skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's worth understanding that the light which you see is the result of many photons -- though it's usually estimated that maybe, if our rod/cone cells were a little more sensitive, they might have been able to perceive individuals. So actual energy/mass transfer comes from a lot of particles each offering their own individual kicks. So the overall intensity is not just (energy per kick) but really (number of kicks) * (energy per kick). The number of kicks counts.

Phonons, for sound, actually are quantized in the exact same way as for light -- just replacing the speed of light c with the speed of sound in the medium v. (Both arguments are based on analogies to a harmonic oscillator problem which every quantum mechanics course works out; basically any vibration in the bottom of a potential well X can be dealt with by approximating that potential well with a parabola, which leads to particles, we could call them X-ons, of one form or another. Quantum mechanics makes all particles act like waves but also makes all waves quantize into particles.)

So, long-story-short, the physics is the same, and long wavelength phonons also carry less energy per kick than shorter ones, just like photons. That's not the difference, and the E = h f equation is still the same. But for phonons it's more about numbers.

The biggest sound particles you can hear correspond to 20,000 Hz frequencies. The smallest light particles you can see correspond to 700 nm wavelengths or 10^15 Hz frequencies. So photons are more than 50 billion times more energetic than phonons, as a rule.

This changes a lot of features about them. For example, every degree of freedom in a system has some average energy due to just random energy-sharing, which is known colloquially as the "temperature" of the system. If you work out how many 20kHz phonons there are simply due to a room being at room temperature, it works out to about 300 million. Any detector which registers 20kHz phonons, including the hairs in your ear, have 300 million of those phonons in them just from random thermal excitation. On the other hand, the red light receptors in your eye have on average (300 million) / (50 billion) = 0.006 photons in them on average, meaning that if you look at a thousand of those photon-absorbers you'll see on average only six of them which are excited randomly just by thermal excitations. So we can, at room temperature, detect individual photons, where we can't detect even ten thousand phonons at once without it getting hopelessly buried in thermal noise. (But our eyes simply do not fire the neurons when a light-sensitive cell only sees one photon.)
Yes the Java async messaging stuff required some pretty deep understanding, especially ironing out a couple of deadlock bugs (ironically drawing a diagram in whiteboard fox helped me understand the deadlocks: https://s1.whiteboardfox.com/s/420876221780898a.png)

I would have much preferred a solid framework or library. Maybe I didn't spend enough time researching the alternatives to writing it myself.

But then again I wonder if a library would have had the low-level flexibility I needed. For example, I found that one of the most frustrating things when using whiteboard fox was that your internet connection would go down and you wouldn't know about it. So you would not realise that there was a problem and think that the other person had simply stopped drawing. My solution was to add a 5-second heartbeat so that the browser could display a 'disconnected' message when it didn't get the heartbeat. Would a high-level library allow me the option of such a heartbeat?
You will not believe what he did in return
Ask HN: What are some good essays/blogs on VCs?
What are some good essays/blogs on VCs?
the getting back to old music that you like is a problem even when you do have an account. Your likes are only stored in the order in which you favorite them, with no real search functionality. I've been trying forever to find an old song that I liked, but searching for it only yields similarly named songs. I wish there was a search within only favorites..
A similar site I built (http://stoodle.org) supports these three features in addition to group voice conferencing through Twilio.
The moon was the minute hand,
the seasons the hour hand.

Guy can write. Once his weekly obligation ends, he could make it work with a source of income as a writer, using a smartphone, bluetooth keyboard, solar panel, and get near a cell phone tower. Without rent and utils, he needs much less money than usual. Order groceries etc online, so he can remain isolated (and of course hunt/fish).

Or write a book, invest, live on interest in the woods.

He wouldn't really like having to write, but he admires good writing, and if it would grant contentment...

See also, coding in the woods
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...
Great stuff ! I'll try to build my own version using socket.io :)
You are fortunate if you have a quiet room or dark room at work. Even more if you have an office which reduces noise.

Two of my biggest points when I try to find a job -

* As small a commute as possible and hopefully public transportation availability (have achieved this time and again)

* Place where I get an office, quiet room. (Have never achieved this)
URL Shortener API in 30 Lines of JS
Groups conducting subversive activities all moving to one service..? This sounds like DARPA's lucky day.
> Doesn't it operate as a social network, where some content is available publicly? That would make it a bit different than email...

There's no technical reason that email isn't public, just social convention. Emails are like postcards, and the content is visible to all routers that they pass through on the way to their final destination.

In theory, we could have decided that email was an open discussion platform (more like USENET) with almost no technical changes.
for the record, "ISIS" changed their name to just "Islamic State".
No. A completely demoralized person (I think that's a better descriptor than 'homeless') would not experience much delight in life. Demoralization is genuine poverty. It's our duty to reduce and eliminate demoralization in all its forms to the greatest extent possible. You cannot do that with money, houses, or guns (aka govt. force). The character traits that prevent demoralization are courage, forgiveness, gratitude, authenticity and willpower.

But even so... finally, we all die a tragic, senseless, and humiliating death, the ultimate demoralization. So the only reasonable posture we can take towards a demoralized person (or any person for that matter) is empathy and compassion.
And smalltalk in that mix too.
True, exactly this article are very interesting.
The site is blocked at my work so I can't see the implemtation but here is one I wrote back in march that is 79 lines: https://gist.github.com/eliotfowler/9360895
I thought ISIS was another name for ISIL and changed their name recently to IS as part of their propaganda about a new caliphate? If not, then what is it?
Microsoft’s Windows 9 Unveil Said to Be Coming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_state

Not so much. You are using the definition from an article geared towards ousting extremists -- and therefore their definition is "extreme". An IS can very much-so be a legitimate non-extreme government. (albeit, different from what most of us would prefer as a government)
Twitter suspended ScraperWiki's API use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_state
The issue isn't just which characters are obscure enough to use - it's that they must be unique for each combination of languages and we could have potentially infinite combinations. Using the CDATA example, ]>> is pretty rare and we're unlikely to see it used in other languages - the problem is it used in one language - XML itself. If you happen to have some XML data embedded in a CDATA, and that XML also has CDATA of its own, you've broken the parser, because it will match the inner ]>> as the closing tag for the outer CDATA. To solve this, we'd either need to modify the parser for the inner XML to use something other than ]>> for it's CDATA, or we'd need a parser which ensures these escaping delimiters are evenly balanced - and our regular parsing algorithms are unsuitable, so we'd need SDE.

Of interest are languages like Nemerle, which allow you to define additional syntax for the language through macro systems - however, there are dedicated delimiters which can be used to enclose sequences to ensure unambiguity. (Nemerle uses a PEG based parser).

Another interesting approach is taken by Wyvern, which was just posted recently - which uses different indentation levels to disambiguate different languages in the same text file.

What's interesting about Tratt and Diekmann's model (Language Boxes), is they do not specify a storage format - although they use a tree based format in the implementation of eco, one could in theory, spit out plain text in languages like Nemerle and Wyvern - where the editor can do the job of selecting the right escape delimiters for each embedded language - and the result is just a plain text file which can be accepted by the normal compilers, but that's still open for research.
I wrote the Lanczos3 scaler that Picasa uses (about 14 years ago!), and it doesn't (by default) correct for gamma.

For most images & kernels, you can get by with doing math in about 31 bits total precision (a bit for underflow clamping), so that's the magic speed improvement from ignoring gamma on old 32-bit architectures.

If you gamma-correct, your sources will need to be 10-12 bpc after transformation, and you'll need >32 bits of integer precision for large kernels. Even though x86 has a 32x32 -> 32bit high word multiply, this all gets a lot better on x64.

So basically: today on 64-bit machines (or wide SIMD) you could do gamma-correct resampling a whole lot cheaper than you could do 10 years ago.

[edit] In the end you notice the difference with line art, but for most photographs you want to spend spend your CPU budget on sharpness (by using wider kernels).
Beheading people is not speech; it's violence. You're arguing for freedom of violence.
Codebashing (Codeacademey of Security)
And it looks like the suspension is permanent per the update today at https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2014/08/the-story-of-getting-tw...
I've heard about jobs that would enable that - working at national parks, where you are given a job to do and have to spend weeks in the wilderness carrying it out - marking paths, taking pictures, fixing things - ideal path for someone who doesn't want human contact, as there will be very little of it. The only question is if he would get it with his, now criminal, record.
Well, there seems to be an unfortunate naming collision then, because Islamic State was already reserved for a type of government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_state
Absolutely agree. I find it a waste of time otherwise.
So I finished reading Dune recently. I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. My main problem with it was how predictable it was: gifted kid succeeds in everything he does. A question I have is whether I should read the two immediate sequels. Do they actually explore the whole "superheroes are bad" theme more? Would I get a better sense of the context for what Dune really was about?

My first exposure to the Dune universe was actually the DOS game Dune II, which is funny since it had nothing to do with the storyline. Honestly, I found the game more enjoyable than the book.
Type systems are the one exception, but it still remains broadly true that Lisp was way ahead of everybody. There are many things we could talk about besides type systems:

Lambda expressions - just now reaching Java and C++, been in Lisp forever

Garbage collection – (obviously)

Turing-complete (edit: fully evaluating) macro systems – I've heard C++ is moving in this direction (not sure to be honest) but Lisp is still ahead on this

Gradual/optional typing – Others have been moving towards this, CL has had it forever

Interactivity/REPL – e.g. Swift may finally give a REPL to systems programmers, Lisp has had it forever

Dynamism/late-binding – Lisp is still way ahead on this, goes hand-in-hand with interactivity

Everything serializable – Lisp is still ahead

Structured code editing (paredit) – Lisp is still ahead, not sure anyone else even knows what this is

Multiple inheritance – I think this is coming to Java finally

Image systems (hibernating a running process) – Still ahead

Condition system / advanced exception handling – Still ahead

Functional programming techniques (map, reduce, etc.) – Still ahead

Keyword arguments – Recently added to Ruby, Lisp has had them forever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_... The first sentence there says "The Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is a jihadist group, widely regarded as a terrorist organisation."

(Edited for clarity)
And another one I found, in 81 lines of Haskell (may be interesting for comparison):
https://github.com/ryantrinkle/memoise/blob/master/src/Main....

There's also a presentation to go with it: http://vimeo.com/59109358
Linux Foundation introduces new Linux certifications
I do not deny the importance of the KISS moral of this story. However, there is also an important meta-moral from putting this story in a larger context: what lessons about feasible complexity you draw from your insect-themed programming contests may depend strongly on whether people like the dunkosmiloomump team happen to be participating.

(See https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/contest/resu... .)

(The winning entry was elegant, complicated, and effective. I was Busman Holiday Club in that contest. I was reasonably pleased with my moderately complicated moderately effective entry, but even allowing for small team and shorter lightning-division timescale, the performance of my design falls rather short of theirs, and the junkyard rat design aesthetic of my entry falls rather short of the ballerina-by-day-ninja-by-night polish of that team's work.)
1033 Program Allotments Visualized
>An unscrupulous doctor could still fake the proof, of course.

Exactly, how is a family to know what is a tumor and what is just regular tissue. Heck, it could be a pig liver and not many would know the difference. Combine this with the fact that the surgeons at this talk mentioned that Chinese doctors and nurses are not well paid, you can start to see the incentive for doc's to commit fraud.
Why Gen Y Can’t Afford Prime Real Estate Any Longer
Love the idea. I'd like to learn more about it.
“Don't Skimp on Coffee”: A CTO's Plea
> I find it hilarious that you're upset with easter eggs in principle because kids were distracted during class.

That's exactly the opposite of what I said, I said I liked Easter Eggs in principle but then gave an example of when they went wrong. The first line of my comment was: "I agree with Easter Eggs in products."

Easter Eggs are good, you just really have to consider the impact they're going to have (in terms of perception, usages, and bugs).
Oh, I stand corrected. Sorry.
Whilst I agree that Linux on the desktop isn't a kernel issue, there is one area of the desktop experience that kernel hackers could help improve, and that's the sound stack. Linux could really do with throwing all the existing solutions in the bin and starting with a fresh approach, something that scales from low latency audio production needs to network audio streams. At the moment we have a kludge of different solutions (ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, probably even have some OSS use out in the wild).

To those that suspect it would be too much work, there's ongoing efforts to improve the graphics stack (DRM/DRI, Wayland, Gallium), I don't see why we can't have the same for audio.
Says who? If you believe the Supreme Court, calls to violence are core political speech (Brandenburg v. Ohio, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware). I'm not even sure what law distributing videos of murder would break.
Why don't you enjoy it?
Struggling with Student Loan Debt Over Age 50
It seems like Backbone is dominant, but after a couple months of using AngularJS on an everyday basis I'm ready to switch and never look back. Hands-down best framework I've ever worked with. The pleasure I get from it reminds me of the early days of Rails, when the leap in productivity was palpable.
Ill give you some real feedback though since I did sign up:

when adding a new option, it should gain focus so i can start typing right away.

viewing a poll that has no votes yet is weird because the whole screen is white and you have to scroll down to see that you have things to click on below the fold

you maybe shouldn't be able to share a poll without any options added to it

Logout icon is not intuitive to me. Coming from a mac where that icon means something completely different

logged in view is not responsive, I think it should be pretty easy to fix that.

delete poll button should give you an "are you sure", its too easy to delete a poll
The Making of “Outside Agitators”
As I understand it, it's a network of federated servers. The Diaspora team doesn't control the servers, so there's nothing they can do.
It seems odd to structure a project around freedom of speech, control of your own information, and dilution of central authority, and then act disappointed when it actually gets used for those purposes.

If a group that posts videos of journalist executions can use it without getting shut down, it is certainly usable for any other group that may be unpopular with their local majority: Tibetan nationalists, Falun Gong, breastfeeding moms, cop watchers, Iranian women's rights groups, Ukranian rebels, homosexuals, German Nazis, Quebec secessionists, eco-terrorists, unschoolers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, red-state liberals, blue-state conservatives, and people who text while driving.

To get the good, you have to take the bad with it. The same Bitcoin that can buy a pizza can also buy a murder. The same typewriter can write both a beautiful poem or an extortion note. A hammer can build a house or crack a skull. A fire can chase away the cold and the dark, or it can burn your home to ash.

The early adopters are going to be the most blatantly offensive, and the most suspiciously paranoid, and the most idealist. The mainstream people already have their mainstream network, and won't see any reason to switch until they find themselves penalized in some way for being different from the owners of the system.

This is good. If someone as nasty as a journalist beheader can't get silenced, I know with reasonable certainty that if I go to Diaspora, there's likely nothing I would ever do myself that would result in me being erased from the network. And I can share information with just my friends, rather than my friends plus all paying Facebook customers.

And in addition to all that, how can you expect to get more jaw-jaw and less war-war if you slap a gag on the other guy every time you see his lips move?
I would just like to observe for the record that I, prompted by a discussion right here on HN, brought this exact same revelation to the world more than a year ago:

http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-law...

(grumble grumble grumble)
Wait, are you suggesting that the Haskell type system is too strong to write a package manager? That makes no sense. A much more valid reason that Cabal is annoying is that Haskell is a compiled language that uses static linking, unlike all the languages you mentioned, which are interpreted.
I would love to use this, but i don't have a facebook account. I hope you support other login options
DeltaScript – Interpreted, math-centric scripting language for Java
Cabal is not buggy. Or, more precisely, Cabal Hell is not the result of bugs in cabal. It is the result of 1) static linking with cross-module inlining, 2) a lot of diamond dependencies, and 3) a lot of breaking changes in the ecosystem.

1 is arguably an artifact of Haskell - performance really suffers if you can't do this - but also something that's arguably desirable generally.

2 is the result of the ability to provide abstractions and tools that are useful in a phenomenal number of contexts (mostly a good thing) and the failure of the language-as-standardized to provide these directly (mostly a bad thing).

3 is the consequence of an active community that values experimentation, is willing to try new things, and places an emphasis on Getting It Right. This is actually more mixed a blessing than it sounds.
It's not just unfortunate, it was deliberately chosen by the group to invoke legitimacy and power they don't have.
I don't think anyone really takes issue with Twitter pulling down content -- they are a private company (as-in not controlled by the govt) -- but when a government starts censoring material (like in the UK were linking-to, or even viewing of this sort of material is considered illegal), that's where things get not-OK.

What I find more outrageous was that the reporter apparently was held captive for 2 years... without anyone (in the public) knowing. Bergdahl was held captive for 5 years and luckily was returned in a controversial exchange. What is going on that we are not able to protect and/or recover our people?

Seems to send a clear message that if you get captured by an extremists group like ISIS, the government won't come running in to save you, nor will the public even know you are missing -- fore the government doesn't want to stir public opinion into favoring some sort of military action. So, in essence -- you are all alone out there, potentially for years, or worse. -- That is outrageous to me.
Did some research as it seems people don't like it when you don't have citations.

A Dutch researcher named Baas Becker wrote in 1934 "Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects".
This has generally been my experience as well when I'm working with almost any reasonable type system. Every time I've focussed on leaning on the type system, it's made refactoring much quicker for me and left me feeling way more confident.

Every time I encounter a bug I think "is there a way I could have encoded this into the type system so it would have never compiled with the bug?" The thing I like about Haskell is how often I can say "yes" to that question and implement it. From what I understand, that question would would "yes" even more often with dependent types, though I've yet to really learn much about them.

I really dig lisp (especially clojure) but the thing I miss when I'm using lisp is a really solid type system.
Thanks for the link (it's one of PG's I hadn't read yet.) That being said, I really didn't like the part where he implied that if 1 line of Lisp can replace 20 lines of C that it also means that a feature can be developed 20 times faster in Lisp than C. Are you a Lisp programmer? I've only used it a bit, but I didn't get the impression things would scale that way for feature development.
If he did, surely he would have told them about it, rather than just say, "foreigners do it differently".
Yes! It's about creation vs. consumption. We appear to be the only thing in the universe that has a choice about which of those two activities we want to be primarily engaged in moment to moment. It's a heady responsibility.
Obscenity, right? That's not just about sex.
Freedom of speech is clearly enshrined in the US Constitution as freedom of restriction from government, but freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. It's kind of an academic distinction if a multinational corporation like Twitter is restricting it or a government.
Exactly joseph, for me this the most interesting one from this article, a monster mouth doorway, ruined pyramid temples
Behind the Science: An Introduction to Connectomics
Keep in mind that, for quite a few startups today, the real product is equity and the real customers are investors. So it's really no surprise that tech blogs focus so much on fundings and investors.
Two aid workers infected with the Ebola virus have been discharged from hospital