skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Any such small particle will turn into a floating dust when the droplet which contains it dries out. The only question is, can they survive in that form (and over what distances), such that they can land on a host and infect.

Not only does the virus have to survive drying out, but it has to be able to make it past the mucous protecting your upper respiratory tract and and infect cells there. Viruses that have evolved this capable are very specialized--most viruses are not transmitted this way.

There has never been a recorded case of a virus evolving a completely new transmission mode. We have never seen a virus that wasn't previously airborne "go airborne", and we have have no evidence that Ebola can be transmitted this way right now. In fact we have plenty evidence that it can't be transmitted this way--if it could be, there would already be millions of cases not thousands.

If Ebola were capable of the same kind of airborne transmission as measles and smallpox, previous outbreaks would already have spread around the globe and killed millions or billions of people.

There are so many things that could wipe out civilization: super volcanoes, comet impacts, nuclear war. Why should we worry about a hypothetical scenario for which there is absolutely no evidence? That doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to contain the outbreak, just that we shouldn't spend our time engaging in existential hand-wringing over unlikely, hypothetical threats.
I haven't played with iCloud, but Couchbase Lite + CouchDB on the backend has been pretty great to work with. Data sync is free and Just Works™, and thanks to Couch attachments, supports files as well. Not right for every use-case, obviously, but for keeping data in sync across devices it's been great.
I had a brief period of RSI while playing video games in my teens and forced myself to switch to Colemak as a Microsoft-style "natural" keyboard wasn't enough. The Colemak did the trick, until 2 years ago when I suddenly had terrible pain in my fingers and wrists for about two weeks. It eventually disappeared as I began to learn how to use an Kinesis keyboard and experimented with an RF-based Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 or a Kensington SlimBlade Trackball. Adjusting my chair and posture helped enormously also. I eventually discovered the source of the mysterious pain when I tried to solve a Rubik's Cube and it flared up again. Turns out, I'd spent the weekend before my 2 weeks of misery at a hackathon that featured Rubik's Cubes also and I'd spent time learning how to solve one. I do really want to experiment with voice, but these darn open concept offices ... As for gestures, Kinect might come in handy, it also does voice and can focus on one person of many for voice recognition. But I'd almost rather learn a custom, chorded ten-key keyboard than speak every semicolon ... Oh and the trick with the Cherry MX blue "clicky" keyboards is that you don't actually have to press as hard as people normally push the keys. Pressing harder strains your hands further, so the audible and tactile "click" feedback helps train your fingers to not push as hard -- at least, that's my two cents on them. I like it, but not enough to switch from a nicer, concave layout like the Kinesis. Makes a good backup keyboard though, as I can't afford two concave keyboards.
Actually most of them are quite consistent since POSIX published guidelines for it - and the only inconsistencies are historical exceptions:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...

(I'm not so convinced that long options are a good thing, as evidenced by the --extended-regexp/--regexp-extended and other little "was it spelt this way or that?" type of confusions. It's not hard to remember single letters, especially if they're mnemonic.)
Here's my anecdote.

I don't personally know a single person personally under the age of 32 with a Mac. For kids under 18, their parents almost universally buy them cheap $500-700 laptops at Costco. They're basically a yearly disposable item at that price (though most of those same kids have iPhones). None of my friend's kids in college seem to have changed that purchasing habit since it's pretty sensible.

If you gathered all my friends and family together with all their computers, probably <15% would have Macs. Of the people with Macs, only myself and one other person work in tech.

At my local coffeeshops, about half of the people there mess around on some kind of tablet, of the other half, most (maybe 90%) are on corporate Windows machines or Surface tablets (they're really popular around here with the corporate sales types for some reason). And then I and maybe 1 other guy or a college aged kid with a 3 generation old used Macbook are the only people running any version of OS X.

I use a Mac because it's what my work issued to me - a West Coast based startup btw. I'm about to change companies soon and I already know my new place is going to issue me a Windows machine.

I live in the wealthiest town in the wealthiest county in the United States. Most of the neighboring counties are also in the top 10. My county is also in the regional home to one of the 5 largest tech industries in the United States.

Welcome to the world outside of the SV bubble.
Ah nice, now that is frustrating. We just ended up fixing it, where did you find it was a bug? I find the communication between Apple and the general developer community is pretty difficult to come by (even after millions of installs of our app)
I'm completely unfamiliar with Hylang - could you please elaborate on its limitations?
Hey, I didn’t want to suggest it’s about squeezing money. You are certainly correct, Apple is much more directly involved with in-app purchases, so they also take much more ownership and responsibility for it. (Though I would also argue that this has a lot to do with the status quo. In-app purchases were quite new and there were no expectations about how to deal with them and who gets what. Credit card transactions are old and established and to get in on them you have to be competitive when it comes to fees and at least as convenient.)
IBM pays $1.5bn to offload chip unit
Synaptic – Architecture-free neural network library for Node.js and the browser
Pathological or not, ensuring that pathnames can essentially contain any byte value except the 0 terminator, and it will still work, is important to prevent surprising behaviour which often has security implications.
In your flow, how would you update a pull request branch to fix a typo? Make extra commits and normal push?

and how would you update a pull request branch to contain the latest master? Merge back and forth?

From the looks of it, this tool is made for the force-push flow, which doesn't suit you. See https://github.com/reenhanced/gitreflow/issues/52
We know the brain doesn't do "backpropogation" in the sense that backpropagation is a complete description of how the brain works. It may be a component, but there has to be much more, because what backpropogation can do is fairly well characterized mathematically now and is not sufficient to build anything like a human brain. If you haven't seen a paper that clearly spells that out, it's because it would be considered too trivially obvious a result to publish.

When we don't know how a thing works that does not preclude us being able to eliminate some of the possibilities. Our ignorance is profound, but not total.
Upgrade cycles shouldn't affect sales growth unless the upgrade cycle has gotten longer since the iPad's introduction.
I'm really starting to hate these title edits.
That there is no game-plan for doing anything any better than Coq presently does is why I'm a bit skeptical. The trimmings are nicer - nothing else as of yet.
The brain could, and likely does, individual neurons do not. Synaptic current only travels in one direction.
It's not C#, but here's Minecraft in C++ and Lua: https://github.com/minetest/minetest
The problem is that if a block updates, it triggers something like 6 additional block updates - those +/- 1 in each of the cardinal directions. These block updates in turn may generate yet more block updates.

There are two ways to make look-up or other utility calls with this fact: by either feeding in raw integer values based on the original values, or by allocating 6 additional objects. In both cases, you need to maintain your original reference position when generating the additional values, because the position is needed to generate all the values, so can't be changed to generate the first one. The integers being passed at a low level saves on the amount of objects being allocated.

This has the potential to end up generating a lot of objects in response to certain kinds of events in the game world.
I dunno, I generally consider making offensive comments to real live humans to be worse than being a Republican and mocking Mel Gibson. You do know the context of that one very offensive quote, right?

http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...
You seem to be talking past each other. He/she is saying that Ebola is not a threat to the US, which is the scope of the legal mandate of the CDC.
This is just confused. He appears, perhaps, to be using "OS" as a metaphor for "basic conceptual approaches" or maybe for "common assumptions and attitudes" -- but if that is the case it is just impossible to imagine what kind of "breakthrough" he hopes to get. Or, if it is talking about actual OS's, which one(s)? Does he even realize there are different OS's in phones, in laptops, in embedded systems? What kind of "breakthrough" does he imagine would change all of them?
Ikea Launches Standing Desks
Pretty poor examples. I reside in Colombia - you can choose spanish and Colombia on the airline websites, but it all comes down to the country where your credit card was issued. LAN simply won't let you pay the domestic price with a foreign card, you'll have to physically go to a bank and hand over cash. Avianca has one of my American cards whitelisted after actually going down to the office to pay in person, but will generally decline the transaction for foreign cards. Until you've actually submitted a transaction and had it approved .. what you see on the site doesn't matter.
First of all, sorry if I was really rude, I didn't mean that. "complaint" would be a better word instead of "cry". Sometimes my poor english embarrass me.

It's terrible, the philosophy behind the cryptocurrency would support your freedom to trade your values.
as the author mentions below, this is his effective internal model, and his sharing it simply offers the opportunity for anyone else to read it, think about it, and take and apply what works for him or her.

that said, for me, it's not so easily applicable to interactions with others, such as with Bob and Alice. for issues in my own peabrain, i can try and logically explore the bases for my emotions, my triggers, and possible alternate solutions, which i can apply at any point in a particular journey or task. i have the ability and choice to attempt to alter my own course, in terms of actions and reactions, any time i start to be plagued by and cognizant of my own discomfort. in interactions with others, however, the applicability is limited. unfortunately, it rests on having the ability to understand the complex nuances of someone else's emotional triggers, subconscious or unconscious, and having some sort of reliable heuristic to predict their reactions and digressions.

personally, i don't have an issue with the simplification to positive/negative outcomes. sort of reduces emotional processing and synaptic fires to binary code, or an electrical circuits with switches and AC current.
I agree with most of what you just said, but that doesn't really contradict what I said. I guess I could have been more verbose, but I meant to reply to:

"But once you build it out and start trying to support it..."

which suggests that the topic is something like "systems that start out elegant, pristine and pure, and slowly accrete functionality and complexity, and become brittle, unstable, and hard to maintain and support". And I posit that this applies to pretty much all software, not just "enterprise software".

I mean, there's a reason we have aphorisms and memes like Greenspun's Tenth Rule[1], Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment[2], the Turing Tarpit[3], the Inner Platform Effect, etc.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
Helm is much much better than ido mode once you get past the whole "stop hitting tab so much you shell heathen!" thing.
It's very interesting. It seems a neat solution. Anyone go further? Really work on it?
Emacs is in essence, a virtual machine: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ByteCodeEngineering. That's why you are able to do so many things with it. The whole text editor GUI is just a frontend the Lisp interpreter. You can think that Python comes with an interpreter that runs in terminal. Emacs comes with an interpreter and a whole GUI frontend for its interpreter, not merely a terminal interpreter with a prompt. That's why you are able to evaluate any Emacs Lisp code ANYWHERE.

If you only use Emacs as a text editor, that's fine for using a subset of it. Just like a casual user uses Linux without never using its underlying tools in the terminal.

> saying that Emacs is only a Lisp interpreter implies that the entirety of the text editor is implemented in Lisp, which is clearly not the case.

With this argument, I guess Python is also not an interpreter because clearly it is not entirely written in Python.
On Mac (OS NeXT, perhaps?), the convention seems to be that most commands produce human readable output by default, but you can pass a parameter like -x or -xml to get (usually) XML, machine-readable output, and with some tools, -j or -json will give you that format.

But then you've oddities like plutil behaving like gzip by modifying the file you specify rather than printing to stdout. You have to pass -o and a dash to get it to leave the file alone and instead reformat it to stdout. That one gets me every time. And I'm not alone: https://twitter.com/mavcunha/status/417823730505895936

But other parts are nice. For instance, "system_profiler -xml > MyReport.spx" generates XML that will open in the System Profiler GUI app. The XML generated is usually a Plist, since that's as native to the platform as the Registry might be to Windows...

Let me know when PowerShell gets tabs though. Maybe there's a Terminal.app port running in Mono somewhere? Seriously, I wish somebody would build a better terminal, maybe get creative with scrollback and chaining commands, and ship it in an OS... with tabs. ;-)
Flickr PARK or BIRD – Solving XKCD 1425
Betrlyfe Power Bank 10K
Social Entrepreneur Completes Seed Round via Crowdfunding
Betrlyfe 3 in 1 Premium Braided Charging Cable
I'm not sure that I really agree that a good mechanical keyboard is better than a good rubber dome keyboard for people with RSI. The key word there is "good."

The thing about rubber dome keyboards is that they are the cheapest kind of keyboard. So you'll find a lot of absolutely awful ones out there. For example, you'll find ones where the amount of force you need to push in the key is unpredictable (keys feel "sticky"). You'll find ones where it takes too much time for the keys to come back up after they're pushed down. You'll find keyboards that have almost no weight, so you can't type without moving around the keyboard.

In contrast, people pay $100-$200 for a mechanical keyboard (they are a specialty item) and the build quality reflects that. For that money, you usually get something which has a weight in it (so it doesn't feel like you're typing on a hollow plastic shell), has reasonable ergonomics, and key action that is at least tolerable.

I find that I am a heavy typer (I press the keys hard) and I could never get used to mechanical keyboards. I was always "bottoming out." Unfortunately, the hard stop on a mechanical is even harder than the hard stop on a rubber dome. It's like hitting a wall. There are mods you can make to mechanicals to fix this, but you have to do it yourself. (For example, you can put rubber bands underneath each key, to get a more gradual stop when you bottom out.)

Right now I use a good quality rubber dome keyboard with an included trackpad. I find that keeping the keyboard in the correct position on my lap is a lot easier when I don't need a keyboard tray. It really is all about ergonomics.

My advice to you would be to stop lifting weights for a while. Just use machines or something to avoid putting pressure on your wrists. And then get a good quality keyboard. You will need to try it out before you find the right one for you. You'll probably have to order a few online before you find one you like. You will also need to start using good typing posture so be sure to research that.
Oh man. Just from looking at the title, I had a feeling your might be in the adult space. The same happened to me. We were using Mailchimp to send technical newsletters to our registered developers.

I did try speaking with someone at Mailchimp to plead our case. Unfortunately it didn't work. You might have some luck though because you're more in the health & wellness area of the industry, whereas I own an adult app store, so I'm 100% in the "porn" side of it.

There are some adult friendly newsletter services out there, but they're usually very costly. I think I saw one a few years back that was $150 a month. We've been using Amazon SES to send verification emails for new registrations, so we opted for SES for our monthly dev newsletter, neither of which have any porn or adult content in them whatsoever.
Martin Gardner, puzzle master extraordinaire
Robots Replace Theater Actors
:( That's pretty much the same response I received when I argued my case years ago.
'LulzSec leader Aush0k' found to be naughty boy not worthy of jail
Right. I was just thinking that the most straightforward, naive, approach in java was to have an array of Objects (so you'd pass around those references), and if you were going to pack everything into a more "primitive" structure (like an array of int8s) it wouldn't make much sense to marshal those into objects, but rather go for a more traditional data structure approach and stuff the complexity into some static methods... or failing that at least use some local, long-lived "proxy"-objects with raw attributes:

MyVoxel here = new MyVoxel(x,y,z,normal...);
MyVoxel there = new MyVoxel(); // "null" voxel

for // some x,y,z
here.xyz(x, y, z);
for // some offset_x,y,z
there.xyz(x+1,...)
here.distance(there) // or whatever

Which I suppose is essentially caching objects.

The idea of having lots of "new" in (inner) loops... just sounds really weird. Even outside of sub-ms-game-land. I'm guessing even assigning (as opposed to just using) primitive values to an object probably can have some nasty effects wrt. needless copying -- but it should probably be a lot more predictable than a GC hit -- possible to optimize, and might not trash CPU cache as bad as one might fear.

I suppose it's quite easy to end up in a mess when trying to do a straightforward rewrite from a static/non-java-oo style to a more java-oo-style -- without some careful thought as to what's actually going on...

[edit: looking at teamonkey's reply further down... I think I've seen some code in this style, creating lots of short-lived objects. Is it considered idiomatic java, or an anti-pattern? (or both? ;)]
Compile Time Conway's Game of Life using C++11 metaprogramming
This was an incredibly rational interview.
Think about it; biological neurons most definitely don't use backprop. Physical neurons can't backprop linearly if they forward prop nonlinearly. I think Hinton pointed this out, though almost all ANN researchers agree.

Hebbian learning .... maybe. I never thought too much about contrastive divergence.

It doesn't really matter; brains most certainly don't work like ANNs, except maybe in some weird mean field sense for a few things like liquid state machines. It would be a huge coincidence if LeCun or Hinton or whoever magically wrote down the brain equation....
I've tried helm a few times but I can never stick with it. It definitely looks impressive, but I think it takes up too much room and I end up preferring the minimalism of ido in comparison.
A few years back I used the IRS's form to report three local churches for prominently displaying candidate's promotional signs on their property. I also included photographic evidence of said signs, clearly on church property. Anecdotes be anecdotes, but I can personally guarantee that there have been at least three instances where a church has illegally promoted candidates, been reported, and yet maintained their tax-exempt status.
xargs assumes the input is composed of quoted and escaped atoms. Compare

$ printf '"foo bar"' | xargs -n1

and

$ printf '"foo" "bar"' | xargs -n1

and

$ printf "%s" '\\"foo bar\\"' | xargs -n1
I can tell you that in Roslyn it is a very important component of our optimization strategy. System.Collections.Immutable.ImmutableArray is an obvious example.

As an extremely high performance managed application that competes directly with native code, it seems to be quite a good proxy for similar applications, including Minecraft.
For any home brewers who might be interested I maintain braubuddy, a temperature control framework written in Python:

http://braubuddy.org/

It was written to scratch my own itch - I use it to maintain fermentation temperature within a certain range. Especially useful for lagers or brewing ales in the fridge in the Summertime.

It'll also publish metrics to a variety of outputs, with the next release to support Twitter, Librato, and Hosted Graphite.
CloudKit Tutorials Part 1
I recommend checking out book Coders at Work[1].

[1]: http://www.codersatwork.com
At least at this point it's accurate to about a palm sized region, and there is a cool auto scroll demo. But getting together UI and making it useable is a pretty big project.
I am reading a short story collection of Asimov compiled in a book called Gold.

The second half of the book contains extensive commentary by Asimov on how to write science fiction. He delves into a lot of topics like writing style, grammer, ideas and many other things.

There is a whole chapter on a how to generate a story from an idea and how to get the idea to start with. In it, he stresses on thinking. As in real, solid literal thinking, what we would normally call brainstorming. As a science fiction author, he says that the brainstorming is not something that he used to do in short bursts like someone would normally do. He writes that a science fiction author has to think to a point where her/his head starts aching, literally.
Hey, I appreciate the response. BTW, I tried to follow you on Twitter via your website link but it said user doesn't exist anymore. :-/
Some honest feedback: Putting dark grey text as description copy against a dark background makes trying to even start participating useless.
It's only been four years since the iPad was introduced, we may have only been through one full upgrade cycle if that. Lot of people are still using iPad 2s and Apple is still selling them (in the form of the non-Retina Mini) so that's something of a vote of confidence for them.

I know many developers wish the thing would die since it's the only A5 and non-Retina iPad.
LLVM would be an enormous task to write, indeed. Thankfully, it's done already :)

Your tired has-been COBOL is so infrequently used that on Tiobe, it outranks D, Erlang, Common Lisp, Haskell, Scala, Go, Lua, ...

In light of that, I'd be careful with predictions like "few or no new projects will be done in C++". It might be a long while before we reach that point.