skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have a priori knowledge of the data distribution, you can construct an ideal partitioning scheme. In practice, this runs into some significant problems:

- The average distribution of the data and the instantaneous distribution of the data can be very, very different. This means that some cells are overloaded while others are idle, and the whole system runs as slow as the overloaded cell. The canonical (and fairly benign) example is data following the sun.

- Many data sources have inherently unpredictable data distributions.

- Spatial joins across different data sources (say, weather and social media) require congruent partitioning or it won't scale. Unrelated data sources tend have unrelated data distributions, so this is a problem.

Making your partitions match your data distribution is good practice for static data layers. With some caveats, this can be modified for spatial joins across static data layers as well. For dynamic data sources, you run into issues with data and load skew at scale.
I have 12 of these to get rid of in the UK and it looks like I will have to pay to have them disposed of. The problem with servers of this age is that power consumption is 3 to 5 times that of a modern server. The extra cost of the power would more than pay for a new server over its lifetime.
Redirected walking is really neat -- though sadly it seems like the current 15' by 15' area of the Vive is too small for it to really work.
Ask HN: RTSP streaming server
I'm looking for an audio/video streaming server, supporting RTSP protocol. I'm going to test ffmpeg but I can't find any open source alternative. Any idea? Do you feel comfortable with ffmpeg ffstreamer or any others?
Reminds of me an experimental, hypothetical future Internet architecture called Named Data Networking: http://named-data.net/
"Pretty sure you only get Meerkat messages if you install the app or enter/comment-on the streams"

Nope, my twitter stream is buried with |LIVE NOW| tweets from people who are using Meerkat. I'm hoping that will stop now.
Adventures in message queues
I went to a national science fair with a friend who (completely on his own) came up with a novel, patentable way of reducing drag on ships. I don't remember the details, but he went to the international stage with it, justifiably, and there was a fair bit of fluid dynamics involved.

For me, science fair was the only thing that kept me going to school. (Indeed, I dropped out the next year when I was disallowed from competing.) The project that got me to the nationals was about comparing the efficacy of genetic algorithms against neural networks in a game playing task (with a multi-machine, networked simulator); looking back, it was a big mess, and there was a lot of dumbness (that, if I had had even one mentor, could have been rooted out), but it wasn't dissimilar from unambitious master's projects in the CS department at my local university. Many projects at the national level were much more sophisticated.

Like any school competitions (does the author think math and programming contests are any different?), people with ambitious parents who push their children, and especially children in private schools (that often dedicate class time to working on these competitions), have a massive presence at the higher levels. But what's nice is that you don't have to have any of that to get to those higher levels, either. Motivation is a funny thing.
You say in your profile that you're a graduate student, so I don't understand your point. Are you trying to say that because the software is online, a high school student can do research?

Any high school student can download free software. That's not a question. Almost none can understand the math (I say "almost" because I'm sure there's some child prodigy out there who can; the exception makes the rule), and fewer still can conceptualize a question within the field that counts as scientific research.

The few (if any) prodigies who can surmount those hurdles are, by definition, already graduate-level researchers in the field, and are not piddling around with high school science fairs.
Doctors, lawyers, academics are just as bad.

"Illusory superiority" applies to a lot of things. Most people think they are 'good drivers' and that is where it starts.

For most cognitive tasks the people who do them probably did fairly well at school, possibly the top 5 or 10 percent and so assume they are smarter than 19/20 or 9/10 people...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
> As it stands, there's a way of saying 'I put some text on the canvas' but no way of saying when it was removed. The whole canvas could be cleared, or a particular region could be cleared, or over-written, or the canvas could be resized, which would result in it being cleared.

Indeed. That's a solvable problem - you can track pixels and estimate with a degree of certainty - but it certainly does exist.

You'd also have to determine prominence of the text, which again is solvable assuming the size and weight and zoom level of the text has some bearing on the importance.

And you note the temporal aspect too - you'd have to track whether something was visible, ie sufficiently contrasts against the background, not opaque etc.

And indeed, there's no hierarchy asides from prominence.

All of that, plus more, is far more easier than getting the entire world to avoid, or write fallbacks for canvas.
> Can't you frame every social organization in this kind of light?

This reminds me of the comment I recall from 'patio11's podcast, someone was talking about how their sales pitch uses a lot of spam-associated techniques like suggestive rhetorical questions ("Are you happy with...", etc.), and was asked (in order to give structure to the guest's pitch) something to the effect of, "What separates you from the spammers?" and his answer was, essentially, nothing except I deliver the goods.

I think in general this is the only sane answer to this style of question. Can't you frame every organization as a cult? Probably, if you word it carefully. Not the right question on either end, really.

Does TED deliver the goods... I don't think so. If these people truly have deep knowledge of their fields, <20 minutes is not long enough to really communicate that in general, and from the talks I've seen, while engaging and enjoyable, are not really informative. On a higher level, it's 2015 -- if I really want to change someone's brain so that it _gets_ my field, there will be e.g. interactive elements, which are largely missing from TED talks.
Top marks largely go to Asians. Bill de Blasio wants to change the exams
I can promise you that powera knows something about reliable software. Any indication to the contrary is just loose talk. :)
Also TEDx has happily adopted a wide variety of nutters and pseudoscientists that have wrecked their brand.
For those that are wondering, it's a secondary URL redirecting service hosted on GitHub Pages.

http://google.com ->
http://git.io/hvTe ->
http://sauravtom.github.io/4gitiohackRepo?u=http://google.com ->
http://google.com
Also a cell phone cost $7000000 in 1950. So if we look at the change in terms of cell phones rather than in terms of pieces of paper with pictures of dead white guys on them, wages have gone up over a million time while productivity has only gone up 4X. (well, not really, but to make a point...).

In the 1950's families generally had one car. They didn't eat out as much. Less vacations. More work to manage a household. So amount of paper in hand is maybe less of an indicator than amount of goods and services that paper can buy. Which has increased I think.
Had the exact same experience. I had assumed TED talks provided easily digested summaries of various scientific, economic, social, etc. fields. Until I saw a talk about my current field of work. Charlatan is too kind a description - as it suggests some sort of cynical intelligence behind the act; the speaker was simply an idiotic clown. He hadn't a clue - yet the audience treated his completely mistaken analogies as profundities. That was the end of TED for me.
But another point often forgotten is that the main goal is to deliver a working increment. Even if not the whole sprint gets delivered for some reason.
How do you come to think, that almost everybody is failing at it? I don't experience that. Isn't it like with every other problem in our world? We hear from them far earlier and with big noise. Success remains quiet.
As the founder of Wikitravel Press and an ex-Lonely Planet employee, it depresses me to no end that the world's default source of travel information is completely copyrighted and controlled by a totally opaque corporation knee-deep in hock to the travel industry's own commercial interests.

I continue to believe that Wikivoyage, the CC-licensed and Wikimedia-hosted fork of Wikitravel, holds great promise, but I've also come to believe that travel reviews of points of interest and the wiki format are conceptually incompatible. As this article illustrates, one man's Angkor Wat is another's pile of boring rocks, and you'd need to build a hybrid -- a Wiki for factual info, and unlimited personal reviews -- to get the best of both worlds.

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page
I always like random idea generators. Very dada, funny and sometimes even insightful... like this one "Spotify for all human knowledge" or "Facebook for your cat".

Note: fix the word "knowlege", the d is missing.
Supply and demand. If they sold seats to witness a new pope starting his gig, I am sure they'd sell for quite a lot!
Narrated flights from drone pilots
Fresh out of school does not necessarily mean "no experience." Many students have written a lot of software before even entering college, and then work as developers during school, leaving with 2-3 years of development experience.
And how do you know the student wasn't just a glorified proxy for their mentor?
I'd always prefer an algorithm to be correct 100% of the time than any rate than 100%. This is the type of thing for which there is no fundamental reason why you can't simply do it right. The more things you can do right the less you have to worry about! It's much simpler.

That said, I'd certainly listen to the tradeoffs of being correct 100% of the time vs being wrong a mere 1 in 2^1020 times. I wonder if 2^-1020 is greater than or less than the chance of a cosmic ray flipping a bit...
Hell yes. Risky Business has been my favorite new podcast discovery this year, and I can't believe it's actually been running for 7 years. It's really well presented, the segments flow well and are informative & entertaining.

If you've currently got Security Now on your podcast playlist, definitely pick this one up. I think you'll feel like you've been shortchanging yourself all this time.
IMO the best thing the people from Onion have done since this genius piece http://www.theonion.com/articles/al-gore-places-infant-son-i...
"Perhaps I'm just biased, because I've been working in excellently-managed agile teams that have been delivering software very effectively, and have seen how useful Scrum has been as a framework to manage the complexity of planning it."

I'm lucky enough to have been in the industry before agile and scrum were popular and back before the agile days I worked on excellently managed teams that delivered great software effectively. I've also seen a lot of agile projects crash and burn.

At it's core agile is a small set of guiding principles. Principals I'm sure most of us agree with. Yet it's hard to sell these principles to process heavy organisations. I've seen it fail time and time again despite the efforts of top consultants and coaches.

IMO, agiles real success has been in giving structure to cowboy driven teams. Teams that now actually write requirements down. You could never convince these "cowboys" to write an SRS... But a few user stories... That's more realistic.
I'm still not sure what problems of polygon indexing are not solved by space-filling curves.

About commercial usage:

- Oracle uses R-trees now, I think. Before that, they had what I thought was a bad implementation of something sort of grid-like. Some notes I wrote from a few years ago on their "hh-encoded" index:

Oracle 9 Spatial offered both R-tree and quadtree indexes
(http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/appdev.920/a96630/sdo_intro.htm#i877656).
The generation of index terms for a spatial object is called "tesselation". They have
two approaches to tesselation, 1) fixed-size tiles, in which the space is partitioned to
a fixed resolution, and covering cells give rise to index terms; 2) variable-size tiles,
in which spatial decomposition stops when a configurable number of tiles are generated for
the spatial object being indexed.

Now here's where it gets strange. An Oracle quadtree index is either pure-fixed, or
it is hybrid. Hybrid is a fixed index AND a variable index. The docs recommend not
using hybrid. I could not find an explanation of why they even offer a hybrid option
(as opposed to pure-variable).

This Oracle 9 doc is from 2002. I also found a paper doing a performance comparison
of R-tree and fixed from around that time
(http://www.dpi.inpe.br/cursos/ser303/oracle_r_tree.pdf). This paper concludes
that R-trees are usually best, although they identify situations in which quadtrees win.

Oracle 11 appears to have dropped quadtrees altogether
(http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/appdev.111/b28400/sdo_intro.htm#i877656).

The pure variable-sized tile approach option was never offered in their product,
and not examined in the 2002 performance comparison. As that paper points out,
tuning fixed-size is tricky. If the tile size is too small, you get a large number
of index entries per spatial object. They take space, io bandwidth to read,
cpu time to process, etc. If the tile size is too large, you run the risk of
poor accuracy, retrieving more objects than necessary, again generating more io and
cpu. And if your data set has objects of various sizes, there is no single good size.

- Microsoft is less clear to me. From some of the tuning options on their spatial indexes,
it sounds to me like a fixed-size tile approach, with tunable resolution. But I could be wrong,
and I haven't looked into it in years.

- PostGIS uses R-trees. The problem with this approach is that it's a separate implementation from their main B-tree, so it always lags behind. With space-filling curves, you just use your B-tree and improvements to it then apply to your spatial indexes.

- MySQL also uses R-trees, and only in conjunction with MyISAM. So that's pretty bad.

- I know less about distributed spatial indexes, but I would think that space-filling curves are more amenable to distributed structures because they don't rely on a tree to organize the space. You can partition the 1-d space of z-values to load balance the shards.
Zuckerberg-Backed Startup Seeks to Shake Up African Education
In other words: Scrum would work in Utopia?
I'm sure he does. But I wouldn't want anyone less experienced to read his comment and get the wrong idea. Young minds are impressionable after all! :)
Rebuilding Education: Emerging Business Models
Think of it as an apprenticeship: university doesn't give you the experience to jump in as a senior dev, but you'll eventually get there with practice and mentorship from an experienced dev.

Every 22 year old thinks they can do everything just as well coming out of school...very rarely are they right, and looking back just 5 years later provides a lot of different perspective.
This is from the UCDavis vidi lab [1]. It is a group of software engineers and researchers who work on scientific visualizations like op.

1. http://vidi.cs.ucdavis.edu/
I'm personally a bigger fan of how Sam Hyde explains how the future will change within our lifetimes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cflCyyEA2I
Straight out of the box you get "a lot" of statistical functionality (not to mention things like easy io), a good repl on osx, and incredible plotting functionality is available almost instantly thru installing ggplot2.
Nicely done! Wonder if GitHub will keep it up :)
Protecting a copy-able product comes down to brand, distribution and user experience.

Pick some businesses such as Coca Cola and look at why they are so successful with such a replaceable product.
Wow, I stand corrected. I had no idea the idea had spread this far. My apologies!
I am surprised at the cost and the graduate-job-interview style questions just to attend a satellite event like TEDx Sydney.

I applied and was rejected. I am not interesting enough for them I guess, maybe I will apply again once I have been to the moon. So freshly discontented, I am more inclined to agree Ted is a religion, cult etc. :=)

I do find the talks unsatisfying. The first 3-4 I watched were great (but I can't even remember what they are about) then they are same-ish after that. (My reason to attend was meeting people rather than the talks.)

There is a lot of style over substance in TED talks. I rather have an OK public speaker speaking about something very interesting to me than vice versa.
"10x" is not without parallel. Most of the creative and sporting fields accept logarithmic pay scales - a few multimillionaires, a tier of people making a living, and a vast number of amateurs. It's just that in sports being 0.1% better can mean winning 10x the salary.
Why not? It's not as if there hasn't been incredible diversity in the x windows experience over the last 30 years.
From my experience most of the time companies/teams didn't even try to implement Scrum. Like having multiple product owners, skipping meetings, inventing new meetings, product owners not attending sprint planing or developers not caring about the process at all. The product owner is a single point of failure. If he does not work well it is hard for a team to deliver. In most teams I worked so far team members haven't even read the Scrum Guide nor gotten any training and didn't care.
This is sort of a dumb question, but why develop omnidirectional treadmills instead of omnidirectional footwear?
Star Citizen, $75M in crowd funding, 100gb game
I had a bullshit job. My managers invented it to try and keep me happy (which is nice) but I just couldn't stick being in a sinecure.
The slant/bias in this article was thinly veiled at best.
Although Houston doesn't have zoning, it does have development regulations in place that mimic the density restrictions of cities with zoning - lot sizes, parking minimums, etc. In effect the entire city is one big zone.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/11/30/the_myth_of_z...
Here's a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEzMNp2d6Bk&list=RDhEzMNp2d6...
Customized Professional Logo Design and Web Services with Lowest Price
Apparently a deliberate duplicate (URL has "?hn" appended) of post from an hour earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9208235
And now i am hankering for some popcorn...
'Je Suis Charlie' Has Been the Subject of 50 Trademark Claims Already
But he did design his own protocol
Is there a tldr (or in this case tldw)?
That wasn't a science fair, it was a geography pageant. This was a science fair:

Behold gravity, in all its glory!

http://37.media.tumblr.com/96643a967724c72c1b17bb0ef2d851c4/...
Rather to compare E2E with Mac GpgTools, I'd try to compare it with https://www.mailvelope.com/ which is a much better comparison since both are addons for browsers.

Mailvelope works both on Firefox and Chrome (ironically, the Yahoo plugin seems to only have Chrome support at the moment) and is actually even nicer to use (read: seamless) than E2E IMO.
I liked the cat sharing idea. I am thinking of physical cats rather than the virtual ones.

Think about it - you never own a cat, they go and hang out in the neighbour's garden etc. What if there was a way to share cats.

It could be like uber. You need a cat and sign up. People who have cats also sign up and you argee to share.

I can see it going to the moon!
Were they not TEDx talks? you can virtually pick up anybody from the street to do one of those.
N-bit hashes have at best (N/2)-bit collision resistance (see birthday attack[1]). An 80-bit security level does not have a large enough margin of safety nowadays.

RIPEMD has a 256-bit variant, but it hasn't received enough scrutiny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack
I agree, to a degree (we're all going to draw a different line in the sand on "fair").

Imagine a kid who has had the best environment possible: his parents were some kind of scientists, encouraged his interest in the same thing, and had access to the proper facilities. Another kid has parents that don't care about any kind of science, and were too poor to indulge his interest beyond letting him buy some books and lend them at the library.

If the first kid wins some prize over the other[1], it's not a prize saying "you did best given equal starting points". It just says that he did the best.

If you want to measure something other than skill in science X, like having the best willpower and drive irrespective of background and talent, then you should come up with another competition.

[1] And they both did the work themselves, to a reasonable degree. Not something that the parents did for them.
Build & Launch (build & launch a new product every week)

StarTalk Radio (Neil DeGrasse Tyson - lots of science & humor)

99% Invisible (design in everyday life)

Product Hunt (you know)

Diggnation (there's enough episodes to enjoy for years)

The Bowery Boys (NYC history)

Hatching (discussions about NeedWant's products/strategies)

Release Notes (iOS dev & design)
but they were all 2x engineers!
...you've really escaped the cycle of negative feedback, haven't you? ;)
It is funny seeing this concept beginning to gain legs. A buddy and I were working on a concept for VR/AR laser-tag style locations for a college entrepreneurship class about 5 years ago. However, every entrepreneur they brought in to critique our ideas flat out told us this was a moronic idea that could never work and that nobody would ever be interested in. We were told we had to change to a new idea or we'd fail the class. Oh, academics...
VCs Generally have tons of ideas. They invest on the founders and your background in solving a problem.

If you are focused and domain knowledge on what you are working on, to solve a real world problem. They will be dying to invest in you.

If you are not the right person to solve that problem, and your idea/product is amazing. You should be make an IP and find for experts who can help you with that.

It also depends on what you are building. If you are BT you should definitely patent it.

But if it's not complex you don't need any kind of IP.
> Almost none can understand the math

See this is the point I disagree with. I think plenty of high school students can understand the math necessary to do cutting-edge scientific research. No need for child prodigies at all.

Maybe for work that's Nobel prize winning or something, but your average run-of-the-mill PhD student? I imagine tons of 14-18 year olds are capable of it.

I was writing my own Metropolis light transport programs when I was 17 by looking up articles on WoS and Google Scholar. Now I'm doing the same kind of thing -- just with MD instead. I don't think I've become any more intelligent since high school (or even that much more knowledgeable), and in fact, I was probably better at focusing back then than I am now since I didn't have so many distractions in my life. There's nothing atypical about me; I'm nowhere near the level of "genius", and I was not a child prodigy. So yes, I'm quite sure of my statement.
Extensive discussion 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 (same article on different site)
This his how we reached the first App users. A growth toolkit
Where does the energy which generates the charging electricity come from? Some places will use nuclear energy or some other non-oil energy source, but many places will use oil to generate the electricity used in an attempt to save importing oil.

Then the problem is that generation and charging losses will mean that more oil rather than less oil will be imported.
Unless you're this guy:

http://www.11alive.com/story/news/local/college-park/2015/03...