skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rust is important, but that article isn't very good.

Rust is at the level of C/C++, without an elaborate run-time system. It solves the three basic problems that cause most failures in C/C++ programs: "How big is it?", "Who deletes it", and "Who locks it". It does this without throwing a garbage collector at the problem, which means it can be used for operating systems and hard real time.

The basic memory management mechanism is single-owner pointers, with language enforcement to make this work even as pointers are passed to functions. (Pointers passed to functions are "borrowed"; you can't keep a copy whose scope outlives the function return.) For more complex ownership, there are pointers with reference counts. For data shared across thread boundaries, there are atomic, locked pointers with reference counts.

We need Rust. We're still seeing CERT advisories on buffer overflows in C/C++ programs, after almost four decades of C. The threats are getting worse, too; it's not script kiddies any more, it's governments.

I just hope the Rust crowd doesn't screw up.
I like your computer analogy because it's easy to reason about. Surely a powered-down computer is not conscious. So if consciousness has an off switch, then it's not immanent (inherent) to organization.

Koch compares consciousness to the electric charge of an electron. But the electric charge has no off switch!
Go 1.4 beta 1 is released
What happens at an interview largely isn't about you - it's about the company that is trying to hire someone. They will only ever see a small slice of who you are and what you are capable of. Whether or not they get what they need to make a decision says a lot more about their hiring process than your quality as an engineer.
Isn't that like arguing that you should avoid sex because you might get an STD, or avoid flying because you might die in a crash?

Just as the overwhelming majority of sex for most people will not result in an STD, and the overwhelming majority of flights will not end with your death, the overwhelming majority of mobile app developers won't have any serious problems with the walled garden app stores.
It's got a microphone and bluetooth so it might just be a software limitation. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple actually locked third parties out from using Siri like this though.

Are you saying that you want Cortana even if you're using Android or iOS? I don't think that's going to be possible.
Ask HN: How do you search and select web APIs?(survey)
Changelog http://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.4
How the scp protocol works
Microsoft enters the health wearables space with $199 ‘Band’ bracelet
Oh the title got me thinking that this is music related, like a new version of Songsmith. I'm glad I was wrong, the device looks very nice!
Companies like AWS, Google, and MSFT have representatives that consult with YC founders to help them with engineering goals. I suppose to up-sell them on scaling with their platform.
While I was very pleasantly surprised as I read the letter, I had this fleeting thought as well. But although the FCC has been an occasional nuisance in the last 25 years, they naively seem to me to have been a generally good force in broadcast competition.
Nintendo details its first QOL health product
Yes, I think you're right. Clunky memory. And I didn't know about the 155, 165 retrofit.
Last time I remember was when they provided Basic for my C64 and were biting the hands of IBM.
It's not directly related to the original article, but the idea of consciousness arising in any sufficient system reminded me of an essay by Hans Moravec, "Simulation, Consciousness, Existence" [1] (and that essay in turn makes me think of the dust theory of reality described in Greg Egan's "Permutation City").

"Perhaps the most unsettling implication of this train of thought is that anything can be interpreted as possessing any abstract property, including consciousness and intelligence."

[1] http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
Look pretty slick. It's interesting that it's marketed as a fitness device but is actually a smart watch. I own a Garmin Forerunner 305 which can last 6-8 hours of active use. I know that the recent Garmin devices last close to a day. The Microsoft Band doesn't tell us how well it does on battery with the GPS -- without the GPS it claims 48 hours.
That said, it is mostly good enough. I've used it for a few SASS projects in combination with Bourbon and it works great. IMO the huge compilation speedup (I saw reductions from 5-6s to about 200ms) was worth the slight move backwards in features. I became much more productive with a more responsive livereload.
I get junk mail from the USPS about how to send junk mail via the USPS. ("We'll deliver to every mailbox in the zip code, you don't have to even address the junk!")

I guess they have to make money somehow.

USPS and FedEx are nice, but are more expensive than the USPS. And there's that whole rain, snow, sleet, or hail thing.
Does anyone know what the retry/reapply period (after rejection) for Google is these days?
The requirements are that the consumer must have some way of concealing pin entry. That, and some stuff about how hitting different numbers can't make a different sound, or have easily picked-up electrical signatures, etc. I believe the EMV specs are publicly available, too.

Tamper-evident is likely baked into the device, instead. Make a circuit that trips when you open the thing up, wire that up to wipe the keys and brick the device until it goes back to factory.
Maybe one has a higher (non zero) phi rating, which apparently means it is conscious. I agree with you, I don't see the test. I'd also like to agree with Koch, intuitively what he says makes sense - it's possibly a lack of understanding on the writers part that this key point is lost.
email ids of currentc users was accessed http://www.techworm.net/2014/10/currentc-hacked.html
This article skimps on the details. I seriously think that there is something that is missing here. I hope so as well.
Pilots, Alcohol, Hollywood and Farce
Both reliability and performance. And also reliability is something which you estimate, calculate basing on some models - it's probability, not a guarantee. How would you estimate the reliability of an engine which run over 3 hours on a test stand? Of course you might prefer a well known fuels, industry-proven range of pressures and other engineering solutions, and you test them on Earth first - but after that you have to fly.

Track records are tricky for rocket systems. Since the first Sputnik, over the 57 years the humanity had may be - roughly - 4000 launches of space rockets of all kinds, with many different fuels, engines, sizes etc. It's relatively rare when you have a good track record which is measured by many tens of flights - let alone hundreds. When a system flew 20 times it's already considered rather mature - double so if those were all successful flights. So it's quite usual to use a new engine in a new design of rocket - in fact it's rare when you have many different rockets with the same engine type or many different engines used on the same rocket. Rockets and engines are usually optimized to each other - particularly rockets are built around engines, since margins are quite thin.
When we think of consciousness, we normally associate with the brain. But according to the complexity theory, shouldn't there also be consciousness in most of our organs? The liver is a massive network of cells that are in at least a moderate amount of communication, and yet I am not aware of its consciousness.

But perhaps it is conscious, just at a level that's inaccessible to my brain, which is a nearly distinct structure with very minimal relative communication to the liver.

I also found it interesting that he denied the idea that America might be one larger consciousness. I've had multiple experiences on LSD which have suggested to me that as an aggregate humans are one larger organism with a single collective consciousness, that operates both at a slower speed and a higher overall awareness. (Most accessible in the 150-200ug range)

When you think about how individual neurons work, spraying neurotransmitters at each other to trigger responses from the next neuron, essentially passing information in a complex yet highly organized web, are humans that much different. The set of humans who design cities are different from the set of humans who manage government policies are different from the set of humans that try to go to space. Each human passes information to others in highly complex ways that form super organized macrostructures. It doesn't seem to be that much of a stretch then to say that consciousness also arises from the interactions of the macrostructures in the same way consciousness arises from the interactions of all the parts of our brain.

And the internet would seem to be a massive facilitator of this. Because of the internet, the amount of communication I do per day is enormous, and my interactions happen at a global (though mostly English speaking) scale. I doubt communications of this scope and magnitude were available to humans even 20 years ago.
I tried to make this point to two neurosciences a few weeks ago and they basically said "but consciousness IS well defined" and I really had to scratch my head because they appealed to "I know it when you see it" logic which is completely useless when trying to figure out the physical phenomena that produces conscious experience. Actually, on reflection it seems that it makes the point that we do not even have a good working definition for consciousness all the more obvious.

On the deeper observation here: there are plenty of things that can exist, but whether they actually have being in this universe is a trickier question.
How to win texas?cheat or skills?
How to cheat at Blackjack? GS Company can supply texas analyzer and texas cheat card for you, so you will know the result in advance. As long as you choose a good cheating device, it is not hard to win at texas cheat.http://www.gsgamblecheat.com/blackjack-analyzer/
I left my programming job today to study mathematics 
I left my programming job today to study mathematics/ algorithms - for a year. Give me some courage, suggestions Community!
http://i.imgur.com/4zlJhGg.jpg
ibdknox, here's [1] an example of a relational scheme on top of HTTP APIs, maybe this could serve as inspiration for some aspect of your project. (BTW I feel like I keep bringing this [seemingly defunct] project up... oh well).

p.s.: Oh! there's a Meijer paper behind it [2].

1: http://ql.io/
2: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1961297
How Long Does an ID Need to Be?
Oh, look, I don't have a single Apple product in my possession. I already voted with my money and this stupid crap doesn't even matter to me. You can do the same, too!
Parallel Universes Colliding Could Explain Quantum Weirdness
Startup Slovakia Inspired by Startup Iceland
When you cannot get the project name right, why should we pay any attention to what you say about the benchmarks game?
Wow!

This.

Is cool.

And $199?

Just ordered three of them. Happy to see Microsoft put out something like this and, to some extent one-up Apple. While the i-everything world is interesting, not sure I want to shackle myself to a single company like that.

Swimming? Is it waterproof? Any swimming apps?
"I also realize there is a group that does care more about style"

Amusing that you call the majority of the population a "group". People buy clothes, shoes, cars etc based on style not specs. And you only have to look at the LV, Prada etc of the world to know they are willing to spend huge amounts of money on it.

Gadget on your wrist ? Nice. But it's a niche market.
"...At the time, it seemed much better to be chosen than not chosen"

http://cdixon.org/2013/02/13/the-credentials-trap/

this too, shall pass.
According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/10/27/mic..., they sold $908 million in Surfaces, out of 2.45 billion total hardware sales (including Xbox), last quarter. Total revenue last quarter for Microsoft was 23.20 billion.

So, Surface won't be replacing Windows/Office any time soon, but nearly a billion in revenue for what a lot of people try to frame as a failed product is not too shabby.
Maybe you should help the D community to publish some measurements!

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/lv7h1r$mg3$2@digitalmars.com?p...
Not quite relevant but: I once found a bug in apple's calculator app for the iphone (which I reported and they fixed after 3-4 months) where REALLY basic math operations like division gave different answers depending on the way you held the phone. (portrait vs. landscape).

I don't just mean the displayed precision changed, I mean the actual answer changed, fairly significantly.

In particular, if you accidentally tilted the phone in the wrong direction so that it switched to portrait then tilted it back, you'd get a different answer than if you held the phone steady.

I only found this bug while in the middle of a midterm for a graduate-level finance class...

Edit: details of one of the bugs:

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the calculator application
2. Ensure the app is held vertically (non-scientific mode)
3. Enter a number such as 10,000,000
4. Attempt to make the number 10,000,000.1 by pressing "." and "1"
5. Notice that instead of this number, the calculator application converts the input to 100,000,001 - i.e. the decimal point was ignored.

This does not happen in scientific mode.

Bug ID# 6743558.
Ah, not waterproof. That's OK.
Virtual #hackathon by koding
Could probably get a few bucks out of ; http://projectwonderful.com/ (nsfw friendly) until you compartmentalize the content properly for adsense to not flag/ban you.
Should be able to prevent PIN information from getting accepted by any means other than your locked-down PIN entry screen. So, any app that wants to grab people's PIN entry would either require them to enter their PIN twice, or block the transaction from going through, which should be very visible.
>> even though it can't by definition ever be state of the art

Is 'state of the art' a synonym for 'slim' ?

When I think 'state of the art' I think "most advanced hardware".

In theory, if Ara is successful, it will be much easier, more cost effective, and less ecologically harmful to keep your Ara phone constantly at the bleeding edge of 'state of the art' than it would be to constantly upgrade to the latest phones.

Consider also that no single phone on the market combines all the best hardware in one place, one could argue that ONLY with Ara could you have a fully state of the art phone.
It has nothing to do with marketing. Apple simply has a record of disrupting industries e.g. music player, music store, smart phone.

So of course people are going to compare it to the iWatch.
My advice? Don't sweat it. I didn't get an offer from Amazon after the in person interview. I was pretty bummed, to say the least. But I did end up getting a job that pays just as well, in a company just as cool, in a position that might actually be a better fit.

If you are good, keep going. You'll find what you are looking for. Just don't get too caught up in the "it has to be Google/Amazon/Apple/etc" mindset. There are a lot of other great jobs and companies in this market for technical skills.
If you boil everything down to the most reductionist form, the majority of software development is an exchange of lines of code for food, clothes and shelter. There may be more freedom on other mobile OSes (although I'm not sure which you mean... Firefox OS? Is there another one?), but there isn't more MONEY. Stallman's notions of software freedoms don't put bread on the table. People are more willing to pay for software on the closed mobile ecosystems, for a lot of reasons (ease of use/user experience, hardware availability, etc.).
I don't want to sound skeptical (I like the device and consider buying it), but how likely is it they gradually introduce "Windows (Phone) only" features for this device, up to the point it's not so useful in other platforms?

EDIT: clarification
You are correct and many Rust developers and contributors are aware of that point, but the OP wants to highlight the often neglected portion of Rust that may appeal to C/C++ users. Not every C/C++ user would move to Rust just for the safety (I did, but their mileages may vary). Some people look for the better abstraction, some look for the performance, and some others look for just fun. Rust is trying to appeal to many of them, not just the paranoid C/C++ developers; I think this article is very adequate for them.
Regarding charging:- "Connector: Magnetically coupled connector to USB" http://goo.gl/mDFKbM
> > That I experience my existence is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I am experiencing existence.

> It's really astonishing to me that he words it this way, because independently I have thought almost exactly the same thing for a long time.

This is just the famous "cogito ergo sum" of Descartes, dating back to the 17th century. A significant piece of epistemology is devoted to criticizing this reasoning:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/#4
As a developer, which is what the article is about, it doesn't matter what you want. It matters where your customers are.
Tech companies are at the forefront of western civilization?

I guess so, if by which they mean the general trend of displacing more risk onto younger people while thrusting them into lower-paying and less secure jobs than those held by their parents.
>So if gadget = functionality

I don't mean this.

I mean that Microsoft's band looks decent... for a gadget. Apple's watch looks decent for a watch.
The only thing that's a bit of a bummer is the battery life (the Peak Basis claims 4 days and the Fitbit Surge claims 5 days) and the MS Band is only "Dust- and splash-resistant" while those other devices are waterproof to 5ATM (usable for swimming), but the sheer number of sensors is really impressive and I'm much more confident about software/data access. At the very least it looks like MS Health pipes data into HealthVault, which is API accessible), but I'm most looking forward to getting access to the raw data stream (considering it's my biometric data they're collecting).
Try working for McDonald's. The interview is a lot easier, and you get free food there as well!
What are some examples of financially successful mobile software where the value lies in the mobile software, rather than a cloud-hosted server running a Stallman-esque Unix derivative?
The New Flipboard Gets Personal with Over 30,000 Topics to Follow
It does prevent that but it also prevents my device from ever being dead because whenever I'm at my desk I just put it on the charger. With the wired chargers in the past it was a paint to plug and unplug so my phone was always low but with the wireless stuff my device is naturally juicy all the time.
HP is getting this right. HP has a long history of understanding what goes on at the nozzle of an inkjet. Intuition fails at that scale; you have to do fluid dynamics calculations. HP did that decades ago.

They propose to lay down not only material, but an extra solvent where they need to tweak the properties a bit. That's borrowed from the printing press sized printers where accurate color on non-gloss paper is desired.

Being able to construct materials with non-homogeneous properties has potential. Mark Cutkowsky at Stanford has done that to make gekko feet for his climbing robots. That was done by loading up a "color" 3D printer with plastics with varying properties. But that machine couldn't mix the plastics; you could just
switch between them. Full variability of material properties could be useful. It's going to be hard to talk about at the user interface level, and the first UIs will probably be kind of clunky.

STL is really an output format, like PostScript. You don't want to work in STL; you want to work in a constructive solid geometry system, like SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor. In systems like that, you can move a hole. Try that on a mesh.
I love PCalc and am a long time user, but the notification widget looks ridiculous and is way too big in the notification center. Is it possible that the majority of users here on HN know about the tiny edit button at the bottom of the notification screen but the vast majority of users dont? I can't recall if PCalc turns on the notification center widget by default but I recall not liking it at all and turning it off.
Icons – Generate Icons Of All Sizes for iOS or Android App
Experience the C1 cloud server with a free 15 minutes trial
Would have bought this if it were fully functional with non-MS devices. It has all the sensors I want and looks unobtrusive. Even the Apple Watch looks like a Casio, so it's not like we're in top style here.
Some photos: https://scriptunasimages.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/inside-nas...
inspired by http://makeappicon.com/
I can relate. I've been rejected after 2-3 months of pretty good prep by all of FB, Google, MSFT, Amz and Apple after onsites with them. It's been pretty depressing and I feel totally burned out, but the only path forward seems to be to practice harder.

All the companies above told me to try again after a year, Google mentioned I wouldn't have to do the phone screens again, so hopefully I'm not that far away from getting the job.

My advice would be to try stay positive. If you're a programmer and have a stable job, you're in the top 10-20% income wise in this Country and probably in the top 5% of all humanity. As programmers, we have the tools to imagine and make into reality whatever we chose. To top it off, we generally enjoy doing this stuff and working conditions are usually tolerable.

My current path is to keep challenging myself progressively tougher algo problems on websites like HackerRank and not get locked into the mindset of gluing together libraries all day.

All the best for next year!
I think John Cocke was working out the architecture of that line then. He's not often credited with it but he invented RISC with that effort. Hardware was built in research (called the 80x where I don't remember x) but the actual Power-PC was quite a ways in the future.
you're young and healthy until your first visit to ER without insurance
I'm feeling like it's a whole new age of security, these days.

The amount of time/resources it takes to keep your apps or sites secure today is so much greater than it was even a few years ago.

Development and maintenance practices that seemed reasonable to people only a few years ago now seem impossible. Delivering an app or site based on Drupal, WordPress, Rails, etc. as a finished product to a client that does not have sufficient in-house IT staff -- you can almost guarantee they're going to run into security trouble. And what is required for 'sufficient in-house IT staff' is way more than we thought a few years ago -- even if not everyone has realized it yet (those who have not will get burned).
Yep. Apple gave its customers the proverbial faster horse. This looks like an actual step forward.
For Surface, Microsoft made $908m in sales, but spent $839m to make the devices. Compare that to last year, when they sold $2.13b worth of Surface devices but spent $2.87b to make them.[1]

I wouldn't say it's a key profit area for them yet, and we also can't call it a success yet (as they haven't reported the total retail purchases).

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/24/a-win-for-microsofts-...
Why the fuck is Starbucks a launch partner for a fitness band? What could interest could they possibly have in my health other than undermining it?