skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair question.

My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap.

That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, but screenshots of the iPhone app were pasted on weibo), the government here has started reporting pollution numbers in major cities around the country. So there's reporting now.

Second, they've forced the state-owned oil companies to retool to start outputting cleaner gasoline, moved big polluting industry out of the cities (steel plants, etc.), closed down barbecue pits, ended the sale of some of the more polluting coal briquettes that used to be common, and are trying to get construction sites to keep the dust down.

All of those steps are helping, but not reversing the trend (so far as I can tell or have heard). There is a push to move from coal-burning power plants to gas-powered power plants, but they need to find the gas (via fracking or other means).

Is there an outcry? There are certainly people posting about the pollution on Weibo, which is China's twitter. There are also plenty of people emigrating to the US, if they can afford it (voting with their feet, even if they can't vote here). But I think for people to do more than that, they'd need to see the government just not giving a damn. So perhaps the attitude is 'wait and see'?

Hope this helps.

By the way, one of my Beijing buddies said of the Shanghai smog: "In Beijing, we call this Tuesday."
RethinkDB compared to MongoDB - RethinkDB
thanks, interesting stuff!
Binary python packages are useless IMHO. If I want binary packages, I make a binary package for my package management system. Running pip/easy_install on a production system is an anti-pattern.
Actually, you just have to wait until the planet "generates" more oil via geological processes.

You're just going to be waiting a very very long time.
Show HN: Log your learning everyday, via email
Hotline Trail
The joke used to go: Windows users blame Microsoft, Mac users blame themselves.

(Linux users just fix the problem on their own.)

I concur with other posters saying that Mac users ranted a lot when going from Mac OS 9 to OS X 10.0, and they had a lot to rant about. OS X felt slow and didn't support lots of devices, and was a brand new paradigm of computing for them at the time. Now, a lot of stuff just works, much like Mac OS felt like it did.
The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA
I would say (which means: IMHO) that it's because the UI "is" the OS to 99%+ of the world. We developers, geeks, tinkerers, etc. know what an OS is. But to the end user, it's what they see on the screen. It's what they interact with. That is the abstraction we attempt for the vast majority of users. There is no need for most people know know how something is implemented. They just use it. The same applies for just about every other thing in existence. We use things. We consume things. We don't need to know how they are built to use them. Sure, some of us care, but most don't. Just talk to non-nerdy types and find out how ignorant (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way) they are when it comes to technology. Just as in Android and iOS. Those users don't care about a Linux kernel with a Dalvik VM vs. a BSD microkernel running applications compiled mainly in the Objective-C language. They care about cost, public image, features etc..

I'm just throwing this out there for thought. But, I don't hear a whole lot of us talking about who's microwave oven's firmware is implemented better. It just doesn't matter to the user, as long as it works. It is usually the style and ease of use from an interface standpoint. Same for cars to most people. They don't care about how the technology under the hood works. If they get the gas mileage, style, price, automatic or manual etc. they want, then that is what they buy.

So, to most people a Car is the Make and model. A computer is the UI and perhaps the software available for it. That's all.
I hear ya. I think cloud should only be pertinent to PAAS like Heroku.
FYI: Any freelancers in the Raleigh/Durham area are free to join us monthly at http://www.meetup.com/Triangle-Web-Freelancers/ - forgot to add that to the earlier post.
Small User Experience Details Most Websites Forget
> I don't think that 'intellectuals' help...

A lot of criticism of the financial sector is dismissed with arguments like "it's more complicated than that" and "you don't understand."

So I guess by "intellectual," I meant someone who can see through the layers of complexity and find the weak spot. I think this might require more of an insider position rather than outsider.
Well, you may never have read Asimov's "Last Question": http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
Show HN: Nat. Salesperson's Day is today, show your love
A bit of trivia why Opera is claiming to be 9.80: They used 10.00 in beta of Oepra 10 and found out that many site's sniffers couldn't process 2-digit version number. So with final release (and after that until the death of the browser) they used Opera/9.80 and put the actual version elsewhere in the string.

That being said, people who sniff UA string to serve different content (or even block the user) should end up in hell. I'd start with Google.
I'm the same. I recommend getting a heavy stubble and maintaining it with a beard trimmer. It easy, and you still look clean and professional, plus the ladies prefer it ;)

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3345796/Women-pre...
How are you going to avoid your access from being pulled by the upstream providers?

I wouldn't be surprised if any of these services pull your access which wouldn't be a good thing for this kind of product. I guess it depends on the ToS.
Because Linux always lose at this comparison? GUI is one of the most important parts of OS for most people.
My understanding is that you need essentially free electricity to make it worthwhile.

Also, Bitcoin is wasteful. People are using an incredible amount of energy unnecessarily. It's a pretty selfish thing to do. This is a flaw in the system's design. I'm not sure other coins are much better in this regard.
Quickstart link doesn't exist: http://www.arangodb.org/quickstart

Looking forward to learning more when it's online!
The analysis is a joke.
Hacker League Acquired by Intel Subsidiary Mashery
"It reports that sea level rises and cold climates intervened to push pioneering groups of humans out again and again until our ancestors were finally established some 12,000 years ago."

I wonder if the word finally is misplaced there. During the next glacial period, the area may become uninhabitable again. In those past 700k years they talk about, there may have been periods much longer than 12k years that the area was inhabited. Each of those previous 7 settlement attempts would probably have seemed like the finally successful attempt to the people at the time.
Yes, I would never describe Hungary as a chaotic country.

I see how all of those things would drastically alter your needed income, especially the cost of a car and inflation.

I'm certainly not well informed on the cost of rent here, but I guess that 300-400€ per month should get you a more than decent place to live and work.

I checked the blog on your profile and seems like you're working on some cool things and doing well for yourself, congrats on overcoming the odds like that.
Why OpenGL Probably isn't the Graphics API of the Future and I Hope it Dies
I decided to write this blog post after seeing David Rosen's 2010 blog article on OpenGL vs DirectX linked here yesterday. It's also been an ongoing conversation between myself and a few other programmers on Twitter. To summarize: with AMD's recent announcement of Mantle things are getting really interesting in the graphics API wars. This blog details why I think Mantle could (hopefully) unseat OpenGL as the cross platform API of choice and why DirectX is better positioned to continue evolving than OpenGL is.
George Poste: emerging threats, innovation, risk, and competitiveness in the US
>but a finite currency system... do we really expect that to be stable for 50 years

No, it's deflationary. And while deflation isn't "evil" in and of itself, it causes the same problems as inflation (in reverse, obviously).

For example, if Bitcoin are restricted to 21MM units, as the population of the planet increases, an individual's wages must decrease in Bitcoin terms to maintain their real value.

That means that prices for goods will have to drop as well, which leads to terrible menu costs, and hoarding (why buy my car now when it will be cheaper in bitcoin terms next year?) In a predictably deflationary environment, it's always better to spend your money "later".
I love how in the screenshot in the article it says EXPLICITLY:

"This extension displays some optional ads. If you do not wish to support us, you are welcome to
disable ads in the settings."
Funny how they the article turns the stagnation of OS X into a benefit.

Also interesting that Windows users now rant about their OS, where they used to rave about most releases instead. I remember being genuinely excited about Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Longhorn (but was disappointed by Vista) and 7. I was even tempted to buy a new version from my saved pocket money as a kid - I eventually got pirated versions of 2000 and later XP though :-).

Nowadays, I dread new OS releases. Be it Windows, OS X, Linux (Ubuntu, Gnome) - OSes and desktop environments get heavier with each release, yet loose features, and get hideously redesigned because Touch and UX, LOL.

From that perspective, the stagnation of OS X really is a virtue, since Apple is at least not messing it up.

(I like the inverted scrolling from Lion, the new notifications are useful, and Mission Control is not bad. I can pretend Launchpad is not there. OS X feels like Ubuntu anno 2010 or XP with a Mac theme, which is a good thing.)
Time's 30 under 30
one should hate something when that thing is something he dislikes but most importantly it is forced on him or her. I am criticizing only the title, he might be right about these tools, but using agitative words does not make an argument better.
If we're going to assign a meaning to the term 'cloud', shouldn't we assign it to something we don't already have a word for, so it actually describes something?

If I start two VMs on my desktop and we call that a 'cloud' then the word 'cloud' isn't terribly useful in describing anything.
Their stance and the same from a lot of publications can in fact be in the long term interest of the bitcoin believers.

The reason is simple; it will keep away the speculators who understand neither bitcoin nor the principles of speculation.

Speculation is mostly about stellar risk management and knowing when and how to take profits. People who change their opinions by day to day (or hour to hour) fluctuations and are swayed by headlines will never learn these principles.

I am getting tired of seeing people liquidate all their investments and invest them into the X new big thing. A new generation of fools come around every 3-5 years. Their opinions change faster than their under-garments and their risk management skills are slow to evolve.

The benefit in keeping them away is simple, lesser volatility. BTC is in desperate need of THAT for its sustainability.

I say we need more vocal naysayers to keep these speculators away, at the same time the believers can work on developing the marketplace and make it sustainable.
My Personal Transformation: 6 Life Lessons From 6 Years of Blogging
Linux users just try another distro.
Treasure Arena - HTML5 Online Battle-Arena
Except, if you are running customer supplied code on the instance then you've made the sandboxing problem that much more difficult.

I'd much sooner have a clean VM to run my tests on than have to think about the ways the previous user might have left things in an insecure state.
I upgraded to Office 2013 recently, on Windows 7. The all thing got super slow and I am still fighting the ribbon, plus this flaty thing on Windows 7 is just odd. Yes my computer is 3 years old, yes some linux distros are worst, but when somebody gets this kind of experience over and over, when he has a choice, he goes for something else. Sorry, maybe they have super cool products, but I won't touch them even with a stick (plus they have a cost, or not?).
The article misses the mark completely. The main thesis is that Mac OS did change only incrementally, while Windows leaps chaotically between new features and philosophies. That's not true, and in fact the illustrations used contradict the conclusions drawn in the article.

For example, when they talk about the introduction of the proto Dock in Mac OS, they say "no major changes in UI". But when Windows introduces the Start menu and task bar that's changing the UI "completely". Then come the incremental UI refinements and color changes that coincide with new graphics capabilities, again this is heralded as being more of the same for Mac but radically different with each version of Windows. Looking at these screenshots which show similar trends in UI development side by side and coming to wildly different conclusions in the face of those similarities is just a stunning display of cognitive dissonance.

The change to Metro would be the only big jump where the article is actually right in asserting a real change, if we'd be willing to forget the fact that Metro (or whatever it's called now) is nothing but a thin veneer you have to get past in order to access the real Windows, which is of course pretty much a clone of its predecessor.

All this just to explain a conclusion from an anecdote, a conclusion which the article itself proves wrong unwittingly. Even if we accept that OS X users don't buy books about their OS and don't rant as much (which I find particularly out of touch with reality), that's because there are vastly more Windows users around. Because the numbers are so great, there are also a lot of Windows users who lack the tech intuition but want to learn, so they buy a book about it. OS X clientele is just by and large different. That's where the real difference lies.
What you really needed to do was move to Google who bill by the minute.

Not a Google shill by the way - I don't have a preference yet. However, for that particular complaint, Google has the solution.
An economic angle, summarised in: Lowenberg, Anton D. "Why South Africa’s Apartheid Economy Failed", 1997

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Contemporary-Econom...

TLDR:-

1. Decades of intensifying international isolation over RSA's political climate.

2. RSA's growing reliance on international short-term loans in 1980s, leading to balance of payments crisis.

3. Threat and introduction of economic sanctions by international community.

4. ... Leading to increasing economic costs to industry and individuals, which reduced internal support for Apartheid amongst South Africa's elite.

5. Coincidental fall of the Soviet Union, leading to the West's reduced support of RSA against revolutionary front-line states.

(Not to discount the struggle for equality amongst non-white South Africans, embodied by Mandela and others.)

EDIT: Clarity
And if we made a pool How many iOS 7 users want to downgrade to iOS 6? Probably quite a lot.
Please take a look at using and building real packages for your system. RPM and APT. These are battle tested, they handle dependencies, transitive dependencies, multiple repo sources, {pre/post}{install/uninstall/upgrade} scrips. They provide a transactional way to add software to your systems.

You can use pip and virtualenv as well perhaps by creating a parallel Python install in /opt or something like that if needed. And then install that in an RPM if needed.

But if you are installing hundreds of binary files, dlls and using requirements.txt as the main way to specify dependencies you are probably going to end up with a mess.

It is much harder if you have multiple OS systems to support. Installing on Windows, RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu and Mac OS X is hard in an easy and clean way. But if you target a specific server platform like say CentOS 6, take a look at RPMs.
I only know what he told me, which is that his visa allows him to enter and leave as he pleases, but, unlike my 60-day multi-entry, does not need to be renewed (much like a residence permit). $1000 isn't an unreasonable price for not having to leave every few months.

I have no knowledge of M visas; I just use Ls.
Scroogled again.
1,107 new apps daily on Google Play Store (Infographic)
my favorite is how they have a stupidly ridiculously low ulimit maxfiles of 256.. and keep on changing the way to persist it between os releases.

unless it's something unixey i use every day, i now just refuse to bother with installing it on OSX. a VM is so much easier.
Gmail Now Caching Images
Show HN: Step - Android microframeworks I used for development
I think you are mixing several different things here. The size of the market for a thing does not define its intrinsic value under my definition. In fact the value assigned by the market is the opposite of intrinsic value, and my definition explicitly addressed this. The fact that whale oil has a very limited market and more efficient alternatives does not mean that it has no intrinsic value.

As for value being tied to human want/needs, obviously this is true. A thing can have value by its very nature as opposed to value created by a market, though. Whale oil will heat my house even if no one else is interested in buying it. That is what I call the intrinsic value.

The intrinsic value of a thing may be hard to extract without other people (e.g. Industrial uses), but this is different from saying that the value is tied solely to others' desires.
I think it is less secure because it centralizes all the security in one single layer. AKA the email address you are using to handle the credentials. Once you have access to that email, then you have access to everything. Contrary to what happens now that at least raises more flags when your accounts start getting password changes, etc.
> As long as they are easily interchangable (I can swap my LTC for BTC in liquid markets) it's not so much of an issue.

I think that will be the exact issue: lack of liquidity for alt currencies.
I'm glad I'm not the only person that thought this, because I'm a HPC batch admin and that sort of machine packing is just what I do.

I'm glad they found a solution which seems to work out really well for their use case. Changing the algorithm to use the machine for an hour would imply that some tests may wait to be run, and that could be a bad thing for TestingBot (I'm not sure what their SLA is).

Going to their own "cloud" though will require them to either overbuy capacity or eventually make a push to increase utilization, so they may end up making that algo anyhow.
People Don’t Actually Like Creativity
>Looking through a list of Mandela's quotes [1], there is an uncanny parallel between his viewpoint and those of an entrepreneur

Except the startup entrepreneur is talking about a photo-sharing app.
I wish every representative did that.
Yes, you have got it in one.
I can't speak much to their OS/Office products. They allow me to do my work with minimal frustration, but it's not particularly enjoyable either (of course, neither is setting up a decent Linux distro). At home I prefer a Mac, when I use a non-iOS device at all. I'm mainly talking here about their development tools and platforms, which are really second to none.
Any reason why you didn't just OpenStack instead?
Off Track Planet Raises $500,000 Seed Round for Travel Guide App
As a Firefox user myself, with the same problem of having hundreds of tabs open all the time, I've noticed a neat little trick to "unload" all the tabs from RAM if you need to free some up.

Just bring up the menu bar (or hit Alt), then go to File -> Exit, which should close all Firefox windows but save the current tab history. Then, simply restart Firefox, again go back to the menu, then do History -> Restore Previous Session.

Besides the few tabs that get auto-loaded (i.e. the ones you were viewing in each window), the remaining tabs should remain un-loaded until you manually re-visit that tab (at which point the page will be redownloaded or loaded from cache into RAM).
ah yes the mythical "western pacifist" who thinks violence is never justified and that, for example, police forces should not forcefully arrest violent criminals but limit themselves to trying to convince them of going to jail.

You've made yourself quite a frail stawman. You will find that this "western pacifist" you speak of is a figment of your imagination and doesn't exists in any serious form.
I appreciate how this is currently sharing the frontpage with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860839
Why should anyone create PDFs that are 100's of MBs in size?

At some point "convenience" becomes annoyance. Because instead of encouraging people to do the sensible thing like breaking documents into smaller, digestible pieces (e.g. small PDFs, page images, etc.), they are encouraged to be lazy (e.g. throw a 500 page document in a scanner that outputs PDF, and upload the oversized result to one of these annoying sites). Then the average user tries to access it and she has to wait patiently while the browser tries to load this ridiculously large file, or her browser just chokes. So, "time saved" on the front end - easy scanning of docs to PDF - can often lead to "time spent" dealing with the mess on the receiving end. The uploader gets convenience, the user gets annoyance.
Electrical brain stimulation may spark a person's 'will to persevere'
The Frictionless Development Environment Scorecard
I'll also chime in here with a recommendation for anything Adam Curtis does.

His documentaries are among the best I've seen (and he has quite a few). Most are available on Youtube (or in a torrent collection, if that's your thing).

I recently watched "It Felt Like a Kiss"[1], and it's quite the piece of art. No narration, all great music.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Felt_Like_a_Kiss
They can? Even local chinese kids without 户口 can't go to local schools, to hear them tell it. That was one of the primary reasons students came to the school where I worked in 2010-11.
>> So speaks an Assembly developer

C is a portable, readable assembler abstraction in a lot of ways, yes. I'm not seeing what's wrong with that. Was that supposed to be an insult?

>> I guess the design goal was to make security exploits as easy as taking caddies from children.

Do children often have caddies? I've never noticed a child with a caddy. Golfers perhaps.

I'm still not sure why you think type safety is the be-all and end-all of everything. You can have memory violations and leaks just as easily in type-safe environments as any other. There are lots of ways to f*ck up in C, but the flexibility turns out to be useful as well, when used appropriately.
Looks like "their cloud" couldn't handle Hacker News' traffic. Had they set up their blog in an AutoScaling group in EC2 this would not have been a problem :)
Stockbrokers always give a target price about 20-100% more than the current price for any asset. It's a marketing thing. They make commision or get investment fees whether the estimates are wrong or right.
Some systems are needfully complex, because they do a hell of a lot.

And some are needlessly complex but you inherited them from another, long-gone team and somebody has to maintain, improve and update them, unfortunately!