skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to attend a private school bordering RMNP where we did a lot of outreach work with the park and surrounding community. Including, a significant amount of wildfire mitigation work.

I couldn't agree more with your statements. Wildfire mitigation is extremely labor-intensive and -- in the bigger picture -- not very useful. Controlled burning in a 'healthy' ecosystem can have a much greater positive impact.

I get really upset by the persistent culture of 'environmental do-gooders' that have no clue how biological ecosystems work. Such people put way too much value on (animal and plant) life and conveniently ignore the limitations of sustainability in natural ecosystems.

I don't really have an answer to fix it. The problem isn't that we don't have the ability to mitigate massive natural disasters. It's that people can't see beyond their vanity enough to realize that natural environments don't exist to perpetuate life. 'Healthy' ecosystems have constant cycles of destruction and renewal. Our influence has been the greatest negative influence on that process.
Have you got any references to " … what many security experts agree is appropriate"? Because I can't think of any plausible threat that a sub 1 pound multicopter represents, that isn't already a treat from kites/frisbees/skateboards/bicycles or many other things which are considered perfectly acceptable and the risks of accidental injury or intentional misuse aren't dealt with just fine under current society.
Great Questions from StoryCorps
Paris attacks: Why families never seem to know about the killer in their home
>Yes, micro-optimized, low-level code will always have an edge in terms of absolute raw performance, but there's a huge cognitive overhead involved with working with code like that

I disagree. Code written to be optimized for a particular use case may itself be challenging to follow, but using it, if it's just a component and has a well documented API, doesn't have to be difficult at all. The Vanilla code in that benchmark article wasn't particularly hard to understand, for instance, and it could be wrapped in a Web Component to isolate the complexity.

Think about OpenGL/WebGL and the complexity and math and parallelization and optimization tricks that API conceals. At this point writing pixel shaders is almost easy, and yet they enable insane levels of parallel math with very little cognitive load.

I've written game SDKs that concealed a lot of complexity and yet were easy to use [1], so my gut reaction is to want to start with generic components that don't restrict what I can do, and then build up a DSL that is very easy to reason about that the app is assembled from. Based on my development history, I'm also likely to be making apps that are more than simple CRUD (with real-time interactive features, including games), so my personal requirements and point of view may be a bit different than the typical front-end developer.

>I strongly recommend taking a look at the first link in my original post if you're interested in more details.

OK, I'll take a look.

[1] Look at the listings for "Playground Game Engine"; the list is incomplete, but it gives you an idea: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,13...
Global terrorism database
Totally supporting this. As always in that kind of thread I feel it should be mentioned though, that easier to use is never, never, never ever more secure. Yes, less clutch means more secure. But if you ever think you can just start any computer and do something secure, without checking, configuring and understanding your environment, then you live in a dream world. Higher security means having more control of the environment, and that might very well mean understanding some physical and mathematical boundaries. "just starting to do X securely" (with X possibly being communicating with someone else) is impossible.

In fact security gets harder every year, not easier, because our computers get more complex and harder to understand. If you have a smartphone it's really hard to even understand the hardware you have, because 90% of that computer is in a single chip. You can't look inside just like that anymore.

And besides all these technical issues there is also always the human factor. The most secure tool is only as secure as you interact with people. You can't improve that with a better GUI or something either.
No lens? No problem for FlatCam
What about commercial 3-D printing? A large scale facility that can afford to invest in the latest and greatest printers could turn a profit in just-in-time prototyping, small runs of specialized custom designs, etc. Email us your design and we'll have 100 units ready for you to pick up in the morning. Overseas manufacturers can't beat that.

They're using glass, metals, and fabrics now. It seems like only a matter of time before you can order up almost anything at the corner print shop. If I were China, I'd be trying to get upstream of this trend as soon as possible and become the main supplier of the printers in the world.
Wtf. In what language (that has the concept of NULL exposed to the developer for the purposes of comparisons etc) does the STRING "Null" (in whatever case) equate to NULL?
A programmer wrote scripts to secretly automate a lot of his job –
Direct link to PDF:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06090v1.pdf
Ask HN: If Donald Knuth woke up 10,000 years ago, how would he build a computer?
Assume he knows what he knows now, but is a strapping young man.
The 3:2 pulldown judder that the author grew up watching is unrelated to the "look" of 24ps. The soap-opera effect is purely a frame-rate issue.

It's also unrelated to the artifacts resulting from "motion interpolation". Again, it's purely related to frame-rate. High frame-rates look real, and therefore like soap-operas. 24fps content (e.g. most films) look "unrealistic" which is a good thing. In the same way a van Gogh painting looks "unrealistic". Impressionism is actually a valuable art form, and is actually appealing to the brain. It's not something that needs to be "engineered" away as Peter Jackson thought.

Only an engineer would look at a masterpiece of impressionistic painting, and think "Hmm, if only the painter used a finer brush we'd get more detail! Say this painting could really use some up-rez'ing."

24fps video is precisely "impressionistic". It's distinctly not what our brain perceives in the real world. It's what makes movies look slightly "other-worldly". And that's a GOOD THING. In fact it's one of the reasons it's been such a hugely successful art form for 100 years. Impressionism is a fantastic form of art, whether you're talking about broad brush strokes, or low frame-rate video.

Can we all stop (looking at you Peter Jackson [1], Ang Lee [2], and James Cameron [3]) wishing van Gogh used a finer brush?

[1] http://www.thehobbit.com/hfr3d/faq.html

[2] http://variety.com/2015/film/news/ang-lee-shooting-billy-lyn...

[3] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/could-avatar-...
I'm actually from around Austin. It is a great city.
Enlightening!
Pretty cool, but it isn't made from discrete logic gates. It's built from MSI TTL chips that contain a bunch of gates. And the ALU is a table lookup using two 1 megabyte ROMs. (Reminiscent of the old IBM 1620 which used a table lookup in core memory for arithmetic.)
It's not readily apparent, but this item was written in 2012.
tl;dr: Aperture coding, embedding a known pattern into a mask in front of the sensor, is used to make reconstruction possible. 512x512 image reconstruction currently takes 100ms.

Link to the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.00116v1.pdf
Show HN: Visualize sorting algorithms
For those interested in reading some academic literature related to the subject, read Fischer Black's Interest Rates as Options.
I think it's mainly being able to use a language you are familiar with vs working with Bethesda's custom scripting language[0]

[0]: http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Papyrus
That is essentially what this bank is responding to. They can't make enough lending the money as it takes to hold. So they charge you a storage fee in the form of negative interest.

The most interesting thing to me is that they are charging big depositors more than small depositors. This seems crazy given the costs of banks is usually considered fixed per dipositer. This could be more about the banks politics than actual banking costs, I suppose.
Such a bug didn't deserve the snarkiness it got; as the article author notes, Linux itself remains a minor platform for end users, and benefits from people doing ports to Linux of software that has more users on other platforms. (For instance, Firefox and Chrome both have far more users on Windows than Linux.) But apart from the unnecessarily snarky response, I think this played out exactly as it should have. A kinder response would have been "none of us run OpenBSD, but if you can provide a non-invasive patch, we'll merge it". Which ended up happening anyway.
Great book, a favorite.
Excellent point. But can this be extended to abstract mathematics as well i.e. software reasoning able to gain mathematical insights automatically? That would be very interesting indeed.
Miller 3.0.0: Integer and float arithmetic, improved documentation, other features
Can innovators build a future that's both disruptive and just?
George Friedman, Peter Zeihan, and numerous other astute forecasters/demographers/etc. have been talking about this for many, many years.

It isn't a partisan thing, it's a spreadsheet thing.
I agree. I haven't yet encountered an IDE that has any hope of doing anything more than being able to enumerate the defs in a module or the functions in an object. JavaScript is one of the worst because there is no canonical "include" semantic so you really have no idea what's going on. The corollary seems to be that many of these languages are fast to develop (and run) so excessive console.logs appears to be the "solution"
It wasn't long ago that Linux users fancied themselves the underdog being sidelined in favor of Windows. Now, the Linux users have become the Goliath flaunting their weight and key spokespeople even encouraging the rejection of all other platforms. It is a community defined by myopia, arrogance and a refusal to look outside its borders.
GP may have been referring to TFA, which was getting into medium scale hybrid residential-commercial developments.
I think Ahmed and his family forfeit their right to the "American way" when they decided to move to Qatar after receiving an outpouring of support from the American public (including meeting Obama).
Biometric Tattoos for Medicine and the Military
It's gambling in the same sense poker is gambling.

There is skill involved in both, but if you are in it for the short term you will face variance and could lose money regardless of skill.

If you have skill AND play for a long time, then the variance is lowered and it is positive EV.

It is in the site's best interests to actually decrease the skill portion and increase the luck portion. The main reason is because new user's will try it out a few times, lose all their money to the site's sharks and say they cannot win and give up.
Mine was "hitherto." I pronounced it "hit-hurt-oh" once. Once. (It's "hither too" if you didn't know.)
PCG, a Family of Better Random Number Generators
Medieval “pocket Bibles” were made from livestock skin
How do you list your open source contributions on your resume? Unless you are applying to SV based, startup, technology company, just listing open source contribution under "Open Source Contribution" title is not going to have much impact.

You have to customize the information depending on the company and how likely the group you are applying to cares about open source contribution or connects the dots.

Considering you are contributing to iOS open source project and assuming you are applying to iOS/mobile related opportunities, I will suggest listing your contributions under "Professional Activities" or "Personal iOS/Mobile Activities/Projects'.

In iOS area, you might be better off creating your own side app and listing that on resume than open source contributions.
The DNA Databank of Japan: A Look Inside
not to sound rude but I don't think people who are concerned about their notes would move their precious notes to another not-yet-proven startup.
The New Great Game Between China and the US
It's unfortunate that the "hoax" label on this clock story is being considered by some a conspiracy theory.

All it takes is 15 minute to look into the political history of the kids father and the nature of the clock that he "built" to realize something is amiss.
Tried it out. I keep `scp`ing a file, or editing it using `vim scp`, but on browsing or publishing, I get an "Article does not exist".
IIRC Google Inbox supports that feature.
> There is still the focus on doing the problem just like they were taught, and taking points off for not drawing counters. There is still the work involved in figuring out how the concepts are described so I can help her do the homework.

So how is this really better? I'm not getting it.
Most readily available material is sticks. Make em into gears powered by water flow in a river. Your very own prehistoric calculator. After ciliization starts mining and improving it's ability to shape raw materials your computers can advance with it.
Leo Tolstoy on Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World
I think people are more disgusted by how self serving the "plant" is. Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus to support a movement. Ahmed Mohammed brought a dismantled clock in a suitcase to school to further the political ends of his father's career.
Can anyone explain the issue here and what the potential implications are? As far as I can tell the npm client code isn't under a problematic license and you don't agree to any terms of service unless you use the service.
A Secretive Air Cargo Operation Is Running in Ohio, and Signs Point to Amazon
And there isn't a password reset option or password confirmation. Hope you typed it right!
Waiting for Musk post the same for Mars.
As someone who has spent the past two years and planning to spend at least the next 5 years creating the best Blogging platform (SunSed.com) I have to admit this idea is simple, refreshing and brilliant! I had a similar idea called textBlock killed it in favor of SunSed. +1 for this project!
You're misunderstanding something. P=NP is about whether two sets are equal. If it's "undecidable" or "independent", then ZFC is consistent with either P=NP or P \neq NP.
How about two months in jail for a Singleton? :)
Generally these sorts of draconian measures seem to filter down from China, to the UK, then to Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and then the United States. From end to end it takes about 10 years.
It actually made sense, a while ago. Hollywood editors were using Final Cut X in production, and you could host beefy architectures on XServe and XServe Raid, with fiber channel and all latest tech. I think that's the time where videographers, designers and then web developers all moved to the Mac OS platform, it seemed like the cool platform where all the hardcore users were.

Now fast forward 2015, Apple is focused on its mobile cash cows. Pink gold iPhone 6S. Gold Apple watch worth $10k. But they seem to forget what made them successful in professional environments initially.

I need XCode (for iOS development), but I see more and more librairies developed for Ubuntu. So you are right, maybe it's the time to think about Linux.
The system has 2GB of RAM, so that should not be a problem. However, the CPU is a Celeron M, which is really, really slow.
I especially recall the old debate in the mid-1990s about whether Linux was pronounced "Lee-nux" or "Lin-ux."
Linear algebra is not the main thing C64s were used for. It not worth putting lots of LinPac code modified for SSE MMX
> I disagree. Code written to be optimized for a particular use case may itself be challenging to follow, but using it, if it's just a component and has a well documented API, doesn't have to be difficult at all. The Vanilla code in that benchmark article wasn't particularly hard to understand, for instance, and it could be wrapped in a Web Component to isolate the complexity.

I don't think we actually disagree. =)

By "working with code like that", I meant actually writing, understanding and changing micro-optimized, low-level code. Your example of building on top of a micro-optimized, lower-level SDK is the perfect example of a global optimization that alleviates some of the need for tedious, case-by-case micro-optimization from the code that uses it.

I'm just saying that micro-optimizing every single piece of code case-by-case is not the best use of our time, and that we should opt for global optimizations where ever possible, and that React and Flux-inspired architectures like Redux can enable some very practical global optimizations.
Agreed. I recently wanted to read one, and had to pick one of the many. It's always a fun game trying to pick which one of the many that won't phone home what and where I scanned.
This is the way good things get done. New ideas should come from anywhere they can and the best ones bubble up into the product. Always reset expectations if anything that does get said ends up being misread. Let's face it; text is a horrible medium for communicating complex ideas. Open the communication channel accepting things at face value.
How to access an on demand software testing during peak delivery cycles
Technically I would not call it a transfer of wealth to the rich hobbyist. The subsidy doesn't go to the private buyer, it goes to Tesla. No one will buy the (now used) car for the full sticker price from the private buyer, but even if they did you are not allowed to claim the credit if the car was bought for resale. The buyer is not $30k richer after the transaction is complete. And when the subsidy no longer exists, the price will not simply be $30k higher, a significant portion of that lost income will be eaten by Tesla. (which is exactly what they are saying in their risk disclosure)

As a country we have a strategic interest in having viable battery powered electric cars. You can personally not believe in it, but it is a stated-goal from the President on down. What's the best way for the government to help make that happen? A subsidy is the classic macro-economic tool, business loans are another.

When we give Tesla $30k in government subsidies for each car they sell, we're simply telling Tesla we'll subsidize them more as they sell more. Rewarding market success is the right way to structure a subsidy if you want to encourage companies to make products that people actually want to buy.

I'm sure you also know Tesla is burning through cash at an impressive clip, I think they burn about $50k each year per car they sell, and that's net of the sales price! That's not to say that gross margins for the car are negative, it's just to say that their reinvestment rate for R&D is set to '11'. That's partly supported by the early adopters, part investors, and part subsidy. But it is clear they are iterating fast on new technology, and as a bonus they are even putting their patents out for general use, and undoubtedly driving a stagnant and change-resistant industry forward.

Finally, it's incorrect to claim that average Americans are on the hook for at least $30,000 in federal and state subsidies. That is looking at just one line on a very long invoice, and what we're actually interested in is the net effect. So we have a "rich hobbyist" paying $70k after-tax cash for a prototype electric vehicle. First, there's perhaps $10k - $15k in local excise taxes over the life of the car, which is a pretty nice bonus for the town. "Cars" as an asset class are taxed especially heavily, and as you say for many the Tesla is an extra car they wouldn't have bought otherwise, so that level of excise tax is not money the town would have seen otherwise. Second, there's increased employment and associated tax revenue from Tesla in general, including things like their battery factory. Maybe down at number 30, we have an extremely safe car that kills less people, which saves taxpayers money too. Somewhere on the list is a blue bird that 20 years down the line the tech has matured to the point where it is a major geopolitical factor in our dependence on foreign oil helping us disengage from the Middle East and potentially saving taxpayers a few Trillion. There are actually many ways you can start off handing out over $30k per vehicle but end up in the black!
That kid is a little shit. Its not a bad thing, I was a little shit as a teenager too. Thank god the internet wasn't around to blow me way out of proportion.
Testing your code is vital, but you can't use testing as your only tool to produce quality code. I think the parent may have been referring to a scenario like this [0, 1, 2, 3, 4], where TDD evangelist Ron Jeffries tries to test his way to a sudoku solver. He fails. Why? Because he didn't really stop to gain knowledge of the domain. In plainer terms -- he didn't really have a clue what the problem was, so how could he hope to solve it? Note in his introduction to [2] he says,

> I've read a bit more about Sudoku, and even played part of a game.

Not the wisest way to go about solving a problem.

I do admire his courage in leaving this up all these years though.

Compare/contrast with Peter Norvig's sudoku solver[5].

[0]:http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/oksudoku/

[1]:http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/sudoku2/

[2]:http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/sudokumusings/

[3]:http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/sudoku4/

[4]:http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/sudoku5/

[5]:http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Norvig tests his code, too, but he begins by seeking to understand the problem, not by writing tests first and hoping to end up with a quality product.
The sanest way to manage tags is really quite simple: use google tag manager or Opentag from Qubit. Give any third party partner the ability to write tags and rules. Do NOT give them Deploy access. Then the dev team gets to use the sandbox debugger to test and profile, and then publish. Because GTM has immutable snapshots of config, rollback is painless.

We were working with an agency serving a large software company in the Seattle area. They have a site dedicated to competing with other companies that make productivity software, among those a company that also has a search engine. We outlined the above workflow and successfully deployed Google Tag Manager on the site in what may be my career's biggest -#ironywin to date.

Marketers have highly complex rules for when customer events turn into when tags should fire. This is best left to them as rules and platforms are always in flux. We even sometimes use GTM variables to split test tags from different inventory sources.

I would love the future to allow for tag management to be done on a seperate web server that uses a single proxy tag that sends event streams to a service that routes the event data to all 3 party tracking. No document writes, one tag to load. Anybody know if that is or isn't possible?
> Sounds almost dystopian when I read it aloud.

Sounds dystopian when read in any context. I can't imagine this is a sustainable strategy, but if they find out that it is, it would be 1984 realized.
The transition from film to digital was a bit jarring at first, as well, but after acclimating over the years, movies shot on film look a bit old-timey. Who is to say frame rate isn't a similar issue? Other-worldly 24fps could just be what we are used to and thus temporarily comforting.
Though my 7 month old isn't a baby anymore, it's pretty clear to most people that she knows that she has a great sense of humor. Not only does she understand what's funny and what's not (subtleties in expectations and anticipation), she makes up her own jokes, as well.
When you exercise your option, it's no longer an option, you're now holding a share.