Hacker News Reader

rshabanon New string formatting in Python

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Hoping for a decision from the core team – having both f"" and .format is a pretty clear deviation from this principle.

rshabanon How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

The Economist tends not to include links in their articles; no idea why

rshabanon Deep Learning in a Nutshell: History and Training

Searching for "this series" [0] seems to indicate that so far there's only two installations of this series, [1] and the current article [2].

[0] http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/?search_theme_form... [1] http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/deep-learning-nuts... [2] http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/deep-learning-nuts...

rshabanon Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming

This is easily the clearest overview of deep learning I've read. Kudos to Olah for his consistent quality

rshabanon Every County in America Ranked by Scenery and Climate

The data shows clearly: California is better

rshabanon Setting up your own blog

You can also do this pretty easily with Hexo, which makes it easy to push Markdown blog posts to prettily-formatted static webpages. There's easy Github integration so that creating and deploying a new blog post is as a two-command process: http://razishaban.com/2015/07/from-zero-to-hexo-a-quick-tuto...

rshabanon China did it again: US Government Computers Hacked to Expose 21.5M People

The US government is now vulnerable to identity fraud and blackmailing at an unprecedented scale. Hopefully the tremendous technomilitary apparatus will innovate to produce new identity-verification systems to compensate for this damaging loss.

rshabanon [dead]

Direct link to the talk, titled "Distantly Supervised Information Extraction using Bootstrapped Patterns": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqso5fth8uc

rshabanon A floating holographic plasma display that you can touch

The abstract of the paper being discussed, "Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Aerial and Volumetric Graphics Rendered by Focused Femtosecond Laser Combined with Computational Holographic Fields":

"We present a method of rendering aerial and volumetric graphics using femtosecond lasers. A high-intensity laser excites a physical matter to emit light at an arbitrary 3D position. Popular applications can then be explored especially since plasma induced by a femtosecond laser is safer than that generated by a nanosecond laser. There are two methods of rendering graphics with a femtosecond laser in air: Producing holograms using spatial light modulation technology, and scanning of a laser beam by a galvano mirror. The holograms and workspace of the system proposed here occupy a volume of up to 1 cm^3; however, this size is scalable depending on the optical devices and their setup. This paper provides details of the principles, system setup, and experimental evaluation, and discussions on scalability, design space, and applications of this system. We tested two laser sources: an adjustable (30-100 fs) laser which projects up to 1,000 pulses per second at energy up to 7 mJ per pulse, and a 269-fs laser which projects up to 200,000 pulses per second at an energy up to 50 uJ per pulse. We confirmed that the spatiotemporal resolution of volumetric displays, implemented with these laser sources, is 4,000 and 200,000 dots per second. Although we focus on laser-induced plasma in air, the discussion presented here is also applicable to other rendering principles such as fluorescence and microbubble in solid/liquid materials."

Full paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668

rshabanon [dead]

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells)."

"When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill existing windows, view a list of windows, turn output logging on and off, copy-and-paste text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows in whatever manner you wish, etc. All windows run their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the user's terminal." - man page

rshabanon Useful Python Libraries for Startups

Hi @zallarak, nice to see you on HN! Not sure if you're doing any text analytics yet, but NLTK is designed to be super-quick to get up and running.

rshabanon [dead]

“Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down,” - Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder

what a phenomenal quote

rshabanon A proportional visualization of the world's most popular languages

"As you look through Lopéz’s visual, you’ll want to keep one thing in mind: Although the 23 languages visualized above are collectively spoken by 4.1 billion people, there are at least another 6700 known languages alive in the world today."

rshabanon IBM Invests to Help Apache Spark

Some interesting perspective from The Register: "Up until last year, Spark had just 465 contributors."

rshabanon IBM Invests to Help Apache Spark

Neat! Thanks for sharing this, it's a great overview.

rshabanon IBM Invests to Help Apache Spark

It's been pretty good so far -- you can sign up now and only get late deductions (if you care about the grade) on two assignments.

rshabanon IBM Invests to Help Apache Spark

A link to the IBM press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47107.wss

"At the core of this commitment, IBM plans to embed Spark into its industry-leading Analytics and Commerce platforms, and to offer Spark as a service on IBM Cloud. IBM will also put more than 3,500 IBM researchers and developers to work on Spark-related projects at more than a dozen labs worldwide; donate its breakthrough IBM SystemML machine learning technology to the Spark open source ecosystem; and educate more than one million data scientists and data engineers on Spark."

rshabanon Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship

"Based on the success of these research advances, we formed a startup company, Monoidics, in 2009. Monoidics joined Facebook in 2013, and since then we have adopted the continuous development and deployment style practiced at Facebook and improved our analyzer based on an iterative feedback loop between our analyzer's development team and Facebook's mobile software engineers. We have demonstrated that verification technology can indeed thrive when applied to codebases at Facebook's scale and pace of change."

rshabanon Show HN: Learn Swift

"For anyone who has been programming in a modern language such as Ruby [1995], Python [1991], Clojure [2007], Haskell [1990], etc, and who was put off developing iOS apps by Objective-C, Swift marks a new era."

You say modern but I don't think it's really what you mean here.

Your descriptions of Ruby vs Obj-C make it seem that really what you mean is high-level; that is, to a newer programmer, easier.

These languages (Haskell excepted) make it very easy to do simple things. Describing them as "modern" in contrast with the implicitly antiquated Obj-C makes it a little hard to take your assertions seriously.

Verbosity is a claim to make, age is not.

rshabanon Ask HN: What are some important math topics every programmer should know?

... most of these are intertwined. Is there more significance to your comment, or is it just a nitpick?

rshabanon Joel on The Absolute Minimum Every Developer Must Know About Unicode (2003)

"and, in fact, early implementors wanted to be able to store their Unicode code points in high-endian or low-endian mode, whichever their particular CPU was fastest at, and lo, it was evening and it was morning and there were already two ways to store Unicode."

rshabanon Mapping, Beirut-style: how to navigate a city without using any street names

Knowledge of how to get around in Beirut, and much of the Arab world, is based on contextual knowledge and history. People have shared space, and this shared knowledge serves as the basis for spatial communication.

rshabanon Metascala – A JVM written in Scala

"Metascala is barely 3000 lines of Scala, and is complete enough that it is able to interpret itself metacircularly. [...]

The goal of Metascala is to create a platform to experiment with the JVM: a 3000 line JVM written in Scala is probably much more approachable than the 1,000,000 lines of C/C++ which make up HotSpot, the standard implementation, and more amenable to implementing fun features like continuations, isolates or value classes."

That seems pretty neat to me.

rshabanon Metascala – A JVM written in Scala

You're kind of missing the point, TheShrek. The point is to prove it can be done.

rshabanon Metascala – A JVM written in Scala

Likewise, any tips for learning Scala without knowing/learning Java first?

rshabanon The First First-Person Shooter

This was a great read, thanks for sharing.

rshabanon Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish

I'm pretty curious about who this "Sterling International Consulting Group" suing Lenovo is, their website (http://www.sterling-consulting.com/) 404s...

rshabanon Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish

"Notably, Lenovo did not preinstall the Superfish program on any of its computer models that were marketed to businesses or more sophisticated computer users."

That's a particularly damning accusation.

rshabanon The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”

It would seem from the context of his statement the latter, especially given that he built C++

rshabanon A new syntax definition format for Sublime

This is much much better than the hassle I had to go through building Sublime syntax support for a language a few months ago. Glad to see the Sublime team are making themselves competitive!