skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a good time to repost a link to pg's "disconnecting distraction": http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html
...it's not?

Do you have an example?
I'll concede that there are some scenarios where choices may be required:

e.g. Child darts in front of car. Slam on brakes and hope for best or swerve off road (which probably isn't a cliff) or into traffic? And perhaps there is a different calculus if the car isn't carrying a passenger.

But, for the most part, these trolley arguments are pretty uninteresting from a technical, as opposed to a philosophical, perspective. It's going to be very rare that an autopilot would even in principle be able able to reliably forecast a significantly better outcome than hitting the brakes and/or otherwise protecting itself/its occupant as much as possible.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Stream (getstream.io). Let me know if you have any feedback. We didn't have much experience with Meteor (who does), but I'm very happy with the result. The tutorial is also pretty accessible if you've never used Meteor before.
Most people think of the parking brake as an emergency brake for some reason.

That's because that's what it used to be called. In the owner's manual. I imagine the change might be due to liability more than anything else. That, and just marketing. No one wants to imply that you'll have an emergency in your shiny, new Chrysler.

These things are wimpy brakes that are designed to prevent a vehicle from rolling if parked incorrectly or on a hill. They are generally cable actuated and don't have much stopping force if the vehicle is in motion.

Fifty years ago, this would describe most brakes on consumer vehicles [0]. They're wimpy because they're drum brakes (though more upscale vehicles have rear discs). They are difficult to modulate because they're actuated by flexy cables. But cable-actuated drum brakes were what you got when you bought a 1960 Chevy.

As for stopping force, a parking brake should have all of the stopping power that the rear brakes usually have. The reason they often don't have much stopping power is because most people don't have them adjusted regularly (meaning the cable runs out before the full power available is applied), or more commonly they don't use it at all and the cable rusts up. If properly maintained, you should be able to lock the rear wheels at speed.

[0] EDIT: give or take. I don't remember exactly when cars went hydraulic, and the web's no help. I did own a 60's Harley/Aramachi motorcycle that had cable-actuated brakes, FWIW.
...it's an operating system component, that's used in a lot of places...

This is a strategy tax, for a strategy that stopped being reasonable a decade ago. Numerous alternate browsers have had no problems competing with an "integrated" IE, for many years now. The DOJ case was settled by a completely different set of executives, so the current bunch don't have to pretend that OS integration is somehow vital to the function of a browser. Someone should draft a memo to the browser department: that stupid shit you were supposed to do 15 years ago? stop doing that. An organization that continues with such a farce for so many years is puzzling.
I know nothing about the company, their IP, their talent, etc. So we don't know if they weren't able to deliver or not.

And this kind of short term thinking isn't uncommon for large companies. And by the time the vesting period is over, there will likely be newer, better technologies out there. And not everyone will leave after vesting, but you'll have to have done something to cause them to stay on before vesting is over.
See also reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization, named-data-networking, and web assembly. I think ultimately a common cross-environment cross-language platform with semantic versioning and a peer-to-peer module registry will make it much more practical to adopt and evolve these types of systems.
I don't understand why this keeps coming up. I have never seen or even heard of a driver getting into a situation where there's any sort of moral dilemma in how they react. There's always an obvious best answer or a bunch of equivalently good answers.

For the one-in-a-trillion cases where this is not true, it's OK if the car reacts sub-optimally. It will still be vastly better than human drivers, who frequently react sub-optimally in unambiguous situations.
>without achieving professional goals (ie starting a succesful software based company).

Is that really what you want? Or is that what society told you you want?
> [P]eople will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option

If that was an available option, it would be fine. I'd choose no evil and no privacy because I'd know that my information, and more importantly the information of public officials and company leaders; folks who wield power; wouldn't be abused.

But that's not an option that's on the table, and whatever it is they intend to pick it is not what people accomplish when they endorse surveillance. Our governments do some pretty evil stuff and those are the people who end up with the power in these sorts of arrangements. What people are being given the choice between is 'a dubious promise of safety; an evil that doesn't offend them personally; and no privacy' - or 'a perceived higher rate of evil that does offend them personally; you're under threat, they're coming for your kids, hate freedom etc; and privacy.'

You seem to be taking the no evil part of things as essentially solved. But it's not. We do not have systems we can trust not to abuse this.
As also someone old enough to remember that time, lots of SNES and Sega Genesis owners were saying that. And people were getting sick from Doom at far greater rates than they are today from Oculus Rifts.
Cheeky the Tabby Cat
Show HN: Custom Ideas Portal Using Required Fields
Looks like someone beat me to the punch on posting this to hn :)
It's interesting to me that they use language superficially similar to the language of rationality and science to justify their beliefs. The belief is ridiculous, but how many people have opinions that they rationalize as scientific that aren't so ridiculous but still unjustified? It's easier to convince yourself that you're 'rational' than it is to be 'rational'.
Have you tried VR? It sounds like either you haven't, or you did and had a shitty experience - because it wasn't until very recently that VR was even remotely usable. You should give the Oculus a shot when you have a chance. Sure, the headset is annoying to put on. But once you've spent a few hours in a high-quality VR experience, games on a normal monitor just feel clumsy and claustrophobic.

Carmack and Newell are going back to producing quality games. Those two have been in semi-retirement for years now, and VR is the thing that finally got them excited to make things again. Those two have been dreaming about VR gaming since the day multiplayer was added to Doom.

Also, the trolls still haven't figured out how to downvote here. Don't tip them off.
They sometimes break [sic]. I think your position requires a fully autonomous world. Instead, imagine that the car behind you continues to barrel forward instead of slowing itself. Your autonomous vehicle then has a decision to make.
Well, i know of sites that still support IE7, IE8 and the revenues from those users are in millions.
If you outlaw anonymity, only outlaws will be anonymous.

But we were talking about privacy, not anonymity.

My argument is that even if you don't have secrets, someone with power over you (politician, judge, general, CEO) may, and you should want their secrets kept.
Have they no Firefox? no Chrome?
Taking advantage of Observables in Angular 2
I believe you're ignoring the mass shootings in WWII.

I would say they are relevent, as one of the arguments for the 2nd amendment is to keep government from killing the citizenry.
If it's gambling, people shouldn't be able to consistently and skillfully win at it.

Fantasy sports is much closer to the stock market than casinos. There's a lot of luck and speculation involved, but you can carve out an edge through skills.
This comment is a deja vu from when the first iPhone launched in 2007 :)
That depends on the kind of project you are working on, If you are highly motivated and the project is fun you may work for longer hours, my case I could go as long as 8hrs non-stop but if it's not as described above then 3hrs max.

Two years ago I experienced a burnout for the first time, for a 23-year old freelancer, I knew nothing about burnouts and thought I was severely depressed. My motivation level was 0.

So if your job is fun then you may find 8hrs a day not even enough, but it's not your fault, it's your employers.
Why Your Holiday Promotions Failed and How to Recover
All I want for christmas is a Portal 3 and a VR headset for Linux (that actually is using a standrad like VGA was)... ;)
Introducing dumb-init, an init system for Docker containers
Well, yeah, how can we prevent misuse of private information other than by keeping it out of the hands of those who might abuse it?

It's simple: You have to create a perfect test that can tell good people from bad people, and then build a police force that only hires good people.

The fact is that there are people in this world who are willing to hurt other people for their own advantage. You cannot fix that by giving huge amounts of power to some more or less random selection of the general population. There is no silver bullet, and trying to construct one nonetheless tends to end badly.
Let's hope. The world did survive the breakup of the soviet union, which left nuclear weapons and material all over the former soviet block without a major incident. If they do set off their one bomb (under the slim chance they could even deliver it), it would be utterly terrible. End of a major city? Probably. But not the end of the world. Japan, South Korea and the US would wipe NK out so fast they wouldn't even know what hit them. The end of North Korea regime? For sure.
Gambling is stupid tax, end of discussion. Anything bigger than poker night with the fellas and you're going to get screwed, one way or another.

The real suckers are people who still think easy money exists when you aren't a billionaire.
I don't understand your question. I'm not doubting the impact of the paper, just one of its conclusions.
At my current job, IE < 10 is less than 2% and support for IE8 has already dropped, and IE9 will next month iirc.
If we're talking pro-gamers, they probably don't want a 34 21:9 cinema display either. While I haven't tried it, I'm guessing g-sync @ 100hz makes having a insane refresh rate unnecessary. But at $300-400, I'm guessing most progamers will go with the minimum necessary to get their frame rate optimal.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I couldn't have said it better. After a year, I'm really getting tired of having to explain this to such unimaginative people.
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
The Green Book Map
His point is that currently in the US "games of skill" are legal where "games of chance" are not. Fantasy is legal because it is classified as a game of skill where black jack is not.
In a world where hard core gamers will pay >$500 for a graphics card, this price will work fine for a 1st gen. It'll be a smaller audience at first but that will also help them out as they need to focus on their customer support for issues they find in the wild.
You have very low opinion of me to think that I was trying to insult him by just inquiring about his parents national origin. His family name just caught my attention "Heidari" and I thought it was the Persian "حيدرى", that's all.

I thought people here give other people the benefit of doubt and not judge them based on mere speculation.
You are quite correct. This was a poor example. A better example would be a failure of a brake hose or brake line, where the system loses pressure quickly. (I had a 99 suburban do this recently. It was quite an adventure)

Your examples of tire/ball joint failure is of course much better.
I was reading "self-driving cars" as "Level 4 autonomy" under general conditions. Which IMO is many decades away.

But we're in violent agreement about the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" argument.
Or a series of files with numbers that go up and a data structure tracking their dependencies. Git and others might use Merkle Trees but they're not even necessary. Good, but not necessary. Lot of ways to represent these basic concepts with so many tradeoffs.

That's why it's exciting when people break away from the crowd dictating specific approaches and start asking themselves questions about alternative techniques. :)
>>$599 may seem like a perilously steep price to debut

Just wondering if we would think the same way if Apple had launched this even for something as high as $1000.

Perception matters. The apple watch is median $500. And its not even something novel. Watches have existed since hundreds of years.

I think Apple will come to launch VR sometime in the future and it will be ~$1000, and people will buy without blinking, because people will think it's Apple, and a expensive product means a good product.
You are right. As much as people love to hate IE7/8 etc, they still help make a lot of money. (millions of $)
There are physical limits on how fast or smart you can make braking.

We make thousands of unconscious decisions while driving - many of them moral/ambiguous. "Should I pass this car in the intersection even though it is breaking the law?" "Can I squeeze past this bicyclist even though it forces them towards the curb?"

The core of most of these arguments assume a fully autonomous world - and it just won't work like that.
Personally, I don't mind the lack of touch controllers. I'm more interested in flying spaceships which is going to mean buying separate hardware regardless.

I do wish they'd sell it without the Xbox One controller since I already have 2x wireless 360 controllers. Nothing in the new one sounds particular worth re-buying.

I might be priced out this generation regardless. Ah well.
Formal verification of protocols like TLS is essentially the research thesis behind this group at INRIA, which was also responsible for Logjam (as well as the paper you linked to).
The Triumph of Email
"A super-charming machine"

A television, or a tablet with facebook and youtube apps?

Its interesting to think of mass propaganda a la Bernays as an example of "super charming machine". In the old days the cogs and wheels in the marketing business are/were humans, just like in the old days "math calculator" was a job description but it got automated and accelerated into computers.

Populist political machine might be another example.
As someone who has taught himself development after more than ten years in entrepreneurship, marketing, advertising and strategy, I find you arguments too simplistic, with no regard to strategic tradeoffs. A successful business needs to be able to "fire" some of its clients to gain competitive advantage or increase operational efficiency. And sometimes those clients are users with old browsers.

Branding a request for proofs to general, overarching statements as personal prosecution (Spanish inquisition, really?) is a sign of discourse grounded in ideology, not practical considerations.
Even photography experts can't tell the difference between a digital photo that has simulated grain added to it, and tone manipulation done in post, versus a picture shot on film and scanned to digital.

I suspect its the same thing in cinematography.

Double blind tests do real havoc to all kinds of fetishism from wine-tasting to high end audio.
Culture-Brain Link: Negative Age Stereotypes Predict Alzheimer's Disease Markers
Neat editor, I've long felt there's room for a markdown editor geared to writing 'real' documents - been working with Atom which covers a lot of ground with the right plugin - I even wrote a plugin that does something similar to their inline math rendering: https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline
I thought this was an interesting history of email, though the end does read like a submarine ad[0] for Slack.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
They don't actually believe they are Gods, of course. They project this image to maintain control of a brainwashed populace. I'd say their leadership is rather rational for their objective (which is to maintain total control and thwart intervention of the west).
This is awesome! Finally empirical evidence to back up what I've felt all along -- that those fake LED candles don't look anything like a real candle and are actually kind of distracting.

That animation at the end really sums it up nicely.
Interesting to see that this article does not, a single time, mention quality of the food.

Yes the French and the Japanese spend more, how much healthier are they?
> More focus needs to be paid to these sorts of risks

Yeah, we should really up the level of fear and tension over the terrorists.
Jailbreak 9.2.2 iPad Mini
Until they aren't, at which point the building is still a liability even if it is empty.
This applies only for a diminishingly small amount of large corporations and is not applicable to absolute majority of HN startups/bootstraps/side projects.
It is even better to do something hybrid that is tuned to the application.

A bad thing about scrum is that it introduces a lot of phony deadlines that have nothing to do with the business; this is like the common practice of the boss setting a short deadline on the hope that they can control the cost (total hours) by controlling calendar time.

On the other hand having a release every two weeks means you actually need a release. There are so many projects where a few programmers spend say 1.5 years building a components and hypothetically the application is feature complete, but they are nowhere near running it on a real server or packing it up for the customer with an installer and all that and it takes another 0.5-1 yr to figure out how to make a release.

Then there is a stressful process of making a few more releases to fix the inevitable problems, then they go off and work another 2 yrs on the next release and then find they've forgotten how to make a release. The best thing about scrum is that it avoids that.

The idea that the phony deadline is fixed is another problem. If you can slip the schedule by 2 or 3 days in scrum to address critical things in the scope there that is no problem but many agilists will fight that.

Another failure mode is the project that is hitting the goals for milestones well (estimating things about 10% accurately) and that makes people feel good, but somehow you never get to the last milestone.

I came in late and helped finish one of those severely troubled projects where there was a huge amount of blame to go around. Scrum and Kanban concepts were being used by teams involved, but a lot of people on my team including the boss and star programmer would not do what scrum required. My boss would bitch me out for making "rediculous" estimates of 4 hours to do something that involved a 45 minute build process and I wondered how the other people on the team didn't have this and I found I was the only one who was serious about estimating and that the star programmer did not do it at all.

In the end we gave up on scrum and got heavy on checklists. We made a checklist with about 300 steps for a release process and it a was a stressful process but we learned how to do it reliably. Also we had a checklist of things to have done before the final release.

It was not pretty but we did cross the finish line and get the product in front of customers and they liked it, so I felt I did my part and felt free to move on when it was done.
In practice that depends on the app quite a bit, something like http://marshmallow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ makes validation a breeze on the backend for an API and you will need the database for more complex ones anyway. Again that probably depends on the app, but the only duplication in mine right now would be the password length which is a 1 character change.
I am working at a Fortune 100 financial company currently, IE8 support is already retired, and IE9 in the next month or so. This being a numbers based decision.
Yep, I'm assuming it comes with Lightning earbuds and if you want anything else you're on your own.

Bluetooth earbuds would be a pretty hard sell if they come out and say "We're changing to Lightning for better audio quality. Here, have some bluetooth earbuds with worse audio than your old wired ones."

EDIT: How small can you make a decent DAC anyway? All the audio ones I've seen are way too big to put on an adapter cable, but that might be driven by the optical and RCA connectors more than the conversion hardware.
That ship sailed long ago. The people who make use of all the cool new stuff either explicitly don't care about IE, or ship polyfills and then don't really check to make sure they work (because they don't care about IE).
That sounds AWESOME from a technical perspective. Is there a reason that you're doing a client/server thing instead of just having "offline mode" be the default, though?

For a solely single-player game, it seems to me like being able to host everything off of a static fileserver instead of a Scala server seems like a scalability win for you and a bandwidth win for users. I don't doubt your choice and your tech stack (you know way more about your project and its needs than I do!), but I'd be super-curious to hear more about the reasoning and process.
> I've only been able to serve a small handful of concurrent users at a time with Express.

Something's massively wrong with your node setup. node won't be as fast, but it should be on the same order of magnitude as nginx: https://github.com/observing/balancerbattle (or any other benchmark)
This is good for digital in ways I think people won't notice quite yet.

As an amateur photographer I tend to see film users a lot. I shoot digital but I'd like to shoot film too. The reality is that there are some artifacts that film gives you that you can't replace in digital yet. In art, if the effect or feeling that you want is given on a certain tool then that is the tool for the job. In photography, if this is film, then film is the right tool for the job. There's also the large factor of workflows. People get used to a workflow that influences their style and it's important to them to maintain that workflow. What is measurably better in technical terms is not important.

What I see happening is that market trends like this will push digital forces to perfectly re-creating classic films. The difficulty with re-creating film with filters or presets is it's notoriously hard to do and usually not perfect. Fujifilm is a perfect example of this with their film simulation modes on their X-Mount camera lineup. I suspect that the film trend is going to push photography giants into creating more accurate emulation of film baked into their workflows and devices rather than the current trend of generic hipster Instagram filters or playing in Lightroom for a few hours (and still not getting the effect you want).

Whether you're a professional or a 16y/o girl with a K1000 and mix-matched 80's leg warmers film still does have a place amongst people and this will in turn affect the development of digital processing.
(Odds of winning * 20 bets * $1) has exactly the same expected outcome as (odds of winning * 1 bet * $20), assuming the odds are the same in the two brackets, but the difference is in the latter category you get to play 20 times.
Probably going to get some hate for this.....

Honestly, I believe 9/11 was an inside job, but all the quacks that come along on the conspiracy train make all others look bad.
Chrome will drop support for Windows Vista and XP in April 2016. Firefox still supports Windows versions all the way back to XP SP2. About 14% of Firefox users still run XP!
They can hardly get worse. I used to be a huge fan of NS, but Seveneves was the last book of his I bought without reading review first. He seems to have decided that character development is for other people, not to mention the gaping plot holes. Sloppy and superficial.