skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>build something that some people love but most people think is a toy

best quote...
Am I The Only Techie Against Net Neutrality?
This one is SO OLD though. It was in the books I read as a kid 30 years ago.
To me, the presence of the stone found at 90 feet makes me think the whole thing was just a fake treasure pit designed to waste your adversary's time. If you were truly trying to hide a treasure, why would you intentionally leave semi-cryptic clues about what lay below?

It's kinda like a reverse-proof-of-work. It takes you a constant amount of time (probably a few weeks of work for a crew working on digging the ~100 foot pit and leaving a few fake clues). Then, once you tell someone else about it, it has the potential to occupy years of their life attempting to discover the "treasure" you told them about.
Why do you feel that something that is incorrect (even blatantly) isn't useful? I have often observed a thread where somebody ignorantly spouts something and is taught appropriately. I've learned stuff from those and left with a net positive. The original poster might never admit to being wrong, or changing his world-view, but I certainly have many times.
What about COM? That was pretty bad.
That lets you make GC infrequent but the amount of heap will determine the pause time when the GC comes calling. If you have a large number of live objects with pointers in them then pauses are unavoidable with the current Go GC, it sounds like if all goes according to plan things will be a lot better in 1.5 though.
Was the movie Goonies inspired by this?
Well, won't these companies finally open their silos to Google and Apple? What is to fear here?
O(N^2) is not exponential but just polynomial. O(2^N) is still exponential. O(N!) and O(N^N) are faster than exponential but not that much; O(N^N) grows slower than O(N!)[1].

Hyper-exponential is most likely double exponential O(a^b^N). There is an exponential growth of apps on these platforms and another exponential growth of users on these apps.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling's_approximation
iOS8 to support WebGL – is this the end for matrix3d frameworks like famo.us?
There's been a lot of hype lately about famo.us, a javascript framework that claims to have solved performance issues in HTMl5. Famo.us gets its performance by heavily using "matrix3d" CSS property to allow positioning, rotation and alignment of elements by means of applying a 16 cell transformation matrix array onto these elements. Matrix3d is also one of the few CSS properties that reliably invoke GPU acceleration in the browser. You can see some demos of the framework @ http://periodic.famo.us and http://famo.us/demos/.

But there are alot of things that famo.us cannot do - one of them is rendering real 3d models. Reason for that is that famo.us relies on divs as its core building block, and divs are, by design, rectangular. To create a 3d mesh with famo.us, you'd need to create tons of tiny divs, positioned to create an illusion of a 3d object. Each one of these divs would need to have a matrix3d transformation applied to it. That quickly becomes extremely hard for a browser to render.

There is, however, a web technology that can do it much better. Its called WebGL, and it's been around for a few years now. WebGL operates completely differently from the way famo.us does. It, instead, relies on HTML5's canvas tag and its also GPU accelerated. Because it uses canvas, which is basically a pixel based drawing board, it's much more flexible in regards to what it can display. Downside is that you can't use any of html elements we are so used to. For example, if you want to create a text input, you'd have to create (or use) a class that actually creates one my means of canvas. You can check out some examples of WebGL @ http://threejs.org/examples/.

And now, Apple has made and announcement that webGL is coming to the iPhone near you. What do you think that means for things like matrix3d and famo.us? Would this prompt more developers to use webGL? Or would the two technologies compliment each other?
The Utah Lawyers Who Are Making Legal Services Affordable
success = hard work * luck

0.0 < hard work < 1.0

0.0 < luck < inf

you should be proud of yourself, but not be so judgemental.... after all you were lucky enough to have a grandfather to serve as a good role model. I'm sure if you examined your life critically you'd find many other instances of luck.
I'm new to these concepts, so please forgive me for coming up with something that already exists.

I guess then the question becomes why would the roadmap avoid such an implementation?
I think your original argument was valid (make smart investments (educational RSPs) rather than personally motivated investments (softball). However, I would have backed it up by coming up with number of softball players/softball scholarships, expected return on RSPs over 10 years etc not anecdotal evidence like "If she actually enjoyed playing..."
Isn't it being old kind of the point? People are actively attempting to excavate it.
I'm not on a retina display but that doesn't look as nice. The letters are so thin they start to disappear even before using the light-purple-on-dark-purple font.
What if such a comment was the only one? Is is better that the OP observe no votes and no comments, or a single comment saying "Thanks!"?
I was under the impression that I can downvote whatever I want to for whatever reason I see fit. Reading the HN guidelines, there are no rules dictating what criteria should be met for me to be allowed to downvote (or upvote) a post. What it does say is:

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

The current method of downvoting appears to work just fine. I can't recall the last time that I saw a truly valuable, substantive argument downvoted into oblivion at the bottom of the page.
This is something I'm interested in discovering as well. I view most of these developments as modular components that could be used in conjunction with existing processor pipelines. For instance, with these 'neural' chips, I could imagine an existing processor querying the neural chip to look for particular activation patterns. Though I'm not too sure on the language one would use to specify which patterns to look for... Perhaps you could extract the parameters from the neural chip itself through a learning process, which you'd then use to bootstrap the process a bit and know what to look for? I'd imagine a lot of formal research is still needed here.

Neat developments, excited to see how they shake out.
I find the sub threads the correct things in a helpful (kind tone, provide citations), however
I'm super excited to see improvements in the built-in App Manager in Firefox's developer tools. Hopefully it becomes a novice-friendly IDE that allows you to quickly start a new app, add some dependencies (jQuery, tweetNaCl, etc.), and start coding.

Having a built-in IDE significantly lowers the barriers for locals in developing countries to quickly make apps that apply to their local community.
I really wish Mozilla would put the resources currently behind Firefox OS and use them for something like a modern libgecko and standalone gecko wrapper that runs on different environments instead of making an OS.

The blink/webkit monoculture is causing issues but every app is embedding it because gecko as a platform for embedding is essentially dead.
8 Ways To Be Derpy In Minecraft Summer Edition
You cannot have both deterministically-freeing GC and GC without arbitrarily-long pauses. That's kind of a given.
>Memory safety does not require VM management (or so Rust is trying to prove).

I agree, with a few qualifications. I think Haskell has already proved it's possible.

I think Swift + ARC isn't a strong enough guarantee of memory safety for two reasons:

1) Swift has to interact with a huge amount of objC code, of varying degrees of quality (some Apple code, some OSS code via cocoapods). Swift itself would be much safer if all objC was rewritten in Swift.

2) ARC isn't as strong a guarantee as either GC or Rust's pointer semantics. For example, it's easy to hold weak references to something you thought was retained, and then dereference an invalid pointer.

So yes, you can have a memory safe language without a VM, but I think you need GC and/or much stronger pointer semantics, ala rust.
Public Relations Is A Process Not A Product Hunt
Couldn't you avoid doing allocations in Go?
By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Things that seem truly revolutionary are, more often than not, incremental changes on previous ideas that were easier to miss. As such, many movements and uprisings may be largely inevitable, and probably aren't the result of individual products like Facebook and Twitter, because they could've happened without them.

But that line of thinking is COMPLETELY missing the forest for the trees.

The world changes exactly because of such products -- specifically, because of the confluence of every idea and product up until that point in history. The Arab Spring may have been largely inevitable, but it was spurred by everything leading up to it, including the advent of social networks as a new communication platform.
The published paper is in science here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6197/668
Is Big Data spreading inequality
> Also, I think this is your 3rd time(in my recent memory) derailing a Firefox OS thread to talk about how there are no phones in stores etc. Are you an astro turfer or are you just really angry at Mozilla for some reason?

I'm sorry but he's right. The OS is not good, the phones are not powerful, they are barely available and because they are web based they have no unique selling point over any other platform.

You can get more powerful Android phones for cheaper and they run more stuff.
Watch any talk by Hans Rosling - this one https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_... for example - and you'll learn that your mixing up cause and effect re affluence and children.
I recently made this jump. I'm a programmer and I wanted to work on some ideas I have. It helps that I can also do some contract work to keep some money coming in. Here are the main things that helped me make the jump:

1. Believing in myself

Almost everywhere I've worked I've never been included in important decisions and I've seen teams I'm on make poor decisions without consulting me. This is entirely because of egos. People that work for other people aren't trying to build that business, they're trying to build themselves within that business. These egos and politics got in my way far more than I could stomach anymore. I've also noticed a big difference between my enthusiasm and passion for becoming a better programmer and that of my coworkers. I hope to be able to employ other people someday and give them a great culture for building and learning.

2. Having Money/Savings

I saved a lot of this before making the jump recently. Some people might recommend 6 months of savings, I saved enough for quite a bit longer than that and I hope I can maintain a lifestyle at least similar to what I had before. I'm married without kids but it's very important for me to not put any burden on my wife with my starting of a business. Trust me, no matter how good you feel before going into this, your head will get messed with a lot as those first few Fridays pass by and no direct deposit is hitting your bank account. It takes a few times to get over it.

3. Desire for more Money/Savings/Freedom

The advancements that you make in wealth when working for someone else are very incremental. Maybe I'm just impatient, but I want bigger earning potential and I want it quicker. It helps that I can do some consulting to make a little bit of money while I work on the product ideas that I have.
Erosion of privacy, ease of government surveillance, and monetization of personal identity could all be viewed as either upsides or downsides. It depends on who you ask.

Technology doesn't have to have a net positive impact to have an impact. The moral/ethical debates on atomic fission, cars, and industrialized agriculture are all still very much open.
vonsydov's link is not dead and I don't know why his comment was downvoted or why I can't reply to it. There's nothing wrong with his link, though this one may have been slightly better

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1254642

More broadly, I don't understand why HN seems to prefer press pieces (so often containing more inaccuracies than useful information) to the papers on which they're based.

In this case, even if you can't access the full text, the single-paragraph abstract contains all of the new information in the 12-paragraph Tech Review story.
This comes up so often.

However, https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/104
Creating Voices for Chewbacca and R2-D2
I haven't left my day job, but I've definitely struggled with the same thoughts about whether I was "flaking out" by not leaving a stable but non-challenging job.

First, you should never feel guilty about providing for your family. We glorify start-ups in silicon valley because of survivorship bias and it's silly given the realities of a person's family responsibilities. So let's get that out of the way.

Second, if you think about leaving all at once it can seem daunting. Instead, you should prepare yourself over the next years to manage the risks of starting your own business. This means understanding your family finances, saving money, setting a timeline for your business, and setting a time to call it quits and go back to a salary job to reorganize.

Make a plan, communicate with your family about your goals, and then prepare yourself to execute that plan. Good luck!
Origami robot folds itself up, scuttles away
Show HN: BoominAudio – Audio product comparisons
I find it quite mindblowing that people on HN can dismiss Facebook/Twitter as "just some social networks" that aren't "world changing".

Maybe you are all high and mighty and don't use "just some social networks", but they have definitely changed the world, in HUGE ways. I would say facebook's global permeation (circa 2009) is probably the most world-changing thing since global consumer internet availability (approx 1998?).

Just the other day, we on HN watched as a hotel business most likely crumbled because of worldwide attention on such social media [1]. Similarly, entire businesses are livelihoods are being built upon being visible on facebook. News travels like wildfire, opinions can make CEOs step down, a viral video can turn a beginner musician into a contemporary sensation, the list is endless.

How does one deny that these things have changed the world compared to before? They may not be all good changes, or any of them good changes, but they have changed the world, in huge ways, and we had best learn to accept it and take it into account in our lives.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131162

Edited to actually add link.
More importantly: can you measure it?
The problem is that these poor adults don't realize what they're missing. Maybe they know on some abstract level that education is good, but they don't value it where it counts - time, money, and effort. They get mad when they're expected to be involved with their children's education, ("It's your job to teach my kid - you're a teacher") they refuse to spend money on extracurricular activities, and they don't put forth the effort to actually make sure their kids are learning.

What's more is that they are unwilling to pay the taxes that would pay for better public school education. Public schools in many areas are as minimalist as they can get. They teach only the required subjects; in many schools, home economics, auto repair, cooking, and budgeting are barely even electives.

What's more is that the rich parents see these terrible schools and say, "Well, it's going to cost $10k a year to get my kid an education, but we need to pay it." Now the bad schools are filled exclusively with kids whose parents are indifferent to education. Not good.
> 90% of it is your effort in either case.

I think that's an over-simplification. Maybe better put as: 90% of successes required putting in a great effort.

But how many equal efforts did not result in success?

I think it's fair to consider the effort (which undoubtedly is less and less important to success the more resources you start with) a minimum barrier to entry. But I don't think it automatically follows that the effort you put into something is a very good gauge of success. Or even that it's a differentiator between success and failure.
Leverage Rescale for high-order CFD simulations
Maybe cstross will feature it in his next Laundry novel.
Why don't you just provide a correction?
In the meanwhile, here's a little class I made that implemented just enough pattern matching as a fluent interface : https://gist.github.com/neuschwanstein/6c0c9256c1dc5b370011.

Not pretty, but it works well enough for a pragmatic programmer.
I too, would like to know this.
You miss the point of the article, which is that it's not victimology to understand that social mobility depends on a lot more than talent or hard work, and that you have to be either young or naive to believe that that's all it takes.

I'm currently reading a biography of one of the most famous and successful British rock bands. The core of the band met at a famous public school. They had:

1. Spare money to buy instruments and equipment, including vans and cars

2. Plenty of rehearsal opportunities - often in very large country houses or grand cottages where they stayed for free

3. Direct access to successful people in their immediate social circles

4. No immediate financial pressures. (Not that they were rich. But they were never in danger of starving or becoming homeless.)

They happened to be very talented. But without those opportunities the talent would not have been enough, and they would have had to join most of their peers in ordinary jobs.

Class is a network of opportunities that is denied to outsiders. It's also about learned social confidence within the network.

A few 'Well I made it so you can too' anecdotes are beside the point. A few people always do make it, no matter what.

The real issue is the number who don't, in spite of best efforts and hard work, and of the talent and hard work wasted in a culture of low social mobility.

The failures never appear in Fortune, but they're out there in their millions.
A community feels hostile when everyone down-votes the unpopular opinions and I think we should at least refrain from down-voting when we just don't agree.

Think about a democracy. You can't down-vote, you always vote for something. People get "down-voted" (getting trialed and fined) when they act against the rules.

What I humbly recommend is sometimes actually up-voting a controversial comment that you disagree with as long as it is in-line with the conversation. That makes it more visible and it becomes more likely that there'll be a discussion under it it. I usually reply and up-vote when I disagree, just up-vote otherwise.
I think the problem is only perpetuated by inherited advantages or laziness. But there's also the problem that no matter how fast or smart people become, it's possible that there may only be a few elite positions for every race.
Google defends child porn tip-offs to police
How do I get started programming games??
Many laypeople just use "exponential" to mean "really fast" (or even worse, "much more than"). It's been used that way so much that it's been watered down to mean just "fast". So the author probably just said "hyperexponential" to get back the original lay-meaning of "really fast".
Also with "You are a sexist." Disagreeing with a person might have nothing to do with their sex/gender but is also an easy way to shut them down. People will be hesitant to agree with a person that was just labeled racist/sexist.
Broccoli Taco: A fast, simple, and flexible static site generator
Somevid: Fast, fun, anonymous video sharing
vonsydov's account has been hellbanned for 52 days.
Could you elaborate on this. My impression was that connections between data centres (e.g. in the case of using an EC2 instance with Cloudflare) were already very secure and therefore do not require SSL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
Synapse Program Develops Advanced Brain-Inspired Chip
You can trade CPU usage for heap size, for the purposes of the plan it sounds like they wanted to be able to pick some concrete goals so they've picked 100% slack RAM and 25% additional CPU as their numbers. If you wanted 50% then the CPU overhead might be 50% on the same workload.

For a lot of applications on a GCed runtime 100% isn't an unreasonable number though. To get the overhead down you can manage your memory more carefully (pooling, keeping most objects pointerless) and tell the GC to run earlier.
I thought the same thing, but some say otherwise:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497569
I think I can speak from experience as someone who frequently gets downvoted (and upvoted). I think a lot of people do downvote for something that they disagree with, although I would imagine most would say they did it due to the post being useless. Also using humour here is a likely downvote.

I would have to imagine that the liberal downvoting for 'useless comments' actually detracts from the value of HN. Good thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031898
the font does look thinner but I like it (doesn't look any more invisible from my eyes)
Compose: Hosted Elasticsearch beta
"Farming is still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I grow food instead of hunting for it. My parents did great as hunter-gatherers."
I feel like you're contradicting yourself here. Yes, there are probably more than one reasons for their success. That is why focusing on one (design in this case) is silly.
> the presence of the stone found at 90 feet

You mean that really important stone which somehow got misplaced—or put into a fireplace—and so we have this replica "for reals you guys"?
Not so surprising punchline:

> Just 33 children — out of nearly 800 — moved from the low-income to high-income bracket. And a similarly small number born into low-income families had college degrees by the time they turned 28.

What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in. A great example of this is how often people point to outliers in discussing the structural barriers holding back poor kids. It's not rational. Obviously the relevant question is the plight of those with median-ish determination and drive, born into different circumstances.

I've worked a little bit with inner city students, and what just kills me is meeting kids who are like 90th percentile of determination and drive. Not the 99.9th percentile kids that will go to Harvard on a free ride despite growing up in the ghetto, but the kids who are a notch below. Those kids are one wrong step away from never making it out of the ghetto. Their counter-parts, born into well-off families, on the other hand, have a great shot at ending up at the upper end of the income spectrum.

[1] One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life. Not just in terms of education, etc, but even in terms of expectations and aspirations. How do you tell your kid to work hard so they can be anything they want to be, when you your own circumstances belie that assertion?
You must have missed this one, then: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/russia-loses-contr... (the actual title is funnier than what's in the URL)
Great app! I like the simplicity
But what does any of that have to do with the process of designing and developing Firefox OS? You also just kind of seem like an astroturfer. Android was not mentioned anywhere in that article as far as I could tell. Why are you posting that here?
iCracked (YC W12) Goes Global With Its iPhone Trade-In and Repair Services