skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is Apple's next big push? Wearable (motion processor in iPhone, iWatch) sensor monitoring of humans for medical, insurance and payments (iBeacon/BT), among other use cases for lifeform surveillance.

Can Apple support the cloud analytics needed to process the large amount of human-generated, personal sensor data for the many enterprise verticals that will be transformed by this data?

IBM has invested in "Smart City" initiatives, urban-scale control and coordination. Pick your favorite sci-fi movie. There is potential here to marry the personal operating system (Apple) and the city-state operating system (IBM).

Earlier this year, IBM adopted an ARM-like approach to their Power architecture, licensing IP to "OpenPower" partners. For example, here's a $4.88 billion joint project on servers & software for smart cities in China.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-07/14/c_1334823...

---

The joint project with Chinese firm Sichuan Huaxun Zhongxing Technologies Co. Ltd follows their announcement on May 18 that they will build a service center dedicated to the big data and cloud computing that is necessary for smart cities.

... "Cooperation with IBM will have an immense impact on the construction of smart cities in the world and fast-track the R&D level of high-end servers in China by 10 to 20 years," said He Wenjun, chairman of Huaxun Zhongxing Technologies.

The smart city concept was invented by IBM.

In 2012, China selected over 130 cities as pilot sites for a smart city program that will explore ways to foster a new type of urbanization.

---
Here We Go Again (on being an Indie dev in 2014)
There is no such ridiculous law, as the (somewhat unhinged) article itself makes clear.

If you hold your nose and click through to the original source they link to, it's even further from your summary, referring to stockpiles of MREs, on a short list that also includes night vision goggles, rifle tripods, high-capacity magazines, and ammunition pouches.

(The flyer seems pretty clearly geared towards "suspicious" militia types).
I recall the suspension thing being the whole reason the name thing came to light, perhaps I am mistaken?

Edit: Seems you are correct:

> Horowitz also took time to dispel the rumor that a suspension of a Google+ account means that a user loses his or her access to Gmail, Google Docs or other Google services. "When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed," he said.

http://mashable.com/2011/07/25/google-plus-common-names/
DOS and Windows are not the same thing. One reasonable interpretation of the history is that "Windows" is specifically the point over which Microsoft & IBM diverged, with Windows being the additions/lineage where Microsoft ruled and IBM's formal contributions essentially nil.
Really liking it so far. Works as advertised and I like how its 50% of the power of Hazel for less than 50% of the price.
I'll be more interested when they've found a way to work with native binaries on windows, and handle creating/using binaries that take full advantage of the PE's import/export functionality. In reality it's not cross-platform if it doesn't support the almost guaranteed necessary features of the platform -- utilizing compiled dynamic libraries.
Musk might not have been the founder on paper, but he was the founder in every respect that matters. The company you see today is his vision, not the product of Eberhard and Tarpenning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2
Samsung Buys SmartThings for $200M
zopfli: not a png optimizer.
"Thanks !! Eric" nearly sent me over the edge. Did he ever moonlight as a realtor?
The US-Mexico Border: Where the Constitution Goes to Die
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657858?hl=en
This request came after an election in Australia where during a recount 1375 votes originally tallied were unable to be found http://www.aec.gov.au/media/media-releases/2013/e10-31.htm

An investigation was conducted http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/Reports_On_Fede...

Rather than a police force transporting a sealed box, a commercial courier company or volunteer with their own car moved what might not have even looked like an official box (perhaps a printing firm's box) which in the end might have been thrown out in the recycling or might have been maliciously removed as the warehouse doors were left open or when a single security guard was on duty overnight.

As Mr Keelty wrote: "There is less concern for the security and integrity of Senate ballots because it is considered that they have less of an impact on the election outcome and in any event are warehoused for six years. This is a cultural problem within the AEC and it needs to be addressed.
The fact that it had been thirty years since the last full recount of Senate ballots most likely added to the loss of care in routinely dealing with those ballots during the election."
Is this a plan to bring the health information closer to the patient or is it just for the hospital to have the data in the cloud?
Who doesn't have more than 7 days food at some point in the grocery shopping cycle? When I was single, I could have lived for several weeks without going to the grocery and without going out to eat.

Big boxes of ramen, pasta, frozen pizzas, etc.

It's not like I go to the grocery and buy a couple days' worth of food at a time.

Now, with kids, we tend to shop 2x a week, but even with that, even when we're about to go to the grocery, we could, if pressed, survive 7 days without external food. I'd imagine the same is true of most anyone with a kitchen, a pantry, and who is not in extreme financial distress.
How can the order in which votes are counted change the outcome?

The whole process is in my opinion pretty easy to understand: each ballot is assigned to the candidate who is marked as the top preference and each candidates votes are counted. the candidate with the fewest votes has their ballows reassigned based on their next preference. This process continues until there are only enough candidates left to fill the number of seats. I can't see how this is nondeterministic (but would like to know it could be).
I'd like to know if this company exists and how to find them. And if they don't exist, why they failed?
Look at it this way: what if Drupal's own security committee posted a description of a SQL injection vulnerability (as they often do when issuing patches), and another person takes that info and uses it to attack an unpatched Drupal government site? Would the security committee members be charged?
Open an issue. There is really only one contributor who works on Windows support. We need more people telling us what we are doing wrong on Windows.
For some examples of one form of "probabilistic programming" is, have a look at some examples from the BUGS book [1]. Here, we'll estimate P(Z < 3), where Z ~ Binom(8, 0.5)

model {
Y ~ dbin(0.5, 8) # Y is Binom(8, 0.5) - 8 trials, pSuccess = 0.5
P2 <- step(2.5 - Y) # does Y = 2, 1 or 0?
}

When this is passed to {Open/Win}BUGS, the software constructs a factor graph for this model and uses MCMC techniques to sample efficiently on this graph. For example, you can example the distribution of the nodes P2 and Y.

node mean sd MC error 2.5% median 97.5% start sample
P2 0.1448 0.3519 0.003317 0.0 0.0 1.0 1 10000
Y 4.004 1.417 0.01291 1.0 4.0 7.0 1 10000

Thus, we infer that P(Z < 3) ≈ 0.1448.

[1]: http://www2.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/thebugsbook/examples/
I could see it as a combination of a trainer plane and freeing up boarder patrol etc duties. It's a jet fighter, so pilots will rack up useful experience. And you do not need performance to shoot down an airliner - a WWII prop plane could do it.
Is an osx server better for command line admin than the non-server version?
It's called like that because it's a booter[1], so it's loaded from a floppy disk at boot time.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_booter
Unfortunately, all those other things don't fit into the classic Haiku:

A systems language /
pursuing the trifecta /
safe, concurrent, fast
Best response by 12pm EST 7/16/2014 gets a free SandPiper!
It's just like an old game, when I was a middle student in China. The only different place is game map. Different level has different map to increase the difficulty.
Internapalooza 2014: Premier Event for Silicon Valley Interns
Outlook search really is awful. I find it easer to find items by visual inspection.
> My local electorate is Fairfax

I'm sorry.
A friend of mine actually made something kind of like that: https://github.com/danslimmon/oscar

Instead of using RFID, it's using barcodes. It's a little more manual, but same basic concept.
As I understand it, this is Apple focusing on consumer, while leveraging IBM as a strategic partner to service/support the enterprise market.

Without IBM, Apple would have to build up an enterprise sales team or cede that market to Microsoft who has an existing enterprise sales team. So, if this partnership works out it plays to both companies strengths.

Finally, Apple has been encroaching on enterprise for years, each iOS update has included enterprise specific features (central management, per app vpn, single sign on to name a few from v7 & 8).
SC-Project GPM2 installed
No, checkout CompletableFuture in Java 8. Nesting and exception handling is pretty great I think.
yeah looks like nice externals, but yet again, all the inference is with MCMC :s

MCMC is the most general approach, but also the most inefficient, so its got limited appeal in crunching live numbers coming out a physical system. Some problems are intractable and its the only way, but really you want to limit application of MCMC as little as possible, so if you use church you now have an interoperability problem with binding (LISP) to some ugly but efficient FORTRAN system or some such.

Exactly why I think think this initiative will be highly welcome!
I always think of him as being more like Peter Weyland from the Alien universe.

"For those of you who do not yet know me, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Peter Weyland, and if you'll indulge me, I'd like to change the world."[0]

0. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpYUW0ekPSA
Linkspam for a duplicate of an apocryphal story (I don't believe this is a true story) already submitted to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024577
I could easily defend the idea that engineering should have it's own marketeers...
Oh, wow, someone responded? I deleted that comment because i didn't feel it was sufficiently on-topic, but I had said:

>Ada 95 achieved this two decades go, ATS some time after. Rust is trying for a fourth goal, to be expressive and convenient to use, and a fifth goal, to be portable and available to everyone.

> Safe, concurrent, and fast just isn't enough.

Also, consider putting in a little more tension:

rust: functional stuff

Concurrent, safe and clever

still fast and easy.
iirc the Tesla battery pack has liquid heating and cooling.
Right, because Windows is entrenched. There is little hope for OSX to displace Windows. Look at how Sun & Linux initiatives tried and largely failed.

This is for iOS a greenfield space, where Apple wants to lock up their position as the standard mobile platform. Apple can win without working too hard to displace the incumbent (likely Blackberry).
general inference on a graph of dependant variables is NP-hard to do exactly. So you use a sampling based method to converge towards the right solution and stop when it looks about right. However, for many smaller problems there is an exact analytic solution.

Real problems in the wild are a mix of both types of problem, and intractable part and a part you can do precisely.

In an ideal world you would use the iterative methods ONLY for the parts that don't have an exact solution available. In practice once you have developed the general iterative solution, you might as well just use that for the easy parts too, as you are just burdening yourself with more development work and more scope for bugs by writing two inference implementations.

A language that allowed inference to be switched at no development cost it would be amazing
I suggest also this: http://rustbyexample.com

It's an awesome resource and updated on a daily basis.
Participate in Project Ara
I'm always curious about the 90%+ numbers.

Does that mean 90%+ issue Apple devices to some employees? Or simply support (or tolerate? Or turn a blind eye to?) using them on the corporate network and/or corp email? Or something in between?
You are right that Blackberry doesn't compete with Apple in the consumer space. But, a lot of enterprise shops are still Blackberry. Largely because Blackberry infrastructure has been in place for years and purchasing takes a long time as well. Apple with IBM has a chance to displace those aging Blackberry mail gateways.
> but he was the founder in every respect that matters.

Except actually being a founder. He provided money to an existing company, resulting in a controlling stake in that company. Certainly he is important aspect of Tesla as it is today, I'm not disputing that, but being important, perhaps even the single most critical aspect of Tesla today, does not make him a founder. It only makes him important.

Even Musk doesn't claim to have founded Tesla. He's said in the past the he was looking for a company like Tesla to become involved in. That Eberhard's dream (an electric sports car) overlapped Musk's (build affordable electric cars, but start with a high end sports car) is what brought them together.
I looked a quick tutorial - it seems to be just a normal continuation-based approach. If want to have a single try/catch block for a bunch of code that calls many different async tasks among other things, how does that work?
Is this post sponsored by Twilio?
That is very exciting. I like the direction the project is going.

But, one thing worries me -- performance. Anyone know a list or tracker of benchmarks to see how it roughly compares.

Or is it too ealry too talk about it? Am I pointing to the elephant in the room? I am ok with saying "we are not there to talk about it, stop stirring the pot". I understand that.

But looking at the future, if Rust is to compete with C++, it needs to perform close to it. Not necessarily in the "safer"/default mode, but it needs to have an unsafe, turn-off-all-checks-run as fast as you can mode.

C++11/C++14 improved C++ many enjoy and like using it. Many that don't are probably using it for performance reasons. That is a niche Rust will have to compete in.
And the test stand

BFTS the big fucking test stand.
Home Welcome to OpenAdobe
Yes, it's the "ongoing movement" to mobile that is disruptive. This agreement is just part of it.

It's not even a technical change for Apple... the same devices, used in the same way (I think they'd fail brand-damaging if they tried to suddenly be "enterprise", you need "dirt under your fingernails" as Cook said).

However... the imprimatur of IBM will open the floodgates for all those enterprise VP waiting for a sign that it's time to switch. (Just as the IBM PC did for personal computers?). Suddenly, the herd of VPs will place orders, each massive in their own right, overwhelming even Apple. That's the budget that previously was allocated to desktops/laptops...

So, in a market sense, this is arguably the key to the disruption. And looking back, the moment the dam breaks might well be seen as the disruption (rather than the warning drips and trickles). Certainly the most consequential.
Would you be interested in a custom built product based on your needs?
Corn flakes are 120 years old. Kellogs turns a profit manufacturing them despite their commoditization.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_flakes
Thank you for doing the crypto challenge by the way. Was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next set :). Has anyone else finished it in c# yet?
Rust's performance is competitive with clang and improving, even in the "safer" mode. We have benchmarks in many of the libraries (search for #[bench]) and some in src/test/bench. We're on the benchmarking game, but that is really just a game, not indicative of anything besides how much time someone has spent microoptimizing a specific program. Someone is working on a custom LLVM pass that will remove essentially every null check that Rust adds. On top of that, there are still a few more changes on the way that aren't easy, but should give a nice perf improvement.
I am very excited for the iWatch release. During the rumours of Apple building a phone, I doubted their ability to design one that I would want. Boy, was I wrong. Today, I can't fathom wanting to wear a watch again. So, I have no idea what Apple could do that would make me change my mind, but they seem to be betting big on this.

My guess is a watch with a bunch of health sensors, or maybe a truly next generation Siri experience. Those are neat technology improvements. But, it still doesn't get me excited to wear a watch.
The concern is that the Earth's magnetic field (likely) weakens around 10% or so during transitions, which leads to an increase in ionizing radiation reaching the surface. This leads to two different risks:

- Biospheric effects, due to increased rates of DNA damage; and

- Infrastructure effects, due to increased radiation damage to satellites, or damages to power grids due to large induced currents from geomagnetic storms.

Infrastructure effects are well understood: higher risk of power or communications outages. You can mitigate that risk by stockpiling water (which is a good thing to do anyway), buying a diesel generator, etc.

On the other hand, biospheric effects are less well understood. There is some statistical evidence of some species going extinct right around pole reversals, and several plausible mechanisms have been proposed, but the evidence is by no means conclusive, due in part to intrinsic limits in the fossil record.

Note however that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so biospheric effects cannot be entirely discarded. But it is also unclear what steps could anyone take to mitigate such uncertain but potentially fat-tailed risks, so it is your call.
Yes, building the source will produce (among other things) a command line application called "cjpeg", which can encode or re-encode.
Or is it?
http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

Now with OS X 10.9 support!
> It's open source. Why don't you add it yourself?

This attitude seriously needs to die.
Can you ELI5 what would be the actual impact of a huge selloff of Microsoft shares?
Cosmic Rays are often started from one singular particle, but by the time they hit the atmosphere, they cause air showers large and small. This is because there's not a whole lot to interact with in space, but there's tons of matter once you start hitting the atmosphere. At ultra high energies, cosmic rays cause extensive air showers leading to radiation in the form of gamma rays, muons, and electrons/positrons through pair production. The electrons are actually called the "electronic shower" There is a distance where the average energy of the photons in the shower is less than 1MeV, causing pair production to cease. This distance into the atmosphere is called Xmax, but it's dependent upon the amount of mass in the atmosphere, not the magnetic field. For lower energy cosmic rays, Xmax is pretty small. For higher energies, Xmax can easily hit us.
In these enlightened Unicode days, why are fonts still “for” a language?
Hopefully this will be a big step forward in solving the problem of Han unification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

It's infuriating how many Japanese sites still don't use Unicode, purportedly because of this issue (though I suspect that it's just another example of Japan lagging when it comes to web/computer tech).
There technically is an "unsafe" mode, but not in the way you're thinking. You can drop down to C level by writing code in unsafe blocks and using methods prefixed with "unsafe." This will stop the compiler from doing things like inserting bounds checking and should perform fairly close to Clang.

Generally though, rust strives for the same ideal as C++: you only get what you pay for. You can carve out the subsection of the language you need through things like feature gating without too much trouble right now (and the standard library is still improving in this regard).
It seems Apple and IBM have done this before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
Amazon in Talks with Simon and Schuster
As I understand it, the goal is for Rust to perform as well or better than C++ without the need for an unsafe mode. From the long discussions I've seen on the Rust mailing list, I think the likelihood of a "disable all checks" mode is nil.
A lot of fonts don't support a lot of unicode characters.
> Not necessarily in the "safer"/default mode, but it needs to have an unsafe, turn-off-all-checks-run as fast as you can mode.

By design, Rust allows you to opt-in to this mode locally via `unsafe { ... }`; this allows you to be 100% safe through the vast majority of the code base, but then eek out the very last drop of performance in core routines where there's no safe alternative. Then only those regions need to be checked for memory safety vulnerabilities rather than the whole codebase.

Although, many things can be written in safe code and still be performant: iterators provide safe and highly efficient sequential access to vectors and arrays (right now they optimise to the same code as the equivalent C/C++, other a bug in LLVM where it's not recognising that some pointers are guaranteed to be nonnull).
This is a fascinating thread. I wonder if formal letter writing is still taught in grade school?
- Alpha channel
- Animation
- Proper metadata
- File size

The list of things that WebP offers that JPEG, PNG, or GIF alone will never address.
According to the site all the fonts together are 134MB compressed. Maybe that's the reason or maybe because it's a work in progress so works out better in segments.
The 'Secret' to a Hit Song Title
Why bother, it will be shut down by years end anyway.
If I could ask an unrelated question, what are you using to power 2 external monitors on your MBP? I have a 30" monitor at $work, but a pair of smaller monitors would be even better.
I'm quite bullish on smart watches, mainly due to the health applications that seem to be on-route. I've been wondering how this will effect the wider watch making industry? My initial thought is the middle-call watch brands will get hit. Someone looking to buy a Patek Philippe still will but your 25-55 y/o white collar worker will likely start moving towards smart watches.

It will be interesting to see how groups like Swatch fare over coming years. Android might be popular if it lets them make own brand versions via open source software.
> but that is really just a game,

Very much so, agreed. It is a PR game most of all. It is unfortunate. But it is probably a game that needs to be played. I know microbenchmarks are bogus, but I still click and look at them.
so YouTube comments are back?
The BIOS has a lot of built in traps that, while minimalistic, make all PCs appear the same to you, the trap-user. This is the bare minimum to load an OS + drivers from disk, or run an OS installer, or turn your PC into a flappy bird arcade machine.

Come to think of it, "bare metal" would really be modifying your BIOS to contain flappy bird. Then you could draw to the screen directly. Too bad it would only work on one model of motherboard. :)