skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, I specifically said "you get stuck in something you don't yet see as successful" so it only really applies when you are unhappy with the current outcome (which may be modestly profitable).

It was not meant as a definition but an example of a possible case where bankruptcy is beneficial.

I was just trying to express a situation where massive failure is worse than modest ongoing profitability (zombie company) as the great-grandparent comment suggested was always the case for start ups. If you look at my other posts in the original thread I disagree strongly with the great-grandparent about the definition of success but I can understand at least the possibility of circumstances when full blowup is better than drifting along.
> I could spot black on two out of three......

this probably means you need to calibrate your monitor a little bit better. no need to use an expensive (spyder) tool unless you're a graphics artist, but if "not black" shows up as pure black, you might want to do some simple adjustments to at least make sure you can see a full colour range (just google "monitor calibration", there's many simple tutorials).
Gun Lobby Loves 3D-Printed Weapons
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SSL (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Signed up and tried it out. Some feedback:

1. a better way of presenting the linked accounts (the small yellow icons are not easily readable). a flat list without the tabs,maybe?

2. the notifications need to be such that they don't push down content. not really a bad thing but somewhat irritating

3. shouldn't sharing be on by default when I link my account (twitter) ? couldn't figure out what the yellow power button meant till I clicked and found out.

4. the follow button above my twitter widget in the link account area shows @SGforums... no idea who that is and why it's there.
This is a brilliant move by Yegge. Now if you call him wrong, you're just like the guy who attacks Aunt Marge's politics at the family dinner.

Unfortunately, your business is not Aunt Marge. You need to be able to make the tough calls and say that, no, banning the color yellow is not a viable policy. Software engineering and programming languages are both seriously-studied disciplines, and all too often, the evidence comes down conclusively in favor of one position.

To pick an easy target, in many languages like Java and C++, null can be passed in place of (almost) any type. But

1) Empirical studies show that values intended to be non-nullable are more common...

2) ...which means that many method definitions are cluttered with is-null checks (to cut down the exponentially-increased state space)...

3) ...and it's just as easy to provide a feature to turn it on when it's wanted (option types/Maybe monad)...

4) ...which many companies hack into C++/Java anyway (various annotations and preprocessors)

This is a pretty solid case. Liberals win -- it's less code. Conservatives win -- there are fewer bugs. Sometimes things really are that one-sided.
I don't really know, I've never had a thing for any colleague (one exception, really long story, but short version is I found out he's straight before he was ever a colleague, so irrelevant), and I've also never had a job where it wouldn't be allowed. All I was saying is that plenty of "freedoms" are restricted all the time, we just don't word it like that and they don't feel like a big thing.
It might be because of the Scala community, as he feels it is with Clojure.
crazy :)
We would need at least three for constant contact, Arthur C. Clarke style.
Some of the tendencies depend upon the nature of the organization. Startups tend liberal (want to change the world). Corporations tend conservative (want to avoid major mistakes). The selection of tools does not always reflect this immediately though.

Also some classification of technology as conservative or liberal depends upon the competing technology it is running against. I was a bit surprised to see Python classified as liberal - but it makes sense when comparing it to Java. If it is being compared with Ruby it is very conservative ("do things one way").

There are some non technological risks that influence technology decisions. Visual Basic may be "Hardcore Liberal" from a language perspective, but it is pretty conservative politically (backed by Microsoft, lots of available experienced programmers).

Steve as usual has interesting insights. I am not sure that this is a paradigm that completely fits - but it does provide a perspective for understanding fundamental beliefs that can lead to disagreements in software projects.
Tumblr and Twitter don't strike me as a particularly conservative audience. Quite the opposite.
I didn't notice at first because this particular article doesn't have that much text, but if you click around ... ouch, yeah no way I'm going to read more than two paragraphs of light-grey text no matter if it's carefully saturated with some warm brown colour or not.
Nasa Morpheus lander crashes during moon mission test
Here are some more pictures (including color) http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Mars

I wonder what the sky of mars looks like. Can we see earth?
With optical mouse type tracking wouldn't you lose your position relative to other cuts if you lifted the router off the workpiece?
> The recent iCloud breach makes me believe that in many cases the "security questions" practice is by far the weakest link in modern web authentication.

Isn't that how the Sarah Palin thing happened?
Well, thanks for pointing this out, although I think it should be possible, for a Chinese author who's not very fluent in written English, to write about Golang in a web dev perspective.

I don't really care about the author's English skills, I'm no grammar nazi.
And was eased to a landing by a rocket-powered sky crane. Yeah, it's cool that it rode a rocket, but man has been doing that for some time. But sky cranes? Completely automated? And no crashing?!? Holy crap...
Yeah, unless you do it consistently everywhere, which again defeats the purpose.

Maybe you could do something like consistently answer the previous question from the dropdown?
I usually immediately down vote reddit style comments like this, but I just laughed coffee out my nostrils.
NASA has the "Astronomy picture of the day" archive at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Here is a look at the polar vortex on Venus -- it's like looking into hell!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100928.html
Well done. Your coding is well elaborated and uncomplicated in form, making it easy to comprehend. Keep up the good work.
Hope you guys succeed, I'd be a customer!
Anonymous promises revenge for the takedown of Demonoid
It's about computation improving the rate of computational progress

But computation doesn't improve the rate of computational progress. That's achieved by improvements in manufacturing. Computation does help a little, giving us better tools for chip design. But mainly it's manufacturing.

The only way for computational progress to exponentiate, past the limit of Moore's Law, is to use more physical resources - computers get literally bigger.

And so expensive that only the five richest crowned heads of Europe can afford them!
For me personally, college wasn't about academic learning. It was about personal growth and making a lot of mistakes (and learning from them).

Before university I programmed for the love of coding. My four years at university ripped the programming soul out of me. A year after university I regained that love again and started learning on the job as an apprentice programmer.

Everything since then has been learnt off my own back, via the internet, or from my peers and work colleagues.

Education, especially learning how to develop software applications, is not taught well in traditional "red-brick" British universities. That may well have changed since my days some 20 years ago, but back then it was all theoretical lectures and very little practice. I was not inspired by anyone nor aspired to become anything better during those four years (from an academic perspective).

Don't get me wrong, university isn't a place where you get you should expect to be hand held through your studies. Personal drive is absolutely required. College isn't high school where you get hassled for your home work submissions. However, good mentors and inspirational tutors would have made the whole thing much more attractive.

That aside, there is one thing I have learnt that I would happily pass on; it is to never assume someone that didn't go to college isn't as smart as you are. I work with several very smart people. Regarding two in particular, one went to Oxford and the other didn't go to university at all. Both amaze me every day with their abilities to tackle hard technical problems.
I very much doubt that, with the Perseid shower due this weekend.
Not much of those you linked to actually use pure black, but this one comes pretty close:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Francisco_de_Zurbarán_018....

It also happens to show very nicely what's wrong with using pure black as shadows: they're not shadows, they're holes.

(what a god-awful painting, btw. and they compare his work to Caravaggio's ... )
Perhaps I am generalizing based on my experience in Tucson, which is close enough to cross-pollinate with the bay, but most places I worked and interviewed and had friends expected everyone on the team (apart from the DBAs) to be able to touch any part of the stack.

We also tended to have companies with small teams.
> if you have safeguards in place such that 16 character passwords can't be bruteforced than you don't gain much by going to 256

Yes, right until the day your database gets accessed by intruders and they steal all your hashes for fast offline cracking. Which just happened.
He just downgraded "intelligence" and replaced it with "imagination" and his arguments are valid. However, an AI with imagionation, now thats something and still opens up possibility of singularity.
Is there any other place in the world, called a "nation" but made up of 28 different states, each with its own unique language and culture (not minorities, but full blown states)? Just see what happened in Europe when they tried to unite their currency.

In reality, India is more like Europe than the US (shared culture and history, different national entities, never really jointly ruled until modern times), yet its government is centralized and cultivates hopes of becoming like China. I'd be extremely sad to see India break up into separate states, but I'm becoming more and more convinced it's the only way to solve its real problems.
Finally we can use border-box box-sizing everywhere! http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/ The bug has been fixed: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/11004
First important data from Curiosity: human-tolerable radiation
Why do you want that feature?
While that is bad, according to my napkin calculations that still gives you 82 bits of entropy for your password (if you randomly generate it, taking into account that they aren't case-sensitive {seriously}).

82 bits is actually "good enough" so, for now, not too big a deal. The bigger deal is the SHA1 + salt hash they're using to store them!
Assembler is so liberal that you have to be deeply conservative in order to write code for it.
Cog: http://cogx.org

Still using this on OSX ML, works great if you just want a very simple, easy-to-use music player.

BTW, I personally hate iTunes. :-P
Now i understood why i love Common Lisp and hate Clojure.
It has nothing to do with Community or language. Its about Me. I'm a liberal. Knowing that i'm a liberal liberated me.
> But why you PHP guys should learn Golang? Just because it is cool! Ja, I’m kidding, but it is true.

I stopped reading here.

I don't know. Skimming over this blogpost made me think "Why should I use go?". I'm not even a PHP guy and this isn't even convincing me. What hope do they have to convince a PHP guy.

I didn't see any code. Sure there's a link to the "A Tour of Go" but if I was a PHP guy I would be confused by the syntax. No semicolons? Ok that may be an advantage (I'm also fairly sure you can add semicolons to Go and it wouldn't care).

I dunno, there wasn't enough here explaining why I should use Golang instead of PHP. I didn't like the way it was formatted. I didn't like the rhetoric.

I am one of those strange people who prefers to watch videos of a language or a web tool working and found http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/fosdem-video/2011/maintracks/go... which seems to go through some of Golang's features. It's a little longer than that blogpost but it's a little better with convincing me to use Golang.
I certainly got my adjectives mixed up. I usually proofread better than that. Oops.

s/less/more/
> modern science has shown us that it's simply not true

It's simple thermodynamics. It can't possibly be not true unless human bodies are magic.
Have just sent you an updated stylesheet that includes support for Opera, Firefox & IE. Please feel free to use that.
Along similar lines, antirez' LOAD81:

http://github.com/antirez/load81

Lua sure is a lovely language for this sort of thing!
> BTW. In the browser the native and well documented way of dealing with callbacks is by using the EventTarget API

Closure Library uses EventTarget for their event handling system[1], thus making it work exactly the same for browser events and custom events. YUI 3 takes similar approach, but instead they use their own API, however also based on DOM events model.

[1] https://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/docs/class_goog_e...
Many, many years ago, I worked for a company called "Inter-Touch". It's now owned by NTT Docomo. What can I say that has not already been said?
That's great. Works fine for me. Once again, congrats.
> Further, as explained in that post, the idea is wrong. It's about contrast (and, thus, dynamic range) more than it is absolute color. Indeed, if one wanted to be pedantic, they could point out that #000000 isn't actually real black and that no human has ever actually produced a truly black object. If one wanted to be slightly less pedantic and more particular, one could note that #000000 has a fuzzy meaning anyway as you're depending on the sensor of the image device (when/if it's captured) and then the output device – the rendering of black points (and whites) isn't the same on almost any two devices.

Reading the article I was really hoping he'd mention this--I don't think it's pedantic at all, #000000 on a monitor is not "black" in real life, for similar reasons as his pretty saturated shadows are not.

As you say, it's all about contrasts. And once you use #000000, you can't shade anything darker than that.

> Black can easily be used in such a way as to not yield overly contrasted images – it just needs to be paired with another color sufficiently dark so as to keep contrast low enough to be acceptable.

But in that case the pure #000000 black is actually a stand-in for a really dark colour that the monitor (or other medium) cannot produce. Although, I suppose, there are probably instances where #000000 is exactly the colour you need, but because it's on the far corner of the RGB cube chances are it's probably clamped or rounded-down for something else.

Still, in those situations, #000000 is the best you can do.
Apps Script seems to be capable of quite a bit more than the name suggests. Wouldn't expect it to have a full UI toolkit and designer, hosted memcache, or SQL access[0].

(In the docs, Google seems to dance around ever calling the language "JavaScript" but I can't find any reason it wouldn't be. Anyone know anything on that?)

[0] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/defaultservices PS: naturally most of the "core" Apps services are exposed as well
I have a site with lots of statistics, tables, charts and similar stuff. As you can understand, fetching all that data from the database to render the analytical charts is fairly expensive. My solution is to first render the page template and send it back to the client as quickly as possible with all statistics widgets empty. Then the page makes a few ajax calls to fetch the data from the server to render the pie and bar charts widgets.

It works very well for a human visitor. The page loads extremely quickly and the widgets rendered using javascript and ajax are below the fold anyway so it doesn't matter that they are visible 500 ms later than the initial page load. Unfortunately it is crap for Googlebot which never runs the ajax calls and never "sees" my pretty graphs which leads it to think I have a much more boring site than what it really is.

So that is my need to "app-ify" my site and my, as of yet unfulfilled, need for a framework that is able to provide Googlebot with an accurate view of my appified site.
They are too late to gain back market share from Sublime Text.
How much of the difference between the C# and Java ecosystems is due to the age of the language? Of course, I agree with you, too, because we have a "liberal" language (C#) tied to an extremely "conservative" company/platform (Microsoft), and that will always be a limiting factor in the growth of the ecosystem.
> who would actually recommend that instead of just plain, simple eating healthy through whole foods?

This sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy, which is sadly common when it comes to discussing food.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adnature.html

It's also not entirely relevant, in that you're changing the topic: My whole point is that it's apparently possible to lose weight and improve your cholesterol on a Twinkie diet, not that it's necessarily desirable or anything else.

My larger point is that foods are not necessarily good or evil. Demonizing foods is idiotic. So is idolizing them. They must always be evaluated in context.
> For almost any practical and objective definition of "human intelligence" that you might write down. I can write a computer program that will follow those specs and execute it better than a human being. Today.

If that were true, how come humans are still superior in many (intelligence based) tasks? From games such as Go and Arimaa to more practical tasks such as laying out electronic parts on circuit boards (autorouting).

Mix in self-learning and generality, and I doubt that a better computer program could be programmed today.
Don't be evil - Google pays £6m UK tax on £395m turnover
MapReduce as Laundry wash- DefCon17 Hacking Con slide extract
I don't get your argument at all. As in, I'm not sure what you're trying to argue. If you agree that computers will soon be capable of everything a human brain does, and that the brain is just a machine that could eventually be copied and improved, how could there _not_ be tremendous and unpredictable changes to the world when it happens?

If humans create artificial minds that are able to operate on their own, what we decide are the important problems to work on could end up becoming a moot point. You can't really negotiate with someone who's a lot smarter than you (not more than a chimpanzee can negotiate with humans).

If you're criticizing philosophers and researchers for "dreaming" about these ideas, you might want to have a look at some of the thoughts around what would happen if we created self-improving, human-level artificial intelligence. The consequences are potentially catastrophic to human existence, and hence justifies some effort even if you think it is completely unlikely. And whether it is unlikely or not is subject to strong debate. Have a look at

http://singularity.org/research/
The Eurozone (17 countries, 333M people) is a subset of the EU (27 countries, 503M people) which is a subset of Europe (50 countries, 739M people).

So less than half of the people in Europe united their currencies into the Euro.
You must not be aware of the new rules here. At least 1 post from the Svbtle network must make it to the top of HN per week. That said, I enjoyed the post. It highlights something I missed out on growing up and serves as a reminder for me to pass these lessons on.
Agreed. I really dislike the "security question" feature a lot of sites force you to enter. In my opinion they make my account much less secure than it would be without this feature. There are plenty of people around who know my email address and have the means to find out my mother's maiden name, or what car I first had or whatever ridiculous information I'm forced to provide to "secure" my account.
European universities are cheap because they are government subsidized. The US has state schools that, once upon a time, were partially subsidized and cheaper, but not quite free. State governments have stopped giving money to these universities forcing them to raise tuition. This is a political decision, is what the voters want, even though it might not be in their best interest. It would be nice to have low cost universities in the US but is not going to happen in the near future.
They sure do have a loyal following. Even here. I noticed the downvotes on my comment.

In general it seems that both the PS3 and the 360 have a very loyal following, yet hate each others system.

There seems to be a culture war there. This seems to distracts people from actually noticing the quality (or lack there of) compared to its potential. And its hard to have an honest debate about that, without all the fanboys showing up, and focusing on which system sucks less.

I guess consoles are just not for adults. I don't have the time or the patience to deal with that all that crap. It's no easier than just running windows. It's actually worse.

And we can't speak out, because it will be drowned out by the fanboys focusing on which console sucks more. All I know, is that, unlike what I expected, the 360 did not provide any value to me. And it's all because of the software and UX.
you're attacking a straw man. he did not mention pure white. the eye-hurt is because of the pure white, not the pure black.

pure black on light gray does not hurt my eyes, while dark gray on pure white does, after a while, late at night.
There's also the commercial Imprys at http://imprys.com/ for the iPad, which is my creation.
Beginning to a Rat powered Skynet?
http://labs.phurix.net/posts/converting-your-logo-to-ascii-a...
I posted this link somewhere else, but it's such a good read that I'll post it again.

http://singularity.org/research/

Even if you disagree with the ideas of what general artificial intelligence could do to the human existence on Earth and elsewhere, it is justified to spend some effort thinking about it. The potential consequences to human existence are all-encompassing. So when something is deemed a potential existential risk, it's worth thinking about.

If the current development in computing continues, I believe that superhuman artificial intelligence is inevitable. And that if we don't prepare for it properly, we might screw it up in a historical way.
sublime text is not Free Open Source Software
if textmate2 gets ported it will surely eat sublime's share
The Soviet TMK was even more interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMK - a planned 3 year mission. There is also info about this on the site linked to in the parent.
those tools are really nice, it's just that I use graphics programs and other tools that really benefit from an accurate depiction of colour way too often. even websites that talk about colours. for instance I'd have to disable flux before I can trust the colours in the images of this particular article, right?

and flux had like what, three configuration sliders or so? this redshift program seems better because at least it's scriptable in its "one-shot" modus.

I don't know how, but it would be great if someone could come up with a tool that does for your eyes what Flux does, but on the other hand doesn't muck up applications and instances that really do benefit from an accurate depiction of colour. If someone is looking for a "problem that needs solving", here it is :)
I imagine you can integrate information from a QR-code for global positioning and an optical mouse sensor for fine tuning