skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I did a bit of air stuff with the same setup but nothing terribly interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7HooQZPSZo

What I ended up using for the ground/water stuff was sending serial commands out of the headphone jack... surprisingly low latency, especially compared to bluetooth, and it was only a few bytes at a time so low baudrate was fine.

http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.AudioS... Here's the source and schems if anyone wants them -- the idea here was to make the hardware as light as possible!
Judge Koh refuses Samsung ban for the third time
How do you plan to set yourself apart from the hundreds of other real estate listing startups that have come about in the past 5 years?
I've had good success with adding a text field to forms that must remain blank. Hide it from humans with CSS and then let the form fail silently if there is content on that field upon submission.
This. My current company (consulting agency) has a somewhat startup-like atmosphere, but we currently have 3 full-time devs (including myself) and 5 support staff members (including the founder) - and I can't imagine life without them. They abstract mounds of paperwork, hours of client communication, sales, pretty much everything other than design (also handled by me) and code away from us.

Joel Spolsky has a great article on this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...

"Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
Less moving parts. Tilt rotors exist mostly because humans find it difficult to cope with a tailsitter's changes in attitude.
Do you think the benefits would hold true for animating SVG elements?
looks similar with SpellDial <http://www.spelldial.com/>
Sorry, but I can't do any of the things you list (fall asleep within 10 minutes whether I'm trying to fall asleep for a nap or to go to bed at night; let my mind wander and not get distracted; not worry).

I have a lot of anxiety, which I imagine is relatively common among the developer and tech community. Sleep and peacefulness does not come easily to me. I've tried taking naps at various points over the years, but haven't successfully taken one since I was about 12 or so. Sometimes I'll even lie in bed for 30, 40, 50 minutes to just try and take a short nap. Eventually I'll give up and wonder why I wasted all that time.

This will happen to me even if I'm extremely sleep deprived, and feel very physically and mentally exhausted.
Me too. I did everything required to get my authorship to show up. Now that it's gone, it's kind of frustrating to have put in the effort. Just like it's frustrating to have no less than seven different g+ public interfaces, between my work account, business page, newer personal gmail account, older personal gmail account, account being used by my wife and myself, and these weird alternate Youtube versions of two or three of the above.

I called a client today to discuss them signing up for webmaster tools. The most frustrating part of the conversation was a discussion about dealing with the other Google "stuff" that comes with the new Google account they'll be making. Do they want to use the new email address for anything? What if it accidentally gets out? Etc.
In the US its still legally impossible. Only public entities like police or universities can get legal permission to fly an unmanned aircraft. (BP/Aeovironment got the only approval that's been issued to private companies)
Headquarters (2007)
The author (and others who use desktop Linux) can't be happy with his personal choice of desktop. Instead he's bitter and angry that others don't make the same choice that he does. That's way too common in many facets of life these days.

There are many factors why desktop Linux didn't take off. One is the whole Gnome/GTK+/KDE/Qt debacle. Many know the details, but with limited resources and not being radical enough in your designs, then there had to be more collaboration and not division (Gnome vs KDE).

Distros were similar enough to not be very differential, but incompatible enough to make support a nightmare for ISVs.

The other direction that could have been taken is a whole lot more experimentation with radical designs. Trying to be better than Windows was always going to be a losing strategy. Just don't be Windows.

I guess there is some redemption in Android, but I think the diehards will never accept Android as a real desktop Linux.
The article directly contradicts your claim:

While the hardware is a significant part of the problem, they seem largely agnostic about which flying machine might ultimately serve their needs best. The real challenges, Teller and Roy insist, come in the design of the rest of the system like, for example, the delivery mechanism.

For example, the reason they do the winch down thing, instead of just landing, is so that customers are not tempted to approach the drone and get hit by the rotors.
What do dishes typically cost? (I'm not anywhere near where they operate.)
Also, the inefficiency of ex: wind turbines would add a lot of energy which would be counter productive. You might be able to control the weather by blocking out the sun and then selectively lighting some areas over others. But that's not really controlling weather so much as setting the temperature on an AC.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Or what it has to do with what I said.

I've been a user of Gmail since it entered beta. What's your point exactly?

If you have something to say, say it, don't be smug by linking to a wikipedia entry for Gmail, as though I don't already know what year it was created.
Alright, so, question.

Why would the speed of the hash function make any difference, assuming it's a cryptographic hash? If it's faster, run it for more iterations - if it's slower, run it for less. You pick a maximum time, figure out how many iterations can be run in that time, and go from there. I would have thought that a fast hash function would be better, if anything - as it's potentially already more optimized for current hardware, which means that it's less likely that it will get faster on better hardware.

I always thought it was the memory complexity of the hash function that was the difference, not speed. Makes it harder to run on GPUs / ASICs.
I'm with the folks who are wondering at the police response. Aren't they trained to assess a situation? There is only one person in the room - which is an office and he's playing on the computer. Is their only training to throw people on the ground and pin them? Aren't they trained to simply ask questions and judge from body language and emotions whether this person is up to something, is armed or acting strange vs just a bystander.

I think this video is very disturbing. It shows we have incompetent police. We need to train them better. It's very easy to take a bunch of hefty fellows and give them guns and show them how to shoot people.

It takes more time to train them to assess situations, and approach people with dignity and respect. I think we should spend this time.
Please be careful brandishing intellectual superweapons.
Real-time face pose estimation
If You Want to See Inequality in the U.S. at Its Worst, Visit an Impound Lot
Immediately ^'d this post for it's usefulness, but I put this in my .bashrc instead:

function body_alias() {

sed -n $1,$2p $3

}

alias body=body_alias

I used to have little scripts like body in my own ~/bin or /usr/local/bin but I've been slowly moving those to my .bashrc which I can copy to new systems I log on to.
I'm afraid I don't see the benefit of believing in a tautologically defined creator of the universe, nor do I see why such a thing should be called "god" or "God" when that term/name has so much additional meaning associated with it.

It's an unnecessary complication; if calling the Big Bang or whatever might have preceded it "god" provides useful explanatory and predictive power, then such a definition might gain some traction. But as it is, the universe appears indistinguishable from a naturalistic physical process.
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8240088
I second this.

I've also noticed that bots always fill fields based upon their name attribute, so call your fields something other than "email" and "username" and reject submissions where fld9624-v2 is not a valid email address.
Well, you can tweak the customer experience portion and try backing out of it again.
The claim would have to be that Google couldn't have used any other alternatives. I believe that to be obviously false. Of course the market would have happily supplied options for mapping, calendar, and email - all Google would need to do is ask, or leave it open for users to decide regardless.

What was the alternative to iOS? There was nothing, only Android. That was true right up to the point where Microsoft rebuilt Windows mobile. iOS was not going to own 95% of the market no matter what Apple did, if only because people want to own different phones for fashion purposes. Android's strategy, plus an open market of app alternatives to the bundled software, you get the same result.

Hardware manufacturers needed something as close to an iOS clone as reasonable without literally duplicating it, and that's what Android was.
> far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces

CERN built capacitive multi-touch displays in the 70s. Mitsubishi, Bell, Microsoft, IBM and a bunch of other companies were involved in the R&D from there.

What Apple are good at is integrating and commercializing at the exact point where the economies of scale are viable, adding a layer of accessibility for users (eg. inventing the gestures, but not the touch technology itself).

The anecdote about how Apple tried to launch the iPad before the iPhone is proof that they didn't catch-on to how the core touch tech scaled (every inch of touch surface would increase production cost non-linearly) until much later.
Used to be similar for me.

Until I discovered deep meditation (http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Meditation-Pathway-Personal-Freed...).
Summarized: Repeat a chant, such as 'I am' (or any phrase of your choosing) for about 5 minutes, focusing on what the chant-phrase sounds like in your mind.

With the phrase 'I am', you would try to feel the sounds 'A-Y-A-M' being pronounced in your mind, without ever vocalizing it.

Gets me napping within 5 minutes, wake up charged up for a massively productive session. I hope you'll give it a try sometime.
Robophishing Call: Your Debit Card Is Locked
Imperative languages - i.e., markup and scripting languages (HTML and CSS) have a shallower learning curve than programming languages, about which you need to learn about variables, objects, types, control structures, and so on through the entire catalog of logic concepts.

At least there's enough JavaScript out there that you can get usable native code on GitHub, or perhaps even just cut-and-paste. Even without jQuery, if you're sagacious enough. And then of course there are full-on jQuery plug-ins, some of which even run tolerably off-the-shelf.

THAT is why MozFound pushes the paradigm of progressive enhancement: not because it makes life easier for developers (it doesn't, as a rule) but because it makes Web publishing approachable to a far greater user population than developer-kit-based toolboxes.

In conclusion: is reliance on the basic native stack the ONLY way? Of course not!

It is, however, the way that's easiest to learn and (usually) the hardest to f* up.

Yes, even CSS, as long as you care to walk before you run.
Ask HN: Learning New Programming Languages
I know I am not the only one interested in learning new languages and I find myself dabbling in a few at the moment. However I struggle to get the feeling that I make any progress. I scroll through tutorials where they describe what variables are or how to create a list already knowing these basic concepts.

I can breeze past the simple things but when it comes to advanced concepts in a language, I sometimes get the idea that I glossed over something I should not have. In the end I want to start writing a project right away and skip over your "Hello, World" material.

How do you all handle learning a new language and becoming comfortable with it?
That was the strangest part for me. Google+ forced an odd hybrid between my personal and business activities, but it wasn't absolute. I couldn't tell you how many google interfaces I have right now, I'd have to count them and go through a few while logged in to make sure it was complete.

It wasn't that much work, but I suspect they could have improved their user testing on how multiple identities worked.

Maybe they were just targeting the median user, but that is likely a mistake if you miss all the evangelists.
There is an audio[1] that appears to be a recording of the perpetrators of this "swatting." Twitter handles[2][3] go along with it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPRmpUnTgM

[2]: https://twitter.com/ScrewPain

[3]: https://twitter.com/spiky
It's an opinion, of course, but I disagree. I think Android would have done just fine without google apps. Indeed plenty of android phones are sold without them. If the Amazon Fire fails, it will be because there are already cheaper phones with bigger app stores, not because it doesn't have gmail.
Are you sure that was the first? When I was at Georgia Tech we were doing that in 2005 :-) there's some videos online

http://uav.ae.gatech.edu/wiki/uavrf/movies

Look for GTEdge transition to or from hover in the video descriptions. (We probably weren't the first either...)
Sounds like what ice cream trucks have been doing forever.
I guess that would depend on your definitions of "product", "successful" and "heavy".
Realistically if they are in a position to leverage any bundling - why wouldn't they?

But here goes, in no particular order...

Google Public DNS - Dec 2009

Chromecast - July 2013

Chromebook - June 2011

Chrome Browser - Sept 2008

ChromeOS - May 2012

Nexus 4,5,7,10 - various starting Jan 2010

Golang - 2009

Dart - 2011

AngularJS - 2009

app engine - April 2008
Did authorship truly help anyone from an ROI or branding perspective? The entire thing seemed like a huge failed experiment. I am sure it was just removed because it took too much attention away from AdWords.
I thought I invented this 5 years ago during a weeklong coding sprint before a live demo. I called it a red bull nap but otherwise it was exactly the same. They are amazing.
His not so subtle point is that it's been 10 years since Gmail, and if that was the last successful non-bundled product, that was a long time ago.
I agree, it takes practice. I can't let my mind wander though. If I want to take a nap in the middle of the day I have to consciously visualize something. The visualization that has worked best for me over the last year has been sitting in my childhood home, assembling the tail section of a scale model Su-24. The end product looks a lot like this one: http://paperwings.orgfree.com/su24/index.htm (except I never finish it, just doze off)

The sleep is worth the practice :)
Of course, I want to mind :P
Flight TodoMVC example
>if you believe for a nanosecond that we need source-level compatibility to get the benefits of inlining

You do. Yes, there's LTO, but to do it effectively relies on storing source code or information derived from it in the intermediate object files. Without the source, the best you can do is try to inline what is hopefully a reasonably well-behaved hunk of object code without any of the high-level information associated with it that the compiler threw away when it emitted it.

>C++ has many faults, but overhead with the C FFI is not one of them [...]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if you're talking about the runtime overhead of calling an extern C function, then that is very much a fault. Inlining can make all the difference in the world with respect to performance in an inner loop, the classic example being qsort and std::sort, and to take advantage of that, source-level compatibility is needed.

Now, if you said that source-level compatibility were better achieved using a fully-fledged FFI than by stuffing all but the worst (well, some of the worst) of C into your language, I would whole-heartedly agree with you. If C++ had done the former, it would be a much cleaner, much less popular language, and instead of using a warty language with templates, useful user-defined datatypes, and function overloading, we'd all be using a warty language without templates, useful user-defined datatypes, or function overloading. Hell, many of us still do anyway.
The current quads/drones have problems with naturally occurring thermals in calm weather and the slightest winds - they don't come close to surviving the climate surrounding a wild fire.

When the tech and price scale are right for this application, you'll definitely see it as it has been discussed and is actively being worked on.
I would be careful with this assumption. A reasonable concern the poster might have is that when he leaves his current job, if he started a venture based on his own IP, his previous employer could shut it down by suing him claiming that they own that IP.

That's not an unreasonable problem. In fact, it belongs to a class of "worst kinds of problems": the ones that only become apparent when you're first successful, and threaten to render that success forfeit despite your hard work.
Extract content from a webpage with Pillage
The examples are pretty insulting to people who work professionally: "I need a logo, and I'll pay $15." "I need a website, and I'll pay $250". Cool, you're getting a logo designed by a robot and an off-the-shelf Wordpress theme.

Maybe that's not the target market?
Agreed. Authorship was supposed to be a revolution in search marketing. Author Rank was the new Page Rank. It was the Next Big Thing (TM). And now it's dead.
I've seen noticeable CTR on numerous campaigns with authorship as a great picture would grab more attention. Maybe a 3-8% swing which is noticeable on keywords with search volume >1000
Facebook wants to let mobile users run keyword searches on friends’ profiles
Rest In Pause.
Data security soup
I believe that if I have a bias, it is that I assume good faith. But I don't think this is an incorrect bias to have, given that my experience has been that most people act in good faith most of the time.

I just want to ask you about the last line. you truly, truly have NO opinion about what you read there?

About whether the individual reviews are accurate? Only that it is most likely that the reviewers were not deliberately skewing their reviews in any direction.

you don't think there's anything amiss or disturbing at all about the apparent pattern?

Much to the contrary, it is very clear that there is a problem. What concerns me most is the possibility that the reviews are completely accurate -- since that would indicate that there is a large pool of less-aggressive women who are being overlooked during hiring or discouraged from entering the field.

you sound a bit, well like a robot

A past girlfriend told me that I reminded her of ST:TNG's Commander Data. I decided to take this as a compliment. I don't think she meant it as one.
Meh! I find these features just incremental improvements. Most apps these days quickly catchup on UI/UX features. Even OSes are mostly the same these days.
Hal Finney's re-usable proof of work (RPOW) system preceded Bitcoin by many years and IMHO satisfied the technical requirements of being a viable digital currency, but failed on one of the "social" requirements: namely, RPOW needed -- but never got -- a way to persuade millions of ordinary people to take it seriously.

The way Bitcoin met that social requirement was to give early adopters a large financial incentive to promote Bitcoin. The hype around Bitcoin, in other words, in addition to setting off many bullshit detectors here on HN, greatly increased awareness of Bitcoin. And maybe that is the thing that will make Bitcoin more than just bullshit.

Since Hal's system provided no particular financial incentive to its early adopters, the RPOW server Hal designed and implemented sat on the internet for many years, waiting for a rising tide of transactions that never came.

Nice try, Mr Hal Finney, esteemed hacker.
Questions for IBM’s Watson
Or 3) It's working so well that people are gravitating towards it rather than clicking on paid links (most probable reasoning).
"could have easily resulted in a death" applies to lots of things.

Getting in your car in the morning can easily result in a death.

From a statistical point of view, this situation probably wasn't as dangerous at it seems.
Ever wonder where Amazon gets its book category taxonomy from? This is where
On the flip side, the people most likely to do things like this are also most likely to set up their own site somewhere and keep it running. For instance, http://www.windytan.com/ (Oona Räisänen) and http://tronixstuff.com/ (John Boxall).
Next time you could try dropping the disparaging tone ("Good for them?") and just stick to the facts "I did something like this a few years ago..."
Isn't this basically the honeypot captcha or invisble captcha method? I don't think it would work as well since we our forms are submitted via ajax request, but I could be mistaken?
No I think they are stupid to try to bring back the dead.
Universal laws impose their own validity. The legal system is our recognition of those universal laws.
wget as a service...?
Three Kids, One App, One Love – The Five-O Story
This stuff is really bothersome because they didn't ask nicely - they forced all google users to use G+. In doing so, they screwed up a bunch of perfectly fine services.

Now they're trying to un-screw-up what they spent the last 3 years doing and pretend like it's not a big deal.

I mean, I get it - Google can do what Google wants, but it doesn't do much for their brand loyalty.
I went through the paperwork pile to apply to round one access of the Watson APIs and discovered the shocking restrictions/requirement that the system apparently "needs" unstructured text, and if your dataset is more structured than unstructured they won't accept you into to the program.

Needless to say I was a bit annoyed, because I was already using fact extraction in the system I wanted to test Watson's query 'skill' on. I'm in no position to store the raw text. That would require over a hundred times more storage, probably closer to a thousand times the storage costs, making it fiscally untenable for me to even build the database let alone a product with it. Any idea if release 2 in October will change this restriction and give people who aren't sitting on GB of unstructured text, like myself, a chance to apply.