skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW I've been following this story for a long time and here is what I think the situation is.

Early on the uBeam folks built a pretty low power acoustic transmitter/receiver that could, over a relatively short distance, actually deliver a charge to a phone. Not a super useful charge but, you know, something. Based on this demo and some handwaving (and maybe a bit of math) they went out and said "something that delivers more charge is possible. give us some money and time and we'll work out the engineering." Mostly they raised money on this. Likely without a ton of due diligence.

The actual engineers working on the project (including the one in this "spat") at some point realize the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise. But they still think "a useful product is possible here." Maybe you can deliver enough to charge a phone overnight while it sits on your coffee table. That could actually be cool? Maybe?

Meanwhile the PR machine gets going and, as so often happens, the exaggeration kicks in. Those that haven't been here themselves look at it and see LIES. I have a more nuanced view. The press can misunderstand and distort things on their own side. And then if you don't refute it fast enough then you almost have to support it. Not saying this is ok, but I can see how it happens. The statements about what is possible just get out of hand and then you're stuck with them.

So behind the scenes some of the engineers read the press and go "WTF, this is insane, I'm out!" Others say "well, that's all bullshit, but this overnight charger thing could be useful. So I'm gonna keep my head down and work on that. If we can get it to the point that we can release a commercial product then we'll see what the actual market is." Inevitably actually building a commercial product takes longer than you think. These are just normal engineering delays. No "trying to defy physics" type delays.

Which brings us to the present day. Almost certainly what has been hyped is not real. But there might be something less good there. Maybe. If they can balance the tradeoffs between input power, actual power delivered, distance and safety. That's real engineering work right there.

All just speculation. Take it for whatever it's worth.
That change of equality is more or less inevitable. Imagine a line of humans as far ahead of us as we are of dogs. They're certainly going to have their own ideas on how to use the resources of the world and will almost certainly think they know what is best for the rest of us. (Hell, there are plenty of modern day humans who already think that about their peers.)
Show HN: The biggest news each day in 1500 words and 50 links
"In this forum" being the key operative words. A bug tracker is supposed to be a tool to help software developers to get stuff done, first and foremost. Even at the best of times, it's not ideal to use it for end-user support, and it's especially bad for contentious discussions about product direction or organizational policy.

Just look at bug trackers for large projects like Chrome. Any time there's a bug report or feature request that attracts lots of attention, without heavy moderation, the technical content is quickly drowned out by me-too-ing and angry rants.
Even if the technique for synthesizing a human genome was available literally tomorrow, it would still take a few decades for the first genetically synthesized human to be born, to grow up and to get an education before it becomes useful to anything.

That would leave lots of time for non-biological AI to catch up.
"Strong opinions" works for me. Are those still allowed here?
The person that would be the result of such modifications would most likely have serious psychological issues and probably other problems that we cant even imagine.

We are like kids playing with loaded machine guns, currently we are working on removing that fiddly thing called a safety.

And we're like how hard can i be, our parent mother nature does it all the time.
I was trying to figure out the actual angle here because the challenger couldn't have been that stupid. I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Wiki says it's in a resonance with Neptune (Pluto is as well, and Eris might be), so probably "not that close".
Declassified documents detail 9/11 commission's inquiry into Saudi Arabia
As you said that's a mentality that exists already among many people. It's more of a political issue than a technological one.

I personally believe that smart people don't feel any need to get privileges of any kind, since they are by definition more capable to attain their goals anyway. You may not give a dog lots of rights, but you don't see it as a threat or a competitor either.
I run a software agency with 8 peeps, and we all log time using Toggl. We have a bot that then sync's with Jira tasks - and generally we find this pretty painless.

For the benifit of being able to do accurate estimation comparisons, retrospectives, hunt time vampires etc - I personally think it's worth it.
this feels similar to the overhead of an escript
> They're certainly going to have their own ideas on how to use the resources of the world and will almost certainly think they know what is best for the rest of us.

And nothing will stop them from pursuing political and business careers at equal terms with the rest of us. Of course, their superior genes will let them get ahead, but regardless, that's what already is happening - more genetically smart and charismatic people can get into positions of power easier than others, and we seem to be quite OK with it.
Spacex Completes Hard Barge Landing for Second Time
Well, when the real you moved up from a prior position, or has consulted for the company for a few years, or has worked at the company multiple times in the past and kept in touch with old managers, sometimes it's less of a "let's discuss whether it will work" and more of a "you mean you're finally saying yes?"
No. In addition to the others, another link of interest might be on etendue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue
no less than dykstra was convicted of grand theft auto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_Dykstra

I think you mean Dijkstra, who did say that, because of an argument with mathematicians about indexing from 1.
It is still possible to generate diffs. You can convert doc files to plain text or HTML with openoffice and compare text versions.

Or, even better, new .docx format is actually XML so it can be diff'ed too. You just need a good UI to display diffs.
> One solution might be if the statically-linked program included an nscd client, since most people using NSS+LDAP will be using nscd for caching.

No, that's not OK either; many people use other NSS modules, including mdns (for .local names), resolve (for local resolved support), resolving "localhost" (via "myhostname"), and resolving local container hostnames.

If you want to resolve any of the things NSS supports, use NSS.
Also in downtown San jose, you can change the colors of the lights on The88 building:

http://www.siliconvalleylofts.com/blog/living-in-downtown/cr...
> the City is an endlessly
> useful haven for all sorts
> of companies and individuals
> to escape financial scrutiny

Can you cite a single meaningful difference in the financial regulations a company in The City vs one in Southwark faces?
Absolutely most certainly yes all three of those things.

Nefarious: government is, I contend, only that group of criminals we have collectively decided we would be better to regulate and pay off. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, we certainly need some regulation and law enforcement, etc.

Diabolically clever: the word means 'characteristic of the devil' - government is responsible for torturing people, killing people in pointless wars, etc.

Cartoonishly inept: for sure! you only have to go outside, pick up a news paper, browse a news website, to see how incompetent government can be.

But, we tend to speak of 'government' as some cohesive whole, which it most certainly is not. Is any one branch or agency of government all three of those things at all time? I don't think so. Some parts of government do a fine job of administering their responsibilities, some of the time. Probably. Maybe.
One thing to keep in mind is that scientific computing languages often have people using them who are not programmers, and who will not be "rolling their own multidimensional arrays."

If they're used to R, MATLAB, or basically any statistics programming/scripting language ever, not only will they be expecting 1-based indexing, they might not even know that that's a thing they have to think about.
Unless they would immediately build a spaceship and leave for a better place, it is obvious they would look at us as under-race that is heavily polluting and destroying the same planet they are force to inhabit.

While some might think, "oh well they would just guide us on how to treat Earth better and we all gonna live happily ever after", I would rather bet there would be no good reason for such investment on their part; you don't invest time and energy into training monkeys not to leave the Zoo perimeter; you just put high fences and plug them to electricity.

Honestly, and selfishly, the better race of human is just that - a better version of humans. Sadly I personally would accept their superiority.
That's incorrect. The dwarf planet designation only removes the "must have cleared its orbit" restriction that planets have. They must still be in hydrostatic equilibrium.

Non-spherical objects can still be in hydrostatic equilibrium due to centrifugal forces being anisotropic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet#History_of_the_co...
Show HN: Fare Feedback – trade your expert feedback for a cheap ride
I agree about pro/niche reviewers. A few sites I've used: dpreview.com (cameras, though owned by Amazon now, I think), rtings.com (TVs, and they're adding headphones), and sleeplikethedead.com (mattresses). I am sure they have their biases, but they're good places to start. (And you learn a lot about what the various features/materials/buzzwords actually mean.)
Apple confirms reports of potential bug in iTunes; patch expected next week
This is a common response but it's not addressing the core issue.

Bugs and vulnerabilities are discovered every day in the layers that can be independently verified. Your argument extends to every single piece of software everywhere that runs on Intel and AMD microprocessors, for instance. It's foolish to say that an OpenSSL instance shouldn't be examined because the network interface it communicates over uses a proprietary firmware blob, or runs on Windows, for instance.

I agree that the freedom to verify the behavior of (what amounts to) firmware is not one of the Four Freedoms, but there is a non-zero value in being able to find bugs and help the manufacturer improve the product, as well as being able to use that information to inform a purchasing decision. Especially for something which could potentially be considered to provide organizational security.
I beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom I had created.
He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be
called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some
inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have
spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to
detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the
courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained
during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest
agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as
if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which
I had so miserably given life.
I always wonder why in general there is such a distrust / avoidance of marketing in tech communities.
It's possible to do automatically this by using a SIMD library such as libsimdpp (https://github.com/p12tic/libsimdpp). Everything is mostly abstracted away and you just write the SIMDified code once and add a CMake rule that builds the same file for several architectures, sets up dynamic dispatch and links everything together.
Secret Android Utility App Gold Rush of 2016
> I think part of this problem is the community, multiple people have reported having bad interactions with core language devs.

I can only think of a couple of instance where I've heard anything like this.

The first and most prominent is Dan Luu. I'm very sad about losing him from the community. I've met him a couple of times in person, I still read his blog and I very much respect him. I don't think any of us have the full story of what happened there, but I sincerely hope that time may be able to smooth things over.

The second was in an HN comment that I just went back to find, and discovered that is was you. I'm sorry if you had a bad experience with the community. I know my perspective is biased, but I've rarely interacted with a community that's as passionate, helpful and friendly as the julia community (LLVM is up there as well).

As for documenting the process, I agree there could be some improvement there. We do have a contributors guide (CONTRIBUTING.md in the main repository). As for policies for feature inclusion, we've considered having more formal code owners for parts of the code base (right now there's mostly de facto code owners for various parts), but haven't found it necessary so far. I definitely expect some of this to be discussed at JuliaCon in June.
So, if I receive an ACH payment on a contract, I'm at risk of my bank pulling the funds from my account for 60 days?!
And to think Larry Page wanted to be a "good net citizen" with his user-agent string:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...
Hinton, "How the brain does back-propegation": https://youtu.be/kxp7eWZa-2M?t=38m13s
All Your Hashes Are Belong to Us
Because he founded the Free Software Foundation, not the Free Products Foundation. At some point, you have to define the term "software" in order to focus your mission, and given the Four Freedoms that underpin the notion of Free Software, the current definition is apt.

That's not to say that there isn't value in open hardware, and certainly it's not a bad idea to advocate for open designs. It's just not part of the FSF's mission.
I didn't even know this existed, and now it's gone! I've been looking for something like this for awhile and would gladly pay for it. The few similar things out there are all clunky, slow, and just not up to the task. I'd throw in $50 or so just for this if it worked :)
It's original discoverer, Mike Brown, wrote a few blog posts about this object back in 2011 that are worth reading: http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2011/08/redemption-of-snow-...
They should have told you that $20 bills are like electrons: Every one of them is the same one. :-)
Opencv doesn't provide convolution-based resampling. Only supersampling with INTER_AREA flag, which is comparable to BICUBIC for high-ratio downscaling. So, such statements don't make sense without exact code :-)
Here's the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03090
How does this compare to OpenSCAD?
The current Julia version is 0.4.5 =).
Largely triggered at disgust with Peter Thiel's support of Donald Trump.
> GPL (which uses a "copyleft” approach)

Are there really people who understand what "copyleft" means, but need to be reminded what the GPL is?
Jeremy Hitchcock's Last Tweet as CEO of Dyn
I've done symbolic AI work. It's great within limits. Deep learning on its own isn't the complete solution either, but statistics and learning are more important than symbolics for achieving breakthrough performance.

I'd invite you to read "The Master Algorithm" to understand exactly how they failed the first time and how they aren't the route forward: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Algorithm
I'm surprised they got as far as they did with such a weak idea.
But you can take even normal audio and blast it loud enough to generate some trivial power in a receiving microphone. Phased-array/beam-searing is known technology.
You can google and see that she was doing the PR circuit and making some grandiose statements herself.
You can't just tackle a hard problem, take in lots of money, produce nothing and say "oops, technology is hard".
And shouldn't they have " realize[ed] the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise" before they took the money and started the engineering?
Getting 90% of the way to the finish line, but getting beaten there by a competitor is a normal business failure. Getting 0% of the way there, but putting out lots of PR is a con job.
And with a better understanding of the basic physical laws of the universe, things that were once thought impossible may become possible. One day, perhaps, even the speed-of-light constraint will need to be revised in light of newfound physical knowledge.
I don't understand why they couldn't simply release the app without the money transfer part, and it would just keep a tab of how much the parent owes the kid. Then, when the parent gave cash or whatever, the debt would just be wiped.

Pretty much "freshbooks for chores".
Having had this same conversation in the past:

I want to say thanks for all the hard work!

Regardless of anyone's rationalizations about 1 or 2 or X tools, having great tools exist is most important!
Way back in 2001 I was part of a 2 person team to sell traffic video monitoring systems to Manila. They were ISDN (H.320) based... I wouldn't be surprised if they're still running.
This is a good point and frankly the reason why I started to learn more about AWS.

Having said that, Laravel, is the fourth most popular framework on GitHub (Rails is second) and that's built with PHP.

There are too many AWS services to just offer AWS Consulting on its own which is why I felt compelled to look at something which combines both...
Police: Are you a law abiding citizen?
You: No
Police: Come with me, please.
I've gotten 400(+)x speedups by going from python to python.

Original program was 50min in python, 1 min pypy

After figuring out some inefficiencies that were O(Nsquared), it was 3 seconds in python

This was timing for a case where N was much larger than my normal cases, where run time had been a couple seconds with the original version and optimization didn't really matter.
> You should look at old school DSP code some time. :) Some of that is translating from variable names in mathematics papers.

I feel that is sort of a valid exception. If it is common notation in the field you need to be familiar with anyways or you are implementing from a specific source, not using short names adds another layer of mental translation. If I'm implementing an algorithm from a paper I put an "implementation based on: <citation/URL>" on top and try to match it as closely as possible. (DSP code probably doesn't do the latter, because performance, but where possible)
> what scenario are you imagining where startup times would be a significant concern?

Starting a REPL or running a computation that doesn't take long time, adjusting parameters, re-running. Startup time may not be too big in absolute numbers but it's noticeable and adds up quickly especially if you start using more packages rather than toy programs that I used as an example.
Git: Internals of how objects are stored
Planetey McPlanetFace you pleb. ;)
Brazilian banks do that. Nearly all of them. It is a major pain.

Some are moving away from them, but installing spyware instead.
That is until things like this happen:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak
I am completely clueless when it comes to finance regulations, but how does "sends cash in a registered mail envelope" not raise any red flags for people?
dando o teu cu
Money. Doing biology research is expensive.

You'd have to find a country that cares about blue-sky health research and not bioethics, which sounds tricky. Despite the hype, this sort of technology wouldn't have any useful immediate applications- even if we could make a human with a complete custom genome, we don't have a good idea a what genes to give him/her in order to produce useful qualities like intelligence, strength, etc.
There are a few factors involved. If this is your personal checking account you're almost (lol) 100% safe.

If this is a merchant account which it needs to be if you're pulling from other ppl's accounts then yes. Hence the very strict consent rules. At the end of the day there's no guarantee of course but if it comes to litigation a recorded message with a verbal approval might tip the scale in your favor. Most merchants don't bother of course and just write this off as a cost of doing business and recoup the funds by factoring fraud costs into their prices.
Numba acceleration is way too brittle as of now.
Because we are so far off being able to simulate biological systems it is easier to do other things.

There is some work in this though, but often going the other way: see for example http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/brain-dish-flies-pla... and even more extreme http://www.nature.com/articles/srep11869
Upcoming product, sounds promising:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1048259057/openkey-the-...
1 standard deviation difference in group distributions of intelligence already seems to result in vast disparities in power, control of resources, etc.

I shudder to think how a greatly magnified version of that will turn out.
I'm not sure why they couldn't have used Stripe's "send money to debit card" feature [1]. Or they could have integrated with Paypal's API. Or they could have integrated with Square Cash, for near-instant debit card to debit card transfers [2].

Finally, they could have simply kept track of a kid's balance for their parents, and made a button to send mom and dad a push notification that they would like their money the next time they are together. That probably would have been the most useful of all these things.

They certainly didn't have to let the fact that they couldn't do things exactly as seamlessly as they wanted be a startup killer. I have had this attitude in the past, but then I would look around and discover people doing similar things with great success, using the alternative methods around roadblocks that I had dismissed as unacceptable.

If they really wanted to pursue this project, they could have done it.

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/send-money-to-debit-cards

[2] https://cash.me
> “Our ability to understand what to build is so far behind what we can build,’’ said Dr. Minshull, who was invited to the meeting at Harvard but did not attend. “I just don’t think that being able to make more and more and more and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper is going to get us the understanding we need.’’

As point of comparison, consider how well any of us would understand software engineering if it cost thousands of dollars to compile a program. That is the potential impact of this technology- talk about using this to create super-humans or whatever is pure hype and/or scaremongering.
My idea is instead of having review why not show the percent of orders that were returned. That would give you sense of the quality.

Another idea is to randomly select customers who actually ordered the product to leave a review. Since it's random you wouldn't have the self selection problem of people getting paid to leave reviews.
Honestly, we need to start changing the laws to prevent patent abuse. If your patents become part of a must-implement standard (with your permission, of course, mpeg-la members have obviously given theirs), then your patents become null for anyone implementing that standards, ie, you are forced to license them for free.

Using patents like this is pretty much the patent equivalent of entrapment.

Also, why isn't Vysor just using the HMTL5 facilities to use hardware h264 enc/decs?