skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive

I think a smart signal processing/soundtech/AI hacker could create a software program that uses a computer's audio to destructively interfere with other sounds in a room. Say there is an annoying mechanical whine coming from outside your bedroom. You position the computer's microphone near your bed, then tell the program to start listening. The program learns the audio pattern of the whine, and then begins to emit an antiwhine that cancels it out.
Neural face recognition network tuned with 650,000 pornstar images
How can one possibly respect a law one cannot read or any lawmakers/political bodies who make/encourage such laws or institutions claiming to enforce/defend them?

What exactly is the difference for the accused between this situation and having legal cases randomly decided by random rules?
I wasn't quite trying to communicate egoism; more what the mental process (you could say "subconscious flinch reaction", but that doesn't capture the "physiological-ness" of what's happening) to encountering the kind of contradictory information that the brain "learns" from.

That is, new information that contradicts your knowledge usually triggers focused attention (i.e. NMDA activation) in order to facilitate learning. However, overlearning can make the same information be discounted as irrelevant (i.e. a GABAergic signal of "it's okay, I don't need to figure that out.")

Explaining at a high level exactly what that "it's okay, don't pay attention to that" signal is rationalized as in conscious experience, is a whole different thing.
We've been living lives of unparalleled comfort and safety with nearly monotonic increase since after the industrial revolution. Would you have preferred all progress had stopped at some point? Mostly things get better because people are dissatisfied with current state.

edit: I find the downvotes on this confusing - I don't see anything controversial in above.
The primary cost difference is salary.

They are outsourcing from a country where people are paid $100k to one where people are paid $10k. The health benefits are a tiny fraction of it. It's absurdly easy to fire poor performers. Anybody who complains otherwise is, honestly, a terrible employer and/or woefully uninformed.
What is the thresshold where you do decide to release the bug description?

Microsoft has sat on bugs for years saying they were working on them. Do you disclose after a week? A Month? a Year?

If it were a company or team with a solid history of patching swiftly I could see trusting them. But this is Microsoft, they have the resources to fix bugs. They chose an OS design that sacrificed security for other things. Worst, they chose to betray trust in the past. Someday Microsoft might earn that trust back, but they are a long way off from earning mine.

If I informed them of the bug and it wasn't fixed in the next patch, then I would need solid evidence they are working on it or I release the exploit. If it were a group I trusted I would follow up several times until I lost faith in them.
If my impression was anything to go by, I clicked on the original title of "Intern saves Google 15M GB every day" (something like that) expecting to hear what on earth could have saved that much bandwidth. Instead, I got an advertisement for how great this woman is. (But, now that you want to hire her, too bad, she's already taken.) There was just one sentence that talked about what I went there for: namely, she changed the compression algorithm. If the title were "Look how awesome this Google intern is" I wouldn't have had a problem with it. On the other hand, I woudn't have clicked it, either.
Wrong. The wage of that specialized position will increase, thus attracting more people into that specialized field.
Vizio was sold to LeEco in July, right? Does anybody have an idea about whether this data went along with the purchase or not and/or whether it would have made for a significant boost in the price paid for the firm? Seems like pretty valuable data to re-sell to third parties.
Relevant:
https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-educat...
Advancing Research on Video Understanding with the YouTube-BoundingBoxes Dataset
Cheap labor isn't the only issue here.

Wage theft in the form of capping competition is the big issue.

Assume the rate of salary change dS(t)/dt is propotional-to/a-function-of (average_labor_demand - average_labor_supply)

Now, if you keep topping up supply from overseas, salary never increases as much as it might, as such it is limited - as such, salary rate increase is also capped; and it's not employees can have any relief from a lack of demand, other than maybe fewer visas, but I doubt there would be many lobbyists for that... complaints about unemployment or lack of jobs falls on deaf ears - ears stuffed full of money by happy employers...
Only if you have resistive electric heat. Resistive heat is a simple X electricity -> X heat added to house. A heat pump uses electricity to move heat from one object to another, so it's X electricity -> Y heat pumped into the house from outside, where Y has some efficiency limits, but isn't directly bound by conservation of energy.

The effective heat gain here is more than 100% of the electricity spent, and we measure it with "Coefficient of Performance" instead of "efficiency". A good system is somewhere around CoP 3.5, making the LEDs a comparatively bad heater.
sure, towers I guess. maybe some clever company will float it on kites/balloons/wings/copters/microsats.
Show HN: Simplest Keylogger
Smart Pipe Infomercial (satire)
Whoops, I am a bad community member and posted before seeing this.

Yeah, Gingko is really phenomenal, especially for multiplayer!
Of course, here you go:

http://www.ehang.com/ehang184

There is also a German project, the e-volo.

http://www.e-volo.com/index.php/en/
why can't they simply update the firmware?

A secure PRNG can be made trivially.
By the way, research shows that guys think they are more intelligent while girls think they are less intelligent than they really are. I would like to propose a theory of why intelligent girls have more doubts about their intelligence than intelligent guys.

High intelligence is an asset. You don't want your competition (in social situation) to know that you're smart. So it's generally better for you to believe you're not that smart, yet be in reality.

However, for males, this is different; they need to show off to attract females. So they need to display their intelligence (because it's a desirable trait) despite the above. That's why they act as they were smarter than they really are.

It's similar to why in many birds, males are often wildly colored, while females have masking similar to the environment.
I think it's worth clarifying that arrays declared in parameter lists are simply just pointers. It's 100% syntactic sugar. So the `int a[n]` is simply treated as `int * a`, and the value inside of the `[]` is ignored completely. This leads to the weird situation that you declared it as `int a[n]`, but `sizeof(a)` just gives the size of a pointer, not the size of the array.

The only special case is `int a[static n]`, which does tell the compiler that `a` has at-least `n` entries. But `a` is still just a pointer in this instance, so `sizeof(a)` still gives the size of a pointer.

Personally, I'd recommend avoiding the syntax purely because of the `sizeof` issue, but its up to you.
That's because it _is_ a library. If you compare it to something like Ember, it's pretty obvious that's what it is.
Thank you. I will check it out later, super interesting project!
Automatically Deploy Images from Dockerhub to Heroku with Mermaid
If you had an intern that was responsible for turning GZIP on in IIS for a website that had 1B users it starts to become much more of an accomplishment.

Even small changes at that scale require careful analysis and coordination.
Do you have a substantive argument, or merely the vague supposition that somewhere out there there must be some personal anecdote that invalidates what I said?

Could you clarify what "assume so much" refers to? I'm pretty sure that the only assumption I made is that most illegal immigrants are not non-workers collecting benefits.
"old school PIM"?
Wikipedia and I find this ambiguous [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIM
> I have no other explanation for it (believe me, I want one)

Um, the fact that that her work saved that much bandwidth is a happy accident of the fact that she was at Google and assigned on a project that had a high user volume. Other than passing the intern interview loop, that took no absolutely no merit or effort on her part whatsoever.

Moreover, the blog post describes the work as "to add support for Brotli for both new app installs and app update." I mean, hundreds of thousands of developers use third-party libraries to add functionality every single day of the year. Some "achievement".

Please take off the X-ism colored glasses, dajohnson89. I promise that it makes the world look like a better place.
I would say the biggest effect is that modern media makes America much more sensitive to casualties, in contrast to the past where broadcast-style media like TV and newspapers were essentially hijacked for uncontested government propaganda. I'm sure if an expert thought about it for a while he/she would come up with more stuff around homemade explosives/IEDs, small arms, and the like, but I think media is the main one.
I find it baffling that you can speak about open conflict between two nuclear superpowers so confidently.

Nuclear exchange would mean, best case, collapse of civilization with a possible extreme worst case of human extinction. Why in God's name would you even tamper with the possibility? Or do you think that nukes would never be used, no matter how desperate either side got?
Sounds like an excellent use of H1B; but I'm sure it's not a common one.
Most car trips are much shorter than that, although that could change when driving is no longer necessary.

For an occasional long-distance trip, it would make sense to buy a ride on a purpose-built high-speed self-driving vehicle. Kind of like a personal train cabin.

For day-to-day commuting and errands, people could be able to spend much less for a smaller, slower, simpler vehicle that is potentially cheap enough for an average person to own.
Suppose you have a background job you want to run. Clojure has good concurrency, so it's tempting to just run it in the background. OK, now it needs to retry: that's great, Clojure has STM so it'll keep retrying until it succeeds. So you have your process spin off a bunch of threads doing some background stuff. Easy.

Now, because you're using AWS, or a new deploy, or something else, the server dies. What happened all that stuff running in the background? Because it was built with clojure primitives, it never got saved anywhere, like it would if you had used a queue and workers.

The summary is: Clojure's awesome stuff encourages you to use it, but it's actually a bad pattern for horizontally scalable apps. Rails - lacking the cool concurrency stuff - forces you to have better habits, and makes them easy.
Foof, this is yet another reason for me to be completely out on smart tvs.

I really don't see the appeal of hooking up my tv to the internet if the only thing I'll get in return is buggy service integrations and, worse, the tv spying on my viewing habits. This is on top of the added potential for security exploits on a poorly maintained device connected to my home network.
Climate scientists versus climate data: response to critiques
Many countries can't participate on iOS, Play, Amazon, Stripe etc. People in many countries jump through hoops just to use e.g. PayPal.

Apple recently removed apps from Iranian developers who were circumventing restrictions by pretending to be from another country.

Millions of other developers can't participate in online markets we take for granted, unless someone facilitates it for them.
In reality, it's made more than just the 1% wealthier, but the balance is that it's made a whole lot more people poorer. I don't have references, but I remember reading them at some point, in terms of numbers there have been more losers than winners when you look at inflation adjusted wages.
And this is why giving cruddy companies insane amounts of cash works out well for humankind. Few sane companies would have been able to put significant resources behind something like this without a solid lead in hand.
Post-apocalyptic irradiated countries, maybe. World? Not completely. I am skeptical of China's capability of successfully nuking US, aside from perhaps the west coast.
Trees are not all alike and I think this stops most such plans. Some trees have types and tags, quoting of other trees, container patterns that are representable as a tree but unpleasant to edit.

And we get stuck on that and say "Let's have a syntax." And then we're back to text again.
Hardly. If the cost of 10 interviews exceeds the cost of 1 bad hire, then my 90/99 filter is probably worth it.

If you think it's retarded, try and work out the arithmetic yourself.
LEDs are significantly more efficient than CFL. Is there something about the spectrum plants needs that requires CFL?
Thanks for sharing! The original thread is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13572384
This doesn't sound like a difficult macro/function to write. More, this has been replicated in other languages, now. These refactoring capabilities are considered a hallmark of the popular IDEs that people point to.

And keeping HTML "well formed" is a battle that lost hard with xhtml. Further, any "rich" editor likely kept the tree structure well formed. It did little to keep it manageable, though.

And I wager that most "bad JSON" is programmatically generated. This is literally a problem with countless solutions today. But, it is almost always quicker to println something out that you are certain you know the structure of, than it is to use a library. So, people don't. :(
Have you considered implementing IIIF? That's an emerging standard for constructing image URLs which has a growing amount of existing client support:

http://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/
Are reverse proxies always the way to go?
The system here is a bit weird. We pay large sums of money to the dutch equivalent of Al Capone then wonder why there are problems with organized crime in Amsterdam.
I wouldn't call it BS per se, but it's primarily incremental improvement in easy to deploy tech, eg FireEye, Cylance, etc. There's little adoption of things that could provide a real barrier in the long term (application whitelisting, U2F/FIDO) because they impact the business.

No-one has a great answer to application security, pretty much everything is incremental improvement.
The arguments you're making are no more convincing than historical ones like "it will never make economic sense for an individual to pay for their own computer" or "elevators are an inherently dangerous form of travel".
Anything else than pure salary can be gamed. We are for better or worse a capitalist society so lets use the one currency we have to determine who is most needed instead of making up new currencies.
1. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully slow rate to make errors more noticeable

You have to be careful with this as well. There are some musicians who do this, but can only play at the practice speed. (So be sure to speed things up, and vary things. You'll have true mastery if you can morph what you've practiced.) It's also good to listen to recordings of yourself and of model musicians as a means of feedback.

2. Chunking - breaking down the skill into smaller components

Care has to be taken with this as well. I've encountered musicians who have chunked ornaments in traditional music, but have practiced so much, that they consistently replay the ornament at their practice tempo, regardless of the tempo being played at the moment.

Music is a game of continual contextual awareness. There is a powerful analogy with programming here.
Your point falls through either way. A traditional full-out war is an improbability, because of any number reasons (balance of power between Russia/China/US, destructive capability of respective nuclear arsenals for MAD). With a proxy war more like recent conflicts (korean war, vietnam), a pyrrhic victory or an uncertain resolution is the most likely outcome. There's no point arguing who wins a global war in the 21st century because WW3 ends in irradiated hell on earth for all involved and would usher in the rise of whichever country was insignificant/uninvolved enough to avoid the ICBMs
I agree with you.

To be fair, 10% is the better number attributed to this change.

That ten percent amounts to 1.5 petabytes is a credit to the Google Play Store / Android platform.
Average NFL linebacker or Google engineer: Which career pays more?
Then that's fine. The contributors that do not contribute to my projects are irrelevant for me :)
Full and immediate public disclosure seems irresponsible and counterproductive IMO.

The last thing I'd want as a developer or a manager is to wake up in the morning with a PR shit storm and angry users on my hands because some inane script kiddie found it appropriate to disclose a zero day without reaching out to me or my team first. Sure, some other guy might know about or find the vulnerability and exploit it by the time a patch comes out; it's guaranteed that they will if you release a 0day.

We can discuss all we want on what a reasonable delay to release a patch might be, but absolutely not on the notion that immediate public disclosure is the right thing to do. It wastes everyone' time, disrupts workflows, puts fellow developers, their managers, and their users under intense pressure and stress, all so some kid can enjoy an ego trip. To me it just seems gross and childish.
For American workers as a whole, the average hourly wage has about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
I feel like the only way to solve this is to ensure the plea is within some margin of the actual charges.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Not the book by Douglas Adams, but the fictional travel guide in that book.
>features never seen since, such as "Make this code subexpression a standalone function". This would pull the subexpression out and make it a named function, inserting the correct calls with the correct arguments in the original code.

Isn't that a pretty basic refactoring feature of most IDEs?
http://www.allsides.com/ Doesn't have voting stats, but would be a great addition
Presently coming from Python to C, I'm trying to figure this out myself. One issue that occurs to me is that someone coming from a higher level language like Python or Ruby might have to re-calibrate what they consider 'small'. Since C itself is a smaller, lower level language, functionality that might be small and simple in say, Python, is probably going to be bigger and more complex in C. There are no lists, tuples, dictionaries, strings or sort functions from a batteries-included standard library in native C. If you want such, well, here's your ints chars and pointers, have fun implementing them yourself. (That's not intended as a slam against C)

As for suggestions, all of the following are guesses because of my own n00b status with C. That said:

The runtime of the higher-level language of your choice. If you already know Python well, looking under the hood and seeing the C code that actually implements all the convenient and useful bits may well be instructive.

Rsync. I was able to get some small understanding of how it worked by browsing the source even though I knew hardly any C at the time.

Postfix. I don't think is a small project, but I have heard it spoken well of from a security standpoint -- in part because it is actually several small programs/modules that specialize in one task. Those individual binaries/modules might be comprehensible on their own.
You're completely right, but I think it's worth clarifying that VLA notation in parameter lists, and actual VLAs are two completely different things. The example he showed doesn't actually use a VLA, it just looks like it does.
Visas are currently the "easy way out" to get decent developers for cheap. The problem, that's not what they were designed for. Their purpose is to find specialized skills that cannot be sourced otherwise.

The most immediate effects of fixing the visa system will be employers suddenly offering "on the job training" to fill these lowly skilled jobs. It's hard to see this as anything but a net positive for US workers
I second this.

I'm using yEd a lot, and I especially like layouting functions like hierarchical layout. I often use it to plan interdependent tasks. I just start with tasks I know are required and the thing of their prerequisites. Quite fast this gives a big graph structure. Then I run a hierarchical layout on this and suddenly I have a very clear structure of tasks. Their hierarchical layouting algorithm is great. I suspect it may be based on GraphViz dot's algorithm (http://www.graphviz.org/Documentation/TSE93.pdf) as it produces results of similar high quality.

I also love the UI of yEd. Zooming in and out, creating nodes and dependencies/edges feels just great.
I see a lot of complains why this is illegal. It is illegal, as anything that it is illegal, because the law says so.

As, for example, in Nevada:

"NRS 465.075 Use of device for calculating probabilities.

It is unlawful for any person at a licensed gaming establishment to use, or possess with the intent to use, any device to assist:

1. In projecting the outcome of the game;

2. In keeping track of the cards played;

3. In analyzing the probability of the occurrence of an event relating to the game; or

4. In analyzing the strategy for playing or betting to be used in the game,

except as permitted by the commission."

http://www.gambling-law-us.com/State-Laws/Nevada/
fair point, I just thought it deserved calling out as a blow to NN.
The original Hyperloop design relied on an air cushion, but nobody claimed that it was flying. A seaplane is similarly not considered a flying car, and is unlikely to be efficient. Nor is a hydroplane.

As for cities with traffic jams, expecting governments that don't get enough in taxes to improve infrastructure to solve that by expecting the citizens to pay tremendous amounts for flying cars is unreasonable.
Obviously those symptoms in this "study" do not apply to everyone.

It's as anecdotal and irrelevant as you claiming anyone drinking a gallon of green tea gets sick. Which is a falsehood.

White tea has an incredibly low amount of caffeine. So I am not sure why you are claiming I am addicted to caffeine. If I run out of tea and take 4 or 5 days to order more I don't get headaches or have side effects. So again I don't know what you are basing your statements on.
I don't share your sentiment. The reason I have adblock is to block intrusive, annoying and misleading ads, e.g. lots of animations, sounds, popups, not letting you leave, claiming that you have a virus, etc. I do not mind traditional Google text ads or simple honest image ads, at all. The fact that my adblocker blocks "good" ads too is because I didn't bother to configure it, not because I have a vendetta against all ads.
Lets Join Our Hands for Rhino in Safe Hands Campaign Along Wid KP and Mark Boucher