skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope the author ports this to something else than Oculus, since I bailed on it when it sold out.
Keep this in mind next time you interact with a salesman. It's a quip I found on the Internet:

All really good salesmen temporarily believe
whatever bullshit they are selling at the time.
It's kind of like method acting.
Customer validation survey
This is my response to this article:

"Hahahaha...far from it."
You've got to be kidding me. Really?!

How about we get a climate scientist's critique of the Swift "language" while we're at it?
Or have a CEO tell us how that change to their product should be "simple".

Let's let the experts do their jobs, ok.
You have no idea how sales really works do you?
Yup. Couldn't agree more with this response.

There is this growing contrarian sentiment—particularly in the HN and Reddit communities—that "college isn't for everyone". The college industrial complex aside, I cannot see how further education—particularly through programs like this one—could ever be a bad thing. After all, education is the silver bullet.
Would you play a game that used that as its business model?
Locks FF30 when trying to open 5MP jpg file.
It is certainly possible, but it is far easier to just join the second network and run a packet sniffer. You could also sniff in monitor mode to see traffic on all networks in range, but driver support for that can be annoying.
Players are rational, after all. Thats what's game theory is about.

Bitcoin players aren't rational. Karpeles stood to earn way more by not manipulating the market. He did so anyway and bankrupted his own company.

Game theory assumes all players are smart.
Have we met?
Where can I find a soul-sucking job that lets me wear a Hawaiian shirt? That sounds like so much fun.
yeh it pissed me off, they have some sort of algorithm for this.
A good place for the non-specialist, but mathematically aware, to start is a basic energy balance model: http://puzlet.com/m/b00gf . (Disclosure: I am an engineer; I wrote the visualization.). By all means, dig into the data and reports, but I personally felt much more comfortable with the whole area once I understood the basic physics and sensitivity to the main parameters.
Well I don't: http://imgur.com/nbpMiDp

I have location turned off using the quick setting.
it's not, this is real.
It does have some structure to it. It seems he leads with an introduction to try to give himself some credibility (engineer, done solar farms, energy efficient housing, drove an ev). If you go to page 11, he has a list of 5 points he goes through and refutes.

I thought it was interesting that he leads with a 150ppm argument. He basically states that increasing CO2 saved us from certain doom.

Interestingly, I don't hear anyone here refuting his primary point so it must be too new for realclimate.org to have a page giving marching orders to the drones. Mostly all I see is sarcasm and name calling... ie. Quality comments in league with Yahoo news and YouTube.

I'm glad this didn't make it to the front page. It's pretty off topic for this site. It doesn't really belong on hacker news.
> Japan has been following Friedman's proscriptions (QE forever) for the last 20 years!

I would say that Japan has been following Friedman's prescriptions until now. The major difference between monetary policy before Abe and after Abe is that Abe has made it clear that he won't jack up interest rates as soon as there is life in the economy. Past governments made it clear they would take away the punch bowl as soon as there was a hint of growth.

Basically, Abe has convincingly promised to be irresponsible. And so far, it has worked to beat deflation. Many other indicators are looking better, too, but it'll take some time before we know if it really works. (Hyperinflation? Wages? and so on)
I'm unclear on why supercritical steam is important for electrical generation. Anybody happen to know?

Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_steam_generator indicates that Benson boilers are more fuel efficient (and perhaps less prone to explosion), but reduction in amount of fossil fuels used to turn a turbine seems to be sort of a moot point here.

Would super critical steam generation mean a solar plant can produce more electricity? Or that a supercritical steam generating solar plant is cheaper to operate?
Turn Detroit into Drone Valley
Interesting. Though as mentioned the ratings of shows are largely skewed by time -- ie: because no one was reviewing shows from the 50s-80s at the time of airing, it's all viewed through nostalgia and history, so it skews to certain shows and avoids even reviewing the dreck.

When you get into the 90s and beyond, shows were being viewed and reviewed contemporaneously and therefore everything was covered and a greater range was covered so overall ratings for the period actually went down...

Nice analysis of the available data anyway. Also interesting to see the appearance of certain non-English language shows as well.
Thanks for the feedback!

It's primary use case is for limited size and limited palette images, generally < 512x512 and 32 or 64 colors. It is a pixel editor not a photo editor :)

Though maybe I should give up and display a popup if someone is opening a file it will be unlikely to handle.
That doesn't provide any value. Would you like to articulate your arguments?
Did you read the article? Z-machine wasn't the cause of the graphical games failure. By the time Infocom ventured into graphics the games division was hamstrung by a focus on the business division (and their database product Cornerstone). They just didn't have the resources to compete. The graphical game Fooblitzky had its own issues, including that graphics quality was tailored to the lowest common denominator allowing the game to ship on multiple platforms as all of the text adventures had. This kind of thinking may have come from the write-once-ship-everywhere approach of Z-machine but it was a failure of strategy rather than technology.

The virtual machine approach did have grave consequences for Cornerstone - performance just wasn't as good as the competition. While it allowed a full-featured database product to ship on just one floppy it made performance so sluggish that one test abandoned testing their larger datasets after horrible performance with the smaller data.
SHRTURL.CO – For Sale (really)
Or it could be by limiting what the artists can do they get better games because by limiting what the artists can do the team can spend more time and resources on other places.

I've always personally felt many of Nintendo's games specifically limit the art in the service of gameplay where as many other companies are "art first" companies. Zelda in particular aims at making worlds free of clutter and trying to make nearly everything interactive. Compared to most games where 99% of all doors are not openable, 99% of all plants are not manipulable, 99% of all rocks, pots, etc are not movable. If you let the artists fill up the world you get Uncharted, which while it might be a great game in it's own way, it's also massively static compared to nearly any Zelda game. If they let the artists fill up Zelda to be as art drivin as Uncharted it would no longer feel like Zelda because Zelda is about gameplay, Uncharted is about art.
Actually, according to (http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1796) the boundary between liquid/gas and supercritical fluid is inherently poorly defined, it's not a sharp boundary like the line of evaporation or fusion.
Get World Cup data as JSON
Yup, still remember watching the news with my parents and not really truly understanding the ramifications. Yet despite my lack of comprehension, it has left a mark.
Finally have fun programming in JavaScript
>No matter how you measure it, the Government of Japan is up to its neck in debt, and is still sinking.

Japan's debt is a trailing indicator of economic malaise, not a leading indicator.

>The only reason it can keep going is because it pays remarkably low interest rates.

It ought to be obvious to anybody with an ounce of sense that any country that prints the currency it borrows in can choose its own interest rates. This is precisely what Quantitative Easing does.

>But the first "arrow" of Abenomics is to push up inflation, and you can be sure that this arrow will meet its mark because they can always "print" more yen.

Yes, this is true.

>One of the iron laws of economics is that, when inflation goes up, so do interest rates.

This is totally utterly false. As long as QE continues (and so far it has continued), interest rates on Japanese bonds will be held at zero.

>Now, to cut a long story short, it looks like the government's going to get out of this bind by directing the Bank of Japan to print even more money to buy it's debt at below-market prices. In fact, if you follow the bond market news, it's clear that this is already happening. And that, my friends, is a recipe for hyperinflation.

This is not just false, it is absurdly false. Hyperinflation hyperventilators have been predicting Japanese hyperinflation since 1997 when their debt went over 80% and they continued deficit spending. What happened instead? Deflation.

They couldn't have been more wrong then just as you couldn't be more wrong now.

Like any economic variable, inflation can be targeted. In Japan, it simply wasn't targeted and it wasn't aimed for during the last 20 years. They just engaged in QE, which swapped bonds that represented Japanese savings earning subinflation interest for cash savings which also earned subinflation interest. And they thought this money was magically going to be spent?

For inflation to happen you need spending. PART of what is new about abenomics is that it actually does do a bit of that, but not very much.
Free Iced- Tall Starbucks Drinks- Monday 11:00-12:00
To be fair, reference counting isn't strictly deterministic either. The moment you mix in multithreading or call out to code you don't control and whose refcounting behavior could change over time, you can no longer know when an object will die.

As for memory pressure, reference counting does generally behave better, but in some situations you can end up doing much worse. If you manage to generate a lot of autoreleased objects (harder to do these days with ARC, but still possible) then you can end up getting your process terminated due to the memory pressure of should-be-dead-but-not-yet-freed objects.

I think that the C interop problems are the real killer. The other problems with garbage collection can potentially be solved, but as long as C is in the picture, you're doomed to a sort of halfway land where none of the good GC techniques are available to you.
Needs the most important feature that prints out the "Memory cleared..." text as the original TI-OS would to fool the teachers and still have your crib notes!
> I agree with your sentiment. For instance, I have a friend who went to college but never used her degree, she is a stay at home mom.

Is she dead? If not, how do you know she will never use her degree? (Apart from probably being a better parent by virtue of being more educated, and so probably be a better educational aid to her child (ren)).
That's a nice macroeconomic model you have there. But what happens when G/D < x0 and then you increase D?

But you're right about the hyperinflation thing. I was being overly dramatic. I should have said: And that, my friends, is a recipe for a collapse in confidence in the yen. But the effects are pretty similar.
> claims the ozone hole was not due to CFCs

Was there any even halfway plausible evidence for this in 2001?

The only things I can find on this are in 2007, there was some indication that the Cl2O2 photolysis rate was much lower than expected. But that appears to have been resolved in 2009.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090507/full/news.2009.456.ht...
If you don't already know, there is a Church encoding for singly-linked lists that is in the lambda calculus. We can already implement some of the operations you have listed with just lambdas:

(defun cons (x y)
(lambda (z) (z x y)))
(defun car (l)
(l (lambda (x y) x)))
(defun cdr (l)
(l (lambda (x y) y)))

It's not like a lisp with 'just lambda' would be 'absurd and unusable'. I just showed you, we can implement cons, car, and cdr with just lambdas(hooray, closure! not clojure, closure...). Although there are some design decisions that had to be made, e.g. set, list.
Undergraduate education is not synonymous with vocational training. There is value in degrees like philosophy and other "questionable" majors not directly related to their utility in the job market.

Don't get me wrong: many undergrads would be better off for paying greater attention to the job market and their coming role in it, but education can also be a step towards less tangible goals or an end in itself.
> In reality "min" should just be a function, and you should write a separate function for each type you want to define it over. This is how this problem is solved in C, and almost all other languages.

This is not how it's solved in any languages with any degree of polymorphism. Of course, C is entirely devoid of polymorphism – except for its math operators like `<` and `+` – so having a version of `min` for every type you ever want to take a min of is how you're forced to do things. But no, `min` is not pathological – it's completely normal for math programming. If you look at math libraries written in monomorphic languages like C and Fortran – BLAS and LAPACK, or hell, just math.h – they are full of multiple nearly identical versions of functions that take different argument types and begin and/or end in different letters to indicate these types: `round`, `roundl`, `roundf`, etc. In LAPACK, it's completely conventional – "s" for single float, "d" for double float, "c" for single complex, "z" for double complex [1]. You'll note that the LAPACK naming scheme also encodes the type of matrix it operates on (there are 28 of them).

That's all fine, right? Well, it's fine if you're ok with writing every function four times. And that's only dealing with polymorphism in one argument. Hint: it's not at all uncommon for math functions to take multiple arguments. This is precisely why the first thing that a principled approach to mathematical programming does is allow polymorphism – ideally on multiple arguments. This is why people do math work in dynamic languages with lots of polymorphism, like Mathematica, Matlab, R and Python. Otherwise you can't get any work done without writing everything dozens of times – or struggling with C macro programming that makes this min puzzle look utterly tame. Sussman et al.'s SICM (SICP but for classical mechanics), not content with a dynamic language, immediately builds a multiple dispatch system on top of Scheme. R supports an awkward multiple dispatch system in one of its four object systems. This is why Guy Steele included multiple dispatch in Fortress. This is why Julia has multiple dispatch as its core paradigm. You need it for math. Badly.

[1] http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lug/node24.html
I know it's done the rounds but I want to make sure that everyone has seen it...

John Oliver on Tony Abbott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3IaKVmkXuk

This guy man. I don't even know what to do about it.
I do not understand why kolev is being downvoted.Is it so hard for techies to get that there are people with motives other than money?Think different.
Not many people take taxis from home to work every day, or even weekly. If you are the type, then likely, you are someone who lives in Manhattan (getting to work via cab in a borough is a tenuous situation) and in a dense enough area where you are one of dozens/hundreds of people who could conceivably be dropped off at your home spot (think of the density of high-rises).
On the bright side, we'll probably never explore much of our galaxy, let alone the universe at large.
Lease contracts are contracts but deeds aren't really contracts. Terms of a deed can run with the property in a way that terms of a contract cannot.
Transportation Fuel Energy Densities
Nice reviews. I've read and enjoyed Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe series. I think the comics medium has the ability to makes technical subjects approachable and light and would love to see more such 'comics introduction to ...' books ! Does anyone know of such comics for computer related subjects ?
What technologies were used in the creation? When would you post the source?
While many universities strive for exclusivity, ASU is finding ways to be more inclusive. It probably hurts us in the rankings, but it's the right thing to do.

Proud to be a Sun Devil.

From the AZ Constitution:
Article 11, Section 6
http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/const/11/6.ht...
Section 6. The university and all other state educational institutions shall be open to students of both sexes, and the instruction furnished shall be as nearly free as possible. The legislature shall provide for a system of common schools by which a free school shall be established and maintained in every school district for at least six months in each year, which school shall be open to all pupils between the ages of six and twenty-one years.
While somewhat obvious when you think about it, this point is rarely addressed:

> You can't learn calculus just hanging around people who know calculus, you actually have to study it. It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do. Maybe you can't just learn it by hanging around people who do it or else just hanging around trying to learn it by osmosis. It may require training and teaching, a techno-literacy, and learning how to manage your attention and distractions is something that is probably going to require training.
The idea has come up:

https://chronicle.com/article/Free-Community-College-/144553...
>But ultimately, it boils down to demographics.

Deflation and wage stagnation wasn't caused by the Japanese not having babies.

The wage stagnation and deflation was THE CAUSE of the Japanese not having babies.

If you ask most young Japanese today working McJobs (a large and growing number) if they are hopeful about the future they will say no.

THIS is the real problem with Japan today and at its heart it is the problem with the west too. It's why they aren't having babies.

If the Japanese government wants the younger Japanese to start having babies again they need to actually provide decent jobs. They can do that by printing/borrowing yen and spending it on employing people, EXACTLY as the US did following the great depression.

>The only real solution (real in the economists sense of the word) is mass immigration

This will make things worse. It will simply ensure that the already crappy McJobs the Japanese young are increasingly doing are paid even less thanks to Fillipino competition.

Want the Japanese suicide rate to skyrocket from its already high level? Start bringing in dirt cheap labor competition from the 3rd world.
As a player and fan of Infocom games back in the day they were released, I was always turned off by the very idea of them moving towards graphical titles. It seemed like they were trying to jump the shark[1], losing their uniqueness, and betraying the principle and vision of the original, purely text-based games.

Though Infocom died, their spirit lived on in a lively and incredibly innovative amateur interactive fiction community.[2][3][4]

For a tiny taste of how far interactive fiction has come since the days of Infocom and the Z-machine, see Inform 7.[5][6][7]

[1] - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark

[2] - http://www.spagmag.org/archives/index.html

[3] - http://brasslantern.org/

[4] - http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

[5] - http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/tads3andi7.html

[6] - http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Inform_7

[7] - http://brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html
I'm guessing you were responding to an earlier version of my post where I kept mentioning that the liquid->supercritical and gas->supercritical boundary was poorly defined (in agreement with you) but then, in apparent contradiction to what I had just written, linked to a video of what happened at the transition, which I reconciled with my earlier claim of arbitrariness by emphasizing that the transition is well defined and physical you have a 2-phase system in equilibrium that you slide along the phase boundary until it "slips off."

That's still true. You can see the evidence in the video :)

But at every other point along the liquid->supercritical and gas->supercritical phase boundaries you are correct, the boundary is an arbitrary definition and not physical.
> Then game theory is pretty useful model. Players are rational, after all. Thats what's game theory is about.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. My argument is that the people citing game theory as a reason Bitcoin players had an incentive to avoid a 51%+ scenario kept assuming that all players wanted Bitcoin to succeed.

(However, as a former cognitive neuroscientist, I think it's mistaken to assume that people always act rationally. Check out the literature on the ultimatum game or anchoring effects in prospect theory (for which Kahneman got the Nobel prize) to see examples of people acting irrationally in a sytematic, biased way.)

> Would a miner with 51% of hashrate willingly help a government(and why would he)?

Who said anything about being willing? My example suggested threats, which is way more likely than cooperation.

> Remember, it is not a single entity. It is a pool. And, in fact, ghash.io share is down to 39%.

Yes, but the people running the pool have the keys to the kingdom as long the pool members don't know. So, more subtle perversion has a good chance of lasting a while, while gross manipulation is more likely to cause pool members to switch.
Pretty sure formerly "text-based games" got relabeled "interactive fiction"

Lost Pig has one more than a couple of IF related awards.

IF is a great addition to tablets when traveling -- light weight, lots of options, a nice compliment to books (kindle app or otherwise).
By the way, if anyone else wondered about that parenthesis on union busting, here's the union's home page:

http://starbucksunion.org/
Here's hoping I can convince the teachers of how great open-source software is instead!