skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. I guess I would disagree with the assertion that Gadfly is "quite well documented". It has some docs, but they are mostly just a list of parameters (with no indication of what values you could/should set them to) and maybe one example, e.g. http://gadflyjl.org/geom_boxplot.html

Perhaps it's all very obvious if you're already familiar with ggplot2, but as somebody without an R background, I found their docs extremely spartan.
You can't fly drones in national parks? That's a shame
"Amazon does check your [...] MAC address" -- this is well known -- but still does not explain how these sellers are getting away with submitting fake reviews en masse.
Gestation Period for New Developers Is 3 Months
Wow, where was that? Sounds like a fascinating experience. Did you cut off from tech altogether for that period?
Someone should start a blog interviewing failed startup founders and letting them tell their stories and share their lessons, really in-depth. Maybe even bring in other people for multiple perspectives.
How 888,246 red ceramic poppies captivated Britain and brought WWI to life
Old age doesn't automatically mean technological incompetence anymore.

For example, Judge Alsup was born in 1945 and demonstrated a perfect understanding of the issues in his ruling. As I recall he even taught himself Java programming during the trial.
This reminds me of a tool that came out 10 or 15 years ago, which allowed you to feed it arbitrary binary data that it could display in 3D.

I remember reading a Slashdot article on it in which one of the examples was a 3D, freely-rotating view of the Linux kernel binary.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I can't seem to recall the name of the project or find it.

Also related:

http://vimeo.com/110257380

http://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?id=199

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f7hZBoEwV0

https://github.com/pwaller/binview
MAC address - always wondered how they manage to grab the MAC address from the browser.
With Some Dating Apps: Less Casual Sex Than Casual Text
Any feedback would be welcomed. The landing page blog pretty much tells our whole story.

@gradtrek
contact@gradtrek.com
facebook.com/gradtrek
2.5M Installs Later, R.I.P. Downloader for SoundCloud
http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/2008/12/aftermath.html

Spent 5+ years at Google after that, worked on a bunch of cool projects, finessed my technical skills, learned how to push through difficult projects until completion, rebuilt my confidence, and recently left to try again. We'll see how it works out this time.
Failed at a bootstrapped startup (http://shoutt.me/) earlier this year after a painful 2 years. Learnt a lot and failed a lot - in practically everything - marketing, sales, growth, tech, operations. Lost a fair bit of money too. Failed because the product was wrong and it took us 2 years to accept it.

Succeeded in one thing - found the right co founders.

In 2 months started working on the another idea (https://doctorc.in) with the same co founders - moved to India. Got funded this August. Could execute infinitely better on this one because of all the lessons learnt in Shoutt. The experience of failure of the first startup is paying off now in the second one.

I wouldn't have it any other way.
Then you are missing out on a wonderful programming tool for a very superficial reason. I wish indices were offsets like C and not indexes like Lua, but I'll deal with it for all the language gives.
It was near Redding, CA. Unfortunately the monastery needed a website built for them so I spent quite a bit of time working online. I couldn't escape it. But building and maintaining a website for a few hundred users was much more relaxing then building and maintaining one for tens of millions.
I'm not sure the implementation is quite what we need, but I definitely agree with the rationale.

CSS is global, as they point out, and CSS makes assumptions that may not be true today. For example, most apps these days — at least the kind I build – gain zero benefit from separating the style from the DOM. We never, ever apply different stylesheets to a single app.

The few use cases where truly separate stylesheets would be useful aren't significant enough to justify the separation. For example, "themes" are implemented through SASS variables that drive the presentation -- not with separate stylesheets.

And generally speaking, apps are simply too complicated to reimplement the entire app's stylesheet multiple times. And CSS cascading rules are sufficiently gnarly (eg., the exactness of the selector guides priority, except !important, etc.) to make things too error-prone to work in practice.

CSS was designed for basic marked-up hypertext documents, not today's sites or single-page apps. It works fine for documents, but for everything else it's increasingly showing an impedance mismatch, especially with respect to isolation and layout handling. Even with "flexbox" it's very limited compared to constraint solvers like Cassowary. We have to face the fact that layout belongs to content.

Anyway, there are a few problems with the CSS-JS approach:

- Media queries aren't possible anymore and must be done with JS. (I usually end up doing a lot of this in JS anyway, because media queries only deal with viewport sizes, not parent container sizes, so media queries break component isolation.)

- When you have styles applied to almost every element in a complex component, the DOM will look increasingly messy. You can't do mass-application things like "div > li { ... }".

- It's going to massively increase DOM size.

- Surely browsers must have highly optimzied CSS processors these days. I can't help but think that applying entire style rules to DOM elements must be slower than just referencing an existing compiled style.

Personally, I suspect a better way to approach this would be a React-specific, component-oriented style language. Not the modest tweaks they demonstrate in the first slides, but something built from the ground up.
Moved onto idea #2 which was a refined #1 that skipped a lot of mistakes, it wasn't financially viable to work on it so I moved on to idea #3 while mumsy picked up the rent.

Idea #3 was this 'passive revenue stream' idea of making tablet jigsaw puzzles, I figured it would be very quick + easy to set up and generate enough income to cover me for something else. That quickly changed into a full time effort to grow the company as it was so enjoyable having a product that makes money + could be better.
Sellers might prefer it
If only civilians in places like Pakistan could also say "don't fly drones here"
Startup failed (early employee).

Did my own startup; growth was insufficient. Ran out of runway (7yrs of doing startups).

Looked around & got a position as a Product Manager in AdTech, since I didn't want to get back into a dev role, and wanted to move more into the prod/mktg side.

Since then moved into an accelerator working with early-stage startups on mktg/prod.

Life's been much better than I expected when I failed.
Intrigued. Do tell more.
ITYM "really not meant to be used from a shell script".
UEFI over the opensource Coreboot?
You need to include Hacker News username / real name with each entry. Additionally, you should clarify (or limit) that each entry is to a personal blog.
What's a quirky open source project, if not the communal work of collected lunatics?
Oh... http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111123184929/batman/ima...
I agree with one option only - disarming. The other idea will fall as soon as it's the teacher that starts the shooting the next time. And that's going to happen sooner or later. What will people propose then - arm kids so they can defend themselves from the teacher?
Why is set intersection intuitively multiplication?

My expectation is that a set multiplication would give me a new set consisting of all pairs consisting of a single element from each set.
Why HN is smarter and not the DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA USA?
latest find: Homer about the Trojjjjjjan Wars. Remember the trojan and
trojan horse?

1.) use catapluts of dead animals with plenty of fleas into the city,
with any luck it would hit the well or water source.

2.) other use of beehives and catapult.

3.) fictional story. THERE IS NO AIR BORNE EBOLA virus.
Please believe everythiing in the media and government sponsored
news.

The use of mosquito and bats (for fruit bats DO NOT carry ebola or is it?)
for mosquito carry malaria, dengue fever which is virus.

So, the new transformation in the fiction story is the miniturization
of mosquito bomb.
Using the Django 1.7 migrations with Mezzanine
Is it common these days to have a drivers ed class in high school? My city's (pop ~1/2mm) high schools didn't, circa 2003ish.
Shoutt was a great idea. I'm not sure why all startups like this fail to take off - Vark, Jelly, etc. Is it a timing thing? I mean everyone has a smartphone now, right? So how come it never works out?

Wishing you and your team the best of luck with the new venture!
Contract work and actually having money
I'm sure they do. Unless they had insurance though, the investment into the datacenter and servers will be lost forever.
We organize our SASS files very carefully. One file per component, careful naming, strict rules about overriding a component's internal classes (".mycontainer .somecomponent .somecomponent_title" is illegal). It's still painful.

One reason is cascading. The way CSS applies to trees means that every component has to be aware of what properties it could accidentally inherit. So to code defensively, you override things like colors and fonts. Using SASS mixins helps.

But sometimes you do want contextual modifiers, for example styling all components differently when they're in a certain type of container. For example, if the container's background is light grey, we'll want all nested text to have a subtle bevel (ie., white text-shadow).

It's tempting to use cascading for this, but that breaks — by definition! — separation of concerns. In one way it's better to actually have each component be container-aware; for example, given that Form and SpecialContainer are both components you can do this in form.scss:

.SpecialContainer {
background: #f0f0f0;
}

.Form {
.SpecialContainer & {
text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #fff;
}
}

It's cheating, though; now you have a dependency between the Form and SpecialContainer that really wasn't needed. So when I'm not being lazy, I resort to explicit parameters:

.Form {
&[data-light-background="true"] {
text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #fff;
}
}

Now I have to pass "lightBackground" as a prop to the component have it set the data-light-background attribute. Of course, this only works the component embedding Form actually knows that it has a light background or is embedded in one that has a light background. Not ideal.
See also Docker Desktop[1], which I'd prefer for something like this.

This Dockerfile creates a docker image and once it's executed it creates a container that runs X11 and SSH services. The ssh is used to forward X11 and provide you encrypted data communication between the docker container and your local machine.

Xpra + Xephyr allows to display the applications running inside of the container such as Firefox, LibreOffice, xterm, etc. with recovery connection capabilities. Xpra also uses a custom protocol that is self-tuning and relatively latency-insensitive, and thus is usable over worse links than standard X.

I know X is kind of outdated in some respects these days, but at times I'm amazed at how much foresight went into it to enable things like this to work.

[1] https://github.com/rogaha/docker-desktop
>even though the scientific consensus is that GMO crops are no more dangerous than non-GMO crops.

* "The State of the Science :
Most of the evidence for the safety of genetically modified food crops comes from studies that only look at short-term effects … and from information provided by the same
companies who sell those seeds."
http://www.nymc.edu/sanewman/PDFs/GeneWatch_State_of_the%20S...

* Taleb: ''Wrong to say "the scientific method is based on evidence"; it is based on knowing how to deal with absence of evidence.'' ( https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/528646752124297216 )

* The Physics arXiv Blog: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modifi...

* "The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)" http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
well, don't forget to send the cpu to sleep before waiting for the interrupt as well
Not a suitcase, but a backpack bomb existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...
Don't forget matlab starts at 1. R starts at 1. Mathematica starts at 1 by default, though you can override that for any given array.

1-based indexing is very common in mathematical software.
Arial is one of the best fonts available on the web at the moment. Sure, it's crappy, but it's sharp and readable on low resolution displays. New fonts are much better designed, but they're blurry and difficult to read at the small sizes used for body text, because there simply isn't enough pixels on your average display.

Once 4K and 5K monitors become normal, we can wave goodbye to Arial, but I get the feeling it's going to stick around for another 5 or 10 years.
Show HN: Songftware – Music Written Like Software
Are you saying that people purchased the software not knowing that the license agreement forbids you from running it on non-Apple hardware? There are even minimal protections in place to prevent it running on non-Apple hardware e.g. "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/ so people can't just claim it magically worked on their PC when they installed it.

To me what they are doing are no different from the people distributing cracked games with disabled copy protection.
> Nowadays? Well, what's the average size of an iOS/Android app?

Depends. Sometimes you see apps which pack a ton of features and a killer UI under 10 MB; and sometimes you have apps that are barely more than web view wrappers go take a few hundred MB's because they pack useless intro movies and ridiculously large assets.
Well, that is what the courts are discussing at the moment. It may or may not work, but the origins of Dalvik as a "licensing hack" are well-known.
I've been using Babun [1] and fully enjoying it.

[1] https://babun.github.io/
It being new really helps the iTunes rankings.
Compare to probability. Probability of element being in one set AND another distinct set is multiplication of two probabilities (which are, in reality, actually defined by sets).

"Pairs" (and, respectively, cartesian product) is a bit more complex, and not so much related to boolean algebra deduction concept.
Make a dent in the universe, join Drchrono: Django engineers needed
Another startup. And another, until it worked.

Here's a question that is less frequently asked: to founders whose startups met with moderate success wherein it turned into a lifestyle business that could be sustained indefinitely, but never appeared to be reaching the life-changing initial vision, what did you do?

We focus a lot on success and failure as binary concepts, but I think there are a ton of businesses that meet with some success, but fall well short of the initial goal.
> The NeTV does this in realtime.

No, the NeTV does NOT do any kind of decryption. What it does do is encrypt its own image using the same key in parallel, so that it can overlay its own display on top of the incoming display stream.

It does include an implementatiom of HDCP that could be used for decryptioon if you work hard enough at it (and I would guess someone worked hard enough at it), but as it comes out of the box, NeTV cannot be used to strip off HDCP.
Very nice and inspiring demo.

I wrote a music player from scratch with Sound Manager 2 and I realized ... this stuff isn't that hard. We can build real software in the browser.

Someone bought Winamp for a couple hundred million about 15 years ago. Today, you can throw it together in the browser and do distribution for practically free.

Long live Client-Side Javascript!
What do you mean about not being a popularizer?
I've got a Roku HD (model 2500X) and just did some measurements:

Starting up: 3.5W

Sitting idly on menu screen: 3.15W

Sitting idly on screen saver: 3.3W

Streaming Arrested Development: 3.45W

Also worth noting that when not in use, it goes to screen saver mode. It never actually powers down at all.

So basically, it uses the same amount no matter what you're doing with it. And really ironic that the screen saver uses more power than the menu screen. I guess the appearance of saving power is more important?
Began a startup senior year of college (Thryv). Managed to build a team, get sales, generate revenue and score a large partnership. Long story short, I was a customer of my own product and assumed I knew what other customers wanted. I spent the next 6 months having a product built without validating my initial assumptions before launching. The product was too niche only fitting customers who had my specific workflow and I ultimately found this out too late when we ran out of steam/resources. Total timeline (including fuckups) was 3 years.

I was non-technical at my first startup (domain expert & business/marketing/sales) and after I shut it down, I spent the next 8 months teaching myself how to build software programs, becoming a now tech co-founder.

I then started my second startup (http://notiontheory.com/) by getting $20k pre-sales in 2 weeks to validate my idea before committing to it.

Attempt 2 has been far more successful and we're already beginning hiring in month 5 bootstrapped.
It would be good to know where we are slow, so that we can fix it. Can you for an issue with an example on github?
OpenBazaar uses a three-way transaction. Buyer, seller, mediator. Only two keys are required to release or revert the transaction. In the event of a dispute The mediator is the final judge, they're supposed to decide based on evidence whether to release th payment to the seller or refund the buyer. I do not recall off-hand what the selection criteria is for the mediators, but I believe that it's not in the control of either party.
On vectorized code we are on par usually, but sometimes GC performance hurts. There is a patch for this in the works. Could you post the code snippets to julia-users mailing list?
New Raspberry Pi Model A+ Leaks
Grabbing the restricted/prohibited areas out of the national airspace data and adding them in seems like a fairly obvious thing to do before putting the thing out for the public to see. I actually have a hard time figuring out how you could have the class B/C/D areas and TFRs without also grabbing the restricted/prohibited areas.
Someone may pick up a large-scale sapphire manufacturing facility at pennies on the dollar. Perhaps we will see sapphire screens on non-Apple phones as a result, using equipment funded by Apple. The irony...
Isn't the x220 a tablet?

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series-table...

Seems an odd choice. Not something I'd want to own :/

EDIT: nm. there's a non-tablet version, just no page on main site: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd015812
What info does this give you that a VFR sectional chart doesn't? Or is the idea just to avoid having to learn how to interpret a chart?
> nothing in IEEE-754 requires that this state be global. In the C language bindings, for example, dynamic rounding mode and status flags have thread scope.

My example, RegExp captures in JavaScript, also have thread scope. Thread local global state is still not good. What makes the flags global is that access to them is provided implicitly and ubiquitously, independent of scope. All the operations as well as the flag functions like saveAllFlags are given read and/or write access and none of them take arguments that control the scope of the flags they're manipulating. They get pulled from thin air. This is problematic.

I deliberately never say that the rounding flags are global, my strawmen are that they're either lexically or dynamically scoped, both of which are problematic.

> You can take "block" to mean whatever makes sense for your language: it could be a single arithmetic operation[1] or it could be the whole program (though it's more useful if it isn't).

What I'm arguing is that there is no interpretation of "block" that yields a satisfying result. I didn't consider applying it to individual operations because the whole motivation for the rounding mode mechanism is to keep the same mode is in effect across multiple operations. The lack of hardware support suggests the same thing.

Maybe you can give an example of how you see this working where the attributes are more tightly scoped than per-thread?

> Finally, the concern about "exceptions" is entirely misplaced. "Exception" in IEEE-754 simply means "an event that occurs when an operation on some particular operands has no outcome suitable for every reasonable application," which is a rather different meaning than the way "exception" is understood in colloquial PL usage.

Fair enough, though that introduces a new problem: how do you implement fp-exceptions if the're not language level exceptions? But maybe if a reasonable solution can be found for the rounding flags something like that would work for the exceptions too.

> I would encourage you to direct questions like these about the spec to committee members. If you work for a big company, a few members probably work with you. If you don't, most committee members are happy to answer questions, even from people they don't know.

I did, I raised some of these issues, including the licensing issue, with David Bindel a year ago.
It seems like a work of genius, but it may be many years before an artificial intelligence can fully interpret its unique significance.

In fact it reminds me about a massive book on cellular automation that I once picked up, which went to incredible length in interpreting the potential of dynamic patterns in 2D space. It was a monument to extreme intellectual rigour and dedication, if nothing else. If only I could remember the title.
So if I were to write a book named A Game of Thrones, under the pen name George R. R. Martin, would it be permissible by law to publish it?
I got a job where I just get to write code, go home at regular time, and get paid every month. it's awesome.
The problem is these lessons are, for the most part, already out there. Unfortunately, some things you just have to go through to really learn. All of the mistakes I made were ones I read about. It just took me a while to recognize that my mistakes were the same as the ones I read about.

That said, if somebody did start that blog I would definitely read it.
* Psychics that tell parents their missing child is in heaven and happy. Do I have to enumerate the problems this has?

* Breatharians that recommend not eating.

* People that stare into the sun for energy.

* People that recommend 'natural' cures or other inanities rather than science based treatments.

* dowsers that take your money to wave around a stick.

Sure, spoon bending is silly. Going to Mexico to 'cure' your cancer against the advice of your doctor? It happens every day, and it is anything but silly. These are the people he targets, not just the Uri Geller's of the world.
Those are indeed the slides from the talk (or very close). Hinton gave this talk at Caltech last month. Very cool.
I think it is similar to what ARM SBSA uses.
>This article makes it sound like Spatial Pyramid Pooling is something new and amazing

Hardly, the paper specifically states "Spatial pyramid pooling ... is one of the most successful methods in computer vision" and "SPP has long been a key component in the leading and competition-winning systems for classification".
> Instead, the motivation he suggested was that you could run a computation in all the rounding modes, and if the results in all of them were reasonably close, you could be fairly certain that the result was accurate.

I actually thought that was the use case I was describing, though I would expect round-positive and round-negative to be enough. Don't the other rounding modes yield results within those bounds?