skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Art of Unix Programming dedicates a chapter to the advantages of using text for the input and output of programs: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/textualitychapte... . They also note that Unix and its derivatives are one of the oldest operating system paradigms still in active use, and that it has migrated to everything from smartphones to supercomputers. In a way, by using a Unix-like OS you are betting on text.

On the other hand, I would argue that engineering, architecture, and industry rely heavily on visual languages such as technical drawings, blueprints, control/process flow diagrams, etc. Text is a good bet, but it's inadequate for a lot of problems related to the physical world that require spatial reasoning.
Hi, I'm curious as to what you mean as 'better'. Act to a higher moral threshold? Can be relied upon to render assistance?
I'm curious which products you would recommend for bug tracking. If they have testcase management, even better.

I run a managed hosting company that hosts a fair number of Atlassian instances. We have our complaints about Atlassian and our customers often experience sticker shock when upgrading past the 10-user licenses, but we've had trouble finding other issue trackers with similar functionality, flexibility and market acceptance.

The same goes for Confluence as a wiki. While not perfect, most other products seem unable to do things such as access controls easily.

If there are other mature products out there that people are using we'd love to take a look. We do support Bugzilla and MediaWiki as well, but this is usually a different market segment from what Atlassian serves.
Oh I agree with you there. We probably do.
The iPhone, also the new one, doesn't create any tactile feedback besides just feeling like a vibrating device. It's a much more subtle and precise and pleasant vibration than on my current device (iPhone 6) on the new 6s but it's not really a big change. No quantum leap.

(Can I just say that I really hate people who dislike that metaphor? A quantum leap is a discontinuous and surprising change, not necessarily a massive one. It's more appropriate to describe a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one. As such it doesn't really matter that in reality a quantum leap is a tiny distance, what matters is that it's discontinuous, with no steps in between. That's what the metaphor is playing at. Something that seems familiar weirdly ends up in a suprising place it has no right to be. Not without being somewhere else in between first.)

On the MacBooks that same technology most certainly is a quantum leap: on the trackpads it actually feels like clicking down a physical button. On the phones that same sensation is not created. Not at all, not even a little tiny bit.

My hypothesis is that with the trackpad your only point of contact with a vibrating surface is the tip of your finger. With the phones you feel the whole device vibrating in your hand. That should make it harder to fool your brain into thinking you are holding anything but a vibrating device. I will have to lay the new iPhones flat on a table and test it out when I get the opportunity, maybe they would feel differently. (But even if they could create that feeling while flat on the table iPhones are probably set up differently than MacBook trackpads and more tuned to just create a pleasant vibration, since that's all they normally can do in your hand.)

All that said, yeah, real tactile feedback, if it can be pulled of convincingly, provides some neat perspectives for touch interfaces.
> But this reform would be even more helpful if it required agencies to cite and share the sources for their “facts.” Where, for example, are the Department of Labor data that prove hot dog venders [sic] earn less than $9 an hour?

This smells funny. Why are there scare quotes around "facts"? Why is there a demand to prove that we're not getting duped by the revolving door between the government and Big Hot Dog?

One of the authors is a "senior fellow at the R Street Institute," a conservative think tank in DC. So naturally, it's in the author's interest to write a propaganda essay discrediting the liberal executive branch and poisoning the well, and publish it in the expanded op-ed section of a DC newspaper.

This is just recursive politics, trying to pretend it's not.
I can't remember the last time I've actually made a field private.
Police slapping phones/cameras out of someone's hands need to get control of their emotions and bear the "I will catch you slipping up" threat with confident professionalism.

That said, the criminal-record stereo-blaster was probably lying about 'his uncle' and I don't think you get to 'you have no warrant we're done here' and shut the door on the police responding to a neighbor noise complaint. If they want to give you a talking-to or a ticket (depending on local law), they can.

I do believe the guy about his phone being "lost", though (should be easy to corroborate if they have signatures/records of personal items), and we can expect real sanction for the phone-slapper if it's clear which cop did it.
Meh. In my opinion, Jira is pretty awesome. It's got irritating quirks in places, but so long as you spend the time to configure it in a manner that's suitable for your organisation, it doesn't get in the way.

I'm not really sure that there are better alternatives out there.
I think I saw a few of these discs at Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale. I've also seen some non-vhs, non-beta video cassettes around. A collection of music videos on some quite large cassette format, almost double the size of VHS at American Science and Surplus in Milwaukee.

Fun stuff, though I've sort of grown out of collecting every weird format I find.
Don't forget larger traditional investors that are getting involved in private funding rounds as they chase returns. This could easily ripple out to mainstreet.
Funny you mention Oculus as an example of non-funding driven innovation:

> In 2011, Luckey got a dream job working as a technician at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). There, he had a chance to cross deep into VR territory. On Sept. 25, he posted the following on MTBS3D. [These excerpts are condensed and lightly edited.]

He described the experience in a 1500-word narrative titled "Truly immersive (AKA "Holy crap this is real") VR simulation."

via: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12956/pa...
I'm sorry, I don't understand this comment. Which mindset do you believe is unworkable, which defense do you believe is passionate, in what way would you say our age is munificent, and is that a good or bad thing?
Pluto Time
Is there a CAP theorem for Durability?
>> But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture.

I think so. A lot of the research at Xerox PARC and Bell Labs failed to generate much profit for their parent companies, although it was of great benefit to society, so why should companies continue to operate that way? It's a market failure. The federal government probably needs to pick up the slack and fund more basic research.
As one of many developers here in south Asia, we agree with you :)
Show HN: Ekanite – an open-source syslog server with built-in search
> These are just some recent examples of the executive branch using our tax dollars to shape our opinions.

Yes, and where will they be when the "executive branch" is their side, doing the same thing?
I was also desperate to see this. And rightly so, here's what looks like a prototype link from above - and it's beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drmRYsvUaM

You can really appreciate the difference between the gentle movement induced with mechanically actuated magnets, and the nasty instantaneous movement which would happen with electro.
Sadly I use my brower tabs as my Tsundoku... I keep them open for months and even years.
ABA Problem
How would this scenario protect elephants in the wild? Or would the extinction of species depend on the demand for products made from these species?
There's Nothing Mindblowing About Windows Releasing Its Own Linux OS
I can't imagine options would be cheap to buy, as the seller is taking on all the risk, and they will take into account the volatility of the underlying asset when determining the price they would be willing to accept.

Forward contracts are different from options. But what's the point of being paid in BTC every month, if you enter into a set of forward contracts to convert that BTC into USD? It's equivalent to being paid in USD.
Good. Wall Street doesn't know how to safely derisk on its own.
I don't know of a paycheque with no risk. Lay-offs are a type of risk, I hope you will agree with me. Given the capital obligations e.g. mortgages paid using the paycheque you can see how the risk is even more than just the unpaid labour. Also labour markets are not liquid.
North Korea travel guide – Wikitravel
Hackers have been wanting to "censor" the internet since September 1993: not to enforce top-down rules, but to keep it a group of people (hopefully all people, eventually) who respect social convention and respect each other. The group that thinks it's a free-for-all without rules is a late-coming one trying to claim the mantle of hackerdom. And in many cases, as with ESR's de-facto takeover of the Jargon File, they've succeeded in presenting themselves as the original hackers.

Don't be fooled. The technical design of the Internet and its serious non-resilience to spam, malware, and other various opportunists (because we all trusted that Internet users were reasonable people) should show you that none of this was in the original vision. "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept from others" worked because everyone respected that without enforcement, and there was no crowd demanding the right to be liberal in what they sent.
Most of their customers are in the US.
I suspect this is why the Texas economy looks to be doing so well right now.
How to Lose Weight
I'm writing a book on Ansible, and I've made $25k before publishing
I think the neologism "cyber-violence" is incredibly loaded terminology. They need to be called out on it.

Violence according the dictionary is "behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something."

There is no physical force over the internet. Being subject to harassment is not violence.
A masterful essay. Thanks for the pointer.
That's really interesting! But do you believe Luckey would not have worked on VR if it were not for the job at MxR? I believe he would have, though it might have taken him longer or he may have taken a different path. The innovation stems from Luckey and the culture of risk and it's given a chance to flourish easier through funding than without.

Besides, I was saying that other means have become available as the cost of innovating has been cut, sometimes by orders ot magnitude. Kickstarter, specifically, has replaced a lot of traditional public or large corporation outlets for funding.
> A property tax is generally progressive because the poor do not own real property.

Won't those taxes still be passed to the poor as higher rent?
I think one of the commonalities there is that that kind of pictorial information still shares many of the advantages of text, namely that they are searchable, asynchronous, and permanent.

Speech is often problematic, because it is so ephemeral, unless extra pains are taken to record it. Ideally, you'd have voice recordings or at least good minutes taken of an in-person meeting or telephone call(which actually just turns it back into text...), so that the information doesn't just disappear into fallible meat-memory. The other problem is that it is a real-time communication. You can only consume the content at a single rate - you can't speed through the filler or go back and reread something that didn't at first make sense. With recorded video or audio, you can sort of do this, but it is so slow, compared to reading speed, and it's not like you can just Ctrl-F through it
I just finished my undergrad studies, so I don't have any spare money to gamble on the market. If I did have extra capital, I would keep 95% of it out of the market, use 5% to buy 1-month Facebook put options at a $92.5 strike, wait for a correction in real-estate prices, and use the untouched 95% to purchase some property in Inglewood and Compton, CA.
Writing a book has been a much longer project than I originally planned, but the journey has been very rewarding so far. It's a little ironic that, almost two years into my stint writing this book, I still don't use Ansible for anything directly related to my day job.

But that's probably one of the reasons I've been able to stay motivated through the crazy editorial process (which takes half as long as the actual _writing_ of the book!)—since infrastructure management is a fun hobby instead of a 9-to-5, I've kept an eye out for new, cool features and different integrations that I would otherwise miss due to myopic focus.
Is this sarcasm/a joke? I can't keep firefox or chrome open for more than week without it running up 4GB RAM utilization.
I go through reading phases where I blow through book after book voraciously, but somehow my Tsundoku increases simultaneously. Then I go off reading for a while and, when I come back on, I ignore my Tsundoku and start reading entirely different books instead. Just as there are Steam games I'll eventually play and games I've bought but will probably never play, I have Tsundoku that have been around for a very long time and will probably remain as such forevermore. It almost seems like we need a word to describe books that, at one point, seemed like a good idea to buy but which we'll never realistically get around to reading.

I'd also like a word for books that I just can't get through, for no good reason. I think I've started reading Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" half a dozen times but this book inevitably puts me off reading for a while.
Made in the USSR: Reverse Engineering the Boeing B-29 (2001)
Check out the credits at the end of the page: http://www.hellorhei.com/

No mention of a particular Makerspace, but obviously a lot of collaboration with people with various tools/skills.
> In a compartmentalized ("need to know") environment, it can be hard or impossible to know the real purpose of any particular task.

There are definitely a lot of areas that wouldn't suffer from this problem. I'd be surprised if a cryptographer couldn't distinguish between working on civilian signals intelligence vs military (since the first will be using published ciphers).

Any how far does the scope of assisting the organization go? If you work for the FBI in a non-surveillance capacity, are you still part of the machine since the FBI and NSA cooperate on counter-terrorism? Should everybody at the FBI with a conscience quit because some in the organization have taken advantage of overextended surveillance powers?
How does rent control come into play here?
I was watching a TV programme on haiku the other day. One of the things they stressed was that because haiku is so compressed (17 mora in Japanese, where a mora can be though of as either a vowel sound or a consonant followed by a vowel sound in English terms) that you have to be careful of what grammar constructs to use. Grammar does not usually lead to imagery and if you can strip away the grammar, you can have more mora to use for words that evoke imagery.

This made me think that haiku, in particular, is good at evoking emotions and imagery that the reader/listener is already familiar with. There are some incredibly powerful haiku that in just a few words can really tug at your emotions. But you need to have already experienced the imagery for it to have any meaning.

I find that picture to be similar in nature to a haiku. There is very little in the picture itself, but the elements it has evoke powerful emotions because we know what they mean. The starving child, the vulture sitting ready, the question of "why is the child starving" (war)... You assemble these ideas in your head and it generates a huge number of thought processes and feelings.

To me, the difference between such a picture and a haiku is that the picture is not something I have ever seen before. I couldn't imagine it without seeing it first. Someone could write the most poignant haiku about that image, but it would mean nothing to me, who has never seen such a war. But, to the people of that village, I'm sure such a haiku would be incredibly powerful -- possibly even more so than the photograph. They would fill in their own experience in the gaps left by the words. For someone personally familiar with the experience, the photograph might be too real and obvious -- even gauche.

I wonder if text is an ideal mechanism for discussing topics for which the the audience already has some experience -- something to relate to and hang on those words. Pictures, on the other hand, are good for describing things that people have not seen before and may not relate to.
I have the same problem. Then there are so many tabs and I have to use a Chrome extension to automatically save and close inactive tabs. Guess I should set some time to look at that limbo place.
Ask HN: What is the future of content based ad supported websites?
With all recent events happening regarding web advertisements and ad blocking , indicates that web advertisement going to have hard time earning revenue from typical advertisement.

Either they will have to find a different way of putting ads (sponsored post etc) or have a pay-wall for content access or go out of business .

There are still billions of people in third world countries , who can't make payment online and the advertisement industry is so big that companies involved in this will let it go.

What do you think is going to happen ? Would it be wise for someone to invest time in making content based website ?
On chrome there is a setting to resume where you left off and reopen all the tabs. Also ctrl+shift+t, or the recent tabs menu opens them.

Then there are extensions that let you save open tabs, like session budy. Or just regular bookmarking.

Having lots of tabs open isn't really in issue for some reason. I think it saves tabs that haven't been looked at for 10 minutes to disk.
> If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population.

Although this is effectively the definition of progressive and regressive taxation today—because that's how the terms are almost always used by the large number of people who have only the most casual understanding of tax policy—it is a perversion of the original and long-standing textbook definition, and of the way in which the terms are still used by some economists.

By the original definition, a progressive tax is simply one whose rate of assessment increases ("progresses") with the value subject to taxation [0]. Thus an import duty on bananas is progressive if it taxes them at a rate of 1% ad valorem for the first $1MM's worth, and then at a rate of 2% of their value above $1MM.

Note that the original definition and the popular corruption coincide when the thing being taxed is a person's income. (Together with the mistaken association with "progressive" politics, this seems to be the source of the perversion of meaning.) But the two definitions often differ, and the term "progressive" in the context of taxation originally had nothing to do with how the burden of taxation is distributed across society.

0. This is also the definition given in the Wikipedia article, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax (and given by several of the cited sources), although much of the article anyway discusses the burden-of-taxation interpretation.
Heroin is fueled by gateway drugs, particularly oxycodone and vikodin. This story just shows how the market will evolve to overcome barriers to sell a profitable product in a restricted market.
Unless I'm missing something, it's only an inconsistency if you assume Erlang is not statically typed, which is why I said you seem to be begging the question. Erlang (and indeed any dynamic language) could be viewed as statically typed in the not-particularly-useful way amelius was describing.
Most of the squeezing seems to come down to cronyism, which is a problem in just about any system. For example, the government pushing of subprime mortgages (at the urging of cronies) over-inflated housing prices, and then when the balloon burst, the cronies won again by having the government take over their debt. The question should primarily be how to restrain cronyism, and thereby provide the best outcome for the most people. Cronyism seeks to restrain trade in a way that is advantageous to only a few politically connected players.

A pure socialist system or a pure capitalist system would probably not have these issues, but then these are both unicorns.

Cronyism seems to be the primary way a socialist system operates. If you're politically connected, you tend to get best access to the goods and tend to be able use regulations to handicap competitors. This makes sense as in a socialist system, the people running the government are more actively engaged in the economy, and the tendency to reward friends and punish adversaries is hard to fight.

In a capitalist system, cronyism can also occur if players collude or if a player obtains a monopoly (or some other type of controlling position). In either case, the system then becomes distorted as players increasingly use coercion instead of mutually beneficial exchange. For example, Apple colluding to keep down the wages of workers.
IQ is /defined/ with 100 being the average.

Talking about a 150 IQ being "average" is nonsense.

I mostly stopped reading at that point, because it seemed to mostly be a re-tread of GATTACA but with some real company names substituted in.
According to the NSF's numbers, about 2/3 of doctorates awarded by U.S. universities in science & engineering fields go to U.S. nationals (citizens and permanent residents). The ratio has been fairly constant over the past 20 years, fluctuating within the 60-70% range. Not sure about prior to that.

In absolute numbers, there was a decline in U.S. nationals earning science & engineering doctorates from 1995 through 2002, but the trend is upwards again since 2002.

Chart: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2013/digest/theme1.cfm#cit...
I think you hit the nail on the head. An email is yours in the sense that once sent to you, the sender cannot 'take it away' or 'modify it' or 'delete it'.

This is different than many other 'communication protocols' out there such as Facebook Posts, Twitter Posts, Slack comments, Shared Docs etc. which all have the notion of an 'owner' who can retract permissions, modify, delete etc. after 'send'. The email analogy would be the sender reaching into your inbox and deleting or modifying your email (ugh!). This is fundamentally what gives email the feel that there is no favored owner. Conversely, every recipient can feel that the email is theirs.

We're launching an email-like service, (https://tmail21.com) in the next couple of weeks. Our premise is to preserve the best aspects of email while fixing or improving on the worst.

We think one of the best aspects of email is the aforementioned 'democratic' (i.e. no favored owner) characteristic.
Negative income tax is a much better idea.