skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NO. It depends. Let's reduce your argument to the absurd. If I make it a goal of mine that <foo> happens by next week, and I do <bar> in the meantime, and in fact <foo> happens, whether or not <foo> is my fault depends on what <bar> I did. If <bar> = nothing, then obviously <foo> was not my fault.

Facebook has designed a killer product that makes it really easy to use for social interaction. But Facebook is not forcing you to use it, Facebook is not forcing your friends to use it, Facebook is not forcing social peer pressure on you, and if in fact someone's friends are wholesale excluding that person because they're not on Facebook, Facebook is not responsible for the fact that someone has shitty friends that are too lazy to include that person.
You are ignorant, have you ever been an addict? I doubt it, you've probably lived a safe life in your white middle-class bubble.

If you think you could just convince a loved one to stop doing dope and crank with words, you're living in a fucking dream world. I speak from experience, having the disease of addiction.

You are extremely naive, stop posting please.
> Doesn't it have a budget for occupying an entire country in somewhere far away?

Yes. It doesn't. US couldn't occupy successfully neither Afghanistan nor Iraq. If you'd like to occupy someone ask British. They successfully occupied India for many years.
I use SMTube[1] for that.

http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/en/smtube
> they have a success rate (Active + Acquired companies) of over 90%

Firstly, nowhere on that page does TechStars claim a 90% success rate. The interpretation of Active + Acquired = Success, is actually wrong.

It is actually trivially easy for a startup that, for all intents and purposes, is dead, to keep limping along for years, or to otherwise maintain a skeleton presence.

You could consider using the acquisition % as a metric for success, but even acquisition/exit % is not a good metric for success because the best companies go years and years before IPO/exit (see: YC's biggest winners like Dropbox and Airbnb, which have not exited yet but are widely considered mega-unicorn successes), and because acquihires are actually failures, just dressed up as soft exits.

The closest metrics to success for measuring an accelerator's performance that I can think of are % of graduate companies that raise money, average seed valuation of companies after graduation, and/or average valuation of graduate companies in the entire portfolio.

Even those metrics are flawed.
Android ecosystem is more complicated. In China, the largest market of the next 10 years, Play store is irrelevant. Chinese market has several Android app stores (Anzhi, Xiaomi, Wandoujia etc), and together they have hundreds of millions of users.

It's likely that there will be different app stores in other growing Asian markets with business models more suitable to their countries.
Owning anonymity is an attack on privacy. It means if i want to set up a system where people pay for things without being tracked i have to pay the guys who are tracking all purchases.

Theoretical full ownership of all anonymous payment processes means consumers cannot own their own behaviors without paying a tax on doing so.

If i can hold on to my anonymity i can actually own and even sell my own behaviors. As one example, I could prove to someone that a bitcoin wallet was my own.
I would not expect that the current ability to purchase weapons could impact past events (, unless the Iraquis have access to US army surplus time machines as well).

It should also be noted that most discriminatory and tyrannical regimes selectively arm or disarm segments of their populations, so as to effect greater control and stability. If one quickly examines the "Jim Crow" laws of the southern US states, it is easy to find many which were targeted at disarming the black population and others (, making the minorities vulnerable to lynching).
I think there's an unstated idea with the person you're debating here that drug addiction is a medical/psychological issue that drug cartels profit from by taking advantage of people with a disposition towards substance abuse, not social or commercial problem.

Do you now understand why you're getting nowhere in this debate? It's like trying to convince somebody that the solution to cancer is bringing in the army to defeat viruses.

If you disagree with the fundamental assumption, you would do well to state that.
I think the blog post is valuable, but I'd point out that aphyr is also not publishing formal proofs or utilizing the verification he suggests is necessary. I don't think this is intentional, but they should realize and own that they are borrowing authority of formal method they are not demonstrating and then criticizing others for the same lack of demonstration.
Passenger Shoots Time Lapse of Flight Between SF and Paris
what book is that from?
Now that you mention it I remember that the mirroring was done to hide a gap in the racks on the right!
Yellowstone supervolcano 'even more colossal'
"In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon"

True for an anti de Sitter space (thus ADS/CFT) but not for the one we live in which is a de Sitter space and lacks the requisite boundry. I wish someone could explain the relevance of ADS/CFT to this universe.

I once had the opportunity of being in a car alone with Juan Maldacena for an hour and asked him. He pretty much shrugged (probably meaning any attempt to explain that to me, a layman physics junkie, would be futile.) He's a really, really nice and personable guy so I'm sure that if there was anything I could have understood he would have tried.
Have a look at D: It's what C++ should be.
Already been done a few times. (See D and Rust)

But the result will no longer be C++ for better and worse.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Cure for Depression?
What a joke. Nokia with the full backing of Microsoft can't even make a decent OS. How do they expect to make a decent OS on their own after firing all of their software developers? Pathetic grandstanding.
Best Places to Work 2014 | Glassdoor
Yup. That seems to be the prevailing opinion. C++ is still relevant, but not all of the applications that want its performance can justify its complexity. So various language designers are working on alternatives. The frontrunner is undoubtedly Rust; D and Nimrod are also relevant. And I have a cat in the fight too. ;)
You're privileged, white, and at least middle-upper class, why are you spouting your mouth off as if you know what lower class drug addicts have to deal with?

You don't, I do. This shit is real life for some of us, you can stop pretending like you give a shit, thanks.
> "I sometimes wonder if those dealing with legacy systems have been subjected to new fangled methodologies like agile and scrum"

I doubt it. I worked as a Mainframe programmer (in this century). Revision control consisted of printing your full current version of the code and inserting it into the project's binder.
It's similar to Green's Theorem, a special case of Stokes' Theorem. The latter is probably very closely related to the ideas underpinning the holographic principal (just guessing; my background is more math than physics, though I love both).
A thousand times: yes!

(This makes me incredibly happy. Now I can enjoy scripting models. Just imagining Web Service API to Vim3D, or dare I say DjangoGraphviz to Vim3D.)
An interesting realisation in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s was that Army operations had to be brought back under the umbrella of civilian authority.

From 1969 to 1977 the Army in NI basically operated independently of the constabulary, with only informal liaison and co-ordination, whilst pursuing their primary mission.

But from then onwards the Army was seconded to Security Co-ordinating Commission and was re-orientated towards support of the policeman on the beat.

The UK Government had realised that soldiers having unregulated police-like powers over people was counter-productive, and the response was to re-establish the 'primacy of the constabulary' to give some faith in the justice system. If you were arrested, it was by a police officer with his number visible on his lapel.
Not sure I got that - that sounds an awful lot like JSF, which should never have been invented.
Well this one's proof by construction, so I don't feel the need to go particularly deep into the math. If you prefer a more rigorous approach take a look at the TLA proofs earlier in the Jepsen series; think I linked one on Redis+async replication in the article.
Let's be charitable to the NSA for a minute, and imagine that they are following the plot of the God Emperor of Dune[1], where in seeing the danger posed to the Internet by the formation of cloud service giants, they became the fearsome yet benevolent tyrant, strategically planning an engineered leak, so that on their death the Internet would react by distributing its services among many providers in The Scattering, thus ensuring the safety and continued survival of the Internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Emperor_of_Dune
Ask HN: I am writing a book on web design. Any suggestions?
I am about to start a new side project and this time I am interested in writing a book on "Web Design". My primary target audience are hackers who want to get better at web design and use the knowledge & skills to develop well designed front-ends for their product. Here are my initial thoughts on how I would like to go about it :

1. I don't want it to be a 500 page HTML reference. There are many such texts available. That's why I want to focus only on HTML5 elements that are used in real life projects.

2. Teach CSS3 in a simple and fun way by focusing on fundamentals and using mini-projects to illustrate how it can be used in real life projects.

3. I also want to cover design concepts like typography, layouts, responsive design, color theory, etc.

I am looking for suggestions on what to include in my book. What are the most important topics that you would like to be covered in a web design book?
Very cool. I'm not sure I would call vim a "bare bones" text editor though.
Updates are automatic, and understated in the UI.

Version numbers are still useful as literal milestones (well, allmost... it would be 6-weeks-stones, but no such thing exists).
It is not like you can release new phone with different OS in a month. As well it is not like Nokia is single solid company. There are speculations that Nokia was killed by giving too much independence to different parts of company.
Great Browser. Thank you Mozilla.
Relevant:

http://betanews.com/2013/12/09/tech-giants-surveillance-refo...

As long as these companies build the best tracking engines the world has ever seen, that can identify anyone and everything they're doing, it's just a matter of time before governments get their hands on that data, legally or illegally. It's just too tempting to pass.

If I were Google I'd start thinking long and hard about how to solve this problem, and try to make money by actually being on the user's side when it comes to privacy, not against them. Google will ultimately fail if their goals aren't aligned with those of the users anymore.
Antavo has been excellent marketing key tool until now. From now on, with targeted emails new feature, you went one giant step beyond and it will be even more useful. Thanks for the great tips.
its a trend, many vendors try to differentiate; Sony has its extensions too: Timescape is a 3D interface for SMS messages, very intuitive; but you can't have it on any other Android phone.

Here is a demo for Timescape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD2PECP2AaQ

Apparently it is addicting; my wife got upset about it, now that I got her another phone she is missing this feature.
> I will remember that there is art to software engineering as well as technology , and that there is beauty in code. I will not forget that programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Why is this a part of the oath?

> I will use technology for good and for the progress of mankind, free of evil, for the betterment of peoples' lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
For the end user this means: different command line parameters for commands; more consistent userland; consistent documentation; less drivers; slightly less applications
It isn't a claim that can be backed up more than anecdotally - it's the typical jihad without real data.
Unless we figure how to tunnel to the other side of the universe. Because quantum tunneling would allow us to move faster than light which is necessary to escape.
Not really. All it means is that Nokia has to convince Android developers to upload their apps to the Nokia store too.
F-Secure is a prime example how company blogging should be done. They have a lot of interesting posts about and around their core subject, but they manage to avoid the vibe that you get from typical startup blog posts that somebody is trying to sell you something.

And it isn't just blogging, it's their public presence in general- Mikko Hyppönen's talks (like his TEDx talk about NSA) are genuinely interesting.
Inter-thread communications in Java at the speed of light
The story begins with a simple idea: create a developer friendly, simple and lightweight inter-thread communication framework without using any locks, synchronizers, semaphores, waits, notifies; and no queues, messages, events or any other concurrency specific words or tools.
"Sorry anonymous your search - - did not match any document.

Suggestions:
- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords."
Selling Off Privacy at Auction (NDSS'14 PDF)
Chrome OS can go investigate the dark smelly tube from which Google cloud crapped it forth.

Taking a great OS from a great community like Linux, twisting and attacking it with Android and Chrome OS and layers of control designed by endless arrays of slimey lawyers while championing evils such as centralized data storage, consumption-centric hardware that dumbs down the populace and denies the joys of understanding creativity to the next generation is not laudable.

Chrome OS deserves no space on HN. It is dead on arrival, yet another artifact of a culture the PR wet-dream-team labelled 'fun', 'cool', 'open' with colors and systematically designed crutches for stagnating social/personal development and isolating employees within the company: a myth sold artificially to a generation of young talent who could otherwise have done good in the world.

SHAME ON YOU GOOGLE.
High Frequency Trading for Your Private Data
Given the rise of 'robotic-assisted surgery', it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It's difficult to decouple the medical procedure from the hardware/software involved: robotic arms, the code behind it, machine vision bits, etc.

While far from a medical technotopia, this seems less insidious that patents on DNA sequences or even pharama in my mind.
Good points.

First, I'm not saying that cryptographic randomness can be created out of thin air, without entropy, I just argue that you don't need n bits of real entropy to get n bits of high-quality randomness.

I mean if you really needed 4096 bits of random seed to generate 4096 bits on randomness, why not just take the 4096 bits you waste on the seed as randomness?

Of course you need a random seed. That's what i was alluding to with the boot-time or VM remark.

But you're not really interested in lots and lots of potential output sequences, one of them is enough. Remember, the first requirement of a block cipher is that it is indistinguishable (to a computational polynomial bound) from a random distribution.

The real counter-argument is the state attack. And that's mitigated by a modern RNG's design. Fortuna, for example, constantly mixes incoming entropy into outputs that occur far in the future (technically, it reseeds every now and then, but without estimating entropy). This does not protect you from a total state compromise, a computer is deterministic, after all, but it's quite hard to argue with a straight face that such a total compromise matters, because everything you might want to use the randomness for would most certainly be quite as compromised, as well.

So why take that (probably insignificant) risk?

Because the alternative is worse. If you want to have Linux's current /dev/random behavior, you have two things:

First, it blocks when there's not enough entropy in the pool. That's bad. Just google for "sshd hangs". Either your system doesn't work anymore, or people find creative ways to subterfuge all the crypto stuff to make it work again. Just for the far-fetched fear about this total state compromise?

Second, how much entropy do you have? Lots and lots has been written about it, but despite all this technobabble ("'entropy', there must be hard physics behind it"), estimating entropy is not really an exact science. More guesswork. So you never know how much entropy you really have. That's why Fortuna got rid of all that estimating that its predecessor Yarrow still did.
There are a lot of students in economically backward countries who won't be able to shell out $50 for a hobby project. I remember my first domain name which I purchased as soon as I got a card capable of internet transactions. I certainly wouldn't have went ahead with that purchase if it costed $50.
In practice police do not pursue charges for marijuana possession unless it's bagged for retail. The general idea seems to be, that you can do what you want in the privacy of your home, but smoking marijuana is not socially appropriate.

It's not actually the law that's the problem. We have had ballot measures to legalize the retail of marijuana, and so far the public opinion seems to be against it. I gather that people are more or less happy with the situation as it is.

You may be confusing the law for something that actually exists, when in reality, and especially in Alaska, the question is merely what category of offense may provoke an officer to arrest you. I cannot admit to having practical experience growing, buying, and selling marijuana, nor tell of any experience that I have had in conversing with uniformed law enforcement officers about said activities. However, another person of my acquaintance suggests that marijuana use and trafficking is widely tolerated. Another person of more distant acquaintance had the curious story of having had much confiscated growing equipment returned to them out of police custody.

It is very important to note that Alaska, being in the northern latitudes, has most of its population in areas which receive less than 5 hours of daylight at the solstice. In humans lack of exposure to daylight is known to produce vitamin D deficiency, which can result in depression among other symptoms, and this disease is both prevalent and largely untreated. This to my mind is the strongest correlating factor, but the fact remains that Alaska has extremely high rates of alcoholism, murder, child and other physical abuse, vehicular accidents, as well as other drug problems.

No one is going to call the cops if you're smoking a joint, even in public. They will think you're an asshole, and being an asshole is often a good way to be arrested. If you are drunk and weaving, and you have a bag in the glove compartment, you will probably be busted for both. If you're not going out of your way to bring the fact that you smoke pot into public view, everyone will be okay with that. That may not be your definition of legal, but it is certainly a definition of legal, and as much as you or I might wish it to be otherwise, it's pretty hard to argue with the vox populi.
REMOTE : Ruby on Rails developers. http://railyo.com
'Angry Birds Go' review: how free-to-play ruined the 'Mario Kart' of mobile
Ghostery's game seems to be tricking users into sending their data to Evidon. Going off the company's own numbers, something like 45% of Ghostery users send Evidon data (by comparison, only 2% of Firefox users share data through Telemetry).
I go to hacker news to avoid comments like this.
Apple’s vision of the future
Dimension as in - three spatial dimensions we navigate every day. There is no other reality, ergo there is no our dimension.

Don't take it too literally, it's like saying information gives rise or causes energy, as in - information of the holographic universe causes energy to behave in the world we experience, probably with some other descriptions how it behaves in spaces where lower or higher dimensions are flatter than our own.
Wow, I just read that entire paper. Thank you for linking, it was super helpful!
...wow, overreacting a bit?

I have an ARM chromebook as a second device and use Ubuntu with Crouton as needed, but tend to stay on the Chrome OS side for my primary use case.

It certainly has an appeal, especially with battery life, for certain users/uses. (Check Amazon's best selling laptops and there tends to be several chromebooks there, as well).
Certainly, you can use QEMU without KVM. It's just slower that way. I'm not sure about the other way around.
How to see what government agency is spying on your Android phone
It's nice to avoid the default initialization and construct a member directly with the argument you want. Then you can construct a second member which might depend on that previous one, etc. This can even include lambdas right in the initialization list, and all of this may throw and log an error with the catch block. Personally, I rarely like to see code in the actual constructor body anymore.
The dangers of loose talk about genetics
So 6 lakh views is 600,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh
This comment is spot on. And the corporations are run by people who do not play well with others, often heavily medicated, often with borderline psychotic obsessions for money or beating the competition. They actually believe that so-called economic growth is a good thing for the world.
I like the idea, but I agree that there's sort of an odd mix of topics in here.

"Betterment of mankind" + "human-readable code" + "ask a coworker for help" = ???
This is just a hunch, but I don't think your family would be too worried about these things if you kept your GPA up. They are trying to find the reason for the falling GPA, and blaming what they can find.
"making surgical procedures patentable" - in what sick world do we live in?!

I give the United States a maximum of 10-15 years before it will collapse due to massive civic unrest. (Which will undoubtedly be handled the Chinese way, with all the military equipment the police gets these days)