skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yeah, I'm gonna take this study with a grain of salt. Too many "fMRI studies of 17 people" have turned out to be barely disguised hooey.
Oct. 4
Hawaiian Crows Join Tool-Users Club
Can you buy patent troll insurance?

$500/month to protect against a 0.1% chance of being sued by a patent troll over a 7 year period gives $42 million in expected value to fight a bogus patent when it does come up. Adjust the numbers to whatever's realistic.

It seems more sustainable than asking strangers to fund patent lawsuits.
Perhaps they are not a troll, in that they don't trawl. But look at the patents that they used in their dispute with Samsung. They have no problem using their ass-backwards patents agressively if one becomes a threat to them.
I would have switched to typescript but I had to rename EVERYTHING from something to something else in order to use TypeScript. If that's how "compatible" starts, well, no thanks cause clearly that's just the start of the pain.

Compatible should be same files, new compiler = "just works".
they're not talking about phase of the sound wave but "phase" of the scale notes as an alternative way of describing what music theory calls modes
Sorry if dumb question, but isn't that patent expired?
" Legal status: Expired - Lifetime"
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8738435
I imagine that this stuff will be great for prototyping algorithms and figuring out good applications/requirements, but eventually (like when stuff has to be mass-produced) you'll see physical structures coming back in.

I don't know about that.

This platform can be fairly cheap in mass production. The legs are really cheap. No gears. And just two motors per leg. No extra force sensors, just the control electronics.
The danger of Forth, is that much like with LISP, as soon as a programmer gets competent in it, they think "You know what the world needs? Another version of my favorite programming language".
Well, the glorious leader does seem to be getting quite... globious in recent years.
Ok sure but I was meaning in general.

Anyway pass in (repeat 0) and you get a side effect. :-)
Remember patents don't patent ideas.

What is patented is not "a paper bag", but their particular method for constructing a paper bag.

Is their method obvious? Perhaps not.
"The patent has just expired, but the troll still has 6 years to ask anyone for the licensing fees or the damages that they incurred during the term of the patent — which is 20 years."
Lil Wayne and Birdman Slit Apart
"The instructions signaled to motorists that automated vehicles would not be a Wild West where companies can try anything without oversight, but were also vague enough that automakers and technology companies would not fear overregulation."

That ought to set back automated car evolution by twenty years. It's always fun to watch lawyers trying to write rules for industries in which the technologies change before the ink dries in the federal register.
> Fast forward few more days or weeks, you're unexcited, you think this is hopelessly daft, you think no will care about it, and slowly de-motivation creeps in.

Maybe the idea was not so good after all. That is not a bad thing. Keep on rocking.

This guy puts it nicely I think:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8 ( explicit )
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDHb3vC9OmE ( PG rated )

"Most ideas kinda of suck when you do them."

That is perfectly fine, move on to the next.
I've been watching a lot of Project Runway lately, and they muddy the word muse, too. Sometimes you can stretch it and say it's still the source of their inspiration, but something they're given a "muse" and forced to work with them, which to me isn't a "muse" at all, but instead they're a "client".
it's real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795344
Seriously? In a thread about Android Studio of all places??

https://developer.android.com/studio/write/layout-editor.htm...
2-Factor Authentication in Mobile App Testing
RFC 7943: Generating Semantically Opaque Interface Identifiers with DHCPv6
Please don't bury this comment completely. I am going to be honest and tell you that I believe TypeScript is pure embrace, extend, extinguish from Microsoft. And I am amazed honestly that so many web developers are eating it up.
I've learned that lesson, and it often leads to just not reading the article at all, when perhaps I might have gotten something out of it if I'd read it before the comments.

It's a double-edged sword.
I work at GDS - that sounds broken, can you let me know where that link to localhost is?
I think that things are easy and intuitive for the designers, not so much for the user that tries the app for the first time. Devs don't see the problem. Moreover serious qualitative research is expensive and difficult to do. Finally it is hard to actually apply changes proposed after doing the UX research because it may require a lot of coding which costs both lots of time and money.

In short: the business wants to deliver fast and the users will use it anyway.
I think all mobile providers in UK do it, especially around downgrading images.
40 Content Ideen Für Absolut Erfolgreiche Blog Artikel
I just always see the stupidest questions asked on Quora, like askReddit just 2x worse
Interesting, but what practical uses does this have, besides for authenticator hardware (like two-factor "usb sticks" etc) ?
S/V Seeker! I love it when two different interests of my own find a match somewhere. I've spent way too much time catching up on his videos, but he's phase inspired me in some of my own projects.
I'm curious how it got set to 10 years seemingly without anyone noticing.

Then again, after going to their main site to find out what Jaco is...

The easiest way to watch and analyze your users’ behavior

...perhaps some bugs are better left unfixed. :-/
Does Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja Moonlight as Street Artist Banksy?
It's pretty easy to make high-temperature (liquid nitrogen) super conductors already , I remember making this in undergraduate labs a few years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

The problem with them is that they are not ductile, and only super-conduct in 2 dimensions (along the planes of the material) and therefore it is difficult to do anything with them.
Flexport is hiring a sales analyst
HypnotizZzZzed CSS animation
I shall digest the article properly later on as it is relevant to me. One question I wanted to reach out and ask quickly is how do you find the speed of the new Azure portal? I appreciate this is very much an aside topic, but it's recently been incredibly slow for me. I'm not sure if this is just related to UK traffic. Having got used to it I would say I prefer it to the classic one, just wish it wasn't overly slow.
I think they should let him back in. He was an entertaining read.
That is something we have definitely thought about, but when making the numbers with the actual probability of being sued (more like 1% each year if you are a mid-sized VC funded startup) and the average lawsuit cost of going to court against the troll ($3M over 2 years, in case the case goes to the end), it is very dangerous to setup without a proper actuarial model, charging $500/month to some companies might be too risky.

What we are focused on right now is on diminishing patent portfolios so the lawsuit probability goes down. We have a lot of things in the pipeline that will make it easier for companies to be protected using Unpatent, that don't necessarily involve backing individual campaigns.
Reposted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12530652

I disagree with some of the claims, as I think these sorts of edge-cases mostly serve to highlight how imprecise the given pure/impure distinction is, and how we can't always take a semantic concept from one language (e.g. Haskell) and apply it in another (JS).

For example, if you always get "TypeError" when calling "sum()", you can replace "sum()" with its result ("throw TypeError") and get the same behaviour; it doesn't break referential transparency, so is it "pure"? What do we even mean by "result" in a language with exception handling? Do thrown exceptions count, or only return values?

Similarly, using "valueOf" doesn't show that the sum function is impure, it shows that the sum function is higher-order. If we mapped 'Math.random' over an array, does that make 'map' impure? What does it mean to be pure/impure when any variable can be replaced by a 'valueOf' function/procedure?

If two expressions call the same procedures, the same number of times, in the same order, and return the same pure function of their outputs, are those two expressions the same? Would replacing one with the other maintain referential transparency, and does that imply "purity"?

I think the answer is that such examples need more fine-grained notions than just "pure"/"impure". Otherwise it's just arguing over the semantics of English, rather than semantics of programs.
It looks like they make their users' browsers request a Google URL.
US, Hands Off Korea
Oh my, the hours we wasted inside of DEC playing that game as it was being developed, which was just called Doom at the time. It's a pity Dave hasn't given it the SDL treatment or updated it for OS X but the rights are probably all screwed up from publishing it for the original Mac back in the early 90's. It was fun because of its wonderful sense of humor and sci-fi storyline, ATMs, radioactive green slime, and all the wonderful warrens (where you could find wonderful things way beyond your current level). It really did have a story and a mystery to be solved. A true classic.

You'd need to post a picture of the Security Authorization Chart for any of us to play that however.
I think it's commonly agreed that pure functions depend only on their inputs AND cannot have side effects. So when introducing 'Math.random' the function would be impure as it has side effects.
The only real difference between Chrome and Firefox I notice regularly these days are subpixel rounding, input + button positioning in Firefox and styling of stuff like checkboxes, selects or radio buttons.

It is a pita, a few weeks ago I implemented a responsive design for a wine website created from the company's print agency, who just vomitted layers upon layers of images on the thing. Zero whitespace. Still it is nothing like it was 10 years ago. IE6 with its float bug simply destroyed the whole layout. Now it is more like "this button is 2px off in Firefox" or "here is some whitespace in chrome".
> There's no substitute for caring

Or for being paid, progressive enhancement is more work than not doing it and if the client/manager/… doesn't want to pay for it… the dev is unlikely to bother doing it on their own dime.
Exactly. Some patent trolls wait near the end of the lifetime of their patent to start asserting them.
Were they doing it in cash? I can understand it if the warehouse was literally being bought in hard currency, but otherwise it seems a little strange!
They are making business of a free service, that's still quite unique and innovative. I think that most of happens in Facebook is not visible to the user - keeping the uptime and performance are the key concern.
What ocean application are you talking about?
Learning things is fun. Having to unlearn things seldom is. This set bad habits in a discipline where a lot is muscle memory. I don't think it's a good idea.

Furthermore, I tried hard to ignore the glaring similarities between this and Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" from the way the course is structured down to some expressions.

This would have been cool if it at least mentioned the course on the right side pane with the other recommendations.
No, they were taking a loan from a small local bank and the bank literally didn't have enough money sitting in the account to pay out all of it instantly - they had to ask their other branches to make the transfer to their account first, before they could make the transfer to the account of the seller.
> Aren't the Babel people trying to define a common standard format for the AST so different parsers and code generators can better work together?

Actually kind of the opposite - babel used to use the common ESTree AST format, but they've moved away to something similar but incompatible.
I agree. React is far too opinionated for me to treat it as just a library. I use it as a framework just as I would use Angular, and it fits the bill. That it can also be used as just a library is a bonus, but doesn't define its identity.
> the loading of package was really slow

Was this on a Unix or on Windows? This has been my experience too on Windows, both the initial startup of Julia and the loading of packages was pretty slow (this was in 0.4.2 I believe).

> It has macro, if only it has lisp syntax...

Honestly, it's a language whose audience is at least 50% non-professional-programmers (scientists, engineers, statisticians), so with a lisp-y syntax it would probably have died a sputtering death. There's a lot of other things to love about the language though, whether superficial (being able to say `2y + 3` or `if a ≠ b && e ∈ S` if you wanted to), practical (pretty good FFIs to C, C++, Python, MATLAB and R already, decent-sized and quickly growing package repo), theoretical (mutliple dispatch, the type system).
> Yes, that's a feature that some of us use. Any replacement needs to support that ability, or it isn't a functional replacement.

No it doesn't. There is no need for any client without any permissions or privileges to be able to snoop on other processes. Why not let users decide which clients can snoop?

> That's only true for a small set of X clients.

What does X do?

> More can be prevented if toolkits bothered to draw using X instead of re-sending client-rendered pixmaps on every update (a lot of the people complaining about X are not actually using X for most of their work).

No, that is how X works. I found out this when experimenting with creating my own toolkit. The Composite extension fixes this.

> Choosing to break 20+ years of software by removing these features is not an acceptable solution.

It is acceptable. Most people don't use 20 year old software. XWayland can be used to keep backwards compatibility.
Pigeons love to hear bad news
See also: https://www.mysociety.org/2011/08/11/mobile-operators-breaki... where O2 stripped JS comments, without checking to see whether those comment delimiters were part of a string.
Natural gas can presumably be easily switched on and off to take up the intermittent 50% of the demand. So the realistic combined price is somewhere around $47.
Why then build nuclear at $97 ??
I'm not surprised really, since the sort of services you can access with a gov.uk account can lead to identify theft or other types of fraud.
I've been using React for small projects in my personal time, and I haven't needed anything like Flux at all. Maybe you'll need it for complex apps, but React can be used for small ones without that added complication.
It's safe visit these websites ? I've visited cooks.org.kp with JS enabled-_- (but origin ublock active)
Video killed the radio star
@lachyg Thanks for the invite!.. but as far as I understand Stripe only covers b2c payments to US cards? Or if we sign up as US company, can we send world-wide?
Action! rocked! So fast to compile and run. Too bad it came along too late in the Atari lifecycle to matter. It's big trick was to disallow recursion, which meant local variables and function args/results could be allocated statically, which worked around the 6502's limitations.
Wouldn't funding this be in the interest of mid-sized companies? Albeit it's not likely that they'll be targeted it seems like an awfully cheap insurance policy. By "they" I mean "a company".

Seeing as they are a potential target for the next six years they'd effectively pay 20000/6 which rounds up to four grand a year that has to be much cheaper than the legal fees they'd incur if they were targeted.

Split that cost with a few other companies and it hardly costs a thing in the relative scheme of things. Makes for a good PR opportunity as well: "We will not sit idly by when others are bullied into paying licensing fees on such a nonsensical patent, effectively robbing the cradle of new businesses"
> It's about issues that would have lasted for ten year, without the possibility to be fixed, if we hadn't discovered the root cause

Don't all issues last forever without the possibility to be fixed if you don't discover the root cause?

I agree, poor title.
> That amount of data can still be downloaded over the slowest mobile link imaginable in a fraction of a second.

That's a bit of an excessive enthusiasm. EDGE is effectively ~200kbps (30kB/s) with ~200ms ping, so you're at a good 1.5s assuming no dropped packets.

And that's not "the slowest mobile link imaginable" by a long shot, GPRS is under 100kbps and before that was CSD (around 14kbps, with high speed CSD around 56k)

And CSD was already 2G, 1G was NMT, at 1200 bits per second.

None of these even require imagination, they're existing historical mobile links, most of which (GPRS up) are still in active use (I believe NMT has no deployment left, and while I'm reasonably certain most telecoms have dropped CSD I wouldn't bet that all deployments are gone)
What we love about the crowdfunding is that it raises awareness about the issue. You have to actively back the campaign. But we're thinking about other, more passive methods as well.
It's not false and that trend is nothing but clear.

There is no clear trend in countries below 20 000$/person/year GDP (ppp).

There is clear trend of lower Gini = higher GDP in countries that fall in range of 20 000$ - 45 000$. Above that, the trend reverses.

I had to exclude Afganistan, Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria and Ivory coast becase the data didn't have gini for them.
Intuitively I like this -- hits all the good buzzwords and has a ton of good things going for it. I was especially impressed that they're possibly heading towards a Simian Army situation. To me this is the only logical way to deploy infrastructure in a modern setting. I'd sure like to look under the hood, though.

Most interesting was "...Deploying Kubernetes in a highly available configuration on AWS is not for the faint of heart and requires you to get familiar with its internals, but we are very pleased with the results..."

Wonder how much pain and suffering there was getting this to where they wanted it.

The only part I was concerned about was 150 microservices so early in the game, moving to message queuing while still very small, and the RPC/locking stuff. Smells like over-engineering. But hey, I'm not there. There's a ton of stuff that goes into making decisions like that. Thanks for the story!
But the people running bombing raids regulate the securities industry. Therefore, they make the rules. This ain't Plato and Aristotle's polis.
Love, Friendship and Public Accounting Don't Mix
This may not go down too well, but it is an opinion I heard and I personally agree with (having worked in UK gov institution and that far from GDS):
GDS is wasting taxpayer money, spending way too much attention on minute details like apostrophes, CSS and stuff.
Given that most of *.gov.uk are standardised now, it works out to literally millions of GBP per line of CSS.
In an ideal world we'd have fully accessible web, progressive enhancement, responsive layouts etc, but any real business has to say stop - this does not improve our services that much anymore, whereas GDS are free to to redesign their CSS over and over, just because no one else in the government understands technology.
> My guess is that most people who prefer zero-based feel strongly about it, and most people that like one-based don't care that much.

FWIW, as someone in the latter category (liking one-based indexing), I'd say you're partially correct: I'm not emotional attached to 1-based indexing the way some 0-based folks seem to be, but it's a practical nicety and one of the things I'm really glad Julia chose to do. Making 0-based the default would definitely reduce its appeal to me.
That's it! You nailed it
GainSpan Supporting Apple Homekit Reference Designs
Eikosalepto is a lot, but eh, you just wouldn't agitate it while it was down. Three, five or ten seconds don't matter that much.
Am I missing something? This patent is specific to automated insurance marketing. The unpatent.co campaign seems to imply that is some kind of catch all patent that covers all automated decision making. I don't see the link.
You're conflating user and service designer here. The user has a problem (including but not limited to those listed) and so turns off JS. The service then has the problem that JS is disabled... no amount of SSL will help if your pages require JS to load.

Edit to clarify: The user turning off JS and using the service are likely to happen at entirely different times. If you browse with JS turned off, it's likely off by default and only enabled when needed (if at all).
Acorn also did Forth and Lisp, though the Lisp was interpreted.
Hi Alex. Cool! Please let me know how you get on with it.

Now that you come to mention it, I have also found the portal to be rather slow. Indeed, sometimes it's excruciating. However, for some reason I hadn't really thought about it until now. I usually have loads of browser tabs open, so maybe I thought that was the culprit.
Ask HN: What are some good Crowdsourced Testing Platforms?
Hi HN, I'd like to get your feedback on my new site and wish to find some good Crowdsourced Testing Platforms.

Check it out - http://www.now-do.com
I'm looking for a crowdtesting platform, and I have the following specific things I'd like the beta users to provide feedback/comment on.

- Look around the home page - what is your initial impression of what you see? Are any good call-to-action buttons? Is it a clear idea what the website is doing?

- After you click one featured, was reading/translating/sharing/signup straightforward? Did you find anything confusing?

- Think of something you want to find on this website. Now try to find it. Did you find what you were looking for? Was anything confusing?
That's what I thought. It boils down to the question of whether:

f => f()

is a pure function? If so, then so is the author's example. If not, then I don't see how any JS function that takes an argument (and evaluates it) can be pure. Under that definition, I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about.
Facebook acquires nascent objecs
I'm glad that they are doing this to raise awareness about the problem, and it seems like a good idea to request prior art on this page.

And, it looks to have a great team behind it:
https://unpatent.co/about

So, I'm curious, is Lee Cheng going to be the one going after Marc and his group, and is the $20k just to try to help pay his court expenses? Because, it seems like it's going to be a lot more expensive than that. I'm asking because there isn't much information about how the money will be used on the campaign page, and I think more would give if this were clearer.

Good luck to Unpatent in this! I think this is an inventive way to help start to solve this problem.

Something else that people could do is write to their representatives about it. These patent problems are solvable with law that penalizes organizations that try to blackmail organizations with patents that are overly broad.

http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_c...