skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Columbus, when he sailed West, used as reference a number of maps sourced from the Chinese empire (among others)... In particular, he might have used the 1492 Martin Behaim globe as his primary reference. [0]

The Martin Behaim globe shows Cipangu, which is actually the Japanese island of Kyushu as depicted by the Chinese. It also show part of Indonesia. Worth noting is that when Columbus sailed West, he was not looking for "the Indies", but for Cipangu, described by Marco Polo as "the land of gold". [1]

So it seems that Piri Reis compiled recent south-american data together with older asia-pacific data. The so-called "antartica" part of the Piri reis map appears to match Java as shown on world maps of the same period. Mystery solved, I guess... (check for yourself by comparing the Piri Reis map and the Martin Behaim globe).
This is supported by the fact that the Piri Reis map also seems to show Cipangu off North America, and describes the "antartica" land at the bottom as a warm land.

Anyway, the outlandish claims of the article about the extraordinary accuracy of the map are complete BS. Check it yourself. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#mediaviewer/Fil...

[1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2008/07/27/to-be-sorted/cip...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Piri_rei...
Department of Homeland Security safekeeping deadly virus samples
Humans are incredibly resourceful when pushed into a direction.

See the average consumption of gasoline/diesel fuel for cars in Europe especially over the last 3 decades. And to make things even more impressive, graph out the average horsepower, weight and overall features added to cars in the same time frame. A car these days uses 1/3 the fuel it used to use in 1980 while having probably 2x the horsepower and 10x as many features, many of which have greatly improved passive and active security.

Of course, not all improvements are good, but the overall trend is nice.
I disagree. The technology needs to be fundamentally different before we can have viable, distributed, alternatives.

We've had crypto for a while and yet nobody encrypts their email by default (or even shares keys). We've had the option to self-host for a long time but few people do. Why? IMHO it's because doing any of these things means you have to become a sysadmin to some degree. Very few people will put up with that for long.

There need to be tools which solve the fundamental (and common) problems of creating distributed systems/applications -- identity, connectivity/sync, deployment. With those tools, new and robust alternatives can be built with the end-user at the centre of their network. Without those new tools, we're simply using band-aids.
Top 5 “First” Discoveries In Astronomy (Along the History)
The European air traffic control body, Eurocontrol, said Ukrainian authorities had banned aircraft from flying at 32,000ft or below and the doomed aircraft had been cruising above that, at 33,000ft – however this apparently still left it within range of the sophisticated surface-to-air weaponry that pro-Russia forces have been using recently to target Ukrainian military aircraft. All civilian flights have now been barred from the area of eastern Ukraine.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/mh17-pressure-o...
Manual compilation, wget+installpkg on precompiled packages (whether by AlienBob or anyone else), sbopkg without queue files/with queue files, slapt-get/slapt-src, the FTP repository that can be queried from slackpkg, etc.

Most of the time I use slackpkg to apply updates and version upgrades, sbopkg for third-party software by handpicking the dependencies, and precompiled packages for software with lots of dependencies that are tedious to sort.

It's clean, easy and avoids the bloat of unneeded packages lying on your system.
> There was a new version based on the Civ 4 engine (http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/colonization/) but it wasn't as good as the original.

It was absolutely terrible, I got it and was crushed by how bad it was. It felt like a Colonization-themed Civ IV (which I guess is what it was), rather than a Colonization remake.
Cyber Security Expert – Job Interview
Following your off-topic lead and lacking anything on-topic to say...

It seems to be very factual and describe what is with no editorialised position on whether anything is good or bad which reduces the opportunity for an exchange of valid viewpoints.

It might be that the article is interesting but without people feeling knowledgeable enough to add much. And if the article doesn't make any significant errors the knowledgeable people won't jump in with corrections.
Math can make the Internet 5-10 times faster
Hard as a rock, and keep staying here.
Good job Patrick Volkerding!
What's hiding behind these giant holes on the Moon?
FWIW, This looks terrible for my jenkins logs:

font-family: monospace;

http://i.imgur.com/da3TbE8.png
HoMM games are not 4X. They're great[0], but they're not like Civ at all.

[0] Though I prefer the King's Bounty remake[1]

[1] Although 1C is excessive in its milking, Armored Princess + Crossworlds had a somewhat better balance and interesting new units wrt The Legend, but Warriors of the North got seriously long in the tooth, felt like "well we'll just reskin a few units and change the magic/rage balance and call it a day
I suppose quantum computing presents one of the few exceptions? And on the other end, distributed systems? Where else is new ground being explored? Cross functional work?
We don't have that compatibility. Even BSDs and GNU/Linux on x86 have completely different calling conventions (ordinary C ABI vs registers + ptr to memory).

Edit: also Linux is made with completely moronic way to return errors (it uses some negative values as errors).
Nobody beats the US though. They shot down a huge passenger aircraft and then claimed they thought it was an F-15.
But Polymer depends, for example, on Shadow DOM, which is currently only supported by Chrome, Opera (Chrome-based) and Android browser - not even by Firefox yet (http://caniuse.com/#search=shadow%20dom). There are pollyfills but they're too slow to treat them as a viable solution.
Squishy Robots
Looks like a possible add-on feature for http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/
I personally agree completely, but in the interest of knowledge and learning- how do we avoid conflict re: energy security?
Great device, great idea! Please allow orders from within the EU... That would be awesome!
In terms of 'overcrowded'ness, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong all have greater population density than China[1], yet they all experienced income growth to first-world levels without need for any population control. What evidence is there that the one child policy 'significantly contributed' to raising China out of poverty?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...
It's definitely true (I used to be a UK cop). While there are situations where you can de-arrest someone after arresting them, it's rare, and you do not need to place someone under arrest to detain them. Many (minor) crimes are not "arrestable" offences, for instance a cop cannot arrest you for littering. However he can detain you while he ascertains your identity in order to issue you with a fixed penalty notice (ticket), after which you are free to go and have not been arrested/de-arrested, merely detained. If you refuse to co-operate by giving your details, or he believes you may have given false ones that you can't back up with ID, he can then arrest you under PACE regulations and take you to the station to confirm your identify. But he can't arrest you for the littering. But he can detain you briefly.

On the police shows you mention, when the officer stops a car and takes the person into theirs to check their driving license, search them etc. they are detaining them. Only when they tell them they are under arrest are they actually under arrest, and they need reasonable grounds to suspect them of an arrestable offence before they can do that.
On the state of Free VoIP
spam blog, just google any paragraph and you will see
Actually, it's more like a lady's inner thighs... (y) ;-)
And if Ukraine stops fighting now ... all will be solved. Oh wait.

Besides if we got rid of "self-damaging instincts", there'd be other, equally horrible problems we'd hit. Competing, of course, is why evolution works, and thus if life, as a whole, got rid of this "self-damaging instincts" we'd be nothing but simple bacteria, if that.

And the problem with statements like this is that they're not really moral. Neutrality is nothing more than a vote that says the strongest party can do whatever it wants.
How does it work? Is this like an online Photoshop? Or you have a staff of designers making designs for people? Or it's a list of prebuilt templates? Or what?
A lot of dupes were removed, but not the original discussion :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8048083

(doesn't have a reference to MH17, no idea where B772 comes from)
What I gathered is that Polymer, at this time, is simply not ready or even intended for production use; it's an experimental technology aimed to implement the Web Components standard, which at this time is still heavily under development. Polymer is aiming at the future, and as such will only become usable in the future.

It's also not intended to support older browsers; I'm okay with that.
All recent wars are about energy (oil, gas, etc.) This is all very ridiculous as we're living in an endless ocean of energy. Not to mention the toll on our environment that those primitive energy sources cause. Instead of putting efforts into super volcano event prediction, meteor shields, and other things that can help us prevent the plethora of possibilities for an extinction event, little people with shortsighted and pathologically egoistic vision are controlling this planet. We need people like Elon Musk in charge - people who want to take our civilization to the next level, not because of some personal agenda, but because this is how they find happiness, and not let us rot in wars, diseases, and poverty, which hasn't improved much in the last century. A new order is needed, the so-called "democracy" is defunct and it only promotes populist politicians that promise to the dumber majority things just to get elected and shortly after election they forget their promises. Look at Obama - he promised GMO labeling and other things, which completely forgot about. I think all politicians should face criminal charges if they don't follow their pre-election promises. This way, they will be very careful to promise things they truly believe in and that can really happen. I really like Jacque Fresco's vision about the next level of society that has scientific advancement as the leading goal. Conveniently, the America's leading goal for the past decade has been "War on Terror", which is a convenient vicious circle as with all wars for oil and enforcing petrodollar hegemony, all America does is fuel terrorism! It's like being a firefighter and an arsonist at the same time - you'll never be out of a job. I think some people in Washington got too afraid that Russia was becoming a good guy, and gaining momentum, and spurred the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine to keep the convenient Cold War going on.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bogvv78h5ae010b/AABjUkWizX_eb6G3R...
Please note that these were shot with an early version of the app (bizarre aspect ratio + green line at the bottom...)
Getting started with Vagrant using Boxupp
The plane fell on the pro-russian "independent" part of Ukraine self-proclaimed as Donetsk People's Republic[1]. If the Kiev government wanted to get where the plane fell, as it stands now, it'd have to be a military incursion into enemy territory.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donetsk_People's_Republic
Google Imagery: Cost-effective, accurate imagery for your operations
The US use of SSN seems strange to me, given that the UK equivalent ("NI", national insurance number) isn't nearly as commonly asked for. You need to give it to your employer and sometimes your bank and that's it. Healthcare has its own numbering system, but I've no idea what mine is and it's been years since I needed it for anything.
R3 bindings for Node.js
Zhen De Shou Fat Loss Capsule Weight Loss Slimming Diet Pills official site
Vishnu Manchu
Burst capability is 10,000 TPS. I'm not sure how up-to-date this information is anyway.
I LOVE Topkapı Palace, it's gorgeous. Have you been?

I had an amazing tour guide who, among many other things, explained how everything had two layers of security (at least) built in. For instance, eunuchs in the Harem were always black just in case the castration was botched - that way, you could still tell the child was not the Sultan's. A bit more here: http://jmilton6000.wordpress.com/2006/11/23/the-harem-and-th...

Talk about redundancy.
Orthanc, free software for medical imaging, celebrates its second birthday
I think the employees who will get fired will receive a decent severance and they shouldn't have a too hard time finding a new job - especially the technical employees.

Also what you describe - reducing wage pressure and taming the employees - is something a company ruled by MBAs would want all the time, so I don't see what is has to do with the economy recovering or not.

In my opinion they just want to cut down the fat.
I suffer from a condition called visual snow.

I realized about ten years ago that what I was expering wasn't normal. The condition was completly unknown at the time and I got multiple MRI's, my eyes and nervous system checked out from every angle and there was nothing abnormal.

Talking with many people I know it turned out that this condition is surprisingly pretty common, though in a mild form. People told me they saw some form of constant noise too but dismissed it as normal.

Your article got me to check the condition out again and it turns out there is new research from May identifing something wrong with the brain of people under the condition.

It's nothing life threatening like you're story, but still it's something you have to learn to live with it's there 24/7 even when you close your eyes and can be imparing at night.

http://www.eyeonvision.org/news/107-visual-snow-research-stu...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow

Sadly I'm not in the US and there don't seem to be any research studies in Germany. Therefore I want to shout out if anyone on HN suffers from this condition, maybe hasn't even realized it because it manifests in mild form. You can all help the understanding of the condition.
another mystery: https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197704/al-idrisi.and....
So it didn't occur to either the Ukrainian authorities or Eurocontrol that due to the existence of advanced weaponry and the remote possibility that either faction could gain access to them, civilian flights should be barred from that airspace? Was the economic impact of rerouting flights so high that they were willing to take the risk with civilians?
Microsoft's TV division to close, a month after debuting its first show
I remember downloading the disks over a 14.4 modem... It was my first Linux, and I was head over heels in love. Here was a system where I could dig around and learn stuff and explore and get the source code to all the stuff I was running and see how it was put together. That was such an exhilarating feeling! I still love using Linux and think it (or something similar like a BSD) is the best system for a hacker.
There is another similar app, DollyCam: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dollycam/id449577531

Has been available for quite a while, and works on iPhone 4.
Well, AIDS/HIV has always had this reputation of being created by man (didn't do any research on it personally though, so this is based purely on word of mouth, I guess). So when I discovered the news it occurred to me that it's quite a big coincidence that the leading scientists die in a plane crash, especially now, that we're starting to see some people getting successfully cured of HIV.

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted above.
OK! That's pretty vague, and could be anything!
That's a good analysis. Interestingly, Apple also seems to be a services company (with their iTunes system and iCloud) but their iCloud system in particular seems to be a service that only exists to help their devices. Pretty clever.

I will wait to see what Microsoft does. As you say, for them to be truly "devices and services" only, that would be a massive change. And not what people expect from Microsoft..?
Because of the guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

For me, the "interesting" thing means a deeper knowledge of some facet of the world, not shallow reporting of breaking news.
Please explain better ways for a syscall to return an error that negative status, and explain how OS other than Linux get it right.
'Brilliant Minds' Perish in Malaysia Airlines Crash
It gets a bit worse than that I believe, officially to this date the blame is still on Iran for flying an airliner according to it's flight plan and in the commercial traffic corridor.
I wonder if xmpp + jingle is a more realistic goal for free/self hosted VoIP these days?
The majority of possible artificial intelligences will assign positive utility to their existence. See Omohundro 2008 on convergent goals: http://selfawaresystems.com/2007/11/30/paper-on-the-basic-ai...
For similar reasons, superintelligent AIs will be unlikely to care much about things like your favorite flavor of candy, except insofar as they affect the AI's instrumental goals.
I've heard this "there are no more big changes left." Perhaps folks in the Valley are too close to the change to see it.

Universal mobile connectivity is huge.

Instant access to the world's information is huge.

Instant access to each other is huge.

Geolocation is huge.

Right now we're just seeing ripples on the surface, but industries are being eaten. Modern financial services couldn't operate without this technology. You can't compete with P&G and Walmart without this technology, because they are masters. The propoganda behind wars now happens on Twitter.
I think it's very hard to generalize about these things. There are as many traps as there are insights when looking at stories retrospectively. It's not necessarily clear if an ocean is blue or not (red?).

First, satisfaction is hard to judge accurately in retrospect so it's hard to say things like 'people were not really satisfied with search at the time'. There were search engines before google. People thought they were pretty good. Google showed them otherwise. People were famously happy with shoulder mounted boom boxes for portable music before Walkmans came out.

Google could be surpassed the same way if a new search engine (or new way of finding things online) took off. If it's a feature in the search engine, they could add it, but if it's something that interferes or competes with their various goals like advertising clicks, or social media stuff they might be in trouble.

These things are by definition hard to speculate about.

Facebook's market was not a 'new market' depending on the narrative you subscribe to it either evolved from a a college hot or not site or it took over a market that Myspace was dominating.

Whatsapp is competing successfully in a fairly well defined and mature market. So is Waze. Timing was really important in both these cases.

Is Waze a new market (social maps), a merger of two markets (maps + satnav) or a small but feisty shark in a bloody red ocean?

If a new site called furkl.me came out with a look up site for people that worked really well and people started furkling instead if googling their blind dates, is that a blue ocean (people lookup) or a red ocean (google/search)? What if they quietly added companies to the mix? Then products?

It's hard to tell the difference between a beachead into an existing market or a new market.

'Blue vs Red Ocean' is very similar to 'penetration vs differentiation' that's always been in the Marketing 101 textbooks. It's mostly related to pricing strategy. The synopsis is that you can either price competitively, maintain a low margin and focus on efficiency and try to get volume or you can price high, focus on differentiation and sell less.

You can be Dell or you can be Apple, but you can't be both. Differentiation is good for new markets or niche players in established ones. Penetration is for big players in established markets, or those who aspire to be.

The big difference in startup world is that software has no marginal cost, it's often free and 'business models' are only occasionally based on charging people money in exchange for a good or service. That means pricing strategy is not conventional.
Δωρεάν Αξιολόγηση Ασφαλείας
47% of US jobs under threat from computerization according to Oxford study
Cat feeder uses facial recognition to monitor how much your pet eats
I started doing exactly the same thing about a year ago and I'm very happy about it. I immediately click either "Archive" or "Trash" on all messages that don't need a response, so I currently only have 7 emails in my inbox waiting for action. It's mentally quite relaxing.
The Importance of Communication Within Your Business
They also add a lot of value to the companies along the way.

If the partners instead created a high tech strategic consulting firm, what would their daily rate be?

This method allows them to share the upside and downside of the advice, as they help choose who can get the most benefit from it.
Yes, this is my bad. :) I added an issue to GitHub about it: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/14

Pull requests welcome!
I can't answer your direct question as I'm not an investor but seed investments are often convertible notes that do not convert to equity with further funding. Essentially they become low interest loans at that point. Investors would obviously prefer to have equity in the company and equity at a seed stage level might place pre-mature valuation on the company that is often disadvantageous.

If you expect to be profitable and do not wish to raise, venture debt or other means of capitals might make more sense. Alternatively being profitable does not mean you shouldn't raise. Raising capital helps with bringing on board investors and mentors you otherwise lack access to, capital to accelerate growth, etc.

Unless you expect insane growth and profit without the need of new capital, chances are anyone investing would want the company to scale up quite large.

Again, as a disclaimer, I am not an investor but this is just what I understand being in the startup game for some time.
I didn't realize it was a conference in which about 25000 people participate. Then losing 100 experts all of a sudden sounds much less critical to the research field than the article suggests.
He wrote

either :: (LoginError -> Text) -> (Text -> Text) -> (Either LoginError Text -> Text)

But shouldn't it be

either :: (LoginError -> Text) -> (Text -> Text) -> (Either LoginError Text) -> Text
How well does this handle stuff like inter-column spacing?
Without making a judgement on weather or not it is or should be legal, it's sadly common to plagiarize or outright copy without conscience amongst marketeers, especially the smaller firms.

I have conversations with (often the same) marketeers that they need to purchase the $9-99 font they've used in their design on almost every project. They send me copy often verbatim copied from the website they are "taking inspiration from". There is unsurprisingly little integrity in the industry. Bigger firms is sometimes slightly better since they have lawyers cracking down on this kind of behavior.

Source: I work for a software consultancy that primarily work with marketing firms.
Micro-disassembly of a DVD player
21 of the Best B2B Growth Hacks
What the happen here and topic going wrong ??
"and you get award-winning documentary shots right from your phone"

Please tone down the hyperbole.
Time to start drinking!
Catch Of The Day waits 3 years to inform customers of breach
A guy played Civ 2 for 10 years, the result is a world like in 1984: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playi...