skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you know that Composer is open source?

One of the advantages of open source is that you have the freedom to take the code and fix issues that concern you.

You can Google "open source" for more information - that might be a more productive use of your time than waiting for people who owe you nothing to make changes that you want.
Another nice site showing light pollution is http://djlorenz.github.io/astronomy/lp2006/

The data hasn't been updated since 2006 but the change should not be that much different. I've contacted the author in the past, for some technical explanation:

The NOAA data is the light source data. It uses the light source data as input to a model of light propagation in the atmosphere to estimate the light pollution.
This takes into account that the light pollution from a town or city (or natural gas field!) can affect the level of light pollution at locations far removed from the light source.
Technically, my light pollution atlas is the amount of artificial sky brightness at zenith.

The site features also an overlay on Google Maps which shows the light pollution. It's a nice tool to find night photo spots. The one I've been using for some time with great results: http://djlorenz.github.io/astronomy/lp2006/overlay/dark.html
While true, if the law is changed to allow certain entities to go after the personal holdings of an individual because of the actions of a corporation then you'll have severely disrupted one of the main reasons to incorporate. That could have far reaching consequences that we can't even begin to imagine how bad it would be. If such a thing happened and I had corporations of whatever, I would immediately seek to re-incorporate somewhere else if I had the means. If I did not have the means, I would seriously consider taking what I have and removing myself from the corporation at the first sign of any possible legal troubles. That's whether I'm completely innocent of the accusations or not.
Fwiw many cities are switching to fully shielded led street lights. They started doing this where I live (Cincinnati) and the change has been fairly drastic.
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It's not clear to me that competition for students does make the whole system better.

You end up with a phenomenon where some schools get used as dumping grounds for the kids that the other schools don't want to deal with or whose parents don't care or don't know any better. I witnessed this when I had a part-time teaching job in the Boston Public Schools. I spent a year at Jeremiah Burke High School, which has the reputation as one of the worst in the state. A huge proportion of kids there either did not speak much English (Cape Verdean Creole was very common), or had severe learning or behavioral issues.

The problems that exist in public education are incredibly complex, and it's not clear to me that any simple, ideologically-tinged solution is going to solve them.
You don't submit it anywhere necessarily. The best way is to get users to come to you which involves doing many things.

First, have quality content that you are genuinely interested in writing. Be detailed but also with a human touch. Keep it interesting. Cite real stories if you can

Use a good newsletter software (Mailchimp, Aweber etc) and make it easy for a user to give you their email address. Make it clear why you are collecting their email and what will you do with it. If someone is genuinely interested in your stuff, they will gladly subscribe

Start with a very simple Blog template where the focus is on your content and nothing fancy. i personally like 2 column with the right/left column having an About section and a newsletter form below it. thats it.

One trick with blogs is that you can auto post them to your social networks like fb, twitter etc. If you use wordpress, there is a great plugin called "SNAP" that stands for Social Network Auto Poster. Check it out.

Add Google analytics to your homepage. Create some "goals" and see how users behave on your site.

Initially, focus on writing quality stuff and forget about optimizing on google, SEO etc. It will happen with good quality content for the most part.

Rinse and repeat. There is no magic wand but this should give you a pretty good start.

Lastly, make sure you know what to do with the collected email addresses. Do you have a campaign setup ? Do you have autoresponders ? If you don't know what these are, read about them. Engaging your users who could be potential customers is a daunting task but also fun if you do it right.
I was reading the article with Zuck in place of Pavel. I don't think any westerner would be courageous enough to do what Pavel did.

But this falls into the narrative that "Russia bad, America good".

How do you think the Russian media spins stories about Facebook's and Google's co-operation with US intelligence?
Thanks for sharing! It's a pretty cool idea, and I'm sure I'd use it if I was currently looking for a job!

A feature that would be nice for us europeans, considering a massive fraction of the jobs are in the US, would be a map to see the ones closer to us.
Is the TL;DR pretty much that the best Steam machine is still your Windows gaming PC?
To answer your first questions: because in the US, we typically assume our mandate is to educate everyone. If the "secret sauce" is to marginalize the students who are in the most need to help, then that does not achieve our goal.
VS2010 ?!? We are already on 2013 with 2015 around the corner.
Docker Officially Responds to Rocket
Inside a Proof-of-Stake Cryptocurrency Pt3: A Local Ledger (w. Haskell Examples)
Hmm.. I mean I guess if you want to get quality people off the bat, but there's gotta be a place for people interested in a particular topic to be able to discover blogs easily.
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Logging Your Food Intake
Depends on what you consider "modern". Core2 timings changed wildly based on code alignment (experienced myself and documented by others here: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/51).
>> Charter schools are public schools - they are just less regulated ones.

No, they are not. They are run by private corporations. That's like saying McDonalds is a public restaurant because they are open to the public. Please don't mix common understanding of what words mean with some plausible other use of those words, it does not actually help your cause.
> even the largest plan is limited to 125 private repos

Leaving the conversation about small plans aside, we can set up a plan for you that has as many private repositories as you need. Just email sales@github.com and we can get it set up for you.
The jubilation in the comments over this seems... misplaced?
A related but slightly different line of thought is that higher education mostly serves as a filtering mechanism, and some serious people are investigating this hypothesis. At the risk of being heretical, this makes me ask, if there turns out to be merit in that proposition, is it so bad that primary and secondary school serve the same ends to some degree?

If the criticism is that it doesn't give a fair chance to some kids, why aren't we focusing more on giving more chances and more types of chances to people instead of forcing everyone into the same mold?
What's wrong with evaluating the framework (questions) she proposes on its own merits? These questions strike me as critical thinking questions, but not biased questions.
Thanks for not answering the questions I asked - namely whether CS degrees administered partially by philosophy departments are any good - and for making the assumption that you know what is "practical" and what is "interesting" for me.

Not everyone wants to follow the classic SV career path.
Oh, this is phenomenal. Not the visualizations alone, that's been done by others. But this site also has a "training" feature (top right button).

Try it out, it's great for learning/reviewing algorithms!
> Mozilla does NOT accept Bitcoin though their donation page.

Wrong.

https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/content/give-bitcoin/
Github proxies the images in comments: https://github.com/blog/743-sidejack-prevention-phase-3-ssl-...

Here's the code behind it: https://github.com/atmos/camo
It is not about being able to "watch the stars"... it is more about experiencing and realising for a moment how tiny you are while beholding the cosmos. It is about putting things (even your whole life) into perspective...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M
Here's a series of images Thierry Cohen made showing the view of the sky from various cities if they had no light pollution. http://architizer.com/blog/lights-out-what-if-cities-swapped...
> Also, memory nowadays is cheap, CPU power isn't.

Unless you're running your deployment on a 512Mb or 1G VM. I've had composer max out swap on those too. Even with 2G RAM it's not been happy sometimes, so be interesting to see what difference this patch makes.
There is nothing new about the idea that to determine whether a point is inside a shape (2D or 3D), you can extend a ray from that point to infinity and then count the transitions across object boundaries. If the count is odd, the point is inside, otherwise it is outside.

Secondly, this ray can be extended in any direction; it doesn't matter.

In the shadow volume rendering algorithm, they were originally casting that ray from the visible point on an object (corresponding to a pixel) back toward the eye. Carmack realized that you can cast it away from the eye. But that ray can obviously go in any direction. The eye has nothing to do with whether the point is in a shadow. Of course the algorithm breaks sometimes if the ray is cast toward the eye, and stops at the eye, since it hasn't gone to infinity. So if the eye is in shadow, then the ray has failed to emerge from that shadow, and count that.

I suspect that a much cleaner solution would be to cast the ray toward the light source! Then we only have to consider the silhouette polygons/surfaces, basically: the light-source-side "caps" of the shadow volume. We don't even need the shadow volume as such; we don't need the sides (because they are parallel to any ray we cast toward the light source) and we don't need any caps on it on the opposite side, away from the light source.

The down side, however, is that casting rays not in the eye direction means considering objects that are not in the visible scene. Your database of objects for the frame has to include anything that can potentially be between the light source and the visible point. The beauty of the shadow volumes algorithm is that it can work with viewport-clipped data. (And that is why you want to cast that shadow volume intersecting ray away from the eye: because stuff behind the eye is clippped!)
Shoes of Prey Raises $5.5M for Custom Footwear
Why Apple can't meet its luxury brand expectations for the iPhone
Yeah, I'd say it's fair to say so.
This is a match made in heaven. Crazy how fast it happened, too - it's only been a few weeks since Sam Soffes announced on Twitter that he was trying to figure out what to do with Roon.
To maintain its course, Apple will have to become the world's biggest luxury brand and outperform top luxury companies like Mercedes and BMW.
Games wind up using cylinders because of the hairy ball theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem

There are always going to be points on a sphere that map poorly to 2D - if you've played Spore, think of the in-planet spaceship map, you wind up zooming through parts of the map and crawling through others while still going the same speed in-game.
Future Programming Workshop 2014 Final Videos
Thanks for the comment. I'm definitely happy to admit I have very limited understanding of computer chess and I think the likelihood of stumbling upon a new approach to chess engines is close to zero.

That being said, I'm not convinced there's anything "magic" about the fast deep search. There's a broad trend of big complex hand-tuned models being replaced by simple models with more parameters and many many orders of magnitude more training data (eg. machine translation, computer vision). There's probably a lot of domains where this approach doesn't work though. Maybe chess is one of those applications. We don't really know until we try :)
I remember story of my friend in algorithmic contest for high school students in Poland (which are quite hard). He solved problems correctly, but in his implementation he got to check in every iteration of loop if a collection still got any elements. He used col.size()==0 instead of col.isEmpty(). The first was O(n) and it fucked up all performance.
I had the same experience while on a trip out near Uluru some years ago. Camping out in the middle of nowhere, looked up and.... wow. Never seen anything like it, and at this point in my life I conceivably won't again.
It's up to member states to pass laws that exempt e-books from VAT.

Frankly Amazon, Google and the like have taken the piss by using Luxembourg as a tax haven for too long. It's right that VAT is charged in the consumers country.
Office 365, Canadian Privacy and the Patriot Act
In/out works for shapes in geometry with continuous boundaries. But digital shapes are defined by vertices. If your ray intersects a vertex right as it inflects back (tangent to a corner) a 'crossing' gets counted yet nothing was crossed?

Another way to do this is to count the area from a point (sum of dot products of consecutive shape vertices). If its positive - inside. If its negative - outside?
It does if the problem students are denying a quality education to students who can't afford to move away from them. It only takes a small percentage to disrupt the effectiveness of a traditional classroom.
Runbook – DevOps, automated
My point is that the system is already stacked against students, even if every school were a traditional public school. There are always expensive neighborhoods, private schools, tutors, etc.

And one of the side effects of the current system is that rich parents and poor parents don't even live in the same school district anymore. And housing prices are both inflated and tied to the quality of the local schools, which is insane if you think about it.
Considering that computer science these days is almost all about complexity and not computability, this article seems to be lacking. And moreover, where are all of the great minds from the last thirty years? Certainly the Turing award winners after Knuth have said interesting things.
Yes, if you looked at something going into a black hole, it would appear to you that it is slowing down exponentially the closer it gets to the event horizon, until a point where it appears to completely stop (before reaching it).

But in the aforementioned scenario, you are not an external observer but a part of the system going into the singularity (but analogies have their limits).
Looking at the light pollution map [1]. There is a band of light between San Antonio and Corpus Christi that does not follow the cities/roads where you would except to see light.

Anyone know what this band represents?

[1] http://www.youcanseethemilkyway.com/light-pollution/
Much of the conversation in this comment thread assumes a public vs. charter school split. If my understanding is correct, these charter schools are public schools. The distinction is that the charter schools have selection criteria.

A public school with selection criteria is not, by itself, a bad thing. I love that schools like Stuyvesant HS and Bronx School of Science exist, but that's because we all know what their selection criteria are.

I don't like charter schools pretending that the only thing it takes to be part of the school is winnning an entrance lottery. That might be the main way to get in, but it's not all it takes to stay enrolled. Many charter school advocates seem to be ignoring, or ignorant of, the fact that these schools actively weed out students who are difficult to reach.

It's okay to build some schools that require a more serious commitment to learning; it's not okay to build schools like this and pretend they serve everyone, or do a better job than schools who have to keep every eligible student enrolled.
Warning: The commit is NSFW.

The commits are embarrassing, stupid and really exposes why developers are considered idiots. Why troll?

Because they are jerks. Period. Grow up noobs.
GitHub blocked in Russia again
Thank you! I was just going to ask for that story!
Interesting. I recently started mixing GitHub and S3 for blog content and it's a pain in the ass. Asking the internet about pushing GitHub content to S3 results in just a bunch of mediocre scripts. I like it.

I also look forward to Perforce's response. For versioned binary files Perforce is still the best. Competition, hooray!
Nice starting point, a few comments/suggestions:

1. When I first make a connection, the application window jumps to full screen size. This is very annoying. I running on a 4k screen with 1:1 pixels, so that is far more real estate than the application needs. Even on smaller screens, I would immediately have to resize the window after I connect.

2. I would like to be able to not provide the database name and allow me to switch from one DB to another using the same connection. (also, currently if you leave DB blank and attempt to connect, it crashes.)

3. 80% of the time I directly connect to my databases with a tool like this, it is not to look at the data, it is to create/drop/modify tables and other design and admin stuff. I'll occasionally use it to test complex queries before putting them in my code, but most of my queries are simple enough that they don't need testing prior to coding. So I'd see this as more useful if it had the ability to simplify the admin stuff. As it is, since I'd need to use pgAdmin 80% of the time, its not compelling to us something else for the other 20%.
The impact of the Linux philosophy
Actually I didn't shut my brain down, which I believe you did because of your reverence for all that is PG. The rational thing to do as a reader would have been to question his argument, but you never did, you just assumed because PG runs with founders that the scales have been lifted from his eyes.

I found his article failed the simple smell test, if it smells like bullshit, it probably is. I've read the article over and over and each time it smacks of a noble in his guarded castle talking about how wonderful and safe life is under the new king and how the generosity of the new king knows no bounds, all the while his royal cousins are massacring the proletariat.

But please, go ahead and bury your head in the sand.
> Wisdom comes with observation, not age.
Scrubous Pip
Yes, I agree. It is an enormous problem. My preferred solution is to increase the total amount of money in education, and distribute it more evenly.
It's a controversial topic. A lot of people are certain it is a moot point in the same way that flying machines are (were thought) impossible, and therefore not worthy of discussion among serious people.

So my guess is the story was flagged of the front page by this crowd. The comment quality in this thread is very poor, though, so although I would love to see the subject discussed in greater detail, it is clear that the HN community isn't capable of discussing this topic right now.
>I have done this professionally. You don't port everything, you just port services as they become bottlenecks.

Yep, been there too. Except, in the case I'm thinking of, it wasn't for performance. We went with a multi-language approach for different reasons, and we ended up with a hybrid that no-one liked. Then, we finally decided to port everything to one language.

All of this to say that a multi-language approach can have its own drawbacks, which is not to say that it's never appropriate. There should just be a really good reason for it. Generally, I'm not sure that starting with a plan to half-port a non-performant app is a good reason. But, I'd never say never.

I'd also add (again) that if you've really taken the time to structure the app so well that you have clean interfaces and modularized, easily-portable services, then it begs the question: did you really save so much time by then implementing that design in PHP vs Java? As you said, the design is the hard part, and I'm just not seeing the notion of a quick non-scaling app, somewhat hastily implemented in PHP, being compatible with the idea of a tight, service-oriented, modular design. I think you kind of have to choose one.

I don't suppose any approach is necessarily the absolute right approach per se. But, given that the article is about picking one approach/language (Java) and sticking with it, I'd have to say that I'm still convinced that it may indeed be optimal, even after reviewing your points.
How to Manage Confidential Data
That's half of what is going on with this material. A silver/shiny roof will reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed into the home. But it will also reduce the heat which is radiated out of the house. So this method won't cool the house it will just insulate it better from the sun. (Which will result in cooler temperatures, though)

Something (e.g. a color, surface finish) which absorbs heat efficiently also gives off heat efficiently and vice versa. That's why steel/iron motorcycle cylinders are often painted black. The amount of heat absorbed by the sun is much less than the amount of heat which can be radiated away.

What these researches are trying to do is optimize this reflection/absorption ratio for the various light/infra-red frequencies. Pretty cool idea, I think.
<Sigh>, so many things are independently discovered..
Why do we still have patents??
"the goal is to eliminate C from the source tree so that—except for programs that use cgo"

What does the future hold for cgo? Yesterday I ran into erratic DNS success with a cross compiled program, win to lin. Haven't had a chance to look further, but I'm wondering when I'll run into similar snags again.
Yea, I mean, that'd cost 20 cents or something to store.
Fundamentally life is just patterns of information and their associated support structures capable of reproducing and adapting to their environment. There really is no answer to the question of "why" life reproduces because life that does not reproduce ceases to be life. The reproduction component is inherent in its definition.

As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. Some invoke the anthropic principle, but that is more of a philosophical answer than a scientific one.
Windows 10 Build 9888 Leaks
Will Telegram finally have end-to-end encryption by default for all users, just like TextSecure, and now even Whatsapp? I fail to see how an app can claim to be "the most secure in the world", when 99 percent of its users don't even use end-to-end encryption.

From the link, this paragraph was cringe-worthy:

> We use SHA1 for integrity check
The SHA1 in question is for raw unencrypted data.
The message key is SHA1-dependent.
Note that the AES key and iv depend on that SHA1.

Glad to see they're using this super-secure "SHA1" hash function for integrity checking and that everything else is dependent on it. In a few years they could even brag about how they're using SHA1 for longer than Microsoft!
It's not that you have to hold all variables equal. One of her core arguments is that people need to be transparent about these variables when comparing charter schools to open public schools.

If the expulsion rate and parent engagement is part of the 'secret sauce', then everyone needs to be aware of that.

Charter schools are impressing people because they claim to get results, and people assume they're getting better results with the same students. This would be interesting if it were happening, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Anyone can take the most motivated, compliant, best-supported students and do well with them.
Show HN: Cleverbot with Hacker News AI
You can see the demo of the app working here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNjj_DcnacQ