skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This review for the linked led strip is interesting:

This is a perfectly usable (and subjectively bright) LED strip, but beware, the specified lumens are a lie. My power meter reports a draw of 33W and another reviewer reports ~38.6W. The maximum efficiency of a 5730 SMD LED is ~110 lumens/watt, so this strip is outputting at most ~3630 lumens. Seller's description of "45-50LM" per LED would lead you to believe this can output 15000 lumens or ~454 lumens/watt. This is far outside the world record 200 lumens/watt bulbs and even outside the theoretical physical limit of 250–370 lm/W.
Curious about the downvotes here. Is this a controversial view or something?
Why is BitCoin often associated with money laundering, as you say:

> but in both cases the transactions can be tracked back in the blockchain

It seems to me BitCoin can actually aid law enforcement in tracking down money laundering!
Open Pattern Matching for C++ [pdf]
Yes, that is, indeed, the point if patents. That's what the OP asked: what 5-10y software research, which we currently benefit from, would not have happened were it not for patents?

In medicine, this is extremely easy to answer. Hence why the vast majority of software patents opponents are fine with those.
Mo' Data, Mo' Problems.

The New Coke flop is a perfect example of this.

New Coke was the result of the largest marketing / consumer research project ever. The conclusion of this research was to change Coke's formula. Coca-Cola Chairman Roberto Goizueta claimed that the decision was “one of the easiest we have ever made”. Coca-Cola thought this way for two reasons:

#1 Research was done with a sample of over 200,000 customers.

#2 Coca-Cola’s researchers triangulated the validity of their data with a mixed-method approach. They used focus groups, various surveys, and individual interviews.

All these data & research did the opposite of what they were supposed to. Their large sample size gave them lots of useless data. Data triangulation—which was supposed to safe guard them—did the opposite: it convinced them that their useless data, were useful.

Why does this happen?

In an unnatural system, variance is unbounded. As your data set grows, the unbounded variance grows nonlinearly compared to the valid data. As variance increases, deviations grow larger, and happen more frequently. Spurious relationships grow much faster than authentic ones. The noise becomes the signal.
You missed the point, it wasn't about ssl, just the fact that something changed the runtime behaviour of the application and I didn't see it coming (which was a failure on my part).
He has lifted the graphs from here[1]. I'm not sure if the underlying data is available.

[1] http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/resDetailOrig.action...
Pure (CSS library)
I posted a little further investigation at http://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens/comments#co...

> http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/51778/ suggests that these LED strips have to be overvolted and powered at multiple points, which might bring them closer to ~7000 lumens.

> I'm also going to try comparing the hkbayi Super Bright to LEDMO's strip with 600 LEDs: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013C2U09S/
How to Develop Good Business Ideas and Motivation to Realise Your Goals
Good points.. One part of the solution is even to get rid of all bank involvement in the micro transaction itself. A prepay approach helps you doing so. The second part of the solution is to still not drop essential aspects such as security to still maintain the claim of being a payment system. This is what we have done at milliPay in Switzerland. If you are interested in having a chat, let me know. Best, Gerrit
>I think that was my peak.

Have you tried to recreate that peak? I'm wondering if it worked so well why you might not have continued working in that mode?
Unfortunately, unless there is data to examine, this is only a platitude. When I survey the landscape, I'll tend to agree with the parent. Yes, there's been an explosion of content. But there's also been an explosion of consumers. Parent probably pulled the ratio out of thin air, but I'd say his point stands. The explosion of consumers is enough to handle the explosion of producers (and even the so-called prosumers). Honestly, you can count the number of YouTube stars out there with probably five digits, maybe even four. Compare that with annual YouTube views and passive accounts.
Most adults are consumers, but children are curious. You're looking at the wrong group if you think any kind of revolution will happen among the current generations.

When people argue that not everyone needs to learn to program, I contrast it to the idea that not everyone needs to learn to read. If you imagine the demand for competent readers before the printing press, it would be a similar situation to the demand for programming skill now. The ability for us all to read and share information is what has led to rapid progress. Imagine doing science without publishing text, but instead, all of our scientific ideas needed to be expressed in words and gestures, via conferences. Such thing just can't scale to the level it needs to be to have any progress. You simply can't do science without the ability to read and write.

It's becoming clear now that you can't do science without the ability to program too. Computers are a far more powerful medium for sharing ideas than text. When we use only text, to find anything of relevance in a big body of it, the author needs to write an "index" and map page numbers to alphabetically sorted words. He needs to manually update that index when the text is revised. (Fortunately, most papers are written with software which does this automatically now, but papers without hyperlinked contents/indexes are still abundant). In schools, children are taught the basic skills they need to do this, but little more which could accelerate their ability to share ideas.

We need to start thinking of programming ability as a core basic skill, among language, math, science and humanities. Most of it can be taught via math, language and science, and it would give children, who are naturally creative, a skill which they can use for absolutely anything. The idea that you learn to program to get a job as a programmer is a complete nonsense argument, it's like suggesting everyone learns to write so they can become authors.
I live at 60°N. Several colleagues at work simply keep a bright-light lamp on their desk, in the general direction of the window.
ReSwift: Unidirectional Data Flow in Swift – Inspired by Redux
Cheap flights to Palma on flychecker € 67
Graphene-Tantalum create high density memory
It's probably overly pedantic of me, but:

> Segmentation faults happen in C when a program makes an invalid memory access.

Segmentation faults CAN happen, but don't need to. Just as likely some padding space (no effect at all), program data (some of your data will contain garbage) or code pointers (worst case! this means arbitrary code execution) can be overwritten.
So awesome, thanks for the link. Guess we could probably reuse a lot of clojure code.
Retirement age now increasing to 67
Okay, I really like this and have thought about creating something similar before... BUT. I think you're missing an essential piece of the puzzle if you don't provide, short of the syllabi themselves, at least the ORDER in which the books are supposed to be read. What's interesting about the syllabi is their structure more than their content.
Also known as literate programming.
Is there any articles that clarify what these guys were actually doing to make the money?

The fact that they don't mention it makes it sound like they might have been doing something more interesting than just selling drugs, as usually they tend to be fairly public about those cases.

Edit: Guess it was just some drug dealers then,

>All suspects fell into one of two categories – criminal “traders” on the Dark Web and “bitcoin-cashers” who are paid by these traders to exchange bitcoins for cash
thanks a lot for your links!

I maintain a sort of microblog just about these topics:
http://www.twitter.com/solyarisoftware

Me too I just discovered Chris Messina's definition of "conversational commerce", definition that I like.

About "personality":

Maybe some years ago we have called this just "user profiling".

In facts approach I suggested (modeling dialogs as a composition of state machines: http://www.github.com/solyaris/dialogs) is just a workflow framework indipendent by the personality/profiling implemenentation.
- On one side personality/profiling could be delegated to to some "inerithed class" (of what I defined as "elemental" dialogs).
- on the other side I'd delegate in the "interpret" method.

Let's consider the usual ecommerce workflow. This could be splitted in 2/3 successive dialogs:

1. compiling a shopping cart - dialog

2. setting the delivery address - dialog

3. setting the delivery time - dialog

So, by example, in the delivery address dialog, the chat bot (or "conversational agent") know the buyer person interacting (because he stored somewhere the buyer address in a previous "profiling" dialog ), so the chatbot could simply propose to use the stored address or submitting a new one.

Just to say, that, for business workflow, maybe the "personality" maybe is just a smart profiling.
isn't it ?

giorgio
Most young people don't want to become good at programming in the same way that most young people have no desire to become good at mathematics. They just don't want to shove their minds into that straightjacket of strict logical thought. It's naturally abhorrent to them.
> because it just popped into your head and you don't want to context switch.

> There's a limited amount of things you can keep in your head at once, and the paper is somewhat of a navigational aid and rapid access memory.

Funny how you describe and justify operating a low-tech tool with computer-y terms, almost like you were a computer yourself.
World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days
Yes, you're right.

When I was made the first version I used PHP with codeigniter and used Backbone on the frontend. Which was okay for the beginning but I convinced myself that it wouldn't scale well in the long run. After reading about Node.js and it's advantages on scalability and performance over PHP, I switched the backend to use MongoDB and Node. And this happened over and over again, on many different things.

Basically, I was convinced that switching harder technologies and redesigning the UI should be done immediately and will help in the long run, because continuing with what I have now will prove difficult to change in the future. I didn't looked at it as a product but rather I looked at it technically (performance mainly).

But that was wrong, as I realized later on (in the hard way, when I ended up with big complicated mess).

I also want to blame my inner-desire to change everything; often I get bored with things looking the same way and hence I end up redesigning the entire UX just to keep myself content. (Which is a horrible thing to do when it comes to going to production; I wonder if anyone has been in the same boat as me?)
There goes my day. First attempt: http://sampulator.com/Lazer/test
So?

To expand: What is the benefit of giving the patent holder the power to stop others from using the patented technology?

If the theory is that it promotes science, how come an implicit license agreement is not enough?

And wrt to incentives for innovation. If your only value to the market is your exclusive rights to an invention, I'm Sorry, but you have no value, only a cost.
The problem is that switching to CF from Dokku is a tremendous increase in complexity. I've been exploring open source/self-hosted PaaS systems for the company I work for, since the manual installs are getting hairy.

While trying CF, I first had to get the BOSH cli, then vagrant, then create a VM for the BOSH director, then I had to generate a CF manifest for BOSH (which apparently tries to install Ruby gems, and so fails without root), then out of the sudden a new concept - "stemcells" - appeared, so I choose one that seems appropriate. I couldn't continue, since by then my drive was full (I only had 4GiB free, and though it'd be enough for a bare installation). And at then end, it seems like one gets a system with a whole bunch of moving parts at various layers.

I don't doubt that CF is a good tool, but moving from Dokku - essentially an extremely thin layer over Docker - to it is like upgrading directly from a 12v solar panel in your backyard to a small nuclear reactor.
As mkempe notes, it's probably a generational thing.

When I started studying software engineering in 1977 he was the most prominent figure in the books my city's college library had, I learned a lot back then from him and it's still generally relevant, although of course superseded as we figured out more things about the practice of software development ... or forgot rather a lot that had been learned back then.
"Goat Cheese & Crackers" is an epic name.
Looks cool, but

>We're sorry but Grove isn't currently accepting new customers right now.

I guess with that pricing structure they don't need to.
H0 and H1 should always be phrased so that H0 is "not H1". In the above case that would be H1 "The psychic is not just lucky".

Rejecting the data based on hypothesis testing is a misapplication of the technique. That doesn't mean that data is always right but it's just another hypothesis about the data itself, e.g. H0 "data is fine", H1 "data is not fine".
I posted this article. Recently I decided that I would retire at 67 or 68. Currently I an 62. I have several reasons for that decision listed in highest priority order first:

1) My youngest will start college next year and will take 5 years to get an engineering degree because of coop work. So for financial support for her college this is the primary driver.

2) I love my job. I work at a university and run their web sites. I code, when time permits, and programming still gets me excited. When I can get a stretch of time to focus on code I get into the flow and that is very satisfying.

3) I'm in relatively good health and my health is improving because of steps I have taken for just such an outcome.

4) I am afraid of retirement and boredom. I love to learn new things but I get bored really quickly and that is costly. If I keep investing money in new hobbies.

5) My wife is younger and she needs to keep working so she has health insurance.

For the older members of HN here I'm wondering what your thinking is on retirement.
Hi,

Thank you very much for all comments.

I am very suprised for the feedback. I need to clarify my intentions for this project.

This tool is a side effect of my main project. I am working on hacking embedded device. During my work, I found out, that device is using Google Protocol Buffers to communicate with Android app and windows C/C++ application.
It was my first time with protocol buffers.
I was looking for any tool, which would help me analyze protobuf messages.
It seems there is none, so I had to learn it by myself :P.

"Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler."

How it works:
1. Developer wants to exchange data between different applications/systems.
2. One describes data in human readable form in proto file:
message Person {
required string name = 1;
required int32 id = 2;
optional string email = 3;
}
3. This file can now be compiled by protoc.
4. Generated code (Java, C++, Python) is then imported to an application.
5. Develoepr can use this code to decode serialized stream.

Now - the most important thing. Protoc output code contains serialized descritor of proto file. This descriptor (in serialized way) is included in every application using protobuffs.

Once extracted (strings, debugger, any other tool), one can run pbd to disassemble it.

In short: Pbd allows to go from point 4. to point 2.
Once descriptors are disassembled, one can rerun pbd to generate code and deserialize protobuffs messages.

Hope it clarifies it a bit.

This project is in beta. Further work depends on interest and needs. I am very happy to hear more comments and ideas. Thank you for your interest.

PS. Pbd name was chosen with premeditaion. It is a bit confusing, but hey - hackers need to be focused :P.

BR
Rsc
What I want from favicons is SVG support.

It makes so much sense it hurts, especially when we think of desktop links, home page pins, etc.

The whole "bundle multiple sizes of animated files into one container" is crazy when they are nearly always different resolutions of precisely the same file.

If we have SVG we could modify the SVG at runtime to have it display additional data really easily.

As for video in favicons... kill me now. SVGs and a strict limit on favicon sizes would be good (enforced by browsers, ditch anything over 50KB - it should be more than enough!).

A nice bug I saw recently was that a server could be instructed to send an infinitely sized favicon, and the browser would happily consume it. Nice way to drain a phone battery, use all of the connection bandwidth, and just to play havoc.

What I want from favicons:

1) SVG

2) SVG support for icons in all major OS's so that desktop links and homepage links just work as SVG

3) Max-size enforced by browsers
The sanity of any laws built on top of the patent system require that granted patents make sense and represent actual "inventions". A patented invention should provide enough detail in the patent filing to allow other experts in the same field to recreate the "invention". For any sensible definition of a patent that could be related to software, such a filing would include actual source code (or at least very detailed pseudocode.

Alas, until issued patents actually represent real inventions, then all the rest of the laws surrounding their use and enforcement will appear utterly insane as well.
Show HN: Project Vique – Webtorrent video streaming queue
The McGill university also offers these MRI simulations, if you need brain scans for your visualisation/processing needs. http://brainweb.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/

Very useful when I did my undergraduate thesis.
Bit braces (the C shaped tools) are also the finest Phillips screwdrivers available, I've found. The design makes it easy to exert a lot of force to prevent the bit from camming out, and the amount of torque one can generate is astounding. Braces are measured by the diameter of the rotation; most good ones are in the 8"-10" range, which is probably more appropriate for casual use. 14" and up were generally for driving big augers, and you need every bit of that torque. I have a 6" one that is cute and small but not actually all that useful due to jaw issues.
> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline.

Citation needed. Even accepting the results of various studies that show age-correlated decline in some measures of programming ability, one cannot take those results and conclude that a specific programmer's ability began to decline at 30. Also, AFAIR the studies don't agree on a specific age and report increasing variance which makes it even less reasonable to make the conclusion the author made.
Case Study: Importance of Mobile Analytics
How did you learn that 1/2" or 1/4" head phones would be wired "opposite ways"? I would doubt that this is the case.
How much Vitamin D did you take? Did you measure/calc the amount per kg?
You can buy electricity with pricing like that in Finland, it's generally cheaper if you're using significant amounts of electricity. (Although I'm not completely sure if it's minute by minute or hourly rates).
Takes me back to when I was a teenager :)

I gotta share mine as well: http://sampulator.com/melvins_shozin/melody-is-symfony

Initially I wanted to call it "Less is More" since I was mostly deleting notes because they convoluted things. But I was also inspired making this sound snippet by the first melody track on the top, hence Melody is Symfony.

I don't know what you plan to do with it but I just had the perfect hour of my life. No feedback on that part. I also don't know how you could surprise me to keep that level up since the constraints in samples that I needed to take was key for having the perfect hour (also mentioned by skndr as "paradox of choice").
Patents last 20 years, well over a decade.
Dunno. The last CES had all the major companies using Ustream to stream their keynotes.
thank for your links!
generally speaking, I can't agree with your first statement :) and I anticipated my ignorance in linguistic topics :)

I'll investigate and study to understand about "pragmatic" and semantic understanding; thanks.

But let me do some more notes:

1. my raugh and crippled code proposal at http://www.github.com/solyaris/dialogs is to consider a "framework" where dialog are composed/nested as "elemental dialogs" (archetypes or "abstract classes") to be instantiated as subclasses, and of course there is not a real NLP.
The semantic understanding is "delegated" to an external engine (see the interpret() method).

2. In my modest opinion the BIG trade off is between a system that really do a semantic interpretation and a system tha quickly supply a service to a user (buyer) in a DETERMINISTIC/fast workflow.

Please let consider the usual example I propose: an ecommerce shopping: I call this a bussines service, that "have to" bring user to purchase something as goal, "as talking by phone" with the buyer (BTW I worked a bit on a proximity ecommerce project http://www.rosposhop.com, where buyer and seller live in the same area and know each other personally).

So the state-machines composistion I proposed is maybe naif but focus on a deterministic workflow, to achive some business goal/task.

To be pragmaticals:
There is some (open-source) NLP to already done to realize a "simple" task as a "ecommerce" text conversation" ?
I'm looking forward for it :)

giorgio
Probably in days that's too overcast a good serving of fatty fish will help. Vitamin d3 is either synthesized from sun exposure or supplemented through diet, it is a good mood regulator.
Any chance you'll stop by in Algavre? :)
It's not that slow. I pulled down the multi-gigabyte Libreoffice git repository pretty quickly the other day. And I've watched certain networks streaming TV shows without any problems.
> . With EC2 instances you're still running a kernel that has a lot of moving parts of its own.

I'm sure that's true, but it's not a statement directly about consistency.
In the article she talks about CRI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index ) which is similar
All, we need is harmonized interfaces for users customization like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit (Let users change the ressources: images, sounds, texts - for translations, improvements).