skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* It costs money to document.

* It costs money to implement. Three days for a lone coder, much more than that for a careful consistent development process.

* It costs money to develop regression and validation tests.

* It costs money to test, including collecting all the different hardware it needs to be tested on.

* It costs money to fix bugs in it.

* It costs money to answer questions from developers about it.

* These costs are multiplied by every future version that will continue to support it.

* These costs are multiplied by the many vendors that will be required to implement it.

* Some of these costs are multiplied by every language that will support bindings to the API.

* It costs code space in embedded devices.

* It costs as much as a vendor wants to spend trying to make it perform as fast as possible.

* It costs conceptual complexity in developers' heads.

* It costs developers when they inadvertently do things the old inefficient way.

* It costs reputation when somebody compares benchmarks of your product using the old inefficient way against another vendor's product using the new recommended way.

* Requirements to continually support it at the same level of performance constrain your choices when developing new hardware.

* Sometimes it costs precious die space which could be better used for other things.

* The inefficiency sometimes increases power consumption and reduces battery life.

* Users are disappointed if every version of new hardware doesn't run the old inefficient code even faster than the previous version.

So if it doesn't have a real need to be there in ES 1.0 then, yes, it is actively damaging and should be thrown out in the rewrite.
Standing or sitting, I reduced upper and lower back pain with one of these: http://epicself.com/move/roll-it-out-upper-back/
> if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically.

True, but just to be clear: In the first link in the article it's shown how people speaking languages with no blue/green distinction are significantly slower at selecting the 'odd one out' when given a set of blue shapes and one green shape. Furthermore, this effect is only significant in their right visual field, whose images are processed by the left (more language adept) part of the brain.
I don't know that I'd call our blog "excellent" because, to be honest, updating it has been a bit low on the priority scale lately. But you might find it moderately interesting nonetheless.

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com
Does anyone else have problems with the sound? I've had two videos stop the sound at some point while the slides still continue. Reloading doesn't seem to help, it still stops at the same point.

edit: Nevermind, I think it was my SSD running out of space. Still waiting for that damn retina macbook ;).
That building is totally bizarre.
Game-theoretic analysis of Smallest Unique Integer game
It's amazing how the realms of secrecy for the government grows unchecked while the rights of privacy for the citizen erodes daily.

But keep feeding that industrial war complex. Peace will certainly come from all that.
Would Christ join a start up?
Is the purpose of hacker news to change the world or is it a quick way for graduate students to make money outside of wall street?
retreive

https://github.com/search?q=retreive&repo=&langOverr...

aaaaaghghgggh
The difference in the quality of the Chinese quick-buildings (i.e., "quildings") and the Dubai buildings is the difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini.

The Chinese quildings are cheap because they lack any sort of extravagance. In contrast, the Chinese structures which do feature prominant decorative features (i.e., the Bird's Nest or CSTV HQ), took almost as long to build as they would have anywhere else.

The Dubai buildings take a long time because they are built to exacting standards using the most opulent, expensive materials the Royal Family can buy. Everything is done to spec, and it shows.
> Every single pollution tops radioactive waste since radioactive waste sits in a storage cask

Of course, preferably, every type of pollution should sit in a storage cask. I was under the impression that we were discussing the potential of pollution of different pollutants. If we compare storage casks, we get to actually compare how dangerous they are. In that comparison, radioactive waste should win the battle for what is most dangerous.

> So instead you want more fly ash? Picking "don't make electricity" is not an option.

Fly Ash is mostly produced by coal plants. Where did I say I support those? Capturing fly ash in other processes is comparatively simple when you do it right - although writing that may just spin into another discussion of why you think it's actually the other way round and it's radiation that is more easily contained and managed.

> Don't do anything with it, just leave it there. When technology improves, use it for fuel.

No, that's the point - it's not even "there", it's in holding facilities right now, because we still haven't decided what this "there" actually is.

Also - if you ask me to grant you that we will develop this improved technology - why is it different for alternative, renewable sources of energy?

> And I guess coal dust doesn't bother you? Or ozone leading to lung cancer? Or particulate matter (PM2.5)? It has to be radiation I guess.

Well, that's again putting words in my mouth. Pollution bothers me - there. Radioactive pollution bothers me most. That's all there is to it. I should be allowed to not be OK with multiple types of pollution, right?

> Not exactly. Renewable fuels are not actually renewable since you need to build the machine to get that energy, and that building material is not free. Nor is the land area free - I prefer to use land for other things, not cover the earth in energy harvesting machines.

Note that I wrote "renewable source", not "renewable fuel". Once you've built a wind turbine, it kind of keeps going (save for repairs along the way). You don't have to rebuild it at the rate that you have to go back to the mine to dig up more fuel. Which you have to do for energy from fossil fuels - for which you also have to build the facilities.

> Use all the energy in uranium and it'll last 20,000 years. Then we can start using thorium, and we have even more of that than we do uranium. By that time we can start mining asteroids.

Not sure how to respond to that other than that it sounds very old fashioned and boring and I'm still not convinced it will hold pace. Not to mention that it is in no way a justification, just an excuse to use the fuel. Renewable sources of energy are also just "lying around" ready to be "mined" by us. And they are, to me, universally less concerning in terms of environmental impact when compared to nuclear energy.

> Maybe I missed something but what technology are you talking about?

The article talks about 17% usage of renewable energy sources in Germany for 2010 - most of it in wind, followed by hydro and your dreaded solar at a distant third place. In any case - I would think that's substantial enough to render your original assertion moot.
That could very well could be, so you ask for citations or you ask for clarification, or even say you're talking out of your ass; what you don't do is pull out singular anecdotes to make a case he's already conceded implicitly and think you're somehow rebutting anything. Rebutting a statical claim (i.e. most) with singular anecdotes is simply illogical, let alone one that's already been conceded in the question itself.

If I say most Asians have black hair, and you counter with I disagree because I've seen a blonde Asian; your rebuttal makes zero sense, it's fallacious.
It seems that the important part is that you're moving throughout the day. Personally, when I'm switching between standing and sitting throughout the day I have more energy and tend to move around a lot more. If I didn't do this, I'd end up sitting for periods of 4+ hours at a time.

As a CTO I manage development and technology for the company, which means I'm up and around the office (and out) for meetings and touching base with other departments. If I were an engineer I'd likely utilize a standing desk less. I personally don't enjoy coding standing up.
It's not specifically Safari; it's the Quicktime codec library which is bundled with Safari (and iTunes). You can just download Quicktime standalone and anything NPAPI-supporting will gain the ability to play the videos.
The Empire State Building completed construction right before the Great Depression. The Great Depression was followed by WWII. The ESB became profitable as soon as the US economy picked up.

In contrast, the Chinese Great Mall has been essentially vacant despite China's decade-long boom cycle. If they can't fill up the mall during a period of double-digit economic expansion, they never will.
Here's the point: Profitability is one key performance indicator and a very important one. In a sole proprietorship model, you don't count the proprietor's earnings into profit. In a corporate model you track executive compensation but this isn't really the same as tracking salaries since it could be on a minimal salary + bonus model.

That doesn't mean it's the only metric. But it is probably the single most important one. It gives you an idea of whether a business can survive and meet its financial obligations in the face of unforeseen events. For a corporation of course equity ratio or debt to equity ratio are also important.
Wasn't there? There were a number of functions he didn't port. He ended up with a subset of OpenGL 1.3. Maybe that subset wasn't worth the effort?
No, because, as has been pointed out to you in another branch of this discussion, it is actually economically reasonable to build a solar cell that will yield more power than you put into building it.

Seriously dude, get over your obsession about solar panels and accept the fact that you simply didn't have your facts straight.
It's not the same thing but it's the closest thing available.

I go around saying there's no ring to bind them all but that an arbitrarily good aproximation can be built.
One step closer to completely serverless development. Love it.
You could start with this: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/coup-detat-at-...
Unimportant things just happen to have lower barrier for entry and higher tolerance for risk.

If important things happen to have lower barrier than unimportant things, we'll see important things progress faster, especially combined with higher tolerance for failure.

Failure in rocketry is often very costly, hence low tolerance of risk. This is also the same situation for healthcare. A drug that didn't pan out is a very costly failure. Both of them also requires lot of expertise and red tape on top of normal startup stress.
Ask HN: Project to store & cache result sets?
Wasn't there a project on HN a few weeks back that was a SQL analytics tool that would store the result set of every query run? What was it called?

My actual question: I need to build a system that caches arbitrary result sets and then performs a variety of sums & groupings for click through purposes, as well as join against future result sets. I've thought of a couple different options, like storing in a separate table that's basically "Column_1", "column_2", & storing the headings somewhere else, or a JSON object of the result set. I've gone down the path of the JSON object, and it works, but for large sets converting it back and forth is turning out to be non-trivial. Has anybody solved a similar problem?
Right. I agree that one can put text next to art explaining something about it, and you have demonstrated it well.

However, starship was upset that the plaques weren't sufficient to make him get the artwork as a novice. I think you'd agree that explaining each work fully is impractical; there's just too much context that's relevant.
Yeah, sorry if there was any confusion. I don't think this was about racism, just an incredibly awkward situation brought about by a stupid law.
Yeah, you can just take a quick pic using the camera; the light flashes for barely a second and you won't notice. Metasploit has a stager for exactly this purpose:
http://www.metasploit.com/modules/payload/osx/x86/isight/rev...
Next Week: JWZ tries to port xscreensaver to webgl.
http://www.igvita.com/

http://tom.preston-werner.com/

http://adam.heroku.com/

http://www.catonmat.net/

http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/

http://natishalom.typepad.com/
You can't blame them, though. Its a basic flaw in human mental machinery ;the we look and create narratives and stories to data compress and make sense of our world. If someone asked you about your greatest achievements, how likely would you be to attribute anything to your era and place you were born in, your random early childhood experiences, etc?
Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security
jwz is complaining about OpenGL 1.3 support. It might be worth asking yourself what computers were like when OpenGL 1.3 was released (August 2001).

P.S. I'm guessing your iPod touch has 512MB of RAM, not 512KB.
If your CPU supports keeping function return addresses on a stack that you can push other things onto, you can do an indirect jump by pushing the address you want to jump to and then "returning" to it. That's a lot easier than self-modifying code or massive switch statements, and just as easy on Harvard as on von Neumann architectures.
World's Smallest iPhone Charger
Meetoo. Moreover, it is deep in Asian culture to have to rebuild frequently their architecture. I have lived beside the Forbidden City and it is in continuous reworking. I bet not one part of it is older than a couple of decades. But its plan odds very old, predates the foundation of Beijing itself. So having to destroy and rebuild every now and then is quite normal here.

Interested readers might want to check what Simon Leys said on the matter.
Where:

* Get caught = a

* jury will believe excuse = b

* society thinks offense is serious = c

* punishment = d

Therefore provide formuala for p(a), p(b), p(c) and p(d).
You don't need stylish to apply custom CSS in Firefox. userContent.css is suffice. Chrome has something similar.
<As with all things, the first 90% took the first 90% of the time, and then the second 90% took the second 90% of the time.

That math is totally consistent with my experience.
That's only if you consider the ACFTU a union in any meaningful sense of the word. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions doesn't.
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That would make sense, except that I have Quicktime installed, and it works fine on Apple's movie trailers site.

It's fine, I'm barking up the wrong tree here TBH. Apple makes it clear that they want you to use their products to view this developer stuff. It's the same type of lock-in that others try to do, so they're not the only guilty party. Just unfortunate when companies do that.

I'll go and install iTunes.
Stealing this quote:

"As with all things, the first 90% took the first 90% of the time, and then the second 90% took the second 90% of the time."
Both the PRC and ROC lay claim to the whole of China, with Taiwan as a part of it. It's absurd, but they both agree that Taiwan is part of China, they simply disagree on who should be ruling that greater part.
On the other hand, chances are that most of those developers still aren't running Safari.
Not as friendly as Intel recent GPUs on the desktop if the need to reverse engineer Mali is any indication:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ARM
It's implicit in the context of the larger debate. The furor is in response to the board trying to cut departments, because UVA has increased expenditures by 80% in the last decade while tripling tuition.

It's easy to say that's not what it's about, but practically that what it's about. The university has been increasing faculty expenditures at 4-5% for years in the face of 0.7% increases in enrollment. The state has no more money. Faculty salary expenditures are the biggest line-item in the budget. If academic freedom is to be preserved by opposing the board's cuts, the practical consequence is continued rises in tuition.
Neither. However because of it's size and quality of content and community, I believe it does have a positive impact on the world. Nothing about HN is about "Getting rich quick".

"The focus of Hacker News is... anything that good hackers would find interesting."
- http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
I agree. The killer thing about Google Voice is that it lets you block calls via a web interface.

It's not hard to figure out how to block all "private" and "unknown" calls. So that means surveys or telemarketers or whoever have to use a number that you can block.

The Google voice extension for Chrome works very well for texting. Nice to use a full-size keyboard.
This reminds me of a question asked in a Game Theory class server years ago:

Pick a number
Whoever's number is closest to one half the average of all submitted numbers wins!

I just whipped together a tiny wsgi app for this:

http://sente.cc/wsgi/number_poll/
jwz makes it clear that his deeper complaint is not about removing the cruft per se, it's about removing vast swaths of the API and then continuing to call it "OpenGL". If they'd called it "MobileGL" or some other nonsense, he probably wouldn't have liked the result (based on this rant), but he also wouldn't have complained that they broke working code.

EDIT: 'continuing to call it "OpenGL"' -> 'using "OpenGL" in the name at all' Effectively, he's complaining about a form of false advertising.
Could be trouble for BellyCard.com
mnicole, this is some KILLER feedback. I really want to make our hint system better (I'm one of the programmers that work on CodeSchool). A couple of us have been talking about changing the hint system to not deduct points, except for the last "hint" which is really the answer. We also want to make sure that you know when we are about to show you the answer (or something very close to the answer) so as to not spoil it. I'd like to chat more about how we can make CodeSchool better, if you'd like, you can email me at eric [at] envylabs.com.
When it comes to efficiency in the real-estate market, efficiency is based on the highest and best use of the particular location. Ownership patterns and the regulatory processes for entitlement are the significant impediments to redevelopment of prime locations. These are less of an issue in China.

To some extent, the web is a useful analogy, we don't blink when a web property is redeveloped - a ten year old website is virtually untenable for commercial ventures. Real-estate is subject to similar forces to those which motivate Google to rewrite their search page.
Except there's no law against selling to Texas. Your logic is flawed.
I've always thought this had some parallels to athletes who use performance enhancing drugs.

The entrepreneur or athlete is so aware of all the hard work and long hours that they put in that they often down play the other factors that play a part in their success.

This often leads them to be defensive when these external factors are brought up as being part of their success.
A number is divisible by 3 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3.
EDIT: The original post seems to be deleted. Here it is so that my answer makes sense (I don't believe in deleting my own posts)

>Serious question, since I see this said a lot, but isn't that true of anything other than process patents? I'm hard-pressed to think of a patent in any other engineering discipline that at the end of the day doesn't boil down to math.

Here's how I look at it: If someone come up with a better car engine, they can patent it because it's a design and application of math. It's not like they patented the Carnot Cycle and precluded ANYONE from ever building ANY internal combustion engine. It's a specific design, not a general formula.

Patenting an algorithm, which is a purely mathematical construct, precludes any work done in the field. Patenting the design an ASIC that implements the algorithm would be the closest example I can think of to patenting an engine based on the Carnot cycle (and I'd be fine with a patent on your ASIC design).
abossy, have you tried this drafting stool?
Id love to hear somebodys feedback before spending $100 on a non-returnable furniture..
It's not quite the same. For other patents, your invention needs to be some device or method for doing something. Now, this invention was obviously designed with math, but only the end result is patentable. That is, if you design some novel tire (for example), only the itself is protected--the math used to get the design in the first place is not protected. If somebody used the same math to come up with a different sort of tire, they would not have to license your patent.

With software patents, there is no device or method. You're taking some math and patenting it just because it's being used on a general computing device. The program itself is not what's protected by the patent--it's the actual math the program is isomorphic to that's protected. Somebody could write a completely new program using the same mathematical foundations and it would infringe on the software patent.

So yes, most patents are going to boil down to math one way or the other. The difference is that software patents protect the math directly where other patents only protect some specific device or invention.
Me neither. I use iTunes to download and watch them and only launched to Safari to verify that it works there.

I already know what I want to watch so iTunes is good enough. But maybe it's just me.

But happy watching. It's a great resource, every year.
I had this issue as well with the web streaming versions and plenty of free disk space. I ended up just pulling them up in iTunes which downloaded the whole thing and then it played fine. Something to do with the adaptive HTTP streaming I would guess.
HeyStartup aiming to combat “brain drain” claims with local video pitches
Agreed - the 6 minute mark is great. You can see the engine return to earth.
I would drive any distance to see a vstol landing of an suborbital or orbital vehicle. Talk about game changing.
The cheapest way to get HBO GO
Not an issue at all. I grew up in Tel Aviv and Israelis love Americans, esp. those doing tech related work.
+1 and thanks for all the positive-toned posts and comments you have added recently (I didn't look beyond the first page). This seems to be lacking among us nowadays.
I'm not special and you (probably) aren't either
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