skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wonder how long it takes before we find BMW, Mercedes et al. are doing the same as VW and this is car industry "standard practice"? That in turn could lead to German economic collapse... this is gonna get really "interesting"
Come to think of it, 115 years ago we didn't even knew Pluto existed.
Cookies Lack Integrity: Real-World Implications
When I was in that situation (maybe ten years ago), we ran gcc on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, SGI, and maybe a couple of others. Then of course there was Windows, which used the Microsoft compiler. But using only two compilers made the ten or so platforms easier to deal with. (There still was a bunch of code that was "#ifdef SGI/#else/#endif", and similarly for other platforms, but at least the compilers behaved the same.)
Michigan sues HP over $49M project that's 5 years late
I still remember when these overpasses were first built, there was a lot of scepticism and animals were initially wary to cross. However it's nice to see how much of a success it's become.

Not too long ago I took the wife's family to Banff, we checked out one of the information buildings, they showed a time-lapse video of the various animals that cross (pretty much every type of large mammal in the park). Was very interesting and nice to see.
Ask HN: Promoting a free niche online tool
I've built an online tool that solves a real but niche problem. The tool is free, without ads (and even with ads it would likely make <=$20/month even at full popularity).

Clearly, I wouldn't spend money advertising it. It's also won't go viral (it automates a boring bookkeeping task). It's also not appropriate for "traditional SEO" (relationship building with bloggers, etc) - can't justify the time investment. Basically, it's barely even a commercial project, I'd be happy to just get users.

I decided then that organic search traffic is the way to go, but for that I need at least some links. My naive assumption was that highly-customized posting in appropriate niche forums was the way to go. I figured that since I am "adding value to the Internet" by making something free and useful, it would be well-received.

I was wrong. In most places, I see cold responses about "self-promotion/advertisement", and moderators delete messages in the blink of an eye. Even in places with "nofollow" links. I understand the frustration with ads, but (1) I am very careful to post in highly relevant places (2) I am convinced the tool is unique on the Internet right now - it's not like "yet another advertisement for X", and (3) it's free and its status as a "barely commercial" project is readily apparent.

I could try tricks such as pretending to be unrelated to what I'm posting ("Oh, look at this cool tool I found"), but this feels dirty. I always disclose my affiliation - seems I'm being penalized for honesty.

So, question: What are good, legitimate ways to let people know about a new, free, genuinely unique, genuinely useful, niche tool, keeping in mind that I can probably devote at most a day or two to promoting it?

Not just asking for this tool: I have many other ideas and would like to make them a reality, but there's no point in making them if there's no way of making the target audience even aware of their existence. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Festivities and Beyond
I would like the see improvements to configure / automake. These tools already allow you to control where the program will be installed "configure --prefix=$HOME". They also generate an uninstaller: "make uninstall".

But they are missing dependency resolution. I should be able to say: "sudo make depends" to install all missing libraries for the system I'm on, for example run the "apt-get install libexpat-dev" or whatever if I'm on Ubuntu.
Yay?!

I didn't have a problem with the way they were pricing before. It matched nearly every other service I use, and it would have cost less (I guess webstorm cost a whole $20 more a year!). I just assumed that all of the people who were complaining before were the standard "Let's complain about things on the internet" people.

Hence why they aren't showing up here to celebrate... they didn't actually care. Every dev I know IRL that uses JB software didn't care. 90% of them have it purchased for them by their company. I'm one of those who owns his own license, and I still don't care.

In a place that is so startup-centric, I can't believe that there is so much pushback against startup-like pricing.

In the other threads I'd have worried about being down-voted, but those individuals are likely busy creating controversy in some other thread.
The really big craters with the mountain in the center -- is that the remains of the projectile?
This is just rail with person-sized vehicles. Maybe you can dub it "modular rail" to make it easier for people to grok, but it's not that weird. Also, you could have them run on the existing subway system and just build off-line stations. Though before you do that, you should take into consideration designing the pods so I can take my bicycle on it, or my dog, etc.
I don't know, but you could ask that about anything a company does. The whole point of owning shares is that you share in both the successes and failures of the company. If the company has a significant downside potential that you can't control for, then you need to account for that when buying shares.

In terms of losses to shareholders, this is no different than if VW had decided to burn all their factories to the ground and go into the sausage-making business, which then failed spectacularly. The shareholders get "punished" for that, and we would expect nothing different. Why should a legal failure be treated more leniently than a financial failure?
That's a funny way of looking at it. "I'm sorry baby, I'll never hit you again!" You know the old saying: There are no victims, only volunteers.

As Mr. Stallman would say, proprietary software is for suckers. You guys using it are volunteering for such abuse. Nevermind the sweet promises. It will happen again. It always does.
Disneyland had one and they ripped it out 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover

Of course, it was just a "ride" and only covered Tomorrowland. I've always thought they made a mistake not covering the whole park with one of these.
Obama’s Russian Roulette
What would happen mathematically if two singularities orbiting each other merged? Would it become one singularity or some super nasty complex mathematical system?
They aren't checked in yet, but https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161350 has some patches (marked obsolete) and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1151899 has a work-in-progress patch.
Yahoo Pipes 2.0
Self-driving cars will likely kill PRT ambitions by being a better band-aid for long enough to not have to think about the problem for a while, like how successive attempts at solar power were buried for more than 100 years by more efficient coal extraction, then oil, then nuclear, then oil, again.
What is the point of this comment? How am I incorrect? My points are:

1) Python 2.7 is still, 6 years later, much more popular than Python 3.x.

2) Python 3.x now has 5 versions, none of which has features which are strong enough to cause migration. Specifically, async is not as easy as the competition, type annotations are an itellectual indulgence if they don't improve performance, and ease of use, a central pillar of the language's attractiveness to newcomers, is being eroded with unnecessary moves towards "seriousness".

3) It was a mistake by the Python authorities to break compatibilty without bringing substantial new features. Breaking compatibility allows revolutionary features. Instead we have breaking of compatibility with only incremental improvement.

4) Because the leadership refuses to acknowledge 1-3, its credibility is now questionable. It is an important related issue that people who point out these problems, as I do, face a strong barrage of criticism, with suspicions of orchestration.

5) With due respect for and gratitude to the inventors and contributors, the time for change has come. For Python to flourish, new leadership is needed.

I am happy to debate my strong opinions, but to suggest out of the blue that I don't know what I'm talking about is not interesting. I have been using Python for a decade. I know it very well. You may know it better, in which case I would like to hear your considered opinions on my points. The context, for avoidance of doubt, is my love of Python, and my strong desire for it to continue to do well.
F# on BEAM would be a match made in heaven!
Not true, some things are retroactively removed because they do not follow new guidelines from Apple. Or they got in and they break existing rules. Those are removed completely and only can be restored by back up.
New ars article:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/fcc-op...

"Despite an FCC guidance to router manufacturers that seems to ban open source firmware such as DD-WRT and OpenWRT, FCC spokesperson Charles Meisch told Ars that there is in fact no such ban. But there are restrictions that in some cases could cause a manufacturer to decide to prevent the installation of third-party firmware. In fact, disabling the installation of third-party firmware by the user may be the easiest and most straightforward way for hardware makers to comply with the FCC's guidance. ... Manufacturers could choose to achieve compliance by simply locking out any kind of third-party firmware, the FCC acknowledged."
There are some reasons why you might not want to do that, or why that might be inconvenient. You could end up with weird voltages floating around and interfering with other parts of the circuit, or you could end up with an unexpected ground connection going through a chip somewhere. Basically, circuits (and ICs) are often designed with the assumption that ground is always ground. Sometimes you can power a chip just by supplying a voltage to the signal pins. This usually ends badly.
I have been watching Elixir/Phoenix for over a year with a lot of interest, one thing that I really appreciate is how dedicated they are to their CHANGELOG files.

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.1/CHANGELOG.md
https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/master/CHAN...
https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto/blob/v1.0/CHANGELOG.md
Wouldn't gas costs kill this? You can't be driving all the time and there are scant few public places where you can park a mobile home.

I mean, pretty much any technology can be imagined to bring about a dystopia, but I think it's quite a leap for self-driving cars.
10 companies killing it at DevOps
It's fine _if you're not audited_.

In Ottawa. We got audited for FY 2013. It was brutal. Took the entire FY 2014 to get our claim. We got it in full because of me explaining everything several times in front of the auditor. It's hard to do because you have to put everything into those specific terms that SR&ED qualifies: experimental development, systems uncertainty, blah blah blah

The man hours spent were not worth it. Nearly killed the company with the cash flow problems as OP mentioned.

Applied again for FY 2014, betting on not getting audited.

CEO asked around, found this runaround/hard audit was common for recent claims. We think it's one of those Harper government, we're-not-saying-there-is-cutback-but-there-is-a-cutback type things.
When they think they have good commercial reason to do so (and, apparently, not before).
Large organizations do take on a mind of its own. This is because individual people will adjust their behaviors once they become exposed to the established pressure from culture, policies, and rules in the organization.

Take the U.S. President for example. They almost always change their policies when actually taking office due to new internal information from government. The government faces unique challenges from that of an individual person, and so the individual must act differently when making decisions for the large organization.
VW Names Matthias Mueller, Former Head of Porsche, New CEO
> that many businessmen in this space are really not entrepreneurs so much as expert lobbyists.

We call those "SBIR Farms". Get rewarded not on the products you create but by the paperwork you fill out.
Relatedly, Germany has some of the lowest incentives for EV buyers in the EU. Probably not a coincidence.
> They donate their body to science and end up as a transitional space filler.

I wouldn't mind ending up like this. While my body may not go on to help someone cure cancer, it's definitely educational for children to peer inside the body, for a short a time as you could spend on a stairwell.

Besides - my kids would (hopefully) hear of me travelling around the world, or perhaps stuck in the back of a dusty vault of some museum. Better that than being stuck in a hole in the ground.
The top 16 software quality and testing conferences
I made it into a 1920x1080 wallpaper. I love high res photos of the planets for wall papers.

http://imgur.com/6EU8Tc4
I get that it's a tangential problem, but vote splitting as a result of first past the post is just as bit a problem. Given the option between paper ballots with something like the Schulze Method vs secure online voting with FPTP, I'd rather take the former.
Having taken MUNI (SF's light rail) underground in SF, I have some doubt about the efficiency of such a system. In my station (Church), in the morning, I can see trains coming in every 3-4 minutes or so; and about 40 people get on at once. With a PRT system, you'd have to first line up at the turnstile to punch in your destination. Assume 15 seconds each. Then, when a car comes in, you'd have line up to get in. A person gets in, swipes her card, punches in the destination, etc. Minimum time: 1 minute, if you're being fast. Suddenly, the bandwidth is just not there; the platform becomes the bottleneck. Same would happen at an elevated pathway too, I imagine.

So, a system like this would be infeasible in a dense city like SF. Above ground is another story altogether: the NIMBYs would block all construction.

What could work is a system of autonomous vehicles (taxis) the size of a Google self-driving car, running above ground, summoned via a smartphone app or a kiosk at every corner. So, instead of dedicated pathways and elevated tracks, use autonomous cars.

Also: very importantly, each car must have odor detectors / biohazard detectors in case someone has an 'accident' in the car.
" The federal government's Small Business Administration (SBA) attempts to help companies with fewer than 1,500 employees win government contracts. The SBA's goal was to award 23 percent of all federal prime contracts, and 38 percent of all federal subcontracts, to these kinds of businesses. But Holman says they have "failed miserably in getting anywhere near that goal.""

As a former employee of an SBA favored, minority woman owned business, let me make something very clear: The entire SBA small business process is itself gamed and owned by former employees (and their still employed buddies) of the big government contractors.

Case in point: My particular "start-up" was "owned" by my COO's wife. She was CEO in name only, but had 51% ownership because she was of Fillipino descent, and therefore qualified as a minority-woman. My COO was a white male who was truly the CEO. His wife was a stay-at-home mom, but on the company's pay roll. Since the other SBA stipulation was that there was a maximum profit limit for the company, the COO and his other buddy both had their wives listed as employees to pay them each the maximium allowed salary of $300,000 a year.

Think that was ugly? Then there was the other peace:

My company would bid on contracts, and when we won them, would simply sub out large portions of the work to the same giant defense contractors. This is not the exception, but the norm.

It is a rigged system with numerous bureaucratic rules which are exploited by the people who know the rules best. Whether or not your company actually knows how to do work is separate from the true qualifier for winning work, which is knowing the system and gaming it.

Fuck all of that. I'm so happy to be in the private sector now.
I think the person you responded to was hating on Apple for stuff they actually do, like limiting your choice to one crappy browser.

And %38% of the market is enough to force any any app maker to deal with Apple, so it might as well be 51%.
curl|bash isn't insecure compared to downloading an installer program over https and running it.

It's just stupid from a reproducibility point of view: the concept that I have some program P which I can run two or more times, such that it's the same object P on each run.

Suppose curl|bash fails somehow and you need to debug it. If you try curl|bash again, it could be fetching a different script.

Of course, there are ways to fix it, like a versioned URL that points to an immutable script. You have to trust that it is immutable though.

A malicious rogue employee who works for the trusted domain could temporarily replace the script with something harmful. Bad things happen to some users, who have no trace of what was executed. The rogue restores the original script and so when that is re-fetched and examined, it looks clean.

None of the affected user saved a copy; they all ran 'curl|bash' and so there is no evidence.

This is really what people don't like; they are just not about to put a finger on it and articulate it properly: the transience of the executable program. When bash terminates for any reason, the program is lost forever. What was actually run? And does that program exist any more, or did the termination of bash just throw away the world's last copy of that version of the script?

In other words, maybe what you want is rather this:

curl | tee justincase.sh | bash

:)
Unfortunately, Microsoft has stated publicly on a few occasions that they have no plans of supporting C99 or C11 outside of what they have to implement anyway for new versions of C++.

The article isn't very clear, but I would guess backward compatibility is going to trump adding new features as far as the C compiler goes.

I wouldn't mind getting proved wrong, but the article mentions a lot of C++ features they're working on, and doesn't mention an C features they're working on.
Wise Manatee, coding advice from a herbivorous marine mammal
Kubernetes on Google Cloud for $6/mo
Imagine if ClearChannel offered a way for you to avoid seeing billboards as you drive for a monthly subscription price...
I'm not sure there is a way to fix the cars without a hardware retrofit if that is even a viable option. Someone on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/3ljng2/volkswagen...) suggested the only way they were able to pass emissions was to keep the exhaust gas recirculator (EGR) operational during the test reducing NOx emissions. Keeping the EGR open has a lot of drawbacks and probably isn't a viable long term solution as it results in loss of power in the engine, reduced fuel economy, greater wear on the engine, increased particulate emissions, increased overall operating temperatures. The later drawback would probably require a hardware solution.

A diesel engine with an EGR operating doesn't efficiently burn off all the fuel which, in addition to loss of power, produces greater particulate matter (pm) emissions which intern need to be filtered from the exhaust. The exhaust filters can become clogged with pm soot and the way it's cleansed is by injecting and igniting fuel in the exhaust to burn off the soot. If the EGR was continuously in operation then this burn off process would happen with greater regularity increasing the operating temperature of the exhaust system which would probably require more heat shielding and cooling.

Another option is a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Assuming one could be retro fit on these cars, an SCR would probably have the last impact on the vehicle's operation but would introduce new maintenance concerns for the operator (DEF fluid) and Volkswagen.
The RV idea assumes minuscule fuel costs and I doubt it would be anything more than a niche appeal, like bikers, but like bikers, it could be annoying and disruptive (god I hate how the tech industry made that word only mean good things) for the people around them.

People could sleep in their RVs as they drive around at night. Again, assuming low fuel costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_industry_in_C...

China is pretty excited about electric cars.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/china-won-...

> China [is] the only market where Toyota sells EVs.
Isn't that factored into the worth, not the price? I thought "the price" was more quantifiable as the specific amount spent to get the car.
Front page with demo videos: http://urbit.org
For getting an intuitive sense of the kind of throughput here, I think it'd be useful to picture a rollercoaster. If anything, rollercoasters are even faster boarding than one-person pods would be, since the whole rollercoaster train shows up at once.

Now picture the line at Space Mountain in the afternoon, except in a subway station.
This fact does not excuse the current behavior of either side.
I suspect that in the same way that people think the most sacred buildings in their culture should be built out of wood or stone depends on their specific culture, rectangular constructions emerge from technological constraints rather than emerging from needs or biological demands.

Take a look at this /r/askscience discussion about human field of vision.[1] Many of the conventions even for rectangular displays are based on metaphors from paper that may not be necessary.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1va3yj/what_is_...
You are assuming that copy on write is the only alternative to mutability.
First of all, you can add a message to your advertisements, saying "clean". This is great as brand-building.

Second: taxes. The buyer pays less taxes (at least in Europe) if the pollution is less than a certain value.

And more, I am sure.
Dear tech giants, if you love someone set them free
While technically true, if you stop at any point and zoom out far enough you will get something reminiscent of a hockey stick moment.
Learning Algorithm Beats Ninentdo's Ninja Gaiden Boss by Trial and Error
Implementation and Ports of Erlang
It's rare but it's not completely nonexistent. Sometimes the dealership will take possession of a recently sold car, perhaps because they offered some sort of guarantee on it. Once the car has been sold it can't be sold again as "new" even in a case like this, so it will be sold as used with almost no miles on it. Almost nobody is going to buy a car and then immediately turn around and sell it at a huge discount, but that's not the only way cars get sold.

Here are a few listings to check out, as proof they exist:

http://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/648714782/overview/

http://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/647726128/overview/

http://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/645336026/overview/

I can't be arsed to do the comparison to see how much value they've actually lost compared to new, but the data is there to prove or disprove the claim.
talk on forums, communities where your product best fits. Get feedback, engagement. You don't need a huge market, just one good enough that you can get value and service to. Once you find what that's you can probably charge for whatever is the value.

Best Regards,
Businesses like this depend largely upon forgetful users and credit card rebills to be viable. Successful user acquisition comes down to how small/hard to read/hard to find that rebill disclosure can be made without getting sued by the FTC. Smartest thing these guys ever did was recruiting Kate Hudson to be a celebrity spokesperson for the Fabletics brand, which threw a lot of regulators off and bought them some initial air cover. But at the end of the day it's the same business and they will eventually be held accountable to reasonable standards.