skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, and this is a good point. I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that patents are a net negative for small businesses.

You are right, shortening patents could allow more small businesses to compete with tech that expires, it could be a positive for small businesses.

But, that doesn't directly encourage any innovation, or protect the development efforts of any individual small businesses. And once patents expire, everyone can compete. There's normally a lot of dis-incentive for a small business to even consider jumping into that fray after someone's got a head start on the market, especially if the patent holder was a big business.

I'm most interested in how to encourage and protect the technical innovations of small businesses without making it a tool big businesses use to crush small ones and monopolize markets for obvious and non-innovative progress. Shortening patents could have a positive or negative effect on the health of small business, but I worry that it wouldn't address the stated goals of the patent system for small businesses.
If you're going to make that pedantic a distinction, then the UK is neither; it's a constitutional monarchy.
‘Flying saucer’ quantum dots hold secret to brighter, better lasers
Howdy all, this is a small tool I put together that I thought could be helpful to others here.

A few weeks ago, I was really inspired to make a desktop native client for Matrix.org chat. I decided to do it in rust, but then found that there was a library for matrix clients already in progress, so I decided to start with the UI. While working on that I decided that I wanted some pictures of people to use as avatars. But I discovered that when I went searching for them that I couldn't find anything that was free, high quality, and having an explicit license, so I decided to fix that.

Unsplash is a great service that provides CC0 stock images that are mostly really high quality, so I had a source for the faces. I then found a python machine learning library that had a face detection algorithm built in. I just ran every single Unspalsh image through the face detector, doubled the bounding box and set a crop for just that person.

With the faces' URLs pushed into a sqlite DB I then made a backend server in rust to serve the image links (I'm thinking I might want to track popularity if people end up using this) and the paginated JSON for image info.

Next I wrote the front end in Elm, mostly just because I'd been meaning to try it for months now and every time I do a React/Redux app I get annoyed at how much boiler-plate & repetition I takes to write something.

If you want, you can checkout the (still pretty messy) source here:

https://gitlab.com/azdle/stockfaces-api/

https://gitlab.com/azdle/stockfaces-web/
Intro to GRPC – Protocol Buffers
In this case though, there's a competitor that does exactly the same thing for similar prices.
Has anyone here done any production-level stuff with D? I'm debating using it for my next project, but I want to see if it's industry-tested.
I'd say the fundamental difference is that gambling sometimes provides a huge payout after a small loss, whereas insurance provides a payout roughly equal to the loss.

Insurance isn't supposed to have big paydays, it's just supposed to make you whole. Your house insurance might pay out a million dollars, but only if that's what it actually costs to rebuild your house.

It's telling that when insurance starts to get away from this model, like people insuring stuff for far more than it's worth, or taking out life insurance policies on strangers, both the law and morality start to frown it.
> ...a soylent drink for dinner...

Careful, you don't really know what, if anything, that's doing to your health without periodic blood testing. For example, my triglyceride levels shot off the scale and my doctor directed me to discontinue using Soylent immediately.
> You then have a choice, ride these waves out, or play in the mud. At some point, Bad SEO will get caught and penalized/de-indexed, which for anyone that's not a household name, can entirely ruin your business if this is a main lead channel.

This is what makes competing against blackhat SEO so difficult. People who are doing blackhat SEO know this so they don't create huge amounts of links for a site that they want to stick around for a long time. They'll either rank a revolving door of sites that are easy to turn up, or they'll rank sites that feed to their main business (such as a "review" site).

There is really no defending against this - right now Google can't algorithmically detect these links with any sort of speed or reliability and SEOers can create new sites faster than Google can accurately detect them.
It doesn't look like a review. Found at the bottom of the page: "This is the sixth in a series of conversations on consciousness between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks."
The "[pdf]" in the HN story header indicates this.
Creating a Book Cover Using JavaScript and P5.js
It still doesn't matter. GE is run by its own management and engineers. It doesn't matter that its all owned by one Chinese conglomerate or NBC or whoever. They're not re-badging Shenzhen #1 Super Fast Machine with the GE tag. Corporate ownership is, generally, an abstract that shouldn't matter in most cases. Unless they're purposely cutting lines or just rebadging stuff, then reading reviews is still the solution here.

I also noticed he didn't mention any giant German brands like Bosch or Miele. Nor any Japanese brands. Or less popular brands like Amana or Admiral or Hotpoint. Again, this space is full of competition. Compare that to tech where we have natural monopolies all the time or a duopoly, at best, with lots of little third-level competitors that barely get sales.

Car guys fall for this fallacy too. Latte-sipping Fiat engineers with only small car diesel experience who are appalled by off-roading aren't designing the new Wrangler. The Wrangler is its own design and designed by the same engineering team that worked on it before the buyout. The 2018 Wrangler won't be a Fiat mini with slightly larger wheels. It'll still be Wrangler and reading reviews on it will be all that matters. Of course, this can change, but the idea that a single large owner depresses the market and hurts quality is questionable. They do, of course, have a big advantage with pricing and other market advantages.
dumbish question: if cosine is simply sine but offset by pi/2 radians, why are we approximation these functions with an infinite sum of sines and cosines and not doing it just with sines?
‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another,’ he quipped, ‘and so make only two people miserable and not four.’
https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html
I disagree - I've had Uber and Lyft for years, and I check both to compare prices and ETA. For the past 6 months, I've noticed that Uber can be 40-60% cheaper than Lyft. I doubt former Uber users will forget what prices are like.
We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species – Is It Worth the Cost?
The title already has the pdf tag and I think that's automatic so it was there when you clicked the link also.

The server does not send the Content-Disposition [1] header, so if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then either you've made poor choices about your browser config or you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs, in which case you may have made a poor choice of browser.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
Poe's law is hitting hard, I thought it was a really well done onionesque parody for a good 10 seconds. But as a handy side effect, one of these nutjobs sells some great rf blocking film I used to good result in my home recording studio.
Google Maps adds parking spot saver
David Rockefeller has died
Lead Leave campaigner Dominic Cummings has a (long) article on this in which he claims that the "£350m for the NHS" statement was the core of the campaign after extensive focus-grouping:

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/dominic-cummings-brexi...

(We really need a good word for "forward-looking statements that are really unlikely to be true"; not quite lies, but very highly misleading. If Brexit was a form of insurance it would be the mis-selling scandal of the century.)
I don't see how Red Hat has open sourced anything, the direction they are taking things is proprietary, not open.
> However, I'm still worried about what's going to happen to our 3m EU residents; there are a lot of ways in which the government could mess this up badly in a blood on the streets way. Will they? We don't know. But saying "that would be stupid, they won't do that" is no longer valid

Especially in the context of the NHS and social care, both of which have many employees from the EU.
This Is What 1970s Motion Capture Tech Looked Like
Nor should they.

The problem is that, to judge something as 'fake', an authority needs to deem what is 'real'. And abuse of authority never happens, right? Banning fake news is akin to state censorship, since ultimately the one making the penalties (the state) gets to decide what 'fake news' actually is.
Google will kick their "real product" to the curb pretty fast. How many people bought a flagship Android phone only to find updates dried up after two years? How many people committed to various Google services only to have them abruptly shut down?

Apple might have stubbornly stuck to their 30-pin connector for way too long, but at least people who bought accessories for it weren't frozen out when the latest incarnation of USB Mini/Micro/Whatever caught on.

"Really stupid" is shit like the Nexus Q (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_Q) discontinued before launch, or the half-assed effort to get Android vendors to update their software more often. It's Microsoft's utter failure to capitalize on any meaningful market share in the mobile space when they were a leader in mobile/PDA/tablet applications for years.
Feature flags ?

- http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Feature_Flags

- http://illumos.org/man/5/zpool-features

- https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zpool-features&apr...

- https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/master/man/man5/zpool...
To add to other good answers here, I think there is something of the practical versus academic bias to be seen here as well. It was always hinted, but recently verified as documents have been declassified, that much of Mr. Turing's efforts after World War II were attempts to explore the consequences and abilities of devices he managed to actually build during the war, but was unable to continue working directly on after the war, so he did what he could skirting what tools he could use and how he could tell people based on what had been classified.

I think that makes Mr. Church and his American team's work all the more interesting because they hadn't built practical machines and presumably never saw practical machines and worked almost exclusively in theory.

But it's tougher for our culture sometimes to credit the theorists and academics than it is to credit practical genius. Especially with the declassified documents of the incredible practical computing work Mr. Turing accomplished during the war (and helping the war effort), it is easy to give him a lion's share of the credit and ignore some of the equally fascinating/important academic work of Mr. Turing's contemporaries. (Especially knowing in retrospect that the practical work fed the academic work and vice versa.)
Personally, I think there is a market for quality in appliances as well (certainly I'd look for quality over wiz bang Internet of Things crap); the appliance market just has a quasi-monopoly dominating sales, and they are currently over-focused on a race to the bottom.

In audio, it's possible to find products designed to last. My current amplifier is from Bryston, bought about 16 years ago. Their warranty for their analog products is 20 years. (http://bryston.com/pages/faq.html)
It makes me wonder if the people at the top could handle expecting less, could trends reverse themselves and more people benefit, or if it's beyond them with too many other factors to consider. Does it really all come down to "We have to grow every quarter or die"?
It's incredibly telling when you know people really well that project a model of perfection on Facebook/Instagram whose real life/attitude is an entirely different story. I can't understand how these people justify their untruthful social projection when they know plenty of people that see both sides. The best (maybe worst?) part is all the people that don't know them locally/currently who provide endless gobs of affirmation for how wonderful of a person they are.

It's reasons like these, and the complete waste of time and escapism that has become Facebook in my life that I made a resolution to unfollow everyone except the closest family and friends and delete the mobile app. So far I don't feel like I'm missing anything, and ultimately I think my life has become richer/better for it. If you aren't being paid for it, or finding great joy from it there are much more fulfilling things to kill your time with... reading, the outdoors, time with friends (unglued from the digital world).
> Similar prices

Not true, Uber can be 40-60% cheaper. I've stopped taking public transit in the Bay Area because of Uber, I don't think I could do that with Lyft alone. Is there another competitor with cheaper pricing?
It is likely a bit more nuanced than that.

Likely for most families you do not need to go back many generations to find a farmers origin.

For those it was not unusual to have some kind of cabin in the hills (4 walls and a roof, not much more than to keep the weather at bay) used for hunting and such.

So the idea of having a cabin to retreat to is ingrained.

In recent years though it seems to have taken on a bit of a caricature of itself as monied interests have taken to build clusters of "cabins" that are as well equipped as full on houses and selling them. You may liken it to tract housing.

And most of these are not bought with straight up money, but debt. One thing to note is that most of the top entries on the happiness list also are up top on the list of household debt, where housing and similar loans make up a big part.

Most of the nations, Norway included, is likely to have their own variant of a "subprime crisis" sooner rather than later.
Wildcard Pattern Matching
Wasn't the Treaty of Rome the one that de Gaulle successfully lobbied to keep the UK out of? I'm no Brexiteer but this seems entirely appropriate.
I've never even bothered with them. My freelance jobs have come through my personal network and various slack/skype groups.

Your goal should be to find a few (1-3) clients who consistently have work for you and are willing to pay you daily or weekly. Take those relationships seriously, work hard, and give discounts when you fuck up or seriously overshoot your estimates. If you're good, they'll come back for more.
> I don't think the onus is on the EU at this point to protect UK citizens.

Why not? Why do people expect the UK to act unilaterally but not EU countries? It's a double-standard.

> Also, you need to take anything the UK government says with a grain of salt.

I do. None of the EU leaders (or foreign press) has contested the UK's accounting of this. i.e. the UK has tried to have this sorted before article 50, but elements of the EU said no.
Soulver is also similar and has been around for longer, although it's paid: http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/
The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a very similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (many replied back asking for compensation, which, according to Google policies, should've been nofollowed, i.e., made not to count for SEO), bought ads on private niche-specific sites/podcasts, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I also paid someone to write "high-quality content", which Google claims is the #1 way to rank, for months.

In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all.

We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time.

We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it's not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us.

My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you've been socialized to believe is "uncool" or "distasteful". Then do those "uncool" things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise against it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done.

Business is competitive and if you're not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That's hard to internalize (for me, it's taken multiple significant business failures), but it's crucially important to be successful. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least "grey hat"; they're absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a "private blog network" (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this.

Google has been totally and completely gamed for years. You have to know that going in. If you're dependent on SEO, you're going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else.

It's really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for "a little while", but they're mostly wrong; unless you're being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google's spam team.

The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone's application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance/quality of the content.
> A lot of people don't have the "ear" for hearing those mistakes

That's me. It's why I wish Rocksmith could be much more strict than it is.

> play a progression incredibly slowly

Rocksmith does that too. One thing that bugs me about it is that after you get 100% on some piece in slo-motion, I wish it would automatically ramp up the speed 10% and start over and continue doing this until I'm playing the section perfectly at normal speed (or maybe even faster than normal). Instead, I have to pick up the control, navigate through some menus that aren't terribly well laid out, then restart the exercise.
Doesn't Facebook use D internally?
Postgres hash indexes use linear hashing, which effectively means that rehashing/expansion is done incrementally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_hashing
UXSS/SOP bypass on Internet Explorer
I don't claim to know what's going on behind the scenes, but even years after launching in NYC, both Uber and Lyft have continued to send me notifications with steep discounts, free rides, etc. I've used both apps since they launched here and a major percentage of my rides have been discounted below 'sticker price'.
"deg" and "rad" seems to work as well so you don't have to type "degrees" and "radians"
Indeed, a small trusted compiler is part of the solution. There's still some subtlety in how you use it, though: http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/dissertation/html/whe...
Breakfast for Dinner
AFAIK the only major remaining issue is font rendering without Infinality. What else is elementary.io missing?
I don't believe this is true for Haskell but I'm not a great Haskell dev. I do know Ocaml (mostly F# actually but it's super close) and this isn't at all true for OCaml which has a ton in common with Haskell. In OCaml I make lists of functions as pipe based expressions, where each step in the pipeline is a function. It's incredibly easy to reason about and matches the lists of functions view of development extraordinarily well. I know Elm (a simplified version of Haskell) supports pipe based programming also. Functional languages haven't taken over because OO and Java are still the primary way of teaching beginners to code. Very few beginners start with functional programming.
If you look at a typical smartphone, the retail/supply chain labor costs in the US are at least twice the production and logistical costs in the country of origin.

Apple could easily increase the wages of all their Chinese staff to $10/hour and they would still be making 30-40% margins on every phone.

I suspect the real drivers environmental, China is willing to pour megatons of waste into their wilderness in a way that we would never consider here in the US.
> Salt/saturated fat are bad for you and you limit your intake - good outcome.

I am in the middle of drastically restricting my salt and fat intake under a directive from my physician and I assure you I am quite thoroughly miserable and do not expect that to change in the foreseeable future.
There seems to be a general trend in literary communities now to talk about the nature of consciousness. Not much pretext is involved anymore apparently.
I'm against software patents for the same reason I'm against patents on things that are mathematics. Note, I've said "are" and not "like." Calling a mathematical formula, concept, or algorithm something else (e.g. "codec" or "my life's work" or "Fraunhoffer's intellectual property" does not make it more than math, and most certainly cannot serve to reify the abstract subject matter. Nowhere in the rules of eligibility is novelty contemplated as an exception to exclusions of abstract concepts and phenomena of nature.

Novel math is still abstract, and as such, strictly ineligible. Software is the same, in that it is purely abstract. It will take time for the courts to catch up to reality, but they have trended in that direction.

Whether I agree or not that, as you say, "...novel ways should be patentable." they are, by the letter of the enacting law, ineligible.
It's often faster to do as much as you can in a single pass, and language front ends are one of those areas where squeezing every last drop of performance out still really matters.
Seatbelts ?
Testing React Applications
There's a Lua library called LPeg [1], which introduces a DSL of a kind to Lua that lets you write PEGs with minimal effort. The vis editor [2] uses LPeg files as lexers for syntax highlighting, and they look very clean IMO; for example, this is the C lexer: https://github.com/martanne/vis/blob/master/lua/lexers/ansi_...

[1]: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/

[2]: https://github.com/martanne/vis
Ya, the cynic in me thinks the subsidy is to bleed Lyft not retain users until driverless cars are a thing.
Haha that's hilarious!

True, but typically using throwaways has some weird connotations. Glad you're changing its meaning!
They wrote a C/C++ preprocessor in D, but this now appears to be abandoned.

https://github.com/facebookarchive/warp
I'd recommend against using raid-z(X) on a USB enclosure. The throughput to each disk just isn't there.

Also, my experiences using ZFS(onlinux) without any raid (i.e. single disk with "copies=" > 1) is that it wasn't very resilient against any kind of I/O error - even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the loss of a whole zpool and restore from backup.
I totally understand. But there's also a british person living in Poland saying the complete opposite. I.e. don't guarantee them rights and leave me to the whims of the Polish government!

The government has to look after both groups.
Thanks it's great to hear from someone that makes the tools I use everyday.

> My personal opinion is that everyone should just use s-expressions. Get rid of this whole debate :P

C# 8 maybe?