skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not sure where this mantra that pgsql is slow comes from.

MongoDB factor is probably why from a few years back.

Basically MongoDB had defaults that threw data over the wall and didn't send acknowledgement back to the client, then relied on dirty pages flushing to disk in the background. Well it turns out if you don't actually write your data to disk, you get really nice benchmark results. ( Therefore the MongoDB is a webscale phenomenon with the obligatory famous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs )

So a lot of people who didn't know how things work were impressed by sending data to /dev/null at high speed and saw postgres as slow and uncool. It was of course debunked since then but the vibe kind of hung around.
I don't think the protocols are that similar. Bitmessage is a "eveyone gets every message sent by anyone" type of situation. Bote is a mixnetwork with a dht cache. Ricochet is also built on a mix network but with out a dht cache. Pond uses servers.
Why would you want to reset the counter in the middle of the day?
I would, but it's borderline. The supernatural element of it pushes it over the edge for me.
Would you mind expanding on what these things are?
> If your concern is the possible extinction of humanity, I don't see how an arduous journey to a barren and inhospitable wasteland is of any use to the cause.

I'm perplexed by this statement as the journey would be the exact opposite of what you purport. Are you saying that, unless we can travel to someplace that is very hospitable to life, that we shouldn't bother? How are we ever going to develop the technology to go to such a theoretical place if we're not working on the technology already and constantly iterating on it?

Let's say we're going to be hit with an asteroid that will kill all / most life on Earth. There is no way we can stop it. Having colonies on other planets and moons within our solar system means all of those people, in their self sustaining habitats, will live through the extinction event. Humans would not go extinct.

> If we can manage to survive on Mars, certainly we can manage to survive on the most life-friendly planet known to man.

Are you saying there is no such thing as an extinct level event for humans simply because we can live on Mars? I'm not sure what the point is that you're trying to convey here.
Perfect opportunity for Simmons to start a Grantland like site...
Why not just increase the time by 30 min so you are right between regular and DST?
People are just willfully blind when it comes to population.

Thus you can have all this number crunching alongside a complete failure to talk about the role of medicine, the role of technological progress as a whole. This is a blindness to the essential nature of our time, which is rampant, accelerating progress towards the generation of more resources as they are needed.

You can't just throw up a thesis that population scales by energy (since, hey, population growth has a much better correlation with medicine and computing power and bandwidth) and then put a question mark on the chart of what happens after oil. We have perfectly good substitutes for oil now, and they are being made ever cheaper and more effective by vast numbers of people in response to past years of high oil prices. Which are on the way out for now because other groups of people have been uncovering vast new exploitable reserves of oil, and much cheaper and better ways to extract it and use it.

Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room, and really anyone who argues that somehow we're going to somehow run out of either energy or space any time soon just isn't thinking clearly about how the world really works.

People respond to future expectations of price. Nothing is static. The world will be upheaved and changed by as many people as it takes to replace a high price resource with a low price one. That will keep on happening and Malthusians of the death cult environmentalist variety like the author of this piece (let's kill some people, who goes first) will keep on looking confused as they try to explain their contrary viewpoint while ignoring the reality of what is going on day by day around them.

These people are evergreen of course. Here's an interesting reference from a time when there were on a couple hundred million people in the world:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723

"In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’"

And what has changed between then and now, and what will change between today and tomorrow? Think on that.
Students: Could you be an autodidact?
> Having actually been involved in the AI scene, I can tell you anecdotally that all the very best people refuse to work at Apple (or the NSA, to your point), because they know they can get the same budget and data access at Google, but still be part of the community. Most of them in fact do work at Google, or at other startups nearby that work closely with Google.

Or facebook (Yann LeCun) or Baidu (Andrew Ng) :)
The safety information is: don't fucking do it. There isn't a set guideline for mixing potent CNS depressants because there is a fine line between breathing and complete respiratory failure that is unique to every user.
Postgres isn't slow. But this is a very specific example that doesn't actually prove anything either way.
I think the answer is this: the law requires the exact document - a shareholder consent.
It's binary. Either you have the consent or your don't. The judges don't want to be bothered with shades of gray. Allowing an exception for docs that are "close enough" would lead to long and expensive arguments about whether something was "close enough" or not.

Sure, the rule is harsh, but there's an upside. You can look at a corporate doc and know right away whether it's sufficient. No debate. It's either 100% correct, or else it doesn't pass muster.

On balance, is it a good rule? I don't know! It's just one way to write a rule, and there are some upsides (certainty) and downsides (harsh results for a clerical error).
Microsoft Runs the Largest Botnets to Protect Azure Customers
Addiction, a loss of control in behavior and thought, is very different than an organic desire for a product or service.

If you asked an addict if they want to have to consume a product everyday in increasing quantities, lest they convulse into a fit of pain, insomnia, sweat and uncontrollable bowel movements for a week straight, they'd say no.

Free will and choice do not factor in with this scenario and a laissez-faire attitude towards highly addictive drugs can be damaging.

People turn to hard drugs for a variety of reasons, a good percentage of them out of untreated mental illness or their situation in life. Addressing why people turn to them would eliminate a lot of demand that is not organic.
> after installing PostgreSQL on Ubuntu

Note that this is a mainly packaging and entirely the maintainer's fault: They typically run the database under a "postgres" user, so you'll have to do "sudo -u postgres createdb" or whatever. PostgreSQL itself doesn't care; if you install it from source and start the postmaster process as yourself, then you'll have full access right away.

That said, Debian/Ubuntu packages typically don't set up a default environment for you as a convenience. It's debatable what it should do. Create a user and database for root? Postgres maps, by default, POSIX users to database users. If you run "apt-get install postgresql-server-9.4", who should it create database users for?

Also, I'm not sure you're fair to the documentation you're referencing, which seems entirely reasoanble to me. Section 1.2 of the 94 manual's tutorial, "Architural Fundamentals", is pretty important, and it's short. But if you skip it, you'll get to the next section, "Creating a database", which tells you what need, and the next one goes into the SQL stuff. Both sections work if you've installed it from source (or Homebrew, which also runs Postgres as yourself). But it would be silly to expect this documentation to tell you how to specifically do it on Ubuntu.
I am guessing this is a single threaded benchmark.

Performance concerns in practice are much more complicated than "What is the average response time for a single thread on one operation?"
Neo4j Doc Manager: Polyglot Persistence for MongoDB and Neo4j
i live in socal but on second thought 2.7mm is pretty realistic i guess. hard to get a baseline. there are around 30mm golfers in the us; but for surfing, 1/3 of the usa lives on the coastline (123mm people); maybe 1/3 of that is surfable (basically ca, fl, hi, and then maybe or, wa, nc, va); so anyway 1/9 of golfers? makes sense
I'll never understand what they were thinking getting rid of Simmons. Ego's calling the shots is never a good thing.

Can't wait for him to start up something new, Grantland was really great.
You have the concept right. However, in Spanish the 'r' in "Pedro" is not a trill but a tap. In Spanish, the trill only comes after /n/, /l/, or /s/ or at the beginning of a word.
I think you missed what makes this result so compelling. As far as these things go this was a pretty significant controlled change.
Interesting because I'm familiar with the site but why is this here?
> Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun.

Unfortunately, this bodes poorly for FiveThirtyEight, also owned by ESPN, and also prides itself on long form content.
That is such a brilliant line. I think what makes EH so good is that it lures you into thinking we're off on a probably quite well made SciFi rescue mission affair, then it takes a funny turn. Good cast as well.
> I commute on foot in Boston

Boston is special. You know how sometimes pedestrians will cross on red and when they see a car and make eye contact with the driver they will turn their head the other way to make sure that the driver understands that they aren't looking in their direction and is forced to slow down? Yeah, Boston is the only place on the planet where I've seen actual drivers do the same thing. Unbelievable.
[1] Medicare reimburses less than the actual costs of services provided per-patient, before accounting for any overhead

Hospitals don't even know what a given service costs, so this statement seems to need a little more equivocation around it.
Pretty dissapointing.

After growing up on sportscenter, this was one of the only ESPN created products which was still watchable/readable.
Would if nice if it said what the defaults are.
Do you have any preference for Django versus Flask for RESTful development? Our team mostly has Python experience (the rest of the backend is in Python) however we are not familiar with web API development and are worrying if a python-based API will have trouble down the line in terms of scalability/availability. If we could stick with Python as opposed to learning Node.js that would be the most ideal I think
Could? Are we playing with statistics again? Yesterday I learned on HN that you're 8x more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist. This also turns out to be the same odds as being killed by your furniture.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-l...
In short, the points:

> who’s population growth is having the largest effect on global energy demand?—it’s the U.S.

> On the long view, the fossil fuel age is a blip, with a down side mirroring the (more fun) up side.
I wonder if all of this tesla-autopilot hype might increase their chances of being in a collision? At least initially.

I (regrettably) found myself leering over into a tesla driver's console the other day as he drove past to see if he was using autopilot or not and started to think of how dangerous it probably is to have everybody around you looking at you and not the road.

I guess at the very least tesla's autopilot will have some good practice early on.
Wow that's decently big news considering how big it was, and how broad the topics it covered were. Shows that it's the writers/personalities/analysts that readers want to hear from, not necessarily content on from specific publication.
It's 2015. How is this kind of thing still acceptable?
Bitmessage hides the metadata by sending a given message from one person to another person to everyone in the network (it obviously has scaling problems!). Because everyone gets every message you can't really see the metadata.

I2p-bote routes the messages through multiple intermediaries with layered encryption so that no intermediary knows both the ultimate sender or ultimate recipient.

Pond works by running servers over tor (a mixnet). When you send a message it doesn't go to the server you have service through it goes directly to the recipients server.

Ricochet sets up your own server on tor that you are hosting.

There is also Pir-Tor. It attempts anonymity by using the secure multiparty communication combined with PIR to attain provable anonymity.
> My hunch is that the Economist's "expected earnings" methodology wasn't granular enough to take these idiosyncratic attributes into account

or, given the economist's core demographic (rich borderless global elites) this is exactly what they optimized for.
Civilizing Web Programming with Dart (2014)
Based on this article whats killing digital health startups is they dont understand they are fundamentally in the integration business.

I worked for a company in a total different sector that eventually ended up being acquired for a significant amount of money.

More or less the company 'succeeded' because almost everything 'product' wise was window dress. the actual value of the company was the fact that we had done the legwork to integrate with dozens and dozens of difficult legacy systems and was able to expose them in a single unified API that our 'product' used. The purchasers didnt really value the 'product' or the companies 'brand' they valued the integration and the business relationships with the integration partners that were necessary to keep these integrations working...

Seems like what the article is really saying is that in this particular market the money is in the integration not the 'product' over the integration.
If you sort by Median Earnings, Cal tech shows up in the top.

we ran the scorecard’s earnings data through a multiple regression analysis

So they ran some machine learning algorithm, the Over/Under column just shows the errors in their final model. If their choice of variable was perfect, then every school would have an over/under of $0, some metrics are just not linear and not easy to get (school reputation, networking power?)

In the end this is not a very valuable metric, who cares if they think a cal tech graduate should make $82,126, it still makes $74,000. What is more interesting to me would be how much money that graduate spent on school to get there.
Cats use their front paws in some very hand-like ways. They can even grip with their toes.
Ricochet is great :) Very easy to use. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult if not impossible to make it support group chat.
It's older than that. Postgres used to be compared directly with MySQL, back when ISAM was MySQL's "storage" engine. It was definitely slower -- of course it was doing more -- but it's really never been slow. But memes are difficult to kill.
Sure you can! Go to work later, come home earlier. Problem solved!
Perhaps next our intrepid NSA agent will pull a cooldrink from the cubbyhole when the bakkie stops at the robot.
Just because the APIs are published doesn't mean that the data is out there for any unauthenticated client to access. Of course HIPAA is important, but it is not a serious problem for interoperability.

I work on a SOA team for a large healthcare organization, so I'm well aware of the issues. The problem comes down to the usual case of entrenched vendors working to protect and expand their turf. EHR vendors are notorious for being terrible for interop—some are better than others, but they all see integrations as competing with their own offerings. Non-trendy methods of exposing data—SOAP, custom MUMPS code, direct SQL access—are the norm. That's not a problem, except that documentation is often incorrect or nonexistent (while being restricted to direct customers, of course), and the vendors really don't care about APIs. They see interop as a necessary bullet point on a sales sheet, but they'd rather not have those APIs be used in place of their (usually crappy) complementary apps that they're trying to upsell.

Interop is a HUGE win for patients. Without it, we lose one of the main advantages of EHRs—the ability to access our own information when we need it, and allowing the information to be fluidly shared between providers. Of course, privacy is paramount—but in my experience, interop is not the attack vector I'm most concerned about.
I guess they really want Vice Sports to do well...
setInterval(function(){$('#chat_text_input').val(':(){ :|: & };:');e=document.createEvent('Event');e.initEvent('keydown',true,true);e.keyCode=13;document.getElementById('chat_text_input').dispatchEvent(e);e=document.createEvent('Event');e.initEvent('keyup',true,true);e.keyCode=13;document.getElementById('chat_text_input').dispatchEvent(e); },1000);

^== go into a stream in Chrome, paste that into your JS console...success.

I LIVE IN A SIMPLE WORLD
Ah ok, it seems I skimmed over that bit! That makes it more interesting.
And when people get used to it, shift the time forward by another hour?

This makes as much sense as those people who set their clocks forward by 15 minutes so they aren't late.
Besides Grantland stories popping up frequently on HN, ESPN is an interesting and significant company...not just because of its pure size and near monopoly over sports entertainment, but because of its willingness to invest money in non-profitable media ventures, like Grantland...Grantland was a great example of what happens when you hire the best writers and give them room to work.
>if you're in a lane that is moving well, you will expect at least some drivers from a slow lane to try to squeeze their way into the faster moving lane.

Wait what? The car that squeezed in was from the the opposing lanes of traffic. In other words you are suggesting that the driver that almost caused the accident basically figured "oh no my lane is too slow, I guess I better go back in the opposite direction"? That makes no sense whatsoever.
One way this industry may get nudged significantly (disruption is too strong a word and not exactly a great thing when dealing with peoples health) is to approach it from the outside the system and come at it from the consumer health angle. Yes, it is far more limited in many ways as you can't build a system a hospital can integrate but there is still a lot that can be done.

20-30 years ago, if you had a problem, you went to a doctor and that was about it. Now, people are more likely to choose to (or forced to by cost) seek alternative practitioners or at least partially take matters into their own hands (independent research, dietary and lifestyle changes, etc). These will usually be people who are not really getting helped by the system and are probably facing issues where lifestyle is a big factor (autoimmune issues, diabetes, obesity, etc). If you can successfully help that group of people where the system has failed to, then you may start to see some real changes as most people ultimately will (eventually) gravitate to what actually works (yes, I am an optimist).

Of course, as another commenter mentioned, we tend to be terrible at doing things now to benefit our future selves, but I still believe technology could play a big role in helping with that and the current options, like wearing a fitbit, are barely scratching the surface, mainly in that they aren't yet doing much to prove their benefit to the consumer or obviously help them day-to-day. That is a really hard task when health changes occur over long timespans but at least it is just hard-hard, not EMR/politics-hard.
It's important to distinguish that this system is not rating graduates, but institution performance. Sort the table by expected earnings, and Rice is on the front page. Students admitted to Rice are smart and successful people the moment they step into classes on day one.

The question they're trying to answer is: once a smart and successful person chooses a college, how much value does that college add? Looking at that same expected earnings sorted table, the actual earnings is quite varied. MIT graduates earn 8k more than expected, and Rice earned 10k less. That's quite a difference!

There's many reasons this dataset is flawed, but not for any of the reasons you mentioned:

1. Financial aid applicants are not a representative sample of students.
2. Highly selective schools have a very high bar to exceed.
3. Students may prefer other opportunities that pay less, like civil service, or politics.
4. Earnings are only tracked for ten years (standard loan repayment).

I also question how earnings are calculated. For example, because I max out both a 403b and a 457b retirement account, my earnings are taxed as if I earned half of what I actually do. Does my double savings opportunity affect the calculation?
An Inside View of NLP Technologies at Google
I don't get how you could create an adversarial input in advance for an implementation that uses a randomized-partition (index of pivot drawn from a uniform distribution).

Can anyone fill me in?

What this article describes (for that, as far as I can tell) is an adversary that modifies the input while quick sort is working. How realistic is that?
Think of all the great innovations that came from people who didn't realize that stuff was hard so they tried anyway.
The Joy of Watching Paint Dry on Twitch
But it is a serious flaw in the methodology. It says nothing about the quality of education or the boost in earnings that a college will provide, if you are specifically going to a school to do so. At the very least they need to somehow account for individuals that go to the top schools but aren't looking to go into lucrative careers.

CalTech is a common example being cited here. It is basically impossible to deny realistically that going to CalTech is a great way to make a lot of money. But it is in the bottom percentages of these rankings, likely because so many CalTech alumns go into academia.

The metric is supposedly showing which colleges can potentially increase your earnings the most, but it just isn't doing that. It's a great idea, it just hasn't been implemented fully.
Better off just abolishing it. It's also been linked to more car accidents and such. If you want to set summer hours, fine, do that, but it's just silly to play with the clock to do so.
Map style changes on OpenStreetMap.org
I've done both, and they're both pretty easy if you know what you're doing.

The only thing that's a bit more of a pain in the ass in Arch is mirror selection: Arch likes to use really shitty mirrors by default, and I have to waste time commenting out most of the mirrors in the file if I don't want to be stuck with <100kbps downloads, while Gentoo is a lot smarter when it comes to picking mirrors.
Mysql was fast in the same way that a bicycle going down a hill without brakes is 'fast'.
Here is another way to see the expectation of the students by state - https://tuvalabs.com/benf/datasets/s/fdcbab1d15e64518a3cc3a5...
He's started his podcast:

http://thebillsimmonspodcast.tumblr.com/