skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Railguns are fun to build as a hobby project. All you need are a pair of rails, and a conductive slug. Ball bearings work well.

The tricky bit is reducing arcing between the rails and the slug, as you can end up with it either welding onto the rails, or carbonising and ending up with "dead patches", sapping your power. Main trick was to go for gobs of current with as low a voltage as we could manage.

We used big capacitors re-purposed from a tesla coil (cider jars!), and copper plumbing pipe filled with gravity-fed circulating mineral oil to keep the temperature manageable.

Think it was 1.5m long or so, and we were using a 10mm ball bearing... and it happily disappeared deep into a brick wall never to be seen again.

Fun times, but lethal if you're not careful.
After nailing your base jump pitch you'll kill it at elevator pitches!
SIGGRAPH 2014 Links – Self Shadow
Oracle's software reign will be toppled, claims top exec at emerging Korean firm
I'm pretty sure it's externally controlled to some extent. Otherwise, how would they know what kind of shape to build, and even more importantly, how to scale it - to do that, you have to know the total number of robots, something which cannot be discovered locally.
WorldView-3 has 31cm resolution
Residential college with online courses does seem to be the plan, with the city of residence changing year to year.

>Each year, according to Minerva’s plan, they’ll attend university in a different place, so that after four years they’ll have the kind of international experience that other universities advertise but can rarely deliver. By 2016, Berlin and Buenos Aires campuses will have opened. Likely future cities include Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. Students will live in dorms with two-person rooms and a communal kitchen. They’ll also take part in field trips organized by Minerva, such as a tour of Alcatraz with a prison psychologist. Minerva will maintain almost no facilities other than the dorm itself—no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their extracurricular activities.

Re: price. They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts colleges. Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme? I'm not American but I do spend far too much time reading American stuff and my impression would be that the only public universities in the US that are vaguely comparable to HYPS are U Michigan and UC Berkeley, maybe Georgia Tech, which is itself very far behind the top four CS schools, MIT,CMU, Berkeley and Stanford.

Being better than Amherst may be an ambitious goal for Minerva's second decade but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand seems doable.
1. There are no absolute universal truths.

2. There are only at best absolute local truths i.e. truths which are truths only in a limited local subsystem of the entire possible universe. The moment you consider a larger enclosing system of which the local subsystem is only a part then the truth may cease to be.

3. One should be comfortable believing that contradicting truths can co-exist. It is the limitation of the human mind to resolve the contradictions.
To anyone who goes for the comments first, like me, the complete book is available online for free.
Oh so it's like a BEAM bot? Only this seems decidedly not analog, as per what I remember BEAM was supposed to be. That reminds me to go get a soldering iron, I've always wanted to build a solar roller.
Science has not much to say about truth - sciences can tell you what is not true and provide a current best understanding of something but very rarely does science talk about truth. Math and a few other things aside.
It's a fascinating problem. It makes me wonder, without zero, what paths mathematics would have taken. There have been civilisations that used math extensively without zero and I hope Ithkuil-fluent mathematicians some day would continue exploring this.
Orthography is more about disseminating communication in an asynchronous way than pronunciation. Over time, it crystallises into something most people can agree on and use to communicate; however, in that time, it will pick up relics that are hard to get rid of. It is also true that while it reaches a relatively stable point, it still evolves slowly (e.g., in texts from about 100 years ago, you sometimes see "cooperate" spelled "coöperate"; in really old texts, you'll see the "long s", like in "highneſs").

The main point is that writing is a human invention, while language itself is thought by most to be a natural cognitive facility, similar to face recognition, that we've evolved to survive and flourish. When a spelling was coined for a particular word, chances are that it was relatively close to its pronunciation at the time, but oral language changes faster than written tradition.
Emily Howell.
Your second point is a complicated thing - while it is true that everything may be different when you go far enough away it is also true that the assumption that the laws of nature are the same everywhere in the (observable) universe is a foundational pillar of science.
Depression
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65M11zUa3_g&list=UUV27UNZR_SqFe0Va_PXh5Uw
I don't see it as a disruption, because it's not a replacement as much as an alternative. People and companies that need unique logos and original designs will continue to seek out the services offered by the author of this article, while fiverr will attract everyone else who wants a logo.
This argument assumes that the function f(x,y)=x^y is continuous near 0 and therefore lim (f(x)^g(x)) = (lim f(x))^(lim g(x)) at zero. But since it's not continous, that formula does not necessarily hold true.
Rendering React Components on the Server
> it was just yet another programming language.

It was considered a high-level programming language.
As far as I can tell, the stars aligned here.

You have a brilliant founder who has a background in the tech (Chem Engineering) and the upbringing and connections to take research trips out to Singapore.

Second, you have the tech: microfluidic assays, and the idea of collecting them all in the same place.

Third, an existing industry that's been content to sit around and charge high prices due to low competition: LabCorp & company.

Finally, a generous funding environment.

Unfortunately, their secrecy is kind of a turn off. How can I know to trust their numbers?
> "If not for pronunciation, what else is spelling about?"

Of course we should be able to read words more or less just by spelling out the letters according to simple rules.

In this regard "my" language is far better. We however have to deal with "word genders" (mostly arbitrarily assigned it seems for me) and other rules that makes little sense other than from an historical perspective.

> there are several groups of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.

Common problem : ) An immigrant arab who lived close to my place advertised a "water bomb" for sale in the local newspaper. It turned out to be a water pump. This was funny for us (many years ago) but the reason was obvious: he couldn't hear the difference between b and p.
It will probably just end up with Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft owning 90% of the pop music industry.
Apart from the size issues mentioned below, how does this work on Android? Is it better than PhoneGap etc and closer to native apps?
برنامج لإصلاح مشاكل الشبكة والإنترنت بشكل مجاني في الويندوز
Thanks for the comments, and for the immense amount of work you've put into building this. I wouldn't care much if it didn't support MB1, just wanted to understand that relationship.

As I thought about it more after posting, I imagined what you describe -- feeding in data sets (via an internal REST interface, say) and figured that would be simple enough.

I'm most interested in the multi-viewport idea, which I imagine is related to nested views. Presumably it lets you define linked representations of the same structures? Linked in the sense of brushing-and-linking [1]. I'm curious to try building some linked representations of real- and phase-space diagrams.

[1]: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063663
Game of Codes
2048 app that use Kivy on android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meltingroc...
wow, just wow. amazing stuff Steven. I've been working on a framework for very easy data structure creation and instance management in a 3D environment. I was building it in 3D flash first, and have tried to build exactly those kind of curved arrows, though everything was calculated on the CPU. I've also been wanting to get to generating geometries from a static set of properties/datatypes for a while, and I was wondering to what degree I'm gonna have to get my 'hands dirty' and learn new things to do that. So wow, am I glad there's people like you building libraries like these!

I'm just about ready with rewriting the underlying semantic web framework to typescript and will soon be plugging it in to either Away3D TS or Three.js. Since I already know Away3D and it's written itself in Typescript I thought I might try that first, but seeing this ... and knowing how much more tested three.js is... I think I'm gonna go with Three.js

I really can't wait to play it with once you release it. I hope you can find some time for good documentation though. Cause at the moment I know just too little of the concepts involved to understand everything you explain in the slides.

Thank you already for this amazing presentation
> ImageOrg

I see a few files, but no instructions. Isn't kivy supposed to be a GUI building tool?

Where is the exe or dmg file?
It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages.

There are other factors at play, such that speech perception is multi-modal. E.g. see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect
Goroutines for java and scala
It's likely not missing the concept of zero but rather the symbol in the numbering system. The 0 is not necessary for representing integers (if there's a new symbol for 10). I'm pretty sure it is necessary to write the decimal part of a real number.
I remember a criticism of Esperanto was that it was too similar to Europeans languages. I read about a language that was similar to Esperanto but incorporated Chinese and Arabic qualities. Does anybody know this?
The language I grew up with has, to a certain degree, mangaged to adapt a lot of words to our writing style, -chocolate for example will be written in the obvious way.

However every time the language committee releases new recommendations people complain loudly, blissfully unaware of our long and successful history in adapting English word to our (saner : ) writing style.
If a browser is an extra layer of junk, then surely a bunch of the features that come with an OS are unnecessary junk too. Printer drivers, for example. But of course, printer drivers don't impede the ability to make games in any way. The fact that platforms have features which are useful for other purposes is unrelated to whether a platform can be useful for a specific purpose, like making games.

There's nothing that Steam can do which can't also be done in a browser. Except, of course, store more than 5 MB of assets.

Why not use Steam? Because Gabe is going to die someday, and there's no reason to think that his successor will inherit his good judgement. Locking yourself into a monoculture isn't a good idea when your whole business can be smashed by one poor decision by the company pushing that monoculture. It's the same reason you don't see any companies built solely on Facebook or Twitter. (Apple is a notable exception, but companies can still live or die based on whether Apple feels like admitting you into their appstore.) Yes, Steam is pretty awesome right now, but arguing against exploring other alternatives is arguing against progress of any kind.

Your objections seem to boil down to "a browser isn't meant for games." Well, nothing short of a gaming console is truly meant for games. But a browser can be used for games, if only the manufacturers would provide a single necessary tool: a place to put them. That is the sum total of my argument, and it mystifies me why so many people are not only against this idea, but somehow offended that a browser might be repurposed for anything other than viewing lines of text.
Genuinely curious, why do you think this is an important distinction?
How to sell Degrees using Social Media Ads with Career Kickstarter
You'll have wasted half of your life. Why wait? It's not an either-or.
Thank you!
yeah I know it's been only 3 days and it drives me crazy.
Will definitely come back here for the update and asking questions ;)
What Does fmap Preserve?
Riak CS is S3 compatible.

I have a very similar problem and end up writing a python script that copies the files to cassandra and Nginx + Lua to serve them using lua-resty-cassandra. The read/write throughput is still not as good as I was expecting though.
This is good advice, and I'd like to broaden it to include any deity. If it feels good, you can take a minute or two at the end of the day to say thanks to colleagues, to a friend or what have you. You can thank Hephaestus for a good day's work, or Hera for your family.
It compiles the python interpreter for android/arm, then bundles this all together in an APK - along with much of the standard library and any extra modules the user wants. It also includes a java bootstrap app that interacts with the system, but does essentially nothing except initialise and display an opengl surface that kivy renders to - along with running the python interpreter on the user's kivy code.

This bootstrap is invisible to the user, you don't need to touch the java to use kivy. That said, kivy has some cool sister projects for using the normal java api - pyjnius for accessing java classes directly from python, and more recently plyer to provide a more pythonic wrapper to common things like vibration, sensors etc.

(The above is also mostly the same for the ios build process).

> Is it better than PhoneGap etc and closer to native apps?

I would say more that it is just different, with advantages and disadvantages of its own. It doesn't use native widgets (though it's possible to create and use them in some ways with pyjnius), so it isn't different in this sense.
One of the threads in David Brin's Jijo trilogy is that development in the galaxy is being held back by (amongst other things) designed, unambiguous languages.
The limit of x^x does equal one when approached from the right (i.e., when x is positive, reducing to zero). From the left, it also approaches one, but is only continuous over the complex numbers. Anyway, while the limit approaches one from both sides, the function cannot be evaluated at x=0 and so is undefined.
Data scientists with 2 years exp can earn $200,000–$300,000 a year
What you need to do is to read the Less Wrong sequences. (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences)

That will help with clearing some things up.
Really nice concept, trying it out right now.
> This just seems like a button toggle problem

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The problem is knowing when it is or isn't. That needs building with all warnings enabled and vetting through them manually, a run with a static analysis tool searching for possible 64 bit bugs, or at worst, running extensive test suites to try to detect errors at runtime.

Some (older) software might also have some internal structures that are designed on the assumption that pointer size equals 32 bits.

This issue is made worse by the loose conventions in implicit integer type casts in C and C++. Warnings do help here, but there's going to be a huge amount of spurious warnings too.

So, at best, all you need to do is change compiler flags. At worst, you'll need a lot of manual labor in making sure that your applications build cleanly for 64 bit machines.
I'll rise to the bait.

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ (first from Google, now Apache) was/is a brave try. The main problem with email is the lack of consistent formatting rules which means that it's difficult to keep track of structure.

But hey, it's a massive success. Worse sometimes really is better.
The user hasn't packaged this into a standalone executable (though this is possible with e.g. pyinstaller). You need to run the ImageOrg.py file with python.
I agree that the UK Student tech scene is quite disconnected.

There are quite a few computer science oriented student societies. For instance, at York (where I did my undergrad) there's HackSoc. There's an IRC channel somewhere on freenode with computer science societies from the uk. We're not completely disconnected, but we're slowly growing to the point that we can start collaborating and having friendly competitions.
Yes but the point in OP and GP is that the amount of content available in the Unity store is greater than other stores. Sure Unreal has the same goodness but there just isn't as much stuff readily available in the Store you can just pick up and use.

So it's a content issue, not a technical issue with the engine itself.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2dlsgl/utopian_...
I don't know which site your are referring to. I made this list for my own startup and thought maybe others can benefit too.
My first game as an indie developer What do you think?
Got it. Infact now i am planning to open source the whole project on github.
Also available on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codemyworl...
Do you have the name of that IRC channel?
Interlingua was constructed this way, at least its vocabulary. They made the mistake IMHO to make the grammar naturalistic, which made it very easy to read for people who already spoke a Romance language; writing, on the other hand, was made difficult by this.

You could perhaps use a typological database with grammatical features of the world's languages and somehow select an "optimal" combination from it, but that's a far cry from letting a computer determine the most efficient means of expressing information; we have no idea how to define information/meaning, so that it's still an impossible dream. I don't think the problem is that designing languages is hard per se, it's that people can't be bothered to agree on one and learn it.
Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? Would love to be able to make such 3D models from go-pro videos - preferably w/ a FOSS toolkit.

Would also be grateful for any papers or articles which discuss the algorithms involved -- especially anything with implementation tips/strategies. I understand the basics of photo stitching, but structure from motion is a bit more nebulous and something I've been meaning to learn more about.
> I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects.

I see you are not using gmail.
Ceph's filesystem interface is built on a lower level protocol which is available through the librados [1] API, which might be a possible solution if it builds for (or can be ported to) Cygwin / Windows and all you need is a client on Windows.

This API is more S3-like, operating directly on "objects" in the Ceph cluster. I wrote a system for storing many small (10-20kB) files using librados & Ceph, but the performance wasn't as good as I had hoped. Possibly I did not configure the Ceph cluster in the optimal manner - the cluster setup is quite complex.

[1] http://ceph.com/docs/master/rados/api/librados-intro/
You are 25 years old, you have your whole life ahead of you, you are still wet behind the ears in terms of learning your chosen profession and in life experience - frankly this is the bleat of a spoilt child ... "I could be great but someone else is stopping me from being so". "I'm going to under-achieve yah di yah".

Stop whining and grow up would be my advice. Life is about taking knocks, getting up and getting on with it - sure ask advice but its hardly a "crisis"

Speaking from a perspective of being close to 60 years old and having worked in IT for 38 years. considerably longer than you have been alive, my observation is that what has truly mattered has been the people I have met, the friendships I have made, my family and my children.

Great things ... cough ... dont come from yet another better version of Javascript or some other re-churn or regurgitation of yet another way of presenting mobile/web data content or whatever is fashionable.

In your context - great things are defined by adding something of fundamental value to your chosen professional discipline or field. That comes from damn hard work, intellectual rigour, a willingness to face and overcome obstacles, vision and often sheer bloody-mindedness
Popups: The Internet's Original Sin
Seven ways for Startups to Monetize Business
To my knowledge, none of the F1 cameras are UHD; FOM (who nowadays produce all the TV coverage in-house, except for Monaco) only moved to HD in 2010, and even then only offered the HD feed from 2011 (in 2010 the feed everyone got was downscaled).
Why all the robots follow the same path even though is not the optimal one? Why no robot is trying anything new? Where is the exploration/exploitation side of the strategy? Where is the additional information each robots is contributing to? Why aren't there groups of agents taking over a part of subproblem ?

If they don't use any centralized decision making then it should have taken them much less time.

The way the robots arrange in shape depicts the way a human would do it. A realistic, real time, no centralized decision making algorithm would move all the robots at the same time. Yes, the stabilization time, until all robots find their rightful position based on peer-peer communication, would take a while and that would have been acceptable. This thing over here looks a lot a lot like hard coded, human minded approaches to a trivial problem.

If the real advancement was the robot mechanical movement then they should have said so. The algorithm they have could have been done by any CS background high school student.
Your Marriage Savior System- Does Your Marriage Savior System Really Work?
details are http://www.compsocs.uk/
EarlyClaim: Reserve your favourite username in new startups
I agree, and additionally I would say we shouldn't remove ambiguity for a more basic reason: humans are very good at resolving it. There may be lots of other areas where we have systematic biases such as estimating probabilities, but dealing with ambiguity is actually one of our big strengths so it doesn't make sense to spend so much energy on avoiding it.

This is a bit speculative, but I have the feeling there is a certain kind of personality that is typically fascinated with this idea of being able to rule out ambiguity. It seems to me a tendency to overextend the idea of mathematical rigor to other areas of life.
A Haskell programmer: Python can't do functional programming [video]
Webflow (YC S13) is hiring Senior UI/UX Designers and JavaScript Hackers
The most important thing: Holmes still owns half the company.

It's extremely rare for such a young founder to still be in control of the company, and to own 50% after more than a decade. That's not only a huge accomplishment, it's a testament to the strength of Holmes' conviction in the company's mission.

Getting rich all comes down to ownership—every single percentage point counts.
"YTS" = http://yts.re/
"This is basically why Dogecoin became so successful."

"Was" is a good way to put it. Dogecoin is worth 1/3rd of what is was worth five months ago. I don't see it going any where but further down...
Microsoft v Samsung: why it sometimes pays to be cynical
It's not really a nationalistic sentiment, but rather one of economic independence. See, for example, Europe kowtowing to Russia because they supply a large fraction of their natural gas.
If there was a site that summarised New Yorker articles in 2 pages I would be there in a flash.
but you can simulate that aswell.