skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web experience, but quite frankly I don't care.

Firefox is also favoring a phase-out of NPAPI usage, for largely the same reasons, though they are dragging it out longer.

NPAPI (and the IE alternative, ActiveX) are done; the only difference between the major browser vendors is the details of the phase-out.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2014/02/28/update-on-plugi...
Should you validate your Twitter followers using TrueTwit?
Here are the slides, at least.
http://www.slideshare.net/davestagner/seven-habits-of-highly...
More than 3 colours? This isn't a patch on Matt Parker's RGB spreadsheet maker:
http://www.think-maths.co.uk/spreadsheet
The real holes in climate science (2010)
Distributed ID Generation and Bit Packing (2014)
The only real use case for this is as a watermarking tool that the end user uses to place his own watermark on his own images and as has been mentioned could provide a pre-composited file generated on the client to the server for later public consumption.

Of course, this doesn't prevent the user uploading an image that they don't have the rights to and watermarking it as if it was their own... that's a whole other subject.

But it's a good demonstration of the capabilities available in modern browsers :)
How to Test If You Have a Great Idea
10 zsh tricks you may not know
I wonder if it's a negotiation tactic.
I need someone who has programming mindset even he doesnt know programming, because I am ready to teach him if he is going to be with us for at least 1-2 years
I go in cycles and use Chrome for a while and then switch back to Firefox. The last few months, I've found myself using FF Developer version a lot more.

The dev tools are much better than Chrome's, and it uses a fraction of the memory and tends to be much more stable. I have an HP Elite book with 8GB of RAM with an Intel i5 processor. If I leave Chrome open long enough, it will bring my system to its knees.
Secure email provider Lavaboom starts crowdfunding campaign
This is a cute hack, but why?
(Mostly because it doesn't take into consideration using text glyphs _inside_ each cell and a second color to add texture)

Come on, let's go full libaa!
Sure. Just interesting to learn about badges technology.
I configured my XP machines at work to use the win 9x appearance. Of course, those machines are long dead now...
It might be. We use several apps that require Silverlight. I am sure Microsoft will update Silverlight in the future to work differently, but I can't do my work without Silverlight.
I don't know that you can even call this a counter argument to all intelligent design schemes: Christians believe that Adam and Eve live in the garden and were cursed for eating the forbidden fruit. That would make the poor parts the result of transgression and not design (most likely). So they might view it as "corrupted intelligent design"? Unclear.

I'm not too up on all the arguments surrounding intelligent design, I think the biggest issue is that there's no good way to prove / disprove it? In that regard this doesn't really contribute that much then.
High Availability for Mere Mortals
Wifi Sense actually shares credentials with your contacts and vice versa, so you automatically connect to hotspots within your (social) network. Not sure exactly how it handles duplicate SSIDs and things; probably with the heuristics you are talking about.
Thanks. I appreciate the help of you and your team.
Ah, but what if you could use machine learning to make the recording of the new actor sound exactly like the old one? They probably could. But yes, short of that, they have a problem on their hands...
Free MVP Virtual Conference and Microsoft Edge
I don't even know what point you're making.

'as long as you adhere to the rules.'

Yes, by 'obtain a commercial license from Xamarin', they mean, 'pay a license fee'.

Like say, if you ship a mobile game. The only reason Unity gets away with it is because they have a licensing deal that permits them to ship mono.

If you want to write a mobile game, you pay for it.

That's not freedom.
Insightful read. Your mention of text mining in "Future Look" reminds me of Levitt's findings regarding sales correlations with keywords in real estate listings.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w11053.pdf

http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
> Why would one care if the technology is old?

Old and insecure was the issue raised by the grandparent. (And I suspect the implied part with old is "has newer alternatives which do not share its security problems".)

> And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves

That the security depends on the plugins themselves is exactly what is insecure about it compared to more effectively sandboxed alternatives.
They're killing themselves because their entire environment conveys to them that either they will be the very best, like no-one ever was, at everything, or they will wind up flipping burgers and living their lives in poverty -- no third options, no alternative lifestyles. Devote your soul to careerism, or wallow in eternal poverty and exploitation.

It's utterly dehumanizing.
ublock was enough for me, I didn't see the ad in question.
Is anyone on the chrome team lurking here and want to comment?

I believe I remember reading that the chrome team had tons of automated tests that get run on every change list measuring compatibility, performance, memory usage, battery usage(?) etc. So either these tests are broken and they don't know there's a problem or they are ignoring the problem (to work on other features) or there is no actual problem and ours in our heads.
Meet: Fast way to schedule a one-to-one on the go
Pycket: A Tracing JIT for a Functional Language
I wonder if many of those string copies could be removed completely with a change in code structure, and the associated use of various fixed-length-buffers; an OS kernel doesn't seem to me like a piece of software where string manipulation is a significant part of its job (besides pathname handling.)
Who is really behind the software you are downloading?
Brand managers need to stop wasting time and money
Yes, of course, in the sense that it is not the best game possible. But it is much less bad than this game. Look at what a Chess AI does and look at this AI.
Angle Curves- the idea I came up with
A Teenager’s View on Education Technology
Oh. At first glance I thought this was simply a text editor that was actually usable on a phone/tablet. Maybe one day...
>Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you

Abandoning a useful technology with zero alternatives, telling the world to "simply get over using those previous functions and adjust to a new reality where you cannot do what you used to do" is the nail in the coffin for me.

This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives.

This is a case where a core idea in web functionality has been rethought, and the powers that be have decided that we should not use web browsers in this way at all, and we will not be able to do so moving forward.

And if we are given the ability back, it'll be a proprietary, non-standard, vendor hack solution that, in 20 years, will occupy the same space as NPAPI.
Ah, when visiting from mobile, there wasn't anything invasive for me. Thanks for clarifying.

edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.
WebRTC allows for a peer-to-peer data channel and does the heavy lifting of NAT punch through for you. I've mostly been messing with the video chat side of things recently, but would be curious to see if the data channel could be used for large file transfers.
2 common issues you can quickly spot by tracking your Cycle time
I have come to believe that wasting the robocaller's resources are the most valuable option. To that goal, I keep the phone listening to the entire recorded spiel. This is worthwhile sometimes. At least twice, I've gotten a call from "Barbara" in a distinctly male voice. Hilarity abounds! If you don't at least listen to the recording, you're pawning the problem off on someone else. After that, I always press 1 or 9 or whatever to get to a human operator. I try to consume as much of the human operator's time as possible. I ask them to repeat things, I hem and haw while answering. I actually have an expired gift Visa card in my wallet to give out as a "valid" credit card number. I will also note that you can transpose any two odd-position or even-position digits except the last digit (which is a checksum) and the first 6 (Issuing Institution Number). That should yield a wrong credit card number that passes the checksum and IIN lookups.

I have had a full bladder when I've received a call from "Rachel" or "Ann" a couple of times. I've taken this as a sign to let the human operator listen to the cheerful tinkle of urination, and the gloomy finality of a flush.

I believe that the robocallers and the human operators are from different organizations/crime families. If you listen to the robocall all the way through, you've consumed resources of one pack of assholes. I imagine the robocallers get paid on the handoff to the boiler room full of dickweed "operators"/fraudsters. So you should probably try to get through to a human, and then waste their time, as that is time they're not spending defrauding someone a bit simpler or more trusting.

In conclusion: Cardholder Services delenda est!
No, the rest of the world is happy with earning a living, having their health, and keeping themselves surrounded by family and friends. Weirdly enough, most of the world takes those last two items (family and friends) for granted, while Americans tend to throw away the last three (health, family, friends) for the sake of careerism.
I've been doing the hour of code with my 7 yr old daughter. She really enjoys it, so much so that I now get bugged more to "do coding" than to help her with her homework. She's going to love this!

As an aside - To all of you focused on making it easier for the next generation to learn and use these skills:

Thank you so much!
Well a (topological) manifold is a topological space X, that is locally homeomorphic to some d-dimensional euclidean space R^d. A topology on a set X is a way of defining what points are "close together" in some sense, more precisely it is a collection of subsets of X, called the open sets with respect to the topology. The collection has to contain both the set X and the empty set, any union of sets in the collection and any finite intersection. Continuous maps between topological spaces are then maps f: X -> Y, that have the property that every f^{-1}(U) preimage of an open set U of Y is an open set of X. And homeomorphisms are continuous maps with continuous inverse.

Euclidean spaces have a natural topology induced by the standard euclidean norm, whenever you have a notion of distance or metric d: X * X -> R defined on a space X you can speak of the "open balls" with respect to this metric, that is for a fixed point P all points P', such that the distance d(P,P') < c is smaller than some constant c. Those generate a topology.

For some arbitrary topological space X to be locally homeomorphic to R^d, then just means that every point p of X has a open neighborhood, that maps homeomorphically to some open ball in R^d. That is to say it locally "looks like" euclidean space.

One usually wants to do differential geometry on manifolds, that is have some notion of first/second/higher order geometry, in other words do all the things one knows and loves from calculus/analysis on manifolds. For that to work one need that coordinate changes are differentiable, that is
given two open neighborhoods U and V of a point p in X and and homeomorphisms f: U -> U' in R^d and g : V -> V' in R^d one needs the composition g . f^{-1} to be differentiable.

A stochastic manifold is then simply such a (differentiable) manifold together with a density p, that integrates to one $\int_X p = 1$.
That's what I thought when I first read it (how easy) but then realized that under stress, expecting an impossible mind teaser, a nervous applicant might mess it up.
It might have been low last year. This year with the deprecation of Windows XP, pagerank boost for HTTPS[1] and free certs and caching from CloudFlare[2] all of my sites are now SNI. Some are even HSTS.

[1] http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-...

[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl
After CS studies and looking at low level computing devices (physical as in stack machines or ideal like lambda calculus), I'm about to fall in love with clocks, gears and engines (like wankel's http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Wankel_en...). As embodiment of loops, reminding me of quines and paradoxical combinators.
Bytemark trying anonymized recruitment to avoid bias
Bitcoin Payment Options for an Online Business
Transport Layer Security (TLS) Jump Start
I think you're going to need a hardware solution for that problem. No amount of software will ever overcome the fact that touch screens are not efficient input devices.
Indeed. I almost thought the link was broken and I was redirected to an alternative article. Once I figured out that I had to mouse-over to the right to present the article, it was broken due to my mostly default Ghostery config. Here's a screenshot:

http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg
>Firefox is also favoring a phase-out of NPAPI usage, for largely the same reasons, though they are dragging it out longer.

Guess it'll be time to say Auto Updates -> Off.

Until the websites and services I use migrate to a different solution, if at all possible, I just will open myself up to vulnerabilities and security risks and stop updating at all.

I wonder how many users will do the same?

Maybe the browser companies will get lucky and the companies and services relying on this technology will simply fail since there is no alternative, and they won't have to deal with users holding out, since what they hold out for has been destroyed.
I hope the rest join him. Its a sad show now, with the occasional funny episode that reminds you of how all the episodes were. If all the voice talent left tomorrow they'd have to fold. Heaven forbid, giving it a planned send-off with dignity instead of milking and producing a less quality product year after year until all of its goodwill is gone.

Television, you just don't know when to quit.

Or do something risky like move the show up 20 years to the future they sometimes show where Bart is a divorced dad with two boys and Lisa is married to Milhouse. There's some amusing territory there, especially the Futurama-esque absurdism like when Homer bought the first hover car, which predictably was full of bugs, loud, and just a terrible vehicle.
Hey, I'm glad! This is a really good find. I love Baez's writing so I'm pretty eager to run through this as well.
The birth of that show was surprising : http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/11/05/macgyver-the-real-origi...
I wonder what the latency on this is... given that "The Simpsons" is an animated show with a long lead time, when's the last episode that will air with Harry Shearer's voice? The end of the 2015-2016 season?
DuckieTV – TV Show Tracker / Downloader Built with Angular.js and Node-Webkit
A Sharp Spike in Honeybee Deaths Deepens a Worrisome Trend
The answer [1] is Hulu or re-runs on Fox ;) Which actually leads me to wonder why The Simpsons hasn't been toss around to any channel that will take it like Family Guy, American Dad, Cleveland Show, etc. did? I know FX has re-runs now, but man it would be neat to see some Simpsons on Adult Swim.
Also, when I turn on full page view in Chrome's PDF viewer, why can't I turn pages with my mousewheel, the way I can in Adobe Reader? When I need to skim a document, doing normal scrolling with the mousewheel would give me RSI or something.
Sadly, the RBS debacle led only to knighthoods, bail-outs and taxpayer money being spent on bonuses so they could "retain world-class talent". Apparently, firing their asses would have been a Bad Thing due to their stellar performance to date (and since).

The very idea of prison time for RBS re-cycling the Enron ideas of debt vehicles is laughable.

Enron people went to jail and the banks (like RBS) then had regulators permit exactly the same debt-swap bullshit that killed Enron. Banks went on to trade in debt - an eventual cause of the financial meltdown. RBS was a major culpable party but their chairman, Fred Goodwin, managed to get away with returning the knighthood and a fraction of his pension, while protected by a super-injunction making it illegal to reveal to the public he was a banker[1]. He continues to enjoy 'Royal Family' level police protection, has his properties removed from Street View [2] and is granted a level of establishment protection no-one else could dream of if they had been responsible for any catastrophe of even a fractional proportion.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/mar/10/fred-goodwin...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/20/fred-goodw...
You know how I know you live in a major metropolitan area and have a good deal of disposable income?
Sunrise Meet
Pgsql: Add pg_audit, an auditing extension
No, it uses up to 55 custom colors.
The Strange Way Frustration Can Help the Brain to Learn
Tried adding one hotspot and got "Sorry! We didn't manage to get a response from the server".
Note that the app appears to be based on this recent research paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/hype...

Not to be confused with the hyperlapse paper from 2014 that was instead using a very computationally heavy structure from motion pipeline. Quoting the 2015 paper: "Our approach resides in between the Instagram approach and that of Kopf et al [the 2014 paper]".
Uber Poaches PR Chief Whetstone from Google
This is wonderful writing. I went to the University of Florida. Its recreational lake[1] (where students canoe, water ski, swim, etc) is infested with gators (the reptile kind, not the students, though there are lots of them too). No matter how many times I was told no students had ever been attacked there[2], swimming in that lake was still nerve-wracking.

[1] http://www.recsports.ufl.edu/lake-wauburg

[2] http://www.gainesville.com/article/20070614/SUNFRONT/7061403...
Exercising ~150 mins/week cuts 8 year mortality from 8% to 3%
From 1Password to Vim to manage passwords
"The point, however, is that as a consequence of noticing when our mind has wandered and then replacing our attention on the breath 10,00 or 100,000 times, we are subtly strengthening our awareness of what is happening in our mind and, so, our ability to take control of where we focus our concentration."

So true. But mindfulness doesn't need to be obtained/focused solely by focusing on your breath. I think you can gain a lot of mindfulness strength by training yourself how to (actually) focus on your work: http://focusr.co
> That's the everyday misconception. Nobody produces wealth just by typing at a keyboard. Products don't design and sell themselves and it's arrogant to pretend that product people and salespeople aren't a huge part of the value creation process in tech.

Okay you've got a point, it is fairly arrogant; on the other hand, any sort of automation or small script or product is valuable enough that we don't need to be subservient.

> But if this is common, why are so many talented developers sitting at desks in open office spaces working 10-12 hours a day for low six figure salaries?

That's what I'm asking, why are talented developers allowing themselves to be subservient? That's why I'm wondering why technical managers all the way up to the CTO level are subservient to other departments when it's the product based on technology that determines the success of the company in the end?

And actually, your idea is optimistic; I wouldn't mind low six figures for 10-12 hours a day ;) maybe that's why we're so subservient, we look at our peers in other industries and they're making much less cash money and it's easy to see that we're lucky to be working in a nice air-conditioned office working with something we're typically passionate about.
One positive of genetic diversity is resistance to disease caused by virus and bacteria.
A population too homogeneous can be destroyed by a disease in a way an heterogeneous population is not (and the infection also spreads faster)

That is: in homogeneous populations either a disease can kill/infect everyone, or no one. So, when it hits, it hits hard

(btw, this already happens with crops)
Cool! Well, that's why we write them, people seem to dig them! And we have a lot of stats and data from our experiences to share, so it's mutually beneficial!
My vote goes to menstruation.

It's an extremely wasteful exercise.

Most mammals do not need to do it, so there's an existing model for how reproduction can work without the need for ~monthly blood and tissue loss.
> This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives.

On the contrary, that's actually exactly the reason that all browser vendors are phasing out NPAPI (or, in MS's case with Spartan succeeding IE, ActiveX) plug-in technology: it is legacy technology for which there are modern superior alternatives.
It's worth noting that Sheare has spearheaded negotiations and threatened to leave before. A few years ago the cast agreed to lower their pay from $400k per episode to $300k.

He is also one of the only cast on an ongoing tv show I've ever heard of criticizing his own show publicly.

I don't blame him if he is tired of working on the show. It can't just be Internet pundits who are tired of the falling Simpsons quality.

More on Wikipedia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Shearer#The_Simpsons
Yep, this was the most difficult thing to grasp when I started learning this stuff. I thought that somehow the body knows to slow things down when it is in motion. But when you think through it, it is easy. Its all in the reference frames. Imagine yourself going from Earth to Alpha Centauri in a constant velocity. In SR terms, this means you are in motion with respect to earth. Now imagine there is nothing else in the universe except you. Take away Earth, Alpha Centauri, all stars, galaxies, etc. Nothing but infinite empty space. Imagine yourself doing the same movement (I know it is a stretch and I am butchering physics here, since I asked to take away your source and destination, but you can form a mental picture). Now, in SR terms, I cannot say anything about your motion. You are neither moving nor stationary and it is pointless to say anything. But based on old Newtonian model, you can be considered "moving" in this big empty room of Universe (which later became theorized into Ether). When you grasp this and understand that motion is relative, also understand that time is relative. There is no giant universal clock which dictates what time it is for this giant room (which is again what Newton imagined). Einstein simply said there is no such thing (aka special reference frame). Once this is grasped, other concepts like time dilation will flow from it.