skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bah. Everyone is dismissing the Touch Bar without actually playing with it. I think it's a great new experimental HID, and if any company can execute well on something like this, it's Apple.

The same goes for the Surface Dial. Cool new HID technology. Let's see what developers do with it. I'm not pulling my wallet yet for the Surface Studio, since it's running Windows 10 and I've heard poor things about the firmware/execution of the Surface Book, but let's cheer MS on for trying something new and exciting in this space.

PS: I want 30 smaller Surface Dials, turn that baby in to a kick-ass synthesizer.
I'm happy that it's back. It seems to be running on a new engine.
When I click around I see a spinner sometimes, I don't remember seeing that in the past.
Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
The Atlas of Early Printing in Europe
While interesting, I'm not sure the actual map as pictured is a "good design":

One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps.
Notice how much of this map is taken up by it. While interesting from a planetary perspective, it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users.

The proposed design thus has too low a land area to map area ratio to be very useful.

The projection itself would be useful as a digital map (with zooming and panning) or as an icon, though.
Tip: https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/cracking-the-hack...

HackerRank are simple exercices which can be done in a few minutes to one hour [online IDE, short single-file code]. It's trivial for anyone who can program, [except the screening tests in limited time with hard (or custom) exercises].

The bootcamp people with good ranking are likely people who started programming a long time ago, but never professionally. It's a given that they must be able to solve simple exercises.
The article surprised me in that it didn't mentioned the potter's wheel even though the principles are mostly the same.
Is there any realistically conceivable alternate-history/universe where cable-suspended wheel-less trams (like [1][2][3] but closer to ground level) became the dominant method of transportation instead of huge roads and cars?

It's something I've been musing on to incorporate into some fiction, inspired by all the recent news and discussions about self-driving cars and the prospect of shared fleets.

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

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondola_lift
Working link for: Wirth, N. (1971). Program development by stepwise refinement - https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/StepwiseRefi...
I love this game. I think I would send the idea of plant breeding. They had this idea to some extent, but I don't think there was big public, long term effort to breed new crops or get much higher yields. If you get modern crops faster, you have larger populations, which leads to industrialization sooner. This isn't just limited to food crops, it's possible ancients could have bred plants and animals for many useful purposes.

Slightly relevant, what information would you send to the past if you had a phone that could communicate backwards in time? But there's a catch, any idea you send is converted to the closest analogue in ancient times. So if you tell them about the scientific method, they will just think about religion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/
How do you know someone's culture when they are booking a hotel room online?
The unfortunate part is finding good IDEs with solid debuggers and auto-completion.
Sadly it is now invisible to the web archive http://web.archive.org/web/20161024110012/http://wiki.c2.com...
Starglider II was very impressive at the time - I was wowed by seeing it on my friend's Atari ST. You could fly around a solar system and through a network of tunnels inside the planets, refuel yourself by flying along power lines, shoot lots of baddies and even see space whales! It also felt extremely fluid. It was interesting in that there was a proper mission beyond killing everything.

Starglider I was also a lot of fun on my Amstrad 8 bit machine, although the graphics were wireframe.
> We set up a control group for science. An entire field of science devoted to studying a phenomenon which doesn't exist.

That this "phenomenon" does not and cannot exist is the foundational assumption of modern science. Back in the days when the Laws of Thermodynamics were being figured out to describe the properties of steam engines, a few chemists realized that everything in the universe could be described in terms of indivisible 'atoms'.

Atoms aren't indivisible anymore, but the assumption lives on.

Life is much more interesting if one assumes that our 3d-reality is but a projection of a higher-ordered reality.
Packs of large animals carve impressively road-like paths between their points of interest in the scrub.
stack allocation: 20 years in the making.
Rejected……
“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”
Thanks for explaining the map's benefits much better than the original article!
It wouldn't be that hard to have a network interface for the FPGA implementations. The Zynq SoCs have two network interfaces, though most dev boards only connect one of them to a connector.
In modern C++ you don't even have to do that.
Is there an indication of trust status? I.e. "auto imported" vs. Manually verified, and more importantly what happens when fingerprints change?
I am, by no means, an expert on pf, but I strongly suspect that many of the iptables extensions have no comparable capability in pf. Specifically, I don't know of any deep packet inspection extensions for pf, ipsec headers (such as authentication info) can be used for filtering decisions in iptables, iptables has some cluster capabilities built in, iptables has DCCP congestion control rules, and so on. iptables, like Linux itself, just has so many people working on it, that almost anything you can think to do with it has already been done by someone and they've created a module for it.

If you haven't run into the missing capabilities, they probably don't matter. I'm not suggesting people who are happy with their pf firewalls should replace them with iptables because iptables is somehow "better". It just has a lot more users and a lot broader ecosystem because of it. To be more clear: I don't generally use any of those features that iptables has that pf doesn't, and I don't think most other people to either; at least no such features come to mind. I think I have once or twice used things like the user extension in nearly two decades of system administration.

I'm always surprised at how strong people's aversion to iptables is. It's really not that complicated. I mean, most of the people here are writing software in far more complex languages daily and don't consider it a huge endeavor. iptables is a very simple declarative language, with only a few syntactical elements, in most cases. But, I guess it doesn't look like what folks are used to, and networking is its own category of complexity that many people never dive into.
Was glass and the tools needed to make a lens readily available to people then? Or would you nedd to time travel with substantial wealth?
Many Powerwall 2's can be combined to reach potentially unlimited scale. Tesla working with SCE to build an 80 mWh Powerwall 2 stack.

Utility power required to partner with local generators. Bright future for both rooftop and Big Utility.

Solar Roofs

Solar roofs superior to normal roof? Can they look better and costs less. Maybe.

Make solar panels look like roof shingles. A textured glass tile contains/covers (?) the solar cells.

Hydrographic printing allows each tile to look unique, so the roof/house looks beautiful. No two roofs will be the same.

From street-level, it looks opaque, but is transparent to Sun.
I don't know the details of the law but I was under the impression that you can be sued as a private seller for misrepresenting the car in a negligent way (and obviously "negligence" can be in the eye of the beholder). I guess "lemon law" is not the term to use.
The main business goals of code quality improvements are to 1) reduce the number of problems customers encounter thereby reducing customer support costs 2) reduce the amount of unplanned work/firefighting engineers do and 3) increase the pace of innovation. Therefore along with code metrics you should be tying these quality changes out to business metrics such as number of customer-filed bugs per a month, number of customer support calls a month, etc. This should provide validation to code quality improvements, and give you a way to sell further improvements to management. Also keep in mind that there are non-technical ways to improve IT efficiency (improve project management, improve release management, improve testing etc)

So how do you go about making code quality improvements:
1) See if you can remove unused code/dependencies/features. Less code means less code to support, and faster compile and testing times. Look at metrics like code removed

2) Focus on the most problematic areas of the code and eliminate errors and bugs. If you can eliminate a significant source of unplanned work/firefighting, you'll have more time to spend on planning development instead of just reacting to work. These problematic areas are where tests will be most useful

3) Add static analyzers and linters to easily detect simple problems (like unused variables, style problems, problematic constructs such as if(foo = bar). As you develop your coding guidelines, implement the rules in these tools to automatically find these minor problems. This will allow your code reviews to focus on the big picture instead of nit-picky implementation details.

4) Do things to close the feedback loops for development. Consider running testing throughout the day. Maybe try to increase release cycles. Maybe add UX earlier in the cycle
So maybe the thing to invent is banking?
Go's garbage collector is implemented in Go.
Direct link to report PDF: http://www.privacylab.at/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Christl-...
Sorry, but I'm not sure I could recommend Lenovo again for a very long time... they seem to be doing everything they can to milk every cent from every resource at the cost of their own brand.
Why Google’s New Phone Will Soon Be Irrelevant
You are obviously not being discriminating against where it matters. Here are a few examples that wouldn't be a big deal to you accordingly:

1) School says they won't accept your daughter, but hey it's not a big deal according to you

2) Neighborhood won't let you buy a house you like because they don't like your wife's skin color, but hey it's not a big deal

3) You are getting paid less at work and skipped for promotion in favor of Elmud because he is one of them and you are not, but hey it's not a big deal

Discrimination IS NOT ok. It IS NOT built into us. It is an acquired taste. Bad taste. First we accept the issue then we work on fixing it.
There's never been a laptop younger than 7 years that Apple stopped supporting with a new OS release.
Using Chrome, getting Italian.
I think that's a great idea. I have no idea what development is like for a blind person, it would be very interesting to learn.
Not all Lenovos. Stick to the mature strains like Thinkpad X2xx and T4xx. They are built like tanks.
Python for Lisp Programmers
Wow, we'll finally blow the lid off all these conspiracy theories when we 'unblur' the pictures of : Sasquatch, UFOs, Loch Ness Monster ... :)
> completely terrible code.

Not everyone is writing games...
It looks like you can "decline the commitment" but not exercise "the option to cancel your account" according to the language on the announcement. So I think they will let you honour existing bookings without agreeing to the new commitment.
Ding ding ding! This is what private industry advancing equality looks like - there wasn't a Brown v Board required here.
On a true spherical globe, Brasil does not look as pointy as on the map. So it's still deforming something at least.

Sadly, not a single high resolution image of this to be found on the internet :(
It's an anecdote based on personal experience. Besides, a Thinkpad (depending on the specific model) is a beast of a different color.

Modern Mac power cables are also far more durable than the earlier models.
It's just a big battery that you can plug things into full time. When power goes out it instantly switches to battery power. It recharges when the power comes back.
I'm really not a fan of this Medium-ization of programming blogs. I find this much harder to read than something more crude and basic, like, e.g. http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php - static html, no JS (aside from the obligatory analytics, Adwords, and social widget throw-ins), high-contrast, no-nonsense.
The dymaxion certainly introduces less distortion but it's also non continuous giving it the same issues as the Goode homolosine
Show HN: Parallel and/or with short-circuit in Elixir
Hi, this can terminate when either branch of and/or terminates early and short-circuits the operator.

def or_(task1, task2) do
parent = self
pid1 = spawn(fn -> send parent, task1.() end)
pid2 = spawn(fn -> send parent, task2.() end)
receive do
false ->
receive do
result2 ->
Process.exit pid1, :kill
Process.exit pid2, :kill
result2
end
true ->
Process.exit pid1, :kill
Process.exit pid2, :kill
true
end
end

https://gist.github.com/roehst/e98a9b0703ceb75d85f7b212b60005ee
> Audio: now using Audio Queues on Mac OS X hosts

Will this improve or worsen audio latency, or is it just using a more modern API with the same performance characteristics?
If it was one human, they'd die off before reaching any significant technological level. However someone who's been on a survival course should be able to survive for the length of their natural life (minus modern medicine), the first few days being the key.

Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on.

There is a book about all this (a rather depressing book actually): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-...
What do you mean the continents are not distorted. South America looks pretty distorted to me, so does Australia.
How I Became HackerRank #1 in Two Hours
A lot of it has to do with geography. Europe is quite a bit further north, and doesn't experience some of the heat that the US does.

It always helps me to remember that Rome is further north than New York.
Strange they don't mention the UFO in the video. Good guys stopping bad satellite seems to be a common theme in all the conspiracy theories.
You do not spend 30 minutes, let alone 60, chopping, mixing, turning, cleaning. No way. You can do other things like browsing HN (or nothing if you wish) while the meal(s) cook. A fair part of the 'cooking' is just about waiting, not acting.

And as far as the active part is concerned, I like to listen the radio and if I can get organised so that I can prepare the food while one my favourite broadcasts is on the air, I don't even notice I "have to work".
I'm unsure about the US but I know that where I live a solid third or so of my power bills are a fixed rate that you pay to access the grid (so pretty much line rental). It doesn't feel to me like that's a particularly unique situation.

So it's worth keeping in mind that the actual power usage figure may be a fair amount lower, and that your SW calcs are a bit of a worst case estimate.
I want the right to be racist. I'm not a bigot- my girlfriend is Hispanic, I'm from a majority black neighborhood, my parents are gay, etc. But thoughts and words should never be forbidden.

That's basically the whole point of liberalism. You're free to be someone that pisses me off.
Another data point. Past 12 months we're at 22,000 kwh. Average of 60kwh a day. Older 4 br house with people almost always in it. USA, TN.

I think the main difference for us is that my wife and some of the kids are at home almost all the time and we kept the house warmer for the baby this winter.
I'll mention a significant case that doesn't have to do with allocation. Large graph-like data structures (lots of small nodes linked by reference) are effectively prohibited entirely by the GC. They make every marking phase take much too long, until whenever time the whole thing gets promoted into the long-lived generation. A mainstream runtime having such an impactful opinion about my data structures (not alloc patterns) is something I just find deeply offensive. Imagine if C++ programs stuttered because you had too many pointers!

They could have avoided that whole problem by providing an API like DontCollectThisRoot, but instead they (and a lot of programmers) chose to pretend the GC was good enough to treat like a black box.
I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok!

Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.
How to Be a Good Client for an Agency
no idea, but do people actually use audio in virtualized machines? I've always found the experience (vmware or virtualbox) to be hideous.
The Romans absolutely used wheels. Those roads were so well travelled with wagons that there are still grooves cut into them where the wheels wore away the pavement. The roman armies would have used large numbers of wagons to carry all the food and supplies an army needs, which is the main reason they needed roads.
I really like vbox. When work forced me to have MS windows box I did 90℅ of my time in Fullscreen vb running Ubuntu. I also ran widows vbs.

Now on osx I run dev db and other server as needed. Nice to roll back to snapshot

Fits in tool box for non automated, as hoc servers. Dont have to configure anything, or write script. Just acts like buying new hardware and slipping in CD.
GraphicsMagick has been one of the hidden gems I've found over the years in my career. HN would probably mostly be interested in it for server-side applications [+], but it is an absurdly useful thing to have sitting around your laptop, too, for those times when e.g. you've got a screenshot of something but a government/etc site will only take a file upload in pdf format. "gm convert foo.png foo.pdf" and you're done.

[+] Really good for common "take an arbitrary user upload; grab info to crop it from your web app; crop and resize to appropriate dimensions" sorts of tasks.
Ask HN: How did you integrate the ACCESSIBILITY features to your site or app?
If you want to share your site or app and the accessibility features you have integrated, please do. Also if you had any hindrance on integrating accessibility features, what were those hindrance?

Thanks.
I'm of the impression that Java has done escape analysis for a while now. They just haven't had value types, which as I understand, just introduce a semantic for stack allocation.
A Conveyor Belt of Dropouts and Debt at For-Profit Colleges
But it's fundamentally one module [re]writing a completely different module. "rewrites its own code" is a very misleading way to describe that.
The Episcopal Church made my parents get gay married or they'd fire them for having a long term live in significant other and children out of wedlock.

The future is funny. That might be considered discrimination?
Solving the GCHQ Christmas Puzzle with Sentient
Apple: The perfect robot without a brain
> However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated.

Well the very nature of the wheel itself probably helped with that - I wonder if that holds true for all transportation-related inventions?
Scrum is better for a more junior team that's less capable of self-organizing and needs more structure. It's also better for a green-field project where you're shipping new features on a regular basis and you want to set targets for completing them. It works well with larger chunks of work and is less flexible around things like prioritizing newly discovered production bugs.

Kanban requires a team of more senior and self-sufficient engineers who can manage their own work. It's also better for projects that are largely in a maintenance phase where you're constantly picking which fix to work on next out of your backlog.

Finally, scrum makes more sense for packaged software where you want to get into a regular rhythm of releases or where you have to bless defined releases (eg for App Store review). Kanban matches well with continuous delivery web environments where you never develop significant inventory of undelivered changes.

Edited to add: one more thing - scrum enforces certain types of communication about your project that with kanban you have to rely on company culture or external processes to manage. This tends to make scrum more effective the larger your engineering organization is.
Computers for Cynics 2 – It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC
Sure, there are all sorts of ways to lessen the pain of syntactically significant indentation. Indeed, I'd say that the annoyance can be made sufficiently small that by the time someone is an experienced enough coder to recognize that the pain has always been communally self-inflicted, they're too used to it to care.

Do also note that I'm not saying that indentation is by itself bad.

http://1060nm.com/42/en/
I'm also of the impression that Go's "transactional GC" is similar to a generational GC?
> Marketing and business model, primarily.

And from that, hopefully, scale. Solar tiles have always seemed to be a very poor relation of solar panels. The approximately 1x1.5m panel is a sort of informal global standard, and that's meant that solar tiles have been much more fragmented, much lower scale, and much more expensive.

On the other hand in theory these solar integrated building materials should greatly reduce the associated costs of installing panels - labour is usually something like half the cost of installing rooftop solar, but if you can install a solar roof without much more effort than a normal roof, those extra labour costs are massively reduced.

If you can leverage this labour cost advantage to ramp up scale of the tiles, and get them close to the per watt cost of traditional panels, this is how you can really make rooftop solar competitive. These labour costs are why rooftop solar is so much more expensive than utility solar. If you can greatly reduce them, total costs are much more tied to the cost of the tiles themselves, the inverter, and so on, where there is enormous leeway for ongoing reductions. Very exciting.