skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article just feels irrelevant and completely out of touch. As many people have pointed out here, e-books are insanely popular, just not necessarily through the traditional distributors.

Personally, I also believe that there's only one reason why the paper book isn't far less popular than it is, and it's entirely temporary.

Get out of the tech-minded echo chamber and ask a person why they would still buy a paper book when they could buy an e-book, and they'll pretty much only respond with "paper books just feel right to me".

The problem is completely unrelated to pricing. Since the beginning of time, people have comfortably navigated the sliding price structure of books. Some people want to buy the next Hunger Games on day 1, and they pay $39.99 to buy the hardcover and find out what happens to Katniss. Some people wait until the hype dies down. Some people borrow from a friend, and yes, some people still go to the library. And those exact same rules apply to e-books.

The entire conversation just reeks of idiocy and a bunch of industry coalitions blindly grasping around for places to point fingers because they apparently are overlooking the simple thing that everybody constantly says. I've already said it, but I'll say it again:

"Paper books just feel right to me."

Steve Jobs had a beautiful intuition about peoples' relationships with technology. It was a skill that's so painfully rare that he's still known as basically the only guy capable of figuring out what would make an advanced piece of technology attractive to an average person. Sadly, he was completely wrong about the iPad being an acceptable replacement for a book, and I feel like many people are continuing to follow him down the wrong path.

This has nothing to do with distribution and pricing. It has nothing to do with the cost of manufacturing an e-book being far less than a paper book. People still pay tons of money for games on Steam.

The single problem is that e-readers aren't good. They're garbage. That's it. Amazon is the clear leader, but it's not good enough. For anyone who wants to dominate the e-reader industry, here's your free advice:

1. Make an e-reader with a beautiful e-paper screen capable of displaying full color.

2. Make the screen refresh very quickly

3. Give it sensible touch gestures that you never accidentally trigger, and give it very useful physical buttons.

4. Make sure it can do everything a book can do. Can you quickly thumb through a 500 page novel on a kindle? Nope. Can you easily write something in the margin? Nope. Can you bookmark your current reading position, and also earmark a few other favorite spots in the book? Nope.

5. Give it a non-tech appearance. Make the damn thing out of wood.

6. Sell it in 3 sizes from day 1: The current standard paperback-ish size, as well as a smaller smartphone-sized one, and finally a large one, like ~15 inches.

Aside from the challenges of building a better color e-paper screen with great refresh, the others are just so obvious and so stupidly ignored. I'm actually frustrated just writing this. Make the e-reader personal, make it a lovable object. People will not stop throwing their money at this.
With the recent HN headline that the bond market could follow suit with the equities market [1] I do wonder about what seems like a growing shift to what I'll summarize as "The Bogleheads" approach of simple, diversified, low-fee ETFs.

Could we be setting ourselves up for a situation where things will crash much harder than they would if people weren't using these robo-advisors because Main St. investors will be more "homogenized" in their investment choices?

Not the most educated on these matters, so please feel free to tell me where I'm totally off-base with this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10252166
Do you desire an upbeat soundtrack while reading this article? I have just the thing for you!

(The Hellion/Electric Eye - Judas Priest)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1B_pZC8aWU
True, but even suburbs in the Netherlands have high cycling rates, thanks to their good bike infrastructure.

And while SV is not a dense city, it's not that sprawled out. Almost everyone in the area has plenty of services and attractions within a good biking range (~3-5 miles depending on confidence), and lots of people live within a half-decent biking range (< 10 miles) of their work.
https://github.com/carlhuda/janus
Make me reconsider if anyone really wants to use FB for blog post comments.
Here is another approach: [1]

I'm not sure if it really works, though, or if it is safe.

[1] http://www.microtransponder.com/technology/how-it-works/
AWS service degradations
http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/dynamodb-us-east-1.rss
12:04 PM PDT One of our mitigations has increased error rates and latencies for some tables. We are actively working to resolve these.

http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us-east-1.rss
12:44 PM PDT We continue to experience elevated API error rates for the EBS APIs and the RunInstances API in the US-EAST-1 Region. Running instances and EBS volume performance are not impacted.

http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/autoscaling-us-east-1.rss
12:41 PM PDT We continue to see periods of increased API error rates and scaling activity delays for Auto Scaling in the US-EAST-1 Region. We continue to work with the DynamoDB team as mitigations are deployed. Existing instances were unaffected by the errors.
Same here. A certain amount of pressure will allow water to penetrate the seal (e.g. submersion), but it will hold up if it just gets wet.
> I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off?

I have at various times tried to use the web this way by default, and it's frustrating to no end.

The comments from the talk about the browser being the user agent really hit home for me. The browser is all we have to fight this, and it still (mostly) does what we tell it to. There are ways to deal with cookies other than outright blocking which allow you to bypass such defective-by-design sites (e.g. "private browsing" and add-ons like self-destructing cookies).

The biggest concern I have, though, is how much computing I do on my Android telephone now. I have Firefox and uMatrix even there, sure, but it's an entire product designed to collect my data.
Building a new smart home system – need input
We are working on building a new home automation system for smart devices and are doing some research into the industry. I've created a quick survey in Google docs and would love to get some feedback from you. The whole survey should take less than a minute.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jdXmeLIHQaPc63q1SzPl_Hj5H90avzbd3OBE-hBPboM/viewform?usp=send_form

Thanks!
I've visited http://test-ipv6.com/ using iOS9 and the results both over my mobile and cable operators are the same:

"No IPv6 address detected [more info]

It looks like you have only IPv4 Internet service at this time. Don't feel bad - most people are in this position right now. Most Internet service providers are not quite yet ready to provide IPv6 Internet to residential customers."

Obviously it's not the computers or mobile phones that are the problem.
> The few beautiful parts that you can't not like is indeed Mozart, but the rest is not.

This strikes me as a bit too much in the vein of Pritchard's Understanding Poetry [1]. Sussmyer et al are not in Mozart's league for sure but the notion (and I'm exaggerating here not trying to straw man you) that near every note he wrote is false and everthing Mozart touched is gold is also a bit silly [2].

[1] Featured in a memorable scene in Dead Poets Society, If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great.

[2] again and again scholars have rationalized why this or that bit of the piece was “inferior” and therefore Sussmayr, only for later historical or analytical information to come to light which proves it had to be Mozart.

http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2009/04/05/who-wrote-the-mozar...
There are whole separate chapters describing arrays and pointers in the C Standard. This is by definition a strict difference. You should read those chapters and please stop spreading this beginners misconception of C.
So, in general, I understand there is lots of stuff going on in Scylla that does distinguish it, at least from Cassandra. There is the user space networking logic for IO. However, a lot of the IO overhead with disk, for example.
Implementing IPv6 in a Home Network (2012)
>> So you should expect similar cluster behavior.

i would expect nothing.

If theire numbers were astounding with a 10, 100, 1000 node cluster, they would have published numbers with such set-ups. I call shenanigans on a report that is purposely out of line with the expected use case.
VW Owners Aren't Going to Like the Fixes for Their Diesels
You can opt out of bounds checking by using the unsafe `get_unchecked` method instead of the array indexing syntax. There's no compiler flag to turn off bounds checking, because the language doesn't want to encourage memory safety that's dependent only on compiler flags (and also because the cost of runtime bounds checking in real programs is indistinguishable from noise).
In the age and day of static analysis, someone actually took the time to question the rudimentary analysis the compiler does?

It boggles the mind. I'm with Linus on this one.
Your body's not that good at measuring acceleration. Sure, it'll be hard to convince your brain that blood's pooling in your feet, but being leaned way back will provide a pretty convincing >1g forward acceleration feeling if the visuals are right.
Create a new compiler warning. My guess is that it wouldn't be that difficult to add: add a warning for using sizeof() on a value whose type is the result of array-pointer decay. If you really want the size of the pointer, then you can change the function parameter's type to the pointer type, or use a cast.
Our builds have been stuck for over 24 hours. Can't submit to the app store, can't beta test internally via TestFlight. Anyone know what's going on?
Wolfe has protected lanes all through, I used to bike on that. Same with Fremont/Sunnyvale-Saratoga, etc.

When I rode a bike to work because I had to bike 500m on El Camino, which is 500m more than what I want to on that road. The alternate was quite longer.

Edit: first para incorrect, I had "protected bike lanes" and "dedicated bike lanes" confused.
> But how much more damaging? Not much, especially since diesel cars are a very small fraction of VW's sales in the US.

If they are really spewing 40x the limit, then we're talking emissions equivalent to almost 20 million cars that do meet the limit. This is around 1 to 2 years of total new cars sales, or roughly 10% of the active light-duty vehicle fleet in the US. Europe allows more pollution but I doubt it is 40x, and they have a lot of diesels.
I mean, they caught it. This is a win for the EPA.
You're right - as a programmer, it's simple - there are plenty of choice. But I'm looking at this from desktop machine user perspective.

And I really do have a desktop with eight different somewhat differently looking and behaving (although they try to co-operate and it's possible to bring some consistency to be not too bothered) widget toolkits.

I'm not exaggerating - it's really 8 different toolkits here. Ok, I got lazy and run KDE those days so it's primarily KDElibs+Plasma and plain Qt (which has its own differences, like file dialogs being notorious one), which are mostly consistent between each other. Then I have a few apps that use GTK2 and GTK3, a few Wine apps, too. There are also KDE3libs for kTechLab, WxWidgets used by pgAdmin3 and Swing for IntelliJ-based IDEs. There are also some old Tk apps but I run those once in a blue moon, so they doesn't count. But on the other hand, LibreOffice and Firefox have their own widget sets...

I've long given up on OSS4 (which, in my personal opinion, is^W was the only Linux sound system with a KISS API) and surrendered to ALSA+PA stack many years ago. And don't have apps that need JACK anymore (used to run some streaming-related software). And ESD & aRts are dead. So, no objections here, although I had quite unpleasant experiences making ESD+JACK+ALSA combo working (that was at least a decade ago). That was before Poettering's rants - honest - although I won't deny that the "jungle" part is obvious reference.
Actually most of the the trains (not the metro for some reason) in Copenhagen have lots of bike space and one can take one's bike for no charge. Lots of people use bikes and mass transit together.
Did anyone try the "deep tissue massages" like one commenter on that thread suggested?
Haxe Roundup #336
So they each wrote one word. One and a half if you count "dear".
Maybe. OTOH, at least part of the tablet decline can be attributed to market saturation and the lack of an impetus to upgrade. So there are still a lot of tablets out there.

You're probably right about the market for dedicated e-book readers although, they've also gotten very good for very little money.
Hmm, interesting. I've always been over-cautious where 'splash-resistant' is concerned (As in, not allowing any water to get even remotely near); I'd never thought to consider that manufacturers probably over-compensate where water-resistance is concerned, to save them time fufilling warranty claims afterwards.
The way ScyllaDB works, it'd be really weird if it didn't scale at least as well as Cassandra.
Seattle as well. It seems to cause consternation in drivers at first because they don't expect it and end up still parking next to the curb in the bike lanes.
No. There's only one language you can write a patch for the Linux network stack in — C.

"Move to Rust!" is not a productive or helpful suggestion, unless you have an massive army of programmers ready to port Linux to Rust.
Not that I know of. Anecdotally though, it has some advantages, but doesn't exactly crush the competition.
Water, but no water pressure sounds about right.
Why do people keep bringing up blockchains whenever they want to talk about generic digital ownership transfers where they don't really provide any benefit...

It's the new "cloud", I swear.
> Sure, you're never going to get people who live 15 or 20 miles out biking the whole way to work

That's what I do every day in London. Why wouldn't you?

Myself and a lot of my friends choose our housing approx' 45 minutes to an hour away from the centre of London just to ensure we've got a good ride every day.

At a commuter average of 16mph, and an experienced cyclist average of 18/19mph means that 15 to 20 miles is precisely the distance I'd want to cycle.

All I'd want is a good shower, secure bike parking and a safe route to ride by.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fb0CBW2...
It is how my original parent perceived it, and perceptions matter.

I wouldn't work on Rust if I didn't think it was important and a step forward, but even technologies with flaws (read: all of them, Rust has flaws too) are worth using, depending on your situation. Trade-offs are the heart of engineering.
I didn't mention complexity. I said efficiency.
I was under the impression that anything other than a 1x liquidation preference is extremely founder-unfavorable and very rare. Am I mistaken? Are these unicorns wandering around with significant (2x, 3x) preferences attached to them?

Because otherwise, a 1x only says you get your principal back. Covers the VC's butt in a down round, but nothing crazy. To the extent it comes out of founders' hide, well, you took money and didn't manage to make it grow. (The effect on rank-and-file employee options is a little less defensible, though, since they have less control over total execution.)
Congratulations on the launch! And I am also happy to announce, that the official command line tool, b2, is already ported to FreeBSD: http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/
That approach works in cities that have established massive cycling communities - the Montreals and Copenhagens.

The mid-step approach for North American cities is an extra-wide bike-lane clear of the door zone with dotted zones that require drivers to shift into the bike-lane if they want to turn right.

Basically, the bike lane is effectively a "bike lane and right-only-turn-lane". It's less protected than the parking-protected bike lane, but it avoids the right-hook problem.

This way drivers will always see the cyclist when they wish to go right.

In urban areas with established cycling communities where you have enough density that cyclists are expected? There you do the parking-protected lane. In that kind of environment, cyclists are common-enough that drivers expect them and know to look for them.

My city (Hamilton, Ontario) uses both, and I get a lot more right/left hooks from cars on the protected lane than I do on the right-turn-plus-cyclist lane. The protected lane is a great endgame and we need to get there, but step one is "take the whole right lane and make it cycling/right-turn-only". It takes a lot of space but it's a great way to begin.

The problem is the popular approach is completely half-assed: the glorified shoulder in the door-zone, with no information for drivers about pulling over into the lane to turn. That leaves both the right-hook open and the door-prize.
Tops – perform in-place substitutions on code
It's not necessarily known by the caller, since the array might be declared with an unspecified size and defined in a different translation unit.
That's no bug. One can use no array arguments and write perfectly safe code. MOST of the "this is unsafe" examples
are just bad code and have been from the beginning. Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do that...

It's an axiomatic choice inherent to the language. You
add a parameter representing the extent of the array, and respect that.

I have no heartburn with Rust, but there's sure a lot of legacy 'C' out there.
It's a mental leap to equate random commentators on HN with any community in particular. :P

You're also mischaracterizing Animats' comments as "offensive ranting". That's John Nagle (this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle's_algorithm) and he knows his way around C.
buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc)

I assume that Radio Shack has in stock a small collection of resistors and motors, at the least. If not then I feel very sorry for you USA-ians.
Let me clarify with an example. Suppose you have an array:

int a[10]

There is a section of memory of size
sizeof(int) * 10
somewhere, and the variable a is a
* int
that points to that section. When someone does this:

int x = a[2]

It is equivalent to:

int x = *(a+(sizeof(int)*2))

When I said "array pointer" in my previous comment, all it meant was the memory address that the variable (which is an array) points to (in the example, the variable "a")

Edit: missing paren
True. The question is how much the VC thinks that accumulated advantage (in sociology, "the Mathew effect," according to which the rich get richer) means that an increased present valuation can increase the probability of future increases in value.

And if the VC thinks that the upside is big enough — e.g., the next Uber — then 1% equity could be worth a billion dollars in the foreseeable future.

The trick to black-swan farming is casting a big enough net. And liquidation-preference makes it possible to take more bets by significantly decreasing downside risk on each one.

Obviously, we are aren't dealing with a linear relationship. Once companies reach a certain valuation, the prospects for future growth are significantly reduced. But there may be an intermediate stage where the benefits to the company are significant enough that the VC's probable ROI increases by investing at a higher valuation.

A VC who really wants to game the system should make a large seed investment at a low valuation, and then make smaller investments in later rounds at intentionally inflated valuations.
Nope, it's something Google would really love to see. You have to remember that as the Goliath in the room, Google has to be somewhat careful about how hard they try to persuade local governments, as many residents already dislike how quickly they've grown and how that's contributed to rents going up and traffic getting worse.

And Google has made a bunch of improvements themselves, like, I believe, the buffered bike lanes on Shorebird and the multi-use path that extends west from Shorebird. But they can't just do whatever they want, no matter how rich they are. Just look at how their plans for development in North Bayshore got shot down by the city.
I don't blame Chris for selling in the slightest and I'm happy that he's been able to let go, but I kind of wish he had found somebody a little more likeminded to take over the place. Chris has always been an excellent citizen of his own community, and always seemed to really "get" what made a lot of the community work. Other than one incident at the end of his tenure, "m00t" was always very well-loved (for somebody on a site that hates everything), and understood how to shape vibrant communities with a fairly light hand. Hiroyuki Nishimura's past doesn't really suggest the same sort of community-mindedness. Maybe with 4chan's current size that sort of involvement is irrelevant, but I hope it won't negatively affect the site.
Is there an opportunity for any meaningful equity/options when joining a company that size? Or should candidates be focused on salary and other benefits at that size?
You are making an argument from silence. "Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by" expressing that feeling and not doing research. The list of authors for each topic is available at http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html.

Looking at the "A" list, and using gendered assumptions about first names combined with a few bits of searching: Likely male: 98, Likely female: 16 Unknown: 1. That's ~14% female.

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia, "between approximately 8.5 and 16 percent—of Wikipedia editors are women"

So overall, you are right in that it does not 'draw a much higher proportion of female contributors than Wikipedia.'

From http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/stats.html (or http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-status-o... ) we see that "21% of employed philosophers are women". These numbers are for the US. A review of some of the authors shows many come from places other than the US, and some are retired, so this 21% isn't a perfect reflection of the available author pool.

It does suggest that women are underrepresented compared to the available author pool. To point out though, the relative under-representation is larger for Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is aiming for 25% female representation.

If S.E.P.'s percentage were 35%, would it be indicative of over-representation of women as editors? If Wikipedia's were 35%, would it be indicative of under-representation of women as editors?
This, a million times (excuse the hyperbole). A low curb between the parking and bike path, and between bike path and pedestrian way is also very important. So is law enforcement that actively cites and tows cars that park on bike lanes, at least while building a culture around it.

Add to that that bike paths in Copenhagen have a totally different, much smoother asphalt. Since it is only used for bikes it lasts a long time. Cars can't drive on it because it is too slick and wouldn't stand up to the use. But it makes biking a lot easier than on rough asphalt covered in repairs, cracks ans potholes.