skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lego power functions is exactly this (but for very limited circuits). There are battery boxes for power, switches (both mechanical, and remote-controlled), lights, motors, etc.

The power functions pieces have special bricks which embed electrical endpoints which click together when the bricks are connected. The system is basically 4 wires - 2 which propagate the power rails to downstream pieces, and 2 more wires which are for PWM controlling of motor spin rate.

I would love it if they added more electronic components to this set (eg. timers, sounds, more sensors, etc). If you like to tinker, you can cut apart these wires and hook up the control wires to an raspberrypi-controlled circuit.

There's probably even more circuits possible with Mindstorms components, but I'm not familiar enough w/ Mindstorms to comment.
I would strongly suggest you persuade the powers that be to set up some sort of automatic testing. It's not difficult to set up and it will save you from so much heartache down the road.
I agree with you about jQuery getting quickly out of hand if you want to create something like a one page app and you should certainly use something like React or Angular. I do use it. But to do a quick Ajax post, read some data and display a message or show and hide something jQuery is awesome. To tie a quick event listener to a dropdown and do something or to find children of some element jQuery is still few lines of code that don't even need to be cross browser tested. Using vanilla JS for these things when you can do this in few lines of jQuery code seems masochistic.
The slides are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/load-balancing-is-impossibl...

Wrap up and Q&A:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gas2v1emubU&t=30m24s

The article from the slide 23:

http://latencytipoftheday.blogspot.co.at/2014/06/latencytipo...

"#LatencyTipOfTheDay: MOST page loads will experience the 99%'lie server response"
You want to integrate rendered objects onto the physical world, so you have to know exactly the pose these objects should be rendered at as if seen from your point of view. The objects transforms are piloted by the head tracking. Usually with pose prediction thrown in the mix to squash latency.
Thank you @chrisbennet. The site I'm working on isn't a job posting board approach. Instead, job seekers create anonymous profiles (like LinkedIn, but very different content) and get anonymously pinged 1x when recruiter has a position that fits. Do you prefer only internal recruiters, or would 3rd party recruiters be welcome?
Masterful malvertisers pwn Channel 9, Sky, MSN in stealth attacks
More or less than if browsers had blocked Flash say 3 years ago?

Because I think that's the standard. If they can do it for Flash, then they can do it for anything else, too. They just need to set a deadline with a reasonable amount of time before it's reached so that all developers can adhere to the new specs.

I really hate the attitude of "well, too many websites/apps would be broken so I guess we'll never do it, or we'll just wait for the web to collapse first so that everyone agrees we should do it" from "platform" (in this case browser) vendors.

If it's that bad, then just set a 2 year, 3 year, or even 5 year deadline for the change (perhaps with some intermediary progressive blocking, like it's happening for Flash).

It pisses me off because it seems the same is happening with ASLR on Linux [1]. We've had it for 15 years, but nobody is willing to force developers to use it "because it would break things". Screw that. Set a deadline and do it already. If their apps can't make such a change in 3 years, then I could care less that their apps will stop working. Critical vulnerabilities that allow dangerous exploits to happen also "break a lot of things", and not just themselves either, but the firefighting patches that come after them, too.

[1] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/708196/845f9287f1936dcf/
The Most Interesting Facts About the Gaming Industry
Learning by Association in Plants
There's also nothing pragmatic in one-sidedly denying contributions without understanding the case that rewriting a whole business stack for a minor player makes no sense.

What I see here is (sadly, again) two groups of developers unwilling to meet halfway and understanding each others problems. Expecting AMD to support a completely separate driver just for Linux is unrealistic. Expecting a 100kLOC code dump do be accepted is unrealistic as well. I don't see anyone talking about how to get over this hurdle on lkml, I just see the single least constructive word: "No."

Meanwhile, 3D support in Linux will remain a crappy tire fire which works well only if you use a completely proprietary nVidia driver.
Emacs, ViaWeb, Macsyma, the DS1 Remote Agent, much of the autonomous navigation software for the Mars Rover before the Pathfinder mission... And I have built a number of small-scale web applications in Common Lisp. I'm running one of them in production right now.
But I can't help but imagine how different the world would be if he had used Scheme as a starting point.

I've heard that he did in fact use Scheme, but the suits insisted on the whole curly-brackets-and-semicolons thing so they could call it Javascript and piggyback on Sun's marketing efforts.
You've linked to the wrong reddit. That one is about a substance called P21.
Developer Question – Passion or Profession?
That's a stable internal kernel API/ABI that's not provided. The stable external (userspace-facing) ABI is very much maintained.
Central Canada means Manitoba mostly, since it is geographic centre as well as being in central timezone.
> Earnings aside, current generations are spending way more because they want more.

That's certainly true, but nowadays the incentives which nudge you to consumption are also much more intense, subtle and clever. We are tricked into things we do not need.

The ONLY escape is not clever consumption but no/reduced consumption, or actually more precise, any consumption which does not involve money to be transferred.
Build quality was part of the thing. As a kid you felt it a little bit. As an adult it makes them a value item. It's not just toy to pretend, it's deeper.
> tread safety and race conditions

I feel like this comment wouldn't be out of place in an F1 thread.
The center of Canada is Winnipeg.
ODG has had AR glasses on the market for longer than Hololens, with an actual glasses form factor, running on Android, and should be announcing their new model at CES2017.
To be fair, he only took some of the semi-colons.
Building the 'biggest database ever' in AWS
For me as well. I get bored pretty quickly if it is just theory. I look forward to these courses over the holidays.
Yep, I also think it's kind of a misleading name.
It's still Consensus but with stronger assumptions on the network (kind of, it depends on an external master for correctness, which could itself use something like classic Paxos).
Simplifying it a bit, they use a single sequencer that every packet must go through to get "ordered".
As the authors suggest, that could be implemented in a programmable switch.
Given that abstraction, they can simplify the consensus protocol itself.
Interesting research paper but multicast is a non-starter for non-trivial production systems.

1. As implemented by most (read: all) network hw, it works fine when congestion is low. As soon as congestion starts increasing, the packet loss amplifies.

2. If you have large multicast groups, the bloom filters used for membership test become very full, hence false positive rate rapidly increases. This leads to multicast storms.

In my experience, anything which is not TCP (or, to lesser degree UDP) is a non-starter for building reliable distributed systems. Despite the claims of "lower overhead" the TCP protocol stack gets most love and hence has been optimized heavily on every significant operating system.
That is an interesting thing to think about. By contrast, I witnessed a young person who was afraid to pull over to the side of the road to help a stranger with a broken down car. I know these two are not a perfect comparison, but I can't help but think our culture has changed since then. That's just intuition -- could be right or wrong.
Or future changes in the linux target need to be translated to all other target wrappers.
What if you made an index on (date, tenant) instead?
Ask HN: How best to stay informed whilst not following 24 hour news cycle?
I normally read online news several times every day, however I am starting to realise that a lot of what I read does not really add any value to my life. I do not gain much by following the latest outrage on social media that has been converted into a news story, for example.

What can I do to keep up-to-date with national (UK) and world affairs without wasting so much time reading inconsequential "news"? Something like a short weekly digest would be ideal. Even via email is fine.
See my reply child post. But anything from tying a quick event of any kind to an element and posting a form using Ajax and consuming the response, doing quick show and hide. And the ease of implemting a million different plugins for all kinds of things, from morals to slides, in this jQuery is still a champ.
I like jed.
Maybe I didn't get it, but ordering is still guaranteed, it has just moved to the network layer and is kind of "hardware accelerared" by a smart switch or SDN node, or am I wrong?
That's not what the paper is about.
They still provide Consensus (i.e., total ordering).
Article mentions "RPG" many times: "RPG back-end", "RPG developer". For those who wonder what it it (like me), it is not a "Role Playing Game", it is IBM RPG language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
Like doing the impossible? Create a responsive layout with 3 sections (header, content, sidebar) that will look exactly the same in the given browsers (at the same resolution) while still looking great on mobile, without any JavaScript or even server-side feature detection. Bonus points for minimal number of CSS hacks.

Seriously, remembering the stuff I had to deal with, in today's world of the "modern browsers", I feel like I changed my profession completely. In other words, I'm afraid that me from 10 years ago wouldn't be able to understand so much from the front-end code I write these days and I'm also not sure about the vice versa. The opposite are, although that I don't enjoy the language too much, my Java projects which feel like they are immortal. I wonder if and when JavaScript will be that mature.
That's multicast for you. Once you congestion and/or group size increase beyond a certain value or group size, things go /really/ bad; as in you may need to "shutdown, wait and reboot" your network to recover.
Thanks -- After reading the paper I think I have a better understanding, and it is pretty exciting, this does seem to be a pretty good throughput improvement, especially if things are mostly happy-path.

The paper seemed to be missing an exploration of worst-case scenarios and equivalencies though, but I guess I guess worst case is paxos speed (consistently failing sequencer, or a leading replica that receives one messages then is unreachable, bad quorums, etc)
Licensingwise where is the difference between x86 software emulation, x86 hardware assisted emulation and new x86 processor? What I get from this is that they will do user mode emulation like qemu-user. Either way they will emulate it in software. If they would add a co-processor that would assist the emulation, would it need a license from Intel? I understand if it would run as a normal x86 core it would require it.
It didn't sound that way to me, but maybe I'm just too trusting. For what it's worth he was probably in his mid 30s and had a family.
there are many other gpu vendors, e.g. in arm cores. I guess this is the code tree in question: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
Security Analysis of Encrypted Virtual Machines
This cuts both ways. As a young founder and manager, I must be extremely conscious of hiding my age. Without knowing the number, my team is fine. Once they know all hell breaks loose, at least for a while.
I disagree one can stay informed while following the 24hr "news" cycle. In fact, I would recommend staying away from so called "news" to stay informed.

This 'old' book from last century (that is year 1999) sums it up well.

Edit:
link to the book > https://www.amazon.com/How-News-Makes-Dumb-Information/dp/08...

Excerpt from desc of the book:

Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community.
I'd bet that "AI first" will play out well for them, because AI is beneficial to both search and ads - while self-driving cars, fiber and balloons are not.
The GUI versions have menus and toolbars and whatnot, you don't need to Ctrl-Z out of those in the first place
SHARQ: A flexible rate limited queueing system
"NoPaxos" is not "Not Paxos" like "NoSQL" is "Not SQL" ;)

If you use a NoSQL database, the relations do not disappear. You just have to implement your joins in a higher layer. NoPaxos pushes some parts of Paxos into lower levels, namely the OUM primitive of the network.
Made in NY: The engineering behind social recommendations: Facebook Engineering
Yes,thats right. This happened few years back while working as Tester.While I was using QA, we focused/worked more on automated testing. Now switched companies & later moved from QA to dev team.
I came to the same realisation that most daily news is just ephemeral content and not worth my time a few months ago. Now my daily routine is to log in once or twice a day to a select few news (bbc/nytimes/guardian mostly) and just skim the headlines.

Reporting is commoditised, but analysis is worth paying for in terms of money/attention. For that I read the weeklies: Economist, Private Eye, NewYorker, Foreign Affairs, etc.
Metalearning Methods
Free Access to Library Books with Your Kindle
I am not a self-made man
We distinguish "video see-through" and "optical see-through" Augmented Reality.

The first one is mainly solved, the second one is way harder due to head tracking latency, computer vision latency, and user-dependent eye projection.
Hololens is not for consumers. It's for businesses which benefit from any off-the-shelf AR, e.g. construction, and Hololens is very much appreciated in that field. From my POV in providing software for construction industry Hololens has huge potential. Will it become a just a fad, or an irreplaceable tool, remains to be seen.
But that is the thing, none of the successful FP languages in the industry are pure FP, rather multi-paradigm, even if functional first.
Ask HN: Moonlighting and how to handle it?
I am a SE working for a small sized company as a full stack dev.

Recently I was approached by an acquaintance telling me that he is looking for some SE to work on a project he has etc.

I gave it a thought and I was thinking that I could definitely do that for the extra money and the fun involved when developing a new system.

So I approached him and told him that I could potentially work on his project as a freelancer on my off time. He offered to pay me fairly for my services etc and I also explained to him that I would like if there is some sort of small term contract 1 month, where I can stop working for him if I feel overwhelmed with the amount of things I'll have to do for work and on my own time. He agreed that this is very reasonable etc.

Now my question to you guys is what do I do about it and do I tell to my employeer?

I've already discussed this with my director which is a very straight forward guy and we are friends, and he told me to look online about it and that we never ever had this conversation. He told me to put on an email to him with my offer etc, payments and details and send it to him to get forwarded in the higher ranks.

From what I understood is that the company wouldn't rly be very happy about it and the answer would be a no.

So what do I do about it? Do I start working for the other guy and just go with it if its just gonna be for 2-3 months?
Do I declare it to my employer and then quit if he says no? (I don't rly want to be working for a company that limits what I do on my personal time)

I live in the UK, and my contract has a clause where it says that I need to inform my employer in case I am taking on another job.
The company that offers me that job is not a direct competitor to my company.

Let me know how you'd have handled it.
Only in the case of wired controllers.
A LOT. The guy matched years of study with months of reading textbooks. His design inputs are almost always spot on, in the long run.
The Art of Programming Contest (2007) [pdf]
> You don't look at your bank account and wonder why the T-Mobile payment went out slightly after your ATM withdrawal.

Your bank account isn't being used for even nearly the same things distributed data stores like this are being used for. And even then they have to make workarounds to ordering issues, otherwise if there were a day when my salary comes in and my rent went out I'd be hit with overdraft charges if they happened in the wrong order.
> On my iPhone 5S it breaks hiding the browser's address bar when you scroll

I believe this is actually due to Safari iframe bugs. See: https://medium.com/@dvoytenko/amp-ios-scrolling-and-position...
I think the problem at MS is indeed not the lack of innovation, but the lack of synchronizing the different efforts and listening to feedback (i.e. checking if it actually sticks).

In years of using and developing for WP, I've been baffled several times by how unsynchronized some of their actions looked from the outside. One thing always enraging WP users was that Android and iOS counterparts of MS apps received new features earlier than their WP counterparts, if at all. While the other platforms are surely important, it looks like even MS doesn't really believe in its own mobile platform.

I just never could get rid of the impression that one layer of management isn't doing it's job propery.
Well yes, you do have to have an engineer mindset to pick this type of details.
Would you mind expanding a little more? If I'm understanding your point correctly -- you're saying that the sequencer failure case (whether it's modified switches or programmable switches, or software-based) is more common as congestion increases, and that's what makes this unusable in practice?

Wouldn't traditional Paxos already be dead in the water at that point?

Also regarding the point about multicast storms -- I was imagining something like <100 nodes in a multicast group -- is that naive? What obvious use case am I missing? I was basically thinking of this scheme in front of a database layer
I was pissed off with the 630 not being supported, but then I remembered that my Windows devices have actually got more updates than the Android ones and got a 650 to keep playing with UWP.
The goyim no
I kinda agree in the sense that I think that a lot of the tech jobs out there are not "difficult" in a way that requires years and years of experience to perform reasonably well at.

So maybe someone older should look for jobs that suit their abilities rather than a job that, as you said, anyone who went through a bootcamp can perform. Hopefully with age comes some kind of niche specialization or skill that can't be obtained easily.
aka save scumming
Why not add South Africa to https://github.com/schildbach/public-transport-enabler ? That way, the eventual voice/chatbot support could support other networks too.

I already made an IRC chatbot for this API: https://github.com/ysangkok/console-transit-trip-planner
that sounds strange, since you have Notepad then I guess you are running Windows, which usually seems to work with file extensions to identify the files.. can you not see the extension?

idle programmer mode enabled
It seems that it would be possible to have special tools built and installed, which would claim the file types and have an icon with a 'no entry' symbol superimposed on the original type (ie Word icon with a red circle and line through it, for .doc etc..) .. the tool itself could be a simple program that just opened a notification saying '<tool> not installed'
I'm curious too - particularly horizontally-scalable distributed rules engines. I realize that might be contradictory since the Rete algorithm scales by throwing memory at it, but what if you want to throw more facts at an expert system than you can reasonably put in one server?
"Rift and Hololens."

Tiltbrush on the Vive absolutely blew my mind. I could paint in the air and use the wide brushstrokes as an immediate and intuitive 3D modeling tool. And then walk around my scuplture, etc.

I would have to categorize the experience to the same slot where building snowmen, igloos, painting, etc goes - ie. creative fun with aesthetically pleasing results. The difference is that modeling on on the Tiltbrush/Vive was so effortless I literally felt I was operating at the speed of thought and intuition, instead of figuring out what to do, then work the aspect for several minutes, then move onwards.

Consumer side I agree, I've not seen anything I would call transformative.
> And why is it that most older people answering on these threads are so passionate about learning and about new technologies and the latest and greatest javascript frameworks. Do they really enjoy having such ephemeral knowledge and basically competing with anyone that's finished a bootcamp or not even that?

Nobody enjoys having their hard-earned knowledge become obsolete (hence the "X11/bash/sysvinit/etc were good enough for me so let's never improve them" crowd).

But the fact is computer technology does change fairly quickly. You have to keep learning to keep up.

If you're really worried there are definitely some technologies that persist for longer than others. If you really hate re-learning stuff then I'd stay far away from the web and javascript. Stick with things like Java, Go, C#, C++ & Rust. Those aren't going away any time soon. Ruby, Docker, React, etc... I give 5 years max. Then you'll have to learn something new.
i guess that is how i learned javascript too, except those projects were paid sunglasses guy emoji
My take is that Language X usually has major deficiencies compared with Language Y for domain Z, for many values of X or Y: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, Erlang, Haskell, assembler, C, etc.

Confirmation bias makes it easy to bind those variables to values that make one's own favorite language obviously the best and everybody else's infuriatingly, irrationally terrible. If unchecked then this leads to wildly false conclusions, such as that languages fit into a hierarchy of powerfulness ("Blub Paradox.")
Bus that can go over traffic is a flop
Applied tool - Babel?
Intro to Computational Physics
absolutely. neither iOS nor Android allow you to build an app in pure javascript/html, or have an app that will run on both the desktop and mobile without a single code change.
Yes, it is.

Convince them :-) Same as with any other.
i also use Safari on my Macbook;

Firefox sucks because it still doesn't support the smooth "pinch to zoom", which Safari and Chromium have had for years. To me zooming seems such a basic functionality which is used so often, it feels like driving a car without rear mirrors or something...

Chromium/Chrome = Google, which i avoid due to lack of privacy.

One of the things i dislike in Safari is the lack of many extensions/addons which Chromium/Firefox do have.
I wonder why this functionality is missing ?