skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see this claim a lot, but it's simply not true. TeX is a relic of another age, frozen in time.

a) TeX isn't stable, it's dead. It can't generate PDF, or PostScript, or HTML. It can't handle Unicode, it can't use OpenType, TrueType, or even Type 1 fonts. Without the need to conform to external standards, it's easy to declare a defect to be a feature. Everything which makes TeX usable in the modern world is a third party program, there's an entire "life support" ecosystem written by others, with stability issues, and bugs, and worts in abundance. TeX is by definition "stable" because it's maintainer does not wish to develop it further - and that's not good for TeX, which has now fragmented in to various competing successors.

b) Much of the TeX ecosystem is buggy, CTAN packages frequently conflict with each other, in ways which are very challenging to resolve. The minimal and low-level nature of TeX's macro language is the root cause of such bugs, because it's hard to write macros correctly, and even harder to debug them. By keeping the core of TeX unchanged and minimal, the responsibility for dealing with complexity is forced onto macro package authors.

c) As for the claim that it is fast, that is questionable. TeX is needlessly slow at resolving cross-references, requiring documents to be re-typeset up to three times in a row. It also spends a lot of time doing I/O on its many macro files - the end result is waiting 10sec or more to typeset a file which should have taken under half a second.

d) TeX is written in Knuth's own private language, WEB, which makes it very hard to read. WEB uses a complex system of macros which is highly unconventional by modern standards. The code is highly non-linear, with macros jumping all over the place. Everything is a global variable. No amount of explaining or literate programming can make this mess "readable". It requires the utmost effort and study to extract meaning from - as the OP explains so well.

If you want to praise any open source project of the past 30 years, I'd suggest looking at the Linux kernel. It's alive and well, for a start.
> Yeah but what use is a model where you assume irrational actors?

For one thing, its likely to be more useful in modeling a system where actors are, in fact, not rational. Like, for instance, the world we live in.

I mean, sure, it gets more complex, just like mechanics does when you can't assume everything is frictionless. But a simpler model that doesn't reflect reality has limited utility.
Eh, screw all that. Wolf dad, AKA "how to beat your kids into the top university":

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143659027/and-you-thought-the-...
How to Break into Your CEO’s Inner Circle – HBR
See NTS at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System
That has nothing to do with it. People are critical of people that represent them in some manner.
Great work! The image quality is astounding, really.

So, I just tested your renderer with the material test scene, and while it ran pretty fast, it seems it only used 3 cores out of 4 on my system. Is there a way to configure/force the renderer to run a number of threads?
GitHub's approach is one reason I've started using BitBucket more. GitHub didn't always used to do this. I've assumed they started so they could have fixed height commit displays in their commit list. It seems weird to force this on people otherwise.
ZeroNet: Decentralized websites using Bitcoin crypto and BitTorrent network
So simply upgrading the firmware now will remove any existing roots or backdoors?
> Economics is a science like theology is a science.

No, its not. Economics deals with measurable phenomena in the material world.

> can accept the impartiality of astronomers coming to a consensus of how close the star Proxima Centauri is to earth. Insofar as deciding how the pie should be divided up, to call that a science with people working in good faith is absurd.

Deciding how the pie should be divided up is not within the scope of the science of economics. Predicting how the pie will end up divided given certain starting conditions and policy frameworks, OTOH, is.
I listened to a Freakanomics Episode on parenting a few years ago. Worth a listen (transcript available too)[0]. From what I remember, activities aren't much of a determinate of a child success so much as appropriate parental attention/affection. (This corresponds to what I've heard from exes who were in graduate lvl psych programs).

[0] http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/17/new-freakonomics-radio-po...
How to create a web scale infrastructure
Just yesterday there where (here at HN) a couple of great articles about just how crazy is housing & real estate over the bay area...
I find the opposite--that Chrome seems bad at recalling items from its own history when I enter, for example, a query string parameter, or similar.

Firefox always impresses, in this area at least.
I'd guess that the problem is that multiple cities are involved, and they suck at cooperating amongst themselves.
I wonder which company it was who recently, mistakenly, spoke to a corp dev, and inspired Mr. Graham to write this!
But would allow the user to install them.

It would have the same effect as the Google Apps in the store, without losing AOSP.
Idiot here. I like to save downloaded files in a directory called "downloads". Firefox has decided it would prefer to save them in a directory called "Downloads". I can tell Firefox to save them in the downloads directory, but sooner or later, it inevitably decides it's tired of that and goes back to saving them in Downloads.
I've found the near term forecast a bit flaky in New York as well, though I've always imagined the city to be particularly unpredictable. I still use it regularly, but I hope they'll devote some of their new resources to improvements to the core forecast algorithm.
Kefir vs. Bacon.js tree performance demo
> I agree with the rest, but that is one thing you absolutely shouldn't do.

And now you have a file system that is case sensitive, BUT ONLY IN SOME UNICODE RANGES. Somehow, that's better than just not being case sensitive in the first place?
> Hopefully iTunes support for this tech is a turning point in the loudness war.

Don't hold your breath - iTunes has had Sound Check since 2002.
Doesn't matter, people still do that, I always had teammates attending our morning sync-ups while on the bus :)
Does the research take into account that charter schools are opt-in, and thus likely to be populated by children with parents more heavily involved in their upbringing? Maybe I missed it being mentioned in the article, but it seems like that'd be a much bigger factor.

If that wasn't controlled for, then it's less that the schools themselves are necessarily any better (though that could also be the case) and more that students with already better chances of doing better are being "self"-selected into a different population.
Completely agree with your observations re. 1st and 2nd problems!

I should have provided a little bit more context: the accelerator is pre-seed and it takes individuals, as opposed to teams, straight from university and mostly even pre-idea. The accelerator itself facilitates team building, idea generation and then provides courses on customer dev / etc. as company progresses.

The accelerator invests in highly technical people and ideas, not companies or teams. The track record so far indicates that the thesis of "awesome people will build awesome things given the right environment" is working.
The service engine I've been building to power http://www.ifweather.com is powered by their API. I'm not sure I would have picked their API originally had I known the company was run by just two guys, but I am very pleased with the API so far. I'm happy to hear that the API is "going to be a big priority for us going forward". Many best wishes and best of luck to Adam and Jay as this new sunrise for your business begins.
But no one cares about stolen soda. The store can just write it off, it doesn’t matter.

In general, everything that isn’t expensive clothing or technology isn’t even tagged at all, you can just walk out the store with it.

Or if you go into the store, buy something, go out, remember you forgot something, go in again, and buy something else (while still carrying the already bought around), most of the time no one will bat an eye.

stealing would be easy, but at least in upper-middle-class districts it’s kinda rare.
Would you say this only applies to certain industries? Also what if the startup is only patent rich, is there anything to lose by talking?
AWS CLI 1.7.0 Released
Out of curiosity, how did you use the information?
Unicode Emoticons
"This release adds support for AWS CloudHSM, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), Amazon Glacier, ClassicLink feature for Amazon EC2, dynamic fields for Amazon CloudSearch, and new encryption features for Amazon Relational Database Service, and also fixes several issues."

Nice to see this tool keeping up with new features, especially ECS.
Keep in mind that even if you work at a YC startup you won't have access to YC directly- its not a coworking space or anything.

If you shoot me your email with your resume I'd be happy to review it. My emails in the profile.
Stop brainstorming
So many problems with this article. I recently started recording music after a long break and I love that everything is in the computer now. I had one of the very first Pro tools systems and it cost $12,000 (25MB hard drive). Gear that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars is now available with a click. I had always wanted to use great compressors and they are almost all available now as plug-ins. I also took some old tracks and ran them through the Waves maximizers - what a difference. What this means is that anyone with some musical and recording skills can compete against record companies.

It seems to me that the writer of the article just doesn't like pop music, and doesn't understand the business of pop music. Pop music, and especially pop music on the radio, has its own rules. It's no use getting upset about them. There's a lot of skill in engineering recordings that work on the radio. And Autotune is great. It's like getting upset that a movie director uses special effects. Good music always transcends the technology. Do you care that Gravity wasn't actually filmed in space?

If you want your music to sound like it was recorded in the sixties you can do so either by getting the vintage equipment or using vintage-style plug ins. But if the Beatles were around today they would be using all of the latest techniques, just like they were at the forefront of recording technology back then.

Meanwhile, my ten-year-old daughter just bought a record player and Taylor Swift on vinyl.
It's a great book, but it takes a LONG time to read. Not just because of the length, but the concepts make it slower to read than a simple fiction book.
This is interesting only in that it points out that previous studies lacked any common sense.
In the case of the pre-industrial (I realize my source is mid-industrial revolution, but we can agree the percentage involved in agriculture when moving back in time, I hope) figure, the vast majority of the support labor of farming was done directly by farmers (necessary because they also made up the majority of the workforce).

In the modern figure, these hours are explicitly not included. The US is a net food exporter, though[0], so I feel comfortable with the conclusion that a modern farmer is roughly two orders of magnitude more productive than a pre-industrial farmer. Even if we disagree on the reasonableness of that conclusion, I think it is an untenable position that the modern farmer is not at least one order of magnitude more productive even accounting for indirect inputs. Please let me know if you disagree on this, as it would pull the conversation in a different direction and I like to at least be on the same page, even if we're currently at odds about what it says.

[0]I'm using the second document available on this page: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/agri...
Creating three files named file.c, File.c, and FILE.c seems like being user hostile for the sake of being user hostile. Even for people using a case sensitive filesystem, it's a dick move. Imagine talking about your project over the phone. "Yeah, the problem is in file.c. No, not File.c, file.c. Idiot! I clearly said file.c, not FILE.c!"
Facebook Studio: Awards
The nasa ufo shot and after france we all need GUNS
Thanks for your input.

I didn't intend to minimize the value of the feedback received so far; I look forward to seeing how HN can do better!
The "wrong place" in London is the one that requires the longest and most arduous commute from your workplace.
note to anyone not using openwrt:

you should be using openwrt :)
"It is a fact that labor costs are typically the greatest single cost when providing public transit in the developed world."

Labor costs include maintenance and administration. It's possible that "Busses are relatively cheap compared to the drivers" still holds but I hope you have considered it specifically rather than inferring it from the content of your preceding sentence.
I'm not in biotech, but my wife is. The stories I could tell...
Well, I think what we said was, "The price is just not compelling, perhaps the time just isn't right. We want to keep growing this and lets talk again in a couple years." But hopefully the meaning was not lost in translation.

Perhaps part of the problem is that it was the wrong partner who didn't value the technology nearly enough, and was too focused on discounted cash flows with an absurd discount rate, and too conservative a growth allowance. They passed that off as "their model" which couldn't be touched. Add in the fact they weren't even paying up-front but where much of the value was earn-outs with lofty targets, including a minimum 20% net operating profit... somehow they didn't see we could earn just as much, if not more, by keeping all the equity and just keep working for ourselves. It would have been this weird "half-exit" where all the upside was still in front of us. No thanks!
Thank you, Ben. You make a difference.
This problem is mentioned in the article.

"Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig created ultra-loud master of Led Zeppelin II, but his version was pulled when it skipped on a record player owned by Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegün’s daughter"
User generated robot swarms
Studying something like this is a great example of the "halo effect".

If you raise a child who turns out to be successful, you'll attribute all sorts of things to that success. Doesn't mean they actually had an impact.

I think one thing most people can agree on is that a stable up-bringing can certainly make things easier on a kid.
I do not disagree with the thrust of your post, but I do have a bone to pick with your point 2.

The argument for a make-work program is not based on any theory of the value of labor. It is based on vulgar Keynesianism and predicated on the multiplier effect of spending.

I agree with you that a make-work program is at best, and generously interpreted as a naive idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption
Do you all have any plans to shave that further? What might be considered the ideal maximum latency for things like flying obstacle courses(fpv racing)? landing from fpv?
Unicorn Hunt – A magical beast of a job board
NASA's guide to crimping cables and wiring [pdf]
Depending on how folks are defining data engineering these days, my group may or may not be using Scala for that purpose. There's another group of computational biologists (read: data scientists who know biology) who come up with novel algorithms to gain new insight in our raw data and then our group takes those algorithms (among other things) and gets them working at massive scale in well vetted data pipelines. Our company refers to it as data engineering (as in "software engineering the data science") but I know that's not what everyone means when they say that.

The use of Scala predates me, it's been going on about 5 years although there's been a huge shift in that direction over the last year. This time last year I'd say it was about 50/50 Scala and Java and now almost all new code is written in Scala. I've been told that the initial "why" of scala was that it made it easy to write DSLs with which to write pipeline data flows w/o leaving the JVM. We have our own pipeline infrastructure written in house (in scala) although we're starting to move toward more OTS options (also in scala).

The surge over the last year has more to do with personnel changes within the group with more people joining who were more pro-Scala (such as myself), mainly for some combination of the functional trappings and the reduction of boilerplate and other nonsense from Java.

In terms of the job market, while we'd love to see a candidate who is a Scala wiz, we don't expect them to have an ounce of scala background. Personally I don't care if they have any java background either, although not everyone in my group agrees. I lean very heavily on the side of hiring smart people instead of hiring for buzzwords, assuming that we're not talking about contract positions.

FWIW the data scientists in our group are mostly split between R and Python, with some also writing a fair amount of scala. The latter has more to do with some of the in house pipeline management tools than any data science-y reasons.
As a type 1, this article disappointed me
The importance of deleting old stuff
It mentions some of the randomized experiments using lottery-admissions, which seem to be consistent with the overall thesis.
>populated by children with parents more heavily involved in their upbringing

Is there evidence to back up this statement?
Yeah, I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do even if you can do it.
AT&T Uses College Football Championship to Test Broadcast LTE
6 Apple products in these icons...

Was Apple a sponsor?
I've been quite impressed by AWS uptime. I've been looking at Azure - I am cautiously bullish. I'd like to take their services out for a genuine ride, but don't have the time to really invest deeply into exercising them.
At the point you are considered being acquired it might be:

100% chance of a million dollars: $1,000,000

10% chance of a billion dollars: $100,000,000

In which case I would go with the 10% chance because if I had run a startup and got it to be worth $1M, and then I fail I can probably make the $1M easy in the next thing I do.
Does it also take into account that charter schools have a tendency to boot out any low-performing or "behavioral problem" students after a certain date (usually right after state funding levels for schools are set for the next year)?
Define success.
No way, a Bugatti would stall at 30kmph.
Errors are exceptions at my command-line.
“Super cookies” track you, even in privacy mode
> if you are willing to share in the credit, you must be willing to take a portion of the blame when things turn sour

Ah...reminds me of a good Wire quote from Lieutenant Daniels: "You should never take credit when the crime rate drops, unless you want to take the blame when its rises."
Of course it was taken into account. Why do you think researchers would miss sth so obvious?

If you click links in the article, you will see they compared to kids who failed in the lottery. And how they address other methodological concerns.
Vim as Go language IDE
If we are just allowed to say things are true by adding the adjective simply, then I will counter with it is simply true. :) To the points, though.

a) I actually mostly agree with this concern, with the caveat that I have fewer problems producing pdfs of documents from TeX than I do any other tool I have ever had the joy of using for the same purpose. I will also note that even just treating TeX as a "core" for LaTeX, it is still a good example of stability. Specifically in the, "I can still typeset any LaTeX document I have." This is far from true for opening pretty much any other file I have. Period. Hell, even just compiling old c programs is less guaranteed.

b) Applications have bugs. Pretty much period. While the overall ecosystem has unforeseen bugs, especially when you mix and match different contributions, I still know of pretty much no examples of a core as large as TeX that is essentially bug free. Care to provide any examples? And, to my point, I would wager there are more bugs in this clojure rewrite than there are in the original.

c) This is pretty much only claimed because of the failure of the clojure version to achieve similar speeds. I mean, if we are fine with setting contrived expectations ("should have taken under half a second"), then I don't understand why I have to wait at all for a fully typeset product to emerge. In the meantime, I have yet to see a product that competes in speed. Tons of claims for those that should be able to, but few actual examples.

d) Is it a language you are familiar with? Obviously not. Does it require effort and study to extract meaning? I'd actually agree that it does. I fail to see how that is a detriment, though. I have yet to see any solution to any non-trivial problem that does not require the same.

Specifically to the complaint of non-linearity of the code. Code is pretty heavily understood in a non-linear fashion. Same for many other topics, actually. One of the things I actually admire about WEB is that it is non-linear and allows the author to introduce a narrative into the process. Seriously, this is hugely beneficial once it is understood.
This is the main point I take from the linked article, although it probably doesn't give enough context for everyone to do the same. One of the big improvements music-lovers were hoping for in move from vinyl to CD was the improved dynamic range on CD. It is indeed ironic that the move to CD/digital provided increased dynamic range, yet the trend of producers has been to use less dynamic range than before.
"The cloud will keep getting more reliable, more functional, and cheaper at a rate that you can't begin to match with your limited resources, generalist gear, bloated software stacks, slow supply chains, and outdated innovation paradigms."

If the cloud is so great, how come it's so much cheaper to rent a dedicated server at scale?
Yes, certain inks contain enough metal to cause significant tissue heating.
http://www.hardlywork.in/
Simple logic would dictate that parents who opt in for better schools for their kids are more involved than those who don't opt in for better schools..

It's getting a bit out of hand where every single statement online is now getting a [Citation Needed] afterwards. There isn't a randomized controlled study for every single aspect of the universe, we'll have to use intuition occasionally.
Free embedded computing conference posts agenda
For the downvoter(s)

Around mile 20 of the Boston Marathon is "Heartbreak Hill"[0].

Origin of Y Combinator[1].

Care to elaborate on why you decided to anonymously downvote the above comment?

[0] http://www.boston.com/marathon/course/stage4.htm
[1] http://old.ycombinator.com/start.html
This reminds me of a UK Office episode where David Brent announces the bad news 'there will be redundancies' then he announces the good news 'I got promoted!'

Oh here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS8WWjR7O98
From around the same time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Palacio_del_Rio