skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My main issue is that electricity prices are not going to reflect the reduction in costs to the consumer, and instead, between stagnant companies fighting decentralization via corruption of local politics and big monopolies taking over, electricity will be high as ever.

A good example is my local town, where the city council are all bought out, don't even rely on the single electricity provider because they live in a different part of the city, but still keep voting on jacking up prices more and more all while the electrical company that was originally a publicly owned company, (pushed private by our congresscritter), is probably the most hated entity in town for it's shady business practices and constant rate hikes.

(For example, last summer they said they underbilled in May, but didn't catch it till June, and then added the new "back-owed" charges at the new rates in July, one of the hottest times of the year, handily raking in tons more money than they would have. No one did a thing because all our politicians are corrupt. Of course this is in one of the most conservative towns in America, where everyone pays jingoistic lip-service to "family values" like "honesty", but when it really comes down to it we're just as bad as the beltway.)
TCP v UDP for games
I have been using one for a few months. It's still a novelty at this point, but it's a neat device. The voice recognition is great and it works from very far away. I can change songs or adjust volume from 20 feet away with no problems. If nothing else, it works very well as a music player and Bluetooth headset.

The instant answers, unit conversions, etc. are convenient in the kitchen, although they could improve on this front. Alexa doesn't always understand the question and seems to screw up sports scores and schedules pretty frequently. It seems about as good as Siri but not as good as Cortana. I have never used Google Now so I can't compare to that.

Amazon pushes out frequent updates and integrations with third parties - Audible, Pandora, IFTTT and some home automation systems just to name a few. They definitely seem committed to Alexa.

Overall, I like Alexa. I wouldn't say it has changed my life or anything and I'm not sure how much I would miss it if I didn't have it, but I'm glad I do if you know what I mean. It is definitely still an early adopter device. It will be exciting to see where it goes as they add more features. I already feel like I'm in a sci-fi movie from as recent as the late 90's where I talk to the house computer. Neat stuff.
Curiosity.com Launches First App for iPhone
https://www.kuleuven.be/english/news/2013/several-top-websit...
Codr- like Google docs for code. A pastebin replacement?
Solidfire offers unlimited SSD wear guarantee, punts software at market
Yeah but last time I heard, a Klein bottle being only a one sided surface can only be rendered in 4D space with the 'passing through' funnel not breaking or intersecting the curved surface and this can't be rendered in 3D space. Unless recently they've decided to relax that restriction. Nice model though and worth getting but I wonder how best to mount it in a display case.
Super excited for our friends at Sense 360!
Very Interesting – 4 IoT Skills IT Pros Need
Not exactly. It has legal purposes - IANAL (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), but I believe it has to do with proving willful misuse (which matters somehow) and establishing a date of copyright. I believe that the idea is to put the earliest date of copyright, not the current year, which is a common practice.
Chillkeeper
yeah, kind of like your cellphone.
Nice... June 22 was in fact the day when duckduckgo.com broke 10M daily direct query count, as predicted by non-parametric, fully-automated forecasting. Congrats team duckduckgo!
Why do you want any inlining? It's a threaded code. You know an address of each instruction handler, so you can replace an opcode with this address and eliminate a switch and any table lookups altogether.
Has it actually been shown that if we were to throw open the borders to STEM employees that it would result in a net economic gain? Because as far as I can tell, movements to get droves of women and immigrants into software is entirely driven by companies' desire for cheaper labor.
It is not meaningless, it is describing parallel (or at least comparable) revolutionary technology. Think about each you mentioned: How many industries where positively impacted by the advent of cheap pocket or desktop calculators? Would the Apollo missions have been possible (or as successful) if the astronauts had to calculate every azimuth with a slide rule? The slide deck seems focused on the point that mobile is the next major revolutionary technology, comparable to the introduction of super computers and the other revolutionary tech that you cite.
How Minions Destroyed the Internet: the horrible story of the perfect meme
WARNING: This website contains cookies known by the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Real estate prices: just look at the prices on Zillow or something.
To borrow some Jerry Fodor:
1. Obtaining Seattle real estate is remotely plausible.
2. Remotely plausible is better than not at all.
Yes, but Docker is an application distribution format that essentially bundles parts of the server the app needs to run on with it so they can run within a container on the host machine. Didn't Microsoft solve this application bundling with .NET before?
"Sometimes you need to try harder."
You mean search for an employer whom would sponsor citizenship? The article explained it is quite expensive - do employer sponsored citizenships happen?
I am really enjoying this, and will probably be broadcasting here the rest of the day -- if not longer. However, and this may be solely my personal feeling, I wish there was some sort of IRC-style chat instead of the submission/comment system on the right side, as it is now.
Save Your Emails from Spam Filter Purgatory with These 3 Tips
Does anyone actually use the "smart" features on their smart TV?

I know of zero people who do this... and I've asked.
I did this too in the past, but I've since found the convenience of 'git gui' too hard to ignore. The fact that it seamlessly runs on remote servers over X forwarding without having to install anything on the remote server really helps.
Because commit messages are important.
So how do I get one of these in the UK? :)
Which operating systems? Windows? I haven't had that problem on Windows 7 x64, but maybe that's just me.
Everything can be done, you can invest a lot of time to make your code run better on JVM and tune the GC settings etc. If you make the same investment into the Erlang ecosystem (like for example WhatsApp guys did) I think you could match the JVM performance in terms of handling number of connections and staying responsive. If your code does numeric calculation most of the time you are probably having a better time on the JVM though.

http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
I do love my Echo, it's just.. it's entirely Amazon ecosystem and that really limits its usefulness for me.

As an amazon employee I'm sure you're probably bought into the Amazon ecosystem. Maybe you even have a fire phone? :p

But I'm primarily an Android user. I'm just imagining what a device like the Echo would be if backed by Google Now. It would be ten times more powerful, easily.

My girlfriend's primary complaint was "it can't even recommend me a book" (Because Amazon was.. well.. a book seller!)
If it didn't what would the meaning of citizenship be?
That might very well have legs. I wonder how one would support keeping a user logged in across sessions, but that might still be a solvable problem.
Except that nuclear plants do not serve peak demand in any way, unless by "peak" you mean something other than the electrical supply industry means by that term; nukes are by nature very much baseload generation, taking days and weeks to spin up and synchronise. Pumped storage, gas turbine, large-scale hydro,... those are peak supply generation that can be brought onstream in minutes to hours to meet peak demand.
It's on "always on" to the extent it's listening for a trigger word.

Now you can say that "hey they could be secreting recording you anyway."

Sure, but so could any internet connected device with a microphone or speakers.
"even supported by the employees"

To which countries are you referring to?
I'm pretty sure they just resell the blades from a Korean company. I did the dollar shave once then went directly to the company that makes them for a better price. Now I use Harry's which I think are a little better
(See the sibling comment with a "10." in it for context.)

4. The Socolar-Taylor tile. This is pretty cool. So, suppose you have an infinite supply of tiles of some set of shapes and sizes (trivial simple case: squares of a single size). You might be able to use them to tile the whole plane (e.g., the obvious square tiling, like the pixels of a computer display). The easiest tilings to think about, like this one, are periodic: they repeat themselves. Some others are aperiodic: they don't repeat.

In the 1960s, a guy called Wang proved a nice theorem: there is a computer program that can answer the question "here are some tiles; can I tile the plane with them?" if, and only if, every set of tiles that can tile the plane can do so periodically. (This isn't hugely surprising in retrospect; the idea is that you can recognize when there's a tiling if and only if all tilings are effectively finite.) And then Robert Berger found a set of (thousands of) tiles that can tile the plane, but only aperiodically.

(I lies slightly: the tilings in the paragraph above are all of a very special kind: the tiles are squares with carefully designed wiggles on their edges that restrict which ones can go next to which others. Equivalently, they're squares with coloured sides and abutting sides' colours have to match.)

So then the question arises: Berger did this with 20,000 different kinds of tile, but how few do you need? You have probably heard of "Penrose tilings": Roger Penrose found a set of two tiles (these ones aren't square) that will tile the plane but only aperiodically. So ... can you do it with only one?

It turns out you can, and Socolar and Taylor found a tile that does it. You can do this with a hexagon and some restrictions (like the colours on those square tiles earlier) on what can match with what, or you can perturb the hexagon so that the restrictions fall out naturally from the geometry (like putting wiggles in the sides of the squares). Unfortunately, the perturbations required make the Socolar-Taylor tile disconnected -- it's made of multiple bits that move around together!

I am inclined to doubt that anything will come of this that's useful elsewhere in mathematics, but it's incredibly cool.
Honest question: If the author "had come to America to attend Yale." didn't they also research the requirements for citizenship or an extended stay? Did they decide the benefits outweigh the cons or did they just "hope" things would work out? Maybe they made the decision after attending Yale - was this decision not well informed?

I think criticism of the immigration system is warranted and valid, just that potential immigrants need to understand the flaws in the system before they invest in a new life within America's borders.
That's interesting! Is it the feeling of a more fluid conversational flow?
Posted 2 weeks ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692191

Looking through the early access, the style reminds me of the "Head First" books (http://www.headfirstlabs.com/).
Drat – Ruby has a double splat
I used the $200 off feature when I purchased an identical panel without a half-finished roku knockoff builtin.
Alexa is my primary alarm now. It was also common for a time to ask it what the time was or what the weather was when preparing in the morning (our bedroom is our living room).
Holy shit! What happened to PC and console games!?! That $40+ Billion from last year are not to be had any more?
Now You Can Really Cut the Cord
Startup Studio EFounders Grabs $6M to Build 6 New SaaS Startups
I personally consider that opening borders is a moral imperative, but I understand why it is controversial. I understand that the arguments against "letting everyone in" have some merit, though I ultimately disagree with them.

What is a real head scratcher to me is the US policy on highly-skilled immigrants. There are certainly some political constituencies in favor of those, but I can't think of anyone against, at least not one with a modicum of political pull.

One could imagine a regulatory capture scenario where large companies benefit from the regime, because they have an easier time obtaining visas than their smaller competitors, but in practice even those lobby for more, not less immigration.

So who's lobbying against this exactly?
How we use ours:

* "Alexa, what's the weather look like?" (every day)

* "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes"

* "Alexa, what time is it?" (we don't have any clocks in our living room.)

* "Alexa, play some 80's music." (this works great if you just want some music playing)

Also, it's a pretty good Bluetooth speaker.

Yes, you can do most of this stuff on an iPhone with Siri, but this kind of button-less voice control is just better.
WHO finds 2,4-D 'possibly' causes cancer in humans
I use it daily to check the weather forecast, manage my shopping and todo list, and set timers (mainly when cooking) while I'm just walking around my apartment. I also bought the Philips Hue Lux bulbs for the cool factor ("Alexa, turn off all the lights") - but the jury's still out on them. If I had to actually use their Philips Hue android app to turn the lights on and off I would flip out. Echo actually makes them usable.

Once they open up the SDK, there's lots of things I'd love to add which will make my life easier.

It was a great buy at $99. I would have even liked to buy an additional one for my bedroom. At $179 it's a tougher sell - I would have to think twice about it. I also noticed they're selling the remote control separately for an extra $30.
Seems like that's a problem with the legal system, not this law. Presumably the same thing happens with other poorly understood laws.
They were DEA Agents, not FBI.
Imagine what happens when a computer hears everything you say.

And tells you what it thinks you want.

Sorta like:
http://theinternetthinks.com/
But it never has to be cheaper than hydro-electric. ;)

It just has to be cheaper than pure coal/natural gas/etc. plants.
How about a web server?

https://github.com/izqui/Taylor
Something I just realized that I wanted to write, but didn't, was that I generally don't do well in whiteboard interviews. I've done a few and it's always algorithms that I didn't learn in school because I was EE/CE (not CS) and while I took Data Structures and Algorithms, I didn't take Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms or anything like that. I took two compilers classes (which were great!) and a pile of classes dealing with hardware and the practical realities of computers rather than the theoretical aspects.

I'm pretty happy that I did what I did in school, but I wish that people didn't rely on the whiteboard situation as much. If I can talk about what I did to find the edges and corners of a piece of mail in a picture, and how I used that I can rotate the image to be square and then crop the image so that all you see is the letter and not the background, perhaps my ability to do some kind of whiteboard coding exercise isn't terribly relevant. The odds that I can answer questions about how I developed such an algorithm while still not being able to actually write code are pretty small.

You're hiring me to solve business problems and last I checked FizzBuzz or reversing a singly-linked-list aren't business problems. End Rant.
The British Gopher is simply cute!
I'm not sure how to interpret your remark. Generally, we want people to obey the law for a number of reasons, like their own safety, safety of others, morality, protecting rights of minorities (or even majorities), the ability to speak out about wrongs or injustices. Generally, we have laws that we hope encourage us to do good things, and discourage us from doing bad things.

Shouldn't spy agencies do good things, and avoid doing bad things? Letting spy agencies not be accountable for bad behavior seems like a policy that won't work out too well, that will lead to contradictions like eating meat, but hating the butcher for killing animals.

That is, if freedom from being spied on is a good policy for US citizens, it seems like it's a good policy for everyone, regardless of citizenship. The opposite policy (no spying on citizens, but spying on everyone else) ends up making the lack of surveillance a temporary privilege, to be revoked by someone if and when the policy becomes inconvenient.
> most musicians do live shows out of necessity, not by choice.

This is absolutely a correct statement, but not in the way the author intended. A writer writes, a painter paints, a musician performs. Not by choice but out of necessity.
An interesting situation would be if one person got the device knowing their room mate was privacy conscious.

The other person has now lost their reasonable expectation of privacy in their own home and might not even know it.
I've read this a few times, and I'm still failing to understand what, specifically, indie app developers have been demanding "for over six years." Apple isn't going to publicly respond to every support ticket filed in less than one day - this really are apples and oranges

(Not to mention, the answer from Apple could be 'no' in both scenarios.)
First off, Welcome to HN!

This is really cool, and... what an awesome first post! I'm probably biased, but I love seeing game-related "Show HN" posts!

Wishing you all the best!

P.S. dang is one of HN's admins/moderators. dang, if you're out there, a kind request to add "Show HN" to this post, if possible.

@lillian-lemmer, just so you know, the latest "Show HN" posts will surface here: https://news.ycombinator.com/show . This link ("Show") is at the top of the page.
Considering U-6 unemployment is about 12% right now, perhaps this is a feature and not a bug. I still don't understand why Disney and others are allowed to do the things they do with abusing H1B's. Or why firms think they need someone with some fraudulent/substandard foreign degree instead of investing in domestic workers.

There's a discussion about labor to be had here and it should be focused on domestic labor abuses. Unfortunately, these things are rarely discussed and H1B and other abusive programs only rarely flare up in the news, everyone sees them for what they are, but there's no political will to fight them.

Immigration's external costs are ignored as well. The source country is constantly having a brain drain, for example. Its amusing to me to see HN'ers with this pretentious global perspective who have no problem taking the top 20% of the people from countries that need them and thinking themselves humanitarians because they got them a coding job in the valley.

If we started being serious about cutting immigration, there would be more political pressure for these foreign countries to get their shit straight. More local entrepreneurs, more devs focusing on local problems, etc. The status quo right now of fleeing to Western ecomomies just guarantees poor outcomes in poorer nations. We shouldn't be proud of that. Jogesh shouldn't be writing disposable freemium games for some rich guy's son who thinks himself "the next Steve Jobs," he should be helping Indians and the Indian economy with his skills.
For people from some countries like India and China, the wait after finding an employer willing to sponsor green card is still a big killer. Typically people have to wait for 6-7 years now to get green card after first filing it. While I agree with the author, I feel he did not try to find someone willing to sponsor his green card with other employers. If your employer does not respond favorably to your requests about sponsoring your green card, find another employer willing to sponsor it while you still have time left on your current visa. And since the author is from NZ, it would not have taken him more than a year to get his green card had he found someone willing to sponsor him.
It's more like complaining about license plate readers, cabin voice/video recorders, hackable cars, GPS tracking, and being increasingly dependent on a centralized service for repairs and maintenance. The "good old days" were actually different.

Yes, there are some benefits to all of those "features", but it seems prudent to consider and expose their risks as fervently as we're promoting the rewards. Perhaps the current balance isn't ideal over the long term, and we'll only see improvement by actively exploring the whole picture (whatever it is).
He's thinking like a desperate poor person and not as the affluent American he aspires to be.

If I were in this position, I'd start a company to employ me and get an investor to foot the bill for keeping me in the US. Someone as smart and well-connected as the author should be able to manage that. It's difficult to get personal goals to align with the government's wishes, but it's not difficult at all to throw money at the problem.

There are scores of ways to get into and stay in the US, the problem is understanding and navigating the bureaucracy. He managed for 15 years. I read stories all the time of creative strategies yielding a green card and eventual citizenship. I don't even ask the many non-Hispanic immigrants I meet whether they have citizenship or not, they all managed to work the system.
I went to Cliff's house a few years back to buy one of his bottles as a gift for my dad. He was just as effusive, welcoming, and excited for one visitor he'd never met as he was in the video.

I thought I was just swinging by to pick up the bottle and pay the check, but I ended up staying for about 45 minutes (because he just kept going!), chatting about the crawlspace, the robot, and life in general. He talked about eschewing a big career so that he and his wife could focus on making life great for their kids. And it certainly seemed to have paid off for both kids and dad: I've never met anyone who seemed to be having so damned much fun just existing. It was refreshing to see that it's totally possible to be driven almost entirely by intrinsic factors and still exist in the real world. He left an impression as being an all-around fantastic human being. The bottle was pretty cool, too.
Unless I'm mistaken, a Cray supercomputer generally had a dedicated and consistent power supply, i.e. they're plugged in. Most phones aren't, and battery technology is still not at the point where you could achieve constant performance if you were using the phone all day.
Honestly, PC is the best place for indies these days. Mobile (iOS included) is dominated by a few big companies churning out free-to-play titles...
I guess Apple is getting into making music now. They sure are playing Taylor Swift and the media like a fiddle.
in italy they just saw it fit to put a 130 eur registration tax, but I haven't seen any official enforcement body being assigned
I don't know of a comprehensive study that has been done (although there probably is) that links qualified individuals immigrating with net economic growth. However, if you look at it like VC investing, it would be worth letting 1000 people in to get an entrepreneur capable of making a Stripe, Tesla, etc. According to this forbes article[0] 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants. Obviously, many were started a long time ago, however I think the sentiment is the same. We want to benefit from brain drains in other countries, and we want smart people who are emigrating to see America as a top choice.

[0]http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
If I had to guess, Japan or South Korea?