skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications.

Some of us realize the value. I just think it's impossible for most people to not take it for granted. If you're under 30, you inherently take it for granted because you know of nothing else, you simply cannot appreciate the technology as much as someone who lived a good chunk of their lives without it. You can "know" and imagine what life was like before our current internet culture, maybe even empathize, but there are still things that are unknowable and can't be experienced by just going off the grid. One such example is culture. The culture of society was different because of the technology (or lack of) at the time. Everything from how you interacted with your friends, to how you received and consumed media, to banking and your place of employment. Everything was different before our current technology.

The people who grew up with supercomputers in their pockets don't know of a world where 3-way calling was something magical and you'd get giddy when you used it (or horrified when it was used as a tool to trick you into admitting you liked someone and they were on the phone silently listening). Or a world where if you wanted to find an address or phone number, you had to go find a phone book. Wanted to go on a vacation and look up cool places to see while there? You were heading to the library. If you were on the road driving, and wanted to call someone, you had to stop off and find a payphone (and pay a fortune if you were out of the area). Good luck if you blew a tire. But back then, more people were inclined to stop off and help because of this very problem. Again, society was very different back then.

People take for granted the fact that you now have all the world's information and entertainment at your fingertips. I know because I take it for granted myself and I know what the world was like before our current technology. I'm in my late 30s. If I take it for granted from time to time, how can someone who never knew a life without internet & cell phones appreciate what they have?

I know this sounds a bit preachy, and I didn't really mean for it to come across that way, but I find myself echoing Louis CK sentiment on technology and today's youth. His bit here really struck a chord with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
Seriously though, I don't understand how our entire grid has made it this far with no storage. All the electricity used in the US is produced at basically the same instant.

Flywheel storage systems would be a great idea to supplement renewable energy, or even to supplement our current electricity generation technologies. Peaking plants are crazy expensive and most of the time base load pretty greatly exceeds actual usage; it would be great to be able to store some of that energy and use it instead of a peaker.
Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, we always kind of hope that others will jump in and start sharing data as well. We'll see!
As a very technologically savvy person, most TVs I have bought recently are "smart" TVs, just because that functionality happened to be included. I don't use it, but I imagine it's probably listening anyway.

This is the case for most non-technical people as well.
At full volume, probably. At a normal volume, it's pretty good at picking up the wake word (which by the way can just be "Alexa" or "Amazon") at just a slightly raised voice. It then lowers the volume to hear what else you're saying.
Oh so true that $ amount was so little to risk damage to their PR.
Damaging in what sense?
c-base, mother of all hackerspaces, kickstarting a book about the last 20 years
We're not really talking about opening the borders to STEM employees. We're talking about keeping highly educated people, educated at US universities, in the country.

There is some exploitation that happens, but by and large people are going to pay market rate +-15%, minus administrative costs. Administrative costs for hiring immigrants are extremely high, so it makes sense that their wages might be a bit less. (The best way to raise their wages is to reduce the administrative costs.)

The system as it is structured right now is basically designed as a foreign aid program. It encourages foreigners to come to the US, get a degree, work for a few years while saving a lot of money, then go home and invest it in building a new business not in this country.
By far the most important factor for getting a smooth, fast shave with a traditional safety razor is finding the right shaving cream. If you get the pre-lathered ones that come in a tube or tub, you can avoid spending several minutes lathering in a bowl. Good creams include Keihl's White Eagle or Blue Eagle and Truefitt and Hill 1805, each of which is pretty much universally loved by anyone who has ever tried them.

With those shaving creams, I find that it pretty much doesn't matter what brand of blade I use any more, and I can shave in 5 minutes. If you really wanted to optimize on the margins, you could get a sampler pack of 10 different kinds of blades and find the one that works best for your skin chemistry.
Public isn't much better, here in Canada the corrupt kleptocrats running my province clean out the profits of the public hydro corp which disappear into general revenue, so the corp has to increase rates every year as they have no way to save any income, and are increasing filled with more crony management positions with sky high salaries.
Matt Heath should totally be on the main track.
Who Owns My Availability?
Do you trust the advertising/documentation/claims?

If so, Echo advertises that it is listening for its wake word and doesn't transmit the audio until that is used. It sends the information to a service of your choice.

If not, why would you trust that the other device's microphone doesn't activate and send your audio remotely?

What laws protect you from your phone/tablet that don't apply to the Echo?
In particular, it was interesting to read about the theory of taking over social interactions by changing one's ego-state.

A: '"Is your room tidy yet?' (Parent to Child)

B: 'I'm just going to do it, actually.' (Adult to Adult)
I was one of the first people to get an Echo when they were offered to prime members at $99 in November 2014. It has quickly become a great device for our family.

Some of our thoughts:

* The integration with third party services has put it into a new realm of usefulness.

* I am still disappointed I cannot tell it to read me a book from anything but Audible. I would love to say, "Read Hamlet from Guttenberg."

* The connection between Echo and Prime Music is sensational. If you like genres of music over specific artists, it really shines.

* If you have kids, the Echo is a blast for them to interact with. Endless questions from your kids is great to hear.

* It would be awesome if they opened it up more. I could see it being a game master for family games of trivia or spelling contests.

* I'd say we use the Echo for 3-4 hours a day with a majority of the time used to stream music. "Amazon, play Kidz Bop 28" is a common refrain.

* When playing scrabble we use it as a timer.

* We've never used it to order anything from Amazon.

* We do use it to compile shopping lists. I was surprised how quickly this became an essential part of our household. So easy to say, "Amazon, add olive oil to shopping list."

* You can choose between Alexa and Amazon as they wake word. We use Amazon since it is easier for the kids to register with the Echo.

* You cannot change the wake word from those two.

* We use the Android app for non voice control and it has gotten much better recently.

* The news function could use a ton of work. I don't want to hear things I am not interested in from NPR.

* It listens to everything. If you happen to mention Amazon in conversation it'll pick it up, even if you are 2 rooms away.

* At $99 it is a device I'd recommend to almost any family. At $179 I couldn't justify buying one.

Anyway, they have a winner for families if the price point was lower. I am very glad we got ours for $99.
wow. also seeing some other great libraries listed. got any more of them that I can check out and try?
Something I don't understand about fusion, doesn't it also produce radioactive waste? Does the containment system get irradiated with high-energy neutrons?

Ok, I looked it up myself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management

It does produce nuclear waste, but with a short half life. The waste is more radioactive than fission waste, but will be pretty much gone in 500 years.

Since it does produce radioactive waste, could fusion also make large areas of the earth uninhabitable like fission when there's an accident?

I used to prefer fission and fusion research but seeing what happened in chernobyl and fukushima I had seconds thoughts, and now seeing how well renewables are doing I don't care for fission and fusion any longer.

Funny story, in Switzerland they release water from mountain reservoirs during the day to produce electricity and sell the surplus to France and Germany at a high price, and then at night they buy nuclear-produced electricity from France at a fraction of the cost and pump the water back up into the mountains to repeat the process the next day.
InstaTab 1.9 update and getting ready for 2.0
The government is supposed to represent its citizens, so, uh, no.
If I have a choice of a "smart" TV and a dumb one with the same panel, I pick the dumb one (it's also cheaper, but I'd probably pay extra). My "smart" TV in the living room would show ads on power-up until someone told me how to deactivate them. It still nags me to update its useless apps when I accidentally press the "internet" button on the remote.
You don't know C.

Reinterpreting an object as an incompatible object is undefined. int and float are incompatible.

C Standard also specifically states that using an incorrect printf format specifier will result in undefined behavior.
I referenced the Rakoff article because it was on HN recently and is very likely the one 'swombat was referring to in his comment. The editorial by Judge Rakoff was against plea bargaining, and the judge is a scholar of criminal justice, so I think it's reasonable, for the purposes of HN discussion, to use the 2-8% figure with a qualifier as I did ("if the 2-8% error rate is correct").[1]

You also misinterpreted the contents of my link. It's on a tax crime blog, but the text is clear that the author is talking about perceptions of the reasonable doubt standard in general ("In a criminal tax prosecution, just as any other criminal prosecution, the Government bears the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.")

> In a society that values the principles of law and the rule of law, it is better to let a guilty man go than an innocent one, given that they should be innocent until proven guilty.

Every heuristic system of decision will have false positives and false negatives. You can ensure zero false positives, but at the cost of 100% false negatives. If you have any criminal justice system, you'll put innocent people in prison. The social debate is just about how many you're willing to put in prison to reduce the false negative rate to a socially acceptable level.

[1] This exchange in the New York Book Review regarding Judge Rakoff's editorial is also worth reading: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/plea-ba.... It contains letters from Robert Swartz (Aaron Swartz's father), and Judge Michael M. Baylson, as well as a response by Judge Rakoff.
Presidential Hopefuls Sell Swag, Collect Data
You don't have to shout. With its multiple microphones Alexa is pretty good at hearing you over the music. There is also a remote with a built in mic in case you want to control it from a ways off or there is a ton of background noise.

Sadly you cannot change the wake word. 'Alexa' or 'Amazon' are the two available wake words.
The Surface is a strange one, seeing as it is both a PC and a mobile device in one. There are upsides - as you've mentioned - but downsides too. I suspect my parents might not be quite as comfortable using a Surface than they are with an iPad. I'm glad your wife is enjoying it, though.

However, I'm really not trying to get into a war between platforms. My point is that adding limitations, which many of us see as reducing how powerful a device is, can actually enable the user to go further and do more than they could previously.
Plus non-internet connected cellphones. We know full well that the baseband within cellphones can be updated to turn a cellphone into a passive listening device.

This is pre-smartphone tech'.
Yeah, the 3D klein bottle is to a real 4D klein bottle what a circle is to a sphere.
That top performer category is hard to get. It's for world class people, like professional athletes, world renown artists, or Nobel Prize winners.
Hacking Popularity: The Best Time to Post
If my parents ask "How do I get control?" And someone answers "Getting Linux to work takes some time, but..." Their response should be that they won't even try. My parents have a hard time with the concept that there are things called "files". Directories are completely beyond them.
I've had maybe 3-4 times in the same period, but they were understandable. Like "a mess of" triggered it once. We just laugh and move on. I do think the "always listening" argument has some merit, because it seems to me it must keep a buffer of sound to recognize so that it always catches the "A" part of Alexa. But that's not "always listening to everything", versus "always listening for a very specific initial trigger sound".
Rhabdomyolysis and neuropathies as a result of squatting in ‘skinny jeans’
I think people tend to overthink this. The only thing I need from a commit message is what you did and why you did it. (One might be implicit from the other). If there's more than that, you might be committing too much at once. People hardly ever go over commit history unless something got fucked up, and then those are the things you're interested in. Whenever people get OCD about the form or rules I cringe.
> "If it's open source you can fix it yourself, given that it is not standardised somehow, and that you have time to spare, and that you have the skills and knowhow to do it or that you possess the financial resources to hire some developers to do it for you.

FTFY.
But you're a net gain for the country where you do live.
Fusion is still in development, but the goal is definitely for it to become a major player.

http://www.iter.org/mach
I would love to see a green screen interface on a phone, touchable, of course. sings I got a mainframe in my pocket...
This. We use it in our family mostly as a jukebox with occasional Siri-like fun (I'm now in the habit of asking for news updates from NPR every morning).

As Jack Dorsey said, Echo is the future.
I agree. I believe this site is excellent.
That's how a functioning society works, you're shamed away from unnecessarily doing lots of things that create a burden on others. Littering for example. It creates a burden on society to clean up after others.

There isn't shame in using welfare as a safety net, its there to catch you from following in to absolute destitution from which there is no climbing out of in many cases. There is shame or stigma with staying on it and not finding work, or not retraining to find work. Their is shame in unnecessary long term dependency of an able bodied person being on it. There is shame if everyone just up and decided everything I want is already being paid for, why should I bother. That's abuse, by doing so, you take away from others who truly need welfare to survive and aren't capable of finding work or disabled, you take money from other areas that need it like healthcare, parental leave, education, etc. That's finding a candy jar of free candy and just dumping all the candy in your pocket.

There is no welfare system in existence, theoretical or otherwise that could sustain a disproportionally large number of people dependent on it by active choice, where there is more being taken out then being paid into it. There isn't a socialist democracy that can function that way.
CSphere makes docker management easier
I worked for my employer for about 6 months when we started green-card proceedings. I was a junior engineer on an H1-B then, having been hired straight out of college from the Netherlands. The job-req I applied for had been sitting there for well over a year, no American worker could be found to fill that position (many interviews were done, no suitable candidate found). I got my green card (EB3) in January of this year, 5 years later and am now the lead security architect on a large project. In those 5 years I've never been paid below average. I'd say it panned out quite nicely for both me and the employer.
Hey everyone, I found the paid shill.
What is the thing with languages anyway. Previous generations were so fetishist about it. I found I've learned deeper things by toying with musical instruments and geometry, although encoding geometry (among other things) as visual symbols was a great foot in the abstraction door. But these intellectual aesthetics are far from human communication IMHO.

ps: sorry for that digression btw
Uhh yes? Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, and the YouTube app (it is Chromecast compatible).

We use it extensively. We've talked about cancelling cable but my wife watches the live sports too much.

PS - We'd also use a HBO Go app if they had one. Currently it is Amazon Fire and game console exclusive as far as I know.
>it's surprisingly very fast

This is very true. With Google, you have to say "Ok, Google", wait for it to go "bleep" and start listening, and only then ask.

With Echo, you just say "Alexa, what time is it" in a single second, and you get your reply.
A pretty ignorant and FUD filled post to be top ranked.
Show HN: Magnr – A Bitcoin Savings and Investment Platform. [London Based]
That's just thesis style infinity + 1, nothing special, a lot of wasted space due to huge numbers.
> From Europe, where people share some culture, they never the less still experience integration issues where locals resent foreign populations, example France and polish workers, or Germany and Serbs or Turks, or Spaniards.

It's not really foreign populations per se. The resentment is really mostly socioeconomic. Nobody resents Persians in the Netherlands because the Persians who migrated here are mostly upper-class with a long tradition of higher education. Whereas the Turks you mentioned were considered guest laborers, Dutch companies literally drove busses to the poorest little villages in Turkey in the 60s and found the people with the least education, who couldn't read or write and had perhaps 2-3 years of primary education, then offered them a job working unskilled labour in a factory hoping they'd go back home after 10 years, basically the 1960s equivalent of off-shoring production to China at a pre-globalisation time when the factories were still back home.

Knowing what we know of lower-socioeconomic classes (higher rates of crime, lower rates of education, higher pregnancy rates, more conflict with authority etc etc), it's no real surprise it turned out this way. The sad thing is that in Europe the debate about these problems acts as if it's a cultural issue (e.g. Turkish culture or Islamic culture), when it's really a socioeconomic problem (taking the least educated people from an already poor country, putting them in factory housing and not teaching them the local language, and expecting them to go back home or thrive), not a cultural one. And this debate has essentially created tons of animosity because it invites all this 'class of civilisations' bs rhetoric and turns it into what in the US is referred to as a 'racial' problem.
I couldn't work out why people didn't just use the browser cookie controls. It seems shortsighted to force the server to bundle a message down the wire to me - the browser should tell me that. What if I am a dumb client like telnet that's just done a GET?

Do we also need servers to inform us in large letters that they're making a note of our IP address and adding it to their logs? That they're using our referral info and browser details (I'm using Chromium on a Mac!)? That they'll use those details for analysis? Weirdly people have switched to Google analytics instead of just looking at the server logs (like awstats from yesteryear). Do we need messages telling us that the ISP is throttling us or logging too? That I'm using PPP or something?

It's all daft. Hopefully this madness doesn't make it into mobile telephone calls - "your location can be triangulated from our phone towers"; "you're using GSM which has weak encryption and can be eavesdropped" etc. etc.

We should have the option of authorising all the GET requests it makes too I feel! That'd keep websites from loading too much (and suffering website bloat, as the average website data size has been climbing massively due to all that JavaScript)
I find this method to not work too well for me because oftentimes features will have changes to the refactored code.

So I'm stuck with undoing my feature code or leaving smells of my feature in the refactored code.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong though.
3 - The rare earth mining operations in China which provide the raw materials for solar panels, batteries, and many other electronics products are reportedly quite filthy and require massive energy (diesel trucks, processing plants, etc.)
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-m...

The push for renewable energy would not be possible at its current scale if it weren't so attractive to the political elite (and subsidized as well), for the shortcomings you mentioned. Fossil fuels and nuclear simply better fulfill the role of consistent, cheap, plentiful energy. Unfortunately, even though nuclear is quite safe, has very few emissions, and emits a ton of energy, it takes a Herculean effort to get federal approval to build a plant.
I should have said the monadic form of Option<>. When you use it monadically, the result is nearly equivalent to exception handling; you call a function and the default behavior is to bundle up the error and just throw it up. It is true that if you are manually unwrapping it every single time, it's equivalent to checking every time.

"For Golang programmers, "return err" is muscle memory."

First, as I said, no, I actually think about it every time. And second, I bet you end up with "muscle memory" default handling under any scheme (for instance, exceptions: don't catch them or rethrow them)... in the end, you can bring the horse to water but you can't make it drink. You can only feel good that at least you brought it and you did your part. Option<>, even manually unwrapped, does not force the programmer to do something sensible with the error any more than any thing else does, or indeed, can.
That's thesis style infinity out of infinity +1. Nothing special, weird fonts, lots of wasted space.
Does France Need Axelle Lemaire?
The Apple Watch doesn't inspire much confidence in Apple's future products. And I'm not talking about iPhones and iPads and Macs here. Those are "easy". But Apple Watch, Apple Car, Apple VR and whatever else they might want to launch in the future - I doubt they will be "Jobs-quality". And by that I don't just mean whether or not they will use premium materials. But whether the "product" package makes sense or works as well as it should.
Is it a language, or an operating system, or a virtual machine?
I spent many years waiting to get my Canadian paperwork sorted out and spent a small fortune doing so. In the end I gave up and moved back to NL.
MassPay – an API built to help send money to anyone, anywhere, for free
> Do we have to wait 200 years to see fights with ISIS in a similar "noble tragedy" kind of light, where there are no clear baddies and nobody's assigned blame for the killings?

I dare you to find any redeeming quality in ISIS.
Ask HN: Do any of the 'Do Funky Stuff X – You don't need to code' work?
Is this a healthy productive trend the industry is moving towards or is it time we stop these gimmicky claims....