skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rehashing part of my comment from a different article:

I don't see why any reasonable developer would choose building the same app on multiple platforms over building it once on a standardized platform and having it just work everywhere.

That is, of course, if the standardized platform had all the capabilities and great UX of the proprietary platforms. This is where the web often falls short, and the companies behind proprietary platforms have some very sweet incentives to keep it that way, i.e. developer lock-in and maintaining complete control over the platform's direction.

Despite all the impediments, I still firmly believe an open platform will triumph eventually, because developers love efficiency, and the current landscape of wasting work on rebuilding for proprietary platforms is anything but efficient.

In fact, the web is already capable of competing with native in terms of general UX, not yet quite enough to match or surpass it, but definitely within striking distance. Just take a look at some of the apps made with Ionic: http://showcase.ionicframework.com/

Additional tip for for Android Cordova development: bundling an external WebView like Crosswalk makes quite a bit of difference for <5.0, both in terms of performance and in terms of not having to worry about legacy WebView quirks for older phones.
> specs and requirements keep getting bumped

This is a (common) misperception based on hype. In fact, the release Rift hardware is more or less the Crescent Bay prototype they started demoing last September, and that was pretty close to Valve's "room demo" circa January of last year.

Oculus has been struggling with implementation problems and scaling, but the target spec for what counts as "consumer VR" hasn't changed much in years.
Agreed. When I first got my DK2, I played for about 10 minutes despite feeling sick, and was really ill for like 48 hours. It was a horrible experience. Thereafter, I was very careful about giving up on demos that were glitchy rather than try to play through the glitches, and even more importantly, never ever strafing or moving in a way that is unnatural for the human body. With those two changes, I usually felt fine in VR.
There was a point when Facebook and Twitter were both almost exclusively used by students and teenagers. 6 months ago, I would never imagine having a snapchat, "because I don't need to send dick pics to anyone and if I did, I wouldn't rely on an app to automatically delete it." Yet for the past 6 months, it's slowly become the social network that I use more than any of the others. It's fundamentally changed the way I interact with my friends. And now, I've been seeing an increase in the amount of people "snaping mom and dad."

This has all of the chance in the world to move out of its current demographic, it'll just take time.
The Sony PS4 also has demos with the same idea.
Minneapolis is a bit like that, too. I think the real interesting angle here is the enterprise. We are to Fortune 500 as Silicon Valley is to startups - there are more Fortune 500 HQs per capita here than anywhere else in the world, including the Bay area, NYC, London, and Tokyo.

It's still a fledgling movement, but I think we will see more and more startups here emerging from the corporate giants, developing new tools to meet their needs.
If you browse back a few pages on my comments, I've talked about the how-to at length. I may put some sort of e-book or long-form article together on this to lay it out better. In a nutshell, at the very bottom level you find people with a high appetite for risk who believe in the script and are willing to simply write a check. At slightly larger budget levels, you get access to some tax breaks or financial incentives, plus you can buy what's called a Completion bond that effectively insures the production to ensure the film gets made (subject to having a very very detailed plan and rock solid contracts in place). That costs about $100k minimum but ensures the picture will get completed. Beyond that you raise finance by getting presales agreements from distributors who put money in escrow or enter into sufficiently binding contracts that they can be used as collateral for a bank loan at an exorbitatnt rate of interest, in addition tot the completion bond. The massive risks involved are part of why Hollywood likes film franchises so much, because they make for more predictable revenue than one-off films.

It's somewhat the same problem with distributed patronage. It does work much better for episodic stuff as well as issue-driven documentaries and so on. But if you're limited to that approach then you're looking at no long-form stories, no historical fiction/fantasy/sci-fi and so forth, because of the up-front costs involved. Cameras and media storage are much cheaper than they used to be, but you still need things like lighting, props, locations, costumes and so on. The best prospect on teh horizon is Title III (equity) crowdfunding, where you are actually able to sell ownership units in the film rather than having to do a separate campaign of rewards/swag in return for donations. The Kickstarter/IndieGogog model has a lot going for it, but it strongly favors established rather than new properties.

The model for films today seems to be mostly driven by critic reviews, 2 minute trailers, and whatever all your friends are seeing at the cinema that weekend, which doesn't seem like a particularly good model either.

It's not so bad - people within the industry know how it works and there are established strategies for how to launch films of different budget levels. Bear in mind that the theatrical release is (except for the very largest films) basically just a marketing campaign for the DVD/streaming release. The fact of a film having played in theaters is an economic signal to consumers that it will provide a certain minimum level of technical quality.
> The concern for the first jumper is ... whether it can be thrown hard enough and accurately enough for the second to ever reach it. The concern for the second is whether the first can catch his ball without exploding like a paper sack full of wet spaghetti.

This is just a practical difficulty. There might actually be stronger constraints in play -- the two jumpers might be causally disconnected from one another entirely (that is, their forward light cones might intersect only at the singularity.) I have no idea whether that's possible, though.

> If you aimed correctly, you could send messages to your older self, but I'm not entirely certain if your older self could reply.

Any message has to be received "lower" than where it was sent, so all messages go from younger selves to older selves.
Those features have all launched; see: http://blog.chromium.org/2015/03/chrome-42-beta-push-notific...
RPlay Is Spying on You
there's a LaTeX package (last version dating 2015-04-16) available [0] (with samples [1]):

This package provides LaTeX, pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
support for the Roboto, RobotoCondensed and RobotoSlab
families of fonts, designed by Christian Robertson for
Google

[0] https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/roboto

[1] http://ctan.uib.no/fonts/roboto/doc/samples.pdf
But is it better to have more apps, if most of those apps work like shit? Wouldn't it be better to have fewer apps, (although I reject the premise that it would happen) but higher quality apps?
That must be another plus of living in an atheist post-Soviet world :)
If you're dealing with bridges or buildings then you're right of course, you don't stress anything and you just let the stress dissipate through various movements.

But thermal stresses are very small, for "normal" steel it's 13e-6 per degree C. If you figure that the temperature variations in CA aren't going to be more than say 40C (and that's probably too much) then you're looking at 520e-6 or basically 5e-4.

As far as strain goes, that's not a terribly big number at less than 0.1% especially considering that most of the stress/strain graphs will go up to 10% or more and the first 1% are usually WELL within the linear elastic region. That means that you're talking about doing perhaps only using a few ksi of the steel's strength for the thermal effects.
I strongly disagree. Why wouldn't we want to continue making progress on the web? Where would we be today if cavemen decided spears are good enough so let's just stop there.

I think the web should continue innovating and that trying to compete with native apps is a worthy goal.

The web is the most compatible and universal format. There is a lot of benefit to having a universal development platform. With Node.js the web has been brought server-side as well. There is a huge convenience factor to being able to use 1 platform for browser, server, and mobile.

I don't like being locked into a vendor or being uncertain if this platform will be around 5-10 years later. Having the web around as an app platform creates certainty that encourages commitment from companies.
interesting, didn't know voat was just as toxic, based on the many comments i saw on reddit i thought it was really big
Prezi focuses too much on transitions between the slides and I really don't like it much
"I don't see why any reasonable developer would choose building the same app on multiple platforms over building it once on a standardized platform and having it just work everywhere."

Because it provides a better experience for the user, and because it allows for access to hardware native features.
if facebook is at a growth stops phase, it's possible it's because they've almost saturated their target market. They have something like 1.5 billion users. That's Billion, with a B. How many of those dead services you mentioned ever had 1.5 billion users?
I think this is trying to simplify an already simple idea, succinctly: "Optimize your time intelligently".

Rules of thumb (like YAGNI) may not be correct, depending on the situation. Estimating time complexity is hard, so deferring development defers mistakes in estimation. Great.

However, if you know that you have a 90% chance of needing a feature in 6 months, and it will be 2x easier to build now when you have a team actively engaged on a similar project, then YAGNI is the wrong choice. Counter examples exist, like you are in such an extreme environment where (like first month of a startup) the opportunity cost of those programmers is very high.

Regardless, I would ask "Is this the best use of time now" rather than "YAGNI".
You Should Start Podcasting. Today
> the idea that knowing somebody's SSN basically puts you in control of their life and gives you the ability to ruin it is unbelievably ridiculous

Especially since they get passed all around like that's not the case by employers, insurers, creditors, etc, etc.
Regular SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) is needed to get the headset's coordinate system locked to the real world. Otherwise you need external localization aids - markers, transmitters, IR cameras, etc. SLAM as a general technology is in reasonably good shape, but doing it with no frame delay to pixel or subpixel accuracy is tough. Many of the known algorithms deliver their best info about where you were a few frames ago, because you can average on both sides of the frame and deal with noise and artifacts. If you have to decide based on the current frame in a changing environment, sometimes you'll get it wrong.

Someone might come up with a killer app for a mediocre AR system while Oculus is getting it right. But probably not. The Google Glass debacle shows that crappy AR doesn't sell. The previous several generations of VR headsets show that crappy VR doesn't sell. There's good VR in controlled environments right now, but that's a niche market. This is a technology that has to work quite well to be tolerable to use.
I think quite a wide variety of app devs might find it more important to be able to, say, develop an app faster than have a snappy start-up time, especially if there's no fundamental limitation at play but just limitations of the current tools!

I trust app devs to choose the best tools for the job.
Any time. Basically, one the runtime was removed[1], this became true.

1: Of course, all programming languages have runtimes, but once we got down to C or C++ levels of runtime, that is.
While I see what you are saying and find it interesting, I find the idea of going anywhere with the sole intention of meeting strangers for romance to be very unnatural as well.

My reasoning has little to do with romance and more to do with practicality. To me, people end up in good relationships because they can't imagine themselves without that person. On the other hand, people who are only looking to cure their loneliness usually end up with poor relationships.

I speculate this is because people who are lonely are more likely to "settle" whereas people who aren't looking but happen to find someone can always just leave the relationship with little difficulty and so if the relationship lasts it's due to compatibility.

I hope that didn't offend anyone, I have no issue with people going to bars or whatever to meet other people. This is just the way I like to live my life.
Depends on the single event that led to their victory but you could easily argue that the British Empire would have been better off if it had never gone to war with Germany in 1939. Its a war that basically bankrupted Britain, caused the collapse of the empire, pushed Britain from being the major superpower into second division status, led to the dominance of its major rival (America), and has generally blighted the last 60 years of British history.

Humanity is better off because Germany lost, but Britain? Not so much.
>It turns out that for certain types of content, users really, really don't like to wait for external programs to load.

I'm not sure how that's a valid point. My native media player loads in literally less than a second. (I timed it at 0.59s from when I double-click a file and it starts playback.) This is faster than any webpage can ever dream of loading. And unlike Flash or HTML5 video it gives me completely hitch free playback, whereas browser integrated player tend to drop frames quite frequently.

I would much rather use it than any player integrated into a web browser.
I've found that designing for extensibility is wrong more often than right. The code doesn't stretch the way you expect, and then it strains against other boundaries you didn't realize you were setting.
I'll never understand why our politicians continue to cut funding to the one organization that could help the government save AND make more money.

Not to mention save all of us from the headache of things like this.
This isn't about the normal theft of someone's tax refund by fraudulently filing a tax return. This about the IRS itself divulging the sensitive data required to fraudulently file tax returns. Someone tried about 200k times and got about 100k sets of people's tax histories.

In the more mundane act of fraudulently bypassing the IRS's trivial security to steal a tax return… thieves got me, probably as a result of Anthem's inadequate security. The thieves didn't even have the courtesy to pay what I owed! I say you file my tax return, you take your chances.

The maddening part, aside from the scramble when the April 14th filing from the tax people failed, is that no one in law enforcement is the slightest bit interested in enforcing the law.
Since these are all subjective terms I think I can say I agree at least to an extent - earning your own fortune is admirable in my opinion but changing the world through innovation is awe inspiring, god like.
Are they trying to make a move to imitate microsoft's hololens? That's gotta be it.
If you block the ads, how does the site make money to support your viewing habits?
Yep, and that code isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Big, boring, slow moving enterprise software. I work on one of these systems.
They will presumably be building this out in the middle of nowhere in CA, not in a downtown urban core. But it is helpful to be in driving distance to a metropolis with a high degree of excellent engineering talent.

People from out of state assume everything in CA is nuts expensive but you have to remember the state is also full of farmland, forests and deserts.
Is there a cubic algorithm for determining one graph is a minor of another? Last I checked it was an existential proof and no one actually had one
to be fair, a lot of these money mules advertise as 'legitimate jobs' and stuff, targetting the less-smart people generally..
Microsoft’s Cortana Headed to iPhone and Android Phones
The engines and starter motors have been slowly getting more efficient over the years. I recently hired a car which, once up to temperature, would kill the engine when stopped and fire it up for you as soon as you put it back into gear. That feature wouldn't ship without a lot of confidence in the ability to start every single time without putting excessive wear on the starter.
Al Pacino cancels Denmark trip due to nazi sympathizer theatre performance
Regular SLAM is detecting your own position relative to the environment. Its main use has been for mobile robots. The Dyson robot vacuum[1] is a commercial example. Position tracking from fixed gear is called motion capture.

"Inside-out SLAM" seems to be a term used only here and by one person on Reddit.

[1] https://www.dyson360eye.com/
i think part of the problem is the bad taste anyone would have in their mouth after using any of the obviously fake dating sites that have existed to date. as the majority of dating sites are littered with vast amounts of fake or ancient profiles, after a person has been through a few, they usually write them all off as fake or poor quality. its just an industry, much like adult, that collectively has not done itself many favors in the eyes of the general public and past customers.

the other issue with growing a date network is the fact that it is a hyper local focused market, so unless you have a good regional marketing and roll out plan, traction will be hard to gain.

these two problems coupled make it a pretty tough nut to crack. reeducating, recreating trust and moving market by market is going to a cost a bit. the good news is, members tend to stay around a while, in fact often times for a few months after they have found a new person to date. If you want MRR, dating is even better then porn.

one thing that was good for the market was the disappearance of myspace and aol, both of which allowed for searching via zip, dating status and age... making them free places to find possible dates.

source: used to work in the web based dating industry.
These days, I think "Yagni" is often used as an excuse for sloppy code and as a justification to avoid thinking about design.

I think the principle as Fowler describes it is valuable, but it can be easily abused. Taking the application of "Yagni" at the microlevel to its logical conclusion can be used to justify a mindless, just move on it and fix it later style of coding into which good architecture cannot be retrofit.
I think Napoleon likely would have allied with the US over the long term. The US did not have the baggage of nobility, was ruled by enlightenment thinkers, and we already had a common enemy in the British.

That said, the US was a sparsely-populated backwater outpost at the time with only about 7 million inhabitants (a million of whom were slaves). For comparison, the population of Europe during the same time was close to 140 million. We simply didn't have the manpower, infrastructure or money to meaningfully contribute to a European conflict at the time.
The great tech migration: Silicon Valley people increasingly seek Seattle homes
But on the gripping hand, deferring an implementation often means you understand the problem better by the time you get to it, so that your actual implementation is better than the naïve version you would have written earlier.
I actually think it may be a little more prosaic than that.

In order for us to have a scientifically verifiable theory, or at least a consequence of a theory that is scientifically verifiable, that theory/consequence must be invariant under translations in space, time and rotation. Otherwise there would be no repeatability of any related experiment.

As such, by Noether's theorem, that theory/consequence must conserve momentum, energy and angular momentum. At the very least.

So any theory that didn't conserve these quantities couldn't be scientifically verifiable. So it's sort of a tautology that scientific theories conserve these quantities.
Relevant link: The Divine Comedy on Project Gutenberg (in English)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8800/8800-h/8800-h.htm
There are multiple companies and governments targeting space technology, like sending manned missions and providing infra for cheap launch into LEO.

And there are already many efforts to improve existential risk right here on Earth.

What's a better population comparison? It'd be instructive to estimate this.

But regardless, if you're one in a million, there's like 7 thousand of you. And there's many actors on the stage. But it does spark a useful debate, good point.

I would bet according to my uncertainty. If I was donating expertise or money, I'd supply fractional amounts relative to my own consideration of how valuable each endeavor is. It's not all-in.
> It will take that Sun an infinite amount of time to do that (drops below the Schwarzschild radius). Any conclusions you draw after that point are unscientific.

Not true. You incorrectly assume that when the star collapses there is already an event horizon, somewhere. But it isn't. The event horizon will only form at some particular proper time, and at that time most (but not all) of the stellar mass will be trapped by the horizon and will form a singularity (interestingly all the trapped matter will reach the singularity at the same proper time).

This is all very clearly explained here: http://www.aei.mpg.de/~rezzolla/lnotes/mondragone/collapse.p...

Related physics stack-exchange answer: http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/28837

I don't want to sound rude, but you really need to understand GR. The seminal work on the subject is "The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes" by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, you need to know GR very well to be able to understand it, but the pdf I linked is comparatively much simpler on the GR and the mathematics required.
Nor did they have a link to simply download the font files. You can do that here: https://www.google.com/fonts#UsePlace:use/Collection:Roboto