skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a wifi -> GPIO board, this seems to be similar to the Electric Imp, but better since it doesn't use their misguided SD card form-factor or their blink-up nonsense. They also have a web-based ide, as well as a downloadable ide. I've not tried either of those out, but the downloadable IDE (though no Linux support) means I can use the same version control tools (ie git) to manage it, which is a huge win over Electric Imp's web-only IDE.

$20 for the Spark is an interesting price point as it's cheaper than most of the Arduino wifi shields, which you still need to connect to an Arduino. It's also the same price (in many places) as a USB wifi dongle, which you need, in order to connect up a Raspberry Pi.

While this things is drastically less powerful than a Raspberry Pi, in projects where the Raspberry Pi is a simple Wifi -> GPIO board this seems perfect, especially since there's a already a mobile app.

--

I wonder if the current title, 'Spark: Introducing the $19 Photon', is as it was submitted. But either way, it's a terrible title. What's a Photon, and why is it being $19 newsworthy?
My apologies. Reading the documentation page confused me, figured the Photon was the only device by the group.
Here's an open source tool that does something very similar (and you aren't vendor-locked into AWS):

https://bitbucket.org/scorebig/elita
I'm excited to try out a Spark that isn't using the SmartConfig entirely because I'm unable to get it to connect to my WiFi network at work (running an enterprise WiFi setup using Cisco's APs)
I tried competing grocery delivery services and wound up worrying about good jobs
How on earth does "I don't like operators" support your claim?
> We have a trace and the IP of the hacker.

I doubt they have the hackers real IP. The hacker was almost certainly using a proxy right? Even if they have an IP address of the hacker, what is the likelihood of tracking it down to a physical person?
Just on a 'I can see the code in the stack traces' is benefit enough. I envy android devs being able to do that, while with apple code it's a bunch of binary.

You can see the comments that the platform dev put, which helps you deal with their assumptions about edge cases that are not documented. You can also see how they develop for C# internally to get ideas how to make your app better too.
"I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation… "

This reminds me a bit when the Nightly News runs a story about something and then adds "but critics say it's not enough and doesn't go far enough".

Who are the "critics" exactly? Critics are easy to find.

Critics are visible and get attention. But never do I see any quantification of how many people actually "complain on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit about the lack of innovation". Or even care.
Looks nice. I've been meaning to give Ionic a try, so nice to see you had a good experience with it. Did you check out Framework7? I've been using it with Cordova and it's provided a way to build cross-platform mobile interfaces quickly. It provide a native-feeling skin and interactions for your apps.

http://www.idangero.us/framework7/
any famous apps done with cordova?
Ah. Part of the problem is that you haven't registered for a Wikipedia account. ClueBot NG, which is a machine learning system, uses information from your track record as an editor as one of its inputs. Editing anonymously, you have no reputation.
A Day in the Life of a Senior Systems Engineer
I agree with this whole-heartedly. I was doing video conferencing on my iLamp in 2002, I worked remotely and globally since 1994, my Nokia phone paired over Bluetooth to my computer long ago, things are pretty certainly, but I'm not seeing massive innovation in day to day computing.

I am weary of the clichéd argument against someone who speaks about an app being badly made or complains about a computer crashing. It always goes something like "you know everyone moans about how limiting this technology is, failing to realize how amazing our world is now" and I just want to scream every time I hear this empty and self-important pseudo critique being dolled out by some vapid hipster-esque person.

When I know how rock solid my computer was a few years ago, and know how easy it is to make software that doesn't crash or cause data loss, I am entitled to make a comment about sloppy apps and buggy operating systems. In fact, it's my duty to in the hope that someone thinks twice about how they make something.

Yes, our current world is good. But it could be a lot better, and it's not whining to say so.
I wish we lived in a world where the layman - the Joe Nobody - could grasp how truly momentous this is.

Too often the gravity of such endeavors is lost too quickly, from our collective imagination.

We need to reanimate the sense of wonder among the non-science inclined people everywhere, to make more of these efforts possible.

Live feed of the press conference which should start in a bit:

rosetta.esa.int

Some cool links:

http://wpc.50e6.edgecastcdn.net/8050E6/mmedia-http/download/...

http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/avZGG4q_460sa_v1.gif

http://sci.esa.int/where_is_rosetta/
Great Data: it's all in the delivery
Sam is probably too young to remember what the world was like before the internet. From my perspective (just turned 45), the technological change in everyday life between 1994 and 2004 is much more significant than the incremental improvements in the past 10 years.

- In 1994 I didn't even have dialup internet; in 2004 I had a reliable 1 mbps connection.

- In 1994 I knew few people with mobile phones; in 2004 I had one with a color screen (Motorola v600) that could search Google and take pictures.

Facebook and Twitter did not exist, but the basic entertainment and communication functions they provide are not radically different from those of online forums, chatrooms, email, older social networks.

The main difference that Sam overlooks is that in 2004 all this was not available to hundreds of millions (billions?) of people in the world, just like the internet was not (or barely) available to me in 1994.
I want more than this. This article talks about adding type annotations, and if the variable has an annotation, then the type is checked. That is, you have to change the source code to use it.

I want a knob I can turn at compile time. "Compile this dynamically, so I can run it and play with the algorithm. OK, now I think I've iterated the algorithm enough times that I'm fairly confident in it, now turn on type errors as warnings. Now that I've cleaned up all of that, let's go back to the default, which is to compile with type issues being errors."
The best rejoinder to this might be the Founder's Fund manifesto, which originally started with, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

That specific phrase has since disappeared. But it illustrates that we can enjoy—even invest in—certain innovations like social media, while bemoaning the lack of innovation in other spaces (eg transportation in this example).

Here's the modified version of the manifesto:

http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future/
I was unaware that taxes were such a recent invention. Clearly I've been misinformed about history. What other insights can you provide?
Name-clashing with an Apache project really surprises me. Also, consider the fact that Aurora stems from Mesos, which supposedly Amazon (cloud; although DB people are doing this one) folks have to know.
For a Scala developer that signature makes sense. You want to add an element of type B to your collection with elements of type A, however the addition of an element of type B may not be supported (e.g. you may want to add a String to a BitSet and get in return a plain Set[Any]), so the above works only as long as there is a builder available that can build the new collection. The function also works on covariant collections, because it's building a new collection (i.e. it's for immutable collections), so it doesn't have the covariance gotcha of arrays.

Scala's collections have some quirks, but not as many as .NET's collections and you're actually comparing apples to oranges, because you won't find the equivalent of an "add" that returns a new collection instead of modifying the old one in .NET.

This is what happens when you pass judgement unto things you don't understand. Working with immutable data-structures is really, really awesome and Scala's API for these collections is very friendly and very type-safe - as in, if you feel the need to use `isInstanceOf` / `asInstanceOf`, then you're probably doing something wrong ;-)

And I really wish that C# would grow up a little in this regard, as modern programming languages need immutable collections as well, with a nice API to go along with it. And btw - working with Option is super awesome, no category theory needed.

That said, as I was saying in another comment, I'm really excited about this announcement, because this is mostly about the runtime, not the language. You can run things built with Scala on top of .NET right now by means of IKVM. And the JVM finally has some credible competition.
I have been working with .NET for 11 years since 1.0beta (On the same application, i.e. have been continously pushing a massive codebase through every released version of the framework yet!), so to me this so huge. It has felt like I would have to go do Javascript, or go back to java, if I wanted to leave the .NET ecosystem or do something radically different. Not anymore. Feels like not just Windows-based server (asp.net) and desktop (WPF/WinForms) apps are .NET based in the future, but a good chunk of what today is Node.js, Java, Objective-C and so on will be .NET, and hopefully F#, in the future.

If you want a high-level lang runtime with good IDE support, you can just use .NET now. You know, unless you want Ask toolbar.
Android and iOS development in VS will be done via Xamarin, Cordova, or C++. That's why you don't see Maven or Gradle support anywhere, there's no Java involved.
If women "have a preference for jobs involving people rather than things", why are they so well-represented in chemistry? Is chemistry an especially social science? That's what you want to hang the whole enormous gender gap in CS on? That CS is uniquely antisocial?

To the contrary: CS seems especially social compared to the hard sciences --- people work on teams and discuss trivia endlessly in a variety of venues.
That's an excellent set of comments that I'll take into account for the next lang I'm gonna learn! :-) ty
They have opened up the source on large chunks of the .net family compilers. Developing a decent ide on top of Rosalyn should relatively easy (as developing an ide could be). And while Rosalyn ides won't be as good as visual studio, Rosalyn should give them a fairly significant leg up.
All mobile metrics in one convenient dashboard
How Data Can Help You Write a Better Screenplay
That countdown showing the number of remaining orders with free shipping is a stroke of marketing genius. It certainly worked on me.
Now I love C#, but in defense of the above poster, standard library code is often pretty gnarly stuff.

C++ is the poster child for this. No one argues that C++ is a bad language just because the standard library is full of magic.
Seems like they're pulling a GeForce FX in some ways though, using FP16 in shaders in benchmarks. The GFXBench PSNRs seem to suggest 50% worse than Maxwell.

NVidia was raked over the coals in the GeForce FX era for running FP16 shaders because FP32 ran far slower (ATI was using FP24 which was a nice sweet-spot at the time)

I'd like to see more image quality comparisons for mobile GPUs like the Desktop Era, because there may be cheating involved in IQ department.

Also, in comparisons with the K1, keep in mind NVidia claims K1 is DirectX12 class, so some of the die space is being used for functionality not benched in GFXBench.
I think that the AWS vendor lock-in won't come from single features such as databases from specific vendors, but rather the ecosystem of Route53, elastic load balancers, S3, EBS, AMIs, Glacier, RDS, CloudFormation templates, SQS, security groups, libraries like boto, auto scaling groups, and everything else besides instance provisioning. Of course you can implement most of these yourself, e.g., HAProxy for ELBs, rabbitmq for SQS, but all that requires application code changes and significantly more configuration management.
This is slowly but surely happening, with platforms like Experiment.com [1]. The main issue that I've seen so far is that campaigns that center around raising funds to pay a scientist's salary don't seem to be working. Whether that's a case of providing better explanations as to why the money is well spent, or whether it's a culture issue, I'm not sure.

End of next year I'm going to have to job hunt again and I'm thinking of trying to crowdfund a postdoc position.

So in short, I think the transition to more crowdfunded science will happen, but as with many things that change the foundation of how science is done, it's a gradual process.

[1] https://experiment.com/
I think it's being flagkilled for hijacking the top comment which seems bad from and probably deserves it.

re "free speech" a corollary is that those reading said speech are free to call it dumb
You probably aren't the target audience if your database fits in RAM.
We live in a Republic, in the United States at least. As a result, you have elected certain people to represent you. Basically, you have given your proxy to someone. NASA, or any other organization, then goes to the person you've given your proxy vote to, and convinces them and leads by example, asking for money peacefully.

The person votes for it, and by extension YOU vote for it. Nobody's stealing anything; you voted to give it to them.
Project Beyond – Think Tank Team – Samsung Research America
This could be a big deal in terms of raising the bar for deployment practices.

Right now "nobody ever got fired for" setting up deployment via rsync and some ad-hoc shell scripts. That works for a single host, although it's not great for reproducibility. But as soon as you go to multiple hosts you need some degree of orchestration, monitoring, and integration with your load balancer to avoid downtime.

CodeDeploy offers those benefits, so if it turns out to be even slightly good, it could become the "nobody ever got fired for" choice, for any non-trivial app running on AWS.
How does this compare to Deis? Does it serve the same use case, albeit locked into AWS?

Discussion on Deis from yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8591209
Vexillonaire
I'm not even sure how to access that in debian, nvm i didn't try to fix the apc issues, yet. I'm sure there's a command already, anyhow.
Definitely. But one of the nice things about a lot of the AWS stuff is that you can build on the same infrastructure you'd use if you wanted to scale up. So if you have a toy project that ends up being more successful than you expect, it's pretty easy to just add resources. For example, DynamoDB is ultra cheap for the lowest usage levels, but simply by reserving more capacity you can scale up with absolutely no changes to your app. Makes it easy to prototype or play on the real system and not have to re-do your work later if the project becomes more than a toy.

I guess since this is MySQL-compatible it wouldn't be that hard to migrate from MySQL to Aurora, other than moving the data...
First we have to see it as a standard Debian package.

Then we have to look at its memory usage, GC pauses, locking issues.

It is much easier to say than to port correctly a large, very complex code-base to an alien platform. (Mono has been written from scratch, if I recall correctly).
This attack is conceptually simple, and the linked paper (http://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf) is very approachable for the layman. I recommend giving it a read.

Here's the basic idea:

1. The first thing the AES encrypt function does is XOR user input against the secret key.
2. The result of this operation is used to index into a lookup table (the S-box).
3. The timing characteristics of step 2 will vary based on the contents of the cache.

By measuring the timings for a large number of random inputs and correlating them by index, (e.g. sort all messages into buckets based on the value of the first byte), we can recover the corresponding byte of the secret key.

Though it's not clear a priori what the timing characteristics should look like for a particular key byte, we can easily measure this on a machine we control that matches the description of the target platform.
I've only slightly dabbled in Android development: installing the SDK, IDE, build a "hello world", and run in an emulator. I've done a bit of old-school mobile development (Symbian, WinMobile) and I was very surprised how poor the emulation experience was for Android.

It looks like Microsoft might have a better Android emulation workflow than Google. What strange times!
http://phonegap.com/app/feature/
This is incredible, perfect for xamarin or phonegag. Cant wait to use it
No one else seems to be complaining about it, so it may just be me:

Your link just drops me at the front page of his blog. Searching for it through Google leads to a result, but clicking on that link also takes me to the front page. Is there a mirror?
You seem to have skipped the "read my post" step and jumped straight to the "reply" step. Women are not "so well-represented in chemistry". As I said, the complaint is generally that women are under represented in STEM fields period, which is why I responded as such. The latter part of my post addresses the "I just want CS to steal the few STEM interested women from chemistry" case.
WOW! the best answer by far in here, thanks for your comment it really proves all the benefits the ENTIRE human race gets from this (relative) small investment.
What I've overheard on some podcast discussions is that they are taking the multiplatform Silverlight runtime, and have enhanced it to be a headless server-type runtime instead of browser-plugin-UI-focused. It doesn't include all of the windows-only features of the CLR and BCL, but has all you need for ASP.NET vNEXT.
They really need to start serving Segoe UI to non-Windows users.
I was mostly responding to the tone I saw in All the important article were done years ago.

An unnecessarily complicated and difficult to read article isn't really done.
The article does not discuss much the motivation they might have had for this hack, aside from the fact they're probably looking for gaps in general US systems. But I'm very curious about the economics of hacking another nation's weather service; China could give itself significant (and creepy) economic advantages my MITMing the data from the satellites. I wonder if they're considering things like this?

Edit: Also, if they just wanted weather data, they should've signed up for http://pressurenet.io ;)
He could easily reply with that, but it would be dumb. There are many causes I believe in strongly but I don't donate all my money to them because I don't have enough money to make a bit of difference to them. Big projects must be taken on collectively.
If people focused on poor in the past instead of science - peasants and slaves would be sligthly less abused, and slightly happier, but we would still use them.

Instead they focused on science and we don't need slaves nor peasants anymore.
EU wins? :D
> I'm sorry, but I have literally no idea how this post follows from the one you replied to?

Literally? Well it is visually displayed under it and to the right :P
> Microsoft is not your friend

Nor is google or Oracle. So who is? To put this in perspective you need to look at the alternatives. Getting a free (as in speech) source CLR/BCL/JIT/Compiler and a free (as in beer) IDE is pretty sweet.

Sure, you can do python or Node.js, but it's not covering all that you can do now with .NET. Only java/jvm really competes on "everything except high perf" (from enterprise to mobile to cloud etc.).

And in the java universe you may end up with Ask toolbar, Eclipse and tears on your keyboard.
I've only briefly read over the documentation, but this service seems to not follow deployment best practices that aws and others such as netflix have been talking about for years. Specifically the pattern of pre-baking an ami with your current version of the app you are deploying and any other needed software completely installed on the ami and then having an autoscale group be able to boot that ami up in a few seconds and start working. This greatly helps with scaling up, doing rolling upgrades and also very easy rollbacks.

The CodeDeploy service seems to operate by you manually launching base ec2 instance with a code deploy agent and then this agent will checkout your git code on the live instance, run any provisioning steps and then if things break somehow rollback all that work, still on the live instance.

I'm sure this is still a big improvement to companies who are manually sshing into servers and running deployments by hand, but as someone who pre-bakes ami's and does rolling upgrades with autoscaling groups this service seems like a step backwards.
And his being an executive at a corporate giant made this a very unorthodox and risky move. Having a great idea and a sound methodology is one thing; betting the future of one of the largest technology companies in the world on it is entirely different.
Is this going to integrate with Docker? Would make a great orchestration platform
What company is not opportunistic? They are by definition.
>It looks like Microsoft might have a better Android emulation workflow than Google. What strange times!

Sure but keep in mind that Google has to produce an emulator that emulates ARM, MIPS and x86 and all of that has to work on Windows, Linux and Mac. Significantly different and tougher challenge!
Deaths from prescription drugs skyrocket
Microsoft run a few programs - Action Pack, DreamSpark, BizSpark. If you qualify then you get a lot of software for (fairly) little money.
I don't understand this response, since the representation of women in chemistry is a fact I believe I introduced to the thread, not something you introduced that I responded to.

The participation of women in other STEM fields is very inconvenient to your argument, which you've made clearly and repeatedly, that the gender gap in computer science owes largely to a preference among women to avoid CS.
I think the question isn't whether or not we innovate enough, the question should be whether Sam believes that YC is funding start-ups that will one day become the new Tesla or SpaceX.

From the previous batches I don't recall a single one that ever stood a chance of that, though there are plenty of new middlemen and some neat innovations. Most of the really interesting ones died off very quickly.

SpaceX and Tesla required massive investments, the long view, a very unique founder and good timing all in one package. If they had been YC funded companies rather than companies funded by a founder that could personally dump a fortune in them when nobody else cared they would have sank long ago.

So I don't think that YC will fund a Tesla or a SpaceX, the model is not particularly suitable for such long haul and extremely risky ventures.

But they'll clean up on making a bunch more companies like Dropbox, AirBnb and so on over the next decade.
The Calculating Machines of Sir Samuel Morland
Yes you can. I haven't found a traditional Object-Oriented pattern I can't use in F# ... but honestly, I've usually just ended up molding things to fit pattern-matching and reduced the complexity of things in the process.
Great use of GIFs by datafoxco in a “How To” post
If it's the criteria to fund something

The point is that the criteria for the State/government doesn't have to be the same as the criteria for personal expenses.
Unsurprisingly excellent description. How much control do we have over the cache lines populated by AES in a TLS scenario? We can't fully randomize the AES inputs, because they have to correspond to the TLS protocol.