skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting point, and I generally agree. But RE "avoidable monopolies":

> Why is there a copy of your photos on Facebook's servers? If one of your friends wants to see one of your photos, why are they not getting it directly from you? Then you don't have to trust Facebook with a copy of it. So the solution for this half of the problem is, disintermediate the avoidable monopolies.

It's because decentralization like that is stupidly, stupidly inefficient. Not to mention that the assumption that your phone is actually on-line 24/7 is unrealistic, and that's before we notice we're not on IPv6 yet, or that people also use cameras, or that they change their phones, go out of service range or simply want to free up space on SD card for something else.

So the fundamental reasons are a) efficiency, and b) availability. That's not to say things couldn't be improved wrt. privacy. I don't know that much about crypto yet (that's about to change, for work-related reasons), but I vaguely recall that there are encryption schemes that would let only you and your friends access the data stored on third party servers, and that would make the data unreadable for said third party.
I wouldn't say it never shipped to consumers. It was available for purchase on the Play Store alongside their other consumer products, and billed as an 'explorer edition'. If it was only intended for devs it should have been available for purchase on the dev site and billed as a developer edition.
Is an emulator really that useful if you need a physical calculator to get a ROM off in the first place?
Well, that price does include HiFi headphones with a built-in DAC, an Xbox One controller, a small hand-held controller, and two games. Retail prices on those bought separately? Easily 1/3rd the price.
Inside Graduate Admissions
I think stand-ups are valuable, but not for this reason. It is simple to exaggerate the unexpected difficulties of a task. You can watch videos on YouTube all day today and tomorrow say, "Yesterday I worked on auto frobbing widgets but ran into difficulties with the foo widget because it didn't frob correctly. Today I'll be fixing the foo widget and completing the auto frobber".

No one will bat an eye (so long as you put meaningful terms in there) until this happens for several days in a row. Nor should they, because the micromanaging alternative is worse.

Stand-ups aren't a motivating factor for typical developers. It drives some accountability for people who are just accomplishing nothing for weeks, but that could be accomplished by looking at the checkins once a week, too.

[edit: phone typos]
I use http://phaser.io for scene management (animated resizing of the game, tweening cards to predefined points on the table, etc) and the particle effects, as well as dynamically building the card images. I've been really impressed with Phaser.
I see one of the requirements is a Windows computer...

So for a Mac user like myself, that $599 would include a good $1k+ for a Windows PC ?

Nevertheless I'm very excited about this tech, although I will not jump into it just yet.
Bright backgrounds behind the screen require bright content on the screen to be easy on the eyes. A typical office needs a light theme, a shaded bedroom needs a dark theme.
The most concise description of what you're missing is "chilling effects".

In a hardcore surveillance society, almost any innocent act can be harmful to one. If government, for anti-terrorism reasons, has a rather complete picture of our lives, then we need strong safeguards against how they can act based on that picture.

And the same goes for the private sector, which might form that picture for business reasons.
Good idea, and a simple change. Thanks!
I have a suspicion that they couldn't change it for now even if they wanted to. There are articles claiming that the 5th and 6th (current) generation were already under development under Jobs. If it is so, then the 7th and 8th generations have also been in the pipeline for years now.

Assuming Jobs presided over the trend for thinness, and the ID team continued that direction after his death, if they even listen to people become more vocal about thinness vs. battery life since 2014, they could have it influence the design of maybe the 8th or 9th generation.

Remember that at those scales you don't have to just redesign a phone, you have to redesign supply chains, processes, fabrication methods and machines.
It's not the headset that causes the nausea, it's the software.
Consider the failure of the car's master cylinder.

I realize it's just one example to make a point, but automotive master cylinders don't completely fail all at once since about fifty years ago. What causes a master cylinder to fail is a failure of the seals. But because modern master cylinders have "dual channels" (for lack of a better description), half of it might fail, but it's so unlikely for both sides to fail at the same time I never even heard of it in my years as a professional mechanic, let alone actually seen such a failure. Though a self-driving car would still need to account for the fact that only half the wheels have functioning brakes.

Any other failures I can think of on modern cars are going to be so much of a failure that merely getting the car to the side of the road might be a challenge, let alone worrying about the bus full of nuns and orphans in front of you. Examples would be catastrophic tire or suspension failure (ball joint breaks loose, for example, making the car very difficult to steer).

On the flip side, it could be argued that late-model cars have worse failure modes. By that I use our Nissan Leaf as an example. There is no direct mechanical linkage on any part of the car that makes it stop, go, or steer. Parking brake is electrically actuated. Brakes are run on a wire. "Gas" pedal is wire. I'm pretty sure the steering is drive-by-wire, but I'd have to go back and look it up to make the claim with confidence. I'm sure there are redundancies, but I'm picturing an ECU letting its smoke out and then you might as well just let go of the wheel and pray to your preferred deity.

Anyway, this has been Captain Pedantic checking in, thanks for reading. I now return you to the point you actually trying to make.
Indeed, and just a quick Google suggests that a lot of people have had nausea issues with the Rift e.g.

http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-2355037/minimize-oculus-rift...
You give up privacy in many ways on Twitter, not just when you publish content.

Twitter can track you across third-party sites using its widgets, and it also knows your subscribing/reading behavior.

A decentralized system could be self-hosted and only pull in data through RSS, keeping you as anonymous as the IP address that you use. You'd only give up anonymity by replying to posts.
What It Takes to Build Your Own Video Recorder
But that's a canard because the D/A conversion has to happen so the speakers can be driven.

Unless... they're also announcing a Lightning connector for your head. Digital audio, straight to the brain!
That's well within their rights so I really don't see the problem. Copyright basically means you get to have a say in who offers the stuff you built and TI requiring people to go through them for their ROMs makes perfect sense.
Thank you for sharing that! I'm in my late 20s but it seems like I'm rapidly sliding into middle-age without having made an awesome game or startup or whatnot...this post reassures me that not having accomplished what, say, John Carmack had by my age doesn't mean that I'm a failure. It's something I've been wrestling with lately; not to the point of being deeply depressed about it but it's been nagging me nonetheless.
The iPhone 9i is rumoured to only exist within the complex plane.
I like all the listed podcasts, but IETC really grabs you emotionally and stays with you. I remember one in the most recent series about whether to amputate a woman's healthy leg:

> Six years earlier, Sarah injured her knee in a skiing accident and the intervening years have been dominated by operations to repair her knee, each followed by months of gruelling rehabilitation.

> But despite all this, Sarah's knee remains unstable and painful and it's taking its toll on her mental health.

> Various surgeons have refused to amputate her leg and recommend that she either accept her existing level of disability or agree to further operations.

> But Sarah is adamant - she wants her leg amputated. She doesn't want to live as she is and has lost faith in the medical profession's ability to give her a knee that will enable her to be active.

> The surgeon is caught in a dilemma - he appreciates how she feels but should he amputate her leg?
Eh, 24 inches, no *-sync, 144hz refresh, 1080p, 1ms "grey-to-grey", and it's TN not IPS.

More on the high-end is Acer Predator X34: [0]
34" cinema 21:9, g-sync, 100hz refresh, 1440p, and IPS (also full 100% sRGB coverage). This thing retails for ~$1300 and is sold-out almost everywhere.

[0] http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/predator-x34-series
> Obviously Apple will have a plethora of overpriced headphones

FTFY
10 year old feature request: CTEs for MySQL
Volume (spatial). It takes up a ton of room inside the phone that could be battery.

I'm not particularly excited about it, but it's obvious why they'd want to do this, even if the phone doesn't get thinner, based on this picture from an iFixit teardown:
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/fdaWRVGrZhxlZoJH.h...
document.getElementsByClassName("op-item-info__cost__price")[0].textContent;
"$59900"

Tested on both Firefox & Chromium, so it doesn't seem like a font issue.
This is a frustrating thing as a software developer: not enough people outside the industry know how to audit what they're buying. The expectation is that you reward a developer for simply implementing X, and no attention is given to whether or not the implementation sucks. A lack of open-source mandates may be one factor, and a lack of quality regulation may be another.

It is entirely possible to implement a "working" system that will require Herculean efforts to make the slightest change: a system that will collapse in on itself entirely if anything is touched anywhere else. And if you already spent a lot of money to get this far, you may assume a lot more is required to patch it.

Sadly, although we as an industry do know how to build hardened systems that are a lot more likely to adapt with the times and provide stable operation, people outside of the software industry really don't seem to know the difference. And if better software comes at a premium up front, cheap organizations may always pick the lower bid because they're thinking of software like an office chair and not a bridge that's holding up a road.
The experience is software + hardware, so I don't see what distinction you're trying to make.
It has to go analog at some point.
I can't see why anyone is surprised by this. Classic Apple move. It'll just create a market for the cheap 3.5mm to Bluetooth dongles [1] you can plug into your headset, which I've actually come to like since I can tuck the headphones into my shirt pocket then use the phone like normal. Of course just one more thing to keep charged though...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/MOCREO-Bluetooth-Wireless-Streaming-Re...
You don't need to spend anywhere close to $1600. I just put together http://pcpartpicker.com/p/p8MjmG with only a little consideration for price and it's less than $900 while exceeding the requirements.
Presumably they make their money from repeat customers, in which case ripping off their customers is probably not an optimal strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game
The first part sounds like a design flaw of your Toyota Tundra rather then a self driving car issue.

Secondly, is it considered a mechanical failure when the master cylinder fails and the driver is too slow to find the emergency brake actuator in time? Self driving cars do not suffer from that problem.
Relevant: Clark's Third Law

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war.

North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations.

While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.
> Plus the price is roughly comparable to a higher end smartphone.

Interesting comparison, but most people are able to finance phones through their carrier (although I haven't looked into that for a bleeding edge new phone model).
It's not a matter of the size of the period, but of the size of the seed. To be able to generate all shuffles, you need to seed with at least 226 bits.
I can speak to the fact that on the ecommerce site I work, only 1-2% of users are on older IE, but they account for many thousands of dollars of sales.
Show HN: Onbudget.io – Smart budgets and SMS alerts for your bank account
How he got there and what he did before is irrelevant.

The point is that he was Mozilla's CTO and his article is filled with inaccuracies showing he doesn't really understand what he's writing about and, worse, that he didn't even bother researching any of it.
Maybe my situation is a little less common, but I keep waiting for a mid-life crisis. I'm 45, have achieved a lot more so far than I ever expected to (I never expected myself to amount to much).

What I have become, is two things - more aware of time, and how limited it is. Second, selfish with my time. I do what I want to do, and no longer do what my girlfriend or anyone else wants me to do, unless it aligns with what I want to do.
> I look forward to the extinction WINE and PostgreSQL, and the resurrection of the SCO corpse for another tilt at Linux vendors, he said sarcastically.

Wasn't one of the central issues that Google copied Java headers verbatim? Wine doesn't copy windows.h [1]; it seems to be a clean room reimplementation.

[1]: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/367b30d8278684aaff3...
I recognized many personally and clicked on some but not most or all. Now that you mentioned it, I click on more to find that your right: some references straight up contradict the claim being made. Wth... Might have to make a revised version of it.

Many of them are hardware-related but you can't solely blame it on proprietary hardware. The times where work was put in got things done. Tons of work has been put into Linux with all kinds of features and fixes. There's even enterprise distro's aimed at business desktops bringing in revenue. Yet, core functionality for desktops has problems it's had for a long time that can only be explained by lack of effort.

So, author's (and my) point still stands even after knocking out bad references or ignoring truly hardware-specific problems. If you doubt it, just check out autotools to see the state of software maintenance that sometimes shows up in FOSS UNIX's. ;)
The thread under that comment just serves to reinforce the OP's point.
Not to mention that whole promise that Facebook is going to make it so much easier for them...and they can't even provider proper support for all mainstream chips.
Knowing Apple, I'm going to say $30 optional accessory.

The old to new magsafe adapter is only $10, so maybe I'm being too hard on them. On the other hand, their Lightning to HDMI or VGA adapters currently go for $50.
To my knowledge, none of the listed countries actively promote a rhetoric that involves annihilating another country for some injustices in the past, perceived or otherwise. Similarly, none of them have adopted a military doctrine along those lines.
Coming from a family that thinks they are Gods isn't crazy already?
Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2016
Usually it's the managers who find it helpful - for them. Getting verbal confirmation from everyone of what's on the board.
I just got a secondhand TI-84 on ebay for $20, the plan is to leave it in the woodshop for quick woodshoppy calcs. I never played with one before and was really impressed with what I got for $20.
The problem with doing 20 small bets vs. one large one is your almost guaranteed to lose on a given day. You are much better off making 1 bet per year and then stopping, than lot's of little ones. EX: I am up over my lifetime on slot machines. How? I did a few bets on a fixed amount got slightly lucky and never played again.

That said, if your doing this for entertainment then minimizing the money your betting is reasonable. People making 100+k per year can get really competitive over penny poker.
I used to work at British Telecom and they where very hot on this issue. BT Security do not fuck about when they investigate this sort of crime.

Developers with wide access to data had to be positively vetted to TS level.

A few years ago there was a contract killer that suborned BT employees to find the address of some one in the witness protection schemes parents new address and killed them. The people concerned are doing 10-20 years for conspiracy.
Previously I didn't care if phones got thinner but now that they're making the screens so big I can barely hold them in one hand I would appreciate a reduction if width to make it easier for smaller handed people like myself to hold.
What you see with respect to self-driving cars IMO is a lot of people who SO want them to exist that they assign timelines that are so optimistic they'd be rolling on the floor laughing if applied to projects they had direct familiarity with. Of course, it's also fueled by a lot of hype and hand-wavy statements about exponential growth and the like.

Like many other aspects of AI, I'm not sure just about anyone thinks we need to have strong AI to make self-driving cars work under the vast majority of conditions. We "just" need to create automation that can handle a reasonable number of corner cases without flipping out or grinding to a halt. But that's a debate about engineering timelines not something more philosophical.
This article seems very confused. Most importantly, it doesn't distinguish between what AI can do right now, and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years. Everyone agrees that AI today, and in the near future, doesn't even vaguely resemble a "person". That doesn't imply that much more powerful, "person-like" AI will forever be impossible. Airplanes weren't a practical means of travel in 1910, but by 1960 it was a different story, and some people in 1910 had already realized that plane travel was coming.

Secondly, it does a lot of handwaving about "religion". I am an atheist, and think most religious beliefs are irrational. However, that doesn't mean that every belief that "looks like" religion (in some vague, poorly-defined way) is irrational. The Aztec religion was false, but Hernan Cortes and his army of men with guns was very real. It would have been stupid for Aztec atheists to ignore Cortes because "that sounded like religion". The right question to ask is "is this claim supported by the evidence?", not "how much like religion does this claim sound?".
A lot of people around here use their earbuds to talk on the phone. It's especially handy if you're already listening to music when someone calls. I'm not sure how popular that is outside Boston, though.
> The difference between the D.F.S. high roller and the blackjack whale, of course, is that the whale is trying to take millions from a multinational casino corporation and not from the honeymooners from Fresno who are betting away at the $5 tables.

I don't understand this bit. What's the difference? The casino is taking money from those honeymooners; and it's paying it out to the whale. The whale negotiates rules that are different than those that apply to the honeymooners. How is this different than the DFS whales?
With a Gen1 release, Oculus is trying to build its "core audience" which will be the PC Gamer. Any serious PC gamer will have built their own custom rig to play games. As long as they can nail this audience, they'll be able to grow from there with more "mass consumer" equipment to target lower capability computers.
But it still goes to analogue by the time it hits the driver, does it really matter if that happens inside the ear buds themselves (which would require bulkier ear buds) rather than in the phone.
There is some really fantastic stuff here. I'm especially excited about the maps, American[1] and otherwise, but the stereoscopic views[2] are amazing. They really give you a feel for what it must have been like to view these things. A fun technological trip.

1: http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/5cd94760-c52a...
2: http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/robert-n-denn...
Red Admiral and Verbena Bonariensis Flower
> Why is there "Mozilla" in the hn title here, but not in the article's title? (nor the article body, except for a small aside about the MPL license, in parentheses)

Yeah, this seems to be a clear case of an editorialized article title. :(
Not to downplay the seriousness, but that site is quite surprising. I grew up about an hour outside of DC and according to that site, greatly overestimated the danger of a nuclear blast in the nation's capital.
I fully agree with the religious aspect of it (religion doesn't have to be theistic at all, but the particular beliefs in an after-life/resurrection/omniscient-omnipotent being do resemble the theistic, and indeed, monotheistic religions), but I think there's another aspect to the "AI threat" belief that is more than just "vestigial monotheism".

I think this is (in part) a power fantasy. The believers in the AI threat normally perceive themselves to be different from other people due to their (self-perceived or real) higher intelligence. They therefore describe that property (that they believe makes them special) as being particularly dangerous, and therefore powerful, because they want to believe that intelligence imbues its possessor with power and a lot of it. Sadly, superbugs, meteorites, H bombs, climate change, human-rights violations, inequality and other threats don't require or possess much intelligence, but an unstoppable AI is the purest manifestation of intelligence-as-power.

In the human world, intelligence is not very correlated with power, except very roughly. The most powerful people are generally more intelligent than average, but the correlation doesn't extend far beyond that. If anything, charm, confidence and courage seem to imbue their bearers with much more power than raw intelligence. Which is why I fear (only partly jokingly) a super-charming machine than a super-intelligent one. A super-charming machine is far more likely to bend humanity to its will -- and therefore pose a greater danger -- even if what it wants may be truly idiotic; a super-intelligent machine would be far more limited in its effects...
Provably Correct Peephole Optimizations with Alive [pdf]
I've been getting a kick out of the flat Earth thing. I've figured it as a "guerrilla ontology" or "alternate reality" prank in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson, the Church of the Subgenus, the Incunabula Papers, etc. Either that or it's a skeptic troll of the "alt media" community.
> Windows Vista will have security updates till 2020

This isn't true. Windows Vista EOL is April 11, 2017. See http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
What makes you think it is 2020?
Hope that mall booths start popping up where you can use them.
The parts are swappable. Going to a different headset isn't going to make you less prone to nausea if the software is no good. And if the software is good, you'd not get nausea even on a lesser headset. The headset is not the determining factor of nausea. Even the DK2 did its job and did it well enough.

It's like blaming the plate for overeating.