skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently switched from a 15" macbook to a lenovo windows 8.1 laptop after 10 years of mac/linux for my daily driver.

I live with Windows as the base install and virtualbox linux (arch + ubuntu).

I am so glad to be free of the Mac... My hardware is upgradeable again, the touchscreen is a real innovation, Excel opens instantaneously and when I want Unix, I use the linux vm, I am not tempted to use the strange halfway house that is the mac unix cli/packaging system with ports/homebrew on its back.

windows 8.1 is a bifurcated experience, but they tried to do something new... it feels like Apple desktop engineers only really do truly new stuff in desktop hardware (smaller, lighter, glue and solder) ... the software is pretty but way behind Gnome, KDE and Windows...

I was the biggest MS hater you could be 10 years ago.... now it is Apple that seems like the bad guy that isn't innovating now...
That depends on the nature of your site, why you care about feedback, and what kind of feedback you hope to get.
I find many of the claims suspect. We should all know by now that 50% of marriages less than five years long end in divorce, but if you can get past the 5 year mark, the divorce rate drops off significantly. [0] Further, the divorce rate is falling, not rising, and for recent marriages, following the trend since the 1970s, the 50% claim is off by a half.

Not that there isn't still room for improvement, but when an article starts off by siting a spurious fact, I've been lost as an engaged reader.

[0] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surg...
There is an additional wrinkle here. The overwhelming majority of people prosecuted by the Feds are guilty of something (and not just of some "made up" crime). I worked for a federal appellate judge. Saw dozens of criminal cases come up on appeal. Didn't see a single one from the Feds where the evidence of guilt wasn't overwhelming (even if some convictions were defective for technical reasons, and even if some were for debatably immoral conduct like drug trafficking). They don't go around baiting random people they think are innocent to lie in an interview. They do it to make sure they have concrete points of leverage to get information about the rest of the crimes.

Of course, this really sucks if you're innocent (though even then, often your associates aren't and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time). When these guys see guilty people lie to their face day in and day out, it's hard to give the rare actually innocent person the benefit of the doubt. They have the moral obligation to do that, mind you. It's just understandably hard.
My post was about the banality of arguing about exactly how likely things like abiogenesis and intelligence are in the face of ~0 information. The probability of all such unknowns will fall somewhere between 0 and 1.

It was not about ruling anything out, or a statement that any particular position was irrational.
Would be nice to know the background of the project.

Writing a UI library is not an easy thing.

Was it written from scratch, or some existing library was used as a reference? Had the authors had any background in developing UI engines? How long it took them to write this?
Stunning Drone Footage of Torres Del Paine National Park
Done, plz respect others :-)
This is incredibly interesting. I wonder what their support was in the last election? Or how long it is until the next election.

I know very little about Iceland's political system but suspect some translation problems with the language in that article.

Biggest would really only apply to seats won, while this reads to me as being 'most popular'

Still, really interesting.

I also suspect that the 'shun corruption' just means they havent been caught yet.
Question: If spotify isn't a good deal for indy artist, why don't they all abandon the platform and use an alternative? Like Bandcamp, which you mentioned pays 8x. Come on artists, I dare you to?! :) Or are you afraid of subverting the dominant paradigm?
Drones have become the spotlight recently but people tend to forget about their photographic potential. Earlier this week there was a beautiful video piece shot with a drone in Hang Son Doong, the world’s largest cave. This video is another beautiful example of how drone tech will pave the way for prosumers to bridge the gap between cost and pro level video.
like Java? :)
Spotify commented at the time, comparing Vulfpeck to John Cage. Made me giggle. Vulfpeck is great, I saw them live in NYC a few years ago
Anecdotal, as is this whole thread, but I have off and on experience with Linux, starting with Red Hat around 2001, several different distros, laptops and PCI wifi cards, and I don't remember ever having to separately download a NIC driver. In Windows, however, I have had to do this several times. I fully feel the author's frustration that in 8.1 Windows doesn't include their OEM's drivers. That's not to say the driver world of Linux is just peachy, far from it, but at least I can start connected to the internet to begin troubleshooting my issues.
There is no difference between a woman's brain and a man's. Give two brain scans (fMRIs/MEGs/EEGs etc) to a neuroscientist and they cannot tell which one belongs to which gender.

This claim sounded fishy enough to me to warrant more research for sources, and the first Google result was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences
It does seem to clearly contradict your claim. Further research directed me to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_dimorphic_nucleus
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.abstract
Generally, searching for "sexual dimorphism human brain" brings up a lot of results. It seems that you should update your data.
THE CHANGING – AND UNCHANGING – STRUCTURE OF TV
This library is fantastic. These patterns are essential in the production of print-ready and print-like contents.

With the high resolution screens available today these make for stunning graphical presentation.
I think from the context it's fairly obvious what he's referring to.
In the growing family of ML-inspired systems programming languages, it's worth mentioning ATS as well: http://www.ats-lang.org/

A big difference here, though, is that AFAIK BitC removed macros, while both ATS and Rust have them in some form.

Writing macros in an ML-like language doesn't really compare to writing them in Lisp, although in the case of Dale it's a little disappointing that the macro syntax looks more cumbersome than it could be.
I was traveling in Homs, Syria, about a decade ago and I met a Dutch couple at the hotel. We had dinner together, and I had enough Arabic to order most of the food, but I was trying to stress that the woman was vegetarian.

When I couldn't clearly do so, the boyfriend pulled out a large picture book and started flipping through the pages. He came to one with an image of meat/chicken and a large, red circle with a slash through it. He pointed at his girlfriend, then at the picture, and the waiter nodded. She got the vegetarian version of a bean dish that often has some meat served in it as well.

I was impressed. The book was indexed and divided into categories for everything – bathrooms, the airport, food, hospital visits, etc. It covered so many cases that I had needed addressed in my travels and many more I had never considered needing to communicate. I travel enough that I have sought this book for a decade, and I would pay good money for an indexed app that could do the same thing.

Menus are just the tip of the iceberg.
Arch Linux now supported on Opennebula
Ahh amazing! We met one of the creators at Famo.us earlier in the year. He was truly inspirational and the css work he has done on April Zero is mind boggling.
myopia.org:
first impressions, timecube. Second impressions: wait, myopia isn't inherited? There are 18 loci on 15 chromosomes that are associated with myopia. Carriers of these genes are 10x as likely to have myopia. Bullshit meter for the site is off the scale. Does the same person who writes that site write homeopathic guides? Wait, let's see what else is linked to. Oh, some bullshit cholesterol pills! And on all cholesterol products, "We are currently not supplying this item due to quality issues at the supplier's factory."

And cataract drops! "Carnosine (β-alanyl-L-hystidine), and its topical prodrug formulation N-acetylcarnosine (NAC), is advertised (especially on the internet) to treat a range of ophthalmic disorders associated with oxidative stress, including age-related and diabetic cataracts. No convincing animal studies or masked clinical trials have been reported"

This dude is a snakeoil salesman. The myopia.org site is just the bait.

gettingstronger.org: it has some, hm, interesting opinions that's for sure. He's a chemical engineer and philosopher, though, so not .. quite .. sure about his clinical expertise, especially with regard to myopia. No ads, not selling anything (on the surface) except his slightly-out-there ideas.

Frauenfeld Clinic: with clinic in the name, you immediately think it's run by a doctor -- right? Welllllll.... it was launched seven years ago by a "holistic ophthalmology practitioner" that signs his posts only with "Alex;" The current curator is "Jake Steiner," who claims to have fixed his own myopia with "this amazing program." His training in the area is self proclaimed as, "[...] tak[ing] dozens of classes in ophthalmology, stud[ying] optometry, and read[ing] tens of thousands of pages of myopia studies" His consults start at $10k.

Yeah, dude, you're propagating snake oil :)
I was very unhappy to find that RDS does not support cross-region read replication for Postgres, only for MySQL. We had made a significant investment to migrate from MySQL to Postgres but are now having to back out a lot of changes, because we need that redundancy.

Postgres is widely acknowledged as the leading open source database. It's frustrating that it remains a second class citizen on AWS.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=604244
It needs to happen. It's so simple and effective approach that it's really puzzling to see it not being implemented anywhere.
that's a feature ;-)
Obviously there's a balance here. You don't want to put people in danger with your silence. The answer depends on what you look like, what you are doing (are you carrying contraband?), and the situation.

Being a witness in general is a real pain in butt in any case, particularly if you are witnessing a non-trivial crime.
Laziness and greed.
But really, it's mostly laziness. If you tell someone cookies are 100% bad because they kill kittens, people won't use them unless they want to kill kittens. If you nebulously say that they might potentially be used to kill kittens at some point in the future, nobody cares.
While I agree it's ridiculous, Apple imposes a limit of 100MB for cellular downloads - http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/18/apple-increases-over-the... - so even though it's a more reasonable figure, still a showstopper for obtaining your 230MB wi-fi driver.
The article mentioned a couple of towers falling down. it might no longer be acceptable - either to investor or regulators - and so the extra money on materials and design would explain it.
Sadly I think that a lot of businesses either don't care or don't think about the cookies and tracking added to their site.

In my experience it's usually the marketing department that want much, not all, of the things that end up setting cookies. It's not that it's a bad idea necessarily, but it's adding tracking upon tracking upon tracking and rarely a request to remove something. Some sales person try to sell marketing "Yet another up-sell tool" or "customer retention solution" and no one considers that the site already have five of those tools installed, 3 of which isn't actually used anymore and the last two we aren't really sure of.

I think it's a scam mostly, trying to convince businesses that they're leaving profit on the floor. The providers of these tools leave real businesses jumping from one tracking/data-mining/customer-spying to another in the hope that it will boost their sales by a few percent. Do we really need to know know that much about our customer? Probably not.
Integrating Social Data with Your Big Data
You're kidding, right? Where is the source code for java compiler and jvm stuff? Can you send a pull request? Can you see the commits? Can you see design meetings about the language? Java is not more open than .NET in any way.
Show HN: Buildcache memoizes execution of build commands
"so you can manage to write arbitrary data to $somedir/jitcache instead of $somedir/foobar"

That's already escaping from sandbox which most likely would cause much more troubles. In this way we can worry about absolutely anything ;)
It's a shame the one in Germany blew it because of internal conflict. It would've probably reached 15 percent by now, too.
Blue light dependent penile erection in rats (optogenetic)
Janus – A Fake REST API Server in Go
Thanks! Of course, as fate would have it, now the site's up again, but it's the thought that counts. :)
There's also "tereré", which is like "chimarrão", but it is infused and consumed with cold water instead of hot.
I'm in almost the same position as the OP. I bought a toshiba s55 with Win 8.1 as a travel rig because my eeePC just wasn't able to handle the load any more. The Toshiba doesn't fit as well into an airline seat, but it is a very nice setup. I use Linux Mint in VirtualBox (my main work machine- the one I'm on now- is also Mint but as a native install.

In short, I'm quite pleased with win 8.1. I like the tile stuff ok. VBox with Mint is fast enough for development work (no usb 3 support yet). But for the first time in years I can confidently print and scan and really get full use out of my hardware.

The drawback is crapware. I apparently downloaded something called Pokki which isn't really a virus (some people might have a use for it) but which is pretty hard to get rid of (maybe not for Win types but it took me a while). I don't think they tried to be malicious- everything was in an easily discoverable folder and their website tells you where it is, the just have an auto-start process that you have to delete after starting in 'safe mode.'

Other than that it's fine. I follow the same security practices: I have an admin account that I don't use very much but I use for installing 'global,' trusted software like vbox and Office (Libre/MS). I do my work under a non-priviledged account. Etc. Oh, and I did use the Norton virus thingy, just in case.

Overall my experience with Win 8.1 has been positive.
Also don't forget the satellite radio service that merged with XM radio. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Satellite_Radio
You're right, the study's not worthless - the "key findings" are all accurate and portray a reasonably sensible, true-to-life picture of the results, and we do need more easily-consumable, experimentally-justified content to help ensure that the public doesn't end up backing stupid laws.

That said, the article's focus on 31st December 9999 and outliving the lifespan of the user, the discussion around the number of cookies served (rather than the number of parties serving cookies, and the amount and type of data that they're storing, which is what we're really concerned about here), and the click-baity headline to both the page and the HN article take what was probably a very sensible study and pervert the reader into drawing conclusions for all the wrong reasons. Giving public funding to something that's going to place that sort of bias (which in a private news publication would be fine) between the public and science I find pretty galling.
Note link between Yerba Mate and esophageal cancer: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3947123/
and http://preventcancer.aicr.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id...
Personally if you're altering browser chrome you've gone too far - it's the users browser, not the web designers.
Adblock Plus Removed from Google PlayStore (2013)
Yeah, but you probably shouldn't assume that Spotify is the only money they spend. Just because someone has a Spotify subscription (and thus has demonstrated a willingness to spend money on music), they might buy at least the odd track and/or also subscribe to other streaming in some form on other services, e.g. as part of Amazon Prime. And OTOH, unpaid Spotify subscribers will in some cases be unpaid precisely because they get their music from other sources (streaming, paid, "free").

Of course, music revenue has declined overall in any case.
At that age, myopia progression of 0.75 in a year is considered average. In Asia, the average is actually even slightly higher.
I'm actually fascinated with the lastest comment on that page from klkvsk:

"Anyways, blame Intel and N-7265 wifi adapter you have in your laptop, not Microsoft. Windows does have a generic driver that works well most of their adapters, but seems like not all of them. That's a question for Intel, why is it not compatible."

This is just Linux guys' (me) scripted answer for people trying linux for the first time who has wifi problems. Things are really inverse now.
I became curious about this when I became significantly less short-sighted during each of my years of maternity leave. A few more kids and I won't need glasses any longer :-) Indeed, I spent much more time outside while on maternity leave than when I was working.

I found this interesting too: http://www.katysays.com/pumpkin-eyes-and-pelvic-floors/
By the way, some sources say that the download cap has already been increased somewhat for Windows Phone (from 20 to 50MB): http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-lift-20mb-download-l... - still nowhere close to 230MB, to be sure.
Access's 1.0 code name was Cirrus, in the About box's easter egg you can see a bolt of thunder coming from a cloud striking two ducks in a pond. A pair of ducks...
28 most important events leading to modular smartphones
Chasing wild horses with drones...you don't see that everyday
Opera Buys SurfEasy to Add Secure VPN Services to Its Browser Software
Getting silence in an open plan office is more difficult than you think. Management frowns on me duct-taping other developers' mouths shut.
I assumed it might be "A leopard doesn't change its spots" and searching that got me here:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-t...

(which matches the above characters)
Aspergetaart met verse tuinkruiden – Leef Nu Gezonder
JSONB is nice, but the inability to perform updates inside a JSON doc is major drawback.
lenovo... lol
Isn't RenderScript available since API level 11? And there is also a SupportLibrary version that is available for even older versions of Android. What do you mean saying that it's from API level 17?
Remote work and hacking the workflow of employees
If your scripts are going to be downloaded asynchronously because you've used "async" or "defer", you should place them before any blocking resources, like CSS for example, otherwise you're sat waiting for that blocking resource to download before you even start downloading the scripts.

This is why my script tags end up in the head now, because I want to place them before the CSS tags, and I want to fetch the CSS before the body starts being displayed.

I tend to use defer rather than async because I want the scripts to execute in the order I add them to the page, and only once the body has been fully constructed.

That said, if you have to support old browsers, make sure you research which ones support async/defer, and which ones have buggy implementations. caniuse.com is your friend.

[*] If I'm wrong with any of the above, please correct me. Just checked your profile and you seem well qualified to contradict me.
Show HN: Hacker News NCAA bracket (password: geekout)
I have used Xamarin Studio a lot in the past for free. It's the mobile stuff that costs extra. Now I lean a bit more toward Visual Studio as it is free for my purposes.
well, this is great news, im not sure weve had a real government since jfk tho. i dont think afghans were insurgants anymore, i think we were killing residents, and im really sad.
Ask HN: How would you implement a verifiable open-source web application?
Wasn't really sure how to make the title descriptive enough without putting the full question there.

Anyway, I have been toying with the idea of creating an open-source web application. Open-source in the way that I would host the product on my own servers but the full source code, except, of course, authentication info, tokens and things which shouldn't be under source control anyway, would be available on Github. Anyone would also be able to set up a self-hosted version of the product, and if anyone wanted to contribute, I would accept pull requests, etc.

The idea behind that was that, since it would be targeted mostly at a tech-savy crowd and deals with personal information, I would like to introduce some level of trust that I'm not doing anything sneaky or unexpected behind the scenes (like storing information I shouldn't be).

So basically I started wondering if it is possible to implement a way people could verify that the same code they see on the Github repo is the code that's also running on the live hosted site? I will be working with node.js, but I don't think the tech stack is too relevant here.

The client-side part, as I imagined it, would be relatively trivial to verify - run the build part locally, compare fingerprint of the live code and the local version.

But my idea got stuck on the server side. Since there, even if I would make a server side endpoint that returns the fingerprint of the live code, there is no way for someone to check what is actually going on, I could just as well return a static file with a hardcoded fingerprint.

I'm sure someone has dealt with or thought about similar problems before, and I would be happy to hear some insights. Feels like this might be a pipe dream, but at least some level of verification would be nice to achieve.
Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm planning on getting one by the next months, when a relative of mine will come visit from the U.S. Fortunately, I don't really use the function keys, maybe twice a week I'll hit one F-key that I mapped out to perform a calculation, but other than that, I have it all mapped out to the regular rows. I took typing in high school, so long ago that it was on an electric typewriter, meaning it had to f-keys - I think it was 1993. So I never memorized the f-keys, so I always got around to not using them. Just one more thing: do you have the regular keyboard, or the one with the linear key switches?
I sadly had the same experience as this guy. I guess when you are a standard user browsing the web, everything works fine on windows, but if you are a web developer it's just a nightmare.

There is always something to install which is not there, I have to install tons of drivers, Putty, WinCSP, a decent terminal (cmd.exe is just unusable), WAMP, python, various python libraries, perl, node.js (lots of front-end tools needs it now), Cygwin (otherwise it's impossible to do anything with the base programs), wget.exe, 7zip, notepad++ (the built-in notepad does not handle newlines properly), git, setup bash aliases, emacs, Firefox ... (the list can be expanded).

So yeah, you can code on Windows, but you are basically fighting with the system all the time to install everything you need.
Then they're using the term incorrectly. Legally blind is having 20/200 vision in your best eye with the best correction possible.
Welcome Emails: Transactional versus Scheduled
Get cyber smart: 10 promising European cyber security startups