skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
regulation can be a pain as you say -- there are a lot of highly regulated components of real estate, but some of them are pretty easy to get into as well. For example, crafting rental property management software like maintenance ticketing systems.

Some interesting companies in the residential home sales game are trying to streamline the process. Off the top of my head, paperless pipeline & dotloop are both trying to reduce the paper volume.

there was also a brandery.org (cincy incubator) company in the last cycle that was doing something similar.
I'm sure you can figure out both the cynical and the correct answers.
> A public company in case you forgot is an institution designed to create value for share holders.

I don't know much about US law regarding this, but I thought the only thing a public company shouldn't do is destroy value. I don't think a company has the obligation to specifically pursue the cheapest/fastest way to do something. Directors and executives have some freedom to run things as they see fit, but won't abuse their freedom to not be voted out of the company; not because the courts would punish them for it.
This discussion comes up every time only because some people seem to think OS development is like racking new x86 servers running RHEL.

Many of the machines do not have LOM. They have hardware failures instead. They hang because they get trashed building OpenBSD and ports pretty much 24/7. There is debugging and serial cables going on. Someone needs to push that NMI button and check the LEDs flicker like they should. Reboot them. Constantly update to the latest development version, making them panic quite a bit. Diagnose that. Installation procedure requires console access, monitor adapters, weird keyboards, ... They don't fit in racks properly. There are security concerns. Etc, etc.

It's wrong to think of the machine room as rack space than can be had for cheap somewhere else. It's much more like a lab (with the mad professor living on top, controlling the experiment).
Is there any larger apps or libraries written in Hy? Would be great to see examples of "real-world" code outside of the tutorials etc. Wonder how it would be to use this for data analysis with Pandas/Matplotlib etc. IPython integration?
I wonder if you could also normalize against weather - to differentiate between "Steady state" photos that happen regardless of weather vs. photos that are taken only when the view is clearly good
> A few year ago, it was very difficult to bring your computer on a construction site.

Pardon? Rugged computers (like business Thinkpads and Toughbooks) have existed for far more than a decade. I would more readily take such a thing to a construction site than an iDevice or an Android tablet.
It truly is and even for experienced developers it can be overwhelming. It is simply impossible for anyone person to be knowledgeable every new technology and/or programming language.

I used to constantly fall in the trap of shallow but wide breadth of knowledge. Something new would come out and I would drop everything and dive right in. It feels rewarding at the time but really in the end has very little benefit (unless of course your a tech reporter).

My advice is to achieve a narrow and deep knowledge base. Pick a few that you feel passionate about and really concentrate on mastering those. It would help to pick those that have a large number of related job openings if its your livelihood. Mastering Java may seem old school, but the number of job postings I still see for java developers is amazing.
I'm not really talking about things outside the reach of science. I'm talking about choosing to believe differently about things for which science does have an answer, or at least a strong suggestion.

There's a subtle distinction I'm trying to make between "true" and "scientifically proven". Equating the two requires a belief that what science discovers is absolute truth, but that meta-claim cannot be analyzed by the underlying tool of science.

One can easily conceive of example theories which are not scientifically testable. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the universe was supernaturally created out of nothing. Not 6000 years ago, but at UNIX timestamp 0. But everyone was created with memories. Objects were created in motion. Everything is exactly as we see it, with cause and effect stretching back for countless million years, but it actually was just all created looking that way. As absurd as this sounds, it isn't scientifically falsifiable. It can't be disproven.

Assuming the above scenario is true, it is still scientifically proven that the universe is unfathomably old. The natural, empirical explanation does not change. It simply becomes false while remaining scientifically valid. The science is still sound. (And assuming the universe was not in fact created at UNIX timestamp 0, the belief that it was is still false even if it isn't disprovable.)

The rationalist believes that the findings of science are absolute truth. That if the universe appears billions of years old, it's because it is billions of years old. But whether observation is proof of absolute truth is not a testable question in science. Science can't assert absolute truth in that way. It can only assert a sound, natural explanation of cause and effect. And just because everything has a sound, natural explanation of cause and effect doesn't mean those are explanations are true. We simply have no way of knowing whether the entire universe was created at UNIX timestamp 0 with everything exactly as it should have been to make it appear billions of years old.
Theo says it's because if they drop $platform, they'll lose the devs that like working on $platform who quite possibly work on @other_platforms as well.
The counterargument is that there are so many financially entrenched interests, you'll find you can't make any headway against them.

I can't count the number of tech people I've heard say they want to create a website that will get rid of the horrible broker system of renting apartments in NYC. But that requires convincing landlords to do something different, and so far they have had zero financial incentive to do so, since it's the landlord who uses the broker, but the renter who has to pay the cost of the broker.

So ten years goes by, and still you usually have to go through the ridiculous process of paying brokers.
1st wearable and fully customizable on-the-go musical instrument
The important part of sdkmvx's comment is that those SGI workstations help find bugs that also affect x86 users. The more diverse ecosystem makes it easier to reliably detect and reproduce tricky race conditions, endianess bugs or memory management mistakes.
> Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.

Plenty of us have had positive interactions with Theo.
The 20th-Century Architecture of Eero Saarinen
Do you have any reference/proof/etc. for 0.999... === 1? As one of those taught to believe it is not, I would like to see it.

Unfortunately, text books conserve non facts for very interesting reasons. Some good examples are at http://www.textbookleague.org/
I may be the only one excited about this, but I think it's awesome.

I imagine a future where a "web browser" is just a WebGL + Networking + JS API, and you just load in HTML5.js. The benefit of something like this is that it puts the power back in the hands of the people. You don't have to worry about Microsoft ignoring standards, you just load in the HTML5.js that you know works. Want a new feature? Fork HTML5.js on GitHub.

One other benefit that interests me is for games. Games badly need a free, standardized way to do UI. Porting v8 + WebGL is far easier than porting an entire web browser. There's a chance for greater performance too, since frameworks like ChromiumEmbedded typically only provide a memory buffer of the rendered frame, which you then have to copy (back) to vram.

(reposted because the other thread was killed)
I guess you don't know Theo de Raadt ;)

The guy is infamous for being one of the most aggressive, sarcastic and trollish OSS developers out there. He's been like that for 20+ years, he's not going to change just because they are 20 grand short.

Part of the success OpenBSD has enjoyed is in fact due to this uncompromising attitude: Theo pushed hard against security-by-obscurity, binary blobs, undocumented proprietary hardware and poor development practices. With openSSH, they pretty much set the bar for security-related programs the wotld over.

At the same time, Theo's personality routinely drives away a lot of very capable developers and users, which limited the overall popularity OpenBSD could ever reach.
Is the project available anywhere? I'd love to play with it!
Firefox cannot run chrome until they implement v8.js
How would you feel if you found out that your employer's competitor really wanted to hire you, and would've willingly tripled your salary, but your manager had a talk with the competition and they made a backroom no-poach deal?
Because getting a Ph.D. is more than getting a degree. You're actively doing research, and contribute to the world. Some people value this higher than simply getting a degree.
For a while, RC4 was recommended because it's immune to the BEAST attack.
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer Fortran?

Note: preemptive clarity: this isn't a language flamewar thing, I'm genuinely curious.
You ask:

"I wonder how the salaryman culture gels with the Japanese being so innovative."

But that was answered above:

"You presided over a corporate bankruptcy? Oh dear. That's even worse than a personal bankruptcy. Not only did you fail personally, you ruined the lives of people to whom you owed society's highest form of loyalty."

They are highly motivated to engage in enough innovation so as to stave off bankruptcy.
Are you claiming that smart people aren't already working on solving these problems? Or that they're using something other than "science and evidence and smart people and big computers"?

Do you not think you might be an asshole for implying that, because these problems aren't already solved, no one is working on them? Or that anyone working on them isn't smart?

Maybe these problems are HARD! [They, in fact, are. Witness all of human history.]
Duologue Is A New Quality Assurance Tool For App Designers
Slides: HTML (http://nimrod-code.org/talk01/slides.html) and PDF (http://nimrod-lang.org/talk01/slides.pdf)
The Janitor would probably even perform better than the exec.

You might enjoy the classic Twilight Zone episode "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville." It's available on TV.com.
Many of the "Who" -> "Americans" call / responses I believe. However, it feels like correlation without causation. Yes, statistically, the majority of Americans are self-interested actors who vote as individuals, not as well meaning members of a greater whole. They're people. But so are the voters in most other representative governments. I would instead say that they are just the logical developed state of a nation that extols Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (all very individual goals) while situating them in a place with a very rapid, capitalistic feedback loop that gives carrots for highly self-interested choices, and sticks for choices which benefit the larger social group.

This will be a bit of a stretch, but nations are kind of like equation solvers. You start with ICs (form of government, economic views, population diversity), BCs (neighbours, trade, media), source terms (research, development, legal activism) , ect... and then start moving through time, trying to solve for a converged social state that's stable. Some of that junk just isn't stable and diverges spectacularly. Some are only locally stable, so you get periodic upheaval. And some are stable solutions and converge well. Almost every IC for America is one that favors absolute personal freedom over the welfare of the group. Our government rewards people for thinking locally and voting in their self interest. Our economic model is one which absolutely rewards people on self-interest. The idea model (touted here and elsewhere) is to develop the minimal effort product, market it extensively, build a loyal following, and then go public so that early backers / founders can cash out. At which point...who cares? Next big project and the public can get soaked. Even our population distribution favors it. "The land of bounty and opportunity where anyone with enough determination and drive can be a millionaire!" what kind of folks is that going to attract?

And like I said, it all converges. The media used to balance some of this, but as the iterations have continued, the bankruptcies, the buyouts, and the new investors, they've gotten more infected, to the point where they're now largely just mouthpieces for whatever self-interested individual or group speaks through them.

Are we divergent? Hard to tell. We could be a convergently stable Rome, stagnating as we develop ever more robust home tofu delivery visualizations. With the core of extreme individualism, we could theoretically be explosively divergent. However, I'm hoping for locally stable, so that we can get enough upheaval to kick us over the nearby hill and maybe find a better minima, where we once again aren't risk averse, dare to build big projects that change the world, and possess a government that does more than go into spasmodic seizures every two months.
I agree. Shipping matters: my comment on the code was just a friendly observation.
Why you should not use Tcl (1994, "The Tcl War")
Today I Briefed Congress on the NSA
Thanks for link, donated some.
You could probably turn Firefox into a NaCl app that would run inside Chrome.
> 1. Lots of users use the same password on multiple sites

I'd never say this at a job interview but I'll be Devil's advocate: As a business, this isn't my problem, it's yours. If you want the convenience of the same password for multiple sites, in the real world there are going to be weak points on some of those sites and someone who can abuse any point of the chain on any site can obtain your password for all.

For the rest, expecting to change my passwords if my phone is stolen is not an unreasonable thing at all. I should do this anyway, even if businesses ensure me that I don't have to.

And 99% of users who aren't IT or security professionals would just prefer to be done with entering their password after the first time, period.
Since today seems to be Tcl Day, I thought I'd submit this: the beginning of the famous Tcl War.

Here is a direct link to John Ousterhout's reply:
http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html
Use your own product or die
GP means string literals. To quote from the spec: "4.3.16 String value: primitive value that is a finite ordered sequence of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer... Each integer value in the sequence usually represents a single 16-bit unit of UTF-16 text."
I think this is really neat! Congrats on launching! I hardly see enough startups (uh, side projects?) taking on mundane, everyday things (car maintainence to name one) so this is nice.

One piece of feedback: I love that it is free. Free is great! But this does mean that, at some point, it might go away. What then? (That is, help me figure out why I shouldn't be worried about relying on this for maintenance!)
The idea is from ECMA 262, sections 2(conformance), 4.3.16 (String value), 6 (Source text), 8.4 (String type)... That's basically THE reason, why all js engines are UTF-16 internally.
This passive-aggressive attitude is going to get you nowhere in life. Back handed complements are only cool in pre-teen TV shows.
It sounds like you could figure it out by simply asking a local real estate agent what their pain points are.
Have a look at this stack overflow question[1]. Javascript/ECMAScript strings are supposed to be UTF-16. That said UTF-16 encodes 4 byte codepoints just as easily as UTF-8.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8715980/javascript-string...
Hell, a lot of us are just now absorbing ideas that came about in the 60s and 70s.

There's good new stuff of course, but a lot of it is redoing an existing idea in a slightly different context, with new and exciting bugs waiting for you to discover them when you'd most prefer not to.
Thank you for sharing that. That is a really interesting vision for the future of browsers.
"All of these tools have different trade-offs. There are so many trade-offs that simple blog post comparisons don't cut it. And so you have the "magpies" who try and figure out some of these trade-offs for themselves by experimentation. (That is what, in my opinion, hack days and 20% time are for, not your new production system.)"

Absolutely. Someone has to be the designated pseudo-magpie in order to architect the stack. Doing so effectively though requires a dev who can look past the buzzwords and elevator pitches to really get to the core of it. Essentially they have to be magpie and anti-magpie at the same time. Does this new technology really offer me any benefit or is it the same end result wrapped in new clothing?
Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86.

I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).
The dress-wearer here. Getting into the dress with all the electronics was a bit daunting, just because I didn't want to pull any of the wires, but it was totally comfortable to wear. I was able to sit (which I was worried about) and dance totally normally. The dress did have extra room in the top, so the battery pack and flora were able to be installed there. This dress was also perfect for installing electronics because it had two layers on the bottom, so I was able to have the LEDs in between in top layer and bottom, so they weren't touching me.
That's all true, but in the end the architect is responsible for much of the bad design. There's no one better positioned to "be the change" when it comes to architecture than...architects.

I don't think there are many (if any) fields that affect people more thoroughly on a daily basis. Of course there's pressure to do take the path of least resistance. You know that going into the field. The responsibility, though, is to overcome it whenever possible.

It's not like software is any different. There's tons of pressure to just get by. It's our responsibility as developers to go beyond that whenever possible.
This may be tangential, but I think that computer languages should have a different type (and literal notation) for human text (strings that may be read by human, may be translated, won't affect program semantics) and for computer string (strings that are strictly defined, not to be translated, and may affect program semantics).

Then we could put all the human language problems into human text type, and leave the simpler computer string type with easier semantics.

In Python, although there are no tools for that, I typically use the following convention: single quotes for computer text and double quotes for human text. I guess you could use byte arrays for computer text as well, but it would be more painful.
>The fact that nobody else at that time had put apartment search on a map is a great example of how low the bar is for excellence in this space (no offense, @padmapper).

I'm pretty sure that housingmaps did it earlier. However, padmapper provided a much nicer experience.
The Dark Side of the Truffle Trade
Very well said.

I believe the bottom line for any nation regardless of their intelligence apparatus is to act on their own self interest in preserving the state. Every nation with a vested interest is involved in spying internationally, and although all these nations also have vast domestic intelligence operations, I believe that some nations are more actively focused on gathering information on their own citizens for specific purposes than others.

I can only speak from my opinions and what I've read, but it is my belief that the NSA is more of the former, interested more in international affairs while still maintaining a catch-all domestic program with the intention of gathering as many intelligence signals as possible, though not actively pursuing 98% of what's been gathered. Granted, if they wanted to take action against an individual they damn well have the capacity, but I don't think this is their primary objective. I do believe genuinely that "preventing terrorism" is one of their aims (or at least giving the state the resources to do so), but obviously the tools that are being used to fulfill these goal are taken to their logical extent and ping everyone instead of "the bad guys".

When I look at other nations and see very obvious programs of state-sponsored espionage (China's Unit 61398, for example) I wonder how far the United States would eventually fall behind in the game if they don't keep pace with other nations. The NSA's operations have less to do with corporate espionage (as far as anyone can tell) or political dissent (somewhat), but cyber warfare is a very real threat and having the capacity to monitor that threat and actively work against it is a power I hope the agency doesn't lose.

I hear and accept the argument of intelligence powers being used to ultimately instill tyranny, and I grapple with reasoning defense of the state's interests vs. living under tyranny (not to mention protecting my own self interests), but I don't know if we are realistically at that point yet and I still would argue that there is an importance to letting the state manage its own affairs. That is a flawed argument obviously but that is one of the reason I wanted to hash out the topics in my initial question.

I agree that the next few years will present a privacy arms race in the private sector and I hope those technologies would be able to combat the over-reach of any agency with intelligence gathering capabilities but I hesitate to believe it will hamper these agencies abilities to monitor and track individuals. I hope I'm wrong, but the cat and mouse game of technological advancement will continue unabated, and as long as the USA continues to spend more than half a trillion dollars annually on defense the resources will always be available to break or hinder those advancements. We can only hope the individuals at the helm of these new technologies can stand against encroaching influence and money.
Zero dollars flow to music license holders via Grooveshark. It operates in a legal grey area. Also the file metadata is set up by uploaders and is a lower quality than Spotify in most cases. I don't know what the Grooveshark Android/iPhone client is like, but Spotify's is decent.
Show HN: NFLdb - database of play-by-play data (with live updating)
Storage space is so cheap nowadays. I find it very hard to be enticed by even more free cloud storage. I doubt that offering me more and more would help.

I would be interested in an application that makes agreements with the ISPs that have throttling or download limits so that traffic to and from their servers don't count.
Just to bolster your point that neurons can be influenced by radioactive decay (in case a reader were wanting to dispute any direct influence exists): a person with a Geiger counter can make a decision of any kind based on the parity of a count produced by it. "Even I turn left and go to work, odd I turn right and go to a park."
JavaScript source can be encoded in any way that the browser can handle, yes.

Within the JS language, strings are represented as sort-of-UCS-2-sort-of-UTF-16 [0]. This is one of the few problems with JS that I think merits a backwards-compatibility-breaking change.

[0] http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding
Not to mention that terrorists aren't the only thing the president is charged to protect citizens against.