skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quick list of more inventions that are not Tang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
And this is why I'm working in Austin, Texas, and not in California after graduation!
It is perfectly possible that the NSA really do need to damage human rights in order to fight terrorism. Just because they are acting improperly doesn't neccessarily mean that their arguments are entirely specious. The internet is hugely powerful for terrorists and the only answer the government have is to take away even more privacy. It is a slippery slope because the danger is real.

Edit. My comment was not excusing the actions of the NSA. I think that human rights should be protected at all costs and the spying should stop. I just think that a real threat probably does exist and this creates a catch 22 in a political sense.
> By definition, profit benefits society.

No.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-v4zI8gKuFug/T-vpFAjdXeI/AAAAAAAAB-...

More formally, Nash equilibria != global optima. It is not uncommon for companies to spend money destroying value for their customer -- and to profit from doing so! See: keurig DRM, speed grading in the semiconductor industry, Goldman Sachs cornering the Aluminum market, Enron shutting off power to create the infamous rolling blackouts. There are recordings of Enron traders literally giggling as they call plant managers to order them offline at times of peak load.

Profit is about leverage, but value creation is only one of many ways to obtain leverage, and it's often not a very reliable or effective way (just ask Bengali sweatshop workers). Other methods for obtaining leverage are generally "evil" and most certainly do NOT benefit society, but they are very effective, especially in industries where best-practices have long since solidified and the only way to gain a competitive advantage is a sprinkling of "black magic". The most obvious dark patterns are illegal, but the lethargic whack-a-mole from our legislative and judicial branches is nowhere near sufficient to stem the tide.
> What to Submit

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a Brian Cox show we're talking about, not a science show. I'm surprised there weren't more slow mo shots of Cox doing his "boyish wonder" face.
The drawback is that they require systematic vulnerabilities to work; therefore the rhetoric for state-sponsored malware demands systems deliberately be left vulnerable to attack, either by failing to fix vulnerabilities found or deliberately inserting them (as in by backdoors)

This has a global effect. The "enemy" uses the same things you do. A weapon to attack them demands weaknesses in everyone's armour, including your own.

They are so easily reverse-engineered and repurposed to attack you or third parties, so easily developed by low-budget or non-state actors, and so easily misattributed, that they exhibit all the same essential properties as biological weapons.

I think state-sponsored malware should be banned, by international treaty, and I say this as someone with expertise in the field.
Duke economist: Most research on why investments do well is all wrong
Our blog post about this update: http://blog.silk.co/post/101751758532/the-data-revolution-an...
I didn't say anything about violating Bell's theorem. Yes pilot wave theory is a better alternative that doesn't require spooky action at a distance but consistent histories doesn't require wavefunction collapse (which is a huge source of spookiness as well).
Thanks for being civil about this.

When I stated "substantial fraction" I guess what I mean is that it's at least 20% or 40% or something. A basic income of 5% of median personal or household income is going to be little more than a sick joke. Note I didn't say "exactly the same as" but rather "a substantial fraction"

To compare people who make millions of dollars a year to people who are eking out subsistence wages is a mistake I think. These people tend to be highly motivated and thus for them it's often not strictly about the money anyhow, but the money sure is nice as it affords them the ability to work on the thing they're passionate about. When you're making $9/hr at mcdonalds I suspect that passion has less to do with it and a need to eat and have shelter is a bigger factor.

The higher taxes go, the more incentive there is to work under the table. I don't know if the black market in the US is bigger than in Europe, but I can tell you that in the US taxes are lower and so there's less incentive. I agree that policing can do a fair amount, but what if you push people into entirely invisible jobs? It doesn't have to change MOST of the labor market, but if right now the black market is 10% of GDP and the taxes rise enough to push it to 15% or 20% then you're growing crime. I don't think that's a good outcome.

Now a great question to ask is which is worse? Would it be worse to raise crime and have a basic income? I don't know. Trying to think about the unintended consequences of policies is really hard, so few do it. I think that's part of the reason our laws tend to be so full of obvious loopholes.
Well if you're not american you're guilty until proven innocent regardless.
You should have thought of that before you decided to not be born in America.

Down vote all you want it's true. A lot of you are only mad and arguing about it because the same spying you have no problem applying to the rest of the world is blowing back in your face.
It's election day in the US. Please join the ACLU

https://www.aclu.org/secure/become-freedom-fighter-join-aclu

and remember that we can make this an issue to which politicians must be sensitive.
Plenty of the information sources linked to are free of advertising and not behind paywalls. In fact, those are probably the better information sources.

That's how the web started, remember: no ads. Just free sources of information.
Also see https://medium.com/@ivanpashenko/how-one-designer-was-learni...

How hard was it to learn Swift without much programming experience? I've had more than a little trouble figuring it out, mainly due to the cryptic error codes, but also because I just want to write Objective-C or use NSString or type @{} when I should be using String and [:] and all that.
That, or don't make your buffers contiguous unless you absolutely have to.

I did one of those classic "100X" speedups once where the buffer was growing by a set value on every expansion. Could have gotten 10X or better improvement with exponential growth, but did even better by having an interface that didn't guarantee address-based access from one element to another, so all I needed was a tracking structure for multiple smaller buffers.

Don't use an array unless you need an array's cross-element addressing leakage.
yeah, the search kinda sucks. for app discovery there's xyo.net and there used to be chomp.com - the latter one was bought by Apple, but it might be worth for you to review their story.

now, on the developer's side there are also dedicated tools for app store seo - for finding good phrases and keywords to use for positioning, and for tracking your position. That's AppCodes.com . you might also want to check out some of my slides here: slideshare.net/kolinko . we've outlined the search basics over there.
Of course there is always a way to put a negative slant on just about anything.
> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
Lost in Transition
Android job posting at Trello Inc
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoconvert-auto-c...

That may do the job
At a guess, by doing a match first on a substring using a hashtable. That way if something is a 'candidate' you can hit a more expensive datastructure to figure out if you really have a hit without burning a lot of cycles.
I don't understand. Why do you have to wonder? No offense but there is a lot of hand waving going on in your post, like this:

> Uber, being big and diversified could easily take on that risk and insure against it (or really just self insure with their scale)

Uber is a marketing channel. Why would they want to take on this risk? Why is it "right" for them to take on this risk? Exactly how easy for them would it be? How much would it cut into their profits?

> It's certainly worth thinking about more deeply than simply shrugging and saying that you can't take advantage of someone in a voluntary transaction.

I don't agree with this. It's a free choice, as free as you can get. Yes, some people have better choices than others in life. But just because I can't spend my life making exactly the choices I want doesn't mean someone is taking advantage of me.
there are other options than sensortower - like AppCodes.com. while we're not as polished, we offer a totally different approach to the process.
There will be Teslas selling for under $40k.

They're called "used Teslas".
Samsung Reports Lowest Profit in 3 Years
Interesting. The detour at the end about weed is also kind of weird. Not sure how I feel about it.

Sure, addiction of any kind is something we should probably investigate and help treat.

It's still weird to hear what amounts to a "Reefer Madness lite" scare at the end given that what I took from the article. That is, widespread drug abuse is almost assuredly a symptom of other problems (unemployment/dim prospects in the case of Georgia), and that banning harmless drugs (e.g. Subu) will just lead people to seek dangerous alternatives (e.g. Krokodil).

If the author's point is that we should look from a high level at why widespread drug usage occurs and how we can make beneficial steps towards reducing that (like increasing social mobility, as nebulous as that phrase is) then I'm on board. If it's that we should be concerned about legalized marijuana because it'll lead to glass pipes littering our parks, I'm less convinced.
Not disagreeing with the overall point of your comment, but:

> private chef

I can purchase a pre-prepared meal and heat it up in my microwave by pressing two buttons. That's pretty close!
What Not to Name Your Children
Fedora 21 Beta released
How much of a problem is using Tesla vehicles in cold climates these days? I recall adverse battery performance as a result being up for discussion a while ago.
Interesting to see so many people having problems finding the app. What's wrong with clicking the 'App Store' button and downloading it from iTunes? You can configure your iPhone to then automatically download it.

Serious question. I'm sure you all have some good reasons to not use iTunes and wanting to download it from your phone. Curious to hear what those reasons are.
If you have a copy of Windows (legally or one you are willing to use anyway), I find installing it on a VirtualBox VM more convenient (and entirely free) than Remote Desktop to an EC2. And faster.

The alternatives discussed here are for when you don't have and don't want to pay for a Windows license, and are unwilling to break the law and pirate it as part of your job.
'Magic: The Gathering' movie grabs writer from 'Game of Thrones'
I made the exact same thing: http://www.getinstabot.com

I couldn't get anyone to use it, so I think you're fighting an uphill battle. Good luck, though,
> couldn't be bothered about pursuing something that could lead to a more fundamental understanding of reality.

This seems like a bit of an insult based on a misconception. There are many things that could lead to a more fundamental understanding of reality, and many different people working on different options. There is no real reason for people to jump on this one, especially since it isn't clear what insight it could actually give.
We fixed UX based on your feedback. And implemented bulk selection of photos. Please get new update (1.1.13). Moments is meant to group photos in small clusters (photos taken in a short span of time) in a day. We're happy to receive your thoughts! Please write to us for free promo-code (qohloinc@gmail.com), as a token of gratitude for the feedback
"For example, they can be used for duplicate detection across a large data set."

From extensive experimentation with this exact topic, you have to be really careful because there's a lot of handwavey arguments or "just use openssl" but just because md5 is 33% faster than sha1 on 32 bit openssl in i386 doesn't mean whatever random platform and library combo that you're actually using will be exactly 33% by switching from sha1 to md5. Probably, someone out there has a pathological example where md5 is somehow actually slower than sha1.

MD5 is almost too good of a hash function for mere de-duping, but I have to use it because its near universal. On mysql I have the function "md5()". In clojure its "(digest/md5 "something")". On the AS/400 thankfully thats not my area of responsibility but I know its compatible with all of the above. In perl its "use Digest::MD5". The most important part is a md5 calculated on an engineering data record will always be the same hash result number no matter the source, which is very important for de-duping.

The world of programmers has some very peculiar ideas about hashes such that there is usually only one library for hashing and it often only has stuff like md5 or sha1 which is not good enough for crypto and overkill for de-duping and ID creation. The world would be a better place if as a profession we split our hashing libraries on all machines and languages into "really fast insecure de-dupe hash functions" and "really secure glacially slow crypto hash functions"
Report: Learning on the Go – tips and trends in m-learning
Highly unlikely. There is fat that can be trimmed, but the modern economy would collapse without the finance industry.
It's only a fallacy if there is no basis for the caustivie chain that results in the effect we find objectionable. That is to say, if there is no clear way to get from point A to point B, it's a fallacy. If the chain of causility from point A to point B is quite clear, it's not.
So Coffeescript for example is just a fat regex plus a call to eval?
Armadillo.cc – Free music for game dev, creative projects, etc.
Yes, although I thought the site I submitted actually had an interesting comment. The IO9 site less so, and hence in my judgement, on this occasion, the link I submitted was in some sense "better" than the raw youtube link.

I think the guidelines are mis-guided in this sense. Sometimes the original, raw content is somewhere else, but a page that points to it can sometimes add context, or otherwise enhance that original post/material.

But this is meta, and getting off-topic. To go meta-meta, I do wish there were somewhere sensible to discuss these sorts of issues.
The New Horological Machine No. 6 by MB&F
I prefer an expressive API to a smart one. Which is to say that I wouldn’t mind specifying the expected “history” up front when allocating.

I’ve been thinking of writing a library for “roles”, which would let you describe how a value is expected to change over time, and thereby encode some of the intent about what a variable or bit of code is for, with the happy side effect of helping the runtime system select fast paths.

For example, the “accumulator” role would be for values that are expected to have a property that grows monotonically, like the size of a vector or the value of a counter. For a vector, you might additionally encode whether its growth should be linear or exponential, what its minimum and maximum sizes should be, and various growth factors.

Violating a role would not be an error, though it might be slow, and in debug mode you might get a diagnostic message to help you adjust the roles in your program.

Some role-like features are already present in languages, libraries, and hardware, such as “restrict” to encode the expectation of non-aliased buffers, “__builtin_expect” to encode likelihood, and “__builtin_prefetch” to encode the intent to access a value soon.
Awesome! Please add Pivotal Tracker integration :)
A fully-associative LRU cache can have significant overhead, yes. An 8-way set-associative LRU cache, not so much.
Reaction Commerce: A commerce platform developed with Meteor
Balls has an interesting game play that I haven't seen before. The physics work very well.

My only issue is that there is no option to remove the sound and haptic feedback. I know a lot of people think the sound is an important part of a game, but I probably won't play again until there is an option to turn that off.
Show HN: Katib – A Markdown Editor for Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Hebrew
I love how professionals who work at that facility and have probably deeply understood those principles for decades still display so much wonder at seeing this experiment with their own eyes.
Can anyone confirm or deny that this new Gmail supports media queries / displays mobile emails?
I think they are mixing manned and unmanned missions.

The deadly failure rate in manned space missions is less than 1/50.

For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 deadly failures.

The Soyuz spacecraft had 2/128 deadly failures, but it's probably safer now. They have no deadly accident in space since 1971. Nevertheless, they have a few "recent" non deadly incidents in 2003 and 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...
I willingly choose to not eat it because I don't agree with the aggressive fishing natures. Tuna and other fisheries are rapidly declining. America, and the worlds, obsession with sushi is not helping matters. So that's my "dog in this fight."
This sounds just like London.
Oh my god. This is it - fantastic plugin. Thank you!
Agreed, and a similar point can be made regarding private zoos (first world citizens have access to zoos) and milk baths (most of us could afford it but we have even better hygiene products).

Some past luxuries were just fads and go out of fashion, others address a lasting need but fail to scale up and remain extravagant luxuries only available to the ultra rich, others still also address a lasting need and are transformed into something that works on a societal level.
Similar to how we Americans put foreign words in italics, no? Does that look aesthetically irritating to others?
Fall 2015
Exactly. I was frantically searching the video for this. Did they show it?
I doubt. In Japan advertisers aren't playing with a ton of different interesting fonts the way we do in the west. Rather they they play with thickness and add outlines and colors, simply because building a font is expensive, so there aren't that many to choose from, so they focus on a different approach to differentiation.
That's why the EFF are so valuable. We need EFF to have bigger presence in Europe - I think a couple of their people have moved to Berlin recently.
Neat :)

I remember there was a "Linear Hangul" movement around the middle of the 20th century or so to do away with the blocks entirely, but it didn't catch on.

I'm kind of glad it didn't because I think the blocks forcing the retainment of more morphological information is actually a really cool trait of the writing system. Basically, you sometimes have multiple options for how to distribute letters over blocks when writing down a word, and the ortography then fairly consistently prefers the variants that keep the same morpheme spelled consistently across different words. It promotes morpheme reuse and makes the writing more LEGO-like.

Purely phonemic spelling is sort of overrated. Hangul lets you write phonetically if you want to (though it's more rigid than Latin because of the block grouping forcing certain consonant/vowel patterns) but for practical use of an established language there's many other concerns.
> Rocket launch failure rate is about 5%.

That's not too far off Everest's death rate, for which customers happily line up in hordes.
If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please
don't put "Show HN" in the title. Once it's ready, come
back and share it then.

For example, blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers
can't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
SPF is an awesome and unique facility, I wish more of the public would get to see it in person.

If you want to see more of it in video, it's also where the opening scene to "The Avengers" was filmed. Plum Brook Station has a whole collection of really cool (though mostly single-purpose) buildings.
Yea, that's definitely an improvement. I would prefer if there was some sort of "cohesion" measure among the moshing particles. Groups, no matter how small, tend to stick together.
Speaking for me, always MOBI, cause most PDF's look shitty on my Kindle. MOBI can always be scaled on a font basis, while PDFs are enlarged as whole pages making them bigger than the screen. Not sure how this behaves on bigger devices like iPad Air etc....
Besides that: Technical books are not meant for E-Readers. E.g: I regret buying "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" for Kindle, cause the code snippets are hardly readable and technical books are meant being read (sometimes in a non stringent order) and worked thru, with jumping back and forth, completely different like novels.
7 Ways Social Media Can Help You Generate Leads
Certainly a lot of us know what to expect in this experiment, but the thing I never really thought about was a that the feathers would bounce back up after impact. Seems obvious in retrospect, but it was pretty cool to see.
Virgin uses the plastic hybrid, not SpaceX.
I find it interesting that Brian Cox, the presenter and avowed scientist, obviously finds it so 'surprising' as well. Maybe that's the true meaning of being a scientist, though - he doesn't truly believe it until observing it with his own eyes.
sure it's bad karma but just be flat out frank with them, apologize, forget about it, have a nice new life with Y.

US and especially silicon valley is very clear about the rules of the game, and the rules is that there are no bad moves only illegal ones.
I too though this "boyish wonder" face was phony. And yet the "boyish wonder" face will change the fate of the whole video when I show it to my 7yo. The rest is concrete and iron, not really appealing to kids, despite the potential awesomeness of the huge vacuum chamber.
Python: Why It Is a Good Fit for Data Science
Amazing expandable suitcase
And for the violently impatient, the actual drop: http://youtu.be/E43-CfukEgs?t=2m52s
The current non-prototype (/production car) record holder is the 918 Spyder with 2.2s (and a slightly higher base MSRP of $845000)
You can also use e.g. BLAKE2 which is at least as fast as MD5, while still being cryptographically strong. Win-win.
The internet is a communication method. It's powerful because it's widespread and fast, but it's not a 'tool for terrorism'. The internet doesn't make bombs or create extremism. People do that. Claiming that violating privacy is the only way to fight terrorism is ludicrous. If their goal was to make the US a lesser target of terrorism, they'd be changing foreign policy, monitoring financial flow and looking for equipment and materials. The TSA, for all their paranoia-fuelled craziness, is a much fairer way to stop terrorism than wide-spread monitoring of a communication channel.

As an aside, terrorism as a general thing isn't new. The US was founded with an act of what would now be considered terrorism (the Boston tea party). Americans are so hung up on their constitution, but they don't believe the founding fathers considered these situations when drafting it? Or did 'talking to each other more efficiently' so radically change things in ways they couldn't foresee?
Oops! Sorry, changed the title.
Microsoft accounts work with any email. Mine has always been my Gmail address, works fine. I think the reason people think you need an outlook or hotmail address is because of the example prompt text on account sign up.
Haha, wat?

edit (less obtuse): there should be less passing of referral headers, not more. Browsing is already such a leaky experience privacy-wise, we shouldn't be clamouring for it to become worse...
Valid criticism, but Blogspot is to blame here.