skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also see victims of the Therac-25: http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/Therac_25/Therac_1....
Yeah, pretty bad headline. You still need to work up a sweat, even with HIIT.
Unlike the OP, Nikita's PHP parser is actually used for a lot of things. He wrote a script to detect code broken by syntax changes in the next version of PHP, for example.

Anthony Ferrara used it to implement PHP in PHP: https://github.com/ircmaxell/PHPPHP
It would have been more appropriate to have said "cooccurrence is not causation", because there isn't actually a correlation between personality flaws and accomplishment, just some notable cooccurrences.
Thanks for the tip! But after trying for a while (remembering the positions of these 2 squares), I lost patience and closed the tab. But it lost my progress, even though the game told me that it was saving my progress at each level.

That's really too bad, because the game is very fun.
Still, the total they are talking about is two minutes per week.

I'm struggling with how they can draw a conclusion from n=12. It's something to do with the population variance being low, is that right?
>“Cash is the dirtiest secret of the modern economy. It belongs to a 200-year-old economy. It’s being allowed to play a role because it suits vested interests.”

is an odd statement. Cash goes back to at least the 30 pieces of silver in the Bible, it's not much of a secret and I wonder who the "vested interests" are. Perhaps the several billion people who use it daily? And "allowed to play a role" is odd as it's the standard system everywhere. Maybe Banga dreams of a world where Visa and Mastercard have the power to ban cash but perhaps still graciously allow it to play a role. I hope that does not happen.
Like others mentioned, this largely depends on the building type -- e.g. concrete vs wood and gypsum. Most American apartment complexes below 5-6 stories high are usually all wooden with low sound proofing.
Keyboard Quickfire Rapid Custom LED Backlighting and Keycaps
My local supermarket sells young coconuts for about half the price of a can of coconut water and, I assure you, I'm about as far from where coconuts grow as you can get on this planet! The stuff is seriously overpriced at present. Also, most brands have sugar added, which makes the stuff sickly sweet. I can see how that's necessary to make inroads into the soft-drink market, but healthy it is not!
It would be hard to prove whether the NSA provided the data but someone [1] was kidnapped in Milan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Mustafa_Osama_Nasr
An alternative example...
http://www.aerospike.com/blog/big-bucks-for-bluekai-snapdeal...
"Snapdeal replaced 10 MongoDB database servers with the Aerospike database on two servers on Amazon EC2—an 80% reduction—while continuing to rapidly scale the business."
Yes. The US constitution, Article 1 section 8 http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8 states:

"The Congress shall have power...

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes..."

Congress has passed such laws, authorizing the President to impose economic sanctions banning trade with countries which pose "any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat." (50 U.S. Code § 1701, 1702, and so on http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1701).

The President recently used these powers to restrict trade with certain entities in Russia, to put pressure on Russia to stop providing support for separatists in the Ukraine: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/D...

So, it's not quite "just like that". The President must declare a state of national emergency (which he did in Executive Order 13660 in March http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/D..., expanded in EO 13661 http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/D..., and expanded further in EO 13662 linked above), and can only impose sanctions directly related to that national emergency.

Ukraine is a country which agreed to disarm itself of nuclear arms when it split apart from the USSR, in exchange for an agreement that nuclear armed nations like the US, Russian Federation, and others would respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine and not use force against the Ukraine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security... The invasion of Russian and annexations of Crimea is a direct violation of this agreement, and a very worrying trend for nuclear non-proliferation. Russia's further involvement invading the east of Ukraine (under the guise of simply supporting an "organic" separatist movement) is further seriously troubling.

Hope that helps explain the situation. The President cannot simply order any private company to suspend working with other companies, but can if he declares a national emergency and the sanctions are directly related to that national emergency.
Baidu will have to go from copy cat to innovator to make this work.

Right now Baidu is missing a differentiatior that shows how it is better. Unlike T-Shirts that you can find a market for knock-offs search engines are free to the end user so you have to compete on quality, or on "default install". Baidu is missing both of those.
Cassidy Stay shooting Hoax Texas Must see this evidence
Well in the case of companies like Google or Facebook, they might actually modify the database for various of reasons (e.g. internal policy, speed, etc). I don't have first hand experience with modifying databases so I thought I would ask :)
That used to be true but they have been collecting sales tax the past few years.
Idea: A Tool to Get a “Glossary” of a Given Term
Thanks, an amazingly beautiful demonstration which seems not very wide known. Here is the video from "Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations" which is quite beautiful (just the thing at work, without distractions) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3fi6uyyrEs
I hate to call Baidu a 'chinese knock off', but in the purest sense of the word it is. They simply take Western internet phenomenons; Street Maps, Open collaborative encyclopedia, crawler based search engine, even a TV/youtube service which I've used to watch star trek (TNG torrents post season 6-7 get very slow and netflix didn't exist at the time). And copy their feature sets, even stealing whole american templates. Last time I used Baidu's video service they literally stole their layout and color scheme from pornhub down to ad placement and video selection.

Lastly Betteridge's Law of Headlines.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
that's incorrect. in practice, MasterCard cannot do any of the things you suggest, aside from "arbitrarily refuse to accept payments for a business", which they have already done. your bank could shut down your card due to fraud, which may suck for you, but you can switch banks if you disagree with them. unemployed people can absolutely get visa/mastercard debit cards. ditto homeless people.

mastercard deserves criticism, but try to actually stick to things under their control (e.g. their appalling but now discontinued ban on wikileaks donations).
Is there a way to practically keep in sync with the blockchain on a battery constrained device? Because at the moment, I don't think you can make the equivalent of a debit card for bitcoin. Even a mobile app would be impractical with it keeping in sync with the blockchain on battery.

Debit cards are only online in the sense that the shop must provide a connection to a trusted third party, which is a far easier problem to solve. The cryptocurrency equivalent would be to present the blockchain on the spot; if that's not insecure it is at best very unpractical.
A little rephrasing: In a system with a negative temperature the particles have more energy than a system with 0K. A system has a negative temperature if making it hotter/adding energy increases the order in it (delta q/delta S is negative). For example if there is a maximum energy state for each particle increasing the average energy at some point makes it more uniform, as more particles reach said state.
Just spend 1 minute doing sit-up, push-up, move your hands, feet and your neck slowly every morning always make my day better if I can't afford to jog for 30 minutes in a park.

If you do jog, try to find a park (I usually do it in a park with basketball court so I can run in a square). I get the sunlight and the fresh air. Avoid the gym unless you are going to do weight-lifting.
>If there are lots of end users for desktop software then it should in theory be profitable for a company to keep making it,

I've been bitten this way too. It was a hardware/software product, small company made a neat little USB DAQ that became very popular. Bigger entrenched player bought the company and discontinued the line. Shortly after that they released their own product based on the ones they discontinued, but now it requires a much more expensive software package. Just because a commercial product is profitable does not guarantee its longevity.
Not charging sales tax in a jurisdiction you have no presence in isn't a loophole, it's an intentional feature at the federal level. States can't legally tax interstate commerce.

Amazon is only starting to charge sales taxes in states because they're establishing local presences in those states.
This result, described today in Science1, marks the gas’s transition from just above absolute zero to a few billionths of a Kelvin below absolute zero.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean that the gas molecules (at near-0K from negative) were extraordinarily hot? My understanding is that -1/T is the "true measure", ergo super-low negatives are, in fact, "absolute hot".

Does anyone know what are the thermodynamic properties of negative temperatures? For example, a pin-sized blackbody at 10^9 K would probably kill everyone on earth if it remained at that temperature. Would that apply to macroscopic objects at negative temperatures (if that were even possible, and if blackbody mechanics make sense in such states)?
What?? Look, coconut water is a new trend in the US, but not everywhere else where it's been consumed for quite a long time. Here in Brazil I've been drinking it (me and everybody else) since I was a kid, and it was just like having a soda or some OJ (actually the two came after the coconut), and Brazil doesn't come close to how much the Philippines and Indonesia produce, and we're the fifth largest producer. There's plenty of coconut water to go to the US.

P.S. We also drink a lot of sugar cane juice here, with ice and a bit of lime squeezed in it. I like it even better. Maybe it will be a fad in some 5 or 10 years, though it's sugar content is (obviously) quite high, and I don't think it keeps as well as coconut water. Give it a try if you're ever in Little Havana in FL.
Are you from the US? I'm from the UK and I really liked the comments too. I really find that people from the US are more likely to dislike humour in this kind of game. Especially Californians.
Show HN: Game About Squares solver in Python
Haskell Distributed Stream Processing with Exactly-Once Semantics
Sometimes the coconut is not at the right point, so the water will no only not taste as sweet, but will also have an unusual taste, even bitter sometimes. Even though he shouldn't, the guy will still sell it to you, though.
That's a very nice and clear explanation.
Please see HN submission early this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8074654
And if they do, would the US government pay off any current contract obligations IBM had to break?
In what example is the US Government killing, kidnapping, torturing, or droning citizens of other countries on any meaningful scale basis outside of a few obvious countries like Afghanistan?

What does someone in Brazil, or Peru, or Belgium, or Russia, or China, or Spain, or Japan, or Australia etc etc - have to fear from the US Government? Absolutely nothing, even with all the understood spying abuses that have taken place. Most likely 99.999% of the world will never have anything to fear from the US Government.

The primary threat is actually economic espionage, from all the major powers. On that field of battle, China is arguably the world's largest threat, they have the most to gain from stealing technology from other countries (Japan, the US, Britain, Germany, Russia, France).
We modified the title to make it less misleading.
You leave out the fact that they reached profitability years before their business plan called for it, showing excellent and stable growth.
Could be just this line: "‘loop quantum gravity’ — a theoretical attempt that has yet to find experimental support"

As @jerf points out here as well, LCG has as much experimental support as any of the other competing GUT hypotheses... which is to say, none. This whole "thing" about the lack of experimental support and lack of testable / falsifiable assertions in physics (especially String Theory) is explored at length in two pretty interesting books: Not Even Wrong[1] by Peter Woit and The Trouble With Physics[2] by Lee Smolin.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/046...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-With-Physics-Science/dp/06...
To put 100,000 amperes in perspective, that's about a 10x-above-average lightning strike, like the one that hit right before the launch of Apollo 15.

The reason this is significant is because the current was flowing through a superconductor, and so would flow forever (well, forever-ish). Imagine the biggest bolt of lightning you've ever seen, and then imagine it going around in circles inside a loop about the size of a person.
As an outsider I'm a bit frightened. I my (mostly estranged) cousin is a Maths researcher (from wikipedia it looks like he's at UCLA now). Once I was talking to a PhD student friend about him, and actually he had used my cousin's work in his field.

So I don't think there is no hope in research. Also I admit this whole citation, publication and plagiarism hunt is a toxic bullshit.
Here's a benchmark from 2013 from Thumbtack Technology, comparing Aerospike, Cassandra, MongoDB and Couchbase...
http://www.odbms.org/2013/01/ultra-high-performance-nosql-be...
http://www.odbms.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/NoSQLBenchma...

In this benchmark, Couchbase gets some impressive results, but it does appear that Aerospike is the overall winner when it comes to speed and reliability. Anyway, the code is free to install, it's easy enough to validate the speed claims...
http://www.aerospike.com/blog/aerospike-doubles-in-memory-no...
I lived in Vietnam for about a year. On many major street corners, you could usually find someone selling coconuts. The vendor would pick up a fresh one, chop the top off with a machete, and insert a straw + spoon. While the quality varied, more often than not they were good. That said, it's definitely not a taste everyone will enjoy.

I've been back in the states since June. The coconut juice/drinks sold in the stores taste nothing like actual coconut juice. I'm not sure people would go as crazy over the real thing...but who knows.
There's also the problem of dealing with the standard library. Not everything has a directly equivalent function. So you'll make your app dependent on an obscure library based on another language's standard library.
IMHO if your only/main source of news is the western media, you get a very one sided, anti-Russian point of view. Things are really not that black and white, they almost never are in the global politics.
A fast track 3 yr phd would be really great and yes the US system would make that very difficult.

I am equating those things under this context, if the majority of PhD grads are not becoming professors, I would like it if they "released" more of them sooner with something like your 3yr degree.

I think I can somewhat quantify prestige if you look at where some CS professors got their PhD[1]. I do think science is meritocratic but that doesn't mean all scientists are or statistics like these mean that all scientists won't experience self doubt or even get in to pissing contests with others about credentials. That sort of attitude really detracts from the altruistic community effort I imagine.

Can I ask where you are studying? I have genuine curiosity about the Euro grad schools.

[1]http://cs.brown.edu/people/alexpap/faculty_dataset.html

edit: I should add that in no way am I saying these results prove prestige has influence or that things aren't meritocratic. But can you envision how someone might look at this and interpret it so it reinforces stereotypes or misconceptions? Spots for grad students shouldn't be zero-sum.

full disclaimer: I went to a university with a top 5 program in my field and I don't think there is a very large difference in research from these universities over time.

edit2: Another clarification, it shouldn't be that someone says "oh I didn't get in to XYZ U, I am a failure" nor should it be "oh I got in to XYZ U, I am superior". It should be, simply, "I got in to grad school, now I will study and perform research." The former attitudes are things I have encountered and find it distasteful.
The first thing to do is figure out if they have the legal right to sell it. If it was developed by a contractor the odds are very high that it is not a "work for hire" and the contractor owns the copyright, unless there was a copyright assignment in the contract. Saying in the contract that it is a work for hire is not sufficient.

(I am assuming this was in the US)

Google "computer software and work for hire" for more info. Sorry for giving no links, but I'm tapping this out on my iPhone while waiting for a take out pizza to become ready.
I first read about making one's own cloud chamber as a kid. I used to read old issues of Scientific American for the Mathematical Games columns written by Martin Gardner, which I highly recommend, and the Amature Scientist column written by a series of authors over the years, starting in 1928.

The projects were amazing. My favorites to read about were the seismographs and telescopes. Several cloud chambers were described, the first in September of 1952. These were of varying complexity, some made from peanut butter jars, etc.

I believe that these columns are still in print in various forms (collections published in books and on the internet as reprints from Sci. American). Not all of the project could be undertaken lightly. Particle accelerators, x-ray machines are two risky ones that come to mind.

The diagrams that accompanied the columns were notable for their clarity and ability to illustrate.
Maybe the companies I've worked for have all been unusually picky about hiring

...Or their initial screening heuristics are unusually bad and have to interview tons of candidates. Or maybe their recruiting process is really good at generating a high volume of sub-par applicants. Rejecting a lot of candidates after subjecting them (and current employees) to grueling interviews doesn't mean they're making good hiring decisions.
Eheheh, coconut meat.
Amazon EC2 documentation contains “gabrielecirulli/2048” as example (:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_docker_console.html
In some sense. If you wanted to get the government to enforce the contract, they wouldn't, so there you go, paid off.
Not so great if it takes even one full-time employee to maintain it (and any dependencies it has) on an ongoing basis, either.
True. China is an international beacon for human rights and freedom.
Theoretically, the H1B application requires evidence that the employee is receiving market-standard pay for the role fulfilled. However, there's a gradual effect over time of course when there's a lot of expats who are willing to work at the lower bound of that pay. So Re: H1B, I pretty much agree with you, and I think immigrant employee visas need to be restructured to really punish the Wipros/Infosys' that just import manslaves that are fed change to output code, lowering the average engineer's pay.

I was raising the point regarding my position because that seemed to be the thesis of the article -- for people more in my position than for employees of companies on the scale of Microsoft, etc. We are not entering the US with the objective of taking other people's jobs. The only reason I applied for the H1B was because it was the legit path with the most reasonable chance to get cleared. I think it's the wrong kind of visa for a founder to attempt to get, there just isn't a better one.

So YC and people like me are hoping for a visa similar to the O1A, except right now that is expensive to file, vague in the conditions that need to be cleared, and usually needs you to foot a fat lawyer bill too. And it's a bit of a stretch to be applied to founders. Essentially, the existing visas are all hardly different from 10-15 (or more) years ago, times have changed, and the government has done nothing to accommodate the changes in the economy.
Checks in the UK are quite cheap too - about 75p to write or receive for small business, often free for private accounts. The banks do the processing.
These are really easy and fun to put together. I'd highly recommend it for a weekend project.

Here's one that I built running with a sample of Americium 241 from a cheap smoke detector: http://bit.ly/UDWpc0

Here's a different one running with a bit of Thorium containing lantern mantle http://bit.ly/1Annrp5

You can also try with thorated tungsten welding rods and other household sources of radiation.
No idea why you got downvoted.

Such silliness really drives me away from hn.
>> This is ridiculously stupid

No, it's not. IMHO the problem is not the exact procedure, but the lack of option for the user to properly encrypt their data.
Why was this downvoted and/or flagged?
I enjoy the game. I just wish it wouldn't talk to me so much.
Youtube has a bunch of nice videos of cloud chambers. Here's a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnKvtazt5So
>> Noting of course that Law Enforcement already has access to numbers you have called and all SMS & MMS messages you have sent by subpoena to the carrier responsible for your service.

That's a poor excuse. Those calls may have been made in a different country.
Infosys pretty much single-handedly ruined the opportunities for so many non-Americans to move onwards in their career. I really hope the US does something to shut down the Infosys US sweatshops.
How to Invent a Person Online
There are a handful that seem to get touted as the poster children for viable Windows app developers. Atley Hunter who has 500+ apps in the ecosystem (currently all phone targeted but a recent podcast mentioned he was moving to Universal development so that they can run on Win 8 too), he looks for trends (like "Don't tap the white tile" type stuff) and then implements them in the Windows Phone store.

Then there is Rudy Huyn, another full time Windows Phone dev that targets the "flagship" type apps that MS is dinged for not having on their platform, think Instagram or Vine before they finally released an "official" app and now Tinder. His MO seems to be reverse engineering the HTTP apis and delivering a client app that works with those services.

I'm not aware of any Windows Phone app developers like iOS's Marco, where a single well executed app was enough to sustain a developer over a long cycle. But I could be missing somebody in one of the other markets, Windows Phone does well in GB, France and Italy among other non-North American markets.