skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been planning to make one myself once the Microvision laser scanning displays got reasonable, but I've been waiting about...15 years for that? so it's probably a lost cause.

The area which I think would be super-interesting and easy would be pure audio mediated reality. Vision is hard, but I could do audio for $500. I have shooting earmuffs which essentially do this already -- they have microphones and speakers, and amplify soft sounds while attenuating loud sounds.
OK here we go, and why not, after all it's Sunday and I've got nothing better to do.. right?

The central tenet was that discourse here is regularly devoid of sound engineering because it tends to be blinded by mindless cultural perceptions of the companies involved in whatever happens to be under discussion. In the case of Apple the expectation is their products are flawless and if not then all hell will be paid on blogs and comment sections everywhere.

Whether or not Darwin is or isn't open source doesn't freaking matter, it was heavily marketed as such back in the sands of time and even if this wasn't the case it doesn't invalidate the central point made in the rant - that just because this device has an Apple logo every popular discussion surrounding it turns to mindless diatribe as a result of non-engineering centric expectations people place on their products, and every engineering-centric party (i.e. hackers) must deal with the whining polluting engineering-centric forums for days every time it happens.

In effect, the complaint is that commenting resembles the squabble of a throng of uninformed consumers rather than the judicious discourse of a forum of engineers.
Apple Must Pay $368 Million in Patent Suit Loss
> That makes no sense. I've taken literature, I've read hundreds of books on my own. Most of them are full of illogical things. At best they are OK to teach morals, not logic.

Not trying to be snarky, but what level literature classes did you take?

I was an English major for a few semesters and I found that there were a league of differences between an introductory course which was little better than reading something on my own (plus a professor's gospel, which we were asked to support or comment but never refute) -- and an upper-level course, which was more centered around research: diving inside of a text and an author, plumbing for patterns and arguments much like one would dive into JavaDocs.
Fuduntu: An Innovative Old Linux Revisited
JavaScript is the future, and why it matters
When did Google try to make people think that?
Global tipping point not backed by science
Text files on Dropbox.
That's a reasonable answer, and yes, it makes sense.

You could say analysis is a theoretical form of programming, or correspondingly, that programming is an applied form of analysis -- specifically, applied on computers.

I guess my main reservation is that if kids' first exposure to analysis is through programming, there's a risk of skewing their perception towards looking for solutions that use computers. ("When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.")

In my experience, I've seen problems that have been approached like: We're doing X too slowly, and it's costing us; what kind of computerized tool can we build to let us do X more quickly? And after the tool has been built, it introduces a new set of processes with its own set of burdens, and X is not really done significantly more quickly. My conclusion is that you often need to step back and re-examine what people are actually doing (and why), and what they actually want to accomplish (and why.)

(And a significant obstacle with that is that people develop habits, and they get comfortable with them, and don't want to change them -- so, without knowing the details of the problem, the first step in "How can I speed up harvesting?" would probably be to have some willingness and flexibility to try out variations in your methods of harvesting.)

If we can find ways of teaching kids to program that build their problem-solving skills while also not clouding their heads with the idea that computers are necessarily part of the best solution, I'm all for it.
I didn't give the Amazon.com URL before. So i had to repost.
I'm surprised by the article really. For decades geeks have been mocked and ridiculed in society and the media. Fast forward to this last decade the wider world understands geeks and the geeks' work has made lives better (in some ways) for a lot of people. And now they are the criminals?

There isn't a god-like status, the internet and blogs are built by nerds so yes they will have their praise there, much as you will see farmers being praised in Africa where i'm from. Geeks aren't even called geeks because 1. they are far apart 2. no one even understands what we do in the first place. We all almost know each other because there's so few of us

Of course we need farmers, we need doctors, ventriloquists: we need all sorts of trades but when you find a different calling don't make yourself feel better by ridiculing other people's careers.

Or maybe, just maybe, because tech is the hype where you are and in your media you feel other trades are being neglected. Whether that's true or not for WHERE YOU LIVE i don't know. I do understand your frustration with the code.org campaign though, which makes it seem like kids won't get identity documents because they can't code (lol). But for the rest of the world outside the valley? We actually need more coders.
The old-school (mid-90s) chording input device was the "twiddler"

http://www.handykey.com/

emacs sucked, though -- it was a pretty good case for vi, due to the control keys not working well with the versions I used. but it looks like they fixed that.
Nothing beats pen and paper. Trust me.
I agree with your point. Most of us here are experts and have click-to-plugin addons installed. However, as Schneider states, the person is always the weakest link.

I've been on the internet for a few years, as a kid, and never got into phishing trouble. Now, as an adult, I've seen phishing forgeries so incredibly detailed that I had to check a lot of factors to finally conclude that it's phishing. And I'm an adult computer scientist who programs web pages!

Just think about any other intelligent adult but without the technical knowledge to detect forgeries. It's turning to be really scary.
all use Ethernet and standards are set for them, all peripherals need to talk to it in same protocol and newer devices should be back compatible .

But with lightning you can design cables which need not use device computing power for all transformations, it is pretty smart, they built this cable for the next decade we will see interesting applications from apple and its partners in coming years
Yes. and it sucks even more when the city your living is a crowded one.
No, we won't. The machines that make us extinct will, however.
I launched StartHQ, a web app directory, this week. You can see a list of todo apps here: https://starthq.com/apps/?category=productivity

I will also add all the ones mentioned here. My personal favorite is https://starthq.com/apps/wunderlist.
A server error occurred. Please contact the administrator.
First one to comment, no surprise given my nick.
;)
Back to Apple’s Future
Unmasked, But Unfazed: Chinese Hacking Group Is Still Active
Today's Outage Post Mortem
The problem wasn't that queuing delay was impossible to detect. The problem was that the documentation described a specific load balancing setup that would have guaranteed better performance per dyno, and that setup was not in fact what was being delivered. It was clearly a material misrepresentation, and in any other service context would constitute a deceptive trade practice. That Heroku is being defended at all is a testament to the goodwill they've built up in the tech community, but it doesn't change the fact that they misrepresented their service, even if it was negligence rather than malice.
I've been using emacs org-mode (http://orgmode.org) for a little over a year. It makes it easy to capture notes, todo-items, and agenda/calendar items. I wanted to learn how to use emacs and it gave me a reason to run emacs every day. Now org-mode has become part of my routine for keeping track of what I have to do and what I've done.
The Entrepreneur's Hoax, and Why I Won't Play Along
If you squint a little bit, video games are a bigger business than movies and such, and they went pretty mainstream circa 1980.
>Car salesmen are sitting and solving logical problems?

If they aren't then they will be unsuccessful as car salesmen. Apart from "how can I sell more cars?" there is "what is the optimal number of cars I can fit in my showroom?", "how shall I present my most profitable deal to its most likely demographic?", "which aspects of my communication skills can be improved?"...the list is endless. Point being there are logical challenges to be solved everywhere.
The SHIELD Act
The cell phone?
Malthus was exactly right, but he couldn't anticipate the coming industrial revolution and the explosion of energy availability through fossil fuels. There may be an equivalent revolution looming, but I can see no sign of it. For all purposes, Malthus could be right 200 years late.

Most people seem to stick to "the system has worked for 350 years, so it must be able to go on indefinitely".
I trust Amazon because their practices make me feel warm and gooey inside. The fact that (foreign) workers are actively exploited just so I can get something delivered that I could have bought for roughly the same price in an actual store for roughly the same price while simultaneously supporting the local economy aligns nicely with my worldview.

I trust Amazon because they treat their workers like cattle, allowing me to feel superior due the fact that I have not yet sunk low enough due to economic pressures that I have to leave my home (and family and/or country) in order to work for sub-standard wages in aforeign country without any actual enforcable rights. I trust Amazon because they successfully subvert union influence , hollowing out any form of social or political control in favour of laissez-faire. I trust Amazon because they fight essentially fight the fascism-socialism-communism of regulatory influence on a market.

I trust Amazon because their ideology does not just include jostling workers like livestock, rather, it also allows right-wing security contractors with Neo-Nazi affiliations to watch and exert control over a mostly foreign workforce.

I trust Amazon because it exploits present social laws if at all possible, showing us nicely that an international company really does good things for local communities.

I trust Amazon, since it is a company that can in all seriousness act surprised once its systematic and systemic abuse of people is uncovered, feigning unawareness and promising immediate consequences.

I trust Amazon because it can now hide behind the "mistake" made with a right-wing militiaesque security outfit instead of addressing the actual scandal, which is the ruthless exploitation of workers who have little choice.

I trust Amazon because it can rely on our own inactivity, complacency and convenience which will let us order things instead of realising the sick machinery that Amazon's behaviour is just a product and example of and that is far more widespread, where everyone involved can defer responsibility because they are but a cog in an overall bigger, self-perpetuating scheme.

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/neue-vorwuerfe-gegen-amazo... [german]

https://www.taz.de/!111213/ [german]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-used-n...

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-to-investigate-german-...
Networking Tips for Shy and Anti-Social IT Pros
Last van brandend maagzuur? Vermijdt dan zeker deze voeding
> Co-founder of Catch here, we are sometimes compared to Evernote but Catch is a note-sharing and collaboration app.

Would you say Catch has something to offer over Evernote for someone who uses the latter for private & personal notes?
I have always felt this way, I just don't feel a need to make a noise about it.

Be wary of confirmation bias and sample set bias (you only hear the worthless noise from those who are speaking it) when reading sites like HN/Reddit/etc.

It's a lot easier to hit the upvote button than it is to type a comment. Not all of HN's constituents are whiny blowhards.
You are absolutely correct. I grew up on a farm and I'm now building FarmLogs because of how tough farming can be. Maybe introducing better technology into the farm can blend both programming and farming.
The story of the machine that took us to the Moon
Backed Or Whacked: Covers To Cloak Your Keys
Have you tried OmniFocus? The Mac client is just fantastic (if you take the time to learn and customize it). And v2.0 (due in seversl months) is even better.

Of course, you have to learn GTD system to get the most out of OmniFocus. It's something that'll greatly improve your efficiency in the long run, so I think it's worth the time you invest.
The Lean LaunchPad Goes to Middle School
Here's our post mortem on what happened:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515
Yeah, true. A model can be valid for some subset of data for some fixed period of time. The real failure is when the model isn't valid even for the defined period. Skill at articulating the limitations and implicit assumptions of any model is far too rare.
I spend several thousand dollars testing a few "eyesight for the blind" products by taking video on a head mounted camera, encoding the image as an 1 image per second audio file that is transmitted to the ears. I was actually able to get it to work as advertised, and I believe that given 10 hours a day practice for a month, you could detect a sense of depth perception and make out attributes in your environment through your audio cortex enough to walk around slowly without bumping into things. I had the blind friend test out the best I could do, and although it was a technological marvel, he actually didn't like it because it made people ostracise him even MORE than him being blind. He can move around slowly without bumping into things much more fashionably with the system he already had, a stick, good hearing, touch, and memory.

So a few insights:

1. If you are putting something in front of your eyes, or on your hat brim that looks like a hacked together bunch of cameras and wires and you wear it in public, there is millions of years of evolution causing people to ostracise you. It's so bad, that a blind person told me: "The ostracism from wearing it is worse than the ostracism from them realizing your blind."

2. You think you're confidant and can handle it? You aren't, inside you are millions of years of evolution to remove what is causing the ostracism. If you are the kind of person who can choose to remain single and lonely for life when you burn with passion for the opposite sex, then you have the kind of mettle it takes to wear cameras and wires on your head in public.

3. The experience I had with converting visual to audio and using my audio cortex was tremendous. For example objects that "popped out" at me during audio-vision were completely different than normal vision. Take a brick wall for instance: I could hear the distance between the bricks (cement) was smaller in one spot, and larger in another spot because of an anomalous blip in the audio file. When looking at it visually, you think "meh", it's just a brick wall. With the audio file, the different brick leaps out at you as an anomaly. Thus exposing the data structure/algorithmic differences between the visual cortex and audio cortex.

Doing visual as audio makes you an infant again, the tiniest changes in things leap out as fascinating. This experience I had could probably be sold to people bored to tears with life. A billion dollar idea! Be an infant again.
We launched http://taskmessenger.com in January. It's a shared to-do list for personal and team use. Sign up is free and if you need any features or help getting started drop me a mail at alan@taskmessenger.com (I'm a co-founder)

We have a search function for keeping track of tasks, an activity feed showing tasks completed while we also track stats such as tasks shared, picked up and completed.
Driving the equipment around is the fun part, but not the real work that goes into the business. Farming is actually quite challenging.

A recent problem I remember having on my farm: Soil is full of wet lumps of clay, unsuitable for planting, cultivators are not breaking them up and you have a few day window to fix the problem before it gets too late into the season to plant the crop. What do you do?

I actually agree that the point is to attract more programmers into the industry, but the consequences of that seem dangerous. What happens when we have too many programmers? Should coding classes be dropped from the system?
I just roll with butt ugly for my docs. I figure, at least I'm generating them.
- For simple personal things, a Chrome extension I made that gives you a simple localStorage backed textarea. I can share if anyone's interested.

- For code, Github issues/pull requests

- For team tasks that need to be delegated, Teambox (http://teambox.com)

- For scheduled things, Google Calendar
My favourite example of this is loops. Its very annoying to put an async call inside the loop since you need to rewrite the loop as a recursive function.
Since you said a great desktop interface.. check out MS OneNote, integrates with Outlook for schedule/reminders, very good drag/drop support of anything.

If you can pay $, Atlassian JIRA is the best for programming, you can schedule/plan tasks, get reminders, much better sorting of issues/categories, phases, have them automatically close with commits (JIRA is just like github only way more advanced in what you can do)

Now if you are doing an open source project for the community then hands down stay on github
Senator Seeks More Data Rights for Online Consumers
I hope submitting your own stuff isn't considered unethical. I just thought some of you guys might find this useful.
Tried building it, making sure that I used a clean bash environment not polluted with Homebrew or anything else. Bootstrap failed with no particular error, just a useless "exited with status 1".

Traced it to bmake/boot-strap, which after building bmake will run "bmake -r -m / test". Apparently bmake doesn't understand the arguments but, in typical Unixy fashion, will not say what it doesn't understand, but will instead output a "usage: bmake ..." and exit with a non-zero exit code, which causes everything to abort.

So I added some debug output to bmake's main.c and found that even though boot-strap invoked it with those arguments, bmake itself parsed them as "-j4 -w". Which is what I have MAKEFLAGS set to in my environment. I unset MAKEFLAGS and everything builds.

I love Unix, but I just hate how everything exists with so little separation and so much obscure brittleness, ending up in a situation where a tool called "bmake" will use options I intended for GNU Make (which doesn't have a .gnumakerc and so requires a global environment variable).
nvAlt
Yes, it did. Think about it again...
Not any more...
Google Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Athrow...
It's all been pretty boring since the harnessing of fire.
What would you add or change on previous apps you've used?
Caterpillar announces rugged Android phone
Heuristic algorithms are pretty much exclusively about biases.
They're sort of already here. Bulb with dimmer and communications and software configurability built in:

http://www.smarthome.com/2672-222/INSTEON-LED-Bulb/p.aspx
The comments on the Crimson site are insane. These are some jaded people.
Team Collaboration With GitHub
Couldn't find a support@throwww.com to email about the last post, but it seems like the server went down. This link should work, I think. Also, I couldn't edit the url in HN, so I posted it again, tho I do see now I google cache version in the comments section. Should I delete this story?
Do you know if there are any good alternatives that are pure-ish JS? I know that same guy worked on tamejs but they don't seem to be working on that anymore...
Wow, that's pretty fast turnaround for a post-mortem (although it looks to have been a simple problem, so easier to figure out what to write)
I still don't understand why people are so reluctant to teach kids code. Most of the argument I had read by now can be reduced to "not all people can be a programmer".

While I am agree that programming as a career is not for everybody, be able to code is a valuable advantage in a lot of areas such as marketing, sales, physics, biology, chemistry, art, etc.

I wonder if the same controversy was in place when people start recommending to teach math in schools, just because Math is not for everybody.
Responsive web design: the war has not yet been won » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks
I'm not very educated on this end of the spectrum - but I wonder if a process is possible where a rule or router update of some description is applied to one router only, testing the specific schema before pushing to the rest of the routers, thereby failing one router and not failing the rest? I understand the need to respond as quickly as possible - but as stated in this case this was already a manual response.

It appeals to my limited knowledge and non-existant experience that this would be a solution to the prevention of this occurring again in the future?
[1]: They sell the things at a profit, then turn that profit into more infrastructure to sell things before it gets to the shareholders -- which may or may not be the best deal for the shareholders, but that part impacts the customers little.
[2]: "many products" - what, Prime and the Kindle? Plenty of people don't interact with either. :P
At the physical level, there are big differences between 10baseT and 10GE, even though both are "ethernet".
While I agree that there is precious little interesting technical discussion on HN, engineering is an ideological discipline, just like anything else.
"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought."

That would mean that, the best way to influence people is to use expletives. If it's true then there's no wonder so many people are rude on the internet - it's the best way to get your message across!
Why Groupon Ousted Its CEO
What is your point? That he's an imperfect version of the kind of rebellious hero figure people think he is?

Very few people have sufficient courage of their convictions to consider doing what he did. The rest of the psychological portait is noise.
> Growing food is far more challenging

...NOT!!! I know you Americans tend to see having a basic little vegetable garden as "black magic", but it's really something one can learn in under a week and based on this knowledge grow things to the point that one can actually produce enough for sale and maybe run a small business! But's you can't learn programming well enough to actually get any benefit out of it, let alone actually make a living from this alone, in a week! Yeah, I pick my food from the supermarket just like you, but I spent enough of my childhood at a farm know that things are really easy (at least if don't try running your little garden as a real business and get enough profit to cover marketing, distribution etc. - then shit gets really complicated), basically high-school biology is more than enough and everything can be found in any book or googled in minutes and you have tools that come with all the needed instructions and seed, herbicedes etc.

It all boils to this funny observation: plants can grow by themselves, you just need to guide things a bit to get the desired outcome! otoh, computers don't program themselves, code doesn't write itself - you have to do it, and this is why it's hard and also fun and rewarding (for a comparison, starting to learn how to farm by writing the genetic code of the organism's you'll be farming - ok, it's and orders of magnitude exaggeration, but it's still the closest way farming could be alike to coding).