skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if an analysis of this and the comment corpus could quantifiably show shifts in the opinions of the Reddit "hivemind" since the start. Has the Reddit userbase turned more conservative over the years, or is that just my impression?
Anitya – A cross-distribution upstream release monitoring project
I worked for Johnson&Johnson in Belgium years ago. On each desk of the open space I was on, there was a small "manifesto". The title was : "we work for the good of our patients and investors". Yes, patients and investors put on the very same level.
If everyone who can afford a phone with WiFi can afford a mobile Internet plan, then India is better in that regard than my EU country. I know many people who can only afford to read their email, apply to jobs, etc on WiFi hotspots.
Strange that it still depends on Blender 2.69.
I watched the "Frozen in Time" documentary about this plane and it was heart wrenching to watch the guys' faces when the plane burned down on the runway after so much time and effort spent in adverse conditions.

If anyone needs a not-so-gentle reminder about failure, watch that documentary.
Cool, someone should write an Emacs mode for them! I am very sympathetic to the arguments for using a keyboard-only interface, i try to achieve that on my own computer as much as possible, too.
I knew a pharma rep once - she was a beautiful, intelligent woman, who spent her days going to doctors offices and trying to convince them to recommend her pharma-co's drugs to their customers. She explained to me, quite matter of fact, that she was literally not much more than a paid prostitute (Germany, where its legal) who slept with pretty much every client in order to close the deal - a fact she had no compunctions with sharing with me over wine, one evening .. actually, it broke her.

I'll never forget her telling me how she felt little more than a hooker, albeit with a much larger list of drugs to peddle, legally and with the backing and support of her company - which expected her to do what it took to get the doctors on their brand. It seems this is not uncommon, either - that pharma-co's hire the youngest, most attractive folks to rep their wares at the front lines of doctors offices.

I think that aspect of the industry has a lot, lot darker side than people are willing to admit. I knew her for a few years, until one day she committed suicide.
Where I once worked we were obliged by law to keep a huge range of medications in a dedicated emergency kit.
In the years I was there none were ever used or needed.
The drugs ranged from salbutamol to adrenaline to glucagon, steroids, tablets for angina etc, etc.
In the mandatory refresher courses we were also quietly advised that with our level of emergency experience and thus diagnostic ability we were far more likely to do harm than good with these and so there were only a couple of items in the kit that we should ever even think of using.
Only one company was approved for the supply of these kits and they'd regularly contact us advising that such and such now needed replacing and invoice us.
Not only was it onerously expensive but what was really annoying was that they never supplied anything with a full shelf life.
Stuff that might have several years shelf life would commonly be supplied with a year or even less left to expiry.
Adding the "think" is being overly careful.
Another way to state that average paradox: The majority of people have an above average number of legs.
I work with a lot of Lebanese people, and the sad reality for many of them: Leb is just too damn expensive to live, so many work abroad. They are highly educated and talented, so the brain drain has always meant excellent co-workers for me. I do not complain.

But the quality of life in Lebanon (and I mean like in the general sense; the politics of day-to-day is increasingly dumb) compared to other parts of the Arab world is wonderful. As an American, if I could make money living there, I would be working there already.

Awesome article. I hope to see the startup scene takeoff. I wish these guys and gals well. Make place to employ me so I can escape to Beirut.

Now if they would only fix the traffic problems ...
Mostly off topic, but I can't seem to find the answer online:

Does anyone happen to know what the difference is between 6 contact and 8 contact chips? I have an older travel card that has 6 pads, and a recently issued card that has 8 contact pads. Are they inter-operable? I've only used the chip and sign twice so far, both with the newer card.
Not Internet but Splinternet. Facebook's new Internet.Org is just as evil
Grunt Plugin for Tomcat
I agree with your light gray comment. Coming from San Francisco, I've been working in India for the past month and have made a few unexpected observations:

1. Despite scarcity of 3G and land line data, consumers hardly budget their usage; when the network is available, it's every-man-for-himself trying to watch youtube & consume other media

2. Train loading & unloading is incredibly fast. This can make the station a hectic place to be, even for locals.

3. The same Uber vs Local Taxi (In this case, Auto Rickshaws aka Tuk-Tuks) battle exists here, with Uber charging less than they pay drivers to price out the competition

4. Young people, boys and girls, want to be either engineers or doctors.

Train Station Wi-Fi will be great for already-online mobile users to briefly consume content and call an Uber home, but that's not what's going to 'get the next billion Indians online to access more opportunities.' People love free Wi-Fi, but this RailWire contract is a bigger win for Google than anyone else. Let's see some secondary schools come online!
That was super interesting. Thank you for posting it. The DVD/Streaming split was an especially interesting period for Netflix. I didn't know the back story behind it. For anyone curious, it's at the end.
But we cannot download that one.

This is actually what has been bothering me for a while now. In the past where search engines (well at least the big one) weren't that thorough, you didn't mind if something stayed on the Internet, since it wasn't easily accessible.

But it's a major difference if it's indexed/searchable or downloadable.
I couldn't see from the source what form the data are in? It mentions what properties are available, but is it a DB snapshot? Are 'submission objects' only text?
Nit: Patents are state-backed monopoly rights,
patent supporters argue that free market would result in too much competition.
The documentary: https://youtu.be/1u4YBwjQTds
A Q and a with Pedro Domingos: Author of ‘The Master Algorithm’
The key point is that this is nothing specific about health care nor that it's somehow broken/rotten.

And sales is usually more important unless it's a highly technical situation. There are plenty of terribly engineered but extremely popular products. The important part of staying in business is getting people to buy it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10232769
Funny you should mention Dixons. Back when I was a university student I worked part time at a Currys store (part of the Dixons group) here in the UK during the transition from a keyboard-driven SCO system (I don't recall its name) to a touchscreen Windows system called "Eclipse". We were one of the few smaller stores that got to trial it first. Absolutely horrendous. Typical transactions took 10x as long, the system froze up regularly, a load of functionality was missing. We had all muscle-memoried all the common tasks and could navigate to most of them within a couple of seconds on the old system, all gone with Eclipse.

We were promised they were just teething troubles and would all be fixed for the final rollout. Of course, they weren't and Eclipse was universally despised within the Group stores. Dixons Group ran into massive financial trouble shortly afterwards, although no word either way on whether the new till / stock control system was a factor. Amazing how it all comes flooding back!

It still makes me shudder when I go into a Dixons Group store and see Eclipse still in use. I almost break out into a cold sweat.
I guess that explains why celebrities make millions for only being celebrities.
I guess you could say those entries are the less good parts.
A response to Facebook’s submission defending Internet.org in India
Interesting, I'm glad that there is an updated city generator for Blender :)

Now you just need to add city zoning in (like I did for my dissertation) - http://www.blendernation.com/2010/04/26/city-zoning-modifica...
That may be because the US is leading the way on drug development. After the drug has been developed, the drug company will be able discriminate on price to maximize revenue. I imagine the cost of getting approval to sell a drug in European countries that has already been developed and tested for the US is much smaller than the actual development.

It could be that without the US system, these drugs would not be available in European countries as well.

Mandating lower prices for drugs is unlikely to work as it hasn't worked in the past (Venezuela everything, US gasoline, etc).
High school was hell for me, but I had to go back to get over it
I have a 'picture wall' at our house and in between the pictures with good memories I also put some floppy disks (and cassettes). Looks nice in my opinion and reminds me of those times when taking a picture was still somewhat special, and the output was something to be kept, whereas now in the majority of cases it seems pictures are taken to be looked at once and then forgotten for eternity.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/complement-lang-faq.html#is-anyone...?
I was looking at this from more of an 'efficiency' perspective actually. Text-based protocols have a bit of an overhead as they require sending more data to transmit the same amount of information. So what benefits outweigh this?

After a bit of digging, it does appear my question itself was incorrectly phrased. But it seems to be that the majority of internet traffic use text based protocols. There are many more binary protocols than text but more text traffic than binary. Thus most of the successful protocols on the internet are text based. Except for a small number of applications (bittorrent is one example) binary protocols tend to die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYsHK81MTHI
This happens all the time. Engineering is outsourced or team is moved to another project and the same product is sold for a long time.
Postgres to Oracle: please, security test our code
There sure as hell is lot more fear-mongering since the refugee "crisis" started.
It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if the parallel innovations of CD and internet had not sidelined the floppy, since software was already outgrowing them : the last version of Visual C++ that I installed from floppies came on IIRC several dozen disks, requiring the thing to be carried in a couple of sturdy carrier bags - clearly not a sustainable situation.
I am amazed that people don't more universally recognise the advantage of a tactile (== physical buttons) interface... Here where i shop the cashiers also have a touch interface, and they have to keep their arms practically horizontal at chest-height most of the day, which (i'm not an ergonomics expert, but) must be much more tiring than keying stuff in on a flat keyboard. Also, they have to look and aim and peck, whereas a "traditional" (i'm aghast that a real keyboard could fall into a category called traditional, what's the world coming to?) keyboards allow much surer and faster (and sometimes blind) entry...

EDIT clarification
Yeah but I'm sure a lot of people post on here knowing that they won't delete a comment. It's a different story with Reddit, where people have a lot more expectations and it's bigger.
Understanding technical debt and discretionary spending
I have experience in this vertical. There is so much to tell about it. We market a product directly to K-12 schools and never, not once, has a school even asked us, let alone demanded, that student data is handled properly. There is a severe knowledge gap between educators and technologists.

Educators see marketing materials about electronic courseware and quickly see the benefits. Which are huge. There is not only adaptive learning, there is learning on the student's own time, the computer is infinitely patient and offers text, video, interactive quizzes, built-in standardised grading, you name it. It's hard to oversell the great fit between education and technology.

So what happens is that schools engage with this without asking if there are any drawbacks. This is likely to cause problems in the future. Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira is quoted saying “I’m not calling your child a bundle of data. I’m just helping her learn.” And this is 100% true. I absolutely believe he is sincere as are so many other technologists. The point is, what happens when this data is bundled, sold, hacked into, leaked and used in not-appropriate ways? We just don't know but it's almost certain that it won't all be benign. So a little apprehension is in order.

There is stronger protection for children in the EU than in the US, but it almost doesn't matter. Schools don't enforce rigorous data policies--they don't even know they have to. There are laws in place, but the law is widely ignored, no matter what jurisdiction. So right now, protection of children's data is in the hands of the technology companies. If you have good intentions, ask what data you really need. After evaluation, we now only require name + email for our program and nothing else. We stopped asking for gender and anything else that's not needed.

I think it would be helpful if a gliding scale were implemented. Does your technology just use basic info like email? You have more freedom to operate. Do you ask for gender or religion? You're subject to more scrutiny. Do you store the big stuff like social/developmental problems? You have to be HIPPAA/FERPA compliant, etc. Right now though, there are no market or regulatory forces in place to make this happen, it's sort of a wild west.
Mark Zuckerberg Changes His Profile Pic. But I Won’t.
I personally don't care how many lines of code it is but why so secretive about it? Is reverse engineering ruby really easy when you know this?!
It would also be interesting to see the development of astroturffing campaigns from a marketing and also a tinfoil hat perspective.
Clickable link :-p

https://doc.rust-lang.org/complement-lang-faq.html#is-anyone...
Spoiler: Mars is at number 3.

And we know that Mars is slim pickings as far as life goes.
Rarely do I ever manage memory in C++. As much as I adore Haskell there's a bunch of stuff you cannot do fast enough in any of the languages described above, as easily as you can do it in C++.

Try writing a fast A* (without any pointers and memory management, easily done in C++), maybe a travelling salesman problem -- simple 2-opt heuristic (easily done without memory management). If you find these suitable for libraries, and not something you would write on your own, there's not a single fast matrix library implementation in Java or Haskell. If something that "simple" can't be done, then, in my case, I cannot use these languages as easily as I can use C++.

A simple principle, a simple idea of copy and move semantics enabled me to write C++ code without worrying much about memory at all. When allocations become a problem, I just move the container out of that heavy loop, or change my malloc implementation with a simple flag, and it's still 10x if not 100x faster than what Haskell/Scala/Java could accomplish in the same amount of time it took me to write the C++ code.
I keep having the feeling that the west only stayed somewhat sane by having the eastern block as a comparison.
Do you have HTTPS Everywhere installed or JavaScript disabled? The site tries to load a Markdown-rendering JS library over HTTP, so if you visit https://m50d.github.io/ instead of http://m50d.github.io/, your browser won't render the Markdown.
How Does SSL Work
On that note, i have gotten the impression that the bootsector trick has been coming back in vogue. This because modern antivirus packages no longer do bootsector checks unless they are set to their most stringent level.
The performance and performance-per-watt of the X-Gene1 processor that thing uses don't look terribly competitive, unfortunately: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...

Apparently it's made on a 40nm process, and it's probably not a terribly well-optimised design either, both of which go some way to explaining why it's not much good. (Though I guess it was good enough to convince Intel to release the Xeon D for a reasonable price. As you say, Intel's run by profit-maximising professionals - they can resoundingly beat any ARM server chips anyone puts out and drive them out of business, they just don't release their best chips at the best price unless they have to.)
"His English is fluent, if strongly accented. His Spanish, particularly on-air, is carefully neutral—pan-Latino, not noticeably Mexican."

Yes. From a migrant country like Australia, if you flick on SBS TV News, you get the same phenomena. Fluent English, accented but neutral foreign tongue. You can hear the English equivalent on BBC World News with the announcers speaking RP. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
This is why, I think we need to make ICT (Information Communication Technology) a mandatory subject in our schools.

Teach kids about the internet. Many people are still under the assumption just deleting something would make it disappear for ever.

Maybe a lot of people from our generation are doomed to sharing too many things online, but we can at least save the next generation from themselves.

You make a mistake 10 years ago, may be a few close friends in your town know about you. Now you make a mistake, the whole world has access to that information.

Government regulations, bans are not going to do anything to stop the spread of information, we need to educate people to protect themselves from their own selves.
Why create Beer Picker?
Agreed, it was the blind entry where all the time was saved. Even the 60+ year old part timer in our store had most of the functions memorised and complained when the new system launched. I forget the exact sequence (it's been about 10 years) but the faster typers among us could walk up to a terminal, type in their user ID and password, hit e.g. F2 F6 F1 F7 to go to the sales screen and scan the first item within about 3 seconds, even before the screen had caught up, and it would work flawlessly every time. It took longer than that just to log in to the new system!
That's not how it works. There's no "stealing" sales, both salespeople are just closing in $1M in value of the available market.

And how would your budget drop if the salesperson is bringing in more than they cost? Not having salespeople doesn't mean the same money will still be coming in, rather it would be potential market left uncaptured.
"How about just do/like whatever you like, and don't try to make everyone think you're a special snowflake"

So... be a non-conformist? A non-conformist maintains a notion of themselves as such not because they're trying to be a special snow-flake. They need a concept with which to analyze their problems. It's actually really hard to just do what you like and get away with it. Like you said, "the majority of people in the world frankly don't give a shit." No one out there is trying to figure out how to reward you for something they don't understand. Even if it's insanely valuable. There will always be rewards for simply adapting yourself to an existing concept. Anyone not doing that pays a significant penalty for which the conformist world is entirely ignorant. They won't care and they won't help you deal with it. Hence, non-conformists converge-on but don't necessarily conform-to this stereotype. The one in the corner complaining about the conformists.
FTF on Tour – InvestTech: Insurgents, Incumbents, Investors and FCA Innovation Hub
If there would be such a quantum effect it would contradict a lot of conventional theoretical physics, brains operate at high temperatures ~310 Kelvin, and the length scales involved are fairly large for quantum mechanics. You would only expect to see quantum effects at such large length scales at very low temperatures, because otherwise the correlation length is just too small.
Today Saudi Arabia Will Crucify This Teenager for Protesting the Government
"[to hide which] users are participating in each round, all users always perform an exchange"

Resulting in 12 KB/s constant bandwidth usage, with a million users. It does give you an incentive to actually always use it.. I might have misunderstood this but at 20 seconds latency it's not for texting, and also not suitable for large file transfers be.

I like it.. :-)
The difference is resources. You guide your kid to grow, experiment, etc. If you're a pool family, no safety net, no connections, that's going to be a disaster.
Zip drives would have gained popularity, probably, to be later supplanted/replaced by read-only USB sticks/memory cards.
What is meant is that these men committing war-crimes is immoral.

Also, regardless of the "marriage" argument I made, if these men had normal relationships with women, I think the problems would be much less severe. Porn is working against that, not helping it.
Compile-Time Checked Typed Actors for Scala and Akka
Touch screens for cashiers seem to be used for product flexibility reasons. Meaning that chains can add/remove products, or categories, easily.

As for the ergonomics issue, i think that is known as "gorilla arm".

My personal take there is that screens for input and screens for output should be put at very different orientations. A input screen really belong at a near flat angle, much like with a keyboard.

Also, i wonder if the resurgence of pressure sensitivity (See Apple's force/3D touch as an example) will make for some change in this. Especially if one combine it with some kind of tech that can give the screen software controlled textures.
Investment Scam
But we cannot download that one.

Not yet :)

Given their lax security and general cluelessness of the people in charge, I'm quite sure it will leak at some point, at least partially, perhaps to corporations, perhaps to the public, just as internal NSA docs have leaked. It's very hard to keep things like that airtight forever - all it takes is one slip up and all the info stored could be accessible at some point in the future. It's already indexed and searchable, just not by you.

The important point here is that looking at present day tech (as in your comment on search engine prowess) is not the way to look at it - one day all this information will be accessible to much more intelligent future algorithms, able to link it together in myriad ways and form an almost perfect picture of your life in retrospect. The data is there, and will be stored forever.
Love this project, just wish i could get Flow Router working with it then it'd be my go to for anything Meteor wise
The Zip drive by Iomega enjoyed a few years of popularity around 1995-1998:

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

They were commonly used in graphic design, at least. (Designers needed to send files to print all the time, and the Zip drive was the standard until CD-R became cheap and fast enough.)
I dunno. Emacs seems to have the very X+Y+Z+butt+cat kind of key combo issues that was mentioned as a problem elsewhere.

The basic benefit of these interfaces seem to be about single keys (F keys mostly) for reaching major functions.

I am guessing that once the patients id number has been entered, a single key brings up the journal, and one can page through entries (and their content) using single presses (next/prev entry, page up/down style).
Depends on the scale of the problems the non profit is solving and it's overall impact.
That's sort of what I was thinking. I would imagine a huge amount of ugly carrots for example end up chopped up and in cans or frozen bags or mass produced food products. Who knows what the vegetables in a Swanson pot pie looked like when they were in a field somewhere.