skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a really cool blog post. Makes me wonder about a lot of stuff:

What were the projects and discoveries for which the connection machines were clearly essential?

Are there connection machines that are still in operation?

What happened to the old ones?

Does Danny Hillis now keep a cluster of GPUs running somewhere instead of his old hardware?

Would connection machines be more useful now than in the past?

Is it the right time to boot up thinking Machines 2.0 ?
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If you were to compare a similar map from 1970 with the current one the notion of which came first would be much more clear. Before WWII IQ was pretty evenly distributed across the regions of Germany, but during the partition the IQs of children born in East Germany fell way behind those born in West Germany. And now with reunification and economic convergence IQ scores have converged too. Genetics may play a fairly large role in explaining outcomes for individuals, but if it affects measurable differences in outcomes between large groups the effect is small enough to be drowned out by other factors.
You'd have to read the whole series, it makes perfect sense at the end.
Interesting. I'll have to think about that some more.

I've been assuming it's because of human nature: when something's new and shiny, we see all the cool new things it will do for us. After being around it for long enough, we tend to only see the flaws, and forget all the benefits.
It has to do with Nintendo's supposed attitude towards the device and the many lost opportunities.
It's definitely the point.
No, it's not generally easier. You can't generalize because people around you, who were taught to think imperatively, are thinking imperatively. You don't know how would it be if they were taught to think in terms of set theory. It might be the other way around or it could be not. That's the point: we don't have the data to generalize on which thinking is easier.
To be clear, right-turn-on-red requires that you stop first, at least in any jurisdiction I'm aware of. That being said, it still increases car/pedestrian and car/bicycle collisions significantly, on the order of 100% [0].

[0]: http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/25000/25600/25603/DOT-HS-806-182.pdf
Gmail is going to support Email Address I18N
This article is more about using the linear electrical generator on the piston than it is the configuration of the power train. No vehicles on the road today have anything similar to what is discussed in the article.

Also, I'm not sure about the current model, but there was a bunch of kerfuffle over the Volt not really being a strict electric hybrid:

http://www.plugincars.com/exclusive-chevrolet-volt-chief-eng...

Some of the time, at least in the edition discussed there, energy from the engine goes to the wheels without ever becoming electricity. Maybe they changed it in later models (but I sort of doubt it, the capability is there because it can be the most efficient way to use the engine).
Maybe it's just me, but I would find those numbers much more interesting if they were accompanied by a measure of spread of the IQ distribution.
Handling the startup marriage
tldr: ESR argues that mostly only classical Science Fiction is real SF, explains why (historic references as well as references to what the paying audience prefers), and argues why it has tp be that way.

Some interesting comments as well.
88% of ocean's surface has plastic debris: Study
Show HN: ElasticUI – AngularJS Directives for ElasticSearch
Is a single point difference significant?
I drew almost this exact same picture in high school, along with just about every other kid interested in internal combustion engines (before I knew what a horizontally opposed engine was, like the boxer engine in Subarus). I'm just glad to see a car company talking about it, because the way we do it now with transmissions is pretty much ridiculous. This engine is roughly 7 times weaker than it should be, because Nikola Tesla had a 110 horsepower turbine in 1913 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine which was unfortunately ahead of its time because the country was barely getting wired with electricity at that point.

But today a 95% efficient generator connected to a 95% efficient motor for 90% overall transmission efficiency would be worth it on a turbine or Stirling engine running at 40-50% efficiency (maybe 40% overall at the wheels). Compare that with an old gas guzzler from the 70s running at 25% efficiency with maybe an 85% efficient transmission for 20% efficiency at the wheels. Not to mention that cars used to weigh twice as much which halved city fuel economy again, and lacked regenerative breaking which halved it again, and so on and so forth. It’s no wonder that cars used to get 10 mpg when what I would argue are relatively simple engineering changes could have raised that to 30, 50, even 100 mpg. It’s almost like they were deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible…
95% of my grid power comes from hydro or nuclear, so I'm good.
If there was some split of recommendation by activity / mood, I'd be very happy. I did use the recommendations for quite a while when listening to mostly similar tracks. Then made a mistake of giving thumbs up to one electro track. Apparently it meant "ignore all my library, thumbs up etc. in the general blues / rock category; I want half of my recommendations to be for electro / dance music". Sigh...
Years ago, I was asked the C++ virtual destructor question (eg http://www.programmerinterview.com/index.php/c-cplusplus/vir...) in an interview.

My answer was, "I don't know; I would look it up in a book. Is this really relevant for an architect position?" I got the offer anyway and turned it down.

I think these technical interview questions are a silly way to evaluate developers. You almost never have to write low-level sort routines because you just call them in runtime libraries. But it's harder to evaluate the more important ability to modularize code and manage complexity.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea?
I open new tabs for a reason - to open another webpage.

This will both annoy me and distract me.

Reading the comments everyone loves the idea and gives basically the same reasons I gave for hating it. Whats wrong with me?
Windows 8 loses market share. Is there no hope for it left?
Big Quakes Double in 2014, But They're Not Linked
Yesterday on Reddit someone posted their pet sweet potato. Today I'll believe anything.
We do at our own will? So if I'm watching a movie and everyone in the theater is in tears, it has nothing to do with the director trying to create a sense of emotion and sadness, but it was just our own choice?

I'd think Facebook has even less control, and more difficultly predicting emotions. For example, if Facebook displays a post about Jane having a bad day and losing her job, that's bad news. However, it's difficult to determine how I'll react. It might be comforting for me to know someone else is having a bad day, it might make me angry that Jane lost her job, when I lost my job at the same business the week prior, it might make me happy because Jane is always bragging about her job, and I no longer have to hear about it.

When it comes to a movie, I think there's a lot more control since you write the script and characters from start to finish. Every person in the audience has the same relationship with those characters, and knows them for their entirety. You also have fine grain control over the visuals, combined with carefully selected music. As I said earlier, all of this can lead to a room full of people leaving the theater in tears, so I don't see the difference.

Or, when you say we do at our own will, you mean we make the choice to visit the theater in the first place? That would be no different than making the choice to visit Facebook. If anything, you should be questioning every advertising campaign in existence. They're carefully crafted to evoke a certain emotion, and they work specifically because they can manipulate people. At the same time, people have no choice to view them, they're constantly exposed to these manipulations just by walking outdoors or visiting the store to buy groceries.
I once merely disagreed with Christina Love on twitter whereas she blocked me, sicked her followers on me, and went on a tirade about how awful I was - attacking things from my twitter bio that had nothing to do with my comment. Professional isn't a word I'd use to describe her.
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Not only their knowledge is lacking after like 15 years of unversal internet use, they usually insist on now knowing anything, ignoring expertise or relying on bogus "expertise", and otherwise lining with authorities and big biz - who are obviously not neutral, therefore court decision is not neutral either.

I interpret this as a direct malice against myself.
They're going out this morning, PT. Thanks for your patience.
My first impression of Swift
TalkTalk are a completely awful ISP. Not sure what the US equivalent would be, but they're the kind who do promotions of "Broadband for £3/month"-level. You get what you pay for service-wise, but they are also by far the most enthusiastic ISP around when it comes to censorship; they have a spider that follows their users to all URLs they visit to categorise the sites[1] (giving them the nickname StalkStalk), and have been doing this long before the current set of idiots in Parliament forced censorship in (at least since 2011).

I'm in a similar situation, one site I run is blocked both by StalkStalk and BT. No porn, no other 'adult' content; it's deliberately kept PG-13 to use the US ratings.

[1]Check your logs for HuaweiSymantecSpider. It obeys robots.txt though, so a quick "Disallow: /" in robots.txt stops it, although they still grab content from unencrypted pages via DPI.
It's not as clear-cut. The motivation of pro-privacy MEPs from the left-wing EU parties are most likely entirely different from the ones of the Council of Europe. But your point about most EU intelligence services being engaged in spying on EU citizens stands, unfortunately.
Using a midwife in the US is considered extreme or weird. Really only used by people classified as hippies. (Not how I feel, but that is the general vibe I get. Even poor people use hospitals - the people you think midwife's might be useful for. Not many home births going on here...)
A major difference is that "Störerhaftung" is matter of civil liability only, not criminal liability. Moreover, "Störerhaftung" entitles the injured party only to injunctive relief, not to damages (unless, of course, you signed a cease and desist agreement, in which case contractual penalties may apply). "Haftung" (= liability) is thus a bit of a misnomer.

Moreover, the current German government is considering legislation to eliminate "Störerhaftung" with respect to unprotected WLAN access.

As for:

> ISPs are explicitly excluded from this and not held responsible.

This is not accurate. The "provider privilege" that ISPs enjoy in Germany only immunizes them against claims involving damages; injured parties can and do request injunctions based on "Störerhaftung" (whether such injunctive relief is granted is another story, especially when the desired injunction is ineffective). In fact, there have been cases where providers have been held to higher standards than private individuals because of their greater expertise (e.g., LG Hamburg 310 O 433/10 [1]). The details are still far from settled law, though.

[1] http://openjur.de/u/82969.html
Ex RX-7 owner here. Not much room in the back of one of those things, but I always had room for cans of oil :-)

Wonderful cars. I'd buy an RX-9 if they ever built one, but they're never going to. So I have to motorcycle instead, could be worse :-)
On the contrary, raw IQ rises about 3 points per decade. The Flynn Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Which open source projects should a young developer work on?
HNers frequently advise newbies looking for work to develop a portfolio of contributions to open-source projects.

Can anyone recommend projects which are particularly clean/well-documented/simple enough for a less experienced developer to make a difference to or provide advice on how to get started?
Remote or one of our offices: San Francisco, CA - Shanghai, China

We build products at the intersection of technology around data. Lots of data visualization, big data and infrastructure.

We work with large organizations on challenging problems (the World Bank, the United Nations, CNN) OR on our own products (mostly developer tools, things like http://devo.ps or http://octokan.com).

We are a multicultural team with French, American, British, Chinese, Korean, Dutch and Finnish colleagues. We are about to settle a third office in Berlin and are looking at remote hiring in Spain and Seoul.

We work a lot with Javascript (node.js, AngularJS), Python, occasionally Go and Erlang. Lots of single page apps, APIs and infrastructure automation.

We are looking for full-time or interns:

- Developers; front-end (HTML5 + Compass + AngularJS), backend (node.js, Python), ops (Python, Go).

- Designers; you have design chops, understand technology (HTML/CSS...) and do more than nice pictures (content strategy, color theory, ...).

- Strategist; you can quickly immerse yourself in a new field of knowledge, have a knack for data and are quick at recognizing patterns. You are a jack-of-all-trades that can think a solution and get it shipped, either alone or with a team.

- Marketing; you have what it takes to grow a brand or product online and understand how to leverage online and offline tools to get there.

- Business Development; if you are in Washington DC, Berlin or Paris, understand enough of our space and would like to help us grow our services, shoot us an email.

Drop me a line at job@wiredcraft.com, or go to http://wiredcraft.com/careers.html
I tried to send you an email to jobs.europe@omniata.com, but this address doesn't work - "We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (jobs.europe) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group"
The Iron team is here. Feel free to ask us anything!
You could have a reciprocating engine instead. Wankel engines have problems due to sealing being difficult (as would your idea, explosive gases escape at the edge of the sphere), as I understand (I've not studied it in depth), but a reciprocating engine would seemingly have no more [in fact less] issues with being sealed than 2 parallel pistons. Have the first combustion chamber push the piston one direction past the coils and have a second chamber at the opposite end push the piston back. Any excess movement might be able to be used for pre-compression?

Of course many people have thought of this before (don't you hate it when that happens! ;0)) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SlwoBLspTQ shows 2 such engines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yV0... shows another idea, 2 pistons either side of a single combustion chamber.
That works great until you miss ignition on the opposite side, then wham it bottoms out and destroys the other side of the engine.

A gas spring is a pretty simple mechanism and can't misbehave (too bad you can't put it to work, though -- probably a lot of heat being wasted compressing it).
I am developing one these days if this helps. There is no app live on the app store yet

Also I have an old puzzle game on the app store which was done as an experiment, but still is a freemium.

Let me know.
No. You're too damn positive.

"We could solve this problem if we just had some idealistic 20 somethings form a start-up about it."

"This industry sucks, but someone will have the courage to 'disrupt' it."

"When I die, I want my body frozen so I can be regenerated after the singularity."

"My start up is doing great. I'm 'crushing it.' All the time."

"I'm not overworked. I just require far less sleep than the average person. Say 2 hours a night."

Get real folks.
Doubt it. Not a mention anywhere.
I'm actually going to switch to a Ski jumping desk.
Pardon my ignorance, but the video does not show and I am interested to see if they modified the system, but what draws the piston back towards the spark plug?
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Much older than that was the Chrysler Turbine car:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car

This was quite literally a lower power jet aeroplane turbine used to power the car.

I would imagine that this would have been great on fuel economy on the highway, but terrible in cities.
I will never have the skills to maintain let alone write a compiler. However, in a situation like this, I would break up the condition into a set of sub-conditions, set intermediate booleans, and progressively build upon the condition tests so as to make the code more intelligible and maintainable. No need for additional functions.

(Amusing incongruity: "boolean" fails the spellchecker in an IT forum :o)
In theory, I don't see why not. For instance, you could have a language that is adapted for both the JVM, CLR and native and also cross-compiles to JavaScript.
They really ought to reverse that. Make the light shorter for cars and drivers can no longer use the countdown clocks as a signal. They'd have to actually look at their own light. Combine that with starting the pedestrians early and you make it much harder for drivers to be jerks.
TalkTalk has more than one filter setting.

Ask them if your site is blocked at the "Kid Safe" level (the default) which is what the probes run on.
How Companies Became People a.k.a. the need to change the 1st US Law
Geography, accidents of history and positive feedback loops?
Renaming, pushing variables, changing their types, stuff like that. It's still
editing work. Can any IDE split the class into two according to methods'
responsibilities? Can it abstract a set of functions to a single generic
function? Can it get rid of unnecessary boilerplate code scattered around in
various classes? Can it change data structures used to store data?

Because refactoring is about making the code simpler and more flexible.
Rearranging that IDEs do is only a method (and not the only one) to achieve
that.
dart will be super compelling when dartvm is integrated into chrome. imo this is what will increase adoption not improving dart2js.
My wife is a unionized employee in a very large union (which covers a large number of people in various fields), and I've seen a lot of second-hand idiocy related to it.

As one example, my wife spent three or four years without even having a collective agreement; their old one had expired, and the union hadn't bothered to/gotten around to/nailed down an agreement with the employer. Literally their biggest responsibility, and they were years late.

What they did do, however, was send out a mass e-mail to union members encouraging them not to participate in Ugly Sweater Day, because it could hurt people's feelings (literally, their concern was that people's feelings could be hurt), and other equally worthless wastes of time. Behaviour like that makes me wonder what these people actually do with union dues.

That said, there are also huge benefits; for example, there have been a few cases where people we know have been chosen to interview for a position, only to be told suddenly that the position was no longer being interviewed for – and then finding out that someone with less seniority and less experience was offered the job. Not saying our friend should have been given the position, but they didn't even interview her for it.

On top of that, there's the generic benefits of a union environment: more vacation, less nepotism, pension, and – my personal favourite – as long as you show up to work every day and do your job, your salary will increase (more than the legal minimum), your vacation will increase (more than the legal minimum), your pension will keep going up, and eventually you can retire.

So it's kind of a mixed bag. In cases of large, faceless bureaucracies it can help significantly by preventing people from being promoted who don't deserve it, just because they're friends with the boss/interviewed well/bribed someone/etc. On the other hand, large unions are basically another giant, faceless bureaucracy which purports to be on your side but typically operates under its own agenda, and in many cases, appears anti-employer for no reason other than spite.
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Lot of places disable it for the production hours of operation and enable it for maintenance windows. Done using access control not via disabling it though
By telling someone else that 'X sucks', you're asserting your knowledge of X (and often Y or Z too, one of which you might recommend instead of X). Within limits, this is perfectly reasonable - there are pitfalls out there, and advising other people to avoid them is helpful.

However, there are a few big risks which arise when doing this, particularly around non-technical people:

1) The developer who cried wolf - if you have a very long list of things that you think 'suck', it may be concluded that you're just particularly picky (and, as the OP shows, it's not backed up by the reality of the many successful projects that exist). When you really need to torpedo a particularly bad idea, you might not be taken seriously.

2) Trying to persuade people by scaring them can backfire. Telling people that their project will fail unless they use the One True Project Management Methodology, or adopt some particular new library or framework might sound like a good idea, but they're quite likely to conclude that if the chance of failure is that high then it's better to avoid the risk altogether by doing nothing.

3) Undermining the credibility of other developers might give you a short-run reputation boost, but in the long-run it undermines the credibility of everyone. Instead of "that guy sucks, but you're OK", you want people to think "that guy is pretty good, but you're awesome!". To an extent, this applies in other areas ("PHP is pretty good, but Clojure is awesome!" sounds like something a happy customer might say, and we all want more happy customers).

As much as I love his writing, I think Dijkstra should take a large portion of blame for the "considered harmful"[1] style of technical criticism. His claim that anyone who ever learned BASIC is a brain-damaged individual incapable of proper programming has done a lot to undermine the credibility of intelligent, hard-working developers ever since. I, for one, would like to issue a heartfelt "fuck you" in his general direction. Again, I love his writing but I think this kind of disparagement has incredibly negative effects in the real world.

We certainly do need to eliminate errors from our practices and our ways of thinking. That's painful and does require criticism of those things. But the main problem for the software development industry right now is not that we are insufficiently critical of our tools, practices or each other, it's that we don't back each other up enough when it comes to dealing with shitty project management or exploitative practices or discrimination that holds people back in their careers. The low-hanging fruit is not yet another web framework, it's figuring out better ways of organising development.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
No, it is a piece of satire.

Not applicable in any country although you'll find many European countries feel more or less like this atm.
You have plenty of small, extremely corrupt countries as well.
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The brief history of Facebook apologizing
IIUC, a spring.
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Although it may not stick in a weekend, the vimtutor program (if you're on Linux you probably have it installed) covers this sort of stuff.

For moving beyond the basics I suggest this book: http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim
> Unless other continents have significantly more intelligent people than in Europe (seems unlikely)

Why does this seem unlikely?
It's a gas spring, similar to a car shock.