skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think VR is overselled, never underestimate the effect of intrusiveness on the user. This is the same reason we have less 3D movies than a few years ago, the novelty factor fade and the gains from the medium have to be sufficient to beat the intrusiveness. VR is cumbersome, a large part of the population will probably never be able to use them and users now prefer low engagement medium due to the constant distraction life we are in now.
The article briefly mentioned it, but the main reasons these are kept is maintenance and training. That's a far larger concern than the politics, but it isn't as interesting. Hence the nickname "parliamentary trains" -- people love to believe that it's some crazy bureaucratic reason behind them when they're usually very logical.

Some of these routes will probably never be viable on their own, but the segments of track might be needed some day as a detour. For instance if a bridge somewhere needed to be out of service for a year or something.

For example, one of the more famous "ghost trains" (since it's in London) is the daily Paddington to West Ruislip service. Since they're both served by the underground there wouldn't be much need for a mainline train between them. If long-term work disrupted that connection they might want to temporarily run a regular service on that line though.

If you just abandoned the track, you wouldn't know its condition when you needed it. Just as important, the regulators wouldn't let you run passengers using crew that hadn't been trained on that line.

So just running an occasional train and rotating staff through it, the line and the skills are always kept sharp. Then if you suddenly need that bit of track in an emergency it's ready to go.

And since you're going to run a train anyway, you might as well sell a few tickets if people want to join you.
Isn't that StackOverflow careers?
Imagine if all the great Scottish scientists were referred to as 'the English'. That might piss some people off.
I wonder what percentage of the library is actually an intelligible book? I guess for purposes of calculation an "intelligible" book could be one that is completely composed of valid words in its target language; that would at least put an upper bound.

Sadly my combinatorics and number theory is not up to the task.
Court Declares Air Fresheners, Stickers Reasonable Suspicion to Be Pulled Over
Creating the open-source community of your dreams
You missed the example of his own original company, he had employees, the moral of that part of the book was proper delegation and giving employees decision budgets.
Did that at one point. Lost the JSON file in a hard drive death though :/ The day prior to the crash I had wrote a note to put it in a git repo and then forgot. Otherwise it's a pretty nice way to manage a resume.
why would you want to use as much space as possible? the consumer should want to not have to think about storage space, not maximize their usage.

It seems to me there are three major factors here:
* the annual fee
* the price of storage at their scale
* the average amount of storage used per customer

It seems to me entirely possible that these factors could have values such that true unlimited storage is sustainable, barring a malicious actor.
Professional Video Gamers to Be Tested for Doping
Strings in Swift 2
Parsing HTML with regexes
People do weird metaprogramming things with the existing constructs. In a lot of cases it's because people prefer to keep things DRY, but it hurts when you're trying to grep through a large codebase to find that one method you need. A contrived example:

function Animal() {}

function Cat() {}

Cat.prototype = Object.create(Animal.prototype);

(function(fields) {
fields.forEach(function(field) {
Cat.prototype[field] = function() {
// Some nonsense
};
});
})(['what', 'the', 'hell']);

It's impossible to statically infer what methods are being declared in ES5 code in general. You can pick up on some common assignment patterns, but not all the weird stuff people do. Just check out the top 10 NPM modules and I guarantee you'll find some odd assignment patterns. I can remember that the "colors" module did meta stuff when I last checked. You can't just easily run the code to find out what the module is exporting either, because of potential side effects from IO. You can wrap Node's core IO modules, but that solution is specific to Node, and still won't cover every possible case. In short, it's a huge pain to write tools to pull information out of Javascript code in general, and that hurts the tooling ecosystem around Javascript.

With the class pattern you at least have some staticly inferable information you're sure you can pull out of the class, and weird stuff is discouraged. I know in some ways that this is a weak argument, because of the new square bracket assignment, and the fact that anyone can muck with the prototype of the class after it's created. Even still, for the simple OLOO case it does encourage people to write code that has method names that can easily be staticly inferred, and that's a good thing for JS tooling possibilities.

I really just want omnicompletion that doesn't randomly break on me! The OLOO pattern is one that's incredibly common in JS
Yes, I agree with that and also the analysis in your essay.

My point is that your content (though intersting) does not live up to your ambitious (and generic) title, "A Solution to the Uber Problems".

Talking about "real time data sharing" with mayor of NYC is interesting but the "congestion" problem, which could be perceived or real, is not what comes to mind when people discuss "Uber problems." Traffic congestion caused by Uber is a relatively minor debate so far in relation to other problems it has.

The following google search for "Uber congestion" is 504,000 hits:

https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+congestion

The following searc for "Uber labor" is 11,100,000 hits:

https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+labor
Windows lost my unsaved files few times this month.
Check out Qubes: https://www.qubes-os.org/

You can use Fedora, Debian, Whonix, or Windows in "seamless" mode with minimal effort. It has a composable networking architecture (e.g. easy to make all a VM's traffic go through Tor, whose traffic in turn goes over a VPN). Disposable VMs are a native feature. Template VMs reduce duplication of /; Application VMs use a template VM with CoW / and their own persistent /home.

Qubes uses Fedora 20 for Dom0, so you get all the same graphics support as Fedora gives you.
A non-JS fallback would be nice.
Sphericam 2, the 4K 360º Video Camera for VR
There are audio books and podcasts, so it is not completely useless to drive. But compared to trains, you do lose the freedom. In a train, if I listen to an audiobook, it will be by choice, unlike driving. I guess there will be some point where time difference versus productivity would be worth it
Ask HN: What are the Under the Hood technical changes in Windows 10?
All that I read about Windows 10 is the inclusion of the Start Menu and how Metro apps can run in windowed mode.

However, what are the big technical, under the hood changes? Surely there must be some.
Wow, I totally missed the age of this page since I was also reading his main home page which is maintained:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/

Would it be worthwhile to change the link?
hahaha :) cool stuff!
Feedback: smaller emojis would be a bit better. Would it make sense to add 'download' jpg after conversion?

Nice job!
Most of my recruiter contacts have been direct recruiters of companies, so when I move forward I am dealing directly with the employer.

That said, I haven't found dealing with employers directly to give me any more understanding of my background or information about my progress than dealing with third-party recruiters.

I have certainly received my share of terrible recruiter emails, but only from posting my resume on job boards. LinkedIn has been a steady stream of mostly good hits, with the not-so-good hits coming directly from companies.
Likely something facilitating direct imaging, which would require canceling out almost all of the light from the parent star (diminishing it by a factor of at least 10^6:1).

While there are some techniques that could facilitate that (such as enormous star shades coupled with space telescopes) they wouldn't enable the sort of shotgun survey approach that Kepler has been able to do, but it would enable us to survey and extensively study stars one at a time for planets.
Examining Malware with Python
I tried copying the emojis and sending via iMessage. Didn't work :( didn't work on FB either. How do you use it?
In your hypothetical you would contract a real estate agent who would use their expertise in the market to pick the best offers. Getting 100 offers would mean more competition and the likely hood that your agent finds an even better offer than if you had only received 10.

If you have a high quality house, er - I mean, if you have skills that are in demand, I highly recommend you get an agent (like hired.com), because you're probably missing out on those good offers.
earliest, sickest most repugnant form of vendor-lock-in

Hyperbole much? No one is forcing you to use it. If you are so clueless with tech that you don't even know the likes of Gmail exist, why is it wrong for the ISP to hold your hand and provide you an email address? Do you want them to arbitrarily choose one third party provider for their technologically declined userbase? Maybe they should send the clueless user to Wikipedia's list of free email providers?

Try switching ISPs [0] and holding onto your account.

Duh. What do you expect? You want me to forward your mail coming to an address on my domain after we've ceased business dealings? Things like imapsync(1) exist for a reason.

(1) http://imapsync.lamiral.info/
That's the best thing about Windows. It works even for the things that are called 'exotic' in the Mac world (which is a euphemism for 'sloppy programming')
> The users are what is for sale on this site.

Isn't that true of pretty much every advertising driven site?

Full disclosure: I used to work at LI.
A couple of times a week? That doesn't really add up. I flew London to San Francisco and back just once a month - not several times a week - for a year and that was 130k miles.
Running R on AWS
One step towards the proposed idea would be for a tech-savvy government to build a platform and offer APIs. Just imagine: an API to file your tax return, to vote, to register marriage, to open a business, to register a child, to get government statistics generated from all this data and of course an API to authenticate.
I have always wondered what the Hogwarts express was being used for between the annual trips. It seems to be a perfect example of a "ghost train".
As I said in another post, most of these things are not new. They've been done. Maybe not "on a computer" or "with an app", but they've been done, and are the reason why the regulations were enacted. The startup that tried to sell parking spaces was one such example. There were regulations on the books making it illegal to sell a public parking space for a long, long time. Why? Because someone tried to do it before, and it was decided that it should not be allowed.
Also the guy who designed the smoke extractor system wasn't actually an engineer. Stern broke the story last year.[1]

My German is pretty basic, but "Geschasster BER-Planer war nur technischer Zeichner ... Doch di Mauro ist kein Ingenieur, wie angenommen wurde" amounts to "Ousted BER-Planner was only a technical draftsman ... but di Mauro is not an engineer, as was thought".

[1] [German] http://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/stern-exklusiv-geschasst...
I've had my mom use lastpass for a couple of years, and just recently enabled grid multifactor auth (free). The main thing about their multifactor options is you can optionally "trust" a computer and only do multifactor on it once. So she won't have to ever use multifactor, but it's mandatory elsewhere which essentially keeps everyone else out while not changing her workflow.
I find this the most interesting part: "As we look at the data about outdated software, we see a real trend. (We used the alexa top lists) The top 10 most visited sites are ‘fully safe’. They don’t leak a lot of software information, but whatever they leak shows signs that they have the most up to date software versions or even have patched outdated software before a new release is made available. In most cases, the internet is their core business and they take care of their servers.

Going to the top 100 most visited sites, this drops to 93% ‘fully safe’. In other words, we could detect outdated software on 7 of the top 100 sites. In most cases, these were minor issues but we are already see that some sites have relaxed policies on server security.

The further we go from the most visited sites, the more servers have outdated software. And we believe this trend will continue as we scan more and more of the world. Our estimate is that about half of the servers have outdated servers (extrapolating the one out of four we currently have on 25.000 servers to 10 million servers). If we just look at the data of our own clients, we can support this theory, 39% have outdated software (and our current users are still security savvy, because they opted to use a security tool). Scary if you ask us."
What? No, absolutely no we would not just see them with sensitive telescopes. Perhaps, if you're thinking of some sort of interstellar space travel, maybe we'd see the engines? But no, even that seems unlikely.

Any space habitat of any plausible size will be completely undetectable, or at least indistinguishable from a planet. And I would think they'd be much smaller than that.

And structured radio? Lots of possible reasons not to see it. One, possibly not using radio. Two, encryption. Communication will likely look like noise. But even so, the distances involved means long range transmissions will need to be very directed and narrow beam. And even then, it's only a few light years before the signal is undetectable. I would suspect any really long distance communication would be bounced through relays. Also, why? You have to wait years for messages to go around. All of this means no, we're not likely to easily find stray radio signals.
There are definitely companies selling such projects (Daxtra comes to mind), but as Aline Lerner pointed out [1] the problem isn't matching as much as it is sourcing. IOW, you don't focus on conversion optimization if you don't have enough traffic.

I do recruiting and because I'm a developer, matching is pretty trivial. But most recruiters don't have any serious dev experience, so if they need to search through a big database of resumes, this could help. Assuming you don't factor in that resumes are largely worthless :-)

1. http://blog.alinelerner.com/building-a-product-in-the-techni...
Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year
Airline passenger films apparent UFO over Alps
Deaths per KW or cancers per KW is not really very relevant, because the risks associated with our current nuclear regime will persist for centuries.

100 years from now, when the Indian Point reactor will have long stopped producing electricity, there is a reasonable probability that dangerous waste materials will still be sitting in a questionable state of security just off a riverbank 40 miles north of NYC.

As a society, we're not really equipped to work with that kind of risk horizon.
The actual study is http://forensiq.com/download/Forensiq-MobileDeviceHijacking-...

Highlights:

* For each suspect app, they took a factory-reset device or emulator, installed it, then observed packet captures

* They estimated advertisers lose 13% of ad spend to fraud

* They captured a script that simulated random clicks on advertisers' landing pages

* They observed evidence of malicious apps spoofing the IDs of legitimate apps that don't show adds

* Malicious apps would "establish on average 1100
connections per minute and communicate with 320 ad networks, ad servers,
exchanges and data providers in the course of an hour"
Great idea. I save the recipes in bookmarks and it's a mess.
Almost, but not quite.

While seconds since Jan 1, 1970 is a perfectly fine system, sadly unixtime has deviated from that simple definition, due to the introduction of leap-seconds.
I think the key is, Apple rev' their product in a year. Had iOS not existed, a Treo would probably still be a thing.
If they have the ability to telescope us before we do. They can probably guess that technology accelerates.
In fact I feel more pessimistic of the human's future as we found more and more such older planets -- If their million or billion years older civilization cannot reach us, then we might not reach out that far as well in the next billion year, or ever.
It makes perfect sense, you just don't like it.
Maybe - though the presence you get from VR is really something new.

3D was intrusive for minimal gains (even in the best case of Avatar it wasn't that different of an experience). If you've been able to play with a DK2 and some of the better experiences it really is different.

Even with the huge improvements made recently there are still really big changes that would make things even better. (100x higher resolution on the small displays, 90hz and 90fps on mobile, graphics hardware way beyond where it is now).

VR puts a strain on modern hardware, but it really gives you something new and maybe that sense of presence will be enough that even with the intrusiveness users will want it.
Relevant to my interests. Founder of ES host Bonsai.io.

Echoing mrkurt, ES is indeed hefty to run.

Elasticsearch is going to require a hundred+ megs of RAM just to run an empty node. And then you'll want enough heap and CPU that you're not GCing yourself to death while importing data, or while churning through filter and caches. And then enough memory to run those fancy aggregations in Kibana. Times the number of nodes you want for redundancy, and for your master-role quorum.

It's possible to do long-tail low-volume ES hosting for hobby development. But to do so you need to dig in and consider ES hosting as a holistic system. We've worked hard at Bonsai to build a hobbyist-friendly hosting system. Our approach is to fork ES itself to introduce native multi-tenancy. That means everyone in the cluster is amortizing the overhead of all that JVM memory (and redundant data nodes, and master-node quorum, a load balancer and authenticating reverse proxy, and analytics... etc...)

The problem remains that ES, while easy to spin up, is still a pretty heavy system to manage at scale. So it's generally a lot easier to chuck some extra resources at it, maximize your isolation, and eat the higher entry cost.
The World's First Wearable Cuff with Stereo Bluetooth Headphones
Show HN: Kathmandu – before and after the earthquake – in 3D/VR
Say I wanted to put my reputation or money where my mouth is with some predictions like this of my own. Are there any online prediction markets that support this?

This was the idea behind Intrade before it folded, no? I remember hearing about it in the popular media all the time during the 2012 US presidential election. Has anything like it arisen in its place?
Well, when it comes to US equity markets, you can just invest in them (or against them).
I'm not disagreeing that a trial period is a dark pattern. The harm a dark pattern causes is inversely proportional to the ability of the user to spot them. The prevalence of trial periods means that many people see it as common sense to not fall for them.
Does the new PHP 7 will be able to run real time communication?
On stack overflow they always says that PHP is not a good programming language for real time applications in this case like real time chats, long polling, comet, etc. with PHP 7 would this change? or I need to start learning node.js?
Do you think something like Mindmapping interfaces are not suitable for "more than a few people"?

I'm trying to think about other graph representations that are intuitive, but nothing comes to my mind. Trees seem to have more possibilities.
> Perhaps it was before my time but why do ISPs still feel the need to offer email/ftp?

The same reason that apartment buildings tend to come with postal mail boxes.
> Lot less developed than Taiwan, Korea, Japan (which are basically first world countries at this point)

sigh. those aren't "basically" first world countries, they are first world countries by definition. either the old definition, or the new definition.

in fact they invented the term to describe countries like tw, kr, and jp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World
Europe needs some huge infrastructure projects. I wish the EU would make some huge investments - yes, I know it is socialism. Why not connect all the major hubs? Why should it not be possible to go from Lisbon to Moscow by high speed train? Build 4 tracks, two for transportation of passengers, 2 for freight. The Transrapid was a stupid idea but rail is an established technology and can be improved easily.

Some of the Technology is there already, for example to reduce the huge traffic on the European roads:
http://www.cargobeamer.eu/Technology-849174.html

Should be no problem, to have automatic coupling/decoupling of parts of the train, separating at major hubs going to different destinations.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=671327...

Also, Trains are run by electricity which can be created through nuclear energy (Thorium reactors in the future etc.). I see a point in the future, where we DON'T have the resources to build such an infrastructure anymore:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

And yes, I know, the Nazis thought up similar things:
http://jalopnik.com/5819038/hitlers-giga-railway-from-paris-...
http://www.breitspurbahn.de/3000.html
Since LinkedIn shut off their contacts APIs, folks have been looking for other ways to get at LinkedIn connections data. Export is an obvious solution - even though it requires some friction on the part of the end user, people are often willing to jump through a couple hoops if your app solves a real pain they have. By increasing the friction, people developing apps which try to make use of LinkedIn data have to try harder and inflict more friction on their users, hopefully (in LinkedIn's eyes) shutting down more of those apps for good.
Ask HN: Why is the Khanacademy website so power-hungry?
I like to brush up on some topics using Khanacademy, because it is well structured and gives quizzes with feedback. One thing I've noticed, however, is that my laptop gets very hot, the fan spins up, scrolling gets laggy, and Javascript elements (quizzes, etc) have enormous latency.

What are they doing in there that causes it to consume so much computing power? I feel bad for anyone who uses the site and isn't fortunate enough to have a powerful computer like I do, because if it's annoying to me it must ruin the experience for them.
"We are so concerned with if we could, we didn't stop to consider if we should."
Although this was my experience as a FT employee, since I've switched to consulting, LinkedIn has brought me leads and some of those have converted. No active advertising by me either, just the fact that people in my network know that I'm working independently now has caused them to ping me with projects.
> Wouldn't any technique that washes/leaches arsenic from rice also remove similar amounts of nutrients like essential vitamins and minerals?

If you poor (real poor not 1st world poor) then this might be an issue. But I think the research is towards rich westerners who can afford coffee percolators and die of things like cancer, not things like rickets.
I've been reading about Richard Hamming a lot lately, and this stuck with me when he was talking about AI.

"You must struggle with your own beliefs if you are to make any progress in understanding the possibilities and limitations of computers in the intellectual area. To do this adequately you must formalize your beliefs and then criticize them severely, arguing one side against the other, until you have a fair idea of the strengths and weakness of both sides."