skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is interesting, but these methods don't strike me as really viable. The Twitter outreach was specifically targeted at the cooperation of Twitter-using time travelers, and while Pope Francis might or might not be historically significant enough to warrant prescient mentioning, I'm sure comet ISON is not. The assumption is also (and maybe it has to be) that time travelers would blurp out important prescient information - however, I don't think that holds true if they were either well disciplined or engaged in historical research - which would mean they know little more (if anything) about our immediate future than we do.

I'm obviously not advocating time travelers are present (I would think with the certain prospect of leaving your time line in order to create another one, the proposition of time travel seems akin to a one-way change in universes that doesn't sound very inviting), but it's definitely fun to speculate about. Realistically, one would also have to take into account the fact that, by mere virtue of being present, a time traveler will change the course of history in the long run.

A more thorough effort could center on large-scale automated data mining for prescient terms on the internet. Of course, there would be many false positives, but as a side effect we could learn more about the epidemiology of ideas even if we don't discover time travelers. It seems to me that a disciplined time traveler would not purposefully drop historically significant hints - however, if they are from a future and culture close enough to our own, they might still reveal themselves inadvertently through idiosyncratic phrases and reference to concepts that are from the future. Hand-picked phrases are not enough to discover this, it would have to be large-scale AI-supported text mining.
Slightly off topic, but it's fascinating to me that we're not seeing any of the major effects of overpopulation that Harrison imagined despite having surpassed the numbers in his book. Maybe the Green Revolution? Or the realization that not everyone in the world has to live in New York City.
> But this one interests me: Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

But that is not a new prediction. Socialism for example came about in the mid 1800's on the basis of an optimistic view of what would be possible thanks to the industrial revolution - the idea that machines could put us in a position able to eradicate poverty - but also pessimism about how it would turn workers into cogs in a machine.

This latter view came to shape a a lot of thinking and art for decades. In the cinema there are many obvious examples, such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to Charlie Chaplins "Modern Times" (1936).

The latter makes it literal: Chaplin goes crazy due to the monotonous, high speed work and horrible treatment (including being used as a guinea pig for a machine designed to feed the workers lunch more efficiently). He starts seeing everything, such as buttons, as machine parts and nuts and bolts, and keeps trying to fasten them.

Eventually he gets pulled into the machine he is tending to and is shown as being moved along by the giant cogs.
As a foreigner, this is probably the most astounding. After all the commotion in the 90s with Bill Clinton lying about the Monica Lewinsky affair, the double standard is striking. From the outside it seems as if Clapper is simply above the law.
How online investment advisers add value
All toplevel comments on this comment are basically saying, "no", yes-if doesn't work, "because" ....

:-)
Flag the submissions that don't belong here. Upvote the submissions that do belong here. Post great submissions.

HN has always had this kind of content. You can ignore most of the "feelings" by saying this is an example of how a company shouldn't apologise - and that's important for HN because startups sometimes make mistakes thst have to be apologised for.
God damn it. It's like being told that you are now consciously breathing.
What's this, 2002? Is 2014 really going to be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop?
> To me locking means waiting which means greatly reduced performance. That is the whole reason why event-based systems like NGINX and node.js are so popular.

I think you've got it slightly wrong. What do you think happens when one request is being worked on in effectively one green-thread-equivalent in node.js? Everything else is blocked until the current operation yields. That's an equivalent of a GIL, yet it doesn't "reduce performance". If you switched to multithreading + locking (making it run in a M+N scheduling model), you'd gain performance, not lost it.
Pregnant women avoided peanuts without any supporing research: allergies tripled
If you are interested in time travel: I saw the movie "About Time" last night and it was both awesome and romantic. Perfect date movie for the geek/non-geek couple.

And now at least this discussion thread is not completely useless :-)
What if there is no internet in the future?
"Why Are All These Idiots More Successful Than Me?"
IPhones might have a top secret program built in as an NSA backdoor
That's not fractioned. Are you being flippant?
When you have the option of starting a project with py2 or py3 and you choose py3, and discover X days into the project that you have a broken dependency that wouldn't have been broken in py2, you've just increased the cost and time to deliver the project by an unknown factor.

Perhaps for some projects, that factor is small.

...and for some of them, it turns out to be huge. So big you have to roll back to py2, and suck it up for lost time/money spent doing so.

When you have a project that is time/cost critical, that risk is absolutely unacceptable.

If you're working on your own projects, in your own time, sure thing. ...but professionally, on project work? No. Never.

Until you get the reverse, where continuing to work in py2 introduces an equivalent risk, because new libraries are 'py3 only', there is no justification whatsoever for using python 3.

Worse, because of this, when you're writing libraries, you have to make your py3 code py2 compatible, which means using the syntax-feature subset that works with py2, which basically defeats the entire purpose of migrating to py3.

Kivy is great example. The next version is going to support py3; great! ...but it's going to continue to natively support py2 on the same code base; ie. no new python 3 features. It will simply 'work' under the python 3.X interpreters.

That's why I will probably not end up using python3 in any professional work for the foreseeable future.

(If you think that's ridiculous... what can I say? Clearly you haven't worked under time/cost pressures where you have to be personally responsible for delivering on time and budget)
"...say to kill Hitler."

Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/
you are assuming time travelers change history, but it's different if you subscribe to the idea that you can't change past because in fact you did not change the past.

Then you can detect people saying stuff about the future, or possibly attempting to kill hitler while failing miserably.
You've basically restated the core of the marxist idea of the basis for the socialist revolution.
First-to-claim is a really poor way of allocating any kind of resources, and yes, someone who just claims a bunch of stuff under such a system and then waits for it to become valuable due to other people's efforts is scum.

Solutions? I'd like to see something like a tax proportionate to asking price on domains, analogous to a land value tax, to discourage claiming domains that you're not actually using.
Because if the compiler reorders your fields under your foot, you won't be able to know how things a serialized. You lose control over the memory layout.
Look at the evidence, only around 93.5% of people who have ever lived have died [0]. With a sample size of 108 billion, I think we can say the data is quite accurate. Therefore I think your chance of living for ever is more like 1 in 20.

[0] - http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...
This only covers time travelers from the future. If one were to use similar methods to find time travelers from the past, we'd probably find millions of candidates :)
> Let's also assume that somebody had a reason to travel into the past, say to kill Hitler. Our timeline would record that an Austrian artist was murdered in the 1920s.

This would prevent World War 2 and the associated advances in technology, possibly including those leading to the time travel being possible in the first place.
I expect time travelers will agree on a responsible prescience disclosure system which uses something like http://www.proofofexistence.com/about.
Billions, even. Since we're all time travelers from the past...
I believe finding time travellers from the past is trivial, especially those who travelled at a speed of 1s/s (or adimensional 1)
I love these questions! Yes, I started on "Pravets" 8 and 16 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers ) with BASIC and Pascal. We also had these robot hands you could maneuver with the Pravets machines. I would travel 250 miles to get the huge sheet-sized disk with a plumber game on it from my cousin in Sofia to show it off to classmates in Tutrakan. Karateka was also huge. For reference, my hometown had no traffic lights or english teachers (I started learning English from Cartoon Network because I could only study German, French or Russian at school until 8th grade.)

I was 8 years old when I started dabbling with Pravetz in the school lab and the 16 year old "Informatics TA" pulled me aside one day to show me a picture of two people kissing to tell me in the most awkward possible way that he wanted to kiss me. Who does that to an 8-year-old? I just ran back into the lab.

I think Reverse Polish Notation is called the same in Bulgaria (CS after the age of the internet is taught mostly in English back there I think).
Or buy the most property and rent it out. Very productive.
We fully Open Source (MIT) our Energy Model that we worked for for 5+ years
Systematic dragnet spying is a holdover from Cold War thinking, and predates Bush II by decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee#Results_of_the...
The NSA probably has enough data at hand for answering this question.
Infographic [HN search is your friend]

http://i.imgur.com/uEiwZTt.jpg
Coding Scala in Vim by Derek Wyatt
De jure too, isn't it? .us exists for US-specific content; .com ought to be reserved for international sites.
That's pretty much what Readability does.

Swapping your video: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=1FmwefTTnbo

Unmentioned feature: export page as ePub for use on any electronic book reader.
Slate.fr - http://www.slate.fr - Paris, France (local only)

Launched in 2009, Slate.fr is the French version of Slate.com.

We are looking for Drupal developers to help us grow and merge our desktop and mobile websites together with responsive design.

- Prior experience working with Drupal

- Able to collaborate in French with our team of journalists

- Fluent in front-end (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript) and back-end languages (PHP, MySQL)

- Bonus points for a familiarity with the RFC 2616 and curl

If you are interested you can contact me via my profile or follow this link:

http://www.slate.fr/story/81389/cv-developpeur-web-slate
> Twitter-using time travelers

If I were a time traveller I probably wouldn't use any of the social networks that are popular for non-time-travellers. Firstly managing so many social network accounts to keep up with the latest fashions would be a right pain (imagine having to change your profile picture on all of them...), but also their 'timeline' view would be completely different to my relative timeline.

I'd assume the network format would be distributed, running on something akin to a phone that you keep on you at all times. Whenever you make a post it records your relative 'life time', or just increments an id, so posts are always ordered in your relative timeframe. When you meet someone it would sync up with their account - I'm not quite sure how that would work though. The issue is you could post something about them publicly that hasn't happened yet in their timeframe (that could be embarrassing). Private messages are even worse...

(N.b. I should probably patent this idea for when time travel is invented)
"The public" don't support Snowden. Though they also don't really know anything about him. Sometimes the tech echo chamber can give you a bad sense of what the general public thinks.
I maximize them. I'd rather use a tiling VM with a bunch of virtual workspaces than having to deal with resizing and minimizing windows.
Please Fix The Menu ASAP
This is not surprising. It's a calculated risk to make a product just good enough. Development resources invested in retail wireless gear is minimal. I've worked on firmware for high-confidence industrial wireless gear used in mines. Most of them fall over under load, run obsolete+unpatched code and/or reboot randomly. Retail customers will tend to just put up with it and not return the product before the merchant's return grace period.

It's a totally different attitude when the intended market is enterprise: it's assumed that if a product causes a failure, the vendor is going to receive escalating, unpleasant phone calls until it's resolved.
Perhaps Twitter is run by a cabal of evil time travellers who have created technology to check whether tweets reveal temporal anomalies and delete them automatically to cover their tracks and protect the status of an elite class in the distant future. What if all communications technology has been built around this capability; everything routed through a network of 'security agencies' that ostensibly protect the function of the current government but really work to design a future that benefits a rarified few.

That'd be cool.
Most underreported news stories of 2013
The Lobbyists and Legislators Who Kill Municipal Broadband in America
There's a relevant Mitchell and Web scetch. Someone travels back in time and meets Faraday. Faraday asks a bunch of questions, none of which can be answered because the traveller is just an everyday person who has little clue about how things work.
I'm sorry you got that reply. I don't doubt you received it, but it doesn't reflect how I believe my company should have responded to you.

This is actually a feature. FogBugz DOES send email in UTF-8 (just copy some hebrew text and send an email to yourself) if it has to. If it doesn't have to, it will not do so simply because it's working around old email clients that don't support UTF-8. FogBugz has supported all kinds of languages for many, many years, so there's some possibility you are talking about a reply you received before that even happened, but I think you just observed a normal English only email from FogBugz has the content-type set to windows-1252. You could argue at this point that we probably don't need that workaround anymore I guess. I just have to weigh that against whether it's broken now (it's not) vs. the new support emails we would get from people who were having problems with email because they were still using Eudora 3.0.

It turns out that it's actually BECAUSE of the whole reason Joel wrote that article that FogBugz sends English email in windows-1252.
Society did decide about traffic laws, just not you as an individual.
Inequality has grown since the 70's also.

http://drpop.org/2010/02/battle-for-a-living-wage-uk-us/
I'm about to go back in time. If I succeed, the silicon transistor gets invented in 1954 and Christmas goes to happen in the winter (northern hemisphere).
Yttr — A file sharing service for trivial files
> Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too.

I'm curious what exactly you find tiresome about it.

Is it the sexism that often spawns these discussions? the implication that women need extra help? the bad attitudes often displayed in comments? etc.
Were you able to get your firmware upgraded? My understanding is that firmware upgrades can only be done over coax (there's certainly nothing on the web interface), but Time Warner Cable will not upgrade your firmware; so if you need a firmware upgrade you're pretty much out of luck.
> I'm sympathetic with a huge chunk of the world's population having to deal with a (potentially) unfamiliar character set, but what can you do about it?

Well, seeing as that "huge chunk" is a large majority, then the solution isn't "learn english because I'm used to typing URLs _this_ way."

I understand that English is the current lingua franca, but it's aggressive to expect everyone to deal with it just to use the internet.

Why not use our country tlds? It might mean that ICANN has to actually do some work, but I think that the uppermost tld for countries should actually be reserved for suffixes.

e.g.

apple.us #should have never been sold
apple.com.us #there, none of that scary unicode
apple.com.ru #same unicode problem abound (but at least it addresses the first issue)
If time travel is possible at all, we'd eventually discover and use it. I wonder if this means that we'll destroy our civilization before becoming able to use time travel (seems more likely than time travel being impossible to achieve within thousands of years from now).
Probably Daniel Ellsberg. I don't know if he actually had higher approval rate than Nixon, but considering Nixon had to resign after that, I'm thinking he did. There are also a lot of parallels between Ellsberg and Snowden, and a lot of parallels between Nixon and Obama, too, for that matter.

I actually think what Obama did (or continued to do) was much worse that what Nixon did in regards to the mass surveillance and spying. Nixon would've been impeached if he would've pushed the spying machine so far. In fact, he was almost impeached for what he did then, too, which is why he resigned first to save himself the life-long shame. Maybe Obama can learn from that and do the same.

It's also the NYT that protected Ellsberg back then, although I'd say the NYT has been very reactive in Snowden's case, and TheGuardian was the most pro-active one in defending him, by far.

I recommend watching this documentary about Ellsberg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwXylIaJ_Lg

If only there were more people like Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden, and we wouldn't have to wait decades before the crimes and lies of the military industrial complex or the government get exposed. That would be something, but for that to happen, people need to ask for much, much stronger whistleblower laws. Heck, it should be a Constitutional amendment, because I think whistleblowing is absolutely vital to a properly functional democracy. Without it, governments become rotten and corrupt, and the the public can only react decades later when it's too much to bear. It shouldn't be like that. The public should be able to react to government wrongdoing a lot sooner, to correct the course.
RapydScript, javascript precompiler with python syntax
Web platform: five technologies to look forward to in 2014
They don't have to provide the sources forever...
Seemingly the model in question (WAG200G) is originally from 2007.

Excerpt from the GPL [1] (paragraph 6b):

"You may [...] Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product [...], accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License [...]."

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
I've always had naked DSL because of not wanting to pay for cable TV or another line. For DSL and similar services, BYOE tends to be hand-off.

With cable modems, does/can the provider push firmware?
A bit off-topic, I haven't been able to use a version of Office since they brought that ribbon thing in and moved the "Properties" menu option that used to be under "File". What year was that? 2003?

I recall spending ages trying to figure out where on the hard drive the file actually was without having to go via "Save As" (used to be File->Properties, and there it is). I'm sure it's trivially easy, but that interface change effectively made Office a whole new program to learn for me, with the predictable result that since I now had to relearn how to use it, it was on a level playing field with other tools - one of which I switched to. While I'm only one data point, making me relearn the interface meant Office suddenly had to actually compete again.

I also struggle to use any version of Windows beyond XP. I am a total cluster on Win 8 and it's quicker for me to find someone who can use it and get them to do it for me. The older I get, the more sure I becomes that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface; only convention.
The problem I've got with browser zoom is that it behaves wildly inconsistently across sites. In some cases, it will expand all containers along with the font size, frequently pushing page elements off the viewscreen. It almost always scales images, which I generally don't want. In some cases, narrow-format pages end up with ridiculously skinny columns of text floating in a sea of either whitespace or distractions. And in far too many cases, pixel-perfect styling elements break completely, leading to wrapped navigation bars, buttons with clipped text, or just plain broken page layouts.

Sadly, Web 2.0 seems to be desperately trying to re-tread all of the worst aspects of 1.0 design with framesets, animated banners, moire backgrounds, and the like. Some of the worst comes from Google -- G+ and many of the newer Blogger styles are completely unreadable.

gwern, who posts frequently to HN, has one of the better site designs. Medium is actually Excellent. But it's rare enough that I encounter such sites that they're far more remarkable than they should be.
Posting primarily because I like the design, though I have already used it a couple of times to share some stuff quickly and temporarily. Not sure what the API is like yet.
God forbid that anyone on an internet forum [mostly] about startup businesses might try to draw attention to themselves.
ESR: bzr is dying, Emacs needs to move
Edifícios de Elevado Desempenho - HPB 2014
Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move
Temporal Naturalism (2013-11-01)
What's the point of electing a president if for 5 years he doesn't know what his government is doing?
Ask HN: 20 minutes with a VC
I only have 20 minutes with a VC. What should I show/ask him?
Telescopes can make people interested in physics, right?
"Drives contain "extra" storage space above rated capacity, as well as reduce delivered capacity, which gets periodically unmapped by wear leveling, or due to errors, etc."

Yes, that's why you fill it multiple times. But yes, you can have information leaking in a sector that went bad and was remapped

But the good thing about SSDs as well is that they're much easier to destroy, just microwave it, or provide an excess voltage to it (may need more work than simply connect the power input to wires coming from the wall)
Homebrew Cask – CLI workflow for the administration of Mac binaries
We're a game discovery service for iOS games and we're pretty new. Need your opinions.

Here's the link to the product: http://apppulp.com
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999094
Mining is a dangerous industry with its own specialist regulators and standards bodies.

Equipment failure that can kill people should be taken more seriously than equipment failure that leads to less serious consequences.

The thought of wireless gear in mines is pretty scary! I used to build / test equipment for a sub-contractor of Joy Mining and communication between the devices was carried by inch thick cables with nikel-plated machined steel connector shells. Pit props at the cutting face can be active devices that walk forward as the face is cut, and the coordinate that forward movement. Designing user interfaces is tricky, and designing a UI that should prevent death or huge financial costs if misused is probably hard.