skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rolls better than cyanogenmod, which was always hard for regular folk.
The 2016 Pro Copywriters survey
For those curious to play with a commercially published 2600 game, the source for Imagic's Dragonfire was released by the author. It pastes nicely into the IDE, fully working without modification. See http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/source/Dragonfire_sour... for info and the .tar.gz release.

For ease of copying and pasting it into the IDE, see http://pastebin.com/4nrYTt2X.
Before anyone just shunts this aside as "some random blogger", or says "I've already heard CyanogenMod shut down", let me give you some context: first off, this article is long (this is not the blogspam you might randomly assume: click the link and give it a chance) and is not just telling you the conclusion, but showing you a retrospective on them, talking about how things got to where they eventually did.

Second, the author here is important. I'm struggling to come up with the right analogy for people who might not realize who Russell Holly is, but maybe something akin to Android's John Gruber or John Siracusa. At major Android events, such as the Big Android BBQ, Russell was not just "there", but "central": everyone knew who he was and everyone had extreme respect for his position in the community.
Revealed: British councils used Ripa to secretly spy on public
Counterpoint: they are operating a drone in the jungle around illegal loggers who probably aren't happy about it.

I can't seem to keep my drone in one piece without constant deliveries of new parts to my doorstep, and I'm just dinking around in empty parks and parking lots.

Theirs sounds more impressive ("incredible" if you will). I would even be impressed if it was a big official government program.
This is a very long ad for a book, "The Big Book of Science Fiction".
Also, why don't they remerge with OmniRom?
The Bush administration misrepresented the intelligence provided by the CIA

https://news.vice.com/article/the-cia-just-declassified-the-...
I think your point is valid, but I'd like to point out that the phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" was never "Mutually Assured Annihilation". If Russia manages to land 1% of their nukes in the US, that can still count as the destruction of the US as a superpower, although most US people would survive. Rendering the MAD doctrine obsolete means providing at least 99.9% accuracy in the interception of the ballistic nukes. That still leaves the non-ballistic nukes as a threat, and maybe that's why the Russians are rumored to have created the Status-6 nuclear torpedo/drone of 100 MT TNT equivalent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_torpedo#Status-6
Paper Airplanes Launched from Space, Soar Back to Germany, Australia, Canada
Warning: low flying propositional logic. It's something that is commonly
taught to law and philosophy students, not only mathematicians.

> If your assertion of people own blenders were true, there would be no whipped cream shortage [...]

Let's take it from here. My assertion was that people own blenders for more
than just whipped cream. In other words, I claim that people use blenders
also for other things.

Given the article's claim that there is "whipped cream shortage" and how
implication ("if..then..") works, you basically say that my assertion is
invalid, meaning that people only use blenders for whipped cream.

Now go back and rethink what your stance is and how to convey it, because you
surely didn't mean that.
>"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."

Elm can use type inference to work out types. The difference between this and dynamic languages is that it does it at compile time so you pay no runtime overhead.

Don't believe me? Take a look for yourself...

https://guide.elm-lang.org/types/
Yet somehow most stock ROMs are worse at maintaining security patches.
I wonder how low "cars per person" we will achieve through self-driving Uber/lyft services? Those type of services, if cheap enough, could replace the need for cars for little trips here and there.

But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away.

You'd have to have a lot of extra cars that only make 2-4 trips a day due to demand.

Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. If these self driving car services are so cheap, we might increase the car mileage per person. Which means we'll burn through cars at a faster pace than person.

I'm not convinced that the end of personal ownership will be all that bad for car companies. I bet it hurts midmarket luxury the hardest since nobody will buy them.
Writing an HTTP Client in Go
Many people will find it easier to follow maths lessons if there are a few bits of history sprinkled in here and there. It adds a human element and honoring the great ones hundreds of years (or even millennia) after they are dead serves as an implicit demonstration of how important their discoveries are to us. Not a terribly powerful demonstration, but less futile than repeatedly yelling "hey, this is important!"

Also, mathematical concepts don't come with natural names attached. But we need consistent labels for successful communication. It's much easier to not confuse those labels if you know a bit about the history that led to the naming.
Making the fastest site in the world
The entire Von-Neumann probe scenario makes its own unprovable assumptions about the nature of alien civilizations, and the feasibility of the technological scenario required. By definition, the lack of such probes isn't "odd", as it's the way things appear to be in our universe. It's the height of arrogance to assume that, as steeped in ignorance as we are, the flaw lies in the stars rather than ourselves.

It's like Kurzweil describing the exponential curve of self-replicating AI leading to the Singularity and infinite machine intelligence... it's an elegant, mathematically self-evident solution that just happens not to correlate with reality.
For us not-so-smart-people who liked MS Access: PHPRunner.

From a programming standpoint, it's the worst thing in the world: A Windows GUI thing that builds PHP apps and it's closed source.

From a get-stuff-done standpoint: I made a tracking web-app for large expensive tools that knows about Customers, Project Locations, Scheduling, Work Orders and Invoicing - it will grab a customer signature and email them the receipt. I did it in about four hours.

It has hooks in the system for those that actually know what they're doing (not me) to embed PHP code at important points.
Did you read the article? Americans are over owning a car, not mobility in general (the simple problem of when cars drive themselves you probably don't need one full time).
Franks, asked whether the country could afford it, replied: “What is national security worth? It’s priceless.”

So let's see, Congressman Franks, if you really believe that security is priceless. Do you wear a Kevlar vest at all times? Ride only in an armored Maybach? Keep a dozen bodyguards at your home? Line the walls of your house with depleted uranium? Scan every object entering your house with a T-wave explosives detector and a Geiger counter?

Of course not. Security is not "priceless"; it is subject to cost/benefit analysis like everything else. I can do no better at this point than to quote President Dwight Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [0]

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. [1]

I think it's a safe bet that the big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin have been lobbying for a resumption of Star Wars ever since the Reagan years. Looks like they finally found a moment when we were all thinking about other things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech

[1] http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
> High [...] fat content [...] associated with heart disease

Isn't this disputed nowadays and pretty much agreed upon to not be true for some kinds of fat like unsaturated fats?
From what I've read, a lot of the guys who worked on the Atari consoles and 8-bit home computers went on to do the Amiga once the ownership changed.

Both systems were outstanding, and I have to wonder how far personal computing has been set-back by having IBM's attempt to poison the well as its basis instead of fine systems like the Atari 8-bit series.
Didn't know amaranth was so similar to Quinoa - I'll be getting some as I am also in the UK. Pret a manager do a good multi-grain porridge if you're in London or one of the major airports.
Taxis are already self driving cars, and affordable for parts of the population. Those people buy cars regardless.
Do grocery stores not do delivery?

In Germany this is picking up really quickly, you pay 4€ more and have everything delivered to your home in a time window that can be as narrow as two hours (when the service is well frequented). The app doubles as your grocery list, and at some point you just send it off. Great customer retention too ;-)
Project Excalibur
An interesting modification could be to have a small straight wall instead of each pin. A ball, whose trail remained visible, could bounce off each wall and create the image. The orientation of all the walls would determine what image was produced.
I wonder if solar/wind/nuclear desalination plants would be better used piping water into existing infrastructure or (somehow) refilling aquifers.

... and that is apparently already a thing XD [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer_storage_and_recovery
I always start with the one I dread the most.
what about south africa?
There was a short-lived place in Manhattan called Zen Burger. They replicated McDonald's down to the heat lamped burgers and reconstituted fries except it was 100% vegetarian. Tasted pretty crummy but was really no better or worse than a typical fast food burger.

I'm waiting for Impossible Burgers to take over.

https://impossiblefoods.com/burger/
The Controversial History of Letterboxing for Movies on Your TV
Reverse-engineering exact location information through trilateration
Massive discussion from 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13247548
Apple suing Nokia on antitrust grounds; Nokia suing Apple over 40 patents
I think the actual problem is a political one. Too many industries need highways to get bigger and to have more Americans buy cars.
But they don't typically assign a new value to the time variable. It's not part of the normal language of math to have a formula that changes a variable...

Time is more like a function variable or implicit parameter, not a piece of mutable state in the imperative programming sense. Such implicit parameters are also part of Haskell, by the way...
This.

It's actually astounding, albeit hardly surprising, that companies often have zero interest in pushing security patches to devices not being manufactured anymore.
"impressive" at the end this is a case where an NGO got them a few RC foam aircraft with cameras that the fly and maintain.

These aren't some stone age people, they can keep the foam parts together with duct tape; they aren't manufacturing electronics.

The article made it sound like they are doing something super special beyond their natural ability which is condescending, i really loved the part about the "bowstring" and the "lollipop stick" as a drill, I've built a similar airframe and it actually comes with lollipop sticks to fit the holes and to be inserted into the foam for support, and the bowstring well they tell you to tie somethings with a lightweight string in the manual ;)

Yes I know it's not easy to get these things all over the world, but these aren't stupid people; they are aware of modern technology and clearly can use it and they have the same ingenuity as anyone else.
17 Google products you've never heard of
Technical developments in Cryptography: 2016 in Review
As a young widower myself, I can relate to many of the emotions and grief expressed in the article.

It's actually no surprise that I ended up meeting, connecting with, and eventually marrying someone who was widowed in her 30s. From the day we met, on the loss of a spouse (to cancer in both cases), we understood each other on a level that others could not.
Okay, can you give me one example of a useful macro that you'd write in a dynamically typed language. I'd like to see what challenges there are recreating it in a statically-typed language.

Also, regarding activerecord, it seems you're hinting at the benefits you get from composibility, is that correct?
Self driving cars make existing mass transit more useful. Many offices have a shuttle bus to the subway for free, but they don't run late and cabs are slow to arrive and pricey. Cheep and fast self driving cars in such areas make the occasional cab ride far easier.
If you don't know the access patterns, you can't pick the best representation if the prioritized list of criteria determining "best" begins with access speed. If the list begins with something else, you may still be able to pick the best one.
What happened to no militarization of space?
Commutes will be solved when everyone is replaced by automation and we no longer have jobs to get to.
I'm curent developing a rest api in Laravel. I tried lumen before switching but configuring just some basic packages to work with lumen (Dingo, JTW) was such an headache that I moved to laravel.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I grew up next to Lake Michigan, a huge source of fresh water. Yet for decades only municipalities within the Great Lakes watershed have been allowed to draw water from them. That pact has only recently started to be challenged by thirsty nearby communities[0]. I fear that groundwater crises in the Midwest will continue to erode what I see as a rational and sustainable restriction on the Lakes' water.

[0] http://www.wpr.org/great-lakes-compact-councils-oks-waukesha...
there's also millet, a staple of ancient china. It's the small round seed commonly found in bird food.
Someone calls their accomplishment "incredible" and you immediately jump to the conclusion that the author finds it "incredible, because these backwards folks are from the stone age"? You don't think: Maybe, just maybe, the author finds it incredible because it's an inspiring story & technical accomplishment? That, given their own experiences as an average joe, the author (like me) can't keep their own drones together with duct tape... and it is "incredible" that in 2016 individuals and small communities can band together using insanely-awesome technology to solve problems like this? (The "stone age" argument seems like a strawman to me.)

Using a drone to successfully solve any real, practical problem is an accomplishment in my book. I don't care who they are or where they do it. Add extra challenges and it makes it even more awesome -- eg. Geography: unlike me, they don't have Amazon Prime 2-day shipping on replacement parts. I think their accomplishment is incredible. But maybe I'm easy to impress...?

FYI, to use GP's analogy: If a 15 year old from Nebraska (Go Huskers!) used a drone to stop illegal logging or pollution, I'd call it incredible too! We are capable of some serious SciFi "magic" these days!

EDIT: Or to put this another way... have you done anything half as incredible as stopping illegal loggers with your drones...?
the infinite monkey cage by Brian Cox and the other guy

no such thing as a fish by the qi elves

in our time
('a':_) <- x = x : f zs

What's the `<- x`for? I know some Haskell and I've never seen that syntax. And `('a':_) = x : f zs` should be enough I think.
Also I'm pretty sure each line is supposed to be a string, so it should be `("a":_) = x : f zs` :)
Compact energy source for wireless sensors
Well, if by life the author means consciousness/awareness (not intelligence), I don't know that it is necessarily a religious assumption. Western orthodoxy assumes that consciousness arises out of complex arrangements of matter, yet it is different in kind and does not appear to be itself reducible to matter. Isn't it a simpler hypothesis to assume consciousness is the default state of the universe, and all material phenomenon are the result of conscious action? This problem is this hypothesis is that it removes us from our privileged position as masters of the universe.

The idea that I am just a small part in a giant conscious living system makes me feel good. The alternative - that we are islands of life that somehow different and separate from a dead, mechanistic universe - seems kind of unpleasant.
The first settlers got there by a boat thrown off-course by a hurricane, the the seafaring skill was lost, so communication became impossible.

Fair enough.
Yes there is. Volatility is an inefficiency, by definition. Efficient markets seek to the correct market price and stay there. A "volatile" market is one where parasites (c.f. hedge fund maniacs) siphon off capital due to games like this.
I don't mean to side-track a very valid point that you are making, but stepping back a little, isn't it amusing that humanity has reached such an advanced state where a strong argument for owning cars is to ship dogs around?

And double basses, my situation. I commute to work, and could do most of my shopping, by bike. But playing music requires a car, for myself, and to schlep the kids to their music activities.

Still, I could see moving to a situation where I make much less use of a car. Maybe there's a way to request an Uber that's big enough for my instrument, and to pay a little extra for that. There are double bassists in NYC who get around by subway. And since most of my playing is local, I could get away with having an electric car with relatively low speed and range.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

When was the last time an American Presidential candidate ran on feeding the hungry and clothing the cold? Such sentiments are more likely to be derided these days as "socialist".
A space based system doesn't need to be nuclear. Enough mass brought down from orbit on a specific target can be devastating without explosives.

Imagine that instead of flying a drone over your enemy with a missile, you instead launch a steel rod from space directly into their vehicle. Same destruction, no drone to alert them, you can target anywhere on earth.
JQuery plugin for extracting dominant colors from images and applying it to parent
Well that feels like something I can be happy about for a change.
I think the reason it's considered destabilizing is that it promises the possibility that the US could launch a first strike against Russia and then defend itself against the inevitable counterattack. So even in a defensive configuration, it has ostensible offensive value.

Of course, the keywords here are "promises" and "ostensible". It will never work well enough that a rational person would depend on it. (Note, in particular, that it can never be fully tested, short of actual nuclear war.) But can we assume our leaders will always be rational?
Airlines solve the intercity transportation problem just fine. The only advantages rail could have are lower cost and the absence of the TSA. We're one train bombing away from the same screening system, and the cost is not lower (and if you value your time, it's much higher).
Well, there was Bernie :-)
Is anywhere not facing a water shortage? Where is it "best managed" or "least bad"
SB-ASSEMB, for example. https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembl...
Brendan recently wished John Carmack best of luck with landing lisp in VR with his use of Racket for Oculus. Pretty cool seeing great engineers cheer each other on with common goals. Also interesting to see John, someone steeped in and super productive in many C variants, invest heavily in a functional language.
>You said yourself that Apple's notoriously-secretive stuff gets leaked all the time.

Apple's stuff doesn't usually leak until it hits the manufacturers, which are third party. Apple itself is very good at keeping secrets within it's own company. One of the main reasons Snowden had access to that data is the NSA oursourced tens of thousands of tech people. If it's just one or two people, it's much, much less likely to be leaked.

>without the engineering and product owners of the app knowing.

You can sneak it into an app with just 1 engineer knowing. There are still 2-3 people who know the complete formula for Coke. You can get a SVP come directly to the developer and circumvent the product owners, or you could make a skunkworks team of just 1-2 people. Hell, FB manages to keep it's private keys private because only a select group of people can access it, let alone know where they are stored.

>ad-tech clients do want to know exactly where the data comes from

Funny, when I take out ads on FB, it doesn't tell me the algorithms used to determine who likes what, it just gives me the option on what demographics to focus on.

I would venture to say not only is it technologically feasible and organizationally feasible, but they could do it without getting caught unless people start noticing ads popping up for things they never search on, and only talk about person to person. I think that can even be hidden by adding weight only to other weighted preferences captured through other means.
How does something like this end up published by the acm? Is this a special publication that isn't related to research at all?

I don't mean to sound harsh, but there was nothing in this article even close to novel in an academic sense, and none of it is even new field knowledge if you've spent any non-trivial time around load balancers. Perhaps my notions of what the acm publishes are wrong...

Make no mistake, it's a good article for things to look out for if you're getting into load balancing. It's just nothing new if you are already experienced in the field.
It might take something orbiting Pluto to figure out though. I wouldn't know, but with the variables involved that seems possible.
This idea is crazy, and if distilled properly, could do a ton. This iteration is most certainly not going to be a part of it. I suspect we are decades to centuries off of this being realized.

Why one decided to make a completely new vocabulary that feels incredibly inaccessible to even the technical audience is beyond me.
Seems like it would be pretty simple to hold a press conference to clarify those incorrect assertions. If you follow the logic of that narrative you also have to assume Hillary Clinton[0] and a large segment of the democratic establishment was in on it[1], or worse yet failed to even read the report. Then you have to ask if the executive branch has misinterpreted intelligence before and the CIA is unwilling to correct them why would you think this new intelligence has any validity?

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS9y5t0tR0

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution#Passage
Not sure whether you're asking whether DSP is still relevant (I think it is) or a textbook published in the 80s would be relevant. I imagine such a book might talk a lot about the hardware and software available at the time.
TBH well-prepared plain quinua should have a very neutral taste. But if you don't wash it enough, you won't remove the soap-ish outer layer so it ends up tasting bitter:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JdBFm-697eM/hqdefault.jpg