skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adding 1 to the numerator and 2 to the denominator is a trivial improvement, not pie-in-the-sky whiteboarding that prevents you from shipping.
I printed some of my best pictures and I can't believe how beautiful they look on my pastbook. Definitely recommended
So this basically means that if I sign some anti-surveillance petition, or join a anti-surveillance group on Facebook I can forget ever visiting the US for vacation (I'm living in Europe)

Good to know, but I already signed a petition months ago. So no Yellowstone or Grand Canyon for me anytime soon.

I wonder when they will start rejecting US citizens on flights within the US based on petitions signed.
> As much as I support technology development and private space exploration efforts, I think that private companies shouldn't be allowed to pollute the orbit without retribution

Yes; even governments shouldn't pollute orbits. One such example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mis...

http://i.imgur.com/QmWXjCP.jpg
For Icelandic names, it's easy to identify the gender by looking at the last name. For example Bjarni Benediktsson is definitely male while Katrín Jakobsdóttir is definitely female.

Another strategy is to use gender-neutral terms until you find out the gender, as asking directly might be considered rude in some cultures.
Work normal hours for your job then anything extra pushing your skills in areas you find interesting. This can be on tangentially related work tasks or research or skills.

If you find your interests lead away from your job, then that is a path to skilling up for a more appropriate job.

If you think it sucks you have to work so long and hard to find and/or get those interesting jobs it does .

But it's because other people are willing to do this and will get the interesting jobs leaving the boring ones to those that don't.
TRUE, that is all plain wrong, amazing ;-)
where is freedom of speech? can we say that facebook is now Anti-Islam
Looks like it. Same deal with the International Tribunal for War Crimes in the Netherlands. It's "for the other guy", not for "us. We don't commit war-crimes".
It doesn't necessarily need to be 100% accurate to be useful. For example, you might use something like this to choose the gender of randomly generated NPCs in a game. In that case, it probably doesn't matter that the gender of names is always correct but it would add to the realism if it was. I'm not sure why you would generate a NPCs from a single list of names rather than one of male and one of female names but I'm sure there are other examples of problems where this kind of service could work well.
Announcing the first-ever YouTube Music Awards
The chances that my house will burn down is very very small. In the 8 years I've lived in it, only one house on my street of 660 houses have had a fire, and it did not totally ruin it.

But the small amount I pay in insurance is well worth it to avoid bankruptcy in the event it burns down and I'm on the hook for my mortgage plus rebuild costs.

The chances that I'll die before my son is old enough to make his own living is likewise miniscule. Yet the life insurance payments are small compared to the peace of mind they give knowing he'll at least not want for money.

The point of catastrophic insurances is not to break even - on the contrary: You should hope it's a loss, because if it's not it means something really bad has happened to you. Maybe the threshold for what constitutes a "really bad" financial blow is high for you, but for most people it is quite low.

You may consider it ok to run the risk of going bankrupt over relatively minor medical issues. I don't.

And your bankruptcy example demonstrates the point of making this mandatory: Otherwise everyone ends up paying, without any ability to steer how the payment burden is distributed. This is likely to further disadvantage those who are least able to pay for their treatments in the first place.

I suspect that despite the shortcomings of ACA it's going to turn out politically much like the UK NHS: When it was introduced, in 1948, the Conservatives fought it tooth and nail, and vowed to repeal it - one might have been forgiven for thinking it would be the End of Britain if one were to have listened to them. A year or two after it was introduced, the NHS had become so popular that they dropped their opposition to it with the realisation that they'd never form a government again if they kept up their opposition.

Chances are good that unless the ACA implementation is botched beyond belief that Republicans will find themselves in a similar situation in a few years, which might just explain why they are so rabid now.
Wearable tech such as Google Glass, Galaxy Gear raises privacy alarms
My great-aunt is a nun, her name became Peter Claver.

She isn't the only one either, there are hundreds of them that took their name from a Catholic saint.
What will be output? WebGL or canvas?
This makes me curious. Can you elaborate?
Now this is really cool stuff. Though i have to ask, what exactly are the benefits* of making it physical rather than digital (like a shared board).

*apart from the coolness factor
I've been using a Dropbox alternative for years: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_dav.html
"I'll often drop down to node.js if I really need to be close to the metal"

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234856345579446272
Don't agree at all. Whilst it may be asynchronous, people do have an expectation of a reply within a reasonable time frame - hours to a few days depending on the relationship.

It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact. You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.

It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.
StackOverflow is tiny. We have about 6 million LoC of C# across our entire product portfolio...
> When loading the page, physical memory consumption would still jump to almost 3 GB, because the images are still decoded. But it would soon drop down to a few hundred MB, as the decoded data for non-visible images was discarded, and stay there (with some minor variations) while scrolling around the page.

This is a great news. The application that uses the most memory on my machine is the web browser.

I wonder if this fix would make scrolling the page less smooth.
I remember answering if I was planning to become a prostitute in one of my visa applications.
Yawn, sorry its been done better before... I guess the sycophants in the press had to start somewhere.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Node v0.10.20 - Fixes sporadic TLS hang and partial reads
Reach millions by getting your photos featured on Yahoo's gorgeous Weather app
It looks like a row-rent version of SO, targeted at Africa.

The muffin stump of Q&A software: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eipl17WpOo&t=12
I think you can put TradElect down to hiring monkeys rather than professionals. It would have failed in C++ and on the JVM with those guys.
Whoosh - a fast, pure Python search engine library.
I strongly suspect that nobody thinks that when someone brags about the company they own it's any form of modesty, false or otherwise.
[Disregard, I read your post again after a coffee and in a normal screen. Sorry]

I don't understand "yet passing an object by value is only one character off from passing it by reference".

Is that Go?
What sword play games are there? The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Red Steel, and Skyward Sword. And both were made in service of the wii.
There is nothing out of proportion here compared to previous decades. There is nothing out of ordinary in denying visa from someone writes and works against the national interest of US.

Visas have been denied from communists, peace activists, greens, anti-apartheid activists and homosexuals in previous decades. Surveillance critics fit this group just fine.
8-byte mallocs are expensive because most mallocs have per-allocation memory overhead to track things. This is exactly why you may want to use a different allocator.

IOW, you're angle is that instead of finding a solution to the problem, instead choose a different problem. You don't always have that luxury.

My background on this problem is compilers. Compilers allocate lots of little structures that represent tree nodes, values, tokens, etc. Forcing them all to be a minimum of 32 or 64 bytes in size on the basis that would justify using malloc for them, would be more than a little bizarre. Arena allocation - both per module (for structures that need to persist for the whole compilation) and stack based (for structures that are discarded after e.g. evaluation or codegen) - makes far more sense than contorting the problem so that malloc makes sense.
Is the first name in Iceland the family name or is there something else going on here?
From a US perspective: The NSA doesn't lean on non-US companies because it is fully authorized to just hack them directly. Your data kept in foreign countries don't even have the nominal legal protection that US data does.

Unless you've got unbreakable security the NSA is well funded enough that it's irrelevant where you do business.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a carefully chosen name.
I fail to see how this API needs to accommodate transpeople in its 0.1 release.

You have failed at empathy.

Speaking to the fluidity of human gender, "Other" is the majority of the spectrum and defaulting to binary is just as naïve as defaulting to ASCII as expected input in an application/API written in 2013.

Restricting yourself that early in the release cycle (and I'm still dubious of the merits of this project), doesn't bode well for its future.

Edit: I just read your comment history and, if I'm not mistaken, you're already biased. Or would you care to elaborate what you wrote here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451454
thank you, that also crossed my mind. Sadly, Spiegel Online keeps getting worse and worse, especially since they hired former BILD "journalists".
> How do I get those spacetrack graphs?

NORAD's Space Track service makes the raw two-line elements available, but over the recent decade they have tightened usage and distribution restrictions. By the letter of the terms of service, one who downloads the data may not disclose the raw data or anything derived from it.

https://www.space-track.org/documentation#/user_agree

As a result, amateur satellite tracking groups have to 'disregard' Space Track data and determine orbital elements through their own observations.
I agree, but it's interesting to think about how you would handle such information programmatically. Even for a case where you let users input their own gender, it's tricky.

Do you simply add some extra genders? Male-to-female transexual, female-to-male transexual, intersex? No matter how many categories you add, you'll always annoy someone for missing them out. Does 'genderqueer' and 'genderfluid' count as the same category, or different ones?

Maybe just add a free text form for people to input their gender? But then it's impossible to normalise if you want to do any analysis.

Maybe we should just be enlightened and ignore gender altogether? But sometimes knowing your user's gender is really important, and it seems weird to discard this data because some people don't fit. Maybe the best compromise is simply to have 3 categories - male/female/other - though even then you'll get complaints. "Who are you calling 'other'?"

Anyone have any other thoughts?

PS: I seem to see way more people in tech complaining about brogrammers than actual brogrammers.
Love this!

Basically work email is horrible, do all you can to stop it.

It creates individual silos of knowledge that only people included are party to, whenever someone leaves they take this with them (would you start a job and take on someone else's old mailbox, yuck!)

It drags people into work 24/7, especially in global organisations but also in 9-5 local time type places, yuck!

I've worked hard to get everyone at the start-up I work at to stop sending each other emails and use yammer instead - this has worked remarkably well especially among the techies.

Make your life better and do what you can to stop using email.
Here's my IT version of "Out of Office"

* People will seek you out if they think they need you urgently. It doesn't matter there's a 24 hour help desk available by phone or IM to answer the same question.

* Colleagues will IM you every time they see you online, even if it's 1am and you only signed on because you're on-call and need to fix something urgently.

* Some issues resolve themselves if you don’t answer straight away, but they won't tell you, so you still spend time answering them.

* Email is a chore to many people, so they don't bother to read what you said, even if it helps them out.
Great idea! One question though, what about other way around - Google calendar to Lego calendar? or It will just merge with existing events in Google calender?
Smacks of forethought.
It does exactly that. Don't look for natural metrics in an artificial universe.
ACA Sign-up
Which platform do iOS, Android, WP, BB10 developers use as a second preference?
I would think this would be by far it's most likely use case. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the link.
Regardless of your interest in or position on the Affordable Care Act, I'm irritated with the web development team's implementation for creating a user account that:

-doesn't allow special characters, like accents, tildes, etc. (good thing Luis Vicente Gutiérrez, Nydia Velázquez, and Linda Sánchez already have employer provided insurance; what about Erwin Schrödinger's American descendents) [1][2]

-requires that a username have a capital letter, a number, or one of these characters _.@/-

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

[2] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

edit: decedents --> descendents (psychologically interesting typo)
Technically it's three trials of 2D data, with the axes being Time and Memory Usage. The width of the lines given by the version axis is for visibility, not to encode data.

A 2D line graph with 3 colors for the different versions would be an appropriate visualization. This one suffers spatial distortion and is only useful in confirming that yes, they use less memory in step 2 now.
An Arrow that Points Back to Where we Started
eh, the big problem is people on mailing lists. Everyone hates out of office emails in mailing lists.

Vacation messages, when emailing individuals? Yeah, in the technical sphere, they are generally considered kinda rude. In the business sphere, the opposite. So yeah, here on hn, with a foot in both camps, eh, just make sure you don't vacation message a mailing list.
So, it's certainly happened:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

I'm nowhere near talented enough to talk in terms of "odds" with respect to satellite collisions, but it's worth noting that certain orbit geometries are going to naturally see a lot more density because several satellites want to be in a somewhat similar orbit for various reasons.
Is this dumbed-up headline from The Register better? (I think not.)

TUPPERWARE FOUND on ALIEN MOON: Space probe's shock discovery

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/nasa_find_tupperware...
I wouldn't say any console manufacturers took the "safe" route this time around. Microsoft was going to dramatically accelerate the adoption of digital games in the console market, and Sony bashing Microsoft for this and having a huge push for Independents/Self-Publishing, these don't sound like safe moves by any means. And that's not talking about Microsoft bundling Kinect, the Wii U controller, and Sony's abandoning of PlayStation Move.

If anything this is the most "un-safe" the console market has been in awhile.
Which is exactly fundamental to my point and to the article. You have an expectation which you are placing on other. When the author stopped trying to be synchronous with an asynchronous medium he found himself to be more productive and people were OK with that.

It turns out that the frustration you feel is the problem of someone not replying, it is you externalising your problems as other peoples fault. If you really need a response quickly pick up the phone, get a synchronous answer via a synchronous medium.
Is the source for the allocators freely available? Would love to study those.
It's so heartening to see the scales finally beginning to tilt in favour of free and open-source software after decades.

While one reason (for OSes) is of course the much improved UI, installation/upgrade and app availability, I wonder how big a role the relative decline in the importance of the OS itself plays?

I chanced by this tweet earlier today:

"Steve Jobs told Dropbox they were a feature. Increasingly its looking like he had it backwards, the host OS is the disposable feature"

(https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/384756799351451648)
Like many of the other Firefox memory changes, this one leaves me feeling a little ambiguous. On the one hand, obviously keeping memory usage down is good. On the other hand, waiting to decompress/decode images until they are visible to the user means that there are obviously going to be performance trade-offs (and also, obviously, design/engineering trade-offs).

Speaking just from my personal usage: I don't think there has ever been a time where delaying the image decompression on a page would ever have had any utility for me (at least from a memory standpoint). On the other hand, there have been plenty of times when eagerly performing image decompression would make my browsing a bit smoother.

All in all, it seems (from a not-particularly-in-touch outsider perspective) as if Mozilla went from being totally dismissive of memory complaints to being hyper-responsive to memory complaints with no (publicly stated) rationale behind the change. It would be interesting to see the reasoning behind this (if only from an intellectual standpoint), particularly given that in many cases I tend to feel that it would have been better to simply be a bit more diplomatic when rejecting memory-based bug reports.
Nothing new really, without more details it's really just dropbox/drive/etc but hosted in Finland.
The only file sync that actually looks interesting to me is btsync, mostly because it is on your own devices only and it used the Bittorrent for file transfers, something I know from personal experience is very efficient.
New Site Dedicated to Learn AngularJS
You might also want to look at Go[1] from ThoughtWorks* - the UI and first class Pipeline support is it +ves.

[1] - http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/go-continuous-delivery/...

* - I work for ThoughtWorks, but not associated with the Go team, and use Teamcity and Jenkins more than Go.
> 8-byte mallocs are expensive because most mallocs have per-allocation memory overhead to track things. This is exactly why you may want to use a different allocator.

I guess if the objective of the article is to point out the obvious fact that mallocing 8 bytes at a time is a bad idea, then showing up some actual numbers from actual malloc implementations is a good idea. However, even small objects in practical problems are usually bigger than 8 bytes, so making the allocation size a bit bigger would give more realistic figures.

Overall I think the article was informative and well written but more realistic test case would better point out when to write a custom allocator and what allocator to choose for a particular usage pattern.
See The World's First Images Of Actual Hydrogen Bonds
Doesn't know my name. http://api.genderize.io/?name=timofei
Minimal OS X app to help lose weight by increasing meal spacing
One of the biggest keys to this experiment is he notes that he will only be checking email at specific times. If you are in a position to do so, this can be one of the very best ways to get your email overload under control.

Love the experiment, and being explicit about this type of social contract would help many of us have better communication patterns.
IME coverage reports are counterproductive. Once you have a number you naturally want to increase it, but that leads to the likes of http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Unit-Tested.aspx .

Highlighting covered lines can be occasionally helpful - the eclipse emma plugin does this. But you have to be sure you'll resist the temptation to game the metric.
This would falsely flatten the results.
Fair enough, it's not the most fitting term.

I remember a lot of hype and no actual problems. I suspect others do as well, and this could lead to people thinking about the whole problem as over-hyped and a non-issue.

Not saying that it's correct, but that's the catch-22 of preventing problems: If you do a too good job, nobody will notice =/
Surprisingly large. This isn't accurate even to within an order-of-magnitude: it's just to get some insight. The surface of the earth is (to the nearest power of 10) ~10^9 km^2. LEO satellites go up ~10^3 km, so that's ~10^12 km^3 of volume for them. A satellite traverses ~10^8 km/year (that's a lot!), so if it has ~10 m^2 cross section (10^-5 km^2), its path encompasses a volume of ~10^3 km^3/year. Under some simplifying assumptions, the probability of two arbitrary satellites colliding is something like ~(10^3 km^3/year / 10^12 km^3) = 10^-9/year. There's ~10^4 satellites, and the rate of collision goes as the number of pairs of satellites ~N^2, so the rate at which any two satellites collide is (10^4)^2 * 10^-9/year = 10^-1/year or once per decade.

I think the particularly "unintuitive" parts of this are, one, the incredible distances travelled when you sustain Mach 20 for years (10^8 km/year); and two, the quadratic scaling (10^4*10^4).
Not trolling, genuinely curious - why are you using IE8?
But consider this:

The apps maker at some point stops selling the app in the store. You of course still have the binary file which you can install on all your devices.

But:
What if you want to setup a new device and not restore from a backup? A brand new device synced with the app binary would result in a clean install. Meaning you would only have the bare-bone app and I highly doubt the in app purchases are still working if the developer no longer operates through the app store.

This is also my reason for shying away from IAP as much as I can cause I'd hate to have paid money on something I may in the future no longer posses.
> Also, all the plans, whether bronze silver platinum or anything else, include MANY MANY things other than "catastrophic injury coverage". Everything from prescription medication to preventative care visits.

Consider that if a plan is to include many high cost "catastrophic" treatments, excluding prescription medication and preventative visits could easily make no financial sense for the insurers as it opens the door for numerous types of situations where insurance payouts rise drastically because the people insured can't or won't spend the money on drugs or preventative treatments.

It is in other words not at all a given that an insure limited only to catastrophic events would actually turn out to be cheaper to you.

> Imagine how expensive car insurance would be if it covered oil changes, or homeowner's insurance would be if it covered minor repairs?

It would be more expensive, yes, but there is no reason it would increase your total costs unless you were irresponsible in how you treated your car yet lucky enough to escape the consequences.
They didn't need to innovate with the controller, their controller is the standard. They improved in all aspects that they needed to, i.e. the d-pad, and then fixed some ergonomics.

The PS3 controller, however, was kind of awful in comparison. Really light, horrible triggers. And they fixed that.

Saying the new controllers are the same except the features they have for the sake of marketing (Touchpad, and rumble triggers) is disingenuous.