skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why “Nothing To Hide, Nothing To Fear” Is Wrong
Help documentation. I am honestly a little shocked by the length, I knew the docs were exceptional, but surprised by how long they are.
'Toy gun' is a little weak. 'Pellet gun' is more accurate.
How the NSA cheated cryptography
Fed probes for leaks ahead of policy news
One study that tracked drivers in Boston during rush hour found that if you could remove just 1 percent of people on the road (say, to mass transit), you could achieve a whopping 18 percent improvement in traffic flow. But for whatever reason, cities haven't figured out how to do that just yet.

If you don't think in static terms, this is obvious. Across any segment of time, some fraction of commuters will change their habits based on their expectations of time/cost/comfort. Some commuters can respond daily if, for example, they have a car and affordable parking at their destination as well as access to public transit. Other commuters may not have a car at all but will eventually buy one if it begins to offer substantial advantages over its cost. The point is that the system is dynamic.

And if, magically, the City of Boston could wave a wand and redirect 1% of its commuters to the subway, they'd soon discover that the 18% improvement in traffic flow has tempted many other commuters back onto the roads, and the benefit vanishes.
Ten-Step Program for Victims of Founderitis
Whether its true or not, he probably meant it literally. He claims to have remained on his own property for the majority of the time that the police were searching it.
Show HN: Off the Grid. On the Grid.
You can do a pretty nifty heliostat with passive heat collectors and a closed loop containing a fluid which vaporizes at a convenient temperature for shifting the center of gravity. (And dampers so wind buffeting doesn't jiggle the panel too much.)

That said, $30 of motors and $50 of controller board is probably cheaper and more accurate. The passive system is good enough for orienting solar panels, probably not for aiming a mirror.
Hm, I don't think so. These guys are working on it almost 20 years. They just spoke at Bombardier conference in Canada http://www.sae.org/events/atc/
25 things I learnt selling my life possessions
Ask HN: Matching music albums from Amazon, iTunes and Wikipedia?
How would you undertake the task of matching music albums from Amazon, iTunes and Wikipedia in order to show all available links on one page?
Hmm... how about...

@Service
public class SandwichFactoryImpl implements SandwichFactory {

@Autowired
public EmptySandwichFactory emptySandwichFactory;

@Autowired
public FoodComponentFactoryFactory foodComponentFactoryFactory;

@Override
public Sandwich makeSandwich(Collection<FoodComponentDescription> foodComponentDescriptions) {

Sandwich sandwich = emptySandwichFactory.newSandwich();

for (FoodComponentDescription foodComponentDescription : foodComponentDescriptions) {
FoodComponentFactory foodFactory = foodComponentFactoryFactory.getFactory(foodComponentDescription.getType());

for (int i = 0; i < foodComponentDescription.getQuantity(); i++) {
sandwich.addFood(foodFactory.create());
}
}

return sandwich;
}

public SandwichDTO makeMyFavoriteSandwich() {
Collection<FoodComponentDescription> components = Lists.newArrayList();

components.add(new FoodComponentDescription(FoodType.BREAD, 1));
components.add(new FoodComponentDescription(FoodType.BACON, 2));
components.add(new FoodComponentDescription(FoodType.BREAD, 1));

return makeSandwich(components);
}

}
> An urban street that is currently 2+2 lanes could be used as 4+1 in the morning and 1+4 in the evening if that is what traffic requires.

No need for self driving cars to do this…
Exactly. When people shout it online "Get a life", they really don't understand for some people the work we do might really be fun, as horse riding, gambling, or drinking and dancing in pubs is for them.
The biggest flaw I see with this solar project is that it's just another continuation of the centralized model. We should be encouraging homes and businesses to be producers of energy and decentralize our power grid.

$2 billion on a centralized project in the age of increasing decentralization seems like waste of money.
Why do you even try? It doesn't make any sense to me. Moving to the UK or Scandinavia would be trivially easy, and you'd instantly find yourself in a super business friendly environment compared to France. Is it the food?
As an employer in the tech industry, I would never hire someone that complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much, and I don't own a Fortune 500 company.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here (I'm lm, the BK guy).

It's not clear if you are suggesting that BK was helping add backdoors or if all the fuss over the BK license was so they could move to something less paranoid so it would be easier to add backdoors or $something_else.
Showing some sort of sparkline would be helpful (i.e., overlay major versions with their reviews over time), although may be difficult to convey with the limited real estate. Maybe something to expose if you wanted to dig deeper into the review data (users probably don't care that much for $0.99). I'm guessing this is probably already available to developers anyway?
The Increasingly Endangered Middle-Skill Job
GoPro US Twitter Heat Map
Will Any Health App Ever Really Succeed?
JoeThirty - Craft K-Cups Delivered Monthly
Why the Sharing Economy Is, But Needs a Stricter Definition
If somebody sees your password on a sticky note, they now know your password. If they get access to your computer with LastPass logged in, they can't get your master password.

Small distinction, but there it is.

Also, with LastPass you are just trading risks. You increase the risk of your accounts being compromised by access to your computer, but you decrease your risk of accounts being compromised because HN password database was cracked. I use LastPass because I think that trade results in less overall risk, especially because it replaced saving my passwords in Chrome's less-secure password manager.
This seems to be much a do about nothing.

Suppose you borrow money from a bank. The bank could:

A. Use mortgages/IOUs instead of cash so the next borrower who wants to borrow is given IOU's (from various people) instead of cash. Assuming the person selling the house agrees, the buyer trades these IOU's to the seller for the house. "I'll give you 2 IOU's that I got from my bank (1 from Bob and 1 from Sally) totaling $200K for your house."

OR
B. The bank uses some mechanism to convert those IOU's to cash and assumes the risk that Bob and Sally might not pay their debts.

The bank agrees to guarantee/take responsibility for the IOU's it received i.e covers the risk that the IOU will go bad and gives the next borrower cash instead. The banks is being compensated for assuming that risk by charging interest.

Am I missing something?
Movies -> Aaron Copland -> Wagner -> more "elitist" stuff

Would be a good progression imo.
I did comment to say that it works well on iPad, but I would like to add that there are some interesting 'features' when using 2 fingers: they don't work at the same time,but on one board, it's almost like an etchasketch where one finger takes over from where the other left off, on another board it draws between the the fingers, and yet another board the draw point switches between where each finger is. Looks like fun to explore later...
It's my personal goal at the current company I'm at to see Scala grow to be respected as an "enterprise" language. The startup where I learned Scala had a small disciplined team with lots of mentorship that meant almost everyone developed some very good Scala practices.

If code is becoming unmaintainable because of outsourced development, does that not have more to do with how we communicate to these external developers? Bad code is bad code in any language.
Same. I use d$ (i.e. d and the movement command $) to delete to the end of the line. Apparently you can just use D. Also, I didn't even know you could do N | to move the the Nth column (e.g. 30| moves to the 30th column).
I think the video chat component of this is to assuage the 'face-to-face support is more comforting' crowd. If my mum can get the callback, see the person, talk to them, and have the steps explained, it'll vastly reduce the number of service calls I get ;)
And hence the need for labor laws to rein in employers.

EDIT: If you don't like the rules, go open a company in another country. The ability to employ people is a privilege, governed by labor laws. You don't make the rules, you simply have to play by them.
> Work IS learning [...] it's a fallacy to believe that work and play can't be the same thing.

Come on. There's a big difference between being able to decide what to learn and at what pace, and being told by someone else to learn something as soon as possible so as to get work done.
Aren't you worried about missing out on the best performing hires then? Why would a person who can pick and choose work at a place where ass-in-seat time is used as a metric?
I've seen this in action even on a pretty long merge segment for a lane reduction. It's a feedback loop of sorts, lots of people zoom up attempting to merge at the last possible moment and bypass the line of people that are slowing down because people further ahead were zooming up and trying to merge at the last possible moment.
> No need for self driving cars to do this…

100% self-driving cars may reduce the marginal infrastructure costs of enabling this conversion, thus making it economical to do on more of the roads where it might be useful; its done now in some places, but its usually limited to the very worst bottlenecks because the cost of doing it safely (usually involving retractable dividers and lots of signage and other signalling systems.)
Does anyone know what moment in "Castle in the Sky" would cause everyone to tweet at the same time? I saw the movie years ago and it's not at all obvious to me.
AngelList Syndication changes everything – and nothing
Anatomy of a Jailbreak Trojan
I haven't done a lot of reading on self driving cars. No more than the occasional article on here.
Do they have plans for cars that can operate in all weather conditions? I mean I never noticed if they ever said that the cars were only for mild weather areas.

This was before I started thinking about the unknown variables that cause accidents: deer, a tire exploding, other debris (nails, glass, etc), some manufacturer or software bug.

It's all too easy to imagine the software doing quite unexpected things when it gets to an unknown. Even if you could take control of the car I imagine most people wouldn't be paying attention to actually do it.

This is just my panicky train of thought though. The tech is cool.
Just another toy for the wealthy. I'm still looking for something like the Moller Skycar with auto-pilot. Getting a pilot's license is too hard/expensive/takes too long for it go mainstream. It would also be nice if it used something stronger than a propeller (not sure if jet engines work on small aircraft). If it's going to replace plane trips, it needs to go a lot faster than 60mph.
Just beware blurring the line - it's sometimes first step towards burnout. I wanted to give a reference, here's an article from forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/04/01/10-signs-yo...

There are studies that show that work preoccupation outside working ours can be a sign of burnout (incoming or undergoing). I know it's great to love your job, that's what flow state is all about, but there can be a darker side to it as well.
To be clear, you're singling out a specific algorithm and offering a 1000USD, even money bet that it will be used by the winner?
>learning about when to use them and when not to use them.

Learning never to use them is just as legitimate.

"A place for everything and everything in its place" isn't a law of physics, it's a battle-cry for the obsessive compulsive.
One takeaway from the article is the importance of proper scaling on your graphs. The chart does not convey the real difference between the countries in any meaningful way except pointing out that Korea is an outlier. It should be scaled between 1000 and 2000 (with the caveat that Korea is off the scale) to convey the real difference between the countries. Otherwise it doesn't look at a glance like we work a whole lot more in America.
It is an odd definition of concave. It would make more sense to me to require that the line joining two points on the state's border does not cross in and out of the original state when determining the number of other states it crosses... This doesn't really capture concave as a geometric concept either but more aligned with the idea that it is a local property.
If you're going to include water I think Hawaii may have Maryland beat. Maybe even Alaska?
Advertising adstock
I'm not familiar with KeePass, but I can tell you that LastPass does not know your master password. They just keep an encrypted copy of your password database which gets decrypted locally when you type in the password.

For this reason, if you lose your master password, LastPass can't unlock your passwords for you. You'll have to go to the NSA for that.
Haha, well what you said is true, but your spin on it I disagree with. How about "one step forward, a couple steps to the side"?
New results on labor market polarization
You act as if employment is a right. It's not. As I always say, if you don't like the rules, build your own company.

Edit: 'The ability to employ people is a privilege.' I don't believe that, but as an exercise, remove that 'privilege' and tell me how many people would be able to survive long enough to have a hobby?
It's only explicit if the user understands what they are agreeing to.
Google Shopping Express now available to all SF and Peninsula Shoppers
Bitcoin-Central exchange reopens
I think the Blades are an awesome idea, but I really don't understand your assessment of Apple's usage goals for the iPad. Apple has run commercials promoting creation oriented tasks for the iPad. There is a tremendous consumption market for iPads, but Apple pretty clearly wants it to be a device used for creation as well.

If there is a difference in strategy here, it that Apple's view of how a user should interact with a tablet interface is more direct. I.e., the sliders and buttons showcased on the example Blade would simply appear as interface elements on the display. The Blade idea follows a slightly different model where the tablet serves as a hybrid input/display. The up-side is that the Blade effectively doubles your input surface area. I think that appeals to a lot of people.

In short, I think Apple and Microsoft are promoting a lot of the same ideas here, but I think the Blade represents a bigger commitment to the creation side of the market.

I would assume that the HID (human interface device) API within the Surface's operating system has good support for the development of peripherals like Blades. Does anyone know if iOS has similar APIs for Bluetooth connected HIDs?

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_device
Quick question as a guy learning Clojure currently:

I'm using LightTable right now, and thoroughly enjoying the Clojure experience. Can you explain what you see are the key differences in Nightcode vs. LightTable? I'm curious, because I would love to hear the thoughts of Nightcode's creator on this. I'm planning on giving Nightcode a try tonight.
Uh, that's exactly what copyright is: a pre-existing social and legal agreement about the terms on which people can expect to get paid, which they can reliably use to determine the scope of investment required by the work itself. Moreover, its current form (more or less) has been in place for well over a century, while its original form dates back more than three centuries. I'm not sure how much further in advance you were expecting.

Also, people getting paid royalties aren't being paid directly for their labor. They're charging rent on property they own. Copyright law is similar to tangible property law in the sense that people make investments based on how well protected they think those investment are likely to be. No reasonable protection, no reasonable investment.

To the extent that the law is enforceable, people making these investments fully — and reasonably — expect it to be enforced.
What throwaway password do you use for sites with password complexity restrictions? (You know, requiring 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, 1 special character, etc.)
If you can afford a patent, you aren't a small inventor. Small inventors are entirely excluded from the patent game, because they cannot afford to enforce. This has been the case for nearly two decades. If you're not convinced, it could be "either pay the costs or lose the patent".
While true, I think that's besides the point. If you surveyed random people I bet you could get them to agree on whether an animal is a dog or a cat 99 times out of a 100.
I'm guessing they cache as much as they can here too

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/cache/#template...
Would you mind explaining why? I have no problem working overtime if the conditions necessitate, but an employeer with these sorts of opinions is something that I would try hard to avoid.
Or form a labor union.
That's nice. I haven't had a chance to use the word "hubris" in a while.
Ask HN: Any Js lib with pan and zoom of normal DOM elements?
Hello!

I'd like to implement a diagramming sort of program and I'm looking for a js lib which would let me layout my elements in an abstract coordinate system and provides functions for panning and zooming around. Not just for images, but for laid out DOM elements. Is there anything like this available? Any recommendations?

Thank you!
Not really. I'd be more worried about hiring the wrong person and wasting valuable cash on someone that lacks the necessary work ethic to keep pace.

The same person that complains about 41 hours is the same person that wants to clock in and clock out. I want people that think about the product even when they aren't in the office. They are rare breeds sure, but IMO anything else is a waste.
We're talking about DJs, not circa 2000 rock bands. Armin van Buuren is consistently ranked as the number one DJ in the world.
You're probably thinking realMYST, which launched 13 years ago. This game came out 10 years ago in a pre-release, invite-only fashion.
For years there has been talk of building a 1km "solar tower" in my home town.

The basic plan is multiple square kilometers of greenhouses surrounding a 1km chimney. The air inside the greenhouses will heat up and rise up through the tower at high speed. The bottom of the tower will be filled with 32 generators, for a total of 200MW.

http://enviromission.com.au/EVM/content/home.html

I still hope they build it.
Flight: I have a hobby.
lucky you. what about those that flip hamburgers, janitors, there are lots of work out there that people perform to keep "the system/society" in order, and there is no learning/fun in those jobs. work can be fun, but it's not guaranteed to be fun, that's why it's good to have hobbies and life outside of work. working 40 hours per week will not kill you. people have done so for thousands of years and survived.
Do you have any proof for this, or is it just baseless conjecture? I suspect the latter, because nearly every link when you search for "traffic merging studies" states that late merging is more effective at reducing congestion.

From the Minnesota DOT: "Minnesota DOT engineers developed what they call a "zipper," which meshes cars quickly. Signs advise drivers of the upcoming lane closure, tell them to use both lanes up to a point and then direct them to take turns merging. When traffic is flowing, drivers merge early to avoid unsafe maneuvers. But when traffic is congested, motorists make full use of both lanes. The data revealed that the change reduced traffic lines by 35 percent and also brought down "lane changing conflicts," says Craig Mittelstadt, Minnesota DOT's work zone safety specialist."

From the Virginia DOT: "The late merge should be considered for 2-to-1 lane closure configurations to improve throughput when large numbers of heavy vehicles are present (>20 percent) for the majority of the time and congestion and queuing are often present."
I was joking. You know, he's doing this purposely rambling, intricate (satirical) talk, for the purpose of mocking what he finds to be the irrelevance of the subject mathematical discovery.

Then someone (presumably from the math camp) comes along and unwittingly responds only to a tiny trivial detail, in a manner that is as meaningless as the parent believes the discovery itself to be.

Ahem. So...I guess it's not a very good joke if it has to be explained, but I got a kick out of it!
Not quite a pokedex, but you can get a leaf-dex today!

http://leafsnap.com

You can take photos of leaves and it'll identify them for you :)
The real issue with Myst V was the awful drawing mechanic that was necessary to solve almost all of the puzzles. I don't have a lot of artistic ability and what I have is made worse after trying to use a mouse rather than a pen to draw with. Worse, the drawing recognition was poor, so even if you did draw what you were supposed to it was a crapshoot whether the game would recognize it as such. For me, that mechanic reduced the game's puzzles to an incredibly boring session of trial and error.
A Preview of The New Dialog Element
I'd be really interested to know what kind of work this analysis is done on. Is it manual labor? Or repetitive data entry? Or writing code? I'd be interested to see a breakdown between these different categories.

On this note, does anyone know the original paper where those graphs came from? I clicked through to the linked paper at the end, but no such graphs appeared.
EFT- Can It Really Reduce Stress And Anxiety?
I suggest you examine why they are complaining. Are they being forced to work that many hours because of your process? Might want to rethink that.

Do you have so much work that it can't be done with your current staff in 40 hours/week? Hire more.

Is your management so inept that your employees are forced to work more to keep up? Training will help.

Many people will willingly work extra when they need to (trying to squash that one last bug or trying to squeeze in that new feature) but rail when it's expected and demanded for no legitimate reason.
No way! This will result in orders of magnitude more bullshit patent applications, and even more rubberstamping rather than careful review. I'd much rather have patent acquisition cost $inf and none be issued at all.
[Insert discussion here on the propriety of hidden affiliate tags in short URLs.]
How is Lastpass any less secure? Anyone with access to your computer could put a USB keylogger on it and get all your passwords that way. The only way to prevent that would be to use an on screen keyboard, but then all the attacker would have to do is stand behind you or remote control your computer.
Cool. How much does the average worker need to spend on health care to achieve the life expectancy of 1950? And how much to watch TVs of 1950s quality, play computer games equivalent to the pinball machines of 1950, etc.?

I am not endorsing our lust for consumption here, but "standard of living" needs some definition.
Yeah, how dare people think about their family. There's work to be done.
Non-standard ActiveRecord
I'm surprised that the Feynman Diagram didn't make the list. It's not a specific diagram, but it's certainly the best example of a more recent diagram that has had profound impact on the way we view quantum interactions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram
I would if they worked well, but they will be paid for only the time they worked. I'm kinda not a fan of salary, people slack off, and companies think they can get more productivity by making them work more. However, if you paid them hourly and micromanaged them to hell. You can get more out if you only hire them for 10-20hours a week.