skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great, and I'll definitely be playing with this tomorrow.

I also can't seem to stop myself going off half-cocked and writing language interpreters[1][2] and virtual machines[3]. It's really quite addictive, and gives you a "I really made something" feeling that a new backup script or CRUD app doesn't quite provide.

I too actually started off writing a stack/RPN-style language for the exact reason that I didn't want to do a proper parser, but then realized that, for properly recursive structures like in Joy[4], it really makes it easier to just write a parser. And it turns out that a recursive descent parser really isn't that difficult, conceptually, once you spend the brain-time to work one out yourself[5]. Like most things programmatic, it's tough to wrap your mind around until you've done it once, then it's just a matter a typing and bugfixing.

Along with the aforementioned Joy (which is a stunningly elegant language), some other languages I find inspiring are rhoScript (http://www.rhoscript.com/), Pico Lisp (http://picolisp.com/wiki/?home), and the very clever WadC editor (http://strlen.com/wadc-editor), which implements a DSL and interactive environment for describing Doom levels in code, rather than by dragging vertices in a purely graphical editor (This isn't as crazy as it sounds if you're unfamiliar with the limitations of Doom levels, since they are constrained to certain types of simplified geometry that lend themselves well to this).

In short, keep it up! I've never had to use any of these skills in my day-to-day work (I'm not even a professional developer, though I'd like to be.) but it's still a heck of a lot of fun to play around with.

[1] http://billipede.net/2014/03/30/reverse-polish-cowgirl.html
[2] http://billipede.net/2015/05/09/dawn.html
[3] http://billipede.net/2014/06/05/bedrock.html
[4] http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/research/research-proje...
[5] http://billipede.net/2015/02/14/lets-write-a-parser.html
You might think you're clever. Hell, you probably are clever. Unfortunately, that's not what matters. What matters is how the owner of the server will react, and how important they are. If you're identified and charged, the DA will levy absurdly burdensome charges against you. You'll be forced to spend thousands of dollars on defense. You'll spend months distracted by the proceedings, and will inevitably be asked about it by peers/employers when the news hits the streets.

But you're right. You may never be convicted. Go ahead and try your luck.
>IQ tests are notoriously unreliable across cultural and societal boundaries

That's irrelevant. What matters is what they _are_ reliable for.
Go out and find 20 single mothers and stock their pantries with full of food.
Thirty years from now a lot will have changed, including battery technology. If you buy into the singularity and exponential technology growth, it might we wiser to not rush into any extremely costly solution now.
Indeed, I started working on this http://ninjaspam.com/, work in progress
As you alluded, postal systems have a funny way of recovering the costs of these "free-shipping" packages from China/HK: by raising domestic rates, particularly on parcels.

Which only further incentivizes people to buy the item from China instead of domestically.
We've discussed this many times. It's probably time to add it to the FAQ.

The reason we don't ban paywalled sites is that (a) there are standard workarounds for most paywalls, and (b) banning the WSJ, NYT, New Yorker, Economist, etc. would diminish the quality of HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777971

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634076

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647853
I suppose you could sell custom binaries, but if you distribute them, you likely have to publish the code. That said, you could maybe run them in the cloud yourself and sell access.
Who is he survived by?
The comments on this EETimes article[0] are snarky but the criticisms sound cogent to me.

0: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325499
Thanks for the concise summary.
I guess this further shows how ambiguous of an acronym ML is.
I will admit I do not know a ton about these specific energy topics however I tend to immerse myself in new topics for a few weeks and have had very good results. I have been working on some concepts that I know I can pitch to my contacts and I have 1 very novel experiment to conduct in solar which I'm not holding my breath on but if it works it would be pretty damn cool. Basically if it's worth learning I'm down to go at it 100% whether or not it's specifically commercializable - now that you've mentioned these thing surely I'll be taking a closer look. I just love to make things really - and I find it incredibly amusing how simple it is to experiment with new advanced concepts.

My lab is completely random but I have a focus on keeping a huge and well cataloged material inventory as well as electronic components.

I am huge on the conceptual side. I don't consider myself any sort of genius but some of my ideas have blown me away and I know they are feasible and worth trying. I realize I have some hard skills to work on, especially my advanced mathematics - this is where I'd like to have someone to learn from.

There's a lot of really brilliant people who are completely happy building 20th century tech for $100 that was 1,000,000 back in the day - but I focus almost all of my time coming up with new concepts.

Traditionally, expertise in a nice has been praised - it's great for iterative improvements but it makes it tough to innovate without a huge team. I have worked on my core skills however over the past few years I have done a lot of work expanding my breadth.

But as for the lab I guess I'd say I have a lot of low voltage components/ tons of SMD components, a handful of high voltage components and HV safety gear - I'm good to work up to around 40kv with my equipment and probes. ,tons of metals and alloys, a very good basic inorganic chem setup, a basic organic chem setup, basic laser system, vacuum system with a lot of components, high voltage setup (I love tubes, electron guns, piezoceramics and piezocrystals, plasma, etc). I love tear down things for their components, etc.

My current work partner is really smart but he's really only interested in machine learning - he will stay on but I need someone who can help me validate some of my ideas and I can help provide whatever skills I have that may be useful for your projects.

I was in software development for a long time solo... then I joined a team, became a partner, made a respectable sum for a year or 2 and then realized... money is so much fun but I was left feeling completely empty until I returned to roots.

Anyway the ideal person is someone who will push me to learn and do more, and someone I can learn from, and someone who wants to do the same and someone I can help in that regard as well.
Very interesting extension. Doesn't the YouTube ToS prohibit playing just audio from a video? (#8 and #9 under Prohibitions are where I got this impression: https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms)
For an established cow farmer adding additional cows at marginal cost to receive additional revenue is economies of scale. Forcing them to allocate resources to the areas where they don't enjoy economies of scale is likely to raise their cost and not lead to optimal outcome.
http://filecatalyst.com/
http://filecatalyst.com/open-source-fast-file-transfers/
http://www.jscape.com/blog/bid/78782/How-to-Boost-File-Trans...
http://asperasoft.com/
http://www.signiant.com/
Umm... you know there is a standard for that. VRML was the original, but X3D is it's successor.
On a personal level, how do you maintain your business here in Sydney given the costs associated. Compared to other places like London and San Francisco, Australia is expensive, the internet is slow, the government is not particularly technologically minded, i'm not really seeing any reason to stay?
Snapchat is a Government Contractor?
Article is missing a lot of facts that are easily found on the companies website which of course they don't link to. http://www.fastbrickrobotics.net/

Also reminds me of the brick paving machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLDP6s5FPCk
"Relaxed atomic operations can be reordered in both directions, with respect to either ordinary memory operations or other relaxed atomic operations. But the requirement that updates must be observed in modification order disallows this if the two operations may apply to the same atomic object. (The same restriction applies to the one-way reordering of acquire/release atomic operations.)"

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n233...

There is a lot more explanation here that should cast some light on the situation: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n248...
Is it like this for other cities? Strange random world-class inventions popping up out of the suburbs with no warning.

We've got a thriving startup ecosystem that seems to be getting known around town and yet we still get people appearing on the front page of HN that we've never heard of.
Your talking about the rape story? I have a weird feeling they are making sure this will never happen again? At this point, I'm not willing to write off the publication, but I do look at who's authoring the article--more than before.
Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world but didn’t
There is definitely something special going on with relaxed updates though. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n248...

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9796245

I think your initial suspicion is right. The next section: "There are several possible definitions of a data race. Probably the most intuitive definition is that it occurs when two ordinary accesses to a scalar, at least one of which is a write, are performed simultaneously by different threads. Our definition is actually quite close to this, but varies in two ways:" ... "Instead of restricting simultaneous execution, we ask that conflicting accesses by different threads be ordered by happens-before. This is equivalent in simpler cases, but the definition based on simultaneous execution would be inappropriate for weakly ordered atomics." continues at: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n248...
Show HN: Modifying websites using voice commands (a small experiment of mine)
With the sheer amount of money backing ULA, there's no way they can be considered dead in the water. Their launch vessels are incredibly reliable, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

They're not just viable competitors, they're the current market leader. SpaceX is the peppy young upstart here (and still, failures like this are stepping stones to future reliability, if they're spending the time learning from their mistakes like they should be).

At least it was unmanned.
Intent (or recklessness, negligence, etc..) is and ought to be a fundamental principle of deciding if something is a criminal act. However, we should be clear that Strict Liability crimes do exist by force of (portly-written) statute.
Your itemized explanations of what can be done in C++ only reinforces that the environments are quite different.

One of the wonderful things about C++[1] is that it can express just about anything which can be encoded in a program. GC, common base types, functional programming, imperative programming, object oriented programming, meta-programming, logic-based systems, dynamic module systems (a la Apache modules[2]), and a bunch more.

But that does not make a language such as Java a subset, unless your premise is that any language which can in some way be expressed in or embedded int C++ qualifies as a subset. If that's the case, then pretty much every language "is a subset of C++" (and yes, even Lisp[3]).

1 - Yes, I mean "wonderful things" as I have worked in C++ for many years. Still do when the problem calls for it.

2 - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565925670.do

2 - https://common-lisp.net/project/ecl/
Fred Dibnah – Steeplejack (1979) [video]
Dreaming in Code is work a read.
I would very much like to hear a somewhat detailed overview of how you think the "right" way to go about this is - and please don't use meaningless terms like "fair" instead of numbers, otherwise it's a total waste of your time.
See? this is funny. Some says this is the age of data. 10T is just a tiny amount of bits for some entities, and I cannot reliably transmit that much across pacific other than shipping actual HDD. :(

Thank you for the comic.
also I'm a safety nut - so I guess that's either really good or really annoying depending on personality type. I've got a very strict "never react defensively" to safety suggestions rule that I follow and I am obsessive about fire prevention, probably have about 6 fire extinguishers spread around.
Yup,
canvas to webgl
SVG to X3d (declarative 3d)

But I want to build a modular html like standard with the power of web component. Drop me an email if you wan to discuss more!
> The concern here is that the purpose of a church mission is first to convert locals to Christianity, then to provide follow-on benefits like education and economic development.

So cynical. This definitely isn't true across the board. I grew up Southern Baptist, where charity was literally treated like a foot-in-the-door to evangelization and saving souls was the #1 agenda. So I get your sentiment. But in other veins of Christianity like Catholicism (which is roughly where I am now), the theology around charity is very different and it really is about serving others as Christ would--no strings attached. I think the proportion of Christian charities that behave as you describe is pretty small compared to those that focus on service first.
Xe also has the logging problems entirely backwards. It is systemd where one has problems with log flooding. One example of a person suffering from this is http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/208394/ . The daemontools convention, ironically, is to have multiple separate log streams, usually one per service, which cannot flood one another.

Restart behaviour sometimes is configurable, by the way. (-:
They should use that new "I am not a robot" captcha technique to automagically guess that the viewer is a human
> China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy.

There is some interesting reading regarding China's "green GDP" accounting project. Here is one recent account:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/9/china/c...

Here is my brief summary:

1. pick a relatively simple yet crude (or perhaps misguided) metric of progress - GDP

2. reward / punish regional leaders for their ability to maximise this metric

3. spend effort creating a more accurate metric of progress - "green GDP" - that accounts for the costs of pollution

4. trial the new metric and observe that the more accurate indication of progress reveals much less progress than the original metric - perhaps negative progress in some cases!

5. regional leaders are deeply resistant to introduction of the this new, more accurate metric, as it shows they have not actually being doing a great job

6. adoption of the new accurate metric fails for political reasons, as it is very unpopular!

You have to laugh, otherwise you might cry. The article above ends with a few positive notes, so there may be some positive change looming in future!

I personally think there is more potential for China to make dramatic, sweeping positive changes than certain other countries (e.g. Australia, where I live).
I understand what you are saying and I agree that our visions are very different :)

What would be your financial model? Bear in mind that I'm in Australia, so $20k - $30k to me might be something completely different to you. From my perspective, if you can't find $20k, you aren't serious about your business. Also, in my model, $20k gets you to a point where you have a business that you can market, run and start taking orders.

AFAIK, YCombinator doesn't build you an MVP, or provide you hosting or do all the items on your start up checklist, so I don't think this is a fair comparison.

As for valuation, at the point that you walk in with an idea and nothing more, I think your idea is worth about $1. Valuation at this stage is fairly meaningless. They are paying $20K at cost for the services I'm providing. I forgo making a margin on these services in exchange for 20% equity. So, in effect we share the risk. I reduce my risks by making sure I at least cover my costs. They reduce their risks by knowing they'll get to MVP stage without any hassles caused by their inexperience or lack of technical prowess.

Maybe 20% is too much equity, I don't know. What I do know is that I want a potential piece of any large upside I might help create. That's my price for forgoing margin on the initial services I provide.

Yes, for the model you envision the marginal costs should be low. However, you are looking at requiring a very long runway. How long do you think it would take before you start making money? You've got to include the time not only to launch your own start up but launch the first customer's start up that makes money. Considering a potential 90% + failure rate, you might be waiting a while. This is why I think you need to at least try and cover your costs.
One Driver Explains How He Is Helping to Rip Off Uber in China
Google's the most open about the click fraud problem. They'll show you all the fake clicks you received but aren't being charged for if you customize the columns of your AdWords reports to add these two:

http://i.imgur.com/sW1stNL.png

A lot of the traffic they charge for on the display/content network is still awfully iffy. I get spikes of traffic from blogspot blogs that didn't exist the day before all the time. They won't exist a week later. How likely is it that a new blog with a single uninteresting post suddenly has tons of traffic interested in clicking my ads? Not very.
Ask HN: What do you think of the anti-CSS debate?
I've been hearing more and more about the concept of applying inline styles through JavaScript as opposed to using CSS. There's been an article floating around regarding the idea, too (https://css-tricks.com/the-debate-around-do-we-even-need-css-anymore/). What's your take?
The Emily Programming Language
Emily (http://emilylang.org/) is a neat little programming language where every feature is a function. Written in OCaml. It uses prototypal OO and has a semi-functional style. Made by Andi McClure. Also, first post \o/
Another incredible journey: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
If they ship their own from-scratch-not-using-any-third-party-code implementation, they are fine

If they are shipping a GPL version of R, then this is a legal grey area, with different opinions from differing lawyers, mostly on whether it's a derivative work covered by the GPL or not.

It's honestly, not worth getting into the whole discussion, because there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, only opinions on all sides that are usually supported by reasonable arguments.
What do you want to come next?

If you can constructively and reliably ship code to prod, you almost certainly have better immediate options than Elance.

Worst case, calling ten different web agencies in your area will probably get you enough work to pay the bills, likely at rates which are not unreasonable, and with far less pathological clients than you'd find on Elance. You might have to call another ten after that, if your luck is bad or if your sales skills are poor.

After that, what? Full-time job? Freelancing? Another startup? Get out of software and into the exciting world of fruit vending?

It's a wide world and you have skills that are in high demand. What do you want the next chapter in your life to be about?
If you try to change the value by deleting the current value, the jellyfish vanish & do not come back even after typing a new value.

I have to add digits in front of the current value before deleting the existing digits, so that the field stays populated at all times, or the whole thing breaks. FYI.

Also if you put a really high speed, they sometimes swim off the screen & never return, even when lowering the speed. Pretty amusing.
" If that's correct then there's not much to it."

The FSF would beg to differ the last time i looked, depending on the situation:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF

is the closest to their position on this.

Basically, if you can function call into R from SQL/etc, and it's just not just a subprocess completely independent, their view is that you'd have to GPL the main process.
Horizontal barking dog experiment [video]
Couple of things: Can you sell your code? If not consider open sourcing it. Either you get some money or you get some kudos in the community.

If you still want to work in startups, look at the post a few pages back for people looking for founders:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9795503
I think a lot of western consumers would be more than happy to pay just a little bit more if the $ was going into those workers pockets. But how do you make sure it gets there rather than into the pockets of the factory owner / local politician, where you will already find many, many hundreds of millions of dollars (that "could" have been paid to the poor Chinese factory line worker, rather than to such things as buying some 18 year old son studying in Vancouver a new Ferrari).

Do leaders (political & economic) in non-western countries ever deserve any responsibility for their countries overall well-being?
1. Pay the bills, save some money.

2. Take a vacation: "Me and my friends have been too busy sunbathing off the southern coast of St. Bart's with spider monkeys for the past two weeks, tripping on acid. Changed our whole perspective on shit."

3. Tinker: https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html
Pop some bottles at a club.
Huh, the part where you can either keep your original handset phone number or your GV number on one account (but not both) is problematic. I've been trying to get people to call and text my GV number for ages, but some still use my legacy handset number. From the sounds of it, I'll have to do some juggling to keep the two numbers, or just let my old handset number lapse back into the pool, as I can't keep both on the same google account.

Not quite a deal-breaker, but a big enough deal that I will think carefully after my invite shows up (if it ever shows up). OTOH, the pricing model represents something like $30 or more a month cheaper than what I'm currently paying.

I wonder if there are any phone number parking services - I'd pay a modest monthly fee to hook my old number up to a personalized "this number has changed, please call XYZ" and an SMS autoresponder with similar information.