skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Dear Apple, I’d love to see you implement this in Apple Maps. Dear developers, I’d love to see you implement this in any pinch-to-zoom app.

Better yet:

Dear Apple, I’d love to see you implement this in iOS, so that developers don't have to.
Ask HN: Have you considered writing a book with the aid of AI?
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/

It really doesn't seem that far-fetched considering this is what is already being done. I can imagine numerous ways an AI would make writing a book less painful.
Even as a founder of a company, Steve Jobs is by large not of much use without somebody like Steve Wozniak.
Many April Fools jokes are being posted now since it's past midnight GMT.
Type 'peep' at http://www.wnyc.org/
> I'd argue that it's far more likely a mass shooting event would take place with conventional firearms than with a PGF; a bolt-action hunting rifle isn't exactly the quickest method of getting a lot of lead on a lot of different targets. The very nature of the PGF's "Tag-Track-Xact" scope encourages methodical target selection at range, and hauling even a hypothetical smaller PGF into a crowded place and letting loose would be enormously difficult. It's not a close-quarters weapon by any stretch of the imagination.

Sure it's not a close-quarters weapon, but a imagine a mass shooting where the shooter was a mile from the deaths: almost untraceable, and very hard to stop in a short time, so the shooter could sit and pick off targets for twenty minutes.
I think I agree with most of your points, but disagree with your disapproval of "easier to learn". The presentation of material really makes a gigantic difference on how well you learn the material (if at all). While I agree that coursera and edX shouldn't hasten towards "gamification" of any sort, I think there is plenty of work in making the classes of better quality, and I think that _will_ make it easier to learn.

I was taking a course on coursera where I thought the professor was talking too quickly --- so I actually slowed it down to 75% the pace in the video. Awesome! I was happy to be able to do that.

Otherwise though, I don't think the course was presented that well. For one, lectures were shitty recordings of slides; I was looking at nothing but text and static images for entire lectures (never seeing the professor's face), and they were blurry, hard to read, and just hard to understand. Of _course_ that makes it harder to learn! I have to focus on figuring out what the hell is written there! And there was no (free) textbook for the course.

Anyway, I think the point I am just trying to make is that while the author of this article might be suggesting to Coursera to take steps in questionable directions, I DO think a lot of those courses could be better polished, and that would make it easier to learn from them.
How to Identify a Minimum Viable Product
They're still not hip.
https://www.youtube.com/theyoutubecollection
So the no-action letter in this case pertains to whether the SEC would treat AngelList as a broker-dealer under §15(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Brokers are people who trade securities on the behalf of others, and the §15(a) applies various requirements to them, ranging from minimum capital requirements to general requirements not to use fraudulent or misleading statements in the sale of securities.

Given the central role brokers have occupied as critical intermediaries in securities transactions, it's not really hard to see what precipitated their regulation. Who knows, maybe modern technology will make such intermediaries obsolete and consequently make §15(a) obsolete. We're not there yet, and in the meantime I don't see anything particularly morally outrageous about having to ask the SEC for permission to not adhere to the various broker-dealer requirements in situations where you are arguably functioning as an intermediary.

As an aside, regulations are very often oblique, arbitrary, and manipulated by special interests. But have you ever read the CORBA spec? At a certain level its a phenomenon of large-scale human interaction that you have to make peace with. That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight it when it's wrong (we seem to have replaced CORBA with SOAP and JSON and whatnot) but it's useful to understand why things in the world evolve to look the way they do.
This angers me more than anything!
"Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can
pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?"

Voting on good or bad articles for a blog? This is a good idea.

"For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the
end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even
seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments
are ordered chronologically, just like the entries."

Comments along the side, remarking on the story as it goes? This is a good idea.

"And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes --
heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me,
because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version"

Diffs? This is a good idea.

"All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each
comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking
about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so
users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds."

This is a good extension of the previous idea.

"When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single
configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-
matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?"

... uhm. Well 4 in a row aint bad.
Pony OS, a new operating system built from scratch
What kind of non-military applications are there for sniper missions in the US (say, California)?
This has been on HN btw:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919729
Maybe those of us that think this way should have an annual IRC chat so we can continue to learn things while others act like monkeys. Actually I have got a lot of papers I can get caught up on reading today.
Strange. Don't have an answer for that, you can see the full setup in the bug report.
Reboots to Linux?
Gmail Tap is from last year.
I wrote a file system that gives weather reports: http://github.com/bhickey/cloudyfs
The Time Indiana Tried to Change Pi to 3.2
That's a good one too - luckily they had a second edition or it may have been totally lost in the endless abyss of time. I'd be really surprised to find someone of my generation to have read about it though...
Nowadays you can tell something's an April Fools joke because it uses the Bootstrap default CSS.
The angels helping Indian start-ups spread their wings
Doesn't this apply to any long-range rifle? Or do you mean that the specific technology here makes it feasible where it's not feasible with an ordinary rifle? I can see how the latter might be true.
Do the police count as military? Because SWAT would almost certainly love to have better snipers.

Also, javelina hunting.
a) "Um, no", but times a thousand!

b) Quibbling? Have you ever practiced law or been involved in it? If not, prepare yourself; you are in for a frustrating experience. What you call quibbling is what you pay several thousand dollars an hour for. That is the essential function of the legal profession. To quibble. However, it is not "quibbling" to state that SCOTUS has no power of judicial review granted in the US Constitution. It is an assumed power; an assumption which could just as easily be undone by another accident of history. Therefore, they are hardly best described as the "ultimate" arbiter. That power remains one of the consent of the governed. Clear?

The examples you state are of the executive branch exercising (illegally) State power for political purposes. It is not the marshals of the SCOTUS directing the US Army or some nonsense.

As for your "lack of memory" regarding the legislative and executive ignoring the dictates of SCOTUS you need look no further back in history than the same civil rights era you point to. Most of the opinions regarding civil rights emanating from the Warren court were flatly ignored for years. It was the force of public political will and some may argue an ascendant media that changed public policy.

See above? To what? I hate to tell you this, but an opinion of SCOTUS is not a magic incantation. According to your view I suppose if SCOTUS decided some absurd conclusion in clear contradiction of the Constitution it would simply be law?

Consider a more realistic scenario. For example if a future Court decides that the absurd Roberts opinion in the "Obamacare" decision and its legal gymnastics regarding the commerce clause is reversible. Do you think the executive and legislative will refund all the taxes and penalties they will have collected in the interim? If we follow your line of reasoning, a future SCOTUS makes the law void as of the date it was enacted, magically as if it never existed. This may be what they teach in high school civics classes (do they still teach those?) but it is not how power ebbs.

The judiciary has no real power other than that of apparent authority. Why do you think they have resisted for so long cameras in the courtroom? Why do they engage in absurd theater of black robes (thankfully no wigs)? Because once people see how the sausage is made that apparent authority evaporates and they are just another arbitrary institution.

SCOTUS and most, but definitely not all, supreme courts throughout history thankfully have been nothing more than theater.
I believe there are already ATF issues with remote firing, and they could make an argument that this supports remote firing and heavily restrict it, if they want. There were target (pistols? rifles? I forget) with electronic triggers for a while, but they got banned in competition. The Remington 700 EtronX was essentially stillborn in 2004 too.

The spotter in a 2-man (or for some ops, 3-man) team provides a lot of value beyond just wind -- both local security and usually being the senior person, command (and communication with those beyond the team). It's kind of the same thing as with tanks -- we can autoload the main gun, going from a 4-man to 3-man crew, but a 4-man tank can generally be self sufficient on the battlefield; a 3-man tank crew really has a hard time.

It would be maybe more meaningful for a police or other static precision marksman situation, where it usually is a one-man sniper deployment in radio contact with command. But most police shots are very short range (100-200 meter), where .308 or .300winmag are less affected by most wind.
So my One Month Rails class is the biggest class on Skillshare at the moment (5000 students) and I can't echo this point enough:

"Here's why Codecademy doesn't work in the long term... You don't know how to set up a development environment. Any time you have the slightest inkling to build something for yourself leveraging what you've learned in Codecademy, you can't and probably don't know where to start."

I'm all for encouraging a solid understanding of the syntax of code, but it's a totally different skill set from building web applications – which requires an understanding of topics like MVC, authentication, authorization, deploying, and using 3rd party libraries (and which to use).

This is the kind of stuff people want to learn when they talk about learning how to code and most sites bait and switch them into learning loops, variables, and functions.
Google Analytics says the ISS has 41 viewers on your site
Check out your "Real Time Analytics" and have a happy April Fool's Day
Both of the cartridges mentioned in the article are going to be quite loud; combined with the relatively low rate of fire, it would be fairly tractable to track someone down who is firing multiple shots. Someone setting up, firing a single shot and then waiting a week could be a bit more difficult, but then there are many more opportunities for them to get seen lugging around an 18lb rifle.
Agreed. However at some point, the best programmers I know have all tried to build their own product - ownership (with varying degrees of success and failure).

Obligatory patio11 articles:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
At that point, why not just put a rental truck full of ANFO at the target, a cellphone trigger, and a webcam?
The person you're replying to is an actual lawyer.
SWAT, though they tend to be much shorter range than this.
Those of us who do so generally do so because we're sick of the noise and forced interaction overload. We don't replace it, there's nothing with granular enough options to filter out the drek. Shame about Diaspora not coming into its own.
A Romantic Tale of Deferrals and Promises
BinaryScript coverts developer code into BS (April Fools Prank)
I first encountered this method of zooming in and out in an Android browser called xScope a few years back. The developer called it "pin zoom," and it was one of the major features he touted.

Incidentally, xScope was also the first multi-touch browser for Android. I'm not sure what that dev is up to now, but I like to give him props when this UI technique comes up.
Because they're drowned in a sea of garbage.
HBO: 'Game of Thrones' piracy is a compliment
USPTO Refuses Apple's iPad mini Trademark Application
The old "self" was a reference type like C++—it behaved like a pointer but wasn't really a pointer (you didn't use * to access it). This was unneeded complexity in the language.

It was also not obvious that the implicit self type was immutable.

Finally, it let us remove "static" in a few places ("static" methods), reducing noise. It makes type implementations (impl Type { ... }) the same as regular modules, except that you can use "&self" and friends to declare methods.
great thanks, messaged
Why? Unless I am completely missing something, the iOS version is a subset of the Android version. The latter is everybit as usable and smooth, with more integration and functionality.
Show HN: Play the same audio/same time on iPhones & PCs to create 1 big stereo.
INTERCAL on Interstates http://www.intercaloninterstates.org/

Stackoverflow rolls out "Chat with an expert" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470570
My weekend game project for a year now
That is fantastic!
JavaScriptCore LLVM JIT landed
Yeah, it's hard to automate the fixes; most of the things gofix was used for is things like adding semicolons and changing method names. That said, I would definitely welcome a rustfix for the easier changes.
This is also from last year, IIRC
The problem with books and online exercises is that when you get stuck you want to give up. It's hard to motivate yourself to push through. Unless you have awesome friends who have the patience to help, who will be your mentor?

The programs you mentioned are great. But it's still just like going to school.
As for your idea of compiling to some bytecode, if one wants to minimize sandboxing overhead, the representation needs to carry along with it an efficiently machine-checkable proof that it is well behaved. There are other ways to do this, but a sound static type system is the most well researched way of doing this. On top of this, the semantics of JavaScript aren't very clean, so there's a tension between making the semantics of the representation a good target for JavaScript and making the semantics of the representation a good target for non-JavaScript languages.

A stack-based bytecode would likely yield the best code size (at least in the absence of compression). An SSA-based representation is most attractive from the standpoint translating to the most optimized native code. A register machine representation is a good happy medium for fast interpreters and pretty good tracing JITs. People also occasionally float the idea of shipping around compressed syntax trees to at least cut down on bandwidth usage and time taken to tokenize and parse JS, as a least disruptive option.

In the end, I think there are too many options and too many players with conflicting goals for a standards committee to come up with a solution that gets widely adopted, so we'll need the invisible hand of the market to sort out the competing ideas.

At present, I think the closest we've got to your ideal is LLVM bitcode via Google's PNaCl plugin. Emscripten can generate JavaScript from LLVM bitcode, closing the loop, but I'm not aware of any production systems that target PNaCl with an Emscripten fallback for browsers that don't understand PNaCl.

Edit: s/space usage/bandwidth usage/, note that compressed syntax trees are the least disruptive option. Those wishing to disrupt the browser language landscape probably don't want the least disruptive option, but it's probably preferable to a lower level representation that too closely matches the semantics of JS, as that would tend to force JS semantics deeper into the VM's implementation.
might be kind of interesting to do an IamA on reddit. I'd like to hear more about what it's like to work in HPCs -- even simply considering how to build that kind of processing and how to think in terms of jobs that take real time to complete.
I think the largest application would be making a sniper out of a non-sniper. The guy in the video had never fired a rifle before and was able to hit the target dead center at 1,000 yards. If you can lower the costs enough, everyone would be a sniper.
Google Analytics - We were visited from International Space Station - http://www.merocampus.com/blog/2013/04/01/merocampus-visited...
I obviously want one of these :)

The place where this kind of thing would be most useful is integrated into a CROWS mount -- a fully automated turret which can be put on top of a vehicle, in static emplacements, etc. Being able to make single, aimed, highly accurate shots on vehicles approaching a checkpoint from a .50bmg mounted on an unattended vehicle up forward would be really nice, since you could then not put any of your own forces at risk, while taking single shots to the engine (to disable the vehicle) vs. unloading on the vehicle with multiple bursts (which would be highly likely to kill the occupants, who may not be "bad guys").

Deskilling the precision marksman job isn't as important -- a real sniper needs huge amounts of other training beyond precision shooting, so the shooting training isn't the biggest barrier there, and the level of skill required for ordinary police 100-200m designated marksman isn't really much for the shooting, so much as for shoot/no shoot, various intermediate/barrier materials, etc.

The only way to do police levels of accuracy at 1000m would be with some kind of actively guided round; they generally won't accept a shot a military sniper would consider acceptable, as it's usually for hostage rescue situations. A military sniper is probably ok with taking a shot where if he misses, another enemy beside the one he's trying to kill gets killed instead, most of the time, as long as his odds of hitting the target are high enough. So those shots can be in the 600-1500m range. I've never heard of police shots beyond 300m. They're usually 50-150m but often with glass or other barrier material between them and the target.
Youtube on the selection of a winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H542nLTTbu0
There could be all kinds of reasons not to do that. Just for example, suppose the shooter has a specific grievance against black people, or some form of local backing to eliminate certain classes of individuals, rather than just generically being angry at society.

Such things have been known to happen in the history of South America, for example.
Launching a startup can be difficult.
If Rick Falkvinge stopped saying "the copyright monopoly" and instead just said "copyright", then everything he said would make more sense, and more people might understand it more quickly, and he would be less frustrated. There is no such thing as "the copyright monopoly". Each individual copyright is a monopoly. But that's "monopolies", not one "monopoly".

There is perhaps a "copyright industry", consisting of companies and institutions that have a financial interest in the maximal copyright and maximal copyright enforcement. But those companies and institutions don't particularly have a monopoly on anything, other than their individivual copyrighted works.

For a clear statement of how copyright relates to the interests of the general public, read "Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html) by Richard Stallman, which, unlike much of what Falkvinge writes, actually makes sense all the way through.
"If you go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc -- basically any of the Ivy League, top LACs, or a few other elite schools -- and your family makes under, say, $60k/year, your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free."

Unless your family is paying for multiple children going to college at the same time. Mine was a lower middle class family paying for my older brother and I to go to college (with my younger brother going to college by time I was a senior). My parents combined made more than 60k but not by all that much. Combine this with the fact that Columbia's financial aid pool actually dried up when I entered the school (an alum eventually donated a hefty sum a couple years later but that was after I graduated) and my family ended up not meeting the harsh financial aid requirements. And my case wasn't unique either. My roommate, and eventual best friend, was in the same position but without a younger sibling.

"Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school."

This one isn't true in all states. In NY, if you had the type of grades that would get you into an Ivy, you would get some form of scholarship to most of the local state schools. My cousin (same year and school) wasn't good enough to get into an Ivy but he had good grades. He put his effort into showing a few choice state schools that he was really interested in them. This landed him a partial scholarship (with grade requirements that he easily hit). Combined with how easy commuting is in NY (so no dorm) and his total tuition came out to less than half of what I paid in a single year.
Venture Capital Investments in the Information Technology Sector
And that's the heart of it all. If we had a static low-level highly optimized language, im sure we'd all compile javascript or whatever to it, especially if we can add on type checking and other optimizations.

HOWEVER, we cannot. That's the issue. So JS is the web's most low-level language at the moment.
Maybe because I am making no fundamental argument? I have no interest in a dialog. You made several egregious errors. They were pointed out. First that the US Constitution is not a moral document. Second, that SCOTUS is an "ultimate" arbiter.

If you do not believe that the US Constitution and other founding documents were products of Enlightenment thinking and that natural law principles did not inform the debate then we really have nothing more to discuss. You are simply choosing to remain ignorant of the history. I do not care to grant your stipulation. There is nothing to stipulate to. You are just flatly wrong. I'm assuming you are one of those "living" document types and want to talk about what the meaning of the word "is" is. My tank full of patience for that ran out long ago.

Your reply makes no sense. Also your "yelling" comment is rhetorical grandstanding. I have barely raised an eyebrow, let alone my voice.

I also notice you failed completely to address the fundamental point regarding morality and the US Constitution with respect to slavery. Do you believe it was rational thought and not moral judgments that led to the conclusion that slaves were 3/5 citizens for apportionment?