skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blindness is unfortunately a nearly crushing disability economically. 74% of the blind are unemployed [1] (there is another figure you will occasionally also see of 13% unemployment for the blind, that's a US Government statistic that excludes anyone who is not considered in the list of potentially employed people).

Equally important for HN-type readers to know is that Braille literacy is highly correlated with employment among the blind, and rates of Braille literacy are falling rapidly in the US, from a peak of around 50% in the 1950's to more like 12% today [1].

Smart phone apps are great and important but from what I've read they don't seem to be having the impact on blind employment that Braille has had.

Hopefully someone here will know of a survey reporting measurable economic gains for the new generation of Braille-illiterate technologically assisted blind, thus far what I've heard anecdotally on that front has not been encouraging.

[1] http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/braille/needforbraille.html
Yes, because non-copyleft Free licenses precisely grant this right. By contributing to that project (and licensing those changes under that license) you are saying that this is allowed.
Why can't that be a website ?

Why do you have to make console-exclusives ?
I like the idea of helping people for free (as do many people in the thread). But I wonder quality of assistance would be better if people were getting paid. And I wonder if the app would reach more people if it were for profit.
Look back to Sept 2011 to see the Franc do similar price swings without a cap in place... In fact, that's WHY the cap was put into place (also to prevent deflation, recession, and a huge slump in exports).
Daniel Dennett stuck the boot into the Chinese Room argument in Consciousness Explained (and probably in several other places as well). As he points out, it's based on an intellectual sleight-of-hand (what he calls an "intuition pump").

From the linked article on the Stanford site:

> Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room.

[Emphasis added.]

Unless those outside are satisfied with a very rudimentary back-and-forth, such a program would have to be amazingly complicated (and those outside very patient, or the operator superhumanly fast). It's not just a question of "look up input Chinese character and return corresponding output character" -- which is never explicitly stated, but which we're subconsciously led to by the image of a human "following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals".

Dennett gives an example where the outside person tells a joke, and asks the room's operator to explain it. You could also imagine a reading comprehension exercise, with questions ranging from purely structural ("What is the third word on the fifth line?") through semantic ("What colour was the girl's dress?") to analytical ("Why do you think the boy was sad?") Questions can be self-referential, or depend on previous questions (and their answers) or on a vast mass of knowledge we take for granted (a dress the colour of snow is white; a small boy might cry if his kite gets stuck in a tree).

It doesn't seem so intuitive that a system that complex lacks anything we might legitimately describe as "understanding".
I think there is a distinction to be made here.

Paywalls are fine. If you feel that the Wall Street Journal
is worth your time and money then feel free to subscribe to it.
But paywalls are a double edged sword. If the source requires
people to subscribe to read it, then the vast majority of internet
users wont have a chance to read it, and learns to avoid the site.

When you share a link in public forum and the link requires a subscription to read it, that means most readers wont have a chance to enjoy the content
and they feel frustrated.

You can usually find an article about the same topic on a public site.
The manner the topic is covered, the depth of the article, the quality
of the coverage might be different but it will give the general public an idea about what it is all about.

As far as ads and ad blockers. Tivo and tivo like devices are pretty common
now that you can skip over tv commercials. I think its the same with web based
ad blockers. The truth is that the majority of people who use these things
would not have had a positive response to the ad in the first place.

What does happen, both on tv and on the web, is that product placements in
the content itself becomes more and more common.
The underlying principle behind teaching (except for higher eduction) is not to make productive workers but knowledgeable and discerning citizens.

The number of programmers we need is not relevant here: they may not need to know how to write complex programs, but knowing the basic principles of programming will make them more able in a worlds relying heavily on computers. This is already the reason why we teach basic math, physics, biology, history, geography, English, etc. to kids.
Would this cause you to move the business to another country?
I met Sue Black when I was campaigning for the Turing Apology. I would give her the highest compliment I could give anyone: she's a real person.
Not OP, but I too loose sunglasses all the time. I'm pretty sure those are mine. Now as soon as I figure out what Juliets are and where "Yosemite backcountry" is, I'll prove it to you.

Actually, I've been able to hang onto my most recent pair for well over a year now. The trick is never taking them out of the car. The way they get lost is you wear them from your car into some house and take them off.
ShareDesk launches Optix to make running a coworking space easier
When I work remotely, 0 minutes. When I drive 20-60 mins one way depending on traffic.

I'll be moving to a smaller town farther away from work soon and my drive commute will be 35-40 minutes. A little longer on average but not as variable due to traffic. Hopefully it'll allow me to plan evenings better on in-office days.
I can't imagine how that could fail!
I reworked that one for a developer talk at a Sun user's conference and told folks that SunOS would take $100 worth of disk drive space :-) Interesting both your version and mine have since been rendered invalid. As an ounce of gold is around $1200 and a really nice Glock 21 is only about $600. And a $100 of disk is like over 2TB these days.

There are a number of economics papers which evaluate economies in non-currency units, like hours of labor or commodity prices like gold or oil. It can illuminate strengthening or weakening efficiencies that a strict price analysis can miss.
I think I would quit in about ten minutes if I had to put up with someone else's music choices. I don't even like putting up with my own when I'm working but I'm forced to to drown out everyone else.
It implicitly is if their customers use USD / EUR. Maybe they buy something en masse at, e.g., $99 but not $119
Targeted adverts for drugs, alcohol, gambling, payday loans, credit cards, fast food etc.
Great application of remote crowdsourced guidance.

Of course the end game is to allow remote "workers" to take control of appliances in your home to do certain tasks that aren't easy to automate yet, ie clear the dinner table, wash the dishes, clean up after the dog, etc.

Another lucrative application would be remote operation of heavy machinery. Imagine road work with no "Men at Work" signs.
Target to close all Canadian stores
Mass Luminosity Gamers Pcs Giveaways
Technical literacy is not a meme, it's a skill that becomes more essential as technology further permeates society and its jobs.

The goal isn't to make everyone want to become a programmer as a career, but for more careers to better integrate modern technology.
It's not an unlikely scenario that the ECB will keep the euro weak for a long time thereby crippling the Swiss export economy. It's entirely possible that the Swiss have to join the euro in order to save their economy, because preventing the rise of the CHF would otherwise cause massive inflation in the country. Or the euro recovers and we go back to business as usual. The future will tell.
Go still beats Java sometimes: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=i...

I'm not saying Go wins more, but they are very close compared to other languages.
From the little I talked with blind people, I think this could be a great solution for shopping. People I talked with said that crossing streets or moving around ain't big problem for them, but one of their biggest pain points are grocery stores. More and more, Mom&Pop stores are replaced by network supermarkets, in which you need to search for the product yourself instead of asking for it, and employees are often not prepared/willing to help a blind customer. This app could help a lot here.
Show HN: C#-to-JavaScript compiler powered by Microsoft Roslyn
Fastlane – iOS Automation for Continuous Delivery
> The system doesn't know what each sentence means

You can't prove that. For all possible experiments that can be performed we can construct system that will be indistinguishable from entity we accept as understanding Chinese.

If you got atom-by-atom description of human brain without knowing beforehand what it is you wouldn't be able to reason that this brain understands Chinese, so why do you think you can judge other systems?

> they don't evoke feelings, memories, images in the person in the room,

We were speaking about understanding, not emotions, memories etc. Yes you can define "understanding" = being like me, but it's not fair definition, and would exclude a lot of people.

And then of course you can't proove that there are no emotions and memories. They can be simulated by system as well. Even if you wanted lookup table - you would need to include writable memory so the system can rembmber previous questions when asked about them, at that point the system is self-modifiable and can be thought of as having memories and emotions.

> there is no analysis, no agreement or disagreement with what is being said

How do you know there's no analysis? If the system is complex enough you can't know what it does internaly. Or show me theory of consiousnes that can distinguish systems that can understand Chinese and can't basing on the specification of the system.
Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al, might like a word with you. Even though they are smaller businesses, they are thriving, there is nothing to say that they would be if RS had taken the same road.
Radio Shack cannot make money selling hobbyist things to support their expensive retail locations. We all love that kind of stuff but admit it, that business has gone online to places like Adafruit. Even hardcore electronic component retailers that were in low rent industrial parks, or in my case a guy that operated out of his basement when he could not afford the rent in his industrial park have closed.

For years cell phones and people not smart enough to order cables from Monoprice and the like had powered their business. People like me would go to Radio Shack to buy emergency things like a common transistor, or solder, and also to gobble up their ancient hobbyist stuff on clearance.

There is no model for small electronics stores anymore selling any type of good. Hell even the big box places like Best Buy are under immense pressure from online retailers.
They'll rue the day they purposefully restricted the available supply of skilled physicians through limitations on residency programs when those pesky technology engineers perfect the doc-in-a-box.

Even worse is when some of those guys open source it and give away the software and hardware schematics, just because they hate giving $30 co-pays and dealing with deductibles, just to get an antibiotic prescription for a viral infection.

Don't make professional problem solvers see you as a problem, or you might just get solved.
Pretty awesome idea. I'm willing to contribute.
If those office layouts don't appeal to you, it's because those companies don't want to recruit you.

Deep-pocketed companies like Facebook (who surely have enough money to build any kind of office space) choose to build open layouts as a signal. They want to attract a certain kind of developer, and they probably have a platoon of operations researchers telling them they need to arrange their offices like this to get them.

If you like quiet private offices then you will not work at Facebook. But that's okay because Facebook doesn't want you anyway.
Overall that's great to hear, but I can't help but feel that it's too little too late. Once they fix the generics, are they going to go back and fix the secondary issues too (like the issue with Doubles)?

I know this isn't a popular opinion, but these correctness issues really matter. For example, you can see the impact these choices in the JVM and the standard library had on the Scala community, ultimately forcing Paul Phillips to fork the compiler.
I imagine they'd want to verify the identity of "helpers" through the same means that Paypal does: through bank account (not credit card) verification.
Buy a pair of expensive sunglasses. It's like an idiot deposit. I haven't lost my set of oakleys and they are 4 years old now.
Did the private offices feel nice or soulsickingly without character?

I dont' know why, but your description makes the offices sound like the last place I would want to be. Small, cramped, dark, and soulsuckingly unalive.

The bullpen wasn't more productive, but it had character. It made people feel good. Made them feel welcome.
Yesterday's Motto: Don't Panic
I wonder when they'll integrate it with google glass to allow e.g. realtime subtitles for when people are talking to you in a foreign language.
The parent was referring to using gopherjs to compile golang code to Javascript.
A lot of people think RadioShack should have made the transition to internet sales

Huh? Like http://www.radioshack.com/
Last time I was in RadioShack was in the 90's in Washington DC, and I went there for a connector, and there were literally 20 people in line all buying minutes for cell phones, with only one person in the store. I thought this was some sort of hidden camera reality/joke tv show. I just put the item down and left.
https://m.timeline.com/
"In other words, getting an organism to produce a new small molecule is really hard."

A large part of why this is hard is they tend to produce something other than what you want. Getting a protean to fold the right way 95% of the time is a huge achievement, but it also means your producing something else 5% of the time. In point of fact quite a bit of your DNA is focused on getting other sections to fold correctly.

As to population risks Prion's are probably a risk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion For one thing there unlikely to be undetected in the food supply as normal toxicity tests will miss a novel one. (EX: Mad Cow Disease)

Anyway, all I am really just suggesting GMO’s are introduced more slowly. Something like food for 100k people in the first year, 1M the next, then 10M and then you’re good to go. Granted, that would be really hard to do with the way the current food supply works, but simple acreage limits could have a similar effect.

PS: The point about Hedysarum alpinum toxicity was it's not all that uncommon and people had been eating it, but it was not known to be toxic. The point being Toxicity can be more complex issue than is generally assumed.
Yeah, I thought I remembered seeing this before.
Not going to happen. https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2014/12/22/update-heathkit-has...
Bitcoin Is Collapsing
SpaceX's new Seattle-area office is in Redmond; Musk to visit this week
Is there a secondary market for suits that I'm not aware of that isn't Goodwill? Clothing depreciation after purchase is almost as bad as cars, doesn't matter the quality.
React Templates
Clang-format for JavaScript, awesome code autoformatter
The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1].

What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the providers? The municipalities already have the resources and staff to do so relatively competently from water, wastewater and electrical grid deployment and maintenance. Most of the cost of last-mile deployment is the physical laying, but if that is shifted to a public utility while fishing cables (at most) is left to the providers, then might the providers see dramatic increased incentives to compete on quality of service and price?

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cab...
In the opinion of many trad climbers, a first free ascent is just as important as a first ascent (if not more). The coverage has been a bit misleading/inaccurate at times, but that's to be expected when the mainstream media covers a somewhat fringe event. What Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson achieved is nothing short of amazing.
I don't know how much this is true recently, but RS used to be full of microoptimizing incentives which would encourage this kind of behavior, such as incentives tied to average sales size or percent of sales that included particular categories of items that the company wanted to move.

So, I can see why a small ticket sale that would bring down those kind of metrics for an associate would be against that associate's rational self interest, while letting someone walk out of the store with a capacitor -- even though it might make store metrics look worse after the next inventory, and certainly isn't better for the corporation -- would be considered less harmful.
A Letter Ayn Rand Wrote to a Teenage Girl (1949)
just "pretty good"? When i heard of Timeline now, I think of Facebook. This domain worths quite a lot i think.
That region of the US, which is maybe half the size of Germany, has been largely devoid of human habitation since the neolithic Lake Lahontan civilization disappeared a few thousand years ago. It is difficult to overstate just how vast and uninhabited that area is.

When I was in my 20s, some friends and I would make long treks into the deep off-road parts of it to explore it precisely because so few people had been there in modern times. Back then, we made our way into areas where we were probably the first humans to come through since the 19th century. The area is actually littered with archaeological artifacts that remain undisturbed. Those were fun times.
A new RadioShack store JUST opened around the corner from me a few weeks ago. I assume it was a short term holiday season thing.
Thanks, the link I was clicking went straight to the Github repo. Did not see the article.
Show HN: Jetpack, a FreeBSD Jail/ZFS-based container runtime
Right, but that business is dead now. It belongs to mall-kiosks and strip-mall storefronts.
Raw industrial loft space is fashionable in NYC creative fields, and tech in imitation thereof.
People who use adblock are just entitled. They are manipulating the tragedy of the commons and then absolving themselves of any responsibility.

They'll defend their right to use adblock militantly and then go pirate a game using the same defense. It's a personal moral defense rather than a logical justification.
Flink Reaches Top Level Status
I have read Dennett and he's a fine analytic philosopher. But it's important to note that any discussion between Dennett and Dreyfus is a very broad discussion of continental vs analytic ... which is not to discredit Dennett's argument (afterall it's Dreyfus who picked the fight in the first place)
It doesn't matter that they are successful though, they operate on a much, much smaller scale than Radioshack. The maker market isn't nearly large enough to sustain a company of that size... that is to say, if Radioshack shrank to the size of one of Adafruit, it be a colossal failure as a corporation.

The only chance they had to stay relevant was to challenge the Best Buy's of the world, but they failed to do that.
How can you control the creation of code?

This news sounds like "donating to keep software bug-free".
If someone wants or even accidentally, they can create buggy code or "evil" AI.
It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer. "But the page is bloated and unusable with ads". Then refuse the contract. Use another service.

Inventing your own terms about the cost of something produced by someone else is never ok.

"guilting me into watching ads will never work". It is great that you accept your own behavior. That doesn't make it right.
Pretty sure parent was implying they should close down their massive brick-and-mortar retail presence.
"there is no killer application yet even and it's just meh,"

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. I got it last week and its the most mind bending experience I've had with technology. Its just a whole different thing.
It definitely does not feel rushed to market as you claim. The reactions from my friends (who are not into tech btw) when I tried it with them was priceless - I will never forget it.
How to run a successful Kickstarter campaign: a post mortem
It's literally the Reiser defense. "If I did it, you wouldn't have caught me. You caught me, therefore I didn't do it." Historically, a low success rate.
I use awk only for trivial commands that fit in one line. Here is my last one.

awk -F : '/^OPS1:/{print $2}' < machinelist

I think the article could add an example of this kind of simple usages.
WP Engine Open Sources Mercury Vagrant for Running WordPress on HHVM and PHP-FPM
The allegations of NSA involvement were regarding things that the article didn't discuss so far as I can tell.

They weren't talking about how the server's IP/location was found, they were talking about physically following the guy to the library and nailing him with his laptop open while he was chatting with an informant in an SR admin panel. There's no meaningful role I could see the NSA playing in that particular scene even if there's a question about how the Feds. reached the point of identifying him. They appear to have had a number of angles that they used to nail him physically, rather than the single point of revelation through the server, where some of those angles don't look like parallel constructions on their face (Post Office finding fake ids, IRS investigation, etc.).
Looking at some of the other complaints re: OpenReach, the best setup might be municipal ownership/oversight of the last-mile, but with operations contracted out to private companies. That way you can split the network ops among vendors, or periodically reassess effectiveness of the private companies.
And the reason was invalid /boot/loader.conf:

console="vidconsole,comconsole"
autoboot_delay="10"
console="comconsole,vidconsole"
autoboot_delay="1"

Second console actually disables access from web console access, which is fatal.

Autoboot is not critical, although default to 3 sec should work much better for opportunity to change boot options from web console.
So which one is it? Do you slack more, or less, in private space?

I personally find open space distracting. When I'm separated, I do browse a lot of HN and stuff - but at some point I eventually concentrate, gain speed, and start getting the work done. Not so in open-space; there I find it hard to do anything else than read HN or talk on IRC. Partly because I find the presence of other people unnerving and annoying when I'm working.