skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure why the negative attitude..? A great thing about FAKE is that it can be used without worrying much about the context. Yes, it is written in F# and F# is mainly functional, but FAKE is just a great tool for anyone - and as Scott correctly points out, you don't even need to understand much F# to use it.
> one of the particles to fall in and the other to escape. This results in a loss of mass of the black hole (told you it was weird)

How does the energy to create the virtual particles come from the black hole (which it has to in order for the accounting to work: -2+1=-1)? Is it a "Quantum Field Theory doesn't care about the event horizon" type thing?
Responding strictly to the headline:

What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important?
Yeah, I know- it's just drawing a random number. I didn't have space to improve on that.
While the Nintendo DS contained the CPU the GBA did, the Nintendo 3DS does not contain the DS's CPU. I assume that's either because, as they're both ARM chips, the instruction set is backwards-compatible, or that there's actually emulation happening.
I didn't realize that :-p Good looking out!
The "gray zone" problem as stated here is that it is easy for two people who are unlikely to develop a romantic relationship (say, two heterosexual men) to form a close working relationship. But in order to tear down the glass ceiling heterosexual men and women will need to form close working relationships, and sometimes those are misinterpreted as more romantic than they actually are.

This is the most important paragraph:

"I think the path forward is finding a way to tolerate this gray zone and accommodate it without simply shutting women out professionally. So I really do not think these shit shows help women break into business. I think they just reinforce the current paradigm where the people in power -- mostly men -- have reason to err on the side of shutting women out in order to protect themselves from potential scandal or accusations or similar."

This is a very complicated issue, but I don't think we are well-served by slandering one another on social media rather than having a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately the claims made in the current debacle are not permitting a reasoned discussion, either by mistake or design, which is incredibly frustrating.
Loseless compression may not be as useful as a summarizing algorithm, but it is definitely a test of intelligence. Lossless compression requires identifying the pattern that produced an input as perfectly as possible. If you have an algorithm that can predict the next letter with great probability, you only only need a few bits to store a string of text. And making good predictions on real world data is a good test of AI and machine learning.
> I'm certain that many benefits from OS development would carry through to equivalent investigations, especially through harnessing the collective problem solving abilities of communities like HN.

Given the recent high-profile incident where internet crowdsourcing converged on identifying two innocent people as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, and then attempted to spread their personal information as widely as possible, I don't think this approach currently has a good reputation.

I think it's an interesting question what crowdsourcing works well and poorly for. But I'd put criminal investigations way down the list of good candidates, due to the danger of devolving into mob justice, and even raising the risk of innocent people being lynched.
72 People Killed during gun raid in Boston
Fiat currency works because the issuing government guarantees its value... When a government can no longer guarantee its value, it's worthless (see Zimbabwe).
Isn't the nonexistence of large black holes from cosmic ray collisions proof of black hole evaporation? Or have we not been able to measure that / have reason to doubt micro-black-holes are created by cosmic ray collisions in the first place?
In some cases the results of not having ligatures can look terribly bad. For example for fonts where the 'f' ends with what looks like a dot: if you put that kind of 'f' with an 'i' after it, the dot of the 'i' and the end of the preceding 'f' make for a very, very ugly artefact which looks like two dots connected to each others. Not only I find this ugly but also actually distracting. It depends on the font used, the kerning, etc.

This kind of uglyness due to the lack of ligature if not as noticeable on digital media, where we typically don't have the 1200+ dpi that print does and where, hence, you tend not to have these kind of 'f' (for example) because fonts have been hinted (or specifically chosen / created) not too have these issues.

I hope my explanation makes sense: I'm not a native english speaker but I did write and typeset myself about a dozen books (most with Quark XPress, one with LaTeX)... And they were all using ligatures IIRC (I should check for my LaTeX one: it's been a long time).
The beachball lander? That must be Mars Pathfinder. Pathfinder was just a technology demonstrator for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and the science return was rather thin - about a dozen spectrographic analyses of rocks, half a year's worth of weather data, and a few hundred pretty pictures.

The real mission was Spirit and Opportunity, and those two are a giant success. With USD 900 million the price tag is four times higher, and this is getting out of reach of even the ultrawealthy.
very enlightening :)
The chrome notification icon pushed me over the edge to switch back to Firefox. Even though the UI feels less polished & slightly less responsive, I'm happy to support Firefox. Hoping that more people switch to Firefox and they can get more resources to be omnipresent.
This piece really struck a nerve. I am a cynic; I think it impedes my ability to do all that I could.

The trouble is this: I don't know how to not be a cynic.
If I reply to this with constructive criticism, would that be sexist?
> Lawyers get paid, and are legally bound, to faithfully represent the interests of their clients, so they make the best argument they can towards that goal.

In this context that is often the cause of a very serious inequity. The government has lawyers funded by the taxpayers arguing for the government's position against the public, but no taxpayer-funded lawyers are provided to represent the public against the government. Predictably the public interest then gets the short end of the stick in any case where there are no well-heeled private interests willing to pick up the tab.
Exactly. One thing, in her defense, is that the email sounds a little flippant (at least the one-sentence quote we get secondhand!) I'll give the emailer the benefit of the doubt and assume it was meant as an insensitively playful but well-intentioned query.

When she's positioned herself as an advocate for women in the company, why would she get so offended when someone asks how that's going? Maybe she's upset about getting the "special treatment" of being asked after specifically -- well then, she already does "special treatment" of her own by starting Passion Projects, "Talks From Incredible Women In Tech."

"You should ask them." In a perfect world, sure, but is she seriously saying Mr. Middle Manager should walk around the cubes asking, "So, Jane, how do you feel as a woman at the company?" She probably meant that management should listen in general (to all employees.) Well then, is she playing "I know some specific things that are suboptimal, but I want you find them yourself"? What if they are already improving things they know of, and they just wanted her input on anything they're missing? So she spits back some quip to make them feel bad, nobody wins, and they won't ask again.
I have a suspicion that once they encounter and solve all of the challenges associated with building houses (mold, cost, weather, a second floor) they will end up approaching a pretty normal modern residential construction.
Or even "feminist" and "radical feminist". In the real world, radical feminists are quite rare, but the threat of them looms large over insecure men everywhere.
On the flipside, Google probably wants its employees to be motivated to self-learn/develop. It also allows the candidates to have a certain baseline of knowledge before having to pick up Google-specific stuff that they'll probably be flooded with.

Google has a strong reputation for paying well & being a desirable company to work for in the minds of many, so they can afford to do this as a part of their process.
>OOP in keyboard firmware?

I could do it with FP if someone made a Haskell to AVR compiler :)

>Am I the only one who finds this quite a lot more complex than it needs to be?

What functionality would you propose stripping?

>The obvious solution for this is to synchronise the I2C clock to the matrix scanning loop, so you receive/send one bit each time through the loop.

That's the wrong solution. The main loop takes some milliseconds. Communication at that rate would be intolerably slow. And how is that any better than natively clocked I2C? I'd have to re-implement the entire protocol in software to get that kind of control.

>do away with the I2C overhead completely and use a continuous serial protocol between the two halves.

What overhead? Any overhead introduced by I2C is very minimal.

What benefit would a "continuous" (do you mean asynchronous?) serial protocol have? There are also a number of downsides: 1. It wouldn't work well with the symmetric halves design. The cable would have to switch the TX and RX lines, and no common cable does that. 2. It wouldn't support more than two keyboards at once, unless I implemented a shared-line serial protocol from scratch, and then why not just use I2C? And using an asynchronous serial protocol doesn't solve the board synchronization problem.

The new version of the board also breaks out the UART header for people who want to do exactly this, but the UART is not a better solution.
that might be a good idea, or a little strange.

many existing python infix boolean operators resolve to method names based on the meaning, rather than the symbol. e.g. `a + b` resolves to `a.__add__(b)` rather than `a.__plus__(b)`, `x * * y` resolves to `x.__pow__(y)` rather than `x.__asteriskasterisk__(y)`, say. so arguably it would be consistent to name @ after the common meaning also.

http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#emulating-...

on the other hand, "consistency is not necessarily a virtue: one can be consistently obnoxious" - C.A.B. Smith

that said, i like the idea that @ should be more general than just for matrices. an arbitrary infix boolean operation, neither necessarily commutative nor invertible.

even when talking about matrix multiplication, generalising slightly from arrays to abstract elements of vector spaces, and from matrices to linear transformations between vector spaces leaves you writing the same kinds of expressions that compose linear transformations without anything necessarily being represented as a matrix.
I get a really strong Tetris effect[0] after playing this game. I get an urge to move all text on this page to upper right corner. Anyone else?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Architect of Death Star Speaks Out About Vents in Open Letter
That's sort of beside the point. A good lawyer, especially one who is working for a supposedly representative government, should know not to make assertions that a operating manual, or any normal operating document that might have been reviewed by a lawyer, is privileged communication. He deserves the ridicule he's getting for that.
Do you believe there is some necessary domain-specific expertise which the Malaysian authorities don't already have access to?

They have "open sourced" it to the degree that they allow other governments and their resources to be involved. But I don't understand what it would even mean beyond that context.
The Next Frontier in Crowdsourcing: Your Smartphone
Why don't you try?
Cooking to this could change the rest of my day
You can't read it if you've already read 20 articles in the past month, either, thanks to evercookie.
okay I don't really know how to say this, but in my limited and man-centric experience the sexism that I've seen has nothing to do with an ambiguous relationship or sexual tension and everything to do with toxic attitudes towards women. The guy who says "you should be making babies" to a woman engineer is not trying to avoid some kind of "gray zone" caused by getting too close to this woman and deciding between a professional or romantic relationship, he's just an asshole. The guy who says "I don't hire women" isn't doing this because he's afraid of falling in love with them, he's just an asshole.

I think that this idea gets dangerously close to an idea that men and women cannot be friends without romantic feelings spontaneously forming. I think that's crap. It might be true when you're a teenager, but when you grow up I don't think it's an excuse any more. I think that people use "women and men can't be friends" as a lead-in to "and that's why women should stay at home", and that's why it's super confusing to read about it from this perspective.
Yeah he did address the point. The Costco example is apt.

Are people not understanding the concept of membership? There are _countless_ examples of membership, both online and off, in which perks of said membership are touted as "free".

Golf clubs offer free food/drinks/carts. Costco as mentioned offers free unlimited-discounts/samples/eye-testing. etc...

"Free" has at this point become an idiomatic expression, which, when used in the context of a membership perk, effectively means

"You've paid for unlimited use of this perk and it's no additional charge over the cost of your membership"

In all of my time using Amazon I've never felt the intention to mislead me into thinking I would have these videos free if I hadn't paid for Prime... In all of their advertisements/video-descriptions it is explicitly mentioned somewhere on the page that this video is "prime"... The 'free video' section is even labelled "Prime Instant Video".

Whether you're getting free drinks at the Golf Club or watching free videos in Amazon Prime, it would take a mental invalid to not realize the inherent cost of that 'free' item, and the fact that you already paid for access to it.
Or a beat bog person!
http://www.screencast.com/t/QxjN57VfJ
Ask HN: HP makes its laptop unusable on removing OEM installed Windows
My wife has a HP Pavilion G4 1201tx laptop which came with Windows 7 Home Basic and a lot of crapware installed by default. Over time with a lot of usage, the computer with 4 GB RAM and i5 processor became slow as hell. So I purchased a copy of Windows 7 and tried to install it after erasing the existing Windows installation. There were 4 primary partitions on the laptop already - 1 system reserved partition, 1 partition for C: drive, 1 partition for HP Tools and the final one for recovery. Since I was going to do fresh installation, I wanted to delete all those partitions and have a clean layout. I tried to delete the 100 MB system reserved partition and the installer hung trying to do that. I rebooted and started the installer again and it was stuck at the "Starting Windows" screen forever. Confused by what was happening, I tried to boot with Ubuntu Live CD, GParted Live CD and as well as Debian installation CD. All of them faced some out of memory error and ran into a kernel panic. Surprising because, they were all working fine before I tried to delete the system reserved partition. So I went to ##windows channel on Freenode and asked for help. Based on the suggestions given, I tried creating a System Rescue disk from another clean Windows installation, but even that got stuck at loading Windows stage. I tried Hiren's boot CD, Windows XP installation CD and even those didn't help at all. What this means is, my out of warranty laptop (1.5 years old) is bricked unless I get a HP Recovery disk (which my wife created immediately after buying the laptop but has left it at her hometown), my laptop is bricked. Looks like some hardware is misbehaving after messing up with the system reserved partition. I have posted this here to expose what HP in coordination with Microsoft does. Any suggestions/ideas to recover from here?
For me, I kept the hardware, and switched to the open-source driver.
I have tried amazon instant video. People keep saying they love netflix, but netflix has a huge problem - they keep losing content all the time. So I used Amazon instant video to watch a show that i started watching on netflix and which disappeared from netflix soon thereafter.

Amazon instant video is ok once you start watching, but their software is pretty bad and much much worse than netflix. Both amazon and netflix have to spread their software on many devices (such as computers, tablets, tv's and dozens of settop streaming devices) but it seems to me on every single device i have tried the amazon software is really annoying.

I think a big part of the problem is that they are trying to sell both free instant video and their paid service.
On the touchscreen specifically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfN5WK7OzU8&t=11m12s
I'd like to think this is true, because I enjoy working in that manner, but I've generally found going totally offline and solving problems gives me satisfyingly worked-out-by-myself solutions to problems that... I could've solved more quickly if I'd done more reading for half that time instead.

If something really, truly has never been done before, nor even anything similar enough to be useful to me, then yes, this is the right way to work. But it's more common that someone has actually worked on something at least related (even if not quite the same), and that I could solve the problem more quickly if I looked for what they said about it first. That might take a bit of searching and reading to discover, sometimes even a few hours of it. But usually not as much time overall as re-solving it myself does... especially taking into account re-discovering all the edge cases.

My hypothesis is that many people don't realize this because they never follow up later to check if their solution was really novel, or was just lurking behind a keyword they didn't think to try. If you do that a bit and adapt your habits to miss things less often in the future, you can get better at finding and adapting existing solutions, rather than re-inventing things from scratch. But that's sometimes a bit deflating, because then you realize you weren't inventing so many new things before, either...
Any of the KDE Community projects. http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved
Huh?

If more people are brave enough to speak out about harassment I wouldn’t argue that it’s inconceivable for harassers to be more careful. I’m speaking in the abstract here. If harassers know that ex-employees might be willing to speak out against them they might be less likely to do it in the future. It’s pretty simple. That’s pretty much how societal change works.

That’s also why one person doing it is not enough.
Julia also adopted this syntax, and I'm not sure if I like it. In numpy at least, I find myself doing element-wise multiplication much more frequently than matrix multiplication, so '.*' always feels clumsy. I'd rather have special syntax for the matrix multiply (and I was a long time matlab user before moving to numpy).
Ask HN: Is it still worthy to learn Lisp nowadays for data mining tasks
Seeking advice whether I should continue investing more time on Lisp.

My background: switched major to CS in graduate school, familiar with Python, and need to deal with JSON and csv-like data every day. Python has been handy doing the job, but I just started learning Lisp for fun. Though the language looks powerful, for many simple tasks I have to start from scratch while Python usually has convenient libraries and can do things in one line.

My friends say Lisp is too old and not suitable for data mining task, no one is actually using that for work, and they all prefer Python. But I leave their words to doubt as they are not familiar with Lisp. (In our generation, people don't seem to learn functional programming any more?)

Is it still worthy to invest time learning Lisp, for data mining purposes? Any advice is welcome. Thanks :-)
It deserves mentioning that it is very difficult for things in space to fall into each other. If two bodies aren't on a direct collision course they will orbit or slingshot, not "circle the drain until they fall in." The effects that do promote "falling in" happen on very, very long timescales with respect to anything, including stellar lifecycles (you mentioned this but didn't emphasize the extent to which one timescale utterly dominates the other).

We are used to circulating fluid inevitably falling into the center of a drain, but this only happens in our daily lives because viscosity allows the water to shed angular momentum (about the drain) to its surroundings. No angular momentum transfer = no falling into the center, and a galaxy doesn't have a gigantic porcelain fixture anchored to the central black hole to which stars can transfer their angular momentum :)
The more dangerous nuclear waste is, as a rule, the faster it decays. And the amounts of it that are produced are, by the scale of most industrial processes, tiny.

It's a very difficult problem to deal with -- politically. Technically, it's not a non-issue, but it is easier to deal with than, say, the horribly toxic tailings ponds that you get from most mining processes, or the residues from the tar sands. And those, unlike nuclear waste, are produced in massive quantities, and do not decay naturally.
I truly, truly hate articles like this. The constant tone of judgement and scepticism. The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful? Why can't you just say thank you that so many wealthy people choose to turn their fortunes towards so many philanthropic causes? Why do you have to have so much bile and resentment towards individuals choosing freely and harming no one?

Whatever happened to America being the land of the free? When did it turn into the land of cutting down tall poppies?
It seems like there are two distinct problems, and the one Michelle is writing about involves all of the self-proclaimed "good guys" (myself included).
According to Google...

200€ = 278.08 US Dollars

1 meter = 3.28084 feet

So.. 278.08 dollars gets you 3.28084 sq ft, or about $84.76 per single square foot (278.08/3.28084)...

If I did my math right. ;-)
High quality free fonts:

- http://www.studiopress.com/design/google-font-combinations.h...

- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/12/taking-a-second-l...

- http://www.exljbris.com/

- http://jamiewilson.io/norwester/
According to DynDNS it's a malware site.

www.csie.ntu.edu.tw is blocked in your Defense Plan
Content Blocked

This is a known Spyware? website, which is blocked as specified in your Defense Plan?.
That depends entirely on the climate. That strategy is most successful in climates with high diurnal swings (desert).

You really can't go wrong with insulating the hell out of it elsewhere.
On the Near Impossibility of Measuring the Returns to Advertising
ugh.

very loosely related, this reminds me of calling R functions from python that take keyword arguments with dots in their names.

>>> f(hello.world=123)
File "<stdin>", line 1
SyntaxError: keyword can't be an expression

so instead:

>>> f(**{'hello.world':123})
The Bright side of Darkcoin
Follow-up on 4K displays for programmers
Yes, it's hard. I've found some progress in giving help to others, especially in person. It's easy to be cynical on the internet, where we are physically cut off from people. It's why I've chosen the handle "moron4hire". It is supposed to remind me I ain't the hot shit I think I am. Humility is a necessary component.

Try a week of never contradicting anyone. Try a week where you say yes to every proposal, where you join everyone else in their own ideas.