skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you, my friend, are taking the 21st century for granted. we already live in the future.

When you grow up believing you will be driving flying cars and seeing robots help you around the house, how else are you supposed to feel?

we have flying cars. they're called private jets, but most people can't afford them. we have to take the flying bus! we've had robots in our homes for a while. do they have to be anthropomorphic to count, or what?

I am also disappointed in how closed and centralized the applications that run on the internet have become since the internet was privatized. Where we used to have decentralized systems in the 80s to late 90s, we now have huge star (wheel and spoke) networks.

internet applications may be closed and centralized, but i think you are forgetting about the mountains of free/open software that those systems are built upon. life-changing mountains of software. foss is the foundation that a lot of careers (including my own) are built upon.

obviously it would be better if we were all on an open source distributed net, but its not like it isn't a solvable problem. we just have to be more creative.

We have invented the most important tool in the history of humanity and it's being used by billions of people to look at Facebook instead of say, solving real problems like climate change.

the internet is a communication network that people use for a lot of different things, including working to solve climate change.

i don't think we've figured out social networking quite yet. or the internet for that matter. i think its all quite exciting! so much new shit happening all of the time. not only that, but i have the opportunity to be a part of it. i may not be the person that ends up in the history books, but i'm here at ground zero.
> You don’t have to see Linux’s horrible UI.

lol excuse me? Actually now I'm thinking, what does he mean by "Linux?" Like, Ubuntu server? Is the UI for that considered bad?
No. A billion dollar system that is so accessible that it's not even insane to connect a simple kitchen timer to it.

Sci-fi got it wrong with their humorous stupid robots providing comic relief while smart robots do the work. All the robots are the same smart, and getting better every day.
That's an interesting point of view!
As a UX designer veteran, you must know these numbers better than most of us here, do you know how ubiquitous retina screen are?

On desktop, the Firefox Hardware report [1] tends to show that they the most common resolutions are 1366 * 768 and 1920 * 1080, this unfortunately doesn't tell us if those are retina screens or not, but from [2] it seems that we're talking about at most 17% as a 'retina' display would report as 1920 * 1080

[1] https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13184022
This seems to get worse every time I hear the news about pollution in China. I wonder how was it like in US cities before the Clean Air Acts or if this is as bad as Great Smog of London.
Gene transfer on the fungal highway
How/Where?
I'm not aware that nginx has an option to "specify max connections before old ones start getting closed". The default behavior is that when max connections are hit, it doesn't allow new connections[0]. Then with the default timeouts of 60 seconds for client_body_timeout and client_header_timeout, a connection can be held for at least 2 minutes[1][2]. Note that the body timeout is "The timeout is set only for a period between two successive read operations, not for the transmission of the whole request body.", so it's possible to arbitrarily extend the amount of time a single connection is open.

Since these connections are long lived, and normal connections are generally short, the total number of connections gets dominated by the slow ones. If no other mitigations are put into place, then this can cause a server to hit ulimits/max_conns and keep legitimate requests blocked.

This is known as the "Slowloris" attack[3], and is mentioned in the nginx DDoS mitigation blog post[4].

[0] - http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#...

[1] - http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#clie...

[2] - http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#clie...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)

[4] - https://www.nginx.com/blog/mitigating-ddos-attacks-with-ngin...
"distributed Prolog on the global scale. Systems would exchange constraints until they reach a mutually agreeable solution" - wow, I'm impressed, but not sure I fully get this. Any pointers or writeups on this or something similar?
I want to admit that I was wrong about this. I thought Alexa was going to dominate as the first truly great voice platform. I now am forced to admit that I was incorrect. Those who follow Hacker News a lot might recall that I wrote several posts, a year ago, in which I was very optimistic about Alexa. But I am much more pessimistic now than I was then.

When I was still excited about Alexa, I wrote stuff like "How to build conversations via the Amazon Echo"

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/how-to-build-conversa...

But I was also aware of how difficult it could be to get Alexa to understand certain words. See: "Using a glottal stop to force the Amazon Echo to correctly pronounce “tw”"

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/using-a-glottal-stop-...

But, you may recall, I became frustrated with the process for getting into the Amazon store, and we had a very long thread on HackerNews about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409

I'm sad to say there has been almost no improvement over the last year. The problems that I listed in "Amazon has absolutely no idea how to run an app store" are still mostly true.

And I know many, many developers who were excited about Alexa a year ago, but gave up in frustration because we felt like Amazon was not listening to our concerns.

In retrospect, I was wrong for 2 reasons:

1.) many people pointed out that voice was a terrible interface for a variety of purposes. At the time, I thought this was merely a matter of offering the right voice prompts, and getting better at understanding what people said. But I now think the criticisms had much more merit than I admitted a year ago.

2.) Amazon's behavior has been disappointing. I'd like to see them aggressively listening to developers and aggressively improving the service based on developer feedback. That is not happening.
My (soon to be published) book on "Computation At Compile-Time" would not be possible with hygienic macros, because I eval during macro expansion, thus treating the compiler as an interpreter during compile-time. https://github.com/billsix/bug
I've been using Alexa and Google Home for about a month, and I have to say that the user experience with Google Home is hands down better. Having the power of Google search when Google Home doesn't know an answer is huge. Alexa falls flat without a strong search engine backing it.
Feminism lul
From a security standpoint, what's the difference between an always on microphone and a sometimes on microphone?
This is true. They can still be useful if you can interview them in depth to determine why they are saying "heck yes". When doing this make sure to ask them about other services, especially failed ones. This will help you work out if they love your service or are just the type to say yes to everyone.
>"Given his worth it's not hard to justify."

His net worth exists only on paper until theres a liquidity event.

I've spent time in both Unicorns and hedge funds and none of the founders have had body guards, at least not at the office.
You do realize that in order for the assistant to know you're in a car, and that you're "at speed" it would likely need access to your location information, right? Aggregated over time (even if only when the assistant is "on" - ie, the iOS "while using" setting), that's a pattern of your movements.

Either Apple/Google/etc and granulize the permissions such that things like "boolean: user is in vehicle at speed" are addressable separately (possible but unlikely) or such knowledge comes with a cost - the app knows where you are and have been.

Same applies doubly for "noise it has heard".

Consequently my decision is: no assistant, thankyouverymuch.
Anonymous Cowards are something from Slashdot, right? I don't think that applies here.

I also have a few different accounts, while keeping my main account more 'professional'. I do it for a few reasons: the HN hive mentality hates dissenting opinions in general (doesn't matter how well written and based on facts), everything has to be super politically correct these days and the 'cultural fit' mantra could mean I would have a disadvantage getting a job (since many employers/startups will check your comment history to decide if you're a "fit", while simultaneously posting on their blog about diversity efforts).

I'd say keep using your throwaway accounts. It's not the end of the world you didn't get to promote your side project in this thread.
I got about halfway down, and it suddenly started sounding like the Semantic Web reincarnated as an API service. This idea crops up about once every 10 years (in some form or another), and it runs into fairly predictable problems. There are two good essays that I recommend that people read before getting too excited about how well machines can interoperate without humans in the loop.

Shirky's "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview" http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...

Doctorow's "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Doctorow talks about problems with metadata, but these problems might apply equally to APIs and the API vocabulary discussed in the article. Specifically:

2.1 People lie
2.2 People are lazy
2.3 People are stupid
2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
2.6 Metrics influence results
2.7 There's more than one way to describe something

The fundamental problems are that (1) getting people to agree on things is a surprisingly difficult and political problem that can never be solved once and for all, and (2) people have incentives to lie. If you invent a generalized way to look up any weather forcasting API, somebody is going to realize that they can make money gaming the system somehow. PayPal is really in the business of fraud detection, and Google is in the business of fighting against blackhat SEO (and click fraud).

So take your automated API discovery utopia, and explain to me what happens when blackhats try to game the system and pollute your vocabulary for profit. Tell me what will happen when 6 vendors implement an API vocabulary, but none of them quite agree on the corner cases. This is the hard part.
Classifying Amazon Reviews with Scikit-Learn
Here is a good checklist on how to get started with Clojure in Atom.

https://gist.github.com/jasongilman/d1f70507bed021b48625
I've worked on multiple true relational SQL and 'analytics' backends and they have all supported analytic functions of varying complexity. Everyone around me was using them as well because the queries were orders of magnitude faster, and smaller and more readable than using nested SELECT ... GROUP BY statements to achieve the same result.

Note that for reporting and analytics workloads, 1) even batch queries can be much faster using analytics functions because the optimizer can do many of them for essentially free as part of the scan rather than requiring a subquery and 2) interactive workflows become much, much quicker in my experience. Data exploration is much less useful if running a query takes 5 hours rather than 30 seconds.

Defining sqlite as the 'standard' SQL and refusing to use any other features available on your platform out of fear of confusing new developers is misguided. Sometimes analytics functions are the best tool for the task, and good engineers should judiciously weigh their utility against the risk of losing access to that tool.

Keep in mind though that the cost of migrating your db backend is generally so high that if you are forced to do so, rewriting queries that depended on analytics functions will likely be a small rounding error within the total migration cost.
> VR Excel

The most relevant thing I could find on Google was this:

http://www.pcgamer.com/justin-roiland-and-william-pugh-on-wh...

>Pugh: We're one-one, it is what it is. We don’t want to do it and have it not be an accurate depiction of accounting, because that’s just offensive. To accountants.

>Roiland: We want to make sure that when accountants put this on, that they're like, 'This was made for me.' We shouldn't make promises, but the ability to export your spreadsheets and import your spreadsheets—Excel—into the office, that's something we're still trying to find exactly how to make work.
It's years old, but I listened to the advice of-

https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/08/07/ten-reasons-you...

-and in re-analysis it all holds completely true. Nginx gives my deploy flexibility, at essentially negligible cost. And no Go development should include a bunch of boilerplate code to do banal stuff like serving static content.
> I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these (...)

technically ... is that still legal?
That's because they're universal, programmable computers. If you have a very specific, fixed task (e.g., matrix*vector multiplication), then you can build a chip in which a much higher number of transistors does useful work in each cycle. You won't be able to browse the web, watch a video, do your taxes, or program other computers with it, though.
Behavioral tests / BDD with TypeScript
I want to recommend everyone who sit infront of a screen for several hours per day to invest a few hundred dollars extra on the monitor. The extra contrast makes a huge difference.
Most edibles in a supermarket you can just wolf down. Some things to consider:

-If you use dried beans, soak them overnight and boil them for an hour. Discard the water. You'll save yourself stomach pains this way.

-Do not eat uncooked wheat. Your stomach will thank you.

-Do not eat potatoes with green bits. They're a bit toxic.

-If the vacuum-sealed packaging meat comes in is starting to bulge, pick another package. The meat is releasing gases in the initial stages of spoiling. (Probably still fine to eat,cooked)

-Wash your vegetables. Soil bacteria can give you a bad time, although the risk isn't terribly high. In some countries, human excrement is still used for fertilization - this carries a risk of Hepatitis C and you want to heat the produce properly before consumption.

-If it smells off or tastes bad, don't eat it!

I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. This list is already full of "very unlikely to give you trouble" items as is. Have fun cooking!
Atkins no, Paleo yes.
Too bad there are more comments about the format of the discovery, than the actual discovery.

I gathered that this is not actually the first time a ghost shark was caught on camera, but the first time it was filmed in its natural habitat. It was seen alive in California and Hawaii in 2011 [0]. There are other ghost shark photos, such as this one (date unknown, file uploaded July 2016) [1]. Video has even existed, such as this one from May 2016 [2]. Maybe this is the first filming of a live Hydrolagus trolli species? What actually happened for the "first time" here?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-nosed_blue_chimaera

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimaera#/media/File:Deep_sea_...

[2] http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/05/18/noaa-marianas-tre...
A lot of people will recommend reading great code -- well known open-source libraries etc. That's good, but one thing I think is useful is to read your dependencies. Then you can get a better picture of what "regular" code is like. Most popular libraries are not great to read because they are often very abstract, or they use so much helper code that it's hard to see what's actually going on. But fairly small libraries are usually easy to understand and usually are also fairly straightforward, but by reading code you'll be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone who will be reading your code one day, which is the most important things to keep in mind.

I'm mainly a front-end developer, and the nice thing about the npm/node ecosystem is all of your dependencies are right there in node_modules, so feel free to read them to see how they work, or why something isn't doing what you expect -- you can even add debugger statements or console.logs.

In some ecosystems this is harder because you might have to hunt for the source, or only have headers. For example in ruby, use bundle show my_dependecy to see where the code is stored.
Exactly. It's like claiming that because I drive to work every day I can eventually become a racecar driver.
The pension gap
Depends on the country. I had an U.S. manager flip out when I mentioned my age during a remote interview, totally different to here (Uruguay) where it's a normal requirement in the C.V. (along with a photo). I've been told both are huge no-nos in the U.S.
Google should embrace anthropomorphization and just give Google Now/Assistant an actual name and persona.
South Carolina bill would block computers from accessing porn
I think you're confusing the verb "insult" (as it, doing something with the intent of insulting someone) with the state of being insulted. TO insult someone is to ATTEMPT to make them feel insulted, but its up to that person whether or not they are insulted.
You're assuming the device never acts incorrectly/has bugs. Why?

Also, the recent findings show it's not just subversive actors who gets surveiled. There are already massive dragnet operations. That's happening right now. So it's not some hypothetical, that's reality.

I think the better approach, rather than waiting and finding out too late, is just to avoid these altogether. The world has mostly been pretty safe but the security appears to now be threatened and civil liberties are rapidly eroding. So just for that reason I think our position for ourselves and for friends/family should just be to pass altogether on this type of device
I host my own microblog that I wrote in ruby.

http://blog.hajdarevic.net
https://github.com/adnanh/mikro
Startup Investing for the Little Guy
Thank you! I'll have to look at these later on!

Still feels like stealing, but that's my problem :)
More than once I've opted to give up on a service that requires me to say stuff out loud over the phone. Flight information services, for example. "If you want to look up flight info, say 'flight information'." Nope, I hang up. If it were Press 3, I'd happily use it.

I'm not sure what it is, but talking to computers just makes me wig out. I get extremely self-conscious, wondering who is listening or might hear me. This doesn't happen with humans on the other end.
Neat but this is underwhelming considering who it is with his resources. I've seen dozens of setups like this from random nobody developers over the past 10 years or so.

One-off home brew projects like this are neat but until someone creates and releases a good, extensible foundation to build on top of, meh... And even then it would probably be terrible because they would try to spin it into some business effort (which hackers will avoid b/c they don't want to be glued to someone else's product) instead of an earnest open source effort.
This article appears to be in the realm of paid for the news. Only google and apple are in position to succeed in this area because they tend to own most important device that is always with you and has a microphone. Another set of player could be those who have immensely popular apps and personal data about you and has SDKs widely used by coders around the world. Mostly Facebook.

I see Microsoft succeeding in enterprise area but Amazon is nowhere.
Computers don't access porn. People access porn.
I wonder if Rust is fundamentally able to take advantage of its borrow checker and outperform C in this regard.
to non-answer my own question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#United_Sta...

not sure now. maybe, maybe not.
Well in this context Apple already has scale. There's no advantage to Apple to releasing an Echo competitor sooner rather than later.
>I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one

Exactly why did you immediately jump to the presumption that agencies like the PWA that guaranteed jobs for all Americans would result in work that benefited no one?
No, by that line of thought things that are legal are not necessarily ethical and vice versa. The weird contrapositive you seem to assume it implies only says something about you, not about the statement you responded to.
Really, this recipe[0] takes <15 minutes and tastes better than any steak I've ever had in a restaurant. I use butter instead of oil. All you need is a cast iron skillet.

[0]: http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-perfect-steak-in-the-ov...
To me, a Thinkpad looks best. I did spend a lot of time with Thinkpads; I'd take a Thinkpad over my current MBP any moment, as long as it has a reasonable screen. They come with various LCDs, you have to pick one with good resolution. Matte surface is the norm for T series, though. The keyboard is also better than MBP's. The trackpad may not be as fancy, but the trackpoint is better anyway :)

More than that, I'd buy me a used Thinkpad for half the price of a new one. The technology did not make any huge leaps for the last 2-3 years, but corporations do routinely sell their older machines with very decent specs. The only concern would be the battery. I'd buy me a 6-cell standard battery, plus an extra battery for the optical drive bay. "6hrs" is attainable, unless you do CPU-intensive things all the way.

Besides T series, Carbon X1 might be appealing, but it does not have upgradeadle RAM, AFAIK.
I dunno. Current tablet offerings seems to be stuck either as a entertainment appliance, or straddling that and desktop Windows.

Microsoft screwed up badly when they decided you can't put a Metro style interface on a Win32 program and get touch support that way.

You either have to make it a Metro app (and ship it via their store), massively curtailing what you can do, or stay with the Win32 WIMP. And even when you tweak the size of various Win32 elements it is still a mess to operate via touch.

Edit: and using jupyter with a tablet strikes me as accessing a mainframe from a terminal (something a micro could act as with the right software).
actually, we do not know the specifics of the supposed Citizen deal.
The references, in order, are to Frank Herbert, Albert Einstein and Johhny Depp. The point is that famous, successful people don't always start out that way. Just trying to give people some hope.

POP: I read that you did telemarketing. How was that?

DEPP: [laughs] I marketed pens—on the phone. But the beauty of the gig was that you had to call these strangers and say, "Hi, how ya doing?" You made up a name, like, "Hey, it's Edward Quartermaine from California. You're eligible to receive this grand­father clock or a trip to Tahiti." You promise them all these things if they buy a gross of pens. It was just awful. But I actually think that was the first experience I had with acting.

Source: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/johnny-depp/
Because you try it once or twice when exploring a new touch interface?

It takes all of < 1 second. I get it is obfuscated but we aren't talking about a crazy level of interface hiding.

People expect to be able to swipe on most interfaces these days.
How Google and Improbable help developers make massive online games for cheap
And now we know something's up with gravity, because we can't seem to reconcile it with quantum mechanics.
Hell is Silicon Valley people who won’t grow up
That is a wonderfully useful metanarrative. Sticking it in my pocket to dismiss things where I need a philosophical justification for not caring about others in the future.