Hacker News Reader

_ofon Teletext in Europe

I still use it almost every day. Today it has a web interface (http://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html), which has been interfaced to smartphone apps. Why do I use it? It's a quick way to get summaries of what is happening at home.

_ofon How the Washington D.C. Metro got so bad

The NYC subway works surprisingly well, considering that some of the tech that runs it is 100 years old [1]. :)

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-the-new-york-city-...

_ofon Dive into Machine Learning with Jupyter and Scikit-Learn

For those interesting in picking up machine learning that already know R, I recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Predictive-Modeling-Max-Kuhn/d...

It's loaded with useful R snippets and practical examples.

_ofon Is Climate Change Behind the Syrian Civil War?

The original paper [1] is more interesting to read.

"Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with preexisting acute vulnerability, caused by poor policies and unsustainable land use practices in Syria’s case and perpetuated by the slow and ineffective response of the Assad regime (13)"

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.full.pdf

_ofon WHO says processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes

From the statement in Lancet Oncology, "Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat":

"Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation"

_ofon When sequencing makes genotyping obsolete (soon)

The terminology is not accurate. Sequencing can be a form of genotyping. What the title refers to is that sequencing makes array-based genotyping obsolete.

_ofon The future of UI is text

> Lyros

Lycos

_ofon Europe's highest court has rejected the 'safe harbor' agreement

I wish the title was "EU's highest court". Europe != EU.

_ofon Links between coffee and health

> and fruit juice could obviously contribute to diabetes

not only that, Steve Jobs' obsession with fruit juices has been speculated to have caused or contributed to his pancreas cancer .

http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/soy-alert/veganthi...

_ofon Links between coffee and health

Coffee consumption on health is probably one of the easiest things to study, because it's so easy to collect big data on it and perform robust statistics. My point is that coffee consumption is so common and widespread among different populations and genetic backgrounds that we can get very big sample sizes, and sure there can be confounding factors, but with statistics we can adjust and control for that. Then it's a whole other thing to explain the biochemistry behind something like coffee consumption and health, that will require other data and experiments. There is a clear publication bias in science toward positive results, however, if a large, well-designed study running over many years come up with a negative result - this is actually not hard to publish at all.

_ofon France bids to reverse tech brain drain

The catch-22 applies to U.S. as well. Renting an apartment requires a credit score, which you get from having a credit card, which you can only get by having a credit score.

_ofon How US students get a university degree for free in Germany

In the US, getting a PhD is not a job. Everything below the faculty level is considered trainee.

_ofon Amazon Dash Button

Yes, this is a chocking fact I realized when I moved from Sweden to New York. In the former I payed ~30% in tax, whereas here in NY I pay the same. Because you have several levels of taxes in the U.S.: federal tax, income tax, state tax, and city tax, and in addition taxes like FICA, etc.

_ofon University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics

1. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money into the university, especially those outside the humanities.

Isn't this the case in Canada too?

_ofon What I Learned from Building an App for Low-Income Americans

Here in NYC where I live, multilingualism is extremely common.

_ofon Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

Sweden is also free. Plus you get 1100 SEK/month in assistance from the government.

_ofon [dead]

This is not a fair comparison.

_ofon GNU datamash

I love it. No more loading tables into R just for transposing it.. just doing

cat table.txt | datamash transpose

_ofon The daily routines of famous creative people

References needed. What is the source of the information?

_ofon Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders May Soon Be Allowed to Work in the U.S.

Look at any academic institution in the US in the life sciences. If you would take away the Europeans and Asians, what would be left?

_ofon Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

What are the ideological beliefs of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center?

_ofon America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)

1369500 :)

_ofon Camden, New Jersey: America's Most Desperate Town

You don't need to read it if you are not interested. I'm a tech guy and I found it very interesting to read.

_ofon Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life

The same in Stockholm, a lot of beggars from Eastern European countries (mostly Romania and Bulgaria I think).

_ofon Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

He seems to be such a humble person.

_ofon Martin Gräßlin, KDE: "Good Bye, Ubuntu"

According to Wikipedia [1] an ecosystem is

"a community of living organisms (plants, animals and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system."

I wish bloggers can find a better term for referring to something specific to software development. An ecosystem is a specific term in ecology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

_ofon 419-million-year-old fish fossil resolves 'missing link' in evolution

The actual paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

_ofon British scientists claimed to have found first evidence of alien life

Until they do more rigorous analysis of this it is not convincing.

_ofon Water Planets in the Habitable Zone

I think the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is that civilizations destroy themselves before advancing to the stage where interstellar travel is possible. Look here at earth, all civilizations collapse sooner or later and this means that technology is forgotten or lost. Humans are too likely to engage in conflicts with each other before anything like interstellar travel will happen.

_ofon Why I'll never work on First-Person Shooters again

Where is the data indicating that it's decreasing?