skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it's not really different from a hard-sphere type interaction. It's the same thing. But that doesn't matter in this context, because in the system we built, our problem was harder/more-general because we were simulating 'guys', meaning you can program an arbitrary interaction into your guys (is guy type X near guy type Y, if so what happens?), and those 'guys' also interacted with a 2D height field terrain.

Keep in mind this was all on computers from the year 2002, which were pretty damn slow compared to computers today. Today you could do a lot of guys.
MarkdowntoAPA
Neither is putting in 40hrs/week at a stable job at BigCo
Great looking resource, thanks for putting this together. Is there currently a mechanism to request and vote on samples to add? It would be cool if someone could, for example, request a sample on Expression Templates (or whatever), and other users could vote on which existing requested samples are most interesting.
> Just because you are not currently a moral realist, doesn't mean there's no such thing as moral realism.

This is very important, more in a bit

> You're talking about an imagined capitalist utopia.

I really don't think I am, all I've described is the basis for the allocation of resources, not even a mention of how it will eventually lead to a Utopia.

But this basis depends on moral/value subjectivity (which as an aside is also the basis for democracy).

If that is not the case, then a command and control system which allocates resources based on that set of values and enforces laws according to that set of morals will be objectively better than anything capitalism can come up with.

> And this is all, of course, before we start addressing techno-utopian or techno-socialist proposals that run off the basic concept of, "Well, resources aren't that scarce"

As far as I can tell they are, at least for the moment, once we start hitting whole numbers on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale we can talk about this practically. I do love Dyson Spheres.

---

I will read this paper on moral realism and get back to you.
Incorporating in the US
I think most western countries already have a national body that maintains a list of "valid" journals. Often also with a system ranking the journals, so your beancounters get more happy when you publish in Nature than The Hungarian Journal of Chemical Engineering. So maybe what we need is a union of these national bodies? Sort of like we have for most sports?
I've always thought PSNR gets a bad rap. It's not that PSNR isn't a very blunt tool, it's just that every other tool in it's class is pretty blunt too.

I mean it compares a video codec by treating it as a series of independent still images. That right there is crazy, but the same basic methodology applies to most of the alternatives, even the crazy obscure ones that no-one really uses because they're too new or processor intensive.

The Mozilla/Daala team have written a lot about these topics in regards to their work on a) Daala, b) netvc (new IETF codec project just getting started), c) evaluating improvements to JPEG for MozJPEG, d) evaluating WebP

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daede-netvc-testing-00#sec...

https://arewecompressedyet.com/

http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...

In the end, like unit tests, performance benchmarks, static analysis or various other software development tools, they're useful if you use them wisely and know their limitations, and dangerous if you abuse them or treat them as if they are magical.

But crappy tools that can be easily automated fill an important part of the toolbox and I feel PSNR has it's place. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who looks down their nose at PSNR because they've just discovered SSIM for example, which seems to be a common sentiment. They're both just crappy tools that can be used for good or ill if you know what you're doing, running them both (and others too) might help catch more bugs than either alone and if you're automating then why the heck not?
Been using Arch as my main operating system for a while now, I love it, but I'm eager to try CRUX, just need another pc.
A great way to both raise campaign financing and instill fear
I think I'll probably need to ask forgiveness for asking this question in advance. But it really is a subject of genuine curiosity for me.

Is there a reason that someone would use a Javascript engine like Babylon, Three or PlayCanvas over... say... just using UDK or Unity to make a WebGL game ???

My knowledge of Javascript engines other than Three does not go deep... so it's entirely possible that this is a dumb question. I'm just wondering though.

EDIT: Sorry .. I meant "PlayCanvas". Corrected.
Can you tell us a bit about the software that drives this both back- and frontend? It looks great!
I have 10 and will also trade for a lobste.rs invite :)

(keybase proof and link to my social stuff in my profile)
That's an interesting argument and also perspective that I bet will be argued quite strongly in the legal circumstances. In many ways, however, it may not be one particular aspect of surveillance but rather the preponderance of all the surveillance that people are being subjected. That is, by and large a license plate only tells us where your car went but coupled with cell phone records and other means of tracking it gets scary quite quickly.

Do remember, that before this technological advance there was a decided cost to surveil someone. A unit or several would have to be placed on detail to monitor one person. That cost has gone down substantially and as a result, what might have seemed innocuous before has taken on a completely different character. We, as a country, tolerated many injustices towards minority groups because it didn't impact us. Now, we are faced with an impact that is total. It doesn't change the question but does reframe the question.
Every hipster and his window drapes is using i3 and their TWM these days, though.
The reporting on the new .sucks domain has been terrible, so here's what's going on.

The new gTLD Program from ICANN did more than just instantiate new domains. It created new processes and most importantly the Trademark Clearinghouse(TMCH).

The TMCH is a database of validated trademarks from around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse

Along with the TMCH ICANN also created the Domain Protected Marks List(DPML). When registries open up a new gTLD for registrations they must start with a sunrise period. During this sunrise period a registry can allow trademark holders whose trademark is registered in the TMCH early access to their trademark.gTLD. This special sunrise price is set by the registry and can basically be anything. Initially .sucks was talking about charging $25,000, but they lowered it to $2,500.

After the sunrise period anyone can register a .sucks domain on a first-come, first-serve basis. The important thing to remember is that after the sunrise period the price discrimination goes away and both trademark holders and the general public pay the same amount for domain names.

I'm a grad student at UC Berkeley who researches this stuff so AMA. I also wrote the Wikipedia page for the Trademark Clearinghouse so I can vouch for its correctness.
The Surprising History of Poetical Misprints
However, as the parent wrote, technology creates differences of degree that become differences of kind.

And it creates problems that just weren't problems when the law was written. Maybe the laws should have been written more carefully but that's a rather idealistic position. That laws regarding control of personal airspace over my house didn't anticipate the widespread use of consumer drones is pretty understandable. Ditto lots of laws regarding regulation of weaponry, etc.

In this case, we've been seeing nominally public info become more readily available for a while now. There are good reasons most public information (deeds, etc.) are public. But that used to mean someone had to have a good reason to look at them because they'd have to trudge down to the county clerk's office. And maybe the town clerk's office. And then some other clerk's office. Now it's all aggregated in one place at the touch of a button. The good reasons those records were public in the first place haven't gone away. But technology has fundamentally changed the scope of how that information can be used.
Actually the '...' is for parts I've omitted for brevity.
It would be pretty sweet to have IDE integration with something like this -- when creating a source file in Xcode or Eclipse, have a menu pop up with various curated samples of common C++ idioms.
Ask HN: Is it possible to delete HN comments or profile?
I'm not thrilled with the idea of not having any power over something connected so directly to my name being undelete-able forever. Not that I've written anything I'm ashamed about, but as a principle.

What are the options for deleting old comments or an account altogether?
Why would this be difficult in other languages, especially other modern languages? I wish the author expanded on it as I don't see anything special about the use of Haskell here.
A ReQL Command Line Interface Written in ES6
I remember moxie challenging people on Twitter to do exactly this a while back. So, kudos for taking up the challenge.
San Francisco, CA (SOMA) - Generalists & Android Engineers
www.braintreepayments.com - kyle.barbato@braintreepayments.com

We’re polygots. We write most of our software in Ruby but don’t confine ourselves to using a single programming language. We use the best tool for whatever task is at hand. We pair program. We like object oriented programming. We test, obsessively. When we say we’re an agile software development environment, we mean it. We’re pragmatic, not dogmatic, and we value our people.

Take a look at some of our blog posts to see some of the problems we face:

http://www.braintreepayments.com/inside-braintree/how-we-bui...

Take a peek at some of the code we have on github: https://github.com/braintree
Ooh, also have invites if anyone wants them. Hadn't heard of lobste.rs, but seems cool if I could get an invite there in return, as well :)
Thanks for the great work!

I think keybase.io will be an important part of solving public key cryptography usability, given that more of my friends are on keybase.io than there were ever on the PGP keyservers.
Data on where co-founders met, 10-second survey
I really wish Arch had something similar to Gentoo's "eselect news" system that actually displays these notices alongside system updates and lets you query news articles from your terminal.
This is a great list, the only missing part here is: WHY? It would be nice to have a short description of the reason attached to each item.
They're also very prompt and responding to fixing bugs. E.g. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/12/disclosed-minor-bug-in-keyb...

Excellent service which makes determining keys much easier.
"A Tour of C++" by Bjarne is also a nice introduction to modern C++. It's essentially a select few chapters from TCPPPL4 that covers the fundamental bits of the language.
ma.ttias.be has a certificate issued by a CA with a Common Name of "AlphaSSL CA - SHA256 - G2". Is this going to be common, putting crypto settings in the CN and creating new sub-CAs when crypto settings change?
Me neither, at least not in the way the smartness of the TV was intended to be used. My recently bought LG 60LB870V, the then-flagship of December 2014, running webOS 1.x.

It turned out to be a really incredibly slow OS with the TV occasionally crashing due to RAM shortage (having to reboot the TV). It's unbearable slow when "SIMPLINK" is on, ie forwarding remote control key presses like "play" over HDMI to my Kodi player, even for stuff that I don't think is forwarded (volume etc). It can without exaggeration take 10s from eg volum-up-press to volume increasing on the TV. Unbearable.

Fortunately, the smartness also allows me to control it programmatically. I've written a small node.js/javascript module here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lgtv so that I can control it over my local network.

I use it to have a webapp served by my media server to press the Totoro-button to switch to HDMI_1, volume = 10, Kodi start movie Totoro (my daughter loves it). Etc. To qoute Jim Carrey, "There's no end to the possibilities!" :)
As long as you don't expect people to like it.
You probably should've thought about that before using your name online--HN is nice in that you don't have to link your persona(s) here with anywhere else.

EDIT:

Somewhat more helpfully...look, it'd be really annoying to see swiss-cheese holes appear in the post history of the site as users decided to delete/undelete/redelete their comments. It would significantly decrease the archival utility of this forum.
> view generation library

If it were simply a view generation library you could use a dom-diffing library to diff it. But React does full lifecycle management in addition to "generation".

The fact that you can't use React along with other libraries in the same space means its a framework.
You've been cutting cakes wrong your entire life
Some of it is the guessing that other people mentioned. Some of it is vocabulary. Since there are correlations between race and wealth, certain words (say Commodore) may be more quickly understood by some than others.
A part of the story is that each company has the name "Arduino" trademarked in some countries.
Excellent reply!
I don't think HN qualifies as tech news
Is anybody else annoyed by these kinds of articles confusing Fermi problems (how many piano tuners in Seattle or golfballs in school bus) with Brainteasers (why manhole covers are round, or crazy questions about perfectly rational guys on an island wearing hats)?

It seems to me that those types of questions are very different in terms of what they're testing for. Fermi problems in particular show how you might go about approaching a problem, and there may be many different correct answers or ways to approach it, and the goal isn't to get to the "right answer".

Brainteasers, in contrast, either test whether you can recall or figure out an extremely specific problem, or whether you're good at solving certain types of logic puzzles under pressure.

It may well be that both of these types of questions don't give useful information about a candidate, but they are vastly different overall.
Well, true, although, from your list, it's hard to think of application where you wouldn't want those things.
When I was in a grad school I remember a professor who bought an SGI machine without enough RAM so he couldn't do work with it but he left it plugged into the wall outlet and ethernet for 5 years or so and didn't even know the root password when it got hacked.

Those machines came with a camera that had a little door you could slide to cover it, so at least he had that protection.
Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330734
The function of the various proteins used in the sodium-potassium pump, which transports Na+ out of cells and K+ into cells, against their natural diffusion gradient, suggests that the ratio between Na+ ions and K+ ions in the diet, and their relative concentrations in intercellular fluid is far more important than the absolute quantity you consume.

If your Na+ to K+ balance is healthy, consuming too much of both could be solved as easily as drinking more water.

But consuming too little of either one will cause the sodium-potassium pumps to function poorly.

My hypothesis is that there is an optimal ratio of Na+ to K+ such that the saltiest water (containing only NaCl and KCl) that a human could drink for prolonged periods without observable ill effects has that ratio. A different ratio would require more water for the kidneys to clear the ions present in excess, and that would lower the total concentration of dissolved salts.

Learning that value could possibly enable the production of drinkable water by partial desalination with potassium supplementation rather than complete desalination. I have heard that water that is 40% seawater and 60% freshwater can sustain someone in a survival emergency. Perhaps 50% seawater and 50% dilute potassium chloride solution could extend the water supply on a life raft by another 20%? You could hardly do the experiment if an ethical monitor for human experimentation thinks that supplying that much of an absolute quantity of dietary sodium is dangerous, independent of relative concentrations.
Why We Wanted an Advisory Board–And You Might Too
- ty.lc
- tnybit.com
- bilt.io
- adc.io
- shipstat.us
How many of those ideas were given the full attention of the CEO and turned into large businesses? It seems like it's easy to take an idea and start to implement it, the hard part is if it doesn't "go viral" or take off massively you now need to really invest more than just money in it.
Laszlo Bock talked about that in an interview in The Guardian[0]. Here is the quote:

> After six weeks of this, 99 are rejected. They’re not told why. “If somebody just breaks up with you,” Bock says, “that’s not the time to hear: ‘And really, next time, send more flowers’… For the most part people actually aren’t excited to get that feedback, because they really wanted the job. They argue. They’re not in a place where they can learn.”

0. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/04/how-to-get...
I've been using Xmonad for such a long time I can barely use a non-tiling WM properly now. Makes me look like a fool on almost anybody else's computer.

But perhaps the greatest thing about Xmonad is that it can lead you to Haskell and to functional programming in general, and I think this is one of the most useful and beautiful discoveries a developer can make. Your Javascript or your PHP will get better just by looking at some Haskell :)
Is Xmonad still being updated? It seems moribund.
awesome work, thanks for this. Where do you get the city block and neighborhoods shapes from?
Google Moderator was built before the smartphone era and noone was really working on it since.

We have been solving many of the issues of Google Moderator with http://www.sli.do. Even some Google offices have been using sli.do at their events instead of the moderator.
Great work, this is a nice clean wrapper. I find that using google drive as a backend might be slow, but it means non technical people can edit the spreadsheet. Makes for a great proof of concept.
Want better IT talent? Recruit remote workers
I thought it might be fun to collect a bit of data on where co-founders met, and to share the findings with the HN community (inspired by Sam Altman's YC study)!
It looks like there is a trend starting in the software industry to encourage empirical hiring. This particular article follows about a month after another hiring post reached the front page of HN.[1]

I really agree with it, and I hope more people are looking at it seriously instead of fixating on the fact that the word "Google" is in the title. Giving all the candidates the same questions and the same exact interview methodology is much more fair and empirical than simply having an interviewer wing it (which is virtually certain to bring in bias). Most interviewers I know think they are better than the average interviewer due to illusory superiority cognitive bias [2]. However, when it comes down to it, you cannot easily judge the difference between candidates if you ask one a completely different question than another. This goes against all the principles of psychometric testing, yet it is still ubiquitous because no one has bothered to empirically look at whether or not they're really interviewing in a rigorous way.

There is a serious issue in the industry right now where otherwise capable people fail interviews due to their appearance, manners of speaking or other harmless idiosyncrasies. It's because interviewers are very personally attached to their subjective methods, and they tend to really enjoy having personal ownership over the interviewing process instead of surrendering control to a standardized script. This trend looks like the software hiring equivalent of a professor grading papers without reading the name attached to the paper -i f we can have several candidates answer the same exact questions and perform the same exact activities on an interview it makes it much easier to determine who is the real "best candidate" when it comes time to comparing their results.

If this really takes off, the only remaining problem as I see it is designing interviews that accurately correlate to the job activities.

[1]: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
I have 6 invites to give out.
Keybase proof and contact can be found in my profile.
>If that is not the case, then a command and control system which allocates resources based on that set of values and enforces laws according to that set of morals will be objectively better than anything capitalism can come up with.

There is a false dichotomy between "capitalism" (ie: your imagined utopia of perfect markets that increase the subjective value of rational agents) and "command and control".

What I have been trying to say, despite your visible and extreme prior inability to hear it, is that there are far more alternatives than "something resembling American capitalism" and "something resembling the Soviet command economy".

If you can imagine a civilization hitting Kardashev Level I, you ought to be able to imagine their doing so in a way that isn't designed to rationalize 20th-century party politics!
Seems to me these publishers are simply an obvious-in-retrospect symptom of the perverse incentive facing researchers everywhere to churn out publications as fast as possible regardless of quality, as long as the papers fulfill some superficial criteria of "scienceness". It's cargo cult science plain and simple [0]. Meanwhile, Moloch just laughs [1].

[0] http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
How to Delegate to Your Remote Team More Effectively
Right, you're describing statistical significance as it relates to practical significance.
> This is only meta, but something needs to be done to prevent Github threads from getting flooded by useless replies as soon as they gain some popularity.

Make it private?
The famous example of this is the so-called "Regatta Question" in which an SAT question assumed a knowledge of Crew -- an elite sport that would have been a rather obscure reference for minorities from the inner-city. [1]

1: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jul/27/local/me-sat27
Not exactly. They hire the people who are best at interviewing at google, and they believe their process correlates the 2 things well. I'm not so sure it does, but I am not in HR/recruiting so I haven't studied the problem.
I have a lot of domains that I'm not using. Here are some of the ones that I'd be willing to part with:

autodevops.com
dbmgr.com
dora247.com
dora365.com
doradesk.com
doradev.com
doradocs.com
doradrive.com
favepop.com
favpop.com
foobarblog.com
geldesk.com
gelpop.com
gelpops.com
gelstack.com
gelstats.com
geltk.com
geltk.org
geltoolkit.com
gelview.com
gelviews.com
kickround.com
krdoo.com
leanitpro.com
llamamail.com
madraps.com
powdocs.com
yagiga.com
ygiga.com

(Email me at wbstow at Google's email service if interested!)
Facebook sending 'nonposts' to its servers and storing unpublished thoughts
Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized?

This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions...

What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their databases?