skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your brain does a lot of work when you look at things. You don't perceive exactly what your eyes see. You will use context to see something one way or another. [1][2]

The dress photo is deceptive because of the exposure, levels, and cropping. When some people look at it, they see a lot of light behind it, and subconsciously assume that the dress is probably in shadow. A white-gold dress in shadow would look the way the image does, so their brain says the dress is white and gold.

When others look at the dress, they instead see a dress that is illuminated by light probably behind the photographer, or maybe an over-exposure in some other way. Either way the dress is washed-out, and a blue-black dress would look that way if it were washed out. So their brain says the dress is blue and black.

In reality the dress is blue-black, but the photograph is essentially an optical illusion. Within the context of the photograph only, both ways are valid. You can even switch the way you see it if you can get your brain to "reset" the assumptions it's making about the image. For those of you seeing white-gold, try looking at an upside-down version of the image. [3]

Here is an image that might do a better job at demonstrating what I'm trying to convey. [4]

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/290/blue_and_yellowtinted_choices/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion

[3] http://s4.photobucket.com/user/ometauru/media/YNOPKWp_zpstcv...

[4] http://i.imgur.com/9N4KNLn.jpg
I'll be generous and suggest that NatGeo didn't translate the research fully correctly. The quote from the researcher is "animals have no long-term memory of arbitrary events" though there may be "specialized memory systems hardwired to remember certain "biologically relevant information" (such as where to find food)."

This would mean that it's much harder to have a discussion abou the topic without a detailed understanding of what "associative memory", etc. means - knowledge I don't have.
Yes! Because trident wasn't different to WebKit and they definitely worked hard to make it superior!

Wait, no, this is Microsoft we're talking about, and they'll use their monopoly to force everyone to have the "new IE", and they'll break the web, again.

Honestly, I don't know why you think they'd do anything different. They've managed one release of IE that was actually innovative and good for its time - IE4.

I have little faith that they won't just produce some xslt spewing horror show that only works with drm monitors and complains if the backend isn't .net.
Check out https://betterific.com/ for some ideas (crazy, good and the bad!)
Django Cachalot: QuerySet cache and automatic invalidation
So you're saying that Microsoft doesn't break web standards, users do?

Cool logic from the company that refuse to follow any standard they haven't defined.
There was this talk at last Linux Plumbers Conference, fyi: http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2014/ocw/sessions/2421
I can't think of any other reason, but it should at least be optional, as it often is even at the app level - Spotify lets me choose whether to stream on 4G and even set a different quality setting. On Android, updates only happen automatically on wifi, but I can manually apply them on a data connection if I want.

Unless it's a customisation as part of some deal with the carriers. I understand that this sort of thing is common in the States.
I was told it was a series of bugs that made it possible.
Very good catch. You should file CVEs for these, since it's about as hair-on-fire bad as a security bug can be!

News at 5: Library for securing tokens doesn't secure tokens.
This is somewhat tangential, but my professor recruited Steve to come to Fusion-io and always speaks incredibly highly of Steve. When he was leaving the CEO position to give it back to the founder of Fusion-io he offered Steve some additional shares and Steve told him to give the shares the engineers who actually produce the technology. Incredible humbleness there.
But then again the marginal costs are non-zero due to state intervention. But let me change the example, I can probably make a more convincing case with software.

You have developed the perfect office suite and it is used all over the place. No further development needed. You request a daily license fee of $1 per user. You have also bought and payed for a fully automatic solar powered license server on your private island processing credit card payments and handing out new license keys.

Now you have essentially enslaved the people - everyone has to directly or indirectly work a tiny bit harder, produce a tiny bit more goods and services, to pay your license fees and therefore finance your consumption. This is not a big deal if seven billion people have to finance only you, but it is obviously nothing that scales to an entire economy.

Even at $1 per day you will collect $140 million per month assuming 0.1 % of the population is using your office suite every working day. That is enough to also pay for your family and your friends, 14,000 friends at $10,000 per month. It still is a pretty tiny portion of the entire population but we are already in a region where only thousands of such businesses would have a significant impact.
"But now we face the really hard part: making sure the FCC doesn’t abuse its authority."

This is my fear. We're celebrating government interference and more regulation. It may feel good now but beware. Now that the internet is under FCC rule, they can and will abuse it this power in a negative way. Mark my words.

Also when do the peasants get to view the 332 pages hidden from public view?
I also find it easier to concentrate under dim indirect light, supplemented with LED task lighting for reading paper and playing with hardware. If you're stuck in an office, perhaps you can convince management to save energy on lighting and HVAC.
> All of this (immutability) only makes sense to even attempt if you believe that immutability is easier to reason about than mutability. If we don't agree there, then I have nothing more to add really.

Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I spend a lot of time trying to make mutability easy to reason about (my research), so I agree on the problems but disagree on solution strategies (fixing mutability with managed time vs. avoiding it). There are plenty of differing and evolving opinions in this field (e.g. back in the early 90s, constraints were going to save us).

I see as the main benefit of React is that there is no need for change propagation, just do a fast diff at the end. That's interesting and could be an overall win given the constant overhead of change propagation (O(1) with lots of bookkeeping), but I'm not sure how that would scale in practice. One of the reasons I moved on from declarative UIs (I did my dissertation on one called SuperGlue) was because the paradigm is difficult to scale in expressiveness (let alone performance) beyond simple examples; e.g. I couldn't build interactive compilers bolted onto seamlessly onto editors for richer programming experiences.
I love ST; I happily bought a v2 license a while ago, and will buy v3 when it's an option. I just get nervous about the resources being allocated to its development, so I've run Atom almost exclusively for a few months as a hedge.
My point is that those new algorithms need something to learn from, and the humans that used to do the job are no longer in the game. The original corpus could be reused, but then performance will be bounded by that corpus. If better algorithms are trained on the output of worse algorithms, presumably they just emulate the performance of the worse algorithm. Where do the better algorithms get their input from, if a large scale human effort no longer exists?
realize that there's Xen HVM and Xen PV. there have been significantly more security issues in HVM than there have been in PV.
Google's 200 Search Ranking Factors (Infographic)
Most of the non-tech workers see the only "benefit" of tech workers as higher rents and higher cost of living. Your average worker at Target isn't getting paid a lot.

Sure the business owners and landowners are loving it - but those are the minority. In MV, even Googlers are showing up at housing meetings complaining about the high rent.
First patent in list: http://www.google.com/patents/US7334720

Reads like brilliant legal satire.
AWS have posted an update about related upcoming EC2 maintenance: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/

"We’ve received a Xen Security Advisory that requires us to update a portion of our Amazon EC2 fleet. Fewer than 10% of EC2 customer instances will need to be rebooted. We’ve started notifying affected customers when their reboots will take place. These updates must be completed by March 10, 2015 before the underlying issues we are addressing are made public. Following security best practices, the details behind these issues will be withheld until they are made public on March 10."
rackspace most likely uses hvm guests. I think they had freebsd before there was xen pv support
Fintech City Tour in Singapore Discovers Intersection Between China and India
> I am wondering if React is usable for writing a JS Widget, for example Disqus.

It is, I've written some quite impressive widgets and it performs really well.
Netflix HD streams start in about 5 seconds.

If you can download 1 hour of HD in 1 hour and 10 minutes over 4Mbps, that is still "plenty" in my book – especially since 90% of the USA have multiple options for that bandwidth.

If one provider is out front with more bandwidth for impatient cinemaphiles – good for them! Let them charge more, in more ways, as a motivation for competitors to upgrade.

The ability to satisfy all other net uses – web, email, short videos, software downloads, audio streaming, video conferencing, etc – from multiple competing providers almost everywhere is still pretty good. Saying that's "not broadband" is arbitrarily raising the standard to create a false sense of crisis.

It's too bad your LTE needs a careful window positioning; I've noticed mine faces many weak spots around the neighborhood. But wireless is competitive in many places, for many people, for many uses – and keeps getting better. No one is trapped indefinitely with bad service needing federal rescue – the rates and options have been improving non-stop for decades, based on raw competitive factors.
Senate Panel Votes for Ex-Googler Michelle Lee to Head US Patent Office
I've turned off JavaScript in the browser. And only allow it for sites where I really need it.

I though this day would never come.
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1492/
My gripe with this is that it further monopolizes the ad network market. On the web AdSense and AdWords are king. At least on mobile we have several choices, of which AdMob isn't even the best. I guess Google will be king of this arena too.
I am further away than that - and I guarantee you that I can hear concerts at Shoreline.
Someone once posed this question to me: Would you rather not need food or sleep?

I'd definitely say no sleep, especially for learning, exploring and money-making purposes. That being said, if they asked me if I'd only prefer to live the mornings or the nights, I'd choose mornings (let's say, midnight to noon, on repeat), as the mornings are when people tend to be more hopeful in what they can accomplish, when they think more is possible. Plus, coffee time and a quieter environment.
MediterráneaJS – a conference that inspires Early bird tickets available
your sarcasm detector may need recalibration.
Finnish travel app CreateTrips closes €1.4M in seed
> Yes, there was oversacrifices and exaggerations, and that was cruel regime and highly militarized. But it was necessary to protect ourselves from the unfriendly West (the West openly hated communism since the beggining, even when it was only internal Russian affair). And in the end, it was Churchill, who declared Сold War, not Stalin.

Come on. The large-scale purges, the public trials, the goulags... this was done to suppress not only internal dissent, but any independent thought. How many loyal communists, original bolsheviks, were executed or sent to die in the camps? This had nothing to do with "protecting the USSR from the West" (I'll note that Stalin seemed very willing to work with the West, in the person of Adolf Hitler, as long as he got something out of it).

Stalin was a mass murderer. You cannot brush his crimes under the carpet by talking about "exagerations", "sacrifices" and "necessity".
Why it's different this time: computers are so cheap and so general-purpose.

For decades, there have been many jobs that could be automated, but weren't, because the machinery wasn't cost-effective. It might have to be custom-engineered for the job, and if you didn't have the volume, it didn't pay. An automated hamburger outlet was built in the 1960s by AMF. There are machines for almost every picking job in agriculture, but much picking is still done by hand. There are still hand car washes.

Now, if a computer can do it, the computer will be far, far cheaper than a human doing it. The computer can also provide 24/7 operation, and, even better, once one computer knows how to do something, a million computers can be doing it tomorrow. Deployment is very fast in this area.

The list of things humans can do and machines can't keeps getting shorter. That's not going to reverse. But what gets checked off next? More desk jobs.

Actual physical robots are still rather inept. That's getting better, but progress is slow. What makes robots work? Money. For decades, robotics R&D was under 100 people in the US, mostly at CMU, MIT, and Stanford. Then came the DARPA Grand Challenge, when DARPA told the universities to get results or robotics funding would be cut off. Suddenly entire CS departments were devoted to automatic driving. After that success, DARPA tried throwing money at Boston Dynamics. It took about $125 million to get the fieldable version of BigDog working. Now Google is in the game, spending who knows how much.

A key point in robotics, and AI generally, is that there's now enough known that spending money gets results. There was a false dawn in the 1980s; look up the Fifth Generation project and the NASA Flight Telerobotic Servicer, notable failures. This time, though, many of the old ideas work, powered by four or five orders of magnitude more compute power, and lead to new ideas which also work.

Advanced robotics right now is about at the Xerox Alto level - there are impressive prototypes that work, but they're not cost-effective yet. Robotics has not yet had its Apple II or IBM PC. (The Roomba is too dumb. The Dyson robot vacuum, though...) It's going to take a while to break through the cost barrier, even once the smarts are there.

The implication for jobs is that manual labor is, in the near term, less at risk than intellectual labor. If your job is to do something where the inputs and outputs are through phone or computer, be afraid.
This is all well and good, but I did argue this over a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8882088
If it's content that I access regularly (BBC News/Guardian/Twitter/Facebook), then I'll have the app. For other content consumption, I'll use the web.

What I don't understand is why, for organisations whose primary purpose in life is content, it's even much of a dilemma. Putting together a simple web page or a simple app to serve up identical content different ways should really not be a huge amount of work.

If you want your app or site to really stand out from a usability perspective - like Flipboard - then I can understand it. But Flipboard's product is primarily its UI, not its content. For the Beeb and The Guardian, all I want is a reasonably functional app, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a free framework for 90% of what you need on Github for that.
Just look at the performance of the Red Army in the Winter War for an example.
Three ways to write like Warren Buffett
I strongly hope that there will be a drive among the major browser makers to do what it takes to make the future Web as powerful a platform as possible, even at the expense of delegating support for some old websites to legacy-support plug-ins. I personally would not have a problem with a dual-path approach to the Web: one set of browsers that specify a "current standards" Web platform with maximum capabilities, strict rules, and no legacy baggage, and an optional set of browser plug-ins, to which older, non-conforming sites are delegated.

This would allow the Web platform on small-capacity devices such as watches or headsets to grow in capability like an iOS device with its frequent OS upgrades and deprecation of older code, but would make the whole Web back to the earliest websites still accessible to somewhat larger and more capable devices (desktops, laptops) that could afford to include plug-ins for any old crazy code from the past.

I really don't want the Web to be the "we'll keep hanging on to the past" platform, while the native APIs are the "we'll keep bringing you the future" platforms.
I know what you mean I feel the same way. I'm referring to only this proposal iojs have put forth, the proposals aren't as reasonable as claimed and joyents going to sideline it to my discontent.
"Smartflash is represented by Bradley W. Caldwell, Jason D. Cassady, John Austin Curry, Daniel R. Pearson and Hamad M. Hamad of Caldwell Cassady Curry P.C. in Dallas; and T. John Ward and T. John Ward Jr. of Ward & Smith Law Firm in Longview."

T John Ward is the entrepreneurial federal judge that created the Troll haven in Eastern Texas by changing the rules to make accused infringers almost helpless against plaintiffs and drive up costs.

Cashing it in.
Monitor all proposed changes to PHP
No. you won't believe. But unless you are a MV resident your opinion doesn't affect MV - so you are welcome to continue to disbelieve while MV decides our future
Woman asks about dress color, Internet loses collective mind
> The problem with this though, is that the entire framework would have to be written around this idea, and everyone who uses the framework would have to use these datastructures correctly.

That is the problem, and one of the reasons why I haven't ported Glitch (works in C#) to Javascript yet (instead, opting to wrap it up in a new language).

> Immutable datastructures, while more expensive to change, could be very cheap to diff, because you know if two objects have the same pointer, they're equal.

Yes, I use this property a lot in my own code; I'm pragmatic and use both mutable/immutable data structures. That being said, I find it easy to trace changes and do change propagation on a mutable data structure (that can change) vs. an immutable one (which obviously require diffing since you can't know exactly what changed). Using immutable data structures actually make that problem much harder from my point of view, but I see its utility as an easy way to integrate with existing code and programming practices (something I can't offer).
Ask HN: Why do popular sites don't have chat?
I am talking about stack overflow, github or other projects that have a large community. I am building a community kind of project and I am wondering if there is a specific decision from these sites not to include chat for x,y reasons between their users. It is technically fairly easy so there must be something else. Isn't it a good incentive to keep your users online for more time?
Well yeah, those were the companies that were lined up to build the infrastructure for the multi-tiered Internet. How could you expect them to take any other position?
You might find the passive income posts helpful
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844083

edit: posted newer passive income post, 2015
And the morality of the sort of political system the US has (I'd say "capitalism" but that's a little simplistic), is also not being judged when we examine the US scientific approach.
There and back again: A packet's tale
The existence of zero marginal costs are not a problem for capitalism whatsoever. You're thinking in a very inflexible way. You're trying to take the model of economic activity today and map it with only a few adjustments onto some future world. But this is as foolish as trying to model the economy of 2015 from the example of the economies of 1950, 1850, or 1500.

I think the economics of air is an exemplary point here, worthy of delving deeper into. Throughout human history air has not been a subject of economic activity, precisely because it is free and abundant (and I'm setting aside the discussion of air pollution because it's a more complex subject and not strictly relevant). But despite the fact that air has always been a critical necessity for all human activity, the fact that it has not been the subject of economic activity has not been a hamper to other economic activity, in fact if anything it has been a boon. Internal combustion engines benefit greatly from the free availability of air, for example, to great financial and functional benefit to many.

But what happens in the context of, say, a commercially run colony on Mars? There air is very much not free and must be paid for in some way, either through fees, taxation, or metered use of some sort. But even then that wouldn't change the economic foundation of society in, say, rendering "capitalism" obsolete or not obsolete.

The point being, that what is and is not the subject of economic activity can change, and change drastically, between different contexts, but that doesn't require a grand revision of economic theory. In the future a lot of things that are currently very expensive may become extremely inexpensive or free. But this has happened repeatedly throughout history. What happens is that economic activity moves elsewhere. Today getting enough food to survive is very easy to do, even at a minimum wage. This is very unusual historically. And lots of other things were once tremendously expensive, such as: trans-continental travel, world-wide messaging, books, personal transportation, clothing, durable high quality silverware, and, of course, spices and "exotic" or "rare" fruits such as watermelons and pineapples. At one point pineapples were so exotic, expensive, and sought after that ship captains used to use pineapple motifs for decoration as a status/wealth indicator. Today, of course, you can go to any grocery store in any city in the US and buy one for a few dollars, or get canned pineapple for even cheaper. And so what? All that means is that people aren't working in order to buy pineapples, their working to buy other things.

The economy of 2050 is likely to be very different from today's, but it will still have a lot of familiar characteristics. People will still go to work, people will still exchange goods and services with one another. There will still be a huge amount of economic activity, though it's likely that many of the things we consider valuable today will be nearly valueless then and many things we are not even aware of today are considered valuable.
This case is great for startups, incidentally. Apple has been distinctly reluctant to support patent reform that would threaten their own mountain of garbage software patents.

A few billion dollars in bogus jury verdicts -- especially if they have to actually pay them -- might make Apple reconsider taking the trolls' side in Washington so often. All we need after that is to get IBM and Microsoft back on the side of ending software patents as they once were before getting so many themselves.
Doesn't Linus have all of those?
Did something similar during a Software Craftsmanship conference at Bletchley Park a couple of years ago.

BP have a "paper" enigma machine that they use for school children and we pair programmed an implementation in a couple of hours. (no plug board IIRC)

Nice programming exercise and a great place to visit, although if you go don't forget to visit the computer museum (BP and the computer museum have fallen out so access to the museum is a bit more awkward than it used to be).
Appreciate the "read / watch" recommendations, but to what specific end / meaning?
If you run color correct on the photo it's obviously black and blue.