skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So...iOS app developers band together to protest the fact that Apple uses our apps for marketing purposes and to make the platform more attractive to buyers. Yet, they don't pay us a dime.

It's the same mechanism, isn't it? The iOS platform became attractive to buyers due to the HUGE investment on the part of developers who created free, freemium and paid apps for the platform. Apple has been using all of these apps in their marketing campaign since day one. The platform without apps is worthless. Ergo, the apps give them value and make them desirable.

And so, Apple created a slippery slope of an App Store model where just about the only way to have a shot is to give your work product away and hope to monetize it through paid upgrades or advertising. Failure on the App Store is the norm, not the exception. Yet, again, Apple still benefits from your free/mium app being there and they never pay you a dime for it.

Are there parallels between this and music? I think one could very well argue the case to be so.
The execution could be better, but it is certainly not a stupid idea. GA code is esentially a concealed, unconditional transmit of the user data to a third party, and allowing this third party to intercept and modify your communication; pretty high price for a few colorful piecharts, and certainly something that deserves a disclaimer.
Could it be that there might be other names coming in the future - so the product is Echo, but variants are "Alexa", and then some others would come later? (My son really like a "Steve" for he loves Minecraft... lol)
Straw 2.0 lets you create polls and broadcast them to the world from your phone
So much for this:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandO...
> I did the same until I got a safety razor and found some good blades.
> Smoothest shave of my life

I have an honest opinion about that... I've done the disposable refills most of my life, but recently was balking at the amount of money I was spending. Did a lot of research, and decided to give a good electric a try. I'm rocking the Braun 790cc. It's actually a great shaver, and in the last year it's cost very little to maintain. Even buying cleaner cartridges and replacement heads periodically, it's MUCH cheaper than disposable blades.

Problem is, the electric DEFINITELY doesn't shave as close. I totally can tell... the few times I've switched it up and used a blade again, the difference is incredible. That said, I am a white guy with very dark, dense stubble. No matter how close I shave, you can still see my beard line. It's Homer Simpson syndrome.

So I'm left thinking in the end that if the electric shaves close enough that I don't look unshaven, it's good enough. Basically, when I get formal in the evening, I just do a quick followup shave with the electric to make sure I'm 'presentable', and I've never had an issue.
You're right but….

I think the general idea is that moving to renewables turns the problem into a more solvable one, or a bunch of more solvable ones. It's an inherently optimistic idea, but I sort of buy it.

Grids that take more advantage of decentralized production, cleaner solar panel manufacturing (or mineral extraction). That sort of thing.

There's another big thing to add to your list: transport. It's almost all hydrocarbons. Planes, ships, cars, trucks. Same answer for this one. We'll a solar, battery, or hydrogen powered vehicles.
Walnut herb
Absolute genius. Bits & pieces from the junkyard and old drills cobbled together to make a miniature forklift. Lovely!
True. I started using Subversion and then Mercurial for writing scientific papers during grad school (a distributed VCS was handy when editing on multiple machines), but it never seemed worth the effort to teach my collaborators how to use them from scratch.
Yes. Yes, I do. Because I am the paying customer, not the product being sold.
See also Augur:

http://www.augur.net/

http://www.augur.net/blog/the-augur-alpha-is-now-available-t...
How SoundCloud Keeps Communication Flowing
That explains why the guys were ratted out by FBI :)
+1

I've wrote my Bachelor thesis in LyX and it's awesome, especially for math!

If someone is interested (it's about Bitcoin and in German), here's the source: http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~jhasse/Bachelor-Arbeit.zip
And here's the PDF: http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~jhasse/Kryptografische%20Grun...
Nothing fancy like Clean Thesis though. I like the http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ approach better ;)
The modal emissions from nuclear are low, but the safety worst-case is a circle many square kilometers in diameter rendered uninhabitable (Fukushima) or damage to farming across a continent (Chernobyl).
my panasonic smart tv has a netflix app, but it's so clunky and unbearably slow that it's faster and easier to boot up a playstation and browse netflix on that.
Do you have complete tcpdump logs to prove this, or are you assuming it works that way Amazon said so?

What about new versions of the firmware?
Spots on! Thank you for writing this.
Access is definitely the most important thing in here. It actually remind me of the important work that Internet.org is doing.
NSA, GCHQ targeted Kaspersky, other cybersecurity companies – Snowden docs
I perceive the condensed sentence fragment (as requested for Angular) as a conceptual gist, which is all it really is (a few words to suggest the bigger picture), not a title (each commit is identified by its hash).
The first chart is energy capacity additions ... which confused me too...
TPP, Trans-Atlantic and TiSA are the trifecta and the BRICS are excluded out of these for a good reason. Even though there are firm Geo-Strategic grounds for these agreements, they are most likely not in the side of the Worker and likely cement the power of Elite in US and partner countries.
> many of them that can be "fixed" in browser settings

Some are due to user error. A user's clock could be messed up... but the majority of these errors are errors by the website operator or by the network they're connecting with (capacitive portals, MiTM).
That same argument applies to the (metaphorical) claim that all power is solar, which is what I was poking fun at.
Grand Rounds Is Raising at Around a $750M Valuation
>Today’s consumers are spending over 85 percent of their time on their smartphones using native applications,

>but the majority of their time – 84 percent – is spent using just five non-native apps they’ve installed from the App Store.

So...They spend 85% of their time in native apps and 84% of their time in non-native apps from their respective app marketplace? I'm guessing they're using native/non-native in two different ways in the same sentence (native vs web apps and non-native vs "stuff that came installed on their phones". Still kinda confusing.

> Those five apps will vary from person to person. For some, their top five could include social media or gaming, while others may spend more time in instant messaging.

Is that like saying I spend 84% of my time on my desktop computer running programs that didn't come with the OS but that I typically use just five programs the most? I guess I just assumed that's the norm for a lot of people.

I could say that at work, I spend 84% of my time using Firefox, Outlook, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Pidgin. For someone else, it could be a different 5 programs. What's the takeaway though? That people spend most of their time using programs that don't come installed with the OS? That we tend to use a handful of programs the most but keep a bunch of others installed for less common tasks?

It would seem to me that this has been the norm for computing devices for a while unless I'm missing the point completely.
what I don't get is, isn't "highly radioactive" waste dangerous because it puts out so much energy? So..... maybe we should just plop that waste back into a fission reactor, then?
France had to shut down several reactors in the 2003 heatwave due to the river water getting too hot and had to try and cool some of them by spraying water on them from the outside.

http://www.rense.com/general40/reactors.htm

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear
I have to say I have mixed feelings about the video. On one hand I understand there's a whole world of people out there, and I don't mind openness and honesty. Big thumbs to her for being honest and cool. On the other hand, it goes the other way when you're bragging about your awesome product that analyzes people's life and sells that info to corporations.
No, you have two options "Alexa" or "Amazon". My kids love interacting with "Amazon". She tells some pretty corny jokes.
Both Android and iOS have always-listening modes: OK Google and Hey Siri.
The amount of energy extracted, even if we were to go to all-solar, is a small fraction of the incident solar energy.
He might be referring to gallium arsenide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#Solar_cells_a...
If I'd be a trusting person, I probably wouldn't have this exchange with you. I don't have social network accounts (except for a ~mostly~ readonly Twitter thing), I don't use Google Now etc.

Now, I admit that this just shows that I'm not part of the target market - just like the thread's author I assume. I don't claim that people are stupid if they buy into Echo, I just don't see why on Earth you would want to.

"why would you trust that the other device's microphone doesn't activate and send your audio remotely?"

As explained above: All voice activated features have an off button and I try to keep an eye on things/removing services/disable whatever I can. The distinction here is that one device works perfectly fine if you can convince yourself that it doesn't listen to you. The other one doesn't.

"What laws protect you from your phone/tablet that don't apply to the Echo?"

IANAL - but tapping your phone is something that the law is rather specific about and it is usually well protected. You can argue that the use of the phone's microphone outside of a call would be really not 'phone' related, but I'd hope (erm.. maybe I do have more trust than I'm aware of myself here?) that a court would find the invasion worse. Again: One is a device that is meant for private communication under your control. The other one is a microphone in your living room that is sold to stream your audio (yes, I understand the wake word concept) to random corporations.

And in the end it's a matter of limiting exposure. I _do_ think that the phone can be abused. It's just not practical to avoid one in my daily life. I take precautions and accept the risk. Without bashing Echo fans, I personally just wouldn't see the benefit and therefor cannot accept the risks.

Bottom line: Having a phone with a microphone and then buying another microphone for the living room isn't a case of 'Ah, all is lost anyway' for me. I don't think the comparison makes sense/leads anywhere.
Wrong. You and your habits/data are the product for Amazon to sell/use. The box isn't the product.
Samsung 512GB 850 Pro is $260 on Amazon[0], not $140. Am I missing something?

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7KE...
DockerCon Day 1 roundup: Peace declared in container wars
The Three Essential Properties of the Engineering Mind-Set
As others have observed, these comments are used for auto-documentation, for reporting, and for merge requests. Its handy to be able to categorize them, to schedule and organize these activities.
Oh most definitely. You'd rather not have a denial of money attack. For example, if you were hosting your static site in S3 and getting raked over the coals by Amazon for their expense transfer per GB out rate.

Sometimes, better your site go down then you have a huge bill for something you're not monetizing.
All renewable energy sources that I can think of are processes that used to be (Energy -> Heat) and we turn them into (Energy -> Electricity -> Heat), where Energy is gravitational potential, EM radiation, etc.

The two changes are that the electricity is sometimes stored (so we have some small amount of energy cooped up in batteries instead of out in the world as heat) and that we often move the electricity before turning it into heat. The latter probably exacerbates the heat island effect, although I wouldn't expect it to be worse than pushing electricity from other sources into major cities. The former hardly seems like a problem given that global warming is a concern.
Wow. Thank you. I didn't make the connection until you wrote that. I really should reread The Cuckoo's Egg.
To be fair, any FTA (including the TPP) will be made public for a minimum of 4 months before Congress can vote on it (although with TPA they won't be allowed to offer amendments to it).

In reality, almost all legislation is written behind closed doors today (a public Git-for-Law would be a wonderful project), and is then sponsored by a member of Congress and goes (usually) to Committee.

Non-trade agreements with foreign powers are also negotiated "behind closed doors", because the negotiations themselves tend to be quite sensitive, and the negotiating positions of each country are also considered highly sensitive.

The real issue is probably that the Trade Advisory Committees are not required by law to be balanced between corporate interests and public advocacy groups (there are multiple representatives from such groups, although it's not currently well balanced).
"But what she’ll do for sure is waive into DC off the bat after passing in Texas."

This is not possible. DC's admission on motion requires a five-year wait if you do not have a J.D.

http://www.dccourts.gov/internet/documents/rule46c3_admissio...
The US legal immigration system is perfectly described by the adjective, Kafkaesque. In terms of the arbitrariness of bureaucracy, it has more in common with what I saw in the socialist days of India and what one reads in books by Solzhenitsyn and Kafka. The iniquities have been discussed repeatedly in popular press, with almost no changes wrought in the process. Many years ago (yes, 2011 was 4 years ago) Newsweek ran a story about how irrational bureaucratic delays derailed a guy's career in a consulting firm: http://www.newsweek.com/story-one-mans-immigration-ordeal-66...

I know at least 6 other people who have had similar experiences: well qualified people in great skill-specific jobs who were caught up in bureaucratic nightmares. Unlike the subject of the Newsweek article, these people had employees who could afford to keep them on the payroll.

New York Times also ran an article on this issue, of a Google employee who had to move to Canada because of arbitrary bureaucratic rules concerning the work visa. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12immig.html?page...

Further, green card applications have country quotas, which, in the context of citizenship were deemed unconstitutional during JFK/LBJ's civil rights actions.

In spite of such iniquities, there seem to be no political efforts to fix the system.
I'm not criticizing Antirez, he seems to be on the recieving end.
It's more sustainable if you have US style welfare where benefits are things like wage subsidies, for a limited duration after employment, or in kind in some way like Medicaid or food stamps.

EDIT: I think I should point out that the tradeoff is that this way of doing welfare is less efficient but requires less trust.
Transaction Tracing for Node.js with Trace Sequences, Waterfalls, Flame Graph
So this is pretty much guaranteeing that the TPP agreement will pass now? Good grief...
What does your social footprint say about you?
An app that makes your smart phone smarter? Senses when you need stuff and gives you specifics? Sounds genius to me! I like when my phone can read my mind. Brilliant idea I would definitely use all the time.
I'll supply an anecdote of my own. My parents both immigrated to the US, both obtained permanent residency, and are both on the path to citizenship.

This guy has been trying for 15 years. It doesn't explain in the article why he doesn't at least have his residency yet.
It seems sometimes like the only thing that has changed significantly in Ruby since I started with 1.8.4, ten years ago, is that it now has a real bytecode and better garbage collection.

So sad to see a language stagnate like this.
US unable to issue visas to travellers due to computer glitch
My kids love the jokes too.

And I've not had to answer a single "Dad, how do spell..." question since we received it.
There are some experimental IV generation Fission Reactors, which burn the entirety of the nuclear fuel leaving just lighter radioactive elements with shorter half-life.
Regarding safety, the Molten-salt Reactor also of IV generation, allows for non catastrophic failures since if the reaction goes out of control, the salt solidifies and stops the reaction instead of exploding by the increased pressure. The downside is that reactor becomes a radioactive rock.
I have no clue about iOS.

I've never seen 'OK Google' work (because everything Google Now, Google (Games|Music|Books), G+ etc. is terminated and/or disabled and/or removed). Don't claim that this is something you cannot (try to, if we're paranoid) avoid, some mandatory, intrinsic feature of the phone.
Yes, also better multithreading support and lower overhead (like AMD's Mantle which Vulkan is derived from).
Commodity-off-the-shelf, actually.
How to build a Rails API server: Optimizing the framework
Fukushima & Chernobyl are very old designs, any analysis of nuclear power needs to be done in a way that is mindful of the greatly reduced risk posed by modern designs. I'd also point out that there is a generation of plant designs on the horizon that have a completely passive safety system, so loss of plant power does not disrupt safety and control systems. If the public can ever be convinced of the inherit safety of these new designs, rolling them out everywhere would be great economically and environmentally.
It's been said that many dynamic languages have taken deep hints from lisp, so no surprise it's pseud-metalevel call protocol (apply fun <list>) is close to ruby and python ones. Although I've never used (apply ...) with keyword arguments.
I ALWAYS commit message like this:

<action>: <brief explanation>

For example like this:

"refactor: tightened for() loop in networking code"

"added: feature #134"

"removed: debug cruft"

"fixed: one-off bug in string parser"
Is it wrong? Google's answer is the most likely next president, no matter my politics or whom I would like to win instead.
> Mr. Obama’s top legislative priority in his final years in office.

Is it too late to make a 'hope & change' joke without sounding cliché?
How the Tsilhqot’in got their land back and why Canada will never be the same
There's an island in Spain which uses this model to produce most/all of its electricity

http://euanmearns.com/el-hierro-another-model-for-a-sustaina...

(pump water up with cheap wind energy, use the hydro when needed)
Because you're communicating with a device that refers to itself in the first person. Anthropomorphization is inevitable. It's not like this is new, either. 2001 comes to mind immediately, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples that predate HAL.
You lost them at ssh... For now...
The Yale degree is still valuable even if the author can't stay in the United States.
But the TVs in 1984 did have microphones, didn't they? Or at least cameras.
I've heard this story before, but I don't remember a mass exodus from "da goog" as the article hideously calls it. I wonder what the motive is.
BrasilJS 2015
Until Kepler, astronomers believed planets to move in circular paths, but this did not match up with experimental data. So it was postulated that they moved in epicycles (circles of circles of circles ..., as pictured in this codepen) of varying radii. This model was able to represent all the data astronomers collected, but did not explain why the radii were what they were.

When Fourier Analysis became a thing 300 years later, it was shown that indeed any periodic function can be modeled with epicycles of certain radii. That this epicycle "model" actually didn't simplify anything! It was an isomorphic way of phrasing the problem, not the solution.

Luckily by then, Kepler had already postulated planets move in ellipses, and Newton proved that even this was the consequence of the law of gravity.

Occam's Razor FTW.
This brings back SO many memories of the earliest "programming" I ever did: RPG Maker 2000. The stuff I wrote could barely even be called 'games' (after all, I was about 12 years old), but it's where I first experienced that magical 'spark' where you realize "Oh, MAN. So, you're telling me I can just write down what I want to happen, and the computer will DO it?!"

And from there, the rabbit hole just got deeper and deeper. :)
Well, I don't tolerate just anything. But I much rather have "fixed fs race" than "merged a13b1z: <issue 14365><subsystem core><signoff:dave> changed fs_handle.lock to use blargh_lock_45"
I think you are forgetting about the fact that we can store energy. This will act as a buffer and not run into the problems you are describing. Of course the buffer size needs to be reasonable and we need to collect and store energy at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of consumption, but I think we can achieve now with current technology.
This is where geo-engineering can come in. I think climate scientist will be much more comfortable discussing it if it seems we are on track for fixing the underlying causes.

There are bunch of different ideas, most of them involve directly interacting with global temperature by reflecting energy back to space. Injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere for example, mimics how some volcanic eruptions cause temporary cooling. Another is massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans.

One of the scariest things about these ideas is how cheap could be are. What happens if Canada decides it would really prefer a milder winter and sprays the hydro dioxide up there like a bunch of unruly mounties? Then they cut it out and Uzbekistan do the same.