skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are otherwise qualified employees fired the moment a more qualified candidate expresses interest in their job? I don't see that being an issue. Perhaps what determines "qualified" will increase along with pay? I think it will certainly increase the overall quality of employees over time, and this may push out the least capable folks over time.

Has there been any comment by the higher-paid-but-by-no-means-rich contingent of the company? I imagine there are quite a few developers, engineers, and other technical folks in the $90-125k+ range there whom this does not affect directly, but may impact their ability to get raises? The article states company profits are going from $2MM to $500k so the odds of this impacting someone's 3% raise if they make $125k is slim but still a possibility depending on team size and composition (I would think).
I think its worth noting that he owns the entire company so the increase in pay will directly affect his bottom line.

From the article:
> The company made $2 million in profit last year, and that will drop to about $500,000 with the new pay increases, according to company figures.
was it a PR ploy when henry ford did it?
Indeed there are. I could see them all after checking on my phone; the Wi-Fi in my hotel apparently choked on the full-width ad inserted after the seventh.

Still, I would have put the key info from the seventh paragraph into the first, e.g.:

"WHO CAN HATE a Roomba? Astronomers, that’s who, because the latest models in the domestic robot family interfere with the radio frequencies used by major astronomical observatories..."
Indeedarino. I never know the right name anymore.
Edit: just realised you're the author, so I want to reiterate: this is a lovely designed app and making your own chatbot is rad. Original reply below.

Re 1. Yes, it does attempt to pass the Turing test.

Re 3. Yes, that includes interacting with a human in a similar way that a human would with another human, that's part of the Turing test.

My own experience was: it asked me how I was, I told it I had a hangover, it thought that was great and that I was 100% happy. Which wasn't a long test. Obviously your own experience might have varied.

Re: 3. Isn't machine learning just machine learning and NLP just NLP?

I personally don't feel like my app suddenly becomes 'AI' if I import nltk and start tokenising some corpus to train it with, or load opencv and tell my drone to avoid the big red thing. If the app would work out how to /train itself/ I would consider it an AI.

Eg, the drone having the objective to follow me at a safe distance for as long as possible, then working out that the big red thing is dangerous and avoid it.

Or the chat both to, say, have an objective of beating the human at the turing test for a certain amount of time, then working out how it gives itself away, then avoiding doing that.

I acknowledge that's just a feeling though, and many definitions online would qualify 'thing that loads library and needs human training' as AI.

However I can't help but think that's going to promote the Reading University 'captain cyborg' school of cranks.
Ask HN: Website Monitoring Tool (Internal)
Hello,

I work for a Network Operations Centre for an insurance group and have been tasked with monitoring and alerting the status of a large number of websites, both external and internal. The issue I am having is finding an open source application that we can run from one of our application servers, so that we can use this to monitor our internal sites.

There are a number of paid service options, but these require a Firewall rule change for inbound traffic which is not currently possible from a security perspective.

Does anyone know of, or currently use any applications that would suit this?

We have looked at ServiceMon, which is excellent, except this will be displayed on an 8 screen wallboard and the management team were not a fan of the simple design. We have the option of the SolarWinds Web Monitoring package, but due to the price this will be a last resort.

Thanks.
You can arrange it here: http://longbets.org/
It was a secret. You weren't allowed to mention borg outside Google. Note John Wilkes was generally careful about not saying the name was 'Borg' or acknowledging it as such and instead referred to 'Omega'.
frequently, a business' goodwill is worth substantially more than their profits. if this successfully gains persisting goodwill for gravity payments, it might be worth the acquisition.
Just because you can win in court doesn't mean you can collect damages later. If the other guy set up a business then he is pretty safe.

Kickstarter needs to fix situations like these.
Agreed. I think it's so amazing we actually make up work for ourselves.
Trying to make Pulse work is a big mistake. The first step on any Linux setup is ensuring that it isn't installed.

One can get very short latency out of Alsa, up to the point where the hardware becomes your bottleneck. But that's extremely processor intensive, and won't work well if you try to share the dsp with several processes (if you want to get that extreme, I'd recommend you get extra hardware for exclusive use of the application you want low latency from - but here I'm talking about 1ms latency).

Anyway when using a cheap USB interface, I'd focus on improving the hardware first. Low latency and high throughput USB isn't cheap (nor is it available at every computer).
D'oh, you're quite right. In that case, top marks!
This kind of broad policy will almost certainly have unintended consequences that will be interesting to watch play out.
Show HN: Rails Deployment Tutorial
Because you need more processing power and sensors to first build the map, and then know where you are on the map.
Inexperienced lifters don't realize the incredible abdominal pressure you have to create for max effort lifts, the breathing control that goes with it, and the inevitable strange noises...
The problem is it's unsustainable. The employees aren't providing $70k of market value. The CEO is changing his pay to attract attention and build customers. Companies are not going to adopt paying 2x market salary as a standard business practice. If people will work for $40k then that's where the costs will "gravitate" (hah) to.
Well at least having Skype go Pulseaudio only prompted the creation of https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse.
Stiga has been making robot mowers for quite a while, and I haven't heard of drunken Swedes who would have been hacked to death by their mowers after passing out on their lawn.

Apparently animals will run away and sprinkler heads can be marked with perimeter wire so that the gadget avoids them.

http://www.stiga.com/products/stiga_en/robot-mowers.html
Check out the upcoming Dyson 360 Eye - http://www.dyson360eye.com/

Disclaimer: I worked on it.

Edit: To answer your question directly, you have 3 choices:

1. Don't map (or somewhat guess it) - Roomba.

2. Map first, then clean - Neato.

3. Map as you clean - Dyson 360 Eye.

This is obviously a crude explanation but they get harder going down the list. If you are interested to know more, read up on SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) algorithms.
Or optical, even? Once you've accepted that there will need to be a stake in the ground, you'd already eliminate a lot of the line-of-sight problems.
As the article says, you have to bury wire along the perimeter that is to be mowed by the robot, that's how it recognizes its limits.
There's no atmosphere, so its unlikely Lunar dust would contaminate any equipment. It settles immediately after landing and doesn't blow around. Minimal shielded for touchdown would be all that's necessary.
It's nice that RFI is being taken seriously. In many, many cases it is not: Noisy utility transformers, plasma TVs, poorly designed wall-wart supplies, touch lamps, and broadband over power lines, just to mention a few troublesome sources.
GPS accuracy on its own is nowhere near good enough. Differential GPS can give you 1cm accuracy: http://www.blackroc-technology.com/technologies/gnss/dgps/
(not burning buildings, though =P)
How to Incorporate a US Corporation from Outside the USA?
Show HN: The combination of WYSIWYG editor and grid system
Luajit IO framework
I think they've ruled out the barge landing at this point. Seems like even with the stabilization, there is still too much movement. I dont see any reason they couldn't bring it back over water onto a landing pad. It should be really easy to keep the landing pad clear.
How about Sensu? http://sensuapp.org/

I haven't personally used it (yet). But I have heard good things about it.
Despite it obviously piggy-backing on Wolfram Alpha when it gets confused, I still think the normal responses are pretty good. "Where have all the flowers gone" was most likely added by hand to WA, just like all of the hilarious Siri easter eggs, and is no more impressive in terms of programming.

The kid's clearly good, just not as good as an entire company of professional programmers.
Would GPS augmentation not work for this case? Don't airport runways use a system like that?
Your quote is of exactly the method they do not want to use.
They also mention that those tests were made in the best case scenario (disabling noise correction, etc. for the sake of speed) with the best performing mobile, and by following Google's low latency guidelines. Most Android apps don't have the first two luxuries in the general case, and (apparently) don't bother with the last one, thus the much higher latencies in practice.
It doesn't steer. It augments the cruise control, accelerating and decelerating in stop-and-go traffic (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcwObeGB_mU). Which isn't nothing, but it's not driving you to work.
Announcement with more details can be found here : http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/11626...
What Microsoft Was for PCs, This Company Hopes to Be for Drones
Fatal error: Call to a member function xpath() on a non-object in /home/ericlevan/public_html/acuman.us/chatscript.php on line 325
Which planet would that be? I see them nearly every day. They certainly aren't perfect, but I think it's reasonable to say that we have working prototypes of self-driving cars.
Why schools should teach coding
I'm not certain.

Although I work in the district, I'm typically stationed at buildings other than where the current 1-to-1 deployment is happening; so I miss out on a lot of the day to day details.

That being said; the computers run stock-ish Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. The students are able to install whatever accessibility tools they wish.
Sounds like this kid was a super evolved humanoid whose special powers were tamed by pharmaceuticals
Ted Ullyot Joins Andreessen Horowitz to Build First Policy Group at a VC Firm
This is from a TechCrunch article published 3 days ago:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/13/irobot-is-working-on-a-robo...

"￼iRobot: “Use of the iRobotRLM [robot lawn mower] will increase lawn mower safety. An estimated 1,517 lethal accidents occurred with lawn mowers through the years 1997 to 2010. It is reasonable to assume that many of these injuries and deaths would not occur if consumers used a robotic mower. More than 17 million gallons of fuel, mostly gasoline, are spilled each year while refueling lawn equipment. Abattery poweredRLM will reduce emissions, gasoline spills, fires and other such accidents.”NRAO: “iRobot cited multiple statistics of grim accidents and spilt gasoline to assert the public benefit of approving its wireless robotic lawn mowers. However, there is already a competitive market for robotic lawn mowers using wire loops [buried edge wire], which has somehow failed to stanch the stream of ghastly accidents and spilt gasoline that iRobot associates with the mundane practice of lawn-mowing.”"
Like Stiga and others, they are based on having a perimeter wire on the ground.
An Alternative Guide to Startup Terminology (Just for Fun)
Pulseaudio has gotten a really bad rep, and I think there was at time where it was legitimately awful, but I think it's better than it was.

On mainstream distros with pulseaudio like Fedora or Ubuntu, audio just works, when you don't have low-latency requirements.

When you do have low-latency requirements, things are a bit tricky. You do pretty much need to get a low-latency or realtime kernel, and you definitely want to use Jack or ALSA. Maybe this setup is a little more frustrating than Windows, where you may just need to install one driver like ASIO4ALL.

But it's flexible, and you can actually get Pulseaudio and Jack working pretty well together after installing the pulseaudio-module-jack. You can turn on jack when you need it, turn it off when you don't, and all of the pulseaudio stuff will get routed through it so that you don't lose sound from your other applications. If you want, you can route audio from pulseaudio into whatever other audio applications you're using - sometimes I like taking Youtube videos and routing the audio through weird effects in Pure Data.

I toggle jack on and off with this little script, works pretty well for me right now:
https://gist.github.com/YottaSecond/f0a1b515f95b2e791755
How is it better than Roomba and Neato -- what's the cleaning algorithm? Does it map the space? etc.

Edit: thanks, you answered while I was asking. That's a very interesting use case for SLAM. Does it re-map every use (i.e. today there's toys on the floor, but tomorrow there's not)? Does it store the point cloud or convert it to something more manageable? Are you licensing someone's SLAM library or did you roll your own?
On a practical level it certainly matters for single threaded applications. They're just not benefiting like they should.

Formally, Moore's law is just about transistor density not performance, so this is all academic. Historically, density was tied to performance. That's just not true anymore and hasn't been for at least a decade.
Imagine where our species would be if all efforts were contributed to betterment of society. Right now the missing piece to researcher A's puzzle is sitting on researcher B's bench because company X hasn't figured out a way to extract profits yet. If we managed to move toward an Ubuntu(I'm talking Michael Tellinger not Canonical) contributionist social model we would make more technological advancement in 1 year than we've seen in the past 50, maybe even 100, years. CEO's coming to the realization there is more to the human experience than profits is just the start.
Not sure if this was sarcasm or not, but having a lot of landscaping architecture friends it's an interesting idea.

In places where grass is hard to grow (Southwestern US) you see a lot of rock varieties and other materials that they substitute for grass and it looks great.

Just Google, "las vegas yards" and look at the image search.

The last place I lived, my neighbor was tired of his grass in his bakyard (about a 1/4 acre) so he created a huge concrete terrace in his back yard, along with a large rubber hard court for basketball and other activities for his and the neighborhood kids. He still kept his small front yard grass, but the entire backyard was now completely utilitarian.
The most powerful passports in the world, ranked
I saw this on the planned launch schedule a few days ago. The date mentioned there is 22 July 2015. I was surprised they were getting clearance to try so soon since they haven't quite nailed sea landings yet. I guess it could be argued they have seem to have the navigation part down pretty well though, minimizing the odds they will drop this in a neighbourhood.
ALSA with JACK has been shown to give latencies less than 2ms.
$300k More in Leads Using the Visitor Vocab Technique
It seems like installing the base station for differential GPS would be easier than installing the electronic fencing descried in the article.
In Arizona and other water starved states they use artificial grass in their lawns, and some of them look reasonable. I am starting to see the trend in the bay area as well.
Here is the KS page :

http://web.archive.org/web/20140913060147/https://www.kickst...

Evertide Games is the creator of the project,not the OP's business.
How Gordon Moore Made “Moore’s Law”
I am 24 and have been consulting for close to a year now, with no real end in site. However, each assignment includes problems and skills on a spectrum between pure dev and pure business. So your comment about not understanding what people are trying to accomplish worries me. However from my perspective, there is a lot of value from my confidence and being able to map out what my client SHOULD do (not necessarily what he wants or is trying to accomplish) and directing him down that path. You can't always get them there, but you really need to be able to read people well to bridge the gap from a potentially idiotic or doomed decision they are about to make and a much much better one.

Also, I recommend reading Alan Weiss's The Consulting Bible: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Consulting_Bible.htm...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Austria%27%29%3B+DROP+T...
Well he owns the entire company, so theoretically he could take a disbursement of 100% of profits if he wanted to. Realistically a large portion of that is almost always reinvested in the business. Besides, which one is "more fair" of the two options (from this story specifically):

- A CEO makes $1MM and owns 100% of a company making $2MM in profits every year.

- A CEO makes $1.00 and owns 100% of a company making $500K in profits every year.

Regardless of how large his profits disbursement is, he's intentionally putting himself in a worse financial position so that the majority of his employees get a massive pay increase in an expensive urban part of the country.

Just because it's a good PR move doesn't mean it isn't also a good move in general and a good move as a human being.
Direct democracy is what gave us lovely things like California's three-strikes law that puts people in prison for life for their third non-violent felony (voted in by public referendum 72-28).
Perhaps I wasn't clear. This would be an unmanned telescope. We're talking a one time landing of a piece of equipment. Dust will be a non-issue after the initial landing.
One in Six NFL Players Goes Bankrupt Within 12 Years of Retirement
Put "cu=on" (without quotes) in the "Parameters:" box of 7-Zip's "Add to Archive" window, and all your Unicode issues are solved.
If our site goes down (again), the webcache can be found here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zvFOaWH...
I am shocked at the differences. A picture is worth a thousand words.
It is my understanding that the eventual goal has always been to land where they takeoff/launch from.
> the concept of organized labor is beneficial to all workers.

Yeah, it sure is great when I'm not allowed to adjust my own monitor due to union rules. Only facilities is allowed to do that!
Python 2, Python 3, Debian and Porting
>a bump in pay will almost certainly help reduce costs associated with retention and retraining and may turn out to be a good business decision, not to mention the publicity.

I was thinking about this when reading the article myself. It has to help retention as it instantly becomes less desirable to move company if the market salary is far below what your current company is paying, which is what this will do.

For the time being it's great for all involved. The employees benefiting from it should be careful in terms of how they adjust their lifestyle based on the extra income though, because if the company went under or there were redundancies or similar they are almost assuredly going to experience a significant drop in their earnings.
ALSA isn't the problem- JACK runs on top of ALSA, and people comfortably run well under 10ms. The problem is higher up in the stack. Even switching to the much-maligned pulseaudio could be a huge improvement: http://arunraghavan.net/2012/01/pulseaudio-vs-audioflinger-f...
I don't think they can completely give up on the barge though. As I understand it they'll always need barge landings for the Falcon Heavy core?

Maybe they're just itching to get a success on their pelt.
> The problem is it's unsustainable. The employees aren't providing $70k of market value.

How do you know this? Sure, if you make the assumption that the before this one change, the world worked perfectly in line with the kind of simplifying assumptions that you might see in an Econ 101 class, then that would be true, but then, if the world worked that way, this raise wouldn't have happened.
I think they've tried that in a couple places already.
How do you machine learn your property boundaries? It's an abstract concept of personal ownership.
Think about it: how much does the lowest paid staffer make there? 25,000? 30,000? These lower-paid staff will be very loyal, because they're getting a very significant and possibly life-changing raise. They're not going to quit on you, and they're not going to kill the golden goose.

Recruitment has real costs. Hiring and training, and dealing with the hiring mistakes you make, all cost money. Having a happy staff saves a lot of money, time, and headaches.
Developing a RESTful microservice in python
Type “Find My Phone” into Google to Locate Your Android Device
I think now that they have proven they can 'hit the hole', almost spot on, they'll be able to get approval to go for a try on cleared land space.
It sounds like to me, landing on land would be ideal; less expensive and less risk with stabilization and rough waters.
Smallpdf – A Free Solution to All Your PDF Problems
I spent a lot of hours fighting with the low level Android libraries while writing a Spotify App for Android back in late 2013. There is very little documentation on the web (especially for streaming Audio). Getting this working was a serious headache.

If anyone is interested, I pulled the OpenSL ES parts out and posted them to github.

https://gist.github.com/mox1/3516112bc52c54aabb98
You're jumping to negative conclusions and making cynical generalizations. I think this is actually pretty cool.
Yes, although it may be more expensive (I suspect you have to license a whole pile of patents)
Automatically and accurately remove red eye from user uploaded photos
Raghavan: PulseAudio vs. AudioFlinger: Fight (2012)
Unfortunately I'm not really able to go in to much more details, but this video explains what's public knowledge - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oguKCHP7jNQ

Sorry!
How to easily automate precise red eye removal from photos of web and mobile applications. Red eye removal is automatically performed on-the-fly on uploaded images in the cloud by Cloudinary.
Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854
This would be great if there weren't so many red pills to choose from.

Like calling it "the" red pill is overselling it I mean.

It's "a" red pill.
Chrome started flagging SSL where the cert has SHA-1 in the chain, iirc xkcd was used as an example of where this occurs further up the chain than the site's acutal cert.

Just checked, if you look at the rapidSSL CA cert, it uses SHA-1.
Does the French legislature not have Quorum requirements? That seems like a poor design.
> nasty habit of judges being highly politicized

I have quite a different perception, that judges do their job of not mixing law and politics pretty well, whereas politics try very hard and unashamedly to neutralize judges as counter-powers.

Could you expand on what makes you think that French judges are highly politicized?
Wouldn't a more fair comparison involve domain sharding for the HTTP/1 impl?
Toroidion 1MW Electric Supercar Unveiled
Maybe you guys should challenge one of your student apprentices to use one of the laptops with their eyes closed (or with the screen turned off if that's feasible), try to get through tasks that a student typically has to do, and fix any problems that come up, even if that involves contributing to the relevant open-source projects. The Orca screen reader is written in Python and supports application-specific scripting. The process could be quite educational.