skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Growing up this was a huge question that nobody knew the answer to. I don't remember the first discovery of water but I do remember reading one after another water finding. Back then water = life and if we found water it was very likely we would find some form of life. I've already read articles talking about microbial life but I think we will soon discover a variety of living forms.

That being said I don't think our solar system contains a more advanced being than humans. But what life, in some form, demonstrates is that it is possible, in some place very far away, there are living beings as advanced or more than we are. I would really love to be alive to meet them.
Hackr.io – Share and Discover the best programming tutorials online
Great story! That's what I love about immigration - bringing people like you here. America needs people with your attitude.
Watches are boring; instead they should make a Curta mechanical calculator with this level of quality.
I'm fairly certain I have a long term disability rider on my life insurance policy. In my opinion you should look into doing something like that.
I have a feeling that a clearly written document would still have drawn criticism. If someone parsed the original to prove a point then nothing would be acceptable.
Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon reviews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614 .
While the conventional justification for statutes of limitations is to protect the defendant from late claims - something that I would agree would not make sense here -, in some countries - this certainly applies in Norway, for example - part of the argument for statutes of limitations is to give society a chance at closure by increasing the chance that a perpetrator that has been able to evade justice will be willing to confess in some form or other.
> What has to happen is there has to be near unanimous backlash against loud b.s. talking assholes.

This is basically every VC out there who maintains a social media presence. They just shout and scream how great the teams/products they just invested in. As if yelling and screaming will force these ventures to success.
Even trying their hardest, decisions made by "less intelligent" people will be bad.
Could also check out api.ai they do a pretty good job of voice recognition into machine commands.
New Crypto-Ransomware Targeted the Gamers
Om is over engineered, Reagent takes the simple-made-easy approach.
Maybe a find-as-you-type/autocomplete search engine running on a free text field would help. Doctors have to type less, and the software would display a giant confirmation of the parsed medication name, dosage, and schedule for them to confirm (instead of the software guessing later).
Or the claim is highly probable, if bad policy was systemically painting peaceful people as felons. If so, what then is the root cause of the harm?
"If you are interested in being part of a limited-participation beta ahead of the SDK's public release"

Then why would they make it public?
I really hope the bank gets a lot of bad publicity out of this.

Marketing opportunity for other banks to jump on the bandwagon and share there public keys on social media.
Why Apple Watch and Smart Watches Are Just Mobile Evolution
I'm old. I was told to learn COBOL.

But Java is just 21st century COBOL, really.
It's a sight better than signing a whole NDA. And it's no different a situation than all the other APIs we have to deal with in Android or iOS. You gotta fight the right battles at the right time.

But yes, I believe the System.Speech.Recognition namespace wraps WSR. But given that it's in the System namespace, it should be a part of the ECMA standard for .NET. Aaaaaand, yep, it appears it is available in Mono, so I assume they are managing the cross-platform dependency issues for you.
tl;dr

- Biologist offered €100,000 to anyone who could prove that measles is a virus.

- The biologist believes the illness is psychosomatic.

- The reward was later claimed by a doctor who gathered evidence from various medical studies.

- The court ruled that the proof was sufficient.

- Biologist has to pay up to the doctor.
They could perhaps replace the 'movement' - what an odd name for a fully electronic watch.
A similar thing happened with the red meat industry.

From the first food pyramid evidence was already showing intake should be minimized, but the lobby fought back, and the pyramid was changed.

You will notice that the current food plate still carefully avoids saying anything at all about red meat: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/food-groups/protein-foods.html

Compare & contrast against the evidence-supported http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-p...
Depends on the registrar. As a registrar I can tell you that we would bend over backwards before allowing a domain to go this route.

Also there is very little practically that prevents a registrar from putting in valid whois info (event their own info) and holding the domain on ice until the registrant shows up (if they want to for some reason that is). There is nominal carry cost vs. the aggravation of doing the wrong thing.

And there are cases where no whois info at all appears and ICANN is ok with that. There is a domain that I am trying to get now for someone that is at godaddy. The registrant (fearing a UDRP) told godaddy to delete the domain. Godaddy didn't do that they removed the name from whois so "no match" appears. Not kosher but they do that and ICANN doesn't seem to mind. They will wait 30 days and then sell it to us for $24 backorder fee. To me that makes more sense time wise then taking it up with ICANN (and I have high level contacts at that organization that I can tap but for $24 why bother?)

Back to the issue of invalid info. Typically the process would start with someone filing the complaint form with ICANN. Then we get notified by ICANN and get time to fix the problem. De facto, we can populate the whois with whatever we want and reply back to ICANN "problem fixed". ICANN will then reply back to the person who filed the complaint "problem fixed" (to simplify things). Can't vouch for what others may do, this is what we have seen happen.
The alternative would be for the governing class to be the most intelligent of the country.

I would rather be governed by a few intellectuals than by a stupid majority.
I guess the dream of a scientocratic society proactively punishing ignorance won't materialise. Denying evolution? 10 lashes!
In google chrome it reaches out to google to do the recognition.

.NET seems to be built on the technology that has shipped with Windows for a while, and yet Cortana etc still reach out to the mothership for their speech recognition, so there are probably significant benefits to doing so, otherwise someone would have made theirs work offline and touted it.

I'm guessing that matching a pre-specified pattern with some amount of error is easier than transcribing arbitrary voice, which you need for search.

But I definitely agree, I regularly wish I could stop google maps' directions with a voice command when I get to a part of a route that I already know well enough to complete myself.
Magento SEO tips: common mistakes to avoid
Web cache version, since the site is down for me:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p...

While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only books...

Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.
>Is having to learn a game engine going to be faster than starting from the ground up?

Yes, pretty much by definition, since a game engine saves you the time of writing an engine. ;)

Unity[0] and Game Maker[1] both come with tutorials which will show you how to build a basic game quickly. Game Maker uses its own properietary scripting language called GML, and Unity lets you do scripting in Javascript, C++, and Boo, which is basically Python. Also, attempts are being made to integrate Clojure support in Unity as well[2]

On the other hand, if you like actually writing the code, there's a good chance there's a low-level framework (like SDL[3] for C++) which will let you code, but still take care of some of the hassle of cross-platform support and graphics. I've only played around* with SDL and C++ but there are quite a few tutorials for it.

Also worth mentioning is Construct2[4], a game engine for html5/js. It is possible to do 3d rendering in javascript/html5[5], but as far as I know, only Chrome supports it well. Last I checked you have to change the config settings in firefox to allow opengl rendering to work and I just assume IE doesn't support it by default.

If you want to work with 3D and want to get something done then Unity might be a good idea, although of course you're going to need good models, etc. Game Maker supports 3d but it's primarily for 2d.

[0] http://unity3d.com/

[1] https://www.yoyogames.com/studio

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJr_TD1BtF0

[3] https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php

[4] https://www.scirra.com/construct2

[5] http://www.ambiera.com/copperlicht/

*I've got some of the basics for Space Invaders done, and it's taken a while, after getting bogged down with creating a spritesheet manager and an entity component system, but I have a thing and it shoots bullets, and that's nice. John Carmack won't be taking my calls anytime soon.
How does that bounty work legally? Publicly( if a website counts as such ) declaring a reward for something isn't a legal contract.
Is it still true that all of the developers on the project are volunteers?
The one thing that fellow big companies never get is that people find it anyway (see, Snapchat)
Accessing Apache Cassandra in a Reactive Way
> H1B is not a problem for America or "engineer's wages". Abuse of the system is.

I'm sympathetic. I really am. I have a lot of friends working on visas, both now and in the past. But I just don't see the economics of this. How can adding hundreds of thousands of people in any field not depress wages, at least in the short-to-medium term.

Why do I care? I want young Americans to go into IT and engineering in general. They are becoming more interested because wages and job security have been improving (at least relative to other careers, I'm not sure about in absolute terms). If we open the valve and flood the market, wages will be affected. Maybe they won't shrink, but maybe they'll be stagnant. And maybe the job security isn't quite as good.

When I was in school, many people didn't go into IT because investment bubbles and trends in offshoring made IT work seem like a bad bet. There was skepticism that IT would provide a good long-term career. I don't see how importing hundreds of thousands of technology workers won't do the same thing.

So, again, I really want people all over the world to have opportunities, but I feel my concerns should be for the future of the young people around me. They don't have another America to move to when their prospects get stale or bleak. They're already here.
I'm not sure how much we can conclude from a sample of HN comments.
YC Digest – 3/6-3/12
Disclaimer: I'm an AWS employee

"If you are interested in being part of a limited-participation beta ahead of the SDK's public release"

It says right there that the SDK is going to go public. Can you blame them for wanting to slowly ramp up their API capacity and not have a sea of devs whining every time their early beta API changes? Why must everything be evil?
I filed a complaint with the BBC over their use of the word “sceptic” in place of “denier”.
The First-Ever White House Demo Day
Thanks these valid concerns. We would certainly like to improve the discover functionality in GitLab. Right now https://gitlab.com/explore is pretty limited. But the community is actively working on this. This month we introduced a commit calendar and I'm sure that it will improve further over the coming months.
Perhaps it is in Germany?
There will obviously be a distribution of people. But those who haven't upgraded from XP yet are more likely to find changes disruptive. You should have heard stories about installing alternate browsers and having to change the icon to that of Internet Explorer, because users know the IE icon is how you "connect to the Internet".

Similarly the complaints about the MS Office ribbon interface are rarely about its actual functionality, but rather about it being different than before.

You are right about phone upgrades, but they are far more incremental with only regular small changes across apps and the phone OS. That is far easier to adapt to, than the OS and apps all changing after years of no changes.
Apache Kafka 0.8.2.1 release
The problem isn't unique to Amazon. The same thing happens on the App stores. It really does seem like it's high time something were done about it.
Time is still something we don't fundamentally understand. All we have is the instant when we do some kind of analysis in our heads of events and try to make a decision about time as it relates to those events. "Time flies when you're having fun", but it also flies when you're working hard toward a deadline, and while sleeping!

The title gets it right -- time "feels" slower because "time feels X" is as good as science gets right now.
I thought Broken Age was fantastic, although I missed the original announcement and picked it up normally through Steam.

I think the puzzles are only underwhelming in retrospect. I would have like the game to be longer, but the visuals and audio were really top notch. I found the story to be really superb as well.
Why not just go for a million dollars? It worked once before and I've always thought there was no reason why it shouldn't work again after the original faded from people's memories.

I still don't get why businesses go for this but I guess I've never completely understand the advertising market.
I have 7 invites. contact is also on my profile.

edit: they are all gone.
I am not sure how many times my ex-wife woke me up by touching my erogenous zones. Unfortunately there is no country where raping a man is a crime.
There is exploration and there is colonization, which to some degree are orthogonal and to some degree complementary to each other, but they are not the same thing. Manned missions to Mars would mostly be about colonization, though exploration would be a significant side benefit. Mars is by far the most promising candidate for colonization (with the potential for using local resources to enable an early level of significant self-sufficiency, increasing over time) which would help kickstart our capabilities in interplanetary spaceflight in general, both manned and unmanned.
Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books.

What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?
In Germany, bounties are relatively strictly regulated by law in terms of what you may and may not do etc.
Therefore, if the bounty itself was valid in the sense of the law, then - AFAIK - there's an obligation to pay up.
That's a very kind gesture from you! This made me realize: why having some CDs pressed, printed and shipped if most people don't plan to ever use them? Maybe they should offer some different kind of collectible/gizmo that would be funnier than a boring layer of polycarbonate.
McDonalds.Horse: Of Course, of Course
Doug Lemov believes great teachers are made, not born
The libertarian in me was about to be pissed off that they were fining him for skepticism.

But it looks like the dumbass actually offered $100,000 for someone to prove it, and the courts merely held him to his promise. Thanks German Court System for not being completely retarded this time.
I can't wait to get my Echo. All I want is for the wake up word to be "computer". Is that so much to ask?
I don't think this is unique to Amazon.

I've gotten this on the iTunes app store quite a bit. Low ratings from people who don't review any other products (or if they do, it looks super spammy).

On top of that, the bad reviews tend to come in bunches (multiple in a day), are void of any actual useful feedback or complaints and are just vague & angry (sucks, ripoff, etc).

I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but it still sucks.

Google Play allows you to reply to reviews (which helps quite a bit as far as either helping the customer or correcting a misconception). I'm not sure what Amazon can change on that front.
they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on
I've thought about doing it, but I don't already have the devices in my home that are capable of being automated and I've got enough money dumped into projects that required bits like this that I never finished as it is.

I would, however, be interested in trying to create a room simulator. I did work on living space automation for a while, a few years ago (specifically for hotels, not homes). One of the most difficult parts of designing good user experiences was the lack of ability to rapidly test, due to the need to setup a ton of devices, associate them together, maybe even flash them with new ROMs. You could get in two, maybe three tests as day, if you were really cooking. I wanted to be able to test as fast as I could compile code, you know, like I had gotten used to in every other software project I had ever worked on. But electrical engineers work with primitive tools and seem to like it.
I often see developers at the climbing gym I frequent.
Hey, I resemble that project!

Yeah, it ground to a halt due to fundamental differences in the way Linux and Windows binaries work. I'm actually now kind of scared at how much working hackery LBW ended up containing: it'd dynamically patch the binary after trapping out at instructions manipulating things that Windows wouldn't allow access to.

(The LBW instruction patching code is here. It's entertainingly bonkers. http://sourceforge.net/p/lbw/code/ci/master/tree/src/ehandle...)

Not all the horror was Windows, mind: Linux's interface to executables is barely documented and extremely fragile, involving passing a key-value table full of magic parameters on the stack after the argument and environment tables. And, of course, I'd have to replicate this otherwise glibc would crash out. (At least, I thought I did --- I cannot now find any of the actual code. Maybe I got rid of it?)

I eventually gave up because it was obviously not a tenable approach. Plus, it'd completely fail on 64-bit platforms. Dynamic recompilation is obviously a way more preferable approach. If I ever have to use Windows again, god forbid, I'm definitely checking this out.
That's what Great Pyrenees are for ;)
That's not true at all. It depends on the pressure.

http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_educati...
They are completely separate missions. Mars is about sending humans somewhere other than the moon. It's less about scientific discovery and more about engineering and exploration discovery - we're doing it to learn about Mars sure, but moreso we're doing it to see if we can.

Mars is the next step in humanity's long term (hundred of thousands of years) survival. If we ever intend not to be at the mercy of gravity, we have to get off earth. We've been to the moon, which is gravitationally constrained to earth, and is only a three day journey (with many chances for safe aborts). We've conquered LEO and now know more about our planet than we could have dreamed up 20 years ago. Mars is a completely different challenge, and by going to Mars we'll develop the first bits of technology that will help us off our deathtrap of a cradle.

These two missions can coexist. We haven't developed the technology to send humans that far out into the solar system so we should continue to send probes.
They could buy Reddit and crib their spam detection algorithms. :)
Tony Stark Delivers Real 3D-Printed Bionic Arm to 7-Year Old Iron Man Fan
Drone captures world's first hybrid megayacht
Of course in this case, he isn't getting bad reviews on his book. False good reviews on other books are pushing those "books" ahead of him.

Any type of system to respond would be useless for this particular problem.
It's an offer, which can be accepted by someone complying with the terms. At that point it constitutes a contract.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/1892/1.html CARLILL v. CARBOLIC SMOKE BALL COMPANY; admittedly that's English law rather than German, but the principle holds. That case also deals with rewards, diseases and pseudoscience.
Cheddar
I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title, authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negative, it's likely not a very useful review.

I'm sure there's a lot that could be done with this, but some run of the mill NLP seems like it could at least help. I'm not sure the plausibility of this at a large scale, but it seems like an interesting problem nonetheless.
That's true, but I do think its disappointing we rank so far behind our neighbors (Duke, UNC) in CS in it seems every ranking.
I learned about tardigrades from an episode of last year's remake of Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson said tardigrades survived all five of earth's mass extinctions.
Just a matter of vocabulary: "dismissal of scientific evidence" != "ignorance".
The biologist in question is Stefan Lanka, who's also an HIV-denier: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/index/slanka.htm
The H1B visa system needs to be abolished. I am not worried about foreigners or Americans competing for my job, if they have the skill set they are welcome to it. Being an American is not a technological achievement and should count for nothing when hiring a tech worker.
All I am seeing in the original article is that dumb foreigners who cheat in school are willing to work for less money so let's keep them out. Maybe foreigners are willing to work for less because they don't have crippling student debt? or maybe their degree programs are more concerned about maximizing the profit for the University than creating industry-ready engineers? Maybe the system is geared so heavily towards stifling innovation that a country like Israel is the leader in venture-capital investment per person ($140 vs. $70 in the US. And it is no surprise that they spend 4.5% of GDP on R&D vs. the 2.2% of the US)
Limiting the number of people who are coming here to work might be stupid, immoral and careless(no one cares about that) but the worst offence in this case is that it is ineffective. This policy has been around for a long time and it hasn't worked for us yet.
Absence of a legal contract for such cases exposes a website to abuse. I refuse to believe that a text posted publicly is subject to the same standards as a real contract.
Or perhaps remove non-verified reviews once there were more than just a couple of reviews.

I've never published a dishonest review, but I have reviewed a product or two that I bought somewhere else (not on Amazon), but I certainly "bought the product."
Well there are so many options here, which make things that much more exciting. So basically: 0V, 5V, everything else

:-)
The steel watch video is the best promotional/informational video I've seen. The music, cinematography, and story telling is perfect.

http://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch/
Visualizing a century of European population trends