skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The incentives align to make me want to support f.lux here, I think. Not because I want f.lux (the product) to win, but because having Flux (the commercial organization) in the market means that they'll "hunger" for that money and use it to push Apple to open the gamma API.

Having done so, though, anyone can then use that gamma API. If there's no special advantage to f.lux's patented implementation, then some other (maybe FOSS, maybe not) gamma-shifting app will win the market. If f.lux has especially clever secret sauce in how and when exactly they gamma-shift, then f.lux will win the market.

The real question: should someone be able to clone f.lux's (latitude, time, and option-dependent) gamma curve formula without paying f.lux? Is a gamma curve formula patentable? I don't really know. I do know that it's easy enough to create your own that probably works nearly as well without it being f.lux's formula.
“The Bataan Death March has never, ever,” Gaerlan says, “been part of the history curriculum in American schools.” She also says it’s neglected in education in the Philippines.

Is this true? As a Canadian, it certainly got a mention in our (Grade 9? Grade 10?) social studies.
>It's the "patent pending" part that sucks. They're trying to patent the idea of changing your video card's CLUT (color look-up table) to reduce eye strain, which is a fairly obvious and trivial thing to do once you know that blue light affects melatonin production.

On the other hand, since nobody else has done it (or patented it yet), real life proves that it's not that "obvious".

Like the "egg of Columbus" some thing are obvious in retrospect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
Above all, we are disappointed that you and President Chodosh weren’t brave enough to come to the defense of a student who was told she was “derailing” because her opinions regarding racism didn’t align with those of the mob around her. Nor were you brave enough to point out that these protesters were perfectly happy to use this student to further their own agenda, but turned on her as soon as they realized she wasn’t supporting their narrative. These protesters were asking you to protect your students, but you didn’t even defend the one who needed to be protected right in front of you.

It's like nobody on any side of any of these university free speech issues can keep themselves on the rails. These people don't seem to get it either.

Students don't need "protection" from free speech, nor does anyone need to be rescued from the "mockery" and "humiliation" of an accusation of racism.

Demands for journalism-free "safe spaces" are bad, but so too is the idea that accusations of racism are so beyond the pale that people need to be shielded from them by institutions.
That's like trying to start a campaign to call bullies "assailants" instead of "bullies". It will not change anything.
Show HN: Organize weekly tasks
If IS takes the pain to fund and coordinate something like this, it is surely because they want to obtain something. If the attack would not change status quo in any way, there would be no reason to invest time and resources in carrying it out.

According to those Western scholars who study IS ideology, it is clear that they adhere to an apocalyptic interpretation of islam where they envisage some kind of final battle against "the armies of Rome".

Whether the attack was intended to serve a strategic or ideologic purpose, or just to make a point, it is clear that the last thing they want is for it to change nothing.

So, in a purely rational world, the best reaction would be to change nothing. Not scale up military presence in Syria, certainly not scale it down, not change any policy, keep on carrying out business as usual, and on the emotional level, mourn, but not fear. Of course, we do not live in a purely rational world, so whether this route is even possible to follow, I don't know. But I really believe that if we were able to react (or rather non-react) in this way, it would be the very least the attackers wanted. It would reduce their "heroic deed" to just the meaningless slaugher that it was.

As a semi-analogy: After the right-wing extremist Anders Breivik killed some eighty people at a youth camp a few years ago, the Norwegian government more or less handled him as a regular criminal (albeit a high-profile one). Now he spends his day alone in a prison cell, occasionally whining in the media about not having the latest X-Box or something similar, pretty much revealing to everyone with a working brain what a small character he truly is. If he had been executed (not possible in Norway, I know....) he could surely have ended up being seen as a martyr by some.
When explaining why heroin is bad and should remain illegal, how often do critics point out the drug's pros? Are critics not being objective or honest when they adamantly condemn it? Or, what about when assessing the results of Hitler's reign in Germany? Are historians being dishonest and subjective when they don't bring up the positive consequences of his actions?

There are countless other examples. If someone feels very negatively about "Free Basics", I'm not sure why they're not being objective or honest by leaving out potential pros.
I shared that same link a couple days ago, mostly hoping to see if it sparked some interesting convo. No one bit. It's a silly article though given that it's pretty clear that functional programming is actually taking over, bit by bit. Not so much the functional languages themselves, but the techniques -- Python's comprehensions, Ruby's blocks, Javascript's Underscore library, and so on. I guess it's debatable whether real startups should go "full functional" but as traditionally imperative and traditionally functional languages continue to converge, it probably matters less and less.
Indeed history repeating itself. Book burning started on college campuses as well.

Not necessarily the Hitler Jugend, but Fascism was also considered an "intellectual movement" in its heydays, very popular on college campuses with perfectly well-meaning people.
This is the obvious change immediately made by anyone whose health is affected. If the lowest level of brightness were sufficient, users would not need to seek out apps like f.lux.
I read the article quite rapidly so apologies if this is mentioned, but Disney (the company) actually did launch a planned community, I think it's essentially town-sized, called Celebration. It's near to Disney world in Florida.

I visited it about 15 years ago when I believe it was still relatively new. No idea how it turned out, a brief google search reveals it still exists but I can't find anything remarkable reported about it.

Seems like a pretty interesting thing though, there must be some stories to tell. If anybody knows of anything, books or articles etc, I'd really appreciate being pointed at them.
I've written two major projects: a window manager, and a fuzzy matcher.

The window manager inherently requires a lot of configuration because everyone wants window managers to work differently, and even the same person will want to change how they use their window manager. So I've written about a dozen implementations of this; the most popular one one just wraps system calls as Lua functions, but it's also the most difficult to maintain because of the complexity of wrapping system callbacks with Lua callbacks and tracking them and allowing live code reloading etc.

The fuzzy matcher was written in one day, and I use it every single week day. It just uses stdin and stdout, and takes very few options. I haven't compiled it since I wrote it, and it's working beautifully.

So all in all I'd say the UNIX philosophy is a win.
I am not interested in this political debate at all. You can safely assume any argument I'd come up with would just be sourced from people like Juan Cole anyways, and go read him instead.
10k lines of C doesn't mean "simple".

Perhaps not in this case, but even an 1K line of C program could need tons of research to be written, extravagant math, etc.

There can be 1K programs that are orders of magnitude more complex to write than 100K programs -- e.g. cryptography vs a game engine.
I'm not the best placed person to answer about Python, my background is primarily C++/Java and functional languages. The types in general get out of the way. The ability to specialize behavior by types makes for some very interesting patterns and for a module writer add a huge amount of power. For the user of the module they rarely see the types.

The cons, top three from the top of my head, implicit array concat ( going in 0.5 ), String types ( going soon ), anonymous function performance ( gone by 1.0 )

None of these are show stoppers, but they do sometimes fall into the category of surprising. The core dev are very aware of the issues and if you look at the road map for 1.0 many are either well on their way to being fixed or are scheduled to be resolved.
i think it's intended to work only the first time, when you're really surprised. i'm 37 as well and it guessed correctly.
How uneducated do you have to be to equate ISIS with the Syrian people? Yes, the bombings are taking place in Syria, but they are targeting ISIS, whose fighters are in large parts non-Syrian foreigners (many of them from Europe). This is one of the reasons that, of all the insurgent groups in Syria, ISIS has the least support from the local population. From what we know right now, most of the Paris attackers were not from Syria, many of them were born and raised in Europe.

It's also not the case that people do not know the history. US support for Bin Laden's faction against the soviets in Afhghanistan is well known. The same is true for Saudi Arabia.

What is your point though, where's the connection to the current conflict? What should the West do? Sit back and let ISIS take over more and more uncontrolled territory?
It might be deeply flawed, but the first time it missed my age by 2 months, the next ones i was prepared and my reaction time was lower.
You are trying to sound really smart and its causing you to sound like you're saying nothing.

> Allow me to randomly speculate that in your mental world

> That habit becomes deeply learned by your neural networks, reinforced by daily training.

Look out everyone, we have a DATA SCIENTIST (TM)

> Fortunately your species has evolved the mysterious capacity of thinking and willing, so you can in fact make decisions that are counterintuitive to your own neural training.

reddit.com/r/iamverysmart
The Phony Islam of ISIS
What wide a brush you paint with. Are blanket statements and bird shot opinions all you've got to contribute?
Ask HN: For an automated theorem prover in prop. logic: Haskell or OCaml?
Title says it all. I'd like to write a program that, some givens and a theorem, can generate a Fitch-style proof of the theorem (not just a truth table). I'd like to also output to LaTeX, but not so important.

I don't know either Haskell or OCaml, and I thought I should learn one of them for this project. I already know Python and Clojure - any suggestions?
I can't comment on the library yet, but I wish more libraries/frameworks had homepages like this.

It tells me upfront what it is (so many miss this out!), gives me an example in code, details more features, and then presents a tutorial.

Basically everything I need to know to understand it in a single page. Nice.
Pretty. What layouts does this thing do? I see force-directed, and then an almost useless grid arrangement. Are there a bunch more in the library?
Just read an article stating Islamic groups are too fluid, the moderate may become extremist very quickly. This idea might backfire.
I think what you said both here and in your post are very valuable additions indeed.

To me what it feels like you're saying is - when you are truly an "expert", it is more likely that you can identify/recognize other "experts" - or even people with that potential.

When I look at my own skills, I try to rate myself honestly on the following scale with regards to some particular skill: expert, professional or amateur.

Expert is a guru-level understanding. If I say that I am an expert, I am saying I think I am as good as the top x% (where x is maybe 1-10) in a particular skill. For me, I pretty much never rate myself as this in any skill!

Professional is practiced, practical, hands-on real world skill. You've honed this skill, you've been formally trained, you've employed this skill successfully in a repeated, demonstrated way.

Amateur is a hobby, done it a few times, do it for fun or would like to do it/get better at it level of experience.

I observed that in traditional skilled tradesmanship, we have the apprentice, who progresses to the journeyman, who progresses to the master craftsman. These are the same levels of what I mean by amateur, professional and expert.

I don't know why our industry seems to reject some of these concepts from skilled trades in terms of organizing into better/stronger professional trade organizations and certifications.

Actually, the way we often talk about coding as a "craft", it's almost like we would feel a lot better with a formal organization and such a career progression/structure in place.

We have our 1%'ers in the software community, our gurus/experts/master craftsman. I often think of these as the core contributing past and current "fathers" and "mothers" of our industry, people ranging anywhere from Ada Lovelace to Vint Cerf. Reality is, those core thinkers are probably where many of us learn from anyway - that and "hacking/tinkering" which is what many of us do and can still lead to progress too.

To me it's all connected, but something about our community always holds us back... maybe there it is the element of not wanting to be forced into structure either. After all, the "hacker" ethos is also a source of our strength, and part of the art.
This is really great, far better than the average totally anthropomorphized AI story.

I think what non-practitioners don't realize is that most AI isn't really "build a Terminator, set it loose" so much as "build a system for supplying feedback to your Terminator and hope it learns from it effectively". In a real sense the training & feedback system is more an AI than the particular model & weights.
It doesn't have to be either or. Having/ setting up an admin/root account should be an option, not the default. But it _should_ be an option for those of us who do have the abilities to use it wisely.
Better title: "The Chromium Built-In HSTS Whitelist".

Search for "noisebridge", which is right around where all the small sites start.
Not every piece of software has to be usable to the 100% of world's population.
Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story (2014)
15 Sudanese migrants killed near Egypt's border with Israel
Suicide Attack Database (From U. Of Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism)
I think you don't understand it either. While I do "lose the freedom to install what I want" (outside of the 1.5 millions apps that I can install that is), I get more than "fancy designs".

I get a system where progress and adoption is faster, I get far less (close to statistical noise) malware compared to Android (none, actually, if I stick to top tier apps -- whereas there are Android phones that came with malware pre-installed by the carrier), I get most pro apps first and often (e.g. for music creation apps) exclusively, and a whole ecosystem that works admirably well, from laptop to watch, and, for my uses, better hardware.
I was starting to feel confused about the anti-commercial sentiment I was seeing in here, noting that this is a forum created by one of the most successful venture capital firms in technology.

But, then I saw your comment. I can get on board with this comment. The fact that they're attempting to patent something so trivial puts them right up there with the likes of Intellectual Ventures, etc., IMHO.
Leapfrog.com downloading malicious software
Visiting the leapfrog.com website will download malicious software.

I just visited and was prompted to upgrade my outdated flash player. Software is hosted on codehost.ml.

It seems it is an issue with sellpoints.com, serving the malware.

The code hosted on: t.sellpoints.com/c/3905/sp.js

alert('WARNING: Your Flash Player plugin is outdated! Upgrade to continue!');
location.replace('http://codehost.ml/programs/adobe_flashplayer_9.exe');
> If they'd open source it, users would be able to compile for their own devices just fine.

"Just download this repo & compile for your own device" really isn't a solution for most people. There's a lot of people who would love to use f.lux on their devices, but wouldn't have a clue how to compile something with Xcode. Even offering the binary to sideload is a poor solution - what about people who don't own a Mac to connect their phones to?

For the maximum number of people to benefit from this, whether it's f.lux or GoodNight or another solution, it needs to be built into the OS (like Samsung has with Reading Mode) or on the App Store behind a big easy button that says "Get". That's what f.lux is campaigning for.
I looked at probably two dozen American History and World History textbooks aimed at high school students, back when I was a high school student in ~2003, and none of them had more than a couple pages about US involvement in the Philippines, at the end of discussions of the Spanish–American war.

I think it’s safe to say that most Americans have little to no understanding of this history. Maybe “written out” is an exaggeration, but “quickly glossed over and afterward ignored” would be a fair summary.
Local cost minimization in ant transport networks
Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node
India in WW2 is...complicated.

(Unless you meant the Native American contribution to the US WW2 effort -- the code talkers got a lot of the coverage there, especially since the Windtalkers movie)
Yes, this is troubling. If live experiments are going to be run on readers, it would be safer to have live sensors hooked up to the readers, rather than broadcasting to thousands of anonymous viewers.
You seem to be implying ...

Yes. A significant portion of discrimination is invented, on the basis that women have a motive to do so.

Do you agree or disagree?

By that same logic ...

First, that's an orthogonal issue, why bring it up? Secondly, it's false, because there are no corresponding incentives.

there's plenty of data

Most of this data has been collected by people with massive and unresolved confirmation bias.

Feel free to offer some thoughtful analysis of the actual papers mentioned.

Would it be worth my time? Can you give me any reason to believe that this isn't standard issue gender studies material, with methodology so bad that Trofim Lysenko looks like a shining beacon of scientific probity in comparison? I have read enough of those. How, to raise but one point, do these papers deal with confirmation bias?
Incorporating themes and plugins strikes me as basically equivalent to using a framework written by a third party in your software product, which few would say disqualifies you as a "developer," even if you couldn't write framework components yourself. I'm not making claims about the amount of expertise required to be a WordPress developer, only whether the title could be appropriate for a person who cannot "write code."
Apparently I have inhuman reactions. It must be scientific.

Meow.
Except we shouldn't, because about 98% of people can't keep their devices secure, at all, if root is just floating around aimlessly for any apps to grab any privs. The security record of Android vs iOS illustrates this extremely well.

The gatekeeper model works for mobile devices.
This is also true (also called hindsight bias).
Went through a few of the puzzles on Friday last week, it's pretty great for shaking out the cobwebs in languages you haven't used in a while.

I did have some issues with their IDE in the latest Chrome build when I first started it though. Not sure if that was because I was using it as a guest but, strangely enough, everything worked perfectly in Edge.
That doesn't work to well in the suburbs.
Professional+Photoshop+editing+any+time+-+fiverr
Use micromorts to fight terrorism
So this is for read through caching with distributed locking. There are a couple scenarios where this is interesting.

1) If calculating the item in the cache is so expensive to some system, and might happen so many times concurrently, that you'd rather block than duplicate work.
2) There is something not-idempotent about the operation you are blocking on.

But, coming from experience, be very very very very careful with distributed locking and put lots of logging/monitoring/timeouts around it if you have to do it. Avoid it if possible. Try hard to use a different persistent data structure, store, or algorithm that makes the locking irrelevant.
If a wing is too stiff, you get one kind of flutter, too soft, and you get another. The idea is to be midway between those two cases. Flutter (dynamic instability) will rip the wings off. An awful lot of design effort goes into avoiding flutter.

Blow on a stretched rubber band, and it'll vibrate, too.
If Apple decides that having the screen temperature vary with time, lighting, whatever, I promise it is easier for them to write a few hundred lines of code than it is to engineer secure holes in the sandbox, develop policy around their use, and deal with f.lux.

Adjusting white point is a feature, a little one in a long bullet item list, not a business model.

␄

Appendix: If you are doing this yourself, you can get an approximation of the white point for a temperature kelvin much more easily than computing it accurately. You are probably not doing astrophysics. A 1% or two error is ok. See: http://www.zombieprototypes.com/?p=210

If you want to use it in your iOS app, you can get a UIColor.colorWithKelvin() function from this gist. https://gist.github.com/jimstudt/c5069349f305dd5bb6b2 Use the color multiply function, also in that gist and multiply all of your colors by your white point. Which of course is a lot of work compared to adjusting the display CLUT, but you can get in the Apple store and you don't get the ability to screw up the user's other apps. (Hint: Use the screen brightness to guess the ambient light. You aren't allowed to use the ambient light sensor.) ((Also, I'm relatively certain multiplying is not perceptually correct, but it seems close enough for things I've done so I haven't gone down that rat hole.))
Oh, yeah, sorry, should have given a timestamp.
It'd be great to see a comparison of this against d3, which also provides pretty great graph drawing support and is also a general purpose tool.
for a similar interactive demo here is an old hn post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335581
Why should I believe you. Do you design airplanes?
There's also a way to shortcut this low light mode (triple click Home): https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/2ros9k/lpt_nig...
I already use Redis-Mutex for such use cases: https://github.com/kenn/redis-mutex

What's the difference?
But we know this is false. We have computed way more pi than he knew about when he wrote that.

Conversely, we also know that even with the amount of pi we have, we can already come up with any kind of pattern you could want to, by changing the base, by arranging the numbers in a different order, or by picking particular colours or whatever. In a sense, this is an application of Ramsey's theorem. We can find patterns in pi for the same reason that we can see patterns in clouds, or the Bible, or in constellations.

I still think it's cheap potheaded thinking that dilutes the whole "mystery" and "numinous" edge he was going for.
1 is the max load one would ever expect to see in service.
Yes, the mismatch between writing and pronunciation of English is hard. But it is let's say, 30% off the rules (meaning that the basics can get you to pronounce some 70% of words correctly - my estimate)

The worse mismatch between pronunciation and writing I know is Gaeilge (Irish)