skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Such organizations tend to be populated with people aligned with extreme ideological positions.

I think you need to start backing up your rhetoric with facts. As it stands, you are just spreading innuendo and FUD. Anecdotes about lifelong Democrat parents and a table full of relatives talking up Donald Trump are great stories, but that's all they are. It's obvious Trump has people interested, the polls show that. But if they are seriously considering Trump and his non-plans as a viable future after being Democrats, in what way are they not the exact people that caused the problems you seem to be railing against here?

> The proof is in the trees. Nobody could see past the rules/ideology to focus on the damage would ensue from not finding a solution to the problem.

You mean the trees, which as the OP mentioned, are having problems due to beetle infestations caused by drought? In what way is the drought the fault of environmentalists? Do you think a water plant in Cambria will somehow make the area no longer susceptible the massive ecological ramifications of a state-wide drought?

> There's nothing wrong with regulations. Nowhere did I say that regulations are bad. It's more about being sensible about things.

No, you just jumped from regulatory agencies preventing something to saying environmental Nazis prevented it. Perhaps you think the people at the agencies have the ability to ignore the law and carry out their own agenda, and there's no recourse? Forgive me if I'm having trouble parsing what your intention was with the original statement, the logic didn't seem sound to me, so I had to assume the point you were trying to make.

> Again, today, you could not build San Francisco. Period. You couldn't even start. Think about that for a moment.

Even if I accepted this completely unsubstantiated statement as truth, have you bothered to think about what it means? Since when do we just build cities like San Francisco? San Francisco is the way it is because it was built up over a couple centuries. Would we want to build a city with portions of it built to the standards of the 19th century? Even if we could build a large city to current standards, why would we? Why not build something better?

> We have allowed things to devolve to the point where we are damaging our ability to function and drive progress.

At some point you should really try backing up these expansive statements about the state of country with actual evidence. It might go over better.
That has nothing to do with international geo-politics.

And if we are talking about what governments of countries force on their people lets start with the Saudis first.

And I would like to remind you to in america you have similar level of bigotry with Christians.

Iran has slightly more bigotry - does not mean you invade them.
We've found that most "U" bike locks make a satisfying and attention-grabbing noise when hammered directly onto the roof of inattentively-driven autos. If there is occasionally a small dent or chip in the paint, even better... b^)
For the less dev tools savvy, you could leave those top instructions on solving 2x - 3 = 4 in a console.log in your code. So once they get dev tools open they see some more instructions for the next step.

console.log("Type the following in this order pressing enter each time you see a semi-colon: \n var expr = new Expression('x'); \n expr = expr.subtract(3); \n expr = expr.add('x'); \n console.log(expr.toString()); \n var eq = new Equation(expr, 4); \n console.log(eq.toString()); var x = eq.solveFor('x'); \n console.log('x = '' + x.toString());");

Very cool project by the way.
My family lives in a N. California suburban town with major fire dangers and large trees. The town council is responsive with applied effort. The family and neighbors had to have a neighbor's fallen tree into their own unoccupied house cleaned up, in addition to the overgrowth of weeds removed. They city eventually did it and billed the property owner. Problem solved. If it happens again, I might prosecute adverse possession and I think the neighbors and town would be okay with it.
> We had been trying since 2008 to build a desalinization plan, but had been blocked at every turn by the Coastal Commission and other regulatory bodies, because we would have had to dig a pipeline across the beach to get to the salt water.

Except that you seem to conveniently omit the fact that there were also anti-tax people complaining about the unfair burden it would put on ratepayers.

In addition, part of the whole deal is that a desalinization plant is intended to allow more people into the area rather than simply servicing the existing ones.

Finally, I have a better solution. Let's shut down the town. It would be cheaper to dump all your sorry asses somewhere that has desalinization already.

Now, how about that solution? Oh, you don't like that solution? Gee, perhaps there's a bit of tension between different groups and the different solutions?
The thing is, a co-founder won't save you if you don't have self-discipline. It's probably one of the top sources of co-founder conflict, actually: one founder slacks off or loses focus, and the other(s) get upset, and the whole thing falls apart.

Self-discipline is a highly underrated quality. In my experience, most people can't work productively for an extended period of time on an open-ended project.
Then you have changed the point you are making. Intelligence does require communication. You admit that yourself now.
Just to correct a couple things the brackish/treated water Cambria plant, which cost $9 million not $3 million, was approved and completed in 'record time' (quote below). The picture of intractable government being painted in the comments here is only partially accurate.

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/03/18/3544036/cambria-wate...

In nominating the Cambria project, GWI said the fast-tracked construction of the project “is unprecedented in California” and “sets a new benchmark for what is achievable in the face of severe water stress.”

...

The nomination also said, “Although the city had looked at seawater desalination before, Governor (Jerry) Brown’s declaration of a drought emergency freed up the possibility of developing an alternative brackish water option, which was exempt from a burdensome environmental review process, enabling it to move ahead in record time.”

If you want to see what life is like without environmental regulations take a trip to any major Chinese city. Has the pendulum maybe swung too far in the us? Perhaps, certainly in some ways and combined with nimby zoning there's certainly a lot of room for improvement. But in other ways it's worked great and with climate change you could argue the reverse.
Those people know it is really torture, they are just able to handwave it away because the people it is happening to believe in a slightly different god than they do.
You're not the only person who has thought along those lines. I've seen multiple proposals to mass-produce plant alkaloids using microbes (bacteria or yeast). Very few people have the skills required to do this; you have to be an expert in chemistry, as well as molecular biology, and also be patient and good at running experiments and getting funded. And you've probably also have to be lucky in choosing what synthesis to work on.

This falls under the "Synthetic Biology" domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology is a decent introduction to the concepts.

See also the iGEM competition:
https://www.igem.org/Main_Page
the students who work on those projects often come up with really clever ideas and implementations, which has the potential to push the field along faster than if it was just academically funded professors and some startups.
agreed asking "how is this different than x,y,z" is such a great way to allow the creator to open up and dive into the nitty gritty and fun details
Back when I changed from supervisord to runit my life was substantially improved. That correctness means way fewer emergency maintenance ops issues in production.
This is very well written. I want to mention two other IL that takes SSA even closer to a functional representation:
thinned gated single-assignment (TGSA) form and the Value Dependence Graph.

I've used the former with pleasure as a lot of traditional passes become trivially done by construction: global common subexpression elimination, copy propagation, dead code elimination, and constant propagation. With very little extra work you also get strength reduction, expression hoisting, and a host of other things that I'm forgetting.

I never understood why this wasn't more popular as old-school SSA, as used by even LLVM, is so terribly clunky and inefficient.
Are you saying that you develop on Windows and did not take the Linux quiz because getting a low score implies you are not a "significant" software developer?

This does not seem to be a tool to merely judge you as a developer. Rather, it acts as a tool to determine syntax understanding, and to possibly point out new things one may not be aware of. Much more important than assigning a number to a skill.
There are some interesting examples of humans who grew up without language out there. In particular the ability to control sound or breathing may have less to do with the idea of language than the ability to concieve of things symbolicly. i.e. attach labels to things and understand that the label is representative of the thing.

http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-languag...
Science and engineering have already made the switch to metric. NASA and JPL aren't using imperial when designing their probes and rockets anymore.
Despite all the competitors everyone is linking to here, I bet you learned a ton while building this. What was most surprising to you? What was the trickiest part?
Whoa I keep finding more people
https://twitter.com/ammeep

https://twitter.com/davystevenson
It's not the novelty of this approach that excites me, it's the evidence of it working so well.

We can take this data to a legislature and lobby for new treatment plans. A parent's hunch will not carry the same weight.
I was actually in Cambria on Wednesday, for the first time ever, visiting a friend and his family that moved there a few years ago for his job as a CA state ranger. They shared the opinion on the job market and the people that live there. It came up in conversation, as we discussed the reason why small two bedroom one bath house with little to no extra land close to them was recently rented for $1800 a month, by an older couple.
Freedom – Reduces digital distraction across all your devices
The title of this HN post is misleading, since this podcast is a work of fiction:

http://www.limetownstories.com/about/
> I think Trump said (I don't follow him, not sure) that in today's messed-up system we would not be able to build any of our great cities. From Los Angeles and San Francisco to Boston and Manhattan. If you wanted to undertake projects of that magnitude you could not get it done in a thousand years.

Except that those cities were shitholes for a significant chunk of their lifespan.

Here's a good example of that era:

Pittsburgh circa 1940:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/historic-pittsburgh...

Look familiar?
Beijing circa 2013
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/29/asia/gallery/beijing-smog/inde...

This is what you get without regulations.

Maybe we have too many regulations, but too few is just as bad, if not worse.
Why not to hook electrodes directly into brain? Electricity is legal, cheap as dirt, and cannot be detected. As bonus, it will do no harm to your body.
Congratulations!

I'm always curious; what drives you to do these challenges? It is the competition? The collaboration? The general enjoyment of solving puzzles?
Actually we have it. The new desal plant pumps treated water into the aquifer towards the ocean from the intake, reducing the intrusion of brackish water from the ocean. The desal plant is more for purification, but it does handle any brackish water that gets through. This is a much more cost effective model than direct ocean desalinization. Our plant was entered into a worldwide competition for brackis water desalinization and came in second.

A couple of decades ago I was on the board of a small mutual water company on Skyline above Woodside. We were having trouble meeting water quality standards, no serious violations, but the county was hassling us. We built a desal plant strictly for filtering water and removing minerals. Worked like a charm.
How do you safely source something like that?
Point taken, and you're right. I'm extremely sensitive about my work too. My deepest apologies to the OP!
You can pick your 3 letter agency if you win
duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020840
Where I'm from, that would be a great way to provoke a fist fight.
I see language as a sort of 'programming' that we acquire. If it's like software, it should require relatively compatible hardware in order to run the program.

It doesn't seem like chimps are able to acquire that the same as humans are, given things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

The signs end up being things like "Grape eat Nim" or "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
It's hard for most people to accept that the situation is often beyond immediate and total human control, and instead use blame as a shortcut and abdication of responsibility and power. It's like sociolological bikeshedding instead of working on positive solutions to modify lifestyles toward prevention. Such is human nature, but thankfully it's not an universal condition.
What makes me sad is just what complete disarray the GOP is in. I'm sure at some point the GOP actually stood for something. Now? It just seems to have been completely co-opted by religious conservatives. Presidential candidates are cut from that cloth or, worse, they're just puppets for particular private interests (eg Scott Walker is nothing more than an empty vessel for the Koch brothers).

Compounding this is the huge political power that Israel has in US politics. Whatever your opinion about Israel, I think it's fair to say that Israel has been disastrous for US foreign policy in the Middle East for every country's relationship to the US other than Israel.

Earlier this week I was reading that the Obama administration may hasten the release of Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard in an effort to appease Israel. Israel has found unlikely allies in the Jewish lobby (who tend to lean left) and religious conservatives.

Iran is a problem the US made by repeatedly and disastrously screwing with the region. The support of the Shah fomenting the Iranian Revolution, using Saddam Hussein as a proxy to fight Iran (killing hundreds of thousands on both sides) and invading Iraq a decade ago.

The invasion in particular was the last straw. The lesson the "axis of evil" could take away from this was that having nuclear weapons (like North Korea) was the only guarantee of survival. So of course Iran wants the bomb. Whose fault is that?

Yet the GOP in particular seems ready to sacrifice everything for a policy that isn't working just to appease Israel. Well, Israel is just going to have to learn to live in that region because someone there getting nuclear weapons is a question of if not when.

We've come a long way since Eisenhower could (and did) tell Israel to get out of Sinai. The fact that Obama is even trying to stand up to Israel is amazing to me. I honestly hope he succeeds because I think engagement with Iran is the only sustainable course forward.
Snagging men and avoiding questions [0] and making sexual innuendos [1], while being racist [2]. But it's okay since they redefined the word to not include their form of racism.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/c9IHbKm.png

[1] http://i.imgur.com/XPMXW3l.png

[2] http://i.imgur.com/MBebKrJ.png

Where's that Github Code of Conduct I was looking for again?

>Be welcoming: We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, colour, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, size, family status, political belief, religion, and mental and physical ability.

Conveniently ignoring: all backgrounds, of any colour, of any social class and of any sex. Because they have a personal political beef with certain backgrounds, a certain colour, and a certain sex.

Real productive work, I'm sure.
The problem with this is mostly spotting people doing it, and then taking action against them. When you have N cops, versus a thousand plus times as many drivers, spotting and pulling over the people doing it becomes an extremely laborious process.

There are three options that can be used alone or together.

1) Technology solution. Put digital eyes around the area of the steering wheel or otherwise pointing at the driver. Report drivers that frequently use a phone while driving. We can trivially build a phone identifier for a car today, given the drastic improvements in recognition technology. We could also easily judge drivers by their poor attentiveness to the road. This approach will freak people out in regards to being nanny state invasive.

2) Community shaming, education programs. This was half the battle with getting people to use seat belts regularly.

3) Traditional police enforcement. Cops start pulling people over for it more frequently, and hitting them with on the spot $100, $200, $500 fines. Perhaps it increases with each offense within a certain amount of time. The problem here is, the radical majority of people will simply slip through the enforcement cracks and not be caught. It would also be open to easy abuse, cops stuffing the budget with lots of fines. People see seat belts as a life saving device for the most part, so voluntary compliance mostly worked, but I'd wager most people do not see their phone habits as potentially life threatening. That requires greater disincentives to reach the same compliance, or a vastly larger shaming & education project.
Thanks for this. I was having trouble finding things newer than about 2010.

I also note that one of the things that makes life more difficult for the water situation there is that they lost use of an aquifer due to gasoline contamination by Chevron.
A Suspicion of Plausible Answers
Really great code - clean and extensible! I also really like inotify for this sort of code and actually use it myself to kick off my build scripts automatically when changes are detected. BTW, have you run into too many files/dirs issues with inotifywait?
My car also beeps when it detects that the key has left the car. The engine keeps running, but you obviously cannot turn it on again once you turn it off.

I had it happen without me leaving the seat (e.g. my wife has the keys in her bag/pocket, I had been driving, and she gets off the car to unarm the home alarm). The car is turned on by pressing a button, not by turning the key.
Yes. I'm aware. I was trying to be as terse as possible on the diverting topic. It's disputed whether past singular they was considered grammatically correct at the time, despite the source. Of course, then you have to define what it means to be "considered grammatically correct" and who decides that and now you're entering a whole subjective can of worms that turns into circular logic, leading back to the realization that language is largely cultural and expressive, not technical, unfortunately. All of these are reasons why there's not much room for a logical argument here, and only an appeal to emotion, bandwagoning, and some historical bad actors making the "generic he" untenable.

Still, the OC was factually incorrect and this entire topic is diverting and as you've now contributed to with your sanctimonious desire to prove me wrong, controversialized and alienating here on HN.
While exaggerative, I agree. Some organizations value attending and winning competitions like this one.
You seem to think that the death of many trees in the forest would have been prevented if the desalination plant had been built. I don't think that's true. Desalination is very expensive; I can't imagine the resulting water being used to irrigate a forest.
It does have a bearing on Edward Snowden given that we demonstrably do NOT have actual rule of law. The intelligence agencies have clearly compromised the integrity of our justice system, which ensures Snowden would not be treated fairly.

Until the system can show it's worthy of our trust by pursuing powerful people who flagrantly violate the law in the public view, there is no reasonable argument that Snowden should be subjected to its plainly unequal notion of justice.
Unfortunately, we couldn't get this to work at all. dang and I could see each other and he would pulse every once and awhile, but we never heard one another, which I'm assuming was supposed to happen. Lack of help or documentation made me unsure if it was me or you.

I wish there were some links to public chats that I could have joined just to see.
> But there were no alternatives!

Are you seriously suggesting you had no better alternative than to drive drunk?

There were at least three alternatives available: Don't drink, get a ride with someone sober, or walk/bike/etc.
Paradeiser – An Alternative to the Hamburger Menu
What I was thinking of is that output to a PDF could still be primarily targeted for print, but have the software generate at least 2 pdf documents, one for letter/A4 size paper, and another that is sized closer to 4x6 with minimal margins. Then use deduplication so that it doesn't make the file size much bigger.
I was looking at Strongtalk the other day for the first time in some years.

Unfortunately, it isn't clear at all where to best obtain the sources.

Since Google Code is going read-only soon, it would be nice to have a canonical location outside of there.

In 2010, there was a post on the mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/strongtalk-general/S...

But that GitHub repo has been idle since 2010:

https://github.com/talksmall/Strongtalk

It seems other people have also tried exporting from Google Code to GitHub as well:

https://github.com/szKarlen/strongtalk
https://github.com/rvedam/strongtalk
https://github.com/rmacnak/strongtalk
https://github.com/Michaelangel007/strongtalk
https://github.com/DmitryVSkiba/strongtalk
https://github.com/emanuelpeg/strongtalk
https://github.com/liutanyu/strongtalk

At that point, I got distracted and moved on to something else of interest at the time.
...assuming prices are driven by supply and demand, and there are no demand shocks, then total revenue must go down. That is econ 101.

If that's what you learned in that class, you should ask for a refund. If the demand curve is relatively steep (i.e. not elastic), then a supply shock (e.g. a drought) could change price drastically while changing quantity very little. This is not an uncommon situation, especially with respect to food commodities.

[EDIT:] Haha whoops! I certainly didn't intend to tell you anything about your own field. I think that in this case you might be missing important details about the situation on the ground. Irrigation water isn't auctioned off to the highest-bidding farmer. Rather, different farmers have rights to various amounts of water, and those rights are ordered so that some farmers will get nothing in a drought while others will get the same amount they get every year. So, while the industry as a whole has not profited from the supply shock we're discussing, the "lucky" farmers with senior water rights certainly have.
I thought that Snowden stated that he's not going to leak anything further? He handed it off to the journalists and he's done. I remember this being part of his conditions for asylum in Russia, but I could be mistaken.

I wouldn't expect him to leak anything or discuss government capabilities beyond what has already been leaked. That was never his stated intention. Involving journalists was deliberate on his part to remove himself from being final decision-maker about what to publish.