skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone interested in an open source web-based database diagramming tool?
They say that scratching a programmer's itch starts an open source project. But we all know that the itch can take us only so far. Sooner or later, it is the community that needs to get around a FOSS project in order to keep the flame alive.

We all know that there are many side-projects which begin life on github with many stars and then just wither away due to lack of users and finally, the devs too stop taking interest.

Few months ago, I went through the same cycle when I started a side-project Visual Alchemist (https://github.com/prahladyeri/VisualAlchemist). It began its life as a tool to quickly draw a few database tables on a html canvas and export it as python-SQLAlchemy ORM code. I was working extensively on Python at that time, hence I started that project. As usual, the project just withered away after some time, but recently I've taken a renewed interest in its development again. This time, I don't have any particular interest in Python, but I want to start making VA a generic tool that outputs to multiple formats apart from python-sqlalchemy. Things on the feature-map include raw sql formats (mysql, postresql, etc.) and other ORMs.

I invite you all to collaborate in this project of mine. The people I need most right now are users, beta-testers and document writers.

These are a few things I've done until now to show my commitment towards VA project:

1. Refactored the old code, and added raw mysql as an output format.
2. Changed the license from MIT to GNU GPLv3 to demonstrate my commitment towards this project.
3. Updated the project README file with all project details such as governance style (meritocracy) and contact details.
4. Created a subreddit as a discussion room to discuss improvements in VA.
5. Using my hilariously limited GIMP skills, even created a VA logo.
6. Created a hosted version of VA.
7. Defined the feature maps, so the project can have some vision about what to develop in the near term.
Not at all. See my other comment.
Eliminate+That+Dangerous+Belly+Fat
This is false. Google's cars have only gone as far as they have without an incident BECAUSE of human drivers. In a 12 month period, human drivers prevented Google Self-Driving Cars from causing ten accidents. And 272 times the car's software outright failed and dropped control of the car to the human driver. This is all in Google's recent report to the California DMV, but it's not a reality they like to advertise openly.

Statistically, Google's Self-Driving Car would've lost it's license by now, if not for human drivers keeping it in check.
SF/NYC. Liberal arts college degrees from well-regarded universities, public and private. Minimal previous careers (none were more than two years out of college), but all non-technical. The jobs are at various smallish, startup-ish web oriented tech companies.
Yes, that is my point, with so many options in JS frameworks, libs, etc, I normaly study Github activity before jumping in. Learning a new tool takes time and we cannot afford to waste it on dead-end projects.
Fixing the Inequity of Startup Equity
Hold up. Just because Google's problem is a big one to solve, doesn't refute the point that human drivers are bad.

Yes, driving is actually a challenging task. But guess what, humans are BAD AT IT. And are computers going to be better? I'd be pretty damn surprised if they weren't.

Most crashes come down to distraction. Computers never get distracted. So if we can workout errors like the one in this story, then at least we can say the computer isn't going to get lazy or distracted and suddenly forget it's lessons learned.

Yes, its a challenging road ahead for these self driving cars. But I'd feel so much safer in a world of autonomous vehicles than I would with the morons behind the wheel of today.
For example, Peter Lustig: He was the host of Germany's most popular kids TV show for decades. At some point, he made an off-hand derisive comment about the BILD. Quickly, BILD spread a rumour that he secretly hated kids and was only in it for the money, a rumour they kept alive for decades; and which they are now again bringing to the front covers after his death, claiming to "try to uncover the truth".

Utterly disgusting and borderline criminal.
Then have a system that shows every article together with a measurement of quality. Number of references, actuality, estimated bias.

Then people can switch between the different tiers they want to search in. Give me everything but potentially crap too, or just give me the hand selected meticulously crafted wonder articles that the deletionists crave.
I just went to netflix and it's not at all how you describe. It's incredibly fast and live filters as I type. There may be an abundance of poorly written react apps out there but netflix does not appear to be one.
> Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!?

It depends on the city, but bus drivers often don't care whatsoever about other vehicles in the way. They merge and let others avoid contact.
People are bad drivers. Every winter at the first snowfall there are tonnes of accidents because folks forgot to adjust following distances.

The promise of an AI driver is that there will never be a second accident of the same type. The only question is how fast the learning rate can ramp up.
Every time an asshole recklessly endangers the occupants of a self driving car, the car will have recorded the entire event. They should send these to a central clearinghouse and after a certain threshold hand them over to the appropriate prosecutor for charging and conviction. We'll all be safer.

If the asshole can't bring himself to drive civilly, eventually he'll lose his license on points and have to ride around in a self driving car!
I'm not convinced that the distinction between "situations requiring thinking" and "boring situations" is that strong. You seem to be implying that self-driving cars will probably be worse than humans at things like negotiating through city traffic (where this accident apparently occurred), but is there any evidence of that?

It's true that most deaths and serious accidents occur on highways, where human factors like boredom and sleepiness are probably significant. But humans also have a heck of a lot of fender benders like this incident, and a lot of the ones I have seen weren't exactly situations where "a lot of thinking" was necessary. People are texting and rear-end the person in front of them, or underestimate how much room they have to switch lanes between two cars, or other things like that. I don't see why these situations are uniquely difficult for AI to solve. In fact, they seem like very apt problems for computers to solve.
Up next: Google self-driving buses, finally American buses run with the same attention to time tables that Swiss ones do. And added benefit: they obey traffic safety laws.
You might want to add the link here.
"Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter."

Having driven a corridor with a ton of snow quite a lot (western PA to washington DC), i'm going to strongly disagree with this.

People don't "adapt". They just do it anyway because they have to.
The rate of minor and major fender benders in this kind of situation is really high, it's just "acceptable".

In truth, computers that understand the physics of what is happening to the car at a given point in time based on tons of sensor data are going to be much more effective drivers in snow and ice than people (because of even simple data it can use like "this wheel has this much traction currently, so i need to correct this much"). People are really bad at figuring this out in their head and use horrible heuristics, often hitting other cars, guard rails, you name it.

You could also can get data about surrounding conditions (IE the ice the wheel will hit next or whatever) that people can't because they are not close enough/can't process fast enough (IE not just what is going on with the car, but what is the state of the ice on the road 2 inches to the right or left of the car and would it be better for the car to steer in that direction to get more traction, etc)
It sounded like it was merging into the bus's lane. But I imagine Google will prep some very fancy videos of the incident from the car's perspective within the next week or so, and then we'll know for sure.
For those of you that didn't see the tiny, grey-on-grey Help link, it's a writing app that deletes all your work if you don't type something in five seconds.
How to Verify the Integrity of a Downloaded File – On Windows, Mac and Linux
This sounds awesome! Any plans of putting any of these scripts on Github? I think this stuff could do a lot of good.
Yes, there isn't much money in solving non-problems. Instead, find people in pain, and sell them band-aids.

In the 1980's I worked for an Electronic Design Automation startup (during the go-go years for EDA). Our CEO said: "If you asked customers to give a letter grade to their current EDA tools, most would give a "D" or "F". If we can get a "C" we will do great."

He was very right. People in pain open their wallets easily, even for a stop-gap solution. That gives you money to do the solution that eventually gets graded "B" and even comes to define "A" if all goes well.
It's not the tininess of the box, it's the overflowing wealth of opportunities for profit and for experience provided by the surrounding city. Most people want to live in such conditions, and judge the smallness of the private living space to be a reasonable tradeoff.

There is a reason that those wealthy people only visit their holiday homes and don't simply move to the remote places where they are located.
Security is not so much about sophistication as it is about lacking backdoors and fundamental flaws.

I can imagine this would be hard to "tout".
>That said, having the option to forego controllers entirely would be preferable

It's not good for HTC if it means splitting up the control schemes for the platform, which forces developers to avoid games that only work with motion controls.
>Does it seem that the entire industry has migrated to this stack, whether or not it really makes sense for everyone to?

It definitely doesn't make sense for all types of websites, but React seems to me like a solid choice any time a) a true web application is desired and b) maintainability, interactivity, and scalability are high priorities. React isn't the best choice for static informational sites and such, but I can't think of an application that wouldn't be well suited to React.
Many more options here: http://writeordie.com/
and here I am thinking, surely Silicon Valley will be nothing like Vancouver, we are all leaving Vancouver for better paying jobs and housing we can afford.
Does this really exist? If a company could meet the need cheaper, wouldn't they? Instead, you're either referring to using the wrong tool, and hence a high salary, or you're being relative to a given location. If that's the case, then pretty much everyone's salary is inflated, since there's certainly someone in the world who will do the job for $20k USD.
Housing prices in Mountain View are just as bad as those in SF.

Also, YouTube's head office is closer to the SF airport.
Largely undetected Mac malware suggests disgraced HackingTeam has returned
Show HN: Midene – Engineering blogs aggregator
The Definitive Guide on Win32 to NT Path Conversion
Call me a technology optimist. I'd bet 10 years.
How difficult is it to not hit something?

Let's suppose you are given a 2d field in which there are a number of rectangles, each of which have a velocity vector. So you know the location of each rectangle now, and, to a good approximation, in the near future.

How difficult is it to program a path-finding algorithm that will not crash into any of these rectangles, given that lowering speed is always a good option within a city?

I'd say this is really not all that difficult. Yes, there are a lot of special cases to consider, but still, in essence, this seems to me a quite simple problem.

So breaking down the problem is key. If you look at an autonomous vehicle as a black box, then, of course, it will seem dauntingly complicated, and difficult to trust.
@maebert -- Just tried the app and I love it in every way! I finally wrote a letter that i've been meaning to write for over 2.5yrs!
Maria Consultant.sl
If you watch closely too you can almost always tell when a car is about to change lanes, even before (if they bother to at all) activate their turn signal or depart their lane. I'd love to see automated cars process stuff like this (small behavioral cues from human drivers)...maybe they already do? I'm guessing that they're not just relying on turn signals to predict intentions :)
Glad to hear that. I've mostly seen positive feedback on Mithril so I wanted to test it out on a pet project before considering it for production.
Probably because since the 2007 when the mobile bonanza started, everything has to be "apped" and sold on shiny websites, animations, cute logos etc. "There's an app for that" is one of the main reasons for this insanity.
The Google car apparently had a driver who missed it too.
React Native [0]. Your view-specific code still has to be done per-platform, but your core logic can be shared, and all of it is written with Javascript using React as the framework. The JS creates and controls native elements, with the native parts mostly abstracted away.

[0] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
SEMPAD
His mention of the flex layout model implies React Native
I shot them down IF (the most important word in my post) their comparison of the consumer versions of the two most important VR releases is instead a comparison of the consumer version of the Vive, and the DKs of the Rift (or no Rift at all).

I agree, I could have worded my post directly as a question, and if I could edit it, I would.

I'm stunned that you're all allowing coalescence to sit at the table and IMPLY that the Oculus Rift CV1 makes him want to take it off, is not intuitive, and is not rewarding.
Unfortunately I'm not looking for a Religion, I'm just looking to get my job done. Too much structure can be just as bad as not enough when it comes to programming.
I reckon that depends on where you are. I don't have any hard data on this, just a lifetime of disappointment with hotel wifis. It's not the captive portal on first use what irks me, but continued DNS intercepting after you pass the captive portal challenge which hampers either DNSSEC, local resolver, or both. This is not likely to change soon, so DNS folks dream about DNS/HTTP, DNS/TLS and all that.

Intercepting actual content transfers makes more sense to me than intercepting name lookups. One thing should be common - once user authenticates, no more MitMing.
"always assume that buses are out to get them and avoid them at all cost"

This is a case where perhaps the computers have too much imagination. We actually tell human drivers to drive that way, but as humans we all know that we don't really mean that we need to worry about someone driving in front of us suddenly slamming their brakes, drifting 180 degrees, and driving at us full speed. Tell a computer to assume too much malice and the car will refuse to even move, because it's pretty easy to specify the search algorithm that will find that outcome.

We have to specify the exact level of malice the computer can reasonably expect, which is way harder. And it will still, by necessity, at times be an underestimate.
This is the most interesting part of this story to me. That the test driver believed the bus would let the vehicle continue indicates to me that the human driver would probably not have done any better than the automated car in this case.
That is definitely a badass promo video. Makes me want to scrounge up some dollars and plop down $800 for one. I am in no position to do that but it makes me want too!

So exciting, 2016, year of consumer VR/AR!
I'm much the same, and came from a similar background; I didn't move nearly as widely as you did, but certainly did have frequent moves.

Seeing this described is inspiring me to try to develop normal social interactions -- or perhaps it isn't. Having actual friends, who agree with your goals and will support you in pursuing them, who you don't have to put on a false face before, is one thing; having long-term acquaintances who disagree with you and hold you back is something else. If you're comfortable alone, you won't tolerate unhealthy interactions as being better than none at all...
I loved the prominent placement of that graph.

Makes a strong, unambiguous statement right off the bat as to why I should be interested in this project. If nothing else, shows me the project's goals and priorities are aligned in the right direction.

Having said that, I suppose the best approach would be to randomly assign developers to learn a language/technology stack they haven't used before, then have them learn the technology and implement a project in the language. Would evaluate difficulty of learning the language, availability of resources, and the strength of the community.

If you evaluate performance based on language/stack the developers already know, would be difficult to tease apart the correlation between technology stack and developer ability.
If you suck at hiring, almost nothing matters (early stage startups)
I love the idea, but I'm not sure if I'm using it right.

The premise is your writing session dies if you go 5 seconds without typing as a means to get you in to flow. When your session 'dies', everything you wrote disappears forever (as far as I can tell) so there's a lot of incentive to keep going whatever the cost. I presume there's some sort of congratulatory messaging/saving opportunity if you last your entire stretch (I didn't last the minimum 5 minutes)

Given these stakes, I'd be too nervous to use it for anything I'd actually want to hold on to due to the risk of something out of my control commanding my attention for five seconds.

I'm still glad the project exists - it's easy to picture it being great for somebody.
Another way to do it would be for each manufacturer to have to price in liability coverage to their vehicle. This could be done as a yearly or monthly software license fee that the current owner/operator of the vehicle has to pay. It creates the right incentive for manufacturers because they can charge less (or make more money) if their cars are safer and have fewer claims.

We'd probably also need some amount of limits on full tort liability though since the manufactures would be bigger targets for lawyers than individuals.
Math as taught in US high schools has very little to do with anything of real value. It's basically an SAT prep program, to push people through to calculus.

I could very nearly count on a railway brakeman's fingers the number of times that high school math has been an asset in my software career. The three years of computer programming electives I took were wildly more useful - and actually taught me geometry...
neat idea
If only there was a bus straight to campus that went to like 5 counties...
The description of events is slightly suspicious. For all the predictive smarts of the car and its impressive LIDAR, keeping from bumping into things seems like it would be the highest priority possible second only to loss of life. The corners of the car have some kind of distance sensor so the car would have to have known it was about to collide with something. In CPU time there was plenty of time to react and its always looking at all four corners.

The article make it sound like the AI blindly changed lanes into the bus. It seems most likely that the AI knew about the impending collision and decided colliding was safer than any other option. It'd be great to know what the other options were, but I imagine we'll probably never get more detail.
I agree; my main concern is that at least I need to have a choice, to be able to opt-out.

However, if your electric company already uses smart meters, which capture your power usage at a high resolution, they can determine a lot of what goes on in your home already: They can see what machines are on or off (they have different power signatures), even what TV show you are watching (again, based on the power signature), and make good guesses about when you are home, awake/asleep, how many people are there, etc. If you are less busy than I am at the moment, you can find reports from the Congressional Research Service, Colorado Public Utility Commission, ad IIRC MIT and the Dept of Energy detailing this (I think the CRS report references the others and is a good place to start.)
What ever happened to Wayland / Maynard on the Pi?
you could certainly make an extension which could hook into the site and communicate with an arduino and administer these shocks
Atlanta's First Mobile Un-Conference Is Coming
This article is a total and utter joke.

In my city, the vast, vast majority of people earn shit wages under shit conditions. They will work for their entire lifetimes and at the end of it have a state retirement which affords them some rice to go with their beans.

Software development is one of the very few careers that allows its' workers just about enough, in some cases but not all, enough to buy a home and to have some leisure time.

Yes, we are worth it. _Everyone_ is worth that. The fact that not all careers reward enough for basic living is an indictment on our society.

Not only that - he's talking about food at work and fancy bloody chairs as if they actually mean anything. Wake the fuck up. Your boss has seven, eight, nine figures in the bank. That's 'indispensable'. Not this Stockholm Syndrome bollocks.

Divide and conquer.
I read the most dangerous App Writing... so I tried making a basic Javascript app to see what would happening... Now I read it again I see why everything disappeared...
So how many decades now?
It would appear that in each of the examples, the result uses the top source image for "content" and the bottom one for "style". So no, it's not commutative.
I haven't read much on rationalwiki, but nothing I did struck me as gish gallop. They might have a lot of angles on attack on some bunk concept, but they expand upon all of them.
These are list prices, we are finding list and sale prices are quite different in the Bay Area. Folks list low on their realtor's advice to ignite bidding wars. And bid buyers do. On the plus side now we are hearing from our realtor and others that prices are stabilizing (i.e. not going up as fast, but definitely not coming down). Still hugely unaffordable for most.
Ask HN: What's your opinion on vertical/automated/indoor farming?
Maybe look at the reactuate configs - those don't seem horribly complex and are a nice prepack.
Why not have a multi tier system in which articles are marked with their validity?

The internet will probably replace "published sources" becoming the place where "original research" is done.
If wikipedia hold on to this outdated standard of correctness it will fall into oblivion with the rest of paper media.

Wikipedia could have become the next publishing platform, with cryptographically signed articles/papers, and cryptographically signed peer review.

I would rather trust a wikipedia article that has been signed by a thousand watchful eyes, than a scientific article that has been looked at by a couple researchers and publishers.
There's some pretty awesome model predictive control out there. Google "Andrew Ng Helicopter" or similar.
you have a lot of truth in what you say. the funny thing is how this bunch of kiddos / noobs that started doing "websites" and "mobile apps" after iOS and Android thinks they know it all and they are doing the best thing ever when actually they are just implementing shitty designs that were done by other noobs that have never ever animated a button rollover properly or even a "website transition" in their life but call themselves "art director" , "senior bullshit" or something like that