skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope to hell that this person's first language isn't English.
Small Business Evangelist | Serial Technologist | E-Commerce Platform Idealogist

GROAN
Mandela's favorite poem that sustained him in prison for 27 years
My New Book: Inquiry and Innovation in the Classroom
Chromes font rendering is very jaggy compared to firefox (which is almost certainly using Windows ClearType.)

Do you have subpixel font rendering enabled in OSX? Are there settings?
Citation needed.

1/ There are gullible (not necessarily dumb, by the way) people everywhere, why would Kickstarter's user base be exempt from that? Besides, Kickstarter is fairly mainstream now, so there's no reason to think it's only frequented by well-informed technology enthousiasts. The point is that they're trying to target the most gullible fraction of the website's user base, not that all of it consists of naive people.

2/ You claim it's not effective. However, it looks like they're close to reaching their goal with 300+ backers and almost 40k in pledges, so it seems to me like it works.

3/ "Either way the project gets caught at an early stage and cancelled."
This doesn't seem true. This project hasn't been taken down so far, and it looks like they were only discovered today after having run for long enough to collect 40k in pledges. Had these (alledged) scammers been more modest (40k goal, earlier deadline) they would have gotten away with it.
Besides, Kickstarter has had several cases of fraud and scam recently, so it looks like their Trust&Safety procedure has not fully matured yet (which is normal since they've recently grown big enough that this is enough of a concern to create a dedicated department). This is a concern big crowdsourcing platforms are starting to face, and for working in the fraud detection space and often discussing these matters with other tech companies I can say it's still something fairly new to them.

4/ All this discussion is completely besides the original point I was trying to make. Whether this particular instance is going to go through or not, my point was that there is something interesting about scammers in that they seem to (consciously or not) have their own culture and implicit codes, one of which being this very specific type of communication that seems egregious to most of us but could drive better conversion among their target population. I thought this was an interesting/amusing thought, but you're free to disagree.
543 Bucket List Ideas. No More Excuses
Pollution is now the No.1 reason rich people migrate out of China, second to Education of their kids. I claim this from experience.
Spotify is Reportedly Planning a Free Music Streaming Service for Mobile Devices
Well, there are worse fates than being cuddly.
Seriously question and not trolling, but was there ever? Has there been a change in culture or has it always been this tragically uncool?
> Fontas is so infamous that his pump announcements often result in the price immediately going down.

That could be a useful trick. If you know you can consistently reduce prices, and have the capital to acquire the now cheaper commodity. Announce the scheme, prices drop, buy in. Wait for prices to recover and sell off for a profit.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-fai...
Viral pic in China - Shanghai pollution PM2.5 scores over 600
prove I should finish reading you

Maybe you can persist with reading through an article when you see it being very popular on Hacker News?
And chrome on 10.9 is just as bad. It's painful to read.
It's in
http://www.younited.com/support/

"What is younited?"

But yeah, it should've been located somewhere more prominent.
Off-topic: I alwyas liked the idea of like loose source routing. And the original netcat supports it. Does your kernel support it? Would you use it if you could?
The reason they're starting from scratch is they ran out of features to cut from X without breaking it.

On one hand, they're justified because most people don't use X as intended.

On the other hand, maybe people should be.
The angry customers aren't "getting" 300$. They're getting their money back. Virtuous giant lose virtually nothing in the process (perhaps the cost of the transaction and some man-minutes for processing the refund).

And customers wouldn't threaten some bad reviews if VG agreed to refund: They'd just get refunded and move on!

This is a pretty bad PR move in my opinion. In fact, it's worse than the threats that the original customer would have carried in my opinion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering
Interesting: HP nixes Amazon EC2 API support — at least in its public cloud
I submitted this post, despite thinking that it is quite a bit too pessimistic. It is a nice list of thinks we should be concerned about at the moment, but I think that all of it is solvable without dead bodies in the streets. Except, perhaps, the panopticum state.
The relevant and important difference being that this is a one-time expense. It contributes almost nothing to the cost unless you do this then immediately drop the platform.
I am not suggesting that capitalism is not the economic system most suited for human nature: it probably is (at least more suited than communism, if we accept that the theory of evolution can be applied to historical processes, and thus capitalism has survived as the fittest alternative)

What I am suggesting is that precisely because human nature is only compatible with capitalism, we are not going to be able to tackle long term existential problems.
November 2013: three Cisco vulnerabilities
This simply isn't true. The jump from Mac OS to Mac OS X was huge and Mac users ranted for years about it. You had different file structures, compatibility issues, and Mac OS Classic prided itself in its "out of your way, no nonsense" GUI while OS X started the "Fisher Price" GUI era.

More than a decade has passed since then, so I don't remember all the details, but you certainly had to learn the OS X way, just like the man learning Windows 8.
"If a 30 year old puts a days wages into an account and can expect a days wages out when he's 80 years old then he can drastically simplify his retirement."

Your idea here seems to be that bitcoin could help you not only hedge against "inflation", but also against rising economic productivity. I.e., what a saver really wants is some kind of guarantee that at age 80 they will be able to consume the same fraction of economic output that they were able to at age 30. Could you spell out how bitcoin helps solve this problem?

(I take it for granted that hedging purely against inflation is actually a solved problem, because you can just invest in short term bonds, which provide excellent hedges against inflation. But of course they don't help at all with rising productivity).

Edit: Another - massive! - issue with retirement savings is longevity risk. How can you ensure that you won't run out of savings before you die? Bitcoin won't help you here.
I would love that for Android. I miss the Cyanogenmod ROMs for Gingerbread where you could toggle which requested permissions YOU allowed an app to have.

Also, I've been saying it for a long time, but icons colored according to their security risk would be better than just names with descriptions. We have to make security more convenient.
I think programmers should try to use code as much as possible for their password. Some simple expression involving an array of something and an operation on it complete with the result. Easy to remember and I think pretty hard to guess since it involves a lot of symbols, letters, numbers, underscores, dashes, spaces, equal signs, etc (unless I'm missing something obvious, which is totally possible given I'm no security expert).
"The SNP chip method that 23andMe uses was never very good at providing useful genetic information. Its advantage has been its low cost. But as sequencing gets cheaper and cheaper, SNP chips have already largely become obsolete for most genetic testing."[1]

Basically, 23andMe has always oversold the results available from the crude SNP chip technology they were using as a hook to have people PAY to send them DNA samples that would make them "members" of 23andMe. Then the members are reminded to send in personal health history information to be put into the 23andMe database so that 23andMe can data-mine that and try to figure out what the DNA actually means[2]--which no medical geneticist knows to any precision at the moment. That business model of suckering in paying clients today for the promise of an unknown amount of actionable information in the future is why 23andMe was trying to stonewall the FDA while marketing what was plainly a direct-to-consumer medical device. It's not surprising (see first link here) that the FDA is not going to let 23andMe get away with that.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/why-the-fdas-anvil-dropped...

[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-...
It seems to me like this isn't likely to be a problem. If it were an order of magnitude different from the number of pennies, we might need to worry, but it seems likely that one cent is far more granularity than is really necessary.
There's a niche in the market for gender neutral clothing with positive messages.

"HERE COMES TROUBLE" or "DADDY'S LITTLE PRINCESS" are sub-optimal.
Is every hn story now an excuse to start complaining about the NSA? The piece makes no mention of it, nor does there seem to be a good reason why it should.

You could have easily ranted about the murky world of campaign finance, or the murky world of banking. Neither would be less relevant than beating on the NSA horse one more time.
Why the FDA’s anvil dropped on 23andMe
Ask HN: Is it still a good time to invest time/money in mining Bitcoins?
With Bitcoin, fraud may be temporarily outside the law; but with JPMC and HNBC, fraud is built into the law.
Right, but doesn't the error handling approach you describe mean allowing a whole process to fail whenever an error condition occurs, which would cause any requests that were being handled by other threads of that process to fail even though they were perfectly valid?
Maybe not as autistic as one might assume, based on the facial recognition scores: http://lesswrong.com/lw/28l/do_you_have_highfunctioning_aspe...
People were making out of band HTTP requests long before the irritating term AJAX was coined too. The name being made up after the method started being used does not mean the method can't be called the name if the properties fit (likewise as much as the marketers think otherwise, making up a new name doesn't make a thing technically revolutionary!)
Was it possible for you to breathe the air in the surrounding areas? (Lantau, Macau, etc)
Wrong link for ReQL, for anyone checking. ReQL reference is here: http://rethinkdb.com/api/javascript/
Unless you want to do it on a huge scale (see http://theverge.com/2013/12/2/5165428/bitcoin-mine-in-hong-k...), it's not.

You might want to look into mining litecoin (LTC), which might still be profitable and whose mining is CPU-based.
I spent too much time with .NET I don't want to learn ruby!

It always pains me to hear such cries from someone who claims to be a software developer/engineer. I've used .NET (among several other) technologies for some years and had a few co-workers who would openly fret about Microsoft's direction and what horrible things they might have to endure if .NET went out of favor. Gosh, you mean you might actually have to learn a new technology? What a truly awful experience. I could never relate to that and I legitimately felt sorry for them. I hope to never become afraid or resistant to learning and am always ready to admit how little I really know.

The language/framework is but a means to an end. Each with strengths and weaknesses, but all of them suitable for a wide variety of uses. If you feel that your knowledge as a software developer is so language specific that you fear having to move away from it, you're doing it wrong.
There's a link to it now.
Well, I started with 2.

I have reservations about the amount of power available in the systems of today, and about how that power is exercised, but I'm not a big believer in a competent, intentional conspiracy underlying it.
I'm an unapologetic .NET lover, and the comments on the subreddit largely hold true. In the end, culture is the biggest differentiator. MS has excellent tooling and support, but nobody knows about it. They have Bizspark, which is one of the best startup-focused programs I've seen (literally tons of free stuff for your runway), but once again nobody knows about it. Azure is probably the most innovative, stable, clearly-priced cloud platform in the industry, but nobody knows about it. If you want to write Javascript/Node with full IDE support, Microsoft has you covered, but nobody knows about it. F# is probably the best FP language in existence, but nobody... well, the point is made.

The only people that know about the new things MS comes out with are the few of us .NET developers also with a foothold in the Startup scene, and old enterprise companies who bought into the stack back in VB5/C++/MVC days.

The other uphill battle is young people's view on technology. Most of them would rather platform-hop in the same way people change churches (and for much the same reasons). New = better, and Microsoft = old, so no need to even see what they have to offer. Young people with ample free time have always driven the software industry, and young people want to use things built by startuppy or nonsensical names. "Microsoft? They actually have software in the name? No thanks!"

Finally, it's an issue of evangelism and online/community presence. Because enterprise is the bread and butter of MS, MS tends to target those kind of people more. It's not that they don't try to capture new minds, but when you attend an event where you're the lone startup guy among 50 enterprise people, how do you think presentations are going to be focused? When your community seems to be centralized on your corporate domain, are you really going to attract someone who isn't willing to type in "microsoft"? New platforms get popular not because they're actually better, but because they're cooler. Either cooler sounding, there's a new type of tutorial (to-dos and 5-minute-blogs are played out, people), or it's got a guy with weird hair promoting it, using Jobs-esque language like "beautiful" or "elegant". Of course it's elegant at version 0.9 before it really does anything. Look at Rails now that it actually does stuff.

Anyway, mini-rant over. I think MS deserves more attention than they get, but ultimately they dig their own grave by not investing more in capturing that next generation.
For those unfamiliar with Amazon, Amazon AWS consists of over 25 different services. This article focuses on EC2, the virtual server service.

I use S3 and DynamoDB regularly and think the pricing is better than most. I don't use it for pricing though. I use it because I don't have to worry about load balancing, adding multiple servers, running out of disk space. Set it up and forget about it.
I make no mention of PYTHONPATH.
The NSA on a helicopter
It's mentioned. It's not easy to measure but they're all in the 800-1000 lines region.
I know Indiegogo is hard at work towards building automated scam/fraud detection systems. I work in this space (I build such systems for Eventbrite) and from my conversation with them it seems they're new to these problems but are making them a priority. Now Indiegogo has a slightly different model (campaigns can be created by anyone and are not curated) than Kickstarter that makes it more of a priority for them, but hopefully with the recent cases of fraud on Kickstarter they're putting more work into prevention as well.

All in all, I don't think it's an inescapable problem. It is perfectly possible to build scam-detection systems (we do so at Eventbrite, to prevent people pretending to be selling tickets for an event they're not actually organizers of), and although it's not easy as these crowd-sourcing grow larger they'll hopefully have more resources to put behind it.

[1] Like this guy: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/new-kind-kickstarter-scam-ba...
People who are 82 now spent most of there life living in the city before it got very bad. The real question is if people born there now will see 82...
Nelson Mandela's 1964 sentencing speech: "I am prepared to die"
Dear play store: let me search by permissions. Or to sort by low-permissions. When I want a flashlight app, I want to be able to search for things that only use the camera system.

I appreciate that Android lets developers and users do what they want and lets Users know what the applications have permission to do, but if you have to snoop at every application's specific details to find this out, it's not really good for those of us who care about such things.

A big problem is some of the permissions have terrible names - stuff like "read phone state and identity" - what freaking user is going to know what that means?
The meat of the linked article are pages 2 and 3, where the author gives a breakdown and commentary of the Mac and Windows approach to UI. Those pages are short with lots of graphics. Page 1 is stupid and page 4 is redundant. (This paragraph is for people complaining about the supposed length of the article and for people commenting on the title only)

The point of the article is that Apple has never made any dramatic changes to their core UI while Microsoft never seemed to settle on one that worked. While I disagree in many respects, the author makes a reasonable case.

The truth is that for most windows (and even mac users), they tend to be locked in to their OS of choice for other reasons and just deal with whatever UI they get. The lesson is more relevant in the general sense and applies to all manner of other GUI software. Windows users might be stuck with Windows but what stopped Ubuntu users from jumping ship when Unity made arbitrary unwanted changes to the interface? What stops Firefox users from switching to chrome or Opera when upgrades break functionality?
I wonder on what basis the author assumes that the next glacial period is a million years from now.

This would be a clear break with the last million years (100k year severe glaciations separated by 10-15k year interglacials), or of the first half of the pleistocence (mild glaciations every 40k years).

If the holocene interglacial really is extended to a million years, it would likely be enough time for the polar ice caps to disappear completely, ending the quarternary ice age altogether.
That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this issue than the average monkey. I'm not sure if "capitalism" is the problem though, since greed and waste existed long before its ideas were articulated. I sometimes thing our economic system should be overhauled with better accounting techniques so we actually count the expenditure of resources as a loss rather than as a profit as we currently do, under the rather dubious assumption that more consumption is always better. I guess we'll find out how badly we have erred when the future teaches us. I hope its lessons are gentle...
Not entirely sure, but a lot of these VOCs come from stuff in your house (carpet, paint, plastics).

When I lived in Augusta, GA the air around the city would occasionally reek due to a nearby paper mill. The smell would blow over the city after an hour, but anything that slipped into drafty homes would remain for hours; I'd only notice after returning from walking the dogs.

I started to wonder what I was breathing and found a list of possibile offenders: formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, benzene, chloroform, tetrachloroethylene, and trichloroethylene [1]

I was hoping my plants would help (the link nate_meurer posted casts some doubt).

[1] http://www.sonomatech.com/project.cfm?uprojectid=1103
Except that that function has been completely perverted by economic dynamics.
What's the name (or link) of the visa company?
I think it's about experience.
Let father (windows user) upgrade to Win8.
Do the same for Mac 10.9 (mac user)
import fuckit
from string import ascii_lowercase, digits
from random import choice, randint

def defuckify(test_fn, fn_name, n_arguments):
''' Randomly generate functions until the test passes
'''
defuckified_fn = ('def %s(' % fn_name)
for i in range(n_arguments):
arg_name = ('arg%d,' % i) if i != n_arguments else ('arg%d' % i)
defuckified_fn += arg_name
defuckified_fn += '):'
exec('def '+ fn_name + '():\n pass\n')
while not test_fn():
for i in range(randint(100,10000)):
defuckified_fn += choice(' \n,[](){}\'"=+-*/%:'+ ascii_lowercase + digits)

with fuckit:
exec(defuckified_fn)
print(defuckified_fn)

Edited to use fuckit instead of try/catch

Edited again to add that it has been over an hour and it hasn't been able to make a function that returns 3
"we send the characters you have already typed to query our prediction engine" (under 'What information does Telepathwords collect and why?')
New York State Employee Salaries
Having just come back, this week, from a three weeklong trip visiting a large portion of the country (Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Guilin, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shijiazjuang [along with a number of minor cities]) the pollution was by far the worse in Shijiazjuang, though not on the level seen in Shanghai this week. Shanghai was polluted, but the wind was generally blowing most of the pollution away from the city.

My impression was that most people have a rather nonchalant attitude towards the pollution. They know it is bad, but don't really know what to do about it. This includes my American brother who has been living in Shijiazjuang for the last year. Whenever the topic of pollution came up, he didn't really seem to have any strong feelings about the pollution, either way and explained that seems to be most people's attitude too.
>"Due to inflation uninformed people are bullied into investing in mutual funds, stocks, housing, etc. with their savings."

It's not bullying, it's the foundation of capitalism; that is putting capital to work, not putting it under your mattress.

I'm satisfied that Bitcoin (or whatever succeeds it) exists, merely as a check against corrupt government. It's good that the money printers know there's an alternative. But I'm not ready to ditch the current economic paradigm, which has created more wealth for more people in the past 200 years than any point in human history.

People are disillusioned if they believe there were significantly more economically stable periods in history. Believe it or not, smart people are actually concerned about, working on, and resolving current issues. It doesn't happen overnight.