skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most stories are not spam, they are just posted at wrong time.

To give you an example, this story itself was posted on last Friday evening PST (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825146). It got just one upvote and 0 comments. Exact same story with exact same page content on exact same domain was posted on Monday (today) afternoon PST and it got 80+ upvotes, 30+ comments and got on frontpage for more than 6 hours!

A lot of stories are like this. HN ranking algorithm isn't perfect.
An open letter to all my male friends
Good to see you're alive. You had me worried there. Message me sometime.
PLEASE add four spaces before very long unbroken strings.
I think my Mac is a 2011, but I saw a similar thing when I upgraded to Mavericks. I've been pretty happy with it for the most part.

More recently I saw massive power savings by switching browsers. I love Chrome, I love its UI, I love its web devel tools. But even when I only have a few tabs open my Mac's fans just won't stop spinning. :( I kind of swapped back and forth between Safari and Firefox since then, but mostly settled on Firefox. I may give Safari another chance when I install Yosemite.
I am fairly certain that trains do not need the slack between cars to get moving. Like others have pointed out, trains seem to be perfectly capable of starting on inclines where there would be no slack.

There is one assumption in the article that is certainly wrong:
"...but it seems crazy to think that the train’s friction coefficient is 10 times more than the cars"

This does not make any sense. The forces we are comparing is the friction between the rail and the wheels in the case of the engine and the friction in the bearings of the axles in the case of the cars. There is of course some frictional force from the deformation of the track and the wheel as well but as they are both quite rigid (being made of steel) it should not be very significant.
>The statement I'm making is that you can simply brush off every scientific study by saying "yeah, that's just random chance, don't worry about it".

That is not what I was doing, and that is not true.

Scientific studies involving statistics and probability, when done properly, are sound. Quantifying uncertainty is a big deal, and when you can do it you can make very solid conclusions. Are there perturbations due to random chance? Sure. That doesn't mean you can always brush them off.

>If the data shows something incredibly unlikely happened, that means we should re-evaluate our assumptions.

Absolutely agree with you here. My point was it is crucial that you document what you believe about the problem at hand. If you believe something is not true, it is not usually assumed to be true.

>> Let me pose the question to you. You are given a fair two-sided coin. You flip the coin 1000 times. 875 of the flips turn up heads. Is the coin biased?

>Probably.

You are incorrect. The event that occurred was just very unlikely. I can tell you that with complete certainty because you were given a fair coin and you knew that information.

If, on the other hand, you didn't know whether or not the coin was fair, then you would be correct (but that wasn't the case).
This reminds me of the orange/blue contrast thing in movie posters that went viral a few years back[1]. I wonder how much things like this are just industry fashion trends, as opposed to having a deeper, more timeless psychological basis.

[1] https://www.google.com/#q=orange+blue+movie+posters
Any reason this is better than standard OAuth2 flows?
A node based postgre terminal / commander
South African here. You'll easily find good people. Our startup culture is so-so and if you want esoteric languages you'll have to look harder, but .net, Java, Ruby, mobile, Linux etc should be fine. For interns just contact a local uni in the city you're like to be in (probably Johannesburg or Cape Town).
Please automatically convert very long unbroken strings into code markdown, thus putting them in a scrolable box.

See this for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837247

View it on mobile (chrome on iOS) to see how unusable that thread is now.
I started/ran a commercial satellite provider (in war zones) for a while last decade. The big transition just happening then (but not in my region, due to a rocket blowing up during launch) was Ku -> Ka band.

Ku has big enough beams (thus, less freq re-use) and low enough bandwidth (due to cost of space segment) that it really wasn't economic for "regular" Internet for people -- hundreds or thousands of dollars for a high-latency connection with other performance characteristics of the worst DSL.

Ka is an order of magnitude or more better (although more subject to rain fade); smaller and cheaper equipment, too.

I was kind of sad Google went with "project loon", which seems kind of..loony to me..rather than UAVs, tethered aerostats, or LEO constellations. It looks like they're not just doing loon.

I want to figure out how a Gerald Bull space cannon or RAMAC (10-50k G force launch of 1m diameter satellites, for $100/pound) could be used to build an LEO constellation.
We are here!(Tanzania) Mostly working in shy demoralizing banking IT departments.
I have began looking into immigrating probably to Canada or Australia due to their immigration policies.
Google+ iOS App version 4.7.0 Released • vlogg.com
I would assume everything is, just on general principle, unless Apple explicitly promised it is not, in writing in language that does not allow any ambiguity. "Centralized" means "not locally", and "secure" only means "it's not available publicly on the Internet, we promise", so I see no reason to assume Apple (and anybody who comes to Apple with a warrant or hacks them) has no access to it.
curl -I -L <url> will follow redirects

There's also this service that expands shortened urls: http://longurl.org/
Fake Heartbleed Removal Tool swipes Users Details found by Symantec
Game development asset marketplace
thats pretty cool. you showed great hustle in making it to the show and loved to read the inside experience of filming and your experience
If I recall history correctly, Google was the first to monetize SERPs with ads. It is their golden goose.
Make your voice heard in the net neutrality debate
http://jsbeautifier.org/ has no problem deobfuscating that.
Weak Zazzle and anyone else actually taking this seriously in the first place, even if they reconsidered afterwards. The incentive to try to abuse the system is too great in the US and met with success way too often... Companies and individuals need to stand up against this kind of thing.
Like I'm going to get my 5 year old an iPad. Not happening.

I let him use mine, and when he logs in, I want him to see a few educational apps... and that's it.

When we're at functions, we see parents let their kids use their iPads all the time, and they are always checking in to see if they've opened their email, or certain games, etc.

Maybe just a "Kids" login. It has NOTHING but a few apps of choice show up. Doesn't have to be a full user-account system, just a pseudo login that hides almost everything.
Managing the Best
If you're given a fair coin, then it's impossible for it to also be a biased coin.

If you're given a coin, and you don't know whether it's fair or biased, then you can do an inference to give an estimated probability of how biased the coin is.

Those are the two situations. This is a problem about perfect versus imperfect information, not about probabilities.
I am surprised noone mentioned Erlang!

Tuples and pattern matching are the bread and butter in Erlang and deserve to be mentioned as one of the source of inspiration for the Swift language.

The '_' character used to ignore some values in loops/patterns was also taken from Erlang (for _ in array { ... }).
I live in Sweden. While I support a 6-hour workday as an improvement over an 8-hour day, I would personally prefer a 4-day work week. For me, the activity of physically going to work is the most problematic part of working, not the actual work. My attitude is probably because I'm a programmer, perhaps someone working as a caregiver or cleaner would feel differently...
Of course, in practice such an app would not attempt inspect the coastline on a molecular level. It would just use vector data from some map source, and I suspect that would work quite well in practice.
People that still believe in google's good will and use it as a measure for the industry are really too big an amount. That's embarrassing for a community with this level of knowledge and deep understanding of IT matters.
Adding a name to the list Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD and OpenSSH is also from euro african descent.
It's a nifty technique, but I think that's the same approach that is discussed in the article?

That's when it hit me! Render each seed as cone pointed towards the camera in an orthographic projection, coloring each cone according to the seed's color. The Voronoi diagram would work itself out automatically in the depth buffer. That is, rather than do all this distance comparison in the shader, let OpenGL do its normal job of figuring out the scene geometry.
You couldn't possibly be more correct. That newspapers and blogs even have a design is unfortunate outcome of too much license for customization. It's hard to fathom complaining about flexibility, but we've really developed the wrong tooling and gotten entirely off track with our original goals.

If we'd have come up with a semantic document interchange markup, information would probably be searchable (without Google), computable, and easily discoverable.

In the end, I think it's the user that should determine how to style and display their content. The UI/UX should be software we're free to interchange. Like back in the 90's.

I like that you've outlined key areas for different platforms--that's something I hadn't previously given much thought to. Great analysis.

Do you see anything helping to break us free of this technological local maxima?
That sounds bad. Heh, you can define your own extension and rename that method.
A company that wants you to come back to it's site is now considered clingy?

It worked bc now I want to view my MySpace, just to see who my top 8 friends were and to see a snapshot of my life back then. Hopefully MySpace still has those features!
That's not Denmark (Greenland) at the top. Greenland has been removed from the map for some reason.
It's easy to depack even the packer's "Base 64 encode", just replace the eval function with a call to console.log for example, and you will have your original code.

Jsnice doesn't exceutes eval as it's doing statical analysis ie. without executing the programs.
Ninajifunza kiswahili pole pole :)
(Your question did go over my head, but it did allow me to learn many new words :) Asante sana!)

My wife and I chose Tanzania for various reasons, including:

- We knew Moshi from some years ago (we climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro), and have sentimental attachment to the place (I asked my wife on Uhuru peak).

- We knew our son (1 year old) would be safe (good medical care, few mosquitoes and nasty animals, varied food). He made friends with our neighbourhood kids pretty fast :)

- She had some connections with a local NGO and so could work as a volunteer here.

- We remembered Tanzanians to be the most welcoming and friendly people we've ever met (and we had the chance to travel a lot). We were wrong BTW, Tanzanians are even more welcoming than we remembered :)

- Kiswahili is a challenge to learn, but we like learning new languages (we take lessons bi-weekly)

- It's much more attractive than most places for our family to visit during their vacation ;)

- I always echoed Mark Shuttleworth's sentiment that "Africa is the future", and I decided to put my actions where my mouth is :p

I could go on for a long time, we really like it here.
How to Turn On Hand-Off in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8
I've always enjoyed when a work of fiction manages to make a point so well that it's the most useful and convenient way to discuss a class of real-world situations.

Works particularly well when a work does so in a timeless way. Blunt references to current events or specific real-world analogues don't hold up well to time; the observations that stand the test of time never make you immediately think "oh, he's referring to $SPECIFIC_REAL_WORLD_THING, groan".
Are people allowed to trademark an arbitrary letter of an arbitrary alphabet? How about arbitrary collections of letters that may or may not form a 'word'?
"the issue hasn't been technical elements of delivering search results, but providing a compelling case to switch."

The problem is that DDG's compelling case to switch (anonymous searching), undermines the technical reason that Bing can provide results that are competitive with Google. DDG would almost certainly suck if it wasn't built using a search engine that uses the collected behavior of millions of people to produce relevant results.

The "we don't track" thing is a great bit of propaganda for the insurgency, but it's a terrible burden if you happen to win the war.
I have seen a few crashes involving motorcycles not paying attention or taking unreasonable risks. Overtaking on blind bends etc.
I haven't seen anywhere near the same number of crashes involving cars.

Is that confirmation bias as well?
I don't see how you can be certain that they don't store the data if government can easily force them to and make them shut up about it.
Or you can use this gpu only technique https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldl3W8
Oh yeah, and TTCL deploying a good country-wide fiber optics backbone did help as well :)

I have a 2Mb/s symmetric link to my house, which is faster than I could get in many many places, including the US midwest.
Essentially none of the unreliability of consumer SSDs is directly attributable to MLC flash cells wearing out. They're large enough, have enough spare area, and the wear leveling works. When a consumer SATA SSD fails, it's almost always a catastrophic failure of the controller or its firmware, and the rest of the failures are from things like losing an entire NAND package or some other critical component on the PCB.

Now, it can be said that the need for good wear leveling and latency hiding is what causes the controllers and their firmware to be so complex and thus failure-prone. But the myth of SSDs wearing out needs to die. When an SSD does wear out its write endurance, it's a gradual process with lots of SMART warnings and a gradual decline in performance when the controller no longer has enough less slack space to work with, and some sporadic data corruption. It also doesn't start happening until the drive has been subjected to a lot of heavy writing - it takes months of 24/7 torture testing: http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
> I just don't understand how it even gets developed in the first place, if they don't have a small team to continue working on it post-release.

From talking to PMs at Google, they have exactly this problem. Engineers are free to pick and choose what they work on.As soon as a product is released, hits "1.0", and the engineers have claimed whatever kudos they can, they move on to the "next big thing", leaving the PM alone with the product. That leads to situations where PMs can't even get basics like localizations to specifics countries / languages.
If you don't count small islands like South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (UK), this seems to be the case in reality. However, it wouldn't necessarily follow from this map, since this map only shows North America.
Can read the guide on browser apart from iBooks
Many of my friends, technical and non-technical, do prefer tracking precisely for this reason. They find it more convenient that the search engine knows their preferences, location, etc.
The Game Of Thrones Way Of Closing Your Copy With A POP
For one definition of "around the globe," yes.
There's also VimFx which is also actively developed.
JSNice: statistical renaming, type inference and deobfuscation
Sure (in my limited experience, the answer to "is there a blind person who does X?" is virtually always yes). I've met engineers with varying degrees of visual impairment. Obviously, it's not for everyone, but coding isn't for anyone to begin with. Like everything else, they find the tools they need to make things work for them. Several that I have met have been involved in the open source accessibility movement, which means they've been working on developing those tools to give themselves and others more control.

One anecdote. My team had done some work with a contractor, who was blind, to do QA around accessibility features and screen reader compatibility, his specialty. He came into town for an all-hands meeting, and after a brief orientation to the physical layout of the office, was perfectly self-sufficient and resourceful. Until one point a day or two into his visit when he called me over to his desk asking for help. He was rather frustrated because his screen reader had completely stopped talking to him, even though he could feel from the fans that it was still on. He asked if I could see anything obviously wrong on his screen. I failed to suppress a bit of a chuckle as I realized the screen in front of him was the least accessible in all of Windows: a BSOD!
OpenFDA: Access the FDA’s Publicly Available Data
It is common when a new language appears to authors to see similarity with their own language. Actually, most of the features of Swift were already implemented in some older language. Extended pattern matching for example exists in Scala.
Oh how blessed are we that the landlords allow such mischief...

Seriously people are pissing themselves all over with these announcements as if they weren't possible before.
This case is about a trademark, not a patent. Any word or symbol that identifies a source of goods can be a trademark. Hence Apple getting a trademark on using the word "Apple" to sell computers even though people have been using the word "apple" to refer to fruit for hundreds of years. (The same goes for "Amazon" despite the river, "Windows" despite the ventilation system, and "Beats" despite the existence of rhythm). If one tried to sell computer parts under the name "Apple" or any reasonable variant thereof, it wouldn't be a defense to say "look, there's a fruit called the same thing."

The real problem here is that Zazzle caved in based on a weak letter about the trademark -- not that the trademark office somehow failed. If Apple Inc sent a letter to Zazzle asking to remove all references to the word "apple" in Zazzle, the problem wouldn't be that Apple's trademark is invalid (it's perfectly valid for selling computers), but rather that Apple would have stretched its trademark too far (it only grants the right to control uses related to selling computers). Same here. Somebody could quite reasonably sell computer products under the name "Pi" (see Raspberry Pi for example), but that wouldn't grant the right to remove all references to the number from Zazzle.
Dish Network plans to accept Bitcoin payments
Flappy Bird in Swift
Green Computing Farm
The story behind Halt and Catch Fire – How Compaq cloned IBM and created an empire
Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday
Warren Buffet’s Investment Checklist – The Secret to His Success?
A problem I've had with recent lighttable releases is that there's a dependency on recent GCC due to build of webkit that light table uses for its GUI.

I understand lighttable 0.5.9 to be the most recent that works.
WWDC 2014 – Where Apple Scored (and where it didn’t)
Same with mine and audio. coreaudiod just shits itself 5 times a day.

I'm now on Debian 7 with XFCE on an old Think Pad. Life is better here.
Yes and yes. "IBM" doesn't form a word, but it's a perfectly valid trademark and you would be sued into oblivion (quite fairly at that) for trying to sell computer software or hardware as "IBM." Gatorade has a trademark on a capital "G" in the field of sports drinks because consumers have come to recognize the "G" line of products. "Google" is a mostly-made-up word (it was at least unfamiliar before Google became popular) and it is a valid trademark. "Apple" is a commonly known word and it is also a valid trademark. The symbol for Prince [1] is an arbitrary symbol that could also be trademarked.

The key fact is that trademarks protect the right to use a word or symbol in connection with selling goods or services in a certain field. Apple doesn't get to ban all uses of the word "apple" but you couldn't go sell your own products as "Apple Computing Stuff". Prince can't ban people drawing the symbol linked above, but he could sue anybody who released a CD with that as their cover artwork. Gatorade doesn't control all uses of the letter "G" but I wouldn't try selling a sports drink with just a capital G on the bottle.

Zazzle done messed up, but not because letters or symbols alone couldn't be trademark.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prince_logo.svg
You are probably Generation X. They were less susceptible to advertising.

People that pay more for a similar product are not just buying the product, they are also buying style and the ability to set themselves apart from their peers.
I get 5 hours on a 5 year old ThinkPad with a 5 year old battery on Debian 7. I reckon it can be done.
Running Colossal Cave Adventure on a PDP-11/34 [video]
Why I don’t feel like presenting at conferences any more
Here are two sites which show you the opposite points (antipodes) of the earth of a given location. One is interactive, the other takes an address.

http://www.freemaptools.com/tunnel-to-other-side-of-the-eart...

http://www.antipodr.com/

There do seem to be some phone apps available as well.
JQuery Mobile experience report
Eric,

I am a software developer in South Africa (Embedded). What skillset are you looking for?

Searching for a suitable candidate in South Africa follows exactly the same process as everywhere else in the world. If you want experienced candidates, use the headhunters or post the job on job boards. For interns the best approach is through the universities or schools.

Finding someone good in South Africa is the same as everywhere else, good developers are in high demand.

Regards.
Imagine if all math books in future will have to include a footnote saying: "All greek letters' trademarks are property of their respective owners" :)
How Different Cultures Understand Time
They could be running on Apple hardware.
Not true. S3 is not blocked in China. Yet. That Blocked in China site is crap but I know we are biased.

https://en.greatfire.org/s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com
covered earlier in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836092
I would've voted for buying/licensing Xamarin instead; C#/F# would've given them everything including a lot of fresh programmers. On the other hand i'm happy they didn't as they would've tossed out Android and (at least for me) there is no alternative yet to the speed / power of development here.
> if you can't be number one, you must shut down and walk away

What a terrible and insane advice! Apple doesn't sell as many phones as Samsung and therefor they should shut down and walk? Or am I missing something here?
Why not promote DuckDuckGo / Tor and something like that to void the censorship and the surveillance from both of the governments? Why so addicted to Google search, I am wondering, especially for those with sufficient technical skills...
I <3 this guy's next attempt.

http://www.trademarks411.com/marks/85481027-i-lt-3

For the record, I don't.
Nice story, thanks for sharing it :)
Infographic: The Difference Between Mark Zuckerberg and an Average 30-year-old
Maybe we need to reinvent the app layer. Half the reason web apps are such a good choice (currently) is because of strong sandboxing that allows dynamic code to run locally and consistent display standards.

If someone could replicate those on an app layer that wasn't the DOM and javascript, so you could simply link to a URL and download and run an app with high performance I reckon we could stop abusing the web.

Still a pretty tall order though.
Eh! Don't all news corporations depend on advertising revenue? are all of them unethical?