skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
would make a cool battlefield ambulance if it could fly itself, just needs a bit more endurance.

Curious, at what speed the rotors must go so that if you kill all power it doesn't plummet. How high would that fail altitude actually be
Yes, but mainly commercial stuff. It costs 3-10x what the consumer appliances cost but it's usually actually secure and stable. Aruba, Ruckus, Cisco, Meru, etc.
I think you nailed it: hackers don't want to write blog posts saying "damn, this thing was pretty well made".

Perhaps an open-source effort to document & track what work has been done, even if it's just pulling firmware images and taking a look around. Maybe some kind of gamification to motivate researchers to pull things apart and report what they see.
The "hypothetical minimal genome"...was actually a backronym because we called it the "hail mary genome" but decided that was inappropriate for publication.

One in-house ORM I worked with was called TFP, because it was entirely written on a plane ride to Houston, and they named it TFP because the authors liked to say they wouldn't touch it again with a ten foot pole. Their company later thought about trying to sell it, with the name "Technique for Persistence."
I'd like regulation agencies to mandate, as a condition of market entry, for each and every electronic product:

1) Full firmware source code and required toolchains/sign keys/... be submitted to the national libraries, to be kept for secure archival until the device is officially unsupported by the manufacturer.

2) For networked products, the full source code must be either published, or licensed institutes must perform a security check.

3) There must be provisions in place to ensure timely reactions in case of security issues. If the manufacturer does not respond to security issues, national libraries have the right to release the source code.

4) Required tools, service manuals, datasheets etc. must be submitted to the national libraries.

This should basically kill off GPL-abusing companies, as well as ensure serviceability, even for discarded products.
Wasn't he referring to the phone app that integrates with the plug? I wasn't sure either.
Because gulp, grunt are not real build systems, they are glorified scripts that do whatever, there is no tracking of dependencies, nothing. Make isn't a cryptic syntax it's a quite simple language that took me about a day to understand fully.
I read the headline and thought he was kept in the dark and fed excrement by Stalin.
You called Gruber's article "amazing apologism," and I'm responding to that alone. We're pushing things a bit far if we characterize any of the things you've listed here as either amazing or apologism.

Gruber is not just arguing pro-Apple and saying this is the right decision. Indeed, he even says maybe "Apple is making a mistake," and goes on to include several serious problems with it.

Gruber's post is a reaction to Patel's characterization of Apple's move as user-hostile and "stupid." His reply is not, "Here's why I say Apple is right to make this move." Rather it is, "Right or wrong, and like it or not, here's some sober perspective on why Apple would/could do such a thing."
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952855 and marked it off-topic.
Agree about slippery slope. There has been so much misinformation and propaganda spread that some people are now convinced that a fork to change any consensus rule could lead to the change of any consensus rule - even the 21M coin cap. The result is that the community has become polarized and toxic over something that ought to be noncontroversial.
> in the tech industry you are often rewarded for changing your job regularly.

That only works when you're early in your career (< 5 years experience, beginner to intermediate). You hit a wall fairly quickly after that. Also, in those five years, you hit your 80% learned with 20% of the effort. After that, you can learn and earn far more by making your own products and selling them. Or starting your own company.
My summary is that if I see a ball lightning coming, I'm going to run.
The abstraction behind Scribble is to treat documentation as a compilation phase analogous to Racket's macro-expansion phases. Matthew Flatt talks about it in this video: https://vimeo.com/6630691

He wrote Scribble to scratch his own itch...or rather remove his own pain from having to maintain LaTeX based documentation for Racket/MzScheme. To me, the proof is in the pudding: Racket's documentation is exceptionally good pretty much from top to bottom despite the breadth of projects that fall within the standard download.
> When I read this, I can't think of anything else but Scala fatigue

The language is evolving and learns from its mistakes and incompleteness - isn't it a good thing?

> What subset of Scala? what libraries? what build system? apparently if things worked well, there would be at just one true - and well respected - answer for these.

1. Scalazzi safe Scala subset(https://imgur.com/a04WoHn), 2. the libraries fitting the job, 3. SBT(maven is a mess). But solving everything with a hammer isn't clever...

> So now I ask, honestly, why not go with Kotlin (https://kotlinlang.org/)? a language that IMHO didn't try to rule the world from day one (a Good Thing)

Yes it tries to do that. Today it's a trend for each tech company to roll out its own java/c/c++ copy as the holy grail.

> aesthetics

It's relative - try to build a large enough project and you'll see that Kotlin is just like Java. Some boilerplate has been removed but not a big update.

> abstraction

Kotlin and the abstraction - the same as in Java.

> power

What power? It's 20% of Scala's features and 10% of its power. Kotlin and Scala are uncomparable due to their design - the first one's goals are a less boilerplatish java while the other one is a hybrid oop+fp programming language concentrating on flexibility, typesafety and expressivity.

> Can someone convince me to still use Scala when Kotlin is around?

If you care about DSLs, expressive and abstraction powers, typesafety and functional programming then use Scala.
How corporate organizations use floor() and ceil() functions
Isn't that the idea of open source software? The best maintainer is the one in charge.

I don't think Linus would object to someone replacing him if anyone was more qualified for the job. Hell he even openly encourages people to fork Linux, make improvements, and follow the license (copy left).

I see nothing wrong with the most active/best maintainer having say over the project's future.
For the purposes of this discussion, Norvig has defined a statistical model as:

"a mathematical model which is modified or trained by the input of data points."

He then illustrates how what would be considered a "scientific" model, Newton's law of gravitation, is a statistical model under his definition, but simple one with not many parameters. He contrasts this with a Markov model of a communication channel with a large vocabulary, which has many parameters. His argument is, then, that Chomsky dislikes statistical models with large numbers of parameters, as stated in the passage I quoted before.

My point was that Chomsky's concerns are, with reference to Norvig's argument, equivalent to concerns about model fitting, namely that to fit models with many more parameters than you have data, you require additional assumptions about your model structure. It is difficult (though not necessarily impossible) to learn about the system from your model, because in order to construct your model you have had to assume things about reality that you will not be verifying against observations.

In the opposite case, where you have many more data than parameters, you can fit your model with confidence, given only assumptions about your sampling (which you address by being a good experimentalist). This is what allows you to "learn about the underlying system" - you have a model that describes reality well by itself, without requiring additional assumptions about the nature of reality, so the structure of your model reflects something about the structure of reality, and you can explore your model as though you were exploring reality. Of course, sometimes it turns out the equivalence wasn't as good as we thought, but often it provides us with new directions of investigation.

Hopefully that clarifies the equivalence between the two statements - I apologise for not making it more obvious earlier.
That's not what "static typed" means.

Static, referring to types, means at compile time, or before runtime, the types of variables and assignments can be verified; no invalid assignments are possible.

What you have here is dynamic typing; you can't verify the types until runtime, and then you throw an exception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#DYNAMIC
The impression I got was that the property was listed, not engaged.
Snapchat replacing TV advertising was addressed on Stratechery last year: https://stratechery.com/2015/old-fashioned-snapchat/
Well, we are on a something.ycombinator.com website right now... why don't you throw together a prototype, register a company, and present to ycombinator?
Something about dying in a crashed aircraft that was piloted by someone in a comfy seat 2000 miles away bothers me.
For professional looking docs, you can still write them in Markdown, and then have Pandoc process them into LaTeX. Pandoc even lets you put raw LaTeX commands into your Markdown.
10 Great Programming Languages for Mathematics
This will likely never be the case due to how HTTPS actually works. As someone else stated, HTTPs is HTTP + TLS.

The "s" in HTTPS is for "secure", and TLS provides that security.

TLS is a evolving standard which is updated over time to add new features when necessary. When HTTPS is negotiated, it can seamlessly choose which version of TLS to use, based off what the client and server want to use.

So, HTTPS will never die due to lack of features. A new version of TLS will just be approved and deployed, and newer devices can use that while older devices can get by on an older version of TLS.

TLS is the successor to SSL. They are backwards compatible, so devices that support TLS also support SSL. The full version history, from newest to oldest, is: TLS 1.2, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.0, SSL 3, SSL 2. In reality, very few servers still use SSL 3 or SSL 2, due to known weaknesses, but colloquially, all the versions are just called "SSL".

TLS 1.3 is underway and will shortly be ready for primetime. Firefox and Cloudflare have already written some implementations based on the draft spec (sorta how routers will implemented the newest 802.11 standards before they are 100% official).
Thanks for that last paper, epic!

Perhaps a good moment to refer to this one:

Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3148211/
The problem there seems to be not one with statistical models, but with the fact that extracting a parisomonious mathematical model from a neural net is nontrivial (presumably, you can extract a mathematical model from the internal weights, etc., but for even known simple relationships neural net models produced without an a priori prediction of the general shape of the relationship tend to be very complex.)

Of course, were the model really 100% accurate, then converting it to a the most parsimonious perfectly accurate model would be simply a matter of reduction; the real problem is that real neural net models are not 100% accurate, and are often far more complex than more accurate models, and often aren't convenient to analyze to deduce the more-accurate and simpler model.
Dropbox adds a document scanner and a bunch of new productivity features
The theory of Prof. Aguste Meessen published well before Wu's article in Nature already explains ball lightning as a plasma bubble [1]. It is surprizing that Wu didn't reference this work in its introductory review.

In its most simple form the thin layer of the bubble is a plasma made of electrons oscillating radially. Like soap bubbles, a plasma bubble may have multiple ecapsulated bubbles.

A plasma ball is a dynamic system at an equilibrum using ions like ozone as energy source. The plasma ball will follow ions gradient. It explains why lightning balls may follow complex path like circling in a room and suddently going through a cheminey or a key hole.

He explains why plasma balls can traverse windows which are electrical and chemical reaction insulators.

This theory is now ready to be tested experimentally.

[1] http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/BL-Theory.pdf
"The function of 79 genes is a complete mystery.'We don't know what they provide or why they are essential for life — maybe they are doing something more subtle, something obviously not appreciated yet in biology' "

It is the activation key God puts on each living being... Ain't gonna work without it. =P
Okay, didn't notice that. It was rather hard to read due to the absence of layout. Anyway, it can still be legal; you can agree to a lot of things, especially in the US. One question though would be whether it would be allowed by the institution you're working for; it seems like a massive data leak.
For example, a single cert can serve www.example.com as well as example.com
Headphone jacks are Not the new floppy drive
That's all I can think about when I watch SF movies with flying cars (e.g. Fifth Element, Star Wars, Natl Lampoon's Vacation).

Where do you park?

What happens if the battery dies?

Why is there so much cartoon physics?
Platform links startups with talent who will work for equity
Doesn't a parachute need some free fall before being completely deployed? Plus there would be no way of gliding somewhere safe to land.
"Comma-Separated JSON" implies objects, "object-notation" is integral to the definition.

What about "Comma-Separated JSON Values"? CSJV!
Just based on all the positive comments on this thread, I'd say it's already well underway.

Yes they say that this is targeted towards foreign audiences and yes they say it's an attempt to balance out conversations. I'm sure the Russian and Chinese governments say the same things too.

Propaganda is still propaganda.
Photo reveals even Zuckerberg tapes his Webcam and Microphone for Privacy
Every one of the bad arguments that Gowers points out have been made in this thread full of smart people, even after everyone read the article. I think that's pretty good evidence that the theorem really isn't obvious.
I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything
Fair point. I am editing the entry name to reflect your suggestions. Static typed -> type checked at runtime
I thought the same thing! I loved this series. So annoying it got canceled.
perhaps like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/4omesk/pre...
E.g. water pumps or air conditioners might be sensitive to the characteristics of the current/voltage waveforms when they first turn on.
Publicity could lead to satellite-based companies considering Indian launches as an option over (more) expensive US/Russian/ESA led ones.
In the hypothetical case, the uploader is the person linking to it. They just want to post it on multiple subreddits without having to keep reuploading it.

Heck, I can see a similar situation where post 1 is on a subreddit with awkwardly enforced rules, post 2 is on a more relaxed one, and then because the mods remove the post and image on subreddit 1, the second version breaks with it.

Should people have to keep reuploading the same image every time they want to use it?
Hmm, not sure why you got downvoted. Seems like a fair question. Yes this should be available in Elixir as well.
Awesome, I actually have a platter disc that looks similar but just has a permanent opening in the side, it doesn't pop up on top like this one.
Passengers != manned. They aren't operating the vehicle, they're cargo.
Deep down, somewhere in the genetic code, it still says "Mozilla (compatible)"
I can't believe mobile deep linking is such a thing that requires partnerships, integrations and announcements.
Quite a broad, though unique approach to discussing content consumption. One of my things to think about later is how this article relates to the "MTV Style" of rapid jump cuts. That would seem to support the baseline hypothesis in some regards.
For what it's worth, I'm a 20-something working in the industry while my peers are off starting start-ups.

I agree with the article, at least as far as technical knowledge goes. Some friends of mine who I graduated with are starting an Instagram for music app called Cymbal in Brooklyn, and I talk to them somewhat frequently about what's going on tech-wise. They're seed-funded and have runway for the next while, and have produced a really quality app. Whether or not they'll succeed, I don't know, but I know the quality of their work isn't in question.

My takeaway from conversations with their back-end engineer is that he's getting a lot of experience building an infrastructure from the group up that's taking a lot of traffic, learning what to do and what not to do by things failing. He's developing the "right way to do things". By contrast, my time at Twitter as a backend/fullstack engineer has taught me a lot about what that infrastructure looks like when it's mature, and I've learned the Twitter-approved "right way to do things". We're both learning what scalable robust infrastructure looks like, but while he gets the benefit of familiarity with every part of the stack and learning first hand what works and why, I get a huge jump in general knowledge with less details.

Which is arguably better? We'll only know for certain when I start my own startup in a few years, but my gut feeling is that the skills I'm gaining here by perusing scaled-up systems that face hundred of millions of requests every day will serve me more. I've learned so much about good ways to build things in just my past few months that have already radically changed how I face my own personal projects, that I can't imagine sticking with code I wrote before I had this knowledge.

I know the article is more about industry experience as applied to creating a network of peers and the business side of things, but I'm confident it extends to the technical side as well.

Thoughts?
Show HN: Easy MobX React Example
The major source of RFI from switching power supplies is not the switching frequency or its harmonics. It is a parasitic LC oscillator formed by the capacitance across the switching transistor, and the parasitic inductance between the capacitor and its DC voltage source. Every time the power supply transistor switches, that parasitic LC tank is struck and rings like a bell. 1-10 MHz is a common range for this ringing in a big supply (10's of kW and up). As the components get smaller, the first parasitic ringing frequency goes up, too.
Typography for User Interfaces
Right, this doesn't make much sense. You can add fly-by-wire and autonomy to a helicopter as well (it's been done). The two come from different backgrounds, though: people are familiar with "drones" being relatively cheap and easy to fly. So scale it up and add a person, and now it's both easy-to-fly and accessible to your average commuter.

Of course, this reasoning doesn't usually account for the cost of implementing all that safety and redundancy stuff that was previously just understood to be possible. Not to mention the cost of getting it FAA-certified when you're done.
Simple Optimizations on the “Coming Soon” Page Can Create Profound Results
Can you share some more seeds of thought on this? I sense you have better questions here than anything I can yet think to ask, myself :)

I'll take a crack at some things:

Actors are great patterns for encapsulating concurrency, but struggle in scaling --

because failure domains and persistence/forgetfulness on an intergalactic network aren't always lined up on the same borders as the actors?

What are some of dimensions of scaling would you identify as under-understood?
EWE in Bellevue.

Look me up in the GAL (My username is my name).
Is there a single set of instructions needed for Turing Completeness? It's possible to have Turing Completeness in a random access machine with just one instruction. I should think you really need to satisfy certain capabilities, and there would be many ways to satisfy those.
I'm a digital advertiser here, and I largely agree with your sentiment with one caveat. A good amount of the inventory for programatic video and display is just straight up bots. In some cases it even approaches 50% of inventory that just doesn't exist. With traditional forms of media inventory is a little more predictable.
What's the bet most of them have at best skimmed the article, and that many haven't even bothered to read further than the first few paragraphs, if at all.

Edit: typo
That would seem to imply that previous iOS versions put user data in the kernel cache. Why would that be?
Expedia has massively transformed in the past 3 years from lagging behind to becoming more and more cutting edge.
Here is the link to the federal office for radiation protection: https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w...

It is Ceseium-137 which still contaminates mushrooms and all animals regularly eating those. Occasional consumption is possible but not recommended. And that is 30 years after Chernobyl.
SamDunk: eMMC backdoor leading to bootloader unlock on Samsung Galaxy Devices [pdf]
Ball Lightning: Bubbles of Electronic Plasma Oscillations [pdf]
actually, the latter is far more readable without markup making my eyes bleed.

I generally prefer gradle's method of 'com.foocorp:foo:1.2' but that isn't acceptable statically. scala string interpolators could make it a thing, though.
Especially when that someone was an evil hacker because you didn't have enough bitcoins to get the controls unencrypted.
They are full aware of it:

"Android Studio should currently not be used for development with sbt and Scala. Chances are, however, that it's a good fit for a Gradle + Scala setup."

http://scala-on-android.taig.io/editor/android-studio/

Using InteliJ instead of Android Studio means not being able to use the latest tooling even from the stable version, as InteliJ is always some versions behind.

Using Gradle + Scala implies a few configuration steps that tend to break at each new Android Studio release, versus the out of the box experience from Kotlin.
This is a vehicle that allegedly requires no training to operate and might even be autonomous; parachuting requires a shit-load of training.
The flaw with your analysis is that your independent variable is 'not dying'. There are plenty of other failure modes.
This means that we need first to decide on common environment that minimal synthetics will live on. Then, with this environment fixed, we could try to isolate minimal set of genes for multiple different organisms that are originally viable in this environment.

Such environment should also be 'minimal' - i.e. having lowest number of resources required to construct it and lowest amounts of those resouces.
because gradle is slow, and the dsl is a disaster compared to sbt
I've never absolutely needed Paypal. What situations have you run across where you have to use them? Just curious.
Compared with wifi, though? Trying to screw with your wifi equipment requires just about any laptop sold in the last ten years. Trying to screw with your Zigbee equipment would presumably require me to go find some kind of dongle.

Of course, wifi has gotten more secure over time to the point that I'd be more concerned about giving the devices internet access than I would about intruders on the network.
Can't read article without signing up.
Ask HN: Is it common to be evaluated by software estimation and task rejection?
I'm being evaluated on the rate of tickets being accepted/rejected and the accuracy of my task estimation. Is this a common practice?
A small rocket can be used to deploy the parachute from low altitude. This is already in use on some light aircraft today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems#Com...