skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see where you're coming from, and in a very, very abstract sense it might be true. However, I think there are two different kinds of "abstraction" at play here. The more common is where you have a basic set of building blocks and build abstractions with them. The second is where you adjust the building blocks. That's the one that's profound...and profoundly difficult, I found.

For example, I believe to have discovered that we need a slightly more complex notion of identifier/reference/variable (I call them Polymorphic Identifiers [1][2][3]). Smalltalk says that we only need messages (procedural abstraction) to be polymorphic, identifiers and things like assignment are simple/monomorphic. SELF (another "Power of Simplicity" [4]) essentially said that you don't really need separate identifiers for things at all, all the things that look like identifiers are really message-sends. This makes a lot of sense at first glance, and at second and third. However, there are subtle problems related to the Uniform Access Principle [5], and my contention is that to solve these problems you can't layer abstractions on top, you actually have to go against the grain and make one of the fundamental building blocks (variable access, both read and write) slightly more complicated. And that you actually need the concept "variable access" :-)

Having worked with PIs for a bit now, it looks like this slightly more complicated primitive really does help solve/reduce a lot of complexities in real world systems. As far as I can tell, a lot of these complexities are fundamentally "storage" related, but that unifying abstraction is lost because the mechanisms we have available are procedural. Once you have it, you get building blocks similar to shell filters that you can combine to create variations as one-liners that would otherwise be many pages of code, similar to McIlroy's shell solution to Jon Bentley's word count challenge (6 lines of shell vs. Knuth's 12 pages of Pascal/Web) [6]

However, communicating this appears to be nearly impossible. For example, David Ungar (of Self fame) reviewed my paper and just tore it to shreds, misunderstanding not just the solution, but also the problem, and completely incorrectly claiming that Self already solves those problems. He stopped responding when I showed him the (very simple) examples demonstrating the problem in Self.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2508169

[2] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...

[3] http://objective.st/URIs/

[4] http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/self-power.pdf

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_access_principle

[6] http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg...
Doubtful, the more influentiable people would be like "Oh wow I can totally get rich selling drugs as long as I don't startg using it myself!"
DG Card
Have you seen this digital business card ?
All your contacts always automatically updated in your mobile.
Really cool and useful !!!
https://www.dgcard.com
Can't argue with that! Thanks.
You're right about the interpolation method (bilinear vs nearest-neighbor), it's indeed not a fair comparison in that respect. However, I do think that most PNG viewers use nearest-neighbor (at least that's what my viewer did when I gave it a partial PNG file).

But it's not just the interpolation that makes a difference: PNG interlaces full RGB pixels (all 3 channels at the same time), while FLIF gives priority to luma so you get a chroma subsampling effect on partial files. Also GIF only has vertical interlacing and PNG only does 7 passes of 2D interlacing, which means that for huge images, the first pass can still take a while.

Another point: I am proposing to use progressive decoding to avoid having to download the full lossless image (so a browser supporting FLIF would need some mechanism to stop downloading the image file when "enough" detail is available). Repeated re-rendering is not necessary. E.g. on a mobile phone you would rather just download some prefix of the file (the size of the prefix could depend on the available bandwidth) and render it once, at least until the user zooms in on the image, or saves or prints it or something -- then the download should be resumed in order to load more/all detail.
How to Reach Your Competitors Audience
These threads always fucking suck on HN.

Before you comment I would urge you to go find some reporting by the NYTimes of something you know a lot about - your favoured programming language or a company you work for, and see how well their reporting matches your understanding of the topic.

Here's the stuff that newspaper articles usually fail to mention in reports on therapy / drug studies

1) The definition of major depression has broadened and now includes a much greater range of people. The effect size of treatment is normally greater for people with more severe symptoms, although the relapse rate is also usually higher.

2) The way trials are run has changed, and many trials are not very good. One of the causes of this is odd regulation.

3) People seem to say that pills for psychiatric use are no better than placebo (not true) but that pills for physical health (eg hypertension) are better than placebo (true) but those people should also look at the effect size, which is often similar for both types of meds.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20241/abstrac...

Anti-depressants vs placebo: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20241/epdf

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20263/epdf

Pragmatic randomized controlled trial of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: the Tavistock Adult Depression Study (TADS) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20267/abstrac...

etc.
Don’t know if this applies to your post, but I got a lot more out of Alan Kay talks when I stopped trying to look for profundity, and assumed he's mostly talking about how we're being morons.
Add kodak to the list.
Olivier Blanchard’s tenure at the IMF
To me, it's simpler. You have people who 'believe' in the current system and their role in keeping it stable and sustainable. And, you have people who don't believe or just don't care.

I am unfortunately a believer. I've always wanted to disregard the whole silly, archaic system, but I can't. I'm very 'responsible' by nurture. My spouse is also a believer. We have a very stable relationship, we're very responsible, trustable, and, of course, have perfect credit scores all because of our silly beliefs.
From your description, it does sound similar to abstinence-only sex ed. The only thing schools should do with regards to drugs, sex, alcohol, and all those vices that can be enjoyed responsibly, is to educate - this is what these drugs will do, positive and negative effects, it's illegal to possess it in most cases, etc.

We didn't have much or any of that, but we did have a police officer in class once showing us a block of hash. IDK what all that was about though, we just thought it was cool to have a guy with a gun in class, :p. (note that this is in a country famous for its tolerance towards weed)
I hope the author can come back to tell us whether he did comparisons with different speed presets for BPG; it ranges from insanely fast to insanely slow, and that's probably just the default.
BuildZoom is hiring a lead product designer
One of the designers where I work added 3D Touch to a prototype of a website he was working on this week. During a Demo session no one knew the feature was there until he told them. That's the hard bit about UI design once you go beyond visual things - people are conservative in the ways they interact with devices, so unless there's an indicator, or instructions, no one will find the fancy new UI feature. And if no one finds, and thus no one uses it, what's the point in spending part of your budget making it?

The problem is further compounded by 3D Touch not really having an obvious use case in most apps. What it'll do will vary from app to app. That means a user has to learn what it does over and over again, and how much pressure to use in each thing. What 'light touch' is in one developer's app will be different to another's.

3D Touch is great, and has loads of potential, but it's going to be hard to make it genuinely useful.
Lost me a bit at

Im(f(x+ih))​​/h

near the end (that's a fancy I that android FF won't paste). Can anyone explain where 'm' came from?

Or is 'Im' just a fn returning the imaginary part of its argument?

EDIT: reading the code following, it's clear that Im is just that.
Lots of reason. OSS usually tries to duplicate something that's already there, or make small improvements. There's a lot more chance for a result that others will find impressive when doing something incremental, because you are building on all the stuff that's already there. In fact, academia is also the largely that way: do a small increment.

Doing something that's true invention is far more difficult, and the results are far less impressive in the short to mid term. As an example, you probably won't find Objective-Smalltalk [1] very impressive, I would say that a good part of the reason for this is that it is really trying to invent something new. This is slow/difficult because you must eschew the easy/obvious answers. It is difficult to communicate for the same reasons: everything is subtly strange.

[1] http://objective.st/
Stopped reading after story about cron script killing long running db queries - it means this system is a huge mess, where killing request is more simple solution than finding which part of code generates it. I saw such systems and I'm sure it's hopeless state and only as sarcasm I can read "thankful to architecture principles" here.
Even if we believed someone could have a memory this crystal clear after 40 years, many of the details are completely meaningless to the premise that is presented

I'm not claiming the story is real, but just presenting a counter view to the above. You seem to be assuming that:

A: This is real memories, given the story he's obviously thought about that encounter a lot. So, it's hardly been 40 years, it's been constantly repeated in his mind - also evolving. Some of the details might be wrong, some only carry the sentiment of what he believed he would have felt at that time. If, 40 years ago, he heard the same story he told now he might barely recognize it. Given that he contemplated suicide and add to that that he believes this be the turning point for getting past that (whether that is true nor not is irrelevant). It is no surprise that he has strong feelings and vivid memories from it.

B: Since when is memory organized by meaningfulness? Also, what is meaningful?

I'm not even 40 years old but, as an example, I could tell you in ridiculous detail of a presentation I did in school with two friends of mine when I was 11 years old. (~20 years ago), I could tell you about memories of the notes that we had for the presentation (handwritten notes written on the printed document we had produced) - I remember some of the images we used (and how they were completely irrelevant to the topic). Is that in any sense meaningful? God no. Is my memory crystal clear? Not at all, for one there are huge gaping holes that I either won't mention or that I must interpolate to get at (I do remember the overall context and sentiment, from that I could just assume (and believe) everything else was ordinary), but as an observer you'll mostly forgive that because I can tell you the color and the shape I used to circle a specific note on that document - and how I messed it up and rather than circling the note a lot of it ended up on the outside of it. Or how we messed up the order of the overhead sheets etc.

And that is about a boring presentation that I've not given much thought on, not a life-changing event that had a very sudden and thought-provoking ending.
Call me archaic, but schools should teach proper spelling and grammar in addition to the process of reasoning. I can't take any writing seriously if it's done poorly. (I didn't think the essay was done poorly though, it's still better than a lot of writing done on the internet nowadays)
I'd say the profundity is in how we're being morons...and how we could stop if we wanted to do so. Alas, those insights aren't easy to apply.
PICOLOVE – An Open Source PICO-8 Reimplementation in Love2D
Its pretty silly people keep using the marketing terms as if they actually worked for Apple. It has a very high resolution display and pressure-sensitive screen.
That goes both ways. I bought a cheap Win 10 Tablet (x86) and haven't figured out how to get back from Chrome Browser Fullscreen via F11. The Onscrean Keyboard doesn't seem to support Fx keys.
I don't want to encourage anyone to take more risks with my life, thank you very much
There's no need for guesswork. The person with the red light yields to everyone.
The problem with that line of thought is that the courts don't care if its use or integration, but if the resulting work depends on someone else work. The word used in copyright law is transform, adapt, recast, and such changes requires additional copyright permission. For example, if I buy a painting and cut it into pieces and rearrange them, I actually need an additional license beyond what I got from purchasing the copy. Components can not be cleanly viewed as separate when dealing with copyright.

You can also turn this around and ask if its legal to use process call within a other program without invoking the need for additional permissions. FSF view that it should be legal, but it has never been tested. By now however an industry standard has formed around the FSF guidelines and most courts would just look at it when deciding. This is what commonly happen when no one go to court to find out what the rules actually should be.
Completely agree. Plus, you still have to design your ui so that the feature is accessible by other more obvious and available means.

Those new interactions will always only be the equivalent of keyboard shortcuts. Nothing more.
Im is for imaginary part of its argument as you say
ANTM's “Comeback” shows how flawed its judging system is
I strongly disagree with the idea that computer programs should be designed so that no "help" is required. It only works in the simplest of applications.

In my opinion, a bigger issue is that most "help" dialogs are so badly written that they are pretty much useless. They are too often written by a developer who doesn't have a clear understanding of the typical use cases. When was the last time you found anything useful behind the F1 key?

I see the effects of this in freshmen and newbie developers who don't ever look at the manuals or documentation because they are used to it being non-existent or unhelpful. I hate to be saying RTFM, but I have to because reading the docs is a useful skill, unlike memorizing how a certain tool works.
For many years the Russian Ruble was pegged against a basket of 55% USD and 45% EUR. So at the time you could have had your wish by buying RUB. Until it devalued.

In the 90s the Polish zloty was pegged against a basket of 4 or 5 currencies, I forget, which included marks, dollars, yen, and swiss francs if I recall.

Today, the Singapore Dollar has one of the lowest aggregate volatilities, precisely because it is tightly controlled against a basket of global currencies.

The motivation is exactly what you point out: reducing exposure to a single currency's fluctuations, and trying to match a country's balance of payments more accurately. Often, unfortunately, because baskets go together with pegs (crawling or not, with bands or not), they encourage speculative attack at some stage or another.

You mention your consumption basket in AUD has become more expensive. Your country is highly exposed to commodities which have dropped about 37% in the past 3 years, as measured by the CRB. Thus your nation's income is declining, and you're unfortunately unavoidably exposed to that if you don't hedge your foreign consumption currency basket, because recognizing Australia's commodity links, the market has depreciated the AUD against the dollar by 28%, and by 15% against the EUR in the same 3 year period. That, by the way, keeps commodity prices denominated in AUD, more stable, and dampens the blow to the Australian economy. But it makes foreign goods more expensive (as it is supposed to given Australia's economic circumstances).

You could have hedged yourself quite well by simply going to a broker and selling an AUDUSD futures contract for example, and these contracts are available in "retail" size, or even smaller if you're prepared to get into the index betting sites. Essentially the option is open to you at very reasonable cost, to create your own exposure basket, and that basket, by the way, could also include commodities themselves. Indeed I would argue that currently, as we move towards higher risks of political/policy upheaval globally, hedging is more important than ever. But not putting all your eggs in one basket has always been good advice, as you point out ;-) My point is that you can do that with your liabilities as well as your assets, quite easily.
Not very convincing.

On most cars, you can't completely turn off traction control. The "ESP off" button is there driving with tire chains, it just increases the threshold of the safety systems but doesn't disable them. That could explain the warnings in the dashboard, and also the reduced torque. High torque on low-traction surfaces leads to wheel spin.
Feel free to disable sip, or just unprotect the folders you don't want protected (although the latter would get wiped out after updates).
If your startup has to compete against background noise, you are doing it wrong. If you shoot for the broadest possible audience, yes, you will have to compete against everyone.

If you instead focus on a very narrow and specific audience, it will be much easier to get heard. Make an app for your local city, and it'll be trivial to get press coverage. Or target a specific niche, and you won't even need press coverage. Delight a few users, and expand from there; don't aim for the entire world from day one.
> My attempts to do Xerox PARC-like things over the years, like Interval [Research Corporation] with [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen, most of them have failed for one of two reasons. it’s either so antithetical to the corporate culture that nobody really wants it. Or in Paul Allen’s case, he wanted to monetize everything. He treated [Interval] as an innovation center or product engineering division. He never understood the process of doing invention research. A company should have an invention center because it’s a wild card.

I went out to dinner at SIGGRAPH in the early 90's with some people from Xerox PARC and some people from Interval Research. When one of the Interval people quipped "We're the Xerox PARC of the 90's", one of the Xerox PARC people took issue with that and corrected them: "Actually, we consider ourselves to be the Xerox PARC of the 90's."
Also known as The Triffin Dilemma:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Thanks for pointing this out! I only tried ImageMagick convert at minimum -quality. Sorry about that.
The researchers at PARC needed lots of money. For example, they built the Alto. They then used the Alto as a tool to design lots of other great things.

A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto
Ironically, flat UI MAY have made this problem more difficult to solve. Imagine if we were still on some sort of skeumorphism design on iOS, then we MAY be able to come up with some sort of layer/depth/texture visual hint that makes people want to press one area harder.

I have no idea what that would look like, but on a random note, a bubble wrap popping game with 3D touch support would be dope.
Prototyping and exploring custom interactions for the Apple TV
well my 2-year old thinkpad does not recognize 3 finger touch. I would much rather have a uniform cut-copy-paste command rather than wait for some funky hardware support .. or upgrade.

If there was some magical way to get gnome-terminal, vim and firefox/chrome honor a universal cut-copy-paste shortcut... then I'm golden. This is more of a political than a technical problem.

Yes, I know I can remap keys in firefox, in gnome-terminal and browsers. But then they dont work in skype.. or something else. I would pay good money if there was a kickstarter around this.
Home routers 'vaccinated' by benign virus
What you are describing in the rant is how GPL works, so surely there must be some misunderstanding here. If you use a GPLv3 library, your own additions to it can be GPLv3 or any compatible license. It can be mit, apache, BSD, mpl, CC-anything so long it allow commercial use, and almost any of the free and open source licenses. The entire thing to do not need to be GPL and in large projects its commonly not.
>Before you comment I would urge you to go find some reporting by the NYTimes of something you know a lot about - your favoured programming language or a company you work for, and see how well their reporting matches your understanding of the topic.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Which was coined of course by... Michael Crichton. Anyway, it's a good rule of thumb.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...
3D Touch is great, and has loads of potential, but it's going to be hard to make it genuinely useful.

I see one big exception and that is games. Phones are limited when it comes to controls and 3D Touch can be a welcome addition. Discoverability isn't as much of a problem for games, because there is usually a tutorial anyway.

Of course, it will be a while before games will be designed around 3D touch, because older iPhones and Android phones.
I think "vital force" is the term you might be looking for. While almost any scientist would just chuckle at the idea, remnants of it are still quite common in modern philosophy.
Yeah, Kodak had their moment. [1]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kodak_moment
Statistically if it's never once happened to me it's unlikely that it happens to millions of people a month. I'm not sure where you're getting your information from.
Plaza Accord
I was surprised by this as well, so I checked their paper:

"When multiple threads need to share a resource, they can
pass ownership through channels. However, as we discuss in the rest
of this paper, it does not work well in systems that use non threadbased
concurrency models and when resources must be shared [...]

While hardware interrupts
are asynchronous, and therefore run concurrently with other kernel
code, in our operating system interrupt handlers enqueue tasks to
be run in the main scheduler loop, which is single-threaded. As a
result, on_receive and send can never run concurrently and no
data race is possible.
We overcome both issues by declaring most resources as static
variables and borrowing them with ’static lifetime. [...]

Being able to mutably borrow static variables multiple times
means our operating system can allow multiple drivers to reference
hardware resources or each other. However, doing so means we lose
the ability to detect real data races at compile time, for example,
if the kernel passes a shared resource to an interrupt handler that
may run concurrently. Instead, we resort to an overly conservative
convention in which interrupt handlers perform no work except
posting to the main scheduler’s task queue. An ideal mechanism
would, instead, allow for shared state between components that will
never run concurrently, but disallow sharing when they may."
There's a difference between:

Department of Simulation Research

and:

Department of Research Simulation
I always saw it as an interface like right clicking, which is genuinely useful.
The title is too optimistic, IIUC, he is not saved yet, he is still in prison.