skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"she" is also often used when referring to countries, though the only reason for it (and for vehicles) that I've found is tradition. English is strange.

I used a gendered pronoun in the second sentence to create mystery in the lede (if didn't already know it was about a company being sold when you hit the post, you don't mind out until further down) and go back to "it" afterward.
Wait. Again? Re-Relaunch of Google Wallet?
> Side rant: why do they teach trig before calculus in high school? That's completely backwards. Trig is a bunch of arbitrary formulas if you don't have the calculus behind them.

Math is hardly the only place where arbitrary facts/formulas are taught, and people taught to apply them, before learning the underlying math/reasoning behind the arbitrary facts/formulas.

And trig is useful in lots of places in the science curriculum without the backing calculus, so teaching it in the math curriculum early to support the broader curriculum makes sense from that perspective.
The 'real' paper sits behind a paywall at http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v9/n6/full/nphoton.201..., but http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00095 probably is fairly similar.

Crux seems to be "our algorithm searches the full design space of fabricable devices with arbitrary topologies."

Very useful, but may be not that spectacular, depending on the efficiency of that search.
Almost impossible to read that font on my machine.

edit: I'm on Linux/Firefox. I assume it has to do with what font sets I have installed.
An arXiv preprint of the scientific article and copies of our previous work on this topic are available on our research group's website[1]. Just search the page for "design"; the most detailed reference would probably be Jesse Lu's thesis[2].

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/nqp/publications.shtml
[2] http://web.stanford.edu/group/nqp/jv_files/thesis/Jesse-thes...
Guess that means I'm wrong too about reality tv, Justin Bieber, fast food and the importance of cars as a status symbol.

Oh, and let's not forget the believe in the existence of an omnipotent deity.
Did anyone see this coming? Quite a successful secret by Google.
Next up: Street View 3D?
Can you recommend any good resources learning about taking this approach?
How does it do stereoscopy?
The interesting aspect here is the iPhone availability for Cardboard and the use of Youtube as the platform for 3D VR.

Youtube already had stereoscopic support, but there were not many clients available, content was limited and difficult to create with 3rd party solutions that all cost money. It never took off and couldn't ride the wave of the studio and CE company driven 3D momentum, which quieted down after a while anyway.

This time Google ticks all the right boxes. Client devices on iOs and Android. The videoplayer everyone uses. A $5 cardboard enabler. A capture platform with GoPro and free assembly software.
Since the original thread on this vanished, questions (and applause) for any Googlers reading this:

- - - - -

EXCELLENT. Two questions:

1) If I've stored photos as 2000px on G+, will they automatically upgrade to full size if I upload my full-size photo library to GDrive?

2) Likewise, will auto-awesome creations from previous low-quality pictures be upgraded to higher resolution versions?
I like it!

A good test of an organization or person isnt how they are, but how they adapt. And the signs are promising here.
True. Amazon's CMS is pretty old-school, but let's not blame Java like one of the commenters did earlier.
Web page is nice-looking, but isn't snappy (at least not on my laptop).
just started dealing with avago a few weeks ago, before that had never heard of them. seems like they do a lot of buy and splits to get the really profitable/strategic pieces and sell of the remainders
"They had some issues understanding basic system administration, data modeling, basic algorithms, web architecture, and systems modeling."

Can you expand on this a bit? As in, what kinds of things within those areas were they not getting or completely ignorant of?
This is quite an overstatement, the electric potential of a neuron would be most accurately described by some pde, only approximately by the ode's that are usually used. Then it is another bunch of approximation down the line until you arrive at neural networks. It might be the case that certain types of neural networks accurately model the computational essence of what a brain does, but it does so in quite a different way.
Didn't this come out last IO (2014)?

I can't see how it is different.
A dark side of comedy: the impact of John Oliver’s ‘fowl’ jokes on Wikipedia
Some languages use pronouns differently. Dutch people sometimes use "he" or "she" when referring to objects even when speaking English, because they are used to doing that in Dutch. So it could be that English is not his first language.
Definition 5.1/5.2 is interesting. It defines derivative at point c, not the derivative function of f. Note that f1(x) is not equal to f'(x) for all x, but f1(c) = f'(c).
We're obviously going to have different definitions of abusive and obnoxious, but for the record I don't find tracking that I visited a website to fall under that category. I was speaking more for pop ups and things that play video or music.

And as I said, adblock has it's uses. If you don't want your kids to see ads for sex toys, nothing wrong with using adblock when visiting those types of sites.
What you described is exactly what WeChat is able to do and doing well. It has a half billion users (including every Chinese I know) yet comes with no social baggage. If you don't like the social features (called Moments) you can turn it off, or simply use WeChat as an IM and hardly notice the existence of all the other features (there are not many anyway)

So your enriched version of address book does exist, but only in China, and it is one of the few things I miss so much when living outside China.
Android M Developer Preview
>If you use Google Now, Google autorecommends locations -- including retail stores -- that you might want travel time to based on its tracking, so its pretty hard not to be aware that it is doing the tracking.

I've noticed with that, every time it surprises someone, they call it creepy, but they don't turn it off and then get used to it. Myself included.
Just to add to this point, the difference is that Rust can only guarantee this for the standard library. I can similarly write a library with safe interfaces that can be (ab)used to cause UB and there's little that the Rust team can do. This is different from other "safe" languages.

This is why it's so important to establish what the responsibility and expectation is of library developers to uphold the safety guarantees that everyone else relies on. It only takes one bad library to destroy the safety guarantees everyone who is transitively using that library relies on.
I'm with you on Reader. Heartbreaking to lose that. Oh well, Feedly has been an acceptable replacement.
From the article this submission is linked to:

"The M Developer Preview includes an updated SDK with tools, system images for testing on the official Android emulator, and system images for testing on Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player devices."

So, no.
> New protocol for "Internet of Things" called Weave.

From past news articles, "Weave" -- with that name -- has been Nest's protocol for a long time. What seems to be new is availability outside of Nest/Google.
My 3 Biggest IT Career Mistakes
Hiding that chat with chrome tools was the first thing I did upon opening the stream.
16 GoPros? Sounds expensive. Certainly not something I would buy, since it would gather dust on the shelves along with my other gadgets after a few initial uses.

That being said, this may be the right time to reinvest in 360 degree stereoscopic video since the viewing technology is finally catching up. Point Grey has been making similar spherical cameras since the 90's [1]

Pretty cool idea overall. Other questions I had: Does it have a single data interface? How do you charge this behemoth.

[1] http://www.ptgrey.com/360-degree-spherical-camera-systems
DASH? No.

Anyway, a bit is a fraction of a packet, so the download speed is more or less irrelevant.

For TCP/IP you want several sets of ACK packets, which can be a fair amount of data, before you try and guess a line speed. You can do Quick Start etc., but the protocol is designed around maximizing transmission speeds not a steady download rate.

You don’t need to stick with TCP/IP, but that opens up a huge can of worms which is more often than not handled poorly.

PS: To simplify; a lot of things are designed around maximizing total bandwidth. Clever buffering strategies are really important to pulling this off and many of those strategy's fail when someone is slow to fill up a buffer.

A simplified example: You send a 3k, packet the network is designed for 2k packet’s so it breaks that 3k packet up sends 2k, buffers 1k and waits for your next packet.

Your client on the other end expects 3k of data, that times out and it asks for you to resend... network gets 3k so it sends the last 1k and 1k of redundant data. Meanwhile the client things it must have a really slow connection even though requesting more data would speed things up. Note: There are a lot of ways this example could go. The network might give up on getting more data and send a 1k packet which adds high latency to your connection as you always need to wait for that timeout.

Consider, Wi-Fi connection > local network > home router > cable system > cable network > ...
I'm extremely excited about Expeditions - VR for schools (and other people/institutions at some point, I guess) can have great impact on how we learn. This is a long term investment, with better educational system we'll get more innovators and, I hope, better world.

JUMP (camera rig & assembly) is cool too and I hope it won't share the same fate as Glass. In general, seeing all the progress in the VR world makes me feel that we're at the edge of another technological revolution (and it's great that Google wants to bring this experience to everyone, or at least the viewers as the camera ring won't be cheap). I have a great dose of skepticism, of course, but I plan to learn as much as possible about developing for VR platforms in the coming months - can you suggest good resources for this? What languages are the best bet? What concepts are the most important ones? I'd appreciate all suggestions.
I used 128-bit as a max. I just don't like some unbounded thing when we know that there is a practical max. I wouldn't call something perfectly fine when getting the number of characters actually displayed on the screen is a chore.
Ask HN: Are user names personal information?
Setting facebook's real name policy aside, is there case law in which user names are defined as personal information. As an example, consider the following. Reddit has a policy in which users should not post personal information, especially about other users. A gaming subreddit deletes links to videos/screen-shots that contain gamer tags claiming gamer tags are personal information. Clearly this is policy rather than law, but often law influences policy. Is it reasonable to consider user names to be personal information?
The article talks about switching in a single place, as if by accident. The abstract has no mention of switches at all. Yet, "light-based computers" is something completely dependent on switches, and not much of anything else.

If somebody has access to the actual paper, is there any chance that can lead to switches? Or just multiplexing / demultiplexing?

Update: Thanks fferen. It did demuxing. No work related to switches, except for a "in the future, somebody may use a similar technique to make a switch" on the end (yeah, maybe, using some other dozen techniques not yet discovered, and this one). Demuxing is very important, just that it alone does not lead to practical photonics.
Probably with some simple optical flow view morphing. There's enough data from all the cameras to enable creating a stereo image.
Has anyone though through doing this with binocular vision in all directions? just thinking about the geometry, I can't thing of a way to do it without a truly egregious amount of sensors.
Yeah, not sure why it has font weight of 100.
If you're going to make that kind of complaint, you really should at least mention what you're using to view the page.
So, if you're at an event or something (like sxsw) do you wear this as a hat? or have a large pole... or how does filming with this actually work?
Yep!
Confirmed in Go 1.6. Also - algebraic data types, monads, operator overloading, actors, STM, multiple inheritance, exceptions, LINQ, full opt-in dynamic typing, optional GC! Anything you want! All language features, ever conceived, will be crammed into Go, starting with the next release!
I used to think VR was mostly for gaming, but with this, and expeditions that they demoed, I'm starting to get really excited about VR apps for the masses.
I think that moving the world away from HTML and XML as markup languages is likely to be considerably harder than simply defaulting to using UTF-8 in any new code for which there isn't already a natural encoding to choose based on the platform or APIs you're developing on.

Furthermore, even beyond the markup, the vast majority of written content is in the Roman alphabet, of which most characters are in the ASCII range, and those that aren't fit into 2 bytes of UTF-8. 55% of text on the web is in English, then languages using the Roman script or other scripts in the 2-byte UTF-8 range make up 21 of the next 25 most commonly used languages on the internet; of the top 25 languages, only Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai are in ranges that require 3 bytes in UTF-8 for the majority of their characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet).

So for the vast majority of text that is processed, UTF-8 is dramatically more efficient than a hypothetical UTF-24 or the real UTF-32. Now, you might say "well, it should all compress away anyhow", but when dealing with text in RAM, it is generally not compressed (and that would make handling it far more complex than just using UTF-8), and memory capacity, latency, and bandwidth can all be important.

Trying to deal with text as fixed-width characters is simply incorrect. Almost every non-trivial means of handling text needs to support arbitrary length strings, needs to deal with clusters of more than one codepoint as a single unit, and needs to iterate over the characters linearly at least once (and can then store byte offsets for random access later on). Dramatically increasing storage requirements of text for the non-benefit of being able to deal with fixed-width codepoints just doesn't make sense.
Looking at the picture immediately makes me think of it as an oversized crown or tiara you're supposed to wear on your head. Sort of a "Glass 3.0".

The "Camera Crown" is an entirely impractical idea of course (that is, not the actual idea), but that does lead me to wonder how it's meant to be moved through spaces, if at all.
so, based on the first image, I need to press 16 buttons to start capturing, and take 16 sd cards out before I can view them?
But the actual release may support it, theres no way to know now
Amit's probability of death http://tumblr.amitgupta.com/post/85539436331/filed-under-tab...
He's at about year 3 which looks a LOT better than the earlier years.
There is definitely overlap in the FOV of the cameras that are adjacent to each other (GoPros in 16:9 generally have about a 120 degree field of view, though specifics depend upon which GoPro models is being used), so I assume they timesync the individual videos and use that overlap information to determine relative depths of things.
The Golang FAQ mentions from the day one that they are going to consider adding ge<censored>ics someday in the future. So I was wandering if there are any updates regarding this. I didn't expect such a fanboysm though...
Yes, they don't want to be associated with someone who might use that association to emotionally harm others. I don't see the contradiction.

I don't understand your point about being 'ahistoric'. Private organizations are allowed to prohibit certain types of speech. That is part of what freedom of assembly means. Quoting Mills, it's the "freedom to unite for any purpose not involving harm to others". Or earlier in the same paragraph, "the principle [of expressing and publishing opinions] requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like".

If we don't like someone else's opinion, we don't have to express it for them.

Like I said, freedom of speech is on par with freedom of assembly. There can be a tension between them, certainly, but it's certainly not the case that freedom of speech historically trumps freedom of association.

Otherwise, a Perl conference will be forced to accept talks about C#, Google would be forced to accept and forward unsolicited commercial email, etc.

Quoting now from the Supreme Court in THOMAS v. COLLINS (1945):

> It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances. All these, though not identical, are inseparable. They are cognate rights, cf. De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 364 , 57 S.Ct. 255, 259, and therefore are united in the First Article's assurance. Cf. 1 Annals of Congress 759-760. [323 U.S. 516, 531]

Similarly from N. A. A. C. P. v. ALABAMA, (1958):

> Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association, as this Court has more than once recognized by remarking upon the close nexus between the freedoms of speech and assembly. De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 364 ; Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 530 . It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the "liberty" assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech. See Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 666 ; Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 324 ; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 303 ; Staub v. City of Baxley, 355 U.S. 313, 321 . Of course, it is immaterial whether the beliefs sought to be advanced by association pertain to political, economic, religious or cultural matters, and state action which may have the [357 U.S. 449, 461] effect of curtailing the freedom to associate is subject to the closest scrutiny.

How about you clarify to me what the freedom of assembly means, and its connections to the freedom of speech? Since the historical record seems to say they are aspects of the same sense of liberty.
I'm curious how Android Pay works on the retail side. Does it use a traditional VISA payment terminal system or are Google running some sort of server-side payment hub?

I'm assuming, for instance, we won't see Android Pay integration in to Bitcoin apps any time soon.
Browser extensions are the new kernel modules
this might just "jump start" VR (pornos)

Ok sorry couldn't let this word pun slip :-p
I wonder if this is what gets VR to take off. Seems like Oculus will be way too expensive for practical use. Once people start getting content out there all you'll need is a $20 cardboard kit to take advantage of that.

You could have several of these say at a music festival hanging around and watch them from your house at your leisure without having to deal with heat and crowds. And worse you go see an artist on one stage and realize they're a dud and you have to now travel to another stage. With this, boom, you can switch in an instant.
If you're in a position where you need something to listen to while driving or public transportation, I recommend The Jeff and Casey Show: http://mollyrocket.com/jacs/

It's quite fun. I would describe it as two experienced programmers who are goofy, grumpy, and opinionated, shooting the shit.
Not enough people to make it worth hiring the fleet of delivery people.
Go 1.5 is shaping to be a pretty major release! Definitely feels more major than 1.3 and 1.4 were. Really happy it's progressing so nicely. Can't wait to see the GC improvements in 1.6+.
That'll be awesome! Walking on any street of the world, just as if you were there? Why not!
xiaomi's sports camera is about $70, gopro's cost is about the same I guess
I love all the experimentation in this area but I'm afraid systems like this are going to fall into a sort of uncanny valley of VR. Your brain is incredibly good at picking out the discrepancies between the real world and a high-resolution 120fps image with surround sound - just as it is incredibly good at recognizing objects and motions masquerading as human.

It's like going from 2D/24FPS to 3D/48FPS. You'd think it would be a huge increase in perceived realism but it's quite the opposite. What you want is magic window, which is what you get when a film or even a game really pulls you in and your perception sort of synchronizes with something completely out of step with your physiology and totally unbelievable for many other reasons. Instead, you get a feeling of unreality or surreality, and the final gap between the media and your perception is unbridgeable.

I think that's part of why VR/3D/HFR stuff has always been so unconvincing, and why it's no coincidence that it's finally only catching on when we pair it with totally unrealistic games and demos. You need the fantasy. Because it's so clearly not reality, and anything that attempts to replicate reality too closely will be rejected.

Anyway, cool tech though, and I'm sure I'll enjoy using it some day. But for now I think the foreseeable future of VR is in virtual environments, not in the duplication or capture of real ones.
Objects of devotion are often referred to as if they were women.

"The Sea is a harsh mistress." "He's married to his job."

Does it bother you when people refer to non-children as children?
"That boat is his baby."
It's a little sad to keep seeing such approving references to Strunk & White's Elements of Style. To see why, read Pullum's The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style.

http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf
This conversation again?
You'll need some fancy ML/CV algos to take photo-only data from this to turn it into 3D environments, but Google could already create Street View in 3D with their self driving car data their collecting using their cloud point laser scanners.
I had a book of chindogu from at least 10 years ago. They had an invention that looked shockingly like the jump camera. Here is an image which shows a scan of a few of the images including the relivent one: http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chindogu-un...

I find it kind of funny that Google is now using a system that was invented so long ago as a joke. Why not use any of the other system to capture 360 3d images? Why did Google decide 16 cameras was the right way to go?

The only reason I can think is you might get higher res images out of 16 cameras than with only a few and a hemispherical reflector or a motor, but is it really worth the extra cost and points of failure?
The 16-GoPro rig isn't for a home user, it's for YouTube channel owners and other video publishers who are making money from their videos and want some more immersive content.
The Servo browser engine: https://github.com/servo/servo
Comcast is worse than zero brand, it's a brand associated with poor customer service. Xfinity is an attempt to rebrand.
Tomorrow's JavaScript syntax today (ES 2016 Transpiler)
If it's using infrared light for signaling, doesn't that mean waste heat could more easily corrupt data?
GoPro cameras can communicate over wifi, so probably not.
20 years ago, in 1995, 4 year-old computers from 1991 generally could run just released productivity software, compilers and OS versions just fine, on Linux, Amiga, Windows/DOS computers at least. It was best to add another RAM stick though.
Guess I'll have to finally root, no way there will be any issues getting it running M.