skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, rendering is broken. Missing grid lines, misaligned; unusable. I presume this is CDN issues?
To some extent, _start is (https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/hello_from_a_libc_fre...), so you can make a working program that has no main(). And in general entry points are a quirky land heavily dependent on OS and compilation stack.
Spot on. I provided another analogy to this concept in a comment awhile back:

> It's not particularly strange if you break down the business models that dominate the SV ecosystem. These companies you speak of are merely procurement channels. Think of them as oil drills that suck up as many attention spans as physically possible. And largely they are all competing with each other to strike the next big oil well. Not unlike the oil industry they put massive amounts of capital into the discovery and refinement of such oil wells. The likes of Facebook, Google, etc are simply refineries who sell this attention (refined by analytics and insight) off to the Fords, Coca-Colas, etc of the world.[1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6400714
> what happens when people realise that Google actively watching everything they do

People know. And frankly, nobody thinks Apple does any better. Particularly the omnipresent "M7" motion recording microcontroller is seen by many as a straight up NSA bug. Actually people are using Android devices without a Google account, preferring to instal apks from obscure sources.

So no, Apple does not have a better reputation than Android. Nokias N900 does. Welcome to the European tech scene, home to the pirate party.
Indeed rockets landing on people do happen, happened too me, though at the stage the fall most of the time (like nearly all) have already burned out and just a stick that hits you on the shoulder and you think a bird has shat upon you it is just so low impact. Least the one that bounced of me. But your spot on the odd's are low and even then the chances of it causing damage are low. It is the ones that go off incorrectly at angles into the crowd that people worry about and with that one bad rocket at a public display - it happens. Still if these seeds when deployed clump up, gain moisture and freeze together into a large ball of ice and seeds - then it could be most epic a landing.
I've seen accurately targeted technical ads when viewing my local paper's site that are creepy as well, since there's "no way" they should have known enough to put that ad there, and was musing on a post about this creepiness, too. Recommendation engines are interesting, and it is amazing how much information can be gleaned from simple yes/no/didclick kind of stuff, but it can also reach a creepy point faster than we might think. Sort of like the little "20 questions" novelty toy that can surprise you, where (I assume) it exploits the effectiveness of dividing the solution space in half with each question... you do that 20 times and you've reduced the space by a factor of a million.
Yeah, got me making the same error as I was complaining about. Thanks for the link though.
Where I work they have a few gratuitous large-screen displays that in reality just suck up electricity while presenting slides about how "green" our IT organization is.

They use Mac Minis, with full-screen Chrome to run the slideshow, and I often see error messages on these (though typically from having dropped the wifi connection and not from an OS panic or other real error).
Yeah, not trying to downplay its seriousness. I honestly did not know how much alcohol impairs one's driving ability - I would have thought maybe 2 or 3 times, turns out it's more like 20x. Well, I learned my lesson.

I was just saying that attempted murder is when you actually attempt to murder someone. It's not the same, not at all.

As a whimsical thought experiment, care to explain why the other 60% of fatal accidents should not be classed as criminal negligence by one party or another? : P

edit: since this got a few upvotes, I'd like to expand. I'm in my late thirties; I got my drivers' license in the early nineties. I was never really educated on drink driving the way people are today.

I didn't take it seriously enough. I thought it would be OK; I didn't know the risks properly, and I certainly didn't know the penalties. I had no idea that being a couple of times over the limit led to a 20x+ increased risk of accident. Maybe I was stupid to not know that, nonetheless I had never properly internalised that fact.

Maybe everyone here is smarter than me - it certainly seems like that most of the time - but I am not completely stupid, and my internal risk profile was totally wrong about this. If you're of a similar age as me - earned your license decades ago, in a more permissive time - I beg you not to make the same mistakes I made. Drink driving is never an option. It is not even on the table. You are endangering yourself, the community, your reputation, and everyone you love. Catch a god damn taxi, like I wish I had done that night.

Drink driving - not even once. From one hacker to another. Please.
OK sure. Let me know when Tim Cook gives you a call for your words of wisdom. Or, you know, doesn’t.
Yeah, I am going to side with the attempted murder interpretation. You should have lost your licence permanently as well.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
There's decent evidence that avoiding grains like wheat is a good idea, but I don't think there's any reason to think sugars and simple starches are bad for you. The article insinuates orange juice is bad for you because it has sugar in it. So what? People in Cuba get something like a third of their calories from cane sugar and are quite healthy; healthier than Americans. Many healthy cultures have subsisted on milk, which is loaded with sugar.

Cutting out sugars and simple starches like rice is just a convenient way for fat people to lower calorie intake. If you're lean I've not seen any convincing arguments to avoid sugars.

Also, a lot of the paleo way of looking at diet as the cause of diseases is I think way over done. Some folks will insist almost any disease can be traced to diet, but I think there's good evidence that yet to be isolated infections cause things like rheumatoid arthritis and MS and some other stuff. For example, skeletons show rheumatoid arthritis existed only in the New World and spread after contact to Europe and Asia. Another aspect is mutational load. People with weak immune systems or poorly tuned cell metabolism used to regularly die in childhood. Now these people survive to adulthood and eventually exhibit various degenerative diseases. They also pass their genes on, increasing prevalence in the population. Diet surely matters, but population increases in various middle age degenerative diseases probably has other factors totally independent from diet.
My wife went gluten free and sugar free about 18months ago. That's led to losing 30 lbs, reduced incidence of numbness in the extremities (residual effect of west Nile) & heart murmurs. In addition she seems to be functioning at a higher cognitive level. She has suddenly taken a huge interest in reading and has written over 300,000 words of a series of novels. She is negative for celiac or any food allergies.

I go on and off gluten free and I'm starting to realize that while the effects are less profound for me, I do better without grain (we do eat a lot of oats).

The business of eating exclusively meat and dairy is due to ignorance. You should be eating large quantities of vegetables, particularly leafy greens. The hardest part of changing your diet is re-learning how to eat.

OTOH I find the historical perspective somewhat suspect. If you believe Jared Diamond, grain led to the rise of civilization. I think that it's incredibly difficult to understand life for the majority of humans. 100 years ago there were no antibiotics. 200 years ago there was no refrigeration. 300 years ago, the fastest way to move goods was by horse, which meant farming was naturally local. 500 years ago, corn and potatoes were unknown in the European diet. Humans have been around for about 2 million years. The best analogues are the abject poor in underdeveloped parts of the world, which makes the advice in "Born to Run" about "eating like a poor person" take on a new light.
This seems like it could be a great series, but maybe the author should wait a little next time until there is more content to post.

I am currently reading Engineering a Compiler, and I eventually want to build my own small, interpreted language. Does anyone know of any great resources to supplement that book that is particular to interpreted languages? Is a supplement really needed?
>almost no chance of working in the real world

Why do you think this? The company that I work for uses remarketing, and it actually works really well. I don't know the details behind it, but I know that it's a good source of leads (at least for my company).

Keep in mind that it might not work very well with you, but HN readers don't exactly represent the majority of web users.
So many assertions--any citations? Why should we believe you over the article's sources?
Engine engineers usually chuck frozen turkeys into the engine and they do just fine…
But it said he got the maximum sentence? It doesn't say in the article, but maybe there were other charges dropped in exchange for him pleading guilty to the one?
Mobile advertising is dead
Ask HN: How do you back up your data?
I have hundreds GBs of photos/videos, thousands of songs, many important docs, Mac's time-machine backups, software installers... I just find it is really difficult for me to figure out an easy and reliable way to backup them.

I currently put the photos, videos, docs and software on two portable hard disks, some photos and docs on both Dropbox and Google Drive. But such way is really inconvenient, every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos. I also don't feel the cloud storage reliable, so looks like hard disks at hand better. However, those hard disks may get older and 'wear out', so I have to upgrade the disks every three or four years..

Just wondering is there a better way to do the backup?
Bitcoin network surpasses 5 PH/s
Although its a similar approach, I suspect that what is actually being used here is Facebook Exchange, as I doubt Facebook would let Google remarket directly in their users newsfeed.
Yes, Occam's Razor tells me that when an employee of a media organization says he's going to arm Pakistan and India with tridents and swords, it's most likely and therefore best to assume it's a joke. Assuming otherwise would require some evidence.

I don't wish to engage in hypotheticals, suffice it to say I'd sooner be a prostitute than work for a weapons company myself.
Are you sure Steve Blank said that? That doesn't seem like something he would say.
What about the huge time cost of replacing everything that was in the wallet, if replaceable, and the intangible emotional feelings of insecurity that result from letting wallet-stealers run free stealing wallets? Probably doesn’t exceed $1.5 million, but to say the cost of a wallet theft is only $50 shows absolutely no sympathy for a victim, and is not that far removed from saying, “well, the guy who stole it probably needed the money more than you do.”
I mentioned it in another post, but we do have significant evidence that grains led to the rise of civilization, so I think that the "gluten is toxic" line is quite hyperbolic. However, the nutritional content of wheat is very low relative to the calories received.
Perhaps you didn't read the part of the article where carbs are ultimately blamed.
Well, no. You certainly can't do it at install, and even if there's a hidden setting that can only be invoked by installing a user-created app, changing the settings post-install is too late - your address book has been downloaded and stored permanently by the app maker.

What you describe may exist in a future version of Android but does not in 4.3.
The web site you build does the same thing that the standalone app does. The web site is hosted by the web server. That's an added piece of software to maintain and configure, over and above the web site itself.
Kinda weird that the crossword is case sensitive and only works with lowercase letters. Funny idea, though.
If you could get images for the titles and possibly a short summary, it would be a lot better.
I bid 750 million
Hi , what technology do you use ? Flash,Java or something else?
Judging an act by its consequences seems like a frightfully hard-nosed, rational thing to do; the problem with trying to put it into practice is that we tend to end up judging only by the superficially obvious consequences and ignoring the more important long-term effects.

It's easy to compare the nominal cost of this event with the idea that it only helped one person, but the latter isn't actually true; it obviously brightened the lives of thousands of people, and not just with shallow entertainment but with the opportunity to lift their gazes from the mud and look at the sky, to reflect for a moment on their place in the world. I have no idea how to calculate the benefit from that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it greatly outweighed the cost.

As you say, truckloads of aid money has been pouring into Africa for decades, and not only has it not produced the promised results, it has been argued by people familiar with what actually happens there that it does more harm than good: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-intervie...

By contrast, smartphones are connecting Africa to modern civilization, and that's something that might actually make a positive difference. There is after all no intrinsic reason Africans can't provide food and water and medicine for themselves just as people do in Europe and America and large parts of what used to be the Third World. What's missing is knowhow and organization. A truckload of money dumped into projects that feel good to rich Westerners won't provide those things. Putting the knowledge of humanity at the fingertips of individual Africans just might.

And yet those phones weren't paid for by charity, because the people running charities are mortal and fallible; they just can't see that far ahead. The phones were paid for primarily by rich Westerners buying them as toys.

The world is more complex than any of us can know. Enjoy your toys with a clear conscience.
I've organically come to a system that works pretty well for me.

I browse HN, reddit, Zite (iPad), and sometimes click on links in my fb feed. That's my 'inbox'. Then:

1. Anything I feel like reading right away, I read.
2. an actual article, usually more long-form, I add to my instapaper list.
3. an article that might be interesting, but not right away, or anything else that is worth saving, but not useful right away, I add to Pocket.
4. for any comment pages, or articles that somehow don't go through step 2 or 3, I add them to my OneTab list (by far my most-used chrome plugin). Often these are just things I can't read right away, but I'll probably look at later in the day, or things that instapaper can't handle (HN comments).
5. anything that really stands out, I either add to my OmniFocus inbox, or to my Wunderlist inbox (Because I don't have OF on my phone).

With that done, here's how I process stuff:
1. when at my computer, I tend to first check my OneTab backlog. I open a few tabs, and read through them. This is generally during work breaks or lazy moments.
2. On the road, particularly short commutes, I read instapaper articles. I intentionally kept myself from getting internet on my phone so I'll keep from aimless browsing. Interesting snippets or articles then go to my Wunderlist inbox for later processing.
3. On longer trips, or significant downtime, I generally look at Instapaper for the 'better' material.
4. every once in a while, or when I'm reminded of something I read a while back, I check my Pocket 'dump' for the relevant material.

All in all, this kind of just started happening through use. I didn't agonize over a workflow, and I'm not sure it's optimal. But it works pretty well.
Link goes to an incomplete WP installation.
Grains can support a large population even while causing dementia in later life. The two are not incompatible.
I think the point is that for each wallet stolen we would send a guy to jail for, say, two days. If we think that the guy has stolen approximately 100 wallets we prevent the next 900 from suffering by imprisoning him for the most part of a year, and that's it.

What I haven't seen yet is a comparison of cash, not to the cost of imprisonment, but to the cost of getting a job. That is, if someone is in prison for 200 days, that costs a few tens of thousands of dollars to the US taxpayer, so the arguments being advanced in these threads say "this should be a response only to someone who is stealing $10,000 from us, otherwise the government is taking much more from us in taxes than the guy was taking from us in crime." That makes some amount of sense. It ignores certain problems (like "who do the taxes come from?" and psychological damage from getting mugged and so on), but it does have some core "thrust" to it.

On the other hand, to be an effective deterrent to crime, you'd figure that we'd want to make the crime net-unprofitable; that is, you'd want the 9-to-5 job at $7/hour to be a more profitable way of living than stealing $100 wallets. So this would suggest that for an expected number of 100 wallets stolen you should really incarcerate for, say, 2 years or so, so that the original crime "really doesn't pay", in the sense that you lose job-access for a total sum of more money than you gained. (That punishment might also have to be increased if the chance of catching someone who steals 100 wallets is not 100%.)
Link shows the Wordpress install wizard...
My eye-opening creepy moment was after installing Facebook's android app. I had the G+ app already installed, but logged in with a dummy account which follows various people I don't know in real life. For some reason, G+ put those people in my contact list and one day I accidentally called one of them that put their phone number on G+. It never rang because I quickly hit disconnect. The next day on Facebook, guess who was suggested I add as a friend? Mystery dial.
Trust. After you sell me your cat for an imaginarily large amount of currency, why continue to spend your gains or buy my imaginarily intensely valuable cat?
I have tons of articles on Instapaper that are really great, and usually I power through a bunch of them on long trips or vacations. It feels like a security blanket.
Police warn of 'ransom' spam targeting UK users
Why Valve's SteamOS Could Be Revolutionary
EU citizenship for sale
> people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing

Does it? I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics. Right to bear arms, for example, freedom of speech and religion, right to life. The "stand your ground" phenomenon, a very American thing, is definitely right-wing.

It seems to me more that the "right" and "left" have adopted certain civil liberties for their pet causes, and the ACLU, a left wing organisation for sure, advocates for their favoured issues. But let's not confuse that specific organisation and their agenda with the general concept of "civil liberties" per se.
I can't imagine how many times it has been already said, but here goes anyway: Use the tool that suits your needs.

Python might be a good start, but don't stick to it just because articles like this claim it's the best.
For anyone wondering what's normally attached to a weather balloon, reading up on the history of the Radiosonde[1] is pretty interesting.

Things like thermal insulation, choice of materials for biocompatibility/minimal long-term hazard etc are all important parts of the design.

There's a fairly in-depth tear-down and explanation of the bits of one by Mike Harrison online[2]. The battery tech used there is particularly neat IMO.

[1] http://radiosondemuseum.org/the-collection/

[2] http://youtu.be/xSxtwuTS5hw
The images and data don't show for me.

Chrome asked me to sign in with my Gmail account, which I declined to to.

Could that have something to do with the missing images?
This is a great implementation, and super fun in many levels. Thanks for whipping this up.

(meta: yes, just a simple comment to say its great. Lets not forget to post these as well once in a while)
That's why you travel in exofficio (or similar) underwear.
This is a beautiful answer, thank you. Here's a twist that I read about from Tyler Cowen, from marginalrevolution: for reasons a child of your comment has pointed out, handouts to the people asking for handouts creates something of a perverse incentive; Cowen recommends going to random people in third world countries who seem to be in need but are _not_ begging for money, and give them your money. Not sure about the practical effects of this (there's a whiff of the kind of paternalism that economists, including Cowen himself, debunks in other economic domains) but thought-provoking nonetheless.
Are there any tools to convert R to JS or Python, or... any other common language that doesn't require a 60mb runtime distribution?
Anecdotal evidence suggests it's a working strategy http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/ad-retargeter-adroll-we-qua...
Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"
I'd much rather see specific comparisons to other choices, rather than generalizations pointing out the strengths of the language. Why and when, specifically, is Python preferred to C# for web apps? Why and when is it preferred to Ruby? How can we be sure it is not just 'trendy'? Is it common because there is a larger economic force behind it, like C# is only on the list because it is Microsoft's?
> Do you think it's worth learning?

Everything(almost) is worth learning , the question is , is it worth using ? you give 0 clue as to why you'd need that stuff.
plot MSFT, AAPL, an SP500 for 24m

They are about the same, all showing mean reversion.
... or Derby [1]. I'm curious about things the HN crowd has been building with this kind of stack.

[1] http://derbyjs.com
Meteor is one of the most comprehensive and smooth frameworks for making web applications available today. It solves a ton of problems with a few overarching concepts: http://docs.meteor.com/#sevenprinciples
I have done some work converting R to C++ by hand. The problem, as this presentation discusses, is that a 95% automated conversion is easy, but that last 5% often involves diving deep into the weirdness of the R interpreter.
> Their plan is to grow until they dock with the Deathstar.

many chased that model in 2002-2007, with google in mind
And can you add keyboard navigation too?That'd be supper addictive
I'm a huge fan of what Snowden did, but that's not a fair summary at all.

He fled out of fear of long-term incarceration, for actions that ordinarily would indeed deserve such harsh sentences.
Would you advocate for the same 'top-down' approach to stimulating the economy in the US or another developed country? I think the concept of 'hawkers' could be easily applied to startups. Do you believe a good consumer should be supporting big corporations or fledgling startups? I'm just genuinely curious of your position and if you think the analogy applies in the first world.
Well, quite a lot of politicians and pundits seem to think otherwise. It is getting a bit tiresome. Also, I was responding to someone who wanted a citation of the stats.

Freakanomics has a long section on it that contradicts Gladwell and I am inclined to believe the Freakanomics since they back it up with stats.

This isn't scientific but It just seems like the 70's had a very chaotic vibe with a lot of external stuff hitting the US. The economy wasn't strong and we were going into a massive transition (factory -> office). Nixon (scandal & economy) and Carter (personified weak) didn't help a whole lot. A lot of in decline thinking causes a lot of unrest and crime.

I would rank most tough crime laws as a cause not a cure.