skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Impressively they even have Smith charts, for a graphical representation of RF transmission lines.

For a closely related good time hit images.google.com and try nomogram and nomograph for various paper and pencil based calculators.

I spent many an hour wargaming on hex grids in the olden days.

(edited to add: Oh my. I suppose its inevitable people would print on demand hex notebooks:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/jed-mcclure/albatross-dungeon-noteb...
)
I learned a lot in my CS program I probably never would have discovered by myself and much of it is foundational skills I subconsciously use when solving problems. I also understand what the trade offs that need to be made and where my optimization time should be spent.

When in college I did a whole lot of programming using version control (CVS in my time, kids have it good today!), API's and various programming languages. I didn't need my college to teach me these things. It was the application of what I was learning in school.

Also, in college we had a Software Engineering course elective, a Testing course elective and some other more practical course electives that most people took because it was, well, practical skills.

So I think a decent mix of theory and practical skills are best but the it is also up to the student to engage themselves outside their program to learn "real world" skills. That's especially easy for students today with tools like Github and OSS becoming such a huge thing.
You might wish to consult Sue Grafton...
I guess it's vaporware at this point, good to know.
Likely the reason this stuff is still classified at all is because it casts doubt on the legitimacy or appropriate conduct of the US Government.

This seems to me to be an entirely inappropriate reason for something to remain classified decades after it occurred.
Looking at my brother, who is about to finish CS at Columbia, I don't recognize the criticism. He seems to have a good mix of theory and practice. There's a fair amount of grinding ("argh why won't it compile? / Google the error") as well as working with other students. There's also a huge amount of data structures and algorithm stuff that you expect in this sort of course. I didn't see a lot of reading other people's code, but maybe that's in there as well somewhere. I definitely get the feeling there's a lot of mini-projects.

Of course there are things that are much easier to learn on the job, such as how to navigate a huge codebase. Because you'll have time to do that. Also architecture decisions are hard to get right as a novice. You can read around, you can ask people questions, but in the end you need to make mistakes and rebuild to appreciate some aspects.
Stepping into This Shower Feels Like Hugging a Warm Cloud
Forget about advertisers and site runners and economics and the rest of it. I run ad blocking software because ads are too good a delivery mechanism for malware.
Contributor Covenent: http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/2/0/
Like Self-Driving Cars, perhaps?
> if I buy a software, and it does not run on my system,

This would be one example case. As I posted in my comment.

Integration can also just mean for future possible integration – for example, if someone writes a tool that can read a file format, I may decompile it to implement a tool to read the same file format.
Why would people be accessing the proposed alphabet.com? There's not going to be any consumer related stuff there. In fact, I'd be surprised if abc.xyz will change much.
The part that got my attention was around the Birth certificate angle: USA & other countries have made the document issued more secure, but method to create birth record still not secure. Ugh.
Have you seen the actual code of the mutations?

https://github.com/facebook/relay/blob/master/examples/todo/...

It is ... massive!
I'm spoiled by the niceness of JSX. It's a very clean and expressive and easy to read language, because it's only what I already know, Javascript and HTML. There are no APIs to learn (except for some minor cases, like inline comments). This template language looks like it would only have downsides compared to JSX. It's a new syntax to learn, and less expressive. This templating language even adds HTML-like attributes! What a mess.

Also I don't think the templating language has anything to do with the nature of blocking vs non-blocking data fetching.
It uses inotify, so "scanning" for changes more frequently should have only a minimal impact on performance. Of course if you have a lot of actively changing files, you don't want it spending a lot of time transferring files that are still in the process of being modified, so reducing the frequency might help.

I've never noticed performance issues with syncthing, excepting my old original Nexus 7 tablet which does seem to suffer a bit due to its poor hardware. I keep my photos volume (~250GB) synchronized between three desktop systems and it's never presented a problem with those.

Given that the grandparent mentions issues with larger volumes, there may be some sort of "tipping point" beyond which performance degrades, and I just have not encountered it.

Regardless I'd encourage people to give Syncthing a try. The project is under very active development and the issue the grandparent mentions may be resovled by now, and of course that issue might be environment specific and not generally applicable.
I know what they do, not what you do.

If you know something I don't, then I have no way of using it to form an opinion until you tell me about it.
Determining someone's name from their email address
>Because a few moments of thought to compose a reply will produce a better result than people who have been working on codes of conduct for years and have seen the stunts people try to pull?

Simple amount of effort doesn't guarantee a good result. I'm sure we can all name software projects that added feature after feature as years slipped by and ended up as a bloated, counterproductive mess, much like the CoC we're debating.

>And in the process, you've also managed to dismiss any and all discussions of how to positively improve a project to better address social issues, or how to fix existing problems. Congratulations, your code of conduct itself makes people unwelcome.

Actually, since you mentioned it: why is it the obligation of every random hobbyist open source project to "better address social issues"?
Lenovo shipping a BiOS rootkit?
Yes, I definetely have to work that out. Some of HN readers contacted me to help me out review the book.
An open letter to Lawrence Lessig – replacing voting with polling
They are 'effectively' banned in Europe though. As you can see from this infographic[1] approval of a GMO requires a political vote in the European Commission. This takes place after a very expensive risk assessment, and you can't get that money back. It's a tough business case to spend a ton of money on the risk assessment and then be at the whim of politicians who are publicly against the technology and know they win votes by being against it. My company makes GMO plants and until the situation changes there's no way we'd considered trying to get approval.

I conjecture they setup this system because an outright ban, which would be unscientific, would violate international trade treaties, instead they just use this process.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/docs/decision_making_process....
Certainly. However, if you look at the popular literature, UKF is more represented than the SPKF by far, even given its better performance on highly nonlinear systems.
There are probably some issues with missing SIMD, but no further hardware support would be helpful.

It's purely an implementation issue - you don't get software as good as x264 just by paying for it.
For 8192 elements I also get result that their search function is faster than STL. But 8192 elements is tiny size of array where to search, for larger array I get opposite - STL is faster. Here is output for 8 * 1024 * 1024 elements (~8.4million).

gcc 5.2.0 on Windows x64 (i5-3210M)

stl : 881 miliseconds
version 1: 880 miliseconds
version 2: 1607 miliseconds
version 3: 1260 miliseconds
version 4: 1271 miliseconds

gcc 5.2.0 on Linux x86_64 (i7-4770S)

stl : 629.231 miliseconds
version 1: 629.436 miliseconds
version 2: 897.143 miliseconds
version 3: 862.827 miliseconds
version 4: 863.22 miliseconds

clang 3.6.2 on Linux armv7h (CuBox-i, Cortex-A9)

stl : 3380.29 miliseconds
version 1: 3428.9 miliseconds
version 2: 3433.65 miliseconds
version 3: 3391.86 miliseconds
version 4: 3376.91 miliseconds

Oh, and Visual Studio doesn't have "/O3" argument they say they are using for cl.exe.
How many hits are you getting per day that isn't great performance? I'm running two WP blogs each on their own $5/mo plan and it's been working great with one notable exception: I would constantly run out of memory on my highest-trafficked site (20 uniques per day) with WP Super Cache turned on. When I uninstalled it, the speed went way up and the out of memory errors disappeared.
Google has less assets, half of the profit and half of the revenue of VW.

Google has a higher valuation due to an investment bubble, not due to actual economics.
To which holding company named "Alphabet" are you referring? Google's or BMW's?
First, a more minor point: Mechanical engineering is a university subject, even though it isn't physics. What you call "Trade School" is really software engineering; it is properly also a university subject, rather than something that should be dismissively consigned to trade schools. (It could be taught there as well, of course, to the same degree that mechanical engineering is - which I suspect is not much.)

My larger point: According to your thinking, then, we need to take the people who are studying computer science, and move maybe 98% of them to a software engineering major. If CS is what you define it to be, we absolutely do not need as many CS graduates as we have people enrolled in CS.

What we currently have is that the schools think they should be teaching CS (per your definition), and both the students and the outside world are expecting the courses to teach what is actually useful out in industry - software engineering. I could actually see this as a useful split (we separated physics from mechanical engineering). But then CS becomes "that computer thing you take if you want an academic career", not what you teach all the people who are trying to get a job. CS loses the vast majority of its students, and with it, much of its prestige.
I'm actually opposed to repealing the estate tax (And if it were up to me, the estate tax would be 100%), but it goes to my point that he just wants to raise taxes on everything. I actually forgot to mention that he wants a carbon tax, too.

/edit typed the exact opposite of what I meant
The science of skipping breakfast
Some previous discussion in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039306
Can we stop centralized sources of trust to become bought, sold, and politicized? They must be financed by somebody, so they will be bought and sold. They must be organized internally and they must interface externally with other organizations, so they will be politicized.
Trying to stop it upfront is impossible. What we should struggle for is transparency, where we allow the money and the politics to flow but in a agreeable manner.
So I'm drinking the React kool aid, anyway, but this stuff has hardly been out in the wild. People have been saying tech X saves us from complexity for decades (OOP, noSQL, Knockout, Angular, etc...), and after a few years of use we realize it's not actually a magic bullet. Again, I'm drinking the kool aid, but maybe we should slow down on the hyperbole. Unless there are reasons to believe that things really are different this time?

Also, totally not okay with how FB mines data; they don't get a pass on that. Their OSS work is top notch, though. Now only if someone would take their own technology and beat them with it. A little guerilla warfare.
Fun read. Topic modeling can be fascinating to work with.

Curious how they measured performance of their model, and whether they found a "best" number of topics for LDA where their model stopped getting much benefit by having more topics.

I'd imagine increased number of topics would have some interesting side effects where it would create too narrow of recommendations.
The "you have to distribute it" argument doesn't matter. When your company IP is subject to onerous restrictions as soon as you have to "distribute it", you've greatly reduced the value of that work, now and into the future.

It's notable that your popular examples had to be qualified to be limited to "free" (as in open-source) software. The majority of popular software isn't open source at all. Your examples also include software that is 1) maintained by copyright-holding commercial organizations who 2) rely on the asymmetric relationship created by copyleft to build a sustainable business in which they can actually sell IP rights beyond copyleft for profit.

The copyleft ideal of "user freedom" is founded on the premise of a software industry barter economy in which the only tradable resource is not even software, since that's freely copied by anyone, but rather, actual time spent writing software.

This is insane, not least of all because the vast majority of humanity can not and does not want to write software, and even if that wasn't the case, time spent writing software is literally worthless outside of social standing.

You can't use bartered time to pay rent or buy food, which means you cannot actually build a sustainable economy around purely copyleft software ideals in which anyone is able to recoup the real-world costs of spending time writing software in the first place.
The downside of venture capital, entrepreneurs need to remember that investors prefer trying for billions and failing, and consider trying for millions and succeeding a failure.

I've read a few bitter stories about people with ramen-profitable businesses who got a late-stage investment into their bootstrapped company. Basically you spend years slowly kindling a small fire, and the VC comes over a dumps a truckload of lumber on it. Might get the bonfire they're looking for, but they don't really care if they just smother your campfire instead.
Yes, Theora is also royalty free. NETVC's goal is to surpass the quality per bit of existing codecs though, which Theora doesn't do.
Comparing x264 to hardware-accelerated encoders (QuickSync, NVENC, VCE), the speed/quality/bitrate tradeoff is massively in favour of the cpu-only x264. So i think hardware encoding could help VP9, but it's not a magic bullet (unless your CPU is busy with other work simultaneously).
An example is chessground [1], the UI for the lichess [2] chess game, written with Mithril [3].

[1] https://github.com/ornicar/chessground
[2] http://lichess.org
[3] http://mithril.js.org
Lightyear.fm
Not if low and high are both unsigned (size_t is unsigned.) Even if it overflows, the result will be correct. See: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...
As a fellow entrepreneur from a long line of entrepreneurs, I couldn't disagree with you more.

Unions can have...problems, but fundamentally they are just people banding together to leverage the only capital they have. They can be frustrating (much of my family is in mining and mineral extraction on the ownership side so unions are a long standing fact of life in that sector) but the idea is not, at its heart, terrible.

Government regulation is necessary as a counterbalance to the vast power of the market (and market players). The market, even when left alone, is subject to distortions and issues -- some of which cannot be fixed from within that same system. There needs to be checks and balances between the market and government, but each needs the other IMO. Ideally, the government has a light touch and represents encoded hard earned wisdom protecting the public from things like hard to trace externalities etc. and fending off nasty things like monopoly and acting as a hierarchical repository for information the public may need. Of course, it takes constant vigilance to maintain a balance, but that is life.

I think each of us gets far more value from our taxes than what we pay, for the most part. I'm sure it could be better but, with all human built systems, some inefficiency should not be a surprise.

I don't know if I agree with all of Sanders' policies, but I am a bit of a demand side person. Helping alleviate some of the egregious distortions of the market we've allowed to come about and accept as normal, especially on the lower end of our socioeconomic spectrum, would likely create more value for everyone starting from the demand side, so, overall I support his candidacy.
> and when you see that color + typeface together anywhere you instantly recognize what brand it is for.

This (blue + simple, light shape) trend was taken to such extreme that nowadays I feel discomfort looking at the screen with FB, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, IFTTT, Dropbox, Skype etc.
You are confusing Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX is not filing for patents.
Sorry, I must be missing something. I see no mention of a successful Labview install on an R-pi, no matter the operating system. Maybe I missed a thread? I'm okay with any operating system of course, I just want my Labview program to run on it.
Title should be "Covenant" not "Convent".
There are many more products besides the few that skirt the law.

>What do you think most early iPod adopters filled the disks with?

The first iPods shipped with decoders for several patented codecs, including mp3.

This supports my claim that the codecs were not prohibitively expensive to make gadgets that include royalty payments to codec patent holders.
Covenant
> Have you thought that your own privilege might be blinding you to the plight of some people who may have problems with the things you list?

I'm quite certain it is, which is exactly why I make a point of listening to people who have more of a stake in this than I do. I notice somewhat more than I used to before I educated myself on these issues, but still nowhere near as much as people who live through them personally.

> There are many white males on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder that are effectively silenced in this discussion. I suspect a lot of the pushback you hear comes from them.

I suspect you suspect wrong, and most of the "pushback" comes from people indignant that their "concerns" are not at the forefront the way they are everywhere else, as well as people who see yet another opportunity to be disruptive. In any case, socioeconomic status is one of many relevant, and it's closely correlated with many other forms of privilege.

> There are also minorities that have succeeded in the current system by working hard and being smart that are being told their experience is abnormal/non-existent.

Read http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Clawed_my_way_up , which directly responds to the argument you're making. Such experiences are not "non-existent", but they're also not a sign that there's no problem and everyone else can be safely ignored. There are a lot of other smart, hardworking people who have not had the opportunity to succeed.
Thank you for that quip. Different domain, differnt concept.

As I said in my opening paragraph,

"Yes, there are many companies with alphabet in their names, but I have not found a single one that has assumed that name because of their products!"

Unless you could find another company within the software/IT domain?
The display itself isn't, but the existing Thunderbolt displays contain a PCIe network adapter that probably carries an option ROM.
For one thing, it helps when googling for more information.
Hugo on Netlify == speed 6 seconds from Git push to live site on global CDN
Discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040285

I swear they made this title for the "cloud to butt" plugin's users.
I wonder if the problem has to do with providing a desirable product? It's already pretty easy to get good food, good organic food and good organic locally grown food from a variety of vendors. With GoodEggs it seems you're getting a clunky ordering experience, inability to select produce, an extra shipping charge, moderate/high prices, etc.
If you're going to miss when you go back to the array, you're going to pay that cost regardless. But without the mispredict, you'll be able to issue the load that much sooner.

I'm not familiar enough with Intel's architecture to know one way or the other, but it wouldn't surprise me if not mispredicting the next memory access saves you more than just some pipeline flushing: The CPU could speculatively issue the load you don't actually need, wasting resources that could be used to service the correct addresses.

Or did you mean something else?
> [...] fine, go ahead and do your RPC. Just don't try to tell me that it's anything other than RPC, with all the problems and warts we all know.

Why the heck do you think that "lol, you use RPC" would be an insult? Because
you clearly send this message with your tone.

I put RPC wherever I need an operation(s) to be called remotely. And yes, I do
use dedicated RPC protocols (namely, XML-RPC, for popularity of its clients).
I rarely create things that boil down to being a CRUD database interface, so
I find REST very limiting.

> From that point of view, something like SOAP is a perfectly respectable protocol and you should use that instead.

Apparently you haven't worked with SOAP. No, it's not respectable. It's
overcomplicated itself, it uses overcomplicated format (XML with namespaces),
and its tooling is overcomplicated, too (e.g. try to control how WSDL looks
like, so you can swap implementation languages; or try to create WSDL
beforehand, and then implement its backend in a language of your choice).

Really, in HTTP-based remote call protocols (this includes REST!), Microsoft
hit the spot twenty years ago with XML-RPC. The only two things missing are
null/None/undef encoding and named procedure arguments.
> Could twitter and random blogs have stopped Vietnam and Nixon too, if they had existed back then?

Go read about Watergate and get back to me (though, ironically, to do that you would need to read the works of investigative journalists...).

Today, the equivalent to Deep Throat might be Snowden, and that, too, required journalists like those from The Guardian to get the story out. That kind of journalism requires resources to research, travel, for legal costs associated with protecting sources, etc.

Regarding Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers would never have been published if the Times hadn't spent their own money going to court to defend their right to publish them.

So no, I don't believe twitter or random blogs have the power of the fourth estate.

> And if there is something unique to journalists that make them more proficient at stopping presidents and wars, why couldn't they stop the Iraq war?

That's a deeply complicated topic.

First, it's worth noting journalists never stopped Vietnam from starting. But as the war was waged, journalism played a role in turning public opinion against the war after it had started, thus hastening its end.

So, with that said, journalists actually played a very similar role vis a vis the Iraq war.

Now, I do believe they were less effective than in the past, but I actually believe that's exactly on point, here: that period is the same time when journalism began to struggle in the face of the ascendance of the Internet.

Which brings me right back to my very original point: Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.

Your mistake is in believing quality journalism never existed, but that's only because of your limited perspective, having only seen the medium as it began its slow decline.
I have heard this many times but I couldn't find a source for it. Do you have one?