skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For some strange reason it is users in Europe that prefer manual transmission, since basically every car is available also with automatic transmission also.

If anybody cares, here is my theory (at least for Germany, where I am from): Driving lessons are very expensive in Germany and you have to decide if you want to learn automatic or manual transmission. If you learn on automatic transmission, you are only allowed to drive automatic cars. If you learn on a manual, you are allowed to drive both. The prices for the drivers license are the same. So, most people will learn to drive stick. Since they are then only used to driving stick, they are actually more comfortable with than with automatic. I have met quite a few people who I had to explain how to drive an automatic (it's obviously super easy if you already know how to drive a manual). So, I think it's want you learned first that you will stick with.
Simple.

Build something people want.

Nobody cares what JS framework you use. Look at Craigslist.
I've worked with anonymized patient data in a litigation consulting context (in the U.S.). I worked at a small consulting firm nobody's ever heard of.

We worked exclusively on air-gapped servers behind several layers of physical security. Even encrypted data was never, ever sent over the public wire.

You don't connect sensitive data to the internet if a single breach is catastrophic. We talk about things like the Target hack as catastrophic breaches, but they aren't. You can change your password or cancel your credit card. You can't change your medical history - once public, it is always public.
Doesn't the "safe harbor" clause apply to US companies ?

You know, that joke of a clause which says that US companies fit the needs of our data protection law as long as they claim to fit it (and they only have to claim it) ?
Part of the new data protection law that was supposed to be voted in the EU following/during the PRISM scandal was revoking that stupid clause but I'm not sure what happened to that reform.
Most people can not understand the impact of such a decision and must therefore be protected from doing that.
Jail for what exactly? No laws were broken, at least no laws that existed at the time.

At best the whole situation in 2008 was a bank run[0] caused by a freeze in global liquidity.

Sure the financial institutions made some risky speculation that lost them some money. Losses were big in absolute terms but quite tiny relative to the assets under management and profitability.

a. Do I agree with (any company) functioning in the grey area. -- No.

b. Do I agree with bailouts of any kind. -- No.

c. Can I ever agree with people who ignorantly believe $20B in a recoverable overnight line of credit is more valuable than >$600B in assets and >$10 trillion loss in market capitalization. -- No.

There ought to have been some convictions but none were related to the TARP directly or indirectly.

Unfortunately, most quoted "crimes" were caused by human incompetence, a large number of other ones are caused by public ignorance and confusion about market making.

Designated market makers were regulated and were required to stand opposite to their own clients when necessary. This was by design and regulation. I quote this because invariably someone is going to cry about how these designated market makers bet against their clients.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Russia demanding Ukrainian military leave Crimea by 5am
As an example US immigration are now sometimes turning away tourists with mental health problems. So in the absence of privacy if you have such problems you can either turn down treatment and suffer or risk being unable to visit or even transit via the US. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/canad...
Windows XP starts countdown to end-of-support on April 8
Especially since, in this case, what they changed it to is not even the title of the page. It makes sense a lot of times, but in this case not so much. :/
I thought it was so cheesy that it had to be fictional, because of all the misrepresentations of computer interfaces in other movies like "Hackers." This is apparently a common assumption.

It's admirable that SGI was experimenting with interfaces. However in this situation having to navigate such an interface created a very real safety hazard. I suppose she could have used the regular file browser instead - or perhaps the substantially less exciting XTerm.
I'm pretty sure "the government" in GP's context referred to the UK government, not the US.
I am going to work on that. Made some minor style changes that I just pushed to try to clarify that the buttons allow for login and added a "tell me more link" under the login buttons that leads to an "about us" page. The platform is actually fully functional -- the founding team has pretty solid technical and subject matter expertise -- a software engineer/lawyer and a couple of practicing lawyers who negotiate for a living -- but your comments point to a weakness in design, and that is critical.

Many thanks! Screenshots and more explanation to follow.

Stephen
Even if all they do is do things better and more polished than others, that's something any company would do well to emulate.

And sometimes doing things simply in a "more polished" way is revolutionary.

The early, pre-iPod mp3 players were an absolute mess when it came to navigating your music. That doesn't show up on a spec sheet, but "creating the first mp3 player that lets you actually navigate your music in a simple and enjoyable manner" is pretty freaking revolutionary in my book.
Yea, you get to the end and it turns out its just an animation, you don't actually control the bird at all.
It tells us something, just not something anyone seriously wondered about. We can be pretty sure that vehicles with touchscreens don't get into (for example) 10,000x as many accidents as vehicles with manual controls, as that should be visible in the statistics.

What it doesn't tell us is whether or not touchscreens pose any significant additional danger.
This brings me so much joy. This movie - the SGI and this scene in particular made me want to switch from being a business major to a computer science major in college. I did and it was the right decision.

I bought an SGI Indy and spent a lot of time in the shell just so it would look and feel like the scene from this movie. I don't know why it affected me so much but it did.

So much love for the author who create this simulator.
Rogue space scientists set up "Intergalactic Travel Bureau"
Survey Results: How Many Developers Write Unit Tests?
Their servers are back to normal now. They were lagging for approximately 40 minutes.
Ask HN: Project Feedback - equipping written stories with an awareness.
Hi HN,

I made this webpage-story and was looking for feedback.

http://inthehandsofothers.com

It reads similar to a choose-your-own-adventure, but there is more to it than that. It is supposed to be about improving upon the book medium by combining a written story with computing/music/etc. I haven't got much support outside of people I directly know, so I was wondering if you could tell me what you think, and if you like the idea.
Well, shouldn't they?
Russia never played by the rules. Russia wants to be feared and respected at all cost. Russia wants an image of a masculine and all knowing power. I love my motherland but like a parent it can be overbearing and wrong. It won't admit any wrong-doing. It goes back to the power ego.
Well as long as you acknowledge that "militant atheism" is not the same thing as "militant islam" (etc) in that the key word "militant" means a very different thing.

A "militant" atheist may be distasteful, but his/her "attacks" don't physically hurt people and harm society.
Um.

> mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Plug-ins;
> curl -L goo.gl/zoAnfh | tar xv -C ~/Library/Application\ Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Plug-ins -

Don't run this. While the download itself is served using https (https://s3.amazonaws.com/xcode-fun-time/alcatraz.tar.gz), curl will contact goo.gl using HTTP. Honestly, if I wanted to MITM one thing on any network, URL shortener would come first.
You'll acclimate to it like you do everything else in life. People learned to drive just fine after coming out of horse drawn carriages and wagons. Don't act like people are not adaptable to innovation and change.
Ha, small vital one—obviously meant 'not'. Thanks!
This looks really cool, but I don't know what problem it's solving for me. Maybe I'm not an Xcode hacker/ninja/whatever, but it has constantly met my needs as-is. Sure, I've wanted to add a color scheme before, but these are a lot of hoops to jump through when Dusk is fine.
> TL;DR: high school math, and even much of what's taught in an undergraduate degree now (in math!), is just glorified arithmetic.

Is this a bad thing? You can design and build airplanes with what doesn't amount to anything more than glorified arithmetic. I don't see the value in teaching kids more than that.
The McGurk effect
Because it's illegal to put MY data on a server in the US.
These awesome ladies also have a Kickstarter sos they can go on tour:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1392002203/the-intergal...
Samsung’s 64-bit processor: coming soon ‘whether you need it or not’
I had absolutely no preconceptions going into using the automatic - I would even go so far as to say I was looking forward to it as I'd never driven an automatic before.

I would think my number 1 complaint about the driving experience was the occasional (but not predictable) incredible lag between pressing the accelerator and the car going faster and the ridiculous over-revving when I presume the car got confused about what gear it thought I should be in.
BTCplex: Open Source Bitcoin Block Chain Explorer written in Go
More like roommates, because they share a house.
If you're interested in this kind of work, and especially if you're also interested in using computers to open up new kinds of mathematical play and learning, you should read Seymour Papert's "Mindstorms" book.

The ideas are powerful and radical. Radical enough to explain why run-of-the-mill schools never successfully integrated awesome tools like LOGO and its descendants. They can't deal with learning that's so child-driven and free.
Sorry, but Apple maps is still a disaster. It still has wrong and old data, and the search still sucks. It thinks "SE" means Sweden.
If that means full postcodes, then that information will easily be sufficient to identify every member of the UK population, aside from outliers like twins or the occasional statistical fluke.
How I made $500 in one hour on Hacker News
Yeah, having done a little C#, my impression was "They aimed for 'a better Java' and mostly succeeded."
C# is most definitely not a functional language. It has a few functional constructs, and it's possible to (painfully) code in a superficially functional style, but a "functional language" it isn't.
Apple OpenSSL Verification Surprises
recent (20m):
"I’m sorry to say I’m also now aware of more @HSCIC stories breaking shortly. What a mess. They need to come clean asap, clean stables."

"Wait for details on story i’ve been tweeting today: twitter is first draft. Story is: small number rule breach, I believe, which is bad."

https://twitter.com/bengoldacre
I agree. This is something that XMLSchema got both right and wrong. The XMLSchema basic datatypes [0] are well defined and for the most part fit nicely in host languages. However, they really screwed up with the complex types making it difficult to map onto programming languages for multiple reasons (sequence/choice can't be easily modeled in most programming languages without intermediate types, extension versus restriction, derivation versus substitution groups.) For a good write up of the design philosophy behind XMLBeans, see:

http://davidbau.com/archives/2003/11/14/the_design_of_xmlbea...

[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/
As someone who spends most of their day in Xcode, Alcatraz is an invaluable tool to grooming my Xcode setup and keeping up with the latest plugins and what not.

Congrats on the launch Marin! Been following the repo for a few months now, I'm really digging the design.
Microsoft Adds An Intelligent Social Layer To Office
JS is like Perl, grok it, and you're in love.
It is interesting that HIPAA is the opposite of what I thought it was about. It is motivated by sharing with privacy protections, rather than being motivated by privacy.

I can imagine that if I ever got a leukemia, I wish I could see 1000s of patient records of people with a similar disease, rather than having to rely on a doctor who spills tons of bullshit based on anecdotal experience.
Anyone else think it's kind of silly that he's a mac guy (all of his screenshots are of old OS X) and his example is downloading PuTTY? Recent OS X versions all come with ssh client.
Safe Harbor avoids some of the issues with exporting data from the EEA at all.

It doesn't cover exporting the data without notifying the subjects appropriately.

It isn't even close to covering exporting sensitive personal data (which is a technical term explicitly including health-related information), for which much stronger rules apply under UK data protection legislation.
Oh; I totally agree that working more hours is not better for the company. I think that a lot of organizations also realize this, especially in software development. A large part of my current job is fixing the types of dysfunctional environments that you describe by providing development managers insight into the quality of code/tests that individual developers commit. I'm acutely aware that your "rockstar" developers may in fact be your problem children; but it takes a lot of data and process to be able to prove that.

My comment was really aimed more at the reality of the situation: when operating in a political environment (as every office is, like it or not), it's better to err on the side of being visible. Like I said; some people are perfectly content with maintaining the job they are currently in, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you have ambition to move up into management, simply writing good code isn't enough. You've gotta play the political game at some point or another, and the political game often happens late in the day after all the senior management are done with their meetings.

This is doubly true for a consultant. An unfortunate reality of consulting is that when you're on short contracts -- as most consultants are -- you have to sell the next project while you're working on the current one. Being visible and physically present leads to the conversations that end in your client asking you to help them out with a problem. These are not "hard sell" tactics (I always hated those because it makes you come off as scummy and sales-ish); it's just making sure that you're in the right place at the right time and you're having the right conversations with the right people.

This doesn't have to mean working yourself to death -- I usually leave around 5:30 and almost never stay in the office after 6:00, nor do I typically work more than 45 or 50 hours a week. Do I wish I could go home at 4:00 some days and not be negatively perceived? Yeah, I do. But that's not reality, at least not anywhere I've ever worked. If the social norm is 9:00am-5:00pm, you should probably be there during those hours because an 8 hour work day really isn't asking much. If the social norm is 8:00am-7:00pm, well, you should probably find a better job...
They're solving different problems. Marin Usalj (Alcatraz developer) is actually a member of the CocoaPods core team: http://cocoapods.org/about
There are a lot of really great plugins for Xcode, you should browse the package repository to get an idea of what's out there :)
Why? I don't see any limit being hit by loading 27 DVDs worth of data.
I would not recommend admitting to using a referral scheme on Hacker News. That's not "hacking" or "creative marketing," that's just spam.
PA Consulting are idiots and everybody who gave them this contract should be fired.

Saying "I didn't know" is no excuse as this is not the first time PA Consulting have lost data!

"The Home Secretary announced on 10 September that the government has terminated its contract with PA Consulting, following the recent high profile data loss

On 19 August PA Consulting formally notified the Home Office of the loss of a data stick containing sensitive information relating to the JTrack system which PA manage under contract to the Home Office

The data on JTrack relates to prisoners and other offenders in England and Wales."

http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i=ne9297
I think you're absolutely right that math has to be motivated. A lot of the effort to motivate it is to provide problems that students understand relate to the real world. Most of them come across as contrived.

You hit on a good concept with the idea of incorporating the history of math. I'm working on a Geometry curriculum that does just that. Understanding math in the context of a grand story of mankind trying to understand the world around us is a lot more interesting than as a set of received wisdom that must be memorized.

I would love to see more math material along these lines, but there isn't much out there, and it takes a long time to produce. I've been working on mine for around 6 months and am just up through looking at how the discovery of incommensurable lengths influenced Plato's philosophy. The idea is to work through the history and philosophy in parallel with Euclid's Elements, relating points back and forth where possible.

I've tried teaching a history of math class to local homeschool kids along those lines, focusing on Egyptian - Greek history, with some success. It takes a lot of research and work though.
No matter how valid some of these arguments may or may not be, this is like the nth time ESR has had to make this sort of point, which is basically to attempt to lessen the cultural impact of RMS and the other MIT AI guys.

Like, we get it dude. 30+ years later you're still upset that you didn't get into MIT and weren't part of the MIT/CMU/SAIL crowd. Steven Levy didn't mention you in Hackers and called RMS "the last true hacker" -- we get it, you're still butthurt. But seriously dude, move the fuck on...
Hacks are useful to get things done that are not important to you but need to get done. I do believe that "It’s the experience you should be seeking, not the short cut. It’s the voyage you should embrace, not the destination. It’s the path that elevates the soul, not the destination. It’s the process that ennobles, not the result." You want to feel excited for your journey, hacks be damned.
I was a mac specialist for a few year 07-09. People were just dumbfounded and some angry that a new Mac didn't come with MS Office. Some refused to believe me and thought I was trying to upsell them (for no commission).

Sir if this laptop is for your daughter starting college, you'll probably want to get MS Office or Pages. "What? No Office included?!" Well it comes with TextEdit. "That's fine she'll use that" I'd then tell them about OpenOffice but that would confuse most people even more
I don't understand why the data being on "Google servers" is generating such outrage.

Because Google's systems demonstrably aren't secure (see numerous recent discussions about NSA etc.) and therefore aren't an appropriate choice to transmit or store sensitive personal data under UK data protection rules.
Microsoft's Siri competitor Cortana Gets A Sneak Preview
Just because you decide that someone is "biased" doesn't mean that you don't have to address their arguments specifically. We have more reason to think he knows what he's talking about than to think that you do.
Refuse to give it. Apply someplace else.

Even if it's a job that requires a background/credit check, then they should (at the end of the process) make an offer contingent on passing the credit check.

Don't give out your SSN until you're at the offer stage.

http://www.realfreemarket.org/blog/2012/05/24/headhunters-de...
I also know some smart teachers that started with something else and ended up teaching high school. I have more examples of people who got a degree in something else and wanted to teach, but then found out how hard and expensive that transition is.
No; compared to the guy working 45 hours a week. You put in 40 hours for your employer doing your current job. He does the same but also puts in 5 hours of his own time learning how to do the next job he wants. Who's going to get the promotion assuming you both have equal production? (however you measure production, which certainly should not be lines of code)
That depends on the company. In terms of reputation/respect, I earned most of it when my boss was on vacation and I had to make decisions and take responsibility. Didn't benefit me in that particular case, since our company was bought by a bigger one and they started calling the shots, and then I left that job. So I suppose I should upvote you :)
> The point is that it has a context they care about (people like working on puzzles!).

I'd guess most kids hate puzzles.
If you are not writing unit tests yet you may want to ask yourself why you are in the minority. How do you compare to the results in this survey?
Hell, my 2013 Subaru BRZ has dials and buttons for the A/C. Granted, there's a display that shows you the temperature, but if you want it warmer, you don't have to look at it unless you really want to set it to a specific temperature. If you want it warmer, just turn it a few clicks to the right. Same goes for the passenger (it's dual-zone). There are loads of 2014s out there that don't have the automatic climate control, even. It's the same, old system that you see on cars from pre-1990.

Contrast this to the sound system, which only has a volume knob. Jumping to the next track requires you to hit a small touchscreen button that offers no tactile feedback. It's frustrating to do it while driving.

IMO, there's a good middle-ground here. There are a lot of settings and features on my sound/navigation system that I don't need to access all the time, or really at all while driving. Bass is too high? I can wait until I come to a light. That stuff can remain touchscreen driven since it offers more flexibility in the design and allows you to build in a lot more features than you'd have otherwise without cluttering your dash with a ton of buttons and knobs. But stuff that I mess with pretty often, like skipping to the next song, should be a physical button. Other head units get this right.
Brilliant! I hadn't seen that, thanks.
Crowdfunding's Latest Invasion: Real Estate
Lessons Learned From Female Founders and BossedUp Conferences
I truly hope you aren't an American; having the right to offend others is a good test of whether you live in a free society or not. And twisting legal justifications to fit your perspective of what's okay is even more messed up.