skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha, I own one of these and the thought has struck me multiple times that Lelo are probably collecting data on usage and also that there must be security holes to their backend so you could in principle take control over thousands of vibrators. Never worried too much about it, and not at this point either. But it's obviously not a good thing.
Because the regulations state they can't have an intersection controlled by both signs and lights. The rest of the intersection is controlled by lights.
> That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of.

It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories.

Personally, I'm a horrible storyteller. If you were to ask me what I did over the weekend, I'll offer some facts like "oh, went swimming in a river and Bob lost his hat, but we found it later. The water was nice." Whereas Bob could easily regale you with stories about the epic hunt for his hat and throw in a punchline in the end.

If I didn't know that you'd be asking for solutions I'm proud of, I might draw a blank at that moment. Granted it's an interview setting and these are the questions one needs to prepare for. But if given the choice between speaking about myself or whiteboarding, I'll take the whiteboard.

I've always preferred math over history for that matter. It's easier for some of us to apply processes than to recite chronologies.
How many PulseAudio but no ALSA installs do you know?
Huh, Android team has been explaning themselves around Java 8 issues a lot (look at I/O talks, linked redding thread in another comment here, etc.)
might want to use https!!
In the rest of the world its a given that you'll check its safe to continue before driving through an intersection ;)
In the UK, flashing amber means "yield to pedestrians at this pedestrian crossing", FWIW.
It breaks on systems with asynchronous drivers. (E.g. recording timed differently from playback) Those are allowed by ALSA APIs and are present in quite a few high profile embedded Linux devices.
Yeah, it does a similar thing like RetroLambda - things like lambdas are polyfilled and replaced on bytecode level. Some features require newer VMs and I'm afraid standard library won't be expanded with new APIs.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5zf1xo/future_o...
Is it better to learn Keras instead of tflearn?

Copying a comment I made in another thread where one response recommended Keras:

I currently have a small pet project where I think some simple ML would be cool but I don't know where to start.

Basically my use case is that I have a bunch of 64x64 images (16 colors) which I manually label as "good", "neutral" or "bad". I want to input this dataset and train the network to categorize new 64x64 images of the same type.

The closest I've found is this: https://gist.github.com/sono-bfio/89a91da65a12175fb1169240cd...

But it's still too hard to understand exactly how I can create my own dataset and how to set it up efficiently (the example is using 32x32 but I also want to factor in that it's only 16 colors; will that give it some performance advantages?).
Nintendo bought them 10 years ago, before they created Xenoblade Chronicles which was the most impressive game on the Wii. Xenoblade Chronicles X is the sequel on the Wii U. The things they managed to put on screen with that hardware invoke memories of the demoscene.

As soon as I saw the first footage of the new Zelda game, I thought for sure they were building it using Monolith's engine, because their engine is something special. Even the biggest open world games just don't feel that large compared to Xenoblade Chronicles.

In real life when you look off and see a mountain in the distance, that's the feeling I get from it that I simply haven't gotten in any other open world game. Those ARE big, but just don't feel big.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_Soft
Maybe Apple doesn't purposely do it, but if you wanted a Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus and weren't awake at 3am when pre-orders opened, you were not getting one before December.
"Contribute to standards processes" and "don't roll your own" aren't moral arguments. They're complimentary pieces of practical advice on how to make trustworthy systems.

Meanwhile your comments bury whatever substantive content they might hold under layers of emotional, accusatory garbage. Maybe get those feelings locked down a bit before posting?
Parking is not allowed on direction lanes (this one is a turn-right lane). You may halt your car there, but you may not leave it (thus park it). So while you can do this, you will also block yourself from doing much else.

Of course, a DDoS attack would be possible by having a couple of friends and switching the driver every once in a while.

A witty state lawyer may also try to sue you based on StVO §30 (1), though winning that trial won't be very likely, because you can simply stop the engine (allowed at traffic lights).
I mean, somebody has to consume all that entertainment (which you call "mindless")

We can't all be creators
Inside Slack’s Search, Learning and Intelligence Team
The law tends to address this in various ways. I don't know how German law does it, but usually there is a fairly exact description of what stopping for a traffic signal entails (e.g., the driver has to be present in the vehicle). Also most jurisdictions have a catch-all law that prohibits dangerous behaviour in traffic.

So yes, there probably is a legal obligation to keep moving. If you went there and stood in front of the light for an hour a friendly but stern police officer will — legally, and within his mandate — instruct you to move along.
Tech interviews are not reflective of real life regardless if there's a whiteboard present or not.

Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem that's a smoke test for "can this candidate actually write code or is their CV faked". I think it took somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes, which I consider to be rather well spent time compared to spending hours or days on a take home project or anything bigger.

The only time I've been given a take-home assignment I refused to do it because I was extremely busy at that time (finals at uni). The employer gave me an offer anyway. Someone else made a better offer, though (based on a whiteboard session).

The whiteboard is not a good way to assess the level of programming skill of an individual. But it's a good binary indicator of whether they possess any coding skills. If the result is yes and their resume is good, experience is relevant and maybe there's some GitHub or other code they can share, that should be enough to consider a person to be an able programmer.

Like any tool, the whiteboard can be misused. The task should be rather trivial and the time should be short. The purpose should be to weed out the people who have faked their resumes or are applying to programming jobs even though their talent is something entirely different.
I don't know anywhere it is officially permitted for passengers, but anecdotally it still happens in some countries.

http://liveandletsfly.boardingarea.com/2016/07/27/smoking-on...
It looks like many companies in this list use the take-home project approach. The take-home project however is not a replacement to the whiteboard session, as they're not meant to screen at the same level. Once you're given a take home project, you're almost in. It happens when the recruiter really likes the person and wants to dig further with a real life scenario to see how that person would perform.

The whiteboard session is a way to spot people who can't code early in the process.
>Only in the later stages of decline, when economy was tanking and people spent half their time queuing for things, they probably had less time to read...

That's what I meant: in the turmoil of 1991 and beyond, people would have less time to read...
For more details, see his blog on this topic: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

A real piece of art, this RMS..
Layering Keras on top of another framework, such as Theano, is useful because it gains compatibility with code using that other framework.
If Keras and PyTorch are both similar (in spirit and API) to Torch, integrating PyTorch-based code as is into Keras project would be very low-value compared to a presumably easy translation to Keras.
I highly recommend News Feed Eradictor. It substitutes the news feed with an inspiring quote, that way you can use Facebook only for PMs and Events.
Thanks for suggestion :)
These notes explain the logic monad by solving solve n-queens with it: https://github.com/sshastry/queenslogic Despite its name, it's more of a search monad, it doesn't perform unification or anything like that.

Another interesting paper is "Monad transformers for backtracking search" https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2058

The Select monad described in the later paper can be found in the "transformers" library http://hackage.haskell.org/package/transformers-0.5.4.0/docs...
Good point. When I notice that people are struggling with finding something, I usually just pick one thing from the resume and try to go more in depth about that.
Entertainingly, you can't create a cyclic data structure with 100% pure code.
Oooooh. Thanks for that information about the Jot. That's remarkably good advertising showing the smartphone on the webpage like that, I have to admit.

Regarding the Sync, I suspect it contains the same electronics as the Rip in order to do the sync thing, and a touch panel.

Based on the other comments I've read in this thread that explain how "writing" on screen (and "ink" showing up) is entirely mechanically driven, ie, the pressure on the surface of the display displaces the crystals and makes whatever you draw stay on the screen. Applying a voltage for a short moment somehow causes the crystals to reset.

I'm not sure why the display itself wasn't made writable. It's entirely possible Kent Displays simply couldn't find a viable way to market a (MCU-)writable version of this technology, and so they went in this direction instead; it's also possible that ChLCD (developed up to the point Kent have it at) doesn't have the capability to be addressed reliably. I have no idea.

I based my hunches above about how the Boogie Board resets on something I saw on TV a while ago, which I just determined is classified variously as "switchable privacy glass", "electrified privacy glass" or "intelligent glass". I learned (from the house-construction TV show) that it's essentially a single, gigantic (!) LCD "pixel", and I saw (in one of the construction stages) how simply plugging it into the wall and turning the wall switch on was what made it go from opaque to transparent. Obviously it's a fair jump from this to the Boogie Board reset mechanism, but it seems reasonable that some of the same ideas are used in both.
In practice Air India seems to allow it, especially on the older jets and longer flights. Unusally long lines immediately form at toilets and don't seem to subside throughout a several hour flight. The smell of cigarette smoke is attended to regularly with a good old spray of air freshener.
I found things to be easier if I first contemplate why people ask the question in the first place and then reply to the reason of the question, not the question itself. People ask questions they don't require the answer to(for instance, there might not be an answer) for all kinds of reasons; trolling, 'just making conversation' etc. Depending on the reason and if you have time / want to indulge you can go after the real intent. If someone trolls you can have good shouting matches (which I enjoy now and then), if just making conversation and the question might be laden, you can change the subject that wasn't the goal of the conversation anyway.
I highly recommend the News Feed Eradicator plugin. It substitutes the News Feed with a quote of the day. That way you can keep up to date with PMs/Events without getting distracted by other peoples lives.
Interesting! I actually love using the whiteboard to sketch solutions and architectural decisions. I believe the hate comes from having to code on a whiteboard - which is justified, since no one ever coded on a whiteboard except in an interview.
> Honestly wish there was a 3 month bootcamp for this.

Please, no.
This is the exact opposite of what I got from reading this blog post... Jack is what did the bad stuff you are talking about, Jill was (apparently: I hadn't read much about it before today) a mitigation for that badness (by allowing you to "link" in .class files), and they finally decided to throw all that away and go back to actually (correctly, in my book) supporting the old javac->dx flow (which guarantees that if they are going to support Java 8, and this blog posts claims they are intending to do so, that they do it by supporting the bytecode correctly, as now all source code has to go through this path and the Java ecosystem of code transformers will continue to work as expected).
OutWatch – a new reactive UI library based on Rx for Scala or PureScript
Create-vue-app
AFAIK they did this to 1) improve runtime link/startup times (so, a similar reason why many other mobile devices have their own class file formats; for more information, read my introduction to the subject, linked below), and 2) to make sure they were not violating various bytecode-related patents from Sun that relied upon a stack machine.

http://www.cydiasubstrate.com/id/727f62ed-69d3-4956-86b2-bc0...
>JSX and Redux are going nowhere... they'll probably outlive React, though I also think that's going nowhere anytime soon.

Let's check back in 10 years.

>Redux (and similar single unidirectional stores) is a paradigm shift, but seeing ever broadening adoption and similar ngrx/store for example in the angular side.

And in a few years we could have another paradigm shift, with webassembly bringing about e.g. a nicer UI stack for web work.

>As to your list.. Java and C# are pretty firmly around today.

Speaking of Java, that I've followed best, where are Applets? Or J2EE? Or Swing? Or JS Faces? Or that java grid API that would revolutionize computing? Or lots of other Java-related fads du jour that history forgotten, but at the time had loads of adoption and were touted as the best thing since sliced bread?
I thought I disliked whiteboard coding, until I recently had an interview on a provided laptop running one of those JavaScript IDEs. It was miserable. Extreme unusable OS X mouse acceleration, an awful keyboard, an unfamiliar hotkey setup in the text editor, and a tiny 11 inch monitor split into 4 sections which means my editor was maybe 10 lines tall. I failed miserably at a relatively short and simple challenge that I am confident I could code on a remotely familiar and sane computer setup. Heck, I would have preferred writing valid JavaScript on a whiteboard. At least I'd be able to see a lot more lines at a time, which it turns out is pretty important for my ability to code.
"The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services."

This is the real story - Monsanto interfering with our ability to find out what is safe. But I'm sure needless endangerment of the health of ~tens of thousands of farmers will carry a stiff prison sentence for all involved...
> 'why on Earth does powering a single light cost €5500pa'

Exactly. I can sorta understand the argument that if the intersection has lights then this street needs one too even if it's always red, but for me the real WTF was

if one red light costs €5,500 yearly, how much are we (over)paying for the whole system?
My impression from the post was that they were going back to the old (standard) way of letting the standard javac compile Java to bytecode and then letting dx convert it to Dalvik bytecode, but now with the addition of Java 8 bytecode support in dx. Their stated reason is precisely what you bring up: compatibility with tools that work with the bytecode, like the Scala compiler.

Is this impression incorrect? Are they doing something special with the Java source code instead of processing the byte code? Are they doing their own javac compiler?
Waging Doubt on Integrity of MEMS Accelerometers with Acoustic Injection Attacks [pdf]
IME the biggest thing is having the same, much-better-than-JS language on front and back end.
CodePen – CSS X-Men
Why should a woman search through profiles when she can review 20+ already interested candidates in a day?

I don't think you can equate a man sending a message with genuine interest in many cases. At the very least women on dating sites have to filter out the guys who cut and paste the same message to every woman. Even if that's only 1% of guys, that's still a lot of messages to read and reject.
I was just in Dresden over the summer and stayed at a hostel only 2 km from there! To think I got to witness such a feat of engineering... thanks so much for posting
Natural Language Processing and TensorFlow Implementation Across Industries
This is an adapted excerpt from a recently published book. It's about Christopher Knight, who was a hermit in Maine between 1986 and 2013.

Spoiler alert: He survived by committing about 1,000 burglaries of the 100 cabins in the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Thomas_Knight
Stack News  Keep up with the latest news about the tools in your stack
You can in a lazy language, like Haskell.
But this is an endless cycle. At some point, the company has to apply some test to see if the candidate is appropriate, IE, can code to the required standard. That will require a time investment from the candidate.

You could simply get rid of the take home test; that will shift the burden to the resume and cover letter, to the advantage of humanities graduates like me.

You could mandate a full day on-site, which will bias against people from out of town who want to relocate and people in delicate situations at their current employer.

For the time poor candidate, there is always the whiteboard exercise... Whose biases we are gathered here to moan about in the first place.

I always feel in these threads that people think hiring is 'broken' and it can be 'fixed' with the proper application of 'one weird trick'. But then all the comments actually have contradictory complaints. So obviously it can't.
This came out two days ago and uses what they call intelligent synapses to improve multi-task learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04200

Seems closely related.
Yep, that's (roughly) in the same vein as 'first-rate'. What makes the translation tricky (if you speak Russian, apologies for explaining the obvious) is that while the word has uses other than literal 'beautiful' it is composed of a superlative prefix and the root for 'beauty'. The line itself is spoken by character in a play, a high-minded, provincial county doctor as Chekhov himself once was. 'must be excellent¹' is strained and clunky in English to begin with and none of the more natural-sounding replacements evoke the connotations of the original.

¹ Moreover, nobody ever translated the name of the Russian fairy tale Василиса Прекрасная as Vasilisa the Excellent.
At least in Norway the green arrow doesn't only tell you that you are allowed to make the turn, but it also tells you that other traffic has red light so that you know you are guaranteed the right of way.
I think it's evidence to the contrary. We only know how much one street light cost; we don't know (from this article) how effective the overall system that manages the whole country is. I can bet that because of these rules it's much more effective then a system where every single streetlight has to be considered and configured by a bureaucrat who makes an individual decision.
The essay you linked is amazing. And it is a direct counter to grandparent's comment:

> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Bogleheads for investing
Human creation is the process of reorganizing and reconstructing existing ones
Slightly irrelevant but curious question about the Analytics for 7day (34K), 14day and 30day active users. I'm running a similar site so, could it be that, a lot of users reading documentation are using ad/tracking blockers so that active users count appear higher than it actually is in GA. Documentation users tend to read quite high pages per session. If I'm right then they should see less page views per user than expected.
I know this light personally. I live there. It is no problem for the casual driver, as Dresden is one of those rare german towns with US "Rechtsabbieger" rules. You may turn right even with red lights.
And the german law clearly states if one entries to a crossing has lights, all others have to get lights also. This is the only case in Germany where this law makes no sense.

But the best is the last sentence: They do change all the green and yellow light bulbs also in their regular maintenance schedule. The justification goes like this: Bulbs mostly wear due to hours in usage, yes. Red and Yellow are not used, so should not wear, and thus should not be replaced. But hours can not be the only cause for problems, and while we are there and there's a budget for replacement, we'll do it all together. Not really a just technical justification, just a practical one.

We do the same in software also all the time. There are two principles:
1. Make minimal changes to cause only minimal effect.
2. Harmonize your changes to avoid unnecessary asymmetries.
They went with 2.
You can fight the system, or you can live with it. In this case there is no reason to rock the boat.

[Update:]
The lawful alternative would have been to close this crossing for the Ziegelstraße into the Güntzstraße. People would have protested over this sillyness. And Dresden has enough budget surplus to do such things. In fact Dresden was very lucky in its real-estate deals, where they sold all of their old residential apartment complexes to a US company Fortress for billions:
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/milliardendeal-dresden-verk...
Normally such deals turn out bad and unprofitable, but in this case not. Both parties are happy.
Ask HN: How can software engineers solve the problem of Income Inequality?
.
Gin, television, and social surplus
I just started using Twitter this past year. What you get out of Twitter really depends on who you follow, which is not obvious at all to get a hook into and find good accounts you'd value hearing from. I luckily found a few good ones, and you find more by being exposed to content they retweet. It has been a great boon to me because I found a few cogent tweeters of the kind of politics and analysis I like, who I would not have been exposed to otherwise. I feel like it has expanded my political awareness and given me a better informed commentary than I'd find elsewhere. Not just empty heads there. You also get some minor amount of conversational interaction with them and others, and real time commentary on unfolding current events, and some of the jokes that get retweeted are funny. It's easier to see the value of Twitter on the inside than from the outside and its gimmick of short messages.

A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.
What???? I doubt this is true. Smoking has never been allowed in numerous Air India flights I have taken.