skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What Microsoft is attempting to do with HoloLens is nothing short of amazing. While Oculus and other companies focus on virtual reality headsets for mostly gaming and 3D purposes, Microsoft are developing something truly unique in that HoloLens can be used for more than gaming. While I am excited for virtual reality headsets, I think augmented reality is more exciting in that real world objects and environments are used, not replaced.

I can see a future where a learning platform like Udemy exists for HoloLens, you can sit across from someone and learn a skill like guitar, drawing or sewing. Imagine the applications this could be used for in third world countries like training and medical purposes? Being able to save someone's life because a surgeon could guide someone step-by-step and appear as though they are in the same room.
Show HN: A 60 second meditation tool to help clear your mind
Um... I am old and I don't have time to work on side projects - I have dying parents I need to spend time with because I won't get that time back. I have friends that live all over the East Coast now and visiting them is very important and now time consuming. My point is this is incredibly superficial and the stuff that matters (his actual work) gets lost in all the needless fluff.

Plus I'm too busy getting my actual work done to "market" myself.
How I Learned to Code in Only 6 Years: And You Can Too
I'll bite and play devil's advocate, with a few qualifications. If we consider a class of vehicle rather than a specific make/model, there are certain kinds of vehicle designs that are approaching 100 years in age. The pickup truck, as a basic design, came about ~1930 and has proven to be an immensely important automotive variant. In 15 years it will be a 100-year old automotive design.

I think the question DARPA is asking is of course different and maybe more fundamental, what are the reasons software stops being useful?

My guess is that list of reasons is fairly finite, e.g. assumption made about memory availability and speed no longer hold, so new software can now outperform old software, etc.

But it looks like we've arrived a kind of plateau, and we also have a pretty good idea what's going to happen in the near future with basic computing.

- Computers with 64-bit memory addressing provide enough memory for just about anything we can think of over the next 100 years

- We'll continue to outfit computers with more RAM, more cores, more main storage and all of it will start to get faster following observed trends

- and so on

So if we can write software assuming these questions and answers, why wouldn't it be capable of expanding to fit computers 100 years from now and continue running?
It's incredibly rare to not use a library for this kind of math unless you actually work on mathematical software.
As an Airbnb host (we rent out our master bedroom suite), I can safely say Airbnb is not what it used to be.

It's just like any community online, really. Airbnb started out as a tight-knit, mostly Bay-Area-techie demographic. As a host in Austin, where many techies visit, do job interviews, or hang out for a few weeks, I enjoyed meeting interesting people who were in the same (or similar) community as I was--startups/entrepreneurs. I met people who had shared connections with me on Facebook and people who became good friends.

Fortunately for Airbnb's valuation, but unfortunately for hosts, the demographic has dramatically changed over the past few months to a year. With Airbnb becoming a "household name" of sorts, with a multi-billion-dollar valuation, people have started booking on Airbnb who are not of the caliber (to put it nicely) of the original close-knit community that made the site so neat.

I get it. Communities, as they grow and become mainstream, tend to attract more not-so-great people. It's inevitable. It's just, as a host, it stinks. Airbnb is going to have to get even better with quality control. (One step, as I've made clear in emails to their support team, is to get really firm on their guideline of not letting people book for other people. It is a trust and safety issue--the person booking the Airbnb should be the person staying in the house, PERIOD.)

I wrote more about my personal experience a few weeks ago on Facebook [1]. I didn't mention some of the particular bad experiences we've had with guests in the post, because I don't want to embarrass anyone publicly, but let's just say...we have had some really negative, uncomfortable experiences with multiple guests in the past couple months. That's after having over 100 positive experiences, but the percentage of positive vs. negative experiences has taken a dramatic negative turn lately.

My experiences are not as horrific as the above article--probably in part because we are here when we rent out our master bedroom. However, this definitely is a trend/issue that Airbnb is going to continue to struggle with. I hope their customer service team takes these incidents seriously and continues to make it safer for hosts and guests of the service.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/ericabiz/posts/10152926663453305
Here are some relevant selections from wikipedia:

> Factoring is not the same as invoice discounting

> Factoring is the sale of receivables, whereas invoice discounting is a borrowing that involves the use of the accounts receivable assets as collateral for the loan

> However, in some other markets, such as the UK, invoice discounting is considered to be a form of factoring

> Invoice Discounting is sometimes referred to as Discreet Factoring as it is essentially the same product as Factoring

(That last quote is from the page on invoice discounting)

None of that indicates to me that there's any difference at all, other than (possibly, but not necessarily) the name, between selling your accounts or borrowing against them. They're both loans, identically structured. There's no demand for this euphemistic product in new US markets because we already have finance.

Oh, another quote from the factoring page:

> in other industries, however, such as textiles or apparel, for example, financially sound companies factor their accounts simply because this is the historic method of financing
So, what can one develop using this beside "hello, world?"

Can I build a cross platform GUI application? Is there a servlet container? How about an IDE?
How Technology Has Affected Wages for the Last 200 Years
You seem to be under the impression that I'm a proponent of using dynamic typing to the exclusion of static typing. That's not the case (I'm an ObjC fan). I just hadn't seen a situation before where the argument for one vs the other in a particular situation hinged on something so fundamental rather than on a design artifact.

EDIT: Removed comment about scala because I was confusing it with clojure. My bad.
2 years I would say. 1 year minimum and 3 years max. Past 5 years is way too long. I automatically ignore resumes with 10 years tenures.
A lot of the time, restarts are required to remove old versions of files that are still in use. AFAIK, there is no way to remove files that are 'in-use' (and not locked) without having to make an entry in the registry to schedule a deletion on the next reboot.
>>Unexpected expenses will of course mess it up and throw you into a spiral if you don't have a buffer. But that's true at any income level.

Not really. Minimum wage jobs rarely cover health insurance.
It should be really easy for Airbnb (which insured the house under its TOS) to recoup the damages from the renters, of whom it has all pertinent information to track them down.

Though the article is sensationalized linkbait, unnecessarily showing pictures of the damage, the story is an affirmation of Airbnb's good business practice of mitigating risk to the owners.
The wall warts thing mentioned above is another good example of this. You'll save a few watts per person... but the US averages 10,000W/person of energy consumption, so it will barely be noticeable. Moving to more efficient designs is a good thing, to be sure, but it's barely relevant in terms of making things better. You'll never find enough initiatives of that size to make a dent. You need to attack major energy wasters, like cars and air conditioners if you want to accomplish something.
The 2048 guys stole my iPhone game
Skimming over the PDF, they seem to be brainstorming all over the place without much of a clear direction.

That's exactly their remit - fantasize about cool stuff that seems technologically feasible and would provide a strategic advantage if we had it, and wait to see what sort of ideas people try to sell to them.

That's a reasonable point about COBOL, but it's be nice to have that sort of 'it just works' predictability in smaller and more modular packages.
Could you explain why? I'm still a college student so I am not quite familiar with this.
It's a multilayered disruption machine: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...
ASP.Net is not going anywhere, perhaps you should read a little closer before you respond.
It sounds very cool. I'm just trying to figure whether it's exciting in the way the computer engineering was in 1980, or if it's more like the way fusion energy was in 1960.
Just want to note that Windows has a whole mess of dependency-management, much of it provided by the service that handles those MSI installer files.
Did Microsoft Miss an Opportunity with Edge?
I hate Windows. I spent 90% of my life in Unix.

Powershell is fantastic. I'm not joking. Do you have any actual criticisms?
PhantomMagick for converting HTML to PDF or images
I don't know about that. A lot of companies, some of the world's largest, use non-MS technologies and seem to get by very well.
PhantomMagick provides a simple API to ease the process of converting HTML to PDF or images. It's especially handy for things like generating invoices or capturing screenshots of websites. It's framework agnostic but it does provide a facade for simple use in Laravel 4/5.
Why not make lots of simple single-purpose modules?

My policy is that if I find myself doing something over three times and it's easily isolated and contained, I'll make it into a module. Then I can write a few tests for that code, I know it'll always work, and I won't have to think about it again. Even if it's something that's not hard, you don't want to stop focusing on your main task to implement some helper that you've already done before.

There's also a really strong argument when it comes to browser support: supporting and testing lots of things on old browsers is hard. But if you break stuff out into small modules you can test it easily in isolation and know it works in all your test browsers.
> Here's an interesting meta-study about the effects of a high debt to gdp ratio.

I know you're sincere, but I kind of had to laugh. Reinhart and Rogoff have been through the ringer for publishing that paper, which is almost entirely bunk. There was a huge storm that made it even to the mainstream media about how truly flawed that paper was (with errors getting as basic as "they can't use Excel.") It's even mentioned in the OP.

To be fair, the claim that slower economic growth is correlated with high debt is somewhat true. But most argue causation is in the other direction: slow growth causes high debt.

> I admire the candor of your second point ("we just inflated it away.")

You might recall that the time period in which we inflated that debt away was one of the most prosperous for all Americans.

Meanwhile, austerity will directly lead to people losing their jobs and an economic slowdown that will prolong the suffering people are already going through...for what?
Top Technical Interview Questions for 2015
Agar.io
What's striking about this is that this constraint is essentially a type constraint. To the degree that existing type systems (and the checkers therefore) make this ugly, difficult, or impossible to express that surely points to an opportunity for improvement.

Note that, contrary to some on this page, I read this as speaking entirely about computation whose structure is known at compile time. Obviously, if the structure is based on run-time information then you probably need dependent types to guarantee statically that nothing can go wrong.
> Only if they win in court. And in practice if you don't have any money anyway, what do you have to loose? Why go into non-medical debt to pay off medical debt?

If you don't show up in court, they win by default. Have you never heard of "summary judgement"?
/b/, /pol/, arguably /v/ are all containment boards. They've never been good, they'll never be good, etc.

The reason 4chan has survived has been that it promotes anonymity and hence genuine expression. After dealing with it, for a while, you get to kind of know different types of people. You can go to a containment board and find people that are genuinely, for example, homophobic and antisemetic with complete seriousness. They compete for space with people that are just trolling, and both compete with some genuinely level-headed people. It's fascinating to watch.

Meanwhile, in other boards, you'll find people snarking over guns (/k/), bicycles (/n/), anime (/a/), otaku and general Hikikomori behavior (/jp/), making things (/diy/), and on and on.

Because everything is anonymous and the boards move so fast, there's no advantage to the sorts of politics and forking you see in Reddit or whatever--instead, you just develop a sort of hang-out culture and occasionally interact with invaders. It's fun.
Fury rises at Disney over use of foreign IT workers
I can't stress how important it is for Americans to get this right. What you set into law, will be forced upon the rest of us as treaties. We can't influence your politics, but you can.
Photos from the Times Square riot
Can't you vet the people that stay with you? Do you find the ratings process unreliable?
/v/, /jp/, /pol/, and so many other boards are extremely toxic in behavior as well. There's some interesting stuff, but it's behind layers of "2edgy4u" behavior of people trying to out-insult each other.
In order to sell Yahoo, she'd have to find a company that:

(1) had enough money to buy Yahoo (the market cap of Yahoo is $40.52B[1])

(2) had a plausible reason to want to buy Yahoo (instead of spending that money on its own business or some other potential acquisitions)

(3) was willing to pay anything close to its current market value (if they offered less than that, it wouldn't be a good deal for Yahoo's shareholders).

I can't think of any such buyer.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo&ql=1
I know it doesn't say much, but having never coded in ML and having tried F# briefly (I code mostly C#, and it'd be easy to have mixed F#/C#), I think Scala has much clearer syntax, or perhaps it's just more familiar for someone who's coming from imperative languages like C++ or C#.
Warehouse robots to work alongside – and replace – humans
When Bots Collude
VS Code Lua Linter
> Simply put, this is a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a different NAT, without any 3rd party or network changes.

> There is no middle man, no proxy, no 3rd party, no UPnP/STUN/ICE required, no spoofing, and no DNS tricks.

http://samy.pl/pwnat/

The FAQ is great too :)

Ok, so does this really work?
Yes. Try it!

I'm confused. This can't work.
You should be, and it does work.

But it can't. My NAT blocks incoming packets and so will the other.
I know.
Thanks! I just try to follow the meta-golden rule: treat your users as you would prefer to be treated by your implementers.
Would there be a F# equivalent to that Scala/Spark thing?
> it has a feature superset.

True, although the most relevant difference is value types, which Java is getting, too. As to the rest, it's not about the number of features, but the quality of implementation. HotSpot's JIT and GCs are simply years ahead of the CLR, and HotSpot's next-gen JIT, Graal, is another tremendous leap forward.

> The CLR is generally much faster to start up

Compared to HotSpot, yes (but, like you said, there are many JVMs out there), although Java 9's JIT caching will change that.

> The library linking story is much more pleasant too, with a single dynamically linked executable referencing GAC-installed assemblies, rather than stringing together enormously long class paths.

This, too, is no longer the case in Java 9, but the difference in the other direction is much more relevant: the JVM's agent capabilities (both Java and native agents) are one of the things that give the JVM its power. The ability to easily transform code as it's loaded (or after its loaded) packs a lot of oomph.

In general I'd say that the JVM offers fewer abstractions, but more powerful ones and it offers less opportunities for hand-tuned optimizations and more for automatic optimizations. In the end, HotSpot is simply much more advanced internally. The CLR is like a car with more buttons, but HotSpot is the car with the better engine. HotSpot has always opted for constant change that's hidden from the user, while the CLR has been adding more and more user-accessible features.

The work being done on Graal/Truffle is so far ahead of anything anyone else is doing, that it will put HotSpot's JIT beyond the reach of any other technology for years to come. It seems to me that the CLR might even stop competing and C# might switch to AOT compilation, with VB possibly being abandoned. Some of the latest moves by MS seem to hint in that direction (RyuJIT was already done or nearly so).
DC Incubator and Seed Fund 1776 Acquires Disruption Corporation
When people say "you don't want to add meters to feet" it's a short-hand for "you don't want to add [a primitive data type representing] meters to [a primitive data type representing] feet [thereby getting a nonsensical result]." Whether "inches" is the "true type" of my value depends on the context - what invariants am I trying to enforce by giving it that type?
Not for the upcoming 4K video — and probably not even for today's Full HD.

A large screen is still a nice place to attach your phone to, instead of a dedicated docking station. At least it can provide a lot of electric power. Also, it's a reasonable place to put your phone's camera so that it's looking at you.
Tell me what happens with that technique when your json has > 22 keys. ;)

(Edit) this is apparently working in the latest scala 2.11 But it killed my adoption of scala for real work early on. https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-7099
weird how the GPL shows up as the most popular license by having double the marketshare of number 2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Viral_licensing

" Craig Mundie remarked, "This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it."[35] In another context, Steve Ballmer declared that code released under GPL is useless to the commercial sector (since it can only be used if the resulting surrounding code becomes GPL), describing it thus as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"."

It seems even the Wiki editors believe he was speaking about the GPL.

Stop being a jackass.
It's not automatically integrated. I just transpose as needed from my help desk system into it as I doubt I'd find it as useful if the entries were not in my own terminology.
Here is one example that happened to us. A man with prior positive reviews did an Instant Book on our place. (We had it set so people with previous positive reviews could instantly book our listing without our prior approval.) Then he sends us a message through Airbnb saying the reservation is for his daughter. Great--so he's already broken Airbnb policy.

I can't cancel his booking without being severely penalized by Airbnb. (Later, I found out I could have contacted Airbnb's host support and they would have cancelled it without a penalty since he broke the guidelines, but at the time I did not know that.)

His daughter turned out to be someone who (I am really trying to be polite here since this is a public forum) should not be living on her own. She was not...OK. After one really crazy incident, the next morning, I called her dad on the phone and explained the situation. They agreed to cut the booking short, and I ended up having to refund them their "unused" nights.

I straight up asked him, as politely as I could, "I don't mean to pry...but what's going on with your daughter?" His reply: "Well, she's never been diagnosed with anything..."

If I wouldn't have already had other people booked on the Airbnb for later dates, I would have taken down the listing after that experience. It was a nightmare. My roommate had to clean up the room, and that was a nightmare too. We were all pretty over it at that point.
If you're developing an app for Android that uses WebViews, your best bet is probably to start using Intel's CrossWalk project. At the cost of quite a few dozen megabytes in app size, you get the latest Chrome (well, the latest when you published your app) plus a few of Intel's pet web projects (SIMD, TypedObjects).

That said, as annoying as it is that Safari on iOS is slow to pick up new web technologies, atleast I know that the vast majority of iOS users are using a browser updated within the past year, and it's all the same browser engine underneath.
I have to disagree with the premise that we did the same things before the internet that we do today. Was it possible to order things remotely? Yes, but it was hard enough that most poeple wouldn't do it - they would go to their local store and just purchase an item there.

Did the average citizen communicate freely across the oceans? Not remotely. Mail was expensive, phones even more so. Can this continue without the internet? No.

Was information ever disseminated as freely as it is today? No. I have volumes of programming books which were years out of date when I purchased them to prove this.

That said, I agree that the internet is about to get a lot more expensive, especially as the ad bubble which supported so much of its growth falls apart. It will be interesting, and bittersweet, to watch how the internet evolves post-ads.
It seems to me like he was purposefully taking a hard political stance on a nuanced issue in order to drive people who are uninformed or unsure about these things into his own company's pen. It has nothing to do with linux, GPL, or any technicality, and everything to do with perceptions, executive policy, and business culture.
If mohammed won't come to the mountain, we will bring the mountain to mohammed.
On choosing to write in a second language
Jesus, what a disaster.
With a flat profile you could sometimes still look to reduce cache misses or similar. Performance problems that present globally sometimes have relatively local cause. Hard to get wins as big as when there's a hot loop, though, to be sure.
How to Send Mass Personalized Emails
Well my desktop also uses quantum effects. So did valve computers at the time, thus, I don't think anybody ever built a "classical computer".

Yes, that's the definition they use on their site. No, I don't think applying it verbatim to my computer is unfair.

Ok, they created a different kind of classical computer. One that may be able to solve some kinds of problems better, like a specialized computer often does. Yes, it could have been huge (but wasn't - too bad). But it's not a quantum computer, and their marketing is dishonest.
I remember last year Techcrunch was publishing story over story about Secret, mostly as uninteresting as 'Secret app has an update and now it remembers where you left off'. And there was always someone commenting on the article 'Techcrunch stop trying to make Secret happen, it is not gonna happen.'

That artificial media boost brought users and huge expectations, but users did not stick.
Chebfun–numerical computing with functions