skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the point is that (integral) numbers stored in hardware naturally wrap, and that this behaviour is not restricted to two's complement. For that matter it's not even restricted to binary - the mechanical adding machines based on odometer-like gear wheels, operating in decimal, would wrap around much the same way, from the largest value back to the smallest... and these were around for several centuries before computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator
Hacker News Kansai Meetup in Kyoto, Japan, This Friday
Has Melbourne startup Rewardle just opened up its Initial Public Offering?
"Found only on FreeBSD..."

Also found on NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD.
This really should be the top post in this thread.

They are restricting water to residents to benefit farmers. i.e. it's about money, not water.

Yet this greenwashing is tricking virtually everyone. And add in the fines they levy for over use of water and it's blindingly obvious this is about money not water.
"something approaching one third of all Native Americans living within the present-day boundaries of the continental United States - which is to say, more than three hundred thousand people - are estimated to have been living within the present-day boundaries of California."

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-IXp7of_QxIC&pg=PA13&lpg=...

The 17,000 BCE may a bit early (that was based off stone flakes rather than direct evidence of human remains), but there are 14,000 year old human coprolites in Oregon and evidence of boat use in California 12,000 years ago.

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-migration-coming-to-ameri...

My point was that there were quite a lot of people considering it worthwhile to live in what is now California, long before Europeans got there, let alone any army engineers.

There are now a lot more people and it is stretching the water use, but there are a lot more people in most places, not just California.

And saying that markets will build any necessary irrigation projects and that the state shouldn't build them is an interesting position to take, given the historic link between irrigation planning and central government. You could make the argument that government wouldn't even exist in the present form, if it were not for the history of managing irrigation.
We already have 4-dimensional models; we just keep the 4th dimension separate and call it an animation path. In fact, Skyrim has 5-dimensional models: there are two versions of each walking animation, roughly "feminine" and "masculine," but each character actually uses a specific blend-point between the two. Similar analogies with facegen textures. All the pieces are there, they just need to be glued together right.
Iridium was seen as the way to go based on the best predictions around. The investors thought it was a sure thing.

McKinsey made a prediction that there would be about 900K mobiles sold in the US in 2000. They were off by 10s of millions or thousands of percent...

This link says it was made in the early 1980s but the prediction was later than that. http://www.samizdata.net/2007/06/fun-with-statis/

It seems amazing now but it was based on the idea that mobile phones would not appear in anything like the numbers they have. The idea that in places like Africa where getting a phone took 10 years that they would have hundreds of millions of cell phones would have been seen as pretty crazy in 1989.
> One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in life is that success has very little to do with engineering. The technical side needs to be just good enough to work. The rest comes down to marketing and networking.

My understanding is that Google started getting traction because the technology savvy crowd embraced the search engine early on. This was because the search engine was built on a technology foundation that was solid and delivered great results. I think all pieces must come together to achieve success (luck being a piece) but saying engineer had little to do with Google's success doesn't seem correct to me.

I disagree.
Date and feet:

08/01/2014	699.06'

......

08/26/2014	680.53'

Lake Oroville has fallen 19 feet since the 1st of August 2014 according the CA Department of Water Sources.

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryDaily?ORO
You can't do metal, but you can do wood and acrylic up to 3/8inch (5mm). It's not fast, but it's just the thing if you want to make wing profiles for a balsa RC airplane. Working on making it do very thin copper, just so I can lase PCBs.

It's not fast.

FWIW, I not only provide the design, I also provide the design (and a video) of the jig I use to make them.
Minus mention of the yacht, the Iridium website (http://www.iridium.it/it/news.htm) states that in 1985 Motorola executive Barry Bertiger's wife, Karen,was frustrated that she could not make a call with her cell phone from the Bahamas to one of her real estate clients back in the US.

For some reason, I thought Iridium was supposed to be marketed to "international business" crowd. Isn't that why they were charging $3k and expected people to call a hotline only to leave their contact information and have a follow-up phone call sometime during the next 7 business days? Or did Motorola believe that the market was moving from analog to satellite, as opposed to analog to digital?
:)

The whiteboard itself isn't really the problem[1]. It's the "writing code in front of people who are judging my performance" part.

[1] Although I do prefer chalk boards. :-) What can I say? I was a math major. ;)
> Why is this hard?

Because these vary. What is employment? Does sitting at home creating an app that could have future rewards employment? Possibly.

The labour force varies according to factors including living costs, available prospect of work, potential compensation, and many other factors. For example, a new plant in a town offering part time work could encourage stay at home parents to take a part time job - while not previously unemployed (chose not to participate in employment) they are now employed. Vice versa, for example, a sudden decline in living costs could encourage a fall in workforce participation.

Then there is the unreported number of jobs, which tend to be picked up be census rather than tax receipts.

People create jobs, jobs don't create people (well, kinda inverse, as better incomes sometimes or often lead to lower birth rates, but that's a tangent). It is not a process of children's puzzles where blocks are put into holes, and after the box is full no more blocks can be inserted.

If someone doesn't want to be employed, they're not unemployed, this is a definition of (un)employment, and the distinction is important. When employed but not reporting this through any important means, this is also important. Measuring this is hard.
Product Hunt Meetups
Qwerty/Dvorak double words
15 Websites for Social Media Distribution of Content with Examples
Show us, please, how the dialect of C which is used for development of the Plan9 is unfriendly and not good-enough.
The business of smartphone apps is a total disaster
Yeah, it's a bit like trying to explain Valve's success in terms of its dysfunctional structure(subjective, I know). If you look at stuff like Google+ and numerous misteps with gmail/hangouts you would be forgiven for mistaking Google for any other large company with enough prior successes and resources to have reached a certain "critical mass". Not sure these companies hold the secrets to repeatable success.
On the subject of cars, I recall seeing lots of tv ads for cars that featured options that were non-standard.
To be pedantic - they didn't slash their price. It's still the same. They are now just offering additional space.
Using Mechanize with Ruby
You can resubmit a link by changing the url slightly. For the policy on reposts see the FAQ.

We changed the url to the changelog.
This has been discussed multiple times today, each time triggering the flame war detector. (# comments > # points AND # points > 40ish)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8231917

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232184
Me too, but I thought that because I assumed the ceo of Nokia would order his engineers to drop whatever the fuck they where doing this second, start a death march, and build him an iphone.
Years of lower than average rainfall have made this a necessity in WA.

We've now got two desal plants here that currently provide 27% of our supply. The supply drawn from dams now only makes up 33% of the total.

The plan is to transition to a 50/50 mix of desalination and underground sources (with groundwater replenishment) by 2030.
Yes. It's great to see projects moving forward, but minor incremental releases don't tend to make great HN posts, except when there's something unusually interesting about them.
Fair enough. I must say from looking into it more that there seems to be an absurdly wide range of cost estimates being quoted, as well as a lot of mixing up of prices and costs, so the figures I quoted are probably bullshit.

Edit - I am not sure I agree with you about overbuilding on infrastructure though. A good example of this is the London sewer system by Joseph Bazalgette, that was massively overbuilt to the tune of twice the maximum requirement from what was considered the highest possible population density, just in case. Which was very lucky, given the development of the towerblock 100 years later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bazalgette
cisco seems to do that: they allow internal employees to create startups, fund them and acquire a large stake, then if they succeed, fully acquire the companies. There's a cute name for it; something like fold-in innovation? I forget.
(1) We definitely thought about implementing a search/auto-suggest for pre-commit. We'd love help from the community to build a solution for that. You can follow/add ideas on the v2 label - https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit/issues/10

For the time being our registry of available hooks is here: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit.github.io/blob/real.... We use that file to generate this page - http://pre-commit.com/hooks.html. It's also available as json - http://pre-commit.com/all-hooks.json. If you create new hooks for pre-commit we'd love to get a pull request to add to all-repos.yaml.

It would be awesome to have `pre-commit search <keyword>` and `pre-commit add <hook-id>`.

(2) I think we could integrate with yeoman generators to provide the company wide requirements. It's really hard to make assumptions about the structure of a repo, often just knowing extensions is not enough to identify file types (e.g. tests, auto generated code). Generally we leave it up to the developer, we don't want to enforce too much.

We're definitely encouraging fixers over linters at Yelp. It's great to tell a developer "Hey you missed a semicolon" via jshint but it's much more useful to say "Hey you missed a semicolon, we fixed it and our change is unstaged, if you agree with our change add/commit" via fixmyjs. We'll be supporting fixmyjs really soon. We were blocked by https://github.com/jshint/fixmyjs/pull/99 and now we're just waiting for the next release.

If you're a python developer using our autopep8-wrapper (found in this repo - https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks) is really awesome. It fixes a lot of the simple pep8 issues.
That isn't weird. At all. The language did precisely what the programmer asked it to. When you make a language operate closely to the metal, you can expect the syntax to be more abstruse. If this kind of mistake was possible in a higher level language, I would expect that to be a language pitfall.
The economics of this is interesting. Drop-box does not store multiple copy's of identical files for each user. So, their cost per GB drops as they add users. Which also means if they start to lose users they may need to raise prices, which could quickly cause a death spiral.
Brazil dismantles 'biggest destroyer' of Amazon rainforest
> you almost invevitably want to run sort before you run uniq

And then you don't actually want uniq anyway since sort has a -u switch that removes duplicate lines.
Hidden obstacles for self driving cars
Actually, I'm much more a socialist. I believe that All people have a right to health. And I also think that introducing large swaths of cash like we do in the USA enables horrible perverse goals.
We use nvd3 in an analytics dashboard with some success, and some troubles. Simple Excel-like behaviour, such as rotating the axis labels so they don't overlap, require lots and lots of tweaking.

Default bar/column chart settings occasionally give mystifying results, like the highest value in the chart plotting above the highest axis value (e.g. 23,600 plots above 22,000 instead of between 22-24k).

I'm sure we'll solve these issues, but they are eating up a bit of developer time for things we're used to having work out-of-the-box in something like Excel.
Researchers Discover Proteins That Block Both HIV and Ebola Virus
It seems to be better in terms of efficiency. After all, it optimizes for profit, costs are a given for every market participant (in a free market), just as profits are bounded, so the most efficient gains more market share at each "time slice". (Sure, sometimes this efficiency is observable only in marketing, lobbying or in other exploitative mechanisms.)
1. Wrong for reasons others have mentioned

2. PHP was never designed to even support objects in the first place. The API is super inconsistent in terms of parameter ordering and naming. Contrast that with the vast majority of the STL. Sources for the zillion ABI incompatibilities comment?

3. How about, oh, IDK, OpenGL being a C interface. Lua? The Linux kernel? X11? Driver interfaces in general?

4. The big presupposition here is that it's a bad language. Honestly, I'd like to see you design a language that does what C++ allows you to do much better.

5. C was arguably way better put together than Perl was. Perl is an abomination to be honest.

6. What are the use cases of C++ compared to PHP? C++ is used to do things like author renderers, or physics engines, or mathematical simulations. Trust me when I say that attempting to accomplish any of those to the same volume with the same hardware on PHP is madness.
Track viewer engagement for your online document in real-time
If I define God as a "the thing that created the universe"...

...then you would have to justify that definition before expecting anyone to accept, prove, or disprove it.

FWIW I was once a believer and frequently associate with believers, so I have some experience in the matter and have given it considerable thought.
I usually hear the latter type of system described as "safety-critical" or "life-critical". You're right that it's an entirely different world, though.
Same here. While it seems like all of my colleagues prefer videos, I can't stand how slow videos go. Maybe it's because I read faster than most people I know, but I'll take a solid book over videos any day.
LA Police: Online Piracy Funds Drug Dealers and Terrorists
"When you make a language operate closely to the metal, you can expect the syntax to be more abstruse"

It's the exact opposite. Close-to-the-metal, the syntax is actually very friendly - you've got values, and you can bash them in like a half-dozen ways. C is incredibly simple (I suppose their pointer syntax is a little janky, but one can always express it "one level at a time" via typedefs).

The really complicated parts come from making high-level operations seem "easy". There is no close-to-the-metal notion of char* vs a string, or a lvalue vs an rvalue, let alone template metaprogramming.
Why is it surprising that participation drops as unemployment grows? x vs 1-x.
I'm not a farmer with junior water rights, so no I'm not concerned.

Even in dry years as we are experiencing now, California has more than enough water for domestic use. Some communities, especially those dependent on small local reservoirs, may run into trouble if the drought continues for several years, but California has dealt with this successfully in the past, most recently in the 1976-1977 drought[1].

The people who really need to worry are farmers, especially those without senior water rights. Many farmers in the state have moved from producing row crops, where fields can be left fallow in dry years, to orchard crops like almonds which still need irrigation during a drought. I don't have a lot of sympathy for almond farmers in Bakersfield. Here's a thought: maybe an area of the state with average rainfall of 6" a year isn't a good place for an almond orchard. The drought might actually be a good thing if it forces some of those farmers to move back to row crops. It may also finally force California to regulate groundwater pumping. Unrestricted pumping leads to subsidence[2] and kills off native vegetation by lowering the permanent water table below where the roots of valley oak and other drought adapted plants can reach.

Governor Brown has also been fanning the flames a little to sell the public on his delta tunnel plan. He used a similar tactic during the 1976-1977 drought to try and sell the peripheral canal.

1. see for example this CDWR documentary on the 1976-1977 drought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZXeEktMYLM

2. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140325-calif...
I can't figure out what the hell this is.
> Actually for me the missing features are

> - a mail client that works well (and that includes at least push/imap idle support and SHOULD, in the RFC sense, include server side searches)

> - a client for xmpp

These are the times I wish Mozilla would have Thunderbird rise from the ashes (hint: like Phoenix, that ultimately became Firefox) and develop it directly.

While I want Mozilla to succeed, I would like it much better if it spent some time and money on Thunderbird both on the desktop and mobile platforms. If there were a "Support Thunderbird" donation campaign, I would even support it monetarily.
I'm always glad to see reasonable overviews of emerging technologies. While very focused on what's wrong, it is a good counterpoint to the typical breathless coverage.
Read Steven Levy's book ("Inside the Plex"). It provides an alternative narrative to the one most engineers believe. In particular, it says that Google had good early traction from technology people, but the Yahoo deal is what made them mainstream.
This is a weird argument: "I just bought a Porsche, and it handles better than any car I've owned!"/"you can't tow things with a Porsche."

Anyhow, as you implicitly acknowledge, destructors help with orderly shutdown, even if the shutdown is caused by an error condition. I prefer them to try...finally that other languages rely on. I can live with C#'s IDisposable, but I personally have a better chance of getting my destructors right than implementing IDisposable correctly (remember, in a garbage collected language, you don't have a defined order that things will be destroyed in).

But, on the completely different topic of how to do disaster recovery when both your program and the host operating system are shut down in a non-orderly manner: I personally am not aware of any language features in any language that make that easier. However, I know it can be done in C++
(stasis ( http://stasis.io/ ), SQL Server, MySQL/MariaDB, Firebird ( http://firebirdsql.org/ ) and SciDB ( http://www.scidb.org/ ) are all implemented in C++, although they aren't all necessarily object oriented C++).
Longplayer: A one-thousand year long composition
> McCarthy was not entirely wrong

So... it's a good thing to model "spy hunting" on the Salem Witch Trials? How is "a communist-spy around every corner" that much different than "report your neighbors for subversive/not-approved ideas, comrade?"

Edit: Just think about pairing up McCarthy-ism and HUAC/SACB[1] with NSA-levels of data gathering today. Would it make the world a better place, or would it have a chilling effect on free speech / free exchange of ideas?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#HUAC_and_SACB
Right. Java-the-language depends heavily on JVM-the-environment to be usable. Without an excellent GC (sometimes even with one) common coding patterns are unworkable, and the design of the language lends itself heavily to GC-dependent overall designs. There are also aspects of the implementation details that dominate language design (eg, primitive boxing and the generics implementation).

That said, if you know what you're doing it's a great platform.
I wonder how active the 3D-CG scene is these days. In the mid-2000s there was so much activity on CGsociety (then cgtalk.com). The kind of work people posted there was just out of this world. Absolutely impressive attention to detail. I was an enthusiast too so I would visit the site many times a day.

Of late, I haven't been in touch. Good to see stuff like this on Hacker News.
Certainly there are sustainable farming methods, but it doesn't change the fact that industrial factory farms are a reality.

My comment was that simply eating less beef would have a huge impact on the environment. I'm not advocating that we replace cattle farms with wheat fields, nor am I advocating that people go vegetarian.
PlotDevice: A Python-based graphics language
Mouse memories 'flipped' from fearful to cheerful
To be clear, I'm not disputing the existence or seriousness of the drought. Just pointing out that this really isn't a very good visualization of its seriousness.
It would certainly looks like you traveled faster than light. But you didn't actually, you just took a "shortcut" as it were.
the DC library has one you can use for the cost of materials.
Thank you @dang & @CyberShadow
Seems like this could possibly lead to memory leak? No upper bound on the memory usage?
Yelp Mobile (Android) App Thoughts and Analysis
Shameless plug for our 3D printing matching service: http://www.supplybetter.com. You come to us with a project, and we match you to the best service bureaus for the job (i.e. the people with the printers, both hobbyist and commercial). I'm the co-founder and mechanical engineer on the team, and you work directly with me as we source your project. Check us out!
Wikipedia's Balancing Act (2013)
I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers.

IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues are would be fascinating, but this ain't it.

"The car’s sensors can’t tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either."

As a human I sometimes can't tell the nature of something on the road at speed. They gave an easy example (rock vs paper) but IRL it is usually things that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not. So avoiding any unexpected item in the road when safe to do so is probably always the right solution anyway.

"Urmson also says the car can’t detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn’t coned off."

People aren't that great at this either, especially in traffic where the hole is obscured until the last second, at least an automated car that reports home could, via various sensors, detect hitting "something that felt like a pothole" and send that information out to other cars in the region.
Do you have a pastebin of the CSV file? Time to play...
I think kristianp's point is that current x86 implementations are simply an x86 instruction decoder/emulator running on a very-RISC microcoded machine.

Which is how a lot of mainframes were implemented in the 60s/70s (e.g. KL-10).