skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copied from my comment when this was posted to r/Singapore subreddit

- The source indicates the site is generated using CKAN (http://ckan.org/). Never heard of it myself, but it is F/OSS, and widely used in other countries. Great to see the government adopt open source software

- The homepage loads 2MB+ without a primed cache, and 600KB+ with, which is really high. The site pulls down a lot of JS - jQuery with a gazillion plugins, Bootstrap, DataTables, Select2, d3.js, and Moment.js.

- The icons are in SVG, which is good, but some of them are really badly optimized - this icon (http://beta.data.gov.sg/uploads/group/2015-06-12-061106.9773...) for the environment category is 128KB (!) which is an absolutely monster for a SVG. The equivalent PNG file will be much smaller.

- The site is not accessible at all over HTTPS - it doesn't even redirect, but just keeps the client waiting until the client times out. It's 2015 - I'd expect government sites to be accessible over HTTPS.

- The favicon is not the icon, for some reason. I really like the design of the icon, although I'm not entirely sure if it is the best fit for the data site. I can see it being used for as a single brand for all government websites though

- Fonts on almost everything need to be made bigger. The graph labels are so small I need to squint.

- The new API looks very very neat. Much more usable than the old one. The documentation can be better, and perhaps should be more front and center, but I guess they need to balance the needs of developers with casual visitors and non-developers. Love the graphs automatically drawn by d3.js for appropriate datasets

- Data is licensed under CC-by, which is quite nice.

A few interesting data sets:

- Amount of mobile data used quarterly: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/mobile-data-usage - Singapore has one of the highest mobile device ownership rates in the world - on average, each resident own more than one mobile phone

- Singapore's total land area since independence: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/total-land-area-of-singapore - Singapore has been constantly reclaiming land since independence

- Number of licensed supermarkets: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/licensed-food-establishments...

- Daily public transport ridership: http://beta.data.gov.sg/dataset/public-transport-utilisation...
IMO this is the future: https://w3c.github.io/presentation-api/
I am from Rhode Island and any kind of change is not going to happen. Voters will not "primary him out." Hell, our capital city almost elected a felon as mayor, and he was in fact the best candidate that was running. Politics in Rhode Island are stagnant. I would like to note that I am not taking an opinion on the bill amendments, especially as I have not read them - just stating facts about Rhode Island.
Find Technical CoFounders
The new world order of Césaire and Senghor
Raspbian Jessie is here
DB is too big to fail. They are just everywhere at this point; I have rarely seen a technology that has managed to find itself into every corner of every industry, and be used by professionals at every technical-level. I have experienced the LEAST technical people asking me to use Dropbox. Dropbox is like if Email was owned by one company.
Wow, my high school is on HN!

IMSA was an amazing place. There are so many smart people with so much motivation and it feels like anything is possible there. There is a dark side, though, not often mentioned publicly. Mental health issues are quite common, as could be expected when you put 14-18 year olds in a highly stressful, high-pressure environment, and people generally aren't very physically healthy, either (4.5 hours of sleep a night is common). I had some of my best times and worst times at IMSA.
I don't expect it to disappear (not completely, not over night).

But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here.

Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true?

So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
Frustratingly slow considering how important batteries are, too. It's interesting to think about what would happen if you had some sort of magic battery, say a 1kg 10cm^3 cube that cost a dollar to make and held 1000kWh of energy. The changes would be huge. The electric grid would become vastly more efficient, wind and solar would suddenly become vastly more practical, virtually all cars would become electric, etc.

Compare to a similarly magic CPU. That would be cool, but it wouldn't change the world. (Until somebody figures out how to run superhuman AI on it, anyway.)
>Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof.

Except the most poetic part of the article that recounts the results of heavy car traffic and lack of foot transportation — a huge negative impact on our sociology, not just on our physical health.

I have become a proponent for walkable cities, public transportation reform, streets hidden from pedestrians, and narrow city roads. I'm extremely pessimistic about everyone else getting on board with these studies, though. People are quite proud of driving and their cars. We need to move forward and evolve transportation for the sake of our physical and mental health and for the sake of our society. I'm wondering how to get that national conversation started.
This is something that I'm uniquely qualified to comment on.

I am an IMSA alum who was by and large, a below average IMSA student during my first two years. However, I learned a lot just by being exposed to my very smart classmates. Eventually, in my senior year I matured and started to work harder and got good grades. Had I stayed at my original high school I would have skated through at the top of my classes without much adversity. Then, based on the average college dropout rate of students from my original high school, I would have faced adversity in college and not know what to do. IMSA is a big part of why I am where I am today.
The logo cracked me up. Love it.
It's pretty easy to stay anonymous if you're just doing something for comedy and not breaking the law - use a dedicated laptop for your fake persona, only post from random public wifi connections and you're done.

You might want to throw in a bit of sanitizing with respect to the linguistic analysis side, but generally speaking if you use a clean laptop and a random public connection it will be very difficult for anyone to out you.
Are you older than me? I was class of '09 and already the kids who lived closer by went home on a fair number of weekends. I've heard the trend has gotten even more pronounced over time.
Some hotels I stayed at went as far as disabling HDMI ports on their TVs, which is extremely annoying.
> It's also important to note what kinds of jobs are being created nowadays. A lot of them are "bullshit jobs" - make-believe work or elements of zero-sum-games like (big part of) advertising industry. Work has been disconnected from benefit it brings, we're literally (although usually indirectly) inventing nonsense tasks because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.

You think bullshit jobs are something new ? Of course not, they have always existed. Even some coders have bullshit jobs - there is probably only a fraction of jobs that actually directly bring value, among a massive amount of noise from other jobs that support the other or have indirect value to the said business.

But on the whole, there are way more "non-bullshit" jobs that there were ever before, that's why I claim you are missing the big picture. There were no scientist jobs before. There were no engineer jobs 150 years ago. There were few doctors (very few) in the same time range as well.

> that those hipsters gave brains to the machines.

and

> now they're replacing human cognitive capabilities.

No, computers are still very much stupid, there is no autonomous AI in sight - we have just been able to make them do some specific tasks very very well and much faster than humans (deep learning and the like), but in terms of flexibility and learning abilities the most advanced computer program and hardware is far behind any life form on Earth. Are you not a member of the Singularity Church ?

> because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.

People don't work anymore to bring food on the table. Food has never been cheaper. Even homeless folks have smartphones these days - the amount of excess cash that people get out of work far exceeds the money needed to get food.
If Digg and Slashdot are any guide, it might be wise to just do a slight enhancement to improve mobile proportions and sizing, rather than any re-design.
> The supermarket baked-on-site bread is much worse, and looks like a desperate attempt by supermarkets to keep people buying bread there.

Oh, I totally agree with you. I was just mentioning that they were reintroducing workers in a process that used to be fully automated.
I'm actually really intensely curious how one would design a voting system for people to choose what subentities to belong to. How would you populate the ballot? Would you run a clustering algorithm on the votes?

What if New Jersey and Michigan just decide they want to be as they are, but excluding Camden and Detroit respectively?

Or would you do something whimsical like draw lines based on football/baseball teams and cleave states like CT in half?
I guess Axel didn't do his due diligence.

http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/the-truth-about-bus...
Agreed - the only thing I dislike about HN at all is the tendency of some users to downvote anything they disagree with. It seems to have gotten worse over time (I've been lurking several years longer than my current account). Now I occasionally come by threads with a large proportion of not-terrible comments greyed out, and it does make me avoid commenting anything that might be perceived unfavorably by someone. It also seems to encourage lots of throwaway accounts for single comments of unpopular opinions. I wish something could be done about this more than anything else, but I'm not sure what that would be.
I order way, way too much stuff in Australia, here's a summary:

AusPost: Our national carrier, realised a few years ago that no one's sending letters any more and "pivoted" to parcel delivery. Parcel Lockers [0] are a "new" innovation here but heaven help you if you try to get a courier parcel into one. Royal Mail = Good, DHL = Bad in this case and you might not even know until the seller receives the parcel back.

Fedex: Sorry, we missed you. (And the nearest depot is 30+ minutes away somewhere where buses don't go and you can only collect after 4 on weekdays)

DHL: Sorry, we missed you.

UPS: Sorry, we missed you (or handed your parcel off to StarTrack, in which case it'll go to a parcel locker, but you'll never know if this is actually going to happen)

USPS, Royal Mail etc: Handed off to AusPost, can go to a parcel locker.

StarTrack: More expensive, more blue version of AusPost - semi private (?), the only courier that AusPost will let into the lockers

Toll: Sorry we missed you, there's a redelivery fee in a lot of cases. Tried to start up a Parcel Locker competitor and then didn't expand to many locations [1]. The website returned 500 errors for the first 6 months of its existence.

Amazon: We're not going to actually tell you who is carrying your parcel because we outsourced it to iParcel who sometimes use UPS and sometimes use AusPost. Send an Amazon (US/UK/DE) parcel to an AusPost locker at your own peril

eBay: Most Aussie sellers use AusPost, so that works, but for some reason overseas orders go through some kind of Pitney Bowes reseller - see UPS, DHL, FedEx, Amazon above.

[0]: http://lockers.auspost.com.au
[1]: http://parcelpoint.com.au
> in C++

You can't blame me because some language you choose has limited meta abilities and doesn't allow you to place asserts anywhere. An assert is a generic concept that you can do in any language, and in languages with meta-facalities all of that is trivial to do, you're too focused on "where" the assert is in your specific language, but DBC came from Eiffel, not C++, and checking conditions or blowing up is an assert no matter where it occurs. DBC is cool, the places DBC chooses to do it's asserts are also a big part of what DBC is, but it's still all just some asserts in creative places under creative inheritance rules.
Do you really, genuinely think that if Russia was the destination du jour for outsourcing, there would be no contention?
This is an oversimplification, though I don't doubt that there is a lot of infrastucture crud especially in large companies, which is a problem that /should/ be fixed. But to measure utilization without any context is naive:

- Most applications out there are probably not cpu-bound, so measuring cpu utilization is worthless. Should categorize services as either cpu, disk, network, or memory bound.

- Even world-wide demand will vary a lot throughout daily and weekly cycles, so over-provisioning is necessary for system stability

- Need over-provisioning to handle peaks due to soccer games, earthquakes, Christmas, etc.

All that said, I work at a company that (I get the impression maybe this is unusual these days) has historically pushed the limits of per-machine utilization through:

- service isolation

- minimal (pair-wise) redundancy (which is cheating, I know)

- simple service architecture

- leveraging mobile client processing power wherever possible

among other techniques, while using the latest and greatest bare metal boxes.. and we'd never hit anywhere near 100% cpu utilization. The most we've ever driven even a a cpu-bound app (the front end) is around 60%, which is dangerous, and we've suffered a couple outages as a result.
Arrow keys? Firefox with vimperator (for hjkl)?
I'm extremely delighted that they spelled doxing correctly (one X, not two).
Something that came pre-installed on my last phone and couldn't be removed, and obnoxiously kept updating itself and asking for more permissions.

No idea what it does, that annoyed me too much to ever find out.
> Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?

Because America is not India. All those American workers have bills to pay in America, where the bills are higher the same way their wages are higher.
24 beautiful libraries of the world
This is going to sound stupid, but I think the major problems with Drive are the line height it uses for items within a directory and the fact that it has relatively short file pagination threshold.

I had thought that Drive was confusing, because I would "create" a Doc or a Spreadsheet in the root directory and then go back to look for it and not be able to find it. I created a Spreadsheet, and named it something starting with 'T'. This put it on the 3rd or 4th pagination request to get more files (these requests were ~1-2 seconds slow) in my root directory. But also the line height of all the files in the directory filled up so much vertical space that it felt like I was seeing most of the directory on page 1, even though it had much more content.

When I look at ~/ locally in Finder, Nautilus, etc. the line height is tight and there is no pagination. I can see everything I have access to instantly or within an immediate scroll. When I use Google Drive every file line item takes up a lot of vertical space and I have to page through results. The result is that I can't see everything and I feel as though things are missing, even though they aren't.
Not just well mapped but also what do they do when there are temporary detours? I can't imagine a situation where an automated driving car copes well with a temporary human based stop/go situation (without signs - I'm talking really temporary here like a construction site with a vehicle backing up). Maybe I'm wrong.
Except my tax dollars aren't exclusively spent on white people, they're spent on the folks in my country. I guess my supporting a path to citizenship for those dirty brown Mexicans that got brought over as kids would come as a surprise then, wouldn't it? Please, save your self-aggrandizing, half-baked rhetoric for your drum circle.
See the "OneNote Bulk" Evernote-to-OneNote migration utility mentioned at http://www.thetechchat.com/2014/09/05/how-to-convert-notes-f...

EDIT 1: PayPal and LinkedIn indicate that the migration app's developer is in China. [1] That initially gave me pause about using the app --- who knows where my information might end up? --- but then I'm guessing that Chinese hackers seeking to steal confidential information aren't likely to be so open about being in China, nor to charge $30 for the app. (Of course, that too could all be part of the evil hackers' cover story, right?)

EDIT 2: I just used the app to migrate 6,500-plus notes from Evernote to OneNote as a test. It seemed to work flawlessly. (My suggestion is to use Evernote's export facility on each EN notebook in turn to create a separate export file; then set up OneNote sections corresponding to each EN Notebook; then use the OneNote Bulk app to import each EN notebook's export file into the corresponding ON section.) I'm still pondering whether to make a permanent switch.

[1] https://cn.linkedin.com/pub/james-linton/50/82/9a
Lapka isn't just a design company, they're a product design company that creates devices that collect data about the things around you like Humidity, Radiation etc. Airbnb has a big focus on UX. I'm sure they plan on integrating this technology to share that knowledge about users Airbnb locations.
This rings true. Many of us start out with very limiting notions of what's possible, and there's nothing like surrounding yourself with bright people to expand the envelope of what seems to be possible.

I attended a school very similar school to IMSA in the early 90's (the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science), and it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at that age. I had a pen pal at IMSA who, like me, was sys-admining the school's UNIX server, so it was fun to trade notes. I had plenty of other experiences later in life that expanded my notion of the possible, but attending that school certainly got me on the right path.
I'm far from an audiophile but "home speakers" to me implies good ole fashioned speakers, as you say.

And the product I'm thinking of isn't that far-fetched and drives a pair of Bose 301s fine.

http://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Audio-Receiver-Amplifier-Mod...

It's crazy that regular speakers are becoming so rare.
I like to joke about how I could set up shop beneath a volcano, and every day predict whether it will explode with over 99.99% accuracy. I simply say "No" every day.
Uber tells you the license plate of the car assigned to you; this seems like a good way of preventing someone driving up and saying "I'm your Uber" if they sniff you using Uber on your phone.

Amazon might not do this yet but they could and obviously should.

People who are totally unconcerned about someone totally random showing up at their door carrying a potentially large(!) package are a whole different level of naive. Most of the world is not like your suburban home culdesac or Silicon Valley.
This is very true--trying to create a single outcomes-based ideal of what's fair is both difficult and subject to the same strategizing that caused gerrymandering in the first place. Instead of choosing what "fair" is and maximizing it, the proposal takes a different approach: by using an extremely simple geometric rule, the algorithm seeks to avoid choices that would be susceptible to influence for political gain. Those are the choices that tend to result in gerrymandering, which by locking down power is expressly designed to be the opposite of fair to future voters. So instead of the difficult task of directly maximizing fairness, the proposal aims to minimize a great source of unfairness. I'd be curious to know how well it would work in practice.
Save for Later: Bookmarking Apps and the Wish Economy
I think the OPM data breach recently put about 10 million fingerprints and a ton of associated personally identifying information into the hands of people who have clear motivation to hack the cell phones of many of the people impacted.
How the CIA made Google
At least they are trying
to do some real innovation --
powerful, valuable, important, useful,
difficult to duplicate or equal,
lots of intellectual property and
trade secrets, etc.

Much better than yet another
social, local, mobile, sharing, membership,
app.

Terrific! Go for it, guys.

Uh, guys, original research in
applied physics is not
the only good direction for
especially powerful innovations.

There is also information technology
from original research in applied
mathematics (theorem and proof kind)
for, yes, powerful, valuable,
important, useful, difficult to
duplicate or equal, lots of
intellectual property and
trade secrets, etc.
Amplify lays off an est. 800. Access, the Android tablet division, for sale
Universities don't provide funding to academic stars. They provide prestige, access to good colleagues and students, that sort of thing. The money flows in the other direction.
The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid (1847)
If pure capitalism isn't robust enough that it won't devolve into cronyism then it's just as worthless an ideology as "communism", and for much the same reason. It's not enough that something sounds good and works in theory - humans have to be able to implement it too.
Also, I wouldn't give up on native pen support just yet.

NVIDIA's DirectStylus technology is supposed to be processor-based and, more importantly, uses standard touch sensors (no active digitizer required), though it does seem to require support for a faster-than-normal touch refresh rate (NVIDIA's DirectTouch).

With luck, good pen support on the Pixel C might be just a software update away...
Repo for the TodoMVC demo: https://github.com/swannodette/om-next-demo
That'd be great. I'm using tags as a poor man's hierarchy for now. I do this on Pinboard too. Ex. #travel #travel-nyc #travel-nyc-Brooklyn.
And a device like this points up those distinctions rather well. It's a 2-in-1, like the iPad Pro and the Surface/Surface Pro line. But, and I'd say weirdly even more than the iPad Pro highlights the dichotomy between iOS and OS X, the Pixel C really drives home the difference between Android and ChromeOS. To get the full Google 2-in-1 experience (something that offers all the promise of a tablet AND all the promise of Google's version of a notebook, you'd want something that can run the offline versions of Google Docs that ChromeOS has (not the Android versions that seems geared more towards consumption) and the tablet apps that Android has. So it's a 2-in-1 that's an Android tablet AND an Android notebook.

(And honestly, I think this also points out how weak Google's OSes are outside the smartphone space. Android still doesn't have the sort of high-end creation apps for tablets that iPad and Surface have, and ChromeOS doesn't have the sort of productivity apps the Windows, OS X or even Linux offer.)
It'd be amusing if asynchronous processors suddenly took off and many Big-O questions became trickier.
Walker and Company Raises $24M, Will Sell Its Bevel Razors in Target Stores
Iran: Latest Nation to Host Critical Global Internet Infrastructure
Actually, it looks like he's a Harvard guy.
Skitch has potential but I've always felt the integration was terrible and unfinished. It doesn't feel native at all.