skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2014, there was a lot of attention drawn in Russia and Ukraine to votes in Crimea and Donbass (the "independence referendums", and elections of local leaders). The latter two votes, in particular, had nice exact percentages, which drew attention of people familiar with statistics almost immediately, and were heavily discussed in LJ.
fun, but what am I learning from this that I don't already know, namely that 3d scenes in OpenGL/Vulkan/D3d are made up of triangles? Haven't I seen this already 1000 times when I select a "wireframe" option on every 3d scene that's ever been around for the past 30 years? Every casual gamer who's ever run unigine heaven knows this.

Am I being instructed here about the matrix math that creates the perspective illusion on a 2d plane? Not really. All I'm seeing is a bunch of triangles creating a scene. This is not going to instruct a beginner about the principles of the z-buffer in any way that I can see. That requires linear algebra. Unfortunately. No shortcut.
APL has historically had relatively high market penetration in Scandinavia and Japan. Dyalog is a British company but for the last decade there has been significant Danish and Italian involvement in the form of major clients and the management team who engineered a "Management Buy In" together in 2005. Our headquarters and more than half the employees are in Basingstoke, UK. We have team members in Denmark (including the CEO and CXO), France, the USA and Canada. Since January, the CTO job is back in English hands.
Hello. I run Boldport. (Thanks to whoever posted this.) A better link for that board / reference is http://boldport.com/bp2 (it was Boldport Club Project #1)
Same here. I was born in Memphis, TN then spent lots of time in Northern Mississippi, rural Tennessee, and Memphis. Mostly black schools for more than half my education. Had to speak like them a bit to blend in and attract attention but not too much to avoid offending them. Same with country or proper English types although they weren't offended so long as I was consistent. I appreciate GFX's link as I didn't know there was a term and field of study for it.

A coworker saw it not long ago. We were talking about a party or something I was at. He's white guy that loves movies, D&D, and so on. We walk past two, black coworkers cutting up. I keep talking with stories about the party. He stops to ask me, "Did you just start talking really black because you walked past a black person?" Black schools teach people to recover quickly and dismiss when hit with something like that. I recall basically doing just that then focusing the guy back to the party while talking whiter haha.

Later, I thought about it. I knew I consciously did that sort of thing when I was around different people. I know my language is even a blend. Still, looking back, I did in fact change how I was wording things, increased gestures, and went for more energetic presentation the second my peripherals spotted blacks who I normally acted that way toward. Just switched in mid conversation without me even realizing it.

I'm thinking some confused looks in conversations with rednecks could've had something to do with that. I'm a little more self-conscious of it now. Try to stick with one style or the blend I use that works well enough in diverse crowds. Except Standard English speakers and academics. I can't speak 30 seconds around them before an interruption unless they're unusually understanding or non-judgmental.
Because they know it involves physical brain trauma and still say they have it?

Maybe we should be sympathetic to all suffering, rather than criticizing people for not being totally abreast of the latest developments in neuroscience. They're just saying "I hurt," not "I am just as damaged as a veteran at the receiving end of an artillery barrage."
I used to love cronitor.io but now I prefer the free and open source healthchecks.io (also from a Show HN).
> Rust & Swift are fairly similar but Swift has a much wider range of possible applications.

Can you elaborate on this? The languages seem very different to me--Swift is garbage collected (reference counting being a form of GC), for example.
See, you actually bring up a good point, which is that the common discourse tends to divide into anti government/pro business, pro government/anti business, when in reality part of the problem is the lines between business and gov are so blurred how can you tell? I get the feeling you are on the bad gov/pro bus side, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.

So yes, the gov did bail out the bankers, but mostly because of regulatory capture and essentially hostage holding from the banks (holding our economy with a gun to its head saying give me the money or I'll shoot!), so this is where I usually hear about how it's the people's fault for electing the government.

So how we can keep going up the chain? In the end the responsibility for the welfare of the people is the government, so though we have allowed our citizenry to be propagandized and our votes manipulated until they almost don't count, the real prescription lays in effective and properly representative constitutional government. That's what America was founded on, and while it was never perfect it is what we should strive for.

I have seen first hand what reduction of government just because people are afraid of it does in many places. West Texas for example, ends up with privatizing water, electricity, and numerous other things, and then all the people are wondering why their service is bad, hugely overpriced, and rife with corruption, and worst of all complete lack of accountability.

Be very very wary of the knee jerk reaction to bad government being to get rid of government vs improving the existing one.

That being said, I have always been a fan of G Edward Griffon's saying, "If in doubt, choose less government". So please don't confuse me with a new dealer or anything that extreme. I see your point, I just think there is more room for nuance in the discussion.
Sure it's a terrible policy.

But that's never how it's presented. It's presented as "Why does the government need a software shop? Isn't this just yet more government overreach and unfair meddling with the free market?"

So, y'know, next time you see someone arguing along those lines, remember the real argument they're making is "this has the potential to help people and save taxpayer money, but it would cut off a fat government check to me or my buddies, so I have to find a moral argument against it".
Yeah, it's too hard to hire good programmers and too expensive as well. If you have the capability to teach programmers, then that's a real competitive advantage.
Meaning reversal has a long history in English, at least back to the 1800's when 'nasty' often meant its opposite.
Soldiers were redeployed around the front as conditions demanded. You might be in a quiet sector fighting misery, boredom and trench foot and subsequently dispatched into the horror.

The western front was a sort of scientific experiment in organized slaughter. The cavalry charges evolved into trench systems. Set piece rolling barrages coordinated with gas were perfected, shock tactics pioneered. It was an evil thing.
Swift is GC'd and has a large runtime. (Reference counting is a form of garbage collection.) Rust is manually memory managed and effectively has no runtime.

The languages are very different.
C or C++. One thing is how you want the world to be, another very different is how the world is. I want to live in a word where a nice language like rust or nim is the best choice for systems programing. But sadly, in our world, in 2016, the best choice is for many many reasons to go with a tried and tested tool like C or C++.
That's right. Swift is a garbage collected language.
Bloodhound supersonic car project back on track
This is ridiculous and misleading.

Economy of scale has nothing to do with the price of milk in different-sized containers, nor does it have anything to do with software complexity.

Economy of scale is about it being cheaper for a large farmer to produce a liter of milk than for a small farmer, because overhead costs don't increase linearly.

Likewise, software has economies of scale because, on a per-user basis, it's far more expensive to support a 1st, or 5th, or 100th user than it is to support a 100,000th.

The author is fine to note that software gets more complex and costly to maintain as it gets bigger, but that has nothing to do with economies of scale -- the author is completely confusing concepts here. Economies of scale are about the marginal cost per user, not the marginal cost per bugfix.
Users don't care if a bug is due to your code or the code in a library you depend on. It's up to you to make sure things work either way.
I believe it. Probably be interesting looking at a list of them to see what's changed. I oppose it no matter who does it if it's a long-established word. I see no real benefit to be derived in exchange for confusion it causes. It's more like fashion trends or something.
Monsanto, Microsoft to invest in agricultural technology in Brazil
Why would this put an end to that line of reasoning? I'd expect it to flare up the debate, not end the debate. They didn't disprove behavior being computed, they demonstrated that a class of data supporting it was useless. The natural reaction to this isn't "okay we give up", it's "better go get some good data".

(Also, I don't like mixing the question "Is our behavior computed?" with the question "Does computed behavior imply no free will?".)
(One of the authors here.) Actually the ballot counts do have some tendency to align with round numbers. We did not discuss this in the paper because we felt that this "anomaly" can easily be contested, precisely as @jcalvinowens argued up the thread (it is written in our discussion section too). So what we say instead is that the round percentages anomaly persists even if we exclude all ballot stations with round ballot counts, i.e. it cannot be explained as a by-product of round counts.

There are other problems associated with round ballot counts. Here is a funny one: a sizable number of polling stations reported round number of counted ballots, coinciding exactly with the total number of ballots received by the polling station prior to the election day (this information is available too). As if so many people came to vote that every single ballot was used up, turnout being close to 100%. There is little doubt that it was all made up out of thin air.
I like seeing what tech trends people are discussing and what people are working on (show HN)
As the planet gets more crowded and more interconnected, the duty intelligent beings have to respect eachother's privacy is increased proportionally.

Because eventually, every thought every human ever has will be on the internet, and at THAT point, humanity will have evolved into the Borg.

Might as well get in line to get your smartphone implant installed and welcome the future.
Massachusetts House Votes to Pass Noncompete Reform Bill
Dont do that. Aliens are evil. They live on a shitty planet with two suns. So when they hear about our place they want to move here.
This is the so called red zone, here are some pictures about it: http://imgur.com/gallery/CdxZM
Well, I can give you the explanation: all of the authors are Russian.
Worth mentioning is, that so far we remain free to build alternative niches (even though they will have a hard time to become mainstream). Net neutrality remains especially important for that.
FWIW I think Boreal is the greatest ios app for HN. It has great features like filters and comment collapsing. Also allows commenting, voting and publishing.

http://getboreal.com/?ckattempt=1
In my opinion the whole idea is a little flawed.

Is not "software" that has "diseconomies of scale", is the design process.

Then, because software has close to zero of marginal cost the design cost is all the one we end up paying.

Imagine the same milk that the author is talking about, imagine to design the system that get the milk from the cow to 2 people every morning.

Not a big deal, get a cow, a farmer and a truck mix all together and pretty much done.

Now imagine to serve a supermarket, well you start to need something more than a cow a farmer and a truck.

Now imagine to serve a whole city, what about a whole nations? What about the whole world?

Simply design how to serve milk to a small supermarket is a problem, but since the marginal cost of the milk is not approaching zero, the cost of the design process will always be less that the cost of the milk (otherwise it wouldn't make financial sense), hence the whole idea of "economies of scale."

To conclude I believe that the root causes of "diseconomies of scale" doesn't lie in the "software" part but in the "design" part.
The Hacker’s Guide to Instagram
Oracle lawyer deserves it, a poor lawyer.

As I think I can easily prove Andorid is a copy of Java.
As a British person I find it exceptionally annoying to meet someone who I know doesn't want to be at work in their retail or service job who pretends to be pleased to see me. The insincerity of the small talk is horrible. I would rather have an honest interaction even if that means getting bad service than be lied to.
Fourier transformations clicked for me from your previous articles, this outline really shows the skill of "sharpening" rather than "building" knowledge. Helpful for young kids to adults alike.
UL Goes Beyond Electrical Safety with UL 2900 IoT Security Standard
Project Wonderful.
Ya Google has a counterpart product to that - https://cloud.google.com/vision/

Regardless Google and Microsoft have offered a narrow slice of what can potentially be done in this space. They are still not seeing that we really need is a marketplace that has the ability to let machine learning specialists surface their work to businesses for a profit.
F-Rep CAD in Scheme
But it does't, that's the entire point. If you have, say, 100 operators, and a flux of calls that sees 500 incoming calls in a 5 minute window, now you're paying for 500 simultaneous calls, even though you're only servicing 100.
Indian phones are weird
I don't mean that everyone who speaks makes mistakes by doing so. I mean that the language came about through mistakes. That, in my view, makes it quite appropriate to say that language A is language B with me stakes.
We use Riverbeds on either side of our sat shots here in Antarctica. Work fairly well for the most part. I didn't know they were running a custom TCP implementation in between the end devices.
> I would rather have an honest interaction even if that
> means getting bad service than be lied to.

I think this doesn't happen, for fear of getting fired. What's below a service industry job? Nothing. Nothing is below.
That doesn't solve the problem. Now your problem is you use "X" and nobody knows what that is unless you're going to say "it's a fork of Felony," which puts you back at square one.

You might as well just be offering to not refer to it at all by any name.
You said yourself, she's doing all that precisely because it annoys the teachers. She wouldn't get anything out of it if they weren't trying to stop her.

Moreover, she probably gets social encouragement from her classmates for doing things like this. Put her in an environment where the classmates made the rules, and now she's just a clown surrounded by people rolling their eyes.
That's rather surpising, coming from someone proficient in C. Perhaps you only need to discover the close connection between C and assembly.

The layer between them is really razor thin — by learning a few C idioms (function prologue/epilogue and the stack frames, argument passing, etc.) you'd be well on your way. You also need to start writing simple asm code as soon possible; only reading about it won't make it stick.
> They're just saying "I hurt," not "I am just as damaged as a veteran at the receiving end of an artillery barrage."

No, that is literally what they are saying.
Yes it did and that's between Plato[1] or earlier and Bostrom[2] and later, which was essentially my point. You really should have visited the link in my comment before making that observation. I was speaking about the theoretical basis of the idea.

Elon Musk's caution about AI comes from the book superintelligence[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...
Using free products for lead generation
Rent 30,472-core supercomputer for $1,279 per hour (2011)
"Rust is manually memory managed"

Is it? As I understand it, memory is handled primarily by the ownership system, and sometimes by reference counting. That doesn't seem to be manual memory management to me.
A real family, sold in Chicago in 1948: http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/hammond/sold-off-sib...
Otherwise I would suggest C++ but from what I gather it's really hard to learn to use it in a vacuum without triggering all sorts of footguns (i.e. unnecessary pain - speaking as a person who has written C++ for a decade). Rust's documentation looks really nice.

Look at this page:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/

Not only does it explain what the data structures do, it also contains pretty solid architectural guidelines on when it makes sense to use them.

Also, Rust supports Windows (which is a high percentage of several markets), whereas Swift apparently, only unofficially (not an expert here, please correct me if I'm wrong).

I really would not pick a language that does not run effortlessly on all three major home computing platforms at this day and age unless the constraints are really well understood.
Well, I think the problems with interpreting fMRI scans have been at least vaguely known since that time a dead salmon activated its neurons when asked to judge the of a person from a photo, this was in 2009.

http://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
And how, exactly, can it "easily" prove that?
Do you think the success was caused by the team being young? Or just building what the customer, i.e. the people really needed in an agile way?
> I find 64-bit assembly much easier to get started with compared to 32-bit: Simpler calling convention (on UNIX, at least), no segments, more registers, etc.

Segments are used in about the same amount on x86-64 vs. x86-32. Where they are used a lot is in 16 bit mode (real mode).
Ah, I found a pdf of the book and did some searches to jog my memory. It was probably the section where he describes going to walks with one of his associates to discuss ideas about decision making, bias and rationality and "examining our own intuitions" to gauge how closely they fit rational actor economic models or their proposed alternate models.

I find this whole "well I examined my intuitions about X so that is some evidence of this model of human decision making about X" that is immensely popular in philosophy (especially meta-ethics) and economics to just be embarrassing garbage. So that definitely hit a very strong bias I have. And it seemed completely out of place in a book concerned with human irrationality.
The study that is being discussed here was essentially done in the end of 2011 and early 2012, mostly triggered by the results of the 2011 legislative election (heavily discussed in LJ as well; in fact, this study itself was mostly developed in LJ).

The election results in Crimea and Donbass do contain some funny patterns and are most likely largely made up, but no information is available on the polling station level so there is little to analyze statistically.
It happens everywhere it seems, even in small resort towns, their success does not apply to everyone. If you have money, you can buy in. If you don't, you live in the next town, and pay for your own bus to get to work.

Back in the day, America, and even in Britain, housed their servant class.

Today, sure the servant class is "free" to the degree they're not literally called servants, but I think we're doing things worse when it comes to housing. This servant class is priced out of the employer's neighborhood market to be sure, but often all surrounding neighborhoods, and increasingly even the town, that their employer resides in. They're effectively exported at the end of their service day, and imported when needed again the next. I think it's disgusting.
Small talk in any culture should not be taken literally or analyzed too deeply. When a cashier says "How are you?" the standard response is "Fine thanks, and you?" It doesn't matter if neither of you really cares. I've read people decrying the insincerity of the interaction. It's just a ritual that's not completely logical, like most rituals. All cultures have illogical rituals. I wouldn't spend much time analyzing them.

In some parts of the English West Country, a common greeting is "Alright my lover?" Don't assume the person addressing you as his or her lover is offering sex, and don't assume that they're being insincere when it turns out they're not. They're acknowledging your presence with the local idiom.

Similarly, in some parts of China they say "have you eaten yet?" as we say "how are you?" I don't think it's appropriate to answer with a description of what you had for breakfast and lunch that day. You probably just say "Yes, did you?"
There's free will as in a decision-making system that generates different options and selects one based on constraints, which is something a computer can do, and then there's free will as in the ability to defy the mechanics of one's biophysics, which is just an indirect way of saying metaphysical soul.

I don't think empiricists can even discuss the kind of free will which defies causal explanation, the kind of mind which exists outside of the brain.

If you reject that kind of metaphysical soul from the discussion, what remains is whatever soul can be housed in a cage of biophysics. And whether you believe there is fundamental randomness in the universe, or whether given perfect information the universe becomes predictable, both perspectives are equally hostile to the kind of free will people dream about.

People who talk about free will want to escape biophysics, and the only way is to talk about the mind outside the brain, or the ghost outside the machine.
OP is an engineer at Google: http://www.ianww.com/
Don't forget basically the entire mobile gaming ecosystem.
very tenuously related, but I forgot that Ian Murdock died over Xmas. crazy. any updates on what happened there?
Are you sure about that? As I understand it, they are testing a really-really-null hypothesis.

Specifically, they started with some resting state data (a condition where the subjects just lie there, attempting to remain alive). They then took this data and imposed fake task structures over it, as if the subject were doing two different things (e.g., condition #1 starts at t=0, t=1 min, t=3 min, t=6 min; condition #2 starts at t=2, t=4, t=5 min). Once this is done, the task+data is submitted to their analysis pipeline.

The null hypothesis (fake condition #1 == fake condition #2) has to be true, by construction. This assumes that the original data doesn't have any structure, which may or may not be true (they discuss it a bit towards the end of the paper).
IANAL but I would be surprised if the judge grants significant sanctions over such a minor legal error. Google hasn't shown any specific monetary damages from the disclosure of their contractual terms with Apple. (I am happy that Google won the main case.)
Impact Investing Takes Hold on Business School Campuses