skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand why universities don't do the obvious and simply require the students to defend their work in a viva voce and a written final. When I studied physics (Exeter Uni., 1974-1977) there really was no possibility to cheat because written examinations were open note, theses and project reports had to be defended orally, and the class of one's degree was determined entirely by the finals (oral and written).
Old idea, people has been talking about railroad tracks up a mountain for a long time.

(I'm hellbanned, but this might have been banned anyway. :-) )
This reminds me of Forth Haikus:

http://forthsalon.appspot.com/

It can get pretty crazy:

http://forthsalon.appspot.com/haiku-view/ahBzfmZvcnRoc2Fsb24...
Grab a plank or any other long, relatively firm object. Hold it straight out to your side. Now hold it straight up. Now you see why it is more far fetched. (Edit: actually, just try it with your own arm for 30 seconds or so)

Not only is it far harder, but it doesn't take much length before even quite solid objects will start bending massively and exerting far more stress. E.g. doesn't take more than 150kg or so before the steel weight bars at my gym has a noticeable bend.

We still do not have materials technology advanced enough for a regular space elevator. Trying build one where gravity is actively working in a direction where there's no support seems unlikely to help matters.
There are a few features which I couldn't find in existing static platforms, including live drafts and instant publishing. Check out the video on the homepage for a demo.

Blot is also flexible about the type of files it can publish - I'm unaware of a static platform which turns an image file directly into a blog post, without some sort of form or metadata requirement in between.

Also – since Blot runs off a Dropbox folder, you can blog directly from one of the many writing apps on phones and tablets which support Dropbox, or make use of neat integrations like this:

http://mrfris.by/16/twitter-instagram-integrations-for-blot

But you're right – a lot of people pay for the convenience. Perhaps it goes without saying but there are benefits as well costs to a hosted service!
I was referring to sub c speeds and what happens by using real confirmed physics. I didn't realize you were talking about warp drives in that case.

As far as I understand from popular science, warp drive doesn't actually move the occupants of the vehicle, it moves the space around the ship so in that case there is no time dilation. It takes the same amount of time for people, in and outside, the ship. If your warp drive is limited to 20c then yes it is a problem, but I don't see why would it have to be limited in the first place. Make it go 10^10c and the problem is solved.
BBC iPlayer Is Dominating Netflix and Amazon in the UK
Just the lower air pressure (and optimized engine nozzles) will help a lot. [Edit: Variable nozzles (or self regulating) is probably cheaper, of course...]

(I assume you put the tower in a high place to start with, 25km up makes a big difference, ~ half atmosphere w/out Googling.)
if you provide a mapping function Stackie will generate colours too. It just uses a grey mapper if none is provided.

You can provide your own function that takes a number and returns an ARGB Int32, so for pretty flame you would just do.

f.generate(Stackie.program("x1x-*5*dx4**y3*p+y!-"));
var flame = f.getImageData(blackbody);
Womens wear
which is the best dress for party?
Ask HN: YC fellowship video shows no views on YouTube
Our application video has no views at all. Are they skipping videos as there were a lot of application?
I've spent most of my career as a full time employee, and recently I've become a 'consultant', which is a fancy term for contractor who works for a middle man. I've really become interested lately in the strategies behind using full time employees, when to outsource, why companies use contractors/consultants, etc.

Are there any good books/blogs on the subject matter that anyone knows about?
I think the clumping is more about how many consecutive same numbers there are in the array.

For example, a naive me would generate: [3,4,5,1,2,4,2,1,2,6]
whereas a true random distribution might generate: [3,4,4,4,4,1,2,2,2].
When you generate 6 million samples you would indeed have about 1 million per number. However you would still have subsequences of the same number.
Digital signatures and tamper-resistant ICs?

If malicious actor swaps the IC, new one won't have the secret material that original had contained (and which IC will only disclosed upon receiving court-signed audit order, permanently burning a fuse at the same time). And if they try to tamper with the IC, they'll need to spend significant amount of time with it.

This isn't even remotely perfect, but can be used as one of the measures. Throw in some more redundant systems with different approaches, ensure their integrity at the end and you'll have some proof that the results are authentic enough to a certain extent (measured in amount of efforts needed to perform a successful attack).
It's a fascinating concept for building super-tall structures, but yeah, not a space elevator.
When people criticise streaming services because it's 'not giving the artists enough money' it sometimes annoys me a little.

What would you prefer?

- A service where people are able to freely access a huge music library from all their devices for a minimal subscription fee.

- Having to buy albums one by one, where one album is more than a whole month of a streaming package.

Streaming stopped me pirating music. I have no reason to do so (other than the odd MP3 file for video editing/DJ practice etc.) any more.

Services like Spotify/Apple Music need to also take a cut for server management, developers and management staff etc.

Also the record industry takes massive cuts so the artist doesn't seem to see much of it at all, even with normal albums.
Yes, substantially so.

First off, the way stresses work it is substantially easier to build straight up than in any other direction.

And secondly, you're missing something. Namely, that the only reason why a string attached to an edge of a merry-go-round whips tangentially is because of air resistance. In a vacuum, or if the air was moving with the merry-go-round, the string would be radially-pointing. (There's also a component of "the merry go round is slowing down", but that also isn't particularly relevant.)

As such, it makes no sense to build something this way. About the only case where not building straight up would make sense is if you're slightly off of the equator - in which case you should move to the equator.

Although I suspect you have the wrong impression of a space elevator. You don't build up, you build down. You have a satellite / asteroid / etc in geosynchronous orbit. You start spooling out two lengths of wire - one down, one up. When the lower one reaches the surface, you anchor it. Then attach a counterweight out beyond geosynchronous orbit.
A comment on the article that you linked:

In germany every child, mother and father has the right to get a paternity test. If any party refuses to give his/her consent to a paternity test you have to get a court order and that will replace the missing consent.
It is illegal to get a paternity test, when one of the parties doesn't consent and you don't get a court order. The order is just a formality, very cheap and you don't need a laywer. This formality exists, because in germany it is generally forbidden to get a genetic fingerprint of a person without his/her consent.
Edit: In Germany a father has to accept fatherhood. If the mother denies a paternity test, he is not liable for child support. A court will usually order a paternity test if a father refuses to accept fatherhodd or the mother denies a paternity test.

So if you are in doubt - the only thing you have to do is claim that you doubt and the full support of the state will be with you.
I agree with your comments in general, although I'd just add that in the current capitalist world, we would definitely have to compete - if we have little or no economic value, it would be hard to exist. It might be even worse in a case where humans are not even a zero-sum, i.e. use up more value than they add. I'm guessing in a world like that, it'd be a good idea to switch to some form of a guaranteed minimum income rather quickly.

Of course, it's pretty difficult to predict the future, and it's possible that human-computer hybrids will continue to outperform vanilla computers in the long term (as you point out).
Count the number of widgets used in the top two inches of screen real estate. If it is greater than say 10, that isn't beautiful; not for someone trying to figure out how to use it.
require the students to defend their work in a viva voce and a written final.

Time & effort, primarily.

Also equality is a problem. Academics are human too, and tend to have preferences regarding looks, sex, nationalities etc that are hard to ignore. I had female students rub my legs in presentations, wear super short mini-shirts, see-thru top with massive clevage etc. Preventing this is a major advantage of anonymous grading. These days you want to protect yourself against harassment lawsuits. I feel very uncomfortable with non-anonymous examiations even though I agree that from a pedagogic point-of-view they preferable, not just to deal with cheating, but also because they give a much better view of the students strengths and weaknesses, leading to much better feedback.
Nice to see it (especially on other image data than just faces). But typically non-negative matrix decomposition creates less ghostly images, with an easier interpretation.

See e.g. http://www.quantumblah.org/?p=428 or http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/decomposition/p... (comparison of PCA and non-negative matrix factorization).

Of course, the non-negative factorization comes at some cost (mostly: much higher computational complexity), but it may be worth trying.
> I ride an ebike and I take more longer faster trips than I used to, so I'm getting more exercise...

I guess it depends on how you ride it and what kind of exercise. For me, I found that I was doing more endurance training, as I would cycle 100+km, which I never did before I got the motor. However, I lost a lot of strength training as I no longer really had to fight with the numerous steep hills around here, and I found that I could no longer bike them after a month on the motor.

So now I occasionally turn off the motor before a really nasty hill just to force myself to really push it once in a while.
Berlin, Germany: Took some savings from working back in the States, got here on a 90-day tourist visa, found an apartment and got my first working visa (without about 2 weeks to spare!, although you can extend a tourist visa here) as an English teacher. Later transitioned into a full-time development job.

Came here with my German girlfriend though, so I had a bit of help in terms of language, talking with bureaucracy, etc. But getting a visa (at least as an American!) was fairly straightforward and cheap, if occasionally slow and, well, bureaucratic.

Been here about 4 1/2 years now and love it.
Creativity and the Culture of Shame
EMO Milano 2015
Im looking for bloogers/writers that will be @EMO Milano 2015.
> But, art imitates life imitates art especially when rule 34 gets involved. Once this idea was uploaded into the medieval blogosphere, joke or not, it almost certainly became real.

As the final paragraph notes.
Thanks. This solves a lot in my head. Nice references.
Astronauts in space have captured a rare image of a giant red sprite
>> I find that number too high to be true. 10 or 20%, maybe; 40%

The 40% came from a study at oxford, which i think was a bit conservative , because it didn't take into account the possibility of creative jobs being automated.

>> I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles

Sure we can. But will we ? i'm not so sure.

>> but that is economically challenging unless we rethink how money is created and distributed.

If that happens , a lot of things would change, for both directions - more jobs and less jobs.

>> Again, this will not be touched by automation.

Automation is the less powerful technology working on healthcare. But if you can detect diseases very early , and have very effective , side-effect free and long-term treatments , healthcare will become more efficient.

Or let's talk about limited mobility(your example) - a leading cause is severe arthritis. But maybe we can cure that ?

>> home-births

Maybe we'll see growth there.But i would guess it's not that big of job provider. and even for home births, there's telemedicine and remote continuous monitoring , i think in use today - saving work.
Yet all those people can easily do 20kph+ on a bike.
Unusual magnetic behavior observed at a material interface
Or perhaps we will witness a return to living off of the land but with technologies to assist us. We have self-driving tractors and automated industrialized agriculture, but how about a personal yard robot that can till the vegetable garden, selectively removing weed but leaving the plants undisturbed.

Many suburban yards are large enough to grow plenty of food, and the food you grow yourself can vastly outperform anything you buy in terms of taste because you no longer have to be restricted to eating varieties that travel well.

But back in terms of wealth, owning land still remains important as it makes the above possible.
Entering manually (HTTPS) https://www.assembly.org/blogs/2/posts/24/ works...?

Why would you get a redirect?

EDIT: on safari it doesn't but firefox it does redirect...
Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit
Locality-Preserving Allocations Problems and Coloured Bin Packing
Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite":
http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d...

Enclosure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this guy with a factory who now gets to be super productive and take away our livelihoods, but he doesn't have to share any of the increased wealth he now enjoys."

Technology undoubtedly increases productivity and wealth. The question is, WHO gets to own that wealth and what gives them a right to it.
Ask HN: Did your YC application video receive any view?
Our YC application video shows no views on youtube analytics. Are they skipping video part since they had lots of application this time?

Last time I could see the video was viewed for our S15 application.
I rented my place on Airbnb, packed my bag, went to a country I was interested in, looked for a job there (luckily there was no need for a visa because I was in Africa/Middle East and you always find a way around there), found one in a few days (being a foreigner with skills help), and voilà. I didn't save any money, I just looked for a job :)
Not letting them fail when the fallout can be contained and managed will increase the risk that they fail in a way that you can't contain or manage further down the road.
"my precious child a common cheater? Never, we raised her well, it must be your fault!"

Clearly I've been living abroad too long. I had completely forgotten about this aspect of the American psyche.

You're right. No amount of having done something wrong will ever be enough to make something an American's fault. I remember golfing with a guy and hooking a ball into somebody's yard, saying something along the lines of "glad I didn't break that window." He then went on to explain his view that the golf course should pay for things like that, since it would clearly not be his fault if he hit a ball through somebody's window.

Expel that guy's kid, and I can see what you mean. Good luck fighting the good fight!
You let whoever was in charge of your page's scrolling fail a bit too much.
It seems that you do not account for falling prices due to automation. And the cost of automated machines will fall too.
Judge, jury and executioner: the unaccountable algorithm
Perhaps just an artifact of a weak PRNG or not truly uniform distribution?
Look around you. Pick any product you like. A thousand financial transactions went into making it, all along the supply chain. Currencies were converted and hedged, iron ore and copper and crude oil futures were purchased and sold. When technology squeezes out middlemen and makes them more efficient, you gain.
Someone in there mentioned trying to make a "WordPerfect killer," completely oblivious to the fact that WordPerfect is dead and Word is what killed it.
here's xkcd on Space Elevators (and fountains): https://xkcd.com/536/
That's security through obscurity. You want any citizen to be able to audit the security of the device, if you have to trust the government or some institution then what's the point?

There are better ways to make sure your vote got registered properly, for instance http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/science/did-your-vote-coun...

After voting, each voter would receive a receipt -- a record of his choices that would be encrypted, or put into code, and could be deciphered only by a collaboration of all the election trustees. After polls closed, all receipts would be posted on the Internet. Each voter could use his serial number to find the image of his receipt, and make sure it matched the one he carried.

Not foolproof but still better than what we have now.
Ask HN: How can I improve my Accelerator Pitch?
A couple of weeks ago we went online with our flight search, that is different from standard flight searches. We often find better and cheaper results.

However, when pitching our product to people we often get the message asking how we are different from Kayak and Skyscanner. I usually attach an example showing the price differences and the savings we conduct (https://tripdelta.com/results/SFO/LON/10-12-15/ vs. https://www.kayak.de/flights/SFO-LON/2015-12-10).

It seems hard to properly communicate the message.

But do you see any general advice on how to improve an Accelerator Pitch?

I would love to hear your thoughts...
Roles PR'd
Check the example of image editing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
I would have titled that as "CloudFlare starts discussion about LuaJIT project governance". We don't have a solution or prescription. We're happy to help Mike in the transition in any way possible and are taking baby steps as we do so.
A side read, but somewhat related. By NY times "The closing of the Canadian Mind".

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/the-closing...
Thank you for your effort.
When the customer has zero, or at least zero in any sane sense, the price will always be too high.

The basic dichotomy of industrialization is that the workers of one factory is the customers of another.
Yes, exactly. Mentorship is about guidance, not hand-holding. It is about asking questions the inexperienced employee may not have thought of on their own, but also letting them find the optimal solution on their own.

For example, if they are designing a backup solution for the first time, asking them "what will the system do if the backup media is full?" is good. Telling them what it should do when full is bad. By asking the question, you're basically teaching them that there should be a contingency in case of failure. From there, a discussion on possible solutions can take place, where the mentor once again guides the employee to figure out the pros and cons of each approach.

That said, I'd never knowingly let people fail. Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. If they don't, they are playing it too safe and aren't learning some important lessons, and it might be time to assign them more challenging projects.
How Google killed my startup
And now the situation for many of us is reversed - I have a powerful Linux workstation at home where I work on my own projects, and a crappy under-specced Dell running Windows at work. It is very frustrating to me :(
I was over there yesterday morning helping sort and it seemed like the vast vast majority of the books were either ring binders or spiral bound and could easily be taken out of the binding to be scanned in a standard scanner.
Ask HN: Did your fellowship application video receive any view?
Our YC application video shows no views on youtube analytics. Are they skipping video part since they had lots of application this time?
Last time I could see the video was viewed for our S15 application.
this is a fantastic idea, low friction start to personal blogging.

feature suggestion: please incorporate Jekyll into the publishing workflow.
Show HN: A terminal Space Invaders game
The Emergence of a Third Application Development Platform in the Enterprise
> while you weren't looking

Well then you don't, and another requirement is that the voting stations may be accessed by the public from start till end. In that case each individual can verify for themselves that ballot boxes are empty at the start. That no one tampers with the ballot boxes during the day, and at night when the boxes are opened and the votes are being tallied.
That 8K near the end of that post is four times as many pixels to render as 4K. It's a surface area, it scales quadratically.

On top of that, the more pixels you have, the more a high frame rate matters to make animations look smooth. Sure, that might mostly just be scrolling on a webpage, but people care about this stuff. It's also physically less tiring for the eyes.

(Don't forget that, mobile includes laptops too - I'd like a high-res screen on my next laptop without the battery draining like crazy)
Title is from the article; I am not the author.
Fortunately, the future is arriving slowly because so much time is wasted having silly debates on the Internet.

No need to worry about it in our lifetime.
> So I would anticipate the clumping to even out as the sample size increases.

Are you saying we need to crash more planes? That seems a little harsh just to get crashes coming at a consistent rate. ;-)
A/B Testing with Hierarchical Models in Python
I think that's a good hypothesis. It appears the mechanism of registration and reporting helps. I wasn't aware of that process when I started; very much still exploring the database.

What do you make of the single hypothesis vs. alternative stuff? That blew my mind.
Rubber Duck Debugging – Problem Solving by Talking to Yourself
Well, it isn't every day you get to redefine π :D
My impression is that LuaJIT is too perfect/complex to the GitHub collaborative model work, where developers uses the software, identify a bug/missing feature for his use case, dig in code for a day/week, and do a push. In LuaJIT the stakes are much higher, and a small change can have big repercussions. Relying on occasional open-source contributors seems like a direct path to abandonware.
70% of Rich Families Lose Their Wealth by the Second Generation
I have used and installed linux many times. I have ubuntu on a dual boot on this computer. But linux on the desktop is going nowhere now that android is on the scene. Yeah, I understand that android is based on linux. But android is the big alternative man on campus now.
The $300M Button
The congress has been starving IRS of funding to reduce their effectiveness at tax collection. So it's not shocking that environment would create a situation where this type of systemic failure would occur.

A guy I know worked for an IRS regional office in an enforcement/audit role for something like 40 years. He had something like 75 co-workers in that role in 1999 and retired with 8. Technology actually increased their workload, but with less people, they only targeted the most egregious violations.

He stuck around because he was really passionate & dedicated to his work. He was a guru on some very specific/arcane areas and wanted to transition it to somebody. That never panned out, so he gave up and left when his health declined.