skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Building a Parallax Scrolling Game with Pixi.js
How many people download and compile sources directly from kernel.org?
Try again. That was fast.
It's technically and physically possible once the energy problem is more behind us. But it would also require radical changes to the way financial assets are distributed and to the entire capitalist system itself. Otherwise 99% of that increase in productivity will go to less than a fraction of 1% and everyone else will live in slums.
How international is Berlin’s startup scene?
I thought this feeling was extremely common, but judging by what gets to the front of HN I'm in the minority here.

I think HN just likes stories about extremes. Stories of people working 80-hour weeks do play well here, but then so do stories of people living in cheap foreign countries and working 10-hour weeks, supported by semi-passive income.

Perhaps somewhere in between is 37Signals' philosophy of pretty regular workweeks (5-day workweeks in the winter, 4-day in the summer) and their "quality of hours, not quantity" philosophy.
Is DNA From Mom or Dad? New Technique Will Accelerate Personalized Medicine
Note you can extract an MSI using:

msiexec /a foo.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\temp\bar"
What's the status with figuring out the encryption key and breaking all those passwords? Surely there are known passwords. Is there any distributed brute force attempt that I can help with?
Now I'll wait for a blog post from etymonline.com and wiktionary about how their traffic went to zero.
Developers, entrepreneurs and depression [video]
A Remarkably Simple Way to Save Time
I don't think saying R is not a "real" is a fair characterisation. It is not a domain-specific language in the sense the term is commonly used (SQL and ggplot2 are domain specific languages, R is not). R is a real programming language with inspirations from Scheme and Common Lisp; just because there's a lot of bad R code doesn't mean that the language isn't bad.
Google gives me "late Middle English: from Old French ethimologie, via Latin from Greek etumologia, from etumologos ‘student of etymology,’ from etumon, neuter singular of etumos ‘true.’". It doesn't give the fancy tree diagram though.
I believe they are trying to make sure the system is secure first. No point in having everyone reset their password if the bad guys still have access to the password db.
Articles like this tend to get lost in our desire to fit the world into our favorite grand philosophyy (philosophical framework, ideology, metanarrative - take your pick.) Since these philosophies are so ambitious, they need to deal in very big concepts like imports or automation-technology. The counter points are equally abstract. Each comes with its own vocabulary like labour/capital (being used similarly here to the Marxist workers/means of production).

I don't have a general problem with big abstract theories. They can be useful. They can also be blinding. Worse, they can lodge themselves as a person's political identity. Realistically, they are very imperfect and we should probably use a bunch simultaneously to try an understand a trend like this one.

Here's an alternative vocabulary that IMO is relevant inasmuch as economic growth takes the form of of new technological product (smartphones, internet). Who/how many get to consume the new products. IE, airlines get invented. How many people get to use them? Personal vehicles proliferate. How many people get to own one.

From that perspective, a lot of recent growth is remarkably equitable. Cellular phones penetrated right down the worldwide income ladder. In 10-20 years they outpaced earlier technologies like cars & electricity. Now most of the world gets to use them. PCs, the internet & smartphones are available to most of the lower income people in above medium income countries. I would say that overall, the common person gets more access to new consumer technology than a decade ago.

Another framework I would like to see used would focus on freedom to make choices, specifically lifestyle choices. How many people choose to take a different job, change careers, work less, etc. I'm not sure how one would go about quantifying this.

I'm not saying this should be the primary method of looking at the economy. I am saying is that if using different frameworks leads you to different conclusions, be suspicious of all of them.
Seeing this 11 hours later, it devolved into a political fight. Sad.

A simple, alternative hypothesis:

With the opening of India, China, etc the world has gotten a really, really large increase in work force -- but (not yet) an equal increase in capital for investment. Supply/demand -- the price for the increased resource (workers) goes down.
In terms of in-office hours, that's not really true; it's more of a programmer thing. It's pretty common for engineers in other fields work regular 40-hour weeks, unless something unusual is happening. Partly this is because the classic professional workplace has fixed hours: 9-5 or 8-4. Many people have no choice but to stick to those hours closely, because they commute in carpools, so you can't go in early or stay late unless you convince the whole carpool to do so.

Admittedly, it is getting more common to do some email in the evenings nowadays, which sneaks in some extra non-office work hours.
> I think HN just likes stories about extremes.

Isn't it because a story about average Joe working 40 hours a week on a pretty regular job isn't much of a story?
I have mixed feelings about patent trolls.

If I buy a home and rent it out, I am profiting from the work of others. Similarly, if I buy the film rights to a novel and create a film then I stand to profit from the work of others. So, in that regard, purchasing a patent isn't any different.

However, it's basically impossible to live in a house and not realize it. And it's impossible to watch a film and not pay for it without realizing it. But, it's very easy to infringe on a patent, especially one that's as vague as most tech patents-"A method and system that operates on days ending in 'y.'"-without realizing it.

I'd like to know if there are any legitimate non-practicing entities? In other words, a company that buys a patent or patent portfolio and that then notifies licensees of the change in ownership, opening the door for normal, two-way negotiations on fees. Because it seems that most of these companies just bring out the litigation hammer and try to make as much money as possible.

Personally, I would be disgusted with myself if I profited in that way. I enjoy working and creating and if I happen to be suitably rewarded then that's all the better. But I can't see patent trolling as much more than robbery and thievery. Even though it's somewhat legal, it still is a business that's built on deception and, in most cases it seems, intimidation.

Maybe that's why I'm not rich :-)
As a native Hebrew speaker, I would love to see the reverse lookup. Enter a biblical Hebrew word and see how it propagated to other languages. Two words that I could come up with were leviathan and behemoth, but that was easy since these sound almost the same in Hebrew.
I think R is actually a rather great first language, as the focus is usually on doing cool stuff, rather than developing a rigorous framework for programming. It's more important to put motivation before rigour, since if you focus only on rigour most people will lose interest before getting to the fun stuff.
The thing that makes me admire Bill Gates more than most others:

There are two types of currencies in the world: time and money, and most of us trade one for the other in various forms (pay for convenience, or spend time working for a paycheck).

For the richest man in the world, he has all the money he'll ever need, but just like the rest of us, he only has limited amount of time left on this planet. Yet he is fully devoted on spending that form of currency, which is infinitely more valuable to him than even others, on the causes he believes in.

That alone convinces me on his sincerity and his true desire in making a difference.
"Don’t retain counsel, show up to court or don’t and let them rule however the judge chooses to do so. If the judge awards damages too unreasonable to pay simply let the LLC become insolvent."

seems fraudulent if it can be shown that you are doing this to escape paying fees that the court says you have to pay.

Also it seems to me more likely that you would be found guilty of willful infringement if doing this, given that you have obviously set up a structure to get out of paying fees for infringing.

for patent troll might be smart way to increase fees - go after just your llc, you close it down open another one, go after both llc and your company show connections, show that you were infringing before and are now infringing again with another cover llc = bigger fees for infringement, TADA!
This is a talk that Greg gave at last week's Business of Software Conference. We wanted to share it as soon as we can. Powerful, funny, reflective and helpful. If you are affected by anything here, also look at Greg's website, www.DevsAndDepression.com
That would be interesting for sure. I'd almost like to do some research into this over time. But I'd have no idea how to begin or how to proceed in a meaningful way.
Actually example.com is reserved for test usage and this kind of things. You are right for the two others thought.
It seems they have pre-processed images of etymologies of most of the words and just indexing it.
Too bad he isn't in charge any more. Been downhill for Google since he left the position ...
I mean it does not display that nice graph.
> If bitcoin flops, all of this effort will have been expended for no net benefit to society.

That's not fair, Bitcoin has the potential to offer vast benefits to society on a world wide level. Why are we worried about repurposing hardware in this context if it fails? At the moment it hangs in the balance, if it does fail it's not been all for nothing, it's got people thinking talking and acting on big issues. If the cost of this is some usless computers then so be it, a very small cost to pay.

It would suck if it this stuff can't be repurposed but in the wider context it's totally irrelevant. Failure and no benefit to society is not a strong relationship.
Yes, I remember taking a Fortran class there in 86 and using those terminals. The touchscreen felt like a plastic membrane over the glass, and gave a little wherever you touched it. What I remember most were the terminal keyboards. The keys were sprung like automotive suspensions, so you had to really hit each key with force to get it to register. When I got home after that quarter my dad yelled at me for pounding the keyboard at home - my typing habits had become almost violent.

I also recall seeing the Plato system being shown off in a display at the Worlds Fair in Knoxville in 1982. I took a peek at the Wikipedia entry for the fair, and it notes that several new technologies were debuted at the fair, include touch screens. Follow the link to touch screens and there's a picture of our friend, the Plato V.
No I understand that and you're entirely correct. But there is a very powerful discourse, especially in the US south, that begins when someone learns that you are majoring in the humanities: "You're an English major? What could you do with that?"

It turns out that if you're motivated and smart then there's a great deal that you can do with an English degree (disclosure: I earned an MA in English). But that's true for all degrees.

Unfortunately, few people will sit down and tell a new student that all degrees, rather than just humanities degrees, are basically worthless if you don't do professional development and networking. My degree wouldn't help me at all if I hadn't impressed important people and made them remember me. That way they can give references and recommendations. But the same is true for CS degrees, MDs, and pretty much anything that's worth doing.
I thought that story was the height of inanity, truth be told.

Turning to the question at hand, at some level, your argument is of course correct, but we're pretty far from it in practice.
I would like to add an instructive story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignalina_Nuclear_Power_Plant there. It shows how new and profitable nuclear power plant was turned into a money-consuming hole by the political efforts of EU leaders. This story adds some additional point of view on the problems of Baltic states.
The Irksome Tuesday Boy Problem
Actually consistent interpretation: people choose to interpret things however they like, to make the narrative that makes them the happiest.
I saw Richard Stallman give a talk while rubbing ointment into his feet.

And when I was at high school looking around my prospective uni, I got help from most of my questions from a random bearded guy in the compsci building who was wearing socks and sandals. He turned out to be the professor specialising in programming paradigms / AI.
My favorite quote, by John Wannamaker, reads just like that. (I learned when reading "How to Make Friends and Influence People")

"I learned thirty years ago that it is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence."
Or, it means they tapped the lines between servers.

This assertion of meaning without evidence is a waste of time. Please make sure to replace "means" with "causes me to think" in the future.
Good question.

I think you'd want to pick Cygwin when you want to be able to compile and run POSIX apps on Windows without having to modify them too much.

However, if you just want a better command-line experience on Windows and want to easily install cross-platform open-source programs, I think Scoop is a better alternative to Cygwin.

If that is what you want, then not being a pain to use and setup is one good reason to pick Scoop :)

Also, Cygwin programs can only run under the Cygwin environment, whereas the programs Scoop installs are usually native programs that can be called from any other Windows program, or executed from a normal console. I assume there's a way to call Cygwin programs from a normal win program too--it's just more round-about.
Tricks or Treats: Using Roll Up Summaries & Validation Rules
Fear of 'Showrooming' Fades
Your arrogance is astonishing.
First of all, that 3rd world country moved a billion people out of absolute poverty without a "human rights revolution", sure there are still plenty of problems around, but progresses are absolutely made simply by making sure people are well fed.
I'm not saying human rights/privacy isn't important, but sometimes different things have different priorities.
Moral relativism does not imply inaction, it just implies that different people think differently on what is "meaningful". Despite your hubris you can't tell me your priority is more "correct" than mine, and I simply choose to focus on other actions that's meaningful to me.

If you want to resort to name calling then so be it, I've met my share of condescending people who always put themselves on a moral pedestal.
Thieves swipe school-issued iPads
ECB mode encryption is like the kind of cereal box cyphers you probably played with as a kid. For any given key, a fixed block of data goes in, a fixed block of data comes out. It won't usually be the whole of the password, but maybe "password" comes out as "94a012e6de4f1f0e" always. And so if you can guess that, then you're halfway to guessing "password123" and "passwordQWERTY" and so on.

In general, using any mode of encryption (rather than hashing) on passwords is dumb. But this is dumber than usual.
Eh? 1976? did i miss something? O_o
Someone will still have money, and (I guess) a desire to spend it.

My own dystopian vision is of a world made almost entirely of services to those few with money - most of us will be/are selling nonessential services (entertainment, leisure, nonessential medical services & care, advertising, etc..). Most of government is probably in the "nonessential" category.

Some % of the workforce will still work on R&D and essential services of course.
Having all the basics covered by a small percentage of the workforce doesn't mean the rest will have to work less.. on the contrary, the battle to divest people from their money will be fiercer than ever - more and better and more exotic services, more advertising, etc. It would be interesting to live in a post-scarcity society, but we're nowhere near there yet (and I'll be a bit Malthusian and say that we should curb the population growth a bit if we want to have what I consider to be a good standard of living in the future)
> Proper nouns are not included, except those also used as common nouns, like Newton

It has Pyrex, but just says it's an invented word.

Pyrex is invented, but comes from Pyro (Fire) + Rex (King), which makes the use of it for heat proof glass easier to understand.

The new Google feature is really neat. I'm uneasy about these things being built into Google rather than Google pointing people to other websites.
interesting, i wasn't aware that the medicis pioneered the double entry accounting methods.
I suspect that just providing digital services to people dying of disease isn't much good, but I think there are some really nice technology projects operating at very cheap and small scales to do good.

Two that spring to mind are kiva microloans (http://www.kiva.org) and the 'Gravity Light' that replaces expensive and dangerous kerosene lamps with kinetic-energy powered LED lights (http://deciwatt.org/)

I suspect that these kinds of small projects, dealing with small amounts of cash, or lighting, or water purification, or similar, are the technology projects that might contribute really usefully and in very short timescales.

Anyone else offer up some examples of cheap, near-term technology projects that HNers might want to get behind?
Yeah my wife has students who are in college that can't sign up for a Gmail account on their own. She actually spends a great deal of her time teaching basic computer literacy because she doesn't think that the kids can succeed in 'real life' without those skills. And that's on top of teaching them to think critically, to analyze sources of information, and to develop rational arguments that are based on facts rather than "My daddy always said..." which is an opening sentence that she gets far too often.
Show HN: BGcoloful #chucknorris
Hey, thanks for mentioning mention! ;)
Yes, as in anyone you meet in the street is a potential costumer. So this is a very weak counter-argument. But there are companies that have more economic value in maintaining a blog than others, YC, 37 signals, and other companies that market directly to people who work in the same business, will benefit more from famous blog posts from their CEOs than B2C companies or B2B companies that develop products for companies in different fields.
I think it would be neat if Google provided some crowd-sourcing to supplement the data it already has.

Maybe modify the graph widget that allows you to suggest a root for any word in the graph.
Little girls want big, oversized lips, incredibly and ridiculously skinny waists and fishnet stockings? Who knew?
It seems a more powerful approach would be along defensive pooling IP across a board range of organizations and solving the discovery costs issues.

Something like:

1. Have a IP company that indemnifies your company from all IP suits up to a certain cost.
2. They review all your tech before launch / ongoing for a small fee to minimize exposure.
3. Make your IP subject to assignment by this company (i.e. -- you can't sell your IP without their consent).

This is a another insurance proposal but the assignment clause makes it interesting. You now have
a 3rd party that is emotionally committed to fighting trolls that has a say in who you sell to.

It would complicate acquisitions a bit but it could gradually pull in larger companies if the few startups with real leverage sign up and ask larger corps to bring their portfolios to the party.
Responses such as yours require less thinking.
Slavery requires less thinking.
Therefore you are a slave. /s
You're right -- it sounds like the future for several reasons. I can't wait to get my hands on an eval board.

Why is it that if I have to list the three or four people doing the most to break new ground in our industry, they're all over 60? Chuck Moore is 75 and he's doing this.
> But in practice, it's often better to have a rule like "don't kill people" than "kill people when it serves the common good".

Eliezer had a nice take on this principle in http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum....

Relevant quote:

"The end does not justify the means" is just consequentialist reasoning at one meta-level up. If a human starts thinking on the object level that the end justifies the means, this has awful consequences given our untrustworthy brains; therefore a human shouldn't think this way. But it is all still ultimately consequentialism. It's just reflective consequentialism, for beings who know that their moment-by-moment decisions are made by untrusted hardware.
But using example on someone else's website to avoid using your own email address is not using it in documentation. .invalid would be a better choice.

I agree that I'm quibbling over probably unimportant details :-)

http://www.iana.org/domains/reserved

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
An NPE not using its right to practice legal racketeering would be comparable to a company not trying to lower its taxes out of a sense of civic duty: it's possible in theory, but so nonoptimal that it's likely to go bust fairly quickly. Being less profitable than regular parasitic NPEs, they won't be able to pay as much for patents, and will have a hard time acquiring valuable ones.

Moreover, I'd venture to guess that people who create an NPE business aren't typically of the most ethic kind.

There's another key difference between patents and other "renting" activities: winning a patent lawsuit costs more than the licence it's contesting.
you can't re-encrypt since we don't have the keys. but you can search for your e-mail, pull up the associated hash, and then search for the hash to see who else used that password, and list all of their password hints.
There are places in the US that bikes are impractical. The more rural areas may have distances of over 10 miles to the nearest market, and the roads will be of poor quality and there may be large hills and/or mountains. That said, a public transportation system could help this problem as well.
... Well, but you probably are procrastinating. Writing a blog is a creative effort. And in 10 minutes you only can write a very short or unoriginal blog post...
I always specify that payment is due on the submission of the app to apple.

So, all of my clients do.

It is the only way iOS development can possibly work.
He made a business out of making user data easy to grep, in order to serve ads.

I guess when he started he (along with everyone else) didn't think the NSA would be quite so blatantly illegally slurping data. There's a big difference between having to hand over data because a judge has approved a valid legal request, vs having a weird secret court forcing a black box onto your network.

But still, Google is chock full of smart people and if any company is able to sort out easier encryption it's Google, and they haven't done that. (Although I accept what tptacek says here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641483 )
its very cool.

the difficulty and panic when making a typo make it for me. :)
6TB helium-filled hard drives bump capacity, decrease power use
There's also the good ol' Etymonline (http://www.etymonline.com/) which I prefer over the Google search.
> "directly from the servers of these US Service Providers" means "with help from these US Service Providers"

Or it means "with the court-ordered forced help of these companies".
Chaining Variable Assignments in JavaScript: Words of Caution