skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that that key piece of advice in pg's essay:

"Live in the future, then build what's missing."

is just a more subtle way of expressing the "missing" heuristic described in this article:

"Focus on enabling technologies and environmental factors."

and seems to me to be a bit of a distinction without a difference.

However, it is helpful to hear it expressed a different way, and reminds me of something I heard Gary Hoover (of Hoover online fame) say at a conference, which was that in the same way Tsunamis are the result of plate tectonic activity that happens months, weeks, or days in advance, there are things shifting within your industry that could result in "tsunamis" of change. What are they?

It seems like very obvious advice, but it is interesting to sit down and make a concentrated effort to think of what the shifts may be occurring in your industry. Sometimes they are easy to miss in that they are so obvious. (As in "fish were the last ones to discover water...").

Another way to think of it came to me from one of Tim O'Reilly's essays where he describes some key marketing advice he was given, which was to "find a parade and get out in front of it." (He attributes the success of O'Reilly media to getting behind the web and open source in its early days - http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121002122119-16...) From that perspective, I like to think of what "parades" are happening in my industry, (energy), such as conservationism and environmental responsibility. What happens if/when 75% of the cars on the road are electric vehicles, (and are driverless)? Maybe my car is charged via solar panels or a whisper gen, and drives itself to the store where someone loads it with the groceries I ordered online? What products/services will be needed to support that? What do things look like when homes are net-zero energy, as they are meant to be in California in 2020?

It can be an interesting exercise.

Edit: Typos
Microsoft has a representative on TC39 (Luke Hoban) who is extremely active. In fact, I usually find that my thoughts on some new feature closely align with his.

Because Microsoft has bet on JavaScript heavily for Windows 8 apps (at least for now), and Windows 8 apps have full support for ES5, they have very good insights about ES5.

ES6 is still "coming". Many features are still in flux, and I don't blame Microsoft for not committing to in-flux ES6 features in the timeline of IE10.
How Ravello uses Ravello to make dev/test in the cloud Not suck
I'm not in America, but would really like to know how many people actually asked to join you?

Happy Thanksgiving!
I have given this subject quite a bit of thought, and I believe the solution is to fulfill this objective:
Make filesharing simple and intuitive.

The article states that the girl ultimately failed to download what she wanted, which I don't doubt is due to the complexity of navigating a torrent index and installing and running a torrent client.

For most computer users, torrenting is too sophisticated, and it doesn't help that most torrent websites seem to be focused on scamming their users (including the venerable ThePirateBay). Other protocols for file-sharing are usually no better.

What if a technologically ignorant user can find, download, and play a work of video or music in just a few mouse clicks? I think this would have huge ramifications. Simply exposing file-sharing to a wider audience will increase political support and help counter the content industry's anti-filesharing propaganda.

I really like the analogy of 4 currencies when thinking about filesharing:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20120222/91144/Pir...

Improving the user experience of file-sharing will not only reduce the first three costs to near zero, but after file-sharing becomes easy and accessible to everyone, it will become more normalized in society. In turn, this will gradually decrease the last cost, integrity, to zero.

The endgame is increased tolerance and political support of file-sharing, and disrupting the revenue of the content industry.

So how can we achieve this vision? I am thinking of a high quality package manager application similar to iTunes or Steam. The biggest usability improvement would be the concept of a repository, in that there is a curated database of files rather than whatever users want to upload, which is the standard right now for most forms of file-sharing.

As a consequence, there will be a canonical version of a title, removing the choice of picking between 10 different torrents and looking at seeders/trackers. Because there is now one destination when searching for a specific title, we can leverage existing and user-generated content to include things like graphics, videos, reviews, etc. on the landing page.

There are definitely huge technical challenges involved. For example, an application like this probably can't rely on a central server. So without a reliable server, how can we maintain a repository and support an easy one-click one-download feature? Moreover, we want to protect our users and implement some sort of private information retrieval.

This is an idea I've been thinking about for quite a while, and when I have time (not enough these days it seems), I have been tinkering around and trying to implement solutions to some of the technical problems involved.
It's worse than that, the exams were pointless because they only tested knowledge of Confucianism.
Non-Destructive Debugging of Chef Recipes
Let us know how many people show up!
And stops around 38 minutes. Lots of Q and A. He often takes time to answer in details even though he can't share everything.
Awww Matt, happy thanksgiving - hope get to celebrate with you sometime!
> So wouldn't you be best just cherry-picking your own gems?

I skimmed through the README. This project is picking up a default set of components needed for API. You can add or subtract components based on your needs. So instead of you cherry picking all your gems, you choose either none or some. For many people, having a default working set with non-needed components removed is good.

> Or using something barebones to begin with, like sinatra/padrino?

I have used sinatra and though I like it, I much prefer rails. Sinatra has its charm, but it's too open ended that in a big project, you end up creating half of rails yourself. Some people mount sinatra apps in their rails application, but I prefer letting Rails handle the api.
> BTW: does anybody know why they didn't put in the specs the Executable Class Body thing? It's the coolest part of Coffee-script, and it's the only real meta-programming style for class (IMHO).

In an effort to get a class syntax into the spec, members of TC39 advocating for classes intentionally pared down their ambitions to something that could get a consensus of the members. Given the time-frame for ES6, I am happy that this proposal was accepted, because it gives us a base to work off of.

As a Rubyist, I consider "executable class bodies" or something like them to be crucial for user-land declarative syntax. I plan to do some work in the near-future on a proposal that should address this use-case.
I deliberately made it generate/play tracks with 0 user input. This thing might be good, but I couldn't make it play anything meaningful
There is MPI add-on for Excel, which allow to work with huge spreadsheets on HPC clusters, developed originally for some Swiss Investment bank. So Excel does scale.
Too bad it takes caltrain 1.5 hours to get up there from SJ. oh well. Thanksfor the offer and happy thanksgiving
Why you shouldn't roll your own security
How technology is failing my family
> That said, I don't think that it's ideal for heavy JS apps.

Rails-api churns out JSON, JS consumes it. I can think of performance being an issue.

What are the other issues?
Who would you nominate?
Seems to me that the problem you're describing is one of confusing the tool for the task, rather than the tool being over-hyped.
Richard Stallman tells a story (or did when I saw him give a lecture a decade or so ago) about Steve Jobs approaching him to do a deal on allowing NeXT to keep the GCC Objective C front end closed; rms explained that wasn't going to happen, and NeXT would have to GPL it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's enthusiasm for LLVM and distaste for GPL code stems from that incident.
My mistake, that's not contradictory, but I still don't understand the argument. To me it looks like this:

Break down some necessary activity into a dichotomy where one option is neutral/good, and the other option is undesirable according to some people. It's invalid to claim that the undesirable action is actually ok simply because you have to pick one or the other. Instead, you have to make an argument specifically against the neutral/good option.
JS Remote Preview
IMO you shouldn't do the benchmark. Let this project be a starting point for a Rails api project and/or a how to for people who want to customize Rails for their needs.

"We are building an API. Rails has extra components which aren't used but might cause overhead. Here is how to remove it."

I think that's a valid enough use-case.
It also has a 90% compliance rate, higher than the rest. In the previous months it reaches 93 and 94%.
They also add class-side inheritance.

This allows the constructor to inherit its properties from a parent constructor:

class Class {}
Class.hello = "hello";

class SubClass extends Class {}
SubClass.hello // "hello"

This doesn't add any new semantics on top of the already-approved `__proto__` (which already exists in all browsers but IE):

Class = function() {};
Class.hello = "hello";

SubClass = function() {};
SubClass.__proto__ = Class;
SubClass.hello // "hello"

EDIT: Oh, and they add `super`:

class Speaker {
say(string) { console.log(string); }
}

class Yeller extends Speaker {
say(string) { super(string.toUpperCase()); }
}

new Yeller().say("hi") // "HI"
Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead
Sebastian Thrun for Udacity.
I thank you very very much for that. Whenever I feel down I know where to get a laugh. The song just makes it better.
Onenote already runs on metro and is kind of nice, actually.
We haven't started eating yet. You can make it! If you want, I can pick you up from the Caltrain.
I have generated quite a bit of music using evolutionary algorithms. My research is mostly about figuring out representations that are not at too low a level (eg 1 "gene" per note). I like representations that in some way represent the patterns, oscillations, and processes that seem to drive music forward over time.

A paper: http://ncra.ucd.ie/papers/gecco2011_jmcdermott.pdf

Some short mp3s: http://www.skynet.ie/~jmmcd/software/GraphMusicDemoPieces.tg...

Longer, slow-developing stuff on soundcloud (using slightly different software): http://soundcloud.com/jmmcd/tomorrow-is-a-new-day
Using social media to cover for lack of original thought
Cameras connected to cops and it's being paid out of the educational budget?
That depends on what you need for building the said API. Rails does a lot of stuff. Lightweight frameworks leave out many things out of choice. You possibly get enhanced performance with lightweight frameworks, at the cost of having to build some components. The choice depends on your "performance gain" to "painfully building components rails provides" ratio. node ecosystem has grown a lot, and it might serve your needs, but that's something that varies from project to project.
http://anomos.info

Someone already attempted to make something similar to what you're describing, but it turns out that it's very hard to do right.
It was probably a wrong way to put it. I apologise.

I don't doubt the integrity, diligence and efforts the Rails project is putting into security as a whole.

Secure defaults are very important. Crypto is important, but not all security is crypto.

In this particular case, and I don't claim that it applies everywhere, this transparency has a potential cost.

I agree that it should be as transparent as possible, and also prefer convention over configuration. But some time the convention means some added risk, and particularly an unknown risk (because by following the convention I don't even have to think about this risk). In such a case, I think configuration might be preferable. Conversely, for any built-in security to be transparent, it really needs to be watertight and fit 100% of the users. Otherwise it puts some users at a risk they are completely unaware of.
Yes, I added it, thanks!
I am thankful I don't live in the States!
Unless, of course, the authorities seed Tor with a whole bunch of nodes that log everything. No timing attacks required.

Tor relies on the fact that even if there's one or two bad apples among the bunch logging everything you're probably going to be safe because you'll go through enough routing nodes that aren't logged for it to be impossible to trace.
> "Other non-believers think John was a bit too fond of funny mushrooms and shouldn't be taken too seriously."

This kind of remark, regardless of author's beliefs, doesn't sound like a very good journalism style. (Also I guess it's a reference to Pantheocide from Salvation War series, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Salvation_War)
The best acronym I was able to find (fits with the multiple redirects) is: Traffic Distribution System.
Communism, everybody is equal but some are more equal than others...
Yeah just async HTTP/TCP, databases, and system commands. Not anything anyone really uses
Although I'm not pushing religion on anyone I feel like it should be mentioned that the religious ground she mentions might have something to do with this part of the Bible:

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Revelation 13:16
The direct quote:

> The school has already installed over 200 CCTV cameras in an attempt to curb truancy, some of which have a live link directly to the local police department, Whitehead said.

I can't even begin to... this is... I have no words.
> Software Transactional Memory

Would pypy be able to take advantage of Haswell's hardware transactional memory?
they sound pretty nice :) will read the paper immediately
Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women
Nice work. Is anybody aware of automatic music performing software? I think that this is similar to automatic generation of music but more structured and therefore easier to implement. I remember reading some studies about software performing classical compositions, but never found working prototype to play with.
Students need the lanyard to use the library or cafeteria, vote in school elections,

I graduated from high school nearly 10 years ago, we had ID cards with magnetic stripes. I graduated from college with some additional voluntary coursework four years ago. We had cards with magnetic stripes and QR codes. Both worked in the function of identifying the student, and swiping in the mess hall as currency. Quantity wasn't a problem even with a student body count of nearly 5500 in a high school, our student numbers started with 0000 and were (iirc) 18 digits long.

So here's my question: why was RFID aggressively pushed if tracking wasn't an explicit understated purpose, when there is tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?
Is anyone of you using OneSwarm? http://www.oneswarm.org/
So how is last century working out for you?
Success metric fail.

Then again - What is the success metric for education? Attendance is (IMHO) pretty terrible, and standardized testing hasn't worked out the best - so what is it?

A classic answer (but still, probably not all that great of one) is jobs upon graduation - but that doesn't help in elementary school.

So, how would you go about turning such long-term metrics as "employment in ten years" into short term metrics, to figure out what to do next week?
This reminds me of this case where the school was spying on students with the camera of the laptops they loaned them. Seriously, what are these people thinking? That 1984 was an instruction manual?
Unfortunately, the school get their money based on how many kids go to their school. They have to keep track, if they don't or if students aren't showing regularly, they lose funding.
Most important part of the article: "What’s happening now is going to spread across the country," Whitehead said. "If you can start early in life getting people accustomed to living in surveillance society then in future it'll be a lot easier to roll these things out to the larger populace."
I familiar with this situation also...
Killing plants == cutting hair
To some people, religion is more important than privacy. In fact, in all religions I can think of, it is taught that religion is more important than privacy.
I've read some papers about software used to help live performers, some sort of co-performer, or accompanying robot. But I can't find the paper right now..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_tabloid
Sounds like a prison system
I recently used http://yeoman.io/ for developing a backbone.js app, you can easily set it up to automatically compile (it uses Grunt internally) the individual sources to your rails apps public folder for development, and then compile/minify/concatenate your files for production. Worked quite well for me.
> A plane such as the 777 has engines which use about 170 megawatts of power.

Do you mean emergency thrust, takeoff thrust, or during cruise? These aren't going to be the same amounts. You're going to have to have some amount of batteries for emergency purposes, so these could be used to provide peak power. Beamed power will also have different properties which will lead to different economics and standard operating procedures. (With more gradual climbs.)

> Even if we were talking about a blended wing plane covered in PV arrays and much lighter than a 777 (due to not needing fuel) and thus requiring less power we're still talking about delivering 10s to 100s of kilowatts per square meter of plane. That compares to 1 kilowatt/m^2 of direct sunlight. That's a hell of a lot of power

1000 watts per square meter doesn't seem such a big deal. Right now, I have a 300 watt parabolic space heater about 8-9" or 20 cm in diameter aimed at me from about 3/4ths of a yard. The intensity of this device is much higher than 1000w/m^2. I note that the rear of this device is made out of ordinary plastic and doesn't ever get too hot to touch.

As a matter of perspective, imagine building a large structure out of aluminum with one handheld hair dryer attached to every square meter of the bottom side. (1400 watts.) That would indeed be a lot of power, but barring untimely rain or some kind of design or equipment failure, you wouldn't expect this to go up in flames.

Heck, this thing is a toy, and I'll bet the intensity is a good fraction of 1000 watts/m^2.
My thoughts exactly. Virtual Music gives a great insight into Cope's ideas: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-music

Sadly his code (lisp if I remember correctly) isn't on github either...
Although im not in san fransisco this post alone made my day!
Prices looks similar to the US system.
It's difficult enough getting many embedded engineers to go to C over assembly. In the ARM world, C is the standard for programming, but for lots of other devices, such as the MSP430, efficiency and deterministic behaviour is really important. Flash and SRAM sizes are very small in some cases and Java would simply be impossible.

For bigger devices, RTOS's and C work pretty well, but you can't be liberal code wise given the amount of clocks available. And you conserve those as a necessity usually.

For networked devices, where you don't care so much about power or battery drain, then I guess there's an argument to be had. NXP LPC43xx with its dual processor m4 and m0 running at 204mHz for example could just about manage it. But for devices doing work like data acquisition most designers would balk at the idea. Especially as regards memory allocation.
The world's oldest original working digital computer
"...and it allows the school to track their every movement throughout the day." Seriously, is this necessary?
Sorry, I have no idea where they're coming from when they say that. It's got to come down to plugin compatibility.

In fact -- again, for MSVC projects -- debugging a 32-bit application on a 64-bit PC is what's painful. There are serious bugs in Visual Studio's WoW64 support that have remained unfixed for years.
Советские мотоциклы
Thanks -- I think they're kind of nice at a "local" level, but they don't have the more "global" coherent movement that yours have.
I don't see any justifiable reason why this shouldn't be illegal

Because sharing is good and it's not our problem if the currently dominant business model has troubles with it?

Even if you think that sharing music freely should not be allowed, the fact remains that we are dealing with an industry that refuses to adapt to new technologies and new customer expectations, and engages in despicable conduct to preserve their outdated business model, as this story illustrates. In this view, accelerating the change, or doom, of this industry is rendering a service to society. Letting them go after file sharers is simply helping them resist change, and only by fighting the symptoms (we're losing some sales) rather than the causes (it's easier to "pirate" than to download legally, legal downloads are too expensive and impose unwanted restrictions).
How do cameras prevent truancy better than taking attendance?
They were useful as filters, if somewhat crude. The tests were partly responsible for advancements in Chinese civilization.
An awesome gesture. Happy thanksgiving from Singapore!:)
Don't be lazzy make a language like Guido did
Surely you are trolling.
As a non-native speaker, I am confused

No, you got it right. Cliché fail. :)
nice marketing..but still remarkable offer
one big PLUS
Auguste Escoffier
The Bulletproof Method for Finding Email Addresses of Influential People
What a complete waste of money. It's as if they actually expect the cops to sit down and continuously monitor all 200 cameras all day. Horrible waste of tax money on two fronts.

Also, say some cop does happen to see a kid walking out of school at 1:30. It's not like he's going to get all alerted and call the school to figure out the situation. No he's going to think "There goes some kid ... probably called out by his parents" and that's the end of that.
what? xD
Personally, I like this one too (from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/11/cctv-cameras-sch...):

> More than 200 schools across Britain are using CCTV cameras in pupils' toilets or changing rooms, according to figures obtained by anti-surveillance campaigners, who warned that the research raised serious questions about the privacy of schoolchildren.

> A total of 825 cameras were located in the toilets or changing rooms of 207 schools across England, Scotland and Wales, according to data provided by more than 2,000 schools.

[...]

> Responses from 2,107 secondary schools and academies showed they used 47,806 cameras overall, including 26,887 inside school buildings.

That's an average of 22 cameras per school, so clearly there is progress to be made, but cameras in the lockers and bathrooms must be worth more points.
This would be so much more interesting and supportable as a privacy issue. Instead the first upholding of this policy will be in the face of religious superstition and will tarnish future attempts to resist or address this policy.

This is infuriating to me, as I fought the precursor to these policies when I was in highschool to the point that I had organized a protest with enough people that I was basically threatened until it dissipated. Now, more than ever, we treat our schoolchildren EVEN MORE like prisoners except that we still spend far more on prisoners than we do our education for our youth...
This is beautiful.

I had a short gig in SF earlier this year and finding this kindness would have definitely helped me make my stay there a more enjoyable experience.

Abrazos from Mexico City.
Google's campaign for a free and open internet
Super cool man. Have a great holiday!