skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I could upvote this a 1000 times I would.

We need more people doing crazy sh*t like this. Java is a fantastic runtime - and a great language. But it has a huge amount of baggage. I'd love to see experiments int the open source arena playing around with alternatives to the standard Oracle JVM.

I'd love to see Android like alternatives for the desktop that re-use java's syntax but have less baggage and are not tied to Sun's view of what Java should be (Oracle's view of the language is actually a lot better than Sun's thank god).

There are countless Java developers who would like to reuse their knowledge but in a different set up. E.g. desktop not server, lightweight not heavyweight, systems level (like go/python) etc.

I keep hoping that one of these JVMs will end up going in their own direction one day not trying to achieve official Java compatibility.

Anyway kudos to the author.
I had a Pocket-Top folding keyboard that I used with my Sharp Zaurus over ten years ago ... There are a ton of these already on the market [1]. I'll admit this one looks pretty nice.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Afold...
This is a great tool in my experience as well.

I would add that it is not only useful to phrase your criticism as a question, it is also useful to try to think through the possible answers, because there may be a logical one.

Doing this can save a lot of embarrassment as well; it can be a rotten feeling to give a harsh assertive criticism, only to find out that you were completely incorrect (not that has ever happened to me!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
I don't think the size is horrible, though for mobile, smaller executables do reduce breakage. I haven't tried converting a large app, but I assume even a big jar is a small incremental increase in exe size.

23ms is is pretty good. To compare, Hello World in Python, converted to a native executable has a launch time of 6ms (284k executable size). So there might be some room for improvement. RoboVM is still amazing.
Even Candidate Obama (now President Obama) acknowledges that the state is the institution which has a monopoly on violence. To try and dispute this is akin to arguing that they sky in not in fact blue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQl-qAtNwQ

> Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.

Not at all! I merely show that a NECESSARY result of disenfranchising people who want to engage in a particular kind of trade which the government deems "wrong" (in the legal sense, because the government can't really determine morality) is that there are very predictable, unfortunate outcomes like this. The whole drug trade is absolutely RIFE with violence because people have no alternative to settle their disputes. I'm not saying that they are guiltless; far from it! But a modicum of thought makes it plain that the violence is due to the illegal nature of what they're doing.

Look at all the other industries that manage to grow things, distribute them, and eventually sell them directly to customers. Coffee, fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. All these industries have rates of violence which are very close approximations to ZERO. What is different about drugs? Two things:

1. They get you high (but so does coffee, sugar, etc)

2. They're illegal

Obviously I can't PROVE the causality is from 2 rather than 1, but I think a reasonable person could make a reasonable assumption that 2 is far, far more likely than 1.
Theoretically? Citation needed. I believe this is only true if pi is normal, and while there's a lot of conjecture that pi is normal and no evidence that suggests it isn't, there is no proof.
"Universal Foldable Keyboard".

People who use it are to be called UFK'ers
They could do it by ~2005.

In any case, it's always been possible. At worst, you make large integer linear programming based models of what you want to happen, and solve them. You can do optimal register allocation and scheduling, etc.

You can basically shove everything you want into the ILP model.

It's just going to take a ridiculous amount of memory and time to solve.
I send domains to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts. It's effective, though over time you do get faster at turning them on and off.

I also try to stay logged out of most websites except for Google Apps.
Nah, that's a perfectly reasonable pace to work at when you have:

* Predefined explicit requirements (a tight spec).

* No distractions.

* No colleagues (i.e. you're working on a non-blocking single thread of execution).

* Enthusiasm.

* An unhealthy enjoyment of coding.

I have worked at this pace and I'm sure many others have, but you need to have those pre-requisites (and they are RARE!).

Bare in mind that if you're the only developer those commits probably haven't been tested and you're not worrying about damaging other people's code.

Of course, you can't scale that model :-)

Which btw is a fantastic real world analogy of why multi-threading can suck horrifically in some cases and why that parallel execution isn't always a good thing.

NOTE: None of that takes a way from a totally awesome and fearless project to take on and complete (which I believe it is?).
Perhaps I'm nearly alone in this, but this just wouldn't work for me. I learned typing on my own, and I don't use the home row. My hands wander of their own regard across the keyboard, and I still pull above 100 words per minute. I understand the necessity of a folding point, but this just makes the product unusable for me.
I am in college here! But I obviously need to do more than college.
Alex Gibney Doesn't Pander to Steve Jobs in New Film
Thanks for the simple advice.
My biggest gripe with almost all portable keyboards is that they can only be used on a flat, firm surface. If I have a flat, firm surface, I'm not mobile.

Unless that MS keyboard locks, I can't sit it on my lap while I'm in the train, or in the back seat of a car. Where are people finding themselves, such that they need a portable keyboard, have a nice, stable flat surface, but also didn't bring their notebook? Shrug :/
I suppose I am trying to leap from one extreme to another here.

I need to do both, though. I'm sure there's a good balance that I simply have not reached yet.
I wonder how long it'll be before Gruber complains about the name.
For gcc 4.2?
Yudkowsky has already made money off it by gating chapters behind receiving a certain amount in donations, which is part of why I find it really strange that he's apparently now trying to explicitly get Rowling's attention.
That was one situation in the long history of a community with high standards of reasoning and discussion, that produces tons of interesting and educative content. Are you really going to judge the whole community by a single overreaction they AFAIR later admitted was an overreaction?
To me it sounds like the issue you faced was one of maintaining someone else's nightmarish code, not necessarily one caused by a framework. I still don't see how the absence of a framework would have made it any easier to deal with this contractor's work. In my (very) limited experience I would wager that if they'd been left to implement all functionality themselves they would have left you much worse off.
Don't have an answer for the question, but how about coming up with a list of charities you want to support and seeing if they are interested in advertising directly on the site for free?
My spontaneous reaction is: Why don't use the existing MediaWiki syntax? It has gone through the test of years (decades?) of real-life needs, has support for (latex) formulae, everything you might need around images and references etc, one of the most powerful template systems I've ever seen, and the list goes on and on.

Additionally there is a very stable, performant and flexible reference implementation implemented as a web app (mediawiki) with excellent import/export in XML format (and the list goes on ...), versioning with syntax-highlighted diff, etc etc etc.

What have I missed? :)
The idea that someone can claim they deserve their success because they worked so hard, when 'work hard' just means 'spend long-hours doing something they were intellectually and emotionally engaged by' seems so transparently egotistic.

On that basis, most successful people I know almost never work hard.
Techno-Religions and Silicon Prophets (Yuval Harari)
For me, the quality of a keyboard mostly comes from it's ergonomics. That mostly means tall, mechanical keys that give me tactile feedback about 2/3 press with some space to go. I can't imagine how you'd cram that kind of ergonomic into this flat form factor. It really looks like a torture instrument for the fingers. Did I miss some important point here?
Well I think the point is that it's a cultural thing. I really like Java, but it takes unconventional approaches to avoid bloat when working with Java tools because the "standard" way of doing things produces 200+ line stack traces.
Actually, Snapchat's $15B valuation makes total sense: Blodget
How to built a RapsberryPi file server
Hah! I currently do support at my day job on a Java monolith which is as scary as it is clunky. I've seen stack traces go past 500 lines...
It may be frustrating and require a lot of patience on your end, but if you look at it in another light it may be a sign you don't want to work at that company.
I thought the method of overlaying the icons like that was refreshing and interesting!
Apparently, time.com reinvited browser scrolling, too. Automatic tab-close for me.
I was surprised that someone who never had any entrepreneurial activities was able to give such — to what seemed to me anyway — sharp observations on the matter.
On the other hand she probably soaked up a lot from Elon Musk and the fact she is also a writer also helps.
They really don't like touch keyboards do they :-)

Having said that Microsoft IMHO are much better at hardware than software anyway so it could well be a decent keyboard - but original - nope - had one of these 10 years ago.
That's how the Tor network manages to bypass the Great Firewall. Google "Tor Bridges" if you want to get some fine examples. I think the newest tor bridge can smuggle the traffic over Google servers.
It wasn't apparent in my own comment, but I don't put much stock in the "intellectual content of the work" myself. I dislike LessWrong and self-described rationalists, including Yudkowsky as far as I know him. I agree with su3su2u1 that, insofar as Yudkowsky intended HPMOR as a pedagogical vehicle, it was not really well done.

That said, it is rare that a work of fanfiction manages to be a legitimate deviation and self-contained work that both comments and reflects upon its originator usefully. Generally speaking, I prefer to give all fiction the benefit of the doubt: whatever its failures, it is hard to ignore that it was successfully written and as someone who has tried my hand at it, I know firsthand the challenge overcome. There's a "Man in the Arena" quote insertion that belongs here. I did find it to be a good and engaging story, though, if painfully in need of an editor, which is not a unique remark in the land of fanfiction.

If you want to really have fun, compare HPMOR with the Left Behind series, which qualifies as fanfiction as much as anything. There are probably some fascinating parallels to be found with their relationship to their original works and author intentions and the like. You can find a much higher quality counterpart to su3su2u1 in Fred Clark's Slacktivist blog, which dissects it on a page-by-hilarious-page basis.
My favorite FP trick: embedding meaningful data in the "ignored" bits of a floating point NaN. That gives you 22 bits (must have 1 nonzero) to play with in a 32-bit float representation, or 51 in a 64-bit float.

As I recall, at one point someone used this at battlecode [1] to lightly obscure their communication protocol. It's also a nasty but effective way to pack more nuanced metadata than you "should" be able to in a packed Java float[] or double[].

[1] http://www.battlecode.org/
Props for using an iPhone.
I've gotten used to the frequent feeling of "everything you know is wrong" - or at least, more complicated - as more fields of investigation become computation-friendly and hop on the Moore's Law Express.

But once in awhile, something like this comes along and leaves me with skin abrasions on my dragging lower jaw.

I'm gobsmacked by the idea that I could stand in the middle of this escarpment and that the ground everywhere, as far as I could see, would be littered with a million years' work of my near ancestors and cousins.

Wow.
Since every single comment[0] at the time of me writing mine is negative, let me make a positive one.

I do really like the concept and would buy a high-quality Bluetooth keyboard. I care about ergonomics and probably wouldn't want to code all day on such one, but sure as hell I would use it to reply to e-mails during my commute or write stuff wherever I happen to be at the moment.

I actually bought a cheap BT keyboard for my phone once for the very reasons outlined above, but ended up not using it because it was too crappy. Not the ergonomics, mind you - this I would tolerate, but the fact that it sometimes locked up and some letters were almost impossible to press - making the whole thing too unreliable for touch-typing. But I trust that Microsoft can make their own hardware well enough, and I might be looking into buying it when it comes out.

[0] - not picking on you personally, AnkhMorporkian, but your "Perhaps I'm nearly alone in this, but this just wouldn't work for me" sounds ironic when surrounded by over a dozen of comments criticizing the device. No, you're not alone ;).
I guess MS is late by 19 years.
PFU Limited reinvented the keyboard in 1996 :-P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard
This doesn't have a date on it, but the corresponding blog post suggests 2011: http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/05/09/fbi-tracking-device-te...
Coincidentally saw this on Kickstarter today about a guy with a cool idea to reinvent typing altogether: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forrestmaready/crosstap...
I haven't read all of the "Sequences," nor am I familiar with most details of the Less-Wrong-mindset's idiosyncrasies. However, I just re-read the whole book and I'm not sure either of those concepts have any bearing on this work.

There is a bit of assertion that "timeless physics" is representative of true reality, but my reaction was to look it up and find that it's an interesting fringe theory. For all I know, EY doesn't even assert that same theory's truth. Nothing harmful in sparking curiosity, especially in things such as statistics and logical biases, which is where HPMOR puts its emphasis.
I came here only for the promise of elves typing a keyboard at superfast pace...
I came here only for the promise of elves typing a keyboard at full speed pace...

(no elves and now I feel sorry for his dad, great)
Same here. I'm not sure what those who enjoy the series get out of it, but I really couldn't see the appeal. Perhaps the author's use of HP as a vehicle for his philosophical ideas was just too jarring.
But hosting and bandwith for servers is extremely cheap if you don't care about reliability and trendyness. You can get a vps with 1Tb bandwidth/month for $4 (probably even less if you look around more than I did). Try getting mobile bandwidth for anything near that price.
Really? As if the post office guys would know what your plates are?
It's not interactive, but there are plenty of videos available on youtube (for example: this series explains how to make games with python and pygame [0]). Since he doesn't have internet, you will have to download the videos, most likely with youtube-dl [1]. So my suggestion is for you to decide what programming environment is better for him to take on, get the corresponding videos, and next time you visit his family you install him a text editor (I'd suggest Notepad++), the programming language, and give him the videos.

Good luck!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7joZ67mC6o&list=PLQVvvaa0Qu...

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
"Spreading the work as evenly as possible" is not communist ethos (likewise, evenly distribution of wealth is also not communist ethos). "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is the classic Marxism principle (it's the same for any other communism - they differ in the method to get there, not the principle).

There are a lot of problem in practice with trying to evenly distribute the work. And they're mostly the same reasons why we have to rely on free market to distribute the majority of wealth: the centralization and power issue, the inefficient issue, identity issue when your worth is tied to the minimum work you need to do (granted this is already a problem nowadays). And to determine a minimum fair share of work means to determine the minimum total work that a society needs to do, which is equivalent to determine the minimum amount of wealth to be produced. Ask 10 people and you will have 20 different answers on what is the "minimum living standard should be".

Also, it stops (or drastically slow down) society from technological progressing. Whether it's a good or bad thing is up for interpretation.
And for everything else, there's AsciiDoc.[0]

For an extra five minutes learning you get a boatload (think container ship) more features[1] - it compiles to DocBook: a mature, actually standardised, highly structured format, and from that you get HTML, EPUB, PDF, slideshows, and man pages for free.[0] For math you get MathML, ASCIIMath, and LaTeX (along with a number of ways to render them.) It has a super nice syntax, is equally good at little docs and huge books, and you could theoretically write a proper academic paper in it with the LaTeX backend. And you always know what's going to happen when you try to mix bold and italic...

Also endorsed by Linus.[2]

[0]: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/#_overview_and_examples
[1]: Well, five minutes to be able to do everything Markdown can do; everything else will take a bit longer
[2]: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/X2XVf9Q7MfV (comments)
Washington was similar... though rather than cities it was regions that struck the power balance. The previous capitals (New York and Philadelphia) were too far in the northern region.
Seriously, you're more than correct. To say this is a straight up advertisement disguised as a puff piece would be kind.

That said, I do regard the Microsoft Natural keyboard one of the greatest keyboard designs I've used, but even that was only a slight variation on prior art. My only gripe is that I've never found one with mechanical switches (so I'm pretty sure they never existed).

PS - here is a plug for another "reinvented" bluetooth keyboard - its not foldable though :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOot8H8GPM4
> Antiwork is also a rejection of what we regard as pointless or immoral work. This might include any form of forced or subtly coerced labour, work that serves no positive purpose (in the opinion of those doing the work), work that has harmful consequences (physical, psychological, environmental), etc.

Work for clean water, plentiful food etc is not pointless, so I think it doesn't qualify.
Cryonics and Cryptography
This is a fine series of articles done over several months. The final one includes links to the rest: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/thats-not-norma...

This last one was also the one that (in retrospect) I found most important: when optimizing floating point routines, do not underestimate the performance penalty of denormal math. You've probably realized that NaN can hurt performance, but denormals can be much more insidious. Not only can each one cost a few hundred extra cycles for the operation, it also resets the branch prediction buffer, so that the next couple executions of every if statement and loop elsewhere in the program suffers an extra 15 cycle penalty!

But it gets worse! Like a disease that quickly kills the host, NaN has the saving grace that it usually only happens once, since it generally contaminates the result. But adding or subtracting denormals (numbers larger than zero but less than FLT_MIN) can go on, and on, while your performance slows to a crawl. And unless you know to be on the lookout for floating point exceptions, simple profiling can hide the source of the problem in the noise of all the missed branch predictions.

Making it even trickier, different compilers have different defaults. Intel's compilers default to FTZ (flush-to-zero), but GCC (and I think Clang?) keeps it turned on. So if you test with ICC but distribute source code, the first sign of a problem might be an end user who experiences code that runs 1000x slower than it does on your test system, but only on certain inputs!

Here's another couple articles on this (IMO underreported) issue:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/x87-and-sse-floati...

http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/cuda-pro-tip-flush...
>What the camera was put there for was to gather evidence of people tampering or trying to steal mail.

That may be true but the camera was positioned to systematically capture information about anyone leaving the facility. There is no mention of it being positioned to monitor the mail drop boxes, which would make more sense if monitoring for mail theft was the only objective.
The TextBlade looks fascinating. There were only demos of it running on iOS and Android devices, but I hope it can be compatible with OSX, Windows, and Linux too.
Given that the early parts of the story are written in such a way that the narrative treats Harry's behavior as completely right and justified, it seems far more likely to be a retcon done years after the fact than some secret master plan Yudkowsky had in mind from the beginning.
It's a keyboard that fits in a purse. C'mon, that's awesome! I used something similar though back a decade and a half ago with my Palm V, although it wasn't quite as sexy.
Somebody probably opened the wrong side once and a passenger fell out and sued...

We'll see more positive train control as the technology gets cheaper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control

It doesn't replace operators, but instead enforces speed limits and stops. It hasn't been implemented in more trains mostly because it's expensive.
If you could let me know what use cases you have in mind, it would help me to prioritize features and think about what to optimize.
No. It will be like typing on a laptop keyboard, I imagine. I imagine the main requirement is just that it be a lot better than typing on your phone, which fortunately is a pretty low bar, allowing them to focus on saving space even if it's at the expense of a bit of key feel.
Maybe it could be more efficient to go the other way round - instead of searching in the digits of pi kind of invert the BBP formula [1] and try to calculate the position of what you are looking for. But because the BBP formula involves rounding this is certainly not a simple task and I have really no idea if anything could be gained.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93...
Where did you read about $300 for free?
Hysteria and Teenage Girls
I read your link and, per my main comment, I'm pretty sure AsciiDoc answers 99% of your needs.

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/#_overview_and_examples