Hacker News Reader

Maybe specify the subset of unicode you're expecting in the headers, and have the compiler do the nitty gritty?

chebuctoon Why is science behind a paywall?

No, there is a second nuclear war. Some people escape on rockets, but human life on earth is ruined.

The author was an American bomber pilot in the second world war, and took part in the bombing of ancient church buildings in Italy. After the war, out of guilt, he became a Catholic wrote the book. He seemed to share the same kind of pessimism that George Orwell had, having lived through one destructive war only to see another war come on the horizon.

It's a very good book, and despite its themes it is readable and in parts humourous (especially the first section).

chebuctoon The Pitch Deck We Used To Raise $500,000 For Our Startup

After seeing the slides, I'm not clear on what they do.

chebuctoon FSF Wastes Away Another "High Priority" Project

RMS's comments in a recent Slashdot interview are worth noting:

http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/01/06/163248/richard-s...

"What project is using the wrong license? by gQuigs

...

RMS: If I could magically change one program to GPLv3, it would be Linux. ... Another program that is important to convert is LibreCAD. This is more than a fantasy: the developers of LibreCAD are working on replacing the old GPLv2-only code that they included, so as to switch to GPLv3-or-later. Would you like to help?"

chebuctoon Philadelphia budget data visualization

You can see the salaries of individuals, at least within the police dept. Is this normal for US cities? I've seen situations where public servants earning more than a certain threshold (eg 100kpa) had their names & salaries published. Doing so for everyone down to crossing guards seems like an unnecessary breach of privacy.

chebuctoon This robot serves up 340 hamburgers per hour

The machine may automate the slicing, cooking, and stacking, but cleaning seems like a major concern. The chutes with vegetables, cooking surfaces, and especially the meat grinders would all need close attention on an daily (or even hourly) basis.