skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are likely underestimating the "third world" of 2013. There are lots of companies embracing the constraints of SMS alone as almost everybody has a mobile phone in Kenya.

Think about all the things you could do with a Twilio account! Better get working on a product for a free and bright future. :)

Examples:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-and-m-pesa-why-money-in-keny...

http://www.sokotext.com
GE's Ingenious Idea for Simplifying Every Gadget in Your Kitchen
I discovered "Kids, don't believe the startup hype" on HN a few months ago...Read it!

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/kids-startup-hype/
It's trivial to transform the units

…except they're not dimensionally compatible. You need to know the solid angle subtended by those pixels. That's like saying you can trivially transform 60 miles per hour into a distance. You can't, unless you have time.

More importantly, the solid angle in question is not obvious – are we talking just the fovea (area of the eye with highest density of cones [1]), the eye as a whole, or the solid area subtended by a standard computer monitor, or…?

[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.ht...
7 Free Tools Needed to Run a Kick Ass Event
You do them too much credit to call them idiots. They were armed robbers, who beat two men severely, and stole things of enormous value. They surrendered their right to be regarded as civilized people.

I would reserve 'idiot' for a citizen with poor reasoning powers. For instance, someone who pays too much for a used car.
mobile app.
If you consider those things to bestow "intrinsic value" (a fallacious concept), the Bitcoin has "intrinsic value" because it is portable, divisible, fungible, scarce, and has all the other properties we want from a scarcity-based currency while having all the great benefits (and more) of digital fiat money.
Amsterdam Has a Deal for Alcoholics: Work Paid in Beer
Google Easter Egg...not exactly an Easter Egg if it looks no different
Only if you don't think USD, JPY, GBP, and all the products and services you can buy with BTC are worth anything either.
Yes, from a plane, which first made massive holes in the structure, followed up by the fuel from an airline that carries more than one tanker truck worth of fuel being deposited into the center of the building.
There are two kinds of HN submissions: URLs, and text submissions. What I called a "direct link" is a URL submission. An "indirect link" would be a text submission with an embedded URL, but these turn out to be specifically disallowed by the HN submission guidelines. (I didn't know that when I wrote the submission referred to in the upstream comment.)
How to interview and hire junior developers
You may want to check the release notes of the latest iOS/Xcode beta.

(but yes, I agree, that it has taken this long is crazy)
I think you mean accident, not accent. I was a bit confused at first.
Yes, the country bordering one of the most wealthy nations on earth.
Not sure if you're just trolling, but I'll bite:

The CIA's drone program is not secret, and hasn't been for some time.

From http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/363199/obama-plan-shift...:

"Despite their overlapping “orbits” in Yemen, the CIA and JSOC employ different surveillance equipment on their drone fleets. They also rely on separate and sometimes incompatible communications networks to transmit video feeds and assemble intelligence from multiple streams in the moments before a strike."

From http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/05/cia_pen...:

"Keeping the drones with the CIA also offers legal cover for drone strikes, former officials argued. By law, the military is not supposed to conduct hostile actions outside a declared war zone, although special forces do so on occasion acting at the CIA's behest."
I was loving it when i was expat there. now sleepless lunch times in my country.
Using the new keyframe animation API by the looks of things.
It could be good or bad. What do you call a society where nobody has to work?
I have been a professional Java programmer since 1999 and I am comfortable stating publicly that StackOverflow can save a lot of time. In fact, I would be willing to pay for it. However, I don't always agree with the 'accepted' answers.
You can call it a ring-0 application if wish to argue about semantics or the definition of an OS but you really do end up sounding like an asshole.

Every OS projects starts out as a "ring 0 application" running on bare metal. An application which does nothing except handle interrupts and spew out numbers on the screen to tell that it is working. And most OS projects never really evolve a lot past that, because they are primarily intended as educational tools for the author and nothing else.

If you had a point, you could have made it in a way that makes you seem like a decent person, not an angry antisocial geek.
Ghosting - Is your identity safe?
> If something is that dangerous, shouldn't there be armored escorts, lojacks and all sorts of other security measures on it?

I think you underestimate just how common this and similarly dangerous chemical substances are. Every large hospital that does radiation therapy has this stuff.

> Isn't it criminally liable to transport something this lethal so carelessly?

You probably mean "criminally negligent", and I don't think the "standard of care" criterium extends to defending against malicious third party actions.
"Sleep is for sissies." also reflected in the Ben Franklin maxim "There will be plenty of time to sleep once you are dead."

A friend had a short stint working in Taiwan and he was surprised by the fact that almost everyone took a nap sometime during the day. Long term thinking that.
It's a nice story, but I couldn't connect it with the "It's hard to get a job" mantra. Could anybody explain?
Chart of the Day: CEO pay versus burger flippers
I wonder if one might describe coinage as the 0th mass medium - I seem to recall that for some people it was the most reliable way to determine that there was a new monarch.
Yeah Google's pretty awful looking. Needs a nice shape up some day soon. The UX is just awful. They need to hire some UX people and get with the times.
Simple Git-backed Microsites
Sony have some shitty support for OpenGL. Any developer worth his salt used Sony's API.

Wii had its own API too, though closer to OpenGL, still wasn't OpenGL.

I'm a huge fan of OpenGL, but evangelists have been spreading misinformation about OpenGL just as much as they accuse DirectX as.
> And "Jews" isn't the same as "terrorists".

According to who, exactly? Who's to say that it isn't simply a placeholder for 'arab', or 'sheikh'?

It's worth noting that I don't think it actually is, and I don't know of any specific abuses of the powers enumerated by the aforementioned acts -- but the point isn't what they're doing is wrong (though it is), it's that we've allowed the government to grant itself the authority powerful enough that, if they wanted to start killing Jews, or Arabs, or Sheikhs, or whomever, they could. The NDAA and Patriot Act give them the authority to do so.

That is a very, very scary proposition to me. That we have abused such power in the past only lends further credence that we will again in the future, and while I don't mean to offend anyone's sensibilities in suggesting that our current administration is evil, there is literally nothing in place now to prevent us from electing a Hitleresque tyrant and him getting away with committing the slaughter of millions.

"Slippery slope fallacy" is an odd accusation as well, considering that somewhat accurately synopsizes many distinct periods in our world's history leading up to genocide, politicide and democide.

I'm sorry that you're so cavalier about the subject, but there's a very real argument that this is exactly the kind of authority the Constitution was designed to limit any single branch of the government from having with its separation of powers. If the executive branch has the power to detain or kill anyone it wishes with no Legislative or Judicial oversight, and the executive branch controls the US military, then there is literally no power that we can pretend it doesn't have.
Anything you can do to reduce friction could help. I'm going to try this app out today: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pebble.pomodor....
Don't know if these are "best," but they're good and available:

Complete Reference: Bash Reference Manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html

Complete Reference: Harder to find things but you should know your way around it: $ man bash

Intro, Fundamentals: BASH Programming - Introduction HOW-TO: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html

You'll get here soon enough: Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Ideas:

http://www.bashoneliners.com/

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

http://www.catonmat.net/sitemap/
Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6822792
Not sure what the significance of this observation is supposed to be.
Returning to Facebook after living off the grid
There will definitely end up being others who were exposed to radiation during the transport/storage. This was linked on the reddit submission of this article and I thought it was interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
When we are around it easy to safeguard our information by tracking our on line accounts regularly but what happens if we are not around? To some extent www.planneddeparture.com can help
It would be glorious, but probably borrowed away very quickly!
GAAP has adjustments for industries. Types of businesses where COGS is very high frequently have Gross and Net revenue rather than revenue and Gross income because of the difficulty in finding signal in costs and margins. Not to mention that a market maker with $1B in revenue can support orders of magnitude less interest expenses than a software firm with the "same" revenue.

Not all business analysis and important ratios depend on earnings, however defined. Thus the importance of a Net Revenue figure that then has typical expenses deducted from it to get to EBITDA.
Interesting enough, in Germany some banks (or rather credit unions, Sparkassen) pledged to give every comer a basic bank account in return for some regulatory privileges.
The cost of dynamic vs. static dispatch in C++
What counts as an error? A typo? A grammar error? A mistake in a citation? A transposition of two column headers? Omitting a ')' in an equation?

How much is each error worth? Is it a sliding scale based on the presumed severity of the error?

Who pays?

What if the person paying disagrees with the person making the claim? Who settles the disagreement? How do they get paid?
Disclaimer: Shameless Plug.

I'm working on a tool to help people out with this problem. My tool will monitor the internet and email you when your images are used on other sites. For a current solution, you'll need to do a google reverse image search, one by one for each image, periodically. This is tedious work nobody really wants to do. My tool will be making this process a whole lot easier. All you have to do is type in your site address, the tool will scan your site for all images and will email you a report every week on where your images are being used.

To join as a beta tester or early adopter, please submit your email on my landing page www.checkmypics.com .

I'm also looking for other techies to help out with development. Experience with scraping is a plus!

- Diran (YC S13 rejected applicant)
Diet Drugs Work: Why Won’t Doctors Prescribe Them?
Fortunately/unfortunately, it's also probably not true. A previous incident in which people were exposed to Cobalt-60 over the course of several days caused 3 to die, and several more to become ill. If they just opened it up, saw it was a big chunk of nonsense, and left it on the side of the road, they'll probably be fine.
Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you. And of course you can't infringe on a never-granted patent, but you can infringe on a not-yet-granted patent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent
Relevance? The Bay Area is one of the most wealthy MSAs on Earth, but it also has the highest homeless population complete with constant childish gang rivalries.
This really shows that Google search is very boring by today's standards. Everything else has moved on. Comparing most other major sites to their old selfs shows a much bigger improvement in the user experience than what Google search has given us.
Warren Buffett had something similar, though his point was that you don't want people who are smart, diligent and unethical.
Actually, you can do something. You can run a tor node (from your home mostly for free). You can also set up a bridge in 10 minutes via https://cloud.torproject.org/ for just $3 per month.

You might not directly see the good that you do, but you would be doing a significant amount of good! That tor node will push a lot of freedom bytes, and that bridge will help circumvent Iranian, Syrian and Chinese censorship.
Practice helps.
North Korea 2013 – A travel journal
Has Stack Overflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
A notable one (For us): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Bad interface design and bad engineering practices leads to multiple deaths.
I disagree with you, I think that it means that a chinese Coinbase can't also be a bank, and since they just ruled that bitcoin is not a currency, it will be sold and bought freely as a commodity in this case a virtual commodity
Pick up phone, call DHS - hey you know how you have a $100 billion budget and are supposed to monitor transportation security? We are about to transport something highly radioactive near your border, just thought you should know.

It would be the most closely watched transport ever.

In fact I am curious why the NSA didn't know about it and tell someone.
I can't quite figure out why I should feel bad for people who get themselves killed due to their violent criminal activities. It's about on the same level as the idiots who fairly regularly electrocute themselves while trying to steal copper. I don't particularly mourn their passing.

The innocents they may have poisoned in the aftermath get my sympathy, of course. But that just reduces my sympathy for the criminals all the more.
The green line is actually the ecliptic, the path which the Sun travels on the celestial sphere. You may find all the other planets along it also, because it is coplanar with Earth's orbit around the sun and, as consequence, almost coplanar with the other planet's orbits.
Why do you assume it'd be stored in plain text rather than hashed? Also, what does compromising someone's local filesystem have to do with the functionality of a keylogger?
The Quantified Diet Project
PayPal does not come back later, that's the point of paypal. PayPal hedges against chargebacks and handles them itself. In case thinks you're above the average risk, it will start freezing your account temporarily. But they will never come back after 180 days and want your money.

On the other hand if you sell directly via credit cards, the credit card company can come to you after 180 days and want money back.
I suspect this kind of transportation is far more common than most people realize.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that "3 million packages of radioactive materials are shipped each year in the United States."[1]

As for security measures: "The shipper must also meet the Department of Transportation's requirements for shipment of the nuclear material including route selection, vehicle condition and placarding, driver training, package marking, labeling, and other shipping documentation."[2] I suspect most of this was in place, or at least the Mexican equivalent.

Nothing about armed escorts is mentioned for general transportation of radioactive material. For spent nuclear fuel, "armed escorts [are required] in heavily populated areas."[2]

For another data point, here's a supplier of Cobalt-60's page on their safety: http://www.nordion.com/gamma/nordion_cobalt.html Again, there is no indication that armed escort would be expected, simply secure vehicles that won't leak radiation while delivering it or in the event of an accident.

All that said, Cobalt-60 is used for sterilization of medical equipment, radiotherapy, food irradiation, and quite a few other things. It's probably not that hard to obtain if you really want it.

[1] https://forms.nrc.gov/materials/transportation.html

[2] https://forms.nrc.gov/materials/transportation/shipping.html
One difference: one was a robbery, one was "found" (the Goiania accident - yes, technically stolen, from an abandoned place)

Maybe the Mexicans already realized what they stole (and the danger of it)
For me exercise giving me a chance to really think about something away from the computer (and sometimes figure it out).
How can it be easier to install more packages then just setting an environment variable?
Fully agree.

I don't have any problems with proprietary software, but file formats, communication protocols or any other type of interface should be open.

Looking forward how it will evolve.
Excellent followup to the coindesk article: http://www.coindesk.com/bitpesa-uses-bitcoin-slash-kenyan-re...

I don't have total confidence in bitcoin itself, but I am very, very bullish on cryptocurrency.
SKCore – A Simplification Toolset ( Core Graphics, Autolayout and more )
Just found you can zoom with the mousewheel. Zomming in on what appears an interesting feature reveals more and more details. This is just awesome. I can't help but feel more insignificant than usual when exploring this sky map.
Once again RMS is proven right, in all his paranoid delirium. Pretty sad is you ask me.
>That was my thinking too. Who sits down and writes a lengthy blog post about a piece of software that they like to use? How boring! It's like someone sitting down to write a blog post about why they like Pepsi instead of Coke.

Only liking Pepsi instead of Coke is an inconsequential personal choice based on taste alone, whereas other people can benefit from an article about a piece of software and learn tips, usage patterns, its capabilities and limitations etc. Heck, there are sites and magazines devoted to REVIEWING software, from office suites to games.

In essense: your thinking was bad, and you should feel bad.
This is surprisingly interesting.
The current state of things is that one has to collect many papers about certain hypothesis and analyse them on his own to get any idea of the what the truth may be -- neither the IF nor good names guarantees anything, on the other hand you can find real marvels in some obscure conference proceedings.

This way I doubt we should give even more complex decision-making and responsibility to the editors; I would rather go for forcing better reproducibility of papers and more open reviewing -- publishing reviews, opening up for more, yet shallow reviews (like lab protocol goes to a biologist, result evaluation goes to a statistician, possible impact goes to some recognised figure in the field) and making publication of comments and rebuttals easier.
Nice post. I would be the same...don't want to be there, but I am because it makes some social aspects a little better. And I think FB is very clever at detecting that a lot of people don't want to be on it...but are, just because all of their friends are there. They have all of these algorithms to ensure you only see so many posts from only people of interest.

Whatsapp is a great substitute for groups chats though. I would highly recommend it. It lessens the dependency for FB.
Unfortunately, HN rules left me no choice but to submit the headline that the article had. But just out of curiosity, what headline would you have considered appropriate?
Always a good idea not to panic at Bitcoin news, unless you have a lot of your personal equity tied up in it - the revolution has already happened, the message calling for a feeless (although BTC has lots of fees associated with it), decentralized, secure, fast way to exchange economic value has been heard.

Whether it's Bitcoin or something else or a LOT of something else's, it's here to stay. I'm working on my own take on it, so I have opinions as to what it should look like, but the great news is so are lots of other people AND Bitcoin is still growing. Payments are about to explode - it's gonna be fun you guys.
You are always going to have people of different skill levels, including those you call idiots. Now if it's a basic question it will likely get answered but if it's incoherent rambling then there isn't much the community can do. Except maybe teach people to ask better questions.
Yes such is average pay in the US or the UK, but these happen to be the top paying countries in the world. It's not average world pay for a programmer.
>The drugs work by suppressing appetite, by increasing metabolism, and by other mechanisms that are not yet fully understood.

Why would FDA approve something which it we don't fully understand?
The Fortune 500 or 5,000,000 Dilemma
It's boring to see all these "news" and some trying to manipulate the mass' sentiment. Cba really.
That's a pretty black-and-white world you're trying to impose on folks.

I've spoken with a lot of Iraq war veterans. Every one of them has qualms with how the war was conducted, and many have doubts about the reasons for invading. But the things they have in common are an underlying desire to to "protect" their country in some sense, and the willingness to die for that cause.

There's plenty of room there for both disagreement and respect.
Working on side projects policy, it's my main question. Career path is also important.
True, but it does help making the applications more resilient specially if they are stateless.

The "let it crash" model from Erlang and micro-kernels.

Still you are right, we are far from having an acceptable solution that we could apply everywhere, so to say.
I got the feeling that it depended on your social status within the team. If you were seen to be a producer and got shit done, then sure whatever, take a nap -- just keep it up. And pretty much everyone I met was someone who got shit done, but a lot of people who get shit done won't let themselves take a nap at work. Even if it's good for them.

Some people still took naps, and I get the sense that the others felt napping would be a violation of a personal code, rather than something consciously felt as a cultural pressure.
Ya they are idiots and they deserve to go to prison, but I don't want them to die for it. And radiation poisoning isn't something I would wish upon my worst enemy.
Game Mechanics Research: What Makes Candy Crush so Addicting?
Beware Of Bitcoin
I thought the author brought up some good points regarding Bitcoin and it's value beyond a speculative currency but he's wrong in some regards, especially the acceptance where in Boston we have several restaurants and services that accept Bitcoin.

My personal opinion is Bitcoin has it's uses but it's been turned into a quasi investment program and is more of a stock market than a currency.
If the site doesn't work, you can enable scripts one by one until it does. Usually you just have to allow scripts from the domain you're visiting, and you can prevent most abuses that use third party scripts that way.

Occasionally you'll run across a site that has scripts from 30-odd domains, and after enabling a few, it still doesn't work. Those sites aren't worth visiting.

But NoScript gives you the degree of control you want. It's possible to enable all scripts by default, disabling them only when you feel there is a problem. Or you can use it for information purposes only, so you know what third party domains have scripts running on that page.
Basically it sounds like a "dirty bomb" is not if, but when, someday. Lovely.
I've been in a place where a bigger company copied our work (including our typos!) and we finally used a patent for our lawyers to get them to knock it off. But it was very painful waiting the 2-3 years for the patent to be granted.

We would have gladly taken a shorter term, like 8 years, in exchange for getting the patent granted faster. We didn't need to hold onto the stuff forever, but we needed some breathing room.