skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for your kind words!
Regarding the mapping of R_2 to the surface of the sphere, I totally agree that although it is better than other options, it is far from optimal. Also, yes, these visualizations are looking from the North pole downwards as I thought this viewpoint highlighted the differnces and discrepancies the best.
It was this clearly suboptimal mapping that spurred me to write a prior blog post on improved ways to place N points on a sphere [1].

I think that much of the problem is not with the particular unit square point distribution but rather with the fact that we are using a mapping (lambert) that has a singularity at each pole.

For constant/given n, there is an excellent reference by Saff on mapping points to a sphere. However, if n is not known (ie you need an open sequence of points) I am not aware of any method that is better than simply/naively mapping a low discrepancy sequence from the unit square to S2.

I think that the most ideal situation will work directly on the surface of the sphere and consist of rotations from one point on the surface to the other. Thus, although this is not my area of expertise I wouldn't be surprised if methods such as what you cite may assist someone in finding a better spherical distribution.

And finally regarding the section on dithering. Thanks for the feedback. I will add some more background explanations to ensure that it is clearer for those who do not directly work in the graphics rendering space.

[1] http://extremelearning.com.au/evenly-distributing-points-on-...
[2] http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/saffeb/texts/262.pdf
Why is that a _bad_ thing?
This looks similar to the 2D "random number generators" at http://pippin.gimp.org/a_dither/ but is even more evenly distributed.
The fact that someone in the organisation actually thought "on let's approach Google and ask for this special agreement" shows a naïvety that really shouldn't exist in a company I'm supposedly trusting to protect my privacy.

I really hope this kind of non-sense starts changing in Mozilla soon. This post is promising, but—as the gp points out—still not without glaring irony/hypocrisy.
And they tried to cover it up.

Plus they could have released anything that helped make the aircraft look less deficient, they didn't. Just tried to hide the test and pretend it didn't occur.
Friendly reminder that Piwik has renamed to Matomo.
Reposted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17876463

Looks like just spam.
It sounds like building a system on top of OpenStreetMap that is similar to Wikipedia's "protected pages" could be worthwhile.

There are legitimate reasons to edit even the information for major world cities (most of them, for example, don't have translations into all major languages yet), but there's little reason to need those changes to be applied immediately.
I don't think Wikipedia is a good example. It has suffered from vandalism and edit wars (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring). It will only get worse when more people rely on it and more people have incentives to vandalize it.

Also, it is not a source of truth, it is merely an aggregation service. So it doesn't effectively solve the problem where two sources claim the opposite and the reader doesn't know who to trust.
Here are some examples: https://whotracks.me/blog/block-third-party-cookies.html
I can’t imagine it would ever be driven anywhere else.
For some reason the video widgets are unclickable for me on firefox, so here's the direct link to the video for anyone else who might've had the problem

http://legoexternal.23video.com/v.ihtml/player.html?token=96...
All-Electric Ships on the Horizon as Rolls Launches New Battery System
They should be able to make it such that some attributes or information would require multiple approval levels before taking effect. City name changes, street names, bulding locations, addresses, etc. states of things might not require approvals, say street closed, buolding undervrenovation, etc.
I pasted it wrong blush

And, Thankyou that seems as clear as can be, when I get my head screwed on straight I will have a better read through your fine insights of the workings.

I will be trying include your sequence in my quirky collection of random helpers for Javascript, illustrated here. http://strainer.github.io/Fdrandom.js/

And will be sure to attribute you and message when I get it in.
My gut feeling is the US got lucky, with a high chance of drones after the F-35. France (Rafaele) and Germany (Eurofigher) might not be so lucky and need another manned fighter in between. UK with a F-35 / Eurofighter mix not clear to me.
I've seen several of these "F-35 is a failure" articles over the past few years, and I have a new theory about it.

Making the opposition think you're weak is a strategy. Straight from Sun Tzu. Negative press propaganda is a tool in itself.
I’m curious why you think my university needed to force students into a meal plan and have a massive workforce to run the dining halls, when the private sector could feed students better food for less.

Or why did the university need a whole administrative department to cater to the “needs” of every kind of minority you can think of (one department per kind of minority)?
Scott Alexander has also written lucidly about this phenomenon ("cost disease"), e.g.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

This increase in cost without a commensurate increase in quality is incredibly scary.
Why does Mozilla NEED Google’s analytics?
Thanks. Good find.

I was looking to see if they find an audience for you and put them in front of your survey. I can't tell if they do that.
No, what I mean is: Apparently Mozilla injects Google Analytics right into Firefox.

That is terrifying.
Ideal Hash Trees (Bagwell 2001) [pdf]
And the best part is it's modular, so you can reconfigure it into a minivan for your daily commute!
Brad Fitzpatrick - Go 1.11 and beyond [video]
Extreme Vespas in Indonesia – in pictures
But the audience product is the product. They don't charge for anything else.

Is there something comparable that finds an audience for you?

Or, to put it another way, for B2B I take it you have to find your own product "by hand" anyway, right?
I hate comparisons like this; purchasing power parity GDP is much different and much more useful for comparisons than raw GDP. "National purchasing power parity income" is the old timey comparison that actually measures what you want to measure. Otherwise you're mostly just comparing how cheap the rent is in Belarus.
Mozilla has a special agreement with Google for this that anonimizes the data.
Also a Zenhub customer. I can't but assume features would be coming stronger and faster had GitHub not implemented projects.
When I configure FOV in "Sites in VR", I can see 110°. Maybe I'm wrong, because I have no other gadget to compare.
What did you change?

My guess is you're still doing a Google Image search, but when it returns no results, you return something random and cache this query for consistency. Is that about right?.
You May Soon Be Able to Log into Windows 10 Using a Google Account
Good someone suggested this. When I realized that partisan politics are actually just veil to highlight social issues and we're all actually playing on the same team. It made me physically nauseous to see my friends, intelligent people that I respected, be so negative online.

It's like they lost all self control with words and could only cuss and scream but no one could articulate how they personally have been affected by the politics. Worse yet, even if people are affected by bad legislature, hardly anyone I know actually has the willpower and ability to go and do something about it.

I have an Israeli friend that protested a gas station. There was already one on the block and they wanted to put another one on a different corner. He got signatures from all the surrounding neighbors. Then presented it to City council with the argument that gas stations can only be built if they have 25 feet distance from the nearest residential house. He had both the support of the neighborhood and support of existing laws. The gas station wasn't built.
What does QE have to do with anything? Also, if you think extending cheap financing to businesses during a financial collapse is wasteful you're a fool.

Pretty strange to be bitching about monetary policy then in the same breath praise pseudo-weaponized Keyensianism that doesn't even yield anything useful. Who do you work for, friend?
That one is less socially acceptable, if at all.
Regardless of helium supply issues we should ban the use of helium party balloons due to severe environmental impact.

https://www.zoo.org.au/get-involved/act-for-wildlife/balloon...
Unclear from this article is how they determine what is a "tracker"? I assume there'll be a curated block list, maybe based on anonymously collected data. But that detail is key to whether this is a success or not.
I do agree with this sentiment. When I saw pewdiepie jokingly claim his YouTube news program to be "the most trustworthy news source", I actually want to agree with it seriously.
That’s a too simplistic approach. Bugatti wants to be able to sell cars at the price point in the future and any marketing and PR they do certainly has to be geared towards that, not selling additonal cars.

Also, I think this is about Lego, not Bugatti (but I’m not excluding the possibility that it’s mutually beneficial).
That’s because people want freedom of speech but only their interpretation of free speech, which is why freedom of spreech, with very narrow exceptions, is crucial.
Try some empathy
Can you deliver pizza's at night? Why can't you do another dev job? Sure there's risk, but the calculus is: $100k a year or $200k a year? Retire in 30 years or 10? I've had lot's of jobs that didn't even make me sign a non compete.
I've received a number of downvotes for this comment. I think it's misunderstood, and that's my fault: I should have included [sarcasm] around the whole comment [/sarcasm].

I've written about our need to address climate change here in past comments. I think the administration's climate change denials (see: "climate change politifact') and regulatory rollbacks are beyond despicable: they're sabotaging the United States by allowing more toxic chemicals into the environment that we all share, and allowing more sites that must be protected with tax dollars that aren't there because these industries pay far less than benchmarks in terms of effective tax rate. We know that vehicle emissions, mercury, and coal ash are toxic: why would we allow people to violate the rights of others in that way?

A person could voluntarily consume said toxic byproducts and not have violated their own rights or the rights of others, you understand. There's no medical value and low potential for abuse, so we just sit idly by while they're violating the rights of other people by dumping toxic chemicals into the environment that are both poisonous and strongly linked to climate change.

What would help us care about this? A sarcastic list of additional reasons that we should care? No! Miami underwater during tourist season is enough! I've had enough!

So, my mistake here - my downvote-earning mistake - was dropping my generally helpful, hopeful tone for cynicism and sarcasm that wasn't motivating enough.

We need people to regulate pollution in order to prevent further costs of climate change. Water in the streets holds up commerce, travel, hampers national security, and destroys the road.

We must stop rewarding pollution if we want it - and definitely resultant climate change - to stop. What motivates other people to care?
In regards to your second point, I often wonder what it would be like today had Reagan not started the trend of not enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. We are in a situation where we may end up having to break up AT&T, for instance, twice in a 40 year period.
Levenshtein Automata (2010)
> Blocking pop-up ads in the original Firefox release was the right move in 2004, because it didn’t just make Firefox users happier, it gave the advertising platforms of the time a reason to care about their users’ experience.

Wow, I had completely forgotten about what a scourge pop-ups used to be, and what a relief it was to finally be free of them. The fact that what used to be such a prevalent scummy tactic could be completely abandoned due to pushback from browser manufacturers gives me a tiny bit of hope that maybe pervasive tracking isn't an irreparably permanent feature of the web after all.
I'd say it's usually a bad one. By staying out of politics, you're electing to be at the mercy of others, who can (and inevitably will) take advantage of you.
Gophercon 2018 compilation of tutorials and talks
That's a fascinating article. I must admit that I've never really thought about the "shorting real estate" angle when discussing real estate bubbles, and it's a very interesting insight into why we keep getting them.
this is very useful to know if i've already got a server or ten thousand, but unfortunately the data doesn't help me with making a purchase decision. does amd overtake intel performance-wise after mitigations or is it only a reduced gap?
I'm sure every tracking company out there says they do only good with the data they track. If that is what it takes to make tracking ok, then why bother at all?
Here is a real problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/technology/inside-faceboo...
If you dig into the bullshit jobs myth you will find it is all based on a survey from 2015. People were asked a yes no question, whether their own job made a "meaningful contribution to the world", 50% said yes and 37% said no.

I think the real bullshit is all the blog posts about economics without presenting hard data or being peer reviewed.
>The government has far too much vested interest to be trustworthy.

So does everyone else.

That's the Great Aporia here.

How do we establish credibility in an environment that is 100% free of trust?
> It also might be worth pointing out that you now need 16x the page mappings

It doesn't. The article mentions it's only 3 mappings since those bits are colors, not arbitrary combinations of flags.

> I don't know how Java does it's memory management but if it does lots of small mappings (Which I'm guessing it does not) then that could be a concern.

openjdk generally uses large contiguous mappings but it may punch holes in the middle of the heap if it's configured to yield back memory to the OS. But applications that dynamically shrink and expand their heaps are not necessarily those that are concerned about the last quantum of page table overhead.

> And like you mentioned with the TLB

On the other hand it does support huge pages to mitigate costs of TLB entries.
I don't think this is true. Titan seems to be an in-house project. Are you basing this assumption on anything but the exterior looks?
> The bugatti can get me to work and back.

So can a jet ski depending on where you live, but it's still very much a toy.
okay. so people who are citizens of the country <country name> are coerced to pay taxes and can not escape, but people who work for <company name> are not coerced to do their jobs. how so?

if you want to make an argument about consciousness then i can tell you that i absolutely consciously chose US as a country to live in, at the age of 41.
What's worse, knowing you have no privacy, or having the illusion that you have privacy? Companies with deep pockets and skin in the advertising game can still track you. Anytime a defense is put up, they just pivot to another method of tracking. When you have an army of the world's best engineers and unlimited resources a way will be found. We need to start living with the reality that privacy is already dead. Weep if you will, but at least accept the truth that Mozilla can't protect you, and that your data IS out there somewhere.
Not much more terrifying than every website using it.
Space Robotics Research Group
You reasons mostly date to the era from 1910 to 1960. The era from 1960 to 2010 matters too, and that is more about outsourcing.

The USA already subsidizes airport service for these locations. Increasing that might be worthwhile. The same goes for good internet connections and many other services. It's like the rural electrification done a century ago.

The schools are sometimes better than the urban ones. Often there are pros and cons that could be considered to even out. We can expand Teach for America if need be, but I think things are mostly fine already.
> SOME parts still could have been shared between the different aircraft

Maybe it's just too much time with software talking, but this feels like the intuitive approach. If you have one task with three cases, use a standard frame and customize the part that changes. But if you have three distinct tasks, plan for three approaches and pull out common requirements into a shared pool - whether that's a utility class or a parts depot.

Doing requirements-first designs for each role and then looking for opportunities to standardize some parts might get you an unpredictable amount of savings, but it'll save some money and get you three working planes. Doing standardization-first design and hoping you can customize for each role after gets you... about half a plane and a broken budget, apparently.
Our next campus needs to handle buildings up to 8 stories high, plus apartment buildings the same height for all our jobs were bringing.. I guess we can't come to your town.

Repeat that 2 or 3 times, and the problem goes away quickly..
The number of BS posts on Venmo and made up reasons for payments is quite staggering. It became more of a joke for most people I know. Most of them on my news feed are for "eggplant squirt" emoji or something similar.
let's not start stretching things too much now.
”Readers lose patience, and the careful quoting, like snipping coupons with precision, becomes tearing — into lines, phrases, and points."
It's a boondoggle in the sense that the one point five trillion dollars could've been spent to better use on almost literally anything else.
BAE’s building the Tempest for the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Tempest
I don't know where you are, but if it happens to be Boston -- Boston Bus Maps is astoundingly better at handling MBTA bus and subway trips. And free.
Similar to the old saying "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - the market is not instantly efficient, just over time.

There will always be work that has become bullshit that the market hasn't gotten around to killing yet. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or can't exist for a long time. Some even last lifetimes!

None of this means we can't do a better job helping the market remove the bullshit work, though.
It's ironic as this vandalism was spotted and reverted in less than 24 hours in OSM. So any improvements and community fixing of vandalism cannot be taken advantage of by Mapbox if they rely on a monthly snapshot.
Improve SEO with Pre-Rendering for Your Angular/React App
FirefoxOS was out last hope for good and accessible mobile operating system - it was supposed to give people who can't afford iPhone something open, instead of evil data-slurp that is Android.

Without it, billions of people in developing world are going to have every every second of their lives snooped by Google.

It failed, but it was still a good idea.
“Firefox will strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content.”

This sounds ambiguous to me. Does it mean they won’t block third party cookies for NON tracking content?

We rely on third party cookies for Single Sign On auth. The question is, how will this continue to work?

Ideally, these browsers should finally allow access to client side certificates functionality so you can authenticate with websites without being tracked by the certificate’s issuer!

XAuth was a step in this direction. We need a place to store these certs or private keys. But are all major browsers even close to supporting it?

Update: Firefox supports them but it’s so clunky. Focus on letting any site install a certificate with the user’s permission, firefox!! Apple already allows web based download of configuration profiles, which is far more insecure:

https://developer.apple.com/enterprise/documentation/Configu...

https://medium.com/@sevcsik/authentication-using-https-clien...
Being a 3rd generation Floridian...I can sympathize.
I really like Facebook Container. I completely forget it's there most of the time. Last time I remembered was because I saw an advert before an embedded Youtube video - I pay for Youtube so it doesn't have adverts, but of course the Container doesn't know that. The partitioning that results makes lots of sense for me.
Yes. I think that using the dither matrix based on the R_2 sequence should be competitive with any of the the dither masks mentioned on that link.

Thus in situations like video, and/or ray tracing where computing speed is of the essence, maybe a better mask such as the R2 dither mask would offer an improvement on existing methods.

However, in terms of end-quality I am not aware of any dither masks that are anywhere near as good as the state-of-the-art error diffusion algorithms. Thus, for a small number of images such as our favourite animated gifs, I would still be recommending an error-diffusion method. :)
That wasn't a trial of air-to-air combat. It was a control law test of the F-35. An F-16 aircraft, which was already being used during the mission as a "chase" aircraft for test execution safety reasons, was also used by the F-35 pilot as a visual reference.

There was no coverup. Rather, the reporter who was sent the document and wrote about it simply didn't have the engineering knowledge to understand what he was reading, nor did he ask anyone experienced with flight testing to review what he had been sent and what he had written.
I agree color can have powerful meaning and help relate the app to the real world. My point was more the use of color in the app seems dated. There's many ways they could make the app feel more modern while retaining color as a way finding method.

E.g. the green floating search box. What does making this green help with? Again, these are opinions, but it looks a little jenky to me.
I was referring to the general sentiment that if you're a serious tech startup, you should be in SV. You can see this sentiment throughout this comment thread, in an essay someone linked to below written by Paul Graham, and in any number of articles extolling the virtues of the Valley.

As for specific people, I’d start with Mark Zuckerberg - a champion of connecting the world through technology - who seems to have believed that a SV presence was necessary for Facebook to succeed. He had to believe that, or he wouldn’t have moved the company there as soon as he had the funding to do it.
True. I did not mean it as an absolute statement. I did say above:

>I sometimes try to implement

It's each person's call, on a case-by-case basis. Had just shared my view with that newb, thinking it might help him.
AFAIK, the Chiron production run is only about 60% sold last I heard.
Building Cooperation and Trust into the Web with IPFS
Michigan’s students/teachers using public data to challenge university spending
Between this and the stupid Mr. Robot thing, I’m starting to seriously question the judgement of PMs at Mozilla (or Firefox at least).
I use another browser for those sites. So Firefox with all the fancy add-ons for 99% of my browsing and then Edge for those times I really can't have it failing on me (any sort of payment, that's pretty much it).
To be fair, I have never seen this on HN. You may still be right, I've just never seen it. (Maybe those calls for censorship are themselves getting censored?)
Do you use an add-on to block cookies? If not, how?