skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel fortunate, in that I traded 8 hours of software authoring for a 1971 Bally Sea Ray machine. The client was using it as a paper goods storage surface.

I brought it home, repaired the power cord, and played. It was so-so. I then started researching, found a trove of data on restoring/repairing, learned to be careful of the back panel art as well as the right kind of wax for the playing surface, and much more.

I also found companies offering replacement rubber kits, as well as spare bulbs, springs, etc. Armed with that and a repair manual, I went through the machine, taking all of the play field apart (after photos), waxed the play field surface, carefully cleaned the parts, put them all back together, replacing burnt bulbs, broken springs, and so on. There was also a lot of cleaning of copper contact points, as well as removal of oxide from the solenoid shafts and housings (some 20 or 30 of them).

New rubber _completely_ changed the dynamics - What a blast! The ball was suddenly flying around, sometimes even hitting the glass top.

It is all solenoids and relays, with one main motor that controls timing. When the ball contacts a target, it has a conducting back surface that comes into contact with another vertical contact situated right behind each target - This completed circuit energizes a specific relay, "saving" the state that the target was hit for the next subsequent rotation of the controlling motor. Without this "save" the target hitting occurs far too rapidly to be caught by the electro-mechanical machine to be scored.

The motor steps/rotates one step with each registered score (or multiple scores, again due to timing), with the appropriate "score" going to either a 10 point mechanical wheel or a 100 point wheel and each energized relay de-energized (re-armed, as it were). The motor shaft also has several (6?) discs with raised tabs at strategic places on the edge that are "read" by micro-switch followers to control various parts of the scoring electronics. The score wheel rims are labeled with the score digits, rotating like an older odometer (or gasoline pump display) with the current status (points, games remaining).

All the smaller targets hit also serve to rotate an axle that has some 20 or so copper wipers that may or may not come into contact with a random assortment of contacts laid out on a circuit board - This completes the circuit and lights up the next "randomly" lit target(s) (imagine your hand with fingers out-stretched rotating around the center of your palm with the tips of the fingers touching on a surface that may have contact points and you get the idea).

I also re-enabled the tilt-mechanism - A plumb-bob-type affair suspended within a conducting frame - Move the machine too much and another circuit is completed from the plumb-bob touching the frame, through to the tilt-circuit.

After all of that work, rather than fit an opaque back to the back box (the original was missing), I used a sheet of Plexiglas - You can see electricity arcing during operation with the room lights turned down.

Lots of fun, time to clean it again.
Hi ddv,

Thanks so much for the compliments!

It took me about 2 weeks to go through Michael Hartl's tutorial, https://www.railstutorial.org/. After I had gone through the tutorial, I still didn't fully grasp some fundamentals like what an MVC framework was; I only figured that out as I started building out my site. I still feel like I can't call myself a developer, since I have a poor understanding of things like JSON and asynchronous stuff.

I had taken an intro course a while ago in college; it was on ANT assembly language and C. So I had some understanding of if/then loops and obscure things like pointers, but I had no understanding of web development and how to create something myself. I also had no knowledge of Javascript or CSS beforehand, and little understanding of HTML. I used Codeacademy to learn the basics, and of course the wonderland, Stack Overflow :)

My next goal is to learn how to create an app, but I haven't found any good resources for that yet.

Let me know if you have any more questions!
No, not glib. I understand. This is my version of FU money: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/02/money-and-ma...

I am pretty tired of being homeless and very much want off the street, but I did make a choice: I walked away from a Fortune 500 company for health reasons. It was the right choice, given my circumstances. So while there are things that frustrate me, I do have agency. I also run a homeless website trying to help other homeless people preserve their agency: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I also more recently began recording my thoughts on What Helps The Homeless: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

Largely due to my medical condition, all my websites are updated somewhat sporadically. But my health is improving and that is resolving one of the big underlying problems that I have. Most homeless people have some sort of medical problem or handicap as a root cause of their difficulties.
>Homelessness in America is our biggest problem.
LOL. Not the military industrial complex? Not pollution? Not corrupt politicians? Not murder, assault, rape, fraud? Not wall-street? Even autism is arguably much more important. You could even wrap it up in poor American education.
>every county should have a piece of land reserved for homeless individuals.
So crime-ridden slums that would attract only violent alcoholics and thieves. These people can't be 'saved' and are homeless because of their vices and inability or distaste for adapting to society.
>As to the fear of crime and drug use in these designated areas--if there's a problem police can always be called. I'm sure they can be dragged away from revenue collection?
Thinking the police have nothing better to do is one of the lamest excuses for wanting to create crime I've ever seen.
It sounds cool, but it appears to be full of bored stoner comments ("waaaassssup" etc.) and people just being obscene. There are also very few updates in my fairly populated area. It's going to be hard to create a community

I'm also fairly sure I could just spoof the location of my rooted phone and view and post to whatever region I liked.
Oh! You go down until you run out of slides then you go right.
To be honest I kind of like it. I was confused at first as well but this does allow you to more quickly go between sections of a powerpoint which just isn't possible with the traditional "you can only swipe left or right" presentation.

Not only that but it also makes it much easier get an overview about what things are discussed in the presentation.
Your claim was that western civilization peaked in ~1776. Peaking implies it hasn't improved since then. But those egalitarian values are significantly more well-applied today than they were then. Isn't a world where egalitarianism is applied better than one where it is merely known?
I think the best arguments for why strong AI might be dangerous are:

1) The main approach to creating weak AI that actually works is to define some objective function and train some sufficiently complex mathematical model to maximize that objective. Hence it seems likely that if strong AI is created it will follow this paradigm and therefore such a strong AI will care about nothing other than how to maximize its objective. Such a strong AI would be nothing like a human mind so anthropomorphised thinking is of little use in reasoning about it.

2) Given a sufficiently powerful optimization algorithm (say, for example, if P == NP and an efficient algorithm for an NP hard problem were discovered) one can in fact imagine the above paradigm producing an incredibly powerful intelligence, one that could discover many sub-goals for its fundamental optimization objective which the creator of the fundamental objective could not foresee. Further it could be exceedingly effective at achieving its sub-goals, much like modern chess programs are exceedingly effective at winning at chess, but in a far more general domain.

There are however reasons to doubt such a danger.

1) If P != NP then although it should in theory be possible to achieve roughly human equivalent AI, the sort of truly superhuman AI that some fear may not in fact be possible. In other words it may be that if P != NP there is some limit to how powerful an intelligence can become due to the combinatorial explosion that occurs when one tries to expand the range of possibilities that are considered.

2) Even if no such limits exist there are probably ways to maintain control over even a superintelligent AI. A powerful optimizer would be exceedingly good at finding solutions within its own model of the world but that is only part of what is needed to construct a super AI that actually interacts with the world. You would also need a process for creating and updating the world model based on empirical data. This type of architecture would probably give you several powerful levers for controlling the AI and you could always let the optimizer run on the world model to check on its behavior before allowing it to act on the real world.
That's a really cool customizer. Good job.
Some retail chains manage to operate at negative net inventory - they've sold the item to a consumer before they've paid their suppliers for it.
Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom, Can It Be Done?
There must be a name for the fallacy that implies that if any one conspiracy happens to be true, then all conspiracies must be plausible. Literally nothing Edward Snowden has revealed has lended, or can lend, a shred of credibility to this particular story. If anything, Snowden's revelations suggest the government is not nearly so overt, so clumsily bloodthirsty.

Yet, literally, people will say that they can't afford not to believe there might be a secret network of tunnels under closed Wal-Marts from which Obama is planning to launch a military takeover of the state, and haul people off in train-cars to FEMA death camps, because Snowden.

These memes have been circulating among the right-wing fringe for a long time. I heard about FEMA death camps, the New World Order and an imminent invasion by joint Federal/European troops during the Clinton years. When the Trans-Texas Corridor was proposed, I heard it's true purpose was to allow easy access for a socialist invasion by multinational forces to replace the Dollar with the Euro. I know a guy who will tell you point blank that the parallels between Obama and Hitler are so obvious that you would have to be stupid not to see them, and we'll all rue the day when the Chi-Coms march into Washington (and I don't believe his views fall particularly outside the mainstream.) This is all part and parcel deep-seated xenophobia, anti-Democrat and anti-Federalist fear at work in Texas politics.

There is a point beyond which paranoia makes you blind and gullible as well, and I submit that this story is sufficiently beyond that point that it can be dismissed safely.
Even if you get the answer you want, talk to a lawyer anyway. It's not a good idea to just jump into the money transfer services market without a legal gameplan, any more than it is to buy a bunch of chemicals and go into the explosives manufacturing business, or buy a very high quality printer and go into the banknote printing business. IT's not that you're forbidden to run businesses of that sort, but that such businesses involve onerous licensing requirements.

Put another way, your minimum viable product requires some legal infrastructure, otherwise you'll probably discover the hard way that it is not viable after all.
This effectively destroys privacy...
Show HN: Top YouTube Links According to Reddit Over the Past 24 Hrs
Cool looking customizer - nice work! I created a super simple product customizer that allowed users to slap their logo on promotional products (similar to cafe press, but a few years before that). Even with that ridiculously limited set of options it was a challenging project, so kudos to you on the bag customizer.
You couldn't even hire a couple of experienced engineers let alone come close to affording to build F1. There are several zeros in the cost difference.
Show HN: Totally free marketing automation dashboard
The notation section reminded me of what good tools APL/J/K/Q were for dealing with matrices:

http://jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm

Instead of Mat.Inverse(), there's an operator that actually means "take the inverse of this matrix". Likewise, the power operator in J, if given infinity as the exponent, will apply a function to a value until the fixed-point is reached. Haskell's infix operators also steer towards this direction of expressiveness.

It's pretty liberating to be able to use programming symbols to represent computations in the same way the integral symbol represents integration. However, the barrier to literacy is inevitably raised.
We have all been there, so don't let it get you down. Interviews where you are expected to code solutions to problems and you're put on the spot are unrealistic as to what you will face in the real world. The pressure of an interview can make us do silly things like forget basic things like closures or methods like setTimeout and setInterval. In an ideal world and situation, you might even question the use of jQuery and instead opt for a vanilla JS solution which shows that you know more about Javascript than jQuery.
Section 8 housing is rental housing. Like a high percentage of homeless people, part of why I am on the street is that I have a serious medical condition. I don't want to ever rent again. Having a high degree of control over my home is necessary for me to stay healthy and off drugs. I would rather remain homeless than give up my agency by entering a shelter or a government program that sets a low bar for quality of life because they figure that "beggars can't be choosers."

I am talking about a social safety net for citizens that first and foremost respects them as people with a right to choose and a right to expect a high standard of living. Most American welfare programs are designed in a way that is enormously disrespectful and expects people to accept some pretty crappy things because in order to get help, you first need to be defined as poor. That's a terrible way to create a social safety net. Other countries have a better track record of providing a safety net for their citizens that allows them to access benefits while still middle class or regardless of their social class. America is pretty bad about not doing anything for you until after you are poor and then doing things that help keep your poor and actively discourage upward mobility.

Edit: I have no idea why this has been downvoted, but my medical condition is deadly and torturous. It is also incredibly expensive to treat with conventional medicine, like $100k/year and up. Compared to that, sleeping in a tent is a minor inconvenience. I have done much better since walking away from a crappy, mold-infested apartment. So I have no plans to go back to renting. Ever.
"Two dimensional navigation for a slide deck would be really helpful, discoverable, and useful."

- no one ever
Pretty good how you've got the articles grouped if they're shared on more that one site.

I've been working on something very similar for a while: http://www.serializer.io, I've kind of slowed down recently though.

It's a rails app, https://github.com/charlieegan3/serializer

I'll have a look over the code tomorrow.
How We Use Trello: Acceptance Criteria
end-to-end encryption is nice, but since the government can force companies to secretly add backdoors, it is pretty much game over for privacy?
I'm not sure whose call it was for ESU to have these duties, but it probably was sold as increased neighborhood coverage, the same way engines do CFR until the real experts show up.

Though I've had good experiences with them, I imagine there could be a lot of problems if their books assign them different tasks that conflict with us (I don't know what they learn). As far as the "car dropping" goes, there's no excuse for that ;).
This is untrue:

"All very true, except that with a share of Google, they're all the same and you arguably know what you're buying..."

We've had many, many corporate scandals over the years: Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc. We know that corporations can lie. The lies are of 2 kinds:

1.) deliberate falsehoods

2.) lies of omission

We also know there are many facts that can not be known about a corporation. What is the real value of the software? What is the real value of a patent? Does the software contain a serious bug? Is the patent open to legal challenge?

Regarding the danger that Citibank got into, and the near extinction it faced during the financial crisis of 2008, Robert Rubin (who had been director and senior counselor of Citi, during the bubble years) said: "It is not easy to know how much risk is building up on the trading floor." Here you have one of the top people of the company claiming he had no idea what condition the corporation was in. Was he lying? If he was lying, then how can you trust any information you have about the corporation? If he wasn't lying, how can you trust that you know anything about a corporation, when the people who run the corporation have no idea?

So how can you ever really know what a share in a corporation is worth? It's at least as much of a mystery as the question of "How much is a computer programmer worth?"
Right, but the traffic still passes through your residential connection, so you're still limited to the bandwidth provided by your ISP; if anything, the overhead of VPN will decrease internet speeds there.

In other words, a VPN isn't an alternative to an ISP's network, but rather an additional system on top of it.

On the other hand, a VPN will generally bypass an ISP's own DNS servers, which could afford some speedup when performing domain name resolution/lookup if the ISP's nameservers are sluggish (though configuring your system to use alternate nameservers would do this without the overhead of a VPN).
Except for programmers. And when people try to do what we do, but in Excel, it's bad. Or if they try to do it in Labview, it's also bad. (I've personally seen both.)

These tools can't do, structurally, what git (or even cvs) does with plain text, or what vim or emacs (or even notepad!) do with plain text.
I think things should be equal. No game should be allowed to use the name of another game to rank better in the search results. Google are meant to be a search company, so why can't they make the weight of tags a lot less than they appear be currently? Keyword stuffing is a technique used since the early days of the Internet long before any app store existed, removing an app for using keywords of other apps is not the right way to go about this, especially if it is not a policy stated somewhere forbidding it. Couldn't they have just removed the offending tag and given them a friendly warning?
similarly at first it confused me, but now I understand it is like a table of contents which is useful and easy to use.
Nice!

> Yes, I do Lisp and I do stupid. :)

Why stupid? I think that is straight solutions for simple problems. MyDef is basically the same idea but with complete programming layer to achieve almost anything. I have been using MyDef for all my programming (in all programming languages) for 10 years now, solves all my syntax problems. It doesn't solve language problems therefore I still choose language to suite problems. However it turns out that programming language minus syntax features are much smaller and the remaining criterion often boils down to library availability, dynamic type vs static, or memory management. Syntax differences can be naturally dismissed.
I actually wrote my thoughts in a diary (edited a bit)

Everything I do has a purpose. Often when I'm programming, I'm consolidating effort...

I don't build shortcuts. I'm not programming to survive. I'm programming foundation to build on top of. The potential is limitless.

I'm building so other people can use, so I document the hell out of it.

I'm building so other poeple can use, so I follow the patterns of the best applications out there.

I'm building so other people can use it to function and save huge amounts of time - get done lots of stuff to great effect, very simply. To remove duplication from their lives.

DRY > Duplication. Macro > Repetition. Abstraction, Idiomatic > DSL / solipsism. Pragmatism and Wisdom.

Write code to be simple. Write it to function.

Utility. Build to the stars.

This me, who I am, my being is truth, ignore the liars. Just build.
My parents (who owned a house) offered to lend me five figures to buy a house, together with my savings I think that would have been enough to bankroll a small business. I earn more than they do these days. I think Mitt's advice is valid for middle class families who don't max out their credit to spend on cars and holidays.
> then you should set your expectation to be the outcome of any random one of possible superintelligent mind designs.

And how did you assign weights to these options?

I assume you didn't make the sophomore mistake of assuming a uniform distribution over all possibilities.
This is one of our pain points as well, educating our customers/users
On the penultimate slide, p.24, what's the relevance of the company logos? It appears to be an endorsement, in what way is that true or false. The alternative interpretation is that the 70 years of product development has been for the listed companies?
Sounds awful. What about people who are color-blind? How are you going to read it out to yellow-somoene across the purple-room?
Homelessness is a basic physiological necessity, like food, water, and others in the Maslow's Hierarchy.

So, yes, it's more important than the industrial complex or "autism" (what the hell does that even mean? What about "autism"?)

>and are homeless because of their vices and inability or distaste for adapting to society

I knew when you said that you were just a troll. Most homeless have mental problems and many are veterans with shellshock.
I installed it but I get 404 on /js/dependencies.js. I'm not experienced with node.js and the like, what can I do?
(not color-blind friendly)
When people try to do what we do, but in python/emacs/git, it's bad. It's not like if you banned excel the same people would suddenly produce a beautifully factored python program. They just wouldn't have anything at all.

Right now we have structured tools with easy learning curves but low ceilings, and raw text tools with high ceilings but with a learning curve like being punched in the face with a brick wall. There is definitely room to explore in between the two.
It doesn't take as large an area as you'd think. My buddy Dave's father-in-law was born and raised in Southern Manhattan, but speaks only Cantonese and is unable to hold a conversation with Dave (who is from Taiwan, native speaker of Mandarin and English). Dave's father-in-law's English is so poor that he spelled Dave as "Day" on his lai see packet his first Chinese New Year dating his now wife. Luckily, Dave's father-in-law went to Hong Kong to find a wife, who is conversational in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

Manhattan's Chinatown is pretty small (the Mandarin-speaking Chinatown out in Queens is much larger), and yet there are people born and raised there who only speak Cantonese.