skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the good stuff (Curiosity, etc.) gets a ton of PR, but that doesn't mean there aren't day-to-day problems that are massive impediments for NASA. The mere fact that successive administrations get to come along and yank on NASA's long-term planning like a dog on a choke chain is really damaging to NASA's ability to actually break beyond LEO.

Until someone is able to marshal enough political power to force a change to this constant interference (and protect them long enough to accomplish their mission), NASA is going to continue to have trouble. Great engineers can still do incredible things even with bureaucratic and political interference, it's just so much more difficult than it needs to be.
Reading code good[video]
How is this similar to what the NIPS organizers did? It doesn't seem related at all.
It's not an argument against state-funded science. It's an argument against politicians using that funding to screw over the fundees.
It's good to see conservationists admit that their task is mostly killing. Too often people confuse conserving a species with being nice to animals. They're diametrically opposite ambitions. Conservationists sometimes try to tap into our "don't kill cute animals" feeling to support their cause, but have to do a 180 when it doesn't suit.

I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.
On Learning and Comprehension
Show HN: One click subtitle downloader for any movie or TV Series using python
A key observation is that WebP biases towards smoothness (which certainly produces pleasing images!) at the cost of sacrificing detail. mozjpeg produces images with numerous macroblocking artifacts (ick) that seem to preserve more of the original image detail, from the cases I looked at.
I agree the people who signed off on this decision should be brought to trial, but I am not to sure that they intended the outcome that occurred. This is still no excuse for a decision that will kill 10,000s of innocent children.
> It's not the most sophisticated solution, but at least they won't be lost and I'll have a chance of reconnecting with something and establishing more anchors in my memory.

Go for it; simplicity works. I've pushed a few of my favourite passages to a simple web page which I can flip through randomly (http://www.jasimabasheer.com/amateur_reading/serendipity.htm...). As a bonus I can also link to it when relevant discussions come up.
Although most LED matrices have parallel columns of series LEDs, since they are usually multiplexed at high speed to create the persistence of vision effect.
A persistent failing in the U.S. system is the ability of congress to micromanage the minutiae of larger programs, all for pork barrel spending. Things like the gasket problems on the Shuttle SRBs, and NASA in general being spread all over the country are all related to every single Congressperson trying to get a little something to take home. In a perfect world, they would have to authorize money at an agency level and with no finer granularity. Of course, if that were the case no money would ever be allocated at all...
So they could be stuck on something like Red Hat 9 instead? The problem is only partially the licensing.
Why Hackers Love Passwords
As one noted in the article ""almost certainly an underestimate", because a number of climate-health relationships are not measurable due to lack of adequate data".

Milder winters expand the range of disease-carrying insects, increase risks of wars or famine with less water, mass migrations leading to political instability, more extreme weather events like draughts and flooding leading to failed crops and other natural catastrophes...

Meanwhile much of the WHO estimate is for people dying due to heat exposure. Easy to quantify, important to know - but nowhere near the full picture.
I have to strongly disagree. For several of the images there are artifacts and noise in the large JPEG that looked much better in a medium BPG (which are about 60% the size of the JPEG).

Also, saying "Large is the only acceptable quality level," means that you are only considering only a very narrow use-case
Well, exactly. The book as a whole accomplishes much more than a brief summary of it does, which is why it feels bad to lose all of that additional information.

I disagree with the parent that you still remember the content but can't summarize it concisely. I believe the opposite: you forget the specifics but retain the ability to summarize them.
I hope the top on the list is Homo Sapiens
And this would be bad why? Snark aside, the federal government is out of control with no accountability. I don't even know how they could be held accountable.
Exactly, the same credit mimicking cognition along vector comparison deserves.
Godot Engine Reaches 1.0, Releases First Stable
In security it also doesn't make sense to ask "am I secure?" but instead to ask "how secure am I?". The money in my bank account isn't more secure from a government that wants to freeze my assets, but it is certainly more secure than the money under my mattress from a potential break in. You have to identify the targets you're concerned about before you can tell if you're "secure enough." And, for the most part, individuals don't need to be "secure enough" against spy networks of nations.

Furthermore, and I think we're going to disagree here, I believe there is a balance to be played between trust, security, and following laws. For instance, a safe deposit box at a bank is generally secure. A bank won't usually open it, but they can if the need arises, and law enforcement can obtain the contents if they go through the proper channels and provide a warrant. In theory, I believe this to be an inherently good thing. The police must be able to pursue criminals, and, by providing evidence, be granted access to things they would otherwise be unable to access. I believe there to be a direct analogy between an email provider that does not routinely give access to its users emails but would respond to warrants as necessary.

Now, I would be naive if I didn't realize that the spy agencies of the world weren't holding up to their government's part of the bargain here. But I believe the answer to be in government accountability, not completely locked down security.

Aside from philosophical views, I also believe that this is a much more pragmatic approach. Do you know why people give up all their personal information, email, etc. to the Googles and Facebooks of the world? Because it's so goddamned convenient. Google provides so many great services for free. And full security is hard and inconvenient. You're going to have a tough pitch to sell fully encrypted email just on the basis of services not being able to provide a good search experience, because I gotta tell ya, Gmail search is really amazing, and it provides many people with tangible benefits. Fully encrypted email provides value that is much more intangible.
> I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.

Okay...
But I'm pretty sure a conservationists goal is not to make species go extinct.

There is a long run goal which is the survival of as many species and habitats as possible. Being nice animals is not diametrically opposed with being a conversationist, nor would a conversationist actually argue for killing all whales unless it had greater benefits for ocean ecosystems as a whole. You're ignoring the long-term consequences and only focusing on the actions themselves in calculating moral utility.
Why the Growth Process Is More Important Than the Growth Hack
Quantum computing enabling DNA computing to solve for non-linear matricies might work.
Yeah, for a long time my wiki based file system based, and the markup is plain text, so you can read it without any software. (I've since switched to sqlite for query flexibility.)

I hear about org mode a lot when I talk about the Wiki, but I'm not an emacs user so it's not as appealing to me.

Can org mode export HTML? At least for reading, plain HTML is the format that works best across all devices, and gives fast access. Writing is a different story.
170?
Rust is a new language. Its designers are close to solving the problems they set out to solve, but they haven't fully succeeded yet. Heavy use of "unsafe" indicates that there are things you can't properly express in the language, or can only express inefficiently.

It's worthwhile to separate the two. If you can't do it at all, there's a problem with expressiveness. If you can't do it fast, there's a problem with performance. It's useful to try to do things without using "unsafe" to cheat the system. Then you find out what the language needs to do faster. That's a trouble spot to be identified. There may be an optimization which leads to a safe and fast solution. Or there may be a way to make something checkable so that it's not necessary to do something unsafe.
Org-mode tricks for team management
You might be making matters worse with a jar: those with screw-on lids have a plastic lining in the lid that's traditionally PVC with plasticizers which are considered to be bad for health. To make matters worse, oil will support the migration of the plasticizers out of the plastic.
Hi,

You've got a misspelling of January on your web page.

What makes this different from SquareSpace?
opera 15:

[16/12/2014 06:25:05] JavaScript - http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/
Inline script thread

Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'file' to object

Error thrown at line 5, column 4 in <anonymous function>() in http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/js/splitimage2...:

for (i = 0; i < file.length; i++)

called from line 1, column 0 in http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/js/splitimage2...:

(function() {
In Engineering, there is no such thing as "at the same time" unless it's a feature of the design.
We prosecute people for negligence for way less impactful decisions. Whoever signed off on that decision either weighed the consequences of their actions and decided that was worth it or they were so incompetent that they didn't even think about it. Considering they're responsible for one of the premiere spy networks on the planet, I'm going to guess they're pretty intelligent. So that leaves one option.
Isn't the problem of drug resistance made-made?

http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/en/

In India, in particular, anyone can buy antibiotics, and they do, whether they need them or not. This problem should probably be addressed before we create a problem that we can't solve.
That's quite frankly amazing. I'm really happy to read stuff like this on here.
I think drift in this case has a connotation of being aimless and directionless (eg being adrift). However, I don't think the article is blaming NASA. Any organization would be adrift after having the kind of success NASA did, then getting presidential grandstanding followed by congressional micromanagement for decades.

The real villains in this story are Congress and the President.
Guy Williams has your back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AG4odHCokw
Didn't you read the article and watch the video? There is a sinusoidal signal added (i.e. up and down) that matches the rotation of the blades and controls the hinges on the blades. So the signal can be high when the blade is on one side of the vehicle then low when the blade is on the other side. Or vice-a-versa if the control system wants to go the other way. Both blades tilt the desired direction when they are on the desired side of the vehicle. The video is quite good and shows the blades hinging different directions on different sides when the signal is applied.
There are two motors.
Well I don't use Red Hat but when I update Debian Stable, my system doesn't break, and I don't have to pay for 500 site licenses. My system benefits from people that ensure emacs and libre office will work if I update glibc.

The same is not true for Windows, where XP obviously gets dropped with no sane upgrade path and a non trivial cost.
Its not NP to determine if the max-forward reach zero. Just simulate it until it reaches zero or not... QED
Yep, I really liked the look/size tradeoff of JPEG 2000. It's too bad it hasn't caught on, particularly for cameras as an alternative to JPEG.
The FiiV Case Straps a Hotspot and Battery to Your iPad
You slipped the blank slate fallacy here: the belief that people are born exactly equal, there is zero genetic component to IQ and programming capabilities, and all that is needed is "working hard" and "believing in yourself".

This is far from universally accepted.
> However, to my eye, Large is the only acceptable quality level on these examples, and at Large the difference between JPEG and BPG looks almost imperceptible.

I feel we must be looking at different examples, or must have very different definitions of “imperceptible”. I find that there is a very substantial difference in high frequency detail between mozjpeg and BPG in nearly all of these examples at the 'large' size, as well as many images where mozjpeg produces highly objectionable artifacts even at the 'large' size and BPG does not.

Speaking for myself, I would prefer to use a higher quality setting than any of the ones demonstrated even with BPG for most of my personal purposes. For my typical use cases, the 'large' BPG versions of most of these images are at the edge of acceptable quality, and every one of the other compressed versions falls far short of acceptable.†

Many other people have use cases where precise image replication isn’t as important though, and at every size BPG seems like a dramatic step up over the competition.

One thing I hope gets worked out before this goes mainstream is color management / color profile support. In Safari on my Mac there are several images where the rendered BPG image is obviously not correctly applying the image’s color profile.

† Kakadu’s JPEG2000 encoder and WebP at that 'large' size also seem noticeably better than mozjpeg, but they still seem to wipe more high frequency detail and produce more artifacts – especially edge artifacts – than BPG. On some images packed with very high contrast fine detail (e.g. Vallée de Colca), WebP performance and BPG performance seems pretty similar and a bit better than Kakadu; in general compression is hard in these cases so the “large” size ends up being pretty large.
Palo Alto’s last remaining mobile home park is running out of options
I'd love to believe this, but it's my day job. By the time I've poured my brain 9–5 into what my employer wants, I just feel too drained to do what I want.

It's a vicious cycle of desire and fatigue.
Look at the hinge picture. See how the two hinge pins are parallel? Now imagine the blades turning 180 degrees. The hinge pins will now be at the "opposite" angle to before, despite that the blades are symmetrical so identical at 180 degrees to 0 degrees.

So at 0 degrees, increasing torque will, say, increase pitch of the "right-hand" blade while decreasing pitch of the "left-hand" one. But at 180 degrees it will be the opposite. This has the presumably beneficial effect of allowing the craft to climb by simply increasing rotor speed steadily (it will "wobble" a bit but in a spiral fashion which will let it climb without too much inefficiency). Put another way, this means that increasing torque at 0 degrees but decreasing it at 180 degrees allows an asymmetrical pitch to be maintained at a rotational speed which can be seen as constant (over the long term).

In other words, your intuition falls down because the mechanism is not as symmetrical as your brain wants it to be at first glance. Symmetry is an intuitive and attractive for mechanical systems, but it is actually limiting in many cases, and this is a great example.
> the database was created at a time when encryption wasn’t used.

Apparently I'm relatively new to technology, but when was this time when "encryption wasn't used?" It seems so fundamental today that I can't imagine a world without it.
Show HN: Bean Counter – Pay by the Minute Accounting Help for US and AU Startups
We live in the future AT&T imagined in 1994 – Vox
(Disclosure: I am a paying FastMail customer) Is there any reason why you put the sender's IP address when sending out a mail via SMTP? Sure you want to keep logs, but why put the IP address of people like me who pay you for the service (and thus, won't spam or anything)
I see it too. Identical version: 41.0.2243.0 dev-m (64-bit) and also on Windows. I see it here as well: http://bellard.org/bpg/lena.html which explains "The BPG images are decoded in your browser with a small Javascript decoder." You can find more on the format at: http://bellard.org/bpg/

Someone filed a bug today: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=442599

Fixed in Canary 5 days ago: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=439743
Welcome to the AI effect. Progress in AI, no matter how large or small, is almost never recognized as progress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

>"It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, Oh, that's just a computation."

>When IBM's chess playing computer Deep Blue succeeded in defeating Garry Kasparov in 1997, people complained that it had only used "brute force methods" and it wasn't real intelligence. Fred Reed writes "A problem that proponents of AI regularly face is this: When we know how a machine does something 'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. If I beat the world's chess champion, I'd be regarded as highly bright."

Now we have computers beating games without using brute force methods (as well as being good at various other unrelated AI tasks, i.e. "general") and we see the same thing happening. This is an amazing achievement.
RELAY: Static Race Detection on Millions of Lines of Code
And as reported in the above bug, fixed 5 days ago. We're living in the almost bleeding edge here ;-) https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=439743
A LEGO version: http://vimeo.com/44202270
It is! In the next 10-20 years hepatitis C will likely be eliminated from developed countries.

The company who makes the drug is offering it a very low price to developing countries so the impact will be worldwide.
> This problem should probably be addressed before we create a problem that we can't solve.

That still leaves the nasty issue of what to do with the large number of people who have contracted a highly contagious and drug-resistant / incurable disease.
At Atari (in the mid 80s) we had some relationships with dealers in Poland; they would occasionally visit us in Sunnyvale to do buys and say "hi".

They loved our computers, but the Polish government wouldn't allow them to sell any of the printers we made . . .
I would be interested in looking at this.
The short version is, I think one of the main things that separates, say, the U.S. from the E.U. is the ability to shift vast quantities of money around the country in the guise of federal programs. It's spectacularly inefficient, but it also helps to set a floor on how bad any one area can get. If that's good or bad largely depends on your personal politics.
The sane XP upgrade path was to Windows 7. Those that don't upgrade have larger problems in their IT then Microsoft or Windows.
You say "FastMail as a company do not participate in blanket surveillance". And then, in your next sentence, you admit that this is actually not under your control.

Why do you keep trying to make it sound as if FastMail had a choice in the matter even though you know that it doesn't?
> We recently had respected independent security firm Matasano do a security audit

Strangely, they don't mention the results of this audit, which struck me as odd, but then I found this:

> Our most recent security audit, conducted by Matasano in October 2014, found no significant issues. (Source[0])

I just thought I'd share in case anyone else was wondering.

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html?domai...
I'm from the US. I've signed up for kollegiums and I'm waiting on the list. It's taking a while as all the first year students have priority first, but that's wearing off soon. Hopefully that'll come through soon, but it's going to pose another challenge as I'll be going on exchange in half a year.
OT ... but I find Canary to be much more usable and stable than Dev.
It's really amazing, as Hep C kills more Americans per year than HIV.

There's a bit of a dark side, though, in that this miraculous cure's creator was bid up to billions of dollars, and the cure is sold to American health insurance for ~$85k a course, which is out of reach for most people without health insurance.

Of course, if you limit the upside on the home runs, you may find yourself with fewer batters in the pharmaceutical industry. I'd personally prefer if governments directly funded research, or even better, offered X-prize style contests, rather than granting patents on drugs.

But none of that diminishes what a remarkable advance this is for millions of Americans.
The nominal voltage on an AC power line refers to the "RMS" average of the waveform. The peak voltage of a sine wave is sqrt(2)*RMS. Presumably bulbs tend to blow when they're turned on while the voltage is near a peak.
Nothing is incompatible with telling people to work as hard as possible and make the most of themselves and the idea that some people are more gifted than others.

"blank slate fallacy" ... Steven Pinker probably has to pay a marketing person a quarter every time someone says that. I should construct a straw man, position myself as a iconoclast against that straw man, and then rake in the TED/book deal $$$ instead of working hard like a chump.
>And yes, its name is truly unfortunate.

Judging by the logo, it's quite intentional.
I've used Air Display, but that's over Wifi.

These guys claim to be using the lightning cable. Which means
maybe, just maybe, I can plug two of them in at once.
It sounds like a great product. However, leaning too much on other companies can get tricky if they decide to cut off the firehose. A previous startup that I worked at got burned by the Twitter Cards API. Perhaps carrying the same concept over to SQL/NOSQL databases (by no means trivial) could be the difficult problem to solve that goes from zero to one, to steal a line from Peter Thiel. That being said, I'd be interested in learning more.
Sounds like something a quantum Markov chain would say.
The soda can alarm system is unbelievable.

Boston has had an electrical fire alarm system for over 100 years. There are hundreds of call boxes located on city streets. You pull a handle on one of those boxes and an alarm rings in the city's Fire Alarm building. The dispatcher can determine which box was pulled and the location. The city licensed the technology from Samuel Morse, who was living in town at the time. There's a modern digital system as well, but the fire alarm boxes still work

(I've been inside the Fire Alarm building and seen the original wiring from the 1920s. It is beautiful.)
Back in the days where if you had a disk that implemented it, it was illegal to take with you to another country (the vestiges of such laws are still around today as a relic of that time).
Do you have a log of your research into this?