skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, yes, I was assuming 'multi-cellular organisms' as the context because of the bamboo rake comment at the beginning, but you're absolutely right that for single cells the situation will be different. Even so, if we're going to expand the scope downward we might as well go all the way, viruses, arguably even more simple than single celled organisms are still full of surprises.
> buy deferred annuities from AAA rated insurance companies and build their own "pensions".

Which, in a post-financial crisis world, also obviously involves relying on government-backing of the insurance companies and bailouts when ratings agencies hand out AAA ratings like candy. Ultimately, only the government can guarantee people a retirement. Which is why I personally think we should say "screw it" and just guarantee everyone a reasonable (livable) payout from social security...
1. In this case we're arguing semantics. Fine, it's not broken, but it's still bad and there are better alternatives with no drawbacks. Arguing to keep it is sort of like arguing to keep an O(n) algorithm that has an O(log n) alternative that's also more intuitive and easier to code. If you still don't believe me, here's what Brendan Eich thinks[1].

2. I've addressed the standard solution / UUID question elsewhere[2]. The way we were generating identifiers is not an anti-pattern. It's a pattern. It's the standard way to produce a random string from an alphabet. If you look at the source code of any website, from HN to Google, I guarantee you will find an almost identical piece of code somewhere. The code is simple, but that doesn't make it bad.

[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/667735502691373056

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605977
Variants and static compile-time reflection will both be a boon to runtime performance. The former means less heap allocation and better locality and the latter means less work at runtime and better in-memory layout (for example, instead of parsing JSON to a hash map you can copy JSON values directly in to your objects)
Ah, the converse of Greenspan's tenth rule in action. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule)
To get better than a completely blurred image, you'd need some way to focus the neutrinos. That's where the fact that photons are affected by more things work in their favor for this use case.
AI dev is only pushing a few buttons: it's right it's only pushing a few buttons but it takes an education to know which button to push. Even if it feels like pushing buttons doesn't mean it's not cutting edge because that's your feeling, not the feeling of every one else. Maybe tech has reached a settled so far and the next plateau is not reached yet.

Also, AI is not the only area where progress can be made. Management of complex (complete?) systems is also an area of interest.

As for strong AI, I have a the feeling that those system will be much like sysadmin work of today.
They don't even have an Android app! I don't know how they expect to be taken seriously. They're doing a bunch of PR like this and appearing on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, but it doesn't seem like they're actually ready yet.
Well they're not actually using it, they're just doing their jobs. [1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
The subtitle is "Why the best dating apps are founded by people who aren’t dicks." Does the article explain why the founders of other dating apps are dicks? Or is it just because they're men?
>Bangladesh is definitely the site of a fairly impressive number of new factories.

I couldn't see jack shit going on when I visited. Just clothing factories. Clothing always migrates to where the labor is cheapest because it is one of the least capital intensive industries and most labor intensive.

Even then it was only in the area around Dhaka (and close to the container port).

North of Dhaka there was basically nothing except poverty (which is pretty much what it's like in most of Central China, too). No infrastructure = no industry.

>Governments can influence their currencies only so much before they too become overstretched

What you meant to say was "governments can push the value of their currencies up only so much before being overstretched". Pushing them down isn't all that hard.

Right?

>As far as the lack of trade barriers goes, wasn't the US the biggest proponent of a free market worldwide?

A) There's no such thing as a free market. It's an economic fairy tale.

B) US oligarchs are big proponents for tearing down trade barriers. Union leaders not so much.

C) Just how much do you think they cared about destroying US industry in the process?
"It shows that across the country as a whole, the price of houses has grown much more rapidly than the price of building houses. The issue is, roughly, zoning."

No, the issue is that the cost of land in those areas is increasing faster than the cost of construction.
When someone contradicts a statement you make, responding with name-calling does not strengthen your argument.
Gnome Video Editor Pitivi 0.95 Release
They are the American one-cent and ten-cent coins, respectively. The words are also used to indicate costs of $0.01 and $0.10.
The nice thing about the e-mail standard is that it's a standard - the basic features work in the expected way no matter what e-mail client you're using. If you add all these features on top of it, people won't be able to use them unless they use a client that supports these features. When I send an e-mail, I don't want to have to think about whether the recipient will have the ability to read it.
If C++ "loses its performance advantages" it will entirely be due to the culture and not the language itself, because you can still do inline assembler in C++. I've long believed that the reason why lower-level languages have performance advantages is because their paucity of "rich" features means their users often find simpler, more efficient ways of solving problems.

I've noticed this even between C++ and C - without classes, inheritance, and so forth, you tend to think a lot more about whether you need something class-like before going ahead and doing it, and many times a simple function is all you need.

Adding new features almost certainly invites plenty of advocates who will opine about how much better they are (which is true in some situations), encourating their use, even if not actually necessary. This is problematic when these features make it easy to generate large amounts of inefficient code.
The actual article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-speed-camera-...
Worldwide Study Finds Few Gender Differences in Math Abilities (2010)
Plight of the Funny Female
"I am shocked, shocked to find graft going on in this establishment!"
Good idea! But it looks like you re-invented a SHA/counter based CSPRNG :). That's not necessarily a bad thing, but there are probably library CSPRNGs that work as well and hide some details. Also, it's not generally any more or less likely to produce collisions than the method we're using. The probability of collision is dependent on the hash function / PRNG being used.
Kind of strange for the info box to specify a color used in the pre-digital era using a digital sRGB triplet.
OCR as a Service
You didn't read the article did you?

(the founder of the advertised app is the female cofounder you speak of)
As you and the article mentioned, it did have a female co-founder. And she has since left Tinder and founded Bumble, the app the article mostly focuses on.
The article does mention diddling with the contrast and brightness as well as desaturating it. However, it doesn't give references to digital-based workflows working like this. I associate non-repro blue grids and pens with doing physical paste-up on a light table. I wouldn't think they'd be part of a typical digital flow although someone in that business would know better than I.

[Edit: As someone wrote, the article just seems confused. Yeah, you can adjust a digital B&W image so that a light blue goes away. You can also adjust it so a light yellow or a light anything goes away. Digital sensors do have different wavelength sensitivities but the use of non-repro blue and rubylith were a function of the specific sensitivities or lack thereof of litho film.]
they still make and use non photo blue pencils in animation and comics. now a days though they remove the blue layer with photoshop.
While it looks nice, it isn't in the category of software I would use. I don't need a CMS, per se.

I use Drupal for commerce with subscriptions, support ticket tracking, forums, software license management, and, only peripherally, for content management. So, it's not the "CMS" part of Drupal that matters to me. I need an ecosystem that contains a bunch of functionality that operates reasonably well together. Drupal, for all its warts, does actually have most of the code I need already written. While it's taken me months to migrate to Drupal 7, it would have taken years to implement all of the functionality I need from scratch (our website is not our core competency or what we're selling, it's a tool for supporting our actual products, so I don't have a team...it's just me).
That female co-founder is the founder of Bumble, the subject of this article.

I'd argue that Tinder doesn't work, and this probably won't either.
Yeah, I expect that's just someone with a mania for Wiki-standardization. It's not a precise shade; any cyan-ish color would do. In practice non-repro pencils and markers varied from sky blue to a rich turquoise.

The article seems confused - it's implying that there is some magic shade of blue that cameras can't see (even today), which is totally wrong. I think that's why someone found it interesting to post here.
>There is nothing in astronomy, science, and math, that requires the presence of a Muslim for work to be done.

True, if snarky ;-)

However rather than simply a hollow cheerleading of Islam, perhaps parent was referring to the fact that several of the mathematical/astronomical devices that Copernicus employed bear a remarkable similarity to those of earlier Muslim astronomers such as Urdi and Ibn al-Shatir (who had rejected Ptolemy several hundred years before).

Indeed, the similarities are so strong that some scholars suggest that Copernicus simply MUST have been directly influenced by this earlier work.

Now it surely remains possible that Copernicus independently discovered all this, and never read Urdi or Ibn al-Shatir. But I believe it's beyond dispute that many aspects of what eventually became Heliocentrism, originated earlier, in the geocentric theories of the Maragha school of Islamic Astronomy.
This seems like a silly title. I interpret it as 'How the CPU, when packaged with a bunch of other stuff, is displacing the CPU.'

Or am I missing something?
The chance of TrueCrypt suing anyone is near zero. They only stipulation they really gave anyone for using their code was to not use the same name, which VeraCrypt is satisfying (unlike the knuckleheads at truecrypt.ch).
1) In practice you're not synthesizing an entire bacterial genome; you're only synthesizing the small bit you're patching along with whatever the retrovirus needs. The bacteria are already pretty great at copying their base DNA on their own. : P

2) DNA synthesis has been tracking Moore's law for a number of years, and doesn't show the signs of slowing down anytime soon unlike transistors.
Clothing is how it starts. Not all that long ago Thailand was 'just clothing factories' and now they make a substantial chunk of the tech goodies shipped worldwide.

Not all that long ago, China could make clothing, basic machinery and some consumer goods that were not too capital intensive.

It's an incremental process.

> Just how much do you think they cared about destroying US industry in the process?

Not a whole lot. But then again, that's their prerogative under the system you have in place. If someone wanted to keep the jobs local and to exclusively source their half-fabricates from local producers under exclusive contract stating that they were required to maintain this all the way up their supply chain then such a person might have cornered the market against those willing to sell out your countries manufacturing backbone.

The most likely outcome of such a plan would have been bankruptcy. It's an arms race and everybody that buys 'made in China' stuff because it is slightly cheaper is complicit.
>you don't want to have free trade and get cheap stuff from China, slap a massive tariff on them, you pay $2,000 for your iPhone, you deal with massive smokestack industries here, and of course become a manufacturing ghetto since you can't export anything if you refuse to import anything.

If my rent dropped by 5% and my smartphone price spiked to $2,000 I'd still come out ahead.

If this policy continues indefinitely eventually the US industrial ecosystem will be destroyed completely. When that happens China will abandon its "keep the yuan low" policy and your smartphone will suddenly cost $2,000 but the US won't have the expertise or the infrastructure to suddenly rebuild all its factories. That will take decades.

Then the US will end up like Argentina - a pale shadow of its former wealth.
Trade associations (501(c)(6) in the US; Eclipse and Linux Foundations are examples) are another category that may or may not fit your schema, roughly nonprofits governed by (usually) for profit stakeholders.

plos.org archive.org and eff.org are additional direct nonprofit (charities, 501(c)(3) in the US) examples. EFF is an advocacy org but they do more interesting tech work than the vast majority of startups.

Another interesting category maybe worth considering are for profits with normal for profit governance but some non-fuzzy public benefit aspect at the core of their business. In the context of tech a free-software-only for-profit like Red Hat maybe.

You probably want to put a finer point on "social impact".
Another great piece written by Bassel's friend Henry Oh (SV entrepreneur): https://www.birgitterasine.com/works/books/visionary/stories...
A discussion on "why" this is happening:

"""

The reason older photocopiers don't copy blue is very simply that the
drum was activated by reflected light from the scanner. The chemical
process that creates the "semiconductor" on the drum surface is
sensitive to a fair proportion of the light spectrum, but frequently
lost sensitivity t the blue portion of the range. Organic
photoconductors had a better response to blues but still cut off a
portion of the spectrum. Newer Photocopiers (Digital) operate
differently and are dependent on the frequency range of the CCD in the
scanner, they are usually pretty good at the blues, and frequently
have settings that enable Text enhancement, enabling a setting of a
contrast point, anything darker than that point is registered as black
anything lighter as white.

"""

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/536535.html
"A Better Tinder", to me, would be one that actually supports its original function, of being "a hook-up app." There are plenty of dating apps; but Tinder was supposed to be a unique value offering: "like Grindr, but for more than just gay men." But it failed to be that, because there was nothing stopping people from making profiles "just looking for friends" or "just looking for long-term relationships", like in any other dating app. (Obviously the "game mechanics" of Tinder are completely at odds with those uses—why pick friends based on mutual physical-appearance attraction? But people still try.)

The best thing any social-networking app can do is to prune its userbase (i.e. ban people from the service) so that everyone who remains is actually using the service for its intended purpose. Then you don't need the initial extra step of both parties dancing around the question of "what are you on here looking for?"—if they're using the app, they're here for what the app is for.
The most subtle troll I have ever seen on HN
I suspect the paper was written by SCIgen.
The Bot That Stole Christmas
The article was written first in 2005. Back then, digital photography was not so popular. :)
This sounds interesting - does anyone have a link? I searched but could not find it.
That doesn't invalidate his comment. You have to ask yourself _why_ are men exaggerating their height by two inches on average?

They wouldn't exaggerate their height if it wasn't an important factor in potential mates. And the data confirms it:
"We've found that taller people, up to a point, have more sex".
You see on the graph that the "frequency of sex" (unlabeled y-axis) increases for men up to 6'8".
Back in the late 70's, early 80's, Dungeons and Dragons modules (self contained adventures) used to print all their dungeon maps in light blue because photocopy machines would not pick them up. This was effectively a poor mans protection against piracy.
"What are genes for?"

Totally. Anyone who adopts is an idiot.
"Apple A9X SoC offers 64 bit desktop-class computing enabling a handheld tablet to go toe-to-toe with a state-of-the-art laptop CPU from Intel"

Yes and no. Most of the innovation in top-end x86 CPUs goes towards multicore and multi-socket scalability. My desktop is almost 10x faster than an A9X -- and nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3.

Intel manufactures different state-of-the-art laptop CPUs. Apple SoCs can compete with the ultra-low voltage Intels, but not with high-end i7 HQ/MQ series.
No need to worry. They only adds zero cost abstractions. As in, no abstractions or features are added that have a runtime performance cost compared to the optimal hand crafted solution. The standards committee is very anal about this. Also the "you dont pay for what you dont use" rule applies. (Exceptions might be an exception)

Compile time has gotten worse though with some new features. Hopefully modules will help cut it back a bit.
Bumble’s landmark feature is that women must
take the initiative on all conversations

It's cool that they bake this into their platform. This was always how I approached online dating through OKCupid, and it worked out far, far better for me than messaging women. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that an average woman on OKC receives an order of magnitude more 'likes' and messages than I ever received (or more!). By only engaging with women who'd reached out to me in some capacity, it was much, much easier to actually meet people (like, e.g. my girlfriend of nine months).
So, in the end, you have a system which allows a JSON data structure to call arbitrary C++ functions. Is that a good thing? That JSON is now highly trusted. And do you really want to program in JSON?

This is essentially a rather complicated way to build an interpreter for another language. To display web pages. Sort of like PHP.

This might be worth the trouble if you were using it to allow programmable shaders in a renderer. Those are usually composed of functional blocks strung together, they have to go very fast, and they're composed by people who are artists, not programmers, often through some GUI. There, it might not be overkill.
Show HN: BestRuby – Ruby Tricks, Idioms, Refactorings and Best Practices
This thread has been linked from a front page thread, sorry to reply so late.

According to Amnesty the letter writing campaign matters, because the government knows they can't hide what they are doing (and even though Assad is especially horrible, his regime must try to hide this, otherwise why sentence him in secret?) when sacks of mail starts to flow in from the entire world.
Hubble in Pictures: Astronomers' Top Picks
Site's back up, sorry about that.
really powerful when you can get past the arcane syntax!
I appreciate effort given by author, but sorry it seems like "how to guide":

How to kill your time by making simple things complex, then how to kill more time by maintaining it, then how to kill more and more time for adding one small feature.
You just blew my mind. Thanks for the heads up about the dual websites... would never have found that in a million years.
Then why do the solutions people use to work around the absence of reflection always seem to suck so much? They're (in some combination) verbose, highly un-DRY, require spectacular feats of type-system-fu, and at the end of the day they deliver capabilities that come up laughably short of their competition in other languages. I'm still waiting for a member of the "Reflection is Useless" crowd to show me a serialization framework on par with what I find in Java (100% DRY, 100% automatic for POD, 100% override-able without a type repository, 100% devoid of compiler/linker trickery). Or a desktop framework that offers UI design capabilities comparable to the introspection-based ones I find in ObjC, C#, or whatever you want to call the home-brew C++-with-reflection that Qt uses.
The 9-Vertex Complex Projective Plane (1983) [pdf]
On neither of those platforms is the GPU doing the video decode. On your phone there's a dedicated DSP. On your netbook the CPU is pulling up the slack. There's a lot of serial work in decoding videos (like huffman decoding) that doesn't translate to standard GPUs without a little extra silicon.
Ok, I get the seed/state space vs. cycle length bit. So it can theoretically generate all of the permutations of a shuffle if you re-key/re-seed periodically. But you can't guarantee that it actually will, right? It is possible that, for all 2^128 keys, and in all 2^128 cycles there are some shuffles that AES will never generate (in other words, some sequences of 52 numbers that will never be generated) so you effectively have a 0% chance of hitting them.

From a cryptanalysis standpoint I think that's consistent -- the probability of generating any particular single shuffle is astronomically low, so the difference between the actual probability and 0% is probably outside the realm of what's computationally feasible. But with something like MT19937 I can show that its at least possible for every outcome to have a non-zero probability. Perhaps this is just interesting academically, but maybe not if you're actually playing a card game for instance?
This is a bit silly. A9X and other mobile SoC are in absolutely no way comparable in performance, on any metric, with desktop CPUs. You do not get 150W performance from a 10W chip, particularly not when you are lagging in process node.
The motherboards were placed directly on cardboard trays. It says that in the article.
Is there some sample code for the C++ interface? It is a good idea but I am curious how much headers and templates complicate things.
Relevant lecture videos:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures-Brian...
https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/E2E-Brian-Beckman...
nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3

Look at Cavium ThunderX: 48 ARMv8 cores, very high performance, 95W.
Its extremely likely that the Soviet Union used far more resources to maintain control over the small republics and it's conventional military presence around the world than it did in tail end of the space race, the former two becoming even more expensive with the political uprisings and occupation of Afghanistan in the 80s. We're talking about 1-2 orders of magnitude here (no citations but the USSR was more populous than the United States so the numbers would be in the ballpark).

You can argue that this is the final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back but there were many, much bigger straws that had already done so, it's just that camel took a while to collapse under its own momentum.
Also, as the author missed, Haswell now integrates power regulation on the CPU.
I had a manual for an assembler (Laser Genius on the C64) that used the opposite approach: the text was black but the pages were a deep red, which would theoretically photocopy to black.

In practice the original was about as much a pain to read as the photocopy.

EDIT: I remember the letters in the copy having a sort of lighter colour halo around them, which made it readable. I figured was due to the blackness of the letters pulling the limited amount of toner towards them...
On Clouds and Containers at Structure 2015
The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard