skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The article actually says we produce enough to feed the whole world.

The issue is not whether we could feed the whole world, the issue is whether we do. If we don't, then the hypothesis that we could is small comfort to those who are starving.

> Massive death tolls from famines always come down to political stupidity.

Political stupidity is much harder to sustain with small populations, people who can vote with their feet.
OT: "Adrift" - a love letter to Karl the Fog

http://vimeo.com/69445362
WeeGee was a crime photographer. This W logo - the logo might not be the only thing that's not real about the image.

(http://weegeeweegeeweegee.net/2013/03/07/ny-daily-news-posts...)

> 6. “Macabre was Weegee’s specialty. Case in point, the photographer took this shot of an American prisoner strapped into a chair in a gas chamber as he is sentenced to death.”

> The W logo on the American prisoner’s head is a hand drawn Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric) logo on a wax figure (self-correction: probably not at the National Wax Museum in Washington D.C., while making the film Shangri-La, instead, it’s probably in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London) of Caryl Chessman… Macabre and humor, etc.
Awesome work, I bought the book versions with my first paycheck, only to sell them on years later. I never read them :'(

Now I've just read the first two chapters online, and I have a question. Have the lectures been updated to 2013 physics, or should I read comments like this:

"We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task." (last sentence in chapter 2)

..as being the state in the 1970s?

If so, what has changed then in the "big picture"? String theory?
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
Your practical, working knowledge of the NYC subway system is way off the mark. If I had to make an estimate, I'd say you've never been required to depend on the subway beyond the splendid realms of Wall Street and Midtown. Maybe a small tidbit of Williamsburg too. Even in those parts Taxi cabs and car service reign supreme, especially when drunk at 2AM (the social context of dating).

That said, I'd like to point out that every city has it's own learning curve, and there's no real way to be honest, and make promises to transplants that any given city's streets will be paved with gold. (...unless, of course, you literally pave them with gold yourself)
What's so crazy about it? I don't get it.
But Facebook facilitates blocking individuals -- you don't have to completely close your account.

The same is true -- or, should be true -- for many other social applications. If an app has a social element and is likely used by teens/children, then it should have a way to block individuals.

Now, whether the victims choose to block the bullies, that's another problem altogether.
I was hoping that this would have been something interesting, like a discussion on using avalanche noise ( http://holdenc.altervista.org/avalanche/ ) in a portable way, or other bits of proper hardware hacking. Not trusting any hardware RNG is silly, especially if you can learn from first principles how they work, and build one yourself.
> Biotech ecosystem is better in BOS

That's debatable. I think Boston and the Valley are about the same (with the Valley maybe a little ahead) for biotech. Either way, Boston (as a city) is depressing as fuck, so I would avoid it like the plague.
Wise choice, because non-LTS version of Ubuntu is basically piece of shit.
> ... the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species ...

Not only is that not a fact, but the opposite is the truth. Humans are wiping out other species at an incredible rate.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1525/abt.2011.73.2.5

Quote: "There have been five past great mass extinctions during the history of Earth. There is an ever-growing consensus within the scientific community that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. Human activities are associated directly or indirectly with nearly every aspect of this extinction."
For anyone who hasn't seen it. An interesting read:

river detection in text
http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/374/river-detection-i...

former HN comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5268364
Is it just me, or do all these visual editors that have been popping up on Hacker News lately seem to be more difficult to read than Vanilla JSON?

One of the main founding concepts being JSON was to make a human-readable data representation. It may just be because I work with it on a daily basis, but I find that it's one of the best data formats for fast and simple readability. I find myself spending more time figuring out what's going on in these visual JSON editors than if I was simply reading the JSON directly.
For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from.

The Americans have taken over and the Americans have, based on their own linguistic experience, decided most people can only handle one spoken language and one programming language.

For some of us, we can handle six programming languages and be fine.

For "average" people, they're lucky to get one programming language, so it was decided to fad-hype-hipster promote One Language To Rule Them All for fronted, backend, sideend, middleware, topware, bottomware, programming your embedded system, programming your car, scripting your operating system, and programming your blender.

Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. You can find the same over-syntax'd-programming-environment-as-shell-script with node too. We're the exceptions. They can't handle the truth.
Also, customized packages sets with poudriere/tinderbox. No way I'm going to hunt around for 3rd party "repos" because Debian ships with rabbitmq 1.8.1 or Erlang R14A (note the "A").
>> The modern equivalent would be the kidnapping of a celebrity's child, by a stranger, for money. Such things happen every day now.

> Really? Give one example.

How about scores, even if we limit ourselves to a short interval of time (2000-2009):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kidnappings#2000-2009

And remember, even though the cases number in the scores on this list, these are only the high-profile cases that saw news coverage for more than a few hours. Many more didn't make the list because the circumstances were't remarkable enough.
I just want to meet one programmer who can work on server side code, client side code, etc who can't handle them being written in different languages. This fad just doesn't make any sense to me. Let's reinvent the wheel so we can have JSON literals instead of Ruby hashes!
It's possible to, you know, not actually like Silicon Valley. That seems like a pretty good reason to live elsewhere.

Personally, I don't care for SF and it's surrounding cities. They feel small to me (they are, compared to NYC), I haven't been nearly as intrigued by the culture as I am in NYC or in Boston, I hate cars, I need the seasons, it's far from the rest of my family, etc.. This makes me very interested in ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley.
Samsung may have lost Apple's A7 contract to TSMC
Nokia was developing an Android phone before the Microsoft purchase
It's difficult to express demand for something that doesn't exist.
(Offtopic: I was hoping whenever you get a minute you'd be able to take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6384789)

EDIT: I responded to your reply. I was hoping you could look at it whenever you have time, because your response seemed to be talking about a different timing attack on a different encryption scheme than what I was talking about.
> Man, I can't wait for the Watsi API to roll out.

Now that would be interesting, letting various sites get their members to sponsor people directly. I bet there are a lot of church sites that would be happy to put something like that on their web page.
@seiji

Average programmers aren't working on shell scripts, client side code, and server side code at the same time.
It seems that Centos is almost an embrace-and-extinguish play--you get folks familiar with the Centos (read: RHEL) way of doing things, and then when things get professional it is a no-brainer to pick up a normal RHEL license.

It's a pretty good thing, actually.
Well, living near transit can be a goal or not. If one decides to not live near a station, that's one's own predicament.

(as for my living credentials go, I've lived in Astoria, Harlem, Jersey City, Long Island City, UWS, ... it's not a park place penthouse, but it is a non-bank-breaking life.)

NYC lets you live near a station much easier than in SF with its linear (in-city) one-line system with a total of seven entire usable city stops.

I think I can destroy your argument with: how many daily private bus services do companies run in NYC vs SF for employees to get from Where They Want To Live to their prescribed daytime slavery zones?
>> lucky to get one programming language

to get? I'm not sure what that means.
Raise bullies? You are putting a whole lot of faith into the idea that parenting alone shapes a child's behaviour. And all kids are different so your burden isn't even amongst the population. The level of involvement for one kid might be near zero while another requires near constant attention. Are you okay with putting additional burden on parents based on the needs of their particular children? Are you prepared to define what "responsible parent" actually means in a concrete way that everyone can discuss, or can I just say yes I pay attention and I spend time with them therefore I am a responsible parent?

What kind of punishment are you talking about? If you imprison them what will you do with the kids? If they are poor and you fine them, is that going to be a net win for society?

And teachers? Teachers these days have near zero enforcement options. You can't make them responsible unless you also give them back some power. They sometimes suffer abuse from students as well.
In a completely unrelated area, you just saved me a pile of effort and time with that tape trick. Kudos.
The Tech Community and Economic Development
No, it's not. It is

normal space + extra space ± stretch’/shrink’

where spaces depend on font, stretch’ and shrink’ depend on normal stretch/shrink and space factor.

Not to mention \frenchspacing (TLDR: it's also language-dependend)
This article is very bitter and inflammatory. In my experience, people only use two spaces after a period because thats what they were taught and are too stubborn to change.

The main typographic case against two spaces after a period is that it breaks up the flow of text and creates rivers inside the text block. Counter space is the most important aspect of a typeface, and by adding two spaces after a period you are breaking the rhythm of the text.
That's all well and good, but when I need to stream music instantly Grooveshark has my back--no fee, no sign-in, no bullshit.

The piracy wars are going to be won or lost based solely on user experience, mark my words.
A good Part Of Speech tagger in about 200 lines of Python
I take that over money influencing the main parties and then using that money to influence most of the population, as it happens in US. This just means the little parties can pop up out of nowhere, and win. That's actually good.
A good sign that its being managed.
Amateur Radio Operators Provide Communications in Colorado Flooding
As a 17-year-old, this hit disturbingly close to home. Absolutely brilliantly executed, and definitely worth the 17 minutes.
I'm not really "Amazed" as that is going a particular bunkerization route that resists a certain class of attackers that you would not be capable of holding off anyway as someone who this article is useful to in the first place. Properly configuring RBAC is probably slightly above much of the target audience.
The article reads like a reasonable response to what is essentially a bullshit rewriting of history.

Now, there are certainly arguments in favor of one space, but "history" is not one of them :)
How should hacker parents protect their kids online?
I have a two year old son and bunch of three-to-seven year old niblings. Recently my sister asked me what should she do to protect her seven year old online, and I realised I don't have a good answer. I gave my sister the typical sensible advice (talk to him about his online experiences, don't let him use Internet devices in an overly private setting like a closed room, etc), but I wasn't happy with the answer I gave. I realised that like so many other things about parenting, I don't know the answer.

I'm not overly conservative, I don't think I'm overly porn-protective or predator-hysteric or whatever, heck, I might've leeched a naked lady or two myself as a teen (at 2400 baud!) and don't think I became a Fox newsesque freak. That said, I don't think it's a good idea to let a seven year old roam the Internet freely (I cringe just thinking about my niblings reddit.com/r/wtf , and I know there's much much worse online). I think it's probably a very bad idea to let the government/an ISP protect the said seven year old, but I don't think s/he should be left alone on the Internet. I'm not even sure what are reasonable cutoff parameters by which to decide when and how give your child more freedom as they approach online adulthood.

What should a sensible, liberal and caring parent do to protect a child online over various ages? I'm interested in answers protecting toddlers to late teenagers, in answers targeting the whole range of tech-savvy to tech-clueless parents, including 'tech clueless but with a tech savvy friend/sibling who'll help set things up' and finally I'd definitely appreciate pointers to good, techie-oriented, not tawdry and not disgustingly commercialised information/opinion sources.
I have lived in a country with proportional representation (Sweden), and two without (UK, US), and i am working in one with PR (Netherlands). IMHO it seems to me that PR creates a better democracy as sections of society aren't so easily shut off from power as in non-PR countries. First past the post systems seem to create governments with often a marginal lead in votes but a massive majority in parliment. In the Netherlands and Sweden the governments are nearly always formed as coalitions, not by a single party. This seems to me to create a better democracy. A better representation of the vote albeit not perfect by any means.

The biggest problem seems to be that virtually no party seem interested in creating a better democratic system. They are just interested in skewing the system for their own short term powergrab.
Maybe not everything, but to explain the concepts behind SICP, why not.
PR makes party tickets central to the electoral system. This plays to the interests of people who are employed around the political scene to carve out a place for themselves while staying loyal to their sponsor. For this reason alone, it's bad for democracracy even in the academic sense of the word.
But in addition to this -
It creates a higher proportion of safe seats, which encourages party people to play to their base.
* PR makes it easier for groups to get elected who are pursuing sectional interests.
In short - PR makes politics more divisive compared to something like the Westminster system (single-member electorates)
*

I'm from Ireland (which has multi-seat-constituancies and PR), and married to someone from the UK (which has neither), and these complaints about PR don't make sense form what I see.

IME, First Past the Post (FPTP) that the UK has, has more safe seats than PR which Ireland has. I was suprised to find out that in the UK it's uncommon for candidates to put posters on lampposts for elections. Irish canidates in party safe seats still need to campaign, because they are competing with another candidate from their party as well.

"More divisive" doens't make a lot of sense because coalitions are much more common in PR system like Ireland than UK. There hasn't not been a coalition government in Ireland in decades. This means political parties have to work together, and the extremes of each party are tempered by the coalition.

What experiences are you basing your claims about the negatives of PR on?
It'd be interesting to get data on this. Thoughts on how that would work? Something like "Take a paragraph, A|B test it on CrowdFlower/Turk with both types of spacing, with the outcome being [?]" Speed? Being able to answer some question at the bottom about some detail in the text? Not sure.

I guess the likely outcome would be that there's no difference. And we'd be stuck in the same place. We'd be better off if everyone used one convention (if multiple people edit a doc, more consistency), but there's not much of a good way to decide on what the convention should be. I suppose that's why these things get so religious in the first place...
Remember Napster? Watch ‘Downloaded’ a doc about it, full movie for free
get, grock, understand, comprehend, become one with

"I don't get why people live on geologically mapped flood plains."
> The “standard” of one space is maybe 60 years old at the most, with some publishers retaining wider spaces as a house style well into the 1950s and even a few in the 1960s.

This article starts off sounding like it is making an argument against prescriptivists, then claims that older standards are more authoritative?

Why not choose scriptio continua as an even more authoritative style? Or, take a look at the quality of writing in something like Readers Digest from the 1950s, and judge whether the conversational tone is worth emulating.

Regardless, most opinions are probably influenced either by such books as The Mac is not a Typewriter or alternately by a high school typing class that was based on a curriculum for professional secretaries. There were still high schools into the 1990s that taught students about carbon paper.

Even if there is a lot of unmerited arrogance about using a single space after a period, there's a lot of officiousness around a claim that two spaces after a period is "correct". If it is a generational thing between people who went to high school in the 70s and 80s vs 90s and 2000s, then it is also a difference between people who were learning business correspondence compared to people who were learning desktop publishing and web design.
Great article. I reposted with a slightly different title to see if it gets more traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6386356
Conversely FPTP gives disproportionate influence to large parties, meaning many groups get disenfranchiesed.
No idea why people would make such a reference without explaining it. He means this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2389212/Hannah-Smith...

...it would explain the question, "Why didn't she just close her account?"
That's exactly what I thought of, as well.
Wow, the bully held onto it for 12 years? That's amazing. Have you thought of putting up the tale, on that domain, of what happened to you?
My main objection to double space fonts is that if we wanted more space we could easily do it with the kerning tables. To physically have to type two spaces is stupid.
Also explained by a CGPGrey video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
Business Insider is Hiring a CTO
From what I've seen, no matter how much of one's life is spent trying to help, people who stick out will have detractors. And there will always be some lazy bum who thinks they know how to do it better... but who isn't actually doing anything at all.

Personally, I think the best response to such is show me. If you can do it better, JUST DO IT instead of telling me how much better your ideas are. Because mostly those people just want to be heard when they have half-baked opinions and no experience whatsoever.
Hey! Hey you! Do you have a family, care about home ownership, need good healthcare, want a stable fallback economy, and want reasonable taxes? Want to not have to choose?

Come to Texas!
Amazon isn't faced with a non-rational business conglomerate with complete control over every product.

Spotify is simply hoping to grow so big so fast that labels can no longer afford to bleed them to death. They are not exactly building warehouses.
I've been playing with Coder for the last few days .. and the thing I like most about it is that the majority of the knowledge imparted is done through the comments .. I think this not only teaches kids good programming practice, but it also gives them the perfect distraction-free environment to be involved with what they're doing - just like commerical developers.

Also, it should be noted that the whole Coder package can be run on any Unix-ish machine (Linux/OSX/BSD) with ease; it doesn't require a rPi in order to get value out of it.

One conclusion I've made after 48 hours with Coder, is that developing for the Web sure is a lot more convoluted than it should be, alas. On the other hand, if I can fork Coder for my own needs (I'd like to use it to build a blog app) it'll be a lot less complicated.
> In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago.

To make that claim, you need to define "rate". Does "rate" mean the absolute number of murders per day or year, or the number of murders per day or year divided by the population?

The absolute rate is obviously higher -- the burden must be is yours to offer evidence that it's unchanged since 1800. But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point.

Also, when you perform a moving average, you can "prove" anything by choosing the right interval. But, because the future is expected to be long, so should our averaging interval. To do otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

For example, climate change deniers use short averaging intervals to "prove" that the climate is actually cooling, where the same measure using a longer averaging interval shows this is false.

Oh, I see you do just that. Too bad -- choosing an inappropriate averaging interval is not science, it's politics.

> ... population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining.

Well ... now that you're arguing my points for me, I guess we're done.
Really unfortunate about the NSFW part! This could have been a great tool to show kids about the darker sides of social media and the skewed perceptions you can have with digital communication... and stuff like that. But I don't really want my kids to see a bunch of dicks. The Chatroulette part could have been just as powerful without actually showing dangling cocks and jerking off.