skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what if I keep the entangled photon around for very long while separating the two by a large distance. Then I image the cat using the photons I kept around which forms a cat image at the very large distance. Very spooky action.

Or is this not the way this works? Are the entangled pairs not actually used to build the image? I find it difficult to understand what they do exactly although the Nature site seems pretty clear:

"This form of imaging uses pairs of photons, twins that are ‘entangled’ in such a way that the quantum state of one is inextricably linked to the other. While one photon has the potential to travel through the subject of a photo and then be lost, the other goes to a detector but nonetheless 'knows' about its twin’s life and can be used to build up an image."
(http://www.nature.com/news/entangled-photons-make-a-picture-...)
As long as we are talking about reinventing programming, I think we can afford it. The problem is that once you are in production, you have to ship...this is what I always got from RPG's "worse is better!"
> Servers are cattle, not pets.

That is for the owner of the server to decide, not an universal truth.
Disclosure: Your comment includes infinitely more information about the market value of Brazilian rainforest land than I had ever possessed before this moment.

That said, there are apparently ~3.34 million km^2 of Brazilian rainforest as of 2013, according to that Wikipedia page.

According to this other wikipedia page[0], the total land area of the United States, including Alaska, is about 9.6 million km^2.

So, there's a metric shitload of Brazilian rainforest. It's not exactly in short supply, from a market standpoint. And most of it is, y'know, in the middle of nowhere.

Add in that Brazil as a whole is of similar size to the US (8.5 million km^2), and is still a relatively poor country, and $700/acre does not strike me as a shocking number.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
the article doesn't actually mention how the tweet led to the company getting funding, or anything to do with what the tweet said!...
Couldn't someone just mirror this?
Seems like a brilliant idea. But few questions come to my mind.

1. Are ECG pattern unique for a person? I believe if they are then they are not as unique as fingerprint.

2. I believe the ECG will change dramatically if a person have a panic attack or abrupt mood changes(ex. under severe stress) or any heart condition development. How do you control that ECG pattern and normalize it?

3. How it will be better than just finger print based authentication? I mean if you can develop a good biometrics based on fingerprint that should be enough. Right?

4. Of course it will have a potential to be used in medical devices where a patient using medical device can use that to lock access to others for the data privacy reason.

5. I will be interested to use it but the price range should be around $50-$60 range (However, it is my personal opinion).

Good luck guys.
> You aren't aware just how many security-critical C programs invoke potentially undefined behaviour today.

It doesn't take much experience with C to appreciate something of the magnitude of difficulty of keeping a million lines of C UB-free. I'm not in the security field, but if the code there is anything like the codes I've worked with, I'd be surprised to find even a "security-critical" C program of any appreciable complexity that doesn't invoke undefined behaviour.

>Every time you write '+' in a C program between two signed values, do you do an overflow check beforehand?

Personally? I use signed scalar arithmetic very rarely. The bulk of the arithmetic I do is with unsigned integers (bit vectors, really) and arbitrary-precision integers. In fact, essentially the only time I do use signed scalar arithmetic is when I can determine statically that it won't overflow. Signed integer overflow is a bitch, UB optimizations or no.

>Or do you do a global dataflow analysis of the program to prove that it can't overflow?

That's the basic idea behind seL4, for example.

>Arguing for a technical correctness that is observably almost impossible to achieve in the wild is what's really pointless.

Sure, but only because everyone writes their security-critical programs in a language that couldn't more effectively impede security if it were designed to do so. Could a "friendly" dialect help? Maybe, but the proposed changes are far from sufficient to make formal verification feasible, and frankly, I don't know how seriously I can take "security-critical" without formal verification.
Considering the average human has only a few miles of officially observed driving before it receives a license, I think this is a bit unfair.

How would you suggest testing these vehicles to tens of millions of miles without having an actual public deployment?

Also, Google can test its algorithms in simulation to many millions of miles within hours. I believe they're lobbying for simulation to be a major part of testing:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/google-tes...
The exact same idea as Hamachi, but with different business model. It'd be interesting to see how this develops.
He probably left because he had a security detail that followed him to the toilet. He was hired for being a specialist in something, then not trusted. That sounds pretty annoying to deal with on a daily basis, no matter what the pay is like.
Excel==Domain-Specific.

I already said that Domain-Specific systems can be successful, and I have nothing against improving domain specific systems.

The original article implied that they were going to fix All The Programming. I'm saying it's been tried, and Every Single Time it fails utterly (or produces a domain specific solution).
The Quantum Effect of Anaesthesia: A New Theory of Consciousness
I've heard about failed city planning a lot, and I wonder is there a good example somewhere? like a booming city with more than 5 million population that have "good" city plan? which city is best in this regard?
Tangible Programming Interface for Educational Coding Game
If you are located in California and do not have any income then contact your County Office. You may be eligible for Medicare California which provides coverage without charging any premium.
(Not a professional advice).
I know a few folks from http://houseogames.com

From what I recall, it didn't really pan out, but people grew wiser and better at what they do, so that's good.

Personally, I got some investment money and almost all the developers included in my current projects live/lived/will live in a big place with me now. I think it works because of clear hierachy, discipline and common concrete goals.

In a commune-like system, you'll get a bunch of extremely individualist personalities and not much of a team, unless planets lined up.

Which reminds me, I need to start distributing morning coffee to their pillows and round 'em up right now.
Your point is valid Joe. The tool users dare not claim the same status. A googler can never claim he's Larry or Sergey
Can the WebIDE be made self-hosting; on the device itself?

i.e. connect up your Flame to a HDMI display via MHL and attach a mouse and keyboard through a powered usb hub.

No desktop required!
Hangul (Korean) has the uniform, blocky look of Chinese characters, while also being a phonetic alphabet like English. Every hangul block is composed of two or more alphabets from a set of 24, so if you know those 24, you can read any of the 11K+ possible combinations. It's similar to the concept of "radicals" in Chinese, but much simpler and with fewer irregularities.

So the reading advantage, if any, is not necessarily incompatible with using a phonetic alphabet with a small number of symbols.

The lack of precision (or higher ambiguity) might also be seen as a disadvantage in the highly technical world of today, although I very much appreciate it in literary and philosophical works.
The short, glib answer is "The same reason teenagers don't learn from their elders' mistakes".

The longer answer is a combination of:

- poor people want what rich people have. And if they can't afford the substance (private country estate), they'll still get the style (McMansion). They particularly want last generation's rich people's things, as this generation's rich people's things are have not gained widespread popularity.

- suburban sprawl has low up-front costs with real costs coming in decades later, as North American suburbs are starting to experience today

- suburbs offer a very seductive lifestyle proposition - the space and privacy of the country and the convenience of city life. In my experience they fail to deliver, offering the traffic and neighbours of the city, without the convenience of dense, walkable neighbourhoods, proximity to downtown and quick transit.

- more privacy and space are quite nice.
That's what I thought too... But I'm biased, because I've only been to Stavanger and not Bergen.

The reason I assumed for not having super cars around there is because it gets too damn cold. Now the number of high end 4x4's I saw there... that's another story :-)
True. So according to your point, today we may have quite a number of Mark Zuckerbergs but few of Bill Gates or Linus Tovarlds. Or I got it wrong?
It's probably hard to make a leap of faith that will leave 95% of your engineers fumbling in the dark after being robbed of their Symbian/Windows environment, while that organisation is making record profits.

The iPhone 1 was just a glorified iPod without 3rd party apps, it excited mostly Mac users, not obviously something to "drop everything" over. Even now iPhone has less than 15% market share. Android was arguably a more obvious threat.
> Chinese suburban sprawl shows that no matter the style of governance or how markets deal with housing, it seems like people converge on the same poor urban planning practices.

If China and America follow this route, that's only 2 examples, not a universal trend. In Europe the cities are much more walkable.
Ephemeral or Time delayed messages?
> And then... maybe just maybe... spammers will be faced with a serious challenge.

Why? Couldn't spammers encrypt the mail they send to you just like everybody else?
As seen 2, 2.5, and (more famously) 6 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920116

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7897173

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7299658
There's a (slightly hidden) public network called "Earth" with ID 8056c2e21c000001, discovered a few interesting hosts already (by using non-intrusive avahi-browse):

28.204.184.27:6667 - IRC server identifying as "nagisa.yasashiisyndicate.org"

There's also a couple o' macbooks and, for a few minutes, someone advertised their EPSON L110 Series printer but it vanished as quickly as it emerged. :)

So far I love it, seems like a viable replacement for Hamachi/Tunngle, the Windows Client is rather ugly but functional, had no issues on Arch Linux (built from source). Kudos.
I think they're currently concerned with making sure the vehicle drives safely. Many humans apply evasive maneuvers, only to end up killing someone else or hurting themselves in other ways.

All this shows is that the Google car was driving well, and you weren't. Though I'm sure as the tech progresses they'll look into this sort of thing, and will implement what makes sense.
This is a nice app/idea but how will it make any money?
> Erlang is optimized for latency.

Too short: for latency with multiple simultaneous users.
If you have a 'one shot' program or one user at a time, you'll probably get better latency with C than with Erlang.
You can have an impact on power consumption at a range of levels. From choosing appropriate algorithms, to switching to different data types, to changing compiler flags. Add together a few of these 'easy' 5-10% energy savings and you've just reduced your application's energy consumption by a third (OK, it's not quite that simple, but the principle stands).

A couple of citations: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0117v1.pdf (algorithms / data types) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.6485.pdf (compiler flags)
This will seem like an odd analogy, but for those unfamiliar with kanji to see what's happening here, I might suggest grabbing a pen and trying to draw Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson, or some other simple iconic figure that's always drawn a certain way. Even though you could recognize it easily, and can recall the general shape and some of the individual features, unless you've practiced it you're not sure how many lines you need or where they connect. And if you just wing it, you'll probably get enough parts right that others can guess what you were drawing, but the result will look way off, even to you.

For me at least, that's approximately what it feels like to be unable to remember how to write a kanji.
Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Beta 1 preview: No big changes
Maybe we should start a collection and afford the OP a box that is HN-proof. A Lisp Machine Hall Of Fame should be worth it :-)
I could see people driving slowly and carefully in those rarer cases. e.g., in the event of minor flooding or a fallen tree that confused sensors.

In cases like garbage bags (may be empty, may contain sharp debris) on the road, I could see a car communicating with the others in the network to describe the problem from another vantage, or after driving through.
> Just... don't.

Let's hear the alternatives.

I'll give you 10 peers, each on its own RFC1918 subnet. You give me a flat addressing scheme that doesn't involve NAT and IP6, requires no manual configuration on peers' part and keeps them on a single connected (in routing terms) network, so that broadcasts and multicasts work. Go!
>There is definitely room for a simplified set of tools that lets end-users build simple applications with a pay-as-you-go approach to complexity and learning curve.

You want this to succeed, then pick a domain and solve that problem for people.

It's not the source control that is the primary problem. You can do Excel-like things on Google Drive, which has integrated revision control, shared editing, and a dozen other features to help the average user or team get things done.

No, the primary problem is that most people don't know what they want. They don't even know what's possible, much less how to accomplish it. Ask any consultant and they'll agree with me: The first thing you need to do is figure out what the users actually can use based on their needs.

It's like Henry Ford said: If you asked users what they wanted, they'd have told him they wanted a faster horse. [1]

The problems exist because they aren't easy to solve unless you have the expertise. I'm not poo-pooing Excel or any other domain-specific solution. If you can create a general solution to a problem (say, for example, WordPress), then users can plug together the pieces they need and create an app.

But there is no "language" that will solve the "average person can't program" problem in the general case any more than there's a paintbrush that will solve the "average person can't paint" problem.

[1] http://blog.cauvin.org/2010/07/henry-fords-faster-horse-quot...
Also, the software for autonomous flying machines would NOT be easy if suddenly we had tens of millions of them in the air.
Show HN: Traversing beautiful waveforms inside the tip of Mandelbrot Set
My feeling is that most such systems programming specialists are too busy working for their employers in the hardware, OS and embedded industries, to blog or participate actively in discussion forums. They are members of the "dark matter developers" group [1].

That said, a github search for assembly language repos and assembly language code phrases throws up some 270 repos and upwards of 100,000 code files. So I don't think asm is doing too badly. Your experience is probably only anecdotal.

May I suggest that you contribute your bit to popularising asm by putting up some of your projects here on Show HN.
There must be other people like me who have been intimately familiar with asm in the past and felt the thrill of coding in it, but have lost touch with it and now feel intimidated by its verbosity.

Some interesting projects may rekindle that interest. For example, recently there was a "Show HN" of a bare bones assembly language game written by students for the raspberry pi, and that made me start learning ARM assembly. Put up something like that, or even something a lot simpler (personally, I'd be interested in a beginner's tutorial on coding and building a simple console program for Windows and Linux platforms, using modern x86_64 assembler and modern tools).

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...
> I've heard about failed city planning a lot, and I wonder is there a good example somewhere?

Cities with functional public transport and walkable neighborhoods: Tokyo, Seoul, London, New York City, Paris, Berlin.

Maybe also Madrid and Singapore, but I don't know much about them. Edit: Maybe Osaka and Nagoya, too (I don't know much about them either).

All these have over 5 million population.
Yes the could, but it would at least cost them more resources which could matter at the scale most spammers work.
It would work at most until the next time you come in contact with a human or another mammal, which is probably not very far away. I guess even just shaking hands would be enough, since people often touch their face with their hands. The individual mites communities on each mammal are probably not very isolated but come often in contact with mites from other animals.
Scientific terms, especially biological, tend to more apparent. Our words have the legacy of Greek and Latin.
I have to disagree. I worked with someone who got an iphone the first week they where available; it probably involved standing in line for a day or something ridiculous. But while the videos that Jobs did where pretty amazing, when you held it in your hand and played with it, my thoughts where 1 - holy shit I need this, and 2 - using fb on this thing is going to be like crack. Maybe I was over optimistic, but I was pretty confident everyone with an ipod or a train/bus commute was going to have one pretty soon.

I still believe any ceo of a cell phone manufacturer who got one (and they all should have purchased an iphone on the first day) and didn't immediately see the future unfolding in front of them is incompetent.
it has a notification telling the user that they need to sign on, but it also tells other applications that a wifi connection is available, which causes all of them to try to sync.
The other commenters have listed some advantages, but you really meant to ask whether any of those advantages make this complex writing system "worth it." They don't.

Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place. Now a more radical simplification of just using Hanyu Pinyin directly and not having a computer transliterate is an obvious next step. Hanyu Pinyin is not intelligible to speakers of non-Mandarin dialects, but this shouldn't be a showstopper for a government that is capable of this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_National_Language_R....
JavaScript Memory Management Masterclass
>- suburban sprawl has low up-front costs with real costs coming in decades later, as North American suburbs are starting to experience today

Would you mind elaborating more on this? More specifically about the cost the North American suburbs are starting to experience.

thanks
Can you imagine the sensors and speeds that might be available within one decade let alone two or three? Compare that to a human looking in just one direction at any given time and with imperfect reaction time.

You know those larger, heavier vehicles you mentioned? What if they're self-driving long-haul transport? They'll likely be able to make it through.

Cost will be the thing that prevents self-driving cars from dominating roads in India before the technology itself is a problem.
Show HN: The App Every Blogger Needs
What area do you live? Maybe start it off small and work up if it works out. Do you know what's it like to have roommates? It's a challenge to live with a diverse background of people. It sounds great if you lived in the Silicon Valley area, if not it maybe hard for others to just go to a random city with no benefit from the city.
If you look at Japan, which generally has much looser zoning practices, it's managed to do much, much, better. It has sprawl and excess road construction too, but the sprawl is much more transit-oriented, and Japan has generally done a far better job avoiding the worst stupidities of U.S. post-war development.

I'm sure there are many interacting reason for this, e.g. Japan's poverty in the decades after the war meant that cars weren't even a possibility for most people, and the sheer population of cities like Tokyo meant that mass car usage wouldn't be remotely practical even if everybody could afford a car.

But surely China has many huge cities as well, and the average citizen still isn't very rich...

My guess is that in Japan, developers just followed the money and did what's practical, and that meant building transit and transit-oriented housing. In China, on the other hand, with its strong centralized control, developers are probably more likely to be influenced by what the fat cats in the party hierarchy want—which is more roads for their Mercedes, and more "western-like" development which they associate with wealth and privilege—even if that isn't so sensible according to the situation on the ground (and isn't so good for the average citizen, or for the future)...
Evolution’s Baby Steps: How creatures with gills evolved feet
Yet out-of-the-box-computing claims to beat all of these by a order of magnitude. I'm looking forward to see how they compare.
> We use every computer in the building to give power to rendering as soon as they are not being used. As soon as someone goes to a meeting their computer-power is used, and of course there is overnight when people go home.

I'm very curious how they manage the distribution of computation?
You make it sound like they're stopping trials. There are only going to be more vehicles from more manufacturers out there being tested and in increasingly complex situations. That mile count will continue to rise.

And this isn't true: "The Google car won't be truly safe until it has logged 1000x miles."
> Python have a simple syntax

Python has a rather simple syntax indeed, but it has very complicated semantics. `foo.bar` - syntactically very simple expression of the attribute access has a mountain of semantics behind it.

> Given that Python and Ruby are both simple to learn and use (as users, not implementors), they are both simple by the definition given in this article.

Good remark. I still tend to disagree though. It's easy to learn and use a very small subset of the language. Not the whole language. Even then, it's practically impossible to limit yourself to a certain subset. Not if you want to use any python libraries.
It's an odd reaction that self-driving cars have to be perfect and handle every edge case and have tens of millions of miles of error-free testing before they're considered "ready".

Humans usually spend about 30 minutes driving 5-10 miles to get a license, are far more unpredictable and inattentive, and have a stupid number of edge cases of their own.

Not to say we shouldn't hold self-driving cars to a higher standard, we absolutely should, but it's silly to think they need to be perfect.
Thank you. I will consider forming one.
Have you considered hosting the images on imgur or another such site, at least during HN traffic?

Until such time as people can reasonably get their hands on OpenGenera (which I gather might now be in the hands of CL-HTTP's author) people are going to be pretty interested in things like this and Kalman Reti's recent YouTube video.