skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope component level circuit board repair continues to grow in popularity and accessibility. Damage and failure which cause devices to be thrown away can often be fixed by a skilled person with specialized microsoldering equipment.

But electronics manufacturers in general seem to be opposed to this idea, preferring that people dispose of products after a few years and buy something new, and often taking measures to actively discourage people from fixing their devices. Not only is this anti-consumer, it further promotes e-waste.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPjp41qeXe1o_lp1US9TpWA

https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-fix-everything
Listening to GOES with a handheld radio (they couldn't fit the entire signal in one channel because it was so wideband) was so cool. I never figured out how to decode APT signals but so sad that with the goes satellites goes the amateur ability to get weather images directly from space :/
I want to read this, but it continues to cover the article with an anti-adblocker notice, even if I totally disable Adblock Plus. I know there are workarounds but why would I waste my time
My brain simply absorbs information at a faster rate with video/audio than reading.
Bit of a self-plug here - LearnDataScience http://learnds.com has been well received as a starting point for newcomers. It's a set of Jupyter notebooks with a lot of hand holding. Git repo has data sets included so you can clone and go. All Python.
That's the part of the business model. IoT isn't about giving you some value - it's an extension of SaaS, but with the twist that it has to convince you to give service provider some value that they can then sell back to you.

Personally, I consider most of IoT products to be a waste of resources used to create them. It's a blatant promotion of shitty engineering in an attempt to get some money out of people.
Even after the completion of the Panama Canal expansion, many larger ships still won't bother to use it because they can't fit under the Bayonne Bridge to reach the major ports near New York. The bridge was supposed to be raised but work has been delayed due to engineering errors and bad weather.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-expanded-panama-canal-prepare...
>> Database design is an optimization algorithm, not an area of engineering.

Maybe waiting for a few years before you start making proclamations like this (and the many others in the op) is one way to avoid feeling everything is bland and pointless?

What I mean is that if you think you know everything there is to know, and all that you know is very little indeed, then it's not hard to see how you may think it's all just boring stuff that never goes nowhere.

Or, let's see this another way: just because you feel you're wasting your time creating the same things over and over again, doesn't mean that those are the only things anyone has ever made, or is making right now.

Corollary to which is: it's not the industry; it's your job. You've stopped learning. Time to move on and learn something new.
Was the GP edited after you replied? Because the comment as it exists now is about how ML Studio makes it easy to learn through visualizations. The difficulty of typing has nothing to do with it.
I always liked Railscasts and the companion/transcribed "Asciicasts".

I think the video format is a kind of forcing function in terms of the presenter really explaining things (if they aren't just reading off the screen). Which in turn made the transcript great to read.
Intent to Implement: Web Share API
I cannot speak with much authority on either game because I have played neither of them.

At the start of the year was the player aware how much a years worth of play would cost them? The key to whether or not something is exploitative in this respect is whether or not the player is spending more than they were prepared to.

Does either game disguise the cost and bring in extras incrementally to promote a sunk-cost fallacy? Do they force the decision to spend at points of particular tension in the game? Some games certainly do.

This is quite a good read.

http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-g...
I remember at one point after listening to one of your talks about TCP/IP as a very good OO system, and pondering the question of how to make software like that, an idea that came to mind was, "Translation as computation." I was combining the concept that as implemented, TCP/IP is about translation between packet-switching systems, so a semantic TCP/IP would be a system that translates between different machine models, though, in terms of my skill, the best that I could imagine was "compilers as translators," which I don't think cuts it, because compilers don't embody a machine model. They assume it. However, perhaps it's not necessary to communicate machine models explicitly, since such a system could translate between them re. what state means. This would involve simulating state to satisfy local operation requirements while actual state is occurring, and will eventually be communicated. I've heard you reference McCarthy's situation calculus re. this.
Almost. I'm saying the difficulty (of household tasks) is so much more than they are in a different class of problems, and cannot be equated using a comparative adjective
This seems to be based on crappy science. Although studies show that low vitamin D status is linked to poorer cognitive abilities, studies also show that vitamin D supplementation has no effect whatsoever on cognitive abilities.

Most likely it is another factor causing both the lower vitamin D status as well as cognitive decline (such as lack of outdoor exercise).
I have also noticed that the results are becoming more spammy, I thought I was losing it.
I don't understand how people can be so confident in the computer models that show that the Earth will become warmer and warmer. They even say that it's caused by human activity and it can be stopped if we avoid burning fuels, but we don't even have computer models that can predict the weather above ground for next week. So how can they predict exact temperature for next few hundreds years?
Stop letting people “just wing it” at work
I am not sure I understand how REPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93prin...) is related to client/server.

As of collaboration ... it could be clients/single-server or fleet of apps synchronizing with each other. Gut feeling: later one has greater potential. Can work in standalone and team modes, no?
I understand the concept you're presenting, but are there any well-documented cases of this happening that people might be familiar with?
Hands-on with KFC’s ‘Watt a Box’ that charges your phone while you eat
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-15/news/mn-20827_1_gomi-...

People used to furnish their entire apartments with other people's trash in Japan in the 1980s.
Last time I moved I found my old Mac IIsi. Plugged it in to see how the old girl was holding up only to be greeted with "bong POP ~fizzle~" and the smell of ozone. The power supply gave out and though I was able to use a bench PS to boot, it was unreliable.

Also, a modern LCDs although conceptually multisync does not actually like frequencies that aren't PC standard S/VGA. Or it was the sync-on-green causing problems.
Articles like this for me tend to vindicate Google's notorious hiring processes.

While it is true that for most people will not need to be able to whiteboard a binary tree inversion in their day to day, it seems like they expect their engineers to be able to throw themselves at any problem they're given and require them to be able to pivot in skillset quickly, and have an appreciation of all the developments going on around them so they can apply anything novel ideas developed internally to what they are currently working on.

In those cases, hiring based on sound knowledge of CS fundamentals seems like a good bet...

60k engineers is a pretty terrifying number though.
Raspberry Pi 3 takes the cake in 2016 hacker SBC survey
Show HN: BBC Good Food Scraper in Go
Scavenging for 'Gomi': Garbage Can Yield Treasures in Japan (1987)
This is great, I use LetsEncrypt for my company. however, the graph is a little misleading. Lets look closer:

LetsEncrypt is almost built upon the idea of frequently (and automatically) re-issuing your certificate(s). The graph's line shows what appears to be an accumulated sum of certificates issued by day.

If every 90 days most certificate(s) expire, of course the graph will look like that!

Whats most interesting to me is the steps up in the graph. It appears that the steps in the graph roughly occur on 70-90 day intervals.

Impressive growth for a great mission/service, but I wanted to point out the mechanics behind the graph. Hopefully others can offer some alternative perspectives!

edit: Grammar, illogical sentence structure.
> We've been using static websites a lot ourselves instead of wiki's pages.gitlab.io

Sure I can understand that it's not a priority but I don't think wiki and static pages have to exclusive - we have a lot of non-technical users and e.g. pushing a static version of the wiki to gitlab pages would ease creation of documentation, so users can use the editor and markdown and the preview to write the wiki and everything gets rendered into some nice static content.

It's basically what you can do now with a regular repository but sometimes it's nice to have docs and code separated.

I'll look into contributing, thanks for the link!
Search his username on github and it will tell you his dev studio name. You can then google his dev studio and find out his niche.
5 Books to Read This Summer (Bill Gates)
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957544
Rahh: Summer Camp for Adults
I've been to a conference literally sponsored by a door knob manufacturer. But they don't target "end users", they target the people you hire to design and renovate your house.

Similarly, the home automation solution targeted at those people usually aren't shit cloud-based products.
The hardest part of coding for me is starting, and pushing myself through the slog of details that wiser developers already know how to handle. It's difficult for me to really push myself when I can hop across the hall and ask the local greybeard how to fix a frustrating problem. That advantage is absent in most startups; self-reliance is vital. I learned a lot about process, communication, and organization in larger companies, but I've learned much more about software development at a startup.
I think part of the threat increase is also that when nuclear weapons were new, people were more afraid of them. Now the fear seems to be wearing off.
> can a human likewise be abstracted away to some substrate-independent program such that we lose nothing by deleting some running copies

Oh. Well, assuming our current model of computation, I think a "substrate-independent" human program is essentially non-human by definition (that is to say, lacking the particular qualities of 'consciousness' that we commonly ascribe to humans), so I'd conclude that "nothing is lost" insomuch as "nothing existed" in the first place. In theory, it seems plausible that we could create a program that could consistently pass a "Bill Gates" Turing test, but it is easy for a programmer to imagine how such a program could exist without actually being conscious.
I love this post. I think that when most apps look the same, you start to wonder why we can't just fill in some data and regenerate the UI again. A lot of UI builders work this way anyway: you drag and drop stuff, hook up events to functions, etc.

Why are we still building CRUD apps in 2016? Building that with any tech is just boring, whether it's COBOL, Java, Ruby, or node.

This is the way tool building works. You sharpen a rock so you can work with wood, you work with wood so you can build a trebuchet, you build a trebuchet so you can go to the moon.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The next breakout programming platform probably won't be terminals and editors. It'll be something that sparks creativity, like the author's Reason example. Mobile apps allllllmost got there; can you imagine if even 1/1000th of Snapchat users had an easy way to program their phones?

Don't be so quick to dismiss someone based on their writing style or their "lack of" education. This is an optimistic, creative article, and it contains a lot of sophisticated insights like this:

> More than that, it allows for infinite “creativity”, also knows as code smells. Most code is pretty rank. Engineers spend countless hours dealing with syntax, typos, indentation, linting, errors, arguing over style and best practices, and making shortcuts to try to coax some of the code to type itself. It’s absurd. And it’s a waste of time.

That's all 100% true.
if locked code review is coming in, i'll be all over it. just let me select multiple approvals, and nested approvals.

it's an immensely useful feature. once again, the more i can define a process in software, the better it is for most non-western, non-modern-management companies.
> But also, aren't they huge on solar even though they get a fraction of the sun that the USA does?

They've put a ton of money into solar and wind, but these are extremely variable and there are days of the year that solar and wind produce practically 0% of Germany's energy, and usage keeps growing.
Well said. I'll only add a quote from my non-programmer cousin who was about to travel the world as an English instructor: "Teaching is like a second language."
Don't celebrate x-mas would be a start. /s
Outline what would your dream product-/company look like (it's like describing the goal settings and features all around the goal), then start reading a ton of info on dif markets/trends/things you like etc - then write/discuss/trying different things. First ideas will be crap, but then the miracle will happen.
haha, that's a working model, I was that CEO for my very first company several years ago
Interactive Timeline of Twilio's Road to IPO
I noticed this page's text is rendered with nice fi and ffi ligatures. Yet, they are individual characters. How do you coax that out of a browser? I see the CSS references a bunch of .woff files.
Consumers don't expect it, but they are being told they should. That's marketing at work, literally trying to create the market for this shit-engineering non-solutions.
What if that energy has a 10% chance to destroy humanity's reserves of fresh water?
In this case, the REPL is just a client like any other. Its behavior is what makes it a REPL (i.e. you type, press enter, get a result, rinse, repeat). It conforms to the same protocol as any other interface we plan on making. This REPL goes a step beyond typical REPLs because the backend is networked, thus its state is shared with other clients. These other clients don't even have to be another REPL. In this way, a developer using a syntax interface could work directly with Steve from accounting, who is using some visual programming interface.

Imagine a developer and a designer working together on an app. The developer is writing the backend code for the app in the syntax he is comfortable with, and the designer is making the UI in something like Sketch. With Eve, this workflow will blend together seamlessly.
Pigar – A tool to generate requirements file for your Python project
I'm skeptical nevertheless. In my experience, most programming is very different than r+d, which often does require significant concentrated training or even the smartest will spin their wheels.

It's hard to describe, but research (which the vast majority of ML remains) is something that even a sound knowledge of fundamentals might not remotely be enough.
While I worry about large carriers absorbing small ones, this could be an excellent big step in real competition for bay area internet access.
In addition to the current upgrading of nuclear weapons. New technology making them smarter, more accurate, and thus more tactical with small yields.
What if "data" is a really great idea?
Totally meaningful difference! With the list comprehension, you're still telling the machine how to go about getting the data; there is an explicit loop construct. With SQL, I'm simply declaring what results I want, and the implementation is left to the execution engine.

For instance, the SQL query can be parallelized, but not so with the Python list comprehension. If you wanted to create a version that could be run in parallel in Python, you'd have to do it with a map()/filter() construct. Ignoring readability for a sec (pretend it's nice and elegant, like it would be in e.g. Clojure), you are still specifying how the machine should accomplish the goal, not the goal itself.

filter(lambda x: x is not None, map(lambda u: u.first_name if u.is_active else None, table_users))
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-on-her-priva...

http://static.politico.com/f3/9b/19d29ab14abeb4a30ca2975f1e6...
Yes, if this is the cost. Loss of local connectivity is not a small degradation. It's like losing floating point math from your CPU or the ability of your car to go in reverse.

If we're building endpoint networks to prohibit local traffic, we are forcing a terrible architecture with terrible long-term privacy and security implications. Because of this, we will have a future where the NSA (and vendors, and advertisers, and the Chinese PLA, and ...) will literally know when you flush your toilet. In the future every interaction you have with every device in your house will be broadcast to third parties across multiple national boundaries and clouds.

... because we had to protect Windows XP machines from rare, marginal threat profiles. (Has anyone actually seen malware spread this way in the past 10 years in the wild?)

The potential criminal and totalitarian applications of a cloud-powered IoT world are incredible. Look into "nudge theory" for a starting point, and then consider things like:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/when-y...

http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/power-behavioral-fingerpri...

The decision of how to architect our communications infrastructure today and whether to, for example, permit local traffic could in the future determine whether or not we evolve into a borg-like totalitarian collective or a cooperative society of sovereign individuals. Communications infrastructure affects... well... how we communicate... which in turn affects every single aspect of human society and culture over very long spans of time.

It's a special case of a larger phenomenon called path dependence. Small choices that you make today based on what seem like rational reasons today can have huge differences in the long term outcome of things in the distant future. While the future isn't fully knowable, sometimes conceptual reasoning from first principles can tell us what the likely outcome of a particular path might be.
Halva: Idiomatic Scala in Java – Cases, pattern match, for-comp, implicits ++
So will Webpass be faster now?
Let's look at this project as a cautionary tale.
The nightmare looks like this:

https://antinuclearinfo.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wastes-g...

"Just dump it in a salt mine" and leave it there for a million years doesn't work. It can't work, be realistic.
This works great with close captioning switched on as well -- I can glance at the captions and the picture and enjoy the film at higher speed. If it's really good I can go back to old fashioned 1x but very little, especially TV, is worth it, any more than all books might be worth reading in their entirety.

I don't know why he claims that his habit "horrifies most people." Why should it upset anyone at all?
It's funny how the article praises large x-height and low-contrast strokes, yet it is written in Garamond, a font with small x-height and high-contrast strokes.

Personally I like small x-height and high-contrast strokes, so I find the article very readable. But I think fonts with these features require higher-DPI displays. Consider Computer Modern, which is beautiful on paper but unreadable at low resolution.

I wonder if the studies mentioned in the article took this into account. Were they testing readability on low-res screens, paper, or what? Would you get different results if you changed the medium?
The sad truth of the matter is that ML is more applied research at this point than a sensible set of programming problems.

From that standpoint, graduate mathematics is more useful for a practitioner than any robust programming experience.
You know the situation is bleak when even the legendary Jeff "llama" Minter says he can't make money on the app store.
Scheduling isn't stock market, you don't need a live feed for that. All such a bulb needs is an accurate date and time source - the rest, including (if you also add one-time geographical area input) the sunrise/sunset times can be determined with a little bit of trivial math on the uC that said "smart" bulb already has.

All that IoT stuff doesn't need Internet access. Hell, most of it doesn't need much of a network at all, but just having them default to intranet would deliver all the value without the problems (and the rent-seeking).
Really, I thought I saw an article on it because of some weird scheduling, might be way off, they did blend together at the time.
With or without ajax? /jk.
But 32Ko is already a lot if there's no images or js libraries.
Thank you Alan for your deep wisdom and crystal vision.

It is the best online conversation I have ever experienced.

It also reminded me inspiring conversations with Jerome Bruner at his New York City apartment 15 years ago. (I was working on some project with his wife's NYU social psychology group at the time.) As a Physics Ph.D. student, I never imaged I could become so interested in Internet and education in the spirit of Licklider and Doug Engelbart.

謝謝。
if it makes you feel better, i don't think you were supposed to be inspired. "ML Ninja" is just the name of the rotation program. if your team sends you, it's because they need someone to get the training, not because the program name makes it sound cool. i doubt the PM thought it would be public when she named it.
How American Politics Became So Ineffective
I don't recommend learning Redux the first weekend you learn React. This would be akin to learning about Relativity the first weekend you learn Mechanics. I actually think it's detrimental to suggest beginners learn Redux alongside React because it unnecessarily steepens the learning curve.

Not that Redux is too complicated (it actually has a super simple API). Redux is a (fantastic!) tool you should use once your project is at a large enough scale that you need it. You can go a long way in vanilla React before you feel the pains that Redux (or Relay) solves. The React part of my current codebase is over 25k LoC and I still don't feel the need to throw Redux into the mix.

Take a peep at http://djcordhose.github.io/hh-react-conf-2016/redux-vs-rela...

If you're just starting out then first spend several weeks/months in vanilla React. Unless you need to learn Redux to work on a bigger codebase at a new job or something...

Qualification: I used to work on React Native at Facebook.