skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"An illustration software: I personally prefer Inkscape, but the industry standard Adobe Illustrator or newcomer Sketch are just as good. Use it to post-process your plots and graphs; it’s often much easier than writing plotting directives in Matlab or matplotlib."

Is this good advice? We generate a TON of graphs and charts in academia, and treating them like "design" objects seems to be a lot of work. Worth it? What is industry standard practice for good looking data viz?
His “If…” observations could easily be condensed into a Bechdel-style test. Easy to game, not entirely accurate but starts painting a picture of the maturity & productivity of the language.

It’s funny to consider how poorly Swift does against this “Bone Test” (mostly due to all the Objective-C/Foundation heritage):

- Hello World in < 5 lines: pass

- Sending email in 1 line: fail

- GET/POST to web page in 1 line: fail

- Number of days between 2 dates: pass

- JSON: fail

- Modern datatypes: mostly passes but no REGEX in Swift is a big fail. The matching Foundation class NSRegularExpression doesn’t count because Jeff is clearly asking for native, in-language support.

- Package distribution: fail (although now you can finally build Frameworks for iOS, not just Mac OS, and if we’re counting third-party, it’s likely that CocoaPods will support Swift soon)

So final score 2/7 on the Bone Test, although I’m sure by the time Swift goes GA a lot of them should be fixed.
there's an app called Habit List (ios) that pretty much does that.
Yeah I'd love for us to make a piano version too. We haven't started it yet, but maybe it's percolating - I've been spending a ton of time on the piano lately. :)
Google does pull your photos and videos into G+ from pretty much any device you sign into, though. It's opt-out, not opt-in like it used to be. If you dismiss the "we found new content" toast notification, which you only get after they've already started uploading said content, the service assumes you want to keep doing that.

I found this out the hard way when I was testing an Android phone; I signed in to the phone with my Google account, then took some pictures. A cloud shaped notification popped up informing me that new content was found and it was being automatically backed up to G+. I had to actually go into G+ settings and turn off this "feature" that I had never asked for, nor authorized.
> It's not more nonsense than DRM treating all its users as potential criminals by default.
It is nonsense, treating a user as a criminal is not a security threat. DRM is just encryption, and although I'll agree that some containers (flash primarily) have been vectors, so has every other piece of software that has any filesystem access. The DRM itself is NOT a security threat.

I dislike DRM, and clearly envision a day where it's no longer used. But your argument doesn't address the article, nor does it add any value to the DRM conversation as a whole. Again, cheerleading.
Im sure some languages, are created just for the sake of sintax, others to prove a marginal point, and others because the author want to be a tech celebrity.. this is "the noise" i was refering to..

We can spot really important languages, that actually put something new in the table.. with real originality and genius.. and the immitators that follow

The clear evidence to what im talking about, is that if you think in a niche that you wnat to create a program, you will have 3 or more langs to choose..

Choice is good? not always.. because once we create codebases in the langs we choose we are trapped..

All the languages we heard of, create programs somehow, otherwise we wouldnt know about.. but some are more pragmatic than others..

My sentence was to explain that the authors of the language were thinking more in the enginnering aspect, than in some theoretical or research

There are a lot of research languages out there... so in my point of view, they were not created with a more pragmatic goal..

They are cool and will push the envelope.. sure! but i dont understand the elitism here, trying to bash things that were created thinking more in the enginnering axis..
while puttting some "not working yet" but "research using the poor programmers as rat labs" in a pedestal..and in the same level as something that works, because it were design to work in a more conservative matter
Let's Make the CASL Act an Annual Event
I'm shocked something hasn't hit the spacecraft yet and obliterated it. It's been great to see the photographs from out there!
It looks to me like Bacon.js is the community favorite and RxJS is the corporate framework when it comes to JavaScript libraries for FRP. I'm thinking about introducing an FRP library into the frontend stack where I work — does anyone have any experience with using either of these libraries (or another) for corporate work? What did you use and how did your coworkers deal with it?
I think those percentages are per year. So, out of 100 women, 6-12 will get pregnant within a year. That probably includes failure to actually take the pill, taking it with antibiotics, etc.

A girl I know got pregnant after taking the pill with antibiotics, or stopping it because of antibiotics and forgetting to mention that? Something like that.
Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater
From the article:

Mr. Carroll [Blackwater's lead in Iraq] said "that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq," Mr. Richter [the State Department investigator] wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington.
Defining time based on "sun directly overhead at a particular place at noon" is, itself, a holdover from navigation and seafaring. The time difference between when the sun is directly overhead where you are and directly overhead at a particular place is the latitude difference between the two places.

That's the historical reason why we have a time definition that is locked to the rotation of the Earth. Importantly, anyone navigating based on that principle will get skewed answers if when noon is at a particular place changes.
One thing is that this is not really 6-12 pregnancies out of 100 (possible pregnancies), it's 6-12 women out of 100 using the pill in a given year will get pregnant in that year, so it's pretty likely that even if the women you know had a similar distribution of use patterns as the average in the studies, there's a decent chance none of them would get pregnant. If you know 40 women and assume a 5% failure rate, there's still a (19/20)^40 = 13% chance that none of them would get pregnant.

Add to that that the people you know might be atypical in their use patterns. The "perfect use" failure rate for the pill is ~0.3%, which I take to mean that most of the pregnancies that occur on the pill are because someone forgot to take pills, that sort of thing.
Ugh... overzealous modders!
I hate to step out-of-universe, but replicators can't replicate any plot-overpowering materials.

Ferengi certainly have Federation replicators as well as their own. If one of them could generate gold-pressed Latinum, then they'd be doing it.

The in-universe explanations are something along the lines of "the pattern's too hard to replicate". Which even holds up for ciders and wines, where captains prefer "not the replicated stuff".
The main problem here is that if you don't launch simultaneously on multiple platforms, your app will get duplicated and polluted with ads almost immediately, especially given the simplicity of this one. Look at 2048 for example.
I think that it might hold, at least for me. The biggest obstacles to my use of public transportation is the first mile and last mile, and the regularity of trips.

Using Google Maps as my source, a trip home will take between 1hr, 3min to 1hr, 30min, and still includes driving for the last mile. Granted, this is San Antonio, which is certainly a driving city. The same drive home is 14-17 minutes, depending on route.

In my calculus, drive vs. public trans. is a balance of which sucks least. Right now, I would say that the cost and altruism aspect of public trans. would allow it 200% of the suckiness allotted to driving. All else being equal, I would need a public trans. trip of ~30minutes or less.
Public transportation is typically worse than using a private car. You can't decide when to leave, you pretty much need to plan your trips around public transportation. They don't take you directly from A to B etc.

This is typically true in North America, but it is not a fundamental law. Particularly, in Europe, but also for some trips in Sydney, Vancouver, et cetera, I have found public transit superior to a private car. The key is to have as wide of a network as possible, frequent service (every 5 minutes so you don't need to think about schedules) and a average speed that is higher than the car (doable with trains, dedicated bus lanes and so on). Anywhere that there is enough traffic to cause congestion ought to be a viable place for public transportation . . . population density is not necessarily the driving factor. In fact, in some situations, a high population density might allow people to move less as they are closer to shops, work, friends, et cetera, rendering transit less important.

No, the problem with public transit in North America isn't some fundamental flaw with public transit, it is because we tend to half-ass it.
I recently stopped using an alarm clock, and it seems to work out a lot better. I now don't get waken up in the middle of a sleep cycle, and the sunlight naturally wakes me up.
Read about the life and works of Alan Turing [1]. Not only did he do seminal work for invention of general purpose computer, he actually went on to study the limitations of this theoretical computer even before it became a practical reality. Every time you see a captcha, recall that CAPTCHA = Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
> "The internet is congested. We can't just add fiber lines, if people had more internet speeds, they'd just use it up! We should destroy fiber lines, and cap all internet users to 1Mbps speeds, so that people start using the Postal Service and Blockbuster more often. "

Love this example. I can already see the wheels turning in some people who prefer a more centrally planned society.... Renting DVDs from blockbuster is more efficient. Each disc transported to an area enables hundreds of people to watch the movie. Sure they can't watch it on demand whenever they'd like, but the DVD rental model is so efficient. Sure, public transportation doesn't take you exactly where you want to go whenever you'd like, but its more efficient! (Yeah, the analogy isn't perfect, but it does make a striking point)
Investors understand risk management. It is possible he knows he needs 15MM to go for the home run, but doesn't want put in the 15MM himself and go bankrupt in the process. Investors allow him to shoot for the moon.

Also, investors help with accountability, pushing through tough spots, connections, advice, etc. Investors also add credibility that 'rich white guy throws money at project' doesn't give.
Show HN: Read the best tech bloggers in one app
Just found this handy resource on GH https://github.com/andreis/interview
If you would have said Belgium, I would have been able to say this…

"In the 1970s, economist Edmar Bacha popularised the term "Belindia" as a description of Brazil: a little bit of Belgium and a lot of India, the country was very rich for some and very poor for most."

Speaking of rich and poor, data from the recent Brazil x Chile World Cup game shows that most Brazilian stadium attendees were white (67%), mid-high/high class (90%), and well-educated (86%). Ok, now I'm officially off-topic. Carry on.
Even these costs pale in comparison to the annihilation of the Colorado River watershed. Desalination would make California produce much more expensive; it might severely hurt the lettuce industry. But it would save the environment of Arizona and northern Baja. Also the energy required to desalinate all the water in a LA house is less than that to heat one in Detroit.

Especially since the rise of solar energy (and tokamak fusion and geothermal) means that electricity is going to mostly get cheaper and cleaner in the foreseeable future.
Great points, and thanks so much for the kind words about the tuner.

Agree that sheet music would be great, and also that the lessons do feel a little quiet / less lively than they could. Your voiceover idea is really cool. We've also thought about adding backing tracks as another way to increase the energy level.

We've also run into that wraparound issue you describe, where a section that starts and ends with the same note can cause an issue when you get to the end and sustain the note. I think you're right about the solution, i.e. better attack detection by looking at the amplitude of the signal.
Why does Google ignore the crawl delay?
There are two major methods.

Jamming (active):

Broadcast so much noise at the relevant frequencies that it drowns out any other signal the devices might try to interact with. You throw a lot of power into going LALALALALALALALA at the frequency bands you expect the devices you want to jam to be interacting at, then they can't hear each other over you. It's actually not a particularly hard engineering problem until you start worrying about heat and efficiency - you just build a transmitter and broadcast noise at high power.

Blocking (passive):

Use a Faraday cage or sheer mass to prevent signals from being broadcast into or out of an enclosed area. Mass attenuates signals depending on thickness, density, and frequency. A Faraday cage uses a powered metal mesh to maintain constant voltage at a surface, which can kill most transmissions without the need to turn your building into a bunker.

But assuming this is actually allowed by your local laws, you still shouldn't do it. It's hazardous and unethical since it will also disrupt e.g. emergency communications. If you're bothered by impolite cell phone use, you should pursue a social remedy which allows for extreme cases where manners are not the biggest concern, rather than a technical one which is blind to significant edge cases.

For military applications:

You don't have an enclosed area to work with, so you mostly use jamming devices with as much power as you can manage. But this gets used less than you might think from Hollywood, since a major cost of using them is that you're very loudly shouting your general position to anyone who cares about that and access to some basic electronics. Also the really good ones are set up as buildings or vehicles, it's not going to be small if you want power on the order of "shout so loud a civilian radio station can't hear itself think."

Passive compliments:

Anti-radar stealth technology, which is where you try to make yourself as much of a pain in the ass to make out clearly as you can manage. This is far more difficult since you don't have a controlled environment to play with, but there's still a lot you can do with clever shapes and surface design. Also the point is less to make yourself invisible, than it is to reduce the amount of advance warning that an opponent would get, or their ability to respond to changes in your vector.

Chaff countermeasures are easier, you basically launch a bunch of stuff that's highly reflective at the frequencies people are trying to track you with. I think this is mostly an air-to-air thing. It actually works pretty well, at least in terms of "make it less likely that you get shot down." But if the other guy has reasonably modern targeting systems, you can bet he's got chaff too since it amounts to a thing that shoots out tinfoil confetti.
What were the technologies the author references when he mentions Eric Meijer and Alan Kay?
Not sure why you're focussing on "whites," but salaries for those who would normally be working jobs at more stable companies (companies that would survive a tech downturn, and/or companies more than 5 years old) are still high enough for them to afford living in SF.
Robot tuna creator gets $200k grant to find military applications
ZAPPOS: A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMPANY THAT HAPPENS TO SELL SHOES
Why is this a concern? It sounds like a completely rational decision for someone of any income level to pay money for a faster trip to avoid an even great amount of money in fines...
This is pretty cool. You can do something fairly similar with www.silk.co except it acts more like an online database and less like a static site. Basically, CSV to Website conversion where each page acts like a row on a DB. (Full disclosure - I work for Silk).
Groups was an awesome service when it launched back in 2001. It was the search engine to go to if you wanted to search UseNet, which (in the pre-Friendster/MySpace/Facebook days) was the largest social network on the Internet. Google slapped a much nicer UI on it than DejaNews ever had, rivaling desktop Usenet readers but without the need to download anything or run another program.

It started sucking when they took UseNet out of it - then it became just another mailing-list site in an already crowded field. (Granted, UseNet itself was nearly dead at this point.) And the field was shrinking, since more affinity groups started moving to FaceBook, or MeetUp, or getting their own individual sites on the Internet with stock forum software. And IMHO, it really died when it went to the AJAX UI - there's no real reason for a content site like Groups (or Blogger, for that matter) to go heavily AJAX, it just makes it feel clunky.
Yes, the article is very much of a rant, which is necessary every now and again to prove a point.

I also feel that many of the points the author had aren't strictly related to the language, but rather its standard library. Which could be argued that you can't benefit from one without the other, but still. Most of his concerns seem to be easily fixable through a more versatile stdlib, but there are certainly cases to be made against that.

For example, I'm not sure I want a language's standard library to know about JSON and HTML parsing, features that seem to be a better fit for non-standard frameworks and libraries.
A new application – looking for early adopters
We at OvaFlow are looking for Pioneers (Early Adopters) to join a unique community. You will have the opportunity to steer the application through its early iterations. Plus other unique benefits.
Blue light may be interrupting sleep patterns, but I assume people who call themselves night owls share with me a certain feeling of mental haze during daylight hours, regardless of sleep schedule. I'm also about 5% weaker at lifting maximal weights until late afternoon. For what it's worth, I don't consume caffeine (allergic) and I do use f.lux.
Its not because it is conditional -- both means-tested and conditioned on meeting specific other participation requirements (which are, apparently, both age-dependent and in many cases time-limited after which the participation requirements change.)

Its a pretty standard example of the kinds of conditional welfare programs in opposition to which UBI is offered.

UBI is neither:
1) means-tested: because this creates perverse incentives against work (reduces the marginal value of outside income) and increases administrative costs (because you need to take information on means, verify it, and determine benefits based on it, all of which changes over time.), nor
2) conditioned on participation requirements (for much the same administrative reasons as apply to means-testing).
Space is big, and as such, things that'd hit a spacecraft hard enough to do damage are few and far between. I'm not aware of a single spacecraft in history being disabled by naturally occurring debris.
Git diff image files on the command line, with color
From https://web.archive.org/web/20040202191903/http://thestarman..., it's clear that this article was around in 2002. Perhaps it's older?
Recipe for a Better Oven
The IUD isn't problem-free. A lot of women have painful allergic reactions to the copper ones, and the hormone-based ones a) have hormones, which cause their own problems, and b) have a bad history of getting lodged in the wrong places and having to be surgically removed.

Of course, in Europe and Asia, there is also a much broader range of options to choose from, which helps women select one that has fewer risks for their particular needs. In the US we have problems with regulatory agencies holding up approval of birth control for really dumb political reasons.
Funny that all of these, minus the first one, have next to nothing to do with the language itself, and everything to do with its standard library and external tooling.
>As much as members of the Bitcoin community like to think of themselves as agitators, there were very clearly no laws broken here.

Yeah, that's all clear now, but 4 years ago the legal situation was much murkier. This was all very new ground and we had no idea how the U.S. government would react, particularly given some of the other things going on at the time (particularly the prosecution of E-Gold, which was centralized but shared some features with Bitcoin).
Such is the flaw of academic curricula. Extreme specialization in a world of complexity.

Quality in Deming's point of view requires a deep multidisciplinary understanding: statistics, psychology, engineering, business, economics, and more.

The true irony is that now, more than ever, coming out of a recession and having a corporate and manufacturing issue in the US, we need the manufacturing and quality prowess that Japan exhibited post-WWII. We need Deming.

I believe his main problem was that he was a horrible writer. We need someone to take his ideas and clarify them much better than he could.
> The difference is this. It isn't completely different, just different in this one way, UNCONDITIONAL. Your dole is anything but. Unconditional income gives options that the dole does not. It gives extra safety the dole does not.

The dole in Australia is only conditional on one thing - how much money you earn. If you already earn more than the basic income, you don't get the dole, which is the definition of a basic income.

If you earn less than the basic income (~12k/yr) you do get it, to top you up to that amount.

It's cash deposited into your bank account, you can spend it on whatever you want.
The Paying-It-Forward Payoff – Gretchen Gavett
Very cool, Akash. I switched to http://www.plugformac.com/ because I wanted to use keyboard shortcuts, but this looks great for the browser version.
The whole article is based on false pretense that fuel prices are highest in the known history. The fuel price have been stagnant for the past 60 years. If you use real money, i.e. gold or silver. Fuel prices, food prices, healthcare cost, etc. are all flat line price chart as long as you use real money. Once you use ever-dropping and hugely inflated USD or EUR, all prices seem to rise. Seem is very important here because in fact they don't rise at all. What happens is that the measure we use - USD - is collapsing in value. It's like saying cars are faster and faster, but every year lowering value of meters in 1 km. I.e. this year 1 km is equal to 1,000 meters, next year it will be equal to 980 meters, and yet next year it will be 950 meters, so on. So in 2024, 1 km can be as little as 760 meters.

A lot of economic news or developments don't make sense unless you understand that we have lived in permanent inflationary times for the past 50 years.