skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's no longer just the very bottom of the market that uses these tools. They're now mainstream and have captured the mid-market.

I don't see this. Take a look at the Wix testimonials, for instance: http://www.wix.com/stories/ – they are individuals and tiny businesses, not the mid-market.
This comment should be unreadably light gray by now. Amazon’s ads are such as explicit part of what a customer is buying that it’s in the title of the product Amazon is selling: “Kindle WITH SPECIAL OFFERS.” Microsoft isn't even calling these “ads” in the SPECIFIC FEATURE TOGGLE that controls it.

“Exact same,” my ass. You ought to be ashamed.
The Problem with Design Thinking
Do you skip Maps? That's one of the most concrete positives on a smartphone, to me, aside from phone calls, texts, and calendering.
> endemic lack of resources.

Funny, the number of "labs" projects mozilla undertakes and eventually abandons doesn't suggest such a thing.
Heck, as someone who used to run alternative firmware they seem to be making it harder for all. After a few years of a forced all-in-one device (thanks, Windstream), I went looking again... things do not seem as organized. Wiki pages argue with each other and point to forum posts without indicating which piece of information is most relevant, and in general things only look stable for routers that are at least two years old, with newer routers having regular, massive regressions. I get enough of JTAG at work, thanks.
Does anyone else feel uncomfortable with calling themselves an engineer without going to school to become a true engineer?
ping me and we can help you get this going with BigQuery :)
Are you kidding? Automatic seatbelts are incredibly stupid, and are provably bad. The only reason they were invented was because the federal government required cars to have "passive safety devices" installed, and they were aiming for airbags. But lots of shitty car companies like Saturn were too cheap to install airbags so they installed mousebelts instead.

The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks.

They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it?

So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none.

Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up.

If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.
Philips got a device called Lumify, starts at $199 but requires monthly subscription to use.
All medical technology is insanely expensive.

My wife is an ophthalmologist in private practice, and we've spent far too much money on diagnostic equipment.

My most frustrating single experience was spending $18,000 on a refurbished visual field last year (the machine where you see flashes of light in your peripheral vision and push the button), and having it show up running a custom version of Windows 3.1 and an actual honest-to-god 3.5" floppy drive.

My current project is trying to figure out how to get digital visual testing systems (e.g., eye charts on a monitor) setup in her exam rooms. If I were to buy a system from a medical distributor, I'd be spending something like $2,000 - $4,000 per room.

With an Atom-powered mini-PC, I could get Windows hardware and a monitor setup in every room for about $300/room. I was hoping I'd be able to find some open-source visual acuity software, but it doesn't seem to exist. Most software-only solutions are still over $1,000 per-license per-room. The best-looking and most reasonably priced Windows software I've found is $400/room. Bringing my total cost to a (somewhat painful) ~$700/room.

There is one piece of good Visual Acuity software in the Mac App Store[2] that we'd be able to deploy in all 4 of our exam rooms with a single $99 license. So with 4x Mac Minis plus monitors, our per-room price would be pretty close to $700/room going that way too. But it seems like such a waste to spend $500 on a Mac Mini that will do nothing besides display some letters and symbols.

What I'd love to see is industry associations working together to produce open source software that solves problems like this. Visual testing software isn't complex. A fairly reasonable investment could get something open source developed that would lower the cost of healthcare across the country, and worldwide.

There are about 58,000 Ophthalmologists and Optometrists practicing in the United States. If we assume they average 2-lanes each, and open source software could lower the cost of visual acuity testing in each lane from $2,000 to $300, that would save $98-million.

1. http://konanmedical.com/chart2020/
2. http://www.kybervision.com/mac/visualacuity/
I was assuming this was about how the easier design aspects are becoming more standardized and available as code.

I think this is really what the issue is and she completely missed it.
I'm working on such a language, called Winter: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/22
Hopefully it will be open sourced in the not-to-distant future.
Microsoft is a very big company. Just because devtools division is doing one thing doesn't mean the Skype team has the same priorities. I wouldn't even assume that half the product teams in MS are using MS dev tools to build their product.
Mimetype corruption in Firefox (2008)
I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the performance of Mirage. It seems to me that whole-program optimization is potentially a great benefit for a unikernel written almost entirely in a high-level language like OCaml.
This one happened to me in 2016 when trying to upload a zip attachment on github.
This. MS want .Net to run on all platforms. Give developers awesome tooling for free. Let them build. When they deploy, pay for Azure. It has an ongoing usage cost. Xamarin is just part of their tooling.
Except for leaks...
Not the fun ones. Most of the small molecules are derivative indicators anyway. Any cancer indicators, many hormones, and other interesting molecules are proteins - and thus not statistically replicable in these tiny samples.
This sounds like my words.:D

So I completely agree. I cringe every time I am forced to use webmail for some reason.
There's more petroleum and/or metal available than helium, though.
You don’t see how advertising is a drag on workflow? It shows you down and takes brain cycles.
Thanks, man! I can feel the positive changes happening already.
A new website is tracking startups’ falling valuations
IMO the tutorial really made it. As startup devs, we get so many "try my app/platform/api" requests, but part of the reason I tried it was the smooth onboarding with a 5-minute intro. At first glance it felt to me like "Zapier for Things" plus a little more. The platform is surprisingly polished for a first release and I'm excited to see where it goes.
You'd think that most of those customers are most likely to already be MS customers though at a guess.
Do you know Gopher (the protocol)?

It's just a tree of directories and files. Files can be text like markdown, images or videos. I think it's enough for a lot of use cases.
I don't understand why people have a problem with this. It's sleazy, sure. But clients should never trust the network.

The fact that this is happening is due to protocol and software faults that need to be fixed.

Once your network client can no longer be fooled with rubbish inserted by someone who happens to own some wires, then fake responses become a simple matter of bandwidth and QOS agreement, like dropped packets.

The fault here lies with the developers of insecure network client software.
I meant as a standard feature in visual studio, not a paid addon
Also, for blood glucose, which diabetics need to monitor closely, there is some buzz now around spectrographic (IR/UV) techniques, meaning you don't even have to puncture the skin. That would be huge.

It would be huge, yes. But it has been "five years away from being available" for about 25 years. Glucose has a much smaller signal than the Hb / HbO2 signal used for pulse oximetry.

Diabetics actually complain more about fingerprick tests for glucose than about insulin injections, which sounds very counter-intuitive to non-diabetics.

Most non-diabetics think that "injecting insulin" involves hitting a vein. That would be far more painful. Instead, we inject into subcutaneous tissue; and the needles we use are absolutely tiny. It's worth noting that it's very unusual to get any bleeding from an injection site.
Why do western democratic governments punish their populations for what criminals do? This "crackdown" makes free speech into a privilege, something to be withheld by The Authorities as the consequences of bad actions. Since there are very, very few terrorists, The Authorities are punishing the masses for the actions of a very few.

I don't think this will end well. The price of liberty is a lot smaller than the cost of oppression, as Mark Twain once said.
Site is impossible for mobile users.
Poll: religion amongst the HN community – are you religious?
Just wondering how many people working in technology identify themselves as religious (we're talking the standard definitions of religion here, not Apple versus Microsoft versus Linux type religion).
Not religious at all
Mildly religious, occasional attendance and following rituals
Very religious, active attendance and following rituals
There are Chinese made 3D machines for sale on EBay for less than $1000:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Portable-Digital-Ultrasound-Machine-...
So, what happens if you disconnect the electrical power input and connect the output back into the input. The device should continue to run for a measurably period until the 'cold-fusion' fuel is expended.

"The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected during 32 days of running in March 2014. The reactor operating point was set to about 1260 oC in the first half of the run, and at about 1400 °C in the second half. The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 oC and 1400 oC runs, respectively."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reacto...
You just made my point. Not all freelancers choose to improve their tool-set. Therefore they fall behind where, like you said, the whole industry moves forward.
> The poster was only asking for something that would improve clarity.

This is not true. There is no issue of clarity if I say "the effect of losing a leg on quality-adjusted life years is four times smaller than the effect of smoking", or at least, no ambiguity about how the two numbers I'm thinking of relate to each other (numbers wholly invented). The poster was asking us to conform to his personal peeves.
Didn't Xamarin compile the C# to native? Isn't this an apples to oranges comparison?
Apple TV Tech Talks Videos
Fancy that, my current project is to create a low-cost, high-quality optical coherency tomograph for private practitioners. I am planning to open-source the software and, depending on how things turn out over the next few months, possibly also the hardware designs.

This device can immediately detect around 80% of the pathologies of the posterior eye segment. It's high time we made this part of first-line diagnostic exams.
I disagree, either the entropy is drained and the randomness of what the pool returns (based on OS) is compromised or you get stalled waiting for more of it and decrease performance of the generator.

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=draining+entropy+pool
Getting a second job seems to be hard. Despite all companies complaining about lack of tech talent, I've approached several about working 6-12 plus weekends (or other arrangements) but have had no interest despite being well regarded in my area of tech.
>I have yet to really pull on an HF wrench that I would call "excellent", however. Various hammers and chisels I've purchased have all lost their shape after just a bit of hard use.

The HF socket wrenches and sockets I've used have been at least as good as any Craftsman competitor, even from over 20 years ago.

However, for chisels, if you're talking about for woodworking, that's something I doubt I would buy from HF. For proper woodworking, chisels have to be incredibly sharp and hold an edge, and that requires high-quality steel. I guess if you're just installing some door latch plates a HF chisel might be OK though, but I'd get something nice for doing any serious woodworking because having really sharp chisels is critical for quality work.
Amazing. This was exactly what we needed right now as a society. More ads.
If you're patient, you might just find old machines (in some form of working order) show up on eBay and other marketplaces for old gear.

There is a video series of a teardown/repair of an old baggage x-ray machine that was acquired this very way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPyE29ABmoA

In fact, looking through the other videos by the same guy, he seems to have a fair number of xray machines..
From what I could see group chats don't have it yet. And note that I said multiple clients, not multiple users. If you or your chat partner have their desktop turned on it should be able to take messages and forward them to your cell phone.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's generally a lot simpler to redesign your workspace to take advantage of a simpler robot design than it is to get a bunch of more general robots like this that still aren't quite there anyway. Amazon's warehouse robots come to mind in every one of these conversations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A

The hardware is almost there, at least, for general tasks. I'm not sure about software. Is there anything recent showing machines reading human-targeted instructions to accomplish some task (change a tire, set up a desk) and then fulfilling the task, without having been programmed or trained on that task already? That would be impressive.
"Entropy draining" :(
If you build it they might come. If you don't build it they can't come. Therefore you must build it for them to come. Therefore the most important thing you do to make them come, is to build it by any means necessary.

Them of course means customers.
On android I encrypted my phone, set a pin and told it to disable all notifcations, it still rings but everything else is hidden that and airplane mode takes care of things disturbing me when I don't want to be.
Lessons from Game Theory: What Keeps Kasich in the Race?
In the immortal words of Timecube: "You have been educated stupid".

Fortunately, salvation is readily at hand: http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/
The State of UX in 2016
I have a turbogears app from 2008 that I still occasionally maintain. It's not officially supported, but it works, and I find Python to be nicer than PHP by enough to be worthwhile. I wouldn't use Javascript because it's awful, but if a small, immature framework suits your needs I wouldn't avoid it just because it's small/immature. Either your app won't be terribly important, or it will be; in either case you're sorted.

If you want to ever have a safe upgrade path that doesn't involve months of testing then you absolutely need a type system, IMO. The only framework I've felt completely safe doing major upgrades on is Wicket - which, not coincidentally, is the only framework I've ever known to make extensive use of final classes and final methods (Java), to enforce that it's only possible to use it in supported ways.
I completely agree. Its like someone carrying a board up a flight of stairs and calling themselves an engineer.
Did you get an typical engineering degree for it? Exactly!
I just realised that all design markets behave in the same way: with maturity they shrink and most designers on that market _must_ adapt to survive.

E.g. on a mature architectural design market, the need for design projects of small scale buildings almost vanishes. It's common that the design project is offered by developers trying to get the building contract. Only on large scale buildings still persiat the need for specialist design. In web design the same trends seem to apply:

designers -> builders

generalists -> specialists
Explain the association..
> the location bar doesn't even take keyboard focus/input

Going all the way from the OP to that petty a smackdown of the author's app is a real stretch, and feels more like an attack than respectful conversation. That's not in the spirit of this site.
Although, to be honest, email standards are a complete mess in some regards and I suppose this make such an endeavour not as trivial as it looks on first sight.

Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.
You should contact me at ben AT theengine DOT co. I'm building an SDK for IoT app development that would be able to do what you want extremely easily on very cheap hardware. I'd love to talk with you about this. (My father in law is also a private practice opthalmologist.)
I can very easily call any of the layers in a secure connection a "seal". Besides, it's an analogy to demonstrate that there are things that are considered private while in a third party's control, not a literal point-for-point template for how to design privacy law for the Internet. The third-party doctrine does not match any non-lawyer's expectations, and it's the doctrine that needs to change, not just people's expectations.
Wow MailChimp. SES as a replacement for Mandrill? What are they smoking. Maybe they don't even understand their own product...
Cheers, that is awesome. Here is a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLHtnza2jM

It seems very limited for purchase, but would be cool to get my hands on one. I added it to the post :)
LinkedIn uses too many dark patterns. I'd like to "link" with recruiters but not have them pollute my graph. They really have pooped up the whole thing.
Not a bad idea. That's actually the second time somebody's mentioned Gopher to me this week. (Was it you the first time? :) But yeah, if we're going for retro, why not go deeper.
Launch scrubbed. Try again tomorrow.

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/702632949938696194
That's true, they weren't.

Several years before that purchase, Stephen Elop (an MS executive) became CEO of Nokia. Within 6 months of his hire, Nokia signed an agreement with MS to sell Windows Phone devices; the classic Symbian OS and the Linux-based Meego - both of which had shipping hardware - were canceled in favor of exclusive focus on Windows Phone. Within the next few years, Nokia laid off over 20k people, their stock dropped by about 85%, and they even sold and then leased back their HQ in Finland. They were a lot less successful by that point, and a lot less expensive to purchase. Which Microsoft did.

There was some amount of controversy associated with the above.
> Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that.

Are you referring to this reddit comment by myself?

https://reddit.com/r/spaceflight/comments/34ay1c/nasa_resear...
Looking at WatsonPaths, I'd say that it it's an "expert system" (very old idea) with one UX gimmick added, the path visualization of Watson's best guess at each stage. It's a totally appropriate application of that type of infographic, but IMO the insight that it could aid visualization to use it is a high level concept. I'd be curious to know whether the idea led to the WatsonPaths project, or if it was discovered in the course of an exploratory initiative (presumably with another name). What it definitely isn't is UX design "as usual". (That kind of diagram is not a new invention: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/daily-c... )
A huge network for a recruiter is not weak. That is his bread and butter. Often, a valuable interaction with a recruiter is very brief: he found you a job. Similar for people in Sales, Business development, Consultant, ...

The problem is that the connection feature in LinkedIn covers 2 vastly different use case. What is regular for you ( and me ), a network of people we have worked with and developed a relationship and that overlap your competences in some fashion and eventually become an implicit reference for what you put in your resume. What is regular for recruiter is a network of customer to which you have provided services. You will look at a recruiter connection to double check if he is indeed in contact with all the major investment banks as he pretend, not to double check he indeed worked at company X on project Y in the past.

The weighting should be almost the opposite for a recruiter. If he has worked 5 year in HR in a company 10 years ago, those connections are less interesting that the one he has made in his current position.

Problem is that all the use case are treated the same in linked in and most people mix and match different type of contacts in their connection.
I'm not sure what the cutoff should be, but at least a week. My smartphone uses less than 10% battery a day on standby. My last smartphone wasn't that different. And this isn't even in a spot with a good signal.

On the other hand if I let skype run on the data connection, it uses hundreds of megabytes of mystery data and burns out the battery in two days.
"Unfortunately, many organizations trying to be “Agile” struggle or fail because of a simple reason- they don’t grasp the fundamental differences between strict TPM by the book, what they are actually doing in practice that causes projects to fail to deliver value, and how Agile/Scrum is different from the two." --> Truth
The "S" models don't.

Which makes me glad that I didn't pay extra for that.
> I also think you're seriously underestimating the computational cost of converting the measured signal to a usable image. No way is an RPi fast enough to produce a live image with decent quality. There are quite a few papers in the literature about using high-end GPUs to speed up ultrasound imaging and denoising, for commercial vendors I'm guessing it's custom ASIC territory.

Really? Medical ultrasound has a long history predating high-end GPUs. Maybe that kind of computing power is required for modern high-resolution/low-lag devices, but my guess is you could get something usable with a computer as powerful as a RPi.

http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/history1.html
Or maybe you should not use IE5 for Mac to Dev in. Haha
I'm not talking about execution performance - I'm talking faster to develop for. It might be faster to get "hello world" running in JS but once you have a few people working on a project and need to do nontrivial stuff not provided by "JS framework X" (in this case React) you'll see the value of having sane language semantics, static typing, tools and a mature ecosystem (much higher quality than JS).
X86 virtualization in JavaScript, running in your browser and Node.js
Google Cast Is Coming to Vizio TVs