skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because they don't make jewelry and weapons doesn't mean some other animals (elephants, whales, other apes) are not highly intelligent. I prefer to call civilizations like ours "technological" and not pass judgement on the smarts of other creatures because they don't like building things.
What's so wrong with solar power?
I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.

This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.

I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s...

From here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...

It didn't compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it's closer to home and of course also closer to the present.
Fractal geometry of cancer cells
Although no one will give a fuck if you don't handle HTTP/0.9.
The data backs it up: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf
Both commit human rights violations against the native population.

You mean when Hamas or Islamic Jihad detonates a bus bomb in Tel Aviv?

To pretend that Israeli military and/or police action against the terrorist government in Gaza takes place in a vacuum, or that it is aimed principally at civilians, ignores the reason why Israel is so militarized in the first place - very real security threats against the Israeli people and state.
Eh. I get what you're saying but I think there's some terrible downsides to this approach. For example, what if the app is supposed to direct you to the nearest hospital, and the user denies its location permissions and then forgets and reopens it later or something? If the app doesn't know whether it has permission (or, worse, thinks it's getting accurate data when it's not), it would be impossible to program reliable error functionality.

If developers try to coerce you into giving extra permissions, hopefully the average user will be smart about it and just delete the app. At any rate, your solution definitely sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Thought experiment:

Some other civilization (let's say the Arabs) comes to America and puts us in a system analogous to apartheid, where the groups are whites on bottom and arabs on top.

In that hypothetical, would your opinions be different?
That was strangely relaxing.
> There's zero reason bitcoin should be the only one.

Except for the problem of alt currency liquidity.

Money that is not liquid is not money at all (liquidity is the defining characteristic of money).
PhoneHome: Remote Logging for Android
I have posted before and got no attention, I started getting attention after I changed the title. Truth is, you got to make the title as attractive since that's all users are seeing here.

If the post was Show HN: "product name" then I wouldn't click it since I don't know if it'll be a waste of time.
Experiments to do with your baby
I'm the author of the book ("Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com).

I'm a big HN fan and would be happy to answer any questions!
Google manager reportedly posts photos of prescription Glass
Ask the Corbicules!
That makes me shudder.

At one point in a previous life, I was the administrator for HP Quality Center at my company. On the good side, HP exposes the entire workflow in VBA (ok, I guess that isn't that good actually, but still better than black box).

On the horrible side, EVERY SINGLE FUNCTION in that application began with the line "On Error Resume Next". I quite nearly quit on the spot the first time I looked at the code. A couple years later, I would regret that decision.
Apple features are only used when you explicitly call for them. Otherwise the entire Finder experience can be considered almost kiosk-like in its simplicity.

If you do want to learn how to use a new feature, you have to Google it just like the rest of us.

If you have a problem with OSX, prepare to enter the dark world of the Apple Forums where any expectation of something working outside of Apple's narrow definition of functionality will be met with derision and ridicule.

But is OSX is a slow torture than Windows 8 is a rocket launcher to the head.

I've never understood why we have to 'like' one over another. Can't we just hold them all to a higher standard?
"But this flashlight app left them in the dark about how their information was going to be used"

Is the joke intentional?!
The decade or so I spent involved in activism in a variety of organizations is, hopefully, not a figment of my imagination.
If you've lived near farms, pulp-n-paper mills or fish processing plants, you will often be told that the stink is the smell of money and you should stop complaining. I expect it was something similar.
When I Got Fired From My Own Company
> What I find interesting is the chart where they estimate daily mining revenue to be on the order of $10 million/day, assuming current prices. Probably, that computation should be easy to verify using the various Bitcoin websites.

One thing I like to point out is that right now mining is over-subsidized by the basic protocol: why is the block reward 25btc (or whatever it is now)? It's completely arbitrary and is paying the miners more than their services are worth (hence the arms race to earn as much of the reward as possible).

The point of mining is to secure the blockchain and render it infeasible to perform double-spends, right? But double-spends are not that disastrous: a few double-spends are an inconvenience and not a disaster for Bitcoin. There is no need to allocate 25btc a block to achieve the current record of close to zero successful double-spends. It is wasteful.

So as the block reward declines, we'll see more reasonable amounts of revenue flowing to miners and hence also a decline in how much computing power (electricity) is spent, eventually converging on what is optimal for securing the blockchain.
I wouldn't do it, on the other hand it proves it's entirely luck what submissions make it to the front page. Your post can be pushed down and get no attention just because a bad dice roll.
I think its hard/expensive to access the firehose no?
It seems like `unfuck` might be a more pythonic name.

That is not a pair of words I ever thought I'd use in the same sentence. :)
I have somehow never read that. It was stunning in its breadth. I loved it. It made me ponder the significance of the series of self-perpetuating chemical reactions that comprises my biological existence. Now I'm sitting here at my computer, waxing existential, when I'm supposed to be building the auth and permissions section for an API...
Tradeoffs Between Consistency and Performance for NoSQL Databases
Moon Express unveils its commercial lunar lander design
>"(Linux users just fix the problem on their own.)"

This is true only because 99% of linux users are power users. When/if the user-base grow you will see a change on that.
The logic may be identical but the scope for programmer error is not. Consider the possible mistakes someone can write by doing it each different way.
A more depressing read is "The Story of Oh" [0] - a South Korean who chose to move with his family to North Korea ... then, upon realizing how the facts on the ground differed from the fiction he'd been taught about the place, managed to escape. Without his family, mind you. His wife demanded he escape, the better to prevent others from following in his footsteps.

----------------------------------------

[0] http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/07/16/the-story-of-...
It is kind of funny that future generations may interpret that opening to mean a clear blue sky.
The Guilt of Selling Your Startup
This feels like just maybe a slight bit of a conflict of interest...
They never are, none of those projects for Android stick computers said it was the same lowend generic stuff the Chinese sell for forty bucks.
I see this as a difficult to fake signal that China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe. It is similar to the challenges faced by industrial cities in the West as they exploited the massive production capacities created during WW II. Generally the reasoning goes, high pollution from lots of power plants / factories is a function of production of those power plants / factories.

You can fake GDP numbers but its not as straight forward to fake this sort of environment.

That said, it would be unfortunate if China doesn't get their act in gear soon and start putting scrubbers on plants and cleaning up their act here.
Not really. Beijing definitely get dust, but the real problem is that Beijing is trapped in a bowl and gets some wicked inversions. And to think I could see the summer palace from my office just yesterday.
Easy: $60/hour, 5 hours a week.
In general, things that we are constantly reminding each other of are things that we either do not naturally believe and thus need constant reminding of, or things we do not really believe (which can be determined by looking at our actions). The things we all already know and believe, we never even talk about. We know and agree, what would be the point?

For another example (and my, did I have to search for one that was politically neutral...), consider how often we're telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it, constant reminding to carefully consider our real priorities, or our actions will betray our true priorities, which aren't whatever we want or think them to be.

By contrast, consider how often we debate whether the best way to learn programming is by doing it, (exclusive) or by studying it. We might discuss the best way to learn by doing, but virtually no one really believes programming is best learned by extensive study before one is even permitted a REPL. (And anyone who pops up here and claims they believe that I will assume is being contrarian for contrariness' sake. Do take note of my "exclusive" there; of course there's a place for study, but even in formal studies there's no reason not to have the student in front of a compiler/interpreter on day one, or lab day one anyhow.)
2014 is the year of the IOT - we mean it this time
No problem. We're all friends here ;)
It seems that to appease the search criteria and thus create a strong 'telepathword', I simply picked three random words, capitalized certain letters according to a simple scheme and typed it in backwards. Now letters were flagged as weak.
And Firefox on 10.9 as well. The font didn't seem to anti-alias well, making it painful to read.
U.S. Navy Launches a Drone from a Submerged Submarine
Very interesting work. I find it very hard to imagine that a society capable of building skyscrapers and venturing into space won't leave more clues of it's existence to subsequent societies. Certainly it will be much more permanent than what the Mayans are leaving us. Perhaps the clues will be cities, perhaps it will be radiation, perhaps it will be stripped land.
"What changed and why don't we have a Rockefeller equivalent today?"

We do, and quite a few of them, but through legal trickery and slight of hand they have learned how to compartmentalize, hide, and remove themselves from, their vast amounts of wealth. Through the use of corporations, trusts, estates, and other things, largely for tax purposes but also for other reasons, the kinds of people on the boards and the people behind them of The 147 (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf) do this all the time.
Stephen Wolfram wants to leave Google, Wikipedia in the dust
There is no mechanism for search "completeness" without access to the fire hose.

http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2012/09/analyzing-twitter-data...

^ that is a good resource if you ever get access to the firehose.

Shoot me an email anthony@makerops.com, and when I get home I can shoot you an email with some example code that Ive written in the past.
If we use M2, which is like $11t, then Bitcoin seems to be in the same situation as the dollar.

$11t is 1100 trillion cents. Bitcoin currently has exactly the same amount of indivisible currency units: 1100 trillion (11,000,000 BTC which are divisible into 100,000,000 units).
And some mod finally updated the title.
I like this explanation, which comes from a reddit comment[1]:

"There are two kinds of journalism that get emotional reactions out of us. One has to do with exposing the 'puppet-masters' of society and their stranglehold on the way we live our lives. Clear and sustained reporting of this kind builds public resentment into effective political currents."

"The second is the kind of scandalous, sordid stories of individual misconduct which keep us occupied, but just leave us throwing our hands up wondering 'what is this world coming to?'."

"Curtis is saying that the lines between the two have become dangerously blurred, so that the latest banking scandal is reacted to as though it's a tale of private immorality that we should just shake our heads and tut about, in the same way we might about Miley Cyrus' latest exploits."

"As always, Curtis pulls his interesting trick of exploring and linking the history of the two trends through the lives of individuals, but I agree that can sometimes be confusing. It's definitely worth a read though."

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1s8a8v/what_the_...
24 national posts to establish global e-commerce delivery network
It's a store with an assurance contract model, like Groupon. You wouldn't say that people "pledge" to get their Groupon.
pt-online-schema-change, problem solved!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:IOS-only_games
> 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.

I would have assume most mac users who want to learn buy Apple's 'One on One' courses or some other related service.
I would say investment is the closest of your 3 categories to describe Kickstarter. Although not by your definition of investment which is quite narrow, in that it only involves investing in companies for a share of ownership.

You give them money which has a potential return (the reward). They anticipate the return to be as described, frequently a slight discount to a good on a certain date. This return is very rarely estimated accurately as with most returns. Usually it is at least incorrect in the date estimate, sometimes the retail price price winds up being lower than the kickstarter price, and sometimes it exceeds the estimate and you get something like a free sticker too.

You are assuming risk with your money for that potential gain, that is the trade, like an investment just your money is a tiny amount, your risk somewhat mitigated, and your gain tiny.
Also curious ...
Great job, this seems pretty fun. Plus, I'm sure your girlfriend really appreciates it, which is always awesome :)

Just one slight thing I noticed is that the "winsdom_scriptregular" font is quite hard to read.
I lived in Hong Kong 2010 to 2013, but actually ended up living in Shenzhen for most of 2011. 18 pages of my passport are taken up with visas and stamps from the mainland (plus several more from HK and Taiwan)

As a Hong Kong resident I had a 6 month visa and then a 1 year China visa. Notably, though, both times it was a 30 day maximum stay, and as a UK citizen they still always just give me 30 days per entry.

I know all about the sneaky 1 year business visa I could get. (there's some guy who sits in a hotel in TST and sorts it out for you)

But I still frequently hear stories of people who've been living there for a year or so, but when it comes to renewing they turn up in HK, apply for a new visa, and end up being granted just 15 days.

Usually they fix this, and pay someone a few thousand dollars, and they get another one year visa. But this is a hassle.

The internet thing is easily overcome with a vpn, but it's just annoying, especially as latency to western services is already pretty high.

So my choice, is "go live in Taiwan", China without some of the hassle.

Notably when I say "I love China", I frequently mean "I love Greater China".
Why is the UA header so screwed up, aside from the historical issues with it? Isn't it time that we replace it with something a bit more sane and structured? It seems the idea of detecting the browser vs detecting browser features goes back and forth. Sure, on the client side, where you have access to the DOM and the JavaScript runtime, it's great to know whether you can use the placeholder attribute in a text input, but server-side you need to decide which video file to serve to the client, and this gets tricky.

Instead, why don't we have something like this?:

OS: Windows
OS-Version: 8.1
Browser: Chrome
Browser-Version: 18.5

(Not suggesting the format, just the type of data.)

That way we can ditch the stupid stuff such as "like Gecko" which means nothing, and focusing on actual useful things.
Sketchfab Raises $2 Million
> being complicit in trading off economic advancement for maintaining Communist party rule.

I think 'complicit' might be an overstatement here; it's not like you can just go vote for the Democrats in China right?

I really doubt Barack Obama would be the American president today if the real penalties for advocating for the replacement of the Republican Party regime of 2000 had included death, life in a torture camp, similar things for your family, etc.
I wasn't sure what phrasing to use (and I definitely didn't like the simple term "intelligent species"). I kind of agree with you, but I think it's a little silly to say only our technology distinguishes us. I'm reminded of Anathem here: even if we all lived like monks shunning technology, we'd still be set apart by our mathematic, scientific, and philosophical reasoning.
80% of my classmates are in China. There are constant messages about PM level in Shanghai, Beijing in all my classmates' social networks in wechat, renren.

Not yet an outcry, definitively discussions, humors, etc.
Hence the term "London Fog" which was not water.
You'll have to pay some bribes but its possible. Generally, expats with kids have packages that include private schooling. Expats without packages usually have to leave when they get kids, though that's probably for the better with this air (the better private schools have huge bubbles, by the way....)
OSX doesn't do shit that pisses me off. That's what I like about it. It doesn't do things without asking. Oh you want to shut down? How about we run some updates first. Oh lets just reboot because I ran some updates. Hey there's a new JAVADOBEVIRUS update you should get it. Oh you're on a laptop? Lets run 253 updates while it's booting up, you don't need that battery life right?

Telling my computer to do something, and having it do something completely different is one reason why I use OSX. Sure, you can force windows to try and be like that, but how long until an update undo's all your little tweaks you've put in place?
"German Tank Problem" - Statistical Intelligence
I expected this thread to have more debate. I'm hardly the first person to point out that the OS is increasingly irrelevant, but I think this thread adds evidence for that theory.
There are a few advantages to being completely managed, rather than using native code. Portability (eg. mobile devices, different OSes), and functional code access security are two reasons that come to mind for me.
Of course they would. But only then.
There's no proof that you need a distributed system to have a reliable public ledger.

There is at least some chance that a big awful corporation is more trustworthy than a plurality of miners.
The difference with China is that much of the entire country is covered by a blanket of smog & dust. Not just the cities, but much of the countryside as well for hundreds of km. China does things big in a way that's hard to grasp without visiting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2478300/Pictu...
14 channels of shit on the tv screen.
I wonder what the response would have been if they'd billed the metro screen as the new start button i.e. when you click start the metro screen appears. Then it would have seemed like more of a stylistic change than a major UI update.
Brand Spankin' New Vision Papers from ICCV 2013
??
Of course they are up to the users to decide, but policies and needs are different. I'm curious, how do you think policies like this change?

Most of the developers i've seen will happily sell you a commercial license if you don't like the software.
After paying for it enough, most companies start to ask "well, actually, how risky is this, really?", and this is how policies change.

In any case, my other point stands - there are no actual legal reasons to not use LGPL/GPL software internally. It would have zero legal impact.
So it's absolutely true that Apple does introduce big new UI features. The real difference is, Apple introduces these big new features as additional features, not as major changes.

So, to take your Dock example: Apple didn't yank the Applications folder at the same time that they introduced the Dock. A decade later they introduced Launchpad, and did not simultaneously yank the Dock. In fact, the Dock still works pretty much the same it did back in the '90s, when it only existed in NEXTSTEP. And the Applications folder is still there and still working pretty much the same way, too. I don't bother with Launchpad, personally, because I prefer the old way of doing things. . . and unlike Microsoft, Apple's totally fine with letting me do that.

To compare with Windows: When the Start Menu came out, it completely replaced the Program Manager. Over the course of the Start Menu's life, it got rearranged a few times - not a crisis, but obnoxious. Even just switching between XP and Vista, I occasionally find myself hesitating for a moment trying to remember where $widget got moved to. And again, when the Start screen comes out in Windows 8, it doesn't just get added for the benefit of people who want to use it. . . it replaced the Start Menu, so now less-savvy users have to re-learn how to use their computers yet again, and I have yet another source of friction when switching back and forth between versions of the OS.
Analog dreamscapes in sound and image by ISO50
There are few among us who truly excel at one artistic endeavor, even fewer who can lay claim to excellence in more than one field. California-based Scott Hanson, AKA electronic musician/producer Tycho, AKA graphic designer/blogger ISO50 is one of those enviable individuals. He is a master of maintaining control of every aspect of his creativity by designing all of his music, artwork, product packaging, tour posters, t-shirts and press photos.
December 12 – 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs
>I was just saying that the project backers don't ever receive any part of that profit, so they are not "investors"

Of course, I don't think anyone is mistaken to think backing a kickstarter project is an investment. What you are buying with a project backing isn't the product, but a good-faith effort to complete the project. One might think kickstarter is a store, but it isn't and doesn't claim to be. Backed projects come with rewards, but they also come with an implicit and obvious 'if successful' caveat with the clear implied risk of failure.
In that case your original statement was inaccurate. It should have read:

> In a predictably deflationary environment, you maximize your economy by spending your money "later".

Which, in fact, is better said as:

> In a predictably deflationary environment, you maximize your economy by not spending money.

And that leads us to the obvious fact that saving up money in order to not spend them is absolutely pointless.