skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work on the renderer for a product that uses WebGL (I won't link to it because I don't want to sound like a shill, but it's a web based 3d modeler called FormIt).

Unfortunately, I think webgl performance has actually been getting much worse on Chrome. (Firefox has been fine).

WebGL is pretty exciting in what it makes possible, but it's based on the OpenGL ES2 spec from 2007 which is way out of date at this point, so the surface area of the hardware you can actually use is really limited, and various aspects of javascript lead to some really ugly performance compromises. This is partially why I'm pretty excited about web assembly -- I don't think it'll fix everything off the bat, but not having to go through javascript could be a really big win.
University degrees ‘irrelevant’ to big employers
I think clearly might be a little strong. It's not a very hard stretch of the imagination to believe that two separate groups of writers and/or producers think torture is effective.
> the link seems strangely mistitled

Probably because it was the subject of a pre-existing email thread. We've changed the title to a representative phrase from the text.
It's better than nothing!
Le Keqiang is not "some apparatchik" - he's the #2 leader in all of China, and a superlative scientist.
Gee, how can automatic merge without conflict identification break? In all the ways that automatic merge with conflicts, with even more opportunities.

It's trivial for two editors to make edits to a sentence which are grammatical in isolation, but the system will merge them such that there is a problem.

Original sentence: "There were two people present: Bob and Alice".

Parallel edit 1: "There were three people present: Bob, Alice and Eve."

Parallel edit 2: "There were three people present: Carlos, Bob and Alice."

Seamlessly integrated, "self-healed", "robust" result: "There were three people present: Carlos, Bob, Alice and Eve".
There's some evidence that recalling a memory makes it labile, and that interrupting memory reconsolidation processes during this labile period can 'erase' them, much like not getting sleep after initially forming a memory can prevent it from becoming permanent.

Emotional/fear associated memories are a really easy model to work with, and are also the most clinically compelling application of memory extinction.

See Cristina alberini's work, and others, as well as reviews like http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v8/n4/abs/nrn2090.html
There are organizations that are attempting to police published research...one such is Retraction Watch...

It's a 501(c)3, thus a not-for profit...not sure how much grant funding they receive, but they do actively solicit donations from the public...

I think you'd be surprised at the number of public research papers, including some that end up being sources for articles in well-known science journals, that are retracted each year...

A list of papers retracted, which is continually updated, can be found at their site:

http://retractionwatch.com/
I suspect IP isn't really the question here. After all, the required balls are made in "Germany, Switzerland or Japan" so I doubt they couldn't be made in China, if someone wished to.

On another note, the article neatly taps into the chip many Chinese have on their shoulder when it comes to be recognized as "equal" to Western countries. In reality, and according to the principle of comparative advantage, no two countries would ever be equal in all things. And that's not a bad thing.
Herzog's wild ride through the web
Significant number, maybe. Penetration of medical services in these countries has increased quite a lot in the same time span. But, impact of this depends on the type of disease.

Significant increase in breast cancer cases for example is I believe a direct result of increased diagnosis.
But, for the increase in cases of viral diseases, I believe the majority cause is due to things like more dense population, unsanitary conditions and poor infrastructure.
Yeah, but the proles don't believe it yet because they've been propagandized since birth that the US can do no wrong. The propaganda is starting to seem a bit hollow for a few too many people, though.
It is, the technology to cheaply filter water on a massive scale exists across the US and is employed by various levels of government very effectively.

Only one of the "US governments" failed at purification - that of the state of Michigan.
I don't have any experience with Erlang but on a side note Elixir is really an awesome language. Pattern matching is one of the neatest features I have ever used and I recommend anyone to try it out.
One of the things I've realized travelling around the world is that the bottom 95% of the tech scene looks remarkably similar everywhere in the world (including SF & SV). The difference is whether the top 5% of the scene exists at all and, if it does, how big it is.

It's always a hard thing to gauge because the interests of the top 5% are in protecting themselves from the bottom 95% of noise. You need to be invited behind the curtain, so to speak and there's ever increasing curtains everywhere you look once you're in.

Thus, it can be very hard to comparatively judge startup scenes by city because you never know how your view is being biased.
So you don't have a source?

I went to grad school with a lot of ecologists (not an ecologist myself). I've seen countless presentations about anthropogenic threats to all kinds of ecosystems. I've never seen anything that included mosquitoes as anything but a disease vector, and I've heard numerous opinions saying that mosquitoes are the one class of animal whose absence would not be noticed by the ecosystem. To back that claim up, I have the micro-review in Nature that I linked above. You can find more sources by following the citation web from it.

Gene drives are certainly a powerful and dangerous technology. But if you want to argue against using a gene drive on mosquitoes from a scientific standpoint, you need to present scientific evidence.
Milton Friedman has a wonderful short lecture on this, about pencils no less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
"The best remedy that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about!"
Liberalism and Islam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Academia_Española

It's similar in terms of language, but very different in terms of culture. Since Spain is a multilingual country the language is does not play a big part in the nationalistic sentiment (though this was different under Franco).

The French national identity revolves pretty much around the language and its uniformity: if you went to a French public school and speak French then you are as good as French (remember that France has jus soli). You can contrast this with Germany, where there are many different dialectal variants of German and they are all acceptable and the German identity is more focussed on blood. Or with the USA which don't even have an official language.

Once you understand this, you'll understand why it's so important for the France to translate everything and why they spend so much money promoting French in other countries: to them the fact that a lot of people in, say, Senegal speak French means that Senegal is somewhat still under their influence. The more people speak English in France, the more they feel they are a colony of the US.
I take it you aren't a programmer.

1) most everyone learns to code with a short demo.

2) short demos for learning to program and understanding concepts are essentially spaghetti free -- the problem is you can't even do the simplest "hello world" in walled app gardens that require elaborate toolkits and permissions.

3) source from the fine article: originally published in Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston (August 1972)
Maybe relevant to watch this video for a first hand report of burnout from a coding rockstar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os

From personal experience think that programming pretty much crashes and destroys your personal life when you really, really want to go above the rest.

Everything changes, except you and your computer.

That's how I feel anyways. Don't sleep much and pass every waking hour on and off solving some coding problem.

I remember when there was no computers. Existed more beer, fun and happiness. But at the same time didn't felt as happy as getting something epic solved.

Maybe one day it looks as it is all worth. Maybe. Enjoy your life OP, you only get one.
Thanks, I did give some talks on it at my last corp, but it's so difficult to write about your own life.

I do blog on technical stuff here:

https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/

Most recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963646
I don't think that the article said "China can't build working pens therefore they suck" and I also do not think it was offering any sort of commentary on "culture" in the first place. Instead it was offering opinions on how the structure of the economy, etc. was holding the country back from moving up the value-added production food chain.
Indeed, let's not forget that their anti-abortion laws are so strict that women have been imprisoned for more than a decade for having miscarriages, and premature (healthy) births.[0]

Seems a high risk if you get pregnant in El Salvador at any time.

[0]: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/dec/17/el...
The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn't Rise
The "behind the scenes" information is interesting, but you are right, there is nothing particularly scandalous here. This article is meant to feed into the backlash over the thematic narrative of Zero Dark Thirty (probably the reason for the FOIA lawsuit in the first place).

In fact, I can't help but feel for civil servants (in general, not just for the CIA) who apparently have to walk on tip-toes, lest the smallest details of their lives be scrutinized under a microscope every time there is a bit of attention from a controversy-hungry media. This is an issue with local reporting (at least, here in San Diego) and it is bothersome, especially when there is really nothing to report, for the sake of column inches.
I thought this would be about how many users are needed to make a social network tip and start growing on its own
Nathan Myhrvold: Basic Science Can't Survive Without Government Funding
If you don't feel compelled to code outside of work, it's probably because you don't love what you are working on enough. I find that programming itself is not enough for me to want to work constantly--I have to legitimately love what I'm building.
interesting technique but it's extremely slow on Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB (and so I assume other machines). Like when zoomed in it's under 2fps whereas I suspect the built in chrome text renderer can do that much faster (generating texture glyphs of the needed characters at the desired res and then rendering them). I'm curious why drawing less characters (like 5 giant characters) runs at 2fps. Is the shader that heavy?
You can maybe gain some sense, but I'm not sure if it can exactly tell you how you're going wrong (except possibly to say, "if you believe these things, it makes no sense to also believe this other thing"; where a thing is a probability value assignment -- the danger is in believing that such analysis can give you positive knowledge [for instance, "I believe these things, so this other things must be the case"). I believe you need a total ordering, not just a finite, partial ordering. Maybe you can say wedding is good, funeral is bad, but how would you incorporate something like the birth of a child, the taste of some food, etc? Basically, you have to reduce all aspects of subjectivity to an integer, which could very well be impossible (making the activity of trying to turn subjectivity into integers highly suspect).

I understand that economic games sometimes use degree of belief, but in the example of a roulette wheel, we can actually count up all of the possibilities and assign numbers based on that. I don't think we can count all of the possible subjective states.

>How do you get an infinite, uncountable number of experiences?

I experience this all the time (though I can't say they are infinite, it is certainly more than I can count).
I'm no expert, but we do import quite a bit of a specific type of electronics from China. The various companies steal from each other with impunity. Not just ideas...like specific microcode for example. The physical proximity, plus the fact that it's not technically illegal makes it easy.

Stealing from Germany/Switzerland/Japan might have consequences, at least for exporting to where you stole from. It's also not as easy as just hiring away an expert from down the street.
It's an amazing racket, the art of making criminals out of ordinary citizens, a racket the US government has got down pat. I have to really hand it to them. When the country and the world no longer requires their existence, they keep coming up with faux reasons for continuing to exist, faux reasons for arresting, torturing, and murdering innocent people, faux reasons to continue to get funding and hurt more innocent people.

You'd almost think that this country no longer has problems (at least none it wants to solve so poverty, justice, racism, education, healthcare, etc. are out), that government's new role is to create problems simply so it can solve them all while making money in the process and justifying its unconstitutional existence. Then you'd be right.
Brain Research Heads into Next-Level AI Territory
I did a bit more digging. Using Ubuntu 15.10 64 bit on a system with Intel HD4000 graphics. I was getting about one frame every 3 seconds and the system felt very unresponsive (eg takes a minute or two to kill the tab). But the mouse pointer moved.

Connecting in via ssh showed that the system was just fine and close to idle. It was the GPU where the issues are. I ran intel_gpu_top and what you see is that render busy is at 100% as is blitter busy (most of the time). Essentially the gpu is saturated. I do wonder if this is similar to bufferbloat, but with so much work pending for the gpu that other requests take a long time to run.

I ended up having to kill -9 chrome, and ended up with a hung system (ie even magic sysrq didn't work).
> Any nation could produce supersonic aircraft, nuclear reactors...

These are not industrial mass produced items made by machines. 1950s industrial setup can be duplicated by any country today on their own.
That torture works is a reflexive movie/TV trope that goes back long before the recent CIA programs. More generally, the attitude in Hollywood is that prisoners rights, procedural protections, etc, are just technical impediments that get in the way of law enforcement doing their jobs and saving lives.
I think it's quite in the spirit of this whole debacle of underfunded and broken public institutions.
SpaceX broadcasts on UStream were not viewable on Firefox/Flash on Fedora. A known problem, tech support said too bad, use Chrome. I get it, it was not high on their list. What are the odds of it now? (Only a cursory look, it didn't appear they supported anything other than Flash)
"'Considered harmful' considered harmful" (http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)?
did you mean "an attempt to re-write history"?
> "Under what circumstances would the government pay a federal agent to watch me have sex for the next 10 years?"

When the federal agent is abusing her or his authority, of course. This point can then serve to to bring up deeper research which illustrate that this "ridiculous" hypothetical is a stone's throw away from what has already happened, and what may be happening now. Such as:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog-...

Or,

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg...

The first step of persuasion is describing how the problem for the many is a problem for the individual, i.e. the other party. People are less inclined to read more into things ( or listen to a longer explanation) if they don't see an immediate personal stake. "God, this guy keeps on talking. The NSA is listening in to ten million people's phone calls? Their email too? Well, that's their problem! I haven't done anything wrong!"

> "I have nothing to hide" it's generally short for...

The statement I intended to castigate was "I don't have anything to hide, so I don't care if they spy on me". I did not clearly elucidate that in my original response and instead shortened the statement to "I have nothing to hide", which was a mistake.

"I have nothing to hide" by itself is indeed shorthand that can be said in some contexts without reflecting badly on its speaker. But in discussions about government abuses/ovverreach in which there is ample evidence that law enforcement officials have been untrustworthy, the "so I don't care if they spy on me" indicates some self-delusion.
A Superdry jacket is the new combover.
I was thinking the same earlier today......
0.1mm balls are unusual - 1.0mm is more typical (eg. standard BIC pens).
How Forbes inadvertently proved the anti-malware value of ad blockers
The question is if "Mosquitoes fill an important niche in a great many ecologies".

The Nature article that ak217 linked to describes the north as the primary special case: "Taken all together, then, mosquitoes would be missed in the Arctic — but is the same true elsewhere?"

Otherwise, they don't seem to have a key niche, eg, as a food source for insect-eaters.

> Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.

It ends with a quote:

> "They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."

Thus, the article argues that mosquitoes do not fill an important niche in a great many ecologies, though they definitely fill an important niche in the arctic.
You haven't wondered very much, I guess, or you would've cleared your doubts by now.

From wikipedia, after a 5 sec search:

Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California,
the only child of Gertrude Kathryn (née Larson; 1917–1994),
a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow (1915–1992),
a paint factory manager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Bigelow#Early_life_and...
5d? for aerial still?

not really, for filming, yes. I was there when it exploded onto the advertising stage. But for stills not really. It was an alright camera, but there were more sensitive cameras even from canon. The nikon d700 was easier to use, and I think it was faster with better optical res (I could be wrong on the last bit)

For high end surveying the 5d sucked because it has rolling shutter(and no finegrained speed control), so you couldn't use it in film mode to get 3d imagery. (RED suffers from this as well, along with being blind to colour, and having a rabid fanbase.)

But then there was a trade off, one time resolution vs speed of acquisition. Film for large plate photography has better dynamic range even now. But it is slower and depending on the stock has less optical resolution.

Most survey planes are all digital. For the kind of thing that's required its just not practical to have 3 miles of 70mm film.

For peering out the side of a helicopter, just choose any high end dSLR, unless you want night shots, then you can't really use a digital medium format.
The Politics of the Turtle Feast (2013)
largely the same (also have twitter and facebook blocked in hosts file, if I want to check them I use my phone, it's less convenient so I end up spending less time on either).

I think it's because HN only has "one" frontpage which changes relatively slowly rather than each subreddit I track, some of which change very rapidly.

Also half the stuff on the frontpage isn't relevant or isn't something I'm interested in so I tend not to disappear down the rabbit hole so much.
If even one game does this, the IHVs and OSVs will freak out, remove pre-compiled binaries from future drivers, and never let us have them again, and you’ll be the one responsible for ruining all the fun. You don’t think they’ll be able to remove it after you ship it? There are ways...

Future of computing right here.
The difference in mortality rates between teenage drivers and middle age drivers suggests a number of factors, but one that springs to my mind is that the teenagers don't have a fear level that reflects the danger accurately enough.

Edit: Also, this book by a threat assessment specialist talks about problems faced by women in particular who have the fear response in mild form, but suppress it. His conclusion is that the emotional response can actually be a lot clearer and more accurate than the intellectual one in a dangerous situation and it is wise to listen to it. If that man chatting you up is making you nervous, it's a sign you ought to be careful.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/...

The lesson from the book is that fear is a second signal (in addition to reasoning) that may heighten perception of a dangerous situation and should not be ignored.
Thank you for the incisive suggestions! This is remarkable stuff. Here's a good one not behind a paywall: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056265/
The Sega Saturn and Transparency
Turns out the study which verified the placebo effect was actually seriously flawed.

It's because, on average, sick people tend to get better even if nothing is done. The placebo study had no control group. So they can't say giving a placebo is better than doing nothing.
The real question is:

Is the virus just like the flu where we kill it and life goes on? Or is the virus like herpes where it gets repressed but permanently there?
The problem with this is that a sexy splashy finding gets a completely unwarranted level of attention. A study with 21 patients should never be published in the first place (unless it's something like a medical case study - that's different).

Peter Thiel quipped that "The eccentric university professor is going extinct fast". He is completely right - and what's replacing them are incredibly media savy extroverts that are incredibly apt at marketing their own studies.
ak217 pointed out this article in Nature from 2015 - http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html (emphasis mine):

> Many species of insect, spider, salamander, lizard and frog would also lose a primary food source. In one study published last month, researchers tracked insect-eating house martins at a park in Camargue, France, after the area was sprayed with a microbial mosquito-control agent1. They found that the birds produced on average two chicks per nest after spraying, compared with three for birds at control sites.

> Most mosquito-eating birds would probably switch to other insects that, post-mosquitoes, might emerge in large numbers to take their place. Other insectivores might not miss them at all: bats feed mostly on moths, and less than 2% of their gut content is mosquitoes. "If you're expending energy," says medical entomologist Janet McAllister of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado, "are you going to eat the 22-ounce filet-mignon moth or the 6-ounce hamburger mosquito?"

> With many options on the menu, it seems that most insect-eaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world. There is not enough evidence of ecosystem disruption here to give the eradicators pause for thought.
Those are news-worthy things.
This is a fantastic reverse-engineering writeup. It's always fun to see this kind of thing on HN.
Thank a Psychologist for Your Third Brake Light