skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Methinks Alkamie disguised a call of 'bullshit!' behind a sort of empty platitude such as "I find it interesting".

>It's a US-centric graph

The title is "Human cycles: History as science"

A US-centric graph that represents the cycles of humanity?

>cliodynamics

Do we need a fancy name for the phenomenon that aspects of history tend to repeat?

Yes, aspects of history tend to repeat, but there's no way to use that knowledge to determine periodicy, severity, when it will happen, if it will happen etc.

I'll say what Alkamie didn't. This is bullshit.
Sensors could manage with some sort of interferometry to rebuild an image from multiple pixels across multiple sensors. The signal processing would be similar to what is used for medical scanners. We could also see a convergence with radar, combining those pixels and algorithms with an active source.
Turf Geography Club Launches with $600K from RRE
ParaSail: A Pointer-Free Path to Object-Oriented Parallel Programming
The legal work I've seen in Asia tends to 1) involve getting a big firm job and then you can perhaps rotate into their Asia office, and 2) tends to want you have some language fluency.

I'd love to go to Asia, and I'm footloose and fancy free -- nothing tying me to the States. Maybe you know something I don't -- did you have a particular market or type of position in mind? Lemme know.
Because the answer might give some insight into a person's personality. Which is a the main thing a good interview is supposed to try and probe. If you make it that far then they should already have good reason to believe you've got the necessary skills.

So, in a sense, you're right. It's a good question because their is no correct answer. An interviewer who's asking many questions that have correct answers is an interviewer who didn't exercise due diligence during the pre-interview process.
Sharp to Ship New iPhone Screens in August
also there is always a posting bias. people post when they succeed, not when just treading water or failing.
The Creative Evolution of Email | Mailbird
Thanks, I made the site and write the articles. If you (or anyone else) has any recommendations for articles or examples of what doesn't work for you, that would immensely help :)
The Definitive Guide to Cryptographic Hash Functions
Congratulations Thomas!
Creative Commons 4.0 Draft Ready for Comment
I think the real interesting conclusion here is: if OpenGL has parity with Direct3D on Windows in terms of features and performance, why should anyone ever use Direct3D any more? Direct3D is almost non-existent on mobiles and tablets, so anyone using Direct3D is just making their lives harder if they want to go mobile, or port to any other OS. We don't live in Windows monopoly days any more. If OpenGL can get you the same thing on Windows, and helps make it easy to port to other big platforms, I can see Direct3D really falling to the sidelines.
I've had a look at the requirements and I'm not really up to scratch, additionally I've spent the last five years trying to get out of full-time employment. If I were looking for a day job and was able to relocate to the states, I would totally spend a few months training up on the required skills and send my details over.
Nicely done! Congrats!!
A comparison with the Lotka-Volterra equation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

which are the mathematical explanation of predator prey cycles, shows what's missing in the article and possibly in the research - the explanation for the cycles.

Predator-prey cycles can be tied back to biological constants - how quickly prey and predator reproduce, how the availability of prey affects predator reproduction, etc. Thus, if you want to model wolves and sheep rather than foxes and rabbits, you can do so, if you know the various biological constants.

I don't get the sense that Turchin has identified the underlying dynamics.
tptacek is one of the few names on HN I recognize during my short time here (not to mention he posts alot!), so needless to say it's pretty awesome to see this happened to him/her.

Congratulations!
I'm a big fan of Memrise. I think one of the best features is that it uses the community to suggest ways of remembering a word. People remember things differently, so if you have to see a picture of a baby crying with his mouth open to remember that the word 口 means mouth, then so be it.

I'm hoping duolingo comes out with their Chinese track soon. That'll be very interesting.
As someone learning python (on mostly windows, but I test on ubuntu now and then to see if it works well) my advice is to just learn the multiprocessing version as shown by hythloday.

I had a lot of problems with threads not exiting/joining properly, and even my multiprocessing code was goofy on windows. I used the "poison pill" method at http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/multiprocessing/communica... and everything works on ubuntu.

I'm aware of the __main__ thing for windows, but I don't think that's my problem :-/
Its everyone's problem.

Everything in life has a deadline, and at every point in your life you'll be asked to make and meet them.

From dinner to that assignment/project due, the pressure is always there.

I feel that most people underestimate the time things take, mainly because they want to look compitent. There are many things you just cannot put a deadline on; and yet you will be asked to.

Under promise, over deliver. Either way, they want results.
While I love the fact that the gaming division of Microsoft seems to be genuinely innovative and doing some really great stuff with interfaces, I'm still really unconvinced by the actual games that are produced.

Wii, Kinnect and Move are all fun for a while but there really aren't many great titles taking advantage of the new controllers and this feels like it's more of the same - innovative, novel but ultimately not something that's going to produce really great game which for all the hype is what these things should lead to.

Obviously there might be possibilities beyond gaming but in that area I'm not convinced anything that requires physical sensors on the body is likely to become part of a mainstream UI.
> I thought stuff like SDL was used precisely because it abstracted away all the crappy parts of openGL and gave you an easier API to work with?

No. SDL only deals with the platform specific parts like windowing and OpenGL initialization. It does not do any OpenGL for you.

GLFW is another popular tool for the same purpose.
For all the other shit MS gets (I'm thinking of Kinect), at least they are actively trying out new interfaces/inputs. Let's hope they go places.
I think now more than ever Mark would want to maintain it's majority share, otherwise the board might start considering replacing him if things keep going downhill from here.
Was that comment truly necessary?

Did leaping, in a hostile fashion, on two words used as a preamble to the point I was making add anything to this discussion not already added by the other comment you made on the thread?
While your statements may be true for a larger company, 20% time is working quite well for our consulting company for myriad reasons.

First, of course, there's the opportunity to work on side projects. The only stipulation is that it implicitly (for very loose definitions of implicitly) helps the company. Write open source code, write a blog post, work on your own internal project... but mostly it's been OSS hacking.

Second, it builds slack into our schedule. We (http://bendyworks.com) are a consulting company, and 20% time frees us to "promise" 4 days of work to our clients. And when the inevitable vacation day, sick day or holiday comes up, the client still gets their 4 days of work.

It also lets us push our book club into Friday, which makes it affect our clients' projects even less.

And for a good portion of us, a single day simply isn't enough to satisfy our hunger, so you'll often see a few hanging out at the office, hacking away on the latest clojure, ruby, raspberry pi, or life-hacking project.
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I don't think that the problem if being able to estimate time is only with programmers. Time estimation is a combination of many factors. In the context of programming or software development, it can be anything from the skills of the developer, constant customer/client scope changes, sudden resource loss, critical vendor bugs that are usually more time consuming and cannot be fixed in-house (if using vendor system), sudden change in company's budget policy and project criticality (i have worked on million dollar projects that are delayed because management does not want to take a risk due to other un-related issues) etc. Unfortunately, all these variables are extremely difficult to estimate.

So even if a programmer is good and can estimate almost accruately from his/her side, these other variables can throw off a project in no time.
I have a fake account I set up. During my internship after college, our HR recruiter sent us an email with a link to like their internship facebook page. The email wasn't a request.

So I made a fake account to like their page. If HR got a hold of my real account and Facebook turned off my privacy settings, I might not have been hired.
Remember when "Executives" were C-Level or at least SVPs?

I'm not saying anything about these particular folks, just noting that the tech press tends to overuse the term executive.
Vizify Is a New Take on the Personal Nameplate Site
Explore NASA's Kennedy Space Center through Google Street View
5Degrees' serial recap of The Lean Startup (plus some cool infographics) 3/10
It is not the "inventor's dilemma", it is the "innovator's dilemma", and folks here are showing a mild lack of context on the history of HBO's innovations over the years.

For example, HBO is being presented as a content creation company. They didn't start out as one. They became a content creation company in response to VHS and later DVD and now Internet distribution. They were feeling that crunch when they were just a distributor of premium movies on cable; had they not innovated they would have died. Showtime made the same move. HBO is a market leader because of innovation.

So, I don't disagree with you. If they make great content, they're likely to remain relevant for a long time. But, they will have to evolve as cable (so-called "multichannel TV") fades in relevance...which it absolutely will. The convenience of streaming will guarantee that.
Why do you need the programmer to estimate if you're going to ignore the prediction?

If programmers are bad at estimating because they feel pressure to produce short predictions, the above method will prevent this.

If programmers aren't even asked to estimate or ignored, obviously the problem is not that programmers are bad at estimating.

The method can fix some potentially harmful management<>programmer interactions. It can't fix stupid management.
If that's your long-time username on the Internet, you could file an impersonation claim. But that will be a harder case to make for a common name.
Comment I posted on this article:

Great post, Scott. Here are some things I do to build off your main points:

Stop Checking Email in the Morning - Batch email checking into something you do two or three times per day at certain times.

Don't make Guilt Piles - If you do make them, keep them out of site and accumulate them for a long plane ride, car trip, or vacation.

If it's important, Schedule It. - Again, I schedule my email and my browsing .I actually roughly schedule my whole day. Happy to send to anyone just email me at wu at skim dot me.

Let go of Psychic Weight - This is a hard one but the key to overcoming digital overconsumption and information overload is to recognize you'll never be able to get through it all.

Schedule Work Sprints - I have two one and a half to two hour slots of real productivity per day. Sometimes I get to three.

Stop Beating Yourself Up - Constant struggle

I'm somewhat new to this productivity thing but got into it after recognizing that my web browsing was becoming addictive and unproductive. It was producing "the guilt and self-loathing" you mentioned if I couldn't keep up with it. It ultimately led me to build Skim.Me. We're making your daily online browsing routines more productive. Not just tools or a platform but really an entire user experience that wants to move content consumption away from addictive page views and time spent towards a disciplined approach to building better, sustainable habits.

We automatically onboard you using our plugin, aggregate from your favorite sites/apps (not just news & social) across devices, and help you browse in timed batches through the day without showing you how many unread or unchecked you have. Hope some people check it out when we launch (http://skim.me). v1 in three weeks.
A lot of people don't even understand what color blind really is

Too true. Two otherwise sensible, college-educated friends of mine once insisted that they'd be able to tell how my eyesight is different if I sat down and drew what I see out of the window. Using pencil crayons that presumably pierced through my colourblindness. I literally could not find a way to explain to them why it made no sense.

"No, but we'll cover up the writing on the pencils so you can't read what colour they are"

EDIT: I realise I misrepresented the scenario. This wasn't talking about colour-blindness specifically, but in more of a "maybe the blue you see is my red" scenario.
I wonder what a "mobile marketing manager" for Facebook does, seeing as how they don't have any mobile advertising.

99% of mobile downloads are from people searching their respective app stores for "Facebook" and clicking download.

Easiest job ever?
Id argue this can only be done by successfull serial entrepreneurs that are already free to do anything. Even Musk started small on the internet :)

IMO Richard Branson and Bill Gates are of equal caliber.
The departure of key execs who aren't the beneficiaries of a big windfall is seen as a bearish indicator for the future of the stock price.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything with respect to the long term prospects for the company. Also, are these folks key execs? No idea.
The messiness piles up around the programmer.
http://colororacle.org/
Check out skritter.com for learning Chinese. These guys are incredible.
I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their public profile. Many of the people "remembered" that. The account still gets people wishing him happy birthday.
Microformats are easy to learn, and pay off well in SEO and mobile
I'm sure that I'm going to get down voted to oblivion, but every time I read headlines like this, I like to assume that Bill is a person. It makes the headline way more fun.
I hope the next step of this site will be a tool so we can all test the accessibility of our websites.
Will Good Eggs Become the Airbnb of Local Food?
I'm eagerly awaiting "They Live" mode.
Programmers are often asked to accurately estimate tasks that are too large to estimate. The smaller or larger the task, the more likely it is that there will be errors in the estimate. The larger a task, the more likely there is a detail that has been missed during estimation, the more chance that you will encounter a surprise during development that greatly increases development time.

Most successful estimation methods boil down to refusing the estimate larger tasks, and instead breaking them down into smaller tasks. The process of breaking them down forces people to think through them in more detail, and you flush out many of the surprises early on. Similarly, most of the successful systems require you to apply a minimum amount of time per task (e.g. one hour). This removes the problem of programmers underestimating simple tasks.

The best estimates come when you continue to use that system over several iterations of work, and analyze the accuracy of previous estimates. This gives you (and other developers) a better sense of how to make good estimates.

Sadly, even when you have a reliable system of predicting how much work a development team can get done in a given chunk of time, many managers bow to pressure from above to hit deadlines, and expect the team to accomplish more than the data says they are able to accomplish.
The good/bad ribbons need some color or tone coding. I did not see them at all at first. And they are not very distinguishable.
Pie chart progress in your website's favicon
I'll go on the record ansd Say Hadoop won't ever make it past the 1% , but rather we will take the lessons learned from Hadoop and create a better and more usefull system. You can see this already with Pig and Hive. People are learning from the shortcommings of hadoop and building on top of it to try and make it usefull. Once the right mix of frustration and technical skill gets together they will evolve the system to make it usefull. That is when you will see it get enterprise traction.
Google PageRank checksum algorithm
What keeps me building product each day after billing 8 hours of consulting time is that consulting profit is a linear function of time * employees but I can't make more time and I don't want to manage a bunch of consultants.
Yes, yes it is. Now can OpenGL please get their act together and create a respectable SDK and documentation?
Microsoft: Windows, Mac malware gets in via Adobe, Java, Office
Surely if they are both doing 60fps then by definition the performance will be the same? I guess the time spent doing the actual rendering vs waiting to do the next frame might be different, not sure if there is a reason that the characteristics would be different at 300FPS and 60FPS though since surely the only difference is how often the render code is called?

Bare in mind that Valve is running this test on a much higher end PC than most consumers are likely to have. People will want to be able to run these games on their $500 laptops , so the difference between 270 and 315 FPS might translate into a difference between 50FPS and 60FPS which would be noticeable.
If something is working for you, don't change it. ExtJS is a fairly large framework and replacing it with something 'better' would have a large cost for your organization.

That said, my experience is primarily with coolite and versions 2 and 3 of the framework. I was working closely with another team using 4, which sounded better.

ExtJS' main problem is that it does too much. It tries to replace jQuery, CSS, JavaScript OO frameworks and then adds it's widget/control and code structure on top of all that.

If it just did the last one (maybe two), it would be a decent framework. I still would not choose it because I don't like how it gets in the way of API calls nor the control of event handling in versions 2 and 3. This last point has probably been improved in 4 with the introduction of an actual MVC structure, but I don't know for certain.

In any case, using enormous object literals to configure and control everything from styles, events and actions made it both difficult to work with and test. Often times these blocks of code would exceed hundreds of lines. In short, ExtJS sets up developers to fail. Most of what it does can be written in jQuery using CSS classes far more concisely. It's strongest points were it's UI controls, especially the grids. I think these are the things where the framework adds value, the rest would be better served using more commonly adapted practices.
>Disabling mouse acceleration in Windows is a single checkbox exactly where you'd expect it: in the mouse control panel.

No it isn't. If you uncheck the pointer precision box, there's still a level of acceleration happening behind the scenes, as late as Windows 7, that still requires registry changes to disable.

http://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.com/2010/03/markc-windows-7-...
Diclaimer: I have full-color vision, but with color blindness there are (roughly) two dimensions of color, whereas most people have three (and a black and white photograph has one). What this means is that with 1D color, you can sort all of the colors you see into a line -- dark to light. With 2D color, you can sort all of the colors you see on a flat plane. With 3D color, you require stacking colors.

Now, there's plenty of animals out there that have more than 3 dimensional color (they have more than 3 types of cone cells). So two colors that look the same for a normal person will look completely different for an animal. Some octopi have eleven dimensions of color! To them almost every human would be severely colorblind.

For most people, yellow photons striking their retina will produce the same effect as a combination of red and green ones. If you look at this cone cell response graph (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Cones_SMJ...) you will see this is because 520 nm + 640 nm light can give the same effect as 580 nm light with the appropriate intensities.

Having 3 cone cells is the reason that most electronic equipment has 3 types of subpixels (red, green, and blue). If you take the colors of these three subpixels, locate them on the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/CIExy1931...) and draw a triangle to connect the points, this triangle is the color gamut of the monitor. The more types of subpixels you add (or the further apart they are in color), the more colors your monitor can reproduce. This is why Sharp's television with that 4th yellow pixel can reproduce more colors that humans can see.

It's thought that some people might be tetrachromats. They have 4 types of cone cells because of a genetic mutation. There's still some questions on how this extra information is processed by the brain, but there's a chance that for these people almost everyone else seems colorblind. They are able to distinguish two colors that everyone else cannot. This also means that television won't reproduce colors correctly for them, and it won't look natural.
The post contains proper HTML markup. Why would he need to add CSS given that it's just a plain article? It should render perfectly - and in fact it's much more readable than many websites here.
Why is signup mandatory?
I would really like to see at least some content before signing up!
> I don't get the sense that Turchin has identified the underlying dynamics.

Then you should read his work. He describes what he thinks are the driving dynamics of the rise-and-fall process.