skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don’t people know about mowing robots?

My parents had one for about a year now. They use it to mow their huge garden. It has worked extremely well throughout this summer.

It got stuck maybe three or four times at the start of summer, when they were playing around with the boundaries to make sure it gets to as many places as possible and doesn’t push itself outside the boundaries because of some tight spot. It seems those problems are solved now. Maintenance is checking the blades every couple of weeks (and exchanging broken or dull ones once or twice a year) and brushing it off a bit.

These mowing robots have been around for decades now. You basically lay a cable (on the surface or slightly underground) all around your garden and big, permanent obstacles and set up a charging station.

Depending on the size of your garden the mower drives around several hours a day, several days a week. During this it is practically completely quiet. Whatever it cuts off it just leaves on the grass. Since it is permanently cutting that’s not an issue at all and not even noticeable.

It basically drives around randomly, but maybe has features like focusing on a certain area when it encounters especially thick grass somewhere. (I think newer ones have GPS, too, but this hasn’t really been necessary at all in my parent’s case.)

The mower will automatically shut down when it bumps into something (and it will try to find another way around it) and it will also stop when lifted up.

My parent’s robot always found back to its charging station on its own this summer, except those couple times it got stuck when they were still experimenting with boundaries. And that’s despite my parents having a quite complicated and large garden.

The result is a lawn that looks better than ever before (basically always like it was just mowed) and extremely even. Also, my parents can now focus on the gardening they actually enjoy (and they aren’t the youngest anymore, which is not ideal if you have to mow a huge garden manually).

I don’t think I would want this robot driving around with a toddler on the lawn, but that’s about it.

This problem is solved and robots do an excellent job.

(Here is the brand of robot my parents use: http://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/robotic-mowers/husqvarn... There are many others.)
It seems to be waiting for touch end. I expect mobile sliders start dragging on touch start and only navigate if released past some threshold.
I don't see how you can not see that the two situations are similar. Note: similar, not identical. Google stole a name that was already being used in the exact same domain (programming language). Nobody said they borrowed the same syntax or anything, that isn't the point.

And I don't really see the problem there

And that is the problem. People don't care about somebody just coming along and arbitrarily usurping a name somebody else is already using. Of course they may see it differently one day when the shoe is on the other foot. But for now, there seems to be a trend where people don't care about resolving name collisions... and even more so if they're a rich entity like Google or Apple.
But is cancer as inexorable as aging? Nobody is going to live past 100 due to cellular degradation. What is the actual mortality from cancer?

I read once that if we didn't get old, death due to accidents would make the mean lifetime 800 years. I wonder what cancer does to that figure.
iCloud hacker would have warned apple had it provided a bug bounty
I built this free, online, no-registration tool to practise verb conjugations in French, Latin, and Italian. It is designed to replace pen-and-paper conjugation tables and to track your performance.

It is a work in progress (I want to expand to German and maybe Spanish) but the system is pretty much done, all it's missing is a few tweaks to the language sets (to better reflect current teaching practices) and some extra features for greater customisation. I also intend to add more detailed statistics tracking, such as your performance for specific verbs.

This is a one-man project and I would love any and all feedback, not just on the implementation but on the concept as well. To my mind it is a study aid for students and independent learners - if you have thoughts on why you would or wouldn't use it over the long term, I'd love to hear them.
I've slowly been able to train my coworkers to use https://ezcrypt.it/ when sharing secrets rather than putting them directly into untrusted chat. Works great.
At this point, methinks there is not the top-down passion for unity that would stop secession. If those wanting out are sufficiently unified and intend to impose a new order by sheer will (a la "consent of the governed"), the central gov't will not have the will to maintain/restore status quo thru force.

I actually expect some morning radio stations in the southwest USA will declare "it's time for Azltan's independence", millions will simultaneously just refuse to comply with existing sociopolitical infrastructure, and those in authority will simply have no idea what to do about it - or may even support it, given the developing tribalism. We'd lose about half the land of at least three states in the process. Individual states not having their own armed militia, they could not stop it (the "National Guard" troops of each state can, and would, be "called out" by the central gov't as a trump move for purposes to defuse their influence). Things would get very tense, but separation would ultimately be peaceful.

Texas has long been considered to have some ill-understood legal standing to ease secession (being the only state to volunteer for annexation as a former independent country), but I don't see that actually happening. It's akin to an oft-angry spouse who frequently threatens divorce but never actually will.
As a hosting provider, we also see our fair share of fraud. It's truly amazing at to me how many fraudulent CCs are attempted. I can't detect 100% -- but pretty close. I've also made suggestions to stripe with a similar response.

Stripe provides a fingerprint, and it would be nice if stripe provided a service to rate/track various card fingerprints and receive a score when adding/authorizing a card -- or develop some community based feedback scoring system with feedback from companies like ours!
Thanks for taking the time to look at the site. You're right, of course, and improving the narrative is essential. It's something we'd like to do.

We're not experts at everything though. We can create some guides with improved annotations, we are also trying to get the word out that the site can be a place where tinkerers can go to author their reverse engineering posts. We have some functionality that sets us apart from blog software, like hover-over photo notes and the ability to tag notes as "components" which makes them searchable (if you want to find something containing an MSP430, it becomes a query away: https://www.takeitapart.com/search?q=c%3Amsp430). On guide pages themselves, components link to Octopart for datasheet and distributor information. And the authoring process was designed to be as easy as possible for making photo-centered guides. It's easy to bulk-upload images; crop, rotate, and sort them; and add annotations right on the site.

Beyond clever reverse engineering posts, I'd like to see more general posts that show visitors how simple things work. Mechanical, electronic, and software understanding is common among the HN crowd, but it's far from universal, and we want it to be a place where kids and adults can also go to learn how things work, virtually, without picking up a screwdriver. Along that line, we have been looking to partner with local appliance shops to create maintenance and repair guides for washing machines, etc., but it has been difficult to find a company willing to work with us. Any ideas about companies or groups who might be amenable?
It wouldn't "ensure" it in the formal sense of the word, but in a system with actual competition, actors generally can't get away with "charging ransom".
Congrats to the Meldiun team! Nice job guys.
I highly doubt that banks really care about "customer frustration." If they did, then they would be focused on fixing a million different existing problems.
It will also set a good example of how it's possible to handle nationalist movements, particularly if Scotland becomes independent, and would give the UK and Scottish governments a lot of clout when mediating nationalist disputes in future.
Venteo – Every picture taken at an event in one album
Open-Exchange:Open Source Encrypted Email and Collaboration Server
Computational Theology
Wait for his TED2023 talk ;).

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2BxH-xwc9M )
How long until you get a reference implementation that supports VoIP?
Do you have any evidence of that? I thought most antibiotics used on farm animals were already not commonly used on humans?
If people live longer and the fertility rate stays the same, it's an interesting question about what effect that would have on the population - if you have children at 30-40, and live until 100 rather than until 70, you're certainly not getting any exponential growth pattern as a result.
"Music Finder"

You open an app. You're played three different pieces of music. You're asked which one you like best. The program branches and plays you three more pieces of music. Again they're different but from a more similar selection.

At each point you can highlight bits of music to go back to - to buy that music or to start the chain from that point.

One example would have this tightly connected to one particular publisher's catalogue.

It would eventually teach about music, giving comprehensive sleeve notes about the composer or the piece of music or the history or music theory or etc.
I have 4 close German friends, 1 MS Math, 2 PhD Math, 1 PhD Physics who all completed their terminal degree at the same university as me.

3 of them decided to go back to Germany mainly for the vacation culture. All big travelers with no interest in the US work environment. The 4th integrated into American culture more but is also the biggest traveler. While he wants to go back to Germany, he is currently working in the US because he says he still doesn't know what he wants to do and he doesn't think he could get away with that lack of direction anywhere else but the US.

For completeness, hes one of the phd maths and does research for an acturial software company. But he will be switching to something else soon.

You may like that the physics guy was doing post doc in the US and then decided to bail and joined a telecom consulting company in Germany. That's not as unrelated as chem to finance but for him it was a huge switch. The company was just willing to take on a long ramp-up time and teach him.
Why Quitting Is Winning
It is the only one with a "Retina-like" price.
Radar vision maps Napa Valley earthquake
That's it! That's the mower I've been waiting all my life for!
How fast does it go? What's it powered by? I imagined when this got invented it'd go real slow, and be solar powered so it never had to stop. But this one is cool too.
Concrete 3D Printer Used to Build Castle…in Minnesota
This is true, but then now you have adverts saying specifically that "we don't throttle"
Should I use a carousel?

http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aubrey+de+grey+talks+at+google
Is there a way to pay for more up to date imagery? Perhaps more populated areas are imaged more frequently?
That's the "profit" number which is useful and much lower than people expect, but not what people normally use when describing the size of an industry.
I actually wonder sometimes how much damage we did to ourselves by creating various popular science fiction shows. As people can't help but believe Hollywood ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic ), I wonder how many people feel subconsciously that space travel is easy, so if ruin this planet, we can just go and find another one.
Good point. Or the startup could just sell drones to roofers, with software to cover a neighborhood automatically.
i'm afraid i gave up on telescope once i tried it on a mobile browser, i was dissapointed.
This presentation from Etsy's Lara Swanson is pretty strongly in the "performance matters" camp: http://laraswanson.com/design/
This was advice given to me by a contract and intellectual property lawyer. Take it as you will.

I've been in this business 25 years and I've been around the block many times with many clients. One thing I've learned over the years is that there is no standard paper. All contracts are written to protect the person or entity that wrote them. Don't kid yourself, if you blindly sign them just because they're "standard paper", you're the fool.

...As for not "lawyering up", just because you're a contract developer with "only" (for example) $25,000 in unpaid receivables... it seems to me that only someone looking to avoid paying their bills by unfair tactics would make such statements... someone who would definitely put their "standard paper" and lawyers in the way of making said payments.
I hadn't seen Khan Academy's Reverse Engineering section. It's awesome! Thank you!

And we do support video uploads. They go straight to a user's YouTube account from our site, via OAuth, and are subsequently embedded. I'm far from a videographer though, so there aren't very many on the site currently. I've mostly been using them to illustrate particular steps more clearly (ex. https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/92 ).
Goldman Sachs: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...
I can agree with most of this, and can relate in a recent discussion with some hired developers regarding use of tabs/spaces, indentation and code review.

They were definitely in the "GSD"-camp, where the output is all that matters, regardless of the complete mess their code was to look at and understand.

It's good to see that others with the same mindset exist out there.
Real Python is now updated for Django 1.7
That's not true (about the recent years) - there has been a lot of lobbying spent by the telcos and big cable for at least the past 10 years. Every time someone influenced by their lobbyists have tried to bring a bill to Congress to authorize them to charge for consumption, Congressmen have found that it was an immensely unpopular action and it would fail. The only reason why the actual charging started happening recently is because the FCC lost a court battle stating that with how they chose to regulate companies, they did not have the authority to impose net neutrality.
They're owned by EA games now. So you never know...
I don't really like the term middle man for this. They repackage and sell a service. They have solved a problem better than anyone else. That is real value.

Just because the product or service is a derivative of something else doesn't mean it doesn't have real value. Fantasy football, for example. Should we look at fantasy football sites because they just repackage NFL stats?

In this situation, we should just let AT&T/Bell dictate all things internet, since they laid the foundation with their lines. I think the point has some weight, but there's a lot more at stake than a simple service fee.
I find it rather ironic that people who suddenly care about net neutrality actually saw nothing wrong with the Fairness Doctrine.

Just in case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
"Blind Lego Watchmaker" - lego biomorphs.

Dawkins' book "the Blind Watchmaker" introduced "biomorphs". These are intended to show the power of repeated random change and selection. He uses a small computer program to draw six images composed of lines. The user selects one and the program redraws another six images, making small changes based on the image the user choses. This is repeated many times.

The new version is pretty similar except it uses Lego pieces instead of lines.
One man's hubris is another's refusal to keep being bullied by other humans.

It's sad that throughout history, most humans are just willing to let fellow humans lie down and die at the hands of a powerful few.
> But it's not possible to write a CFG for Markdown because of Markdown's requirement that anything is valid input.

Honest question here: how do CFGs prevent you from parsing anything as valid input? E.g. AFAICT this CFG in BNF accepts anything as valid input (including no input!)


 ::= <x> EOF
| EOF

<x> ::= CHAR <x>
| CHAR

Isn't it just a problem of crafting a proper grammar which covers all cases? I can see why HTML needs other parsing strategies, but it should be easy for Markdown since everything that is not a non-paragraph is a paragraph (or a blank line, i.e. a paragraph separator).

Also, isn't there a compromise between HTML's crazy parsing strategy and a CFG? A formal grammar, even if not context-free.
Indeed. I can't see the rest of the country being happy with a limbo that ends up giving Scotland ever more powers in order to prevent a by then meaningless "No" in the next round while they all live in statusquoville. Combined with the apparent rise of UKIP the situation is all looking to be a bit of a mess.

The SNP may have successfully engineered the divisive conditions that the Parti Quebecois never quite managed, with the PQ example being that the uncertainty is almost more damaging than what is being debated.
Great!, codes are shorter than on ubicate.me, the main difference is that Location Aware Names try to use the encoding as names , did you see Location Aware Street Names on slide 44?
Bootstrap themes and templates marketplace
The current state of the CGO interface is that you can't safely pass Go pointers to C code. That's all this document is repeating. You may have used this successfully in the past, I know I have, and it works with the GC toolchain, but it is still technically incorrect to do so.

I think there's another design doc being worked on that will document the situation, and possibly have proposals to make sharing memory between Go and C more convenient. There's are many projects that make heavy use of this, where copying is slow or infeasible, and malloc is inconvenient.
Well if you reread what I wrote you'd see I wrote that you should probably learn some asm, it just doesn't need to be x64 asm.
The "E" (Engineering) part of STEM is high paying but the pay for "S" (Science) sucks because there is insufficient market/demand relative to the supply of Phds.
You should be able to easily dispute charges at a "big box store" that were not chip-and-pin transactions, and that did not use the three-digit security extension to the number.

I've had a chip card for, what, some seven or eight years in Canada.

Here is a July 2007 story about how RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) logged 10 million chip transactions:

http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/14243/rbc-marks-10-million-w...

"RBC today announced it recently surpassed over
10 million successful chip transactions at compatible merchant locations in
Canada and worldwide. This milestone comes four years after RBC became the
first Canadian financial institution to begin issuing chip cards nationally to
its Platinum Avion Visa cardholders in 2003."
looks really cool. I can also recommend
www.stock-image-point.com

I use these images for viral campaigns because the images looks more private and not photoshopped. It works better ;)
Battlestar Galactica is not at fault here, just a future reality in some respects.
I'm optimistic that we'll find a solution - "community broadband", "shared WiFi" etc.

The problems we are seeing are because corporations are already failing as an infrastructure.
Grats Meldium!
Consumers are already paying for their internet connection that cost billions for ISPs to roll out. Now ISPs want to charge both parties, and that is wrong.

Do you remember life before Netflix? Incredible you would say they don't bring much value.
Meldium is an amazing tool. We use it at Screenhero and it's been indispensable. The acquisition makes perfect sense, since Meldium truly does "LogMeIn"! Congrats to the amazing team behind Meldium!
Made a jsfiddle where you can see the ant move and die (crash) after building the highway for a while.

http://jsfiddle.net/zuu7bd2e/
> So I'd suggest that net neutrality is actually a side show here, the real culprit is monopolies.

If you mean why not excluded premiums from taxation for all health insurance (with the same limits applied to the pre-tax status of employer-paid health insurance premiums), that's probably a good idea.

(Of course, a substantial number of individual purchasers get better tax treatment as individual purchasers through the ACA exchanges by way of the tax credit for premiums.)

> Would you not agree that treating all citizens equally, and giving them the freedom to choose how and where they get their healthcare would be an improvement on the current system?

I'd agree that not tax-favoring employer-paid premiums over individually-paid premiums would be an improvement over the current system. If you have problems with other distinctions that exist in the status quo, I'd prefer to discuss them specifically rather than generally.
If you fight against humans, it's usually not called hubris but fighting for your freedom and a right to live. I just think we should call it the same if our enemy is not a man, but the Grim Reaper himself.
That happened to me too. I was just wondering why LogMeIn would acquire Medium, and why Medium would take the offer.
Looks great. I don't know why I didn't know about these yet (well, most likely because I live in an apartment with no lawn), but thanks to you and patrickk in this thread I do. (His video link is very informative, btw).

A robo-mower would have indeed made a better housewarming gift for my sister than the cordless Dyson I bought her (same as mine)... although it would have set me back $2,300 instead of $300.

Still, very cool.

OK floors and lawns, ✓ DONE! Next somebody please point me to the already-existing window-washing robot.
No, that was only Steve Jobs and now that Steve Jobs is dead, there is no evil!
I like it too. When shopping I like direct comparisons like this, ones that I can sort based on my criteria.
My Roomba is (according to the specs online) 3.6" tall.

I'm trying to imagine the Roomba height in relation to the couch and tables... Another inch or 2 might be a deal breaker for me.
That's good to know. And Socket.IO could move back to WebSocket-first approach, once the technology becomes more pervasive. It's still a task to set up Socket.IO with Python though. Don't know how nice it plays with Node.js, but I'm happy moving to Go instead.
What is the "3 forms of ID" Supreme Court ruling the person in the video referred to? I wasn't familiar with that one....
I was thinking about a minority reports type desktop in VR.
my concern is, who is uncompetitive?

Comcast, the bane of reddit's technology sub and elsewhere is the only choice for real high speed internet I have. the phone company? They don't care, they did not and are not offering to increase speeds to compete.

How would transforming this all to utilities solve it? If anything I would never seen any improvement, well unless I lived on the same route as an important politician. Where would the incentive be to ever serve outlying areas with high speed networks? Would changes prevent cherry picking which neighborhoods get access? Are we just going to regulate ourselves mediocrity? Besides lack of will, there will endless money spent on litigation.
The corners of the container switch to square before transition and then back to round.
Check out SockJS which has a properly tested/supported Python server https://github.com/mrjoes/sockjs-tornado
I'm definitely not pointing at BSG. I was thinking more about Star Trek, et al. (which I absolutely love, but then again I can feel the availability heuristic working in my head when I think of space travel).
Have you tried https://hired.com/ ?
It seems nice, but right clicking and selecting "View background image" doesn't always give me the current image. I use this so many times a day. I'd imagine breaking this on one of my websites might piss my users.

Edit: Forgot to say, I'm using Firefox 32.0 on Linux x64.