skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is completely contrary to my experience, in which parser generators have not paid for themselves. Writing a parser by hand in C is generally easier and less time-consuming over the long run than struggling along with a parser generator, especially if you have any interest in producing useful syntax error messages or recovering from other kinds of errors in some useful way.

I agree that almost none of the important aspects of language implementation involve the parser - and that's why I write 'em by hand! It doesn't take much time, and it's much easier to debug whatever problems you run into when you can use your ordinary debugging tools.
I agree with you, but I think SDKs for at least Android and iOS will be available very soon.
does it also have rail rust on go?
Any pilot will tell you that birds do most of the work when it comes to collision avoidance.

Drones, not so much.
I just bought some Milight compatible bulbs, hub, and remote. It's less advanced and plug-and-play as the Philips system but hacker friendly. I'm currently coding up my own light wake-up alarm system (which is the reason I bought it).
If you want to listen to some of our past episodes, I would say our best one so far was the discussion of diversity in tech in which we had my colleague Cynthia Lee on as a guest.
I'd refrain from making assumptions until more is known.

Another hypothetical possibility is that there is some corner case of the open standard that nobody realized was ambiguous until Philips changed an implementation detail that broke (non-compliant) third-party devices, and they're now stuck in the rock / hard-place situation of deciding whether to roll back their change and remove whatever functionality or fix just got added or to apply pressure to third parties to be more compliant with the standard.

(That's the charitable interpretation that assumes their software quality process is solid enough that they can even know such nuances and subtleties as "What change did we make that broke third-party devices that aren't physically in our testing bullpen?")
> This actually makes sense; if it wants to scan for malware in web pages and file downloads

Since when does Avast concern JS? I would have thought, to intercept file you'd use the systems file API? Everything else is the concern of the browser, because it knows how to mess with the internals of web browsers.
Philips uses ZigBee, so you'll have to add the cost of an expansion board.
Dear parents: Let your kids use open source software
I've ranted about this and the IoT and how we've came to it.

IoT is awesome, and super, as long as you don't buy products that require to beg for your data from some website API.

What makes more sense?
Local device ->Internet ->Someone else's server(cloud) ->API ->Your cell/computer

-or-

Local Device ->Local controller

I extensively use Node-Red and Apache NiFi both. Node-Red is built on Node.js and is a graphical flowchart programming in the browser. It makes chaining together complex interactions easy and also makes many things no-code at all.

I use Node-Red for my home automation. It's open source, it works, and just makes sense.

Now, what should you use for the light bulbs? Unfortunately not Phillips Hue. This however opens up the market for others to come in and snipe business away. And that's a good thing. And whatever takes away the power of "other peoples' servers" cloud-crap, the better. It's just used as a way to control and extract more money.
Even Apple Doesn't Want to Use Final Cut Pro X
I seriously doubt that using Python bytecode rather than native code makes the application more lightweight. Here are the problems I see:

1. Code size: Bytecode instructions may be more compact than their native code counterparts, since the bytecode instructions are dealing with higher-level abstractions. But the dynamism of Python prevents some major optimizations. First, the bytecode has to include identifiers, since everything is late-bound. More importantly, a packaged Python application tends to include a lot of dead code, because the packaging tool can't accurately tell what modules, let alone individual functions, are actually used. And that's assuming you're using something like py2exe which at least tries to prune the set of distributed modules.

2. Startup time: Of course, even native code can vary here. If you have an executable that's statically linked except for OS libraries, the OS can just read that executable into memory and jump to the entry pooint; that's fast even for a cold start. But if your application consists of an executable plus several DLLs or shared libraries, the OS has to do a lot more work to get it loaded. Python modules tend to be more fine-grained than typical DLLs, and for each module, the interpreter has to find it on the search path, then open the file and read it.

3. Memory footprint: Native code is mapped into memory as shared read-only pages. The OS doesn't actually have to add any of those pages to the working set until they're executed, and it can page them out at any time without having to write to a swap file, which mobile platforms don't have. A few bytecode interpreters, most notably Dalvik, have managed to exploit this, but not Python. So all the Python bytecode has to be in memory all of the time. This is exacerbated by the limited ability to trim the code size as described above.

More generally, my thinking on performance, especially perceived performance, in end-user applications has been heavily influenced by this blog post:

http://chadaustin.me/2009/02/logic-vs-array-processing/

Here's the money quote:

> With disk and memory speeds improving so much more slowly than CPU speeds, the difference between a snappy desktop application and a sluggish application is a handful of page faults. When choosing a technology platform for a project, it’s worth considering the impact to overall responsiveness down the road. And I’m pretty sure I just recommended writing your entire application in C++, which sounds insane, even to me. I’ll leave it at that.

That post was several years old. These days I'd expect him to recommend Rust over C++.

Of course, you've been developing software for a long time, and you've actually used Python in a mobile app; I haven't. So maybe the issues I've raised just don't matter. I'm particularly curious if startup time has been an issue for Inky at all, especially on the mobile platforms.
Here's a quick primer on unions in the US.
https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/employerunion-rights-...
Interesting for the presentation at the end, lots of pointers.
OP here.

Most of the tools I tried are mentioned on this HN thread.

My dismay was driven by the question: "This is a simple problem, how can so many tools fail so miserably?" I still do not have an answer.
Damn. I just bought my first Hues a week ago - a little spendy but worth every penny to have a super easy install into my living room lamps and be able to be controlling my lights from a ruby script in 5 minutes. Hopefully, someone will release a crack sometime soon.
I think the DFRobotshop Rover is a pretty nice starting kit: http://www.robotshop.com/en/catalogsearch/result/?q=dfrobots...

It's really simple and straightforward construction, but it's also really expandable, and really standardized. The main system board is basically an Arduino with a bunch of additional parts like the motor controllers pre-included. You can drop in XBees for wireless control or what-have you, add Arduino shields, etc. The drive system is a very cheap, standard Tamiya kit as well, so it's very easy to repair/replace damaged parts.

And it's an Arduino, which means you have a programming platform that's pretty simple and exploding in popularity right now.
No, but you want HD and DVR which are not really basics. I was just pointing out that it makes more sense to spend the same money or a little more and get a package including those. The other option is drop those and use an antenna for great HD and then watch shows online after they come on. It is all about level of effort and what your time is worth.

Comcast is a huge pita company, but it is either them, DTV, or nothing for my area. So until I can cord cut completely, I want to at least get some value. For now instead of just complaining into the void I look for solutions, and if I must keep Comcast I might as well make it worthwhile from a value stand point. It is fine if you don't like the solution, but I was throwing it out there so you would check the other plans.
Official Reason: "The lamp that cannot be added may be a lamp from another brand. Philips does not test and cannot guarantee the behavior of all bulbs from other brands connected to the Philips Hue system. To guarantee the quality of consumer experience only Philips Hue and Friends of Hue lamps can be added using the the Philips Hue [Hub]." [1]

Real Reason: We invested money into our hub and building out our partnerships w/ Zigbee and "Friends of Hue" partners. We need to make up that money on hardware ($60 per bulb [2]) that 3rd parties could manufacture and sell for a fraction of the price. Why would we let 3rd party hardware companies leech off our investment?

[1] https://home-assistant.io/images/blog/2015-12-philips-hue-3r...

[2] https://www.store.meethue.com/us
I haven't seen the analysis that shows that the average taxi driver makes more money than the average Uber driver.
Are there grounds for a lawsuit when a manufacturer pushes out an update to a product that intentionally degrades its feature set like this? This is no longer the same product that these users bought, it's effectively damaged by the update.
"Does anybody else think that unions are really labor side price fixing"

I don't think that, at least not in all cases. I've worked in some pretty crappy places that thankfully had unions in place to protect the workers' rights and safety.
Modern cell phone AMOLED displays may be a poor choice for nighttime reading. They typically dim the screen brightness through the use of pulse width modulation (PWM) operating at the frequency of approximately 240 Hz. This is the same kind of low-frequency PWM found on early LED-backlit LCD displays that some users reported to cause them more eye strain than their previous CCFL-backlit monitors. I have not seen any medical study examining their complaints but companies like BenQ responded by publicly announcing "flicker-free" (i.e., PWM-free) monitors while others made the change quietly in their new product lines. We've seen PWM in LED backlights either phased out or configured to operate at higher frequencies (often >1000 Hz).

For an introduction to the whole PWM business, read http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pulse_width_modulation..... Personally, I do notice PWM flicker at 0% brightness on some screens (you at the very least see it as strobed residual images as you move your eyes across the screen). I am not sure if it has caused me any extra eye strain but I found it annoying enough to consciously go for PWM-free displays when purchasing kit. I wouldn't pick such a screen for nighttime reading specifically.
Is this one sold by Monoprice similar/same as well?

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=115&cp_id=11501&cs_id...
Nevertheless, it's not hard to find reports of bird strikes. What are some good case studies of drone strikes that I can review?
Any recommendations for your favorite smart switch?

I installed a few INSTEONS in my house and got bit badly when they just stopped communicating. The most frustrating thing is that there's no diagnostic tool, so I can't tell if the switches are broken or if their signals are getting sent but aren't understood by intended recipients.

Next time I get deeply into home automation, I'll make sure to use a kit that includes tools for sensing wifi signal and diagnosing bad connections.
This is the Philips controller software (app) that is refusing to talk to or control 3rd party light bulbs.

I don't really see this as being a problem. It's not the nicest thing, perhaps, but neither is 3rd party companies building bulbs (presumably by ripping off the design and protocol of Philip's bulbs), and then relying on Philips to build the software so they can actually be used. In other words, Philips is refusing to build software, for free, to control their competitors' and/or counterfeit products.

Do the Philips bulbs (still?) work without the Philips Hue software/app? If so, non-issue: you just have to use 3rd party software to control everything. If not, well, that's why you shouldn't buy into closed, walled-garden products.
What you are describing is what existed before what we have now. A group of people working for an employer would try to negotiate for safer working conditions, better benefits, etc. The employer would take the list of demands, fire the person who handed him the list and say, "I'm not giving you any of this shit and anyone who talks about it again gets fired too."

So people started organizing by trade. It made sense because workers of a common trade share experiences and grievances. If one particular employer treated its workers bad, that trade guild had more leverage by threatening work stoppage against other employers who could put pressure on the first employer.

Over time employers started to converge and grow in power. Now you have a company who employs thousands of people in multiple locations. To keep the balance in power, the unions converged and grew in power. You cant threaten to replace a union worker if everyone who does that job is in the union(1).

Now the unions are big enough to disrupt economies, sway elections, etc. They are large professional entities of lawyers, financial managers. They want everyone in the union for maximal leverage (ie fewer scabs, more dues) so they lobbied to affect the policies we have today.

The small voluntary no-admin-overhead organization you are describing is ideal, but its really unlikely to work. It would depend on the employer allowing it to happen.

I could say more here about the growing wealth gap, criminalization of poverty, and the quiet ongoing class war, and end with a Malcom X quote, "Anytime you depend on your enemy for a job you're in bad shape." But I dont feel like saying all that. ;)

1. robots
What a horrible bait and switch.

Sadly I'm too lazy to go through the hassle of asking for my money back. :(
Normal dumb lamps?
Yes, I believe so. From here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/...

"Every instance of Swift’s Character type represents a single extended grapheme cluster. An extended grapheme cluster is a sequence of one or more Unicode scalars that (when combined) produce a single human-readable character."

And then later:

"For example, LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE (U+00E9) is canonically equivalent to LATIN SMALL LETTER E (U+0065) followed by COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT (U+0301). Both of these extended grapheme clusters are valid ways to represent the character é, and so they are considered to be canonically equivalent"
I'd like to second this. After trying a lot of competing tools in the music streaming space, I've come back to Apple Music's playlists and suggestions more than any other. They're very good at recommending me things that I turn out to enjoy.

The UX is utter shit, but the suggestions are great.
good example:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151214/07452133070/light...
Thanks for the kind words about N1! I'm one of the Nylas co-founders. :)

I'd love to get your take on N1, especially given that you've dug so much into email the past few weeks! Shoot me a note? mg@nylas.com

Edit: Just saw this article was actually written in February :P
I think its grossly shortsighted to assume only able bodied workers are working for Uber, Lyft, or any other joke of a startup you want to lump into the "sharing economy".
Feels like we can imagine how we'll define the future:

Government and industry will react in ways we understand to initiatives of our own. They'll be quick to allow any motions that will limit the growth and power of our new companies. We should maximize on this.
How about a cheap dumb bulb from Home Depot or similar?
Ability to set rates does not define the employer-employee relationship. Uber/Lyft are lead generators to driver's (highly successful and thriving) transportation business. Every once in a while they will present a new customer willing to pay a certain rate, the driver can accept or reject that request.

If the driver is too busy serving other (higher-paying) customers acquired via other channels, they can sign off from Uber/Lyft with no repercussions.

In that sense they don't differ much from lead generators for other businesses (plumbers, roofers, landmowers).
They are not real people for "institutional investor", they are just numbers that costs money, money that could be /in their own pocket/ instead of wasted buying food and other perks.

Clearly what he means is that she's not a Carly grade of CEO, firing 10k+ employees [0] and deeming the whole episode a resounding success.

[0]: http://carlyfiorina.org/
Just goes to show that a lot of the "slowness" in Java, et al, comes down to implementation details.
1. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/12/06/near-collision-w...

2. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-medical-helicopt...
The parent poster is suggesting advent calendars are used most often by children. This is true around my area
Do you have evidence of the "Real Reason" scenario as opposed to the Occam's Razor scenario that (a) Philips really can't guarantee the protocol works with any lights they don't explicitly test against and (b) the reason some manufacturers can slide in at a fraction of the price is that they're cutting necessary corners in either hardware or protocol compliance? ;)
ESP8266 based HomeKit accessories
I generally prefer reading on my phone/tablets for the portability/convenience/has own light aspects, but I feel like there's a few things the physical book has:

- a subtle but constant reminder of your position in the book, that gives you one more thing to mentally index by when looking back into the book ("I think it was about 1/3 of the way in, on the bottom of the right-hand page), and also gives you a very definite sense of How Much Book Is Left in a more subtle way than a BIG SLIDER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN ALL THE TIME

- the ability of the book designer to make choices about fonts that subtly accentuate the book's mood

- footnotes, I miss footnotes so fucking bad sometimes. I do all my e-reading on the Kindle app and it doesn't fucking have footnotes, it just has tiny little superscript links that take you to endnotes, which makes what can sometimes be a quick entertaining authorial aside into a laborious hassle of stabbing at the tiny link multiple times until you actually click it. Especially if it's within the area where tapping will turn the page, so you go to the next page, grumble, go back, repeat 5 times, finally click on footnote, realize you've kind of forgotten the immediate context of the footnote while trying to tap it.
The NQC implementation for the new Mindstorms kits hasn't been updated since 2011: http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/

A better and more up-to-date C implementation for Mindstorms is RobotC: http://robotc.net
Get them some lawn darts instead
>Nobody is forced to prostitute themselves, rob or steal, etc. But heh, [to the devil with] social safety nets ya know? If they existed, both Walmart and Uber would have to pay real wages.

True, but how does that make Uber the bad guy here? If driving for Uber is unpleasant, and they don't force anyone to work there, then it must be less unpleasant than whatever these workers are doing it instead of.

To the extent that society fails to offer a minimum baseline that isn't itself pleasant, then that's where the blame lies, not with Uber.
It's not really an alternative to Firebase until you have change notification and a similar scaling model (i.e. scale by throwing money at it).
The slippery slope of "intellectual property" is so steep that even building interface-compatible products is now considered ripping something off. We've come a long way from the age of IBM compatibles and the PC revolution.
> I do believe there are some protections against companies firing everyone when they attempt to collectively bargain. Which is nice I guess. But not a requirement to form an effective union.

Part of the theory of a union is that the workers aren't easily replaceable as a group. Doubly so in that a company that is willing to fire N thousand people and hire replacements will likely have a harder time finding people willing to work for them. That seems sufficient to have enough bargaining clout, even with at-will employment.
No, technically the third-party manufacturers were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal offense with penalties up to five years in prison. From Philips' perspective, refusing to cooperate with those criminally infringing their IP is a feature, not a bug.
It'd be great if more startups entered the car-board computing field. Mounting an Android tablet, rasberry pi or arduino in the dash isn't very complex, and simpler to update.
I wouldn't mind seeing a brief boot screen if it was linux and the stereo was a separate unit with aux input.
Now Prices Can Change from Minute to Minute
they should still have that choice as they cannot choose what happens with their union dues. far too many unions spend inordinate amounts of money on political activities instead of their own membership. then top it off with all the bureaucratic bloat and high paid leadership I think people must be given the right to abstain.

If you want to dodge the free ride then have the dues go to a non political spending charity of your choice provided it is local, may I suggest children's healthcare hospitals
I always figured the other shoe would drop for companies like Uber and Airbnb. Their model works really well in a vacuum where they are not stepping on anyone else's toes, but now that they have scaled, their business model is starting to put strain on existing industries. I really like the solutions their businesses bring to the table, but one of the reasons they work so well is because they completely circumvent existing laws and regulations.
We use parse with stripe. The client drives the transaction and then stripe hits your parse cloud function via webhook with the confirmation.
How does this handle identity? For example, what's preventing me from just changing my name and reviewing myself?
The Pi Zero might be able to do some additional interesting things through with that computing power, including transmitting information over those LEDs at imperceptible modulation frequencies and such. Perhaps it could even be a Ethernet-over-Power to Li-Fi bridge, with some additional circuitry. No Wi-Fi sucks though. And putting Wi-Fi into a Pi Zero requires a micro-USB to USB dongle and then another USB Wi-Fi dongle, thus the Pi Zero as big as a Pi after that cable and dongle mess. If it had on-board Wi-Fi it would be ten times more useful.
Seems he did! https://github.com/cperryk/slatemail/blob/master/README.md
Or fast airplanes. Most FAA speed limits where drones are going to be top out at about 200knots, so that's pretty quick.
I don't see how you can say that this is both "not a problem" and "why you shouldn't buy into closed, walled-garden products." Best I can tell, the thing Philips did here that people are objecting to is turning Philips Hue into a walled garden where before it was not. So if this is an example of why you shouldn't buy into closed, walled-garden products, then it sounds like this product's owners have a legitimate problem with what Philips did here.
Some articles about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733556, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728641.
What are your favorite fitness apps?
As I'm trying to get fit in the New Year, I'm looking for suggestions. I've tried: Fitocracy, MyFitnessPal and SlimKicker and I've yet to find something that's motivating/engaging.
Ten great quotes from Steve Jobs