skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The nearly 300 metres high Citigroup Center[1] in New York had a change during construction:

original design for the "chevron" load braces used
welded joints. But during construction, to save labor
and material costs, bolted joints were used instead

Which led to:

Wind tunnel tests with models of Citigroup Center revealed the wind
speed required to bring down the building; wind of this speed
occurs on average once in 55 years. The building has a tuned mass
damper, which negates much of the wind load.

If electric power failed, say during a hurricane, the damper would
shut down and a much lower-speed wind would suffice; wind of this
speed occurs on average once in 16 years.

The joints were welded in secret.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center
I think you're understating the degree to which the formation of the Partnership for American Innovation, and similar efforts, sucked a lot of the air out of the reform effort. PAI's official position is that they're trying to endorse the fundamental soundness of the existing system, not support or oppose any particular legislation. But c'mon: how else should we interpret an endorsement of the soundness of the existing system right as legislative efforts are underway to change it significantly?

This is the press-release for their formation, posted last month: http://partnershipforamericaninnovation.org/announcement ("To date, the conversation around patents has been dominated by those seeking to curtail America’s strong system for narrow, short-term gains. Companies like those in the PAI support a strong, balanced system and are working together to make sure the conversation is driven by facts, not rhetoric, and reason rather than emotion.")

This is PAI's most recent blog post, from 10 days ago: http://partnershipforamericaninnovation.org/belief-patent-sy.... It's titled, "The belief that our patent system is broken is patently false." It leads with: ("If you listen to some commentators on the subject of patents, you could form the belief that the patent system is irreparably broken. According to these arguments, 'patent trolls' are bringing businesses to a complete halt and that software patents are a barrier to innovation. Some pundits even equate 'patent troll' litigation with the legitimate legal interests of inventors who are defending their intellectual property.")[1]

To me, these read as a pointed rejections of the arguments used by proponents of the Senate bill, timed to have maximum impact on the members of Congress working on the bill. You're right that these companies don't suffer from troll suits and so don't have an investment in getting fully behind reform. But these messages, timed the way they were, did a lot more than simply declare an intention to sit out the debate.

[1] Note that statements like these do not get posted on a joint-blog without extensive scrutiny and sign-off by all the companies involved.
I think their point was that it might not be a matter of how easy it would be to help you understand, but that not every website is trying to communicate with a Western man or woman.

On the flip, can you imagine how inadequate most landing page messaging is for someone from Botswana or even Nicaragua :)
Maybe it's just me and I'm missing the point entirely, but what is the difference between linking to a "door handle" or just a map. You can include some text? I just don't see what the problem they are trying to solve is.
Completely agree, especially when it comes to commission. The best salespeople will quickly sniff out the optimal commission/bonus structure, and I'd wager that they'd perform better under a commission versus a bonus.
Oh man, this really brings back memories. I can't tell you the number of weekends that I spent at the local arcade playing Pac man, Donkey Kong, Defender, Robotron 2048, Q*Bert, and countless other games.
Grawlix: Profanity to Symbology conversion
I would suggest making it really obvious that this a Kenya-only thing (I'm in the US). While it's probably an interesting piece of tech, it has next to no application in the US, which is where Hacker News is based and has it's primary audience.

Second - the landing page tells me nothing about what the app actually does. I saw the tagline on HN, went to the page and was immediately confused with some line about "dinner", which made me wonder if the page had been hacked or worse.
What Rap Battles Can Teach You About Entering New Markets
depending on what you believed he either ended up there as a result of having his passport revoked en route to ecuador (his story) or that was a ruse and he intended to stay in russia because it was the only state that could and would stand up to US pressure to extradite him (assange's claim); neither of these interpretations lend any credence to the idea that snowden condones the russian regime's policies. he has openly criticized putin's pre-scripted response to his question regarding russian state surveillance.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/vladimi...
When learning a Lisp, you have to be careful of the habit of placing ending parenthesis/brackets on new lines like you would in C and Java.
I remember getting those in our phone lab (we were testing for them at the time) and thinking "if it wasn't for windows phone, I'd buy this in a hearbeat".. ah windows phone, killing good hardware and companies for years :)
This is brilliant! Amazing job guys!
Crap article, crap title, written by someone who can't distinguish between "of questionable value and utility" and "malware". Nowhere in the article does it state why MacKeeper is malware. In fact, the last linked article at the bottom ("Please beware") specifically says that MacKeeper is not malware. MacKeeper might be a waste of money, it might use questionable advertising (pop-ups, and typically on less savory sites), but malware it is not.

Additionally, the information on AV and how it works is sloppy. This is already covered well by other comments here, so I won't belabor it.
Hmm, Swisscom have been waving FTTH here (Winti..) for the past few months, and I've seen lots of workers actually laying cable, but nothing to the actual apartment yet..

Fortunately I work for a Swisscom owned co. so there are some benefits that hopefully will eventually trickle down, otherwise I think I'd be very tempted by init7's offer (we also use them at work, and they're a good bunch).
I don't think there needs to be war. I don't think government is the enemy--it is the corruption within government. People fighting the state directly will only accomplish a bloody mess.

Maybe only Lawrence Lessig can save us all now?
Isn't that pretty much GPS with a user-provided street view of the destination?
Arrakis is more of a server OS.
I know Servo is currently a research project, but maybe Mozilla's plan is to get a process sandbox from it?

"... The [Servo] engine processes will use the operating system sandboxing facilities to restrict access to system resources."

https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Design
But that's completely false isn't it, just like saying that copyright is nothing until it's tested in court?

There is absolutely a difference between a copyrighted image and a free to use image, even if I know the copyright holder is in no position to sue me. Likewise, there is a clear difference between someone's protected invention (if they have passed a very high bar over prior art, obviousness, etc) and the way the problem is always and usually solved. (If at all.)

I can respect a real patent just as easily as I can respect a copyright, and so it is hardly fair to say that a patent is nothing until it is tested in court.
Needing to give kids an iPad raises all sorts of issues: Cost, breakage, internet exposure...

I would be very likely to buy a self-contained colored digital etch-a-sketch that logs everything ever drawn on it, which I can later put on my computer.

I know that would be very big brother of me, but it's for cute's sake!
You can still use the "add as many dots as you want" feature in gmail, even if they don't allow the plus sign.

so.me.l.ongus.e.rname@gmail.com

Someone should make a gmail plugin for decoding directives this way.
Biological Noise in an Unpredictable World
Ask HN: Trial Freelancing? 
My business partner and I have been looking for a web developer to help us build a first version of our website. Rather than hire a freelancer outright, we would like to find someone who is interested in doing a "Trial Freelance" period where the developer would get paid to build out an MVP. Upon finishing this initial product and assuming it's satisfactory, both the developer and ourselves can assess if we enjoyed the process / working with each other and perhaps continue on together as our startup evolves.

The Trial Freelance would be a complete standalone deal. If either side didn't enjoy working w/ the other or decided to go another direction for any reason, there would be no pressure to continue working together. A test run of sorts.

We have found that services like Odesk often yield diluted results and set a precedent towards pure freelancing, while headhunting services often pair us with development companies who are only interested in getting us to pay as much as possible for as much as possible. We are trying to find a happy medium.

We have mock-ups, a business plan, and expansion strategy. We both have experience at prestigious companies and are ready to do our own thing with the best of intentions, but have found that many programmers in the freelancing field are weary of starry-eyed MBA grads and wannabe millionaires who have not done their homework. Starting a company is hard enough without delusions of grandeur!

TL;DR: Trial Freelancing is standalone deal where a developer builds an MVP with an eye towards potentially continuing to work with the business (s)he is freelancing for.

Does the idea of Trial Freelancing sound appealing?
My guess is that most people will just close the window and FB can claim to care about privacy (...as much as McD's cares about your cholesterol)
As most things on FB, there's been a slow march about what certain actions mean. In the case of 'likes' it's something on the order of:

"I think this is cool" -> "+ please subscribe me to your updates" -> "+ please tell everyone I know, repeatedly, that I unreservedly endorse this product/company/whatever - while not paying me anything."

You can probably detect my cynicism in the above.
I have a trick for creating a sales script. After every sales pitch/conversation/call/meeting write down the tough questions the prospect asked.

Do this for your first 10, 50, 100 sales. Along the way you will find out the best answers, the ones who move the process forward. After a lot of experience, you will have a fairly good sales script adressing the most important common points.

But also create a complete FAQ for the tough questions, with all the best answers written, print it and read all of it before leaving for each sales meeting. This will help a lot.
There is a similar "augmented reality puzzle game" for adults called Reflow.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reflow/id444083164?mt=8

It was released Jun 01, 2012.
Poor kitty. You should just give it a wildcard name.
Wow, I've never even heard of that one. I'm guessing it didn't make the list because this more of a list of projects screwed up by a single miscalculation, not just big project failures.
Thank you. We changed it.

The HN guidelines call for changing titles when they're linkbait or misleading.
And yet another one involving the culture of Canada wherein Canada had the opportunity to have American engineering, British culture, and French cuisine. Instead, they opted for American culture, British cuisine, and French engineering.
I think the more interesting point to note here, is BBC's toedipping into this type of listicle content.

In a recent internal report[1], BBC was suggested to be mindful of Buzzfeed's stragegy. To quote from the article:

>The report, commissioned by BBC head of news James Harding from Sir Howard Stringer, also said that the BBC's web presence lacks "character and personality" compared with younger rivals such as Vice Media and Buzzfeed.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/21/bbc-news-buzzfe...
Methamphetamine(as desoxym) is also available as a prescription for add/ADHD, though like the OP I've never heard any cases of it actually being used, and i believe it's pretty rare.
http://www.rxlist.com/script/main/mobileart-rx.asp?drug=deso...
My thoughts exactly $58 is a decent price, there are a lot of scrooges in here. The argument of "geez i can build this in a day and the materials will cost me less than 10 bucks" are tiresome and stupid. If you value your time at more than $2 an hour its a good price.
BitLit - The Feel of a Book and Convenience of an eBook
I never understand the surprise some people have that most of the people writing laws are the people who went to school to study how laws work.

Are they also similarly surprised and dismayed that many of the people writing software studied computer science?
maybe you should stop judging your wife's sister and her husband, and/or start being as critical of yourselves as you are of them.
He didn't flee to Russia, he became stuck there.

As for why he isn't railing against other policies I suspect he recognizes how lucky he is to not be in the position Bradley Manning is in even after leaking so much. Snowden has done enough good for one lifetime anyway.
The symptoms of depression, when described glibly, "sound" like a quintessential teenager.

That doesn't mean it's not possible (or useful) to distinguish between a "normal" teenager and one who is depressed and needs treatment.
It's not really true that the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because of the metric/English mismatch.

The team knew well before arrival at Mars that there were anomalies in the location of the probe. Thanks to management incompetence quite similar to that which led to the loss of shuttles Challenger and Columbia, no course correction maneuvers, which could have saved the mission, were allowed.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/why-t...
Even if it is real, the losers haven't been paid anything:
https://blockchain.info/address/1e4aLP3jKD9wRAcSRNVb7VHbd7Kb...
Yeah, I know, I made a little money off of it several years ago. These guys take advantage of people who don't know any better by dangling the possibility of petty cash at them and then (for the most part) paying out nothing.

That guy is basically describing spam, because that is what they were: a spam mill.
You can disable that specific behavior at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social, for what it's worth.
And a management failure: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/why-t...
I've been teaching for over 10 years now and have weathered the storms of many technology revolutions in the classroom.

Interactive white boards < Virtual Learning Platforms < Netbooks < Flipped Classrooms < 1:1 Tablets

It grows very tiresome.
it's really simple to turn kiosk mode on in your iPad. It makes the app full screen and you can only exit out with a pin you set up when you launch kiosk.
Didn't work in a tweet.
But we don't have a system in place that a lay person can use to distinguish between legitimate patents and illigitimate ones, do we?
If most of the stink is ammonia related (and I have no idea if it is), then it's actually pretty easy to imagine that they don't stink.
If you'd like to see interesting solutions to this problem, I recommend solving this 4clojure exercise:

http://www.4clojure.com/problem/104

and then looking at solutions by experienced Clojurians. Some are code golf but still worth understanding (e.g chouser's, who is one of the authors of The Joy of Clojure).
It's a neat concept - a nice, polished AR kit. The actual tangram concept is a bit disappointing though - dragging simple objects around on a flat surface is already something the iPad excels at. In this case it feels like it's somewhat obsoleted by modern touch-screens.

Obviously there are cases where touch-screens fail, but simple tangram puzzles work just fine with them.

I'd be interested in seeing this expanded to things that require too large a play-area to do conveniently with a tablet, or that involve manipulation that doesn't correspond to simple dragging (which you can already do well on the iPad).

Either that or focus on vision-impaired students. Maybe a set of braille algebra-tiles[1]?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra_tile
It appears the responsive design only shows the giant list of likes (and chat widget) when my browser is wider than 1220px. No obvious way to activate it when narrowed.
Thus negating any speed improvements in the markdown parser....
The units problem was incidental and really management casting about for blame: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/why-t...
It (caution/paranoia/hypocrisy/indoctrination) runs both ways:

“If I’d known it was someone from the NSA, I’d have gone and shot myself,” [Wolf] says.
> Exactly whose jurisdiction does Guantanamo fall under if not America?

Cuba's, under the particular concept of territorial jurisdiction stemming from the Supreme Court ruling in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), that the Executive Branch sought to leverage when it established the detention facility at Guantanamo.

It is worth noting, however, that this broad application of the Johnson v. Eisentrager precedent in Guantanamo was generally rejected by the Supreme Court in cases including Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466 (2004) and Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008).
Yep. Everything is nuke (EMP) hardened. Another bit of trivia: the nuclear flight crew used to have a lead eye patch, so that they'd have one good eye to operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.
Open source is no different than any project or business. Marketing matters. Design matters. Name / Brand matters.

We (engineers) do ourselves a disservice by dismissing the 'soft' parts of gaining mindshare.

There are a bunch of image loaders on Android. My personal technical preference may be Android-Universal-Image-Loader, but it sure is a heck of a lot easier to tell people to download Picasso. And when they google 'Android Picasso', they are going to land on Square's awesome landing page for it. It's not a coincidence that it has become one of the most popular options.
Imagine you could use their solution, that you have the problem that they're solving, but you don't know that they have the solution. Now imagine that you end up on their landing page. Have a look. What is there that tells you that:

a) they understand your problem, and

b) they have a neat, clean, efficient and effective solution.

Nothing.

They need to make it clear that they have a solution to a problem that you might not at this moment remember that you need solving.

I understand that you think I'm not in their target market. In fact I am, but that's not the point. The point is that a landing page should bring to mind why they need you, and make sure you know that they are a brilliant solution.
If your friends have your details in their address books and have connected the mobile app to it, then FB has your info already. Just because you can't see it on your profile doesn't mean the data is not on their systems.
(1993!)
Show HN: My startup launched its Angular based HTML5 music site
I don't know I just get the overwhelming feeling that a lot of people aren't parents in this thread. My daughter loves these types of puzzle games on our touch devices. As soon as I saw the video, I have a good feeling she will like it. Really it looks fun , and the word game looks like something we can do together. I'm excited about this product. I really could care less about the actual learning aspects and more interested in the technology + fun aspect.
> Was it "confirmation bias" and "delusion" when I saw a practicing dealer place the ball on the green zero 4 times in a row? Was it "imagination" when I took advantage of that and won a bunch of money?

Absolutely. That is a classic case of observational or confirmation bias, with a sample size of one, it shows absolutely nothing. At odds of 36-1 there will be, randomly, one time in 36 when you make an incorrect hypothesis about the way a roulette ball is going to land, and yet by chance it happens the way you 'predicted'. To confirm your hypothesis with any degree of certainty, one would need to have multiple situations of this kind happen repeatedly. You aren't doing that.
Isn't a clean room implementation supposed to be free of people who have seen the code for the original? I guess I'm a bit confused on this one.
An open letter on feminism in tech
> From their blog ...

Exactly. Why is this not on their landing page?
8 ways to success. 6 traits of effective leaders. 5 key habits of billionaires. These articles get old. Good advice here and there but old.
That and hardware needs to be able to withstand impressive amounts of vibration, environmental conditions, and electromagnetic energy. The latest and greatest ICs typically aren't designed with these in mind, so you're "stuck" with older designs which have been adapted and work well.
I had no idea that feature existed! Nice.
Angry London cabbies attack Hailo taxi app office
AirWheel electric unicycle review
I believe it was contractors.
Am I the only one who saw this and was hoping it was an online remake of Cyan's Cosmic Osmo [1]?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_Beyo...
I disagree, on the tangram aspect. Most games have an almost auto snap feature that if you drag the piece close enough it just snaps into place. I like the fact that it takes more of hand eye coordination and understanding of physical space for the physical objects to create the shapes on screen.
sloppy, at best. the reporter lost me about a minute in when she said that ADHD medications were "methamphetamanine-based"
Isn't Netflix already doing this?

The disruption is surely TV without channels and relying on the Internet for distribution. How do you picture Canle TV disruption looking?
I believe that especially in the US there might really be
more people with ADHD brains (in the end leaving your
continent to settle on a new one is still perceived as
something bold to do in 2014 - think of how much more
risky this must have felt over the first couple of
centuries after the discovery of America)

I'd never thought of that before. Another possible reason for increased prevalence in the US is that we work more hours and have less vacation time than a lot of European countries, increasing the demands on our focus.

Also, just for solidarity's sake: I was also diagnosed in my 30s, and was called "lazy" (etc.) a lot when young. Bet we went through a lot of the same things.
Awesome work !! Facebook sure is distracting! For the same reason, being on a mac, I added facebook message account to iMessage. No more going to facebook now :) Here is how to do it http://www.mactrast.com/2013/11/setup-facebook-chat-messages...
trivia lovers will note beatnik was founded by thomas dolby
I would like a complete template language based on Markdown.
Uses GPIO: So not just Arduinos!

I know this mentions it in the description, but I think it could be made more clear. Sincerely, Order #0039
Someone did. Netflix (and Youtube and Twitch.TV and Hulu...).

For my use case, it just needs mainstream sports :) (and I find the Twitch.TV acquisition interesting because of that ).

I just suscribed to Cable TV to watch the (football/soccer) World Cup, I wouldn't have considered it otherwise.
The DRM sandbox is yet another attack surface, isn't it? Wouldn't it make sense to use NaCl for DRM sandboxing, and then the option is open to use the same sandbox for PDF viewing, and pdf.js can still work, giving users choice.

Creating yet another sandbox seems silly, and NaCl hasn't been hit by pwnium, it's only been a stepping stone to the renderer (I'll let comex dive into details here!)