skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the technology side of things, h265 and VP9 are both attempting to further increase compression efficiency so that we can deliver super high resolutions, wide color gamuts, and bit depths greater than 8. These features are very difficult to achieve with wide compatibility when utilizing h264 and VP8.

More generally, h265 and VP9 can be seen as competitors in the same space, but with some meaningful differences in philosophy. VP9 is a royalty-free codec developed by Google. The VPx series of codecs all stem from the work of the On2 company, which Google acquired specifically so that it could get into the video codec space.

h265 is patent-protected by a number of parties who are chilling the adoption and rollout of this new codec. As a result, VP9 has seen some rapid adoption by both hardware and software manufacturers lately. If you work in digital video today, the likelihood is that you will need to support both codecs in your processing stack and delivery pipelines.

Other interesting developments in this space include the Daala codec in development by the Xiph Foundation (responsible for Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and the wonderful Opus audio codec) and the Thor codec in development by Cisco and their tech partners. Both are aiming to be next-generation royalty-free codecs for distribution of even smaller, and even prettier videos.
How Usenet stores Binaries
Love this, would be cool also to list if there are any external links within theme by default and where those go to, also any libraries used as a dependency. Great presentation of themes though, much better than just the 1 main screen shot.
Because somebody has to maintain the gardens and lawns, and if you're a two-earner couple you may not have time for that.
Galactic Algorithms
An Introduction to PyGame
It's unfortunate, but we have a tendency to take some beliefs so deeply that they become a part of our core identity. Once this happens, validation of the idea becomes validation of ourselves. Attacks upon the idea become attacks upon ourselves.

Once someone has reached this point, logic simply cannot reach them. Successfully defeating their arguments will only strengthen their resolve (the backfire effect), because they're being driven by the amygdala, which only understands threat response. They will grab onto any argument, no matter how flimsy, and be completely unaware of how little sense it makes. Any further argument with them will at best do nothing, at worst make you look as much a fool as he.

The wise man learns to recognize this state and back off.
This is fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to create it. This looks like an amazingly simple way to create a prototype.
Alias declarations reverted from Go 1.8
Wake me up when someone goes to jail.

When you start sending the perps to jail for violating others' constitutional rights, they'll fall in line pretty quickly.

Until then, these "scandals" are no different than Kim Kardashian's nip-slip or that Paris Hilton video.
I've been dreaming of a job where I work outdoors and maintain a bunch of simple IOT type devices end to end. Deploy hardware, script, and analyze data as needed. I would love to just cut through all the noise.
I had never heard of E-Prime, but this reminded me of Reginald Braithwaite's presentation "Optimism" [1].

He advocates becoming aware of when people use temporary or permanent language, and suggests using temporary language for criticizing other people and permanent language for praising people. This is a brilliant bit of human psychology that is highly practical in everyday situations.

I don't know whether E-Prime is practical, it seems problematic to try to police the language itself, but the goals & rationale have a good heart. We probably would be better off if we could all speak less dogmatically and hyperbolically.

I do recall someone here on HN mentioning attempts to create a new language in which one could not lie, I wonder if E-prime was what was being referred to...

[1] https://github.com/raganwald/presentations/blob/master/optimism.md
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12298898
Pi only shows up in the field equations multiplied with an arbitrary constant. Therefore they are trivial to formulate without.
Another early prescient vision of thought-manufacturer and mind-manipulator culture, as well as a great read is the Frederick Pohl and Kornbluth story Gravy Planet, home of the great quote 'power ennobles, and absolute power ennobles absolutely'..

It's from the 50's but it's a shockingly accurate picture of our modern world with advanced propoganda, globalism etc .. and it's free here https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1952-08 .. enjoy :)
Panic recovery and panics can be disabled, and often are. Libraries are not supposed to rely on their existence. Thus these are not a form of exceptions ; they can't be used as such.

Their purpose is to recover from panics when embedding Rust in code written in other languages, where you don't want the panic to try and cross the ffi boundary (or to stop applications that should never crash from crashing at the toplevel, or for better reporting before a crash). Many FFI-based applications turn panics into aborts anyway. Firefox does.

The unwind-recovery functionality in Rust is just enough to get you these useful features if you need them (zero cost if you don't; turn them into aborts), without needing a full on exception system. The reason Rust avoids an exception system isn't the cost of unwinding, it's because it considers exceptions to be an inferior pattern compared to return value based / monadic error handling.

Rust doesn't have a mailing list anymore. I haven't seen much annoyance with panic recovery. There used to be some with panics in general because in the past they couldn't be turned off or recovered from without a new thread, but this has been addressed for ages with panic=abort and recovery. What the hell are you talking about?
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12737328
Is this HTML reinvented? :)
I'm actually beginning to think that we should require a 2/3 majority for simple legislation and a 3/4 majority for amendments. Maybe it'd help nip a lot of problems in the bud.

Or just create new ones …
"On their own, neutrons are very unstable and will convert into protons — positively charged subatomic particles — after ten minutes. "
...
"For the tetraneutron, this lifetime is only 5×10^(-22) seconds (a tiny fraction of a billionth of a nanosecond). "

10 minutes is an eternity and 5×10^(-22) seconds is closer to what I'd consider 'very unstable'
I noticed in the last couple of years as geographically and social circle unrelated friends who were in sales suddenly were working for SalesForce. I imagined they just ramped up their own sales force.

From a business standpoint they are big enough to just buy companies. From a longer term tech standpoint it is harder to guess what could happen. The analogy of drug companies doing leveraged buyout of pharmaceuticals with patents nearing a sunset date seems to apply here.
> The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances.

Sometimes called "strong opinions, weakly held".

I find this principle to be incoherent - if you understand something well enough to have a strong opinion, you understand it well enough to hold that opinion strongly. Holding strong opinions on things you don't understand that well seems unhelpful.
Cool context! Thanks. I've often been tempted to learn Esperanto bc I've heard arguments made as to its general logical consistency. There's also a constructed language called Toki Pona [1] that is fascinating for similar reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
The constant reduction is amazing, for those precise use cases you can afford to use them. Not all linear is created equal. O(10n) = O(n/10), but in practice the performance difference of the inner expressions can be a huge difference.

(Note that is a correct usage of the O notation; because of the fact that those two things are equal we generally just use O(n) because for clarity you might as well use the simplest member of the equivalence class defined by the O notation, but it is still valid to write O(n/10). It's just an error to treat it as anything other than equal to O(n).)
Are we talking about apt on Debian/Ubuntu vs Homebrew on Mac or about some special Mac apt?
Stanford researchers solve the mystery of the dancing droplets
We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda

If you are making accusations against the writer you need to substantiate them. Or else it's just hearsay.
Thanks for the feedback! We discuss that issue here: https://github.com/Jasonette/JASONETTE-iOS/issues/4

Please follow the project if you're interested in finding out where this goes :)
>seems like it ties you very strongly to the FSF's political opinions

Some are happy to be associated with the opinion that all software should be free.

>in particular Richard Stallman's political opinions (e.g., eugenics)

Richard Stallman's opinions, outside of the realm of free software, are irrelevant in the context of the GNU project. Throwing out eugenics like that feels manipulative to me.

>restricts your technical decision-making options

The next few paragraphs will explain why what you see as restrictions aren't seen the same way from the perspective of GNU developers.

>limited plugin architecture

You are of course referring to exposing the AST of GCC to other (possibly proprietary) programs, which was a GCC-specific issue. It doesn't broadly apply to everything. I help maintain GNU Guix, a project designed from the ground up to be as extensible as possible, and there has been no such issue. Nor does GNU Emacs have an issue with extensibility.

>limited support for non-free OSes

I think this is distorting the truth a bit. The point is that the focus of the GNU project is to develop a fully free operating system, and maintainers should focus their efforts accordingly. That doesn't mean that GNU software shouldn't work well on other, proprietary operating systems, and maintainers shouldn't reject patches from contributors that add or improve such support unless it adds a significant burden. Bottom line is: GNU software should work the best on the GNU system, which seems sensible to me. The GNU maintainer guidelines go into more detail about this topic.

>mandatory support for things like GNUTLS

Software in the GNU project should work well with or use other software in the GNU system. Again, those that participate in the GNU project think this is positive, because GNU should form a cohesive whole, just like MacOS or Windows should.

>while not giving you very much in return

GNU and the FSF give Guix a place to host many Git repos, space for a website, several mailing lists, a bug tracker, they colocate our hardware in their datacenter, give us virtual machines on their own servers, handle donations, and promote our releases. I think it's a pretty great deal given the project is philosophically aligned with the free software movement.

>With the existence of GitHub and a wide variety of competitors

I wouldn't call GitHub a competitor. GitHub is just a code hosting site, GNU is a unified project with a political mission.

>What am I missing?

Hopefully I've helped answer this question.
I agree. Elementary is ubuntu and they are reccomending ubuntu as an alt?
Average Height and Weight for Men
>> limited support for non-free OSes

Some believe that's not necessary a bad thing.
Over 100M US political donations interactively visualized
OK, completely misunderstood you there, then; thanks for the clarification!
Glad you liked it!

If you click on the title of each theme, it takes you to a detail page, where each screenshot has a link hover on top of it. Is this what you wanted? Anything else we can improve?
It's great.

I can definitely see an use for this.
Apple should make the Mac business a separate business unit (they could call it Apple Computer...). Then that unit can concentrate on making the best computers they can do. As it is now, the Macs is secondary in importance for Apple's management, and it also takes their attention away from their core phone business at times. Why not just spin it off? Apple can still own 100% of it, the important part to get a management that is completely focused on that business.
Why do you assume all questions are answerable by science? Science says that if you assemble materials in a particular way you will get a solar panel, and if you assemble other materials in a different way then you get a toaster; it can't say which you should do.

Science says that a human being is a collection of genes which are formed at conception; it can't say anything about abortion, murder, capital punishment or self-defense. Those aren't topics on which it is competent: all it can do is inform discussions thereon, by affirming, 'yes, we are talking about a human being in this case, but in this other we are not.'

You simply can't address every issue with an appeal to science.
A video codec is a set of algorithms used to compress and decompress video content. H265 and VP9 are two different video codecs. H265 is the successor to H264, and is a proprietary codec developed by MPEG-LA. VP9 is a royalty-free video codec developed by Google, and is the successor to VP8.
Some enterprise software, most of the patterns are well know and the customization point are well defined.
I would describe more as a well know domain with clear constraints than trivial software.
They generate a lot of code also for high critical real time software (avionics and space) but that is not really trivial.
It probably needs a question about whether the aliens are aquatic or land-based. Some of the follow up questions wouldn't be relevant, like bridges and roads, if the world were aquatic.
Then it might just mean that you are holding it wrong
I don't haz Apple but it looks great.
It is also important to mention AV1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1) which is meant to replace VP9 and compete against H.265.
It’s time to admit Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician
You see, the problem is that systemd promised not needing to specify those
dependencies in the first place, but then we have exactly the same stupid
situation that we had with upstart, Gentoo's initsystem, or SysV init (sic!):
sysadmin needs to manually tweak things to get the boot order right, only that
none of the init systems (except with SysV init) can't tell you the boot order
without rebooting your machine.

And yes, sysadmin will still need to tweak things, because a distribution
maintainers cannot predict all the possible dependencies between services.
One could never forsee that Mailman would fail to run when OpenLDAP was
stopped, and this is what I had in one place.
Actual demo link is here: https://www.mapd.com/demos/political-donations
The program would tell me to do things like make two extractors but put fewer than necessary probes on them, pull probes to extractors after X trips or at X time (can't remember which),

Pros actually do both of those things.
> i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. So why be surprised if people think he's a big python critic.

I think this attitude is exactly what the article argues against.

If (1) you read his earlier posts about python 3 and (2) understood the specific objections and (3) are aware the current state of python 3 is such that those objections don't apply, then you have no good reason to suppose he still considers them to be valid objections.

If (3) isn't the case, you still don't have a good reason to assume his opinions haven't changed, because the world moves on and that has to be accounted for.
Without the mac there is no iPhone.

Before disagreeing, ask yourself what every single piece of iPhone software was written on.

Someone has to make the software and you ignore developers at your peril.
I thought something exciting had been done here but it's been a long time since "GPGPU" meant "kernels written in GLSL".
One aspect you're missing here is time; just because something is true today doesn't make it true tomorrow.
I answered no to essentially all questions. I consider dogs and rabbits, for example, to be intelligent life. From observing the earth and our surroundings, there is no reason to assume that higher intelligence would automatically arise.

How to define human-level intelligence is an interesting question. It would probably have to be done with questions similar to those on the site. E.g., do they know about pi.

P.S. 25% think they have access to time travel?!
You know, here at Brazil we are having some deep recent changes... And I just can not imagine anybody who could be interested in financing the mind-manipulating machine that would be creating this.

I'm still tending to think Huxley didn't have the full picture and populations still have some amount of free-will.
You got me beat (Biltmore's a year short of 20 years, IIRC, oh yesteryear.) I tried searching for RH and banks and other than a landing page re: RBS and a few quotes it was particularly light on details. RH crushed it with the RHEL and JBoss model[1] (pretty much the paragon of "ethical open-source commercialization" IMO). Are these banks replacing pSeries AIX boxes at branches, WebSphere instances for the consumer to hit, or z13 mainframes with CICS or other more-than-five-nines-accessibility with guaranteed zero data loss? (Pardon my ignorance - not a snarky quip but rather genuinely curious as to what, if any, out of the box solutions RH is pushing in that sector.)

[1] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/jboss-example/
I am definitely not opposed to the idea of things we don't understand going on out there, not at all. The thought of it excites me as much as the next guy.

It's really just this specific type of video I am very skeptical towards. Here's a German video about creating these, with timestamp to a demonstration of the result: https://youtu.be/PG-mMiKWbwE?t=2m26s

Considering how little effort the guy put into this (take trombone sound, add reverb, slow down and overlay with badly recorded video) I think it's safe to say that the majority of those videos are fake.

For the news reports, it wouldn't surprise me if they used these fake videos as their "sources". Especially when they're tagged as happening in a specific area I can imagine a local news station picking it up, then being further sourced by others.

As for the phenomenon itself, maybe there's some truth to it, which I would agree to be super exciting, much like the like the article in the OP.
Visa is dead serious about #blockchain
> What's the alternative, assuming that you can't reach into peoples' heads and change their positions on an issue?

Supermajority voting on all legislation & referenda? After all, 2/3 of the population forcing 1/3 to obey a law is much more reasonable than 51% forcing 49%.

And making amendments take a 3/4 vote is even better: if 75% of people think something is a good idea, then it probably is.
Please consider reading this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

I, too, went down the path of JSON -> Compiler -> Code, and I essentially just made a worse version of what I was looking to simplify.
The only apt I know is the Debian package management tool.
My first product launches and how they succeeded and failed
I think there's lots of potential for abuse/time wasting with UML. But consider the fact that when you're writing code, you're often focusing on two distinct concepts: implementation and design.

When designing, you are implicitly asking yourself: "what problem am I trying to solve, what data structures should I use to represent the elements of this problem, how should they relate to one another, what should this system interface look like, etc".

And when implementing, you are focusing on mapping those concepts from design into code. Often during implementation you can discover new elements of the problem or requirements that need solving. So implementation itself is valuable.

But design can be considered and reasoned about without requiring an implementation. Even without a peer to discuss the design with, considering "what if I decompose the data structures this way?" is a valuable exercise. Now, you don't need UML to do that. But you can leverage it to do that. I will posit that the screen-to-brain throughput of a UML diagram is greater than that of code or prose. Also, the brain-to-screen throughput of UML is probably better than those.

You might be surprised at the discussion inspired by a simple class diagram:

"Ok, sure, but which class holds the file descriptor?"

"None -- fred's working on a library that does that"

"No, Fred's library only considers the command line args but doesn't open the files."
Is there a well-known discovery document or any other way to create shortcuts for the ringID? (i.e. mapping it somehow to web or email address) I doubt many fancy spelling ringIDs.
Funny how interesting comments always end up on the front page a day or two later. Happens on Reddit all the time too.

This one is because of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12872108
Sometimes they are driven to the internet where they use superior conflict resolution mechanisms, such as arbitration and other mechanisms that work in the absence of violence.
I think the article has some good points but I disagree on calling the keyboard an “indirect” input method wrt text. Until touchscreen keyboards feel like a physical keyboard, I don't see them holding a torch when it comes to entering more than a few characters. There's a good reason you can connect a physical Bluetooth keyboard to the iDevices. And while a keyboard / touchscreen combination is certainly possible, it's also not as ergonomic as moving your hand just a little bit to reach a trackpad or mouse from the keyboard. Excitement about new tech is not a good long-term replacement for ergonomics.
Here's an excellent article and analysis of Apple's Organization structure
https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad...
>Democracy is interesting because it requires you to step outside your own head, understand that there are people who hold different values and different experiences from you, and then mentally engage with them, holding your own doubt and revulsion at bay, until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone.

Objectively, it can be seen that this is completely untrue. No understanding or empathy is strictly required by democracy. Democracy only requires that you obstinately stick to your preferred viewpoints and shout down those who disagree with you. This can be seen in the legislative chambers of nearly every Western-style democracy on the planet. Specifically:

- in Canada, the hallmark of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rule was a complete rejection of anything outside his personal ideology, even when his ideology flew directly in the face of fact or public opinion.

- in the US, we are seeing someone who most certainly suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder not only excelling in politics, but may soon come to hold the highest public office and command of the world's most powerful military.

The days of good-old collaboration and working together for the common good back in the 1950s were a short-lived phenomenon created by the shared experience of surviving the deadliest conflict in human history.

Those days are over.
A brand that's definitely not trying to look the same is Speed Queen.
how to make an app in 15 min | How to develop a mobile app free
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnsYachOafk
James Gleick on the History of Information
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_agency
Learn how to make an app in 15 min | How to develop a mobile app free
Watch this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnsYachOafk
Rubbish. New Zealand's not that great. It's rubbish in fact.

Please everyone stay away.
AGI will solve it. I think we've got a while yet before that becomes an issue for us devs though.