skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not exactly the same thing but I've actually been sitting on an idea for a mobile app that was inspired by Google: Essentially, you'd be able to look through your phone camera and draw on the world on the screen. Then other people could see your geolocated creations and maybe modify them. (I also considered autodecay for dense areas) I never did figure out the physics of how the projection would work or if the accuracy of GPS made it feasible, but I thought it'd be a good way to blend our real world and allow a sort of "virtual graffiti", a form of augmented virtual reality. As with all interesting ideas though, if you wait too long, someone comes and does it and I saw something similar on HN except with stickers also. As for how Google inspired it, their photo app lets you physically rotate your phone to pan around photospheres.

TiltBrush seems more of a pure creative endeavor meant for artists or anyone just looking to mess around a virtual world. I really much like how you can walk around the creation/space. The fact that it's three dimensional actually makes it more like sculpture than painting, though I"m sure there isn't anything other than parallax errors preventing 2D drawing. The granularity of the brushes seems to be good, so it will all come down to how well the hand controllers will work together with the headset. (hopefully not requiring surgery-like stillness just to get small details right, maybe by allowing adjustable head movement sensitivity)
Oculus Medium (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IreEK-abHio)
I enjoyed the knocking code:

One knock or silence (.) = “We are bad.”

I'm not sure you need a translation to know that no knocks = we might not be doing so great in this capsule here.
Of course it's a valid choice to go along with turning off ad blockers, that's always up to the individual. It might well be better, and less hazardous, to pay for content than be subject to ads.

This issue comes up re: science journals and whether it's appropriate to keep articles behind steep paywalls. The trend increasingly favors "open access" rather than having such important content restricted and inaccessible to the community at large.

It's a different thing when talking about buying material items online, in that case it's clear what one is getting for the money. By comparison is the content of most websites really worth paying for? Mostly I'd say the answer is "no", and that's the reason I would rarely choose to pay for content.

Ads are a way sites try to extract payments from sellers or third parties, but ultimately it's paid by site visitors one way or another. Since I choose not to pay directly because the marginal entertainment value isn't worth it to me, why would I go along with paying indirectly?

I think it's perfectly legitimate to use an ad blocker. No one is obligated to put up with ads just because sites want to make money. If sites refuse to serve content because of ad blocking, the visitor's loss is negligible vs. sites taking substantial risk of losing viewers and jeopardizing site viability altogether.

Sites have choices too. They can "clean up their act", police the ads they run, demand the ad servers/agencies eliminate ad-malware and intrusive tracking, etc. Choosing to monetize subscriptions, well, good luck with that, competition is ferocious, and subscribers probably sparse. Perhaps the internet was not really built to be "monetized" by the kind of ads we're talking about.

Edit: grammar
Reminds me of a first responder briefing I heard at an air show. The first job if a fighter was on the ground with a pilot aboard, after opening the canopy, the first two guys on the scene were to hold the pilots arms down. Nothing else mattered. Should he wake up and reach for those ejection handles ... bad things.
What’s Life Really Like an Ailing Unicorn? Zenefit Employee Perspective
Correct, but very unintuitive
This shameful piece could have only been written by someone who has forsaken their own human condition, reducing their sense of purpose in life to the biological imperative to “survive”. In the interest of “surviving”, people can do all sorts of dishonorable things, like adopting a servile attitude with those who covet (or, even worse, have already stolen!) what is rightfully yours, while turning a blind eye to the plight of your own kind. Fortunately, throughout history, there have always been people with a sense of duty to the collective to which they belong, and will prioritize that duty over opportunities for self-advancement. So not all hope is lost.
Look at how the military does technical training. It's quite different than traditional education. They're in a hurry, they're paying the troops, and they have a job ready for them.

The military approach involves far more physical aids than usually seen in education. Big boards where all the components of a system are laid out are common. There's lots of practice on mock-ups of real equipment. Simulators are common, and not just simulation programs. Many simulators have real system components and controls.

Here's a classic simulator for warship damage control.[1] This is a Royal Navy (UK) installation; the US Navy version is called the USS Buttercup.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGEl5DE_q1Q
I studied architecture. I can't wait to get my hands on this, it feels very much like the killer app for that niche. What separates the students from the men and women who have developed their "vision" is the ability to go back and forth between how you imagine a space will feel to walk through and the lines on the paper. This shortcuts that completely.

With some snap to line and plane functions, mirroring, copy-paste etc this would be pretty usable for rapid prototypes. Imagine importing the blueprint for a cathedral, drawing a few lines in 3D space to define its verticality then blowing it up to its true scale so you're standing in the pews.
Marketplace app Mercari nabs $75M to become Japan’s first startup unicorn
Well done.

I feel old, though.
React Hiring Guide
The concept is cool, but the supposedly-creative music is just annoying for being so generic.
In a new world war, assuming no nuclear wipe-out scenario, Google would indeed be drafted. Their effectiveness as a global entity would collapse rapidly however, as the global internet would be destroyed as a first stage target. Google would lose the vast benefits it has on global information, tracking, etc. Mostly what Google would be drafted for then, would be the sheer engineering talent - basically the government would want their skill, not Google itself per se. In the case of WW2, the government wanted the steel output and labor.
Did anyone else open this in chrome and get an error that the plugin wasn't supported?
Yep. MSYS2 uses pacman's support for GPG signatures. The links to the installers on the website don't use HTTPS, but it looks like they've added checksums of the installers to the website itself, which is served over HTTPS.
Aadhaar Bill to ensure privacy protection
Probably Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBMPC. Ray Duncan's Advanced MSDOS was another essential. If you want a bit more esoteric, The Undocumented PC by Frank Van Gilluwe.

I could name a few more but I probably shouldn't be admitting that I'm pulling these off my shelves :-)
What do you think I was referring to by "playing an institutional game of radioactive-hot-potato"? The places you mention are actually examples of failure.
What came first in modern systems was the ABI standards documentation, which for Linux is the System V ABI, which is apparently followed even on BSD.

http://wiki.osdev.org/System_V_ABI

So System V came out in 1983, which postdates the introduction of the x86 architecture because the IBM PC was x86 from day one and it first came out in 1981. (I'm sure the 8086 is older, but it doesn't really matter here.)

Of course, it isn't the only standard out there for x86. Microsoft exists, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions

Anyway, all of these standards have to specify which registers get saved by the called function and which get clobbered (and, therefore, must be saved by the calling function if their values are important) and you can't know which registers will exist on a given ISA until it exists, so the specific System V ABI for the x86 couldn't possibly have existed until the chips did. Ditto the System V ABI for the x86-64, the MIPS, and all of the other ISAs for which there is such a document.

However, chip designers aren't stupid. They know that their chips will be used to run binaries generated by C compilers, and that C compilers like stack frames and registers. Therefore, modern ISAs are designed with those things in mind, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least a few chip designers worked with one eye on some ABI documentation.

(Compare modern chips with older minicomputer and mainframe ISAs, where call stacks weren't always available and where subroutine calls sometimes involved self-modifying code. The PDP-8, for example, did subroutine calls by writing the the return address to the first (12-bit) word of memory in the subroutine, and then jumping to the address just past it; returning was a simple matter of jumping to a memory location loaded from a known address, but recursion was effectively impossible. The PDP-8 was a fine machine for assembly language programmers, but almost perversely unfriendly to modern mid-level languages, such as C and Pascal.)
I use git bash, with conemu, to be honest I don't do anything crazy but most of the linux commands I need day to day just work.
Ask HN: How big is the camera and lens rental market in US?
Have you read it? Is it worth reading?
Gen IV reactors offer a pretty alluring solution to the so-called waste problem. Being able to close the nuclear fuel cycle, and even consume existing nuclear waste from older reactors, would be much more effective than just locking it all away. Right now, we're only using about 5 percent of the energy in nuclear fuel, where we could be looking at something closer to 95 percent. Instead of looking at transuranics as a problem, we should look at them as a resource in themselves in the future.
Looking forward to the hit pieces about how this is a tool for criminals, layabouts, and Mexicans to slander and sabotage upstanding American employers.
Is it similar to what hololens is trying to achieve here: [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/aThCr0PsyuA?t=1m7s
Agreed...And my brain only read the first part of the title "A peer-to-peer website aims to disrupt..." before clicking through...only to finally acknowledge the "...author-services industry" part...Then after reading the first couple of paragraph dawned on me, that I should really read before I click. :-)
why are you relating moral relativism to life? i'm pretty sure you're the problem.
How about the Norton Editor? Anyone remember that? Great editor that was fast and had an absolutely tiny executable.
Martin Crowe dies in Auckland after battle with cancer
Alberta, the neighbouring province I'm a resident of is considering something "similar". Here is a great article by Macleans: http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/heres-what-w...

I for one, as a citizen am in favour of shutting down coal fired plants that add to the particulate count in my air. I will gladly pay the extra $300-$500 to get rid of it :)
Build, test, and launch your online idea in just 5 days
I've been pondering this myself recently, and decided to explore setting up my DNS-level adblocking in Bind using RPZ instead of my hosts file.

It was quite easy, and I now even use nsupdate to block new ad domains that show up so that I don't have to restart my DNS server to add new names to block.

I pondered making my server publicly available but had concerns about bandwidth, and other potential legal shenanigans. That said I couldn't put my finger on what exactly I'd get in trouble for if I made it public, so perhaps it's just FUD?
I've read the book and get your general point. However, having a hard time believing your math. Are you assuming 8% compounded annually? I have no idea how to do that.
Van Gogh Documentary to Be First Fully Painted Feature Film Ever Made
Very informative, thanks for the summary!
I hate to say this, but instead of recruiting and training people to paint in Van Gogh's style, how about training a neural network?

Still, intriguing project, I have to say.
Will you use Heap for a website or mobile app? Seems most of their client base are web-first.
The flaws (or potential flaws) in a given system are almost always more interesting to discuss than the ways in which it has succeeded. Praises ring soft, criticism is fun to debate.
A heap is a data structure used by the malloc() and free() functions to find appropriately-sized chunks of RAM to give to the rest of the program.

The defining feature of heap-allocated memory is that it's persistent up the call stack; a common newbie error in C is to return a pointer to something allocated on the stack, which will become invalid the instant the other function sees it: If a() calls b(), everything in b()'s section of the call stack is cleaned up when b() returns to a(), so if a() tries to dereference a pointer to something b() allocated on the stack, the program will die.

The flip side is that programmers have to manage this by hand, which is the cause of memory leaks. Garbage collection is used to mitigate this; to, at the very least, turn a program from one with quickly-growing memory usage into one with slow-growing memory usage.
`push` decrements the stack pointer on x86 architecture, unlike on ARM. The stack is strange in that it grows downwards. That is also why in the disassembly of the `blah` function the argument is temporarily stored in `ebp - 4` as ebp points to the top of the stack (which is at the lowest address).

I also wouldn't really say assembly follows the C stack pointer. The C language makes no assumptions about stacks, stack pointer or return addresses. It just describes "functions" to which the execution can be transferred and from which can be returned. How this is implemented, is up to the compiler designer and is platform dependent. I wouldn't be surprised to find out there were platforms without a stack/stack pointer but with a C compiler
Haven’t Done It Before? Don’t Claim It Is Easy Then
Tuesday Adi Shamir at the RSA conference said that this is not the right case for this issue and that Apple should help the FBI in this particular case and I completely agree. Apple also has screwed up as well and should admit it. Apple would not even be able to comply with the FBI's request with the proper security architecture. The iPhone should require user authentication before updating the software/firmware. If it had required authentication first, then the FBI would need to enter the pin before installing any software, preventing them from installing this vulnerable version of the software to crack the pin. Then Apple would not be capable of helping the FBI in this way aside from hacking the iPhone. I hope that Apple fixes this problem by requiring user authentication before software updates so they can put this issue to rest. And it looks like they probably are ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/apple-is-said-t... ) They can then avoid using this technique in the future and avoid putting their signing key at greater risk.

From a security risk standpoint, Apple's arguments are fairly weak. They argue that this binary could potentially be leaked and used on other phones, but this would not be possible if they implement the solution I have already stated. Maybe an adversary could infect an OS with this code using a security vulnerability, but if they can do that then there are worse things they could already do. The best argument I have seen is that doing this will result in Apple trying to comply with requests from the government in bulk, and in doing so create an environment in which Apple signs many copies of this firmware on a much more frequent basis, an environment which would put their signing key at greater risk. Again they would not need to do this in this case if they fixed the authentication problem.

Apple keeps trying to construe this as a backdoor but it isn't really a backdoor. It is a security vulnerability in Apple's security architecture and it is fixable. If Apple keeps pushing the backdoor issue then Congress may legislate on backdoors or the courts may make a decision on them, and likely not in our favor in this case.

This is not the right battlefield for Crypto Wars 2.0. This is a high profile and emotionally driven case with a mass shooting in which much of the public will side with the FBI simply on this fact alone. The phone is the property of the government, the gunman is dead and all of these facts work in the FBI's favor. We should be fighting this on our terms and not the FBI's.

Rep. Sessenbrenner was correct when he told Apple's lawyer during the hearing that "you are not going to like what will come out of Congress on this". If any legislation is passed we will most likely be in a worse situation than we are in now. The best thing Congress could do on this issue is nothing at all. And Apple is pushing them to take action.
In the land of the open office, there's no more cube dwellers.
3K Jailbreak Is  Jailbreak iOS 9.2.1 . – iOS Jailbreak Tools and Jailbreak Guide
This kind of idea crossed my mind a few years ago, but I thought smart phones and data plans were still out of the price range of day laborers. I was thinking along the lines of SMSing the license plate of any car driving up and getting back a rating via SMS. I also wondered about the blow back from "aiding illegals" in more conservative locales.

Someone should write the companion app to prevent wage theft from time clock workers. My understanding is that that problem dwarfs the theft from day laborers. The app would log GPS coordinates as a shadow time clock, and a back end that can ingest a time sheet and validate that the recorded times are correct.
Well, if nothing else, the coming VR cycle is going to be more psychedelic than the last.
Yes, it certainly looks like that. I had once attended their recruitment drive, in a college. It feels like their processes are screwed up.

We had 90 minutes for developing an application, language was of our choice, college had not bothered to set up the lab, then somehow we started, and they told we'd have 90minutes and then suddenly in 60minutes they came up and said okay we are done, now time to evaluate.

They rejected me because my code didn't compile, so nobody cares about your approach, it is like being in college where your architecture is shit, approach is shit, design is shit, we'll consider only when your code runs :D

I am happy I didn't get through. Also, for a company which looses crores of Rupees per year, it is a bad sign if they start using Mac books for development! Bootstrapping!
You could say the same about any other OS that isn't GNU/Linux.

Windows isn't the only one non POSIX and even POSIX ones do have substantial differences.
Actually I don't. According to Firefox help, "private" browsing avoids saving history of pages visited, searches, cookies, etc. It also activates tracking protection, but otherwise doesn't stop ads which is the point of using an ad blocker.

IOW since I'm the only user of this device, there's not much reason to use private windows. I do have tracking protection set "on" and use ad blocking in order to make browsing the wide open internet tolerable and a bit safer.
The future is worth less, and typically discounted at a rate of around 4% a year. So 25 years out is around 36%, 50 years is 13%, 100 years is 1.6%, 200 years is 0.02%...

If that seems a little extreme then consider using 1816's technology to plow a field, travel to Europe, send a message around the world, or treat a cancer patient, and consider whether or not it's 500x better or cheaper or faster. Remember that the hot new technology of the day is the steamboat but transatlantic voyages, Ireland to New York, still run on sail and might take around, say, ~25 days.
To the down voters: Your sarcasm and irony sensors may be due for a tune-up.
Can't we just bury the radioactive waste in the desert?
How the Internet flips and distorts our thoughts
Nicely done!

I suggest making a series of DIY videos and putting them up on Youtube, Instructables and Hackaday.

Youtube is the first place I head to when I want DIY approaches for any idea. Youtube results also appear to rank higher than blogs.

Instructables and Hackaday may bring you the pull requests you want.
Why does the word "victim" matter either way? We should treat drug abuse as a health matter; some people can have a few drinks and eventually get addicted and can't stop drinking every night, others are not affected that way. My mom smoked until she died from cancer, me I never smoked so I avoided the biological component of nicotine addition fortunately.
My mind is exploding with the possibilities this presents even for existing film and animation production pipelines.

Just one example: A layout artist being able to directly sketch into being the spaces and sets they envision, then being able to storyboard and block character animations by sketching with traditional animation techniques, but directly in the camera space.

Similar kinds of programs could be a revelation for modeling, rigging, and animating characters... it had never occurred to me till seeing this how awesome VR interfaces could be for that kind of artistic work.
Not a dumb question, but as the sibling comment reflects - it has been pondered before, and it is indeed a "dumb solution", unfortunately.

In addition to cost of launching such huge mass, and the risks of catastrophic failure (blowing up mid-launch would probably end up being worse than the chernobyl-distaster -- think a really, really big dirty bomb with areal detonation) -- there's also the risk of missing the sun, and ending up with a man-made comet.
Your Favorite Random Twitter Followers
I always just drew the stack downwards in school. Makes it easier to for that assignment to diagram the stack at level of deepest recursion, at least.
Founder of Streak here, love the idea. If you're making gmail plugin, we published the www.inboxsdk.com to make it really easy to make them. Happy to help if you have any questions/issues....
My friend grew up with this CEO's kids, and I can't believe this is being discussed here. For anyone that was aware of the situation when it was just an indictment it's one thing. But now with all the speculation after the death it is kinda creepy.
This book seems to say its 137Cs. Anyways TIL.
It shouldn't be surprising that we tend to measure charity by the sacrifice a persons makes, rather than the impact they have on the world.
One for the History Books: Microsoft Is Apple’s Greatest Ally Against the FBI
"Every self-respecting nation holds grudges, and bids her time until the time is ready to avenge them"

Why would you cherish irrational vengeance instincts. Psychologically, I understand long term grudges from any slight are considered pathological personality traits. It's much more healthier and productive to forgive.

As a society, people can be totally clueless and immoral - but this is no-ones fault, it's a species trait. Political leaders can use their position to drive their societies to do any silly thing.

One can hold political leadership morally and legally responsible for their countrys action. Nationalities are an abstract layer on the tribalistic basic mode of our psyche - where we ask, what is our team - and who is our big chief.

In general, we need to feel part of a group. But the need for vengeance is totally not necessary for a healthy psyche.
So basically the top 1000 (alexa?) is completely broken and insecure?
Yup. Too bad using noscript breaks the web though. An Adblocker will do for now...