skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The number of people casually suggesting github for large binaries on HN is incredible and funny. They should try downloading something from github in Asia and they'll learn why local mirrors are useful.
Show HN: Pipe terminal output to a Gist
OpenGL-over-VNC-ready GPU cloud instances
I'm looking for a cloud provider that has GPU instances that support OpenGL apps out of the box, preferably on Ubuntu.

EC2 has GPU instances, but massive configuration is required to allow an app to see OpenGL.

I found one project that will allow you to do this with CentOS. As you can see, the steps required are substantial. https://github.com/rncry/gpu-desktop

This seems like a service some cloud provider somewhere might be offering, but thus far I haven't found what I'm looking for. Anyone know of something?
Have you looked at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
It's also why the rumor that Nexus devices would get 2 years of OS updates and one extra year of security updates (3 years) makes me want to stick with Nexus devices, despite some of their annoying shortcomings such as worse cameras (than high-end competition).

Two years of OS updates (2 major OS versions, since they do them yearly now) + another year of security updates seems quite ideal and I'd hope more OEMs adopt that. Unfortunately even if they do, they won't do it for all of their phones, only their flagships, which means lie 80% of the Android smartphone population won't benefit from it.
The idea that advertising will survive in a world with even weak intelligence is amusing to me. The second a user has a digital representative that can collect enough data to make informed decisions and gather data on various products and has a modicum of data on what their human actually needs advertising depts will be replaced with far more service oriented equivalents that don't try to exploit things like habit formation to get people to buy products they don't need.
Making a Numeric Type in Swift
> Maybe we need to start a "best practice" of checking in with the maintainers of a project before publishing benchmark results about the project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt
Yeah but that didn't work well for him. I know people who love freelancing, but it would give me anxiety. Hedging your bets with a more solid prospect like working with a company isn't a bad idea.
Yeah this is a punt from the supremes. Not going to happen.
And as the linked article explains, UTF-16 is a huge mess of complexity with back-dated validation rules that had to be added because it stopped being a wide-character encoding when the new code points were added. UTF-16, when implemented correctly, is actually significantly more complicated to get right than UTF-8.

UTF-32/UCS-4 is quite simple, though obviously it imposes a 4x penalty on bytes used. I don't know anything that uses it in practice, though surely something does.

Again: wide characters are a hugely flawed idea.
Lyme disease can usually be treated by antibiotics, especially in the early stages:

http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/treatment/

This isn't mentioned by the article anywhere and must be part of the cost-benefit analysis for deploying a vaccine, especially one which is to be only 80% effective and requires booster shots.
Why is Lollipop a disaster? It introduced many great things.
> Java (particularly early versions of Java) or C# would also be a good comparable, in circumstances where you don't care about the JIT.

Or if you're using a native code compilers (not sure about C#, but they exist for Java).
So there probably aren't many circumstances where you would be choosing between one and the other, but one reason you might want to keep your eye on Rust is for extension-writing. The traditional approach to dealing with stuff that needs to be fast in Python is to get it working in pure Python first, optimize as best you can, and if it's still not fast enough, profile to identify your hot loops and rewrite those bits in C as an extension. This is somewhat less necessary in the era of PyPy, but still a common way to think about things.

To me, at least, Rust provides a compelling alternative to C in the Python+C combination. Coming from Python, writing C is pretty unergonomic; it's super-easy to shoot yourself in the foot and have your program die with an inexplicable segfault, which feels pretty alien for someone used to nice pretty stack traces. Rust promises to make that a lot more pleasant by being memory-safe, while still making good performance promises.
It depends on what they mean by power user. If you like customizing the OS, running another ROM, launcher, or theme, than Android is friendly to that.

If you like using more powerful software, than iOS / iPad seem the clear winner there. Look at the top 10 in both stores, they are very different.

In Apple Store, you will see lots of photography and music apps. In Android, its games and social media.

I've been developing for Android half a decade now, but still see the OS as a toy that can't grow up - mostly because of its design and APIs, but thats another story for another time.

I think both Microsoft and Apple are in better situation with convergence between their form factors and the capabilities of each platform.
Kleiner Perkins 2015 Internet Trends Report
As an enterprise software developer, who gets pitches constantly from stuff we "need" I'd love to hear this elaboration
They exist for C# as well, so this is a good point.
So...they're claiming to "maintain" projects, and that means turning them into adware?

That's so underhanded and nasty that it's difficult to believe. If true, it means SourceForge has effectively become the nemesis of every software developer who ever used their services. And, it means every software developer who cares about software freedom and privacy must move everything off of SourceForge.

We host Webmin on SF.net, still, and it is downloaded over 3 million times per year, making it one of the most popular packages in the system administration category for over a decade (last I checked a few years ago, it was second only to phpmyadmin). They've never done anything weird or underhanded with our stuff (but most of our packages are signed and setup in such a way that fiddling with them would be somewhat challenging). Given its popularity, I would assume it would be a likely target for this sort of thing. But, maybe it's only "abandoned" projects? (Whatever that means, since it sounds like the original author in this case did not consider their project abandoned.)
Most startups that fail wrote code extremely quickly and have a cobbled together system that the devs would be ashamed to open source. There may even be private keys and sensitive info in the code base itself.

Additionally if the failure was an acquihire, or a sale of the business assets to a competitor then the code base probably belongs to someone else now, even if it will never be used or see the light of day again.

Even if the code is in a state where it could be open sourced legally and safely it would probably be next to useless to anyone but the devs that wrote it. This is because most startups don't tend to write proper documentation, because their small teams can rely on institutional knowledge. (Unless the startup is extremely professional with some truly top notch engineers powering it the documentation effort tends to start sometime after the startup scales to a mid sized team and now requires it.)

But when a startup dissolves all that brain space info about how the service works, the endpoints, etc disappears. What you are left with is an undocumented mess that could probably be rewritten from scratch better and faster.
Here are the nationwide statistics for Lyme disease in the US: http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/index.html

And some links to the CDC sites about other tick-borne diseases prevalent in the US: http://www.cdc.gov/ticks/diseases/ (most of these also include statistics on incidence and geographic distribution)
Is it interesting? I don't know, violations of international law have taken on many imaginative and interesting names in the recent past but I think the one I used is rather uninteresting comparatively.
I think it's going to be difficult to be a co-founder, but you might be a founder if you get more disciplined. I am self-motivated and have started a few companies.

I have attempted to start companies with friends that are not self-motivated. The issue is that I end up feeling like I am doing all of the work (and am forced to be in a manager/boss role or they don't get any work done) which causes resentment on both sides.

There are also many boring parts of the business that just need to get done. How are you going to get through these boring parts? At a certain point, co-founders won't be willing to do only the parts that you can't get motivated enough to complete.

Businesses also go through many tough periods before being successful (and even after they are successful) and if you can't keep yourself motivated, you will quickly fail.

In all seriousness, do you really want to run a business? I run my own business and I've never found a lack of motivation.
That was intense. I'm not a parent but I imagine if a parent of a vulnerable teen girl (or boy) is reading this, it would be horrifying to them. What a messed up world we live in :(
Minnesota is a state.
Oh ok it's intentional. Thx for explaining the choice of the name. Not only because of the name itself but also by explaining the reason behind the choice, you achieved to get my attention. I will try to find out more about this problem, because I guess that as a developer this might have some impact on my work sooner or later and therefore I should at least be aware of it.
I get no such warning with 2.7.9 on linux.
Personally, I don't understand this obsession with making money from research. IMHO research should be primarily about exploration and discovery, never about products or money. Why can't you just invest a part of your profits for the express purpose of just doing something interesting? If along the way, that interesting idea manages to be made into a product, then sure go do that, otherwise, you just contributed something interesting to the human knowledge pool.

I guess at some level merely the existence of money minded people offends my sensibilities. :)
Techdirt's take: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150526/16550931121/obama...
haha I said almost the same thing above.
How are you different from http://Webflow.com ?
You can't be serious.

You're tying to convince me that someone passed a law interfering with the market and they are not leftists?

Please. Do you even understand what left and right are?

Right is not where Hitler lives. Hitler lives in the Left together with Democrats. Also not far from Republicans in an American context (unless we wax lyrical about founding fathers). In the right sit Anarchists. So your suggestion that the human beings that passed laws interfering with the market are not leftists is wrong on its face.
The Go spec does not contain the stack or heap, so I guess that in principle it's fair game for the collector to relocate it in memory. In some future version it's only safe to use memory in C-land that was allocated in C-land.
It's funny, I never cared much for poetry until I started listening to Iron Maiden and found out that "The Trooper" is based on "The Charge of the Light Brigade", as well as "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" being based on a Samuel Taylor Coleridge work.

Now I enjoy reading both Coleridge and Tennyson quite a lot (as well as a few other poets, although it will never be my primary interest).

And people used to say that heavy metal was bad for kids... feh.
Good point. The percentage also caught my attention. The article didn't mention any percentages of stage 1 cases versus later stages where long term problems can occur.
Five lists of six things about Rust
That's the entire point: no one can possibly prove or disprove that open office plans are a significant contributing factor to company success, or if they're just correlated, or if they're entirely irrelevant.

Yet the popular story here is that they're highly detrimental and have a causal relationship with low productivity. That might be true for individuals, but we have no evidence (as far as I know) that it's true at an organizational level. The benefits to the company from a systems perspective could far outweigh the difference in individual productivity. We don't know, yet people act as though that systems view is not relevant.

I'm not making an argument, anyway, I'm pointing out a hole in the analysis: there are factors that are possibly involved that are more difficult to quantify that everyone seems to be alright with just ignoring. My hunch is that the lack of quantifiability of the cultural, social, and human factors resulting from office plans makes them a blind spot for people with more logical/analytical perspectives, like yourself. I fail to see how that's boring or irrelevant.
"In my opinion, this sets the required standard to a completely different class. The tax services have an important responsibility to process their information in a secure way. The information needs to be protected against leaks."

There is no way to protect leaks 100%. So you have unrealistic expectations.
The Wrong Head: Madness and the French Revolution
Well, doing it over VNC is the Wrong Way™

Consider that texture sampling is optimized for a specific resolution, but how do you get that through a VNC window which can be scaled to any size by the host?

The right way is to render to a texture and grab the frame. See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-3d-streaming-applicat...
It pretty quickly became the top post in a dozen different subreddits. Last night on r/all, 6 of the top ten posts were links to the same NYTimes article. I'm pretty impressed with the level of interest -- probably just my American bias.
I see. Maybe the additional exposure would have shed light on the risk involved?
Underground by By Suelette Dreyfus http://www.encyclopaedia.com/pdfs/9/518.pdf
Rust's error handling is pretty good. First of all you see in the signature of the function that it can trigger an exception, so such a function will return Result<T, E> instead of just T. This is similar to Option, Either or Try in Scala, or to Maybe / Either in Haskell. To easily pipe such errors, Rust provides a try! macro, which just expands into a catch block.

Rust is less functional than Haskell or Scala, so I don't know how that works out, but in FP languages it ends up working great. Also, compared with Go it isn't the same thing.
I never heard anyone gripe about it... not even once. The cost is pretty negligible, and there's a lot of halo benefit (i.e., you just get more people involved on GitHub the platform itself).

The fact that a lot of non-technical employees in marketing and other fields are using it for corporate blogs is actually a nice bit of pressure on the organization to make Pages and web editing even simpler for those users. It becomes harder to lean on "oh it's a developer site so they'll figure it out".

Mostly, though, I think it's just a matter that we wanted it for ourselves. It's pretty awesome from an industry bystander's perspective to have something free, simple, and static, so we can all benefit from more stable docs, blogs, and so on. Maybe that'll change in the future and something Totally Different will change the industry, but for right now I think it's pretty rad, and totally worth the investment.
PSM is no longer taking applications
If we are going by the political map in usage at the time when Nixon ran and governed, then he was a right-winger. That today's political spectrum is far to the right of Nixon is not a fact about Nixon at all, but instead a fact about history after Nixon.
> Nothing wrong with it, I just don't know it well, and I don't like being dependant on things I don't know how to debug.

Yep, this is basically our approach as well.

We've been using DRBD for quite a long time now on our Git fileservers (which also run in active/standby pairs - in fact, they look a lot like our Pages fileservers) so we have quite a lot of in-house experience with it and it's a technology we're pretty comfortable with. Given this, using it for the new Pages infrastructure was a pretty straight-forward decision.
Wow, thats very interesting .. off to port some code!
Is there such a thing as half a derivative?
All sides in the war took pictures while dropping bombs.

So, each country that got hit during WWII is evaluating those pictures nowadays to find non-detonated bombs – leading to lots of maps of where bombs fell.
I haven't tried the USB MacBook yet.
That looks great as well, if a bit pricy. IIRC you can get four RC plugs for the same price.
Everything-As-A-Service Is About to Change the World
Baen Ebooks will no longer be able to provide automatic delivery to a Kindle
No, left and right are not defined by "statist" and "anarcho-capitalist", except in really especially cultish Libertarian Party meetings. Words have meanings:

* Left: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics

* Right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics

There is also the problem that, as noted, many/most of the actual individuals behind today's anarcho-capitalist movement are in fact the same people (or their children/grandchildren) behind segregation and Jim Crow. The far-right has changed its propaganda, not its actual ideas.
Recommend, perhaps.

I never put a paper up on github until after it has been published, and I've seen considerable push-back from fellow scientists at the suggestion we consider it.

Despite the pervasive influence of github, it is quite easy to spawn local git/svn/hg repos.
Provide a compelling alternative and you'll see developers catering to that audience. As it stands, the Play Store is the de facto target because it has the most users and the best developer experience. Amazon provides a very small fraction of users and revenue, other platforms even less.
Conversely, anyone can claim that any fact is "unfounded speculation".
Yes, that was exactly my point.

I have not seen any first hand evidence. None of us have, I would say. Or has it been released? Otherwise, it is slander.
Multi-Host Docker Deployment with Swarm and Compose Using Weave 0.11
The end of that page says "You should use a product based on the Remote Framebuffer Protocol (RFB), such as a member of the VNC family."

I'm personally using a Chromebook, and there is a VNC app that works well. The problem is, how do I even get my scientific OpenGL app using OpenGL on the instance in the first place. The GPU isn't even seen by OpenGL apps by default. I could spend days trying to iron out a process, but I'm really surprised that no one is offering this out of the box.
And now the situation is reversed, if you want a normal size (ie, less than 6 inches) phone, Apple is starting to be the only company in business that delivers powerful hardware in a non-phablet form-factor
Williams: Apple Will Release Preview of Native Apple Watch SDK at WWDC
Not trying to offend... but why do these teachers work for so little? This seems like an oversupply scenario. There has to be some other factor present.
How 'Mathiness' Made Me Jaded About Economics
I deal with patents day in, day out. With millions of patents issued and many more examined, there is bound to be some real stinkers. Whether or not a patent is allowed depends on the examiner assigned to the case, the art unit (technology category), the prior art patents the examiner finds (they define the outer limits of the patent claims), the skill of the attorney/agent, the name of the company seeking a patent, and, of course, the amount of money thrown at the examination.

Some examiner are push-overs. Some examiners are impressed with the assignee name (Google, Apple, and such), and may be more likely to allow. Some examiners seem to take pleasure in rejecting the application, even if they cannot find appropriate prior art.

There is variability in the quality of examination. However, there are methods to correct mistakes at the Patent Office. I am often involved with post-grant review procedures to invalidate issued patents. If a patent is truly overly-broad, then it should be possible to find prior art somewhere in the world that can be used to invalidate the patent.

The presumption that a patent is valid only applies in court. There is no presumption during reexamination or an inter partes review process. In fact, it is very difficult to defend a patent in post grant review. The patent owner is very likely to lose its patent or find it severely weakened.

Also, someone here has pointed out an example or two of terrible patents. Even though issued, these patents could be near useless, because the claims are extremely narrow and are easily designed around, if anyone cares to even do this. Most of these patents are like bees without stingers - still buzzing and spinning around, but harmless and soon to die.

One more thing, it irritates me when people in the software world say the patent system is broken and should be abolished, when they may just be looking at it from just a software point of view. There are many true innovations in every field, and at least a few copycats that are waiting for a product to hit big, so they can create a duplicate completing product. Look at the X-Hose getting knocked-off by PocketHose. There should be some protection for those who have created something novel.

You can argue that some people would create innovations without the patent system, which is true; but there are many more who would not bother without the prospect of patent protection. One more benefit of the patent system is that, in exchange for a patent, the applicant must fully disclose how to make and use the invention. Instead of sitting in some notebook or Word file, the information is shared. The maintenance fee system (where a patent owner must pay a fee at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years to keep its patent in force) weeds out many patents, as the owner decides that it is no longer worth the money to keep it alive.
Pointing out what allegations exist is not slander. Especially when specifically defining them as allegations.
What is the biggest market in the world?

Energy and Cars...

Google is not aiming at brand advertising. They are aiming at becoming an essential company for physical cars in the future, like Apple became with phones in the past.

Lots of companies would love to "sink" growing 19 percent in profits per year as a big company.

It is of great help to have Captain obvious tell us that because the world is finite, all companies growth must stop some day, specially big ones.
1) Sunk cost fallacy.

2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?
Trivial, technically, but can still be an unwanted cost for projects that push a lot of bits out. Our software at SF.net burns through several terabytes of bandwidth each year for several million package downloads. We've always appreciated their network of mirrors. But, it seems like it's time to move away from SourceForge.

We already relocated our revision control to github (though I'm considering another move to a self-hosted thing on Phabricator or gogs or gitlab, as I'm more cautious about using third party services for this kind of stuff these days).
Kitty Launcher – a MAC OS X project launcher for developers
Wow that's an amazing service. Thanks for this.
I think somewhere else on HN today there was mention of the famous discussion between Kissinger and Ellsberg about how the world seems different when you have access to information that most people don't.

I think most people that work on the F-35 feel that way.
So if you rebuild your docker containers every time you deploy, and you deploy daily, security updates should happen on a daily basis. Correct?
Online IDE now with built-in video collaboration capabilities
"inurl:pdf" is great for finding copies of papers, too. "filetype:" supposedly works as well, but I've had much less luck using it.