skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before graphics cards were standard, very few games supported them. Eventually more and more games started supporting specific cards, and then people started buying the cards. Today virtually all games support them, and if you have a gaming PC, you have a card.

While the Oculus still looks to be competitively better, seeing the market expand can only be a positive signal for VR.
Maybe I've missed something but where is the exaggeration in the headline	'Methylphenidate Exposure Induces Dopamine Neuron Loss in Mice '? You mean it doesn't and they're wrong?
> Is the rate of lack of use of bank accounts ever likely to be public knowledge? There's zero incentive on the banks' side to publicise that kind of information.

Public authorities can estimate this (FDIC in the U.S. has done so) and general trends should be evident (if half of previously unbanked Indians get bank accounts we won't need banks to tell us).

But fair - just the rate of Bitcoin wallet creation then? Maybe compare to global/country population growth.
AFAIK Erlang doesn't even warn you if you call blocking C code. The way Quasar does it is as follows: every time a fiber becomes runnable, it has a counter incremented. Every once in a while (I think 100ms) a special (kernel) thread goes over all FJ's worker threads and takes note of the fiber each is currently running and its counter (this requires some memory fences, but we take advantage of those already found in Quasar, so there's no added overhead). If it encounters the same fiber, with the same count twice, you've got a "runaway fiber", that's either blocking, or spinning too long. You can further examine the thread's state to see if it's blocked or not, to figure out which of the two things is happening.

Just to clarify: it's perfectly OK to call blocking code on Quasar fibers. In fact, it's encouraged. But the blocking call must be "fiber aware", and there's a project called Comsat, that takes many popular Java libraries and makes them fiber-blocking without changing their APIs.

This leads me to another point, which is time-slice based preemption of fibers. That's a feature Quasar had early in it's evolution, but has since been taken out (Quasar is preemptive, but doesn't offer time-slice scheduling). The reason is that time-slice scheduling is great when you have hundreds of threads running, but quite terrible when you have a million, because it means that the threads (lightweight or not) constantly compete for CPU cycles that the CPU just can't keep up with. In Java, plain threads are still available (with the same API as fibers, i.e. new Thread vs. new Fiber etc.), so for long-running computations, you're better off using a kernel thread; work-stealing scheduler aren't great at scheduling such tasks anyway. In Erlang, you don't have access to kernel threads, so time-slice scheduling is necessary to support the occasional heavy-computation process.
Context: I lived in Lisbon four years and know one of the founders of Unbabel. I do not know you, neither your story.

Regarding your comments:

> That's one thing I really hated about Portugal, they just don't offer any information in English

>Thanks, but from the experience I had with both my employer and my landlord in Portugal I'd rather not do business with any Portuguese people ever again. Sorry.

>it does seem like fucking people over is business as usual in Portugal

>Have you had any experience with the Portuguese state or legal system? I'd probably still be standing in a queue somewhere.

Blaming the whole country for a 90 day experience does not seem very proportional to me.

Again, I do not know your story and can not speak for the veracity of your facts. What I do know is Lisbon (and I have lived many years in Spain and Germany to compare with). From that I know that you are just being, at best, exaggerated and I wonder if you have been exaggerating other stuff too.
Sounds like it fills a need effectively for the Disposable Income San Francisco Dweller.

But "everyone" has got to be misleading, right? No way this is cost-effective for someone whose shipping margins are thin like an eBay seller.

And there is no way to scale this across the country without essentially needing a warehouse full of packers, at which point you are basically in Amazon territory competing with them at their own game.

I guess this can be successful as long as the company stays small.
> Specifically: why do so many people ban web crawlers other than the "large" ones,

Never heard of this. Third party crawlers usually get banned because they are poorly made (get stuck) or disobey robots.txt.
Alright, I submitted it again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263848

I had submitted it twice before, but it got few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157645 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8030337 It is hard to find a short title that succinctly describes the concept.

ufmace: I think writing a browser extension that configures filters + auto-responders on some popular webmails (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) would work best to entice users to adopt the technology. As I explained, many webmails already have all the necessary features to implement the concept (see FAQ 1 at http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76). Also, writing a smartphone app to do the same for mobile users would help. There is really no need to launch and run a full-blown webmail service.
Personally, I would never hire anyone who sides with the painting aspect.

Why?

Software development needs structure, and it needs it to guarantee maintainability, quality, testabiliy, readability. Art doesn't need any structure, it is subject to interpretation, personal interpretation which is horrible to read, understand and maintain.

Regarding the example in the article, what 'Andy' does is good solutions engineering by asking the right question (why?), but not software development.

So the example premise that Andy managed to realize (not: develop) a requirement in 20min instead of two weeks does not support any conclusion about anything in software development.
This seems like such a neat, simple idea. Perfect for integration with IFTTT or similar.

I'm a little surprised that nothing like this exists already. I can see how you could easily build one yourself. But that doesn't give you the IFTTT ecosystem, which is probably good for less technical users.
> clears the same bar that we set for social science in general.

This may be true, but that doesn't mean all social science is equivalent to parapyschology. Lots of it may go much higher than just "clearing the same bar".

It would be a pretty bad test that you could pass by scoring a 5% on. And a score of 99% passes that. That doesn't mean the 99% is a bad score.
Detroit-Area Man Gets 17 Years in Porch Shooting
You know what this is going to be great for? Travelling.

I'm facing a flight from Scotland to Australia in December where I'm going to be sat in economy class on a no-frills Air-China flight for god-only-knows how long, and my options to distract myself are currently either read a book on my kindle, or play or watch something on the iPad. I would kill for one of these.

The problems with my existing options are that I can be distracted by seeing people moving around next to me, or I can check my watch absent mindedly, or one of many things might happen that could bring me back into the reality of being sandwiched into a sweaty tin can. Time can pass very slowly when you're travelling.

VR on the other hand completely transports your mind to a place where time isn't really relevant anymore. You need to block out all of your surroundings to really make it work, which means no seeing other passengers get up for toilet breaks, no listening to the engine buzzing along as you read. If I could put this headset on with a decent pair of headphones, and all of a sudden be flying around space in some mobile equivalent of Elite:Dangerous or watching a movie in properly immersive 3D then time would just speed by and my flight wouldn't be so bloody awful.

I've got an Oculus DK2, but I sadly can't lug my beast of a desktop PC on to a flight with me to power it. In terms of being the VR headset of choice for gamers, I'm pretty convinced that Sony will eventually win that battle with their PS4 Project Morpheus headset. This won't compete with either of those two excellent experiences, but I think that as a traveling accessory at least, a wireless headset that uses your phone as a screen could be a god-send.
"Harri summoned an 11 member crack team around him, with the mission of bringing the increasing power of the Internet of Everything to reach everybody's reach. In September 2013 they started making the bttn a reality. Deliveries will start in October 2014."

11 people set out to build a standalone button that costs 100$... Am I missing something? Is this satire? Great idea, would love to buy one but both price and team strength seem to be off by factor of 10.
I agree with mnw21cam's assessment of your charging circuit.

I have a Toughbook and a Thinkpad that have been continuously plugged in for many, many, many years.
It's true that Erlang has some capabilities of preemption, but now we're getting into an altogether more interesting range of details.

Erlang is still essentially cooperative and not preemptive, if I've understood my reading. That means the BEAM VM is doing something very similar to the style of instrumentation Quasar is doing: it injects yields into your code at points it thinks are reasonable. This is not quite the same thing as true preemptive scheduling as OS-native threads do. Quasar could do this kind of safepoint injection as well, though afaik that's not currently a feature.

Your definition of ponies and mine seems to diverge here, and that's fine :) I agree that true preemptibility is an even higher bar we can hold scheduling frameworks to. But it's also a very complicated area to get into, it's not completely without it's tradeoffs (full preemptibility pretty much gets us back to OS native threads, right? and there's very real performance reasons there's so much momentum away from that right now), and I also feel that I can get a lot done with green threads without these features. Maybe we'll see a growing swing towards safepoint injection for psuedopreemptibility -- I'm just making words up at this point, as far as I know; if there's a better existing terminology for these shades of grey I'd love a link -- in the coming years. I don't know where I place my bets on that, yet.

EDIT: this also appears to have been discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962838
> It's been this way for 70+ years now. The "free market economy," then as now, turns out to be its own worst enemy.

You have it backwards. The problem that we have today is a result of not letting the free market be free 70+ years ago. The article you link to says GM "forced" dealers into buying their cars during recessions despite having little chance of selling them. Bologna! They didn't force anything! The dealers had zero obligation to buy their cars. What should have happened is we should have let the free market destroy those dealers. Destroy the dealers that bought cars without being able to sell them.

And you know what? You know what would have happened if all of GM's dealers went out of business after being "forced" to buy their cars. GM would die! Good! GM needed it's dealers to sell their cars. It's a balancing act that the free market easily could have handled but the dealers and legislators took the selfish way out. We would have had direct car sales decades ago if it wasn't for anti-free-market legislation.

The moral of the story, let the free market be free and avoid the shit show that will always without fail happen as a result. (See: Uber)
Except, the lies created by abusing statistics are pernicious and more difficult to exterminate.
It's a false premise - the "Rich American" has a duty to help those who are less fortunate (poor Africans), and that duty extends further than just quid pro quo transactions.
If all you need is _land_, there is plenty of cheap land in the US. But you just have to live away from the big population centers. But then if you are going to be self sustaining, you don't need to near a big population center.
You can't use progn for the handlers, because they need to be separate forms. So there's no other good way to do it.
I think 'mobile device' in the case of construction sites may be a rather broader term.
Bosses, don't let employees use public clouds
Critical Vulnerability in Popular WordPress Plugin
Soooo you're still using a cloud service to sync your passwords, right?
Err, I feel you are missing the point. The button itself costs $5. Removing the vowels is the expensive part. Bttns take research, you know.
Absolutely -- but I listed functional equivalents for less than half the price.
"Turning a knob to switch devices seems terrible."

I was thinking it was kind of brilliant. Easy to do, easy to see which device you're talking to at a glance (especially if you have it labelled.)
Who knows? They both have patents on the same exact goods/services category.

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4808:lt2...

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:16h...
You're not buying a button. You're buying access to the backend. Admittedly, most HN readers don't need that stuff and could write their own.
> The bttn is based on some pretty cool patent-pending inventions.

Please enlighten me as to what on earth is novel (in the patent language sense) about a button on the internet.
Looks like a joke.
Video Conferencing Now an Indispensable Tool for HR-specialists
The problem with this is the universe is no longer causal. Events can happen which cause themselves. It requires you to try every possible universe and then "throw away" the ones that aren't consistent. And if you simulate a universe, doesn't it cause that universe to exist, even if you later decide you don't like it? Who is to say we don't exist in one of the many "throw away" universes vs the one where the particle causes itself to be consistent.

More on that here:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/fok/causal_universes/
You still have to do it manually I think. Having a standardized API to change passwords (a "Rotate all my passwords" buttons) would be nice, but potentially a huge step forward in automating password attacks.
Yep, utter madness. It includes a GSM module and SIM card slot, amongst other unnecessary things. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they will be of use to some, but most aren't going to set up a cell account for a button. They really need to make a cheaper model without it. I'd hope for three variants:

- a really cheap USB one

- a more expensive Wi-Fi one

- a $99 Wi-Fi and GSM one.
Very often there is more to it than money: A single holdout can make a development less profitable/unprofitable. That reduces the bargaining power of his/her neighbours, who may be eager to move to better accommodation. Then you have a big fight that can last a decade or longer.

See this documentary:
http://english.cntv.cn/2014/07/19/VIDE1405753920238884.shtml
Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer to Retire in Summer of 2015
If you need amazon like shipping, you can do fulfillment by amazon where you pay them to keep your products in their warehouse, and then they ship as directed.

Obviously competition is good, but I wonder what they offer beyond not being amazon

----

After reading the article, it seems like the main unique offering is that they actually Pack your item, and take them from your home.

Seems like the article glosses over this aspect, focusing more on how they compare to amazon or other startups.
Geo-Origins – Fixing Location-Based Triggers (iBeacons, RFID, etc.)
Looks interesting, trying it out now! First (tiny) bump in the road: the "Get Started!" link on the Pricing page doesn't work.
This has huge potential. Very simple, very discreet, especially the 'dead man switch' option.

For price, this could be re-produced for $3-4 on a low production scale, say 10000 pieces.
The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.
A self enclosed device to connect to the internet in a user configurable way through a web interface is certainly non-trivial.
well, just an anecdote: back in 'the days' I used amphetamines (or whatever was supposed to be in the speed I bought from my dealer) for a couple of months, then quit it because it's disastrous for your body and switched to Ritalin for another couple of months because the amphetamine addiction was hard to cope with. And because Ritalin has very, very similar effects, including the side-effects like tremors and teeth grinding. So I was living the same sped up and fucked up life after all. Then I quit all of it which was followed by severe depression, while I never had such problems before that period of abuse. Depression, which afaik has been linked to dopamine functioning. Depression, which even years after the facts still sometimes wants to kick in. I'd almost say something is borken in my brain. Now I read an article saying use of MP might yield damage to dopamine neurons. Hey, sounds familiar. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's the same, but just using the fact that dosages in this study were way higher than what you normally use on your kids for instance means there's nothing to worry about seems a bit far fetched.
Developer: Is the job for someone who spends their days doing timed code quizzes?

If it is then it is acceptable. If it isn't then it seems asinine.

For me myself, if I had a literal clock there ticking down then it will take me twice as long and I'll do a much worse job. There's a lot of people who cannot program under high stress situations like that (and a job interview is naturally quite stressful already). So expect to dismiss a lot of otherwise great candidates.

Maybe the interview process should be based around the job you're employing them for rather than for trivial games that only test someone's abilities at completing those exact type of task. Crazy I know, but maybe just maybe it makes sense.
Can't believe the only examples and use cases are at the very bottom of the page in the testimonials.
Why do you think Sony will win?
Then what's the point of using DDG, when it can't give the results, tailored as per my needs!
GitHub contributions calendar hack: “I ♥ Octocats”
Invitations and other handy stuff for events
Both. I remember the Plangrid team carrying around an actual paper binder for construction blueprints during YC. The thing weighed more than many people could lift! From what I remember, those were blueprints for only a subset of that project.

Plangrid uses iPads and they have a large number of prominent customers listed on their website who clearly find it very useful.
A teardown last year showed the Oculus DK2 was using a Galaxy Note 3 as its screen system [0]. Being able to pull the phone out seems like a logical enough step. Though I wonder how much of the 'other stuff' like positional sensors etc they decide to include.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+Development+Kit+...
Only if you are certain there is a correct answer. If there isn't a correct answer, you just cause a paradox. It's also more likely that the machine will spontaneously fail, or the creator will get hit by a bus before he can complete it, etc.
What happens when you meet someone from GitHub
Is low-carb really the best weight loss diet?
As I wrote in the other post, this is just one idea. Don't assume there aren't better proposals by people who actually thought about it for more than a few minutes :)

That said, the many-to-many transactions don't seem a problem to me considering that homes and roads are fairly static. AirBnB alone manages 375000 people sleeping on homes owned by another dozens or hundreds of thousands of people every single night.

This kind of transaction, on the other hand, would probably just happened once a decade, if that.
Done! From TFA:

How does the bttn user know what is happening after the bttn press?

The bttn has handy feedback lights for the end user: Flashing GREEN top means successful completion of the trigger, RED means error, and a circling YELLOW means wait. Pretty simple, really.
However, it is definitely a pain. I had to wait months and months for the car to show up. I'm not sure if there's a good way around that

What, are you saying I won't be able to upgrade to one-day shipping for $2.99?
On purely ideological grounds, I'd prefer to use this service (or something similar) just to do my part to stop the impending and unassailable Amazon hegemony.
I think this is the money quote -- noting that these effects are noted on neurotypcial, and not on ADHD brains and therefore may or may not be generalizable:

These results can only be interpreted in the context on normal brain structure and function, and thus would have direct implications for the illicit/neurocognitive use of MPH. Since the underlying anatomy and biochemistry of ADHD has not been definitively characterized, our findings may or may not be generalizable to the vast majority of humans who are properly diagnosed with ADHD and are prescribed methylphenidate. Nevertheless, this work supports studies [51], [57], [58], [59] that demonstrate that drugs shown to increase the levels of dopamine in the synaptic cleft can contribute to degenerative changes in the basal ganglia.
DRYV closes $450k seed round to launch on-demand dry cleaning across Chicago
By interopt, I meant calling python functions like they are julia functions.
Twenty states bar cities from building their own Internet
So wait... I configure the button through the bt.tn app, then press the button? Do I need to buy different buttons to do different things or go back to the app each time I need the big red button to do something else? Can I set it so it does different things at different times of the day?

I can't imagine a way this works in practice which doesn't seem slightly more complex than just using the app itself. Your presentation makes it seem as if you just press the button and magic happens. But, it's just a front end for the necessary complexity of the app itself. You have to interact with that at some point.
Isn't that what every router does?
Previous discussion about this book....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8238823
Back to School September CS
Non-trivial, but hardly novel.
Thanks. What do you think of pycall?
Thanks for the comment! To clarify, yes blueprints are large. But just like people were happy to give up the inconvenience of fold-up paper maps for google maps, construction folks are almost universally excited to give the inconvenience of cumbersome paper plans for a tablet and an app.

Interestingly, this question is the exact first question PG asked us during our initial YC interview in 2011.
Shouldn't the charging controller in the laptop stop charging the battery once the battery is at full charge?

It seems to me that a great many folks leave their laptops plugged in for weeks or months at a time, and that this would be something that a laptop designer would account for.

(Anecdata: The six-ish year old battery in my primary laptop still holds ~60% of its original maximum charge. This laptop spends the vast majority of its time on, with the battery installed, and plugged in to an AC outlet.)
I like Electrum: https://electrum.org/

From the site: "Instant on: Your client does not download the blockchain. It uses a network of specialized servers that index the blockchain"
I thought it was the land of capitalism...
Put "autoresponder:online_identity" in the subject, you will get a reply.

I do like the blank email + HATEOAS idea.
It's the history eraser button you fool!

I just had to push it - so jolly and candy like.

It is kind of expensive so I am looking for $50,000,000.00 in VC to develop an online version. Here's the first prototype:

<button>button</button>
Its the number one mistake people make... but maybe I should tone down the repetition a little?
Typical US blueprint sizes are 18" x 24" or 24" x 36". Are you suggesting they have a large monitor or a printer onsite?