skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are researchy parts of those companies but getting a job there is a lot like getting any other academic job in terms of competition and number of applicants, so it's effectively academia.

what wondrous land do you propose that will support researchers and their desire for a few months out of the year to think about stuff? at most companies, you won't get a few minutes out of the day to do anything other than pack numbers tightly into excel or go to your next standup.
[ ] has no mission yet, it's really just a component of a larger system, but that larger system hasn't been designed or funded

Fill in the blank and you've described a good fraction of NASA's technology over the past 20 years.
Easy citations and reference lists in your browser: no fee, license, or bullshit
This is mentioned in the article as well, but I believe the real issue is the automatic credibility given to people that possess credentials.

Many people seem perfectly happy to put their health and life in the hands of a medical professional and do a minimal amount of work/research for themselves.

For example, given the popularity of the below drugs, few seem to ask:

'Do I really need to kill my liver cells to lower my cholesterol?' (statins)

'If we don't know how these antidepressants work, and some studies show they don't work, why am I taking them?'
Wow, seems pretty fool-proof then. Always thought even if you could grab a Paypal account, the damage you could do would be pretty limited due to reversible transactions, payout to the user's bank account only, limited ways to buy high value online goods instantly etc.

I wonder how successful their card program is and what percentage of their fraud is generated by it. We're seeing businesses massively shift away from cash, as are governments. But I also thought the same was happening with cards to a smaller extent. Wouldn't have expected a physical-card push from a digital money company like Paypal. I guess cards (physical or stored as digital credentials like Appe Pay) are here to stay for quite some time.
It's what basically every company that delivers project bids that include an estimate of work hours does, AFAIK. Higher hour counts make the managers choosing which bid to accept feel more comfortable, I think.

Doesn't necessarily make it right, but it's very common, maybe even expected and off-putting when not committed, in the way that a lot of business-related lies are.
That would be decoding, not encoding.
The worst consequence of this insecure, anxious, hypercompetitive culture is the near-impossibility of sincere collaboration. I speak from my experience as a very successful grad-student and postdoc in synthetic biology and neuroscience. Unlike equity in a startup, the kudos credit for publishing a high-impact paper is really only split between the first author and the lab PI, removing any incentive for trainees and labs to work together on larger projects. Of course, a great deal of noise is made in grants and PR about academic collaborations, but they are always paper affairs of convenience in securing funding, never truly incentivized joint missions, at least not in the biological sciences. I can't count the number of attempted collaborations that I've seen collapse in heated acrimony. As a result, most academic science is a very lonely affair, and the ambition of what can be achieved today in experimental biology is completely constrained by what one poorly-trained young researcher can do in a few years of hard labor with only a modicum of outside help and advice.
Small world, this is my repo! It actually originally was created by https://github.com/giu/hacker-news-threadify -- I forked it, made some fixes, and submitted it back to him (https://github.com/giu/hacker-news-threadify/commit/cfd57f58...).
SpaceX is also working on a vehicle to transport humans and cargo (at incredible scale) to Mars routinely using reusable vehicles.

And to be 100% clear, Orion is not capable of making the journey to Mars. Orion is envisioned as potentially being a key component of a larger system that could be used for Mars exploration, but by itself it is perhaps only maybe 10-20% or so of what would be needed for such a trip.
While I'm not saying that Bill Gates is or was 'nice', I take issue with the thought that something that is illegal is by definition something that makes a person 'not nice'. I've known my share of people who were engaged in very illegal practices and still, by my moral standards, nice, and even good.

Conflating morality with legality feels a bit easy to me. It's just not always true.
Four times? You can expect the C/C++ version (with some SIMD intrinsics) to run 10-30x faster than the JIT-optimized JS version.
> Only downside: more memory needed, but nobody except the embedded guys care anymore.

As an Android user, I care. Android needs 2GB of memory to run the apps that iOS only needs 1GB for (running Android on a tablet with 1GB has been painful for me).
> “The skinny data nerd …”

Looks like a normally proportioned guy to me.
It's funny - because I've done the same thing. I've had drivers that hit the brakes way too hard, and were kind of annoyingly chatty - that I just didn't have the heart to downgrade, even though I realized that I probably hadn't had a great experience, and, they weren't the safest of drivers. But I just couldn't bring myself to give a black mark to someone who had tried so hard to be friendly.
Except for every 400th year.
> Honestly, if C++ added just allow classes to be reopened (even if they weren't granted access to private methods) a lot of the pressure to roll your own string would be diminished.

But then you'd have the problem with different extensions to the same base class used in different libraries used in the same project conflicting, so you'd also need to make a way to scope the extensions to prevent that.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318.
> When the half dozen browsers that represent about 99.9% of the browswer market all use C++, perhaps the explanation is not "They're all wrong."

I didn't say they're wrong by any means! C++ is the horse and cart. Performance wise, the programming language automobile doesn't exist yet. Of course one should and must use what is currently available!

The best language for writing a web browser does not exist yet. Or for writing other similarly complicated applications with performance requirements.

So, yes, C++ is probably the best language for writing a web browser right now. The cleanest dirty shirt. Certainly not the safest, but out of high level languages it has the best performance. It has large enough work force, important if you're building a large project. C/C++ interfaces with current operating systems natively. And a lot of other considerations make it a sensible choice.

But C/C++ is rather far from what a language could be. It's very bug prone. Overcomplicated. Hard to maintain.

And it is slow. Not compared to other languages, but to CPU performance potential. I can write very fast software in C++ -- if I effectively fall back to assembler or at least compiler intrinsics. In other words, by being a human compiler.
I think we're talking past each other.
If anyone can build a big enough quantum computer (enough qubits) and prevent it decohering (that is, keeping it quantum long enough) to run Shor's algorithm, standard public key crypto like RSA would be broken. That has been known in theory since the 90s.

But if anyone ever builds such a quantum computer it isn't necessarily the end for public key crypto because there is a workaround that will work on classical computers, and that is to avoid trapdoor functions that can be broken by Shor's algorithm. So if a quantum computer comes along that can break, say, 256 bit RSA, we can save public key crypto by everyone switching to a different algorithm. That's the idea of post-quantum cryptography. And although RSA might be broken by a future quantum computer we can still have some sort of public key cryptography.

From the looks of this blog post, though, one of the new post-quantum public key algorithms can be broken. At least it could be if anyone ever makes a big enough quantum computer. And there's still the possibility that someone will find a trapdoor function that will be quantum resistant, so it isn't the end for all public key crypto.

tl;dr One more public key scheme might have fallen to a quantum algorithm. But the quantum hardware isn't there yet, so it's OK for now.
I've used XSLT for APIs that return XML. This allows looking at the output of the API in a human-readable format. This is convenient as a debug tool, and anything that returns an XML page should have a link to the XLST for it.
Modifying WiFi SD Card Firmware
The patents would only cover the implementation that comes with the hardware, not any other software implementation running on it. This means you'd have to use the hardware decoder APIs to decode images, which is less than ideal when you want fast, low latency decoding.
http://www.ams.org/notices/199606/barnsley.pdf
Wasn't this the work that was patented, prevented everybody from using it, and never went anywhere?
I don't entirely buy this. You don't get to go any slower if you are going to Mars, which is not orbiting the Earth in any way. Or if I just want to escape Earth orbit and go drift in space, why do I need to be moving fast relative to the Earth? Why can't I be moving slowly but steadily away?
If I am building a Foo widget and I work 3 hours one day and 3 hours the next and then I'm done, I bill one day.

If I am building a Foo widget and I work 3 hours one day and then I'm done, I bill one day.

If I am building a Foo widget and I work 3 hours one day and then I'm done, and then the client asks me to build a Bar widget and I work 3 hours the next day and then I'm done, I might bill 1 day or I might bill 2, depending on the relationship. This doesn't come up much.

If I am building a Foo widget and I work 3 hours one day and then I'm done, and then a week later the client asks me to build a Bar widget and I work 3 hours next week and then I'm done, I bill 2 days.
Exactly. At every stage he also reminds his audience that they too can do these wonderful things - he relates his pitch to things they do, or at least have seen done, and demonstrates how his solution lets them do it. That's true selling.
Flux is on Windows and Linux, as well.
Ask HN: Carpal Tunnel Recommendations?
I'm having a bit of carpal tunnel. I had it several years ago and I found these exercises which seemed to help a lot:
http://www.eatonhand.com/hw/ctexercise.htm

I'm going to do them again, but I'm wondering if HN has any mouse/keyboard/pads/other suggestions. I already have an elevated monitor so I'm good on that front. I'm currently using the standard Apple external keyboard of a couple years ago and a pretty generic Dell mouse.

Edit: Should add that the pain is only in my right wrist/hand (mouse hand) and I think a large degree of it maybe related to the mouse - I spend a lot of time scrolling with my middle finger for example. I'm considering the Apple Magic Trackpad
You are repeating news sources that are repeating press releases.

The Orion has less than 214 square feet of room. This isn't enough for 4 people to live in for 6 months.

NASA says it's for Mars because it gets people excited. But Congress has not instructed them to do a mission to Mars, and Congress is in charge, for better or for worse. There is no mission to Mars.
The thing about pervasive government surveillance is that we just can't trust that the judges who decide their legality haven't been compromised. That's what's so devastating about these programs - there is a distinct possibility that their existence self-perpetuates by targeting those that would keep them in check. The same should be considered if the US supreme court decides their constitutionality [1].

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/supreme-court-nsa_n...
>Now show me a picture of a man from that dataset that could possibly be construed as sexual.

>This is not a matter of prudishness.

There seems to be a contradiction here.

>I would be very surprised if you could find me a single one.

I agree, not because I think male French researchers would give a rat's ass about the cropped head of a naked guy appearing as a test subject, but because I doubt any would be foolish enough to poke the proverbial hornet's nest and incur the wrath of self-righteous west coast white guys tweeting on their iPhones.
I assume it's a reference to the stabbing performed by Roose, albeit he is not a king.
What a terrible job to have: seven years of living in a shack, not talking to anyone, not allowed to wash yourself or cut your fingernails.

Fortunately it appears not all hermit employers were so draconian. This sounds like an interesting form of entertainment:

"You pull a bell, and gain admittance. The hermit is generally in a sitting posture, with a table before him, on which is a skull, the emblem of mortality, an hour-glass, a book and a pair of spectacles. The venerable bare-footed Father, whose name is Francis (if awake) always rises up at the approach of strangers. He seems about 90 years of age, yet has all his sense to admiration. He is tolerably conversant, and far from being unpolite."

I'm now hoping for a smartphone app called Hermit, which does exactly what is described above. The "tolerably conversant" 90-year-old sounds like a fun kind of AI to write. Compared to the stuff I do on a phone in idle moments, chatting with a simulated hermit while contemplating a memento mori desktop seems positively useful.
Why does a site of a web site acceleration software take almost 10 seconds to load?
I bought into xslt2... which I think was only ever implimented in the saxon parser, written by they guy that wrote large chunks of the spec. My chain was simple, MS Access DB -> XML (via hand written vba) -> parser -> 4 documents with information that was consistent. I then handed it over to a programmer to replace the Access DB / XML / Parser with the server versions, and he never did get it quite right. For my next project I chose JSON, on the idea that a beautiful solution doesn't mean much if it can't be productionized. Still sad about xslt though, lots of potential for making good looking pdfs and webpages that were consistent.
It's true. Patrick is able to charge those rates because he was bit by a radioactive spider, and because he famously invented the idea of hooking "Hello World" up to a random number generator and people want a little slice of that sweet sweet bingo card expertise.
I believe Zeller's Congruence had already solved this, no?

Zeller's is based upon calculating the day of the week, but it also calculates days in the month and accounts for leap years. Plus, it's been around since the 19th century and is used in many major programming languages to calculate date (its implementation is sometimes a first year Comp Sci course project for introductory programming): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeller%27s_congruence

For a programming example that does this same thing: https://github.com/mwhawkins/JavaZellers

How did this make the front page of HN being a problem which has already been solved and well documented for almost 200 years? Not to knock the author, as they put in some time apparently, but was just curious.
I had the same issue, and was told by an old school hacker friend to do the following:

- Stop typing for a few days altogether

- Get a Kinesis Advantage keyboard

- Switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout

After a few months, I got rid of the Kinesis keyboard, and everything was back to normal. I never had any issues moving forward, and I attribute a lot of this to the use of Dvorak.
Looking at the result and judging is actually the best and most important metric. There are numerical metrics, like SSIM, but they are always worse than human comparison trials. You're optimizing for what looks best to a human in the end, after all.
How precisely do you specify upfront what a 'day' means?

I don't. All my recent contracts of this nature have simply stated that a day on which any services are provided is chargeable, or words roughly equivalent to that.

This does require a client to trust that I won't abuse the deal by, say, charging for a day off just because I spent a few minutes replying to an e-mail. I suppose legally speaking I could do that, but then legally speaking a client can typically also fire me in the time it takes to get a letter delivered if they're not happy with progress on their project. As with so much of this business, trust goes both ways.

In reality, I have never found this to be a problem. As others have said, clients are typically more interested in the value of the work you produce than in how, when, or where you produce it. You might see the occasional raised eyebrow if someone asks directly and is surprised at your answer, but personally I'm not aware that I've ever lost business or left unhappy clients over it.

The client was a somewhat difficult/overly-controlling person but willing to pay well for quality. Would you simply turn down someone like this?

Given a reasonable alternative, which is usually the case: yes.

Incidentally, in the UK, where I am, you should be very wary of taking on "overly controlling clients". If you aren't sufficiently independent -- as demonstrated by signals like your clients controlling your working hours -- then you could be deemed a disguised employee rather than a separate business. That leaves you with all the overheads of running a business, yet also leaves both you and your client with all the tax obligations of an employer-employee relationship, which is a Very Bad Idea.
How the Apple iPad Could Flourish Once Again
'Big learning'
There are _so many_ template engines out there. Using XSLT to generate HTML is one of the most obtuse, obsolete ways you could possibly generate static pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_template_eng...
semicolons oh my goodness
Mobile borders on embedded imho, and I agree that Java wasn't the smartest choice there. I'm on IOS, so I don't really know, but didn't Google push for 512MB minimum RAM with Android 4.0, to better serve the emerging markets?
Knockout is one of the best js library out there .. but now it looks like they are also expanding; they have planned to introduce components.
Doesn't a JavaScript implementation offset most of the performance benefits? Today we have browsers that are smart about when to cache the decoded image and when not, etc; does that have to be reimplemented in javascript?
"I mean, a magazine that supports the Democratic party, the Contras, Charles Murray and gay rights. That's a narrow demographic." -- Jeet Heer
There was a Hacker News article about why August has 31 days, breaking the 30/31 alternating days. I can't find it but here's an article about it.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/history-of-august.html

It just makes it a more interesting formula because of that!
"Painfully opt-out"?

You untick a box on the signup form. You're not put on the sex offenders register.
I'd settle for a "We fucked up, sorry we have been sitting on v0.11.x, maybe we'll consider bumping to 1.0.0".
> Or if I just want to escape Earth orbit and go drift in space, why do I need to be moving fast relative to the Earth?

Because gravity. If you aren't going fast relative to Earth, you aren't going to escape Earth orbit [0]. Heck, if you aren't going fast relative to Earth, you aren't even going to be in Earth orbit [1], you are going to be falling back to the surface.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed
Absolutely hilarious, reminds me of the @KimKierkegaard Twitter account. I'm a little skeptical of how algorithmic this is, not at least without some significant human curation!
As the article referenced here is rather light, here is
the actual paper of the mentioned study (open access):
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...,
and a slightly more informative report by the University of Colorado Boulder,
http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/11/20/running-rea....

Conclusion from the paper:

Running mitigates the age-related deterioration of walking
economy whereas walking for exercise appears to have
minimal effect on the age-related deterioration in walking
economy.
Either

(a) Teach a new english word each day.

(b) advertise yourself/services

(c) Read a storey

8 months = ~243 days = ~1 hour of reading you could do, maybe a public domain short story
There is also a Javascript port of WebP decoding: http://webpjs.appspot.com/

As a bonus, you won't have to pay for a HEVC decoder license.
>It does not "beg" any questions.

Yes it does. geofft wants to imply that it is somehow equivalent of using a nude of one's own mother, which is absurd.

>Sexualizing women has nothing to do with ...

Tell me why you think this one[1] is okay, as opposed to the Lena image; and what it has to do with whatever it is you do.

[1] http://jeremykun.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/gala-dali.jpg?w...
Do you actually enjoy working?
I've just began working a year ago or so and I find myself extremely unmotivated, despite being in a company that's generally well respected.

Is this the way life is supposed to be? I studied hard in school and always thought CS was extremely interesting, but it turns out I very rarely use anything I learned.

Do you guys have any advice on identifying the parts that you like or dislike about jobs?

Much thanks!
Exactly it.

One of the most notable examples of agressive enforcement of patents completely stalling research in otherwise very promising and interesting domain.
XSLT is one of those cases where the idea and the intention is great, but the actual implementation is horrible.

I would love to see someone propose a modern alternative to XSLT, that works for the same use cases, but avoids XSLTs mistakes.
mylib: DEFINITIONS =
BEGIN
copy_first_n: PROCEDURE [VAR out_s: STRING, in_s: STRING, n: CARDINAL ]
RETURNS [error: BOOLEAN];
END

Mesa at Xerox PARC - 1979, one of the influences for strong type systems programming languages.

But the 80's startups had to go build workstations based on UNIX.
I saw this back in '90, showing an aquarium, zooming into a goldfish, zooming into its eyeball, and then zooming into the Earth. I always wondered what happened to the tech. The company was IFS, IIRC.
"You only want one? You've got no friends. Like me."
How TED (Really) Works
> 'Do I really need to kill my liver cells to lower my cholesterol?' (statins)

A small number of people taking statin drugs (<1% for atorvastatin, the most popular drug in the class) experience abnormal liver enzyme levels, and the drugs are contraindicated in the case that a patient has existing liver disease. But that's hardly destroying one's liver cells in the majority of people.
Cyber Monday 2014 Aftermath
Why Real-time Summaries Are Your DevOps Treasure Map
I don't think you read the post you replied to.

Bitcoin requires secure signing and hashing, which are post-quantum secure (hash functions and Lamport/Merkle signatures).
most jobs in my experience are like that ;((
Noah Kagan Interview on Reverse Engineering Success
Orbital Sciences is doing something similar, IIRC.

They are the two big approaches to cheap space being done now. 1) Be cost-effective at making rockets, 2) launch from jets. My money is on #1, which SpaceX is doing, but #2 has some things going for it that could prove me wrong. #2 is also strictly limited in just how big you can make a payload, while for #1 you can get up to around 200 ton payloads before things start working against you.
The Evolution of Marijuana Growing Technology
If you want to know the catch, it is that it has high latency at first run, and requires a full compiler at runtime. It is optimized for numerical work, where the long runtime make slow startup irrelevant and low latency is easily amortized.

But if you are suspicious, there are introspection utilities that let you see the generated native code. Give it a try.
Negative SEO with no links Case study