, more tricks in my bag. When you start learning you'll realise it's just three bullets.
I'd be curious to see what percentage of the applicants were simply able to write a grammatically correct response. I'd guess it's fairly small. Many people, and frankly most college grads I know, couldn't have done better.
Ex EE here (RF/mixed signal). I always modelled it as everything being connected to everything via a tiny capacitor and a big resistor in parallel. This allowed a few odd scenarios to be reliably identified, especially in UHF frequencies and above.

The trailing capacitor just had a large value invisible resistor attaching it to your circuit somewhere :)
I just wrote a script to do the follow/unfollow thing myself. When tweetadder removed their auto follow/unfollow system due to pressure from twitter - there weren't any other options left in the market.

So, I ended up doing exactly what I should've done long ago myself. Wrote a python script to connect to the twitter api and do the exact same thing. Sure, it's not as interactive as tweetadder [no excel style tables of who was followed, etc.] but it works fine for me. Most importantly, it'll continue running on my Linode even while my own computer is off, so it runs 24x7x365. Works pretty well :] The other advantage is that I don't really pump through an unrealistic number of followers per day so I fly much lower than twitter's API limits. This doesn't attract any attention and works better in the long run.

Also, at least for the niches I use it in this is an extremely effective method of getting very high quality followers.

EDIT: For those who are unfamiliar with this kind of software - this is a pretty simple method to gain a lot of followers. Run twitter searches on things relevant to your niche, follow people who tweet about those things, some of those people will follow you back, unfollow the ones who do not follow you back - gain net followers. (some niches turn out very high quality followers with this method..) There was software that automated this for you (say, you could run auto searches and follow 200 people a day) but twitter barred these companies from allowing automatic functionality sometime earlier this year..
What else does this magical sentence work for? I want a million dollars.
Apple announces new iPhones
NSA Illegally Gorged on U.S. Phone Records for Three Years
Also, do not miss the indiegogo campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/quasp-wearable-sensors-for...
Clickable: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I wasn't aware that the gender balance was tipped towards the female side for so long. Thanks for the information.

I agree with your final point, but to be honest in my personal experience, I've only encountered one case of sexism in my career, and the man in question was frowned upon pretty universally for his remarks. All in all, I've seen women treated with the same amount of respect respect (and generally more kindness and less petty rivalry) then their male counterparts.

A lot of the stories I read about sexism in the tech industry seem to complain about problems that aren't really there (most recently, a parent complaining that teachers should enforce positive discrimination for females in computer science classes to attract a more balanced gender palette).

I agree that it would be nice to attract more female coworkers to the programming craft, much like it would probably be nice to attract more male nurses into healthcare.

But I'm rather annoyed at the "big deal" people seem to be making of this (as far as I've experienced) mostly imaginary gender discrimination problem in our field. It could be that this problem is geologically clustered (I don't live in the US), and the problem is really much bigger in other parts of the world, but from where I'm standing, women don't have it worse than men in my profession.
Hewlett-Packard Shares Dropped From Dow Jones Industrial Average
Supplementing melatonin, even in people without insomnia is worth pursuing. I'll allow you to do your own research on the claims for longetivity but this is a good aggregator of studies for the other benefits:

http://examine.com/supplements/Melatonin/

It's important to get the dose right, specially if you're still <50 don't jump in at 3mg.
Hacker News giveth and Hacker News taketh away.
> last month, it was discovered that even passwords as long as 55 characters could be broken.

I stopped reading there. This is utter bullshit.

If 55 is doable, then 16 should be peanuts (like, many orders of magnitude easier). Here crack this md5 hash for me: 2419219bcd13f7a6dfebeca7cf94108e. We all know md5 is broken, right? By the way, this was generated by using:

head -c 16 /dev/urandom | md5sum

Of course we can crack 200-character passwords if we can make an educated guess at what it might be, but we can't break truly good passwords as short as 10 characters, even if a one-round md5 hash was used. This "revelation" is nothing more than FUD and may be completely ignored. Passwords are not broken.
Which is completely different scenario than "the iPhone being backdoored". You don't have to sync your device to a computer that is online, except for the first activation.
America's conscience.

In exile in Brazil.
sure I live in the US and most of my college classes are based around Java but there is plenty of options to pick from including Visual Basic for an intro course, not saying that's the right option (it's not) but at the end of the day, it is the teachers preference and what they feel comfortable in, the person criticizing VB doesn't even have the merit to do so it seems
Monozygote twins have in fact different fingerprints. I am not 100% sure about vascular network, but I think it is also different.
Ask HN: Transitioning from print to web design
Hi all! My significant other has a print design background and education, but fell into an unrelated office job for the last several years. I'm a software developer, and after seeing what life building a product with a team is like, she's really interested in exploring UI or UX design as her next career.

I've searched for some resources to help her dip her toe in the water, but I've run into a few problems. The resources I'm familiar with cater to a technical crowd, and the resources I've found through random searching have tended to be very shallow or out-of-date.

For the awesome designers out there, do you have any recommendations (books, sites, articles, courses, curricula, first projects, human beings, anything) that would help her orient herself in your world and give her a chance to see if this is a viable career path?

And if anyone has transitioned from print design, we'd love to hear your stories.

Thanks!
I read this and it was really interesting. Here's a question, HNdom. Should I advertise my nonprofit* on porn? (I won't use nonprofit funds, I'll pay from my own pocket) Do you think the total nonsequitur will work? Is there any downside?

Sub question: If I were to do it, how non-sequitur-ey should it be? I could play it as "help save boobies" or just straight-man it "help cure cancer"

*we'll be crowdfunding to get an public domain anticancer compound through preclinical trials, it may be effective against triple negative breast cancer, and other other cancers.
Yes this is always 'interesting'. I'd personally suggest that everyone at least stuffs the following components over a 30v DC 5 amp supply (in a fume cupboard with goggles on) at least once just so you know when to wince: electrolytic capacitor reverse polarised, 1 ohm resistor, generic npn transistor (base-emitter forward biased), various LEDs, signal diodes.

you learn to double check your circuits first then :)
GCHQ: Can you find it?
At ~1:58 [0] there is what looks like a piece of pie in the dirt near Moonman. Is that an homage to Dan Piraro's Bizarro comic? He hides a piece of pie in every comic.

[0] in this video from a sibling comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM
> Next, it has an intriguing “motion coprocessor”, which I think pretty much means you can use your 5S as a fitness tracker with almost no effect on your battery life.

My guess is that it's much more than this. It's for augmenting the GPS location with dead-reckoning, for places where the GPS location doesn't reach well, such as buildings or on subways, etc.

Accelerometers are already pretty sensitive - enough to provide an improvement on GPS-only devices. But, this new coprocessor will allow a much higher-resolution sampling of the accelerometer, and thus the integration (in the calclus sense) of acceleration into velocity and distance will be much more precise.
[Hacker news]walking Dead video against ticketmaster.. Ticketmaster [video]
That quote doesn't support your viewpoint. There's nothing in that quote that I would say is wrong, and I would happily get rid of copyright entirely.
Parallel also lets you transparently run stuff on remote servers, automatically handling stuff like copying files back and forth. When I have some heavy ad-hoc data processing to do my new favorite trick is spinning up 50-100 ec2 spot instances, point GNU parallel at them and just fire and forget.
As someone who tried repeatedly to make a game but never finished (or came as far as you have), I can only congratulate you on doing better.

I could only see the video on youtube as the site is down, but it looks a lot like a "2D Minecraft". Not that that's a bad thing, but a lot of people will dismiss it because of this. Do you have any plans of expanding the gameplay into a direction different from Minecraft?
This looks great. I would play this. Cant wait to see the progress.
I don't trust websites to not spam me and I don't trust them to not share my email with other spammers. I would never give my email to some unknown character. It's not an unreasonable position.
Narcissistic Design · stuarthalloway
After reading this I was thinking of advertising my nonprofit (I posted upthread) to capture 'other psychological need's.
Looks very cool - I love the idea of a deep platformer. I personally feel that (first-person) 3D is way overused, 'because we can', when it usually restricts rather than enhances gameplay.
Exactly. I think it has a massive potential to take off together with Touch ID.
The PG jab was actually at his personal site. Every time somebody links to one of his essays, I look at the layout and go "who is this clown?" And then I realize who it is and I shut up. His design sense is legendarily bad.
To really get an idea of how H1B screws the working class and poor, look at the lower-paid jobs. It seems like many of them don't require a bachelors degree, or just require some kind of vocational education.

These are the 30k to 45k jobs that make up the lower half of the "middle class."

That's just unfair. Local workers need to get a first chance at these jobs.
Microsoft to offer free Office 365 for nonprofits and NGOs
why stop at incognito mode? You could run an entire vm in a jail'd process. Or make a hidden user account with its own home directory (if you use a unix), etc, etc.
2013 and we still haven't really gotten to a good, universal single-sign on system.

OpenID seemed like it was going to get us there (at least to me), but nowadays many sites moved away in favour of Google or Facebook or Twitter specific logins, often asking for a little more rights than I'm comfortable giving them.

Still, anything is better than signing up to a site with a username and password, and receiving a mail with your account info in plain text. Since the LinkedIn and Twitter hacks, I've lost faith in the backend developers to treat the storage of account info with the respect they deserve. (at least use a hash and a unique salt per user...)
Wow, now I feel old. I thought everyone got started with SunOS on a Sparcstation 2? Seriously, don't most people encounter it either through installing a Linux distribution or firing up a terminal on OSX? Or is even my-first-Unix a virtual experience?
Who cares? I think it's a matter of acceptance, people have come up with different meaning of words which get adopted around the world before the formally land into a widely accepted dictionary etc. Hacker before the culture started, meant a person who hacks (chops wood?), but now has different meaning.

We could create some 'xyz' word and if everyone starts using it, it becomes acceptable; that does not mean you flame early adopters, there are many words people would just throw around (such as fck :P), I guess they use they creative/poetic license and get away :P
Well, I'm in the camp that doesn't use any iCloud/Google services or Siri for security reasons, so I understand your point of view.

For me, it's very relevant whether we have any evidence that the government is collecting data residing _on_ iPhones on any scale, or whether the iPhone has any such capabilities built in. As far as I know, this hasn't been reported.

I know that Apple technically can push out a software update that would enable data collection or even covert audio recording, but in the end I have to make a decision on the likeliness of this vs. the convenience of having a smartphone handy.

Regarding fingerprint data, the US already has that and will continue to do so for 50 years, due to the fact that I had to travel to the US for work related reasons. Not happy about that, but, well, that's life.
Industrial Spiritual Complex
Yes, you're correct:

"Apple purchased fingerprint-reader specialist AuthenTec in 2012, and the U.S. government recently approved Apple's patent for its own fingerprint reader technology. The company, like other makers of fingerprint scanners, uses radio frequencies to map a finger's surface."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386460457906...
I'm only half joking. I'll make a buffer solution, recipe calls for 2.4 grams per liter of sodium phosphate monobasic. Ok, 2 is close enough; I'm making 500 ml, that's half, so I'll round down to 1 gram, etc etc etc.
Want to know how to get a secure encryption standard? Do not develop it with the government involved, especially not the US government.
There's a branch of philosophy that takes this to your conclusion... we can't really trust anything in this world.

However, while the NSA has surely overstepped its bounds I don't believe it is omnipotent. At some point its influence ends. I'm still willing to believe in airplane mode. Perhaps next week's scoop will change that, but for now I'm somewhat confident it works.
That is actually quite a good idea. Makes me wonder what other "Quantification as a Service" ideas are out there.
Heh, yeah it's a pie, but I've never heard of Bizarro. I was playing Fable 2 once, in which you can dig up pies, and my wife commented on how ridiculous that was. So the pie is an homage to her.
Try playing with WebSockets, they're pretty easy to get going. Is there something about them keeping you away? Or would it require quite a re-architecture?
This is classic case of moving targets. There is what is politically feasible at any given moment and what is needed - when they do not overlap.

The moment the needed becomes feasible the new thing needed to calm stuff down becomes politically impossible because the situation has worsened a lot. Typical case was the Euro crisis of 2009-2011.

The USG is caught in weird position right now. The NSA story would have been easy to defuse in June with few bold steps. Now they seem inadequate. And we have a weak presidency and gridlocked congress. And the real fun is Putin just made the rift between them even bigger with a very good diplomatic move. So they cannot move together again to fix the NSA situation for a long time.
Can someone explain what this is about? Why would you need this? I know nothing about Twitter and have never heard of bulk unfollowing before.
First of all, pointing out something that's "negative" is not necessarily racism. "Negative" is also subjective.

For example: Japanese people are short. In the West (and actually most of the world), people would find it a negative statement. If it is negative (that somehow being short is bad), stating this fact is not racism. This is not to mention the fact that it's subjective whether being short is negative or not.

If you look at chad_oliver's post, you'll see that he claims (and provides a source) for the fact that Africans are statistically the most corrupt. This fact is not racism, nor is bringing it up racism, as long as you're just using the facts for what they are: facts.

Secondly, I NEVER made any claims about Africans being more corrupt than other people, or being war mongerers... so every argument about that you've made is moot. If I did make such a statement, please QUOTE me!

Finally, "all men are born equal" is false. The intent of the statement is that all men should be given equal opportunity under the law as if all men are born equal. The statement does not mean that all men are literally created equal. You can easily see this if you're not color blind. Asian people look different from black people, and white people look different as well. And it's not much of a logical leap to conclude that genetic, cultural, and societal differences don't just end at skin color. If you watch Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert often parodies this fallacious political correctness by claiming he is "color blind" and everyone has the same skin color to him. His belief that "all men are born equal" is fallacious, and that's what I was trying to point out by suggesting the opposite might also be true.
these students are worse off. Because now they have a useless degree, some sunk time, and debt. But I think non-profits can be just as bad if not even worse, because the degree is still useless, there's just as much sunk time, and even more debt (since many nonprofits are more expensive than for-profits).
The solution is already here but is still beta: Mozilla Persona (previously known as browserid)
This is quite simply a very clever hack. Obviously it isn't up to production standard, but from a hack point-of-view it's thinking outside-of-the-box and I love it. Good to see people thinking of nifty ideas like this. CSS and HTML are getting to the point where they can do what was once only possible in Flash, then Javascript and now in CSS.