skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is this story more promising materially than the rest of its ilk? I don't see it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342677

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:thesun.co.uk+new+cancer...
Lots of rural communities, like the one I live in, have a central mail box location where we go to collect our mail. That one location services about 50 properties. FedEx or any courier deliver to the local post office in town. It all works quite well, and it's not so bad having to go out to get your mail, since you usually need other things from town too.
Pardon my French, but it's a load of bollocks. Sure, I hate estimating and I'm bad at it, but I've worked with many others who were better than me at it and did consistently deliver what promised, when they promised it. And yes I'd much rather just sit and contemplate and re-re-rework 'the design' and be all-important about 'it's done when it's done' - but I fully well understand that any customer will just fire me and take someone who just does what he says he will.

Building construction is also fraught with unexpected events and project management issues etc., but I'd laugh any building who would propose that I just keep paying them until it's done, or who will start building and go home when whatever budget I give him is used, out of the room. Why would my customers be any different?

(articles like this poison the minds of young impressionable developers who think it's actually reasonable to have ideas like this, btw, which is why we shouldn't just shrug them off)
So all we have to do is get rid of the humans?
A science writer starts off his article about science writing. He describes them being "surprised" about a meta-analysis attempting to reproduce scientific results in a "fuzzy" scientific field (my definition of fuzzy science is any that studies humans). They can only reproduce 33% of the experiments.

What a shocker (not really). It is common in the hard sciences to make fun of the "findings" in the fuzzy sciences. Humans are fickle creatures with a large variance in almost everything we do. With large variances, you have to collect large samples to be confident of your results. But as previously mentioned, humans are fickle, and it is difficult to get large statistically relevant samples of humans. Paying volunteers increases your sample size, but can bias your results towards a certain type of person. Not paying volunteers may cause them not to treat an experiment seriously. Gathering a large group of people together to make the study go faster may cause some word of the study to leak out and some group think to start. Some people just say what they think the researchers want to hear. Doing "science" with humans is incredibly difficult.

So really, it's not surprising that one off experiments are hard to reproduce. Their sample sizes are small and can't adequately account for variance across a population of people. And results for region of the world doesn't often generalize to other cultures.

My rule of thumb for trusting fuzzy data is only to start really believing it when there are several studies looking from several different angles and they all come to similar conclusions. If the studies contradict some previously held knowledge, it will take several more studies than forming a conclusion from scratch. But this is how science works, and isn't really surprising.
Many times I've seen Seattle compared to Amsterdam, particularly on the topic of bikes. One simple distinction between the two most often overlooked is topography. Amsterdam is flat; it's proudly engineered out of the lowlands, and it has canals to prove its level. Seattle is quite hilly, and has a major freeway and an interstate which run through its middle, both overburdened with traffic. Consequently one is nigh perfect for the bicyclist, and the other is at best a significant challenge.
Does this amount to: "If you accept the premise that you can trust people not to be idiots, nuclear power is perfectly safe"?

I say that as someone positively predisposed toward nuclear. People can also be stupid with other sources of energy, of course, but that kind of stupidity is the kind that kills people slowly and unglamorously.
> One thing that is interesting is that compulsory wearing of helmets has not decreased fatalities to any great extent.

I don't think that's the point: I don't think most bike fatalities are from the kinds of injuries that helmets mitigate. I think the point of helmets is reducing the incidence and severity of a certain class of non-fatal injuries that are experienced without them.
We still have the colder winters (join a curling club to make the winters go faster if you don't like outdoor winter sports) but the outdoors are beautiful and great for activities. La Crosse, WI is only two and half hours from Minneapolis/St Paul and two hours from Madison, WI. The area is excellent to raise a family and much less expensive than the larger metro areas. They are slowly starting to roll out fiber too. Although, we're not really off the grid.

https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/
High five! I've just done the same and just passed the citizenship test. Canada is awesome.
For remote workers within the United States, this is one of the best ways to perform currency arbitrage. Work for company in high cost area, live in low cost area. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, go work remotely from Mexico for a couple months. I put away a few grand in savings while living extremely well and meeting amazing people while working remotely in Mexico for a company in Chicago.
You going to give a cost benefit analysis of any of these? I don't see any reason to see a better cost-benefit than wearing a biking helmet.
I own you a beer. :)
I'm actually pretty sure if the U.S. thought it could get away with shipping it's nuclear waste to Kabul, it would do so.
Where is the argument? Reading the comments on HN becomes worse every day. People just writing some stuff to prove, I don't know, that they are very cool or extremely liberal or whatever.
Hydro provides base power. No fancy technologies needed.
Cool. Now how do I charge my laptop? And my camera battery?
Why is nuclear power a better option than utility scale battery storage?
Show HN: OpenCL Path Tracer/Terrain Generator Written in Highschool
> As said above helmet usage is compulsory in NZ (As is yearly warrant of fitness for cars younger than 10 years old and six monthly check-up for cars over 10 years old).

Yes, this sounds pretty good. I think the situation on car safety is much better in the EU and other countries compared to the US.

> But if I ever have an accident I am sure glad that I wear one.

As will I. I do wear a bike helmet a lot. What pisses me off is that I can be fined $100+ for not wearing it when the guy next to me with a car that seems to be running on coal and two tires with questionable pressure goes scot free.
great example of a tech that works perfect in theory, but bombs horribly in practice.

accidents happen all the time, see the massive blasts in china recently. but, with other tech, the effects are limits to proximity.

tchernobyl's fallout cloud swept over europe. no other failure of tech comes close. learning from mistakes in nuclear is very expensive, we might run out of planet until it is perfected.
10 years and $2-4 billion later, if nothing goes wrong. Which is exactly why nuclear is dead.
I didn't perceive it as pretentious. In my opinion the problem is not enjoying the fruits of modern life, but letting others define for you what has or hasn't value, and living a life where the only goal is being perceived by others as "successful".

Its worse when you see someone preaching marxism like these hollywood actors and big bankers praising cuba, the che guevara and what not, yet fully enjoying the luxuries of capitalism.
Brian (I believe) gets called the new Meg in an episode, Meg tries to join in on the joke only to get told to shut up.
I may be in the minority here, but I see the law as having a positive. By actually legislating this instead of having it occur clandestinely, the true intentions are clear to those that otherwise might not have known (i.e. the non-technical masses). I can only hope that the US follows Australia and Germany in making a clear statement about this metadata collection, for better or worse, to increase the market for client side encryption and anonymity.
Zero offense intended; the following are my honest-to-goodness impressions of your product.

1. I have no idea what it is. DIY (presumably) microservices? And, there's a way to use AWS without servers (is this a reference to Lambda?) The title of your product is 'Digital Enterprise End-to-end Platform', which looks impressive but on further inspection appears meaningless.

2. Reading further into your github page and looking at the DEEP marketplace, I think you're selling software-as-a-service deployments? Something like Sandstorm or Openshift, I'd imagine.

3. Aah, okay, so you're making an abstraction layer on top of AWS -- but it doesn't seem like that permits any portability between cloud platforms. Is the only benefit to using your system easy deployment onto Amazon's product?
Fukushima was caused by the decision to build on top of a known earthquake zone ..
My experience too.

But that goes down to like 50k after compression. Some logos are bigger than that.

Not trivial, but for a lot of use cases, that's good enough. Especially if you cache appropriately.
> Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.

[citation needed]
I can estimate some tasks very accurately. I know that adding this new flag to my system will take a day.

Other tasks I can accurately say I don't know how long they'll take. This new feature is... a couple of weeks? This new application is... a few months? I can roughly guess (estimate!) but there's a wide certainty margin.

That uncertainty is never built into the mathematical model used by project managers, which is invariably a simple addition of scalar estimates. The only common way of dealing with uncertainty is to pad the estimates (multiply by two, etc), but that's still not a statistical boundary -- it's just a scalar.

Furthermore, when adding uncertain values, they wind up not being independent, for a number of reasons -- the lessons from one feature are carried on to the next, or the next task is easier because of new existing code, or because as you approach the original deadline you invariably throw out feature requirements. So you can't necessarily just add all the uncertainty values.

So a better approach to estimation would be to formulate a (simple) model which encodes each estimate as {guess, uncertainty, independence} and then provides a function for compounding the guesses and uncertainty and independence factors in a realistic way.
Dear future self, Are you rich? Are you wealthy?
"HelloFresh is actually a clone of Swedish company Middagsfrid"

https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/rocket-internet-clone-fundin...
> has a major freeway and an interstate which run through its middle...

I'm not sure what this means... are you talking I5 and 99 ? There are underpasses and overpasses for those.
Doesn't hydro require certain preconditions that are not true everywhere?
In theory.

I would say that this goes right out of the window when somebody gains a real military power to actually be able to enforce their ownership on Mars.
And a single mining accident can kill hundreds.
Hydro's problem (along with wind and solar) is transmission requirements. Not everyone lives near a location where hydro is feasible.

It's also not particularly environmentally friendly to dam rivers everywhere.

Some of the wave-action stuff is interesting, but you've obviously got to be near a large body of water for that to work.
> for a measly 120k

Spoken like someone who has always had easy access to 120k, which is unfortunately not the case for the vast majority of people.
We get it--Torvalds is an ass, but this "news" is old. It's
great that the developer quit, I'm sure someone will
fill the void.
Exactly. When was the last time solar panels or a wind turbine melted down?
Exactly, if you get hit by a truck a helmet isn't going to do much, but if you go over the bonnet of a car that pulls out without looking then it might mean the difference between a few scrapes and a long stint in hospital.
That's a false analogy. For example, there is plenty of scientific research showing that vaccination is effective in preventing disease, as well as historical data. However, science cannot disprove the existence of God, nor can it disprove the idea that the universe was created by an intelligent entity.

You are also generalizing about advocates of religion. Study history and you will find that there are many, many people throughout history who were very reasonable and also believed in God. In fact, such people are found extensively in the history of all kinds of sciences, including the formation of science itself.

And besides that, whether people who believe a certain thing are reasonable is immaterial to the question of whether what they believe is true. There are both sane and insane people who believe things which are true, as well as reasonable and unreasonable people, friendly and unfriendly, etc.

You are not being reasonable by being so heavily prejudiced against religion. On the contrary, you are actually being unreasonable.
Elon Musk Interview – NPR Marketplace
I admit I'm someone who has asked the NRC to come up with shutdown plans for every existing commercial reactor, considering most are already unable to compete on cost with renewables.

Disgustingly enough, the US taxpayer is going to be on the hook for cleanup costs for each and every one of these sites.
This argument is remarkably familiar; it's basically the same (on both sides) when the motorcycle helmet laws were being argued in the 1980s. It's easy to forget that people actually argued that motorcyclists might be safer without helmets, but they did.
Twitter suspends Deadspin, SBNation accounts over apparent copyright violations
>Drunk driving has extremely severe penalties (10+ years in prison) beginning with the first offence.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but at some point, a meaner nastier criminal justice system does little or no additional good at the expense of harming innocent people. That point's long been passed with DUI laws, and people still do it.
Comedic genius!
The argument that people won't wear a helmet because of a fashion statement? It's not in the article - but its a fact that kids for instance won't wear helmets because of pair pressure. The same as people used to not wear seatbelts before they were compulsory.
> That uncertainty is never built into the mathematical model used by project managers

It depends on the project manager.

The PERT estimation technique was based on giving a 3-part range estimate for broken-down tasks. These are then rolled up with a simple formula.

In the PERT method independence is handled by creating explicit links between tasks, which leads to the concept of the critical path.

Nobody does these. Because it's very tedious. There are a lot of tasks for which "just try it and see" is less effort than performing a full-blown estimation raindance.
Please state how any of this relates to the effectiveness of helmets, and the trade-off between a reduction of the magnitude you're claiming and the reduction in overall bike usage.
Is this a https://github.com/jaws-framework/JAWS competitor?
Of course there are limited means to get around, over, and under, those very large sources and attractors of car traffic; in a notably limited space. So attempting coexistence between those and bicyclists is a challenge. That was my only (apparently) poorly expressed point.
On a side note, love the font
A single trip report could be worth a thousand peer reviewed papers, and a thousand trip reports could create a new science -- if you're willing to listen.
Glad to hear it. No better way to put things in perspective. :)
I would say it's a cautionary tale against making it so people get used to you accomplishing small miracles, or making sure everyone is aware you wouldn't tolerate only doing the tasks you hate forever.
In what ways is it safer to ride a motorcycle without a helmet?
> given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all.

Your metrics for "success" are interesting:

> It's more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.

According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land).

> Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.

This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both onsite and offsite. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years.

> The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.

Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE still cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled.

> Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn't seem likely that will change.

Replace "nuclear" with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters.

Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU's PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950's and 1960's level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
This is the same government who can't remember that RSA keys generally use positive numbers? https://crbug.com/532048

The idea in theory is interesting, but for something even more high-profile than national identity cards, please hire some folks who can triple-check your work....
It does happen.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/04/world/the-us-too-has-dumpe...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047731045792685...

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

http://www.cbrneportal.com/the-disposal-of-nuclear-waste-int...
GRID – Global Research Identifier Database – Launched
"I take a bunch of speed every day and I think people are spying on me, am I insane?"

YES. But its probably just the drugs. Quit taking speed.
Utility-scale battery storage could definitely be an option, but batteries can be pretty nasty themselves. The alternatives like I mentioned (molten salt for solar, etc) need to be scaled up and could provide similar capacity.
Possibly a naive question: If Canada has a more flexible regulatory regime, couldn't one solution be to just base the nuclear R&D startups in Canada?
That's what worries me. This "dead" technology still contributes a lot more to the United States' energy budget than solar and wind combined, despite strong resistance to nuclear and everybody pushing renewables like crazy. It looks like the winner of this fight — between a technology people are eager to declare "dead" and other technologies that are apparently stillborn — is fossil fuel.
It's actually the same question as should marijuana be legalized
And most studies that have been done, are done by people from the medical field, who are at best only qualified to comment on a slight portion of the issue. Their conclusion is always 'if you fall sideways on a curb without a helmet, you'll be dead' (duh), but then the dangerous part is where they conclude 'so we need to wear helmets always, and make them compulsory'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Liquid_flu...

TL;DR Probably China, in a couple years. Projects in Japan, India, Europe, US, Canada.

[Edit: "couple years"]
Fukushima was caused by the most powerful Japanese earthquake in recorded history, followed by a tsunami that you'd need to build a 10-meter wall around the entire island to avoid. And the only people who died were plant workers trapped in the basement.
...

Are you using New Zealand as an example of how to effectively enable cycling? Are we talking about New Zealand the island east of Australia, or another one?
Cars and hills and bicyclists, and a history which doesn't include bicycles and cars in close proximity. You see no distinctions between the two cities as regards bicycle safety, and bicycle safety equipment, as a result of this?
I get that this is upsetting because the NFL is such a large company, but ultimately this is just standard procedure. Content producers have the right to only distribute their content in the way that they choose; that's the whole point of DMCA.
It'll happen soon enough. The post millennial generation lives and dies by SMS. Another (imho) neat thing to happen alongside this will be 911/999 service via SMS.
He's referring to the ads on their search engine results page, not their ad network for publishers.
@Nayetan - none taken, very good and thoughtful feedback! Let me answer your questions:

1. DEEP is designed to be Platform-as-a-Service for serverless environments that developers and businesses could use in their own accounts. AWS Lambda is one of those services. The fact that right now only AWS provides the full spectrum of services made us build it on AWS first.

2. "Sandstorm makes it easy to run your own server" and "OpenShift gives you all the tools you need to develop, host and scale your apps in the public or private cloud" - so I would say neither, because the goal as you further described is to be able to support cross-cloud providers, while above ones are service-specific (am I wrong?)

3. You are correct. Right now it's an abstracted layer on AWS, and we are planning to add in near future more providers like Azure, Google Cloud and more. For now, it makes the developer job easy by abstracting everything except application layer, and have it scaled at AWS size, which is virtually infinite.

Does it make sense? And to go even further, what would you improve in our documentation? :)
If the so called "evil wealthy people" control all the machines that produce goods and services, what would they use those goods and services for, since the rest of the world is miserably poor?

Apparently not even Stephen Hawking understands the broken window fallacy.
Thanks. Yeah, there's a fairly large number of formal management techniques, but like you said, they're very rarely used.

PERT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_...

Barry Boehm's recent work:

http://www.amazon.com/Incremental-Commitment-Spiral-Model-Pr...
Which, given how many repeat DUI offenders there are, is great justification for long prison sentences.

If a person can't be trusted to put either the bottle or the keys down, then they need to be restrained. I'd rather find a cheaper way than prison, but it's insanity that you can drive drunk and receive a punishment that serves as almost no disincentive to continue to do it.