skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Importance of Being Linear" is an excellent article, but there is a caveat.

What do we mean by linear? A linear change in RGB equals a linear change in photons output? Let's call this physically-linear.

Or do we mean that if we sit 100 people down and show them rgb(32, 64, 16) and then rgb(64, 128, 32) that they agree that the second is "twice as bright"? Let's call this perceptually-linear.

Physical and perceptual linearity are not the same and have different use cases. Physical linearity is important when you are simulating lighting: shadows, shading, etc. etc.

Perceptual linearity is probably more important when it comes to scientific visualization, because we are trying to use colour as a form of transmission of information from the computer into our heads, so it makes sense to "spread" out the colour as much as possible (note: I do not have a background in visualization, just experience in CG. I welcome input from those who know the field better.)

Physical-linearity is as "easy" as calibrating to your monitor (gamma, etc.) Perceptual-linearity is... harder. You can start by investigating CIE-LAB colour spaces etc., but the story most definitely does not end there (for example, check out "Interaction of Color" by Josef Albers.)
At the same time, this probably cuts down on "me too" contributions. I have a repo that has been gaining popularity lately and have been flooded with pull requests that do nothing but add a jshint file or other dev environment changes.
Please dont listen to crap telling you it's flattering to be ripped off. That's your work and you have the right to protect it.
There's for sure a difference in people I would call brilliant "hackers" and people I would call brilliant "architects".

I think it's very difficult to be the latter without having constructed a handful of large systems, and those take significant time even if you do them back-to-back.
I suppose part of the difficulty is that no matter how good your process, you still need an 'objective function', and that will always be defined by ideology. I agree that having the measurement of results at least partially based on hard data would be better though. Using measures that are less crude than simply "Is GDP higher this year?" might help as well.

Unfortunately in politics you are unlikely to get any kind of consensus on what this 'objective function' ought to be. Perhaps this is partly why smaller more homogenous societies like the Nordic countries are often considered to be better governed [0], it is much easier for them to come to a consensus about what society's goals should be, and therefore it is easier to strive efficiently towards those goals.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic...
It's difficult, to my mind. If you consider it acceptable to tap his phone for a purpose he'd rather not communicate to the Australians and there's a clear line that says her phone must not be tapped but his is ok, guess which phone he's going to use for that purpose?
How are those passwords encoded?
33 great examples of parallax scrolling websites
Isn't one reason that people subscribe to the terminals that they get unfiltered access to the Bloomberg news feed? I know that market data is the primary benefit, but isn't timely access to potentially market-moving news stories a significant secondary benefit? If they start pulling punches in cases like this, how much can you trust the accuracy and completeness of news being delivered over the terminals?
I own an X1 Carbon, its ok but still only half as good as the fruit. Living in china, I'm not sure what is made and designed here that I would say is really quality....mauve noodles?
Chamonix View Cameras (http://www.chamonixviewcamera.com/) are stunning and incredibly well made. All I can think of off the top of my head.
Hi Solomon,

There are tons of companies that are working on Docker based solutions to my problems. In six months, or a year, there will be plenty of great ways for me to use Docker. The only problem is that PiCloud shuts down on February 25, so I'm in a bit of a hurry. Today, I'm in a gap, and there isn't a great replacement. Specifically I'd need:

* Per second pricing (per minute would be Ok). This makes parallelism "free"

* Large instances with big memory and CPU

* Ideally on AWS (My data is on s3, and it would be good to avoid bandwidth charges).

Nothing seems to fill these requirements yet. Any of you Docker startups out there want to help me out? Any pointers would be great if I'm missing something.
Linux voice magazine confirms CC-BY-SA for all content after nine months
Any employers looking to use this to seriously evaluate candidates -- you are wide open to having your analytics gamed by people looking to get their foot in the door. And commits are much easier to fake out and automate than degrees. :)
It's true: although human perception is nonlinear in a similar fashion (logarithmic/expt) the exact way CRTs (and LCDs) transform is not based strictly on human perception (as far as I know). It is interesting to think of how it could be improved but I don't have any answers right now.
Part of me wonders whether this is an instance of "The Magpie Developer"[0]. I know that I personally prefer git and bzr over cvs and svn, but just ten years ago, people were all talking about how Linux had just switched to BitKeeper.

I also suspect that rather than having a bikeshed-esque argument about switching between one DVCS and another, we can come up with technical solutions to enable everyone to work together. For example, when I was interning at Facebook two years ago, git-svn was used extensively to let the rank-and-file employees work with git, while still allowing chuckr to deploy off of SVN.

For mercurial and git, there are services like Kiln Harmony[1] and hg-git, too.

[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-magpie-develope...

[1] https://secure.fogcreek.com/kiln/
Umm... this isn't plagiarism.

He wrote about the same subject, but near as I can tell he wrote with his own words and near as I can tell even his own data points (for example, he talks about the Commodore 64, and WIN.INI, and I see no reference to either in your much longer article).

I've got news for you, you aren't the first person to write about the fact that younger folks aren't learning computers like their predecessors. Nothing wrong here.
and having a no bitcoins law would prevent at least one person from making a bitcoin transaction
> people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line

Isn't that usually sorted out by the resume piece of the puzzle? By listing placed an applicant has actually worked?

I know it's not your full hiring procedure you've outlined here, but I just see that kind of filtering as very naive. You'd have to make a huge number of assumptions to go from someone's OSS contributions to anything about their work ethic.
The best thing to do is to have a good breakfast, drink lots of water during the day and continue being awesome!
I cannot recommend the mentoring aspect enough. I contributed my first patch earlier this year and having contact with someone on the project to review my code and give me suggestions was a huge help to getting my patch accepted. It also helped me understand the code base better than if I had to make and test my own assumptions wrt design decisions and the like.

I highly recommend contributing to Firefox as well. It's a very cool system.
Microsoft, GE, and the futility of ranking employees
People are not empathetic. Empathy gives a path to logic, once you begin thinking of others. His father called you because he respected your feelings in the matter. How much of him knowing who you were may have played a part in his decision to call you.
Thanks for expessing my thoughts eloquently. Technology changes so many things to the better in our lives all the time, where as politics don't make a lot of difference, imho. All idealistic parties in politics tend to move towards the middle - that's where the power is - until you can't tell them from one another in the end.
I don't see anything in common between the two linked articles save the thesis.
aka "intelligence agency of random country does its job"
Don't forget Eric Schmidt's crazy thoughts on privacy:

* During an interview aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google," Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" He replied: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."

* At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good. And he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."

* In 2005 Google blacklisted CNET reporters from talking to Google employees for one year, until July 2006, after CNET published personal information on Schmidt, including his politician donations, hobbies, salary, and neighborhood, that had been obtained through Google searches.

* In 2010 in an interview with the WSJ Schmidt stated that he thinks teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions.

* In 2010 he also stated that "people aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them" and that absolute privacy would prove too-unsafe in the future
Maybe, maybe-not. Couple things: some of my "personal projects" are more than just learning some new things. Often the project is for scratching an itch, and is a useful thing to me. That's the type of stuff that I will "polish." This forces me to not only learn the new language, but to write code idiomatically, write unit tests, etc.

For "junk projects" that are solely to play around with some new thing, I think it's okay to make that clear in the README of the project and still put it in a public repo. If I'm an employer, I'm going to like the fact that you're actively learning new things; if it's a "play" project, made clear in the README, I wouldn't hold against you writing crappy code. Instead, I'll be more impressed that you're actually learning new things. Just my $.02.
I keep thinking of Ben Horowitz's article about Peacetime verse Wartime CEO (http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo)

Larry Page took over when Google went to war with Facebook. A lot of stuff gets sacrificed during wartime.
Risk Calculator for Cholesterol Appears Flawed
Unless they've changed the article, from a quick scan of both articles I don't see the similarity other than they're both on the same topic.

What are the specific similarities you have issues with ?
it's first author is a Googler, and its posted on a Google domain.

EDIT: haha I am downvoted for speaking the truth. The parent and I have both read lots of papers like these, there is only a modest contribution of this paper. It basically says we fudged the inference and the end results look similar so its a good optimization. However, there will be probably lots of specific models that "need" the mixing freedom the approximation removes, and hence the algorithm will only work for a specific subspace of MCMC problems. MCMC is basically impossible to debug, so we dunno how well it works overall. THIS IS THE SAME CONCLUSION OF EVERY OTHER MCMC APPROXIMATION PAPER. The only reason this is on HN, is because of its heritage. I do not think this paper is revolutionary (unlike some other papers coming out of Google).

EDIT 2: evidence
Modern:
"Fully Parallel Inference in Markov Logic Networks" - Max-Planck
"Hybrid Parallel Inference for Hierarchical Dirichlet Process"
"A split-merge mcmc algorithm for the hierarchical dirichlet process"
Old:
"Parallel Implementations of Probabilistic Inference" a 1996 review paper!

You might say these papers are not exactly the same, ok, but the final justification for the given paper is:

"Depending on the model, the resulting draws can be nearly indistinguishable"

NOTE kewords: "depending" and "nearly"
To those arguing that his politics are bad, or that he is too small to make a difference: you have missed his point.

The point is that geeks need to start doing politics collectively. No, we don't need to be in the same parties. No, we don't need to agree on everything. But yes, we do need more software engineers in our parliaments, calling out stupid stuff, and more geeks in there listening and voting against the stupid stuff.

He's not calling for you to all give up your Libertarian views (in my opinion, equally as naive as his Socialist ones). He's calling on you to care about politics enough to organise and stand.

And maybe, one day, win. Maybe.
Profiting from suffering and how Bitcoin could save the day
Handling IO failure
If simple, basic police methods sufficed here, then why the massive dragnet surveillance the rest of us are caught up in?

Either (a) the dragnet surveillance isn't doing what it's supposed to or (b) there's another reason for the spying.

And yes, I could be accused of whipping on the NSA no matter what, that in my view, they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. So what? Even if I don't have "standing", and the NSA is doing "legal" things, and the 3 Prong Test for Violations of Privacy hasn't been met, the NSA is still doing things that until recently were considered grossly unamerican, a violation of the principles that made the USA different than commie Russia.
Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins
State owned banks make it too easy for politicians to pass laws that will enable them to do whatever they want to do.

Granted, private banks have the possibility to corrupt politicians to the same effect.
Not that I disagree, but it's a bit rich coming out saying those things, right after he has OKed a portion of the open HTML specification created specifically to render the open specification worthless.

Recall the EME^W DRM, then you can come back (again) and talk about the importance of having an open web.
It's an about section by the author who was selfless and benevolent enough to make the site. How is that "unnecessary + irrelevant" when it's specifically about them?

I find it bizarre and disconcerting that this thread (questioning that comment) even exists. Had he said that he was an avid cook, surfer or music enthusiast, would anyone actually dare to call it into question?
Where have you been plagiarised? The article is on the same subject and uses similar arguments, but I cannot see any plagiarism.

I would not be surprised in the slightest if your article served as inspiration for this one, but that is completely allowed.
Unfortunately it's easy to make claims on one's resume that are hard to refute. Yes, you worked there, but what did you actually do? What did the code you wrote look like?

Every writer who advocates FizzBuzz or something related has specifically mentioned these are candidates with resumes that got them to the interview stage, but who couldn't actually write code.

Looking at open source code or a portfolio is an extension of that, since one doesn't really have time in an interview to do anything more complex than FizzBuzz.
The Luck Factor in Great Decisions
I like that. I've always liked that idea actually.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is business manners advice, not legal advice.

Step 1: Start with a very friendly letter noting the similarities, and asking for citation with a link. If it's a friendly error, or you give them an out making it seem like a friendly error, they'll cite you and it's done.

Step 2: If you aren't cited, write a firm but polite letter saying, "I'd prefer to keep this between professionals. I notice the similarities. Please cite my work. Let's resolve this amongst ourselves before involving editors."

Step 3: If it's not resolved, then send a nice letter, along with the correspondence chain to the editor. Explain that you worked a long time at the article, that you respect Forbes, and that you are looking for a citation, and not shaking them down for money.

Whatever you do, don't lose your composure. If you lose your composure, you lose the negotiation.

This should resolve 80% of the issues, without making any enemies. The last 20% just aren't worth fighting on your own dollar. Plagiarism happens, but it's best to let big companies sue big companies. The upside isn't worth involving lawyers.
No calls to boycott Australian products, hmmm.
Computer-driven hot-metal typesetter
The real concern would be if they used parallel construction and actually used the NSA's warrantless surveillance. The core of parallel construction is to use fruit of the poisonous tree to identify the dots you need to connect, then do your sleuthing purely to figure out how to connect those dots.

This cannot be stated enough.
> kids primarily only socialize with kids +/- about one year of age

This was a huge realization for me after getting into the "real world". I suddenly had coworkers who had kids as old as I am. At times I felt like I had more in common with their kids than them, because they would mention things that happened before I was even born. I had worked at other jobs before, but excluding the managers, everyone was around my age.

In school, even 5 years seemed like a huge gap--"Wow, he's in college, I'm still in High School!", doesn't seem like that much.
> Something that can curate the top posts and send them to you on a schedule.

When you read a bunch of articles and upvote interesting ones (for whatever your value of "interesting" is), you contribute to the community by making a distinction between articles.

The problem with reading from a curated feed is that you're most likely no longer participating (because it's too late to meaningfully upvote), and hence delegating curation to all the other users. When a majority of all the other users are doing the same, then the power of curation becomes concentrated in fewer voters.

I suspect the value of HN is amplified by the meaningful participation of its users. There are many other ways to be a passive consumer of news.
Mozilla Firefox 'Australis' to bring UI enhancements to the browser
Very cool - thank you for sharing! Now if only I can turn the volume on....
How To Make An Ethical Difference In Your Business
Hah, that's a great idea. I just redirected comebackwithawarrant.com to the EFF as I'm not really doing anything with it.

Also - congrats to OP on the launch and all the post-launch attention. Must feel good :)
How Europe is totally owning our in-flight electronics policy, again
Countries are human fancy. The nature of the fancier is somewhat pertinent.
Norway vs. the World
Chrome add-on puts browsing data to good use
Nobody cares how hard doctors think they work.

Goods are priced based on their value to the consumer, not based on their cost to the manufacturer.

I don't know how health care is priced, but the idea I should internalize sympathy for the education burden on a doctor into the cost of my bill is asinine.
Subscribe them all to EFF newsletter?
Took me a while to find the repo:

https://github.com/sorich87/bricks
Another tricky aspect about console.log is that in IE console.log will crash if you pass certain built-in types to it (I remember it happening with XML Document objects).
Show HN: Podlife - CocoaPods search, favorites, and notifications on iOS
I like the focus on speed, as larger Jekyll sites can get very slow.

If I had a suggestion it would be to improve the documentation.

For example, it would be really useful to have a "Get Started" tutorial on creating a standard blog setup, with things like pagination, categories / tags, RSS feed, sitemap.xml etc.
Warning! Warning! WARNING!!!

Accusing someone of plagiarism is a VERY big deal. It is potentially a career ruiner.

Consequently, before you accuse someone of plagiarism, you should be extremely certain that he has actually committed the offense.

Here's what plagiarism is:

Lifting, word for word (or very nearly word for word), passages from somebody else's work and passing it off as your own, without attributing the source.

Here's what plagiarism isn't:

Writing about the same topic.

Making the same argument, using different language.

Citing the same quotes from the same sources, but otherwise using different language.

I don't see anything in Mike Elgan's piece that qualifies as plagiarism of your piece, as I've defined it above.

What needs to be impressed upon you is that falsely accusing someone of plagiarism is a legally actionable offense. It's called libel, and you can find yourself with a lawsuit on your hands.

I'm not a lawyer, but I would strongly urge you to retract this post.

Disclaimer: I'm a former Forbes.com employee but no longer have any ties to the company.
It's a very fine line between strong corporate cultures that encompass personal identities, and selfish cult-like behavior.

If you look at the leading companies across many industries, one thing that jumps out is that the corporate identity is primary in the employees lives. Generally these companies also prefer molding employees straight out of school. This is true for P&G, Accenture, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Look at the leadership - most have been there their entire careers.

I am not saying this is good or bad, but I am saying that it's an attribute of many leading companies.

Full disclosure: I am not a Google employee, nor have I ever been.
and another reason to use zsh is the incredibly nice looping syntax, for example, this is the same as

for fic (**/*(.)) doSomethingWith $fic

I find the fact that it fits in a single line makes me much more likely to use it in everyday shell use.. though I'd still revert to bash for scripting
To Peter's point, yes, people need to engage in the political process to get what they want.

However, he forgets that we can use technology to make it much, much easier (and enjoyable) to engage in the process.

Technology (computer technology) is just a tool for making communication more efficient. A lack of communication is what is hurting our political process right now. Come up with an engaging tool that makes the process easier and more enjoyable for a large audience, things will change.
> Edit: When using `git add -p` you can even use 'e' command to manually edit your patch.

This is not something specific to git. Also, this example as a whole is nowhere near an improvement over an hg + mq workflow:

1. `hg qinit; hg qnew refactoring' to add a patchset

2. Make changes, add to patch with `hg qrefresh'

3. Run tests, if tests fail, pop a patch from the queue with `hg qpop'

4. Repeat until everything is fine, then `hg qfinish' to commit the patch to the history.
I've been running the Mozilla nightly(and Chrome Canary) for a few years now. If there are enough alpha/beta testers, it will help the developers move more quickly. Every 6 weeks half the Internet gets a browser upgrade. Helping out requires nothing more than surfing the web.

http://nightly.mozilla.org/
I love the submitter's article, but I have to agree - while the thesis is similar, it's told from such a different viewpoint that I wouldn't have even made a connection between the two.
Actually requestAnimationFrame is limited more (possibly even entirely paused) as it assumes that if the tab isn't visible, no animation needs to be requested
> you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal

But you can. Napster launched, what, 13 years ago, and desperate upon desperate law has not even put a dent into the explosive growth of piracy.
U.S. Senate More Divided Than Ever Data Shows
Well that's just fine. He's a President, not the most wanted terrorist in the world. Are they tapping the phones of his children/relatives as well?