skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think part of the explanation for why the software products with estimates performed poorer in terms of productivity can be explained by parkinson's law[1].

Now, this phenomenon isn't always deleterious imo. I've noticed in myself that my work 'expands' in two ways: if I'm working on something dreadfully boring, then it expands through time wasted on hacker news or time spent on side projects. If on the other hand I'm doing meaningful work, then it's quite often that the work expands when I take on refactorings and minor additions that will benefit long-term productivity.

If the work is indeed expanding in a meaningful way, then even though the measured productivity might not seem 'optimal' it doesn't necessarily indicate a big problem either.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
Swing Cars – Easy Version of Swing Copters
"Key reduction in a spam metric". Stupid question: if they know what spam is well enough to chart it, then why not just use that to fight it?
> It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape.

I think he means zenith, not nadir. 1909 was the high point of human civilisation, before barbarism and ugliness took hold.

Also, not covering Freud, Nietzsche & Marx was no mistake: this is a collection of lessons to learn, not lessons to learn from.
Cities in Scandinavia aren't silent, but at least for me, I register a kind of silence that's somehow in the background. Especially with northerners. As you go south in Sweden, the backdrop of glacier-like serenity fades away and you start to feel the presence of a more European bustle.

Zen is originally from ancient China, where I imagine there was quite a bit of silence. That's not to say the essence of Zen has anything to do with either silence or noise, but I think Zen culture was kind of steeped in rural silence.
Thanks for the kudos! I'm a relative newcomer to the group; we have some great programmers and product folks who have been growing this for years now.

You raise a number of interesting points. Our view is that by sharing our data, we can create an ecosystem in which third parties can make apps and services that make a better overall experience for the customers, and of course we hope that we'll benefit from that, however indirectly. The risks are relatively minor: our code is small and our team is small, so we don't cost much. And at least for now, we're not really serving up any data that you can't see on bestbuy.com, so we're not (yet) facing any large security issues.

As for the use cases, I really think people are just starting to scratch the surface of what you might do with data from a very large retailer.
Yep- exactly. NOW I think this might be a simple way for me to access my devices at home securely.
Movie Theaters May Get More Interactive, Thanks to Audience Entertainment’s SDK
You didn't directly answer my question, but now I'm just going to be pedantic :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding

Even with normal binary fission, there is never an equal distribution of products between cells. Metabolite concentration, organelle distribution, etc. will vary. (If you think about it, it's kind of an interesting period of rough perturbation made to an extremely high-order dynamical system.)

At a kind of base level, though, the genome itself regularly experiences abnormal partitioning that leads to certain interesting states.

It's not strictly binary...

But back to the previous topic. Epithelia and endothelia are regularly dividing cell types. (It's interesting that most cancers arise from these lineages, right?) Blood cells are another lineage that undergo pretty frequent proliferation.

(On an entirely unrelated note, I can't wait for an HN discussion pertaining to quantum effects on biological systems--it's a topic I really want to learn more about. The absorption spectra discussions in the retinal thread has awoken my curiosity. For instance: though it's kind of a controversial, maybe even a pseudo-scientific topic, the quantum effects on microtubules are fun to think about and are still actively researched.)
Do you have any plans to do the other way around? That's important for converting the browser's geolocation data into something usable.
From Slashdot: "Seriously though, as someone who has a hearing range beyond the standard I sympathise with people forced to endure irritating stimuli that noone else notices and hence cares about. I remember having to leave a bar once because the tube was going on their old television; the high pitched screech was like nails down a blackboard. My girlfriend thought I was mad."
Ask HN: Which Real time webapp would you like?
I want to create a simple web application that multple people would use.

No complex thingy, just something that would be decent,usefull and "fast" to create.

What would you use/want?

I'm thinking like a todo list, something like a simple Google Keep alternative. But feel free to make suggestions
The only thing more prone to error than predicting what will happen in the future is predicting what won't happen in the future.

It's hard to measure progress in something like cancer research, but in general, it hasn't been great. But the same might be said of the invention of flight. Flight had clearly been a goal across a variety of cultures for many years.

I suspect that a "cure for cancer" will not come at once, it will be more gradual (owing to the fact that cancer is actually many different diseases). Our knowledge of biology is improving at an exponential rate though, I wouldn't discount that entirely.
Estimates should never be used to apply pressure(people take shortcuts), they should always try to reflect reality. In products estimates are used to work out which features provide the most value, in the shortest amount of time.
I have never seen this distinction made before. cite?
Two salient points:

1. Hydra are apparently immortal. They do not appear to age. It is likely that there is some biological trade off between immortality and cancer predisposition. Therefore they are not a good model for concluding that cancer everywhere in everything is incurable

2. Hydra don't have an adaptive immune system. This is a huge flaw in an experimental system for studying the 'roots' of cancer development.

The main point of the journal article is that maybe we should use metazoans to study cancer. The journalist here is way off the mark.
Sects, cults and UFOs
Ah, but then the data wouldn't fit into 1.6MB!

That is to say, going the other way is a bit more computationally intensive.
The context involved a disagreement with someone else which grew to include a legal action.

Turns out I'd managed to access a significant trove of documents, admissible in court, strongly supporting my side's case.

I was in communication with several entities I suspected were communicating (directly or otherwise) with the opposing side, and while it was useful to communicate that we had significant information, detailing just what it was, or how it was obtained, was somewhat less so.

So the cover story we worked out was that we had deep connections to the black-hat online hacker community who were able to pull all kinds of random information out of the Net. Playing up the whole hacker mistique thing.

One consequence of this was opposing counsel strongly suspecting that the evidence we introduced wasn't admissible. They were rather surprised when it turned out to be very admissible. The fact that the opposing side's witnesses were shown to be markedly less than credible didn't help their side (and may have sabotaged their own case).

It was a vaguely satisfying aspect of an otherwise fairly unpleasant episode.
Not that this is any sort of proof but if you watch the last few videos you can definitely see the shading change on the tree leaves that move around in the wind.
Why be a minimalist? How about one that hides anything to do with politics.
This is actually a pet peeve on mine, I feel it's akin to people playing music loudly on their phones in public. I like people to respect my silence.

I'd appreciate it if web sites asked me before blurting out music - it seems with HTML5 people have forgotten the annoyance of Flash banner ads.
Seems inspired by http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted which is definitely worth a look.
> If I was arguing that it was reasonable, I'd have said that. I merely stated C allows it. Which it does.

That's the thing. The C standard does not allow it. The C standard merely never mentions it, which is a different thing entirely. Hence my analogy to JPEGs (which the C standard never mentions either).

And I meant the argument itself is unreasonable. It makes no sense! I could just as well argue that the TCP/IP RFCs allow fd 2 to be something other than standard error. Or the HTTP 2.0 spec. Or the Ecmascript spec. Arguing that something is allowed by a spec that never mentions it and has absolutely nothing to do with it is not an argument.
One such metrics might be user complains, that only appear after it is already too late.
The Reappearance of the Toynbee Tiles: What Does It Mean?
Users can report spam for any tweet ("... More" "Block or report"). I imagine that Twitter would to catch spam before its users do.
Usually the arguments I see being tossed around is Clojure's deviation of using [] and {} besides ().

Also the direct use of Javas API instead of more Lispy ones everywhere.
Really? You think that ancient Greek tragedy are not lessons to learn from?
Silly thought: What if the universe actually works like this? Instead of actually calculating the full interaction of all particles, it just optimizes by speculating.
What It Takes to Build a Tesla Supercharger DC Fast-Charging Site
There's also the Gutenberg project[1] which offers a huge variety of classics for free in (almost) every format.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/
PostgreSQL use a "top-N sort heapsort" for this. You can see that in effect when doing "EXPLAIN ANALYZE" on a query like this. Without an index you cannot avoid a full table scan. However the top-N heapsort avoids allocating memory for ALL the rows, since you only care about the first 5 ones

For example, I had a 6 million entry table sitting around, and asked for top 5 rows by an unindexed column. With LIMIT 5 applied it told me:

Sort Method: top-N heapsort Memory: 95kB

Without:

Sort Method: quicksort Memory: 577595kB

So if Postgres had to store all the 6 million rows sorted it would need 577 MB of work memory. If (see SHOW work_mem) it was below that that would lead to it writing a lot of temporary files to disk:

Sort Method: external merge Disk: 144072kB

Note how Postgres is more wasteful with memory usage than disk writes for temp storage.

Generally a query that requires you to do a full table scan on a large table should be used sparingly however.
Gmail app hack works 92 percent of the time
SD Cards can have issues when you have many read/writes per minute.

However, my RPi that sits at home, is attached to a UPS and doesn't seem to have any issues related to SD Card or stability.
I was thinking almost the same, but to be fair that benchmark is useful to see how different operations compare (eg, delete is 29 times slower than read).
Does what it says. Simple, free, & open source. What could be better?
Not just user perception - they did have some objective measures as well, such as the amount of health lost whilst completing a task, and the amount of time taken to complete a task. Even these objective measures came back as showing no significant difference between DeLorean and the fat client. That's impressive.
One cheap way of reducing lag where fast mouse movements are done, would be to render a much wider view, send the entire image to the client and then client uses the appropriate segment based on the latest mouse position.

At downvoter: Why would you downvote a suggestion that is on topic?
Swing Copter: The Sequel to 'Flappy Bird'
The 4 way test
Meet the MemTrax Family
This reminds me of the OLPC games. They had the same mechanics and probably also using the scratch programming language.
Interesting choice with the Mies Van Der Rohe Pavilion, because as stunning as it is in real life, it's simple geometry actually makes for a bit of a boring tech demo. Still looks very impressive though.
next time you need fast counters, try hypertable (non-reading increments)
Is WiFi killing us  slowly?
> Do you vendor [transitive dependencies] too?

Yes. Here's an example: https://github.com/soundcloud/roshi
To publish 'a how we did it' article like this suggests to me that the Twitter engineering team are either justifiably confident in their spam fighting creation (because they are confident it is infallible), or they are naively supremely over-confident; thus publicizing how this works will come back to bite them in the butt.

Only time will tell I guess. From the article it would appear that they aren't doing anything magically different with regards to classification of twitter-spam, but they have found a way to deal with the volume of classification tasks in a pertinent manner. It also gives them a way to quickly respond to new types of spam attacks.

Very interesting. They should consider opening it up as an Askimet competitor. The difference between a blog comment and a twitter post is negligible.
I'll give you a hint: what's the name of this website?
New in Intercity: Rails ENV vars on your own server
Well, shit, my HDMI cable just broke. I need a new one. Like, right now. I don't want to wait two days for it.

Hold on, let me (get in my car/wait for the bus/walk a few miles/order it with my phone, take a nap, and wake up with it at my door).
If the bacteria floated up to LEO...

LEO is not a place.
pg_simple: simple wrapper for Python psycopg2 with conn pooling
The pg_simple module provides a simple yet efficient layer over psycopg2 providing Python API for common SQL functions, explicit and implicit transactions management and database connection pooling for single and multi-threaded applications.
> Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions.

I love this quote, and I'm totally going to steal it.

There's just something about the futurists and singularity folks that mimics the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you learn, the more you recognize that we're still operating on Cro-Magnon brains. All of our magnificent toys are merely low-hanging fruit in deference to the problems that seem to really matter.
Democracy is an emergent property of a complex political system.
By any chance, do you have a link to them?
We have a free API that includes IP to approximate area code, but not zip code, if that's of use to you.

https://www.dailycred.com/api/info.json

A few of our clients needed this, so we just made it open to everyone.

It's based on GeoIP and ua-parser.

http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/

https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser
3 ways to deal with responsive images
Trees are static though - they only deform - they don't transform around the scene itself.
Interesting. But the real question we need to ask ourselves right now is: are these drones capable of delivering burritos? Because if so, imagine the possibilities...
See http://www.thefreedictionary.com/predictor+variable , or http://www.theanalysisfactor.com/the-many-names-of-independe...

Pregnancy predicts sexual activity just as sexual activity predicts pregnancy (actually, better). The reference to the future is that you test the second variable in the future, not that it receives its value in the future.

From the second link:

> Predictor Variable: It does not imply causality. A predictor variable is simply useful for predicting the value of the response variable.
The universe is very strongly distributed, it doesn't have such problems
They haven't revealed the conditions they use to determine if something is spam.
Over Quota
This application is temporarily over its serving quota.
Please try again later.
smcFanControl -- I use it on my old early-2008 MBP. It had a known issue with the GPU. I had it replaced once, and live with the fear it will happen again.
So, anything you guys want?
My big point is:

- If you don't know what you are doing or you are doing for the first time, there's no point in estimate as your estimations will be off anyway.

- If you know what you are doing and already did it before, there's no point in estimate as you already know how much time it'll take.
Yeah.... no. I know people who were more than financially able to do this, and the kids still ended up messed up.

To reiterate, if you actually haven't seen this first-hand, it's best to keep your mouth shut. Confirmation bias only makes this whole thing worse.
Should be "Next-Gen Game Lighting".

This is just Physically-based shading basically, which has been done for the past 4/5 years in VFX. Essentially it's energy-conserving materials with the correct fresnel effect based on the surface's IOR which takes things to the next level (for games at least). Doing this properly for layered surfaces (e.g. diffuse wood layer with a clearcoat varnish layer) gives very nice looking results.

Some complex materials can have up to 3 spectral BSDF lobes for reflection, which can only really be done with pathtracing.

For VFX, people are starting to push into spectral rendering now, and trying to optimise things like volumetric rendering for things like SSS which are needed for ultimate realism.
I wonder what you call it when two people listen to Synchronicity (by the Police) at the same time :)
Recast.fm – music discovery through radio
Not the submitter's fault, but the title is really misleading -- contrast with the first paragraph:

"Computer scientists have discovered a method of hacking smartphone apps across Android, iOS and Windows devices that is effective up to 92 percent of the time on six of seven popular apps, including Gmail."
What China wants
If you want to keep a track playing, just hit ctrl-page up to switch to another tab. It'll play for the track's full 30 seconds.

Or you can click the background to listen to it on play.spotify.com.
This has like zero fault tolerancy and by zero i mean none. Don't even push flush to disk... it has a level of a in memory hash of persistence and is totally insecure in terms of multithreading. As a Toy to show off yeah could work but... in the very end of the day. You can minus me but this is crap.
interesting that they should use an id game, doom3, because quakeworld implemented something similar:

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuakeWorld :

QuakeWorld's most important feature is its rewritten networking code (for client-side player prediction and delta compression). Player prediction allowed QuakeWorld clients to compensate for high latency, thus allowing dialup users to move around in the virtual world without being affected by the disorienting effects of latency. This helped Quake network play reach an additional market, as opposed to those who had LAN or broadband connections at the time.
Go, etcd, Linux, containers, distributed systems – do it all at CoreOS
CoreOS is hiring in a number of engineers that are passionate about infrastructure and open source software.

Distributed Systems- Help make distributed systems easy. You’ll be working on our open source projects, etcd and fleet. etcd is being widely adopted by many different projects, including Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Google's Kubernetes, but it is still a very early project and we need help.

OS- Writing a hobbiest kernel on the weekend? Contributed to Gentoo in 2005? Hacking on the core of CoreOS might right up your ally. The OS team is responsible for CoreOS itself, building, patching, and architecting the future of linux on the server. We work very closely with upstream, contributing patches to Linux itself, systemd, docker, and any other component that’ll make CoreOS more successful for our users.

Backend Web- Outside of building a new OS and a new distributed database (etcd), we are also building backend web services. If you have an interest in systems, but expertise in backend web development, please consider CoreOS. Our architecture is a Go based json/http API app server, coupled Angular on the frontend.

We are hiring for full-time in SF or NYC. If you are interested, please email our CEO directly with your resume or LinkedIn: apolvi@coreos.com
This would work for 2D games, but 3D projection doesn't allow this. Furthermore in a 3D game there are more than two degrees of freedom.
Err, how can they call it that?

DeLorean is still trademarked; I know it's a different industry but I imagine considering the inference about the relevance of time to the software and the brand association with time that no lawyer would have approved that.

http://delorean.com/

Also I'm pretty sure a lot of games such as FPSs already do this with direction of motion etc and have done for many many years. John Carmack definitely implemented a long time ago amongst similar techniques such as latency prediction. The only difference here is the location of the rendering.

http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/wha...

> am now allowing the client to guess at the results of the users movement until the authoritative response from the server comes through. This is a biiiig architectural change. The client now needs to know about solidity of objects, friction, gravity, etc. I am sad to see the elegant client-as-terminal setup go away, but I am practical above idealistic.

edit, instead of downvoting please engage in a discussion. This place is turning into reddit.
I don't consider the microprocessor in my smart phone with its billions of transistors, and the ever-faster global internet and wireless systems that enable nearly instant (certainly to human perception it's nearly instant) global communication to billions of people at any time, to be low hanging fruit.

I consider that extraordinary, and the exact opposite of low hanging fruit. It's hundreds of years of incremental progress across dozens of fields, resulting in reaching very high hanging fruit in the form of an iPhone and everything that goes with it.

I consider such amazing communication technology to be every bit as valuable to social beings such as humans, and to our general societal structures, as curing cancer is.
Justifying bad things with a book is not the same as the book advocating bad things.

I suspect you haven't even read it because Smith gives specific warnings in the text as to where the ideas can come into conflict with social benefit, proposing limits on payable interest for instance.
Reminds me of playing with LOGO turtles in primary school, waaaay back in 1982.
Not with dyslexia, no. Because the problem lies with the syntax and semantics of the language and since programming languages are logic based rather than evolved from grunts with complex non-obvious rules, many people with learning difficulties (including myself) find it massively easier to parse code than English.

To use myself as an example, it took me around 30 seconds just to read and understand the first challenge, yet I was able to solve it in around 10 seconds after that despite it being a Javascript language (which is probably the weakest of the dozen or so languages I code in). If I was to go head to head with someone, that 30 second read time would be a hell of a handicap.

As for poorer eyesight, yes you'd have a point there, but at least the playing field would be levelled out a little more.
If I remember correctly the prediction was basic. Using the delta of the previous frame until the updated version came trough.
don't remember the details, for simple repos it's fine, i think it's a dependency of dependency problem, that isaac's didn't want to support for some reason.

here's a rabbit hole of additional information: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/3014

:-)
It was very noticable when I was at school that the biology teachers were a lot better than those for any other subject, there wasn't anything else that they could do.
Well yes. I suppose the problem is people think they are being agile when they actually have a 6 month backlog of user stories and won't release anything for months.

In that scenario estimating things becomes very tedious and not particularly useful.