skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having "play" was great in my experience, and I've never been fond of the idea of a busy schedule of organized activities, but...

It seems that every time childhood comes up, people talk about how they're childhood was great and now because the kids are doing this and that, they are worse off. Of course, their childhood was the true forger of character and personhood, while the brains of kids today are just turning into slush while they hover over their iPad's (even though they themselves spent hours in front of the VCR). The author seems a good example of that (though probably more informed than average).

(Sometimes people talk about how their childhood was bad, but then they blame it on themselves, their parents, or something that is not society wide.)
And yet, in 2013, I had to search in Google for hours, read a lot of documentation and tweak a lot of settings in order to
1. get AMD / Intel switchable graphics working in Ubuntu
2. stop the CPU fan from making too much noise!!

Windows 8 got both this right even without me thinking about it.

(Machine: Inspiron 15R Special Edition)
Plankton Portal
This is where we see Signal moving forward - automatically summarizing emails based on your previous editing patterns.
Flash is dying. Let's have it die with Windows.
It's nice visually but the text-based information could be more thorough - which would result in less links at the bottom.The more info contained on the page the better!
Twitter drops Ruby - The bullshit
Twilio patents "Method and system for a multitenancy telephony network"
I consider my farm to be kind of like a playground. I even get to play with the large equipment in a gigantic sandbox. Every kid's dream.
Whatever these positions were "meant for", the reality is that an ever larger share of classes are taught by people in these positions. Some of them are retired from other jobs; some are postdocs or working on the side; some are trying to cobble together a full time job. In many fields there is no "industry" from which to draw instructors.

No one is claiming these are research positions, but if universities are going to take teaching seriously, they have to address who is doing the bulk of the teaching.
Going to have to sell my Lumia 820 quick!

Sarcasm aside, BBM in the UK is relegated to children at school. I imagine it's pretty much the same across the rest of Europe at least. SMS is pretty much free here so we just use that or email.

As a result of this, I don't get why this is touted as a super-important move for RIM/BlackBerry/Whatever they are called now.
Maybe we're talking about the difference between "generalist" and "specialist" here? It seems like if a child decides to participate in such narrowly focused activities, it could be at the expense of being exposed to different sorts of people and getting a more all-encompassing world view.
I love the idea, but I'm guessing that this extension stores your edits on the local machine you're using at the time?

I jump from computer to computer and something like this would only really be helpful for me if my edits followed me around. Possible?
Not an even comparison. If you really want to compare, then have a look at updates for Nexus devices.
How about the probability of some accident killing you (however small) multiplied for the millions or billions of years you're alive?
> Who's ahead of the [self-driving car] game? I don't know because Google gets all the press and fawning from fanboys--like you.

It's Google. They have the right people, the right ideas, the resources, and they started first. Source: I'm a prof in a related field with graduated PhD students at Google.

The Google cars get press because they are really very good.
NLP: MIT's ConceptNet,to categorize abstract natural language queries.
I remember that something was up, but not the specifics.

I have a bad feeling about this whole thing.
It's not relevant why Android fragmentation occurs when the point is that it occurs at all. After all, what good is an OS update that the majority of users never see?
wow, inspiring story. I'm working on Appcubator (www.appcubator.com) and we're hoping to enable more people to follow in your footsteps.
Here's what's new for game developers on iOS 7
Are you implying there are adjunct professors receiving $200k with perks? I imagine it's possible that you can find an example somewhere (probably earning $197,000 p.a. from another job and teaching a course as a hobby).

Whether adjuncts are poorly paid on a short-term basis is surely irrelevant. People should be able to live on their incomes and cope with illnesses without becoming destitute.
Please do not submit/link to stories that require registration!
*Google announces Calico, a new company that will harvest your private medical data in to the Google panopticon, in order to sell you to advertisers.
> Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things.

So? Why does that matter? From my perspective, before I was born and after I die are equivalent on account of me not being able to have a perspective. 13.8 billion years of the universe where I didn't exist wasn't horrible before so I don't see why it will be so horrible in 60 or 80 more years when I don't exist again.
Even graphic design isn't about eye candy but about function - graphic design is at base macrotypography. What we seem to have in web design is a deeply ingrained culture of amateurism - can you imagine if we had designers adding gradients, page-curls, and drop-shadows on airport signage? The thing that scares me is that in future we might as the definition and function of a professional designer is completely eroded.
This is the kind if thing that is so dismaying to see on HN. It must be her own stupid fault that she died penniless of cancer, nothing is wrong with the system here.

I guess you guys feel differently, but I see myself as much more likely to end up like this lady than the CompSci professors making bank that you're talking about.
Imagine a die-hard abstinent (religious or otherwise) getting this. A Mormon version of hell on Earth?
Specifically the book argued that the capable in society should be artificially restricted to bring them down to the same level as the less capable.

Disparaging unsupervised and unstructured play because some people find themselves unable to enjoy participating in that seems like exactly the sort of thing the book was (with hyperbole, obviously) warning us about.

Honestly, I don't think technology is damaging to children either. However I do think that too much structure and supervision is, even if some children find themselves unable to thrive without supervision and structure.
To me the (potential) benefit is not life extension but healthier lives.
A CNC Routed GoPro DSLR Lens Filter Adapter
> I'd rather see a high quality of life for everyone on earth for 80 years than 150+ year life spans for the first world.

They aren't mutually exclusive goals; working on the social/political/distributional problems that prevent most people from having a high quality of life is not exclusive with working on the health technology problems that mean that no one is living 150+ years.

And I'd rather see a high quality of life for everyone on Earth for 150+ year life spans than either of your options.
Automatic loading bar for AngularJS (using interceptors)
I think it's mostly that it was one of the first free, popular messaging services, at a time when text messages in the US were a lot more expensive. I have never used it myself, so I can't say for sure. It does seem fairly irrelevant in the modern day and age.
The issue is that things work totally differently. AirDrop for the Mac works via multi-association wifi, which takes a decent amount of power. That is less noticeable on a device with a large battery, and Apple designed the UI in such a way that it only turns on when sharing is occurring.

On iOS it still uses multi-association wifi for the actual sharing, but it uses Bluetooth LE for the discovery. That allows it to be active at all times, which is very important given that on iOS most of the time AirDrop will be initiated while the app receiving the drop is completely inactive. The problem is that if Apple were to move Mavericks over to Blue LE discovery it would impact backward compatibility with existing AirDrop to Macs running older OSes, and it would have issues since some Macs that support AirDrop don't have Bluetooth LE compatible hardware. Not to mention you would have a lot more (and more confusing) use cases to deal with in the UI.

I expect them to move Mac OS over to iOS compatible AirDrop eventually, but it is not just a simple oversight. It is going to have to be a transition that has some thought put into it.
Some more context:

61% lack Internet access [1]

35% lack basic sanitation (e.g., toilets) [4]

26% don't have plumbing (e.g., water they can get from pipes in their house or yard) [2]

23% don't have electricity [2]

14% lack access to clean water [2]

14% lack access to health care [2]

13% suffer from chronic undernourishment [5]

11% can't read [3]

14% is about one billion people. Maybe you look at that and think, hey, 86%, doing pretty good! But if this many people can't even get access to even the most basic of technologies today, what makes you think most people, even people in the developed world, will have access to whatever mythical mortality-defying technology people are speculating about here? It's all such speculation as to what they are doing, the question is practically not worth answering. But if extreme life-lengthening technologies are truly on the table, the potential for an Elysium-like scenario should be taken seriously.

(Also, point of clarification: what do you mean by "intrinsic reason"? Can you give an example of an intrinsic reason something would be limited to the elite?)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

[2] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

[3] http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-...

[4] http://www.unwater.org/statistics_san.html

[5] http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20f...
Hey Millennials: You Got a Raw Deal. Get Over It.
> The author seems to conflate UX with visual design or graphic design

I can see that.

What I got from the author is that "sexy" should be emergent and not fundamental.
It took a little playing around to figure out some of the graphics.

The donuts indicate which group (men or women) was admitted more in each kind of department.

Play around with the sliders and you can see it toggle in the combined row, while simultaneously a yes/no answer updates after the question "Simpson's paradox?" It would really help if yes/no was highlighted. Basically, you can make the paradox appear by dropping the % of women applying to easy departments. You can't make the donut switch in easy or hard departments individually... that's the whole point: women have a slight advantage in each.

Honestly, I found the "Proper Pooling" section to have the most intuitive explanation. Combined, there is a bias. By department, there is no bias. The reason is clear: very few women applying to easier departments.
Probably already a thing with Chrome sync?
i wouldn't be surprised if you asked people and it turned out that the dying part was the thing they feared most about death.
If programmers built houses, every 20th time you tried to walk up the stairs, they would fall down for no apparent reason.

Seriously, I know if hackers built houses they'd have a lot more "features," but given how often my IDE crashes, I'd rather an architect design my home...
Me, or him?

I sympathize with the plight of children who can't interact with other children in that way. What I don't do is think that the play of other children should be curtailed to accommodate the others. I don't think this is narcissistic of me; I don't have any dog in this fight as I don't have children and am not a child myself.
It's pretty much the only service anyone who owned (owns?) a Blackberry ever raved about. Yes, they had easy-to-use email before anyone else did. But BBM really was a great chat service, and it was way ahead of its time.

I'm not sure how it stands up against the competition now, as I haven't owned a Blackberry in many years. But it was a really solid service back in the day, and I think a lot of people out there still love it.

I doubt this saves Blackberry/RIM/the_artist_formerly_known_as_RIM from extinction, but it's an interesting move.
> Any experiencer, once his attention is properly directed, shall be certain that experience exists.

Not so. You're referring to qualia, and this is a much debated and unsettled topic, but really "exists" is the wrong word to apply to it. To "exist" means to "have objective reality or being." IMHO, qualia no more exist than Superman does, it's a trick of perception created by your mind to help understand the world, a subjective experience of imagination.

To put a software metaphor on it, qualia are no different than your web browser, it runs on the computer, but no examination of the computer itself will find what you think of as the web browser within it, it's just a collection of bits in memory just as qualia is a collection of patterns in the brain. What you experience (qualia or the browser) and what actually exists in the hardware are vastly different things, both are illusions created in a running system that bear no resemblance to the collections of patterns in the hardware that creates them.

However, as it's a hot topic of debate among philosopher's there's no real point in rehashing what can be easily looked up on Wikipedia to see what all the current opinions are. However, the burden of proof is on those claiming it exists, not on those who critique the idea. As no such evidence exists, then it's nothing more than a hypothesis at best; and a very old one at that.
Microwaves are one of my favorite examples of poor user interfaces. Why is it so difficult to figure out how to do the most obvious thing: turn microwave on at max power for X seconds?
Anyone told the Pope yet?
Netflix not happy with Candian ISPs
Chcopy: Instantly copy file permissions from one file to another.
You seem to be saying that it's not valid to compare adoption rates simply because there are reasons behind the fragmentation. People on HN already know why Android is fragmented. It's just a statement of fact to compare the adoption rates of the two operating systems and the effect it has on developers and users.
haha, yeah... I work in a Ruby shop. :D
Actually, your edits are synced across all your computers where Signal is installed.
> These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment.

From the article:

"Margaret Mary Vojtko... had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years... Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities."

And further information, with sources, backing this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...

Lots of colleges are hiring adjunct professors to teach undergraduate courses, rather than full tenure track professors. As they reduce their tenure track hiring and increase their hiring of adjunct professors, it stops being a short-term contract for a visiting professor, and becomes the only viable career path for many people in academia.

The problem is, when many people think of professors they think of the same tenure track professors that you're thinking of; fairly well paid, good benefits, great job security (once tenure has been achieved, that is; before that, the job security is pretty dicey), lots of academic freedom. What they don't realize is that more than half of actual professors are actually low-paid adjuncts with poor job security (and a good chunk of the rest are tenure track but don't yet have tenure).

On top of that, you have post-docs and grad students doing most of the actual research (and some of the teaching as well), and you realize that academia looks pretty grim. Low paid people with low to no job security perform most of the actual work, while people think of them as high-paid folks with strong job security.
Timelines
a fun perspective of time with a bunch of timelines.
One of our goals is to present you the same information on your phones so having the API is definitely part of the plan!
Is this real? If it is, the stickers look over sized for the small boards.
What exactly is dismaying about the parent comment? You don't truly believe that the parent commenter believes it is "her own stupid fault that she died penniless of cancer," do you?

Please open your mind a little and please be more charitable in interpreting opposing points of view.
Why do professors need to "pursue knowledge"? What is wrong with having a corp of workers who's sole goal is to transmit knowledge? To avoid status quo bias, do primary school teachers also need to "pursue knowledge"? Since most primary school teachers do no research, should we fire them and replace them with researchers?
The GM also leaked on torrent sites and other sources.
I thought this is why we all embrace A/B testing - to eliminate internal forces and to put the user outcome first.
Archetypical comment: probably right, but supremely unhelpful.

Assume that the problem with the comment isn't that the commenter is amoral, but instead that their reasoning has gone wrong somewhere. Then, rebut the reasoning.
No, I am saying there are professors receiving $200k with perks. An adjunct position isn't supposed to be a full-time long term position, so why should it be paid as such?
Elon Musk's Hyperloop is viable, says maker of simulation software
It took me a while to understand the sarcasm. I have probably been in the corporate environment too long :(
Isn't "pixel-perfect" for online design an anti-pattern yet?
2 problems?
Why does it need to access my data on all websites? Shouldn't it only need access to mail.google.com?

Same question for the tabs and browsing activity permission.
What data store are you using then?
Safari was in need of an overhaul - Chrome, Atomic, and other browsers were so much better that I pretty much stopped using Safari.

From what I saw in this review, the new Safari offers much more functionality than the prior version, devoting substantially more pixels to content and offering the iCloud Keychain feature.

I do agree though that the functionality hasn't improved significantly for most of the other apps. I'd be way more excited if the Control Center offered customization. My two most frequent settings (Cellular on/off, Location Services on/off) aren't in Control Center so it doesn't really give me much.
if post.containsOneOf({"windoze", "M$", "winblows"}
return TrolLOL
Out of interest, how do you measure excellent results?
Agreed. The text is straightforward enough to understand, but the graphics are irritating and don't contribute much.
Hey Boomers: You raised an entitled, crappy generation. Get Over It.
So are parents.

I'm not complaining for myself, because incomes among programmers give us much better options than most people, but I really feel sorry for people in the middle class. Two parents working to make ends meet doesn't leave a lot of time/energy for them to play either by themselves or with their children. That's part of why kids get dumped into organized but relatively low-value activities; it's the only way the parents get a break between waking and kids' bedtimes. Unfortunately, it's not good for any of them, or for society as a whole.
Ugh, I was hoping that the "death" was just a metaphor, and that this was just an essay about the end of adjunct teaching as a viable job...which, I guess it is. I'm starting as an adjunct instructor next week, and I'll be getting $1,000 for about 13 hours of actual teaching time and who knows how many hours between classes doing grading/planning. But I have a regular job, this is just a night class. I can't imagine someone actually depending on adjunct work for the pay
Conversely, suppose this condition is more common than generally appreciated (because it does seem a lot simpler to assume someone is an alcoholic who's being dishonest about the incidence/frequency of their drinking). Could it be that a certain proportion of crime or irresponsible behavior is actually the product of involuntary drunkenness?

On a related note, for a few years now I've been trying to think of a way to organize a clinical survey of Toxoplama Gondii (a parasite transmissible from cats to humans that results in inxreased risk-taking behavior) in prison inmates. While it's true that a lot of criminals are in fact Bad People, I think we have drastically underestimated the impact on criminality of environmental factors like poor diet, parasites and so on.

TL;DR a lot of crime may turn out to be a public health problem.
Why is it irrelevant? Messaging apps like WhatsApp, KaoKaoTalk, and Viber are hugely popular.
death is bad
By reading this, I understand why BlackBerry is still way behind. BBM was cool maybe 6 years ago, so what is breaking about this? Facebook Messenger can do the same as BBM, and a lot more. What's the point of installing this app?
On Apple's iBeacons.
Indeed. The year where one could make do with the Linux desktop came and went not long after Ubuntu was first released. I am confident that I could give one to my parents and they could eventually learn to function with it. The question is, when will the year come where it is the easiest and most attractive option? I'm a little bearish about that being soon.
>One of the main benefits of static typing is to detect errors at compile time

Obviously. But a static type system that lacks power and expressiveness is very constraining and can detect very few classes of errors. Hence the example of java, a very inexpressive static type system.

>BTW, static typing goes way before Java :)

Again, obviously. Why are you saying random obvious things to me?
We're currently using Firebase.
If someone's identifiable as autism SPECTRUM based on their eye movements at 1, maybe they'd still be better served to hang out with other kids and be the 'weird kid', learn how to work with other kids while maybe being picked on a little, than to not hang out with anyone and be complaining on an internet forum that they're "aspie" and can't form relationships 20 years later.
Microwave auditory effect
"I don’t know anything about making movies." Doing it anyways.
You could buy developer account device slots for $5-10 for people who just wanted to try the beta and look cool among their peers.
Posting on Hacker News Can Turn You Humorless
I get ya.

From that perspective it's hard to describe exactly what I'm thinking...

If you lean towards "capitalism and free markets are good," then I really don't think you have a leg to stand on, in criticizing a corporation for offering luxury services.

If you lean towards, "Universal healthcare, and this is health care, so therefore the government should have a monopoly on it, except this should be way down low on the list of priorities," then it's a completely different conversation.
> These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment.

They are short term contract, but lots of colleges and universities are using them for a large portion of their faculty, so that they have the option year-to-year of renewing employment without dealing with tenure, and to never have to deal with "firing" faculty. Also, not having to deal with benefits.

> Many of the people in adjunct positions have a completely separate full-time jobs, or perhaps are retired.

The vast majority do not.

> Offering them health-care seems silly, because a large number of them already receive health care.

The whole employment-based model of health care that is dominant in the United States is silly, but given the way that many colleges and universities in fact use adjunct positions, having them be covered by employer-provided group insurance isn't silly within that employment-based model of health care.
You don't have to get it from drinking beer - consider the frequency of yeast infections among women, which is not correlated with employment at breweries or bakeries.