skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It'll be interesting to see whether the drought impacts Californians as much as the rest of the country. Our drought is really, really bad but California is one of the wealthier states with the largest population and an absurd share of the United Stats' agricultural production [1]. With a lot of our industrial meat production backed by corn from other states, our exports might suffer more than total agricultural production (18.8 out of >45 billion dollars)

[1] http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/
Justin.tv was part of the summer 2007 y-combinator batch (with dropbox and disqus among others). Twitch branched off of justin.tv a few years ago (I think technically part of the same legal entity at the moment but I'm not sure- they were trying to separate the infrastructures etc. when I left). Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, is also a partner at Y-combinator if that hasn't changed.
Ramchandran Mirror Box
a billion all in cash
Since I haven't seen any discussion here (yet), I went and looked at the reddit submission. Thought others might find it interesting.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/25vr5t/ocaml_40...
it looks clean, but from the few routes i checked it might be clean because it's been fuzzed beyond the point of usefulness. it's got no scale on it so i can't be sure what exactly is being showed, but there's a couple major hills near my house (and i mean major, i live in the mountains) that don't even register.
Im not sure why this misunderstanding of the code continues to persist. It is not a custom malloc. It is a custom API for reusing chunks of a specific size previously returned by malloc.
Shoot! Now all the fanatics will find an opportunity to annoy us with their "To the moon!" again and again!
They spun off of Justin.tv, which was in YC summer 07.
Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds
Yep, lifers, that is indeed what they were called. My last gig before I decided to go to college was a "corregated board" factory. 100+ degree (F) temps (pretty hot in the winter too), second shift type work (printing and cutting), and I played the "points" game with sick days/leave. Union job, so us noobs got stuck with the manditory overtime if the older guys didn't want it. You could use points to not have to work over, but you only got so much. I played it badly and they let me go. I was signed up for classes that next day.
You already need to link with a Facebook account to post on the biggest channels.
MLB.tv only works for out of market games, and worked amazingly when I was in school across the country, but useless when I moved back, and I got a free subscription to stream NFL Sunday ticket for the season and directv had basically no competency in streaming so it almost never worked.

Honestly, I bought a TV antennae from best buy and a long HDMI cord for my laptop and that's satisfied all of my sports needs through OTA broadcasts and questionable streaming sites.
Most kind of CRUD apps gone online (e.g. accounting, CRM, any business software). A huge category, especially in business.

Video/music? We used to have cd/dvd + desktop apps, right now the web is a huge percentage (e.g. Netflix, YouTube).

Images? Yes, the professional will stay with native apps, but consumer often just have online galleries.

Office? Have you seen Office 365? Going web. It won't happen overnight, but we see shift to web.
Someone posted a video on Reddit of a baboon eating a baby deer, alive. It was like 2-3 mins, couldn't watch more than a few seconds. It was horrible. I remember thinking, why can't the stupid baboon kill the deer and then eat it, instead of eating it alive?

Animal kingdom is cruel
I didn't take it myself, but my (now former) classmates that took PMR told me it was one of the hardest courses they ever did.
A lot of my "hardcore" gaming friends have been moving to http://beta.azubu.tv/ with all of Twitch's issues lately.
Isn't it first to file nowadays, not first to invent? Not that there aren't shipping phones and other devices with this already anyway.
The Twitch chat is half the value of the stream-watching experience for me.

The "character" of the Twitch chat is valuable. The manically insane hivemind, with all the juvenilia and "shittiness" that is inherent to it, is a roiling primordial stew of genuinely worthwhile culture. It's the birthplace of memes in both the vulgar sense and the higher sense of that word, and, to me, feels like 4chan in its early days. The ecstatic chaos of the chat during an unmanageably large event is a unique and deeply valuable thing.

It was why Twitch Plays Pokemon was such a massive phenomenon. Channels which set their chats to subscriber-only mode are shooting themselves in the foot.

I've always desperately craved a comparable live mass chat experience for non-gaming-related events, eg during a football game, or a televised cultural event or major news story.
I didn't provide enough information, streaming from both Twitch and Youtube works flawlessly from London where I am located now.
At this point it's probably a better move to build and then sell/license a streaming service directly to the game publishers. If they provide a streaming system, they can control the copyright directly.
My thought was to piggyback off of web rtc and other free software projects already available just to learn more about it. I'll be pretty happy to just get it working so two clients can watch a stream. I was already looking to learn something this summer so this should be a nice place to start. Thanks!
Amusingly, there are some cases that add controls to phones. Like a volume touchpad on the side.
I agree. Ideally we scrutinize everything but we don't. If the guy believed the earth was flat you would take whatever else he said with a grain of salt.
Stuff like "next song", "accept call", etc. can be done with extensive knowledge in machine learning and some clever work.

The really tough bits will be stuff like,

"Siri, check if PBS Idea Channel has uploaded any new videos, please."

How will Siri know you mean the YouTube app? How will Siri know what "check if X has uploaded any new videos" means? How will Siri know you mean "PBS Idea Channel" and not the channel called "PBS Idea"?
Cisco chief urges Obama to curb NSA surveillance activity
It wouldn't. I'd save the additional income while continuing to work just in case things were to change in the future.
As I said, I've been doing this for 10 months at great risk to my mental health. If this was only a scam, I would be an idiot, as there are far easier ways to make money at a lower risk.

The point of this update is mainly to allow people to get their money back. The old design did not allow for this and could easily allude to the scenario you're reminded of. Now it's hardly a lottery at all, except that the prediction mechanism reminds one of it. It's crowdfunding.
hopefully this will get blocked
People do go out of their way to step on ants, because they are pests. If aliens see us as competition for resources or a potential threat in the distant future, it might be better to eliminate us now.

There is no such thing as "advanced ethics". Our human sense of morality evolved under our specific evolutionary conditions. Aliens would be completely different. Even worse, they could be taken over by Paperclip Maximizers (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer).

An interesting short story about aliens that are very different from us http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/
The organic food movement I find semantically irritating, I wish they would use the word sustainable or something. You have stuff claiming to be Organic Salt on sale in the supermarket and it isn't MSG.
Richard Stallman at FUDCon Beijing Sunday 25th May
It kind of makes me sad to think of all the bad things I would do/let happen for $1 billion, or even $1 million.
It is probably not something you can extrapolate on but I know a couple of people who watch ESPN SportsCenter every single morning (as far as I know).
You close those other bugs as "same-source-fix". As a developer, when you root-cause the bug, you'd inform QA that the bug you root-caused will have an impact on X, Y, and Z, and that they will need to rerun those tests after your same-source-fix is deployed. They will then verify that the 1 change propagated and resolved the other bugs.

This comes down to open and active communication between developers and QA. If you can't approach your QA team and tell them that they may see X Y or Z because of bug 654654, you need to rethink your development, QA, and overall-business processes. Likewise, your QA should be actively communicating to you and say, "we're seeing X and Y" to which you can reply, "yes, that is to be expected. Also, I think Z may occur. No worries, we've identified the issues and you'll get an update for all 3 soon"
Yes, exactly this. Many large programs have custom allocators for performance and most of them are simple primitives built on top of chunked up pages returned by mmap/VirtualAlloc. The examples of this are all over. This obsession with shaming the OpenSSL developers for wrapping malloc is approaching unhealthy levels.
The opening words of the article are:

> Google’s YouTube has reached a deal to buy Twitch

This means that the deal is done! Then there is no point in not commenting.
I would tend to agree that google needs to solve this problem for indexing. They were the source for angular.js and they must realize that stuff they want to index will be buried in one page javascript apps going forward.
I hate YouTube with a passion, this is terrible news for Twitch users. YouTube is absolutely dreadful and makes design decisions that just go against common sense. This is a terrible loss. :/

Will I still be able to see Twitch streams on my PS4? Blergh.
" "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close."

Wouldn't that be like every vBulletin site?
Read this in 1999. Still went to grad school in 2004 after working in .coms of that era. No regrets.
How I fail to design software
Oh man. I learned to drive in my parents' automatic mid-sixties Impala, so when when I bought my first car - a yellow 1969 Toyota Corolla - I wanted an automatic. The salesman said, "You know, this is just a two-speed automatic, and it doesn't perform very well. I really think you'd be happier with the stick shift." I told him I didn't know how to drive a stick shift and he said, "That's no problem, I'll teach you."

So we drove a few lurchy blocks around San Francisco - yes, San Francisco, the city of seven hills. Ah, if it were only seven!

After a while he said, "Doing great, drive me back to the dealership and you're on your own."

I knew my way home, but I couldn't remember where the hills were.

I could have used elevation data that day...

"...sweat beading upon his brow, he might recount that Damp Morning when he drove his Manual Transmission up the Impossible Grade, and was forced to stop, just below the top! In frantic pantomime, he’ll pull the emergency brake and disengage the clutch. Crane his neck to peer anxiously at the car sniffing his downhill bumper. Bulge his eyes. Gun the engine. Pop the clutch. Release the brakes. Lay down some rubber with a piercing squeal. Float his steed slowly onto the flat. Wave the smoke from his eyes. Pump his arms in brief celebration. And finally, grouse about that sadistic driving instructor who got him into the pickle in the first place. What a jerk!"

http://www.datapointed.net/2009/11/the-steeps-of-san-francis...
There are a lot of reasons and I think it's time to write them up, but I think HL2 was actually over-polished. They didn't follow their own rules, either, leading to a lot of "Uncanny Valley" situations.
I made God's official temple. Now, God kills CIA, FBI, MI6 and Jew agents. Then they let my people go to worship God in His temple. (They're fucken retarded and want to fight God.)
There are rumors of partnership with Comcast (which is looking to merge w/ Time Warner)
What these guys just did here is actually a very clever idea in another way. Suppose that there exists a weakness in 1 in 2^30 curves, and each curve takes 2^10 steps to generate. If they picked seeds NIST style (or even using cos(1), exp(cos(1)), sin(sha3(5)) or other permutations) then they would be able to find a weak curve in 2^40 steps. Here, however, they're adding another trivial property, namely presence of BADA55EC at the start of B, which only 1 in 2^32 curves have. Hence, this increases the difficulty of finding a malicious curve to 2^72, which is actually pretty close to what many people consider a secure cryptographic safety margin.

My preference would be to not bother with such tricks and adopt a standard for nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers (eg. find the lowest N such that sha(N) results in desirable properties) to avoid people from end-running around the whole concept with prime square roots, cosines, exp and log and the like, but this is still an interesting concept.
Twitch currently accounts for ~1.5% of all U.S. bandwidth.
I've seen this model successfully used on a variety of small and medium sized communities, Metafilter likely the largest example. While it doesn't seem to generate runaway fortunes, it allows online communities to survive the onslaught of spam and trolls.
Admittedly "proper diet" is subjective, but what I've been focusing on is high protein, non-processed foods. For example, in the morning I'll either do a few eggs or a smoothie with fruits, vegetable protein, almond milk, hemp, chia seeds, and super yogurt. For lunch, I usually do yogurt with granola or chicken/tuna. For dinner, I just go with whatever my wife cooks. She's always focused on cooking well-balanced meals and loves to cook with fresh vegetables. One reason I think this whole thing works for me is that I'm not trying to diet -- I'm simply focusing on eating healthier foods. My biggest issue is night eating. Like many developers, I tend to work late into the night and as I get sleepy, I get hungry. The night eating got so bad with me that even if I somehow got to bed early, I'd wake up in the middle of the night starving since that's what my body learned to expect. It's been hard, but the way I've been combatting that is by eating all my meals during the day, trading in the computer for a book at night, and trying to get to sleep at a reasonable hour (11ish). I still have issues putting work down, but the combination of feeling physically better because I'm not eating chips at 2AM and rediscovering my love for reading has been wonderful.
It's not about resolution. Part of the reason those images look so pixelated is because they're quantized down to 2 bits per pixel: you only get white, light gray, dark gray, and black. Any intermediate shades have to be represented by dithering, which is what creates that stippled, checkered appearance.

If the images had the same resolution but higher bit depth, you wouldn't be able to make out much more detail, but the images would be a lot smoother and less blocky-looking.

EDIT: I used today's Wikipedia featured picture as an example.

Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kumar_Anish.jpg

256x256, 8 bits per pixel: http://i.imgur.com/YVIS2g3.png

256x256, 2 bits per pixel: http://i.imgur.com/iTFslZx.png

256x256, 2 bits per pixel, with dithering: http://i.imgur.com/LnlmORI.png
> All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.

The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic.

IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster guidelines?
Richard Stallman dances with a laptop at MIT
I think they must be using sensor data from GMaps. Yesterday I mapped a ride that said mostly flat. It was not after riding it with Google Maps giving me directions while on the route. Today it shows an incline of 504ft. Same destination, same origin just two different days.
> The legal controls could be for example around certification of a product: no source, no certification, no legally selling product.

GPL forbids giving away infringing code as well.

Does your proposed regulatory regime also encompass forcing all open-source and hobby coders to get one of your licenses before they can enable the "download as ZIP" feature on their GitHub?
Huh. And here I figured Finch was command-line pidgin. What happens when names collide in open source world?
Don't tell them. Most likely, you're not qualified and your opinion doesn't matter.
Getting funded doesn't mean the idea is good.

I worked for a company, that got funded many times over the course of 14 years and didn't make any revenue the whole time.

The only thing the founders were really good at, was talking to VCs and banks...
Forget 'the Cloud'; 'the Fog' Is Tech's Future
my favorite is the GUI. While many credit XEROX with the GUI, most of the ideas came out of the quite amazing Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland. As an MIT student, this list makes awesome reading!

Here is the relevant snippet:

Nearly 50 years before the iPad, an MIT PhD student had already come up with the idea of directly interfacing with a computer screen. Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” allowed users to draw geometric shapes with a touch-pen, pioneering the practice of “computer-assisted drafting” that has proven vital for architects, planners, and now even toddlers.
I disagree, the original link is to an opinion related to a societal issue, so other opinions by the author on societal issues are relevant.
Pretty sure the delay in general is due to them moving to a new system about a year or so ago.
Any references where you could get structured data about property, demographics, etc?
Reminded me of Teresa Carey and "Sailing Simplicity", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsV1VAPzjzc. She has also given a TED talk previously. I feel like I'm being pitched for an authentic experience but led into the gift shop. I guess everybody has to have a hustle but in both these "personal life transformative experiences" I see polished, affluent, hipster packaged products.
Otherwise the sailing looks fun in both videos.
YouTube wasn't super huge when Google bought them though, I'd suspect twitch has bigger brand recognition now than YouTube had then.
Who streams mobile games?
DCF77 and Raspberry Pi
If you couldn't profit from the IP of a faster computer, you could still profit from having a faster computer. Of course, this might mean that people are less likely to disclose information, which is the main economic benefit of the patent system.

I'm not completely against patents, I just think they have grown into something that is now more than slightly ludicrous and needs a serious trim before it becomes un-rescuable.
After reading this headline my first reaction was a verbal "aww man!" I don't really know why. Is it that I don't trust google? Maybe, but I think it's more that I like supporting the little guy and not the BnL's of the world. When I hear of an acquisition like this, thinking of Valve, I fear the brands I love will never be the same.
Yeah you're right. His opinions on the last movie he watched is relevant when he's discussing what he thinks of postdoc positions as professor with tenure.
Demarchy
Agreed, I would've just base64-encoded a GUID and been done with it, but it was clear that the author nerd-sniped[1] himself and couldn't put it down until he'd come up with a solution.

[1] As always, relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/356/
National identification number
The 90% fail / 10% success analogy is a kind of helpful way to put things in context, thanks for your input.

Technology is a bit of a wild beast, I feel like Dr Kurzweil is almost the personification of its unpredictability/mystery in some ways.
Did you actually read what he wrote? The views he expressed are much closer to what you so derisively call "leftist conformity" than his titles would seem to indicate.
It's almost like the industry wants the government to step in on anti-trust grounds.

Wait a minute...
Presumably they set aside an amount of money based on risk factors and so on. No insurance would mean not having any preparation in place at all.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2
The promotional rates work like that sometimes, but if you get the lowest, lowest grade of internet- at the normal non-promotional rate, it is a good deal cheaper than the bundles.

Take my service for example. $40 standard rate (promo was $30). There ain't no bundle out there that runs $40 once the promo period is up.
The Go package name, which is potentially different than the manner if the directory it resides in. Go package names badly include hyphens (only Unicode letters)
NITZ
Your anecdote is not representative of the whole. You have certain interests and your friends share them. The NFL (not to mention the other major sports) is huge with young people. Much larger than your e-"sports".
Slightly off topic but If I remember right, about a question of viability someone at Justin.tv (I guess now twitch) said (this is about four years ago) that playing like a thirty second ad clip can more than cover their operational cost of streaming for an hour. I guess what I wanted to hear from that was that streaming is cheap. Scale probably matters a lot though.
What's alt-.? Some Gnome shortcut?
Ahh, was not aware of that. I think this would solve a lot of my concern.
I can't see how it's simpler, because then you need to write N*M bridges/connectors/plugins to let N package managers interact with M build systems. And what if the library you download is meant to be built with a build system which is different from the one you chose for your application? What if you then want to globally turn on debugging or change a compilation flag, or a preprocessor define to enable/disable a feature?

I don't know of any language-specific package manager that doesn't also make the package immediately available to the programming environment without further fiddling. Solving half of the problem... well, it's a half solution :)
Interesting. Not sure how I feel about the requirment to use c++ features for a c package manager though...
What Happens When Your Phone Falls into the Ocean
If I'm floating in space and I turn on a flashlight, will I accelerate?
Go or D is a very large set of dependencies for a security-focused library and hence unlikely to be suitable for a project like OpenSSL that is designed for use everywhere and by everyone in every language. Security code that needs to be audited should be as minimal as possible.

Go and D are also not yet available for every platform and would force a set of design constraints on consumers that would likely decrease its attractiveness as a solution.

Again, C remains the best choice given the goals I mentioned. It's also why I said OS systems programming and not just systems programming.