skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There are too many competing standards for x, so we are proud to announce a new standard, which will supersede all existing x standards and unify everything." -The founders of every competing standard ever introduced for anything in the history of things.
I've never had a problem with them, and I've been a (paying) customer for over a year now.
>And, to be clear, there are people who don't even accept certain aspects of well-accepted physical property rights.

Yes, but they tend to be in jail. In any event, he appears to be talking about rent and the profits from IP in the context of Western civilization, in which IP rights are indeed a legitimate instance of ownership.
Slacker is a free cross-platform desktop Slack client with native notifications
No, GB is perfectly correct when referring to memory. Just because some people standardized on Gibibyte and redefined gigabyte doesn't invalidate what memory makers have been doing for ever. JEDEC still uses GB, as they should.
So, for certain categories of problems, I disagree.

There's way too little acknowledgement in our industry of just how much suffering and anguish one or two chucklefucks on a codebase can inflict on their teammates. Using only the matter at hand as an example:

"Rude" is waking somebody up to stand watch over a buggy system because it wasn't written properly and will seize up.

"Rude" is wasting senior developer time on a refactor because the last person who touched the code used system calls and primitives only available on one specific compiler and one specific OS, and now the system has to change.

"Rude" is injuring somebody because your embedded controller is using the wrong sized int for something, because it slipped through code review because somebody decided to use a #define that got changed between architecture upgrades and never fixed it.

"Rude" is wasting a tester's day having them try to hop up and down over the same three feet of virtual space while trying to tap the attack key just right to repro a race-condition bug caused by some permutation of the above. 8. Hours. Of. Hopping.

~

When you write shitty software, you are hurting everyone else who might ever have to interact with it--so, uh, yeah, I get to be rude.
Yes, trees die and immediately sublimate.

No, it turns out, decay is a long-term process, and much (most, even) of the carbon is taken up by the organisms that feed on that decay.
All I need to do is shut down one of the robot overlords, root it, and flash it with Cyanogenmod. I don't need much in the way of resources to do that.
Medium volume day trading (hundreds or thousands of transactions per day), where you make $500k per year (which will get you to the 40% marginal tax rate, 31% effective). Have to account for the basis of every trade, all short-term gains/losses, and let's assume they're doing that accounting work themselves (the hundreds of hours is a stretch though), and that they're not plugging a csv file into a program to take care of it for them so it's all manual gain/loss matching.

That's about as close as I could come without getting silly. Even oil companies like Exxon don't end up paying 40% (35% effective I think in their last fiscal year).

If you make $5+ million per year, and have nothing to offset any of that, you can end up paying over 40%. Pretty rare group of people likely to fall into that.
It's fairly easy to a smear campaign someone that does not fit into your narative.

All you have to do is put some labels on him, take things of out context, attribute things not said or done to the said person, and pretend to debunk him.

This way you never have to make the counterargument to the argument made by that person. You just dismiss him in whole.

I don't know if that's the case here, but considering the name-calling from the start, the typical labeling (racist, homophobe, islamophobe, Nazi, RT-shill), I'd say it fits.
Is there any reason not to just use artificial sweeteners besides unfounded fears in the public? And would all this research money not be better spent on advertising and attempts to influence public perception?
And sometimes it works out that way.
Fwiw I've had better luck without SPF records than with them (or at least without hard-fail SPF records). As far as I know, the lack of SPF never resulted in lack of delivery (and I have no delivery problems to the big providers). But my previous setup with a hardfail SPF would cause my mail to be rejected from various people's forwarding setups, especially when forwarding to corporate or university email addresses. The problematic scenario is when they have their own domain hosted somewhere with mail forwarding (e.g. via Dreamhost), that sends it onwards to their real email account hosted by an institution. The final-destination email server then sees the forwarding server as the source of the message, and bounces it for failing SPF.

Openspf.org has a page about that [1] which recommends email providers allow their users to configure authorized forwarding sources as exempt from SPF checks on their incoming mail, and default to not rejecting based on SPF when users haven't configured the preference. But in my experience few institutions follow this recommendation.

Once I ditched the SPF records, I've had no deliverability problems running my own mailserver.

[1] http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Forwarding
30% increase can mean a lot of things.. it's almost certainly not a 30% thrust increase (helpful but not earthshaking) or 30% increase in specific impulse (nobel prize time). From the wording of the quote it sounds like it's probably a 30% increase in payload to LEO, which is certainly nowhere near 2 orders of magnitude in cost reduction.
Yup, ever since I started using XML for every task imaginable I never looked back.
More accurately "market share|revenue > political activism"
Is the report comparing 9 active couchbase nodes v 3 active mongodb nodes? Am I missing something here?
Yes. If Intel can let you control the keys and guarantees in some way that it's not compromising your trusted module, then SGX would be perfect. Unfortunately, right now, Intel wants to keep the SGX keys for itself.
I have this problem at one company at the moment. We use gmail with spf and dkim, and have a low mail count and no mass marketing that I'm aware of. We're on two blacklists. One gives zero reason for being on it, and has a 'contact us for reevaluation' form which I've submitted. No feedback, no change, no idea what to do next.

The other blacklist suggests that it's our commercial site that's hosted with a provider who uses linode, and the linode CIDR block our company website is on has been 'banned with no recourse to remove' due to the huge amounts of spam it has sent. For that list, it apparently doesn't matter that our mail comes from google, not linode. When I get some free time, I'll try to move that website.

What do you do when the vigilantes screw you?
I think most times its worth the "redundancy" in cost of multiple parties discovering the same thing, because then at least they can use it. The way things stand now, plenty of biotech companies just shelve patented things and then its no good to anyone. This can't be easily remedied by "adjusting" the laws, since the lawmakers will always and quite practically be behind the technology, and sometimes not ever understand the technology or consequences.

Either way there is a cost to use: either paying for the rights to the patent, "paying" in completely arbitrary time determined by patent laws which do very little to distinguish completely different technologies and lifespans, or paying to reinvent in trade secret scenarios.

I feel like with trade secrets its much more in our control to remedy situations where many people need access to a technology quickly. It allows for dynamic solutions. For example, private contracts could handle the patent use case without necessarily having IP. They could provide the end product as a service, or provide know-how to build the product under a "subscription-service" where the client agrees to pay a very large fee over the course of several years/dependent on unit sales/etc (the analog to the royalties/licensing fees), with the punishment being spelled out in the contract that if the tech is replicated in some other way or leaked, the client company must pay a large "breakup" fee. That way the client is incentivized to use the tech and keep it secret as well. Client companies can then assess whether these fees are better than the cost of R&D they would have to undertake to develop it themselves. Just look at software: there's plenty of stuff I could build myself, but I happily pay for an existing solution despite not being "forced" to. I think we very early on decided on a patent model and just threw up our hands and said 'no one would possibly invent otherwise!'
this has lots of useful formulas that are useful when you are stuck but no THEOREMS to really guide your work.

jkun, you have the honors?
What are your issues with calendar like Google Calendar or the built in iCal of OSX/iPhone?
What are your tips for hiring your first group of employees?
Akido Labs (YC W15) Provides an API Layer for Hospital App Developers
Anything is possible, but I couldn't find anything with a quick google, and I'm assuming Bill Gates has more time and resources than myself to verify that statement before making it.
Interesting, maybe it isn't that far-fetched after all, though the risks of doing this by impersonating an Uber driver seem a little too hight to convince scammers.
Guy Who Helped Publish ISIS Twitter List Says Focus on Terror Group, Not Him
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Actually, much of the land in Brazil that's being used for biofuels was previously deforested for logging and cattle. Of the remainder, yes, some of it is biofuels, but the vast majority is simply logging, with agriculture (both crops and livestock) a distant second.
Statically Linked programs on linux
can anybody explain why this is better than a mirror?
Yes it is. And so is a lot of malware. The user has clicked the "I Agree" box at the start.

Can you come up with a definition of "malware" that excludes actual malware and excludes the Debian popularity contest?
changing your ip is the solution in these situations. And that's why self hosting is a real hurdle.
Ya exactly. If you're trying to do a functional map, then it doesn't make sense to have to def it especially because your def will go before the actual execution of it which always looks unideal
No problem.

And to be fair, there are a couple of folks I trust who have had great success with it--and yet, I never seem to run into those projects when I need them.

Cool VR stuff by the way...hit me up if you'd like to BS about it sometime.
Can they be points but only rational points? How can you tell the difference between dense rational points and dense real points?

It seems like you can mark regions of zero size either through countable or uncountable methods...
i had exactly the same thought. why not a nanomirror?
You can define "pixel" however you want, but that has nothing to do with your claim that you can't divide an interval into uncountably many disjoint sets with countably many lines (points).

pdonis and I are not arguing about which way you'd prefer to define the word pixel. But I think pdonis lost the train of what he/she was precisely speaking about in one sentence of the last post.

Edit:

> You can describe it with one or two rationals (Edit: two or four for 2D).

Considering the one-dimensional case for a second: if you define a pixel with two "rationals" (I think you mean two numbers of the form k/2^n here, you're describing (I presume) its left and right boundary, creating an interval (a, b) where a < b. Fine.

How do you describe a pixel with one rational (I think you mean one number of the form k/2^n)? For example, which pixel is described by the rational number 3/8?
Tag Heuer will make the first 'luxury' Android Wear watch
That seems like it reveals exactly the same kinds of information that range queries reveal.
> Focus on helping them to build stuff

I'm considering two options: 1) they all build the same app, or 2) they each build a different app, and we discuss individual's problems/solutions as a group.

My thinking with #2 is that it'll be more interesting and motivating, and we'll uncover more real-world scenarios that way.

What do you think?
Even scanned they do have a very distinctive quality. Subtle yet large dynamic range, the hues, the contrast. Beautiful to watch.
Highly recommended If you're interested in this sort of thing: This Coming Plague, by Laurie Garrett. It's a very good book about, in a nutshell, how easy international travel is, and how lower investment in medical infrastructure and social services affect us all.
The reason Diet Coke is so sweet is that it is an entirely different formula from Coca Cola Classic. It is more similar to the ill-fated New Coke, a product that was designed to be much sweeter because market research and focus groups determined that people tended to prefer sweeter colas (New Coke, of course, failed because it alienated Coke's market base, since people who preferred sweeter sodas would have already started drinking Pepsi and New Coke gave those individuals no reason to switch brand fealty.)
From [1]:

The Picat C-source code is distributed under the Mozilla Public License (http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/). You are assumed to agree to the terms and conditions as described in the license if you submit this request. Please provide a valid email address.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/188dDBVrNrrshZtO8smEBgskOrMl...
Mirrors absorb and transmit light. This article from wiki explains what a perfect mirror would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_mirror

I believe the most important part of the article is:

"The team then ran light beams through the lattices and confirmed that they could flow light (without loss) through turns that are twice as tight as any done previously."

If you can bend light without loss, I imagine that is very valuable. All that said, IANAP (I am not a physicist) so if someone else can correct me or add more information, I'm sure that would be helpful.
Announcing Postgres pg_shard 1.1
On February 20, I had a story hit the front page of HN on a brand-new blog that didn't receive traffic from anywhere else.

Here are some screen shots from my analytics.

OS:
http://i.imgur.com/oZNOxCK.png

Browser:
http://i.imgur.com/84DGWHz.png
I can't make it past the first sentance in the opening without just wanting to scream in annoyance. Nothing about immutable objects means that you are going to write thread safe code. Pretty much period.

Worse, nothing about functional programming is necessarily about immutability. It is a convenience on small and easy problems, but is far from required. Consider how your computer adds two numbers. Lots of things change state under highly timed situations to give you that answer. It is not some magic table lookup that works with immutable facts.

I may just be bitter by a system right now that is using immutable objects everywhere. I realize this is a straw man, but with heavy reliance on deep (3+ levels) of immutable relationships, it is not uncommon to find crap that is the equivalent of this:

String foo = "hello";
Character bar = foo.charAt(0);

...
//We need to make sure bar is capitalized everywhere
baz = bar.toUpperCase();
//Now to find everywhere this matters and let the caller know.

I realize lenses and zippers and such can help, but so can just being a bit more disciplined about using modifiable items in the first bloody place.
I was annoyed with TinkerKit's wire arrangement for their 3-wire connectors. The wire order for most standard hobby servos (e.g. Hitec) are [signal, +v, g], but TinkerKet went with [+v, signal, g]. That means I couldn't easily use most hobby servos with their system. I'm kinda happy TinkerKit's wire arrangement didn't become a more popular standard.
Where did you get the TFL dataset?
One of the interesting parts of this is the distinction between different types of applications: safety critical and otherwise. If, as other commenters are saying, no we can't trust libraries, but yes we have to anyways, then a library may be good enough for non-safety critical applications and get all the adoption and work. Then you come along with your safety critical application for which this library isn't trustworthy enough (by assumption). What are you to do here?

I'd love to see a bigger ecosystem of safety critical code floating around. Libraries in it would be less full-featured and optimized than their less trustworthy counterparts with wider adoption, but it's a niche I really hope to see develop as code takes over the world.
Kotlin M11 is Out
Will Starbucks’ new coffee delivery service actually work?
I don't think there is a free lunch here.

Yes immutable data makes the inserts O(1) but increases the query costs proportionally to the number of producers.

You need to traverse all possible systems states to do a complete lookup.

Encryption also makes server side pruning and garbage collection of old system state difficult unless you just clear everything greater than n days old.
That's a very interesting website. Can you tell me more about it?
"controlling the light beams without losing their energy has been the challenge"

I guess perfect mirrors that don't loose any energy don't exist?
It also has the highest archivability of color silver halide film....great stuff RIP.
But "mās" is also Latin for man? We see that used with feminine/masculine. Is there a reason it would be different in this case?
The amazing LIL AMOK
> The best way to buy cars is option out exactly what you want and get the invoice price.

The problem is that you can't get exactly what car you want (all the options, color, etc...). Why? Because you're only limited to what dealers have in stock. You can't even wait a few months for what you. It's just not an option for most cars aside from Tesla.
Ask HN: How do you handle stress?
I don't know if I've got it wrong or the author does, but I think about it like actual rents.

Landlords don't make money by providing a service or selling goods. They make money by sitting on something no one else is allowed to have. They don't have to do anything more than sit back and collect checks. Sure, they bought the land originally, but there's no more investment to be made after that. They can invest in a nicer building or grounds, or compete on services such as "free" utilities or quicker repairs, but those are above and beyond the "rent-seeking" part of his revenue. He could just rent an empty lot, like a trailer park or campground.

This is analogous to, for example, telephone lines. They cost a lot to initially build out, but once they're there, the phone company only has to charge people for access. They provide a service back at the switching station, but most of what they're getting money for is owning lines that already exist. It's harder to separate rent from their other revenue, but it's there.

It generalizes to all revenue that is of the "sit back and collect checks" variety. Cellular carriers sitting on a chunk of spectrum they can sell access to. They can just rent it out to MVNOs if they don't want to provide those services themselves. Film studios sitting on a catalog of work they can sell, license, etc. So yes, IP revenues are definitely rents.
I hope good luck to you.
Work hard and have fun!
so, uh, yeah, I get to be rude.

No, you don't. Let me rephrase: I think it would be appreciated here, and for the sake of politeness and basic respect towards others, that you do not get rude. There are a thousands of other ways to write down how you feel about something without being rude, and people will still perfectly understand it. Moreover they are even more likely to pay proper attention to it if you are not rude.
I find it enormously ironic that when I went to this link it popped a modal with a Rolex ad.
Introducing Talky Beta, and Coming Soon: A Talky Kickstarter
Jared Goodner here (cofounder of Akido) - We're super excited to see what the HN crowd can do with a RESTful API for hospital data! Check out our first blog post for some very simple examples.

https://www.akidolabs.com/blog/hello-world
To me :+ versus +: isn't obvious compared to saying .prepend or .append, which is my point. I shouldn't have to look that up.

As far as :: versus :::, depending on type inference it can be a much more later error that is confusing. The type error messages are cryptic compared to what it could say. Worse, if you then take it and serialized it to JSON or something then you won't even get a compile error, so it may not be for a while that you even realize there's and error and that can be hard to trace down depending on your code.

I really am failing to see why you're defending this. It's like trying to defend programming without a debugger because you have printf. Why not make things clearer, always? Why can't error messages be easier to understand and more human friendly? Shouldn't that be the goal?
Standards

http://xkcd.com/927/
Agreed with your general sentiment, but the BeagleBone Black is still quite lacking when it comes to documentation.

I'm a very experienced web developer, but am new to programming for embedded type devices. While the BeagleBone Black in browser development environment is quite nice, the lack of documentation makes it hard to figure out fairly basic things like reading values from a gyroscope/accelerometer/magnetometer. A lot of this hardware has existing libraries for Arduino, which is why in my opinion the Arduino is still a superior platform for anyone who is somewhat new to embedded computing.
What if Tetris is a meaningless "problem" for them
In many cases, the second half of the sentence never really happens.
Ask HN: How do I tell marketing that their work product is horrible
Quick background, our company is successful and about 40 employees. We have just one issue, a really bad marketing group. The marketing is done by the owner's brother and he is clearly not the best, spelling mistakes in newsletters etc..

This is compounded by the fact we mainly hire recent grads and we have a semi-decent programmer who can also do some graphics. Our advertisements look like kid graphics.

For some reason this makes me a bit angry because at then end of the day when I tell people where I work they only see these images, logos, marketing material and not the fact that our product is successful.

Any thoughts on how to go about providing positive criticism?