skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noted back in 2008 how this was an interesting side effect of Google's empowerment policy.

The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).

So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.

Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.

What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.

One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.

I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.
I wonder why "Apple" is whited out? The "Staff" page pretty much gives it away.
I don't disagree over all, but I'm not sure it works that way anymore. Systems have become super complex and the measurement for what is impressive have gone up. I think the power of a lot of those early system was that they were "boxes", but still impressive enough to keep playing in that box. I think Linux is very much the opposite. You can do pretty much anything you want, but it can be very hard to get good results. If I wanted someone o have the same experience these days I'd probably put them in front of something like processing.
I appreciate this gentle reminder as I am in the midst of building a MVP for my start-up.

Thanks.
How to promote a website?
Since I am new to this whole idea of running a website I need some help with promoting my website and getting some traffic? And who know better than you guys. So any one? Recommendations? Tnx
I've bought food with Wallet before. And made a meal of it.

So, I suppose I have.
We tried that. It ended in disaster.

People thinking like this really makes me furious. This is such a narcisistic thinking, that I feel disgusted.

Human beings are driven by incentives. From drinking a glass of water, to writing a book it is all incentive based. If you have your basic needs covered, you have no incentives. When you make policy, you have to think about the lowest common denominator, not the select few top speciments. It is extremely vain and naive to think removing incentives to educate yourself and work will end in anything other than disaster. Apart from that, the model you describe fosters enormous corruption at every level of society. From the factory workers who go drunk to work and steal, because when everyone is a principal, noone is a principal, to the political leaders who engage in atrocities to keep and grow their power.

PLEASE stop trying to make communism happen. It has destroyed so many lives already.
Borderlands Books to Close in March
I wonder if eventually NSA will get massive layoffs because much of what they'd do would be redundant, and for 80 percent of the stuff they want they could just ask/hack Google. The other 20 percent employees will remain for users of Google competitors and more targeted spying. So essentially 80 percent of NSA's "intelligence" would be outsourced to Google (for free).
> You can't really/easily use a scala library from MRI

You can easily link Scala with Ruby by running both on the JVM. Assuming you really want MRI, on the client-side that implies running 2 processes with their own runtime at least, instead of just one process. There is a reason for why I've heard of Ruby developers choosing JRuby to deploy Ruby apps, because having only one GC for managing a long-running process is expensive enough, having more than one gets awful fast.

On the server-side on the other hand, you have the freedom of deploying your stuff on multiple servers, which is often the case so you can use a micro-services approach - in our current project the front-end is developed in Ruby / Javascript and the backend in Scala, linked through a web service API. The great thing about this, besides using the best tool for the job and so on, is that people can work on them in parallel.

IMHO, I think the reusability of C is overstated. I haven't used C libraries in any of the JVM apps I ever developed and this reduced the headaches I've had back in the days when I did stuff with CPython or Ruby MRI. And given a potent runtime, you can make both Python and Ruby run on top of it with reasonable performance (compared to their reference implementations).
Effect Typing and Monads are yet another colour for the lipstick you put on the pig. You still have non-composability (i.e. the async monad spreads through your code), you still have the complexity, you still don't have proper tracebacks without special runtime support, and you still have the inefficiency that Bob didn't actually mention (unwinding all those stacks all the time).

Languages with threads (Java, C#) don't quite solve the problem as their threads have other disadvantages, e.g. creating too many threads causing contention, though it's much less of a problem than people make it to be.

Go actually completely removes the problem - you don't get a nice tool to pack the problem into boxes more easily, you don't get a different fancy colour for your lipstick, you just don't have the problem at all - you wouldn't know it existed was it not for those other languages.

There might be a deeper lesson here about good, pragmatic engineering vs awesome computer language geekery.
This is sweden man
Isn't network usage also finite? I.e. wouldn't there be issues if every device connected to an ISP simultaneously tried to stream large data?
nice

oh wait it only runs on "windows"
Alternatively, why aren't we talking about venusforming humans? All space operas seem to start with the earth-standard human in a suit. Compared to geoengineering a whole earth-standard atmosphere, bioengineering an intelligent organism that can thrive in nonearth environments seems fairly sane.

There's a social taboo against human genetic experimentation (hell, some people seem to struggle with vegetables) but that will eventually pass.
There's a difference between the kind of things you are referring to as "projects" and the kind of things Ng is referring to as "tech".

A "project" is usually an application of existing technology done in an innovative way. It may well end up being the next Facebook, but it isn't something that usually requires breakthroughs in scientific fields.

Ng's (and Baidu's) "tech" is a much more basic level of research. Baidu isn't interested in funding research into translating English into Latin because - while it is novel - it is unlikely to impact 100 million users.

OTOH: Chinese/English translation? Yes. World leading voice recognition? Yes[1]. Understanding images? Of course![2]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/12/18/baidu-annou...

[2] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1090v1.pdf
Google General Services. Whatever you want done, whenever you want it done, Google will find someone to do it.

"We also walk dogs."
Ultimate Puzzle Created in the Hawaii Jungle
huedoku
Press Contact: gabe@huedoku.com
808-250-4825
Website: huedoku.com
FOR RELEASE 2/2/15
Huedoku: Exemplary Color Puzzle App born in the Jungle
(Huelo: HI): Artist Gabriel Mott, from Maui, Hawaii, and App developer, Dave Scruton, from the Big Island, have submitted Huedoku to the App Store and it will be available for download in a matter of days. The revolutionary, therapeutic color puzzle app is an exciting new game that offers color mastery for the masses. Conceived in January of 2014, Huedoku, was coded in the jungles of Hawaii, over 100 miles away from the nearest technology hub of Honolulu. Huedoku will be available for iPhones and iPads with the version for Android to follow close behind.

Mott, the inventor and designer of Huedoku, lives in Haiku, Maui, overlooking the famous surf location “Jaws”. His internet access is over a cell phone connection because no telephone or cable lines reach his studio home where he works.

“We’ve certainly faced some challenges being far away from any tech hub,“ says Mott, “However, in many ways, it’s worked to our advantage. I can see Haleakala from my window and hike to the ocean in 20 minutes without passing a single home. The essence of Huedoku is color relationship and what better place to absorb visual harmony than surrounded by the gorgeous colors of Maui?”

In the past year, the two collaborators have only been in the same location twice. The first was at TEDxMaui who provided Huedoku a presence at their annual event in September of 2014.

Huedoku is similar to a jigsaw puzzle, yet the solution can be discovered intuitively by looking for colors that “just look right when they fit”. When everything is in its natural place, “it glows as the color relationship is based on timeless elements of visual perception and color theory similar to that leveraged by the Impressionist art movement of the late 1800s,” says Mott.
I use "restore previous session" pretty extensively, personally, especially if I have multiple windows open. That said, I've very rarely had bad luck with it in prior versions of Firefox, occasionally discovering that it's trashed my sessions. Thus, even today, I still keep Session Manager installed as an insurance policy. (Though, I still backup ~/.mozilla pretty regularly too...)

> The tabs are also "soft-loaded" meaning that you have to click on them to load the content

I couldn't be happier since Mozilla switched to this mechanism. It means reloading a massive browsing instance isn't quite as resource intensive. Last I checked Chrome/Chromium, it STILL doesn't do this, which is infuriating and part of the reason I dumped using Chromium as my primary general browser.

There's nothing worse than when as few as 100 tabs can eat up ~2-3GiB RAM right after you start the browser...
An interview with the author of Grassroots for Hire, based on his doctoral thesis, https://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/q-a-with-ed-wa...

"Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes."
You still have to be aware of it when optimizing the shaders and workloads though. On consoles where the hardware is fixed this is easily profiled.

The GPU is creating threads and tasks internally and it's not always easy to balance this workload so no parts of the GPU becomes saturated while following parts in the chip's pipeline are idly waiting for work.

The PowerVR chips we're working with have dozens and dozens of different profile metrics corresponding to the different areas of its pipeline, each one being a potential bottleneck.

You could do something as silly as render a ball with 12k vertices instead of 24 and expecting the vertex processing to be much slower, but after profiling you find out its the fragment part lagging way behind because the data sequencer is overloaded trying to generate fragment tasks. In both cases you're rendering about the same amount of pixels.

With unified shader architectures, its very frequent for vertex and fragment tasks from different draw calls to overlap simultaneously. We're even seeing tasks from different render targets overlapping! Such as fragment tasks from the shadow pass still running when the solid geometry pass is processing its vertices.
Or a keyboard.
I graduated from HS 9 years ago and I almost got suspended from all computer access, ended up getting some detentions, and various other punishments just for using Firefox. (Would have hated to see what the naive principal would have dished out if I wasn't one of the top students in my class)
Terraforming of Europa
The 12 Best Startup Tools from Jan '15
So does the word "Apple" on page 3.
If you have your basic needs covered, you have no incentives.

Self-betterment is an incentive. Betterment of everyone else is an incentive. The idea that people must be forced to work to make money or else they won't do anything else is a capitalist ideal, NOT absolute fact.

Wouldn't it be nice if people could actually do things that interest them instead of worrying about putting food on the table?
I am less technically proficient than a lot of people here. I know a little HTML and CSS and I used to hand-code my own sites. I moved them to Word Press to try to stop spending all my time on coding and, instead, focus more on content creation and general development. I was very frustrated with Word Press because of the amount of time I spent a) updating the backend and b) looking for a better template that I liked more than whatever I had settled for initially.

I ultimately moved everything to BlogSpot. I am much happier and I spend much more time on actual development of content and layout and so on.

/Unpopular Google loyalist pov
What he really seem to mean by "real lights" are actual shadow casting lights. I doubt you were rendering 500 shadow maps along with your 500 lights.
List of beginner, intermediate and advanced resources for aspiring programmers
I'm lost. EnterAct/21stCenturyCable/RCN, the ISP I worked for --- starting as employee #2 --- wasn't subject to Title II, despite offering DSL service. Is it possible that this DSL ruling was a wrinkle that affected only ILECs? The ILECs were, of course, heavily regulated... hence the emergence of the CLEC market. The upthread comment did not say ILECs; they said "ISPs".
How about this: let's nobody ever say 'the science is settled' about anything. I'm fine with that. What about instead we use confidence interval logic, and say things like: 'With extremely high confidence we think that carbon emissions from humans are causing climate change.' You might not agree with that statement either, but it gets us over this non-productive pedantry and into an actionable discussion.

Let's try it out: is human nutrition and metabolism settled? Nope. Do you want to feed your child a diet of 100% JIF peanut butter and candy corns until it is? I'm guessing not.

We don't need to get to settled. We just need to stop reasoning backward from the conclusion we want to be true. Especially when the consequences for things are as high as they are.
Mining the surface is required; importing any significant quantity of material from Earth is a non-starter. Unless you can come up with something insanely valuable to export to Earth, any planetary colony has to be almost-entirely self-sufficient. Interplanetary transit is too long, and too expensive. (This is true on Mars as well, and probably Luna and asteroids as well, though you might find some edge cases there due to lesser gravity or greater proximity.)

The pressure on the surface is that of about 3000 feet of water, so that's not too bad, and the reducing atmosphere can be handled, but the temperature is tough. Still, with practice, you could probably build such machines. Dunno how you make electronics survive long term at ambient 465 °C (oil wells have a hard time with electronics at much lower temps) but some combination of active cooling, limited duration, and novel fabrication should be possible.

Perhaps the easiest solution is to load up your Venus Mining Hopper with a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen, extracted from the atmosphere and compressed and liquefied using solar power falling on your floating platform. It deflates its balloon and drops to the surface, and starts scooping up material into its hopper as the LN2 boils off, cooling the electronics and other temp-sensitive systems. (These are buried in lots of insulation.) When the hopper is close to full, you start venting the N2 into the balloon, and the whole system takes off again, to rendezvous with a solar-powered tug to pull it to your ore-processing factory. That may be a long haul, because the upper atmosphere of Venus moves at 100m/s. Maybe you design your system to stay on the ground long enough for the platform to come back around the planet, a mere 4-5 days. Or maybe it just takes a big bite and goes straight back up so it doesn't get too far behind.

So maybe doable, but it makes the hurdle for setting up a self-sustaining colony much higher. Not that it's a much lower hurdle anywhere else.
How about telling people that they should treat the office area as if they were at the library? Well kept libraries are fairly silent places because everybody knows that they should keep their voices down and not unnecessarily disturb the visitors.

You could lead by example by keeping a low voice and going to a meeting room if you need to have a long discussion with someone.

Your superiors probably wouldn't be fond of the idea. Whispering isn't natural to them and having them adapt to the programmers, which they out rank, would be tough.
I'd also add that there's at least a couple of suddenly-prolific "green" commenters here today... which is interesting (but definitely not conclusive) as to what exactly is going on.

Personally, I'd go from the assumption that suddenly-prolific "green" commenters have some special interest in the topic. These days -- since HN has become mainstream -- I'd lean towards astroturfing or some other monetary interest.
Offtopic: what's a good way to learn about the Videocore processor? I now own a B+ and a Pi 2 so it might be worth my while.
Didn't the article cover exactly such a proposal, in the 60s, by Carl Sagan? :P
I'm rally shocked for this news!
Startup Surfboards – Custom, Branded Surf Boards for Your Startup
According to national average I am paid very well but I can't even afford a house on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. Houses keep going up so much each year it seems impossible to keep up financially. It seems like those that already have purchased homes are doing ok, but the cost to get into a home is so steep and it gets worse each year.
Google proved that it can do logistic-heavy business with it's Google Express. I'm sure if they do something like Uber, it would be as good as Google Express.
> "can only replace humans up to a certain point"

But with advances in both hardware (3d memory, memresistors, neural network chips, graphite), and software(recent advances in CV, statistics, deep neural networks) that point is moving forward all the time.

Not too long ago we couldn't imagine that a computer could recognise house numbers and streets names in arbitrary fonts, but that is what powers google maps. Luckily in this case the technology has not replaced a huge workforce of would-be google-mappers. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

Technology, and especially AI has the potential to be enormously disruptive. And even if the risk seems remote, it's too big to ignore imo.
Variations of movie studio logos throughout the years
It's not a question of morality. What it boils down to is which side are you on. Do you care more about ISPs and their ability to do whatever they want in order to maximize their profits, or do you care more about the health of the ecosystem (Internet)?

In your hypothetical, if an ISP could come with an offering that would hurt the ecosystem (by favoring X against Y, and hence not allowing the Internet to be a leveled playing fields) but offer some savings for its customers then I would be against it. It's far more important to maintain a leveled playing field than save a few pennies here and there.

However, looking at other developed countries and their offerings, we can certainly conclude that what we get now is the worst of both worlds -- expensive monthly cost and throttling -- so there's plenty of room for improvement (cheaper service) while maintaining net neutrality.
I was referring more to them as a pair. I know that CalDAV has been out for a while (didn't know it was production, thought it might still be beta), but I know that CardDAV has been taking longer due to integration with your pre-existing contacts system. :)
Calling all student founders: $20K, office, and mentorship from Highland Capital
>bioengineering an intelligent organism

Or just engineering some. Biological organisms seem overly tuned to their environment and complex ones need a supporting biological ecosystem to thrive (so far that we've seen). It may be more effective to get robotics to our level and expand intelligence into the galaxy 'synthetically'.
Study: Global Warming Is Causing Iceland to Rise Faster
I agree. I have used the following subreddit to learn and practice new languages: http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack - didn't know that one: "The Sybil attack in computer security is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. [...]"
Just look into using a proxy or VPN.
These "startup advice" articles on Hacker News always come off as cheap marketing. Each one seems to make sense, but are so imprecise and arbitrary that they are absolutely useless in practice. Tomorrow there will be another article that points out that you have to add extra features that your competition doesn't have and that's the way to do it, and upon reading it too will make sense.

And about this particular article, can you be any more banal than by stating "do one thing and do it well"? The only difference is that usually people make comparisons to Swiss army knife and in this case it's that ninja tool.
Will any of this matter once the global satellite internet networks come into being. SpaceX and o3b are aggressively working on these it seems.
With regards to SEO, I think a lot of you are missing something special about SFW, and that is that each page has a JSON representation. The client only exists to render the human readable view, but the JSON is fully crawlable by a spider. In a lot of ways, this borrows from the days of XML pages where the content was rendered using XSLTs. In this case, the content as well as page revision history and links are preserved as a single JSON object. This actually may make SFW content more crawlable.
Great link and thanks for the explanation. So by using a deferred rendering algorithm you can reduces the complexity O(m+n), (m=number of surfaces, n=number of lights) where the forward lighting path renderers have complexity O(m*n). The trade-off seems higher memory usage, not working well on older hardware and with anti-aliasing and transparent objects explains why many modern engines like Unreal 3 and IW engine don't utilize it.
Clayton Christensen on Religion and Capitalism (2012)
Maldrone: Malware which hijacks your personal drone