skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great! As a former commando turned programmer I've long been wondering how best to express the commando mindset in programmers terms. The 4 elements of the command spirit are

Courage

Determination

Unselfishness

Cheerfulness in the face of adversity

These sure come in handy in some programming environemnts :-)
I was told by a Dell person (via the chat thing, naturally) that it would be released in about a week.

If I bought either the Windows model or the official Linux one I'd wipe it and install Debian or Arch or Mint, but I'd still prefer to wait for the Linux one so that I don't contribute money and a +1 sales statistic to Microsoft for something I don't want.
I assumed at 3mi a day he's walking for about 1-1½ hours and so was doing that at times when he's normally be reading back work, dictating, reading forums or watching a video or what-have-you.
I believe there is distinction between Apple as a hardware company and Apple as a software company. First part works extremely well while latter one - not so much. I would not mix them together.
The landing page doesn't give away much. What are its features? What advantages compared to similar solutions like codeacademy / etc? Are the videos linked from the same people (they are branded devcast)?
Steam Machines and the Risk-Free Bet of Valve
Prions self replicate, but require the host to have the correctly folded protein.[1] Of course there's viruses too, which are self replicating but need to infect some other organism.

Maybe crystals? Now we're getting in to the potentially wonky question of 'what is life?'

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

Edit: grammar for clarity.
You walk whilst typing?
For me, Ars is still better than every other site listed. Their quality might have slid, but they are still the best[1]. I grew tired of other sites' clickbait and/or blatant partisanship/slant.

1. for me.
Difference Between Abstract Class and Interface
I don't get something. Isn't 1080p a 1920x1080 image, which would make it 2073600px * 4 bytes = 8294400 bytes = 7.91 megabytes?
Clicked on https://github.com/nasa/libSPRITE, but as of now the repo contains only a README with a "Coming Soon!" note... :/ dated 1 Dec 2014, so 3 months ago already...
Threshold Signatures: The New Standard for Bitcoin Wallet Security?
Google’s quest to make art available was foiled by copyright concerns
That's already being done; in mobile based on your GPS/cell location and otherwise based on your IP (not very specific, but a general location work pretty well).
Righted Museum
> Does anyone actually care that their plugs are elegant?

Some people do, I think its an expression of culture. Its hard not to notice that the swiss and the nordic countries (especially Sweden and Norway) value a certain aesthetics. This expresses itself in many things, ranging from architecture to product design, art and the design of public spaces.

There is a reason swiss typography was big, and why nordic design is appreciated all over the world. It could only emerge from these cultural surroundings, its a mindset.

That plug is an expression of british engineering values. Its certainly a very well designed plug, but I also believe the reason why swiss and nordic products are more popular than british ones is that they are made with a different approach.

Probably those same values are also the reason why british music is so great, and why swiss music is... oh well, have you ever listened to mundart-rock? So I'm not saying X is better than Y, there are trade-offs involved.
Almost every time someone asks a question in a headline, it's because it's BS and they don't think they could get away with making the statement directly.

It's a more specific way of stating that an article is clearly space-filling BS. As this one is.
I miss Groklaw dearly but also understood there was a little more than disgust in play.
It is, you know. "Remittances!" is a standard Bitcoin selling point. Because it sounds plausible. Even if it doesn't actually work out that way, because it turns out that last mile is the expensive bit.
When Investment Portfolios Are Better Than Savings Accounts
Content Explorer finds the most shared content on the web
It is. And Elon Musk stated repeatedly that it's a secondary goal, means to an end. There's a lot of wiggle room between "profitable business" and a "toilet paper company".
Not that I completely understand the process for Starfighter. But what are the chances of something like this happening? http://www.wired.com/2012/07/how-a-startup-used-a-5000-conte...
>Suddenly, though, there's this new game on the internet. Not a lot of eyeballs at first, so it starts in free weekly category. Suddenly though, Google (and maybe some other companies) can tell you how many ads are actually getting action rather than just eyeballs.
>It's a metric like we've never seen before, it's the killer metric. Sure, you could get this from surveys, or test markets, but this is like measuring everyone who sees the ad. It's pretty cool.
>But remember, metrics this accurate are dangerous, it shows when advertising doesn't work too.

I suspect that metric is nowhere as accurate as most people believe it to be. But I agree with the spirit of this message: a lot of the BS is getting exposed.
Obviously the US plugs are the worst, but thats the price for being the first. PAL was better than NTSC, too.
A16z Go-To-Market Best Practices for Startups (slides)
Many people discussed that it happened due to Adblocker. If that's true then how sites like Mashable and Techcrunch still surviving?
I actually just rely on an RSS reader to present a whole bunch of ad-free headlines to me, and then I decide what looks interesting. The hottest topics are often covered by multiple, similar outlets, and then there are also niche publishers (like gwern, for example).

Almost unbelievably, on mobile my favorite feed reader is Pulse, which LinkedIn bought a year or so back. I've used Feedly, too, and Google's Newsstand, but Pulse seems easier to scan through.

For tech-specific news, HN is the best source to meta-news that's actually technical, as well as human curated weirdness. /r/programming, /r/technology, /r/android, etc are all good, too. Whenever there's a big trade show or launch event, I usually check Pando, TheVerge, UberGizmo and a few others (Re/Code, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc). I have an IFTTT recipe that pushes any new Android app disassembly article from Phandroid and Android Police (they do a FANTASTIC job of analyzing Google app updates for unspecified changes, and also always rehost the APKs). I look for in-depth product reviews from Anandtech. I laugh at XKCD's always timely cartoons.

Note that for the ones I follow via a reader, I almost never go to their site directly, and never see any ads. I do use an adblocker (uBlock), but I am considering uninstalling it because of memory consumption. I'm on a Chromebook most of the time and between Gmail & adblockers, 4GB of RAM just isn't sufficient.
You can donate to WMF via http://donate.wikimedia.org/ [general donation]
Women who carry mace might also welcome one of these in their handbags. Or people who keep getting inspected at airports. I'm sure there's a market.
What's wrong with the XPS13? I'm looking for a new notebook. Hesitating between this new Macbook and XPS13.
Send Email with Go and Google App Engine
SOMA Analytics @ London, UK - http://soma-analytics.com/careers.html

SOMA Analytics is an investor-backed and award-winning startup that develops pioneering mobile health technology. We are creating the world’s first mobile-based mental resilience program, combining aspects from psychology and medicine with machine learning and hardware.

We are a tight-knit, international family that is passionate about building great products. From encouraging unconventional and lean thinking to advocating a healthy lifestyle, we treat our employees as our greatest asset.

Join our rapidly expanding team and set your inner geek free with like-minded and awesome workmates. We're hiring for full time positions and internships in diverse roles. You must be eligible to work in the UK.
Or you could fill it with anthrax. Or dioxygen difluoride. Or chlorine trifluoride. Or Australian spiders. Or African bees.
8th of March? What's that in reference to?
It is amazing how small relatively isolated team can create awesome product. I am trying something similar, but its very hard. Antirez is either genius or works 20 hours a day.
70 people full time? that sounds like an awful lot. If these are SanFran salaries then their running costs are already immense without even considering other running costs.

Cannot a site like this be ran by 10-15 people? Maybe I'm missing where the labour is going.
In practice, even rebit.ph (which is having a good go at the remittance case) is having serious problems finding Bitcoin buyers at the Philippines end (because every peso you give out, you need to have sold Bitcoin to buy) - http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/2vypy9/if_i_...
I consider Schuko plugs to fall somewhere between the british and the swiss plug. It certainly is a little too big for what it does, and also hard to unplug. That 16A rating is nice, though.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine had the Neo Geo home console from Japan. It used the same huge cartridges as the arcade machines. After school we'd sit in his basement playing Samurai Showdown on the TV, and we didn't even need any quarters. Ahh, the good ol' days.
Test aspa
What I want entertainment companies to give me is exactly equivalent to the result of downloading episodes from illegal Bittorrent sites plus the ability to actually pay for them.

I want a DRM-less HD video file that I can play on any computer, when I want. I want to be able to download it from anywhere I might be in the world, and my nationality should not have an effect on the availability of the content.

Heck, if HBO had a web-based tip jar, I would just pay something for every Game of Thrones episode and otherwise go straight ahead and torrent it. You know, HBO, don't "offer" me anything, just give me an option to pay you which makes my download quasi-legal, and I'll take care of the rest myself.
Now or never exec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day
International women's day.
I've been thinking about surveillance lately and have come to the conclusion that it's simply here to stay.

I really doubt any legal action will change anything what the NSA does. The future is digital, they cannot and will not step down while other countries, basically everyone that is capable to do it, will do it. It's such a big power factor that it cannot be ignored.

The arms race in cyberspace has begun long ago, and there's just no way it will simply stop.

All we can do is decide how we handle it personally and whom we trust to keep our data safe. And if we really need to create certain kinds of data in the first place (with many kinds we have no choice).
Accepting that offer sounds like a great way to get yourself hacked.
CIA 'tried to crack security of Apple devices'
FWIW, I just posted the next part, comparing performance with analytical workloads (TPC-DS-like, DWH/DSS, ...).

http://blog.pgaddict.com/posts/performance-since-postgresql-...
Ouch, looks pretty much designed to kill off the Arm based Opteron A1100... before it even ships.
Yes - and what they've achieved is a CPU that's much closer to the ARM state of the art, and has a much more ARM-like power profile, and would generally be easier to replace with ARM a couple of years down the line.

This coincides with being fanless.

Had Apple made this (say) the same thickness as the MacBook air, they'd have increased their volume by a measurable amount, they'd have been able to have a much more powerful processor, and no one would be able to say that ARM is a good proposition for them for the foreseeable future.

Now they have a fairly weakly performing computer, with an ARM-sized logic board, which is going to be bought by people who don't care about bottom line performance.

This is going to be the slowest Mac in a number of years - and if it's a success then making the next-slowest Mac be ARM wouldn't be such a jump.
Well that sounds like a very dubious move from Matt Stancliff, I wonder what the rationale was.

Edit - particularly galling given this graph https://github.com/antirez/redis/graphs/contributors
SublimeText isn't an IDE
Wow, so are we going to force him to resign as well?
Very OT, but did you find REAMDE to be a bit weak? I found the plot became more and more contrived, and seemed to miss the imagination and scale of Stephenson's other books. The number of highly unlikely coincidences in the plot is incredible, and I got the feeling that he got bored writing it, and just wrapped everything up neatly in a ridiculously unlikely end-scenario.
I beg to differ: hacking stuff is the real essence of the hacker subculture. Being rude is completely orthogonal to hacking.
I don't see it as misusing anything. Has the web changed drastically in the last 10 years? Yes but just because we are using it differently doesn't mean we are misusing it. I'd argue that HTML5 and ES6 push the web even firther into webapp territory.
The NSA is here to stay because who can remove their power without being removed from office? They have all communication.
"
GPU: ATI Radeon™ R7 250X 1GB GDDR5

Oh. Right. You better not talk about gaming anything on SteamOS with a AMD GPU onboard – that can only end with sore disappointment."

Is there an issue with amd gaming on linux? I though nvidia were the ones who wouldnt provide drivers?
It occurs to me that Linus's occasional "smackdowns" can be seen as a necessary and realistic form of discipline. Since Linux is developed in the open, these disciplinary discussions occur before a worldwide audience. One could argue that disciplinary mails should be taken off-list to allow the individuals involved to save face, but it could be counterargued that such mails are relevant and important to the kernel's overall development process and shouldn't be obscured lest other developers make the same mistakes.

The high visibility of Linus's posts expose him to a lot of bleeding heart criticism, but it doesn't really say anything about how useful or important the mails may or may not be; in short, the criticism that Linus is "mean" doesn't say anything about the efficacy of the management style.

When management actually has to happen, when the manager actually has to step in and try to correct someone who isn't doing their job correctly, it's never a popular thing. The political impulse is to rally behind "the little guy". We all respond easily and quickly to the stories of spurned employees who were "totally mistreated" by the Big Bad Employer. Because of this, it's easy to look in and criticize Linus for sending a "mean email", but probably not very fair.

We all want to sympathize with our peers, and no matter how much we may like them on a personal level, it seems there is an almost irrepressible instinct to want to denigrate our bosses. That makes it easy to criticize the calls when we're on the sideline and not bearing the responsibility for the outcome. The actual knowledge of that responsibility and all that comes with it, including the massive flood of disastrously uninformed critics and the need to bite the tongue as they take their swipes, is "the weight" that persons in positions of high responsibility sometimes discuss. While it's easy to acknowledge the hypothetical existence of such a phenomenon, I think it doesn't really crystallize until one finds some measure of "the weight" on his or her own shoulders.

I hope we can all save a bit of empathy for the decision makers on the other side of the coin after getting an earful from and commiserating with our disgruntled contemporaries, even if it's just on LKML.
> One thing I did not liked was Matt Stancliff talk. He tried to uncover different problems in the Redis development process, and finally proposed the community to replace me as the project leader, with him.

What a complete douchebag. Even Frank Underwood gets other people to nominate him.
Almost all of our communication protocols and technologies are built on trust on those who run various services. So as long as that is the case, imho there is no way to stop surveillance.

It would be great to start from scratch and build things without the expectation of any trustability from anyone, but I don't see that happening ever!

Sad to see that the people elected by other people like us to do good for all the people tend to do everything other than that.
> Doesn't research pay fairly poorly on average?

No.
The standards of living were growing before democratization. For example, the colonies that would become the US had richer inhabitants even before the split[1]. In Europe, this growth could have well been delayed by revolutions, not hastened.

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w19861
Thank you FriendFeed - I'll miss you. At some point I thought Friendfeed was going to take over the world... But as usual I have to be reminded that I am not representative of the mass audience.
AMD has very poor drivers for linux: their compliance with latest OpenGL standards is very late compared to nVidia proprietary drivers (already supporting OpenGL 4.5) and performance on higher end cards reaches a bottleneck in framerates for no clear reason while cheaper nVidia GPU outclass them. This being said, you have decent open source drivers for AMD cards, but they can't compete with nVidia on performance yet anyway.
The original story actually relates to a computer running a BBS back in the 90's. The plugs were duck taped to sockets and signs more or less read "do not unplug... ever".

When the place was raided by the police and the computer confiscated, the fun and games began.

The computer was never returned.
The VGA / HDMI adapters include both USB & charging ports as well. So you could use it perfectly well in clamshell on your desk. And now you don't need a separate charging / thunderbolt cable as well.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MJ1L2AM/A/usb-c-vga-multip...
What they actually said was "This is the smallest a cell can be and still accommodate enough material to sustain life" - this was shortened in the lede.

But "as small as life can get" is a thing that has been studied, eg for Mars Sample-Return missions, they have to figure out a safe filter size (chapter 3):
http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2013/01/17/ESF_Ma...

An important distinction is whether these organisms can live 'independently' - a virus relies on a host. Quoting from the doc above: it is believed that theoretically a coccoid[1] cell with the minimum number of genes to be free living in an environment other than a living host would have a minimum cell diameter of approximately 0.15–0,2 μm. - which is around about the size of the beasties in the parent article.

They did consider smaller biological entities though, like gene transfer agents[2], and recommended filters such that nothing over 0.05μm is released under any circumstances, and that there's only a 1 in a million chance of anything smaller than 0.01μm escaping.

[1] Spherical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccoid

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_transfer_agent
You can draw a different lesson from the 20th century history.

[...] generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it's the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.

http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahnem...
It was written by Jeremy Scahill.
See http://liveherpesvaccine.com/category/herpes-immunology/ for a long-running detailed blog by a different scientist who has been working on similar ideas for years. He has shown that a mutated HSV virus which is not capable of causing clinical disease (but which does cause a lifelong infection by the "harmless" version) protects against the dangerous version. This new research seems to be in the same vein:

> When introduced to a mouse, HSV-2 was able to use the HSV-1 gD to enter the mouse’s cells. Once inside, HSV-2 replicated abundantly, but because it could not produce gD, future progeny were unable to infect new cells. According to Herold, infected cells then became “little factories for making viral proteins” that spurred the immune system to produce antibodies to HSV-2.

That sounds like some cells are infected with the mutated virus and this remains as a lifelong infection. So far there seems little hope that the FDA would approve such an approach, based on Halford's experience. (See linked blog.)
Lovely grumpy ol' Linus. I admire him for being willing to try doing something a little bit differently to make the kernel a more welcoming place for developers who aren't part of the old school he was raised in. I'm only slightly younger than Linus, and I have made more than my fair share of rude comments in various Open Source mailing lists...but, well, I'm no longer convinced it's the only or even best way to get things done in a community.

And, I enjoy that it's called "code of conflict", as it's clear that getting code into the kernel is still going to involve a fight, it's just going to be a civil one wherein everyone is following some basic rules ("no hitting below the belt", so to speak).
Geniet van de paasvakantie met de last minutes aanbiedingen van Centerparcs
The only truly reliable way to validate an email address is to try to send email to it.
Show HN: Butternote – note taking by SMS and email
I have some sympathy for our fellow hackers who work as contractors or in big companies, many of them with security clearance. Database engineers, software developers, data experts - the five eyes intelligence agencies directly and indirectly fund many of you readers of HN.

They might be becoming increasingly disillusioned with their chosen life and/or unable to change course. Perhaps the money is too good, perhaps their contracts too restrictive. They might have inside knowledge and believe that the NSA is in the right, but they would not be able to voice that belief to us, their friends and colleagues. Unable or unwilling to change course if they believe their country is in the wrong and unable or unwilling to speak up in defence if they think it is in the right. I'd certainly like to talk (in private) to those I knew who at the start of the Snowden affair openly said that he was a traitor and hear what they now think.
Disney's $1B Bet on a Magical Wristband
Although it's difficult to fully articulate, as our traffic is basically a bell curve through the day and we auto scale between say 7 and 13 servers throughout the day... We pay about $4200/month. That includes several TB of traffic (which we gzip compress where it makes sense).
the right words in the right time.
Read it again. Anyone who puts this in writing is too stupid to teach kindergarten, let alone university courses: "Many female professors in Germany decided to no longer accept male indian students for these reasons, and currently other European female association are joining".