skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A network's value is correlated to the number of (potential) friends reachable through it, and how easily you can.

There are many almost-non-technical reasons why Hangout isn't an adequate replacement for Whatsapp:

- not intuitive enough to create and keep hangout groups. I can probably use G+ circles, but that's cumbersome.

- I believe that you need a GMail account. There are people without a GMail account I want to reach in group chats, and expecting them to create a new mail account for that feels like too much asking.

- the big amorphous G+ blob is so shapeless that we can't think of it

It's _possible_ to use Hangouts, possibly with other bits of G+, as a Whatsapp replacement, but it's not easier nor more obvious. Google didn't envision it that way, they wanted you to produce more durable (and searchable) stuff as G+ posts, and to manage access through a circle system that appeals the 5% of the population with an engineering degree. They don't care about technologically-illiterate people, nor those without a GMail account, let alone without a smartphone.

But we shouldn't care about why G+ isn't an adequate Whatsapp killer, as Google didn't buy them. What's interesting is, why FB couldn't build it?
Lol. Wonder why they never bothered to put Romania on this cart. Is it because they have the best prices (1) at the moment?

[1] http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet...

If you were wondering yes 60RON is about £12.
Or ask them to join Gittip! After they're signed up, others will be able to start giving them recurring weekly gifts that are totally anonymous and categorically no-strings-attached. It's like a DFTBA grant.

Disclaimer: I've taken 4 months off work to help work on the platform.
Here’s why Netflix streaming quality has nosedived over the past few months
This cannot be overstated, I have heard during conferences packagers being made fun of, something to the effect of "they are so cute, they don't understand our problems".

To me it seem some are stuck between a rock and a hard place -- distro requirements vs application specific (vendor) requirements.

So vendor likes to bundle specific library .so in the package or compiles external modules as static. Distro requirement, for security reasons for example, disallow that. Packager is left in the middle trying to reconcile the differences between the two. I have seen people stop maintaining their packages.

Yeah sometimes there is nothing you can do and the latest coolest database or web browser or game just can't easily go into the main distro.

But also I can't tell you how happy I have been in the past if a library I wanted to use was in the repo and I could just to an apt-get or yum install and all that is due to someone putting the work into doing that. Now instead of packaging it myself, building it, I saved a lot of time.
Google Cache (text only): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Japanese Travel Tips for Visiting America
Responsibly Bringing a new Cryptography Product to Market
While I don't personally do this - I try to follow node idiom of having each package be a relatively thin layer of functionality and having packages depend on each other, I believe that you don't need to use relative paths if you don't want to.

For example, if your package is called my-node-module and you have something in my-node-module/lib/app/dir/thingy/wotsit/jimminy.js, it can reference something in my-node-module/lib/server/alf.js by simply going

require("my-node-module/lib/server/alf.js");

There's no need for the relative path at all. It's possible that this only works if your package is in an node_modules directory (which it will be if it's installed as a dependency), but I always symlink my development directory to node_modules anyway.
Understanding Linux Memory utilization
Your lovely neighbours cannot be correct except by chance; if there was any validity to their predictions, it would imply not just that they knew the future of the weather, but that the future of the weather was knowable, which it certainly is not. Your tendency to see their predictions as accurate is likely a conflation of your confirmation bias and your choice-supportive bias.

Humans naturally search for meaning in chaos. That is all that their observations of caterpillars and trees and birds amounts to. They are trying to attach significance to a chaotic universe in order to reassure themselves that their place in the world makes sense. It does not. This is mathematically verifiable.

If the birds and the caterpillars and the apple trees could know the future of chaotic systems, it would imply that we live in a deterministic universe where birds and caterpillars and apple trees could not exist. QED.
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important."

http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon...

Over 30's programmers raise our glasses to Acton and Koum.
The Math That Predicted the Revolutions Sweeping the Globe Right Now
>"you have to be in your teens/early twenties to get funded/build a winning product" myth.

This has almost always been a myth. Other than Snapchat/Tumblr & Facebook, what other 1B+ founders can you point to?
Criteria you should use when decomposing a system into modules
I know, I just mean offering a French-language Reddit UI is better than many other platforms.

That said, http://fr.reddit.com/ should be the top posts from the French-language subreddits, not just the main frontpage with a French UI.
I just looked at my AUR list and most are non-free. A couple popular standouts that are free: shutter, vagrant, gradle, leiningen, apache-ivy, jq
All right. Would the person who downvoted the above want to explain the downvote?

I was asking @benched why the person is surprised. What is obvious to @benched is not obvious to me; what is obvious to me is not obvious to @benched. What's the point of the upvote or downvote? Why did you feel the need to take the time to read all the way here and then downvote that comment?
Article isn't loading for me, but each (3+) tile can be represented as 3 * 2^k, and it's score is calculated as 3^(k+1)

3 -> 3 * 2^0 -> 3^1 -> 3 pts
6 -> 3 * 2^1 -> 3^2 -> 9 pts
192 -> 3 * 2^6 -> 3^7 -> 2,187 pts

I may have an off-by-one (degree) error though. It helps to be a big math geek who looks for exponents everywhere.
> they can at least tell if a season is going to be bad well ahead of time.

Proof needed.

e.g., the UK Met office predicted this would be a dry winter...
I know at one point the US had a somewhat similar arrangement for telephone lines. All the offspring of AT&T (ILECs in industry slang, Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers IIRC) were required to lease their lines to competitors. So someone could offer DSL internet and use the phone company's infrastructure to do it.

I don't know if that's still the case, I would guess so. But I don't think it ever applied to cable.
Nothing is really stopping new entrants from joining the market -- other than the fact that deploying a broadband network in the US is really, really expensive

Actually, a lot is: Google "cable franchise agreements" or "city broadband franchise agreements" and you'll find that many if not most cities and counties either forbid or make prohibitively expensive real competition. Here is one news article about a lawsuit related to them: http://stopthecap.com/2012/06/19/court-invalidates-existing-... .

Many states are also passing telco-financed laws prohibiting local municipalities from creating Internet access as a utility. Examples: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/big-carrier... or http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/12/30/municipal_bro... .
There is an enormous difference in localized weather predictions, and whole globe climate predictions. That is, it is possible to predict, say, average temperature across the entire world, while being unable to reasonably predict average temperature in any one place.
Show HN: Facetflow – Hosted Elasticsearch for Windows Azure
This is critical. If you don't think about this stuff, use the existing code.
Just like how they killed the Instagram goose right?
My answer is "It Just Works."

I only have my parents and my wife on WhatsApp but none of them have or need a Google account or a Facebook account (which my dad refuses to use) and nor do they need to be iPhone users.

WhatsApp works quickly, cleanly and seamlessly across mobile platforms, and that's all it needs to do.
Speak. Slower… and pause… often…
(often unionized) U.S. workers

Some of the countries on that list (like France) have considerably more unionization and labour law than the USA
Gitter – Chat, for GitHub
The local targeting of ads is actually a minor point. Six minutes per hour of the ads you see are local ads, twelve minutes are national ads sold by the parent network. Also, Aero shows you the local affiliate stream so you're still seeing the local ads. At its core this case is about content rights.
http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies...

Or, simply put, the incumbent carriers promised to put fiber to the home in millions of houses in exchange for deregulation; then they didn't fulfill their part of the bargain, because nobody was regulating them.
Results of the SQL Performance Quiz
US ISPs regularly get government subsidies. Hell they took 200 billion to start building fiber in 1996, then they didn't do it.
I think Haskell might actually work better for some. However Go is an upgrade from Ruby and Python in many areas they are used imo.
South Africa would have made that chart look totally out of proportion :) I believe 1Mb/s is going for around $35-$60/month
...and it's live.
There's no free lunch. U.S. cities are geographically the most suitable for deploying things like fiber, but are for historical reasons also much poorer than the surrounding, less dense suburbs. In the U.S., "dense == poor" in a way that is just much less true in Europe. This creates not just an inhospitable geography for telecom providers, but also a very different political climate. American cities are battlegrounds for class issues, as anyone living in San Francisco knows. That makes it very hard to build infrastructure concentrated in the cities. It's not just telecom, look at passenger rail. Amtrak runs a profit in the northeast corridor, but runs at a loss everywhere else because most of the country simply isn't suitable for rail. Yet, it's politically impossible to have an objective of focusing money and effort building a modern high-speed rail network for the northeast, where it makes sense, and abandoning the networks elsewhere.
It's the same way around. If telcos drop SMS const or make them free few people will have initiative to use Whatsapp.
Yeah, there's probably no calm way to stage a coup.
The j2me is just a piece of "it just works".

1) Covers a huge amount of devices. Yep, because j2me, but also because what could be the top-1 competitor, Apple iMessage, can't inter-operate between Apple and Android devices (very stupid tactic, it will get marginalized).

2) Does not require an account, so it is not bound to Facebook, Twitter, ... You may ask, what's the problem with having an account? That you capture in your use base non-social people. Hey mom, put this in your phone and we'll exchange messages for free.

3) Because it just works and is not bound to a specific social network / company, people see it as SMS that is both free (hugely important because of stupidly overpriced SMS are, and especially, were). And... an improved version of SMS because MMS are totally a fail: limited, costly, lame.

4) Add to this business smartness behind that: old users don't pay for premium accounts, no ADV, resist to the temptation of fixing what is irrelevant for the mass of people (security) if this impacts in any way the product aspect (no account, trivial recovery of the account if you change phone).

5) Add to this product/technology smartness: don't archive messages server side so the service runs with 1/100 of resources. No huge scaling issues.

So this is just a very very very well executed product, that was able to provide what users wanted, and this is why they did a 16B deal, not for the j2me app, every successful business is a mix of a number of critical things.

The ground that made this possible was the incredible situation where on the internet era you had to pay 10 cents to exchange 160 chars between two phones.
Building URL-Driven Web Apps with Ember.js
This tech bubble is different.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
Facebook buying WhatsApp – it's not a bad price, it's a bad strategy
I have a non-bt fiber package and my speeds beat most of my European friends top speeds. In fact it sometimes beats my Hetzner (German) based servers.
A friend of mine owns an airplane, and his brother is a pilot in the USAF. I asked him this once and his opinion was that 2 engines makes the plane more complicated and increases the chance of pilot error. He had suffered 2 or 3 engine out incidents in his single engine plane, and landed all 3 with no issue. Obviously if your plane doesn't glide very well then the redundancy of a second engine is necessary (i.e a jet), but in your typical Cessna-esqe plane, gliding is a viable option.
Every season the Heidke skill score is high, they did well. Here's an example http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/ghazards...
Every service may be insecure. We should also consider the benefits of services.
The analogy I like to think of is a ping-pong ball in the ocean. At any given second, its location will be hard to predict, as at the second-granularity, its location will be dominated by local phenomenon. But, over the course of months and years, we can often accurately predict where it will generally end up in the world due to ocean currents.
In reality it is often up to governments to prevent monopolies from forming and ensure that there is enough competition.

In the U.S. regulatory capture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) is often the problem, per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044 . One reasonable alternative in the U.S. broadband situation is to allow municipalities to build their own networks, but in many states that's already illegal, per the linked comment.
Some programming efforts can be casual, some can not. Cryptography is is one that often requires not just rigor, but also expensive investment. The combination can be an obstacle to open source inroads. I'm part of SpiderOak, and proud of their investment in Crypton. It is expensive - like, not just the coding, but sponsoring these audits - but, I believe, extremely valuable.
> It's a shame that the regex API doesn't seem to provide a way to indicate which part of a (?:foo|bar|...) matched. The underlying regex code must know this.

As lmm points out (I think), one can get a big advantage precisely by not requiring the regex code to know this. (Regexes are 'really' DFAs, and a DFA that makes it to its start state not just does not but can not know how it got there.) The more power one gives regexes, the less, well, regular they are, and the slower they become to match.
I ran into a situation where for roughly the same price (the new via SBC) AT&T offered unlimited local calling and the lessee companies did not.
WhatsApp and the software that is eating the world
Quite surprised about the humongous boost following the Surveillance revelations [https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html]
> perhaps so they can replicate this success and also become rich. What's so wrong with that?

My theory: Perhaps because an ever growing population of tech professionals are disgusted with the race for more wealth?

I will be the first to admit, I'm an Elon Musk fanboy, although I think its justified. Instagram. Whatsapp. Messaging apps! Billions of dollars! For messaging! With that same amount of cash, Musk has delivered goods to an orbiting space station and has succeeded in changing the direction of transportation, something an entire auto industry wouldn't (not couldn't, wouldn't) do.

I could be wrong. Perhaps money is still the end goal for everyone. If its just to have money for money's sake, I feel sad for you. If its to pursue your passion, I think we can all empathize with that.
Help fight cancer by playing this game
Twitter has a problem. Nobody will recommend it.
Men need to read this
You won't find many Spanish speakers among the younger generation in the Philippines, and that's your target market. You'd be better off using English or Taglish for the Philippines.
In many US cities, internet is a duopoly, so everyone is squeezed.

My ISP raises its price $5/mo every year.

I pay $50 for 5mbps with 100GB monthly cap.

Five years ago it was half the price.

They are making a killing.
I guess gaming with a monitor or tv. Sure they raised some money but how many have they sold? I think it's still a niche.
Then again, what do I know? Facebook will probably buy them for $20 billion tomorrow.
An engine failure in a twin can be difficult to handle during take-off; the plane can roll over, and there is not much time to react.

http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Engine_Failure_After_Take...
This articles about a month old now. I'm curious if anything has changed with regards to this now that they have a new CEO.
We definitely have some problems with old infrastructure, particularly when you're talking about phone lines and DSL. Some houses still have really old lines running to them and even older lines inside them (I swear my previous house had phone cable from the 1940's). Tearing out and replacing all that stuff is quite expensive. This is sometimes called the "last mile problem." [1]

On the other hand, mobile phones are not a great analogy. Going straight to mobile allows you to skip digging up all the streets in town, but any sort of wired internet you have to put the wires somewhere. Putting in fiber right off the bat is certainly better, but you still had to do all that digging and installing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile#Existing_delivery_sys...
Shouldn't packaging be left to each distributor's experts? As a developer of software you're an expert in whatever your software does--web server, calculator, compiler, whatever. There is no way you can be an expert in your software's functionality and in packaging, especially for more than one distribution.

I'm always wary of installing packages not provided by my distribution, just because I have more faith that my distribution's packagers know how to package and they are more likely to use QA processes that will catch packaging bugs. I'd rather compile from source than install third-party packages; I can make my own rudimentary package that would be woefully inadequate for general use but that is perfectly sufficient for my needs.
This is one of the oldest debates in the pilot world. Single vs Multi and there is no one answer. Ignoring the cost of extra fuel and maintenance for an extra engine. The usual argument against multi is like this - The asymmetrical thrust developed when one engine dies. Basically if one of your engines quits, especially with a high angle of attack (takeoff), you have a very small window to compensate and keep the plane flying. Otherwise you get what is called a Vmc rollover. That is probably the biggest argument against a twin.

But of course if you fly over water to the Bahamas every weekend or the Rocky mountains the pros outweigh the cons right?

My point is it's all relative. Being a relatively low time pilot in NJ I see no need for a twin. Assuming I could afford one in the first place.
This is cool! I being training my eyes using yoga exercises for about 2 months and I can really few the improvements by now. I'll test this app to see if it helps.

Somethings we get in front of a computer too much and your eyes begin to loose the ability to see things farther. It's all about training the muscles.
I don't know of any app but there is a website that does just that: http://www.pilotsharetheride.com/
Very cool! Do you know if OpenAirplane.com also works with helicopter pilots?
Clown shortage threatens the nation
This article doesn't live up to the title. It is just a chart of prices followed by basically "because monopolies" with nearly no supporting evidence.
That is the option (g) here:

https://www.npmjs.org/doc/install.html

You can also use your own npm registy using `--registry`:

https://www.npmjs.org/doc/misc/npm-registry.html
its interesting to see this. i don't often use regular expressions but for the most general case of this problem they are a good fit - however the specific example given, and most real world cases i imagine can be optimised further by doing away with regex altogether and using more traditional lookup and transformation approaches.

the example given can determine the route required by everything following /user/ - in the case that the 7th character of the string is a digit then we have the last case - all that remains to distinguish the other two is to count the number of slashes - if you want to distinguish bad matches then validating the extracted values will be necessary too. of course this kind of logic fails to scale to the general case - but for real world optimisation i can imagine it being much more fruitful (possibly you could do a match like i described faster than the regex function will parse its own input string before doing any matching at all!)

there is the smell of a very classical problem here though - "guess optimising". optimisation should be driven by measurement - identify the slow part then optimise it. timings that show the performance of the solutions overall are interesting and prove the point - but what would be more interesting imo would be 'this was the hot spot (point at timing), therefore i was right (point at new timing)'.
the free market's ability to further low prices and good products

The fact that the Federal government de-regulated does not mean the market is free. State and local governments still regulate, not to mention making deals with particular providers, which is why there are so many local monopolies. In a true free market, something like Google Fiber would be deploying much faster than it is.
First, the $200 billion number is a total fabrication. It was derived by projecting how much more profit telecoms made after deregulation in 1996 than they would have had as tightly-regulated utilities. It's not money actually invested. The states never had that kind of money to invest.

Second, to the extent that tax breaks, etc, were handed out, it wasn't combined with the kind of political will you see in European countries or Asian countries. In South Korea, wiring Seoul up with fiber is a politically tractable proposal. In the U.S., wiring New York and Chicago and LA up with fiber is a political non-starter. In the U.S., rural votes count about 2x as much as urban votes, so to the extent that broadband appears on the political radar, it's all about making sure people in rural Kentucky can get DSL, not making sure people in major cities can get fiber.
Sheesh, now our OS releases are going to be like browser version numbers.
Dringend – iOS and Mac development environment on your iPad
Why we don't sell ads?
I've actually been thinking of moving to Vienna. Anybody in Vienna have a moment to type out some thoughts on what it's like to live there?