skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> we will never know

We as in our lifetimes? Or we as in our species?
* The Data Skeptic: a data scientist and his wife (that has no knowledge of statistics) discuss data science and skepticism;

* Dan Carlin´s "Common Sense" is pretty good if you're jonesing from "Hardcore History";

* Freakonomics is pretty decent too.
Merry Christmas bros
I never knew that, thanks for pointing that out!
Neo900: It's Krampus Time
There are core contributors who would no longer participate because they refuse to use proprietary systems, even remote ones, and do not even run JavaScript. Matz prefers overall inclusivity to losing the contributors, so a wholesale move to GitHub (instead of RubyMine) is not going to happen.
Trump Solo (1997)
The downfall of society began when social media surfaced
I understand that there are indeed cases where statically typed languages make a lot of sense. But anecdotally, I use ruby for web apps, and honestly in millions of lines I have written, I have rarely run into issues because the language is dynamically typed. Is it because I am so familiar with this style? I mean it isn't just me, other ruby (and previously perl) developers I've chatted with just don't have issues like I commonly hear described.
The Laws of Simplicity
This definition is basically a translation of anaxogoras's original definition.

It's good to have a more modern way of phrasing it but the idea is older than Christianity.
Not just the name - the biggest issue is they're losing the infrastructure, and infrastructure is expensive.
The usage of Electron, while convenient, is continually irritating to me. Power consumption matters and "hur dur lets repurpose our web app for desktop" is annoyingly bad for power.

I get why companies do it, I just wish they wouldn't. Alternatively, perhaps an investment in electron as a platform in the power consumption space is what really needs to happen.
> but there are languages with static types that are both concise and readable (Elm being a good example)

Elm's to me embodies everything that drove me to Ruby over functional languages: Terseness in what to me is all the wrong places, coupled with too verbose typing.

> So what advantages am I missing?

The ones you have glossed over: More flexibility, and ability to be terse while readable. They matter more to many of us than you might think.

What finally sold me on Ruby was when I as an experiment rewrote a piece of queueing middleware we were using from C to Ruby and added significant number of features while cutting the number of lines to 10% of the original. Maybe I could achieve similar compact code with a statically typed language, but the likely candidates at the time at least were either extremely verbose or languages I considered absolutely unreadable (Haskell being top of my list of offenders - most of these languages have syntax that is clearly designed by people who are inspired by maths, unaware or not caring that this will push away most people).

I would love a "more static" Ruby, but I would not be willing to lose the terseness or expressiveness or readability to gain it. Maybe Crystal will get the balance right over time, though personally I believe you can get a lot more performance out of Ruby too without a lot of the sacrifices Crystal is making (but it will take a lot of work).
The container scheduling bit of Cloud Foundry (Diego aka Elastic Runtime) is used to run Pivotal Web Services, which is a public cloud thing that is reasonably big, although I don't know the actual numbers. Baidu run some big instances in-house, but again, I don't know how big.
Ironically it's also precisely those engineering minds who have built weapons capable of wiping out the human race.
> I invest a lot of money in a MacBook Pro for work and it makes sense the apps I'm using needs more RAM, CPU and graphics card usage.

100% agreed. The crucial word there is "I". You choose. You get to decide what to think of wasteful apps. Text editor in Electron? Well you're a programmer, so ok. No hard feelings. Image editor using up 50% of your cpu? I'll look for a different one. Might be just the other way around for a graphic designer.

The important part is: let the market figure out what is the balance of acceptable resource usage. Right now, there is no accountability. Spotify was trashing the disk for about a year and finally got off their asses to fix it when it became a serious pr issue. That is not a sustainable system.

Edit: to drive the point home about your mbp: I have one too, and I actually don't think it's acceptable for apps to use a lot of cpu / gpu. I'm on battery a lot and I constantly monitor the tasklist to shut apps that are using too much. Already in n=2, you and I have different preferences. And that's great! Let us collectively figure out a balance like a normal market does :).
Which "it" are you talking about? A lot of things are covered in the report.
Any civilization that can travel between the stars will be able to build space habs more cheaply. There's no good reason to sit in the bottom of a gravity well when you can build something better yourself.

Unless maybe you are losing a war, being chased relentlessly across the stars and need to make a bomb shelter under a thousand miles of rock. You could offer the natives all sorts of technology, or all the precious metals you find in exchange for a few cubic kilometers deep under ground. Whatever deals you make with them don't matter anyway. They'll all be glassed in a few years when your pursuers figure out where you're hiding and begin bombardment.
Happy Festivus (a tad late, I know).
Show HN: Chrome Extension that finds direct download links from FTP servers
While studying CS in my first year at university our maths professor spent the first week teaching us about ancient number systems and for the first few weeks taught us how count, add and subtract using Egyptian (Base 10) and Babylonian (Base 60) numerals.

We were given some historical context for those number systems and this was the perfect way to lead into teaching us binary, octal and hexadecimal arithmetic.

For those of us who have always been interested in computers it mightn't have been that useful but for the people who "sorta fell into this course" it was a great way to learn those concepts without it just being "that binary thing"
Thanks!

- For now I have only looked at circular looms although various shapes would indeed give some interesting result. A circle however gives an great even distribution of possible lines and thus resolution.

- The number of endpoints greatly improves the resolution of the final image. The smaller the number of endpoints the more prominent the actual spacial patterns of the loom become.
This small project was made back in my 2nd year (weekend project stopped working on it), but now is maintained as a part of my college opensource organisation. So I thought it would be great to get it up and running.
This is the github link for the project -

https://github.com/NIT-dgp/chrome-search-extension

Though the code base is very small, but the extension is very useful.
How Closely Do You Follow Networking Etiquette Rules?
Adopt Python 3
My recommendation is to start with an IDE like what Jetbrains offers, (assuming you're working in a language they support) with a promise to yourself to learn command line tools as well/a bit later. I say this because the productivity benefits from a good IDE are incredibly high, especially when working with something like Java. But like at least one other commenter has said, it's highly useful to know how things are actually working on the command line, or how to run a few quick commands to help you find something your IDE might not be able to find easily, etc. Both are useful tools, but potentially different use cases. (I have a co-worked who programs Java in VIM, so it's not like you can't theoretically mold them to be useful for any case, but it's going to take a lot more work and time to get to a place that likely is not going to offer as many niceties as an IDE will out of the box, like powerful refactoring or debugging)

But make sure that promise to yourself to learn the command line does not go forgotten! It IS important, and knowing how to use something like VIM, even at only a basic level, WILL help you.
Self flushing urinals used to work this way. The tank above the urinal was filled at a constant rate, and would discharge when the level ran over the top of the siphon.
I am sure many countries have had interesting years. However being British and doing work with America they are the two countries I know the most about personally :)
> Some may argue that the speed of prototyping a solution is a benefit, but the time saved putting together a prototype is often negated by the time spent debugging as the prototype matures.

Most prototypes fail to gain traction and are discarded well before they mature and maintenance costs start rising.
Best wishes for Christmas!

And one question to reflect on: why can we build compilers, operating systems, and distributed databases, while we can't find the basic rules of an economy that is well-performing, yet fair to every participant, now and in the future?
The video on the website is hilariously bad. Feels more like a parody skit than a real presentation of the service.

Here's a better one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZCv696rMCk
I would look at tomographic reconstruction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction) algorithms for this for inspiration. This is a very similar problem: what projections best approximate a given image?
I agree that the way Rust does type checking for ownership is pretty cool, but transferring ownership without having static analysis verify it seems pretty normal. I don't think it's a reason to avoid channels.
Imagine for a moment that you thought you'd made a good device. Now imagine that a respected organization did their own testing and said they couldn't recommend it.

Would you want to work with them to understand why you came to opposing conclusions?

There's no real chance of bullying, as CR buys the products they test, and has decades of experience with huge companies not loving their reviews.
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017
really nice!
in your fitness function - wouldn't you prefer to normalize somehow for the the line's length? i.e. - longer lines (going between two far away pins) will cover more dark pixels, and are more likely to be picked, even though they might also cover many bright pixels. I wonder if the average darkness of pixels along the line will work better?
Show HN: Final Fantasy Quotes
Very cool. I wonder if there could be an improvement in image quality if you added some form of lookahead, and chose the path that gives the best results. The branching factor would be horrendous, but I suspect that it could be pruned significantly using some A*-ish cost/ordering criterion.
I have not picked out many quotes yet (besides FF7), but the script is there for each game. I'll be adding quotes throughout the day. Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas HN. This is my first Christmas here, and hopefully not my last. Right now I'm in London, celebrating my birthday as well as Christmas.

Have a brilliant day guys.
> Go was invented for internal Google use

Go was invented by a small group at Google with the aim of solving some of Google's problems as they saw them. It's not as if the whole of Google came together and collectively designed the language they needed. I wouldn't read too much into the fact that it happened to be invented at Google, rather than wherever else Rob Pike happened to be working at the time.
Cyanogen Inc is shutting down CyanogenMod
Merry Tiffmas!
Merry Christmas to all.
Crazy that you get down voted for that comment. Its not like anyone wants / expects to use them.
> in today's world you can hardly do anything without touching politics, and we're just fed up with that.

This makes sense, and I appreciate your reply. I don't think however that it's anything new (or specific to this time period), and even being born means you will constantly be challenged to learn new things, or stay stuck. Also I am not sure about the 'political' sense of this.. I mean, people of different gender identities and beliefs have formed political groups, but I don't think it's a direct connexion.

(I do prefer 'they')
Minimum Lovable Moments
Merry Christmas everyone! Been a great year personally.
> like powerful refactoring

Powerful contextual-search-and-replace. Refactoring is a deeper change than
just moving things around.
Yes! Phoenix creator here. We need to give the blog some love, but in 2015 we had a big year. We released the "Programming Phoenix" book for pragprog and our big "Phoenix Presence" feature, a CRDT backed eventually consistent process group:

https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/03/25/what-makes-phoenix-pres...

We also have been working on Phoenix 1.3 which I laid out in my ElixirConf keynote. Ask me anything!
I have always seen ads for glasses. Didn't actually notice them until I actually got my first pair.
Mathiness: not just a problem of macro-economics (2015)
Yes, it's a mess. Its a poor mixture of:

- Scientific hypothesis of consciousness

- Self help / therapeutic framework

- Biology

- Metaphysics

The author should pick one of these perspectives and make a stronger case for one rather a weak case for all.
What's UHT? The canned stuff I get is real cream.
> Wow 2016 has been an interesting year! Especially for us Brits/Europeans and Americans.

I'm certainly looking forward to 2016 Wipe https://twitter.com/charltonbrooker/status/80860484411005747...
Of course, the funny part is that ELisp is generally considered to be the least elegant of the big 3 Lisps. CL and Scheme are actually a lot nicer.
I really appreciate your recommendation.

So, I should definitely learn both, but start with the IDE way, because it's easier.
I don't think we can know what he really believed or if he existed at all. He's a semi-mythical figure and there are no contemporary accounts of him.
The indications from the people who've replied to you are that they downvoted you for the same reason you're now upset: they didn't think you were making an effort to converse.
TLDR: They're using a drone to take video of the illegal logging.

I'd guess a couple of questions come to mind. The first is, wouldn't satellite imagery identify illegal logging? I guess that might be too expensive?

If those images are not detailed enough, what kind of information do they need, other than where/when logging is taking place.
Worrying about an alien civilization coming to visit and take everything is like a moss cell sitting on a rock in the Himalayas fretting that in the next few days an exotic bacteria nestled in a thermal vent in the Mariana Trench is going to show up and stake a claim.

It's actually significantly less probable than that by many orders of magnitude but it's hard for humans to grasp just how isolated everything in the universe is from everything else.
CL and Scheme are actually a lot nicer http://www.bagswalletssales.com
With a compiler smart enough to aggressively cull any uneeded dynamism, it might be possible. But it would still be hard.
“Intervallo RAI” generator
Consumer Reports already sent Apple their logs on the test machines before the review. CR had already made a good faith effort to find the source of the opposing conclusions. However:

> In his tweet, Schiller linked to a story from iMore that says Consumer Reports was just going for a pre-Christmas headline and should have done more testing.

Apple is trying to bully/influence the public reception to CR's review. Gruber has spent more time dissing the CR review (and distracting from Gurman's expose on the Mac troubles which he hasn't linked to on DF)
we're could I get irl versions of this (actually spun, but printed is ok)
Ruby is more than flexible enough for you to add type annotation via DSLs, and use them to drive tests/fuzzing if you want that. There are a lot of people who have done that.

They rarely see much use, though, because most of us quickly experience that the type annotations that seem essential when we work on statically typed languages quickly become less essential once you adopt a more idiomatic Ruby style.

E.g. if you want to output something as text, rather than dictate what should be passed in, call #to_s on it (and optionally handle the failure if it doesn't implement #to_s, if it is reasonable to continue).

Once you adopt the attitude of asking for what you actualy need rather than demanding the client pass in what you think should be passed in, type annotations start feeling like a clamp around your foot rather than a necessity in most cases, and most of the remaining assistance they could provide tends to fall away with test cases you would require in either case.

I used to be a static typing zealot, and I still want things to be "as static as possible", but I've come to accept that most of the time the burdens it adds are not worth the benefits.

I'm sure we can do better, and there are certainly cases where optional static type annotation could be helpful, but at this point I'm not giving up the expressiveness dynamc typing gives me - a static system would need to be practically "invisible" for me to find it acceptable.
Could you expand on that?

I understand that with Vim I will be able to quickly find and replace words, but I will never be able to truly refactor, because it requires powerful code analysis that only an IDE can do and a Vim plugin can't.
Ask HN: Getting started with WebGL?
I've recently noticed a lot of websites make use of WebGL in one way or another. Working as a professional, freelance web developer I would love to add WebGL to my skillset. However, most tutorials I find don't go in depth. At most, you get to render a cube on the screen. I would love to be able to get past that point and more complex things, but I don't have an extensive background in 3D programming, math, etc. How do I get started? One of my favourite websites I've recently come across is: minglabs.com. I would like to be able to build something in the same vein someday.
You most definitely could! While experimenting with it it turned out however that the quality of the image is far more sensitive to the number of pins on the loom. And it is this that quickly escalates your branching factor.

Increasing the amount of pins thus resulted in a far better result for the same amount of computational power than the improved algorithm you propose.
Malware distribution tactics used in phishing campaign
I see. Thank you for your advice.

However, while it's true that some programmers are (too) locked in their IDE, maybe this allow them to focus on the code itself, in a more abstract way.
Definitely.

What defines art is whether or generates a visceral, human response. Is it evocative? Does it spark emotion or memory?

An ML algorithm can luck out and get this right, provided enough training data. But would it sustain if its audience knew there was no human element? I think the machine behind the curtain would throttle any emotional response.

As to this implementation, I have to agree it doesn't produce much interesting from the sample images. I haven't dug into the code to know if this is implementation related or a symptom of its input.
This is very, very cool. Thanks for sharing!
I do something similar, but at an even lower granularity: "Needs Action", "Waiting", and just a couple other labels.

I haven't actually watched Mann's talks and only have a second-hand understanding of Inbox Zero as a concept, so maybe this is just rehashing his ideas, but the reason I like this approach is that I avoid spending the time and mental effort classifying incoming messages more than once.
Here's hoping that the government actually does something about the logging."You can't prove it's happening" sounds like more of an excuse than a reason.

I'm sure the tribe has their doubts too, but I wish them luck.
Hacky Holidays!
>I'm pretty sure you can just wrap your strings with mysql_escape_string or some similarly named function

Prepared statements have been a thing in PHP for a long time, now. Concatenating strings into SQL queries is no longer ever the right answer.
Now, i am no web programmer, but I read that differently. Or at least I saw another truth in it compared to what theauthor meant. To me it seems like web programming is in many ways a "solved problem". Most of the tools for doing a large part of what is web development is already there, and there is a big living ecosystem for web developers.

Lisp is not a part of that, and I doubt it would bring much even if it was. Learning lisp for someone that is fluent in some.pf the big frameworks seems to me like another way of being able to do less with more code and less neat abstractions.

Sure, Lisp has some really cool things, and in many ways it is great for building abstractions in with all the macro facilities, but the path to the same ecosystem (to me) looks too long and too impossible.
Tor at the Heart: Tahoe-LAFS
Driver Robot License Key Serial and Full Crack Download
As a South African I would like to tip my hat to both America and Brit, you surprised even us this year. Welcome to the club.
I strongly believe math should be taught with the science that motivated its development- calculus should be taught with classical mechanics. But I'm less sure the history of science is worthwhile.

The problem is opportunity cost. Schools (highschool, college intro physics) spend a great deal of time discussing previous models of the atom. What's the value of teaching Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom, really? They could start with the current model and list all of the observations/experiments that have shown the model to be useful. Previous models could be relegated to an appendix, or a history class.

This would free up time to more comprehensively discuss 20th and 21st century physics, which are sorely neglected at this level.
This is a good idea, each thread is basically a single point in the 2D fourier transform of the image so an approximate image would sample that space accurately. Not sure what accurately means exactly since the fourier space isn't 1 or 0 (thread or no thread). Maybe include dithering to approximate?
Yes they did 1/2 have of the work they could but I'm not complaining about getting more information. Someone else should leak the RNC. Or possibly it didn't contain as many bombshells? Either way, I'm happy to get more information than I had before.
Ask HN: Why is HN red right now?
I mean, why is the theme modified with red now instead of the usual orange?
Normalizing would most likely only change the order of chosen paths. I do feel there would be something to be gained from penalizing the crossing of light areas. I there say this would increase the quality of finer details.
I've had exactly this experience in Civilization 2. Playing at the higher difficulties, the computer cheats and swaps any knowledge it learns to all other computer players. The computer players are all hostile 100% of the time (a feature of the version that I play), so will never help you in that or any other way.

It was quite a surprise after wiping out the most advanced and powerful civilzation other than me (they had 19th century riflemen, I was several tiers ahead of them so had tanks, battleships, and modern artillery) to have the other civilizations "trade up" to the same level of technology as me and have nukes flying at my cities.

The best way to stop computer civilizations from becoming a threat is to capture or raze all of their cities except for a single one, which you will keep as a pet. After all, you're not a monster.
Dis you make the 200 pin loom or buy it? I can't seem to find such a product online.
Sweet! I had not thought of tackeling the problem from this angle. This might indeed give for some very interesting results!