skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (Bret Victor)
When I was a kid my allowance started at $0.50 and a paperback was $3-$4. So I could only buy a book every 6-8 weeks. For a little bit the $10 gift certificates to book stores I would get for my birthday dwarfed anything I could manage myself. My allowance went up, but it wasn't until I got a job that books got cheap enough that I could buy them whenever I wanted.

I now have a library in my house (not builtin, but 84" shelves nearly wall-to-wall. It's nice :)
Any games that will be enjoyed first graders?
Yes, I assume that a store could very easily link WiFi MAC addresses to CC numbers, and then loyalty cards.

The probability that someone checks out and leaves the store at the same time that you do is high. But two times in a row? Lower. 5 times in a row? Extremely small.
Root Cause Analysis: Tools and Processes
So satisfying when you read an article that just happens to be pitched at exactly the stage of learning you're at. Every single bit of advice in here is something I can use today without any thought.

@fpilipe, you mention you use one schema per customer. I'm curious as to how many people do this and how well it works for them. Any thoughts?
> I don't understand why this purchase was not turned down for on grounds of anti-trust.

For one thing, the deal was just announced. This happens before anti-trust scrutiny begins. Various sources have indicated that the deal is likely to be closely scrutinized by the FTC (though some predict it will be approved as-is). [0]

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/27/us-rite-aid-m-a-wa...
You can modify your ECU all you want so long as it doesn't have any DRM-like protections.
But it's much easier to tell a reporter, "I voted against CISA" than it is to explain cloture.
Goes way beyond that...

On the NSA/spying...

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

Brezinski at a press conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g
Thanks, useful.

I guess I was too subtle in my comment; what I mean is, this looks like geared towards long, periodic bulk loads and not granular OLTP/webapp-type workloads where lots of clients write small transactions.

We're using ElasticSearch for analytics, and being able to write to any node is really nice. We stream events in real time, and only do bulk loads when we need to change the schema or reprocess the data.

But ES has its share of problems, and somethings like Greenplum would be preferable, if it can handle the write pattern.
To a point I see what you're saying, but think of it this way.

Remember the episode of "Curb your Enthusiasm" where Larry David makes an empty gesture to his friend "Let me know if there's anything I can do for you". And what do you know, his friend takes him up on it.

REI saying "Sure, if you bring back your worn out 15 year old shoes we'll replace them free of charge". Then people start taking them up on that offer, and what do you know. Come to find out, they really didn't mean what they said in the first place. It was an empty gesture they were hoping no one (or only a few people) would take them up on.

As far as automation, "it's not an ethical dilemma" so say us programmers until computers learn how to code well and walk, run effectively, etc.. Taken to its logical conclusion, it seems obvious to me that computers will soon (within a few decades?) be capable of doing almost all jobs we humans currently do. And if not as soon as I'm predicting, then eventually. But I am fully convinced that no matter the timeline, it will happen.

And how is this an "ethical dilemma"? Human beings in the modern world depend on the ability to find work to make money to survive. What happens when all work can be done by robots?

Then the argument becomes. "Yeah, but we'll just find new work to replace the old work". This AI revolution is different in the sense that technology is approaching the ability to do all things humans can do. So as soon as we find these "new things", what will keep robots from doing them? More cheaply and more effectively I might add. I will say that the more likely scenario is as soon as robots surpass human intelligence and agility there will be new jobs, but those won't be filled by humans, because humans just won't have the right skill set.
30% of iPhone Buyers in Q4 2015 Switched from an Android Smartphone
I haven't done much Web work in Ruby, but in my head the first thing that comes to mind for file uploads is Paperclip[0]. I'd be curious to hear thoughts on the various alternatives (e.g. CarrierWave, Refile, Shrine).

[0] https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip
I'm not sure, to be honest. Hopefully some of our greenplum specialists spot this post and hop in.
I'm gonna try really hard to not go over the line of the recent rule about too much negativity, but this line of questioning/reasoning really pisses me off. I see it quite a bit on reddit/twitter too. As a matter of fact, one time Jacob Appelbaum asked why people do it and my response was that it seems like a variation on the loaded question fallacy. Implies "you should have expected X", therefore attempting to avoid actual discussion, or shifting of the discussion via the overton window.

It's just such a useless statement. "Why is this a surprise?"

Well, first of all, I'm sure there are plenty of people who might not have had any idea cell data was being used this way and on this scale. Second, I'm willing to bet of the many who might have had a vague idea, this gives a more concrete background with rough numbers to solidify the idea. Third, It's not a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention, but the problem is when we have said something in the past it almost invariably has been ignored or dismissed as paranoid or crazy... At least until a good story or leak comes out and gets enough attention to grab enough media mindshare. Edward Snowden was a classic example of this at work. Sure, many of use knew about tempest and echelon and five-eyes, knew about cell tower metadata issues via watching ownership of said towers. Everytime with few exceptions though, publicly stating these things got us called "conspiracy theorists".

Maybe you just use this as a rhetorical and are one of us that have been paying attention, but this statement is not condusive whatsoever to intellectual discussion of a subject, and we need to address it's fallacy when we see it because it's too pervasive.
Consumption of red meat does not meaningfully increase risk of cancer [pdf]
> Today, its being able to consume 100's of disparate data feeds and build alpha generating signals from it.

How do they validate that this has any connection to reality? Or those who had budgets to spend doesn't ask such silly questions?
That sugar is inflammatory sounds pretty likely, though. Actually, the Wikipedia article on sugar states that food with a high glycemic load cause inflammation.
Senate Passes Bill That Tech Hates
How do you read your books?

I was thinking getting an iPad so that the resolution is tolerable vs actual books.
That makes sense, but I wonder if the city could respond in time to prevent casualties, given the close proximity of autos and pedestrians in most cities.
I feel like this headline is misleading. They've solved the first three parts, but not the last. I was really hoping that this article was going to say something about progress on the last section, commonly called K4.

If anybody is interested in Kryptos, I highly recommend Elonka Dunin's page: http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/
Why Apple Pay Is Our Best Hope to Stop Online Fraud
48M in iPhone Sales Leads Apple’s Q4 2015 Earnings
Dorsey: “Twitter Is Getting Easier to Use Every Single Week,”
I think Three is a bit unusual. They're not doing it because of the EU stuff. I know several people in Norway who use them as their only mobile service provider, by the way, which (being used to roaming fees) I found very surprising. They're cheaper and better than the two Norwegian networks, apparently.
Greenplum Database Sandbox Tutorials
Strange and freaky to think someone might look at us 3300 years from now, though of course we won't be mummified.
People of Color in Tech Highlights Stories of Racial Minorities
Watch the Golden State Warriors Get Their NBA Championship Rings in VR
You're right.

Not enough coffee this morning.
Greenplum is designed for datawarehousing.

The analytics it is built for aren't the kind that ElasticSearch is typically used for.

Greenplum/datawarehouse style analytical are things like: What is the average spend of female customers with 2 children who live in postcode AAAA or BBBB. Break it down by day of week and group by their marital status. Now for the top cohort of buyers on Mondays, give me a breakdown of the 3 most popular products and our profit margin on each one. This is often called "Business Analytics" (BI)

You could make ElasticSearch do that of course, but it wouldn't be much fun.

Given that context, the single master limitation turns out not be be a huge problem. Typically Greenplum is setup to load data from the OLAP-style online system, and the amount of data loaded is very predictable.

Same with things like hot standby and replication. In the Datawarehouse world it isn't uncommon for there to be nightly periods where a batch dataload occurs and/or nightly reporting is done, and the availability of external interfaces to the DB during that time maybe restricted.
Kindle app for kindle books, everything else is a PDF (generic PDF viewer). I have yet to find a quality ebook tablet that handles PDFs :/
AT&T / T-Mobile is another good example; and lots of megamergers that are approved are only approved with substantial modifications, divestitures, etc. to avoid anti-competitive effects. So, sure, generally, people have done their homework with multibillion dollar deals. But sometimes, that homework doesn't get a passing grade.
* Recurring and Scheduled payments. On the first of every month, the alarm service pings my wallet to pay my utility bill.

Most of the other potential applications it's easy to argue that they could set up their own incentives to get some user in the system to execute the call. (lottery payout, scheduled trade, crowdfunding payout, etc).

I think that yes, each of those applications has a viable way of motivating some party to execute the call. However, if a service like Alarm proved to be very reliable, it may be simpler to just automate it with a scheduling service. Scheduled or recurring execution doesn't have to be the only solution to a problem for it to still be a good solution.
Bizarre, campy song explains China's 13th 5-year plan
JRR Tolkien: 'I never expected a money success' (1968)
Biot: Network-Aware Information Pipe for the Internet of Things
First Victory of the Mobile Ad-Blocking War: A “L.E.A.N.” Digital-Ad Standard
just one little quote that caught my eye

“It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’”
Then why didn't any candidate except Sanders vote against it?
How do telcos get GPS or wifi-level accurate location information? Are the phones sending that (easy enough to disable with software changes) or some other mechanism?
Nice! I made a similar thing last year to play around with CSS filters:

https://github.com/lalwanivikas/image-editor

It's not exactly an editor as the original image is not 'edited'. I don't know why I decided to call it that :) Filter is the right term.
The Case of the Crumbling Shoes
Season 8 was fine. The last good episode was definitely the NY one and even then that was very iffy. The Armin Tamzarian episode was what did it. Everyone at school was talking about how it made no sense and I agreed. Although, I saw the episode recently and it's still much better than anything since.. And not as bad as I remember it.
Following the "List of my papers" section from the "Number Theory" page
https://sites.google.com/site/jmptidcott2/nthy

>Some authors even applied the name "kangaroo" to any random walk in a cyclic group. This is zoologically absurd (a kangaroo cannot jump in one bound to another continent) - and mathematically confusing.

Spurred by this thread and especially after studying BSGS and the Pollard Rho for DLP set of algorithms more in depth over the last few days; I found his clarification and justification regarding the "taxonomy" of these methods entertaining and enlightening. Thanks again.
I use a hydraulic paper cutter at work to cut the spine off and then feed them through a Fujitsu ScanSnap. It scans double-sided straight to PDF. It takes about 10 minutes/book to create Hi-res color PDF's. The scanner is pretty fast.

My archival format is this hi-res color PDF (sadly, I like the yellowed color of old pages and like to have that retained when reading on an iPad.) These files are quite large (100 meg or so). Lucky enormous hard disks are cheap.

For daily reading, I send the PDF's through an epub converter that turns them to lower res, B&W epubs and then onto a Kindle Paperwhite.

I used to be bothered by the destruction of the book, but now its almost spiritual. The book must go through the ritual and give up its corporeal form so that it can live forever in my digital Valhalla.
This looks fun. Any word on ballpark pricing or the duration of the beta? (or at least a lower bound on anticipated pricing -- will there be plans that are suitable for hobbyists who are otherwise on DO's $5-10/mo tier.)
Just because the CA or the intermediate says EV doesn't mean that they only issue EV certs. The CA we use at work will issue certs with their EV root when we need compatibility with older installs, they only had their EV root cross signed.
It turns out that paying people to talk to you, although it can work, tends to get them to tell you what you want to hear. Often, this is "lies and clickbait bullshit." (Think of a stereotypical Soviet government report.) Markets work very well for lots of things, but they can't establish honesty and trustworthiness. Instead, they need honesty and trustworthiness to function.

Still, it's better than them getting paid to tell you what someone else wants you to hear.
T-Mobile's free international roaming has been great. I used to always pick up a sim from a vending machine at Heathrow, but now I don't bother. 2G is fine for email, light web browsing and navigation.
Ask HN: Do I choose a few team members or lose our only investor?
Hacker Friends,

I seem to only come here to vent and ask questions that I know I can only answer myself but I digress.

I run a small start up based in the south west area. We are in the drone space, we have some pretty awesome tech, our IP is strong, we are funded and its looking like we will continue to be. Heres the kicker.

We have been in business for a little over 7 months. In that time period we have brought on some team members to write software and put them under the direction of Andrew (not his real name). Andrew believes that we should allocate equity and options to him and his team right now, this second or he will take the team we have built and walk. In a way he is holding my software team in escrow. It sucks and its not ideal.

On the other hand.

Our investor, to put it quite simply, "doesn't negotiate with terrorists". And has asked me to fire him in the morning. He has refused to allocate options at this point and believes we should wait until we raise another round. He is old fashioned and only believes in rewarding value. While its nobel its not ideal either.

So heres my problem. Do I take the nobel high road and take my men, distribute equity and pretty much kiss goodbye any chance of follow on investment. OR... Do I fire Andrew, risk losing over half my software team, and be set back months which could potentially cost me the company?

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Concerns? I dont imagine i'll be sleeping much tonight and could use as many points of view as possible.

Best,
-C.A.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459381
One great property of the Levenshtein distance is that it is a metric in the mathematical sense. This means that the following (in)equalities hold (with d being the Levenshtein distance):

d(a, c) <= d(a, b) + d(b, c) (triangle inequality)
d(a, b) = d(b, a) (symmetry)
d(a, a) = 0 (reflexivity)

Many efficient algorithms operating on distances need the distance measure to be metric in this sense, otherwise they don't work (e.g., [1]). There is also a lot of really useful math that can’t be applied if a distance measure is not a metric. One important question therefore is whether Sift4 is a metric or not. I haven’t looked at the definition of the algorithm but the author acknowledges that the measure is not symmetric, so it can't be a metric. Despite its speed the Sift4 can therefore often not be used as a drop-in replacement for the Levenshtein distance. There is a reason for why we’re are still using the Levenshtein distance despite its somewhat poor scaling properties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_tree
I should clarify the performance issue.

A lot of developers, even today, come to me asking for a server configured to run a specific directory over SSL, with the rest of the site over plaintext.

The argument I am always given is that SSL will tax the CPU and the site won't be able to scale. I'm told it's a best practice and people will viciously defend "wasting" performance on parts of the site that don't need it.

It's not a common recommendation here, where people are arguably more aware of modern practices.

But amongst a lot of the population of entry level web developers I run into, it's a very common one, and it's also very wrong.

The "round trip" issue however that you point to, is totally valid, but also one that will not kill a site's ability to scale.
Guides on How to Add Subtitles to DVD Video on PC/Mac
>>> When I was feeling very depressed, I'd often search for sad things, or even "ways to kill myself"

That may explain those "Hotels near Golden Gate Bridge starting at $40 a night" ads.

In all seriousness, I do not want Google to help me at all, just to leave my privacy alone and show the most relevant results when asked. I'd rather scroll a bit longer than have Google know everything about me
Matthew Herper recently totaled R&D spending from the 12 leading pharmaceutical companies from 1997 to 2011, and found that they had spent $802 billion to gain approval for just 139 drugs: a staggering $5.8 billion per drug.

Granted, we are talking about medical devices, but as soon as the FDA wants clinical trials things get damm expencive and 400M is a drop in the bucket. 200K is about a weeks budget for a well staffed modern lab. Sure, you can get a minor iteration in a week, but nobody is going to send anything down the pipeline without a lot more research than that.
There should be a dying unicorn list too..
How would smoothies remove the fiber. You're just grinding up the fruit, not taking anything out. All the fiber should still be there.
If that is the world we live in, we have no way to tell, because our experience still looks like 'this' world.

And, if it is the world we live in, I guess I don't want it to be, since I think this reality could be a lot better.
> With enough carbs (as few as 50g for some) the end result at that stage of the condition is still a highly-adverse event, a high blood sugar spike above 100 mg/dL. Even if the spike is controlled down within 1-2 hours, there is a lot of accumulating evidence that it isn't the duration or absolute value of high blood sugars, but the spikes (the occurrence of any delta in the first place) themselves that cause cellular damage.

The "normal" threshold for an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) at 2 hours post-load (75g glucose after fasting) is 140mg/dL. Where is this research indicating that a spike above 100mg/dL is "highly-adverse"? All the research I have seen, and the position of the ADA, is that it is normal to go well above that after a heavy carb load.

I have seen claims by Dr. Richard Bernstein and his adherents that the ADA is wrong and that "normal" is much lower and flatter than they claim. I have seen no supporting research on this, and even active criticism of that idea fro various medical researchers.
Allocate options to the team. Fire the blackmailer.
I would not agree it means "the right amount of everything". That would be "everything in the right amount". I take "everything in moderation" to mean not too much of anything, using your best judgement of what too much is. It's subjective and based on intuition, to be sure, but I think everyone has a decent understanding about when they are having too much of something. And I fully admit it's not a great tautology. But in lieu of better science, at least it's something.
Well, I pretty much did the same thing and lost 35 lbs. I know my electronic scale can't be influenced by the placebo effect.

That said, I'm not trying to say sugar is 100% bad for you. I'm sure removing 100% of the sugar from the human body will cause it to fail. Just saying that if you're one of those knocking down 2 bottles of mountain dew and a candy bar everyday, you should probably stop.
Literary saint or arrogant fraud–why do we need Thoreau to be one or the other?
I wonder if Github posts catch more attention than web site posts. Funny since in the comments, someone asked for a demo, which is the website I submitted. Oh well.

However, let's not lose focus of the fact that while it's fun to watch them, you really cannot spend these internet points we earn here.
This is an under-appreciated strength of ebooks: they can't be resold.

With print books, publishers risk undermining their own inventory. The more print books they sell, the more they fuel the used market, which drives down prices. This is countervailing force to the typical upward price pressure of high demand.

Not so with ebooks. Plus you don't have to cut down trees, stamp them with poisonous dyes, and move them around with oil-sucking cargo ships, frieghtliners, forklifts and such.

If only ebooks didn't suck so bad...
My school improved this by switching to a "block schedule" with 3 rotating classes a day for 2 hours each instead of all 6 in one day. The side effect was that it was easy to wait to do the homework until the night before it was due and forget what was discussed in class the day before.
By the time a game hits a bundle the impact on the developer's bottom line is almost negligible. If you want to support developers, buy their games when they come out. Doing otherwise is "nice," but ineffective.
I fear a Police State where it is basically an 1984 type of society. Instead of TV sets watching us, it is our smart phones. The only thing protecting us from the Thought Police is the fact that our smart phones are encrypted so that we can have privacy. Take away that encryption and let the Police or anyone else have access to anyone's smart phone and there is no privacy and you can be arrested for stuff you didn't do but might because some machine learning algorithm says you might commit a crime. Sort of like the Minority Report TV show were they stopped using precogs and went to a Hawkeye program that uses ML to tell if someone is going to do a crime and has access to everything in the public to tell.