skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> suppose European or other relatively simple-to-encode languages didn't exist, and everyone used the OPs language. How would they have handled advancing computers?

Bengali isn't all that complicated; more so than English, yes, but definitely surmountable. Printing presses, typewriters, etc. have been used without incident for Bengali (and for other Indian languages) for a long time.

P.S.: It's not really a great idea to open a post with "Was British rule actually a net negative, in retrospect?" I understand you did not intend to offend, but at the very least it's a touchy subject, and a contentious and complicated history.
Foreground index rebuilds on a shard can DOS an entire Mongo cluster
I'm worried about the noise. The blades spin many times faster than a regular windmill. I imagine it will sound similar to a small plane flying very close to the ground. Of course a plane flies over once and it's gone; this thing will produce a constant droning noise that fluctuates in pitch and volume every few seconds as the kite goes up and down. If you put them far offshore this wouldn't be a problem, but I wouldn't want one of these near my house.
Two companies and possibly very few people decide what apps will reach a billion people. Sure wish we could elect those people.
"Our investigation determined that the attackers may have gained unauthorized access to applicants and members’ information, which could include member name, date of birth, email address, address, telephone number, Social Security number, member identification numbers, bank account information, and claims information, including clinical information."

Then, of course,
"The security of our members’ personal information is a top priority."
You missed the best part:

>[Leap Transit, Inc] OFFERS INFORMATION AND A METHOD TO OBTAIN THIRD PARTY TRANSPORTATION SERVICES, ^^BUT DOES NOT AND DOES NOT INTEND TO PROVIDE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES^^ OR ACT IN ANY WAY AS A TRANSPORTATION CARRIER, AND HAS NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY TRANSPORTATION SERVICES PROVIDED TO YOU BY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.
From the video the first thing I noticed was the lack of basic safety items, usually in regular buses there are tons of places that you can hold onto, and if it's a longer trip there is even belts, so I wonder how is the licensing of this automobiles.
Blinn’s Law and the paradox of increasing performance
I was reading the datasheet of the Cree XT-E [1] which is > 90 CRI at warm-white and still 130 lumens per watt. Perhaps when they start showing up in flashlights you'll get better at seeing the snakes. Although for rattlesnakes (which we looked for in the dark as kids) a UV light is much better since they (and scorpions) glow when exposed to UV spectrum.

[1] http://www.cree.com/~/media/Files/Cree/LED%20Components%20an...
check this http://www.google.com/makani/solution/
Google shouldn't have let Glass overheat
I like the hacking/DIY aspect, but IMO there is still no keyboard that has anything on the Kinesis Advantage (or the older Classic, same layout):

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage-lf-for-pc-mac/

The only flaw is the row of horrible, rubbery, membrane function keys. I don't know why, but they just won't fix them. That said, I just remap my common F-keys (Visual Studio user) to other key chords and get on with my life. The firmware allows on-keyboard remapping and macros, by the way, so my Caps Lock ==> Esc remap follows my wherever I go.

If anything, I'd rather that the separate key wells were even a bit further apart. I don't know how people can type with their wrists jammed so close together, even with the Atreus's angled halves.

By the way, on the Kinesis, the hand wells are actually dished. They achieve this using a flexible PCB that's split into separate 'fingers' for each row of keys. To my knowledge none of the 'hacker' keyboards are dished like this.
Not sure what terminal you're using, but CTRL+F on a terminal is pretty non-stadard.

I wanted to make sure it's not me who's using the terminal that's different, but it's not the case, bash's doc state that "Ctrl+F: Forward one character".
Fair enough. Credit cards offer decent but limited consumer protections; bitcoins offer none.
Because we've decided as a society that paying people a decent wage is a good idea.

The same can be said for a lot of jobs, including so-called "software engineers." You can pay people in Romania $300/day instead of paying someone in SF $1,800 a day.
The people-work relation is a whole other subject. Definitely something to look at, but one that drags in a lot of other topics.

But I would like to add this: other power plants have similar complex HR requirements (think nuclear, water).
controversy in the news about the fact that while the expected lifespan of a wind turbine should be around 20 years, the actual lifespan ended up being in the region of 12 years

There certainly was controversy. An initial study did indicate the lifespan was likely to be 12 years[1], but that was immediately questioned because Scotland already had 16 yo windfarms with no maintenance issues.

That initial study led to additional research, which showed that:

the UK's earliest turbines, built in the 1990s, are still producing three-quarters of their original output after 19 years of operation, nearly twice the amount previously claimed, and will operate effectively up to 25 years. This is comparable to the performance of gas turbines used in power stations.

The study also found that more recent turbines are performing even better than the earliest models, suggesting they could have a longer lifespan.[2]

Also, there's no real controversy about "damage done to forests and birds, as well as noise pollution". There's no damage at all to forests, bird deaths are in the order of 0.1% and noise pollution is what it is: they can be noisy if they are built near you, but there is no mystical "subsonics" or something that some people claim.

[1] http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/scotland/wind-turbines-life...

[2] http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcolleg...
I'm really excited to launch Ruby Together, and I hope that we can bring some real improvements to Ruby's core infrastructure projects.
I think they would keep the NT kernel. The engineering that went into that was pretty top notch. The rest of the Windows legacy yeah, that gets dumped.
These posts and talks by Brendan Gregg are awesome; they always prompt several hours of playing around with new tools and digging into kernel code. I'm trying to get familiar enough with these tools and methods that I can start using them at work and spreading the knowledge around.
In the linked article the M3800 is a hundred dollars cheaper with Ubuntu.
Deal Extreme has a bunch of $10 lights that are fine for when you just need some illumination for a minute. The AA ones bypass some hassle:

http://www.dx.com/c/lights-lighting-1399/flashlights-1307/le...
Articles like this are so aggravating to read[1]. I want to skim and get to the point where they actually start to discuss the actual idea, so that I can determine if it's worth it to me to read it. But they want to build up to it as if I'm reading some god damn novel.

Also, the author addresses his readers as if we're some kind of touch-screen natives who uses our phones and other touch-screen devices to accomplish everything in our lives, and we could never conceive of anything else[2]. Am I the only one who was never enamoured with actually using smart phones? They are a pain to write messages on, they are a slightly less of a pain to browse with, and they are passable to good for everything else.

And the fact that it takes many steps to do something with your phone is supposed to be surprising? It's practically inevitable: one entry point (swipe to unlock etc.) to do all your tasks, equipped with a 5" screen. Good luck.

Thankfully, it turns out that the author's point was more novel than something silly like "What if we didn't use smart phone interfaces, but some other interface instead? WOW...". I hadn't considered a solution like Siemens'. I don't know if it is preferable to my key that already has a remote attached, but it's very interesting.

[1] Yes, I know it's a chapter from his book. But it's published as an article so I will judge it as such.

[2] "Don’t let your emotions blind you" - How about "don't talk down to me"?

★★★

Side note: He has a point about 'everything has to be an app', though. I'm supposed to be using some form of identification, and they used to send out a piece of paper and a little "this is valid for this time period" thing to attach to your card. Now, they have phased that out for an app. An app. To replace a piece of paper and a card. No, I don't think it even replaces the card since you use it to access certain places.
I think you're being too mild in your side note.

The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed.

It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.
The majority of noise you hear from a small prop plane flying above is from the engine.

Also, the advanced height they're trying to achieve limits the amount of noise relative to what you would hear from a small drone overhead.
I think it's fucked up that "modern", "mobile-first" web design essentially boils down to powerpoint in a browser.

That said, this is a cool idea.
Isn't that a benefit and reason to use html5 video over gif formats?
> Then two buses show up at the same time. This has happened to me several times.

This is called bus bunching, here's an explanation.
http://www.wbez.org/series/curious-city/why-buses-arrive-bun...
> I wouldn't really care how it is stored, as long as it looks right on the display

It becomes a problem when you have other uses besides reading text, such as sorting or searching.
Move to Ecuador :) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28992589
Health Insurer Premera Blue Cross Latest Hack Victim, 11M Consumers Affected
It's certainly possible to simultaneously believe that the regulated, unionized public transportation contains service deficiencies, while at the same time advocating that a private transportation that provides better service should also be regulated and unionized.
Sort of. IE was actually a big part of the reason developing Ajax applications was an expensive pain for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

The original idea came from ActiveX, but it didn't take off until it was implemented across browsers via JavaScript as XMLHttpRequest over the next 6 years, and didn't become "Ajax" until the Adaptive Path blog post about Google's innovations with Maps and Gmail in 2005. Microsoft then added support for XMLHttpRequest a year and a half later in late 2006 with IE7, which of course had very little adoption, particular among businesses, because of IE6 (see IE6 @ 49.8% and IE7 @ 17.1% IE market share at beginning, March 2007, of this graph: http://www.w3counter.com/trends).
DNSSEC is just replacing one set of roots (the CAs) with another (the root servers).

At least with CAs you can (theoretically) remove trust from a subset of them and things (mostly) keep working.
I can't fault PayPal for releasing their code as open source. It's great. More companies should do it.

But indeed, I don't think it would be a good idea to wholeheartedly adopt their stack. gevent wasn't even a good idea on Python 2, and I suspect the large companies that use it have built up an armor of best practices and workarounds for its glitches, which you won't know about if you start using it.
YC can chase MIT graduates because they operate in that social stratum - YC's ex con is a professor there. Its most famous founder got his CS degree from the liberal arts school on the 'good' side of the Cambridge tracks. The third worked in Boston's second industry, banking up to the founding.

There are highly capable graduates from community colleges, e.g. Hanselman. But investing is about maximizing the odds with finite time to collect information. Altman is chasing the odds by taking his dog and pony to Cambridge, Mass rather than Troy, Al. It's business.

I apologize for offending you. The reference was self-depreciating on one level and an obscure reference to a respected tech leader that Altman's recruiting optimization tactic would miss. I'll point out that your stereotyping is 'Alabama bumpkin' by value rather than reference.
As a person who regularly rides the bus on my way to work I can assure you that you will most certainly not be able to work on a sideways positioned table in a CITY-bus.

Busses turn left, right with speed and in some cases break strongly.
Speaking of motion sickness, most people I know are not even able to work riding a train (ICE for example, which is perfectly comfortable IMO), so why should/would/could they on a city bus.

However, the interior looks nice and if you're promised a seat then this might still be a nice alternative to public transportation.
Bird-scaring drone startup scores $1.7M to terrorize birds
The big problem that I see, and it applies to any browser, is that every page is loading tons of crap from ad or tracking sites including twitter or facebook. When one of these sites stalls the whole page stalls and it is a chronic problem. As an interim fix I block these domains using my host file pointing to localhost 127.0.0.1 but sometimes that stalls the loading because it doesn't get a reply so it waits for the timeout. I am thinking of setting up a web server on my LAN that replies 404 or 204 to all queries and pointing the worst ad/tracking/social domains there so I can load the content not the dross.
Many of the Java security bugs are in Java code. Relevant to this discussion, "Jetbleed". The many other SSL breaks in Java. A variety of issues involving deserialization of untrusted data, ala Rails yaml bug. Bugs in the JVM itself are more the exception than the rule.
Ask HN: Free / reduced price housekeeping (subsidized by in-home advertising)
My company, The Happy Home Company, is testing out a few new services. One of these is a free housekeeping service, subsidized by advertising.

It would work by the house cleaners leaving products / samples / offers in your home for you to sample / try out.

Depending on your cleaning needs, your cleaning would be either entirely, or partially subsidized.

What do you think? Is this too invasive? Or does it make an expensive service (house cleaning) more affordable through a fair trade-off.

Any and all thoughts would be appreciated.
Some more goodies:

>We do not guarantee and do not promise any specific results from use of Leap and/or the Services.

>We, our subsidiaries, officers, directors, employees and our suppliers specifically disclaim any implied warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

They also don't offer any refunds:

>Any fees that Leap Transit may charge You for the Licensed Application or Services are due immediately and are non-refundable. This no refund policy shall apply at all times regardless of your decision to terminate your usage, our decision to terminate your usage, disruption caused to our Licensed Application or Services either planned, accidental or intentional, or any reason whatsoever.

So, they are basically saying they won't transport you, they don't make any claims to transport you [despite what their landing/marketing page appears to say], they will take your money if you think they will transport you, and they won't give it back to you when they don't transport you [which they never claimed to (except on their homepage)].
It really should be no surprise that these progressive companies have performed better than average. Society places higher expectations on women, so of course they must overperform!
> For drawing a given glyph, there is normally a lookup into a font table that involves solely the string of Unicode code points coming in.

Why are you implementing OpenType? It's got working libraries already.

But if you are getting into that, glyphs in a font are stored by "glyph name", not necessarily by code point. There's a bunch more steps than that.

- Font substitution: Find fonts that cover every character in the text. The order of your search list depends on the language.

- Text layout and line breaking: for best results, you don't want to line break in the middle of a word, and you need to place punctuation on the correct side of right-to-left sentences. I think both of these need dictionaries.

- Choosing individual glyphs: it's complicated!
http://ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html

You have to read the GSUB tables and do a bunch of expected features, like ligatures, automatic fractions, beginning of word special forms (see Zapfino), &c. This includes language specific glyphs, but fonts can also just choose glyphs with a random number generator.

- Drawing the glyph. Remember not to draw each one individually, or a translucent line of overlapping characters (like in Indian languages) will look bad.

Each glyph actually comes with a custom program to do the hinting! It's even more complicated:
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/...

Luckily I don't think it depends on much external state.
A man missing a part of his brain set to be executed tonight in Missouri
It really sucks that I type "Y" with my left hand's index finger. It makes a wide variety of interesting keyboard layouts infeasible without going in cold turkey.
I didn't intend to make any claims about global market penetration. Just pointing out that it has notable tractiom in my market and peer group, and that because of that it had made strides towards the ideal bill-splitting situation outlined above: it is used widely enough that it's a clear default when splitting a bill with a mixed group. Maybe it won't catch on any more widely, but similar apps have been around for a while and never reached the adoption where multiple people in a group would suggest or accept them as payment. It's not actually available outside the US right now, which may be why you haven't heard of it, and which is clearly a big hurdle on the road towards true ubiquity.
It seems like if there were a "farm" of these kites, they would have to be very widely spaced out, or else they would crash into each other or get their tethers tangled up.
Google will fly a crazy, plane-like, 84-foot wind turbine next month
In a 12 year period. So what about a 15 year period? Or a 20 year period? Or in a 12 year period but 10 years ago?

Results like that are generally bunk, or if they really cared, they would have made a broader statement (in these and those periods they performed like that).

I have only looked at the Credit Suisse paper that I think started this meme, and they clearly use a cut off point that makes women led companies look good. If they start their comparison a couple of years earlier, suddenly it looks different.

That's just standard methodology for companies like Credit Suisse whose main business is convincing people to buy stock. That same method is used to make stock market funds look good all the time (so that gullible people pay the 5% premium for the seemingly brilliant manager of that fund).

Other explanations of course could be: categories of businesses were trending that were more attractive to women (like digital services vs mining or something like that). Or the market in the time favored a risk averse approach and women tend to be more risk averse (don't know that) - there was a bad economical recession in that period of time (as they claim women "manage risk better" - well there are times when more or less risk taking are called for).

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind if women are CEOs and lead companies. I'm just wary of "narratives" that sound too good or too ideologically motivated.
SF was puzzling to me when I live in the Bay Area.

In Paris, using your car is hell but you have a good transportation network.

In smaller French cities, the transportation network is less developed but you can take your car everywhere and park easily.

But San Francisco... Both parking and mass transit is bad! The only viable solution is the bike, but that only works if you're living in the city.
Is there some proof of this outside of this USA Today article?

I came here with the exact same concern as the GP comment.

“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan..."

It just reeks of marketing double-speak that gets engineers excited, only to find out that they're stuck maintaining code for N + 1 browsers now.

Incidentally, Microsoft rebranding exercises infuriate me. Arguably, Spartan is a "new" product, but by that measure any product rewrite should get a completely new, unrelated name rather than a version number. I remember COM + DispInterfaces ==> ActiveX, Outlook Express ==> MSN Messenger, MSN ==> Bing. It's just irritating and confusing to both developers and consumers.
Yes it is normal for investors to be repaid first, However the article is saying is that there is a LIFO arrangement for different investors. Last in , first out.

Example: C round investors , in exchange for new, higher valuation, will be repaid before B or seed round investors. The Liquidation Preference.

If C rounders are paying up for this protection, then I guess it's ok. And if the C round is led by firms that primarily invest in public markets ( T Rowe Price, Wellington, Fidelity etc) then the private company is hoping those firms anchor the next round - an IPO at at least the same or higher valuation.

What is the disaster is when the exit comes, and other public fund managers not previously involved in the deal that need to absorb the remainder of the demand balk at the valuation proposed by the investment bank leading the deal. The public round fetches a lower valuation than the most recent private round(s), and people are not pleased.
I'm not convinced that this isn't just post-hoc justification.

All seven reasons boil down to "It's always been done this way".

I don't see how "a" in the Latin alphabet as used in English is any different to the "a" in the Latin alphabet used in Polish - in particular they are rendered in the same way.

Yet the article claims that even though Chinese and Japanese versions of characters now appear wildly different they still represent the same script so bad luck. Should the Unicode consortium be concerned with the glyphs or the semantics? Seems they are selectively doing both.
> Well, can't the type inference just work the same as it does now, if you happen to use type parameters?

I think it can only work with type parameters because they're constrained in what they can do. If type parameters compile down to type members, presumably there is no "marker" that says that that type member obeys those constraints - if there is then it wouldn't really be unification of type members and type parameters.
I like Apple's physical click-anywhere... it's still a physical click... just contextually sensitive. I don't like tap to click, and I don't like region clicking. My Logitech touchpad on my ubuntu htpc keyboard does this, and pisses me off when it right-clicks because I'm in the bottom-right quarter of the pad (not sure if it can be changed in windows, no option in ubuntu).
Google: Here's what we did wrong with Google Glass
I was wondering how they did it - that's really cool. Thanks for the link.
This might have been a decent gig for Lloyd Dobler:

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."
This is soooo right! If it gains traction this will be the next Tripadvisor!