skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For one thing, the government is in a better position than the average charitable citizen to determine how best to distribute money. Individuals mean well, but we only see a tiny part of the national situation, and we're prone to emotional effects.

I'm not saying the government we have does a good job of this, but, for example, in the US we have disability programs that mean that disabled people with no other means of support often, eventually, get enough money to at least help them get by. If we instead relied on individual charity to handle disability, you'd have one sad photogenic white girl getting millions while thousands of equally-disabled people got nothing and starved to death.
Works fine in Firefox Nightly on Linux with Intel drivers.
Ask HN: What do you use for mobile on-call wifi?
We have a large number of people (mostly SREs) who have mobile wifi hotspots in the SF bay area. In general, the experience has been less than optimal with slow speeds and dropped connections. Does anyone have ideas for mobile wifi access that's been working well? What vendors do you use?
lnav (http://lnav.org) provides SQL-queries-over-logs in the unix world. It's also a nice viewer for the logs themselves.
Totally, it encourages networking of like minded individuals as well, which could turn out to be a long lasting support system if the community is continually fostered. Really like the early ideas floating around this model, seems like there is good potential here.
That's the point. The average person isn't affected by MSR developments. Instagram's Hyperlapse will impact hundreds of thousands.
The link doesn't work for me, and I'm outside the GFW right now, so maybe the site is down?
So make it a #pragma.
Correct. Great engineering will get you a few users. Excellent business execution will put you on the map.
Growth Hacking: 5 easy steps
It's been empirically demonstrated that C wasn't good enough for Rob Pike.
Controllers stop taking calls when they the numbers make it pointless to take them.
If this works as described I wonder if it could be used to distinguish incoming scattered entangled photons from other incoming 'noise' photons.

That would be a really exciting application for imaging in noisy envrionments.
discus is a third party SAAS setup. you don't host it yourself it's just some embedded js.
How We Can Get Submarines to Travel at Supersonic Speed
A contract typically requires consideration between two parties. Consideration can be almost purely nominal, but it has to exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration
Not so fast.

It seems clarity of focus and mission counts for a lot. When I look at a company like Sears, I don't get the sense of focus I get from a company like Apple.

It's surprising how little clarity the rank-and-file of many businesses have around what they're actually doing. In the case of Sears, are they trying to compete with Amazon? Or be a great local retailer? Or make great tools (Craftsman) and sell them directly and/or through channels?

Metrics are important but they aren't a substitute for vision and focus. When I see businesses driven from the very top levels of executive management strictly by metrics and numbers, I often wonder whether it's a symptom of a lack of focus and clarity from the folks at the top. Metrics are a great management tool, but they aren't good for setting direction, or leading.
>that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not.

A good example, but even if the trash bag is empty it can cause problems. I ran over an empty trash bag once, and it got stuck to my muffler and melted onto it. Made a huge mess and could have potentially caught fire.
Felix looks really interesting, especially with regard to the first class functional aspects, how they implemented their stack, and the user extensible grammar. I might actually find myself distracted by this instead. :)
Dead for me as well.
Living in Russia, I always tried to conceive how Google cars would behave here, especially in winter.

As a driver here you have to take daring decisions sometimes, something that robots probably should never do due to 'do no harm' rule. That's a real engineering challenge.
So what if the car can't drive itself in anything other than familiar roads during clear weather? I would guess that the majority of my current driving is done under those conditions. If the car could take care of itself most of the time but fell back to my control during rain, snow, obscure roads, or construction zones, I think it would still be a net benefit to me.
I made this comment about google self driving cars two years ago and I think it's still relevant now:

200k miles is nothing. Over 8 billion vehicle miles are spent per DAY in the US. One person is killed for every 75 million miles driven. 200k miles isn't enough to test every terrain, under every weather condition, in every lighting, etc. There's too many variables in the equation.
The Google car won't be truly safe until it has logged 1000x miles.
As an experiment, I took a few paragraphs and replaced the words "software", "software and programming", "programming" with the word "mathematics" and replaced the word "programmers" with "mathematicians":

Most of the problems of mathematics arise because it is too complicated for humans to handle. We believe that much of this complexity is unnecessary and indeed self-inflicted. We seek to radically simplify mathematics.

and

Much complexity arises from how we have partitioned mathematics into boxes: <put various branches of mathematics here>; and likewise how we have partitioned mathematics development: <put various phases here, from "Eureka" moment to copy-editing of proof>. We should go back to the beginning and rethink everything in order to unify and simplify. To do this we must unlearn how to do mathematics, a very hard thing to do. (I paraphrased by replacing the original "to" with "how to do".)

and

Revolutions start in the slums. Most new mathematics platforms were initially dismissed by the experts as toys. We should work for end-users disenfranchised by lack of mathematics expertise. We should concentrate on their modest but ubiquitous needs rather than the high-end specialized problems addressed by most R&D. We should take inspiration from end-user tools like <replace with your favorite tools, like pen-and-paper, whiteboard, abacus>. We should avoid the trap of designing for ourselves. We believe that in the long run expert mathematicians also stand to greatly benefit from radical simplification, but to get there we must start small.
A few things:

1) I was conservatively assuming that the cost of the meat is due entirely to the cost of the water. In reality, it's even less. Taking the value of meat-in-the-city would make the estimate err even further in the wrong direction by attributing, to water, value that was actually added by transportation.

2) For city dwellers, I wasn't using the actual cost paid for the water, but the (approximate, much-higher) amount they would way if push came to shove, in order to estimate the relative utility destroyed by people cutting back on showers compared to farmers producing less water-intense output, and thus how misguided are the campaigns to get people to cut back what are already high-value uses of water.
I remember a few of these difficulties being mentioned in Sebastian Thrun's Self-Driving Cars course on Udacity. It's been awhile, but I seem to remember the snow discussion in particular. The problem wasn't just slippery conditions, but the question of how the vehicle can localize itself when the various visual cues that it uses are covered in snow (e.g. road lines).

Pretty interesting stuff.
>The utilities will be on both sides of that example

In a "perfectly efficient" economic world it would seem almost all of those categories like taxes, insurance, mortgage interest, and maintenance are really on both side of the equation. The landlord will still have to pay taxes, etc., and pass them along to his renters. In essence, buying a house seems like it would be a getting rid of the middle man situation in the cases where you don't need the special advantages of short term usage that renting presents. Buying a house would just be a special situation of becoming a landlord and renting to yourself.

So I'm wondering what specific instances there are where renting makes more long term sense than buying. I can think of a couple:

- The unsophisticated landlord. A little old widow or someone who has inherited a rental property, and isn't charging the market rate. Is there a good way to identify these people, and get a cut of the increase in rent that they could be getting? Maybe they don't know how to advertise or evaluate market comparables? Or is there a way to identify them and get a commission for sending savy renters their way (saving the renters money)?

- Rent Control. I'm not sure how this works in practice (or in theory for that matter). I'd think that this would reduce the availability of rental units, driving up the cost eventually. If you were renting at the onset of rent control, you got lucky, but for someone newly looking for a place, you maybe don't get the benefit?

- Property tax ploys. In some jurisdictions, I'm under the impression that property taxes aren't adjusted to the current market prices (or there is a large time lag). Therefore those property owners have a tax advantage not available to new entrants to the market, so they can afford to compete on rents. The business opportunity here would seem to be identifying people in this situation, and convincing them to move to lower cost location and renting out their current homes.

What other market inefficiencies are there which would tip the scales toward renting? Is there a business opportunity in allowing people to rent houses that private parties want to sell? What I mean is a service, where a renter goes out and finds any house for sale on the market they'd like to rent, then I'd step in and arrange the financing, the property management, etc.. They'd pay monthly rent and wouldn't have the burden of home ownership, but they would have housing options that wouldn't normally be available. Are there already companies that do this?
The problem there is driving is a skill, and one which you can lose if you do not exercise it. A self driving car which only works 99% of the time seems like a non-starter, since by that point the humans inside of them are no longer qualified to take over. Particularly if that 1% is in conditions that are particularly difficult.
How renting my place on airbnb is funding my startup
Enthusiast developer keeps Windows XP alive with unofficial 'Service Pack 4'
Ask HN: Is Amazon's Glacier heading for the deadpool?
AWS Glacier is probably the single cloud storage that hasn't seen a price drop. It used to be the cheapest storage solution by an order of magnitude now, it's MORE expensive than... Dropbox. Is it a sign it's heading for the deadpool?
That's probably a misstatement of your opinion: you almost certainly draw the line somewhere (or at least I would be quite surprised if you didn't), eg white power advocates, racism against blacks or jews, anti-women's equality, anti-disabled rights; but don't include gay rights as equally important.
Personally I think the path forward for autonomous cars goes hand-in-hand with services like Uber. First you need there to be a population of people who can get by without owning cars and have them rely exclusively on driving service. Then you slowly augment the driving service with autonomous vehicles when these folks are going to be traveling along routes that are supported by the cars. These routes will likely be an order of magnitude cheaper to travel, since there is no human driver. The market dynamics combined with the steady march forward of the capabilities of the autonomous cars will do the rest.

In other words, I think it's pretty unlikely you will just wake up one day and swap out your car for a self driving one to drive you around. Eventually, maybe, but fundamentally it will be less about which car you own and more about if you own a car at all. In the long run if autonomous vehicles are successful it makes little sense to own a car anyway, so it's only logical that the early adopters naturally be non-owners.
AFAIK, up until recently there's been no competition, so why lower the price?
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2flispm.de%2fsym...

No luck on Internet Archive/Google.

This page I think has some images from the same domain:

http://ffffound.com/home/fish2000/post/

Server used to be on lispm.dyndns.org previously, so that may be a clue as to why it's dead atm.
Great job by Brazilian authorities.

However, I wonder if they could come up with a more intimidating name for their crackdown than "Operation Chestnut Tree."
Great, but I dislike the combined JS filesize. 267kb is simply still too big for mobile websites, given that it is only a part of a website. It seems to consume a bit too much memory for my iPad2, the first time I saw a blank demo; had to re-open Safari. (combined: c3 is 120kb and d3 is 147kb) c3.min:
https://github.com/masayuki0812/c3/blob/master/c3.min.js , d3.min: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/d3.min.js

A charts library that has no dependecies (no d3, no jquery, etc), has a filesize of less than 100kb and still looks great and offers useful features would be awesome. SVG vs. Canvas2D is another hot topic.
They aren't convicted yet, and if the place is as corrupt as the article says and they have made that much money, who knows what will happen.
The documentation is nice... it's just incomplete.
"There's no way they are in the womb (they wouldn't be able to get inside the uterus, and the immune system would attack them quite quickly if they did)." That is simply untrue [1,2,3,4, 5]. It has been recently discovered that many fetuses acquire their gut bacteria before parturition, it is logical to assume that the same can happened with these mites.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747743
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22647043
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18281199
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19018955
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18166321
Today, for a .com, there are a large number of CAs (let's call it 100?) that can sign a cert. Additionally the registrar or the registry (VeriSign) can change NS and DS records due to a US court order (or otherwise) and the new destination could get a domain control validated certificate.

If DANE were adopted and the current CA system abolished, then the registrar or the registry could still change the NS and DS records to takeover a domain, but that takes us from 100+ parties capable of signing a cert to 2 parties that are already part of the system.
It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles.

Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the car all together. I would love to see a detailed analysis that compares these two approaches.
Intelligent System Creates Descriptive Sentences Directly from Videos
Schrödinger's cat caught on quantum film
I think there are better potential solutions for a self driving car to orient itself in those kinds of conditions than for a person. I've driven in miserable weather, and it is very disconcerting - you just guess and go. A self driving car could take measurements of the road + gps coords + look its map database to know how many lanes there should be, then estimated where the lanes and limit lines are. Once my eyes fail me, I don't have a fallback.
Chicago also. Second floor of Harold Washington Library, just before security, to the right. They also do some maker workshops.
Why not consider the idea that any "dimensions" are nothing but "[useful] concepts of the mind", like "universal time" and even "limited space", the way some ancient mystics (?) of various cultures believed?

The simplest example is about time - we (humans) have notion of time "entirely" due to the certain properties of our environment in which we have evolved - that there is day/night, Moon phases, seasons, periodical changes (due to rotation of the planet and its motion around the Sun, of course, but this is a very recent discovery).

Now imagine that you are somehow "suspended" in the outer space without any motion relatively to the Sun. What would be your notion of time?

The time of a certain process (a mass in motion) has nothing to do with time of another, completely different process (like radioactive decay) and the notion of some "common, universal time" is just a "creation of the mind" which is very handy and useful but "does not exist in reality".

Ancient Buddhist notions of "emptiness" or "void", and pre-Buddhist (Upanishadic) notions of "everything is mind" (which is wrong, but very close and accurate) are insights to the same "truths".

Your "dimensions" are "primitive concepts" of the same kind. Any coordinate system imposed on so-called "reality" is nothing but a "concept of the mind".)
No programmers for the future?
These days we're having so many programmers going for the sexy web and mobile platforms and actually very few people go for the low level or 'hardcore' semi-conductor stuff. I have only met 3 fellow x86 assembler programmers and even when I go to stackoverflow.com to ask an intel x86 assembler language question, it may take 3 days for me to get a reply, while for a javascript or python question it takes just 2 minutes. If this is the case then who will create the next Linux? Android? Or what I'm I getting wrong?
What's a GFW?

EDIT:

Never mind: Great Firewall of China.
The tough one in C++'s case is that it isn't as easy as you think to critique the choices that were made. In most cases they are consequences of following design principles (and ones that seem good) through to the end (and you may disagree with the design principles, but then you probably shouldn't use the language). With PHP, that isn't the case and Rasmus would be the first person to tell you that.
You didn't read lisper's link, did you?
What if you want uniq -c? Any simple way to replicate that functionality better then...sort | uniq -c?
Had a blast with this thanks to your recommendation!
Thinking like a Bézier path
The Loongson is a 90nm part, the others are 32-45nm. No ISA is going to make up for a doubled transistor size.

Really the notable thing to me isn't the ISA nonsense at all. It's how singular a success the Cortex A9 core is. It came at exactly the right moment in history and hit exactly the right sweet spot, being significantly beefier than the A8 yet only minimally more power-hungry. Krait has followed on pretty well, but the A15 can almost be considered a failure at this point.
I like flotcharts too. The Canvas2D rendering has some advantages too. Though, I would like to remove the jquery dependency. I tried to use zepto instead of jquery, it worked but zepto's codebase is ugly and it relies on outdated JS features that emit warnings in Firefox.
Then they wouldn't have an online store either, and they do. I think an online 3D shopping experiment would work for them. Otherwise the competition will go that way and they would be leapfrogged.
Why do you think this? Self-driving cars seem reasonably close whereas there doesn't seem to be anything resembling what you're proposing. Also, aren't autopilot systems successful in commercial air vehicles because they operate high up away from most everything other than a few birds and other commercial air vehicles and they maintain massive separation between vehicles (compared to roads)? This wouldn't seem to scale well to lots of small personal vehicles relatively close to the ground. Or are airborne autopilot systems also good in these situations and I'm just unaware?
As a gamer it's difficult to understand how people can't see what's wrong with journalists giving her attention for playing the victim. She is a troll of the worst kind, are we supposed to join her??
I am making a bold prediction that it will be decades before a self driving car can drive itself safely on Indian streets.

Road Signs ? None.

Rules ? They're more like suggestions.

Roads ? What Road ?
There were actually a bunch of vehicles designed for the army in the 1950s that were just to complicated for human pilots...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piasecki_VZ-8_Airgeep
The suggestions that performance improvements brought by compiler optimizations are meaningless bother me, though.

First, because hardware isn't getting faster that quickly anymore: Moore's Law hasn't meant for a long time that CPUs actually double their per-thread performance every 18 months, so that "1/10th as effective" from your first link, which refers to compilers hypothetically doubling performance every 18 years, starts to get more and more attractive.

Second, because while in C/C++ code the programmer can often avoid useless machine code, newer languages such as Rust and Swift tend to do more stuff implicitly (safety checks, reference counting) which could often be eliminated by a Sufficiently Smart Compiler - increasing the need for good optimizations. (I think that this somewhat mirrors C++'s early history compared to C, but I was too young then to have any personal experience.) Of course those languages also tend to have no undefined behavior, so it's a bit different...

Third, because I don't think undefined behavior is as evil and hard to avoid as people think it is. I think there are a few weird points (you can cast pointers into malloced buffers to any type as long as you're consistent, but there's no way to do that for a static buffer without fully static layout), and it would be nice to have more control over things like aliasing - both to loosen rules and to tighten them (i.e. more flexible restrict-like functionality). But despite being a fun topic, it doesn't seem to come up that often in practice from what I've seen, so the performance gain is close to free. And when you're, say, fighting for 60fps in a CPU limited scenario, it's hard to turn down even a small free performance gain.

Fourth, because as someone who reads assembly frequently, idiotic looking assembly bothers me aesthetically even if it often doesn't have much performance impact. I speak in particular of reloading struct fields over and over when the data is already in a register and any person looking at the code would know it would be illogical for it to change in memory since it was loaded - but the compiler isn't smart enough to prove it can't alias... Sure, in individual cases it's easy to cache it in a local variable to stop this from happening, but in the large it's hard to avoid. Strict aliasing improves the situation somewhat, which is one reason I like it.
They just have to be significantly safer than humans, and that's not hard.
I had pluralsight membership for a month. Although the materials looks exhaustive I felt none of them went into great depth. They are good for first time use and know something in short time but beyond that there is nothing of value. And there are innumerable websites on the internet that teaches these stuff for free(maybe not all video streaming sites).
As usual, the big issue is "do you actually understand the problem you need to solve?". Many problems are complex, either per se or due to constraints outside of your control. Maybe you don't like to have to implement a lot of complex code to interact with a terribly programmed legacy app, but if your customer pays you to do that, that's the kind of constraint you cannot really do anything about. When you look at it closely, my feeling is that you'll find a lot of apparently-unnecessary complexity is there for a good reason, and it's our job to make this complexity manageable.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't challenge existing paradigms. Innovate! Blow our minds! But just make sure you understand the problem you're solving first :)
If only that were true. A single crash right now would make big headlines.