skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds about as useful as the "XML-file only" databases some people decided was the smartest thing ever at the turn of the century.

You don't see those around anymore.
All the known laws of physics are local* so there is no latency issue.

(* EPR only violates locality if you believe in wave function collapse, but there's no reason to)
On the syntax transformation side....

I have started to get really into what you can do with closures and coderefs in Perl. It isn't a macro in the lisp sense but it really works well and you can do some incredible things with it, and with closures and lexically scoped variables....

I suppose I should probably at some point blog about it.

I think a big part of the problem is that these are not tools you had to a beginner. They are things which take a lot of time to really master.
This is not how it works, you don't send an entire image to the client, you send the coordinates of discrete objects and each client renders locally. And yes, the coordinates of objects moving behind you are being sent too.
Handling the offline problem
I meant that my comment was an off-topic rant.

I have no problem with the article itself (I didn't even read it), nor the right of anybody to rant about anything. It's the cliched headline on which I was commenting.
The linked discussion has one of the most succinct comments about error handling I've seen.

You handle the result codes you know what to do with, and everything that remains means your program should explode immediately.
What about a Google group? That is, basically a mailing list, but without the mails, for those (such as me) who get too much mail already. Google groups is the best form of community communication out there if you ask me.

... and, maybe a "community" link on the kivy page, to quickly find out how to get in touch with others in the community. Would help a lot I think.
Buy Overseas Pay Less | Backpack
Oculus + Hydra in Half-Life = Awesomeness
Unless you're a mathematician or theoretical physicist the gross of your CPU time will be spent waiting for IO. Reading from disk, writing to the network, synchronizing, etc.

They're probably just aggregating 2 or 3 APIs, maybe hitting a database and then adding it all together.

That description can apply to almost any and all web applications and is inherently IO-bound.
Q&A with Quantum Gravity Expert Carlo Rovelli
arafalov,

The purpose of starting with this "Simple query syntax" was to try to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible for both the developer and the users of search. We have only exposed the query syntax that we have found that customers we have been working with so far have needed. I am sure there will be more, and as you say, since the core is ElasticSearch, if the demand for things such as configurable analysis is there, we can certainly look to expose it in our API. For things like this it would be great if you could cast a vote in our UserVoice page (http://feedback.azure.com/forums/263029-azure-search). By the way, this is a great place to go to see the feedback and suggestions from customers we have been working with so far.

Liam
Some mental illnesses make directly talking about the problem you have difficult. There is actually a large lack of anonymous therapeutic solutions for emotional and mental disorders for those who need them.

Simply saying, "Use your brain and solve your problem." To a mental patient is very insulting and extremely marginalizing to their condition.
The Economist had a good (i think) piece on India's military [1] which makes me think India's more like a mouse than an elephant. At least, militarily speaking, which I acknowledge your comment wasn't explicitly about. Economically speaking, I agree it seems like a significant oversight.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21574458-india-poised...
Yes I've noticed that. If a subject is not compatible with current government whim, there is always silence.
The Go Experiment
> Without the ability to make some sort of estimate you cannot assess whether the work is likely to be worth the investment.

In case of a product, estimating the development time will be the least of your problems. How do you estimate the revenue of a new feature? Your estimate can easily be off with a factor or 10 or even 100. So in such a case, even with perfect implementation estimates, it's impossible to calculate the profitability of a feature.
loved the idea! congratulations, but don't you think that this can heavily be used for money laundering?
I think your explanation is excellent for getting the point across. All other nice things that we get in FP derive from the "mathematical functions" fact you stated. It's also good in the sense someone can then ask you "how is it that using mathematical functions transform the way you think" and now you have their attention and interest. :)
I'm suggesting that, if you can't find a reference on the internet, then the book is wrong, and you're helping spread the flat earth myth that is common in America.
To be fair, it is in the repo, under the /benchmark folder. But don't go look at them, it will make you sad.
I could be wrong, but it seems that the way Secret is designed it cannot be truly anonymous. They need to be able to decrypt your secrets to show them to others, and they need to be able to associate them with your account to show them to you when you log in. This means that Secret knows who you are (to the extent that your login credentials reveal your identity) and what you've posted. If coerced or attacked there is no reason to believe that posts to Secret will in fact be kept a secret.
If you have to sacrifice your ideals for money, because you have to pay your rent from your start-up, it can kill the passion that could make your start-up become what you want it to be.
Google decides not to implement Pointer Events in Chrome
Wait a second... I think this has been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Jones#The_Grand_...
Setting up the Gigabyte Brix ultra compact PC
I wouldn't, but I'm not really an expert here. If every table is three files, that implies a non-trivial database would be dozens of files.

I suppose the other use of "flat file" I've heard is a flat directory with no sub-directories, but I've never heard that applied to a "flat file database".
> It sounds like an admission that the whole anonymity thing is just a marketing gimmick:

Post Snowden, there's an obvious market for "secure" and "anonymous" apps and startups, and the appearance of security is usually cheaper, quicker to implement and less annoying for end users than the real thing.

Having a bug bounty is nice and obviously security is hard even when you do try, but even that can be used to give the appearance about being aggressive about security while still making sure their network is just broken enough to return whatever value there is in being 'social' (which is usually antithetical to being secure or anonymous.)
I tend to agree with Tom DeMarco on this issue:
"This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value."

(From http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepa... )
SolePower : Charge portable electronics while you walk
Maybe I'm missing something, but I didn't see anything with regard to indexes, users, stored procedures, views or what not.

Seems like it's for table schema snapshotting in a database without any external storage.

Browsing through the code, I see that it's highly table centric using SQLAlchemy.
Speaking as the guy who wrote the points-to analysis passes for GCC (and other compilers):

"By giving a pointer the restrict property, the programmer is promising the compiler that any data accessed through that pointer is not accessed in any other way. In other words, the compiler doesn’t have to worry about aliasing when using a pointer with the restrict property."

This is false.
Entirely.
Believing it will get you into trouble.

restrict is, as written in at least C99 and C11 (It's not in C++03 or C++11 standard, though compilers have imported the semantics from C99 to there to allow its use), is completely broken, in the sense that it doesn't do what you want (say two pointers can't alias).

This is being fixed in C++ (though no plans to fix in C), but as a completely trivial example:

void example1(restrict float *a, restrict float *b, float *c, int i) {
c[i] = a[i] + b[i];
}

In this example, a and b may alias, despite the restrict, because restrict says the storage must be modified:

"During each execution of B, let L be any lvalue that has &L based on P. If L is used to access the value of the object X that it designates, and X is also modified (by any means), then the following requirements apply"

(the standard then gives the above as an example of how two pointers may be aliased with restrict)
FTFA:

"The authors dug up historical data to show that the cooling in the three decades between 1945 to 1975 – which caused people to worry about the start of an Ice Age – was during a cooling phase. (It was thought to have been caused by air pollution.) Earlier records in Central England show the 40- to 70-year cycle goes back centuries, and other records show it has existed for millennia."

This is why you can't extrapolate from a cyclical process.
This reminds me of playing with POV-Ray years ago. I was so amazed what could be done on a low powered PC, granted it took a long time to render, but still was still somehow magical, like the first time you realize you can program a computer. POV-Ray is free and can create some cool realistic looking images[1]. This one is my favorite[2].

[1]http://hof.povray.org
[2]http://hof.povray.org/images/ChristmasBaubles.jpg
You could use schemas or multiple databases for that.
Other than being seemingly more closed sourced, is there a reason to choose MariaDB over MySQL?
You can't shift the rendered state without prediction if it's an interactive experience without prediction or rendering parallel pathways because computational bandwidth makes exploring the narrowed state space more efficient than waiting on RTT for interactivity...
All such proprietary "anonymous" or "private/self-destructing" apps are guilty of this. By far the worst offender is Facebook's "anonymous login". But at least Facebook has a well deserved bad enough reputation by now that not too many people fall for that one. Secret, on the other hand, sounds like it could be truly anonymous - even if it's far from it.
Econometricians, Financial Markets and Uncertainty: An Anthropological View
You are right yet Go is much closer to C than Erlang in syntax, type system and memory-representation. Go is so close to C in fact, that its compiler is a modified C compiler.

Therefore I'd bundle it with C and D rather than Erlang.
Is Google going to keep its HQ in an area newly bereft of non-collapsed infrastructure and non-dead significant portion of employees? Are the hipsters going to be as attracted to SF when their favourite restaurants go up in gas fires and the Dolores hill slides?
Your selfie has already been taken. The box just finds it.
Something of an aside: I'm most stoked about this kind of thing because of the oculus rift. Even just playing through HL2 with my DK2 is an amazing experience.

What I'm really interested in with things like the Rift is foveated rendering, in order to get much higher quality graphics out of less computing power. Basically, using high precision fast eye-tracking to only render the portion of the screen your looking directly at, since your eye can't resolve detail to any great degree outside of a fairly small area in the center of where you're looking.

Foveated imaging in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging
MS Research paper on foveated rendering: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.p...
MS trial on foveated rendering: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/userstudy07.pdf
Foveated Imaging
This is a research publication, not a product announcement or trademark filing. Trademarks wouldn't really come into play unless they turned around and announced games using their new DeLorean technology or something to that effect...
Foveated 3D Graphics [pdf]
Great post.

> It is accessible to those who are intently curious about theoretical aspects of software development, especially abstraction

Agreed. That's why I think it's disingenuous when people complain that Haskell folks are in an "ivory tower" or they think they're the elite. I just think they're more curious and that's why they learned it.

> And I don't like the attitude that because a group G doesn't understand it, and group H does, that H owes it to G to spoonfeed the information. That's not the case.

Exactly. I always think 'I should write this and that tutorial and then people will finally see why FP is so much easier and then perhaps...' but then immediately I think 'but I learned fine with the existing tutorials, why can't others?'.

The answer is, because most people don't care or aren't curious enough. The moment I learned of Lisp and Haskell and people gushing about it I knew I had to learn them just to see what the fuss is all about, and whether people are right in their praise. And they are right in their praise.

It takes time to learn but so does everything (for me, at least), but in the end you invariably get there, and it's more than worth it.
Agree that you want to get a view on whether a task is easy or not - but this is rarely understood until you have started. And frankly most advocates of estimation aren't talking about T-shirt sizes but some kind of currency they can tot up to measure 'productivity'. The danger with trying to predict it is that you are getting deep into a specific implementation at that point and it is exerting a pull on the project aims. I think that can conflict with business value as the driver for doing anything. What's more important for eliminating waste (and death march ftm) is a set of alternatives (outcomes and implementations) and a framework which makes it cheap to back up and switch routes when you find something isn't turning out to be easy thing you imagined.
Supplement to Foveated 3D Graphics: User Study Details [pdf]
Show HN: JavaScript-everywhere, model-driven, web framework withAngular and Postgres
I'm not convinced there is any ultimate way to build a secret type app that allows for perfect secrecy. Ultimately anything build on top of the internet has a chain of IP address that have to exist in order to send message back and forth. Add a system with a server in the middle and it doesn't seem like there is any way to avoid someone (or a chain of someones) to figure out the far endpoint. If you can get at least some information leakage (cell phone connections, other IP accesses, etc) I would think you could eventually figure out the device on the other end. The only hope you have to keep the source secret is to make it too difficult or expensive to uncover so no one bothers.
How much are smartboards? wondering if ppl can afford it easily.
I have used both slicehost in the past and linode and can't complain about either as both were great experiences.

However, last month I moved several of my websites from LayerShift, NearlyFreeSpeech and WebFaction to DO (over the years I had collected family websites and side projects on different hosts). It took just over an hour to configure the droplet and transfer everything. I'm using a $10pm instance, saving me literally $100s a year compared to what I was previously paying. Admittedly most of the websites receive little traffic, however, I also have planet-tolkien.com on the drop which receives 20-60,000 uniques a day – the droplet barely notices. Thumbs up for DO.
The bigger story there is not that Brazil banned Secret, but that Google, Apple and Microsoft, all have the power to delete those apps from your device. That Orwellian power is the truly terrifying story there. And yes, personally, I've been aware for a while that they can do that, but I bet the vast majority of people don't know that.

When will these companies learn that "if you build it (the infrastructure for censorship/surveillance), they (the governments) will come"? It's inevitable, and they should know better by now.
I don't think it is about world. I would expect it is about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

And looking at their diagram[1] I already see where they can make this strategy work. While their collection/document/attachment structure is quite straightforward to move to another document DB, their UDF, sprocs and triggers I bet will be microsoft-specific. And microsoft will make everything possible to "optimize data fetching by running processing code close to data" and lure developers into using these. And in the end locking software solution to microsoft platform.

[1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/docu...
Suggested next version: camera/app which determines whether other people nearby are photographic/recording the same thing, and tells you to just enjoy the view/show while obtaining a copy of theirs.

Think of how many children's group performances/event involve 2/3rds of parents present fiddling with their cameras rather than just watching.
Anyway given how Secret works, if you are the only common contact between two people who receive the same secret, it is pretty easy to find the originator. It seems if would be pretty easy to create an app/website where you share you contact list and the secrets you receive, to find who the secret originator is. There is probably an opportunity here to create a "Reverse Secret" app. If this is really a secret, don't share it...
Ziptastic is another option that seems to work well. http://getziptastic.com
also plays nice with javascript and has a ruby gem.
It's been around a lot longer than that (15-20 years?) but only been practical for video and VFX more recently. People have been doing architectural images etc. with pretty complex BSDF for ages.

For those who are interested but new to this, some of the earlier global illumination stuff is a good place to start for the fundamental ideas, because they aren't concerned so much with fast paths in the rendering architectures.
Not the answer you're looking for, but if your dashboard config is under configuration management (Ansible, Puppet), it'll be much easier to recreate.

Or even just back up the entire card to an image somewhere.
You said like now the Chinese considering only Confucius, with no mention of Lao-Tzu, Sun Tzu and other brilliant philosophers.
The evidence of Chinese lag is not they consider Confucius the "greatest philosopher of all time", in fact it was some western media said that. The Chinese surely lagged behind after the Age of Discovery, but what you said is not the reason.
It's not what you start that matters
How IT can help reduce corruption in Africa
Aliasing is statically undecidable for all cases in any reasonable programming language.

However, the general analysis you are looking for is known as "points-to analysis".

It is a very large and complicated topic.
Happy to try to answer anything more specific though.
To amplify what impendia said, Hiragana[1] is mostly used for participles and conjugation. Most words are written with the Kanji, which are very similar to Chinese Hanzi. Japanese printers didn't actually have a job that was any easier than Chinese printers. I won't say that have an ideogram writing system wasn't a disadvantage, but it wasn't a huge one and China's vibrant literary scene shows that they could overcome it.

The emphasis of the Chinese exam system on the classics was also a problem, though having a bureaucracy selected by what was essentially an IQ test was a pretty huge advantage in general. But intelligence is no guarantee of probity, and by the time of the opium war 25% of the Chinese GDP was being collected in taxes... but only a fifth of that was going into government coffers. Top down control matched with an absence of credible external threats was a recipe for corruption.

In Japan, by contrast, you had the Shogunate which was suzerain over Japan but only sovereign over a relatively small portion of it. The Tokugawas worked hard to prevent the Daimyos from taxing their peasants too hard (as a means of restricting their power), which resulted in a lot of commercial growth in the pre-Meiji period. In the modern West we have methods of taxation that are generally[2] fairly efficient in terms of transferring wealth from the citizens to the state with not much loss, and the things that the money is spent on are fairly useful. These things are far less true of taxation back in the 18th century.

And you could look at lots of other issues too. Like the fact that the Qing dynasty was still viewed as a bunch of foreign barbarians by many meant that they had to be very traditional, and didn't have enough legitimacy to spend on modernization.

[1] Katanana, the other syllabary, is used for non-Japanese sounds such as those made by the wind or Americans.

[2] Except the US's corporate income tax.
That Orwellian power is the truly terrifying story there.

Only if you somehow consider the app store and mobile infrastructure a public good, which is most certainly is not.

There are open source/decentralized options that you are free to use.
> New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle.

It's acceptable to rush to the conclusion that temperature patterns from the 20th century are driven by anthropogenic influence and declare the matter settled, but when the warming trend doesn't continue I'm supposed to patiently wait for these folks to formulate all manner of alternate hypotheses?
Could something like ring signatures be used here?
Hi dawson, Thanks for recommending "DO" and sharing in-depth analysis. Thumbs up to your comment!
Point being that it isn't a rewrite but a new piece of software.
Here's the actual article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897

There's also a short review of the state of the literature in this same issue. Well worth a read: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/860.full

(I'm not sure how much of this content is limited to ivory towers)
You should probably mention the caveats when using ZCTA's to get a list of zips... Namely that they don't include all zip codes, don't get updated as quickly, and may not actually represent the same thing as a zip code:

http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/tiger-line-shapefile-2013-20...
This is fantastic, but IMHO missing one important point that I've learned from my Chinese friends: the Chinese Communist Party is well ... essentially communist, and differs in a few big ways from the European powers:

1. The current leaders want to colonize the rest of the world
2. They want to do so in the same heavy-handed manner that they use to subjugate their own people
3. With overseas dominance, use that "soft power" to increasingly assert themselves over their own people in China.

So the overseas expansion isn't for the sake of only resources, etc, they apparently want to use their external international influence to assert more control internally over the Chinese people as well.
Ha! But the difference between their modeling and your bull is, they do the math?