skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got to believe there's good reasoning from iRobot, even though none of the articles I've seen have covered it (tsk tsk IEEE Spectrum). Perhaps wanting to bury the transceivers rules out 2.4GHz and 5GHz, while needing tight directionality and small antennas rules out the lower stuff?

Having said that, radio interference is taken pretty seriously (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Qu...). The free-for-all that we're familiar with is really just a few tiny consumer bands.

DGPS seems like a better idea (even easier to install a virtual border by manually driving the robot around the edge), but would probably require some above-surface beacons. I'd imagine iRobot is trying to cater to the type of people who think grass needs to be mowed every week and wouldn't want even a few beacons sticking up.

Still I'm sure there's another way. And if iRobot wants to win in even just the court of public opinion, they have a steep argument to make.
Is there a direct correlation between higher qualifications and better performance and output? If having two equally qualified employees, is their salary requirement the only decisive distinction?

I think this experiment will have quite a few positive net outcomes (publicity, reduction of cost with recruitment and retention, etc) but on the longer run employees making 70k will automatically know that they are on the lowest pay scale so I'm unsure how that will work out.
> They're not going to quit on you, and they're not going to kill the golden goose.

Especially if by going somewhere else they have to take a significant cut.
Deploying Phoenix to Raspberry Pi 2 with Resin.IO
Karma isn't worth anything directly but on HN it is a fair proxy for comment quality -- and quality HN comments have a monetary impact.

For one thing, quality comments take time and effort to write. Suppose a comment takes 5 minutes per to write per karma point earned. Then 32553783 karma points are worth 32553783*5/60/24/30 ≈ 3767.8 man-months or approximately 314 man-years not spent doing something else.

This isn't to say that HN comments just lose the authors (or their employers) money due to opportunity cost. I would not be surprised if for a number of HN users their commenting led to new clients and business partners, not to mention exposure for their open source projects or simply memorable discussions the impact of which is harder to estimate in monetary terms. (For example, the recurrent discussions about Stoicism have made converts.)

Then some comments may not make the author money -- at least not as directly as getting a new client -- but may be worth a lot in terms of the money they make others; patio11's long comment history comes to mind.
How does source control work for Pharo? I know it was an issue with Smalltalk as your "source" was a modified binary image. Is this the same?
So I wasn't really expecting this site to get to the front page of HN. It's pretty cool that it did though, I hope some people find it useful. Please contribute and get some good discussion going!

I don't think things are working 100% at the minute which is probably due to the load - it is running on a $3 pm OVH VPS. I'm quite amazed it is still running at all.

It is a Telescope app at the minute which uses Meteor, so there is no chance of it running without Javascript. It was just a quick evening idea that took about 5 minutes to set up. Telescope is pretty amazing how simple it is to set up.

I hear you about being able to run without JS - especially within Emacs. Awesome idea! If the interest continues I will look into rewriting the site (in a Lisp obviously) to serve static content. Could be a fun little project.

Thanks for the interest!
Apple to co-develop 80M kWh p/a solar energy projects in China
The heart of the problem is simply the limited timing and computational resources in a multitasking non-realtime OS.

The smaller the audio buffers are, the more prone they'll be to starvation. Only if the application can be guaranteed to receive interrupt service and/or thread timeslices at a 100 Hz rate or better is it possible to achieve audio latency of 10 milliseconds. That's a difficult thing to guarantee in a modern consumer OS. It can be done, but it won't happen by accident, only by design.

The penalty for failing to service your 10-ms buffer is a dropout that sounds much worse than slightly higher latency, so there's an incentive to use larger buffers than necessary at every link in the signal chain. From the point of view of the OS vendor, musicians might complain about latency, but everyone will complain about dropouts.
One of the Biggest Risks for a Startup Is Concentration of Distribution
> "He would smash his head into windows and glass whenever the word ‘dead’ came into his head."

Yep, that totally makes me think super-evolved humanoid with special powers. 100%.
Yeah, an Astroturf home lawn is what we want.

Seriously, lawns, like other parts of gardens, are something that people do for hobby - they like the work. Yes, it is somewhat contradictory that then people also want to avoid the chores of mowing. A rock garden may be better but anything will need maintenance work to look neat.
Or put a barge in a wave pool or lake to test the grasshopper. That would save on transport costs.
I guess the important part is that they've proven they can hit the target. Thats the risky part of testing over land. One assumes that it's a recognised risk that at the point of actually landing there is a risk of explosion, and a land-based site will account for that.
Shouldn't be that surprising. Military has been blowing up missiles and detonating bombs on land at military testing sites for decades.
If that was the craziest thing I was doing, I'd be doing well :)
How did you discount karma's future value?
Yay for (sub?)urban heat island growth! :(

Not sure where the last place you lived was, but I hope that if it were the desert, that there's some sort of aesthetically pleasing option that exists between a water hungry green grass lawn, and an asphalt or impervious concrete surface. Even if it's not the desert, permeable paving sounds like a win-win solution for aesthetics, functionality, and environmental impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeable_paving
> A large number of people in our societies have negative net worth.

While this is true (for some value of 'large'), a lot of those people with negative net worth are by all indications very wealthy. You don't hit a net worth of minus 50 million by being poor.
It is pure unmodified Telescope. Will add an about page to site shortly.
It's a nice website and concept.

Should be some pictures on the home page.

I don't like logging with with google/twitter/fb. Yes, I create a different login for each website and use lastpass to keep track of it. I would login and try otherwise.
GPS isn't enough. A lot depends on the receiver, antenna, how many satellites are in view, and what's going on with the atmosphere, but unaugmented GPS is generally considered accurate to about 15 meters. Not good enough for a lawn unless you're in a rural area or your neighbors don't care if you cross the property line.

GPS in your car only appears to be more accurate than that because they're typically "snapping" the GPS signal to an underlying road map.
>> In his free time, he enjoys running and skateboarding, playing with his cocker, ...

Ermmmmm wouldn't they want to expand that into cocker spaniel...lol.
My main complaint is the MDI. I don't think non-native widgets are a problem as long as they're done well and behave close enough to native widgets as to not confuse people.

Qt is probably the best example of this, so much that people will actually cite it as an example of a native UI toolkit when in fact it isn't, it just skins its widgets to look like it.
SSL offload NICs do exist, but are quite costly, and use lots of power. They can usually do other things as well.
Take a sneak peak at Moonstone's UI and tell us what you think
ALSA is not the problem, it works very fine for the low-latency case, I can reliably run soundcards with light processing load at 96 kHz @ 64 frames/period (20.7ms --> 1.4 ms latency) on a quad core i5, e.g. for running a reverb effect, but most of the time I only record and will settle for 1024 frames/period or so. (210ms --> 20ms). The period size, just for completeness, is the number of samples recorded on each block that is forwarded to the audio processing application.

If whatever audio framework you use doesn't allow to run processing with a input-to-output delay (latency) of two times the period size, it's broken (probably the case for Audio Flinger at Android, don't know much about it).

➜ ~ jackd -d alsa -p 64 -r 96000
jackdmp 1.9.10
Copyright 2001-2005 Paul Davis and others.
Copyright 2004-2014 Grame.
(...)
creating alsa driver hw:0|hw:0|64|2|96000|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
configuring for 96000Hz, period = 64 frames (0.7 ms), buffer = 2 periods
ALSA: final selected sample format for capture: 32bit integer little-endian
ALSA: use 2 periods for capture
ALSA: final selected sample format for playback: 32bit integer little-endian
ALSA: use 2 periods for playback

(this is on my laptop, just for illustration purposes)
AtoMiC ToolKit – Automate Your Media Center
If you actually read the paragraph you'll find some (contradictory) issues with the NRAO statement (update: see below). Keep in mind we're talking about a statement made by astronomers about lawn mower safety.

"An estimated 1,517 lethal accidents occurred with lawn mowers through the years 1997 to 2010."

No data on the "1,517 lethal accidents" to prove that they were caused by fires or anything that a robotic vacuum solves (although I'd be happy to be sent a link proving this). So it's not "reasonable" to assume that these injuries will be reduced - the icing on the cake is the last sentence which essentially contradicts the first...

"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"

Edit: Just realized the fist statement (claiming safety) is by iRoomba, the second statement (disputing this) is by the NRAO.

So iRoomba (the one selling the product) claims it will reduce vacuums. The NRAO pointed out that despite a "competitive market" for robotic lawn mowers injuries have not been reduced.

Edit 2: Data! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16361919
I responded to this in a previous thread, but I think I can simplify it down to the perception versus reality of the change the CEO has enacted.

What many people believe:
The CEO has set a minimum compensation bar to help those with market wages below $70k.

What has actually happened:
The CEO has determined that going forward, he'd rather hire people with higher market wages and more experience versus paying lower wage workers.

Over the next few years, the company will slowly shift to one with a more experienced workforce. This could pay off, and would not be that unusual. What is different is he drew a specific line in the sand and grandfathered in his hires prior to the change.
Flat files and Lisp macros, with everything stored as closures in RAM, AFAIK. HN doesn't use a relational database at all[0], unless they added one recently.

[0] http://arclanguage.org/
How about an oil rig like structure at sea?
There's a whole load of them here : http://www.telescopeapp.org/showcase
Hm, I didn't know that. (Edit: it doesn't seem to be out yet?) And some cars can steer around corners on the highway. But it's very limited, doesn't necessarily work in the dark or in bad weather - and most relevantly it doesn't actually navigate by itself. It just follows marked roads. To use the self-driving lawnmower, you have to mark out an area for it to mow.
So why are Google disbursing $124m in executive compensation that could be used to build the business? http://ibnlive.in.com/news/google-ceo-larry-page-paid-1-sala... Rhetorical question, of course.

Yes, there should have been an "up to" in my previous comment. Obviously there is a tradeoff between investing retained profits, returning money to investors, and increasing staff compensation; that's what Ford v Dodge was all about.
You would assume, though, that most of those accidents are people using or maintainong the lawn mower. It's quite different if it damages someone else entirely. 'Robotic lawnmower runs over neighbour's child' would be a massive story even if it only happened once.
This company is not big enough to generate that kind of media attention organically, which tells me they made it into a press event.

In that sense it rings hollow because it is clearly a publicity stunt.

I think this is a general issue with all of these activities, and really any activity in a company, that you shape the message that you want to send to the world rather than there being an accurate representation of what is actually happening.

I wonder if there is a way technologically to bring radical transparency to the workplace so that this kind of stuff is discoverable without the company needing to put out press on it.
Free Trial Testing for Your App or Site
The old OS X version can be fine if you're primarily doing Python programming.

However, if one is using Xcode to write iOS 8 apps for the millions of new phones people bought a few months ago, you are pretty much forced onto the Apple upgrade treadmill.

For example, Xcode 6.3 requires 10.10[1]. Apple decided that OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) released less than 18 months ago is not recent enough.

Staying with OS X 10.6 means the latest Xcode you can install is v4 which means iOS 5 is the last version you can write apps for. That would be a severe handicap since iOS 5 has less than 3% marketshare[2]. I'm not sure if Apple servers would even allow developers to submit an iOS 5 app these days[3]. OS X 10.6 definitely was very stable but staying on it has severe economic penalties for many programmers.

[1]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835?ls=1&mt=12

[2]http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/

[3]http://www.macworld.com/article/2080865/apple-requiring-app-...
Very simple interface.
Interestingly, the 'Macrocom' screenshots flicker like hell on one of the monitors I use at work - the oldest.

That reminds me that the poster is not the only one using tricks to get more colors...
It's not. There is some talk of a Sixth Republic during the presidential campaigns, generally from far-right or far-left parties, but the two main moderate parties do not want to hear about it.

French political life is characterized by a complete lack of impetus for change.
It also protects their detailed usage data from the ISPs who are in some cases their competitors. They actually have an interest in customer privacy.
I have sprinkler heads all over my lawn, if the lawn mower avoided them I'd have patches of long grass. My sprinkler heads will routinely get stuck in the "up" position due to sand/dirt that gets stuck in the sliding mechanism.

This actually seems solvable by robotics, but it's not a viable solution for beacons or markers as they are meant to be "passed over" by lawn mowers.
Simple explanation of how color vision works
The live-streaming market is still young. I doubt Meerkat's investors are expecting profits or a viable business model any time soon (this seems like the classic "build a user base and figure out the rest later" model). While buzz may not mean business, it definitely creates opportunity.
It is kind of embarrassing for kickstarter after they've earnestly assured you that they have no way to send a message to every backer of a project.
You're not doing the same amount of DD on a $5M acquisition as you are a $300M acquisition, just as seed VCs aren't doing the same amount of DD as a growth-stage VC. The former may not even have aquifer financial yet and the acquiring company is mostly concerned about the talent of the team and the software. They may not even care that much about a couple of the founders--just needing them for a smooth handover.
Thanks for the suggestion.

I did have a brief look at Sensu and whilst being very impressed, it seems to be quite extensive, and when I deliver the tool and setup/administration procedure one of the requirements is that this can be maintained going forward by any member of the team. We have a few juniors and with Sensu, this wouldn't be the case.

I'd forever be pulled in to 'sort it out', I can already hear my phone ringing!
Correct, this is one of the few restrictions GPLv3 allowed.

But this text does not exist in GPLv2, so it may or may not be considered GPLv2 incompatible (I don't remember the FSF's last position on these clauses, because almost every other license that has them is gplv2 incompatible for other reasons)
"...or maybe from a Krrrrraken!" :)
Because these kinds of test are silly and easily gamed by throwing in some misleading humor or negativity. It like what pick up artists call 'negging.' It puts you on the defense and little and throws a wrench in the works. The developer knows he can't really make something intelligence so its all rhetoric tricks like this with the occasional dipping into wikipedia or wolfram alpha.

Throwing your answer back at you, criticizing your question, or playing with humor is a fun little trick, but certainly not AI.
> I am not feeling sad, but I am glad that you are.

Well. I think things just got dark.
So you're saying that the CEO is providing $1 million in market value to the company? Maybe (and if we're being pessimistic maybe not) the CEO is doing this because he's already made $100 million and realizes it's the right thing to do. I think it's only unsustainable because of greed.
> if you prefer to use an IDE for development and not just a simple editor, then I would argue that it is hard to beat Visual Studio

Depends on the language. VS is the best for C++ and .NET, sure, but not everyone writes C++ or .NET. For example, all the best Java IDEs are cross-platform.
> Formally, Moore's law is just about transistor density not performance

Formally, it was about number of components per integrated circuit, not density of components (though related observations about density and performance were made very early on, and the 18 month, rather than two year, version actually is about performance, but wasn't from Moore.)

> Historically, density was tied to performance.

Its still tied to overall performance (computations performable b the chip in a given period of time). Its not tied to per core (i.e., single-threaded) performance when the larger number of components is divided among multiple cores, and that does make it harder to make full use of the available performance in some applications. But that doesn't mean Moore's Law is dead, it just means that more programming skills (possibly, outsourced to the creators of better programming languages/tools) are needed to fully take advantage of the available performance.
I loved Snow Leopard, but Lion caused me so much pain. The whole "Save As" fiasco is Lion's legacy.

Snow Leopard is still my favorite. Mountain Lion was ok and Mavericks and Yosemite have been error-filled and support headaches. I am hoping the next version is better tested.
Cool hack!

As with other non-composite CRTs, the 5154 doesn't actually have a pixel clock so you don't need to output pixels at exactly 14.318181MHz - the timings of the horizontal and vertical sync signals are the critical thing. Using a 16MHz or 13.714MHz pixel clock would probably be more convenient for a 96MHz microcontroller.

Composite NTSC will create some interesting new challenges, though. I suspect the fact that some of your pixels are 6 cycles and some are 7 cycles will cause visible banding. It might be possible to eliminate this by taking your 14.318MHz source data and doing a proper band-limited resampling of it to 16MHz or 13.714MHz instead of the nearest-neighbor interpolation you're essentially doing at the moment. You'd probably need an output DAC with more than 1 or 2 bits of dynamic range to do that, though. One of my pending projects is to do something very similar, generating composite output from a VGA card (pixel clock 14.161MHz).
most of us are pretty good at picking up new languages/technologies/frameworks/tools etc. in a pretty short amount of time

Isn't this the other way round? Because there isn't a reliable path to teaching programming to people who aren't self-motivated solo learners, that's the only kind of person who acquires the skills, and so when you look around a tech workplace that's the kind of person you see.
Very nice! I was looking for something like this a year or two ago, on my next lua/web project I'll try it out.
This is the third time in a week that this article is posted on hn

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9375978

It seems to be a real hot-button to say the least.
Because they were willing to work for $40k.
You're assuming that every entrepreneur wants to build a company. Maybe it was a couple of engineers who were just really passionate about a product that they'll get to continue working on with more resources and a nice cushion. This may be especially true for companies that are not going to be unicorns, but more like my little ponies. If you're capping out at a $50m business in 8 years and someone comes along and offers you $8m today that might be a pretty good deal.
What's coming in Git 2.4.0
New Podcast Episode #3 Pyramid Web Framework
From what I tried, it seems to be working on templates, similar to Eliza. However, in some templates it grabs data from Wolfram Alpha.

Very hard to find a non-canned response not coming straight from Alpha.

Still, a good project and obviously more APIs can be integrated. Maybe a good next step would be to mine more and dynamically put together templates. Try with simpler synonym directory and see where it goes.
We integrate into a number of third-party applications, and in the description of our app in their app store, we had a line like "We provide savings and analytics" and it put the ellipses in the most inconvenient place possible.
"John's car is red. What color is John's car?"

"You're asking what color is johns car? I can't put my finger on it, but I'm pretty sure it's rank 656th fraction."

"The color of John's car is red. What color is John's car?"

"You're asking what color is johns car"? I can't put my finger on it, but I'm pretty sure it's rank 656th fraction."

"The color of John's car is red. What is the color of John's car?"

"The color of johns car is rank 656th fraction."

...wut?
You say tomato. I say "hulksmash!"
If you think about it, speed of sound is about 340.29 meters per second... also 0.34029 meters per millisecond... also 1.11644 feet per millisecond.

So 5ms vs 10ms latency is like the difference between having your amp 5 feet or 10 feet away.
Companies do made decisions that cause them to go out of business later on. If this decision doesn't work out then somehow they must cut salaries, let go of people or go out of business.
Oh come on. I can't figure out whether you're feigning ignorance or whether you really didn't pay attention in Econ 101.

Basic economics certainly does not claim that every product will be sold at the equilibrium price. In fact, if that were so, then it wouldn't work.

In a free market, some products are sold above the equilibrium price, and some are sold below. It's free, because people can offer the product at any price they wish. What basic economics does say is that a price above equilibrium cannot be sustained without some corresponding market advantage.
I never read anything that pointed towards that objective. Note that the first stage gets a lot of horizontal velocity, so bringing it back to the launch pad is expensive (fuel-wise). It is better to just cancel out the horizontal vector, follow a parabolic trajectory and land east of the launch pad.
Indeed, promoting Free software would be a very noble side-effect.
My Story How I Acquired 30M Registered Players