skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was especially common on 8-bit and 16-bit computers to fake 'high colour' displays on machines that had only limited colour capability. They often took advantage of the fact that people were using their machines with TVs with relatively slow-changing phoshor screens, so the flicker was less evident than on a modern monitor.

e.g. Photochrome on the Atari ST, was especially impressive at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPsY4P8bnVw

The most extreme version I've seen of this was on the ZX Spectrum, which had not only a very limited 15 colour palette, but also limited to 2 colours within each 8x8 block of the screen. Some bright spark came up with the idea of flipping rapidly between R, G, and B frames to give (limited) per-pixel RGB. Unfortunately it did flicker quite badly because of the extreme changes in colour levels (only two levels of each channel), and the fact that it required 3 whole frames to make a single colour virtual frame.

Example here: (not suitable if you have photosenstive epilepsy!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Parrot_rgb3.gif
Model evaluation, model selection, and algorithm selection in machine learning
Working with large Mongo databases
The problem is that the cost of living is already extremely unaffordable and even more so in Vancouver. What could be a competitive advantage for either of these two cities in Canada is just not there. Sadly, the main major competitive advantage is a more lax immigration process over the US.
They're removing links to actual news articles.
Correct, but it's not "that" dangerous, since maternal death usually means the offspring dies as well (in a natural setting, without help)
> I don't mean that I can't solve problems. I mean I can't hold a conversation.

That sounds really hard. I'm sorry.

But I can't imagine any interview technique which would work reliably if you're brain dead during the interview.
Perhaps someone felt that the page layout was far enough off topic as to be a distraction or otherwise reduce the quality of the discussion.

Personally, I've found treating unexpected downvotes as editorial feedback on the quality of my writing helpful. I just assume that:

1. I didn't make my point clearly
2. My comment was low quality
3. Someone just disagrees with the point

In the first case, I edit or delete it. In the second case I just delete it...except in those cases when I deliberately make a low quality comment knowing it is likely to attract downvotes. The third case reduces to the other two in practice, though not so much in logical theory.
Pro tip: do everyone available for best results. ;)
Can anyone in the know comment on what made Austin's legislators pass these laws in the first place?
The shooter was an registered democrat[1], Muslim and his father said that his son got "angry" when he saw two men kissing[2].
So it's OK now, just a cultural misunderstanding. Islam is religion of peace.
[1] http://voters.findthedata.com/l/28019600/Omar-Mir-Seddique- Mateen
[2] https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/742007747349188608
Yes, agree when mods delete/remove comments that spreads false information or rumors. That's right thing to do, that's their task too.

But looks like these (r/news) mods first deleted threads and created a single thread (after 5-hrs?) and made it as sticky so that it will never reach the front page. Then started removing comment, almost everything. This is the most blatant form of censorship.
They really overstate their statistics by pretending each variable is independent.

6 bits from my screen resolution. Another 2 from browser plugin details. 5 from my Http_accept headers. 5 from system fonts. It's an iPad. Every single iPad is going to match on every one of those variables. You don't get to just add them up and say "Yep, 100 bits of info, I can uniquely identify this device!"

Similarly, the 10 bits of WebGL fingerprint and 7 of canvas fingerprint might narrow it down to a single model of iPad, but I doubt the "extra bits" of the canvas fingerprint tell you anything that the WebGL fingerprint didn't already.
Do you go anywhere else except to work? What about groceries? Doctor's appointments? School stuff? Etc...

It's hard to imagine that you never leave the house except for work.
There is that. And the fact that it is straightforward to extend an existing preemptive system to handle multiple CPUs, but not obvious how to do it with cooperative ones.

That said, there are many possible trade-offs between preemption and cooperation. It is old, but http://www.bitmover.com/llnl/smp.pdf made a good case for why SMP was the wrong way to scale to large numbers of CPUs. NUMA is a much better architecture. SGI demonstrated this in the 1990s with 1000 CPU machines. Unfortunately Linux took the SMP path like Solaris before it, and our performance is suffering as a result. :-(

An interesting historical note. Larry McVoy's thinking about how to handle contention lead him to thinking about a very, very slowed down version of it - distributed source control. This lead to a "side project" named BitKeeper. Move a few years later and that was a real product used for the Linux kernel. After some drama, he withdrew permission for Linux to continue using it for free and in response Linus wrote git. (Linus and Larry were always on good terms. The drama was between Larry and Jeremy Allison, of SAMBA fame.)
It's really too bad I Waterloo us not in Toronto. It would be like Stanford being the heart of SV or MIT being in Boston.
Meh. Its not clear to me this is news - its secondary reporting about an Intercept article that doesn't appear on the intercept front page nor on any other Scottish newspaper.
HN facilitates rational and typically civil discourse. As such it seems like an appropriate place to discuss non-tech issues which are of interest to a large portion of the user-base.
The guidelines also say:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Mass shootings in the US are not a new phenomenon. This is a mainstream news story, it doesn't belong here.
Was not my intention to imply javascript was a limiting factor. Nor that web frameworks for python, java, ruby, etc. are all that different. My comment was simply challenging the thought that a bootcamp is necessary for being exposed to technology. There are plenty of free resources online from which to learn. If a bootcamp helps jumpstart that, great. But picking up the next framework (while similar) will require diving in on your own.
We've come full circle. End of one cycle, beginning of another.
Out of curiosity: what's the difference between an error stack and a stack trace?
From the article:

“I'm constantly surprised by how many people don't know you can do this. It's amazing.”

I'm probably nitpicking, but sad to see this in the article. One of the things I love about Julia's writing otherwise is that it is free of this sort of 'I'm surprised that you don't know this simple thing.' expressions.
It is difficult to say if the media has any responsibility for informing the public of both viewpoints, rather than just a polarized version of one side. Media makes money when they get viewers / ad-clickers, and appealing to people's viewpoints, rather than making them uncomfortable by challenging those viewpoints, is the best way to engage users. Isn't it sad that very talented software developers are being used to find out ways to get people to click ads? Is this the world we envisioned as children when we were so captivated by computers and what we could do with them to make the world a better place?

I've seen sites that aggregate both sides of an argument, though [0] [1]. It would be nice to see Facebook, Twitter, etc. start an experimental feed that combines both viewpoints to promote civic discourse.

I've also pondered about online comments sections, and what changes could be made to improve the civility of the discussion. Too many sites let their comments go unregulated in that you have people writing messages with full caps or instantly accusing the President or other political figure of being fascist, neo-nazi, etc. Would a "blind submission" system work, where the user can only read comments after submitting one of their own?

With no rules in place for online comment sections and social media, I'm afraid those sites will continue to be childish cesspools of incoherent arguments, and will result in no meaningful discussion to challenge people's views.

[0] http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/
[1] http://debate.org
The fish always rots from the head.
What I use to handle state transfer from the server to the client is @rill/session along side @rill/loader. Check them out and feel free to ask me any questions (here or in the gitter!)
Are there pyramids in Antarctica?
"It's true to say that there would have been a lot more terrorist attacks"

Why is it true to say? I doubt there would have been more terrorist attacks. They definitely would have mentioned at least one such planned attack that was stopped as it is in their best interest to change public perception.

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-ha...
If you have a job offer, my impression is that it's fairly straightforward to get Canadian residency.

Government-funded healthcare (OHIP in Ontario) is extended to all residents. There is a three-month waiting period for it to kick in unless you are in one of several special groups, which you probably wouldn't be.

http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/public/publications/ohip/ohip...
http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/public/programs/ohip/ohipfaq_...
10 Essential Free Online Learning Sites
Open-source geo is really something right now
I don't think (c) "is" discouraged, so much as Dave Cheney doesn't like it. I think (a) and (b) are the best ways to do this, though.

Also: cards on the table: if there's no straightforward way to respond distinctively to different errors, I don't think error strings are really all that bad. I think it's reasonable to look at untyped errors as "this library function returns only one kind of error: it didn't work". A lot of legitimate interfaces are like that. Why spend extra effort typing their returns?
Yes, although there are other advantages to using Rust (about halfway down there's a "What does Rust offer here?" section that discusses in more detail).

Frankly, the POSIX C standard library does not seem to have been designed with safety in mind (I don't think this requires an expert eye to see). So writing it in Rust is going to require a number of compromises on Rust's safety.

Also, if I were taking this more seriously, the wildly unsafe Rust code would just be a beach head for a bottom-up conversion of a project. You have a project which uses strlen? Great, now use this Rust version. Now incrementally rewrite the strlen-using code in Rust. Now change strlen to use a Rust CString...and so on. Each time you identify a new module boundary, rewrite its dependencies in Rust, and then consume the module while preserving it's outward facing interfaces.
I think it's very likely that Uber and Lyft are going to revitalize the transportation industry by disrupting the old, taxi mindset; however, for everyone bemoaning the loss of Uber, the lesson of capitalism is that once a market gets discovered--or rediscovered--firms move in to exploit it.

The new services might be rocky at first, but competition in the marketplace should rapidly evolve them towards something better.
> Coding modulus from scratch with just + - / * is a fun little challenge in its own right, but it'll probably take you longer than 10 minutes to write it correctly and solve fizzbuzz with it.

I've seen numerous people fail on FizzBuzz despite supposedly being senior engineers.

None of them failed because they didn't know the modulo operator. For one thing, it's actually pretty easy to solve even without modulo.

If someone doesn't know modulo, I'll happily explain it.

More commonly, people struggle with even basic things like setting up a loop at all.
"Does every single screen need to have 60 fps animations, with activities that launch from the exact x/y coordinate where my finger touches the screen?"

This makes it sound like smoothly animating a few rectangles is hard. The only reason it is true is because the web stack is, for lack of a better word, complete crap. It was fine for rendering static text and a couple images with no graphics acceleration, I guess.

Today, AAA games can redraw complete frames of 3D worlds inside of 16.66ms (along with processing physics / gameplay / networking / input) and I'm supposed to accept slow and janky GUIs on my desktop?

I just can't. I tried Atom, and even though it's usable, it's not exactly snappy. The complete waste of my hardware's resources makes me too sad to enjoy any good feature it might have. The web is stuck with this, that's "fine" but could we keep the desktop out of it?
There was actually a vote - the people enacted these laws.
If the Atlantic was narrower, it'd have been settled long before (by Vikings, other Europeans, etc) and Her Majesty wouldn't be overwhelmingly likely to rule the whole of North America.
Supervised learning is what I'm talking about and it's not a solution to the frame problem. The human handler knows roughly the answers they looking for, and the machine learns details. The machine isn't discovering a new idea, it's just learning how to perform well inside a very small, well defined game that a human made.
Maybe Just Don't Drink Coffee
Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

1905 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9784470

David Bowie Has Died

1484 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879262

Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

1459 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646

Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

1373 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416928

How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

1249 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233730

and more...
top comment there now from the mods:
"Only comments breaking our rules are being deleted. If you think its more productive to cry about censorship then it is to discuss this horrifying event, we suggest you try another subreddit."

I think it's safe to say these are not the people you want moderating /r/news

(meanwhile, the top thread on at least my frontpage about it is now from /r/AskReddit, where they seem to be having a more reasonable discussion and are only deleting comments trying to doxx people)
Even beyond that, the fact that we are discussing courts and legal limitations, though they aren't perfect, is an example of the systems in place trying to work. One only has to look at law from any other angle to see that nothing is cut and dry regardless of the topic.

I too have worked on both sides of the game and the irony is that outside of the government it's far easier for me to get raw collection simply by buying a feed from one of the provider(s).

I've taken data from marketing firms that have extensive details on users that have been linked and culled from a myriad of databases sold by the big brokerage firms like Experian. There is far less governance when profitability is involved.

I only hope that in 75 years 1/10th of the work done is shared. Not everyone in the government is evil despite what people project.
In the Savings and Loan recession I had one of those jobs with unpaid overtime and an employer who was comfortable abusing it. I'd start a batch print job and go home. When I came back next morning picking up the paper off the floor was pure pleasure relative to baby-sitting the machines until midnight or more.
A Brief Guide to Participating in Open Source
Kik requires devs to be in Waterloo.
This is one of the better responses. Issues that arise: low # of data points at macro timescale, time series data (and local correlation between individual data points) making it hard to extract training/testing sets, and the overarching structural shifts in the market over time that invalidate older data (depending on context).
The source matters because there are two common types of vitamin D: D2 and D3. Sunlight lets you produce D3, while supplements are typically D2.

In food that's been fortified, it will probably have D2, while food that has natural vitamin D (like fatty fish) will probably have D3.

Although the two forms are metabolized through different mechanisms, the difference is negligible for most people. However, for some people (depending on genetics, diet, or lifestyle), supplemental Vitamin D2 will not be an adequate replacement for Vitamin D3.

[0] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/4/694.full
Mobile UX Design: What Not to Do
>Are we like gun manufacturers who can simply say "it's not our fault that our tools are used for evil?"

It's not their fault. You'd have to be an idiot to now understand what guns are for: they're weapons designed to kill people efficiently. They can be used for good or evil, just like cars. Some guy in a pickup just murdered 5 bicyclists in Michigan; should we ban pickups because of this?

The whole thing about suing gun manufacturers is incredibly stupid. They're producing a product that is a tool for a certain purpose; if that product is used successfully for that purpose, but for killing someone who's innocent, that's not the manufacturer's fault, it's the user's fault. If you don't like that, then you need to enact laws to limit who's allowed to buy guns, instead of holding manufacturers responsible for improper usage. Using the court system to bankrupt gunmakers is nothing more than abuse of the legal system because some people couldn't achieve a political victory and get a legislative solution. If you really don't want people to have guns at all, then you need to ban guns from being sold to civilians, not allow it willy-nilly and then allow them to get sued. It's asinine. It's like allowing liquor store owners to sell to minors and then allowing them to be sued when those minors get drunk and do stupid stuff. If you don't want kids drinking, then pass a law forbidding it; don't muddy up the court system with BS cases because you couldn't figure out how to pass a law fixing the problem.

Personally, I do think we have done a poor job in limiting who has access to guns, but abusing the court system is not the answer. The answer is to pass better laws, get better background checks, etc. If you can't do that, you need to find some better candidates that people actually want to vote for.
Okay, that's pretty bad if it leaks the actual platform. My assumption was that that the way they spoof the platform (and related values) in windows.navigator and the user agent would apply here as well. If that's not the case, that fingerprint protection is pretty much useless.
The only controversial thing in your post is the last paragraph. This part will be the least talked about and thus demonstrate your overall point.
They were originally covering it, it only started getting censored when the gunman's religion was identified as Islam. I can sympathize with combating racist comments. I will not sympathize with people blatantly censoring the news because it doesn't flow with their politics.
We should not be teaching blindly following an absolute in any science. There is always doubt, and if counter evidence exists it should be presented not swept under the rug because a majority disagree.

Equal time? No. Should it be discussed? Absolutely yes.
One technique I've experimented with is iteratively diffusing errors not just towards un-visited neighbors below and to the right, but also into the future. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. [1]

It works nicely with video, and it makes still images (and images you're slowly panning and zooming with the Ken Burns effect [2]) look alive and detailed, as if they were live video.

Another variation of the serpentine scanning (aka boustrophedon transform [3]) you can apply when iteratively dithering an image is to rotate the scan direction 90 degrees each frame, so even frames scan horizontally, odd frames scan vertically, and the vertical and horizontal scan directions rotate round every four frames. That results in a completely uniform diffusion, even when each scan frame only diffuses errors to the next cell.

It spreads the error out over time, as well as space, which has a pleasing effect on the eyes, I think. Any one frame has artifacts, but they tend to cancel each other out over time, break up the log jams, and dance around local minima and without getting stuck at fixed points.

I've implemented some 8 bit anisotropic heat diffusion cellular automata, that exhibited a subtle drift because of the scan order. But rotating the scan order 90 degrees each frame completely eliminated the subtle drifting effect I was getting when using a fixed scan order. Here's a discussion about it I had with Rudy Rucker [4] who inspired some of the rules and pointed out the problem, and a demo [5], and source [6].

Here's one of my favorite spooky Heizenbugs:

>The original version of this code written in C running on a Sun did have an interesting bug: I was not initializing the "error" accumulator that carried the leftover of the average from cell to cell, so when different kinds of background activities were happening on the Sun, the error accumulator got initialized from the stack frame with a random undefined value! I noticed it when every time I typed to a terminal window, the dithering shivered! It was really spooky until I figured out what was going on!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb6H14gVWjM

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon_transform

[4] http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator

[5] https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
Track record helps. But anyone can make an argument based on evidence.

Argument based on evidence + person I like = persuasion.
Yep, the only treatment that makes sense, isn't even discussed in this journalistic article (or, even by medical professionals).

These claims seem like they would be pretty easy to verify with some recording equipment.
Eye witnesses aren't reliable, to be frank, even in court they aren't weighed heavily as evidence. So, I don't mind moderating that sort of thing, especially if the live update might actually put more people in danger, or if it perpetuates a rumor.

That being said, the Reddit mods on /r/news aren't moderating those comments...they are actually moderating legitimate news sources that were reporting possible ties to radical Islam or ISIS. We do know from the FBI he actually called 911 before the attack and pledged to ISIS, so that's not something you can dispute. We also know he was under investigation, at one time, by the FBI. Yet the Reddit mods have chosen to delete those comments or sources.
Most online communities fall apart when they hit a critical size.

I only visit a few small topical reddits now, like Space and SpaceX. Those are decent.

HN is YC's kingdom. I expect a certain bias here and factor that in, but it's remained interesting and has avoided melting down into a total echo chamber or dumb meme cascade.
It's interesting that somehow we all think we can immediately divine the motivations of someone who kills a bunch of people when very often it takes a lot of time and investigation by police and prosecutors to determine motive in a court of law. It's not at all surprising that the conversations immediately following something like this are colored by politics. Was the shooter motivated by religious extremism? Was he motivated by hatred of LGBT people? Was it caused by too-liberal gun laws? Could it have been prevented by someone carrying concealed in the club?

Really, who cares? Why are so many people more concerned with framing future political arguments about causes and solutions? None of it actually helps the victims or helps prevent future incidents.
Talking the valley's talk