skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a strong possibility that technology in the future could create a massive wave of unemployment - as people are replaced by smart machines.

Of course, life could still be better overall as these machines could provide for all the necessities for the unemployed at a low cost. So the unemployed would be more like retired people.

The big question is whether people will merge with machines or whether they will be distinct. If they don't merge, the replacement issue is much more likely (with high unemployment). If there's a singularity a la Kurzweil, then the problem is moot.
Firefox:
Unable to Connect Securely
Firefox cannot guarantee the safety of your data on www.backblaze.com because it uses SSLv3, a broken security protocol.
Advanced info: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap

can we trust them with our data?
As an aside I think a vehicle like this could be developed today and fall under the FAA ultralight powered vehicle classification (weighing less then 254 pounds and carrying less then 5 gallons of fuel). This classification doesn't require you to have a pilots license!

People here might also be interested in the Mosquito Air helicopter as well. It falls into this ultralight classification and is a kit you can build in 200-300 hours. It costs about $30,000...

http://www.innovator.mosquito.net.nz/mbbs2/mosquito.asp
A Re-Recreation of Gapminder’s Wealth and Health of Nations
I would add they just came out with a drug to cure hepatitis C. That's amazing news for 3.2 million Americans with the disease, including my dad. http://www.webmd.com/hepatitis/news/20140729/pill-hepatitis-...
For some GPUS, all code runs, no nested its, just flags to turn unused paths into no-ops. All I'm trying to say is even in your example, the optimal thing we could come up with depended on the problem at hand (graphics vs general purpose). Newer GPUs are different, but still, the ridicule of his question isn't appropriate, reasoning by analogy is error prone, and the real answer to his question is probably a lot more rigorous.
It's the importance of first impressions.
FPGA tic-tac-toe
Show HN: Flash Dive – cute reflex-based iPhone game
"Jacobs Engineering Group, blamed changes in the design, plus unforeseen increases in the cost of labor and steel."

I believe that. Given the project was supposed to be done in 2010 and all those people who are good at this type of labor can earn some serious money in the oil fields springing up in North Dakota and Texas, I can see some serious increases in labor cost. We really need to start thinking about infrastructure talents in this country.
The Great Decoupling: machine learning presents an economic paradox
FYI, I talked with my friend, and apparently a similar situation happened after the Black Death in the middle ages. Since basic communication and transportation systems broke down, the rich were better off moving from country estates to living in urban areas so they could talk with each other easily. This centralization of intellectuals started giving momentum to the renaissance.

However, the situation was a bit different back then since much of the urban population had died and didn't need to be displaced.

I have no idea if similar situations happened in ancient Middle East or Asia.
Jaws dropped. Maybe having the option of adding 1-2% of luminance noise after decompression to disguise the plastic feel would make it look even better. It would look a bit different every time you load the image, though.

I would love to be able to use this today.
You're describing JIT.
Liberal Education as a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor (1997)
http://observer.com/2014/12/exclusive-new-york-mags-boy-geni...

Whoops.
Peculiar. According to https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.backblaze... they only support TLS 1.0, not SSLv3. (Though I'm still surprised by how many issues SSLLabs identifies on that site... )
GitHub print bookmarklet
> Only a fool would argue for the performance without reliability when they can get both. And with a lower total system cost.

I think that statement is absolutely true. I just think you have a myopic view about how to achieve performance and reliability. Look at Yahoo's example use cases.
Part of the problem is a lot of IT talent is more interested in building the latest social networking gizmo than solving Detroit IT problems.
It's not a parallel circuit. It's a series circuit. If you have 100 bulbs in series, each is getting 1.1V across it.

If half of them burn out (and, as the article explains, become a short-circuit), then you have 50 bulbs, and each is getting 2.2V across it.
Hopefully not ALL the mammals. New Zealand does have some native mammals. The short tailed bat [0]

[0] http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/bats/
Must not necessarily look different: use a PRNG with a fixed seed, possibly as part of the image itself. Since there's nothing cryptorelevant here, the PRNG can be a simple one and its exact parameters specified as part of the standard.
Not sure a better case has been made for Free Software in government.
Amazon's Seattle HQ partly evacuated due to bomb threat – GeekWire
I thought it was just me (I've disabled some older cipher suites in about:config). Turns out this site only supports broken ciphers (RC4 and 3DES). Ewwww.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=backblaze.com
If there was good money to be had there IT would find it's way in. If the money dried up, it'll take a long time to fix things like this.
With that and some other odd aspects of his behavior which Johnson claimed was out of character (eg starting an alterction and stealing in the store), I wonder if he was suffering from Toxoplasmosis or some similar condition. Toxoplasmosis is thought to dramatically affect an individual's appetite for risky behavior. Preliminary research suggests that as you'd expect there 's a higher seroprevalance in prison populations, but much more work needs to be done to verify this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
I hear there are also about 4 and a half million homo sapiens there, though presumably they are an introduced species.
I find BPG isn't nearly as plastic as WebP in this comparison.
It's really amazing to contrast this thread with the thread currently up about the Gates Foundation report on good news in reducing disease in poor countries. I live in the United States, I do NOT own a house (I never have), I've had several career changes (bad planning on my part, no one else to blame) but I still consider myself very well off. I have use of this amazing device called the Internet to have intellectual conversations with friends any hour of the day or not. That alone would have been unimaginable in my childhood. There has been a lot of progress, and Americans are staggeringly wealthy by any reasonable worldwide standard. Moreover, Americans are living longer and healthier lives than ever before, and mostly don't even notice that.[1] So, sure, many Americans don't have as many on-paper financial assets as they appeared to have at the peak of the housing bubble, but so what? Americans can still take care of their children, still enjoy leisure, and still change where they live and what they do for a living with a freedom unknown in much of the world. If this is what it's like to be poor in America, I have no problem with being poor. (Disclosure: I have lived outside the United States, and I have been to places with stark poverty. I have a point of comparison as I type this.)

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
Yes...the whole point of sous vide is this ....
43,000 bookmarks and 15,000 tags over 4 years. Sometime I wonder if I'm bookmarking too much.
We've basically created a connected platform that makes it very easy to connect things. You can have your web application talk to your server-side automately scripts. We've made it as simple as including some JavaScript on your web page. Our server-side APIs make it very easy to communicate with APIs and WebSites. Your Automately scripts can store data via the DataBus and they can talk to other execution jobs via the MessageBus.

Edit: Here's a very simple example http://searchproxy.automate.ly/
On Delta, you can change the URL of your boarding pass and get someone else’s
Forth programs are fairly portable across machines — I would guess at least as portable as C — although often not across Forth implementations. That's why Open Firmware drivers are written in Forth.

Macro assembly code can be portable across machines; that's how e.g. SNOBOL4 was ported to 50 different machines starting in the late 1960s, including even the IBM PC; see http://www.snobol4.org/history.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3108946 (a thread here that I posted in, before HN was apparently taken over by drooling cock-obsessed chimpanzees who can't take the time to read EVEN THE ABSTRACT of linked papers, by which I do not mean you, panic) for more details.

In effect, the coqasm approach moves portability, just like safety, from the language into a library. Normal macro assemblers (and, for that matter, C) make it difficult to tell if your application code has avoided processor dependencies. It seems like Coq might actually make it possible to prove that you've done that.
If you look at the Air Force Academy Chapel, the horizontal window bracing are almost completely eliminated when comparing BPG and the Original.
Most people equate the term "memory" with what is more accurately termed episodic memory - little movies in your head. Most people can't remember when "Christmas" was first defined for them, but they can rattle off many things about it - the date, the religious meaning, the corporate meaning, etc. This is semantic memory, and together they form your conscious explicit memory or declarative memory (there are differences between the two that are not relevant here). The brain often throws away the episode but keeps the concept, and that is what Paul is talking about here.

But there's more to it than that. Your unconscious implicit memory includes things you can't even articulate. That's the difference between the date of Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult than recomputing semantic memory.

You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With nondeclarative memory, what you don't know can hurt you.

For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as good a starting place as any.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory
Hypnotism? Does that work?
Tell HN: My new year resolution is to be a prolific StackOverflow contributor
Or in general, StackExchange contributor with a focus on StackOverflow. I will contribute elaborate answers, I will edit questions to make them clearer for people who might not have English as their first or second language, I will ask interesting questions I find, I will map questions to existing answers etc.

Overall, I will try and make StackOverflow (and StackExchange in general) a kickass platform for developers and alike. This is my new year's resolution and I will abide by it.

The only way to gauge my progress is by my score. I wish there was another way, as it somewhat sounds like karma whoring. But I don't care for the score. I will do my best, however.

Anyone wishes to join me?
yeah, not so much:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wire-built-by-ex-skype-empl...
The x265 encoder might not have Psy-RDO enabled --http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/37

It penalizes "loss of detail" like that, biasing towards (inaccurate) noise over (accurate on average) absolute pixel values (PSNR).
Agreed. Living in the age of antibiotics we (in the developed world) have quickly forgotten how deadly TB is (it was a leading cause of death just 100 years ago). Given the difficulty in developing new antibiotics (and relative lack of commercial incentive to do so) the news that they've found a more effective new drug combination (including new drugs) is very welcome.

The fact that the regimen is shorter will hopefully mean higher completion rates: a big issue at the moment as the treatment can take up to 2 years leading many patients to take incomplete courses (and of course this fuels drug resistance). In Australia we're lucky enough to have the resources to provide free treatment with mandatory monitoring by health care workers (to enforce the full course is taken), but in India, PNG etc they desperately need a cheaper and more practical solution.

Edit to add: hopefully new drugs will also help those with sensitivity to the current antibiotics. They have some pretty harsh side effects, e.g. drug-induced hepatitis is a common problem which means many patients can't tolerate the preferred regimen.
Anecdotal evidence, but I often find WD drives to be faster than their Seagate cousins, even at lower rotation speeds. I wonder if this is because of better firmware optimizations or because of higher platter density. Maybe it's both. Or maybe WD lies about their rpms ;)

Hitachi/HGST, now owned by WD, also makes really fast drives. Their 7200rpm 2.5" drives are the fastest laptop drives I've ever used, except SSDs.
Seems reasonable, though I wouldn't be a great target audience (CS major here). Perhaps you should ask people coming out of coding bootcamps? Maybe the bootcamp doesn't teach them about the interview process, finding freelance work, and other next steps?
MyVR (YC W12) is looking for full-stack engineers in downtown SF
I started reading books about an year ago - read about 16 this year and I am not sure if it just a phony hunch or a real thing but I feel reading has helped me a lot in programming.

I am able to grasp things pretty quickly, I am able to link two different things to get ideas to solve problems, and also, I have grown more confident in approaching challenging problems.

Albeit, with anecdotal evidence, I believe, taking interest in wide variety of fields may not give immediate benefits but it helps you in ways you don't imagine. The very fact about which I used to worry - not focusing on specialising and hoping from one thing to another, is what I think has helped me grow my skills in programming, in general.
This made me angry. Why does this page need any JavaScript whatsoever? Why doesn't it just use a plain ol' HTML form and some CSS?

I've been trying to come up with a benefit to the user for having javascript on the page and am drawing a blank.

>I dont know what people have against JavaScript

It's the PHP of this generation of web developers. A bunch of guys with inflated egos cramming tens of kilobytes of js into pages that need zero, all for a worse UX.
Quantum computers are impractical devices and will never be built.
I'm still not getting it. Wouldn't the pitch of the two sides be the same so how would that be useful? How do you control the pitch of two blades with a single motor?
Method for coding and decoding a data stream
The Missing Piece of the Content Engagement Puzzle
In security it doesn't make sense to ask "is it compromised?" but rather "can it be compromised?"

For that reason, I don't think "we don’t participate in blanket surveillance" and equivalent statements are even worth the pixels they take up on your screen. It may as well say "our security is endorsed by His Holiness The Dalai Lama"

The Australian government has the power under the recently passed National Security Legislation Amendment [0] to issue a secret warrant compelling access to any number of computers or networks for anything that will "assist" in "obtaining intelligence related to security". The warrant allows surveillance, as well as "addition, deletion or alteration of data". Disclosing that warrant's existence is punishable by up to 10 years in jail. This is without even considering the reciprocal spying possibilities of the Five Eyes network.

There is no equivalent in Australia to the US fourth amendment. Even illegally gathered evidence can be used in a trial depending on the discretion of the judge. [1]

If you think "we don't participate in blanket surveillance" is an acceptable response to that legal reality, I ask you to consider what you would think of a company that, when asked if they store passwords in cleartext, respond "yes, but we don't look at them."

[0] http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bil...
[1] http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12...
Tags for HN?
Has there ever been discussion of a simple tagging system for HN posts? I think only moderators should be able to give a tag, there should be only one tag per post, and I would suggest just five: "Business/ Startups", "Computer Stuff", "Science and Technology", "Society and History", and "The Arts".

It is easy to over-ontologize, and a waste of time, but on the other hand, I could then ignore everything about startups and exits, and concentrate on the weirdly good social theory discussions that cross HN but often don't make the top page because of GPU and compilers and the like. (Don't get me wrong -- compilers are cool, just saying...)
The introduced rats were a foodstuff for the Polynesian sailors who brought them to New Zealand.[1] The article mentions the exception of the bats, [edit (thanks!): and mentions stoats and ferrets being released to hunt rabbits, without specifically mentioning how the stoats] got to New Zealand. Looking up the issue,[2] it appears that several of the nastiest invasive species on New Zealand were brought in to be hunted for sport, which has turned out to be a mistake.

Where I live in central North America, I have seen and heard coyote quite near by, and I'm glad they are here, as they help cull the deer, which I have also seen at very close range in my neighborhood. (Once my third son and I happened to meet going opposite directions on our city trail just where my son had noticed a magnificent eight-point buck calmly browsing in the restored wild swamp alongside the trail.) Here it is actually important to kill native deer, as deer are the most lethal wild animal in the United States today.[3]

[1] http://www.doc.govt.nz/Documents/about-doc/concessions-and-p...

[2] http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/mammals-introduced

[3] http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-da...
Avian tree of life required 400 years of CPU time
Picat (Programming Language) 0.7 Released
That's one of the best examples of a content-free apology from customer service I've seen. Too often, the responses you get are apologetic, polite, and completely fail to address the specific issue you raised.
Never is an awfully long time.
The article suggests that stoats were brought over to try to control the rabbit population. A real forehead-slapper...
And 40 million sheep, though this is down from 70 million in 1982.
It's ok, Delta is on it! Looks like there are some good action items coming from this.

>I will share your comments with our Online Customer Support Desk Team.
A lot of people are also fond of the recreational hunting species (Red/fallow/sambar/rusa/sika/whitetail deer, chamois, tahr, goats, wild pigs, wild cattle... and maybe a tiny population of moose). They are controlled to some extent via the occasional cull, (and if they die as a result of the 1080 drops, DOC's official position is a shrug), but for the most part their numbers are kept low by recreational hunting, and economics...

...when deer population numbers get high, the animals become economically viable to harvest for meat by helicopter, so the WARO (Wild Animal Recovery Operation) flights take off, shoot all that they can, and then export it to Germany, who loves wild venison. The recreational hunters shake their fists at the helicopters, but it keeps the animal numbers at an acceptable level.
Oh wow, I had no idea this happened! And it's actually true? This isn't the typical "we've cured this" then "loljk here's why we haven't cured this" news piece?
Couldn't higher-resistance bulbs be used?
I've been thinking about this very issue recently, and coincidentally started working on software two days ago to help manage the problem of remembering things that I've read. Obtaining information in 2015 is remarkably easy. Retaining it is damn near impossible, at least for me. I read books and bookmark links from hn and reddit on a daily basis, consuming constantly. But I find that I recall very little of it. I don't know if Stephan Hawking was right about black holes destroying information, but my bookmarks folder comes pretty close. Links go in and then are never seen or heard from again. I take copious book notes and type them up, only for them to be consigned to the void of my hard drive file system. I've tried evernote and anki and several other tools, but it's always a one way ticket. My trouble isn't remembering what I've read, but remembering to remember. No matter how I've tried, I can't change my daily work flow to set aside time to review the notes and information that I've already collected, rendering it useless.

If I had a magic device that recorded all of my experiences, it wouldn't do me much good because I'm too busy collecting new experiences to be remembered. It would be great to be able to search for details and trivia, but I wouldn't have time to peruse the archive to refresh myself about things that I had forgotten completely. Much in the way that google lets us search for and recall anything, except the things we don't remember the name of.

I'm going in the direction of reminding myself about things that I previously read or bookmarked, especially as they tie in to what I'm currently reading. I think one part of the solution is to display existing bookmarks and typed up book notes to myself in a near random fashion. It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory. I think a plugin that relates past content to the current page might be a good idea, ie for this page I could see any previous bookmarks that involve memory and retention. And generally reminding myself to review things I've already learned, even if they don't seem relevant at the moment.

I don't have any great ideas yet, but I've been coding like heck for the past few days to try to take small steps toward a solution. I've been on a quest to make my brain work better, and this essay has definitely given me some ideas and helped to push me along.
Nope, only the Polynesian rat, kiore, was the foodstuff introduced by Maori. The other two species were stowaways.

Incidentally. the kiore is now endangered due to being outcompeted by the other rat species.
In case someone else is interested in this kind of work, there's an interesting line of research in certified programs that's similar to this. Basically, you specify the semantics of some language in Coq. Then, write a program in the desired language. This allows us to analyze the program in Coq and prove certain properties about it. Essentially, it's a process to develop certified programs by using the process:

language -> Coq -> prove properties

As another example of this, Sandrine Blazy and Xavier Leroy have a paper that formalize a subset of C in Coq:

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/Clight.pdf

There's also some discussion on StackOverflow about the definition of what a certified program is:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21320138/definition-of-a...

In any case, formalizing a subset of the x86 architecture in Coq means that we can prove properties about a program written in assembler using Coq, which is both interesting and impressive.
The Coming Cost of Superbugs: 10M Deaths per Year