skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why are they doing that - just because they can and it's a great headline?

if i were a google shareholder i'd rather have them return excess money than go on those pet / "greenwashing" projects
Argentina and Finland are mostly-mountain countries. The water usage there is probably lower, and it doesn't matter (it is not used up in the growing of livestock feed, it passes through), and both countries have large areas where you can't eat the crops that do grow, but cows can.

So you shouldn't take them as examples. That their meat consumption is higher probably actually saves water.
Also the search results are never based on your previous search history - so no "search bubble" (I think it's called that). Everyone gets the same results.
They say this is how they are going to run the business in the prospectus. They are fully entitled to directing their own R&D efforts.
If? We are!
Readability of the syntax of a language has nothing to do with whether it is interpreted or compiled. For example: Javascript used to be interpreted in browsers. Now it is typically JIT compiled. It hasn't changed the readability of Javascript the language at all.
Or http://meteorpad.com - the JSFiddle/Plunkr of Meteor.
Ease of use has nothing to do with interpreting/compiling. It has to do with surface syntax and familiarity. You can interpret or compile any language. You can (say) interpret code written in C. And you can compile Ruby to machine code if you want (with JIT compilation for eval).
If you have multiple front ends on top of a shared backend, like a desktop and mobile UI, as well as a bunch of third party integrations, then it makes a lot of sense to build the API first. The thing is that it requires three different use cases before you can make an API generic enough to cover the majority of the needs, and that makes it difficult to build the API first and UI later. I believe in the approach, but it's not the right way to go for everybody.
It really depends on the demand, I do plan on doing a small run myself - as I said as a kickstarter premium - that lets me test out the manufacturing support hardware (board test and programming jigs) and provide boards really quickly -if the volumes are high enough then yes, we're off to Shenzhen (I was there in May, I'll be back in December)

We have a CHEAP (~$8k) P&P machine, it's great for doing prototypes (you load it with the 10 most common components and hand place the rest) and VERY small production runs (10-20 panelised boards is probably a limit)
There is nothing stopping a compiled language from dynamically loading new code. That is what .so and .dll's are used for all the time.
Java does not represent the limits of what is doable when compiling.
I know, right?

One of these days I'll figure out the right way to explain things in writing...
Don't be so negative. Microsoft announced a partnership with Docker. And there is a lot of free software on Windows as well.
> unless somebody hacked Micah's computer

Which might be entirely possible, as Micah has done work for the EFF.
With all the buzz around SPA frameworks like Angular or Ember it's a worthwhile reminder that there's a still a lot of room in the world for more conventional server-side rendering approaches. Not every web app needs to be an SPA and old-fashioned Rails apps can be a lot simpler to implement.
Why would Cogent still have to pay VerizonT1 to transit to the local ISP if it was spun off? Cogent have their own nation wide network to transit with.
Did I really need to put a "sadly" in front?
I imagine "killer app" is no longer the understatement when your next wearable actually actively monitors your health like this. I think the privacy concerns can be worked out, and they shouldn't slow down the research.

Seeing the headline, I thought it would be an article monitoring passive signals to calculate risk scores, so I was really happy to see biochemistry. I think Google pouring funds into this kind of research will lead to some awesome advancements. It's easy to imagine a recurring revenue stream from a device like this which adds years to your lifespan. Owning a device like that actually reduces the cost of your life/disability insurance because anything that does go wrong gets discovered earlier with better outcomes. Actually, you could pay for the device out of those savings alone.

It is amazing to think what the feature comparison chart for wearables in the next decade will look like.
I suspect that this is highly related to the task being done, and the context.

Some days, I'd totally agree with you; I'm not really sure of the next step(s), and have to give myself lots of time to think about things. This tends to apply when I'm entering unknown territory, and my tasks are relatively fuzzy and uncertain.

On the other hand, some tasks are extremely straight-forward (repetitive / memory-based), and more or less completely WPM and flow-bound. Even working with relatively efficient editors (using shortcuts, macros, VI bindings, etc), it's hard to type out (or otherwise input) much more than 2000 lines of code in a day. These types of tasks certainly require efficient input, and could be greatly enhanced by even better human-to-machine interfaces.

(I'm also a programmer, and these do come from my own experiences)
No Firefox OS port?
I'm working on Google's Governance, Risk and Compliance management system.[1] Porting it to Meteor would accomplish several goals:

* clean and much simpler code base

* automatically (reactively) updated status reports on compliance across various systems depending on numerous components throughout Google in continuous flux

* ease of onboarding new developers in the team given the simplicity and ease of learning of Meteor

[1]: https://github.com/reciprocity/ggrc-core
Top Best Horror Movies for Halloween You Must Not Miss
46 Breached Databases
Galaxy, an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for Meteor apps - https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors-new-112-milli...
Meteor doesn't use two-way data binding. You have template instances, which are wrapped domranges based on handlebars templates that call helper functions (one way binding). You then have event handlers for templates that you assign to class selectors, which will be delegated to each template instance that is created. You then manually change the data within event handlers.
And they tweeted the fingerprints quite often.
the lead dev and architect for OneGet jumped on the reddit thread yesterday and answered a bunch of questions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_...

using the username : fearthecowboy (his twitter is the same, @fearthecowboy )

This was the top comment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_...
Just wondering .. maybe it's used internally by the library?
>> Why are consumers okay with paying a metered fee for electricity, water, and gasoline?

> They're not. But normally they don't have a choice.

Wait, what? Says who? I certainly don't speak for everyone, but I'm perfectly happy paying just for my usage of these things.

I think the difference is predictability and that the costs aren't astronomical if you have a high-usage month. If it's colder than usual, I'd perhaps expect to pay another 10% on my utility bill. That's reasonable and not a hardship.

If I were to spend, say, $30/mo on a plan with 500 minutes of voice calling, and went 100 minutes over, but was only charged, say, $6 for that overage, I'd have no problem with that (because 30/500=0.06 and 0.06100=6). But instead I get charged something like $20, which is way out of proportion to the overage. That's* the objection.

And I think part of it is related to an understanding of actually "using something up". When I use more electricity, I know that I actually used something up: that extra power came from more coal being burned, or more water falling from a dam, or something of that nature. When I use more water, I know that my use of it drained a reservoir a little bit more than it otherwise would. I used up a physical good, and I'm paying for that use. If I use more than what a regulator has decided is my "fair share", I might pay a premium for that extra (many utilities have tiered pricing), but I'm ok with that because I do recognize I'm using more than usual, and the added cost of the higher tier isn't unreasonable or burdensome.

But the cost of me spending 100 extra minutes on the phone costs the carrier basically nothing. Sure, if everyone did that in a month, perhaps it would strain the carrier's network (not that it would cause the carrier to spend capital on increased capacity; they'd likely be fine with more dropped/failed calls that month). In general, though, the marginal cost to the carrier when you use more minutes than your plan provides is near zero -- and yet the carrier charges an exorbitant markup for that overage.
If you're really Steven Sinofski, pretty damn amazing to see you on hn. Watching you introduce Windows 8 at build two years back, I couldn't have ever imagined seeing you post on hn or any other discussion forum for that matter.
I can touch-type on a QWERTY keyboard. For the Latin alphabet, I want a QWERTY layout even when I'm typing French or German; even when the keyboard is physically labelled AZERTY or QWERTZ. I type Korean on a 2-Set Hangul layout, but have never used a keyboard that was labelled with that layout. (Aside: typing in this layout does not generate a Unicode codepoint per keypress, but combines two or three letters into a single codepoint).

If the keyboard was responsible for deciding all this, I'd need three keyboards and I'd need to carry them around with me whenever I wanted to use somebody else's computer.
How are bindings in React not two-way? Update an input field and it updates the underlying JS object. Update the object and it updates the input field. I thought that was the definition of two-way, regardless of what happens behind the scenes.
In the same vein, there's no way to shield the user from accessing the parameters of a REST request. Which incidentally is easier to replay outside the browser than a Meteor.call().
The "15 ships" claim doesn't really pass the sniff test.
It was fixed about two years ago in October of 2012, when they added the accounts system and allow/deny rules. Since then they've added additional security features such as the browser policy package.
How about a rejected application but one that now has traction? ie live in the App Store and growing.
You can create REST points from Meteor collection very easily - http://www.meteorpedia.com/read/REST_API
I applied too, they were in a hiring freeze before 1.0 :-)
This is not always true. Arch support for ARM SoCs is good and you get a shiny new kernel with systemd everywhere:

http://archlinuxarm.org/
I have tried PowerShell a few times but I can't never appreciate it.

Yes, it technical superior than it's counterparts on Linux by piping objects instead of mangling text, but the syntax of PowerShell is just too convoluted.

I have concluded that when doing command line you want to write commands and not program code to execute.

That's why bash is usually straight on and powerful for the 95% commands you do. It's edge cases when you need to do horrible awk piping and general guess work.

PowerShell feels the other way around. Easy for the 5% edge cases, but pain for the 95% common stuff.

Yes, you can create aliases in PowerShell for the most common tasks, but then you don't really learn the powerful mechanics that you need to know.

And it does not help that you need to learn one more scripting language. Microsoft should have gone for JavaScript.

Maybe I'm missing something in the greatness of PowerShell?
This is a deliberately contrived example, the only line that matter is the last one:

sudo apt-get install firefox
Silicon Valley's “Body Shop” Secret
LOOP, HASH and MERGE Join Types
We fixed that. Thanks for pointing it out!
Why do you want to put smart features into a keyboard if your PC is able to do that with around 0,0001% of cpu capacity? Smart keyboards would need special hardware and firmware updates, and this would make them more expensive.

Nobody is forced to use cryptic key combinations like the Emacs defaults. I use Emacs for about 30 years, and I figured out quickly how I can define my own keyboard mapping, even for function keys and other special keys. Emacs has always been more convenient to me than any other editor. The same counts for terminals. Keyboard macros or shell scripts are your friend if your desktop supports them.

If you know how to handle xmodmap then you can redefine even your whole keyboard which also affects every terminal. For instance I remapped the "/" key with xmodmap so that I don't have to use the shift key anymore, in any terminal. However I don't know if xmodmap is able to handle multiple key strokes. If not then this would be a nice to have feature for a coming release.

In my opinion terminals are still one of the most productive features of a computer. Usually we don't use multiple different terminals at the same time. Usually we have one favorite terminal, and that's why custom keyboard macros and mappings are (or should be) sufficient.

I think you actually don't want a smart keyboard. You want an intermediate layer that translates your special key mapping into control sequences of arbitrary terminals, don't you?
About that map, a feature I would like is to fade spots which were scanned long time ago because WiFi access points might not last as long as cell towers. This way, as a contributor, I know in which areas to scan and, as a regular user, I know that the data for a specific area might be too old.
Darpa Circuit Achieves Speeds of 1 Trillion Cycles per Second
I used to use it a lot a few months back "mapping" my town and I had noticed that it would go at full strength even when I was staying in the same place for hours. Would it be possible to gradually slow down the collections when it detects that the user isn't moving?
Got rejected. Will continue as planned.
Getting into YC is not the goal, it is what it is - an accelerator. I am sure if I had gotten in, I would be able to take my company further faster, but with the slim chance of 3% interview invitation rate this definitely wasn't something to count on.
I did have an extra glimpse of hope when I saw my founder introduction video had a view on ycombinator.com on oct-26th (amazing how google tell you these things).
The company:
infiniRoom - Never run out of storage space on your smartphone.
sign up for beta http://www.infiniroom.com
deflation is a bad is a hypothetical, and the arguments for and against are not trivially dismissed. your trading book matters more than any theory. since the analysis is so fact depenedent, there is no simple right answer.
Flipboard showing East European language articles for HN feed
I verified it on a colleagues phone (I have an Android phone, he has an iPhone) and both of us are seeing entries from ~2 days ago and all entries are in a East EU. Every Single Article.

Is anyone else seeing this? Is this something at Flipboard's end?

ETA: A quick search of Twitter shows that I'm not alone and other folks are seeing this.

A screenshot of what I'm seeing - https://www.dropbox.com/s/xev66oishst6ox2/flipboard-cyrillic.png?dl=0
GlyphSearch: Search for icons
Status of Perl 6
It was rewritten from scratch in Vista.
This is awesome. What about a collective dev facepalms gallery?
It would be great to add a caption to the photo with an extract of the error message at the time. You could actually start a meme with that!
We too got the rejection letter. But it is perfectly understandable in our case as we are really in the early stages, without a prototype.

Any thoughts on how much a prototype and full-time commitment from all founders matter?
I am a particular fan of the infix operators, ala:

https://github.com/cosimo/perl6-digest-md5/blob/master/lib/D...
One of the readings [1] and some responses in this lecture emphasize friends of friends as the main outlet for first hires until a startup is successful enough to attract more talent. Many (most?) startups are based in SV. Do most initial hires come from those in the founders' network who already live in the Valley?

Other than recruiting at universities, has there been any other successful outlets for talent that isn't already part of the SV bubble? From what I've read, it seems poaching is very common there. Is that because there is a lack of quality developers and surplus of mediocre ones, or a lack of developers overall who are located in or will relocate to SV?

It just seems to me that the SV bubble is such a small sample (even with a higher density of talented people congregating there), and so much of the world's talent remains unnoticed and ignorant of the opportunity there. If I'm mistaken and anyone more familiar with hiring in SV can provide insight, then I'd greatly appreciate it.

[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire
My New Obsession: Simplicity and Automation in Technology
I killed my startup and published the post-mortem
I think part of that is a reaction to how many people jumped on to the client-side JS framework bandwagon very early, because it was "the next big thing", but before the tools were ready for production.

I've had to deal with more than my fair share of crappy, hacked-together Ember apps that were developed like this. There have been too many breaking changes to upgrade, performance is bad, an they're full of hacks to work around deficiencies that existed back then.

Even though we actually have production-ready frameworks now, that sort of thing can leave a bad taste in your mouth. Especially when you see the same mistakes made by people jumping onto the Meteor bandwagon, for example. But it's defintiely something to try and get over :)
Happy 50th Birthday, Dipl.-Chem. Germar Rudolf
Executing arbitrary commands on your machine?
The Apple Media Distortion Field
I believe the biggest problem for its success is that most companies don't want to give up the control a dedicated installer gives them (e.g. installing AskBar that comes with Java, as some comments pointed out).

In Linux, dedicated installers are the exception not the rule. I'm curious how the adoption on Windows will be, especially for commercial/non-free software which there is a lot on Windows.

I'm also curious how they will present the packages to the average user. Worst case, the user will have to look in three different places to uninstall software (namely System Control, the package manager, and in directories of software that isn't registered anywhere).
This is a very interesting case, indeed.

I think YC used to accept awesome teams with (seemingly) bad ideas. Which is only partially like your example. But I don't believe they are doing it now with so many applications (40% more than S14).

Anyone has any examples pointing the other?
You mean that right click on the window chrome then select 'mark' then select text then right click window again and then choose 'copy' isn't a good user interface?
You still need JavaScript on the client, so you have to switch context between Python and JS if you're a single dev, or have different team members work on the client vs. the server. Meteor is JavaScript everywhere.

Anyway, Meteor offers much more than data binding and client syncing. See http://www.meteorpedia.com/read/Why_Meteor
Will this work with WiFi-only tablets? I'd like to contribute but my Kobo Arc device is marked incompatible. I saw in the screenshot on Google Play that there is a WiFi-only report symbol.
most of the time google collects data it is because users want this data to be collected.

If Google would not store emails on their servers, people would leave Gmail and go to a service that does. If Google would store emails, but end-to-end encrypt it, people would leave gmail and put their data to a service with a working spam filter.

Google Now is very popular and a reason why people use Google services.

For Googles revenue it is far more important that people use their services (and therefore watch ads), then it is to create "better ads".
I say that because nobody seems to get "smart ads" that are actually interesting to them. Googles gmail ads are little more than "if word is used in conversation, show product related to word".
But why "Install-Package", "Add-Package" and "Update-Package" - it's not like you can install, add or update anything else with this tool.
I don't believe it was borrowed as it is something that is definitely taught in courses. I remember learning it at some point early on in my mathematics education.

I definitely know I knew it by my vector calculus course (2nd year) where we use the various named theorems to translate between the differential and integral forms of Maxwell's equations.
There will probably be a GUI for it, called an "App store".

Windows Vista had a command-line package manager, although it was rather lame. It was a kludge to feed canned answers to installer prompts.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748979%28v=ws.1...
Send a Personalized Message to Your Friends
I saw Eric Schmidt's quote "By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded" and stopped there.
By default, Meteor spawns a Mongo instance, with its own DB stored in the app directory, and your data is stored there. No database configuration necessary. Of course, if you have an existing Mongo DB, you can point your Meteor app to it.
This is a really interesting battle, because MCX's CurrenC looks like an utterly horrible piece of shit that was almost certainly doomed to fail even if Apple had never come up with anything in this space.

http://www.imore.com/depth-look-currentc-and-personal-data-t...
> While Windows and Mac users have to run graphical installers — you know, where you hit Next a few times and try to avoid installing bundled crapware — Linux users can just open up a command line and type sudo apt-get install vlc.

Right. As if VLC on windows comes with crapware.

As if apt-get [0] never asked cryptic messages [1].

[0] or yaourt or any other package manager

[1] and it's more about the package than the package manager
Welcome Windows10! What next, maybe a network oriented display manager to be able to open a window on another pc, phone, tablet, xbox? ;-)
Do you really get a modern kernel on the Samsung Chromebook (v1)? Last time I tried, Arch still stuck with their hardwired 3.4 kernel, IIRC.
It's adding a debian-compatible repo (from Linux Mint Debian Edition) in order to replace Iceweasel (firefox without the branding) with Firefox (firefox with the branding). Firefox's branding is incompatible with Debian's licensing requirements, and they amicably split the branding years ago as a result.

The example was intentionally selected to be as obfuscatory as possible, in order to be a troll. Most of those commands are about adding a repository rather than installing software, anyway (and the four lines involving gpg are usually done in a single line)
Yes.

Additionaly - developing countries are developing because they started to polute later. They are now punished again by being prohibited from abusing einvironment the same (cheap) way that developed countries did before.

That means rich countries will remain richer than poor countries because they can afford massive investment into infrastructure to switch to cleaner alternatives, while poor countries will need to adjust by using less power, producing less goods etc.

You basically ask poor countries to be poorer to stop effect that doesn't matter to many of them (or even could be positive).

Without artifical incentives it will be VERY hard sell. And right now the only incentives proposed are negative (tax on CO2 emmision).

What if developed countries PAID poor countries that would benefit from global warming to switch to cleaner energy sources? But that's taboo as well.