skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Particle - field, okay. To me, a 'particle' is
just a temporary entity that happens when a field
has an 'interaction' and decides to have its wave
function 'collapse' -- then it has a new wave
function.

I was trying to go back before there was a 'soup'
of wave functions with lots of quarks or whatever
the first 'particle' was. So, as I read Guth,
there was a 'something', small enough to be
essentially just a 'point', but with very high
energy and energy density, and that density caused
high space-time curvature, and the region with that
high curvature expanded, explosively, on the way
to something much flatter but much larger, in the
first second so large as to be nearly as large
as now and with density and curvature nearly as
low as now. So, back to the 'beginning': There
was just one particle/wave of very high energy
in a very small region of very high curvature
that got pulled by the expanding space-time
and, presto, soon there was two particles or
wave functions. That first separation is the
one I am thinking about, and it had to have an
axis.

And nearly all I have is just layman's descriptions
of the curvature, wave functions, Guth's expansion,
etc. so am typing stuff I really don't know about!
In some of the math, my real field, I'm solid enough,
but for the physics -- no.
It seems like they landed it fine but either crashed trying to take off again or just went overboard in demolishing it (when they had 10 tons of cocaine I think they might have been a bit exuberant): http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i6w-doyje...
Yes he does have a genetic condition called Lynch Syndrome that makes him predisposed to colorectal cancer. Thanks I will tell him to ask (or ask myself if possible) the oncologist for any possible options.
Video: Edward Snowden's SXSW Talk
We're young - but not that young. Core team are 18 (me, dev), 18 (Cam, designer) & 21 (Kyle, design/founder)
> > A PONO file, encoded to CD, then FLAC'ed

> You realise that's a no-op, right?

Given that the PONO file will have more bits per sample than the CD encoded version, from a digital point of view, no, it is absolutely not a no-op. It has different data in it, even when the reversible compression has been reversed.

If a person with good ears can tell the difference, that's a different question. And even if someone somewhere can tell the difference sometimes, do enough people who pay for music care?
> For all we know he was confused and thought she was talking about his previous, possibly classified, work.

Which is precisely the explanation he gave to AP
I'd much rather my contacts be able to set their own photos for when they call (with the option to override it). It's just not worth the trouble setting photos for each person.
Dammit. Mine is 8 and She takes an absolute eternity at the cheese counter.
I can't imagine their motivation for reducing the size of buttons like that. Other than the smaller buttons, 7.1 actually looks pretty good.
Principles of Startup Support
Thanks!

EDIT: Got 2 invites to send out!
I'm assuming you're going to disregard their comment because of their gender? What does it matter what gender the parent comment poster is? They should have a voice too...
> The problem I have with the above statement is that radar is unambiguous. Either the aircraft turned back, continued on, descended rapidly below radar coverage or broke in to bits. They all have different returns so you can't say "it may have possibly..."

Thanks for the specific statement.

I rather have the impression that, especially under less-than-ideal conditions (range, terrain between radar site and target, weather, etc.) radar is not unambiguous.
On the business side, but product is very interesting to me.
Incoming Dropbox intern here. Interested in that as well. Could someone from YC answer that? Many thanks!
Please, please do not suggest treatments for your friend, especially those suggested by people on the internet.

People on the internet may mean well and show you interesting things, but your friend's medical care is best managed by his oncologist/primary care physician. Interfering with their work will likely do more harm than good.

Definitely encourage your friend to ask any and all questions about his care; communication between doctors and patients is helpful for everyone involved.

Self-medication, whether by diet or drugs, is a terrible idea. People die doing this.
It always amazes me that after all these years, Linux still hasn't fixed this.

In my experience, any program that overloads I/O will make the system grind to a halt on Linux. Any notion of graceful degradation is gone and your system just thrashes for a while.

My theory about this has always been that any I/O related to page faults is starved, which means that every process spends its time slice just trying to swap in its program pages (and evicting other programs from the cache, ensuring that the thrashing will continue).

I've never gotten hard data to prove this, and part of me laments that SSDs are "fast enough" that this may never actually get fixed.

Can anyone who knows more about this comment? It seems like a good rule inside Linux would be never to evict pages that are mapped executable if you can help it.

Has anyone experimented with ionice or iotop? http://www.electricmonk.nl/log/2012/07/30/setting-io-priorit...
The flashing is distracting. Quite irritating actually
Well, you know. The reason your computer works is because they trapped a genie in there.

http://james.hamsterrepublic.com/technomancy/
Wow, that was fun, thanks! It starts to make sense after a while. Are lower or higher scores better? I'm at 21,204. http://imgur.com/4tnVPZ4
It has a window, it just on a side of the building that's in permanent shade. The view is worth it though, I can see ~15 miles from my porch since I'm on the side of a mountain (which causes the permanent shade since it wraps around ~270 degrees behind the building.
There's actually a semi-optimal strategy that nearly guarantees winning if you're diligent about it. Just build a stairstep pattern with the highest numbers in the bottom corner of the stairs. Then basically combine sideways and downward and "always" resist the temptation to push up. Its kind of how some tri-diagonal matrix algorithms work. The only problem is you have to be fastidious about never using the one direction you've reserved as your excluded case (Up in my example) as that can screw your staircase by putting a [2] right underneath your wonderful [1024]. Just move blocks back and forth, waiting for the right blocks to create combo patterns, while generally storing lower cost blocks on the outside of the stairs, and then snake them through the stairs when you get a chain set up.

Ex:

x x x 2

x x 2 4

x 2 4 8

2 4 8 16
Confusion about what? If your goal is to know which design people prefer (independently of generation), there is a necessary amount of confusion required with regard to which is new and which is old.

Even if you were to remove the labels, users familiar with the platform will still be biased. There is something called the mere-exposure effect, which dictates that the mere exposure to a thing will cause preference toward said thing. Because of this aspect of human preference, the deck is naturally stacked against "new" things.
The stated claim seems entirely in context. And in fact, your restated argument is still rebutted by the post you're replying to. You can't just say "straw man" or "out of context" and then provide no explanation to those claims. Well, obviously you can, because you have been, but it makes your arguments fall flat.

I would restate the grandparent's claim to further argue, but clearly that's an effort in futility.
Man gets 14 years for ‘lasing’ helicopter
For concave shapes like letters the best choice would probably be a scanline-based rasterization algorithm.

Sort all polygon edges from top to bottom and walk through that list line-by-line, keeping track of all active edges for each scanline. For those you can then find all intersections and fill the ranges in-between. By using an even-odd rule you can make sure that concave polygons and polygons with holes are filled properly.
Don't listen to what anyone who says that you can make as much as a programmer as a manager. The best programmers in the world with no management experience are going to cap at much less than a million a year in 99.9% of cases. Usually 400k or less. That's still good, and if you are happy with that stay a programmer! Just don't justify it saying that's the most you could make.

People who go into management literally have no cap in earnings. There are people who started as engineers and worked their way into senior management and even C suite positions. These positions can pay 7 or even 8 and in some cases 9 figures a year. The cap is much, much higher than you could ever make as just a programmer.
I've used both Python and Ruby for web scraping. Whilst Python is my language of choice for most things, I enjoyed the web scraping experience more with Ruby (in particular, Nokogiri). Maybe it's just bad luck on my part, but I tend to find Unicode issues when scraping with Python 2.x, whereas Ruby has had decent Unicode support for a while. I've not used Python 3.x. YMMV.
Reminds me of tweaking the Colonization game (1991?) by editing text files...
Two hours straight and managed to get once to 1024.
So I used "high end unix workstations" for years and years and years and OSX isn't perfect, but jesus christ I'd take its UI over just about any of the UIs from its competitors.

(and remember trying to compile anything on sunos and only having suncc? fuck that, imo, I'll deal with xcode)
My true aspiration is to start my own company one day. I know I will never be an engineer rockstar, but I see the value in having a strong understanding of code.
When we first started doing this, it was 100% a joke app which we never really had an intention of taking forward. It was a side project from our main work to give us a bit of a breather and allow us to chill a bit - avoiding burnout, etc.

That being said, through various discussions & off-the-cuff mentions to quite a substantial number of people, it seems like people are interested enough to make it worth releasing.

It also has some real practical uses in some fairly common circumstances. For example, if you're physically handicapped, or you're in a city centre and need to go, but you know there is a high chance that the bathroom you visit will be really nasty. This is particularly the case around nightlife venues.

Right now, we are hosting a private beta in San Luis Obispo, as we're still in active development, but we'll be releasing to more in the next few weeks. We have a few hundred people signed up waiting for access.

This project is not our primary focus - we still have our day jobs - but we're enjoying working on it, there is quite a lot of interest & we believe that it could be a legitimately useful app which many people could use on a relatively regular basis.
NYC Yahoo Android event with JBQ
I agree 100% about Kelly Johnson.
People who think of Doug Engelbart as only "The Inventor of the Mouse" sell him extremely short also.
Google "The Mother of All Demos" and be amazed about how much he demonstrated and how much more he envisioned in 1969.
I have to occasionally support a thinkpad user and I wouldn't wish that computer on anybody (just from trackpad annoyances alone).
Accidentally answering a call is embarrassing.
Actually, I hear LOTS of reports of people with $100-$140k salaries who receive signing bonuses close to their salaries. To the point where it seems like the "new standard."

No, you don't see this in start-ups. I think HN may skew toward people who usually work in start-ups, so the perceived average will be lower as a result. Until this recent offer, it was my perception as well.

And no, that's not quite my pay grade, but a lot higher than the plateau that I think people are imagining. I think some developers do get sick of the programming, or they stop learning and go stale, before they get to be an anomaly like me. ;)
I also want to add extra comment regarding #1. Some developers are super and every year they get a new offer from another company and they jump ship. Nothing wrong with that - but maybe a company wants someone who can work with the company for a long term. If a developer who jumps ship every year, they might as well look at someone else who is slightly less senior but good at what they do. I know some companies have contracts that locks down new hires, but i think most of us prefer flexibility but still provide some psudeo-mental confident to the hiring company that "I am not a china easily stealable within a year. Hire me and I will try to help you make things better."
A hearty second for mechanize. It basically wraps urllib2 which is neat. Although, I've encountered situations where language support for distributed systems would have really saved some frustration. There's a version of mechanize for Erlang [1], which I intend on trying out whenever I get around to learning Erlang :)

[1] https://github.com/tokenrove/mechanizerl
It's not rebutted. Nowhere does he address the point that android makes the user manage the power where iOS does not. Instead he simply attempts to reframe the debate into the usual old saw about Apple's approach being restrictive vs Android.

This simply does not rebut the idea that Android is making the user do the work, whereas iOS is doing it for the user. It just tries to make it sound like a good thing rather than a failing.
By using cursor key for voting you dramatically decreased usability, for example I no longer can use Platform Key (Win/Command) key + left arrow to go back to previous page.
Fortran disallows pointer aliasing and it has some language intrinsics which operate on arrays as a whole, so the compiler can emit processor-specific SIMD instructions. I'm sure that a very clever programmer could use restrict and inline assembly in C to get similar benefits, but you know as well as I do that having the language make these guarantees for you is helpful.
Express.js Middleware Demystified
Bending the Light with a Tiny Chip
PHP4->PHP5 was a big breaking change as well. It took several years for all projects nad hosting companies to upgrade and switch to v5 by default.

But there was a strong push from developers. I don't see that happening when Python developers' attitude is "Meh, Python 2 is all right, I don't need to upgrade anything ever".
The word "manhole" is not a fair comparison. In that case they were dealing with an inanimate object. In this case, we're labeling any developer who would need this tool. Hence the inappropriate use of gender.
Flat-rental income 20k p.a.
Valuation 400k at 5% yield.
Maximum plausible valuation might be 600k
Lowest plausible valuation might be 250k

No such exercise is possible with Bitcoin, the 'value' of which could be argued to be anything.
Processes: 180 total, 2 running, 7 stuck, 171 sleeping, 965 threads
2014/03/10 16:24:55
Load Avg: 1.28, 1.13, 1.06
CPU usage: 8.0% user, 20.0% sys, 72.0% idle
SharedLibs: 12M resident, 12M data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 35120 total, 1588M resident, 121M private, 700M shared.
PhysMem: 5020M used (853M wired), 2884M unused.
VM: 401G vsize, 1065M framework vsize, 311(0) swapins, 1527(0) swapouts.
Networks: packets: 14047540/18G in, 8183740/2177M out.
Disks: 386988/26G read, 413161/25G written.
Yeah, that advice has been bubbling around since the deal was announced. It just strikes me as "instead of being a unicorn, create one," though.
Who rules in the other worlds?
Is there a list of all of the popular libraries?
Preface for anyone reading this: I don't have any technical degree only what I have picked up over time. That said:

So in terms of the instructions "wrap the chicken" assuming the chicken were wrapped in a way that there was no crunchiness that produced metal gaps then it would merely block the chicken from cooking in the area wrapped, right? So in theory a nice idea but in practice people slap on the tin foil and then you have sparking? Hence "no metal in microwave" is really simply not being able to rely that the general public using the product will know the nuances (which makes sense). (Human behavior is something that I do know quite a bit about..)

Maybe you've done this one: You take a glass of water in pyrex (or coffee cup) and heat it just until it is ready to boil. Then you put a spoon or other object in and it explodes. Because apparently (I think..) breaking the surface tension is the issue (which can be done with anything if you don't remove carefully and shake a bit it will also happen).

Another thing that I've noticed is that water obviously boils at different times depending on the humidity in the room (I'm non technical enough to think that I figured that one out but feel free to correct me..)
I presume that the “black box” is located somewhere in the plane that is likely quite inaccessible to the crew and/or terrorists that may wish to disable it. It’s a sealed box, and I would presume that the crew would not have the tools to open it and that it is unlikely to have a simple “on/off” switch with which to turn it off.

But… COULD it have been diaabled? Why have no “pings” been picked up as yet?
I see a lot of "coding-centric" answers, but I think the most valuable asset older programmers have is their experience. So I would say, you go into "project lead" mode (which you could read as management, but I think of that hat as non-programming)

In other words, you sit in the planning meetings & your experience on past projects helps get over that "where do we start" mode. You make sure the proper QA and testing is being done, things like that.

Your day is filled with many other tasks than just writing code. You go home at 5pm & work on your private projects for fun & interest (not that 9-5 is uninteresting, but you don't have the time to "play" so much any more)
I think it depends on the kind of lightbulb, but I would be especially careful with eco(?) energy saving light bulbs

From http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-506347/An-ene...

Energy-saving light bulbs are so dangerous that everyone must leave the room for at least 15 minutes if one falls to the floor and breaks, a Government department warned yesterday.
The startling alert came as health experts also warned that toxic
mercury inside the bulbs can aggravate a range of problems including migraines and dizziness.
And a leading dermatologist said tens of thousands of people with skin complaints will find it hard to tolerate being near the bulbs as they cause
conditions such as eczema to flare up.
The Department for Environment warned shards of glass from broken bulbs should not be vacuumed up but instead swept away by someone wearing rubber gloves to protect them from the bulb's mercury content.
In addition, it said care should be taken not to inhale any dust and the broken pieces should be put in a sealed plastic bag for disposal at a council dump  not a normal household bin.
None of this advice, however, is printed on the packaging the new-style bulbs are sold in. There are also worries over how the bulbs will be disposed of.
I've found simply pushing up, left, down, right, I can routinely outdo the score I can attain by actually playing with thought.... Kind of disappointing, but then I lost hours to this already. Fabulous game!
Worked for me in Firefox 27 on a Mac.
I used it in production for an application that is in the App Store right now(ChefSteps). It was a pleasure. It doesn't quite feel completely native yet, but it's close.
For all my fellow CentOS/RHEL users here is a quick bash script for getting it running (assumes you don't have ruby 1.9 installed).

# Install RVM and Ruby 1.9.3
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh
rvm install 1.9.3

# Install JSON gem
gem install json

# Install Scout realtime
gem install scout_realtime

# Start Scout realtime
scout_realtime

# Punch a hole in iptables on port 5555 for Scout realtime
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 5555 -j ACCEPT
service iptables save
service iptables restart
Fair enough, and godspeed. But it's not a product, and it won't be a big consumer platform. We've fed "XUL, the good parts" into the web standards, e.g., flexible box in CSS; and still are, e.g., Web Components.

/be
Yes, we did. It appears to be more of a promotional thing than a tool with much real world use. Mostly 1 star reviews, no longer supported & fairly confusing to use. We think the idea was cool, but we can do a better job :)

Additionally, having to manually add the bathrooms can be a bit of a no-go. We've currently got Foursquare integration with some filtering to try and be smart about this.
> this made it to the top of HN without me even thinking of posting it here

Good for beta testing it.

Unlike with Threes, there's no real reason to use numbers since they're all powers of 2. If you used letters (A, B, C, ...) you could market it to non-HN sorts, and have a version of the game in a 5x5 grid, or, more to the point, in a 6x6 grid with letters A to Z. Most people in the world know the order of letters in English.
I presume that the “black box” is located somewhere in the plane that is likely quite inaccessible to the crew and/or terrorists that may wish to disable it. It’s a sealed box, and I would presume that the crew would not have the tools to open it and that it is unlikely to have a simple “on/off” switch with which to turn it off.
It took me a few tries, but it's definitely winnable.
daaaveg@yahoo.com

Thanks in advance!
Comcast yoinks House of Cards from Netflix because it can
That's exactly how it works on Android. It uses Google+ profile pictures, which you can override, you can also enable option to show details about numbers that are not in your contacts (including the picture).
This would be cool. I think winning in the fewest moves would be the most impressive. i.e. how few tiles you 'waste'. Though winning with the lowest score may approximate this.
Why I Believe Bitcoin/Virtual Currency Must Succeed
Does anyone else have issues when dictating phone numbers to be dialled??

If I tell Siri to call "1800528555" it will interpret this as "Call 18005 to 8555"

Fail...

What am I doing wrong?
I think FreeType is the go-to solution for text rendering.

http://www.freetype.org/

My take on the word cloud problem:

1. Sort words by frequency. Map the highest and lowest frequencies to some maximum and minimum font size.
2. Render each word into an individual image with FreeType.
3. Find some pleasing way to arrange the word images using only their bounding boxes.
4. Render the word images into a final image, picking a random pleasant color to tint each word as you go.

EDIT: Or did you mean, "how does font rendering work"? In that case, I think it mostly boils down to rasterizing line segments and Bezier curves, along with algorithms for kerning and for trying to fit the text to the pixel grid. FreeType's documentation goes into great detail about what exactly a modern text renderer has to deal with, yet I found it to be very accessible as someone with little prior knowledge of the field. I recommend giving it a look:

http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/documentation.html
I think that part of it may be that machines have grown more powerful. You used to compile code because you wanted that last 10% (or whatever) of performance out of your system. Now, the machine is powerful enough that you don't care.

You especially don't care if you're creating a web service. You may have to buy another machine to handle the load. But that costs, what, $500? How much programming time is that worth? Less than a week for a cheap programmer; less than a day for an expensive one. If Lisp (or FP) gets you there faster, it may well be worth the runtime inefficiency.
Thanks again for reporting - we've released version 1.0.1 to fix the issue:

gem install scout_realtime

Note that OSX support is limited as there is no "/proc" support.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4...
Project author here. We don't want to exclude anyone - I updated it to "developers."
That link peaked my interest.
11 Times 'The Simpsons' Predicted the Future of Technology