skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FTA: "social may pose an existential threat to Google’s style of search"

No. Sometimes I want general information: "what is the airspeed of a laden swallow?" Sometimes I want information dependent upon the interests of the hundred or so people I know: "what do you all do in Toledo?" Sometimes I want information dependent upon my interests: "if I enjoyed 'Requiem for a Dream', what other movies should I watch?"

These things conflict: I could not possibly care less what my friends think is the airspeed of a laden swallow.

I use Google for #1, Facebook for #2, and several other sites for #3. Google has (or had) a perfectly viable business providing the best answers to general questions, and it's a shame that they're screwing it up.
I'm in this business. It's really tough to market based on quality without having a big name, but it's always easy to market based on price. So a few companies offer quality parts at high prices while hundreds of smaller companies fight it out for the low price.
I think the only people nthat hate python 3 is the one that have worked with it for several years, newbies wouldn't even care a little.
Plus, you can choose to support local vendors run by community members, or who have less oppressive employment practices.
Emacs Byte-code Internals
The only downside to Duo is Jon Oberheide's previous collaborations w/ Charlie Miller, ex-nsa'er & advocate of the "no more free bugs" movement.

Minor nitpick, but if we're shaming companies in the security community, I think it's worth calling out some of the security celebrities whose stances contribute to the privacy destroying activities of the NSA. He and people like the gruqg are enablers of the government's destruction of our privacy.

I agree with you though. Duo is one of the best alternatives out there. Jon's collaborations w/ Miller were years ago. Perhaps I'm being a bit to grudgy.
While it sucks to not be able to work on it full time any more, it boggles my mind that it'd be possible to earn enough from a tool like that to work on it full time for any amount of time in the first place. Not meant as a criticism of you - in fact if you've managed to do that, hats off, clearly you must have done something right with it.
Either that, or nobody wants to buy your crap.
The difference between Francis and his predecessors is that he actually started a shakeup of internal structures, rather than keeping the debate on a purely theological level. This is what "progressives" like. His two predecessors could talk a good game, but when chips were down they would invariably nominate dodgy ultra-conservatives to take care of finances and would use Vatican Council II as a fig leaf over a de-facto structural alliance with US-sponsored capitalism, because Cold War.

This Argentinian fellow has made some remarkable statements (on priest weddings, among other things), and if he follows through on them, the Church could change radically. He's also dismissed part of the old guard, promoting more "liberal" figures; among other things, he's finally admitted that the shady IOR (the Vatican bank) will have to clean up its act, and nominated new managers to do just that.

In terms of economic doctrine, I personally don't see much of a difference in what he's saying, compared to his European predecessors, but I admit I haven't studied this closely. What is clearly changed is the willingness to harshly criticise the North-American model. In a way, this guy is the first post-Cold-War pope; US donations are faltering (because of pedo scandals) so their political weight is diminishing inside the Church, and Bergoglio himself represents a South-American view of the world which is much more critical of traditional US policy in all sectors, including economic ones.
It's only sort of true. One thing to note is that spontaneous fission occurs all the time with naturally occurring U-235, but at extremely low rates such that the buildup of fission byproducts happens only in trace quantities. But if it didn't occur then fission reactors would be far more difficult to build since there wouldn't be a small background of neutrons from fissile materials to be amplified by reactor/bomb designs.

As to natural reactors, those did exist and they did produce Cs-137, naturally. However, those reactors ran only billions of years ago, so the radioactive byproducts, such as Cs-137, have long since decayed.
I'm guessing this is not what you were referring to, but for some reason my mind immediately jumped to "Round Rects Are Everywhere!" http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_E...
It was also run somewhere in print: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482/ .

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75776
Paths to being a kernel hacker
Sorry, didn't see that (just dived right into the teardown. :) So it's a ~7% difference, indicating that it's not a straight clone but different silicon with a compatible interface.
EReader Typography: Why it's Broken & How to Fix It
I'm not sure why anyone would consider it out-dated. None of the concepts are really things that are 'datable'.

That said, you'll probably find that you need to read it more than once to glean everything from it.
The pidgin client/libpurple library is notably unrepresented.
I've seen no evidence that the key has been compromised, nor evidence that any important NSA keys have ever been compromised. I must assume they have different practices for their keys than for their data gathering practices.

While I've never seen it spelled out this way, I've always been under the assumption that the reason the NSA had so many outside contractors doing particularly dirty work was perhaps because they knew it was illegal and unconstitutional, and wanted it to happen outside the agency itself. But, I may be misinterpreting. It may have simply been a cost-cutting measure in which they failed to account for the lower level of loyalty to the state and higher level of loyalty to the constitution and individual rights than they were accustomed to from "company men".
I feel like I'm only posting the same comment over and over, but if media outlets have all decided to stop using informative headlines, can we at least continue to do so here?

Perhaps something like "Harvard student creates tumblr full of one-sentence theses summaries" might be better.
> humanity survived just fine with regular hand soap in the bathroom for centuries.

What? No! No, we didn't do well at all! Child mortality in the US was 20% just a hundred years ago. What killed everyone? Infectious disease. Yeah, the entire human population didn't die out. Obviously your great grandparents both survived long enough to reproduce. Go check how many of their aunts, uncles, siblings, and children didn't.

The past sucked. Wealth and technology has made it much, much better. There are some drawbacks, but let's not pretend we were doing just fine without.
Argh, I can't believe this image continues to resurface out of context. How entirely frustrating.
I recently purchased a Gigabit ethernet adapter for my rMBP. If you're fine with something a bit larger and are willing to go above "dirt cheap" I'd strongly recommend the Inateck HBU3VL3-4. It's made by a German company so I'm not sure how available it is over in the USA.

It has an ASIX AX88179 which is a USB 3.0 to Gigabit chip and it my tests I was easily able to get around 800-900Mbps. It also has 3x USB 3.0 ports, so not only do you not lose your USB 3.0 port you gain 2 more. I've not dismantled it but it feels solidly built.

Here in the UK I paid the same price as the Apple USB to Ethernet Adapter, which is only 100BASE-T and offers no hub.
Hi, I'm the author.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Understanding a good amount of detail about your users, and in particular, about their social context, is a massive win for search relevance. Google invested quite a bit in acquiring Aardvark, for example.

So, even if you don't ask your friends about something, the information is still really important.
>Machines understand machines not by interpreting HTML but by special language that is made to be spoken between machines.

That special language is called html, that's the point.

>At the end of the day, HTML is just another text file that tells the browser how to display some content to the human

Just because you use it for only such tasks, doesn't mean the rest of the world does too. Plenty of us use it as intended.
better maps

"A numerical simulation of global transport of atmospheric particles emitted from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant"

http://www-aos.eps.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/nakamura_lab/PDF/Takemura...

and

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422/F2.expansion.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422/F3.expansion.html
What are you talking about? Cheese is not a drug. As a heroin user, I can tell you that the APAP is only mixed in as to make black tar heroin snortable, as black tar is the only kind of heroin commonly found outside of the east coast.

Moreover, APAP is not mentioned in the article at all.
It might work well when attached to another device with high (i.e. industry-normal) noise margins. I'd be quite interested to see the performance of two adapters connected together, or connected with a cable wrapped 10 times around a pencil.
Because nobody will buy them because there is no way you can convey the fact that being an exact clone gives more "quality" than being a cheap knockoff. It's already a hard sell a $300 android phone from a $100 android phone, though you would say there is infinitely more differences between the two, compared to two usb-ethernet adapters.

Some people will buy Apple just because it's Apple and they want "original" stuff; others will buy Apple because they read these articles and know that the parts are high quality; others will buy the cheapest one they can find among amazon, ebay, monoprice and korean websites (probably laughing at those who buy Apple parts).

I don't think there's an easy market for "non-Apple and midprice".
You're conflating possible with probable. Many things are possible with a probability approaching infinitely improbable. Something catastrophic and highly improbable already has happened, and three years later still approximately 0 (zero) deaths from radiation. Probability theory suggests the chances of another catastrophic event occurring at the same site are much smaller than the first set of events.
> If you're in a loud environment and need quiet, then communicate that to your boss.

I did, on many occasions.

> If they don't, then they're probably not worth wasting your skills on anyway (plenty of fish in the sea).

I agree, I quit that job :) There were many reasons of course, but the distracting environment and the lack of response to honest employee feedback didn't help their case.

> If I was the one developer out of 8

I think we're coming from different perspectives. If you're working with a small number of people, I totally agree that the group should be able to come to a sensible agreement (I would never demand that my 7 other co-workers act like they're in a library just to please me). My previous post was from the perspective of someone in a larger office (say... 20+ people to pick an arbitrary number) with the typical office layout (cubes, some private offices, conference rooms, break rooms). In such a situation, you're going to have more than a few people who prefer quiet when they're working. Those people are assigned a desk with little choice in the matter, and there's no viable alternative workspace for them to escape to. In this type of situation I think it's rude to intrude on a person's one and only workspace with noise, and silence (or at least low volume) should be the default.

If things were perfect, everyone would get to choose how they work. But things are rarely perfect :)
The comments on Slate just show how little people understand about the culture of EDM. The debate about whether Daft Punk is "stealing" or passing off other people's work as their own misses the point. Daft Punk (and many other electronic artists) are mainly producers, and it's normal for producers of all kinds of music to hire sessions musicians and record them in the studio. Sampling is just another version of that. That's no more stealing other people's work than a director of a movie is stealing the work of the actors or the writer. I think what people can't get their heads around is that a producer can be a legitimate creative role and it makes sense to give them the main credit.

Secondly, no electronic music producer argues against having to pay licensing fees to copyright holders, on fair use or on any other grounds. Since they are copyright holders themselves, it wouldn't make any sense. Remixes are considered legitimate collaborations, and many producers are motivated by the desire to showcase forgotten or obscure works by people who didn't the attention (and money) they deserved for whatever reason.
That's true in a general sense, but has technologically improved household soap in particular contributed measurably to the reduction in mortality rates? There are large contributions from antibiotics, vaccines, the general improvement in living quarters, improved workplace-safety regulations... I could even believe things like more frequent laundering play a role. But I'd be surprised if changes in the composition of household soap have improved health.
You obviously haven't done drugs or been around drug users before.

The only people who think this is murder are clueless.
I've had kidney stones and they were incredibly painful. I wouldn't wish them on anyone.
> I look forward to the lisper UI toolkit

I might not be able to show you such a toolkit, but I can certainly show you an operating system that allows you to write a database driver whose behavior is not affected by the user moving the mouse.

> it doesn't matter if the Oracle code is breaking the rules set out by the MS documentation

Of course it matters. I just couldn't imagine what rule there could possibly be that is both 1) broken by a database driver and 2) reasonable, that could possibly result in said driver displaying the behavior in question. (I can imagine such a rule now because to3m pointed out a reasonable possibility in another branch of this thread.)

> how preemptively dismissive you've been about Win32 while showing something of a lack of knowledge on how it works

I freely confess to being (at least potentially) prejudiced against Microsoft's technology by my anger at the fact that they reached market dominance by breaking the law. As a result of that prejudice, I have maintained a carefully cultivated ignorance of all things Microsoft -- until recently. In the past weeks I have found myself in a position where I had to do some Windows development for the first time in my career. So I am far from an expert, but I do now speak from firsthand experience when I say that, in my humble opinion, Windows is every bit the horrible monstrosity on the inside as it has always appeared to me to be on the outside. And, BTW, my opinion is shared by colleagues who know a lot more about it than I do. So yes, my opinion on this is not as well informed as it might or should be, but I have not reached in a total vacuum either.
I'd love to, but having re-read the FAQ several times it appears to be the case that you should put in the original title. If I'm wrong, let me know. I think someone should make the FAQ a lot clearer.
The worst part is that most people don't want nor care to dig into the details, and accept whatever the calmly dispassionate talking head says at face value. I don't mean tinfoil hat but that which is being reported, especially in regional conflicts and political issues masks the multiple conflicting truths of the interests involved that seek to influence reporting to show their side as most legitimate. This is the type of power play people need to dig into most to get to any sort of "fair and balanced" appreciation for the complexities of situations behind the camera and when the camera leaves. Without an ability to see through the bullshit, the viewer remains a fool.
Are you saying that a they would use that for political power and not 'security of the state'?

Shocking, shocking I say /s.
I have owned and kept a copy near me since I first acquired it. I can't read all of it by any stretch, but it's at least as good as T.A.Z. for opening to any random page and finding something tremendously interesting. It is snack food for my intellect.
+1.

411 - http://rsaconference.com
There is nobody that deserves to live on the street in a nation with as much wealth as America, even if they've made bad decisions (drugs, alcohol, crime, etc.).

I'm not sure what you mean by, "even if," here. The Fundamental Attribution Error holds that it's a mistake to attribute someone's circumstances more to choices than to luck. There are tons of rich people who have chosen drugs, alcohol and crime, with extremely few, if any, turning up homeless as a result. There are also homeless who are not addicted nor incapacitatingly mentally ill (I'm sure we can agree that homelessness could predictably lead to depression at the very least).

Likewise, the way economic policy in many capitalist countries is oriented toward maintaining certain levels of unemployment (full employment being seen as bad, weakening the negotiating power of business owners, etc.) ensures that homelessness and poverty are actual government policy. Your Tax Dollars At Work.

Generally and socially, I contend that the problems of education and homelessness, in the US at least, are directly attributable to prioritizing commerce and the military over domestic care. Let's ask why a country with as much wealth as America deserves to engage in war, shall we?
COM made several promises, and had it delivered on those promises, the world would be a better place. I can understand why projects tried to copy COM, only to regret it later.

As noted, GNOME deprecated Bonobo even though the GNOME name was meant to emphasize the CORBA/Bonobo aspect of things (Gnu Object Manipulation Environment). Mozilla spent a lot of effort removing gratuitous use of XPCOM ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination ).
The taobao link in the original post leads to a listing which does not specify the chipset or support for Mac. This suggests it's a cheaper chipset. The 4-5 best-selling cheap USB-to-Ethernet adapters on taobao use the RD9700 chipset, and can be had for 22RMB including shipping.

The cheapest Asix 88772-based one I can find from a reliable seller is 25RMB including shipping.

It seems like there is another 50 cents that can be cut from the design, although the RD9700 may not have an OSX driver:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1450026
If you look at the vendors on AliBaba/AliExpress (where the prices are usually too good to be true anyway), the AX88772ALF chip alone goes for between $4 and $14 USD with a median of $8.
It is awesome. I've tried getting through it in it's totality 6 times to no avail, but i still await try number 7...

It is a great read.
I am not sure if this is true, but your framing of the problem space is good. There should be much more public discussion(maybe there is) about how to achieve this.
"I use Google for #1, Facebook for #2, and several other sites for #3."

I think this is the crux of the issue, not that Google thinks social is the end-all answer to everything -- similarly, something like Wolfram Alpha isn't trying to solve the "which restaurant nearby should my friends and I hit tonight?" type of questions. Rather, it's more that Google wants you to be able to approach its products with ANY question or ANY search problem, and it can answer it.

Now the problem is whether or not they can pull that off, or you really need independent separate tools/services for each little question to answer.
I would've liked to see a UDP based packet loss report, and also at a couple of different packet sizes.

The throughput drop could be due to packet loss, maybe from more noisy circuitry, or it could be due to a bottleneck on the USB side of things. Smaller packets are good at finding those because they generate more events per unit time.

I saw this with a bunch of crappy WiFi dongles. The radio can run at the 54Mbps or whatever but the USB interface tops out at 20.
To answer the question: Yes, still worth it. Just read it and make up your own mind.

To ask my own...how do people who read GEB find his latest "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking"? I'm just starting it and it has entranced me quite a bit...
I just reuse a foam soap pump bottle and fill with about 3 or 4 parts water to 1 part plain dish washing liquid (non-antibacterial, of course).

I consider foam soap to be one of the great advances of the past few decades.
While I am no expert on testing, I'm pretty sure I have some reasonable answers (I'll address programming language/databases examples, since it really does depend):

1. Programming language
While this is probably more difficult than my cursory attempt to explain, it seems that testing programming language is more a problem of ensuring consistent, and expected input & output as well as performance characteristics of stdlib and core code across versions.

for example -- if you're writing stdlib for working with strings, you can write unit tests for most of the string functions, and do some simple timing analysis as well as output analysis to make sure that with every revision of the code that might make it into a next version maintains same-or-better test performance.

2. Databases
I think that you can probably talk to the guys at rethinkdb or any other up-and-coming database about this -- there are certainly things you can test, of course like throughput (+/- heavy load), number of clicks to do a certain function that has been determined to be a core feature, etc. I think in the database world, you have a duality in the "user" -- yes, the UX must be good, but also, databases look to perform well and consistently, you must address the programmer and the normal user side of the developer that is using your new tool/database.
By now, it's extremely difficult to figure out what your perspective is, much less any points you may be trying to make.
We're releasing a new Macbook Air

Made of metal with the same Apple flair

But if you ask Steve

If it'll play DVD's

You'll be met with a blank 10 yard stare.
Hmmm but DDG will never be quite as good as Bing or Google simply because DDG doesn't keep any histories or track any other activity. Really good search engines get quality and relevance from all those things that DDG purports NOT to track. It's partly a machine learning problem that I just am very very skeptical DDG can get around.
I think the tsunami alone was large enough that we should consider the Fukushima aftermath as negligible in comparison.
I you treat a pair as a one-direction edge, and only match when you have an edge in both directions, then you could add text message verification to prevent people from both impersonating others and extracting additional information out of the service. It would be reasonably trivial then to notify clients when a new match comes in.

This approach seems to require that you trust the server.
OMIGOSH ME TOO!

Hey mmanfrin, I wanna touch your cloud ;)
I read GEB during my final year of university, during winter break. It took about 3 weeks of solid reading (wake up, read, pause and think and clear my mind, do other stuff, go back to reading, sleep, repeat) to get through it. By that point in my life I had already been exposed to many of the topics discussed, and even unwittingly read works that cited GEB, so had been also been exposed to some of the ideas presented as well - I don't however think that matters too much.

It really is, in my opinion, an amazing and clever book. If you can, I would recommend taking a few weeks to really digest it, it is not a book you can read for hours and hours on end - you will need to stop, clear your mind and reflect on some of the points made - at least that is what I had to do.

Be warned, the book will start to mess with you...but it warns you when it does...most of the time.