skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find most e-formatted books to be terrible

Several people have brought this up, and I think it's a great example of path-dependency and bad choices. I remember when CDs first became available and enterprising publishers were trying to think of what to do with all that space, so they made 'shovelware' CDs containing hundreds of shareware games or other commodifiable stuff - particulary the 'Project Gutenberg' collections of classic books in electronic form. Great! But when you'd open them up, they were a mess of line breaks, chapter headings (on every page), page numbers. Even today, the default UTF-8 text versions are still formatted for 80 character terminals or the dot-matrix pritners that preceded them.

The basic literary units (regardless of topic) are words, sentences, and paragraphs. Not lines. Even the most humble text editor has an inbuilt word-wrapping capability; there is no reason to add line breaks to a digital text. 'But,' some will argue, 'what about people who are in a terminal and trying to read something using 'more'?' Well, use a damn pipe. It's insanely stupid to digitize a text and then impose device-specific formatting on it. If something needs to be highly organized in the manner of a technical book, then mark it up properly with TeX or whatever. But if it's linear and doesn't depend on specific typography, then there's no reason to be baking any formatting in.
Yeah, that's one thing that isn't really addressed. Not everyone is out to get 50 million in funding and build a trillion dollar business.
Huh. When I ask my name, it says "Your name is <name>. That's what you told me, anyway."

Seems a lot more suspicious of me for some reason..
I have admittedly lost steam on it and focused on other series...
Pseudonymity is a big one and the relative lack of censoring (aside from self-censoring to fit into the prevalent group-think.)
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Is an event discovery app in India a good idea?
This was not intentional. I've filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1136300.
Exactly. Normally the debugger or repl provides reflection capabilities to be used by the editor to support warnings, errors and hints, and restructuring tools.

Such a typo catcher would be a written (I'm thinking of a lisp or lua here) on the editor side, having the information about the variable and being able to query the namespace or locals visible or not visible. The things jonathan did was just to put this into the compiler for the thrills, but it can be easily extracted, extended and customized from the outside, in emacs, vi, eclipse, ...
such as jonathan did with his perl6 debugger.
I would love to know the views from around the world on event discovery apps. What is their future? Would you like to keep one in your phone?
That's not true at all [1].

This holds for previous years as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...
On Android I use Javelin:
http://javelinbrowser.com/
"A common question that comes up is “why not just convert to the IR of {llvm,gcc,...} and go from there?” [...]
I’m happy to be convinced otherwise - maybe we should throw our effort into getting frame maps out of {llvm,gcc,...} and figuring out how to configure the backend (e.g. which optimizations to turn on) to make it compile quickly."

Wouldn't this be worthwhile just to be able to use some of the LLVM tools (debuggers, performance analysers, etv.) alone? Not to mention optionally being able to compile with more expensive optimisations.
They fixed it. The question of whether or not it was the "proper" fix (out of the two proposed solutions) is complicated. The maximum working array length was changed from 40 (ints) to 49. The difference in this case means that even an additional cache line won't be necessary, and if it is -- only for arrays 120K long. This may have been judged to be better than adding more branches to each iteration (and the code lengthened) which will need to run no matter the input size.

My guess is that they ran a JMH benchmark with each proposed fixed, and picked the better one. In either case, I doubt that makes much difference.
Choose what? To live like Stallman? Even his data leaks all over the place. Absolute privacy, like all absolutes, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I am all for encrypted comm but metadata is almost as bad and virtually unavoidable. Why was no one creeped out that Starfleet always knows where every crew member is at all times?
charging for betas, interesting marketing technique.
I Am Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap, AMA
Yes. My observations count as a type of proof.
I think Commandr would let you do this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.RSen.Comma...
I've worked remote for quite awhile now at a pretty broad range of companies. For the jobs that have had remote teams and local offices I do agree that I'm able to get a lot of communication done quickly when I visit the office.

However I find that the amount of "heads down" work I get done is greatly diminished when I'm in an office. And, much worse, there's a lot of noise in that added communication of being in the office. Remote teams, in my experience, have dramatically less "office politics".

Office space is great for communicating "big ideas" but these aren't anywhere near the bulk of communications being had. For most of the communications needs of software remote works fine (in my experience better).

I work on a quite a few "big idea" projects and I've found the best solution is to visit the office quarterly, get all the big idea brainstorming done, then scurry off to my remote office where I'm not distracted by office politics and can just get things done. A little face time goes a long way, and annual, or semi-annual all hands meetups can do wonders at filling in the gaps created on remote teams.
There seems to be some confusion between complexity, quantity of DNA, and intelligence as a measure of organism complexity.

A larger quantity of DNA does not translate into a more "complex" organism, as amoebas prove. In fact, I would think it likely that organisms with a very large codebase have to be very simple ones, since the simpler an organism is the "safer" it is to add useless DNA code to it without breaking anything essential.

And consider intelligence: it is generally thought that the human brain is largely self-similar (the same structures can be observed throughout the cortex, repeated in layers and columns) and therefore very simple from an information-theoretic point of view. You could express what it does using very little information, or code. The closest we have to an artificial visual cortex, deep convolutional neural networks (shown to have a representational power equivalent to the primate visual cortex [1]), can be implemented in just a couple hundred lines of CUDA code. Just because a system is hard to understand does not mean it has to be complicated, or that it requires a lot of code (DNA or otherwise) to implement.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3284
Want to make it less gross? Make it completely go away.

Installation of Go or Python is just like any other Windows install. You download an installer.exe or .msi, run it, and you're done. Things compile or run immediately, and you don't have to start using a "special" terminal just for it to work.

My experience with MinGW is very different. Especially for dependent languages. "Step 1: Install MinGW" what does that even MEAN?:

"Ok, I ran this installer, and it brought up the MinGW Installation Manager. Is it done? What am I supposed to do here? Which one do I choose? How do you even select a package? What even ARE packages? OK, so I select something then go the Package menu and select Mark for Installation. It's not doing anything. Is it done now? Close window. Nope that didn't work. Open it back up. Oh, so after marking a package I have to go to the Installation menu and choose Apply Changes. ..."

This actually happened to someone I was trying to help over the phone. Heaven forbid they get lost in All Packages and get confused by the dozens of packages each with half a dozen versions and each with three different, non-descriptive "classes".

Installation needs to be braindead simple. During installation it should show a list of extra languages that can be installed, where you can't uncheck 'base' (with an "Advanced Options" button in the corner that opens up the standard installation manager instead). It should set up any environment variables, including PATH, (and including restarting explorer to refresh the env) and it shouldn't require the use of any terminal other than cmd.exe (despite it being terrible).

If you're installing something else entirely that depends on MinGW, their installer should be able to bundle the MinGW installer, and it should install without having to make any choices. It should detect if MinGW is already installed and install packages there instead, still completely automated.

Make it go away.
I'm pretty sure the Kickstarter spirit is defined as "whatever the people running Kickstarter want it to be".
Click on the green scissors above the footer
I'm not a low-income saver myself, but I see lots of low-income savers that just can't hit the minimums. I really would love to see a fee-free option for them that they can drop $5 into here and there and have it add up.
Brew coffee, solve minor daily tasks (weight myself, duolingo session, medication). Get dressed and then commute.
There should be. I collect a set of gov data: there has been a major push from OMB to get all metadata in order and to them post-haste.
Agreed, the salaries on these sites are generally way lower than I expect. It makes me wonder if my current job is paying above market (and thus moving to another employer would be a significant pay cut) or if the data is really really wrong.
In my experience services that don't change over time are the ones that go away. Kickstarter seems like a fluid concept that continues to evolve. As I look they're passing $5 million so it seems as though the community is responding.
Google docs urls that end in /edit will try and figure out what rights you have to the document and give you tools corresponding to those rights (to edit the doc, to share it, to add comments, to add suggestions, etc).

Google docs that end in /preview just show the read-only view.

When a doc becomes super popular, sometimes /edit will redirect to /preview.
Can't say about India, but usually goes like ->

US C-Corp or the likes which is owned by the shareholders. Then C-Corp owns 100% of the shares of the company of subsidiary (depending on jurisdiction there maybe legal limitations imposed). Then there is usually an 'agreement' where all IP generated by sub. is owned by parent company, and parent company pays X to sub. company for services (which are usually 100% match to the expenses). Sub. company hires and manages the employees and deals with local taxes, etc.

This of course, depends on size of the companies (both parent and subsidiary) and countries and then there are a bunch of agreements to make sure everything is above board, but pretty much works this way.

source: just had a friend's company that went through doing that, having a Delaware parent company and a subsidiary setup in Portugal.
I agree. Working programmers who want something to apply would be better off studying approximation algorithms, combinatorial optimization, mechanism design, computational geometry, or the many other topics that get little space on HN.
Disclaimer: Only my gf uses tumblr, I don't.

I think it's the bubble-ish environment that gets created not only by your followership but also by the fact that tumblr blogs rarely get feedback from outside.

Once you've build a sufficient followership around you, every thought you express in that bubble gets some how discussed, accepted and developed.

That's why for once tumblr blogs react so harsh to bubble-out-side topics (/r/shittumblrsays) and secondly why I believe it is such a good place for discussion of "radical subcultures".
As someone living in a very low wage country now, I will never again want to grow a company / work as an employee, in a place where the workers are lowly valued.

In my experience, it turns out bad for everyone. The company gets a far higher ratio of people who don't mind being lowly valued, the workers get lowly valued. Bad for everyone.
How did they get the e-ink display so fast? Or is the video only an explanation of how it works (and therefore not real)?
Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...
Being trans is not a 'radical subculture'
> how do you think phased-array and beam forming work if not by controlling phase delays between antennas so as to create constructive and destructive interference at a desired point, or points, in space?

I consider DIDO separate from a phased array in that each transmitter has its own separately transmitted signal to do the interfering, instead of one phase-shifted copy of the signal.

Artemis/pCell is definitely not a phased array in that sense.
I don't know how it came to be this way, but what happens today is that Tumblr (or a good chunk of it) has a very strong culture of acceptance of everyone and everything, and of rallying to shut down people who try to disturb that safe haven. This applies to all sorts of things, from gender issues to things like self-harm and eating disorders like the article mentions. It's one of the very few places on the Internet where someone who identifies with _any_ radical subculture can expect to be accepted instead of ridiculed.
Allergy Alert Tesco Mini Monkey Milk Chocolate Biscuits Recall Undeclared Peanut
I'm not saying faces aren't determined by hereditary factors, only that there are also other factors. Almost all of the 'identical' twins I've seen had subtle differences.
Photographing people on the edge of a skyscraper in San Francisco
Links to specific Bugzilla bugs and crash reports please.
Exactly. We're more and more going away from analog, physical interactions directly to the symbolic / upper brain. But I deeply believe that the best path to symbolic abstraction is from real to ideal. Skipping the first seems an optimization but it's denying the machine on which the program runs, and is detrimental in the end. Unless you do advanced maths, then your brain is used to go directly to abstract ideas through highly compressed communication forms in signs.
From another comment:

Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...
Objection: argumentative.

And yes, if the claim didn't match with my observations I would expect that they have or be prepared to provide proof in some reaonable form. "Extraordinary claims .." and all that.
Show HN: Renv – a command-line-interface for etcd, inspired by Heroku
Show HN: "backup" a small script that duplicates files before you edit them
Both DDG and Google hatefully over-guess. I understand their motivation -- people typing natural-language queries with smartphone-level typos and expecting to get answers -- but as someone long used to simple keyword queries, I wish I could have the old system back. Programmers trying to make computers "smart" seem not to understand that unless they're almost flawless, users will just have more trouble trying to work around the "smartness" to tell the computers what they actually want.
How to Write Features Like a Pro
I think he's referring to "people who commit suicide virally" not just Transgenders.
With LCD, it's really only the appearance of less light (obviously that's simplified, there are ways to make LCD panels emit less light when it's showing black)

Whoa, hold on there. It’s not “the appearance of less light” - it is less light because the backlight is being occluded by the LCD subpixels. The subpixels aren’t perfect at blocking the light, thus the varying grays of LCD blacks versus the pure blacks of OLED, but a black LCD screen is most assuredly emitting (if not producing) less light than a white one.
killing yourself is a pretty radical solution though.
Cute. I like the photoshop style transparent background pattern.
Bar science: Science explains the secret to keeping your beer from spilling
Ok, so if mainstream news still hasn't figured out how to handle this why do we expect Tumblr to be on top of it? Mainstream news sets a TERRIBLE example of how to handle tragedies like this. I agree with briandoll, let's stop blaming Tumblr for doing nothing wrong (They aren't using this in marketing or as a way to get more users/eyeballs) and focus on the flaws in society that lead to these kids taking their lives.

When the news covers shoots (or stories like this) they ARE trying to attract more viewer, it's a very different thing IMHO to just leaving up posts and allowing users to share. I see Tumblr taking down posts extremely disrespectful to the deceased. Let's not pretend a blogging platform is to blame, instead let's blame the real people at fault: the parents and the communities that drove these kids to what they saw as their only option.
Agree. Chicago is a great city experience for affordable price, but nothing compares to SV, even Seattle does not really match.
Apparently the HN mods are transphobic and won't discuss how exclusionary this is.
Perceptiv SHIFT makes drones hyper-intelligent
I'd go with the four metal dots visible on the back (some connectir unique to the watch)
Seriously, this is the kind of garbage that makes me long for a downvote button.
I think he never intended to say that, still his statement right.
Tumblr as well as like reddit are good discussion platforms for subcultures.
Free Speech and the Cult of Surveillance
> They own or completely control their entire supply chain

Uh? They have OK integration and supply managemnt, but they're a very far cry from controlling their entire supply chain. If it were Samsung then yes, they do pretty literally everything under the sun (and more, they have a logistics and transportation arm, I think the only thing they don't have is mining operations).

> can undercut every competitor as well as invest 10x as much as anyone else to beat the competitors.

And yet they don't, they're usually undercut and the usual complaint about Apple is that their products are overpriced for what they are…
doh, yeah
I'll definitely give Firebug a try. I hadn't even considered it to be honest. I thought I remembered reading a while back that it was no longer important after Mozilla decided to brew their own.
Compose Conference – Modularity and Abstraction in Functional Programming
The article has a false premise.
I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment.

Which is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that were spawned as a result.
Meth is not the worst drug. In fact methamphetamine comes in legal prescription form as Desoxyn and is used daily for many with ADD and narcolepsy. I think that's a mistake to even touch that stuff but it's true. I think you could make an argument that commonly used drugs like Clonazepam (Klonopin) are far more dangerous. Unsupervised withdrawal is much more dangerous than heroin and it plays a major role in overdose deaths when mixed with opiates. The point is that all drugs to some degree are dangerous. They should all be legal and used with extreme caution if at all.
That was true when the term firmware was first coined, but I'm not convinced it's still true. The "firmware" of a WiFi router is effectively a full Linux system, and it needs to be updated as often.

The case is less strong for things like hard drives, but even there, I think we see growing firmware complexity and a corresponding increase in buggy code (I suspect this is is caused by both economic incentives and the mere fact that lines of code are proportional to number of bugs). My Crucial M4 SSD was recently affected by an integer overflow bug [1] that caused the firmware to hang when it got to ~5000 hours of use, and these sorts of firmware glitches are not uncommon.

In any case, I think the question of whether it needs to be a physical switch or cryptographic signing is one that should probably be addressed on a case by case basis: internet connected devices really should have a way to update firmware without physical intervention, but on other devices it's probably not so critical.

[1] http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/BSOD-Crucial-M4/td-...
From what I gather, underneath Datomic is an event sourcing database, which is a model that already scales "for free".

Further optimization is the fact the query engine lies on the application, so if you have N application servers you have N CPUs available for querying - as opposed to overloading a master server or having to provision read slaves.
How do startups go fly fishing?
1. Makes communication (especially when employees work remotely) very simple. Great to integrate things like GitHub and Twitter to keep track of updates.

2. Channels, integrations, also integrating with other teams (I'm part of a Slack channel with a company we're collaborating with and it makes it a lot easier to work on things rather than Skype or email).

3. Word-of-mouth, free

4. Too many channels, can turn into a "Facebook" vibe after a while (once you get "fun" channels that aren't work related). I had to "leave" a bunch of channels today and it's quite controversial to "leave" small channels on a small team... But the noise!
You know, you might be looking at a screenshot that has font settings (hinting etc) which work on the originating display and fail on yours. No reason to jump to snarkiness.
Can someone explain why one can't simply average the individual average results as the author wrote below:

""
No, we can't run averages on worker nodes, and then average those out. We need to have each worker node compute their sum(order_value) and count(order_value), and then sum(sum()) / sum(count()) on the coordinator node.
""?

Thank you.
Off the top of my head,

* Users can self-organize into hashtags, which are easier to navigate and more cohesive than on Twitter.

* Custom blog designs make it feel more personal / intimate, à la LiveJournal or MySpace.

* Reblogs let content spread quickly. Unlike Twitter, there's more flexibility with what and how long this content is. And unlike retweets, reblogging users can add their own opinions / perspectives to what they share.

* Notes, likes, reblogs, followers... provide a metric for the validation of one's opinions.

* The dashboard and blocking system, plus tools like Missing E, let you narrow down the content you want to see and filter out what you don't.

* Emphasis on images / highly visual content which can quickly disseminate social messages and encourages the liking / sharing reaction -- similar to how image macros or videos can easily go "viral".

* No real name policy, and you can easily change your name / switch your blog URL if need be.

* Strong traction in the various fandom communities, which are subcultures in and of themselves and tend to be more receptive to "radical" ideas, as you put it.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Tumblr user; just interested in how internet communities work.