skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a motivational speech by soldiers to soldiers, I guess it's fair to debate that aspect. To be honest I was surprised to see such link at the top of HN, so I'm really curious to know what other HN fellows like coldtea think about it.

EDIT: I know the folks are not soldiers, but the tone of the speech makes it sound as that IMHO
The model does presume that primary and secondary sources will continue to be created.

These days, what actually happens is that people create third-party sources specifically to get things into Wikipedia. sigh.
In case you're wondering why this obviously brilliant article doesn't get much discussion, or many votes, some people here have seen it before. Here are some of the previous submissions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=brief+incomplete#!/story/forever/p...

Of course, it may again get lots of discussion and lots of up-votes. We'll see.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7263243

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6953863

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504217

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234361

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804668

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728843

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377944

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586462

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507566

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1475826

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1310127

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164
> This is the power of recycling and repair — instead of paying $120 for a screen and throwing away what is largely a functional piece of electronics, I just had to pay for the cost of just replacing the broken glass itself.

Some level of replace-ability should be enforced by law. There should be universal interchangeable types of batteries. Board self-test should be available and so on.
It's hard to understand Shenzhen if you've not been there. I just returned from the Dangerous Prototypes Hackercamp in Shenzhen, and quite frankly, I don't think there is anyway you can fully comprehend what they can do there if you haven't seen it with your own eyes. Such things as replacing the glass are completely routine and done with incredible speed and precision. They have tools and techniques there not found anywhere else.

I ran into Ian and Jin from Dangerous Prototypes at the SF Bay MakerFaire last weekend where they were demonstrating the BGA reballing techniques we learned at the Land Mobile Repair School in Shenzhen. Ian told me that earlier in the Faire, a couple of Intel engineers stopped by to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, incorrect and impossible (or some combination thereof). He ran them through the process and left them agog, not only that the process developed by the Chinese (about $50USD in tools and supplies) was comparable to a $XX,000 reballing machine, but that they'd never seen or heard of these techniques before. They were throwing away prototypes worth thousands of dollars instead of fixing the problem because they didn't have proper reballing machines/jigs.

It is well worth the trip to Shenzhen if only to see them disassemble a phone completely and refurb it faster than imaginable. Ian hopes to make HCS a regular event and I highly recommend it!
Gitchain's first screencast
When you are thrown in the mud and choose either to sing or quit - it's YOUR spirit, and YOUR decision, not corporate control over you.
Show HN: PoPoPics.Com Customized HD wallpaper for every device
Neither the video or images were compelling enough to get me to install a free app. Show me someone using the keyboard.
>This is a curse. The sheer power that Wikipedia has over shaping public thought is disturbing. I'm curious if anyone has actually done studies on this, and whether it's feasible to shape public interpretation of history by making very subtle factual edits over long periods of time.

For anything important, the dialectic (i.e., edit-warring) produces something that at least covers everything, even if the resulting article has awful prose.

>Nuwabianism

Thankfully we killed "analogue disc record" before Wikipedia got popular.
"Let's unbundle them and give people a choice."

They're already unbundled, and people already have a choice -- for the trade school thing you want, there are trade schools, 2 year colleges, etc, that require no (or far fewer) of those useless classes for creating an informed citizenry; and a burgeoning explosion of online offerings that are quite good, especially for the price. And there's nothing stopping you from getting into a small liberal arts school and majoring in feminist theory, if you don't want to be tainted by practical skills of any kind. And you can find any position along that gradient, for any dollar figure.

I'd say the issue isn't lack of choice; the issue is that people want contradictory things, and that the 'ambiguous message' is less a message universities are sending than a misunderstanding of what universities are really providing, which is the signaling power of their credential. The practical, no-fat skills acquisition you describe is there for the taking, if that's really what you want. If you're willing to spend the money you can have the best of both worlds at the cost of more time, which is the same as everything else in life.

I don't feel that bad for people who buy a Honda Civic and wish it were a Tesla, or vice-versa. There are certainly plenty of options to get either one, and plenty of information to know which one you're getting. But if you want the Tesla, but only want to pay for the Honda? Too bad.
I don't even have to sell them below my cost, assuming De Beers sells at a highly inflated price, I can just sell somewhere in between.

Pricing myself into the market doesn't mean I have to lose money. It just means I have to undercut my competitors.

There's lots of reasons not to do this but I'm starting to think that there's a lot of people on HN who don't know how pricing strategies work.
I think this example is relevant to many seemingly trivial problems. Where the task seems simple, but once you think about the details a bit more it becomes complex.

I was trying to get Perl tar libraries working, when my colleague asked why I don't just use backticks to do it in the shell. Basically because I don't know that much about tar. I can use it to untar file, or create a new archive. Someone else who has written a library probably has taken the time to read through the whole manual and make it work nicely. They know the errors and warnings, and have abstracted that to a sensible level hopefully. They have thought about these things, so hopefully I won't have to.
A few examples to the contrary are not all the relevant. That's only a problem if you happen to want to write an article on 'Nuwaubianism', chances of which are slim to none.

By and large, Wikipedia is as correct and current (or more so) than any of its paper competitors ever were (not to mention, far larger). It has its shortcomings (outright vandalism, deletionism) and I use it mostly as a starting point for reading, not as the final authority on anything (and I never did that with a paper encyclopedia either).

What I love is that it cites its references, which you can then go and check, if you study a subject hard enough and some of those references appear to be bogus you can use that as your competitive advantage over those that would use WP uncritically.

It's a tool, it has some defects, but on the whole it is one of the best things to come out of the web.
That's neat. Is it a German only website or do they have an English version available?
The Ripple Effects of Rising Student Debt
I agree , but those same claims are true for many subjects learned at school, for example math.
Ask HN: Do you care about your software being pirated?
During the past weeks, I developed and published a small OS X utility app that sells for ~$3 in the Mac App Store. However, due do French export laws for apps that include encryption mechanisms, the app is not available in the French app store.

(It ships and uses libssh2 and implements SCP over SSH, and therefor does not use "encryption mechanisms that are provided by the operating system" - the registration process for that is all in French and neither Apple nor the French government seems to be able to help with that.)

As I got a bunch of emails asking why the app is not available in the French Mac App Store by now, I thought about offering a non-MAS version of the app. Coming to my initial question, I'm not sure if I want to spend time on implementing any kind of license key check etc., or just offer that version completely without DRM / license checks as it surely will be cracked either way. (The Mac App Store version is available as a torrent for quite some time now, so whoever wants to steal the app will do no matter what I finally do.)

So, I'd like to ask you guys how you handle this, or how you would handle this if you were in my situation? Spend time on implementing a license key check that will be cracked either way, or just offer a non-DRM version that'll sell in France to make everyone happy?

Thanks.
The general narrative today about something like this often seems to forget what came before. For example the music industry in Sweden is doing very well and most people I hear talking about why mentions the musical schooling kids get from the beginning as a source. But the narrative about this doesn't often mention this in my experience, as it is probably considered a boring story.
Fair enough, but the general point of mere utility processes consuming all of the available resources leaving nothing to the overall app remains an issue.

I looked for a "big" RSS/RSZ and found my puppet using 53 megs. On a 6 gig machine thats not a big deal, and the elimination of "by hand" administration makes it a fair trade, but on a 32 meg machine that 53 megs would be an issue.
I didn't have the same luck with a nexus 7 couple of months ago. It fell from a small night table and the screen shattered (the digitizer still works). I did the same process as the post explained and I got a replacement in Amazon ($60 and $6 for the tape), but for some reason it didn't work. The broken screen used to work, but now I only hear noise when I turn it on, but no image. I think I made a mistake when I was removing the graphic ribbon, who knows. Now I feel like I don't want to put more money and time into it. It's great a company like that recycle everything, just separating the digitizer takes a lot of work.
I would encourage you to re-think this stance. Interdisciplinary conversation is a tremendous tool to approaching hard problems, conversions, and ideas. I've encountered this enough in my life to know it to be very beneficial. We get arrogant when we specialize, often missing simple solutions because we assume that the solution has to be hard because we're very smart, and we haven't effectively solved it yet.

I've often had aha moments when someone who didn't understand the problem, framed a question in a way that caused me to reconsider my approach.

Besides, jargon, not comprehension, is what keeps many smart people out of conversations that they can definitely add value.
This article makes it much more complicated than it needs to be. It tries to be all things to all people. In practice you're going to have to sacrifice some functionality for the sake of usability and your own sanity.

When I add a CSV import feature to a project I'm working on, I tell people "this works with MS Excel flavor of CSV." This covers most, if not all, real world cases because in my world the people who want to import data are non-programmer types who all use Excel.

I'll often include the basic rules in the screen that accepts the import. If I ever had to accept data from something that was _not_ Excel I'd probably include a combo box on the web form that lets you pick the dialect. So far I haven't had to do that.

The only thing I might not be totally covering is how Excel handles newlines, but in practice I've never had to deal with that.
Customer Engagement Is Key To Branding Yourself
The hairdryer as heat-gun method was first shown to me by an incredibly gifted Electrical Engineer (from China) who used this method to fix dry joints on PCBs (including consumer mainboards).

It was astounding the first time I saw a dead MB revived with nothing more than a bathroom accessory!
This was an interesting article, though most of the points seem to revolve around the theme of "Never giving up". I found the first one particulary interesting (the make your bed one).

here's the points in summary:

1. "Make your bed" - start your day off by accomplishing a small task. Little things in life matter and add up.

2. "Find someone to help you paddle" - You can't accomplish great things alone, you need friends and collegues.

3. "Measure a person by size of heart" - Judge people by their deeds not ethnicity, etc.

4. "Get over being a sugar cookie and move on" - Sometimes no matter how great you do things, they fail. Accept it, keep going.

5. "Don't be afraid of circuses" - in face of constant failure, learn from it each time, persevere, let it make you stronger.

6. "Sometimes slide down the obstacle head first" - Don't be afraid to take a risk in order to achieve greatness.

7. "Don't back down from sharks" - people/events will actively try to take you down, stand your ground, fight back.

8. "Be your best in the darkest moment" - During the hardest/most critical times, you must be calm and composed to bring your peek performance.

9. "Start singing when you're up to your neck in mud" - Be a bearer of hope, persevere in it, there is power in hope.

10. "Never ever ring the bell" - Never give up, never quit.

I would be interested in knowing what other HNers have for good points they try to live by.
I'm pretty sure that is acknowledged in good cryptography texts. It's actually what draws me to the field, because, though my career is rooted in tech, I'm fascinated with what we're capable of _without_ computers. Excellent point.
I presume you would advocate this new law in hopes that it would drive up the feasibility of repairs, therefore lowering costs to consumers. But it won't do that: it will increase costs (and reduce revenues) to manufacturers who will happily pass those costs on to consumers, and the only people who will come out ahead will be the lawyers.

Also, you do not want a phone made by the government.
Ok, I think you need to decide what you are really interested in.

ML and neural networks research are very different from projects like openworm both of which are very different from neuroscience work and modeling.

So you have three very distinct areas of research and work. Which one are you most interested in?

Of the three the ML side probably has the most guaranteed value to you. Things like openworm are shoot-the-moon type projects that are frankly unlikely to succeed in achieving their ambitious goals. Neuroscience research can be incredibly difficult due to the fact you're dealing with live people and there is unfortunately a lot of hand-wavy, "voodoo-esque" statistical and modeling techniques currently being employed in the analytical side of the field.
> you'd need billions of dollars in start up capital

Two more points:

a) Considering a chat app pulled in billions of capital, it's not like there isn't billions of capital available. Now that I have such capital in hand, it sounds like I'm pretty well situated to make this a practical idea.

b) Why mine? Why not just grow? The diamonds are of better quality. Why can't I be the SpaceX of diamonds, start from first principles and build my own diamond growing tools, start mass producing 1-2 carat diamonds and dump them on the market. Set up regional diamond growing facilities each turning out thousands of diamonds a day, 24 hours a day. They'll be virtually indistinguishable from data centers, just huge warehouse like buildings next to readily available power substations. Since I have billions of startup capital, this is pretty feasible. Not only will I be mass producing diamonds, I'll be mass producing the diamond growing equipment, driving my per unit price down significantly.

Better yet, my diamonds will be of a higher quality than anything De Beers can dig out of the ground.
"This gives a conceptual model to work to: Wikimedia as the sum of all university libraries."

I can't imagine a concise concept designed to cause greater offense amongst the deletionists. That must be why I like it so much.
Are programmers engineers? (2003)
Google is doing that, have you tried to look there for AI jobs?
I'm sorry I may be stupid but I still don't understand how the keyboard works after having seen that second video.
Seriously they should make a video where we can see what happens on the keyboard and on the screen at the same time.

Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'?

These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen.

I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
Makes total sense to focus on the format the user actually uses. Still...why don't you use a library?
I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways.

You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.

I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.

I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.

In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.

Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.
God DAMN you put more work into meta-summary than most of us put into actual comments ;)

I know there's been talk about it, but has anyone hacked together a quickie-scraper tool or mini-app that would, given a HN submission, find similar submissions, and generate a plaintext list like the parent comment, but maybe with some metadata (such as date of submission, number of comments, number of upvotes). I'll put that on my side projects list but I bet someone more OCD than me has already done something like this.
Shenzhen, and particularly the Huaqiangbei area, is a great place to be if you're into electronics in general. Components are cheap and plentiful, and so are component-level repair shops. "Fixed while you wait (and watch)" is the norm, and some of the more popular shops have lineups of people waiting with their tablets/laptops/desktops/etc. in need of repair. A friend had his laptop's chipset reballed there (the nVidia one that was famous for failing early.) Very different experience than in the West.

Bunnie has been there before:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=283

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147
Steve Jobs’ Email To A Startup Who Helped Design One Of The First iPad Apps
That's not how engineering works. There are good designs that can't be achieved while making things replaceable. For example, the reason screen glass often isn't replaceable is because it's optically bonded to the underlying LCD, which improves sharpness, reduces glare, and reduces parallax when using a pen. The reason batteries usually can't be replaced is that it saves space and weight to use naked Li-Poly battery packs molded to the available space. Making say a back case removal reduces structural rigidity and reduces space available for a battery. That's engineering--making trade-offs between features people may not care about in favor of features they care more about.
Sorry but I wouldn't spend my time writing good reviews for a service I don't like just to get few dollars off my next subscription (which is going to be in 2 years anyway).

And yes I've used my referral ID to link to their website. I don't see what's wrong with that since I mentioned it in the article and everyone is free to remove it and I'm pretty sure a lot of the readers did anyway.
A 4MB flash, 16MB ram version of this (same chipset) is already freely available for $15 as module (1), or $26 with a break-out board (2). You get 2xserial, a bunch of free GPIO's, 2xethernet, i2c, usb. OpenWRT has already been ported to this module, although you need to really strip it down to make it work reliably given the small amount of ram.

1) http://www.dx.com/p/hi-link-hlk-rm04-serial-port-ethernet-wi...

2) http://www.dx.com/p/hlk-vrm04-multifunction-uart-serial-port...

3) http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/hilink/hlk-rm04
Does it work with Hungarian Ms Excel? It uses semicolons as delimiters.
Such a thing already exists:

$ cat >myarticle.txt
There's a difference between not allowing spaces and not hashing. They could have just written a bad PW policy that doesn't completely make sense

You're drawing conclusions from information that doesn't lead you to one.
Show HN: Video chat with your webpage visitors
Interesting. If I leave the spacing settings closer to the default then it looks like this:

http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/14bdd3324070f790b7f1c54b1b343...

Which looks more like your screenshot, and is no longer lopsided, but IMO still looks pretty bad. I guess I just like tight lines. The huge cursor block is... I don't know distracting somehow. My current terminal uses plain old Menlo and it looks like this:

http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/827024555adee7d98c3a926c76c4f...

I don't mind my terminal font being different than my editor, so I'll still get a lot of use out of Fira.
Story of successful biotech firm
Hm, feels like this should make it more complicated to enter text. Let's say I have a telephone and it has 11 buttons. 0 - 9, call and hang up. This is easy for a person to remember and use.

But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex and hard to use.

One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type, mentally.
No offense, but this speech may impress a bunch of school boys...
There's a cultural quirk buried in the article, when the technician uses his or her "very long thumbnail (in lieu of a spudger/guitar pick)."

Some Chinese men grow one fingernail quite long as a sign that they do not toil in the fields (else the nail would be broken)[1]. It has been for some time a symbol of high status. Yet here we see a long fingernail employed specifically to aid manual labor.

I now wonder if there are budget repair guys walking around Shenzhen appearing to show off their socioeconomic status but actually just hoping their nails don't break because it would make splitting open broken phones less convenient.

[1] http://www.vagabondjourney.com/why-chinese-men-grow-long-fin...
The Navy Seals I have known in my life have been the most honest, bravest, and intelligent people I have ever known. I'm grateful people like this exist in the world.