skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They did two much more impressive demos[1][2] with this technology, including drawing complex geometry using only point sprites, on DX9(no compute shaders).
It's remarkable that those five year old demos could easily do flows, shading and blending on milions of particles in real time, while this JS version starts dropping frames at 262K.

[1] Agenda Circling Forth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5w7Gh7WBjw

[2] Ceasefire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grqb1aIa_4s
Yes, I think restarting is worth the trouble.
Very rarely do I read every word in an article posted here, but this was one of those times and I'm glad I did. The article itself was very well written. You could feel the tension engineers must feel and the mind-numbing scale of the project. I think it captured the atmosphere at ITER very well; a mix of impending doom and unescapable existential claustrophobia counterpoised by a sense of mission.
It, of course, can't be done practically speaking.

That's one of the the basic failings of all the true free market capitalists (at least the ones who really believe in it and aren't just using the idea to manipulate others the way religions do with their 'flocks').

They have this naive understanding of human nature that believes such a system could exist without corruption when history shows again and again and again (and again...) that even if you start from a system relatively free of corruption, if there are not pre-existing checks and balances (eg. meaningful government regulations) that are constantly maintained the entities who "win" at the system invariably become corrupt in order to maintain the status quo that has worked out so well for them and they begin to tilt the system in their favor. Since they won (and thus have the most resources) they are in the perfect position to influence the system to bend to them, which they invariably eventually do if given the chance.
Gone Things: Things Deleted from Thingiverse.com
I must have missed the part where Rockstar Games is engaged in electioneering at all, much less with Grand Theft Auto. Could you point me to some sources on that? As it stands, your comment has absolutely nothing to do with my statement.
These have existed since the early days of the internet, and before that in bulletin board form. In fact, many were (are?) even run by state transportation departments.
Capitalism simply means assets are owned by individuals and operated for profit. The implementation details depend on the individuals (and their values). Nothing about capitalism says anyone or thing needs to be exploited, cheated or monopolized.
Yes, there will be a new screencast series. I haven't decided yet on the pricing, but it will generally be in line with previous editions.
>if they're going to or from a hot air balloon

Seems legit...
Except the FMI flaw is only tenuously linked to the breach - with more evidence pointing away from it (i.e. timeline of how long the photos have been offered for sale, disclosures by other photo-hackers, etc) than toward it.

There was early speculation that the flaw was at fault, but no confirmation from anyone.

Go ahead though - blame that bug, because Apple.
In finance it has long been known that diversity in a portfolio can often trump the performance/ability in a particular stock.

Turns out, you can see portfolio theory popping up outside of financial markets, not only in assembling a team, but also advertising campaigns, ant colonies and bacterial colonies.

And yes, I know that the linked article debunks a paper that abuses math... It's just that portfolio theory is at least an analogy to understand why diversity can trump ability. Within reason.
Richard Feynman has some relevant thoughts on this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY
This is great compared to the other admin frameworks I tried, but I think you should now spend some time on UI polishing (size of the fields and filters, visual hierarchy) to make it pleasant to use without any additional customization.
> a pig on a fish on a tiger etc.

Is this a reference to something, or should I point here if I want to reference this idea?
Have you read the linked paper and the one its discussing?

I find the critique vastly more readable.
This is in Notices of the AMS, which is about as mainstream (together with SIAM Review) as mathematical publications get.

Randomization improves algorithms.

This is a contentious claim. Random choices are actually very rarely the best - they are often good enough and versatile, but they are rarely the best.

For example, consider Monte Carlo integration. You get O(N^{-1/2}) convergence. If you use a deterministic set of points explicitly designed to have low discrepancy (aka "Quasi-Monte Carlo"), you can get O(N^{-1 + logarithmic stuff}) convergence.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/adversarial_bandit_is...

Eliezer Yudkowsky also wrote a great critique of this issue, though I can't find it right now.
The case was all about money. CU wanted to pay to advertise and broadcast it on TV. How the movie was made is immaterial.
>they don't charge individual riders for a shared ride,

Yes, they do. TVCs at Google [1] have to pay $1.50 each way when they ride the bus.

[1] their term for temps, vendors, and contractors
Hmm I remember the blue ride-share info signs out on the highway years ago. but doing a web search cant seem to find info on them. Was wondering if there was any info in there about carpools sharing gas money and such... ahhh, here it is:

http://www.rideshare.511.org/
How does this differ from asp.vnext's kpm?
> After the FEC has silenced all the little guys who dare criticize a candidate, do you really think the Kochs will be reduced to normal private citizens?

Exactly. People vastly misunderstand Citizens United.

Fox News is Rupert Murdoch buying airtime in bulk for his political speech. Unless you propose to shut it down along with every other privately owned media company, money is speech.
There is also a follow-up demo by the same author called Disintegration, with skinned animated mesh driving particles:

http://david.li/disintegration/
Yes, I may be exaggerating but that's what I'm saying; -- many restaurants would still have no customers even if they were the only restaurant in the world.
The site is broken. First I was getting 404 when I tried to log in. Then, after clicking the link in the email, I got to the tutorial. But whatever I click I always get back to the animation at the start. Using Safari on Yosemite PB2.
That was a different person who replied, but their explanation is correct!

Furthermore, the distinction is much more than just pedantic. Hydrogen production from electrolysis (which theoretically can be carbon neutral) is about 3x as expensive as hydrogen production from steam reformation (which realistically can't be carbon-neutral). And I'll give you one guess which method all the hydrogen articles talk about…

When put in those terms, it becomes quite obvious that the whole operation is a fossil fuel bait-and-switch.

http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/consumer/hydrogen/basics/producti...
Yahoo doesn't "barely" make money. $1.3bn to be exact.[0] You're right, Bing is subsidized, but it's not like their revenues are $0.

I appreciated your effort to add to the conversation, but "They barely do make money." followed by "Is anyone making significant money out of search" doesn't add much to the discussion.

[0]https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-...
The Myth of NSA Omnipotence
Thank you for presenting a reasonable and realistic viewpoint. Too much lately, anytime capitalism comes up on this site, we get a deluge of people just spouting left'ish wing propaganda and disparaging capitalism and capitalists.
In Google's case, yes - access to transaction data is absolutely part of the plan. Apple explicitly set their system up so they don't get that data though.

NFC payments don't have to involve smartphones, but look at what Apple Pay gets you:

- Biometric auth
- one-time numbers generated for each transaction
- multiple cards in one place
- hides your info from the vendor (and apple for that matter)

Those are pretty nice things to get from something that lets me ditch my wallet...
Yes. I think a good comparison is airlines. They generate enormous value, but because there's a lot of competition, they don't generate much in the way of profits. Another useful analogy is real estate: because it's so easy to become a real estate agent (you need business cards, people skills, and modest arithmetic skills), it's a relatively hard business to me in. I wouldn't buy into Uber right now.
That's true now, but it's a fairly recent development in Apple's history. It remains to be seen whether Apple can maintain its enviable position in the long term.
It's not so much that they're deeming it a bad thing, as that nobody bothered to consult them before going live with the service, as they are legally required to do.

If people have a problem with a service and don't get satisfaction, they (or their attorneys) typically call up the CPUC and say 'why are you letting company X get away with this?' which is why companies are supposed to apprise the CPUC of what services they're offering in advance.

I'm not a big fan of CPUC (for example I think they have far too cosy of a relationship with PG&E), but they're not making it up as they go along.
no... that would be the California DOT
Thanls for the feedback. We plan to iterate on the design soon. If you have specific examples and could provide screenshots of things you don't like or aren't functional you can send them to support [at] upmin.com

Thanks!
Hopefully they can work out the kinks under the US is ready to adopt it.
My point is that Rockstar Games is a wealthy for-profit corporation, while Citizens United is a political organization funded by individuals. The latter seems for more worthy of having free speech rights than the former.
Exactly. A company can have a monopoly on product quality, or manufacturing efficiency, not necessarily a monopoly on a vague, conventional definition of an industry.
Another example is in-n-out burger. They don't have a monopoly on hamburgers, but they do have a monopoly on their kind of hamburger (high quality/freshness, low price at scale).
Keep in mind that to achieve differentiation, Sparkfun/Adafruit etc. do build proprietary products themselves. Mostly breakout boards and other things that require low capital investment but make the components that they resell (Atmel and TI chips, etc) much easier to use for the through-hole hobbyist. If you don't do the same, you'll probably get stomped by them in the long term, but if you can build a market position in a specific country quickly enough, you can get bought by them instead.
This is awesome and really shows off the beautiful compactness of Forth.

It took me a moment to figure out what to actually do. Basically you just write a little program that produces three floating-point values from 0.0 to 1.0, and these are used as the R, G, and B channels of each pixel in the output. For example, an all-red image is:

1 0 0

And a blue-cyan-magenta rectangle is:

x y 1

You get the x and y of the current pixel with the “x” and “y” words, and you get the current time with the “t” word in order to make animations. Here’s one that continually oscillates between black and white:

: r 5 ;
: sin' sin 1 + 2 / ;
: t' t r * sin' ;
t' t' t'

(You can change the value of “r” to make it oscillate faster or slower.)

Looking at the glossary[1] and cannibalising other examples is really helpful.

[1]: http://forthsalon.appspot.com/word-list
Seems like they could just structure the "billing" of one person for full fare, then assist/force the other passengers to reimburse the paying party. Loophole?
I seem to remember something similar but used a C like language.
nothing happens when I try to register.
No disrespect to Bob Mansfield, but I do not think that he built his career on his good looks alone.
As sad as it makes me that Bell Labs no longer exists, I am glad that Bell was broken up. If it weren't for that we might still have only half a dozen different colors and two different shapes of telephone (rental only).

It seems that people don't even start to rail against monopolists until long after they've become obnoxious tyrants.

It also seems that there are plenty of other fine inventions in the world that weren't made by the benevolence of some monopolist.
I think the problem is that there are a lot of practicing capitalists that also happen to be massive assholes. It's not the capitalism that's the problem, it's the asshole part.
If laws were made with the philosophy that they must perfectly solve all aspects of a problem, there would either be no laws, or there would be complete totalitarianism. Thankfully, people rarely subscribe to absolutist philosophies once you actually get them to think about a topic.
Hosting costs for validating an idea run about $10-20/month, not $10-20K/month. Get a shared webhost or VPS and run things on a single box. Even if you are using every programming productivity trick in the book (dynamic languages, 3rd party libraries, RDBMSes, etc.), there is no reason whatsoever why serving 20-100 users should cost $100K. Google had indexed the whole web and was serving most of the Stanford campus before they got their first check for $100K.
I don't know. Usually when I see this UI widget I think "correlation and causation" over and over. It's the rare story that definitively causes or reports on other news that causes a significant change in price. In a prestigious newspaper, showing the price inline with the article devalues the content. It emphasizes the "what's in it for me" angle rather than speaking to considered learning. If I were the designer, I'd rather include those metrics at the end of the article with more context and graphs (though I have a feeling this was carefully A/B tested).

What's more is that even a few hours to a few days after a story is released, the stock price no longer has any relevance to the story since the widgets are not pegged to that point in time.
Silicondust sells some network tv tuner devices that are very usefull, I've used the home version, HDHomeRun device a few times, and it looks like thay have some big rack mounted ones that would be well suited for this sort of purpose.

http://www.silicondust.com/products/models/tech3-8us-2x4/
Will we see the Northern Lights in Seattle tonight?
I wonder if this means more Harvard students are seeking careers as devs or that Harvard students in other disciplines are looking to add programming to their repertoire?
Sounds familiar, did you colo in Pennsauken, NJ by any chance?
I'd add STM32: Spark Core with built-in WiFi for $39.
looks like fun! I've been holding out for a modern retake on the uplink series or some other fun hacking game.

one UI thing that came up for me - going through the university pages, it wasn't totally clear that the green buttons were actually a "next" button. After I read the software page, I saw the green button said "what if I need help?", thought it was a help button and decided that since I couldn't find a next button, I was free to start playing. Confusion set in when the homepage sent me back to the tutorial.

[edit] in terms of a fix, a simple &raquo; or other arrow-icon might fix this

also a few little suggestions that I hope you'll like (as I like this type of game, a lot!):

- Maybe represent the user's balance purely in BTC? the idea of paying hackers in bank transfers seems a little insecure for a security game :)

- You might run into race conditions when editing logs, depending on how it's implemented on the backend - maybe just a checkbox next to each line to quickly delete lines relevant to you? this might ruin some of the fun possibilities re. dropping other people's IPs into logs though.
Silicon Valley Has Officially Run Out of Ideas
One thing I wish NuGet would do - let me download packages directly from Github, like Bower and Grunt do. I do use Bower and Grunt with ASP.NET but usually mixed with some NuGet packages. It would be nice to have one system for all.
I also remember bar and restaurant owners saying it would devastate their industry and so on. Still waiting for that particular section of the sky to fall.
http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?cur...

Watches and wearable things are just the tip there. The issues with implants is that they are 100% against the Hippocratic oath. No doctor would ever do one if you are healthy. Implants are a long way off, and wearable enhancers may ease the road to them, however a new ethical system for doctors, or an extension of doctors without such oaths, would be required. Think about it for more than 30 minutes, it gets heeby jeeby real quick.
And why is tswartz being downvoted?

Don't know.. maybe because he thinks a law that is 20 years old was somehow written specifically to attack Uber/Lyft?
From the original post: "We use rsnapshot (..) so most of the files have a high link count."

> it is the recommended Unix procedure

I don't think it is "recommended procedure", not today. At least on GNU/Linux cp is just fine. It may have been different two decades ago for some reason: I remember a graphical file manager (called "dfm") that used piped tar back in the late 90ies [1]. I know that installing open source utilities was pretty common back then to get better programs on closed source Unixes, and tar was probably high on the priorities to install whereas cp less so, and hence tar might have in fact been better than the preinstalled cp. I haven't seen anyone in the public technical (hence primarily open source) community advocating that even for portability reasons, so I can only think of it as "perhaps historically relevant, if at all".

Your point is valid though that one could have tested it here. See rbh42's answer on this point. Although I'm not sure he's right about both tar instances requiring a hash table: if tar submits the hard linking as from a previously submitted path to the new one, then there's no need for the table. And my quick look at the transmitted data seems to contain the source path for the link. The question then becomes whether tar has a better optimized hash table (not very likely), or uses a better algorithm (see my post about "megacopy" for an attempt at the latter).

[1] It actually had a problem: it didn't put "--" between the options and the path, and promptly failed when I moved an item that had a file name starting with a minus: it was interpreted by tar as option, and in addition the file manager didn't properly check the exit codes and simply unlinked the source even though it wasn't copied. The tools before GNU may really have been wanting: his failure to use "--" may have been caused by some contemporary non-GNU tar not supporting it. Anyway, of course I moved on to another file manager. Those bits of mine were sacrificed to the god of superior recommended Unix procedures or something.
iPhone 6 and Apple Watch Resources
Like jitneys? They had their own share of legal troubles as well.
Wouldn't any such network need to collect a percentage of each transaction? Otherwise, what's the incentive to run the network competently?
I think your list overstates the contribution of the private sector in many of those inventions. For example, the (semiconductor) transistor was patented elsewhere before IBM invented the way to produce it. OOP existed before Xerox Smalltalk.

And while C and UNIX are widely used I don't think they were extremely innovative; they were instances of a class, not a new class itself.

Finally, it is not clear how much state support was given to these labs. At least today, Xerox Parc gets 1/3 of its funding from the government.
I think he probably means something that is a little more comprehensive and with higher visibility than the forum style ones like Craigslist or whatever.
you should probably re-read my post. your negativity contributed nothing to the conversation. your post would have been a great post without it. That was the point my gp post was trying to make.

This is probably why you got downvotes here. HN doesn't tolerate this negativity. Please keep it where it belongs, on Reddit or 4chan. thanks.
>>>>> The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.

This is missing an important detail: It still has to be a product that somebody wants to pay for. Even a monopoly could have a zero or negative profit.

>>>>> By "monopoly," I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.

i.e., the kind of company whose success can only be described thanks to hindsight.
I love it, great job guys, one suggestion though, mixing the admin logic and customisations with the model isn't a great idea, some models are already fat models, so maybe creating separate model config files would be better, thank you.
Monopolies are indistinguishable from governments at the end of the day, as they become the enforcement agency. And if capitalism, by definition, is an economic and political system not controlled by a government, then Peter Thiel is flat out wrong.

This quote by Thiel, in the article, contradicts his argument:

'By "monopoly," I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.'

Even the mere presence of "other firms" implies there is something to compare against, and as a result, that comparison is the competitive nature of capitalism. Maybe he needs to review his economic theories, but he is in the wrong and inconsistent.
So what practical solution are you proposing? Rupert Murdoch gets as much speech as he can afford to buy but some smaller entity can't buy more than some arbitrarily set small amount of airtime preceding an election?
I also wonder what the percentage of graduates they have after the four years. I'm sure a lot of people see the draw of a fun career and money, but don't know how difficult the degree is.
> most code is terrible... Few people have the aesthetic sense to write elegant code...

Elegant code does not necessarily mean readily understandable code (or "readable" code). For example, some Haskell programmers like writing extremely elegant code -- so elegant that you can base a whole new (elegant) branch of mathematics on it -- yet it is no more readable than, say, many early BASIC programs.

But why pick on Haskell? I've never seen Microsoft Word's code, but let's imagine it were the paragon of OOP design. Then, I'd like to add a feature similar to the spellchecker, that tests whether consecutive sentences rhyme. Now, I could probably find the spell-checking code rather easily, only to learn that it is attached to the main program via the most beautifully intricate plugin system -- with lifecycle management, runtime loading and unloading and whatnot -- that it takes me a few days only to learn that bit.

The point is that software is complicated, and very non-standardized. Code readability rests only in part on its structure, and a lot on how many "advanced" language features are used, the number of libraries used and their familiarity. You'll probably find "terrible" code that uses a couple of popular, mature libraries, that you're familiar with, much easier to understand than the most "elegant" polyglot codebase (written in both Python and Haskell, because, you know, the best tools were picked for each job) that makes use of 10 of the newest, shiniest libraries you've read a lot about on HN and always wanted to learn but never had the time to.
Can anyone explain how this is different from services like Super Shuttle? I get charged an individual fee, but the actual times are subject to other passengers and that can change at any time.