skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are reliability estimates based on parts. The one I am slightly familiar is a military standard MIL-HDBK-217F
https://www.google.com/search?q=+MIL-HDBK-217F&ie=utf-8&oe=u...

Doing some searching turns up an online calculator:
http://aldservice.com/en/Reliability-Software/free-mtbf-calc...

FWIW, my expectation is that the above will give you a very precise, but totally inaccurate, number.

The problem is:

1. MTBF (and other reliability estimates) are based on a statistical sample of a large number of items. If your number of items is small(ish), your statistics become useless.

2. MTBF is not actually computable until you have a meaningful number of failures.

3. Failure rates are very poorly understood, so projecting failure rates before they occur is difficult.

4. Projecting the failure rate of a very complex item (recursively - not only a RPi, but the processor and memory in the RPi) based on estimated failure rates of each individual part that makes up the item is a combinatorial nightmare.

To support my assertions above, see Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident
http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html
NASA spent a large fortune estimating the reliability of the space shuttle and was off by several orders of magnitude. Granted, the space shuttle was more complex than a RPi, but expect your estimates, based on the above calculations, to be equivalently (in)accurate.
Discover online tools other startups use
installing extensions like NoScript, Privacy Badger, Ghostery might prevent the links from sneaking up
Suckers like the 3 excellent, well paid, junior engineers that I work with every day, who are doing a bang up job.
Joshua, you're not just the PEP writer: You also helped a lot with the implementation! Anyway, it also makes me happy :) By the way, we really need someone to document our feature.

http://bugs.python.org/issue24136
I was going to say "wow, this is really making the rounds" but this is actually identical to yesterday's submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10213042
We're using Keyless SSL when HTTPS goes live inside China. That means we can handle HTTPS without any keys being stored inside China.
That would totally make sense. At Fb, we're focused on iOS and Android, but the community is absolutely welcome to step up and implement RN for the desktop platforms.

Jordan Byron already contributed a port of React Native to Apple TV: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/2618#issueco...
It's a cheese-and-egg pie, what's not to love about quiche?
What indication do you have that 37rentals is an American? Is it necessary that he be American for your bias to work correctly?

Your seem to revel in false nostalgia and projecting on folks who choose to travel for leisure. When I travel, I see and experience so much that it is difficult to distill into a 2 minute soundbite for some coworker I do not know particularly well just to make smalltalk. That does not mean that I didn't have a fantastic experience, and I certainly don't wish for you to take it as a data point that things were better in the good old days.

It seems choosing a home in the flight path of a major international air hub was not the best move for someone with such critical views of humanity.

That's not to say I disagree with you; I, too, have negative feelings about these kinds of wasteful competitions. But I think you're going way overboard.
Welcome to Project Soli [video]
Jimmy Wales on Censorship in China
Reinventing Hiring for Software Engineers
Rendering 12,000 Image Albums at Imgur
There is an annual award given to the creators of genetic algorithms that produce results competitive with humans: http://www.genetic-programming.org/combined.php

Some of the results are really impressive. There are domains where stochastic optimization works really well.

And even when it doesn't generate human competitive results, it's still cool. It's a computer program doing something previously only humans could do.
I have yet to meet a CS graduate from a decent school who hasn't been able to learn version control or write good unit test cases in less than a week.
All I ever demanded from my calendaring protocol was to safely and quickly synchronize my calendars between the server and the client. CalDAV has utterly failed at this because it is a complex protocol, and I have no idea how this new protocol improves upon that situation.

I don't give a shit about my CalDAV servers talking to each other and "doing scheduling". I use WhatsApp and email for my scheduling. We don't need more features, we need less of them. CalDAV, iTip and iSchedule seem to be designed around the needs of the corporate bureaucratic world, with little to no regard to the average users' needs, and frankly, I'm horrified that for a protocol drafted in the last three years, XML is still used.

Simplicity is not just some arbitrary property I'm striving for. It's what all protocols out of the DAV series lack to be actually sensibly implementable. Have you read this thread? People are struggling to mount a simple WebDAV collection, because either the clients or the servers are so bad. And you're talking about scheduling.

This isn't even in defense of JMAP. While it at least doesn't try to add crap on top of the crappile, it's just too complex for my usecase either.

I guess I'll just stick to remoteStorage and some ics files in it.
The reason a smartphone cannot compete with DSLRs yet is because of exposure settings. With a phone you always capture the light of the subject, while what you really want to do if you want to capture a feeling or atmosphere is to set the exposure according to the light source and let the subject reflect that light and atmosphere. If I had this granular control of exposure however, I would have no problem to ditch my DSLR.
From my experiences interviewing candidates from Hack Reactor, GA, Code School/Academy, et al, i'd say, results not typical.
Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm in a similar situation, did you have kids hoping that there would be a cure by now? Or were you not aware of the 50% chance when you had them?
Modern “scientific management” threatens to dehumanise workplace
It's worse. I know someone who came out of a 4 year CS degree, knowing only php, because that's as new-fangled a technology as their professors were willing to bother to learn. They ended up going to a boot camp in order to learn how to get anything done.
"Let pi be a rational number"

Using pi as a name is only a very weak cue for "proof by contradiction". The title of the paper gives enough hint to detect it, but I would still use "suppose pi is rational", because it is the dead giveaway for proof by contradiction.

And as to 'obtuse': how many C programmers comment their 'main' function to help people unfamiliar with the language learn that it is the entry point of the program and receives its command line arguments as input? At some time, you have to assume your audience knows some lingo.

My main objection to this proof is that I do not find it beautiful; it feels like one shouldn't need to do integrals over goniometric functions to prove it.

Because it uses such fairly heavy weaponry, it isn't immediately clear to me that the logic isn't circular.
For a moment I was like "dancing baby" ?

and I was thinking of the creepy animated baby from Ally McBeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby

wow I am old, but so is the internet, that's from the late 90s
Web developers?
Of course :)

(Natural language is not a formal language.)
Notion – Document Reimagined
>But now you can get Lost Treasures of Infocom as a free iOS app.

That apparently just includes Zork but you can buy the rest of the Z-Code games (except for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--I assume for rights reasons related to Douglas Adam's estate) for just $9.99 which is still quite a deal. I'd have to try it out and see how playable it is without a keyboard though.
I was recently surprised to realize that only about 10% of California homeowners had insurance covering damage from earthquakes. My surprise wasn't that individuals would decide that they couldn't afford the coverage, but that the banks holding the mortgages would not require insurance on their collateral.

This got me to thinking about the financial effects of a major earthquake in the Bay Area. The estimated risk of a Magnitude 8 or greater quake in the next 30 years is about 5%.[2] With or without tsunami, I'd think that quake of this size would shut down most businesses in California for some length of time.

I realize that these companies have multiple offices, but what would the effect be of having no one come to work for a week at headquarters of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Ebay? And all the other companies based in Silicon Valley? Is this risk priced into the market? Or is the sort of black swan that Taleb and others are betting their hedge funds on?

[1] http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/08/29/is-earthquake-insurance-...

[2] http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_27686200/big-bay-area-...
> it's very watchable using the YouTube speed multiplier.

Good catch. Didn't know this feature, thanks!
You'll be limited by the widgets/apis whatever abstraction gives you. Sometimes it is enough, often it is not.
> Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons.

Looks like that hardware market is not very competitive.
I don't follow. You are saying that returning from a function early is not "changing the control flow"? What exactly is your criteria for "solution to exception handling"?
>Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular that it was on 99% of the world's desktops. There wouldn't be any anti-trust hoopla regarding that distribution having a preferred web browser, no matter how deeply integrated.

Assuming that in this alternate world GNU/Linux wasn't malleable (either because its not open source or for some other reason I am not able to think of). I think there would be anti-trust "hoopla".

For example... Think of the negative response everyone had back when ubuntu started sending amazon data... I changed distros. I don't think just because a system is based in GNU/Linux means that it is automatically sainted.
React in a fairytale (fun video)
As justizin said, if you don't know something, say so. Don't lie, stay calm and remember that the questions that they are asking are related to the job that they need to get done, so put that on your mind. Also think about the questions you want to ask them. They want to see how much interested you are in the position as well. Nevertheless, you'll get better as you go to more interviews. So, no worries, just study the company business and what the role needs.
IPv6: It's time to get on board
Why most of my fears about the future of my Angular 1 apps are gone﻿
Aztec Mexico (2007)
I haven't met a company hiring CS graduates that thinks they can easily learn things; they expect their future employees to have experience with all of their technologies already.

What's scary is that nobody has any clue how to get programming jobs with a CS degree except to get really lucky like they did.
Penalties for crimes that affect such large groups or even populations should be very harsh. Penalties for public services (police/politician corruption or actions) should be super harsh.

Police, institutional execs (bankers/doctors) and politicians should have a penalty structure that incentivizes appropriate behavior.

Just as they impose such rules downstream they should be subject to very harsh penalties when they exploit their positions.
Funny you should mention gnu emacs and that time frame, because those were the years when RMS was getting really testy at the existence of lucid emacs / xemacs.
Beta Release of Wikidata Query Service Now Live
Typo, missing a 'f' in 'off':
s/right of the bat/right off the bat/
In some ways, it feels like the punishment for the crime should be directly proportional to the level of responsibility the "criminal" had.

It seems like any bank boss who, where it can be proven, acknowledges and approves of his subordinate engaging in criminal activity should be sentenced to at least the same punishment as the trader himself.
I've done similar with inotify (dnotify before that) and Python now for over a decade, and it is an interface than can automate anything. I use it with doc generators also.

I believe I used something similar called fam in the 90's but that may have only been on SGI.
Apparently there was a preferred chalk of mathematicians; but Hagoromo chalk just went out of business. A chemistry professor of one of my classes read an article in some journal bemoaning this, so he decided to pick up and try some while he still could, see what all mathematicians were in to.
Nope, he defrauded banks. Banks are not people.
Interesting - I was sort of wondering if you could get sine just from simple harmonic motion, and that's basically what those equations do - the first is equivalent to saying s''(x) = -s(x), so acceleration is opposite to and linearly proportional to (well, equal to in this simple case) displacement. That's a good point.
They discriminate in the same sense that that real companies today discriminate based on candidates' skills and experience. Selecting the most qualified candidates and filtering out candidates because they trip certain flags are procedurally very different.
Actually... yes there is. At least there is a limit to the economic value of art. Given a finite human population with a finite lifespan (also implying a finite rate of reproduction), there is only so much attention that can be given to any form of art created. If a world would start creating art non-stop (which is pretty much what is happening now) the economic value of an average piece of art must drop to zero for the simple reason that people haven't the time to observe it. (Assuming that art can only be valuable economically if it is observed, which is kind of optimistic actually). Also pretty much the state in which we find ourselves now already.

A finite earth can support a finite population which can use finite resources to employ a finite economy. I'm not sure what's difficult about that concept; especially since a zero-growth economy is not a new concept (it's called 'maturity' when applied to an ecological system).
True, many thanks; will change on VIM to honor your comment hehe.
Definitely interesting result.

The primary problem is that nobody is looking for a win-win solution. Content ID was built as a copyrights enforcing tool and copyright holders scorned by the Napster, Kazaa, etc. experiences don't see any other way but take down.

There are many other ways how to not harm the user and also be compensated. For instance put a link to the original song where people can buy/listen to it if they are interested.

It's not only the law but the common sense that has to change towards copyrights and its enforcement.
"Why do articles have to be bundled into issues? The only reason for that bundling is because the economics of print require it."

Not at all. An important function of magazines for readers is to hedge the risk. When you buy a copy of Popular Science or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Good Housekeeping, you know pretty well what kind of content you're going to get. Even if you don't like every article or story, the chances are you're going to enjoy most of them (assuming you're a fan of the magazine to begin with).

Granted, there's still some risk. Magazines do decline or change focus. The risk is still smaller than what you'd get with an unknown author. Also the price is usually less than you'd pay for a stand-alone work.

For the writers, the magazine exposes their work to an audience that might not have heard of them before.

We're actually seeing a mini-boom in magazine-like entities in the indy publishing world. Often they're called "bundles", but they're really not much different than a classic magazine -- except that you don't need expensive Manhattan real estate, printers, paper, postage, or any of the other factors that have put so many traditional magazines on the skids.
I think I can give pretty good insight into this, as someone with a weird background coming to programming. I'm a data scientist with a physics background, but I'm still even atypical in that role, having just a bachelors degree.

My experience has been that without some of the real meaty knowledge that only comes from studying CS, you don't realize what you're missing until you work with other people who have the background. Pairing up, seeing them use abstractions that fit the problem perfectly is an eye opener. The theory helps. I've been shoveling my way through CLRS and learning haskell in my spare time, and both of these things, while not directly relevant to the problems I solve day to day, definitely improve my code.

And of course, when looking for new jobs, the right degree never hurts as far as where you go on the resume pile.
>I don't know why the functional people couldn't stick with things I already know -- obvious symbols like ++ and != and easy concepts such as "inheritance" and "polymorphism".

This is the most poignant line, in my opinion. I think many people underestimate just how much power familiarity has in the industry. "Don't fix what ain't broke" is so ingrained that people try to follow it even when process is clearly broken: they simply can't comprehend how a system that "works" can be "broken".

It's also near impossible to convince someone to switch to a tool they don't understand, especially when empirical evidence is near impossible to get. You can say to your manager, "I rewrote/can write most of our app in 200 hours, cutting the lines of code to 40%, and implicitly eliminating many bugs without even trying". But you can't predict how many hours of maintenance you save in the future, even if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be orders of magnitudes more than the time it took for to rewrite, teach your team, or find good programmers who know your favorite static functional language.

At this point, I think I'm beating a dead horse (or maybe Nothing).
In fact, that's the way the rest of (dare I say, real) engineering works: you get the theory and practice in your studies, and the mechanics in your first job. The software industry has been spoiled because, for the purposes of large swaths of it, the mechanics can be self-learned by motivated people with or without a degree. The degree (computer science or software engineering) is not supposed to teach the mechanics.
This is what I thought of too and I was like "What does Universal Music have to do with that?"
There is no progress; my view has not changed. Nor will being anonymously snotty do a lot to change it.
Showing my age as well. I thought the same thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5x5OXfe9KY
WebRTC: If it’s P2P, why do I need a server?
A quick Google search gives these top links for starters:

NASA: Climate Change Evidence - http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/

Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-im...

Weather Underground: Evidence of Climate Change: http://www.wunderground.com/climate/evidence.asp
IMO looking at existing, evolved, biological systems is a great hint at the eventual future. Even if some of it was trial-end-error, it comprises millions of years of secrecy, analysis, and combat between hideously complex systems.
To be fair, you don't really know what his beginners are "banging up". It simply doesn't take much skill to use a web framework to generate database-backed webpages (witness the rise of the "javascript programmer").

The bootcamps are cranking out a commodity product for a commodity world.
Is this really the case? I know for a fact that large tech companies like Google, FB, Yahoo, MSFT, Amazon are pretty agnostic with respect to the specific tools and technologies that their prospective candidates can use.
I can't help but wonder how much government influence had on this...
I have. I found very little correlation between having a CS degree and being able to code your way out of a paper bag, with exceptions for some specific colleges.
How to Build a Hacker Community
Socrates (in Meno) helped a slave kid prove to himself that the square root of 2 is irrational, using nothing but a stick and the sand on the ground.

I don't think that kid would understand this "simple proof".
Let people experience your app’s benefits without signing up
Netpowder, a mini-server in the browser
Could I realistically state any justifiable criticism of anything related to black people and not be racist in your book? I am leaning toward no.
Indeed – thanks!
Elon Musk plans launch of 4000 satellites to bring Wi-Fi to remote locations
> The Startup That Bet on the Genius of Regular Folk

Well there’s your problem!
super slow here in chrome :(
Ask HN: I own mrrobot.io Should I build something on it or sell it?
I have an idea to build a great website which is inspired by http://3564020356.org/deserve.htm but the hacks will be related to the ongoing series. I'm not sure, if I should go ahead and build it. Would it kick off? or should I just sell it? I'm inclined on the idea to build it. I asked a few friends around who weren't much impressed. So I wanted to ask more like-minded people. What do you think?
I don't see how this is superior to having the plant itself create THC which is much simpler and cheaper. Other than being a cool trick, how is this going to change the world, as the article claims? It really doesn't specify how the THC produced from yeast is any better or different than that produced from the plant. Can yeast production be scaled up in ways that plat production can't? Or is it just that it might be more illogically acceptable to certain people because it comes from yeast?
It would remove the incentive for employees to pay $2k of company money to get $100 worth of (personal) free stuff.
I'm almost 30. I just brought this video up a few weeks ago and it's one of the first times I have felt old. No one knew what I was referring to.
Yeah, basically what matthewarkin said. You could theoretically do it either way: (a) an app could say "Sell your product with us and we'll take 2%" or a seller can say (b) "I'm willing to give 1% of GMV to apps who list our products"
"'Yandex', whatever that is" - Yandex is a $10B public company, a legitimate innovator and the top internet player in Russia. Ever heard of that country, or is it yet another "whatever that is" for you?
Relay: Declarative data for React applications
The satellite portion of the code has been open sourced: https://github.com/oskarth/netpowder

Most of the complexity is on the backend with generation of jails etc. The repo has some instructions and rationale for those who are curious, though.
>the real story here: LIBOR is decided by a bunch of banks calling up brokers at random

This. Am I missing something, or is it bizarre that LIBOR came to play such a significant role in the financial markets, given it's so hackable?

A facetious comparison would be how every year people bet on what colour hat the Queen will wear on Ladies Day at Royal Ascot. If suddenly trillions were being staked on this market, could you prosecute a courtier for handing her a strawberry bonnet?
"...cause they are too big to fail"
I have a strong suspicion that few 'heretics' will be 'recanting' today.
Security is not just crypto and obfuscation.. there are many other dimensions to security. Calling it perfect security is deceiving.
Also, it's not really showing their point well - the reason we're here is because our various historic genetic cousins and such died off because they weren't able to adapt, and we were lucky enough to.