skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't matter.

Focus on validating the problem first. Get people to pay you to solve that problem and once you have people begging you for the solution, then figure out something to build.

I've seen (and experienced myself) this mistake too many times. The tech stack does not matter AT ALL.

All that matters is that you're solving a problem for the people that will pay you. Don't spend 3 months perfecting the ideal tech stack and then realizing you have nothing to use it for.
The trouble is that researchers and universities also act like marketers, and also even different factions within a single company will act like marketers to self-promote their work in order to compete for a better bonus or promotion or something.

Since regression type analyses are so amenable to this, and it's so easy to data mine for arbitrary thresholds of success, like "significance" levels, the problem tends to spiral out of control.

I wish it was just confined to advertisers and SEO stuff. But the ugly truth is that if you peel back the layers in many organizations that claim to do "quantitative" or "data-driven" business, it's just more of this same poor statistical hygiene.
It also doesn't seem like an overwhelmingly helpful survival trait for the species, given that the only thing left of Neanderthals are a few genes here and there. Similarly, the only thing left of modern social Neanderthals are a few scattered and aberrant practices.
Going from arithmetic to abstraction is difficult for some. One is word problems at about 5th grade. Its fairly simple to replace key words by symbols and operators to find the answer. But this confuses some people.

The next step is algebra at 8th or 9th grade. Letters and numbers confuses people too.

In my case I succumbed at Analysis. I like applied math, but dislike constructing proofs.
Yeah, it also provides stable profit to certification "authorities".
Americans didn't invent this principle, and certainly are not unique in having applied it.
Agree. For me it was games.

While other kids complained about algebra, I recognized it as exactly what I had been doing with my little Apple II games, basically fumbling on my own. Now each math lesson was a chance to make my games even more interesting.

My first graphing calculator had a simple example of 3D point rotation. It was like learning a magical incantation! (This is pre-internet.) My friend and I were so excited at the possibilities and immediately wrote a primitive ray-tracer.

The point is: by connecting it to games, we were literally hungry to learn more math.
LG plans to launch G5 smartphone in 2016 despite huge quarter loss
Isn't any packaging system reliant on a server and ultimately fragile if you don't vendor? I don't want to see an overengineered packaging system. Go is open source, has anyone looked at improving "go get"?
I don't see a color picker.
You will learn about how python's scoping rules are actually quite bad.
Grand opening to Library. A new place to read and write stories created by you
Hi HN,

I want to invite you to the grand opening of Library. A new and fun place to read and write stories created by you. I know there are writing/publishing platforms out there but I feel like they're lacking a social structure around the content that is written to enhance the reader's and writer's experience. Medium is attempting to create their platform into more of a social network but is not there yet. I feel this is where Library comes into play. I would really appreciate your feedback and thoughts and if you don't mind answering a few questions.

1) What do you like/dislike about Medium or other writing/publishing platforms?

2) What's the biggest problem you're facing using the current writing/publishing platforms?

3) What new features would you like to see in a writing/publishing platform?

Looking forward to reading your comments. Thank you!
The MIDI export in MuseScore is very solid. All import/export formats are listed at https://musescore.org/en/handbook/file-formats
We are now beyond assuming that you can "see" the tiny computer over there. You can pretty assume that for example that any electrical device could have one of these concealed in it. That includes electric cords and light bulbs.

Additionally these can be hidden in non-electrical objects with small batteries and run for weeks.
I think they hold all payments for 2 months as a matter of course...
This is usually true but not in this case. Or if you want to put it this way, the anticipated critical problem is that this UI would confuse average end users and thus we won't enable it for them.
Re:the giant comment chain about moderation, it looks like transparency is something that HN's moderators desperately need right now.
There was a ton of government work over there. Many tech in the U.S. are also funded with DARPA, NSF, etc. By the time it hits press, the involvement of U.S. government or academia is usually minimized if we're talking a product rather than research result.

Anyway, this great (and long...) book will give you an idea just how much the U.S. government (esp defense) funded our computing advances back in the day. A chunk of that probably went to Silicon Valley, too.

http://monoskop.org/images/d/d4/Roland_Alex_Shiman_Philip_St...
> Outside of that, the importance of insulin levels in healthy people is extremely overhyped. These machine learning algorithms are cool, and may be useful for diabetic people, but for the general population monitoring your insulin levels is a waste of time.

a waste of time? really? what does that mean? does this mean the difference between 10-20 pounds over the course of 10 years? because that's the vast majority of 'weight' concerns - people who are overweight but not obese are 'otherwise healthy' but if we can put a finger on exactly what causes people to put on a few pounds it would be a significant advance in science that would affect billions of people.

like, how can you possibly say that investigating what causes a "increased psychological urge to eat" is some kind of trivial pursuit? that's the whole problem with "otherwise healthy" people.
Rails Dynamic Render to RCE (CVE-2016-0752)
Is your discomfort stemming from the mistaken belief that your opinion of how this undifferentiated mass of "potential" should be squandered?
I took it as "they'd better be grateful to have this shitty service industry job, or else"
How can a lossy format replace a lossless format? The author clearly doesn't know what they're talking about.
Seems like a pretty real and legitimate reason to me.

Sure, but HTTPS doesn't provide it. I mean, not really. HTTPS is the flag by which browser manufacturers have toggled the behaviour.
Teflon found to be toxic, in class-action against DuPont
In Memory of Marvin Minsky by Ray Kurzweil
Things might get worse
Unity Switch from Phong Shading to GGX
It was probably the voice that was annoying - I read the paper copy and really enjoyed it. If you like books like Hackers, Crypto, Soul of a New Machine, What the Dormouse said etc. you'll probably like it.
Marvin Minsky, “father of artificial intelligence,” dies at 88 – MIT News
In the first year of grad school when I was trying to choose a field to delve in, real time rendering was one of the options. So I took the relevant CS-fivesomething class to see how things worked.

The first time I got my feet wet with code, I realized that the workflow was mostly "write and pray it works". No debugging tools, huge blobs of proprietary code and total lack of consensus among manufacturers even on the most basic stuff scared me away. I ended up doing a machine learning thesis instead.

This was almost ten years ago. I can't say I've been following the graphics field closely, but my impression is that while tooling came a long way in the past ten years, the GPU is still mostly a black box for the developers who don't have access to a debug build of the driver of the graphics hardware at hand.

Such initiatives couldn't come soon enough.
> ...no matter what the state of your gut microbes.

Or your mental state. Or working hours. Or illness and injury. Or depression. Or lifetime habits, possibly due to choices your parents made.

Yes, it is all our own faults. That doesn't mean it is easy to change. Nor does it make somebody a lesser person for having made poor choices.

BTW, It is also your own fault for everything else that is wrong in your life. Ever answered a question wrong, made a mistake, messed up a project, gotten a speeding ticket, injured yourself, or hurt anybody in any way? All your fault.

Perhaps throwing blame at problems just isn't a good approach to making things better?
It's an interesting but misleading phrase, because it doesn't allow for the fact that a bad strategy does nothing to further the overall goals of the company - where a relaxation of a bad strategy does.

If your strategy is "Protect the crown jewels at all costs" while your competitors have discovered a diamond mine, no one needs to care what cutlery you're supposed to use.

Of course that sounds ludicrous, but the impression I get is that that kind of strategic confusion has been endemic at MS since Gates moved on.

Clever innovations like Skype Translate or even Hololens are not a strategy. Selling lots of good individual solutions still isn't a strategy.

You can't play defence on strategy (Office 2026? Windows Infinity?) You need a kick-ass plan for the 5-10 year future, and I see no evidence that anyone at MS is capable of designing a product plan for consumer markets that don't exist yet, and then wondering how to market them - while Google, FB, Apple and even Amazon are at least thinking about it.
IonicRealty: New Ionic 2 and Angular 2 Sample App
Ask HN: Is this depression? What should I do?
Hi HN!

Long story short: I'm a 27 years old guy who graduated from the top schools of my country and who likes development and marketing. I quit my job 2 years ago to work on my own projects, and I succeeded. After 6 months of work I released an information product that made me on average $3k per month until recently.

After the release of my product I decided to take a 2-3 months break from working. However this has transformed into a 1.5 year break now where I've done almost nothing.

And now that sales of my infoproduct are almost non-existent, I really need to get back to work. I see basically 3 main options, but I somehow don't like any of them: a) Go back to work on my project that has 10,000 email subscribers that have not contacted in a while b) Start applying to regular jobs like Product Manager but I don't know how they are going to react to my recent experience c) Start a brand new project.

I feel lost, bored, and unmotivated. Is that what depression is? On the other hand I go out with friends, have great time with my girlfriend, I read a lot of books, I keep learning new skills, and spend way to much time on HN/reddit/youtube.

I've been in this really weird state of mind for more than a year now where I do nothing work-wise. This is obviously not sustainable, and don't know what to do to change that... Any advice?

Thanks for your help!

TL;DR: I stopped working 1.5 year ago after a successful side project, and now can't get back to work.
Can you run other general Linux tasks on a DDWRT build?
>True, but the thought is that the feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, even suicide are seratonin related.

Not necessarily true. People on SSRIs can still want to commit suicide after serotonin rebounds and is at a stable level.

I think complex feelings like despair and self-hatred can't be explained by just a single neurotransmitter. Serotonin likely plays a role here, but it's not the only component.
If you want to watch the Oculus connect talk where Carmack discusses this it's online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk

Carmack talks are fun to watch - I think it's worth checking out.
What material have you already looked at?
I had to reload the page four times to get the BPG to load correctly. No thank you, sir.
Here's a link to all the comments on HN covering previous questions & answers about the meaning of the "black bar" at the top of the page on HN:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://news.ycombinato...
> the US was created by Europeans, and mostly consists to this day of people of European descent

Yes, but the statistics for violent crime in the US break down in interesting ways once you start looking at "genetic source", whatever that is. There is lots of discussion as to the _why_, of course

"Hispanics" in the US includes people of nearly pure European descent, nearly pure Amerindian descent, mixes of the two, etc. It's a pretty useless demographic category, really.
> #2 and #3 are just because Google and browser vendors simply limit these things to HTTPS. It is not like it can only come with HTTPS.

True for "signaling value", but for powerful browser features that the user grants or denies on a site-by-site basis, there's a critical reason to only allow those for HTTPS. If you allow those features for HTTP, you allow them for anyone who can MITM your connection and spoof those sites. Any random ISP, open wifi, or other entity could trivially MITM a popular site via HTTP and obtain privileges it should not have.
OpenTable's CEO: How to Prevent Your Company from Breaking Down as You Scale
Amazing for kids who will finally be able to play minecraft at school. The current version runs at less than 10fps on crappy school computers. It's so bad.
Author says that the BPG version is re-encoded from the MP4, so lower quality is to be expected. Looking at the linked comparison tool[1], it seems that while BPG and WebP both have fewer artefacts than JPEG at a given file-size, BPG seems to achieve this with waaaay too much smoothing. Seriously, check out the engineer's eyelids in [1].

[1]: http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/#production&bp...
All that time in the video and all but zero seconds showing the finished product which is surely the point?
From the linked article: "...when Facebook acquired Oculus in July 2014, Notch “blew up about it,” as Carmack puts it. Notch referred to the social media company as “creepy” and publicly stated that it wasn’t the partner he was envisioning when he backed the original Oculus Rift when it was just a Kickstarter project."

The more I read about Notch, the more I'm convinced that Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and getting him out of the scene was the best thing for Minecraft. He strikes me as an incredibly fortunate but oddly emotional individual who was way over his head once his creation took off.
Tom+Loves+Angela
> Even today, it’s not hard to reach the tracks if you want to; plenty of holes and gaps remain. A sergeant with the Philadelphia Police Department told me that the rail bed is popular with addicts and dealers. “And let me tell you,” he said, “you couldn’t build a fence high enough to keep them all out.”

As with software piracy, the solution is not to make the tracks unreachable - that's impossible. Instead, make them less desirable than the alternative.

For people trespassing to walk on the tracks to get somewhere, add good sidewalks or park paths. For people crossing between one building and another, add official pedestrian crossings and signals, or build bridges and tunnels that are nicer to walk than trying to hop even a 4', no-barbed-wire fence.

For addicts and dealers, make non-dangerous drugs legal. I am not sure what to do about dangerous drugs and other crime that needs a secret place to meet, but I think access would make this much easier.

People walk a rail near me because it's literally the safest way to get from the town (restaurants, the park, ice cream, shops, the river a little off-screen to the southeast) to the high school and the Stoney Creek neighborhood to the North:

http://i.imgur.com/0pBaSa4.jpg

Division is not walkable. Lamareaux is mostly, but the sidewalk crosses back and forth, traffic is fast, and the railroad is much more direct.
Nice. It will be interesting to see how the Dataset API matures over time.
Interesting, is there any public discussion on this? I didn't find anything like it when I was researching the blog post.
The necessity of killing of staging servers
Not with initiatives like letsencrypt.
> This post is evidently about junior developers

Hence the "anything but a junior candidate" from my original post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10947023
>doesn't necessarily stimulate any sort of direct pleasurable feeling as people often infer.

Dopamine is very complex and acts on different receptors to achieve varying effects, but a sudden spike in dopamine concentration in many parts of the brain, like the nucleus accumbens, will usually result in a pleasurable feeling. This can be seen in people with dopamine-related disorders, like bipolar, and dopamine-releasing substances like amphetamine.
It looks "unpleasant" out of context, but it is important to note that the proof is accompanied by a diagram of the parallelogram and the students who write this proof have been exposed to the reasoning behind the steps.

High school geometry introduces many students to the idea that math is a way of reasoning and this is _very_ different from the boring grind that they were used to.
Wow, this throws me back to the early 90s, when we would basically have the same discussions about JPEG vs GIF. At the time most graphics programs could open a GIF you downloaded with your modem, but if you wanted to view a JPEG you had to jump out to a separate program, and everyone said that as soon as there was native JPEG support no one would use GIF anymore.
Some of the ad networks don't have https support yet. Though this is really the fault of the ad networks, and since they want customers, will probably be resolved soon.
My day using nothing but WeChat
Still haven't congratulated you guys. Kudu is what I always wanted in a datastore.
This is amazing. John Carmack has become like the Lone Ranger of code optimization. He shows up out of nowhere, makes your game run 20 times faster, then rides off into the sunset. "Who was that masked man?" "Oh, he's John Carmack."
I'd suggest most of homological algebra as an example. It's called "abstract nonsense" for a reason.

Personally, my intuition gives up at spectral sequences.
Show HN: Looking for feedback on my speech tech project
Y'know, they could add actual support for modding into the damned thing.
Depending on what languages you're currently familiar with, Swift might be an easier transition.
Because the internet doesn't need a HUGE lossless animated image format. What it needs is something GIF-like (animated images with no sound) that works universally, is smaller, and doesn't consume too much battery on mobile devices.

So BPG (or others) could replace GIF for the way GIF is commonly used today, rather than a direct 1:1 drop in replacement in all scenarios. If you really need lossless then continue to use GIF, support isn't going away soon, but for small soundless animations, a better alternative may be welcomed.

PS - The statement "The author clearly doesn't know what they're talking about." is inflammatory and needless. The author never said anything either way about lossless/lossy.
Move Your Domain Day 2016 is on Feb 2. $3.98 transfers, with $1 going to EFF
That's the point, that's what firefox is moving away from, isn't it?
Also the Premii HN mobile app is superb:

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
> I think three things are blocking the deployment of optic fiber in the UK:

You forgot the fibre optic tax.
And for any platform that isn't windows.
I think those kind of things are culturally dependent. I am from Norway and I noticed that Americans and Brits typically people from Anglo-Saxon cultures were most angry at the sentencing the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik got in Norway. Victims and their families were not revenge oriented towards Breivik the way Americans and Brits were who were not even at the receiving end of his crimes.

I notice a clear difference between cultures in how this is perceived is in the view with respect to good, evil and punishment in general. I think in Scandinavia in general people don't really believe in good and evil, at least not in the American sense. We don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys.

All the way back to Viking times Scandinavians have practices much milder punishment than the Anglo-Saxons. It might be a Germanic thing. The dutch also were much milder than the British historically. In fact the english seemed almost offended in the 1700s by how mild punishment was in the Netherlands.

I think anglo-saxons have simply been conditioned more strongly to desire revenge and retribution.
Coming off venlafaxine is considerably more unpleasant than going on venlafaxine, even with correct titration up and down.
> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems.

Could you quantify how severe you see those problems as being, how they're lied about, and what sort of solution you think might be possible?

My impression (as a leftish European, so discount it as you please) is that no one denies that some Muslim immigrants commit crimes, nor indeed that some Muslim immigrants are terrorists, but that the usual lefty view is:

1. This, in itself, no more calls for action against Muslim immigrants (or against Muslim immigration) than the fact that some people with beards commit crimes calls for action against people with beards.

2. Overreaction to fear of Muslim immigrants is a bigger problem than crime committed by Muslim immigrants. (E.g., crimes with Muslim victims are commoner than crimes with Muslim perpetrators, and this sort of fear is one reason why.)

3. Accordingly, asking "what can we do to stop unassimilated Muslim immigrants killing and raping and robbing?" is a bad question in the following senses: (a) if it's the main question you're asking about relations between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, that probably means you have an unbalanced view of what's going on, and (b) asking it loudly and publicly is liable to do more harm by encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry than it does good by promoting measures that reduce crime by Muslim immigrants, and (c) actually taking the measures one might come up with when answering the questions is also liable to do more harm by making Muslims' lives harder than it does good by reducing crime.

A few notes. First: I don't know whether the parenthesis in #2 is actually correct. My impression is that it is, but I don't have all the statistics that would be needed to check. Regardless, I would guess that most of the lefty types you have in mind share my impression that it's correct. Second: something can be a bad question as in #3 but still be a question it would be good, in principle and all else being equal, to know a good answer to.

Third: appreciating the European-lefty mindset on this may be easier if you try replacing "what can we do about violent crime by Muslim immigrants?" with "what can we do about financial malfeasance by The One Percent?" or "what can we do about computer crime committed by evil hackers?". In all these cases, there are some actual crimes (and not-actually-criminal wrongdoings) that we'd be better without. In all these cases, people unsympathetic to the group being targetted are liable to overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat, and there are unscrupulous journalists and politicians stirring up fear to further their own agendas. In all these cases, trying to prevent those crimes and other wrongdoings runs the risk of messing with people's civil liberties. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that these cases are parallel in every respect.)
I would recommend going to see the doc for an official diagnosis. Sounds like there could be some depression or boredom in there since you lost motivation for doing something you really enjoyed doing and seem down about getting back into the game.