skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I've invented / patented something powerful. Now what?
This is a throwaway account. My main account is over 6 years old with 5000+ karma. I've also sold a company before for a small amount. I only bring this up because I know how this might sound.

I've invented something powerful. It's software related, but nothing like what the patent trolls bandy about. I filed the provisional some months ago, but I'm having trouble making any progress with the business side of things.

I've noticed a common pattern:

1. I'll get someone I know and trust (like an investor, or business guy with a history of helping people sell companies) to agree not to share the idea

2. I'll explain how it works

3. They'll get really excited, some have even given me small amounts of cash to stop me from seeing anyone else "while we hammer out the agreement"

4. They'll _completely_ flake out. Their main business might have a couple fires, or they'll have a first day as a CEO of a company they took over, or they're just busy flying around the world giving speeches, whatever.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, I decided to try just warm / cold emailing a couple dozen VCs / angels and this is the pattern that emerges:

1. I contact them.

2. Nothing happens.

What am I doing wrong here? I'm 100% certain that Google or Facebook wants this and I'm 100% certain that they don't have it. In my head the only question is what price they'll pay and who I should get introduced to. I was hoping a connected angel or VC would help with introductions and negotiations for a cut of the sale but I can't seem to get past people's spam filters.

Has anyone here done something similar before? If so could you please tell me what I'm doing wrong?
You're off to a bad start by spamming news.ycombinator.
But that's what .NET wanted to be. That's what Silverlight wanted to be.
he's thinking about an nba championship.
Why would the results of floating point math be inconsistent between consecutive runs of the same program?
I wasn't aware of this. Thank you.

Not that I've been using Bash and zsh every day for twelve plus years...
The problem is that as ray tracing advances, so do the hacks on top of rasterization to enable more realisticish images. So rasterization keeps winning. Someday, though...
I've got this embarrassingly ugly perl-inside-cygwin to automate something with a GUI tool that happens to have an even worse scripting plugin.

I suspect Powershell would allow me to take the whole process native?
Improving afl's search strategy and scheduling to find more crashes
Fake human sacrifice filmed at CERN, with pranking scientists suspected
Technology Trends: Is Pokémon GO Signaling the Attention Deficit Apocalypse?
The same entity (government, state or federal) that sentences individuals to imprisonment should be the same entity responsible for bearing the burden of imprisoning the individual.
I love the strongly-typed cookies but I absolutely hate the powershell syntax. It's like C# and Bash got together and had a really ugly baby.
Show HN: Live coding WebGL apps with PlayCanvas
Those types of notifications should be disabled entirely IMO. I don't think people realize how stressful those notifications are relative to their actual value.

I unfollowed everyone on Facebook so I don't have a news feed. I am detached from news. Focusing on my work and local family and community seems far healthier. I've realized that worrying about everything going on in the world, including trivial details about my acquaintances, is a recipe for disaster.
In the Windows 10 thread someone posted this hilarious comic: http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/

We just have to hope that "our" guys (OSSers) have bigger guns than "those" guys (privacy destroyers).
This is plain and simple prejudice and bullshit. The government has been following thru on commitments.

* When Rio was announced people said the venues wouldn't be ready on time. They were.

* When zika broke out people predicted an Olympic pandemic. Then came southern hemisphere winter and you're more likely to get zika in Florida than Rio.

* When media discovered pollution in Guanabara Bay people asked for cancellation of events out of health concerns. No event was cancelled and no evidence of health hazards.

* when a chemical imbalance turned a swimming pool green people called for cancellation. It turned out to be harmless algae.

* when American swimmers claimed to be robbed a media uproar denounced a security chaos. Turns out they lied to hide a visit to a brothel.

All of this is a continuation of a pattern. Rich countries freaked out with the Olympics in Beijing and Sochi too. Rio would have to endure the same.
SF is not special or unique at all and the rich and poor do not agree on housing policy. Both groups are looking out for their immediate near term interests.

The rich want to maintain their low density single family neighbourhoods exactly as they were when they bought into them.

The poor simply want to keep their current home and have it not torn down, as every other apartment is almost certain to be dramatically more expensive to rent than their current one.

If the city suggested building mid rise buildings with a percentage of below market units in leafy rich neighbourhoods far from low income areas you'd see that low income persons would be quite happy about this development. The rich wouldn't be.

Of course this is almost never the case. Rich homeowners vote in greater numbers and have the time and capacity to fight back, and so what we see is that the areas first in line for redevelopment are almost always low income areas (ie. The Mission) while rich ultra low density areas are left untouched.
I think it's been mentioned in the original XAddress post, but the problem is not necessarily mapping a lat/long pair to a human-memorable address.

The way current addresses have worked (mostly) is by associating with landmarks. Large street names are known by lots of locals. Smaller streets are associated with larger streets by proximity (second left on Large Street). Numbers help place an address at the beginning, middle or end of a street, on the left or right.

Grid cities have an added advantage of encoding approximate location in the street name directly.

XAddress and What3Words solve a problem for the 4bn without street addresses, but they do not help locate things or navigate to them without being online.
AMD seems to operate like a middle America mom and pop sandwich shop. Products are decent, lots of people rooting for them to succeed, they never seem to pull ahead, yet they also manage to live on (if only to continue their struggle).
I don't think they are in any danger of bankruptcy. Whether they return to profitability is still an open question but it seems likely that they should be by some point next year. How profitable, and what happens after that, is anyone's guess. There is a lot of room to grow in the graphics and CPU space, but they have tough competitors. I do think their stock is very fairly valued at ~$6 though, I think any potential gains from Zen over the next year or so are priced in to that. It definitely isn't a value buy anymore.

Edit: As the day goes on it seems like they're trading back over $7, so obviously the market disagrees with me :) They were trading around $10 before losing profitability, and in the $20-$40 range during their mid-2000s heyday, so maybe the market is expecting performance closer to that. I think that is optimistic still, but again who knows.
Powershell is an old tech, so browsing the source tree on github should show some of MS internal practices & guidelines in the old times. Yet the github project start in feb 2015.
Where is the source code before that ?
2. Scrivener is great, wish it could do .md natively
3. Yes I hate Papers. Citation managers seem to only be useful for academic papers anyway.
Eventually what you describe will force some density...if you look at an map of the Bay Area, you will see that most cities are bordered by county-owned open space or parks of some kind, which creates a natural border for development.

It was very forward-thinking of local governments to create these parks and open spaces back when the there was no demand for the land.
Stream music on a local network cross platform
I don't forget that women exist. My impression was that they averaged taller than that. But even if they don't, you seem to forget that, if women average 5'4", that still leaves many women at taller than 5'6".

I couldn't find a data source for average (better, median) population height and distribution for the US that combined both genders. Do you have a candidate handy?
There is a great Radiolab episode on this very subject, also touches on the vault of top secret historical documents from the British Empire.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/
While the algorithm is indeed simple, it is not the kind of thing an average person would remember or have time for. Therefore, it makes us just as dependent on technology as before. After all, if you want to find out where a given address is, you google it (although every once in a while the results are inaccurate or mixed up with a similar address).

So Xaddress does solve a problem. Not the biggest leap forward, but a solid step nonetheless. I'm interested to see what applications can come out of this (that couldn't be done before).
And almost certainly languages, too. For example C++.
Powershell really became interesting for me recently. I was working on diagnosing a production issue where one of our win32 applications failed on loading a .net assembly (dll). The error messages weren't terribly useful, and I wasn't getting a good stack trace. While Googling around, I found out that you can randomly instantiate .net objects from the PS command line. A few commands later and I had a full stack trace indicating the problem.
This is a good start but we must end the use of State private prisons as well. Do you even know who your state representatives are??

Call your state reps: http://tryvoices.com/

ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/end-prisons-profit
What food is this?
You think new parents sitting around laughing and taking pictures all day? hahahaha sorry, no.

New parenting (infants) is about 5% photo-filled rewarding, 95% just repetitive work, cleaning up shit (literally), waking up every couple of hours, trying to keep it together with your spouse in stressful situations with very little sleep, and feeding this organism that will eventually have a personality and start interacting back. And that ratio gradually changes as they grow older.

I remember after the first month, I used to consider going to the office my "break from parenting" because of its consistency and ability for my mind to just rest for a bit.

Just remember when you're asking a parent of an infant to have a full-time job on top of parenting, you've essentially now got an employee that is splitting their time/attention/energy between two jobs. If you're ok with the altered productivity, then that's fine.

But let's not fool ourselves.
The HoloLens runs a version of Windows 10 (it is its own computer, which partly accounts for its $3k cost right now). You'd write Windows 10 UWP apps for it and install them to the HoloLens. Those apps could communicate with the rest of your apps in whichever ways make sense. For instance, you could stand up simple REST services on the BSD/Linux machines and your UWP app could make HTTP(S) calls to get updated information from those machines over Warehouse WiFi.
Fantastic answer. Thank you.
Epub has the potential of surpassing doc files as a document exchange format. It's so much easier to read an ePub than a pdf or a doc file on a phone.
Maybe you need to start by questioning the series of assumptions that have led you to have "100%" certainty in something? Presumably if you were correct, then you would be having a different experience by now.
Bicycles are really awesome, but this is also an indication that you're a better cyclist than I am. :-)

However, you did succeed in finding a distance over which I can beat the world record runner, as my 100 mile cycling time is already better than the world record for running 100 miles. But not half of it!

I have a colleague who's an ultramarathon runner, and another thing that I find amazing is that, for what I believe is at least the past 8 years or so, his longest running distance has consistently been longer than my longest cycling distance. Every time I've completed a new longer distance on my bike, he's also completed a longer ultramarathon that was also longer than my bike event. It's not a competition; we just both keep periodically increasing our distances and his level of fitness (and ambition) is incredible.
This sentiment will lead to further eradication of the line between ads and editorial. Your articles will soon mostly be ads, ala the Buzzfeed model.
First you're obviously right.

It is difficult though to distinguish neglect from intent sometimes, with "The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps. [...] The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases [...]"
I speak only for myself.

Microsoft have been hugely focused on hiring people who have experience outside the Windows bubble, and have been encouraging cross-pollination of ideas with the OSS world. There are holdouts for the old guard of course (there's still a BU that requires Windows Phones), but I think everyone knows that the Microsoft of old cannot compete today by bringing an attitude that pleasing the CFO is all that matters. There are techies in the boardroom now who are familiar with the early-mover advantages of free software and the importance of the OSS culture to their workers.

So when a company of massive resources, who can see the writing on the wall, decides to hire thousands of people who actively disbelieve in the value of monolithic lock-in and who enjoy using open-source tools, and empowers them to build interesting things without regard to company loyalty, the result is Powershell on Linux and Bash on Windows. Oh, and a whole lot of goodwill amongst the people you had previously alienated.
Take this from a former competitive swimmer (a not-slow one) now with 25+ years of lap swimming: This is far more complicated than the OP.

Reasons for a current:

(1) This is an outdoor pool. Sunlight is the death of chlorine in pools. The bigger the pool, the brighter the sun, the more chlorine is burnt off. The chlorine-related chemicals used in pools also do not properly dissolve in water. They slowly rise towards the surface. So when you turn off the circulation system, they rise towards that deadly sunlight. Given that, and the fact that they were having epic chlorine-related problems, it is of no surprise that they would have run the circulation systems as much as possible when the pool was not in use. But pool water doesn't stop instantly. A gyre may have formed and be stable for hours afterwards. Laneropes are meant to stop this, but they do little under the surface.

(2) This is an outdoor pool, in direct sunlight, with the pumps off during the day ---> convection currents. And the circulation system is off. This is most interesting because as the sun rises one would expect an asymmetric current to form based on which side of the pool got the most sun. Normally this would be, in the southern hemisphere, the south west corner. I would expect an upwelling there along the wall, with a much lesser current across the pool surface from SW to NE.

Effects of the current.

Head/tailwinds aren't normally an issue. The faster one swims the lesser the effect. If this were happening we would see it in differences between length splits (fyi "length"=50m and "lap"=100m, many confuse those terms). I think up/down-welling currents are more at play. Fast swimmers rely on very specific stroke patterns. Slight perturbations in the water can throw off a swimmer's stroke. Imagine swimming past a water jet or upwelling and your hand is pushed sideways. That can slow you down far more than fighting a slight current.

If I am correct, the greatest effect would be in the SW corner of the pool. Anyone know which lane that would be? In the footage, we should also see swimmers drifting (both left and right) when approaching that SW corner.
Yup, I've been playing around with C# more lately and it's such a good language.

Things like embedding with native code is trivial compared to Java. Want to call a delegate(with extras) from a C function pointer? Sure thing, just specify some syntax and away you go. Marshalling strings? Just works.

Totally a breath of fresh air compared to the mess that is JNI.
Let's hope the awesomeness they are showing on the developer relations side finally leaks into the Windows side and they stop their shenanigans with W10 and Android and VFAT patent threats. It's so disappointing to see this kind of split-brained behavior.
So, that's kind of the beauty to me. For long lived scripts I can always type out `ForEach-Object { ... }`. When I'm ad-hocing there's always `%{ ... }`.

Bash is a strange beauty, but part of that beauty is how arcane it can be. Generally, people use the smallest parameter possible in scripts instead of the full name. While this can definitely continue with PS, the community has decided on "alias for ADHOC and Full-Name for scripts". This helps the readability tons if someone hasn't memorized all the command parameters.
I work at a hedge fund and you have no idea what you are talking about.
Not with the US government, you don't.
Honestly if you want to pay ten bucks to get me a message _right now_, thats okay. The message is probably really important.

It is all the legends of crap that gets send because email isn't even a penny a letter I object to.
TLS tunnels for machines without static IPs. Open source, certs free in beta now
> "But what if some developer decided that some field would have prefix "ABC" in all values, then the value I am interested in, then some value I am not interested in at the end?"

I don't see why this would be a problem for PowerShell. Just use Select-String to strip away the characters you're not interested in. The advantages that derive from passing around objects aren't based on all data being automatically in the format you want.
How to make firing people suck less for them and suck more for you
Great! So I can now run bash on windows (with WSL), open tmux, and open powershell prompts in each tab: the loop is complete!

I wish powershell's documentation was a bit more clear about what's powershell 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... Etc.

A lot of time I'd find a verbose and tedious way to do one thing because the code was written in "old powershell", when the latest version had a much more elegant solution (either because of new language features or simply more cmdlets were added, removing the need to fall back to some C# syntax)

On stack overflow it often means read more than the chosen answer, somebody would have added a newer way to do it. I wish Microsoft "hey script guy" blog had some versioning info (this post was last updated in 2016, using powershell 3, see powershell 2 version here)
There's significant friction in trying to bribe people out directly (e.g. did you bribe the right people, and did you pay them the right amount?). Every single transaction needs to be separately negotiated, and the developer, unlike the state, doesn't have access to all the existing value of the people they're negotiating with.

The point of codifying this sort of payout is so that approval would happen automatically -- i.e. the law says the developer gets green lighted as long as they pay. Basically the 'negotiation' between developers and the community happens only once, during the legislative debate.
> extreme disrespect shown by the Brazilian fans, insane crime reports, Zika, etc.

Bullshit. There's more zika in Florida now than in Rio. There's more crime now in Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis and Baltimore than Rio. And your "etc" was used for Beijing and Sochi too. This is just rich countries' snobbery.

> There's a reason the /r/apocalympics subteddit is so popular.

Yes, it is the fact that every subredit is a virtual linch mob or, as they say there, a circlejerk.
Where are you getting those numbers?

Looking at https://entp.hud.gov/idapp/html/hicostlook.cfm

I see the majority of FHA limits in Texas (including 'hot markets' like Austin) for a one family house are $271,000.

The average home price in Austin for a single family residence is $334,000.
Are you asking everyone to sign an NDA upfront?
London has the same issues as San Francisco, New York and Vancouver, where housing prices are skyrocketing due to it being almost impossible to build new construction, along with foreign money flowing into real estate in those cities. As such, all new construction is hyper-luxury because those are the only buildings that are worth building in this political climate of NIMBY-ism. The new construction going up was never intended to be purchased by people who need a 30-year fixed to pay for it.

If new construction was going up that was priced in a normal bracket, affordable for mere normal people who had 150k to put down for a mortgage, I would consider that a massive improvement.
The disruptive effects still happen even if we don't get to 100%.

For example, a train of self driving trucks can be led by 1 in the front. Yes, I know, REAL trains exist, but they don't go everywhere. A train of self driving trucks could save a lot of money.

If self driving Taxis don't work in the rain, then Uber can just NOT drive them when it is raining! For example, Maybe the penetration rate will be very low in Seattle, but very high in Texas. Disrupting 20% of the Taxi market by eliminating drivers is still a very big deal.
PDF is great if you want to print but nothing beats the simplicity of a PNG for displaying on a web page or inserting into a Word document.
I think the most succinct way of describing it is that UNIX tooling is scatterbrained and at times a little ugly, but each command exits because it solved someone's real-life problem. PS by comparison is a set of tools that try to be all encompassing and solve problems MS devs think people will have.

Our PS repository is full of scripts that do nothing but abstract PS into useful high-level actions.
Apocalympics subreddit is so popular because people really like to feel superior.
"Core safety warning"? Note that bitcoin.org is not Bitcoin Core (which has a separate site, bitcoincore.org). See https://bitcoin.org/en/about-us
TL;DR: AFLFast is a fork of AFL [fuzzer] that has been shown to outperform AFL by an order of magnitude

The paper: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~mboehme/paper/CCS16.pdf
Related: Slow web movement

http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web
http://theslowweb.com/
A shout-out to my former officemate Paul Heckbert who wrote the first business card ray tracer. He also wrote a ray tracer in PostScript when we realized that the processor inside our laser printer was more powerful than the processor inside our real computer. Needless to say, the PostScript ray tracer was epically slower.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/
Markdown: Cómo empezar en 10 minutos
Going through a sales associate is a signal to certain sorts of big enterprises that this product is "ready to deploy" in a serious enterprise fashion.
You can do that on iOS also. It's pretty fine-grained. The settings range from "no activity" (useful for Facebook) to "icon badge only" to notifications to "show a modal notification" (useful for my-flight-is-leaving-now airline apps)
That what you would do with text? If you have no idea what its outputting, explore it by putting it to the console.
To the first question, apparently "no", since the book is likely not yet written.

Welcome to the internet.