skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating discussion, so there are a couple of threads and they can be summed into precision arguments and range arguments. I confess I'm friends with Mike Cowlishaw (the guy behind spelotrove.com) and he's influenced my thinking on this quite a bit.

So precision arguments generally come under the heading of how many significant digits do you need, and if its less than 15 or so you're fine using a binary representation. If its more than 15 you can still use binary but its not clear to me that it's a win.

The second is in range. So if you're simulating all of the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere, and you actually want to know how many there are, and you want to work in the precise values of the rations of N2, NO2, H2, O2, CO2, etc in the atmosphere then, as I understand it, you're stuck approximating. (For context I was asking the a scientist from the Sandia National Laboratory about their ability to simulate nuclear explosions at the particle level and wondering if the climate scientists could do the same for simulating an atmosphere of molecules, or better atoms, or even better, particles. ) that is a problem where there is a lot of dynamic range in your numbers adding 1 to .5866115*10^20 doesn't really change the value because the range breaks down.

And yes, you can build arbitrary precision arithmetic libraries (I built one for Java way back in the old days) but if your working with numbers at that scale then it gets painful without hardware support of some kind.

In my day to day use I find that imprecision in binary screws up navigation in my robots as they are trying to figure out where they are, but repeated re-location helps keep the error from accumulating. And yes, its a valid argument that dead reckoning is for sissies but its very helpful when you have limited sensor budgets :-)
How readers will discover books in the future
Instead of effectively dual-booting Android/WPF, Microsoft should add a compatibility layer to WPF to run Android apps.
Girls and Cookies....
This Is The End - Dog Can't Bark Scene
Out of curiosity....isn't this a distraction from your fulltime responsibilities?

I am not hating on the book - if you were running a lifestyle, non-YC company I don't think it would be an issue, but PG & other YC partners are famous for wanting all founders to focus on just their company.

I can't see how they wouldn't think that this could be a distraction - or am I missing something here?

Again...more power to you for writing, and I am not trying to be mean....it just seems that this is either very ballsy of you (to go against what seems like one of the tenets of YC in such a brazen manner) or a hedge against bad news for the company.
> But regional economic disparities in China are now greater, and not least in the large swaths of territory that historically have been part of Tibet and eastern Turkestan.

if that's an example of regional tensions, it's a bad one; because there's also ethnic tensions involved. 3 million ethnic Tibetans in Tibet, and about 14 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and so on in Xinjiang (living with 8 million Han - it's pretty much colonised now) won't overthrow the 1.2 billion Han.

There's so few minorities that China can afford to bribe them a lot (relaxed one child policy, reserved university places, reserved jobs - which partly makes up for the discrimination they face), and send in the troops if necessary. There still is a lot of tension on both sides, but a country the size of China isn't going to let a vast swarth of territory (with all its mineral / petrochemical wealth) go over it.

It would be better to talk about Hukou (social services linked to city of origin). Or maybe regional divides within Han China.

But the divide between rural and city people has often been a bigger deal (to >90% of Chinese) than ethnicity. Farmers starved in the Great Leap. City folk were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Farmers now struggle to get their kids educated, while they work the undesirable jobs in cities.
"Revise Windows Phone. Right now, as nice as it looks, there are a lot of reasons to choose Android or iPhone over Windows Phone, but few reasons to choose Windows Phone over Android and iPhone"

Revise what exactly? Windows is perfectly fine for probably 95% of the people. Revising it will not make a difference, but price, branding, apps, deals with Verizon, AT&T etc will make a difference.
If you ever get the opportunity, go to an air and space museum and try to get a look at a Mercury capsule if you have one.

It's basically a trashcan with a person inside, stuck atop an ICBM. Pretty rad.
Carl Malamud’s Lawsuit-Fighting Kickstarter to Put Public Standards Online
How is more choice bad for consumers? There are phones I currently wouldn't touch that I would consider using if I could put any mobile OS I wanted onto them. We should applaud HTC if they choose to make phones that aren't locked to one OS. If MS wants to provide a struggling HTC with incentives to do just that, so much the better.
I'd rather be around smart people putting someone down or puffing themselves over things they are right about than be around dumb people putting someone down or puffing themselves up over things they are wrong about. Internet arguing, Politics, Sports, Rap battles, etc. same shit, different group, different MO's

What you've described is normal human behavior irrespective of their level of intelligence.
This is cool, but how does spotify configure the pre/post install/remove hooks of the debian package?

also, did spotify look into using fpm? If so, what were it's drawbacks that lead to making a new tool?
The article talks about lots of "reasons" without giving any example.
Awesome story, thanks.

While you guys were coding away at Harvard, I was not yet able to properly focus my mind, and so took to running around the streets of Cambridge(port) in diapers instead ;-)

p.s. from the above one can assume I was either born in '72 or was taking far too much acid for my own good.
Missing Dr. Who episodes found in Nigeria
No more working at home for Hewlett-Packard employees
I am using windows phone for more than 3 months now..and I am happy I moved from Andriod to Windows...
fascinating ... Im also watching Alias reruns ... Im use to being disappointed in TechCrunch; but it's novel feeling it regarding news.YCom
This.

There are already so many hackers working on open source projects for the government, even healthcare in government, that there would be no shortage of willing helping hands.
If i'm not mistaken, Jason left his YC-backed startup some time ago. He's working out of D.C now with the Smithsonian.
Scientists Just Discovered Water Near a Star 170 Light Years Away
I've done a bit of work to flesh out the jQuery integration in our fork of the airbrake notifier, to automatically wrap all event handlers and AJAX callbacks. Which is great, because it means our entire Backbone app gets a full stack trace with line and column numbers. I should really submit a pull request.

Also very excited about the proposals about having the error object passed to window.onerror... well, I used to be. I've had a little bit of involvement in the W3C mailing lists over the last few years, but it seems like nothing ever gets done.

And source maps support would be awesome! Just as soon as we can get source maps from sprockets, which seems like it's on the way [1].

[1] https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets/pull/311
Thanks for the response. I do hope Rust becomes what it wants to be. :)
I found the quote on the first page of the first issue a little too relevant:

“The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.”
—Edmund Burke
this is my email ibrahimmomani@gmail.com
Basically, NVIDIA has come out and said that they don't want to be in the business of supporting window systems, they just want to be in the business of providing modesetting and direct rendering. They're proposing new things into EGL like the new EGLDevice abstraction and EGLStreams so that NVIDIA can tie less into Wayland and simply allow people to do cool stuff with their driver.

They're not going to support KMS immediately, as it's too simplistic for the full range of stuff that they would need to do (complicated modes, stereo support, etc.). The FOSS driver people are working on atomic modeset and atomic pageflip, which NVIDIA will investigate the API and see if it fits their needs.

They're also happy to support this stuff if we give them an API that ties into their driver and allows them to drop some of their code, but we first need to do that, with their feedback. The community is actively working on that.
How did Adam DAngelo improve so fast in TopCoder
The advantage to the try() method is you get stack traces for browsers other than Chrome. With Chrome you can get the stack trace easily. just do:

window.onerror = function(msg,url,line,col,err) {
console.log(err.stack)
}

If that doesn't work for you, you can get it like:

window.onerror = function() {
console.log(window.event.error.stack)
}

I wouldn't want litter my code with Airbrake.try(); onerror is good enough since you get stack traces from Chrome. When there is a pesky error, I tend to do something like:

throw JSON.stringify(some_var_to_watch);
Well since you can compile python, clojure, etc etc to JavaScript I guess the .js extension is meaningless. In my opinion it isn't at all OK, because a .js extension means that the code is in JavaScript, so that I can look at it, and maybe contribute. I'm not interested in CoffeeScript widgetmajigs that turn CoffeeScript into JavaScript. Use .coffee or maybe CoffeeScript just can't stand on its own. Maybe it's just riding JS's coattails and the moment it separates it becomes abandoned.
Correct. Haven't talked much about it yet, though if you're going to Failcon this year, you'll hear all about it. =)
Takipi hosted production JVM debugging
This article is weirdly convinced that Microsoft is talking about dual-booting WP and Android, but even the source article they cite says that that's pretty unlikely.
I'll take a crack at the problem. What motivated me to lose 10 pounds, was a bet I made with my brother. I told him if I don't do Insanity (workout program) everyday I'd take a picture with myself in a dress. Now he was holding me responsible and I had this negativity driving me. I finished the full program.

I just did a similar thing with my co-founder for my start up except with cold calling. We've broken our sales record this week. Bottom line I think negativity motivates me more personally than positivity. Lastly whatever it is, try to make that a habit, so you have to force yourself to do it at the exact same time and place. (my two cents).
Ahhh....ok.

Well that makes much more sense now.

Carry on....sorry I had to discuss the elephant in the room - but it wasn't addressed fully on his personal site or on the landing page for the book...soo.... :)
Please don't sign your comments. (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Totally agree. When I lived their in 2005/06, I spent a bunch of time traveling and when I went to Xinjiang, I can only describe what I saw as an occupied country with a thin veneer of unification. Xinjiang has nothing to do with Eastern china. I've heard that Tibet is the same. By land mass, these two areas along constitute a huge portion of China. There have been many migrations into their two provinces by Easterners, who are mostly Han Chinese. Personally, I would describe what's happening in Xiajiang and Tibet as "ethnic cleansing by dilution".
Can growing a beard cause problems in crossing borders?
Oh but he read a review of it! That's got to be the same as reading it, right?
If I had the option of a good, dual-booting phone, I would take it.

If I could then quickly switch to the other OS within a virtual machine to run an app or access some data, even better.

There's a lot of crud behind why it's a bad idea rather than actual reasoning.
Yep. Geographical context. no need to be a pedantic....
Why on Earth would you hate to plug this? I could definitely see someone using this and being thankful they don't have to do it themselves. Hell, I'd use it if I hadn't already done my own category.

Suggestions: you might want to allow for three-digit hex strings and eight/four digit hex strings with alpha, I found that convenient in mine. And in the documentation it would be way cool if you made the names of the colors self-referential.

Nits: I would have made all the system color methods like "systemThingColor", capitalized RGB and HSB, and made "RGBDictionary" return @{@"red": ...} (and made static NSStrings for the keys so nobody needs to go to the .m file to see what will happen). Obviously I am a pedant and I live right on the edge of the 80 character limit; of these I'd only suggest making static dictionary keys as an actually desirable change.

Nice work, you shouldn't be ashamed to share it at all.
I was disappointed I couldn't find DownThemAll for Chrome but a quick check on the store found an equivalent plugin called DownloadAll.
Still, he may have been pushing his team to do better.
The entire point of Facebook is to entice people to share every sordid detail about every thing they do in their lives, no matter how pointless or trivial. In fact, the more sordid and pointless, the better--because that's a reflection of a person's "true" priorities and a much better measure of how they actually live their daily lives than any self-censored, banal content they'd put up if they understood the concept of privacy and discretion at all.
alternative perspective VC SV startup is at a tipping point and "smart money" is being more cautious ( conservative ) as the market swings down .
Simple: local maximum. If getting off welfare and into work implies immediate income loss, you are incentivized to stay on welfare, even if working would eventually make you better off, with time. If you are more inclined to respond to short term than long term incentives, you are stuck in a local maximum.
I think this is true for a non-trivial amount of the younger generation. I know a decent number of (relatively affluent) people in their early 20s who simply do not have and do not plan on getting a driver's license.

I have one, but I avoid driving like the plague.
I'm so tired of seeing motivation hacks, or similar stuff. If something supposed to motivate you doesn't motivate you enough, that supposition is just plain weak and has no deeper place within you. That's it. Be yourself. That's the ultimate motivation. Nothing else can be motivating you more than that, and shouldn't be, unless you want to be someone else, or as hollow as possible.
Columbus day should become Bartolome day
If I controlled that much money and was determined to be charitable after accounting for my own personal comfort, I'd love to perform the following experiment, give away $833 to every person in that 41.5% each month for the next 12.5 or so years. IANATL, but at $833 per month you stay just under the $10000 per person you can give each year.

The economic impact of such an act would be a huge direct stimulus to the economy and would change the lives of everyone for the better.
Huh. And I just discovered it and subscribed on my iPad last Fall. Oh well. :)
I found the memo quite insightful as it goes into specific details on why and how the movie depiction differs from their perspective. Some quotes from the memo:

"THE FIFTH ESTATE falsely implies that WikiLeaks harmed 2,000 US government informants. ... US Brig. Gen. Robert Carr – who was tasked to investigate this matter by the Pentagon – in fact stated under oath when examined by the defense counsel that there was no harm whatsoever."

"Although THE FIFTH ESTATE purports to be about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the film was made without the involvement of WikiLeaks or any of its staff, including Julian Assange. ... The multi-million dollar production, produced by Dreamworks and distributed by Disney, has not financially contributed to WikiLeaks or any of its defence funds."
I believe there was an actual problem with Procs that they fixed a couple of months or so ago. The core developers seem to be active on Twitter, so you could ask the source directly if nobody here knows.
DN42, a Hacker's finest darknet
Wastes storage space.
Pivots can land a VC with a conflict of interest, where two non-competitors suddenly pivot into each other's space.

The classic example was PicPlz and Burbn (renamed Instagram after the pivot), the VC in question was a16z

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/23/ben-horowitz-on-why...
Wow! This is some seriously cool work. Very, very nicely done.

Thank you!
> At a time when Lumia 520 and Lumia 925 have been selling like hot cakes

"Selling like hot cakes" is not enough given all the money poured into this fiasco. People just dont want Microsoft Phones.

Microsoft will learn the hardway eventually that its reign is over, and no MSFT PR can change that. Remember when MSFTbots "were spamming" WP7 as a success? WP8 will meet the same fate. The Open Handset Alliance is a success no MSFT cant beat.
cool story bro ... I stay motivated because if I'm not I will lose my job. this is a good attitude because:
1. If you work at a high performing corp the bar is set high and its a non trivial task to just keep ahead of losing your job.
2. Reminds you its a job, and your #1 job at any job is to do a good job.
3. If your not pushing to do better at your #1 job then its time to focus on your #2 Job, which is find a better job..
I can't speak to the Backbone.js changes, but isn't one of the odd things about Rails versioning the fact that 3.x -> 4.0 is essentially a dot release upgrade, but 4.0 to 4.1 a full version upgrade (many things are deprecated from 3.x to 4.0, and 4.1 will remove them entirely?)
A sceptic in me suggests that new sensors could exhibit some sort of unexpected behavior that skewed experiment results.

> Perhaps most exciting is the fact that this finding came after just the first time the new, ultra-lightweight movement sensor was used in avian research.
The quality of a course really depends on who is running it and how enthusiastic they are. So I would recommend keeping an open mind about coursera until you've taken a few different courses.

Also depends on the students that take it. Sometimes you get incredibly helpful people taking the course - that seem to know everything and beyond - and don't mind taking the time giving really detailed explanations on the forums.

I'm doing the calculus course atm - and enjoying it a lot.
you just haaaaad to bring up programming skills, didn't you. FINE. but it's not always programming that gets things done. sometimes its the determination in your veins not the dexterity of your mind that counts for the most. remember that.. remember that.
This is pretty fascinating, in 5 minutes you can have a level of application monitoring better than high profile tech companies do. It's a nice production level supplement to visualvm. It's hosted and right now looks interesting for small shops that can't grow this kind of thing in house.
DON'T CLICK THIS
I think marking cookies secure only is more important than hsts, but if both lack, then it's quite bad thing.

Btw. There are many sites like this out there. So this isn't news actually. There are even more sites which lack https completely.
Don't get me wrong, i think its great, but I'm not going to browse hundreds of issues to read about specific topics I'm interested in.
> and by proxy (I suppose) silicon valley VC community

I don't think it proxies that well. As the article points out, a16z raised a $1.5 billion fund, some top-tier firms might come close, but most of the mid- and bottom-tier VCs operate with the fund sizes in double-digit millions.

Also, for a highly contested B round, A round participants or brand-name VCs will get preference over a generic nondescript firm with a Sand Hill Road address.

Somebody from YC might correct me on this, but I think a16z's participation in automatic round upon admittance to YC comes with drag-along rights, which they can choose to exercise at either A or B rounds. So they don't have as much of a problem of missing on quality dealflow that others will miss on if they choose to skip A rounds.
For many who have exited an abusive relationship, this represents nothing less than a complete betrayal by Facebook.

I have a family member in such a situation. Fortunately, they have stayed away from Facebook and other social media out of fear of something like this.

Congratulations, guys (and I choose that term somewhat deliberately, with reference to gender bias in domestic violence statistics): You've just branded yourselves as well as your product assholes.
"and to control the stealth introduction of vulnerabilities during the manufacture of computer components—vulnerabilities that can later be used as windows for cyber-attacks."

Right... the NSA needs to stop the kind of bad actors that stealthily introduce vulnerabilities into commercial computer systems, which is extraordinarily dangerous for everyone's computer security.

Oh wait...
> How is more choice bad ?

Oh please , Windows has never been about choice. How many people buying computers "chosed" Windows? MSFT did not become what it is by letting customers, businesse,OEMs choose.
Yoshinori is the engineer who developed MHA, MySQL replication auto failover. It's essentially a perl script that ensures a master is always available and functional. This is so DBAs don't have to spend hours manually fixing a broken master/slave replication.
Safe downloading, everyone; remember to first check the ToS and don't change your user-agent for any reason.
I use an older HP 14" Chromebook for my web development (Rails, JS, etc) and enjoy it. Most of the time I use Nitrous.io, but it annoyingly disconnects a lot. Other than that love the simple setup.
Not the Microsoft Skype wiretap memee again. Read the PRISM slides, Skype was tapped before Microsoft bought the company, let alone rearchitected the system
How?

* Made the return values of Collection's set, add, remove, and reset more useful. Instead of returning this, they now return the changed (added, removed or updated) model or list of models.

Given that calling `collection.add(foo)` returned `collection`, when were you ever using the return value for anything? Going forward you might, but I would be very surprised if much if any code was broken by this.

* Backbone Views no longer automatically attach options passed to the constructor as this.options, but you can do it yourself if you prefer.

This might require going through your code base, but it's just adding one line in the `initialize` function:

initialize: function(options) {
this.options = options;

Annoying if you have hundreds of views that directly extend Backbone.View, but not something that should take a day to fix?

Am I missing something?
Three words: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Microsoft will push for better interoperability between the two OSes, however MS will notably utilize proprietary features (disk access protocols or some-such) and encourage handset manufacturers to utilize and rely on these proprietary interfaces.

What's the problem with this? More features are better, right?

Wrong. When it comes to Microsoft, they will happily and quickly change proprietary communications protocols and file formats so that competitors -- AHEM, partners -- cannot keep up with these changes. At some point in the future, MS will ignore requests for technical specifications on the changes made and the partner's features will languish into obsolescence.

Features built on top of this integration between the two OSes will be half-baked and second-rate compared to the native Windows Phone experience, and they will be frequently incomplete or unstable.

MS will be using this opportunity to influence the direction of Android (and its derivatives), and they will be pushing it directly into the ground. Integration between the two OSes will break and Android will be left out in the cold.