skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was accidental semi-minimalist for most of my twenties. I didn't follow any philosophy or even knew about minimalist movement at that time. It was just my natural state. Main things I owned were a laptop, books, TV, PS3, DSLR, TV stand, coffee table, sofa, and a mattress. Space was not an issue for the most part as I lived in Dallas Texas. Even cheapest apartments are huge. In my early 20s, I lived with roommates but later I lived by myself in a huge loft style apartment.

Having less stuff is really freeing. It was easy for me to travel, change apartments, let friends stay at my place etc. I had to get creative when I needed something for only a little while. For example, I bought various lenses for my DSLR that I rarely used. So I sold most of them and then in future, I would buy a used lens off Craig's List and then re-sell it after I was done with it.

Most of my hobbies didn't involve a lot of tools. Photography, videography, video games, books, painting, running, and of course, programming.

Now as a married man with a house, it is really hard to avoid collecting things. I used to sell anything that I didn't use often. I have so many things at home at I rarely touch like guitars, exercise equipment, different kitchen utensils. And to be honest, we are not hoarders, in fact, we still own less stuff than most people we know.

It has been 4 years of homeownership and I am still not used to owning so many things. A lot of this clutter actually really bothers me. Many times I go to the kitchen to cook something but cannot find the right pan that I just give up and eat frozen dinner.

So I have to say if you are naturally inclined to be minimalist than it would be great for you otherwise you may miss things or feel empty.
Azure Container Service: the cloud’s most open option for containers
Developed a solution (File System Filter Driver) to prevent ransomware from encrypting users' files. It's 70% done but I have recently accepted a position at a company and will not have time to build a full fledged product. I have tested it against major ransomware variants and it has proved very effective. I am looking to license either object or source code.
AR headsets already exist, are not vaporware, already are selling into enterprise markets (e.g. Atheer, Lumus). They're clunky and expensive.

MLeap is the only one I know of which has raised the $ needed for consumer-level polish and price. Probably because of the mini fiber-scan display and diffraction zone plates for natural focus. The other major pieces (waveguide or holo lens, IR TOF camera, SLAM, eye tracking, voice) have been done before.
I just read the first one. The guy is attacking this:

> At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States,…in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.

by answering this:

> I have to say this comparison seems borderline disingenuous; the figures used to compare pesticide use in France vs the USA are convoluted and misleading. First, the data is presented in different units (thousand metric tons for France, compared to million pounds in the US), making a direct comparison nearly impossible.

Oh boy... How does this address the point of the original article you quote? It does not talk about absolute values, it talks about evolution: increase on one side, decrease on the other one. Who cares about comparing absolutes values? That's a strawman.

And he goes on:

> Second, the pesticide amounts are not standardized per unit area, which is critically important since the USA has over 9 times the amount of farmland that France does; it would be shocking if the U.S. didn’t use far more pesticide when expressed this way.

Same failure to address the point which was e-vo-lu-tion.

> It is true that France has been reducing pesticide use,

Ah.. so?

> but France still uses more pesticides per arable hectare than we do in the USA.

Because it is much more intensive agriculture and that's why there was no comparison of yelds. But a comparison of e-vol-lu-tions. And the yelds evolved the same way with and without GMO. But GMO users did not decrease pesticide use, and increased herbicide use, whereas non-GMO users did decrease both and yet kept their yields growing as fast.

Jesus boy, how can you start your "debunking" article with such mistakes and fallacies...
A great example of why I hate "Ok" and "Cancel" for most dialog boxes even if the dialog explains what each of them will do.
Pretty sure that was sarcasm...
Given the rates of things such as traffic accidents around the world, I'd argue that you have your results.
Sure, but none of my problems with Apple hardware have had anything to do with reliability.

The fact that various Macbook Pro models get very hot is a well documented issue. I wonder if we can get some data on how much the Mac OS crashes though, relatively?

Apple's extreme efforts to lock you into their hardware and prevent upgrading are also very well known.

That last one is my biggest gripe. They are anti-choice and ultimately, anti-consumer. The Apple hardware lineup is small, sterile and boring to me. There's so much more, better and newer stuff going on outside of Apple's tiny little world.
Reasonable people can reasonably disagree on a great many subjects. I don't think the current so-called debate over plant genomes qualifies as reasonable. It's driven by fear of the unknown and poorly understood on the parts of many.

I don't think "Contains GMOs" is a useful information to provide to consumers. I think it tells them too little to allow for proper decision-making and serves only to fuel fears. It means that something, somewhere, in the package was at some point modified. It says nothing about what was modified, what the modification was, or what the consequences of it are.

I think it's willfully blind to apply one safety standard to GMOs and a wildly different one to crude barnyard breeding with all the radioactive and chemical mutagens a scientist can find. That barnyard breeding has quite a history of producing unintended consequences.

Reasonable people can reasonably differ. I have found this is a subject where being reasonable serves primarily to inflame fears. Suddenly people are painting you with moral brushes made of horrifying birth defects.
> If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse.

I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular.

Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.
More AlphaGo games to be played in 2017
Tragedy of the commons. No individual manufacturer really cares about the issues created by the ecosystem of IoT, so they have no real incentive to address it.
If only things were so easy. Our department gets allocated $XX,XXX each year for raises. My boss has to split that among eight people. If I were to get a 5% bump like OP recommends, other people would get nothing.

Sounds like typical D-grade manager motivation. "Everyone work yourself to death and I might throw you a bone after one year!" I'd rather give up that 5% to have a sane work-life balance.

It's common knowledge that you must quit to increase your salary. It seems like a stupid practice for companies to follow, but it must make sense economically or they wouldn't do it.
Kismatic: Open Source Enterprise Kubernetes Distribution
Makes sense. At the macro level, the way you see gains in the economy is when you redeploy resources.

At the micro level, the way you redeploy resources is by using your two feet. :)
As others mentioned, there was.

I did this myself around the same time as Super Size Me for a handful of reasons, none of which were to prove a point. I had good results from it. Would I have been even better off if I wasn't eating fast food for every meal? Probably. But I certainly wasn't worse off for eating that way and it scratched the itches which led me to that path in the first place.
This looks great. The compactness reminds me of Arc, with the bonus of having all of python's libs.
We recently changed the permission to introduce the "pro" blocking feature. There doesn't seem to be a way to get "write" perms in a more granular way. The app doesn't actually post anything though.
The Emperor's New Museum
Basically things didn't move much. If it were really such a purge they'd be following the author's advice, as well as switching to zsh as the default shell on new accounts/machines before dropping bash in a couple of years.
Like being "blindsided"... by a steamroller... from 20 miles away. Then again, "Disaster in slow motion" seems to be the order of the day, from economics to climate.
> One positive is that she'll have difficult time complaining to you that you need to clean up, since it'll always be her mess.

In my n=1 experience, this is an assumption that won't necessarily be borne out in practice.
I usually charge $100/hr for native mobile development on the side.
Don't assume it makes sense just because the majority are doing it.
I suggest to read Gemba Kaizen books. Yes, it is hard to understand first, but then you realize that Toyota Way is like 3D printer — add only what is needed right now, do it fast, be precise.

So yes, you are right — Toyota Way is not viable for mass production, but it perfect for areas where human labor is still plays major role in manufacturing, e.g. programming.
This is oft-repeated, but I don't really agree in most cases anymore. These days 90% of software like web application front ends & back ends, mobile applications, desktop applications, data pipelines, etc. are all written with some library in a language like Java, C++, Obj-C, Python, Ruby, or maybe Go. Arguably modern software is going to be more efficient for the vast majority of cases if the author sticks to the best practices for their chosen platform/library than trying to roll their own C implementation or tweak what's going on underneath. Writing C from scratch for anything other than an embedded device or low-level system library is probably ill-advised.
Online pharmacy Reviews
Or, or, OR, I can just keep a toolbox in the garage instead of spending an hour+ searching craigslist and meeting some dude in a 7/11 parking lot every time I need to tighten a fucking screw!
Ask HN: Good headphones for noisy coworking space?
I've recently moved from a quiet private office to a shared coworking space. I'm not used to the noise so I was thinking in investing in a good pair of noise cancelling headphones.

What headphones are you using in work?
"We've abused these numbers to make a point the numbers themselves cannot support." -More honest headline.
In my area, all of them. Basically all school & pta functions in my area eschew any homemade baked goods for reasons of food safety regulation or insurance policy coverage. I think it's a terrible shame that such a humanistic level of neighbourly personal/cultural exchange has been extinguished.
I am not a minimalist. I have many hobbies that require things - cameras, woodworking, metalworking, automotive work, mountain bikes, drones, art, guitar. I have the equipment for all these things, and in many cases, much more specialized equipment for working with or on these things. Need to put a new crankset on your bike? I have the tools for that. Need to do an oil change in a land rover? I have those too. Need to laser engrave some wood, or cut it with a CNC router? yep. Better yet, I do it in San Francisco (I rented a house with a 2 car garage 4 years ago).

Minimalism is great, but it makes you either completely dependent on others and services for your everyday needs - cooking, cleaning, repairing, making, hobbies - or means you can't do or have those things. IN cities like SF and NY, I have many friends that just rely on apps and services to get stuff done, and would rather pay the bike shop $100 for a tune up than buy $100 worth of tools and never need to pay for a tune up again. They are often the same friends that are very specialized in their fields or in single hobbies and don't tend to look outside of those things they do well.

I reject that philosophy completely. In general, I find minimalism fights with experimentation, creativity, and serendipity. The more you try, and the more you learn, the better off you are, I think.

Take this example: I recently bought a drone. I didn't know anything much about drones except for a few reviews before buying one. If I had been a minimalist, I would have considered that a drone would further clutter my office (very cluttered already), and potentially would be hard to resell given how fast the technology advances. My risk then is having a drone I don't like and taking some financial loss on something I didn't enjoy. As someone who is not a minimalist, my worries were that it would be hard to fly, or that I would regret not getting a different drone. As it happens, the latter is true, and I likely will take some financial loss in selling the one I bought, but by happy accident, I am now writing and researching commercial drone use for work and using the drone I have to prepare for getting licensed as a commercial drone pilot. I didn't anticipate there being any connection to my work when I got into it, but because I did I ended up gaining some benefits I wouldn't have otherwise had. (it also turns out that I have most of the equipment from woodworking and metalworking to make my own drones, so I'm looking into that angle as well now).
It sounds to me like what you'd need for ray tracing is a fork/join threading model with a master and several worker threads. OpenMP provides exactly that and is a widely supported standard. I'm curious: Why would you use anything else?
Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine
> delta

why can't we use the word difference? delta, mathematically, suggest some space and measure.
But you trust them to keep your vote secret, you trust them to keep national secrets secret, etc. I get that this is a big single point of failure that would be really difficult to fix if it was leaked. But the general default trust in the government to not, e.g, leak your SSN or vote... if you don't have that then the whole conversation is a nonstarter.
I tried my hand at mixing myself but was not successful. Could not make anything that I considered good. With the goal of simplicity I chose to buy pre-made coils and buy pre-made juice.
It's already too late, the data is read from a file so the base of the array can be say at address 0xYYYYY2.
What happens if your boss goes to their boss and says, "Hey, one of my employees is planning to jump ship for salary reasons, can we do anything here?"
5 Things You Can Do Faster from the CLI on Linux
OpenDNS blocks the domain it looks like
I love Hy. I played around with it 3 years ago. Development has been super active since then: https://github.com/hylang/hy

Don't know if it's still the case, but the Hy project had the most puns I've seen in one repo. In a good way.

Here are two previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696975

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7214400
Create virtual identities for online browsing and shopping
What's the agency you go through, if you don't mind my asking?
Get some houseplants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study
The Elder Scrolls games through Oblivion (and I think Skyrim?) are not permanently persistent. The game does eventually do garbage collection, and only some places in the world are safe from it. This is why every major town/city has a house you can buy; your collection of every cheese wheel in the game may not persist forever if you leave it in some random chest in a shop.
America also doesn't have a national language, and ballots are going out in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc.
Only improvement I would personally want is addons being able to use PyQt and the operator options and parameters being a popup window on mouse location (or something as accessible).

Building a good 3D modeling package UI is really difficult. Just look at MAX, Maya and MODO. Blender isn't really much worse. Some consider it better.
Please just tell me when we have the results. I am beyond sick of politics at this point.
This is the same problem we all run into when trying to express anything complicated. A vast majority of people hew to a polar position, make a lot of noise, and drown out the reasonable middle. Given that the reasonable middle is usually relatively small, and the type who is hard to sell shit to in the first place, they're ignored.
I'm a 21 year-old who has recently gotten into contracting to supplement my primary income (a Software Engineering Apprentice for a Defence contractor).

I earn £12 an hour for my contract work, which I'm quite happy with at the moment because 10 hours a week means I get an extra £500 per month (which is considerable at my age, it pays my rent and bills and some).

I know it doesn't seem much, but I think I'm actually quite lucky to be able to get a gig at my age with my experience.
It's possible but it's a lot more context-driven than you think with a human involved. The bots do great against each other with their strategies and muscle-memory stuff. Throw a human in the mix, they start noticing patterns in how the units are managed, what strategies are likely, etc. They've exploited these in the competitions to hilarious effect. Here's the main site on prior work & results at the competitions:

https://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/starcraftaicomp/reports.sh...

Here's a few examples of how the muscle-memory approach, esp if focused on unit vs unit, can fail against humans.

" In this example, Bakuryu (human) notices that Skynet's units will chase his zerglings if they are near, and proceeds to run around Skynet's base to distract Skynet long enough so that Bakuryu can make fying units to come attack Skynet's base. This type of behaviour is incredibly hard to detect in a bot, since it requires knowledge of the larger context of the game which may only have consequences 5 or more minutes in the future. " (2013)

Note: At this point, they also sucked at building and expansion strategies which surprised me since I thought a basic planner would be able to do that. The constraints between rate of expansion, where to place stuff, what units to keep/build, and so on get really hard. The other thing they weren't good at was switching strategies mid-game based on what opponents are doing.

" despite Djem5 (pro) making the bots look silly this year... they were able to defeat D-ranked, and even some C-ranked players. After the human players have played one or two games against the bots they are then easily able to detect and exploit small mistakes that the bots make in order to easily win the majority of games... " (2015)

I don't have the 2016 result yet. It's clear they're getting better but there's a huge leap between bots and humans. Gap seems to be context, reading opponents, and expansion. Now, if they can fix those, they have a chance of taking down pro's combined with the machines inherent strength in micromanagement and muscle-memory on specific attack/defense patterns.

Examples below of the AI's managing units in perfect formation & reaction below. It's like an emergent ballet or something. The second one could be terrifying if they can get it into real-world military. Figured you might enjoy these given your position. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXUOWXidcY0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
Ask HN: What does it really mean when companies want you to have AWS experience?
I see a lot of job listings that mention "AWS experience" as part of what they'd like to see in someone's skill set. Does this mean that they'd like to see familiarity with using AWS services such as spinning up an EC2 instance and configuring a server or does it mean that you should know how to interface with the AWS APIs provided by Amazon to interface or automate AWS processes?
Mozilla on Enabling the Open Metaverse with WebVR, A-Frame, and Servo
Doomtown
For those expecting a grimoire, nope, this is just a historical document of people accused of witchcraft and such.
Very cool, and better than I knew existed. Thanks.

And yet... Check out the bodies displayed at 2:08. A good range, but nowhere near the range in effect for real people - and at least half of them look noticeably wrong to me.

The cloth displays aggressive horizontal wrinkling, in a way that makes no sense. Check out the center-most figure, whose shirt curves in below the stomach with extensive wrinkles that gravity should remove. All of the figures display confusingly broken folding on the horizontal plane - the leftmost model stretches the cloth across the chest, then displays bizarre smooth-to-wavy patterns at stomach height as you move from front to side. And as far as I can see, all of this is weak to multi-layered, stiff, or tailored cloth.

So yeah, I appreciate this, but I think it's woefully inadequate to modeling even cheap, popular clothing. That's going to take a few more breakthrough as large as this one at least, so Magic Leap's VR abilities aren't nearly enough to justify this business model.
Flynn developer here. This is correct, a three node cluster can withstand loss of any single host before things start failing.

Also, log shipping and Let's Encrypt support are coming soon.
That sums up the Brexit, ask them and none of them new what the hell they were really voting for....for or against.
This is very timely news. I'm involved in a fairly large project to migrate some enterprise infrastructure onto Azure. We've hit a road block with ACS and their newly announced ACS-Engine addresses all of that [0].

This Container Registry is icing on the cake.

[0] https://github.com/Azure/acs-engine
If you really wanted minimalism, you could get rid of the fridge, too. In its place you could put nothing. (somehow, nobody complains about the tyranny of cold beer, even when they have no other food or utensils in the house)
That surely sounds like a negotiation tactic was played on you. "I cant give you a raise without taking it from someone else" or "It's out of my hands" are cut and dry sales tactics.

I am a bit pejorative to that tactic because if answered correctly, it actually harms the salesman: proclaiming you cant give X salaries means that they dont respect market rates and thus an employee is incentivized to leave to someone that does. Their inability to give raises is a showing of weakness not of strength.
If your guitar is your only hobby, I'd expect you to have a sound system, a library of music sheets, extra guitars or cases, stuff to tune, fix or mod your guitar. There's probably more, but I don't have this hobby, so I wouldn't know.

Climbers have all kinds of equipment. Music production requires recording and sound absorbing gear, and also playback. Programmers used to have plenty of books and extra computers - nowadays will almost certainly have Arduinos and Raspberry Pis around (and gaming gear). I don't know much about digital art, but I strongly suspect most of their practitioners also practice the non-digital real works counterparts.
What if cinemas, nobel prizes and restaurants were organized like schools?
Open-access in Nature: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13009
You should always approach the negotiations with an upper hand - an offer from somewhere else.
If it doesn't go well, just move.
As a side note and in fact late to the party, but MacPorts very recently also migrated to Git and GitHub: https://github.com/macports/
There's a huge variety in CS programs and you can't really assume anything about the languages they all use. My understanding is that accreditation for CS degree programs is based on concepts, not implementation details like programming language.

My OS class (a while ago) used assembly language for a simple VM, with one or two assignments requiring us to modify the VM itself to implement new instructions required for new OS features (task switching, virtual memory, etc.).