skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel the same way. It was presented to me as a great way to learn new programming languages. But really it's challenging your ability to design algorithms, and overwhelmingly mathematics-related algorithms. (I'm not saying the site itself claims anything different).

It doesn't heavily challenge you to advance past a most basic level of a programming language. For example, most Project Euler problems are solved in Java most efficiently by using the features of Java that map 1:1 to features in C. You could do pretty much the entire suite of problems without even understanding the motivation of a language like Java.

I did find it better as a tool for learning functional programming languages (like Haskell) however, perhaps unsurprisingly.
What company was that? Sound like a great place to work!
One thing I run into a lot is that sometimes tab completion scanning ctags locks up the whole process for several seconds.
> entirely caused by the javascript engine

I've profiled a lot of web pages/apps and this hasn't usually been true in my experience. Occasionally JavaScript is the culprit but that is more often to be due to really bad O(n-squared) algorithms and script that forces layout. In contrast, the rendering engine combined with complex CSS is often the cause of "janky" page behavior. Do you have some profiler runs that show a JavaScript bottleneck on a webview that doesn't exist when using Nitro or some other browser?
good points that need to be considered in building your startup! it's a balancing act, i think, and that balance will change over time. for me, with an early stage of my service, being able to focus on my system's features and functionality is more important than the performance and customization that i would get out of writing some of these services myself. i imagine that later on in the lifecycle of this system, i will remove some of the 3rd party services in favor of my own code. but right now, being able to get features done quickly is more important than the monthly subscription costs. i don't expect everyone's situation to be the same, but i think it's a good place to start when you are bootstrapping your own apps / services
I would speculate that it's because Nest's products aren't scalable in the way most of Apple's other products are. The appeal is too narrow, appealing primarily to ultra-techy folks or people building/redoing their home. Phones and mp3 players and computers are owned by almost everyone. I just don't see smoke detectors and thermostats having that same kind of broad appeal.

Nest is neat. I don't have one but my neighbor does and it's a fine product. I'm as "gadgety" as the next guy here, but even after playing with Nest and being impressed I still wasn't compelled to buy one. I dunno, maybe one day.
> couldn't we rewrite a DOM/CSS renderer with WebGL (or canvas)?

Of course we can. :) But writing full UIs are tons of work.

Why are there no OpenGL UI libraries in wide use on desktops? The same argument should apply to a degree? Or is it just that HTML5 is way less efficient that GUI+, Swing, etc.
In general, Super Mario World is being played back on a Super Nintendo emulator using prerecorded inputs (a file exists that says which buttons should be held down on each frame). But these inputs aren't a recording of someone actually playing; these button presses were constructed frame-by-frame very carefully to produce these specific effects. Theoretically, if you could manipulate a Super Nintendo controller with perfect precision 60 times per second you could reproduce this.

Specifically, some objects in-game have pointers to code associated with them ("what to do if this block gets hit by a turtle shell", that sort of thing). The P-switch has one of these pointers assigned to a very special value by coincidence: its pointer points to the memory location where button presses are mapped. This pointer is never supposed to be followed, but by making a bunch of objects very carefully the authors can glitch the game into jumping to that memory address. Once execution is there, they can write a bootloader by making sure the button inputs on each frame correspond to the correct opcodes, letting them execute arbitrary code that they write in on the controller port.

I wasn't involved in the production of this TAS, so I'm not an expert, but that's my understanding of what's going on.
"large molecule" is pretty misleading. DNA is single molecule and unrolled has length over 2 meters. Organic molecules are practically unlimited in their size.
US Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC Net Neutrality Rules [pdf]
Possibly, this may actually be a good thing, at least as far as the internet is concerned. When governments realise that they can't get any "special exemptions" put in for them, the only real option left open is to throw their weight behind measures to secure the internet for everybody.
Simply put, glass is molecularly geometric - building actuated buttons into the glass itself isn't very probable. But a film of actuated buttons could be added much like with capacitive touch sensors today.

Microfluidics is near the 100nm range today. Throw in a bit of ferrofluid and something like this is at least plausible. The challenge is in making all this transparent. The microfluidic channels would need to not create a 'screen door effect' and the fluid transparent.

The Royal Society of Chemistry's 'Lab on Chip' Youtube Channel [1] is a good place to daydream about the future of such things.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/user/labonachipVideos/videos
Rente zakt onder de drie procent: autoleningen nog nooit zo goedkoop
The widespread use of electricity or trains or airplanes or dams or any major paradigm changing invention in human history requires mega engineering projects for a very simple reason. You have to deliver at scale.

I disagree there. All the examples you stated developed gradually starting small and expanding. The first railways appeared in Europe in the 14th century and didn't really take off until the 18th century with the development of the steam engine.

Even air travel, which went from the first heavier-than-air flight to first commercial flight in a remarkably short period of time of about 27 years, piggybacked off of earlier lighter-than-air travel that had existed for centuries. In the Napoleonic Wars, balloons were used for surveilling the battle field, and airships appeared in the mid 19th century. People already knew that air travel was commercially viable and militarily useful. Heavier-than-air machines were a major improvement on the concept, not something entirely new.

This is a common theme in technology: a primitive form of the technology exists for a long period of time in niches. Then, after a period of time, there's a key invention -- the steam engine for rail travel, the dynamo for electricity, the airplane for air travel, the transistor for computers -- that causes the technology to explode in a short period of time.

That key invention is the last piece in the puzzle, not the first. The earlier developments prove the viability of the concept, build up the infrastructure to support it, and justify large investments in developing the key invention. But if you don't look at the history before the key invention, you'd think that computers and electric generators and railroads and aircraft appeared suddenly and had large amounts of capital suddenly invested in them.

And that brings us back to my original point: all those technologies had clear advantages over their predecessors. What advantage does an all-solar future have over a mix of sources? Simply getting rid of fossil fuels is not good enough.
I selected the points which were well defined enough to respond to:

> 2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)

This is not about how much it costs to heat a house to a given temperature. It's about how often heating or cooling is used when the occupants don't need it.

> 3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.

The only thing I said on this is that most programmable thermostats have bad UI and I'd extend that bad UI to note that they also tend to assume a rigid schedule.
It came as no surprise to me when I read the government studies concluding that programmable thermostats: the Honeywell which my Nest replaced allowed you to set two temperatures per day and there was no way to adjust for changes in your schedule without clicking through the entire schedule — 3 (hour, minute, AM/PM) pairs with two high/low temperature thresholds for 7 days or almost 40 clicks on low-quality buttons which would have shamed a $2 calculator. If you knew you were going to be out late one evening, do you spend 15 minutes clicking through that UX disaster or just say “Meh, we'll heat the house for a couple extra hours”? Maybe you plan to go out for a couple hours mid-day? There's no way to express that short of turning the entire thing off, which is fine part of the year and annoying during the rest when it means you'll come home to a very hot/cold house because there's no way to say “Keep the house over 50° (or under 80°) for the next few hours”.

That's not saying that the public is stupid, it's saying that there's been a market failure in producing decent thermostats. It'd be great if there were options between the Nest and the junk $30 thermostats for people who wanted more intelligence (or just the silly auto-away sensor) but don't mind, say, cheap plastic fittings or losing some of the more processor-intensive features.

> 5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.

You're arguing against something which I didn't write.

> 7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.

Your entire argument has been that if people lived exactly the same way as you do and made the same decisions which you've made it's wrong for them to want a Nest. That's smug because it assumes that there are no other valid positions. Using terms like “ripped off” implies a moral judgement rather than, say, people making decisions based on different circumstances. Similarly, assuming that people will finance everything on a bad credit card is implicitly stating that most people who are not you make bad personal financial decisions — that's both insulting and irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I'm not fundamentally against SaaS, but I think it's not necessarily a good thing for every use case possible. I mean, it's a good thing that anyone can provision infrastructure with an API call, but there are two things I'm worried about:

- vendor lock-in: by integrating whoever's API in your code and making it part of your application you make it hard to switch to a similar service offered by someone else. Example: say you're writing a service that has to scale automatically. Cool, you can do this with EC2's APIs, so you integrate that in your application. When the threshold of request per second crosses a certain value, you spin up a new VM. If it's deeply integrated with Amazon's APIs (i.e you're using it to its full potential, tracking spot instances, whatever) it's very hard to switch to DigitalOcean, because they might have different concepts, and I'm not talking about just nomenclature.

- black box syndrome: you stop knowing how things work. This is convenient at first, but if you forget how to configure things "from the ground up", you stop being in control of your infrastructure/data, and ultimately, of your service.
It has full access to all arch repos including aur.

Edit: I guess you can think of it like "arch with an installer and configured desktop environment".
We still don't know where consciousness resides

However, we do know where it doesn't reside.
Fin is very wonderful!!!
Fish In the Net!! :D
Yep sure, I'd expect any competent programmer to be able to bash out the first dozen without it being too onerous. Think of it as FizzBuzz-on-steroids. Remember this is only a screen, and it's something many programmers would find to be fun anyway!
"So you think it's OK to have infinitely may sets and not be able to choose one from each of them, even though they're all non-empty?"

There's a lot hidden behind the word "choose". Of course I have no objection to you just grabbing whatever out of each set, but when you "choose" by performing an arbitrarily unbounded computation, it sounds less un-perverse. I am aware I've implicitly used a constructivist formulation by reference any sort of "computation".

Personally I'm ambivalent about the axiom itself, I just think it should always be clear whether or not you've chose it, which is generally itself not a problem, so, generally I'm happy either way. It is the case that when you use the Axiom of Choice, you've just irretrievably left the physical universe, which is fine, but worth being aware of.
I agree. I think the "hard" (and some of the "medium") challenges on codeeval.com are much better in terms of requiring coding ability vs requiring math ability. Math ability won't hurt, but it won't get you quite all the way there.
Most pictures nowadays come with EXIF data with the date. I just (automatically) rename them to {date}-{counter}.jpg and let git-annex deduplicate any repeated files.
3 second google search yields these results from 3 months ago:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-p...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2454109/Faceb...

This is pretty well known, and has been happening every 1-2 years. Are you new on the internet?
C is actually quite impressive (or maybe gcc?) in this regard. A few years ago I dug up a 15 yr old C implementation of some image based search techniques by Daniel Huttenlocher, I was able to compile and run it with minimal effort:

http://pugoob.blogspot.com/2008/01/pugoob-image-search-tool....
The UN declaration of human rights includes one sentence talking about the right to food, and many paragraphs talking about the right to participate in culture, community, communicate, and so on.

So if we judge by that, the right to participate in culture is more important than the right to food (or more likely, is simply more often challenged and disagreed with).

If the whole legal regime around copyright is having the effect of preventing people from participating in their culture/society, those laws are immoral and should be opposed.
Court strikes down FCC’s net neutrality rules
They just need the second 80% of work doing to them
People don't seem to understand this about DRM. It's based on encryption, but encryption only allows a secret message between alice and bob, away from the prying eyes of carol. But in a DRM situation, alice and carol are the same person.
Data Scientists, Beware Your Own Arrogance
The back and forth of claims regarding Siri seem to indicate an uneven level of service. My own experience is that it works great just enough to fail frustratingly.
Is ActiveX more dangerous than Java applets? If so, that's news to me, but I'm all ears.
Strange spaghetti-like formations discovered in Finnish lake
Can someone suggest a molecule I might of heard of that is 13nm in size?
When I was conducting quantitative interviews I ended up doing the same thing. One of my favorite problems to give was 267 (http://projecteuler.net/problem=267). It has a few "aha" moments but also requires coding to get it done.
Germany is not a sovereign country, there is no peace contract. "Seeing themselves as close allies" is kinda lol looking from the fact that we are occupied since 60 years.
definitely things that need to be considered - vendor lock in being the worst, IME. i'm less worried about API call integration, as i tend to isolate 3rd party APIs from my code... but that doesn't prevent all vendor lock-in.

for me, being able to focus on features is more important than these concerns, right now. i expect that over time i will take some of these tasks in and write the code myself, but at the moment i'm more concerned with feature growth.
3 Reasons for Common Winter Roof Repairs | LGC Roofing Blog
Absolutely! And private detectives would follow people around before that.
I have no idea where this idea - that AIs would be trivial to duplicate - started, but no: I do not believe that an AI would be "trivial to duplicate". I personally don't think that an AI could be transferred between hardware at all, or at least not without some major effort, much less copied non-destructively.

There was an experiment a while back where someone applied genetic algorithms to design things on an FPGA board. They got results that tended to work, but did things... weirdly. Things like picking up clock signals from the PC used to control the FPGA. Using things that are quirks of the current enviroment, but that don't work as soon as you change anything.

I believe that an AI would probably be along the same lines. I believe that a large chunk of an AI's "core personality" would be how code interacts with the bits of hardware that aren't deterministic. Which processor core updates memory first, how exactly processor core temperature changes when the processor workload changes, the characteristics of the microphone, etc, etc.

For that matter, how would one even copy an AI? I would assume that a "true" AI would be using all the resources at its disposal. How would you copy the current registers if all RAM is occupied? How would you do a copy of something that is constantly changing? How would you copy the data currently in the processor cache? Branch predictor? Interrupts?

I suppose that part of this is that I have always assumed that an AI would be at least partly self-modifying code.
Every time you launch a process from inside vim (like grepping multiple files, generating tags for a large project, etc) it totally freezes the user interface. You can not execute any long task in the background, which is really annoying. So having a multi threaded Vim is very much overdue.

There is an ongoing discussion on the vim-dev mailing list regarding a proposed patch by Thiago Arruda [1]. I have no opinion on the technical merit of the patch, but as a user, I would warmly welcome a move in that direction.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ
Always back up online chats so you can blackmail the participants with embarrassing or incriminating statements they made.
As people often say, it might have something to where you're using these services. E.g. in York, UK both Apple and Google Maps work perfectly fine.
>...this hardware is completely controlled by humans...the plug is physical

I think that software with that sort of intelligence would be naturally distributed among many physical machines and would be able to spread themselves to new machines quite easily (without asking permission).
Trying to shut down a well-designed botnet is not something one does using physical plugs.
Free Joomla Responsive Template
It's an open question if Apps are more like documents, or more like raster (canvas), vector (SVG) or 3D (WebGL) graphics?
I could argue that in most cases the former is the right answer. Calculating DOM is (well, I'm just guessing here) no more resource intensive than calculating word wrapping and text justification in retina quality canvas.
OP here. I just found it hugely hilarious that Salesforce was rated #1 :)
You're only looking at highly specialized apps which require a complex UI, so they tend to be more resistant to moving to the web. For the vast majority of apps, which you are ignoring, the UI is just a bunch of forms to fill in. New development of that type of app has almost completely moved to the web.
I am a NN proponent but think this is good because I don't believe the FCC could effectively enforce NN. At best, FCC enforcement would be a waste of money. At worst, there would be negative unintended consequences.
There are "OpenGL UI libraries" :P It's called OSX.

The main reason why we haven't seen more is because OpenGL up until now has been largely in the sphere of gaming, where standardized UIs aren't a priority.

That being said, even in gaming there are a large number of libraries available that help you implement UIs.
The case for an antibiotics tax
#prodmgmt Boosting 2014, Games of Inclusion, and The Best in February
Apple patents dynamic, motion-sensing iOS interface & 3D video editing
Congratulations, you have discovered the real Chinese Great Wall here - language.

(Hint: there's couple of more behind that)
I'm a bit peeved that much of what is ROT13-ed in this thread isn't spoilers. I went through the trouble to decode it, and typically didn't find it worth the effort.
Here is an important point for the non-Germans, so that you can understand why this was even asked for:

Unlike the German rabble, its political leaders (with very rare exceptions) are personally invested in the "trans-atlantic partnership". The underlying assumption on the German side is of course that this is a partnership among equals.

Team Merkel is hoping sooo bad that a high-ranking US official will come out to tell them that they haven't been just a bunch of chumps. I wonder how they will react now that it has become clear that that won't happen.

They'll probably just step up their self-delusion game.
I interpret this as meaning that they hope to get something in the treaty but not all of the anti-spying measures they wanted.
Gruber calls both Google and Apple on their bullshit all the time. He just knows more about Apple.
I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a computer system solely based on speech recognition, without a keyboard or other input devices, as the one depicted in the article.

How about people who can't speak or hear?
You're right, it is :)

The version with online demos uses latitude/longitude for the spatial dimension, but a new version we're working on (under the master branch on github) allows arbitrary x,y addresses. With that, we've encoded IP addresses as locations in space-filling curves to play around with source IP/destination IP datasets. It's particularly nice because the hierarchical nature of the spatial addresses end up mapping to larger and larger subnets of the IPv4 space.
There are so many options!
One that a friend of mine has put together is - http://getmysky.com/
Oyster, a Start-Up for E-Reading, Raises $14 Million
My point is that even if you isolate 3rd party APIs from your code there might be things that can't be "translated". Obviously both EC2 and DigitalOcean give you the same basic product, virtualisation (the greatest common divisor), but the "quirks" each one of them have are the ones you should be exploiting to get maximum efficiency, and this is generally non-portable.

But yeah, I think SaaS is a great way to scaffold or MVP your ideas. You can have a hugely complex infrastructure up and running in just a few clicks, but I don't think it's a great long-term solution.
Anonymous peer to peer download inside browsers
Anonymous browser and distributed database inside browsers, Torrents like but untrackable
Like a Chinese once said, a single spark can start a prairie fire
Bidirectional referrals were a crashing failure for BCC, the one time I implemented it. I also don't like the interaction that makes my customers have with their friends, particularly not in a B2B context. (I mean, wouldn't it put an undesirable thought in the back of your head reading my stuff if you had to wonder every time you heard me say, e.g. "Twilio is the best thing since sliced bread", whether that was being tracked and compensated?)

P.S. A lesson I learned early in AR's career: don't call massage therapy practices "massage parlors". That is one of a couple of word choices which massage therapists are really really touchy about: http://www.massagetherapy.com/articles/index.php/article_id/...
This.

Damn, if I had your email, I'd send you a personal letter of appreciation. This is just that good.
RFC 7085 - Top-Level Domains That Are Already Dotless