skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UL exists in its incarnation because of government regulation - e.g. electrical components have UL listings because the NFPA 72(aka The National Electrical Code) requires electrical components to be listed. The same is true for the styrene panels used in the design of the structure.

The insurance under-writers (the "U" in "UL") were the driving force in establishing building codes and fire fighting as a public service. Of course the next turtle down is that property insurance allows banks to finance real property in accordance with financial regulations. [edit: the last turtle being legal title to real property recorded at the courthouse - and title to which in many places can be traced back to royal grant.]

Anyone active in the US housing industry ought to be aware that the current requiring fire sprinklers in single family dwellings is a direct result of insurance industry lobbying on the ICC. Or to put it another way, UL is part of the establishment and its members lobby heavily in favor of regulation.
Is it just me, or is the two-column layout a bit tricky for readability?

(1440x900)
>And is accessing a url is a legally binding contract now, especially when nothing is signed or acknowledged by one or both parties when the url is accessed?

This is in no way comparable to using a companies API.
You've explained it well! And you're exactly right, thanks to the accelerometer we get distances in real-world units. The trick is very closely integrating computer vision and inertial sensing. Images provide an external reference that can clean up the noise from the accelerometer, and the accelerometer provides absolute scale which you can't get from images alone. (I'm one of the founders, BTW.)
>However, to my knowledge, I have never signed a contract with Google.

To use their API you will need to agree to their TOS

https://developers.google.com/maps/licensing
Alright, it wasn't clear you were nitpicking the size (not the resolution) or I would have left it alone. Quite fair. :-)
You did come off as smug, but I wish I could un-downvote you.

HN should always be a place where we can give feedback on web design.
I can't believe NodeJS doesn't support Dragon symbols. This is a dealbreaker.
it's actually 9 times the rate, if you do the math correctly.
Where and when did Drew say that?
Ron Conway Is Not Going To Bullshit You About The NSA
Sweet.js brings macros to JavaScript
Running a research group is a lot like running a small business from the professor's point of view. You have employees (grad students, lab managers) and equipment/supply/rent(overhead) costs that you use to produce a product (research, in the form of papers). You produce these products on a kind of account basis (not a per-paper basis), but if you aren't producing enough when it's time to re-up with your funding agency you lose that grant revenue. When the revenue situation gets bleak due to either mismanagement or the funding climate (sequester, anybody?), you can even "go out of business" and have to close your lab. Even though professors are paid by the university and not out of grants, it's doom for your tenure case if your lab goes into the red.
Right time, right place. To me that seems like a pretty standard way (some) tech breaks into the mainstream. Tablets also existed at the beginning of the last decade (maybe even earlier in some form, I don’t know) but they never broke out of their niche.

It took the right technology (low-power SoCs that are nevertheless fast enough for desktop PC level UI performance, better batteries, compact capacitive touch screens, SSDs – and all that together at the price of a budget PC) plus the right software (not just a desktop OS) to make it work.

It seems and I hope we are at a similar point with VR. The tech is finally good and cheap enough, plus the software mature enough to allow developers easy integration.

Hopefully it will work out.

(Also relevant: The Hype Cycle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle But I’m never sure how much confirmation bias is in that way of seeing the world – but it seems to apply to a great many things.)
I have never visited that page. I have visited this one: http://maps.google.com

That webpage serves map tiles over HTTP, without asking me to agree to a contract first. I take it that I may therefore access the map tiles over HTTP? Obviously I assume I cannot redistribute them, as they're copyrighted. And it is good netiquette to observe robots.txt for bulk/crawl access. But beyond that I don't believe me visiting their page constitutes me "signing" a contract with Google, any more than Google visiting my page constitutes them "signing" a contract with me.

Perhaps there is some other API with nice JSON stuff and OAuth or whatever, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just doing HTTP GET requests for map tile URLs.
Although that version isn't offered from the main dropbox page, you have to go to https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes
Oh, I'm just thinking that you only write and read from storage that can be manually verified. You therefore wouldn't verify the output of your compiler with anything that was compiled by that compiler.. instead you would verify it with the owners manual and some underlings to do the grunt work.

So you run your compiler, and it punches cards for you. You then turn off the machine, remove the cards, and verify them. If that checks out, then you boot the machine with the cards again. Anything that persists the reboot has to be on those cards, and is therefore subject to uncompromised inspection.
> I'll just ask the obvious: Anyone else interested in this type of thing?

http://www.seasteading.org/
You obviously do not have the requirement of living close to Vancouver BC in order to maintain an income.

As said elsewhere if one is willing to move out into a remote area you can definitely pick up land for less money ($2k cash for your own land with mountain views is blowing my mind and making me cry on the inside). Unfortunately, so much IT work is centred around metro areas and property is very expensive.
yes, and if you were offered a 25% interest rate, perhaps based on a poor choice of major, then the signal would be "don't go to college"; or "switch majors"; or "get better grades"
Then you don't need the lexer to parse balanced parens. The job of the lexer is to turn

("Foo(" + bar)

into something like

OpenParen String Op Identifier CloseParen

Then the (synyactical) parser takes over. This is pretty standard.
Interesting. Never heard of that before. Looking at a video, the only thing I can see that might be a problem is the motion scaling (where rotations are scaled up, so that a normal monitor will stay in your field of vision even while you look "behind" you). For people who've tried it - is that something that's easy to adjust to, or does your brain nag that things aren't quite right?
Being a jerk comes naturally with being a journeyman. You've got an idea, and you're out to prove it's the best. Especially so in computing, where the only winning strategy is complete world domination.

Mastery of a subject means giving up attachment to favourite ideas and seeing the merits of all of them. But we've not really set up a society acknowledge this, we're stuck in a world of thousands of journeymen, with just a few people who have reached such transcendent heights that their mastery is obvious. We're stuck in a society that values novelty over good taste.
Local news, Hacker News and checking RSS feed for any interesting news.
"conspicuous authenticity" I like that.
Thank you! Search engines are spoiling us. Entire article about an acronym that doesn't bother decyphering or explaining it.
Are you aware that passwords over SSL become even worse when the developer responds to criticism by setting up shill accounts?
I noticed that "get roommates" also wasn't on the list.
Glad you enjoyed it. I just try to be efficient with it by not saving emails and deleting when done and/or if I skip an issue. Besides that, I use gmail's labels and the + tag trick to help sort them.
You make a great point, and we certainly don't want to exclude the in-between cases. We're still figuring out what those pricing tiers might look like, so if you've got an application that you're excited about, just let us know and we'll figure out a way to make it work!
what the heck is an ALF fantasy game?
Smart sprinkler heads seems like an idea that scales.
SHHH - you're insulting my armchair activist! :-)

While I am well aware that ther are billions that live in lesser conditions than the hipster-dome under discussion, one of the points of the article was that there is "inefficiency" in the home rental/ownership paradigm; while this may be true - I do not see how this is solved by sacraficing something as crucial as a bathroom (or kitchen [I lived in my house during a kitchen remodel, and I cooked using my backpacking gear for 2 months, and that FARKING SUCKED])

So - Yeah - this would be a great fort, or cool guest room, I'd not want to actually live there.

Ever have to walk from your "room" to the bathroom when there is a monsoon-like storm outside which you must traverse (at 4am). No thanks
on reflection, I don't think the problem is popularization, so much as "authoritization". For whatever reason we like to put authoritative power in numbers. Although I disagree with his overall thesis and politics, David Graeber, in "Debt: the first 5000 years" really does identify this psychological tendency. (I think the solution is to free people from those shackles instead of giving in to it and trying to craft a solution that avoids it)
Definitely agree with you. There's pros and there's cons. Just gotta figure out if the pros outweigh the cons for you in your particular circumstance. I am a renter and get the same thing said to me "Why rent when you can buy?!" I don't know if I want to spend the next 30 years living in this area, so that's why I haven't bought yet... Although I am thinking of buying a house in the next year.
A lot of it goes into plastics and also tractors.
I can't help but feel that the MBA is the scourge of the modern world. People in leadership positions need to be experts in the field they lead.
> The idea that it's wasting money, or that you're paying someone else's mortgage, or whatever other argument is thrown out there are part of one of the biggest financial misconceptions going.

That I believed this was assumed, and that I was comparing _renting to purchasing a house_ was also assumed (but probably not so clear!). I was comparing renting to what the dome-builder was doing. With that said, renting vs. ownership is obviously situational.

To live 2 miles (walking distance) from downtown Denver:

~650 for rent
~150 for a garage w/ electricity
~100 for utilities

$900 month.

When I looked into buying in Denver anywhere in the same distance, I was looking at $1250 month w/ no garage, unless I lived in the Arts District (a bit rougher), and most of those houses needed to be torn down.
It takes the best of traditional fantasy sports games, mixes it with killer video game elements!
I feel like I deserve to live in a world with fewer self-entitled people.
This is the closest thing I could find googling for 45 seconds:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/226280/dropbox_a_file_sharers...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483053
Really? Found this[0] link on a site listed on this topic thread.

And like blog posts written by people on various subjects, one might click the links, find something of value from accessing the link and decide to access it in an automated fashion without caring (Oh, it has api in the url! * doesn't think twice about it *) to bother to look for anything else because as far as they are concerned, they're getting what they need right there. Now if they run into rate limits and get blocked for x amount of time, its tough luck. But if one doesn't run into rate limits, and continue to uses such a link, should they expect the 2 am wake up call or expect to get kicked out of their home or face significant hardships in life because of it?

[0] http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=fals...
> My suggestion for future articles

The interesting thing about putting things out into the world is that people feel compelled to have an opinion. The fact of the matter is that this only exists because it's something that I feel motivated to write about. I am under no contractual obligation to produce anything, so that it exists at all is the result of a labor of love. You're probably right that there is nothing ground-breaking here and that the same information is available elsewhere, but where? Two dozen blog posts here, a few dozen Usenet posts there, a few books over here and a few papers over there. The value that I'm attempting to bring is through curation -- value to myself and as a side-effect others. The information is free foremost and is created on my free time.

As an author I have very little control over my readers' expectations or desires. The topics that you list are definitely interesting, so I hope to see you one day write about them on your blog (which I like BTW). I think that if this newsletter does not meet your expectations then maybe you will not like future installments. I appreciate your constructive criticism, but if I am to write a newsletter then I should stand true to the topics and styles that I would like to read and hope there are others who feel the same.

Thanks for reading.
That is something that is listed for 9.3. You can have a M1 with R1, R2, R3.

Now you change R1 to master, and take M1 "offline", afterwards turn M1 back on, and have it become a slave to R1.

See http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What's_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.3...
These are usually implemented using Structure from Motion techniques, but more specifically in this case SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). There are two sources of information: from vision and from the Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) on the phone.

For the vision part, you start by extracting interest points in all images (Harris keypoints, or SIFT, or similar), then you match them up by using local patch descriptors, (a reasonable implementation in OpenCV for example is the Lucas Kanade Optical Flow tracker) and once you have the correspondences you can estimate a relative 3D camera transformation that explains the motion. In this case the problem is hard because the depth of every point is unknown in addition to the camera transform.

For the IMU stream you can use the accelerometer and gyro in the camera which gives you an estimate for both linear and rotational acceleration. These can be integrated over time to get a reasonable guess for the camera transformations from one time point to another as well.

You combine the two guesses (from vision and from the phone inertial measurement units) into a best guess, and then combine that in addition with the best guess from 30 milliseconds ago to arrive at an evolving probability distribution of this best guess over time. Standard way would be something like a Kalman Filter.

Another issue is dealing with drift over time, as errors in estimation build up and if you're scanning the same area your model will start to drift. This requires something called "Loop Closure" which optimizes the camera matrices across the entire duration of scan and not only frame to frame. This is very computational intensive and hard to do online and without it scans for longer than few seconds will get progressively uglier and misaligned.

This stuff is super tricky to get right. Also, be skeptical of these demos because they are easy to can. It's fairly easy to get that one shot where it looks like it works, but in practice these are exceptionally fragile and very very difficult to get working. Though I'm impressed it seemed to work okay inside the mall -- with all the specular reflections from the floor. Though I'd guess that if anyone placed a foot into the field of vision (and made the environment geometry nonstatic) it would all break :) Good luck to the team though!
that's a great philosophy, but you have to have the personal network to back it up. make a lot of friends, know who's working on what, and offer to help the ones with projects you like.
BornYet: Notify friends when your baby arrives
Really amazing product! Is the form on your site the most expedient way to get in touch/get access to the SDK? Also, is the error accumulation small enough so that you could use the product continuously for extended periods of time?
The author is a bit confused if he thinks he's going to receive assistance to uphold the constitution from a gun-control lobbyist; why should someone so willing to trample over the second amendment lift a finger to help protect the fourth?
Monolithic domes are a wonder and a seeming paradox. You get an earthquake-proof, tornado-proof, bullet-proof, bomb-proof, collision-with-a-barrelling-semi-proof reinforced concrete structure that goes up almost instantly. But if you get a pin-prick in the vinyl airform, you have to deal with vapor-drive of water into the polyurethane foam, and your structure gets damaged.

http://www.monolithic.com/stories/vapor-drive

That said, there are ways of protecting your air-form, and if you do that, these things look to be nigh indestructible.
Who will peddle Gendicine into the USA?
That's a really important skill to have -- the ability to assess social skills as well as technical prowess.

I find trello pretty effective for daily goals. In terms of a mature bug tracking system, I'm a fan of phabricator. For invoicing, we use envois (https://github.com/lambdal/envois).

Agreed, communication and expectation alignment are critical components of avoiding "never-ending contract syndrome"
No, I mean the gender that has more than a thousands of deaths per year at the hands of their partners, and of which 20% is raped at least once in their adulthood.

Bit regardless of that, if you think a majority can`t be oppressed, I suggest you learn some history.
yes it's definitely huge for AngelPad. Few accelerators can have this kind of exit
The one that's normally available (crosh) is pretty awful, yes. The dev-mode shell available by typing "shell" in crosh is more normal. All I really want it for is ssh anyway. If anything more hardcore is needed it gets rebooted into Ubuntu mode.

Haven't actually laid eyes on the pixel yet, I have a Samung ARM chromebook and I love it. Is the pixel worth the cash? And have you loaded an alternate OS yet?
Steward Brand, in "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built", "asserts that the best buildings are made from low-cost, standard designs that people are familiar with, and easy to modify. In this way people can gradually change their buildings to meet their needs." (Quoting Wikipedia.)

One example was living in a trailer in New Mexico, which can be winterized by surrounding it by straw bales, then turned into walls, and expanded as needed. Another was living in an old wooden boat, on land, where it was trivial to cut a hole if you wanted it.

That's much in line with the philosophy behind this dome, which several others here agree with.

However, Brand also specifically dislikes domes, because they are difficult to expand, or to add internal divisions. For a single person, who does not need partitions or extra space, this is not a problem. (Nor would it be a problem if it were cheap to tear down and rebuild an entirely new structure.)

For a family or group of people, it is less tenable, as others here have also pointed out.
I don't think that even registers as a problem at all, much less one of the largest ones. Installing haskell platform is the entire process, and is as simple as installing any other program. There's literally no difference vs python or ruby or go or anything else. The language is the barrier to entry, not the tools.
``This fog of work is exactly why, in her now famous memo...'' should it be ``infamous memo''?
I would have some sympathy with this if you made it easy for single people to pay you to be able to use your data in a manner outside of the ToS of the free APIs.

However, for the Elevation API there are two choices:

* free and heavily restricted
* business api, which looks extremely sketchy †
and is blocked to most people

The gaming world has learned this with Steam and friends already. People will pirate the hell out of digital offerings that are not available in a reasonable manner. Steam recognized this and made games available in the most convenient manner humanly possible and are making money hand-over-fist. Sure, there are still pirates in gaming, but those are the people who are either paranoid about Steam or those who truly couldn't afford it anyhow.

You're still in this pre-realization phase and have only one single entity to blame if people "misuse" your APIs: Yourself. Make the APIs available for normal people in a reasonable manner and you will find adherence to your ToS becoming the norm, not the exception.

† By sketchy i mean the facts that there is zero pricing information, it's a buzzword-slaughterhouse, and the only way to get at it is to fill out a form with a lot of information, an indication of what one might want to do and which offers no further information or even actual flesh-and-blood human contact.
I wrote a post following this acquisition with some thoughts on mobile advertising for anyone interested : http://bellity.tumblr.com/post/60792069876/mopub-the-mobile-... (it's on the newest in HN)
I'd be interested to get a sense of how these issues vary from country to country and field to field.
Motivation, Leadership and Great Design
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally obtuse here, but maps.google.com is the public Google Maps website, while the Google Maps Javascript API lives at https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/. The very first page there says:

The JavaScript Maps API V3 is a free service, available for any web site that is free to consumers. Please see the terms of use for more information. ...with a link to the full TOS for the API: https://developers.google.com/maps/terms
Transportation of physical goods everywhere on the planet, not just transportation of your butt between work and home every weekday.

We have electric cars. We don't have (useful) electric trucks, or ships, or passenger or cargo aircraft.
Gmail was also talked about because of the invitational format.

In terms of the application, Gmail made smooth, interactive interfaces the standard. Up until then web mail was about clicking between pages. Or, in the fanciest cases, using IFRAMEs.
Color Picker in Pure CSS
500,000 mobile developers use Appcelerator
This is not how it works. For example, our customers are paying for "super" support and we have a contract for a certain SLA. If we don't have an upgrade it will cost a lot of money for them to deal with zillions of customers calling, filling forums with negative feedback, etc.
What's most worrying about this is that Dropbox is injecting itself into processes like NotePad++ and Firefox that have nothing to do with shell extensions.

Either this is lazy coding, or there is some malicious intent to spy.
Predictably, the easy availability of student loans has caused inflation in tuition.
I looked at (made and redacted an offer) on one that was (probably is) finacially 'upside down' in austin (burleson and douglas) built out of preformed foam blocks. They are hollow lego-like blocks that are assembled and pumped full of concrete. poor fellow roofed it with stucco and no drip rails, so quite a bit of roof runoff ran down his foundation walls that the PFB concrete skeleton was built on.

crying shame, I was excited to live in a monolithic dome, they're certainly cool.
So it doesn't disable ASLR outside of this dll, right? The process is already loaded; it can't un-randomize.
Where's the geodesic toilet?
A brief history of (BER) MetaOCaml
I wasn't talking about PhD as a credential, I was talking about how for the normal good-but-not-Feynman aspiring scientists, going for a PhD is one of the few ways you can properly learn how to do research.