skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
India's arid areas appear to have some experience with 'check dams' for precisely this purpose - turning monsoonal wet seasons into year-round wellwater.

http://lawschool.unm.edu/nrj/volumes/48/3/03_agoramoorthy_in...

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/247773763_A_review_o...

http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/Publications/CABI_Publications/CA_...

Digging ditches is much less cost-effective for this purpose than building small dams, though they seem to have also worked with those, ditches filled with rocks under a cover and used as a storage tank.
Full disclosure: Valeant is my largest short position.

99% of the time, shorting stocks is unemotional. Valeant is much, much different. This company is a CANCER on our society, and I don't say that lightly. It is a microcosm for why we have the most dysfunctional, expensive, and unsustainable healthcare system on the planet. They are leading the charge when it comes to figuring out ways to legally (but unethically) and illegally bilk the public for their own interest. I have studied the company for the past two years and it is absolutely rotten to the core. I hope all of senior management wind up in prison...unfortunately it might only be a couple when the dust settles.

I am going to sincerely enjoy this company going supernova, and I might get just as much pleasure watching it take down a bunch of lazy and ethically-challenged fund managers as well. Valeant is going to wreck many people's careers.

The ironic thing is that this is good for us in the long-run. This is exactly the kind of wake up call we need to fix our healthcare system.
Wow, not many history buffs here on HN. Lots of credulous junior-high civics students, though.
Infinity:Battlescape – From a stunning 3D Engine to a polished space MMOG
I feel like the more difficult problem is getting every company to use some kind of electronic system to store versions of legal documents. Actually diffing two documents in any format is much simpler, even against an adversarial company.

I have to imagine that the companies would at least be paying more for lawyers to shuffle contracts around like that than to amend them slightly.
Meanwhile, Northern Europe has just seen one of the driest Octobers for a long while. Large areas has received less than five percent of normal precipitation. Stockholm has never had so little rain in October since measurements started back in 1786, beating a record from 1866.

Will be interesting to see if this continues into winter.
Don't forget:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
Part of the reason is that systemd has absorbed functionality of a number of additional pieces of software, to the point that they are no longer maintained discretely - udev being the best example.

Another part of the reason is that Red Hat forcibly landed systemd in Fedora and then RHEL7, and RH is an elephant on the scale of Linux development.
Fines over pipeline of Silicon Valley surveillance tech to repressive regimes
The problem is different than that. It's that the measurement of performance is susceptible to differences in the conditional distribution of disparate groups, given that they were selected.

We can illustrate it by modifing the GP example to not include time at all, and make the metric perfect.

Suppose we are selecting for the next qualifying round for the Olympic 400m team, and select candidates if their 400m is under 50 seconds. Then, we measure performance -- immediately -- by a 400m run. We have two candidate pools: people who compete in the professional circuit, and everybody else. 100% of the former group who apply qualify, while only 10% of the others do.

Okay, so now we immediately measure the average 400m time of all professionals, versus average time of all amateurs who can beat 50 seconds. It's pretty reasonable to expect that the professionals might average closer to 45 seconds, while the other group might average around 48 (I'm not a 400m expert, the actual numbers might be off. WR is 43 seconds).

According to the article, we now conclude that our selection process is actually biased _against_ professionals! This is at the least very counter-intuitive. Maybe we provide both groups with coaching, and re-test after 6 months, a year, whatever. The professionals will certainly still outperform the amateurs. However, suppose one of the amateurs goes on to greatness, and wins. Wouldn't this obviously be biased against amateurs, according to our intuition?
I don't have the time to read all this crap if I wanted to. And even if I did, I have no recourse to unreasonable terms. It's not like there's an actual negotiation going on.
NASA needs Fortran, assembly programmers for Voyager
this article reminds me of when creationists say "teach the controversy!"
Kakoune – An experiment for a better code editor
The photo caption doesn't have the full context of that statement. Read the paragraph below.

As such, more than 96 percent of Papua New Guineans identify as Christian. Yet theirs is a fluid, syncretic Christianity, not unlike the Christianity of the Middle Ages, one that has been grafted onto a long-established cosmology rife with demons, witches and relics imbued with power.

EDIT: Reading your follow up comments, I agree the "Thanks" bit means "Due to" not actual thankfulness in this context.
In this case, how is the lifetime 'a different from the lifetime 'b?
I think it is intentional. Rust wants you to be explicit about lifetimes in type definitions.
It's certainly possible that the observed bias isn't the fault of First Round Capital's selection process if the applying populations are different -- the "pre-selection" bias you're talking about.

If that's the case, First Round Capital could profitably benefit from encouraging more female founders to apply.
It's worth noting that this is a case of Linus flying off the handle based on incomplete information. It was latter revealed that the bug which caused this whole spat on LKML had already been fixed in systemd, Kay Sievers just failed to communicate that in the bug opened by Borislav Petkov.
I haven't used git-smart, but I read through the docs and it seems that at it's heart it does a rebase -p which won't ever try to see if a merge can succeed where a rebase conflicts.
Yes, I thought about replaying the information too. But the problem is that every different reaction by the car will lead to new input from the environment. And you can't store what you didn't anticipate :)
Most of the issues that you describe are supposed to be addressed via the democratic process. Unfortunately, local races like county district attorney are increasingly one sided affairs resolved in the primary election with no real contested multi party vote.

Between the democrats big tent and the erosion of the republicans in most places, democracy is in rough shape.
I wonder if the same dismissive attitudes would take place if the Youtube app were required to block said content, or were to completely disable/remove youtube from the store because of questionable content on youtube.
The author never elaborates on why exactly he thinks this is needed. I think reading between the lines the reason is that if someone's done a merge/rebase and screwed up a conflict resolution the information about how that's happened is lost forever, so let's come up with some hack to save that information in case there was a conflict.

If that's the case, a solution that would categorically lose less information would be:

1. You're going to push branch you/whatever

2. You rebase you/whatever on on master

3. You solve whatever conflicts you have

4. You make a non-fast-forward merge commit to indicate that you/whatever was rebased as a series with a name

5. You push your conflict resolved & rebased you/whatever branch to master

6. You push the original you/whatever as unrebased/you/whatever

Now you have the original unrebased commits in your repository, you can now simply inspect your history to see what the original commits were, how they conflicted, and how those conflicts were resolved.

Once branches in unrebased/* get old enough you just delete them. In my experience the importance of seeing how someone did something in source control is inversely proportional to how recently it was committed.
No. If you put in an order you're willing to sell at $10 (unless you notice the news about the catastrophe and cancel your order fast enough)[1], you're selling at $10. But if, instead, you just take the market price (as provided by the market maker) whenever you want to sell then as soon as the information enters the market you'll end up selling at $20 (or $19.95 or whatever).

This is one of the other services that you are paying the market maker for: price discovery. If you want you can do this job on your own. You can expend a lot of effort to keep up with all the latest news so you know what price you should be selling at. Or you can let market makers all compete to buy from you at the best price taking into account all of the latest information. In your meat example, keep in mind that there isn't just one trader who will buy from you for $10 to sell at $20. They're all competing to buy from you for the best possible price so they will very very quickly bid the price up to something very very close to $20.

This is why most people love market makers! If you trade with them you can be assured that you are (more or less) getting the best possible price taking into account all of the latest information.

Going back to your comic, this is what's happening in frame two. The ship arriving (for some unclear reason) is changing the price of neckerchiefs. It's generally to everyone's benefit if this new information enters the market as fast as possible. Rather than thinking something shady is going on we should think this is great, and feel good about paying them a few pennies to keep the information flowing quickly.

[1] Which is the exact same risk liquidity sellers normally take! This is why, in flash boys, Brad Katsuyama sees the price move when he tries to make a large trade. All the people selling liquidity are worried that there is some new piece of information they don't know about yet so they move their prices so they don't get run over.

This is why you sometimes see complaints that so many orders from HFT traders are cancelled. They're constantly monitoring all kinds of news sources so that they can keep their prices accurate. The fact that they're cancelling orders isn't a sign of shadiness, it's just a sign that prices are moving.
> Old ideas and old people last to long in this business, they need to be overthrown more quickly.

I'm not sure how literally you mean this, but have you considered that old people are still humans, and after a certain point it's a lot more likely that they have a family to support, need more medical care, plus a bunch of other things? You can't just throw people out because they are no longer as fresh and efficient as they were in the beginning. Being old comes with it's own advantages. There's a place for everyone in the business.
I remain impressed as ever by the health insurance & pharmaceutical markets' ability to distribute financial rewards to sources of value creation.

Speaking of which, even though my libertarian days are long passed on account of forming a realistic picture of what does and does not constitute value creation in the eyes of the market, I never went to the trouble of studying "blackhat" business tactics intentionally. Perhaps I should. Any recommended reading?
> I am going to sincerely enjoy this company going supernova, and I might get just as much pleasure watching it take down a bunch of lazy and ethically-challenged fund managers as well. Valeant is going to wreck many people's careers.

Notably Ackman has a very large position. The Swiss National Bank also owns 1.3 million Valeant shares.

The similarities to Enron are uncanny, as pointed out in the research report that started this all: http://www.citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Val...
Favoring fair outcome over having fair rules is against everything I believe. We should not strive for a participation trophy culture.
Just the idea that all conflict resolution is fallible and should get a second look. I don't see why a rebase conflict should be treated differently than a merge conflict.
Have you written any online resources regarding this? I'd love to deep dive (and perhaps even short myself, for activist reasons).
This is about a 3d game engine, that has been developed for about 10 years. Most of the time by one person. Now he was building up a company called INovae Studios and wants this engine to become the game "Infinity:Battlescape".

In the kickstarter you can find videos of a working prototype that already shows of the beauty of this engine and how well it manages to handle the large scales in space.
> In practice, measure the weakest male and weakest female to be accepted in your sample set, or some similar approximation.

In practice, where do you get these definitive unbiased measurements of the expected return of investing in an individual (or graduation probability or some other score)?
What surprised me a bit is that pg decided to use the word "bias" without any clarification, considering his background in computer science and AI.

Anyway, I think pg's whole argument is rather moot because the three assumptions that he states are incredibly difficult to measure (Part of the reason why it is very difficult to argue for or against affirmative actions without coming across as "biased").
The total economic loss is (economic gains from burning coal to generate electricity) - (economic losses from the pollution and injuries caused by burning coal to generate electricity).

If the gain from burning coal to generate electricity is more than enough to counter the loss to do so, then leaving the coal in the ground is an economic loss.
I'm curious, what does fraud have to do with "libertarianism"? Don't most libertarians loathe fraud and think it should be cracked down on harder?
If you use a pull request workflow then at the very least, you're forced to merge master into your branch (if there are conflicts) before merging your branch into master.

You should never (not even rarely) resolve merge conflicts on master...
Good HN discussion of a review of the book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330280
Well that's a good question, I'd like to have an answer to that.
debian adoption of systemd was a bumpy ride to say the least, it caused a few long time contributors to resign and others to fork debian to remove systemd in a new distro called devuan.

Then again systemd gobbled other critical components such as udev, there's also gnome that made it a strict requirement, like a cancer it grows and takes over other components.
Spatial Data Models and Query Processing (1994) [pdf]
I'd like to see them fix the other scalability problems: hard coded maximum numbers of interfaces, socket API scaling issues, etc. You should be able to open as many sockets as you have RAM and push as much data as you have CPU to do so. A huge machine should be able to do fifty million TCP connections.
Oh yeah? ... yeah looks cool indeed.
Ital – Jah Warrior [Music Video]
F.D.C. Willard
No but there have been enough news stories in the last week or two to get up to speed. Happy to answer any specific questions.
That's fine, all societies may be messed up. That's still opposite the claim that they were good before colonization (noble savage, to repeat myself).

And I don't think colonization belongs on the same level as genocide. Having lived in a shitty country, they'd be far better off if they were colonized by a decent country (even today). They might be better off after a genocide, too, but that has a negative effect on everyone that's killed so it's unfair. Colonization doesn't have that issue. The people of said country seem to agree, given their persistence of trying to immigrate to other countries, while expressing a fondness for their home country. If their home country was colonized, they could enjoy the benefits of both. (To be absolutely clear, I'm saying that e.g. Elbonia would benefit greatly by having e.g. Canada peacefully take over their government and run it as a second tier province.)
Hiring a Medical Malpractice Attorney
About 15 years ago, Monica had been a typical PNG wife, caring for her children and her many subsistence gardens, until her father died suddenly from a heart attack. As the eldest child, she was entitled to inherit his house, but her younger brother wanted it badly and accused her of killing their father with witchcraft. Jelasy like his is very often a motivating factor in Highlands witchcraft accusations.

Certainly some are using their beliefs as an excuse to kill for other reasons, manipulating the fear of unwitting participants. As with any and every belief system though-out history, it will be manipulated by some to their own ends.

I agree that it is probable that the majority of perpetrators are behaving out of long-held beliefs though. Beliefs that need to be dismantled.
I really enjoyed using QNX (I had a job porting Unix programs to QNX---it was not that hard of a job actually). What really blew me away as the inherent transparent networking. I could, from the command line, run a program on my computer, referencing a file on a second computer, pipe the output to a program on a third computer which sends the output to a file on a fourth computer. Really mind blowing stuff.

And fast. I knew the owners of a company that sold X Windows commercially, and their fastest version ran under QNX, using the native QNX message passing facilities. The fact that the QNX kernel on a Pentium was only 8K in size was also mind blowing.
But I think we'll see the end of high school football very soon, when the lawsuits begin and school insurance steps in.

It'll never happen. There's way too much community support for football. And thank god. There's no other sport out there that teaches you about life quite like football.
CodingforCharity
Co-Founder of a Charity Start-Up in a Pinch!

We’re coding PSD screens in HTML over Ruby and the developer was unable to get the details right.

We need help with front end and a little UI/UX aid.

If interested, message with a way I can contact you!
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-30/friday-food...

This makes an interested accompanying read. We are still eating 'em taters because root vegetable was the only thing our grandparents and parents had reliable access to all year round. And old habits takes several decades to kill.
Normally I like Citron's work, but when it comes to Valeant he is a total clown. Like most of the delusional defenders such as Ackman, Citron focuses on the wrong things like accounting and channel stuffing (although I believe there is some channel stuffing going on, it's relatively unimportant). Trust me the guy is totally clueless, but he is certainly a useful idiot if there ever was one.
It's funny you should say this! I actually asked a couple of days ago if one should short the fuck out if it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10460488
If you want to attract a buyer like my wife (she isn't here at the moment, so I am guessing) have a US-based version of the site in US dollars. She buys a lot of clothing online, and this looks like the type of clothing that she likes to wear.

A lot of the higher-end retailers in the States allow the buyer to exchange online products in-store. Your return policy looks fantastic - I think that she wouldn't think twice about ordering.

I will ask her when she gets back. It is really beautiful looking clothing.
More accurately, it allows the lifetimes to _be_ different.

Think of it like generics. What's the difference between:

struct Foo<T> {x: T, y: T}

and

struct Bar<T,U> {x: T, y: U}

"How's T different from U"? That's not the right question to ask -- over here Bar lets T be different from U, whereas in Foo both x and y must have the same type.

With the example above

struct Example<'a, 'b>{ ref1: &'a i32, ref2: &'b i32}

this means that there are two references of independent lifetimes. It could also be:

struct Example<'a>{ ref1: &'a i32, ref2: &'a i32}

which means that the lifetimes must match, or even

struct Example<'a, 'b: 'a>{ ref1: &'a i32, ref2: &'b i32}

which means that 'b is a subset of 'a. (This becomes useful if a struct stores a borrow to a thing and then a borrow of something extracted from that thing)

While the first case is the most common (and theoretically could be elided), it's still often a tossup and it's clearer when you know that a struct is borrowing things.
I'm on a One Plus One phone currently, which is CyanogenOS not CyanogenMod technically, but close enough. However, it is a shame that relations between One Plus and Cyanogen broke down... that said, I tend to stick to devices open enough to run Cyanogen, which usually means I'm about 6-8 months behind "new" when I buy... my last couple phones I had for about 2 years each, all out of contract on cut rate plans.

I care about the ability to root my phone and install third party OSes, I've only actually done it on my G1, and my next (samsung) phone. If you buy new, at the top end, your third party options are ususally limited, and iOS in particular. I'd love to see more open platforms/oses, as I'd actually love to see an android-like (or based) platform that the vendor simply provided drivers on open interfaces for (for the stupid, locked down communications). At least that would be a step in the right direction.
He did say this was a gloomy suggestion..
It would look like today, sadly.

To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy)

Yeah, shame.
While we can have lots of fun arguments about the mathematics of this approach, the basic problem is the underlying data is too small and poor to draw any valid conclusion from.
Probably not, censoring Youtube like that would be a pretty big deal, and not at all what customers using the app would expect.

But... as long as it isn't, that seems to be a pretty decent argument that CCC isn't really being oppressed or silenced or anything quite so ominous.
There's a few other configurations of lifetimes, e.g. (not meant to be exhaustive)

- only allowing storing references that are valid forever

struct Sheep { age: &'static i32 }

- storing multiple references, with the same lifetime

struct Sheep<'a> { age: &'a i32, name: &'a str }

or different ones

struct Sheep<'a, 'n> { age: &'a i32, name: &'n str }

(This is usually most important for mutable references (&mut), rather than shared ones (&).)

- lifetimes that have a non-trivial relationship to other lifetimes/types, e.g. via trait bounds:

struct Sheep<'a, N: SomeTrait<'a>> { age: &'a i32, name: N }

---

There could be some elision rule that allows omitting the explicit annotation in some cases, but I think it would be weird: allowing complete elision for the equivalent thing with types (e.g. writing `struct Foo<T> { x: T }` as just `struct Foo { x: T }`) would not be great at all IMO. These types are generic over lifetimes in essentially the same way as types that are generic over types (i.e. they can be instantiated with a lifetime (resp. type) of a downstream user's choosing), and being generic over a lifetime is part of its signature/behaviour.
I guess I just find it extremely hard to believe almost all of the nations "top" state schools have a negative impact (actual earnings less than expected) on the students that attend.

Maybe I need to dig into the source of the expected earning figures. I'm definitely biased to some degree, being a graduate of one of the state schools with a poor ranking - I'm sitting here wondering where else I could have gone to get a better value.