skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You better than most know than you don't get heard until you release an exploit. Official channels were even more useless in Snowden's case than usual.

And as a taxpayer, I want to know how we're fucking up so I can try to correct some of it. Certainly it wasn't driving itself in a useful direction.

Also, if the fallout of having our actions revealed is horrible, maybe we should have done better things? Hmm. Because secrets do leak.
> no different to 52 different state sales tax's

so... I don't know anything about the EU law we're talking about, but I do know a bit about US sales tax.

First, if I sell a service, not a physical product, my understanding is that I don't pay sales tax at all. Next, even if I am selling physical product, I only need to worry about sales tax in the state in which I do business. In my case, California (and maybe Washington, as I have a contractor there.)

But really, it's a non-issue, because I'm selling a service not a product.

Now, if I was selling a product, it is more complex than it sounds. Yes, as the business, I don't worry about taxes in the states where I don't have a presence, but those customers are expected to file a 'use tax' - many people don't, and some businesses take advantage of this, for example, provantage will ship my supermicro crap from California to Ohio or some other midwestern state, then back to me, so that I don't have to pay them sales tax. It's super irritating, because I pay my use tax, so it's extra accounting work for me, and it is extra shipping money and time. I usually end up getting the provantage price and sending it to my local supermicro re-seller (kingstarusa) and buying from them afte rthey price match. But the point being that the selling company doesn't worry about sales tax if they ship a physical product to a state they don't have a presence in. That's the recipient's problem to sort out (or ignore)

But that's not really the complexity of the US sales tax system. The complexity is that within the states you do business, every county has a different sales tax. And I'm supposed to figure out what county you are in and calculate your tax. (fortunately, I don't have to pay each county; I pay the state board of equalization) - it's a pain in the ass. you need to buy a special database, because counties don't line up with zipcodes always, and yadayadayada. It's doable, just not fun. But I bet that's more complex than calculating a different vat for each EU country, though actually paying each EU country might be a bigger pain in the ass. Seems like something that could be outsourced to your payment provider, though.

(note, this information about state sales tax is about a decade out of date; that's about as long as it has been since I sold physical goods. Point being that it's both more and less complex than you imply.)
This is an important paper and should be read by anyone contemplating the design of secure operating systems.
I really want to know where the author moved next. It doesn't mention it specifically in the article.
The Xcpu Cluster Management Framework (2006) [pdf]
Why global warming?
It's actually not a problem at all. It'll be extremely unlikely that two civilizatizations in this case are about same level in terms of science and technology (+/-1000 years).
So when the two communicate, the advanced one can easily understand the other.
SQL is incredibly low level

- Modelling Sum Types requires giving up correctness guarantees, performance, or both.

- It's not expressive enough to get performance or abstraction - I can't communicate "this is a one-to-one relationship", "this is append-only", "this is associative", or "these things commute" in anything but comments. And my co-workers need to remember to make those joins, and think about how they can use that information to hand-optimize, because the optimizer sure as hell isn't going to do it for them.

- There's no abstraction/composition of anything at lower than a full query granularity, so everything needs to be inlined and repeated everywhere - this makes conceptually small changes, like going from single- to multi-column primary keys or vice-versa, require rewriting practically every view/query.

- Some optimizer WATs are required by the spec ('where' clauses can be propagated down the AST even past another clause that does type refinement; CTEs always materialize the result set and act as optimization walls), others may be implementation dependent (At least in Postgres, "Union All", instead of acting like a simple stream concatenation, more often than not materializes the whole result set and pages it out to disk - your 0.2ms query now takes 2 seconds). SQL is "Lazy when the stars align" and optimized by "this won't break things in the trivial case" - most effort in non-trivial queries is spent trying to convince the optimizer not to hurt you on a whim. Don't get me wrong, the devs do absolutely impressive stuff with what they've got - these quirks are clearly what needs to be done to compensate for the spec, and the spec can't change for compatibility resons - but it doesn't make it easy to work with.

- Things like missing a column in a join clause (like when changing that primary key) cause significant bugs that don't actually throw an exception/type error anywhere - they just change the size of your result set. This could be completely fixed with type-level literals.

- Types are internally inconsistent, and supplied functions are pretty much ad-hoc "we thought this might be useful". Type conversions regularly involve first converting to a string or wrapping in a nested query.

- The syntax is pants-on-head ridiculous for anything non-trivial, making education difficult and maintenance tedious. (especially window functions - SELECT a, b, LAST_VALUE(b) OVER (ORDER BY c ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) AS x).

The problem, though, isn't just the amount of code and maintenance issues this creates - it's the sheer amount of information that everyone on your team who touches the database needs to know and not overlook just to not create subtle bugs and significant performance issues. And all this knowledge is completely non-transferrable.

SQL is so bad that standard practice is just to not do anything on the database unless you have to; eating the connection overhead, adding yet another cache, and having a layer of wrapper functions are just considered the cost of doing business, leading a lot of people to think SQL is perfectly sufficient for what it does.
Sadly, no, but the author is also not a journalist. From her attribution at the bottom: "Lucy Shewell, PhD, is a research scientist in the field of molecular microbiology."

Science Based Medicine was also founded by scientific skeptics, so "refreshing skeptical assertions" will be the norm there.
Very helpful read! Even for someone who doesn't have a lack of space, all the lessons are still relevant and definitely made me think about my living spaces.

Also, in the sentence about the coffee table (seen two photos up), shouldn't that be "second photo from the top"? Unless I misunderstood and tried to find a coffee table in the photo with the surfboards/piano
Surprisingly it's available from Germany.
Most of the post is pointless, agreed. Trying to explain the phenomenon would be more interesting than simply listing dumb requests.

> Is it a sign of a breakdown of the traditional ways of making money (as a summary, the replacement of "working the farm" to earn money with "driving for Uber" to earn money)?

I don't see how funding campaigns compare to "driving for uber". Driving for uber is an actual job, while putting up a nice page saying "I want to go see the pyramids, give me money" is different.
Totally amateur models can easily make $50 or $100/hr for gigs. If you have a natural gift that gets paid like that and want some spare cash, why would you not use it?
Activision Blizzard Studios to create original film and TV content
If you use a mesophilic (rather than thermophilic) strain you don't have to keep it warm: it ferments at room temperature. The most popular strains in the US are all thermophilic, but Finnish viili and a bunch of other (primarily Scandinavian) strains are mesophilic and you can just plop it on your counter overnight. "Bad" bacteria won't have a chance as long as you started with clean materials.
That is actually a really nice metaphor they came up with. The seal and imprint are pretty useful for explaining signed email.

I already explain encrypted email to colleagues with the key and lock metaphor: I give you a box full of open padlocks to which only I hold the key, and you do the same for me. Anyone can have the padlocks as long as you keep the key secure. Seems to work.
You can do better than this straw-man.

As best I can tell reducing work effort is good, but neither the banking crises nor a BI hold much of ceteris anything like paribus. The banking crisis saw work effort fall, but also saw productivity fall and saw incomes fall for a great many individuals. It's not hard to imagine that that nets out negative.
I wish you both all the very best in this awful situation. I have been in the same position as you and in the same position as her. Your love and support will be so important to her.
Buildroot – Making Embedded Linux Easy
It's an interesting idea. For a civilisation is constructing a Dyson swarm, the time required to build a 20% coverage one to 30% one should be less than a decade. If I remember correctly, NASA is already be able to observe 1% of the difference. So we only need to wait for a year.
The OP starts off with: "Noam doesn't make a data-based argument. He uses an anecdote"

And then goes right on to the rest of the post with zero data and a couple of anecdotes to make his case.
I'm still very much for the idea of having both the original title and an editorialised title which would largely avoid these "why was the title altered" exchanges. Similarly when a source link is changed the original link should be kept, some people like to read other's interpretation of the source, other people like to read the original and digest it themselves; oftentimes it's nice to read both.
Yeah, I meant funding, sorry for the spelling. Precisely, I meant that I am afraid Ramanujan's ideas would seem so crazy that nobody would fund his research.
New Niche Social Networking Site Wants to Take on Twitter, Instagram
Former reporter here: One of the things many people don't understand is that news organizations exist for themselves as much as they do for their readers. They are drama queens crying out for attention. Now imagine putting 10 drama queens in a room together with 100 innocent bystanders. That is the media industry. They will tire you out. Media organizations have several proven strategies to push our buttons: voyeurism, outrage, greed, fear, prurience and envious aspiration are at the top.

This is compounded by the fact that the world is full of people acting crazy and doing awful things to each other. News organizations are actually pretty careful to not bombard us with constant photos of dead children, even though Syria alone could fill the pages of the NYT everyday with images of their mangled bodies. (I have sat on the photo desk, and seen the photos stream by on the AP feed -- they rarely make the paper. )

So news organizations are aware of the fatigue that certain sensations cause, and they seek to mitigate them. They need their readers to feel just enough emotion, but not too much. A perpetual state of excitement and irritation. This is one reason why climate change doesn't get the coverage it deserves. It's just too depressing, and people stop reading.
I can see the argument, like one should read 'Mein Kampf' or 'The Communist Manifesto' for historical reference.

On the other hand, I think its important to recognize that the mainstream of academic architecture does not reject his work, and continues to reject, in the main, the works of people like Jacobs and Alexander.

So, yes, perhaps we should still read some of his stuff (a lot of it is pretentious nonsense, in my opinion) but only with a proper understanding of what his aesthetic lead to.
Definitely!

With PGP/Mime email clients that don't understand OpenPGP simply show a small attachment. Without PGP/Mime (the old way) you get funky delimiters in your mail body that look scary to non-technical users. I started with the old way (because it appears to be more compatible with legacy email clients) until a colleague worriedly asked me about the weirdness in my mails, so I switched to PGP/Mime. As far as I can tell only really old Outlook versions can't handle PGP/Mime, and you can use plain text mails as well as HTML.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
Tesla's biggest competitor is the established auto industry. The guys need to stop listening to the folks who say its easy to start a car company. If hile there is some truth to that, its not with the investment. A billion dollars is a new platform, not a new company.
You can't just say "we use data science, trust us!" without proper evidence.

Granted, the founders do have data backgrounds per their LinkedIns, but that does not come across in the marketing copy.
Have you tried out Codeanywhere.com? We just launched a new version that can handle huge files.
I think it sets off the misogyny alarms, but I think the point remains: someone with a quality that could conceivably be used to meet a financial need opens up a valid criticism. We'd say the same if it were a developer asking for money, or a homeless person panhandling when they appear physically fit. I think there's a resistance when it's based on appearance, not skill, but I think there's plenty of models who would take exception to the idea that there isn't work and skill involved.
I object to the implicit assumption that shame is a virtue.
Actually, the ultimate test of a Silicon Valley investor is their return on capital. Your test is projecting your desire onto investors.
A lot of Cloud IDEs actually are 'snappier' :)
The Rationale for High Drug Prices: Incredibly Inefficient Research
This reminded me of something similar: televangelists asking people for "seed faiths".

If you haven't heard about this yet, check out this video from Last Week Tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg
The diamond industry has origin tracking requirements for diamonds, in something called the Kimberly Process. This is ostensibly to reduce sales of "blood diamonds" from conflict zones, but there's a strong suspicion that it's to keep synthetic diamonds from taking over the industry.

The diamond industry dug itself a hole with its PR. The best diamonds are supposed to be "flawless", i.e. perfect crystals. The semiconductor substrate industry is in the business of making perfect crystals. Semiconductor crystal growing technology applied to diamond works quite well.[1] DeBeers keeps struggling to build machines which can distinguish synthetic diamonds from natural ones. They claim total success so far. Others disagree.[2] In any case, it now takes about $50,000 in equipment to detect good synthetic diamonds.

As for synthetic diamond abrasives, those are about $165/kilogram.[3] That stuff is produced by the metric ton.

[1] http://sciodiamond.com/
[2] http://www.diamonds.net/News/NewsItem.aspx?ArticleID=46436
[3] http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-synthetic-diamond-grit...
I'm in organizing a major fundraising as well, not for me, but for supergravity.org. Seeing that some people collect 100ks, I'm curios how much the world will be willing to pay for their rescue - and I'm not kidding about this. Research and development is expensive and I'm not seeing anything on the horizon on conventional research that could save our current doomed path. Anyway, back to work :)
"Tan's point is that there are still power laws at play, choosing one random investment to disprove portfolio theory is incongruent."

Except that he made no such point and just countered the anecdote with his own anecdotes. The original NYT article comes across as a well-researched, sensible piece of writing compared to this lazy, ill thought out blogpost.
That's just the engine efficiency. They estimate that refining a gallon of gasoline uses 4kw/h of energy, that energy by itself can power a Tesla for 12 miles, and you're not even accounting for fuel transport, storage and handling yet.
Ask HN: How to keep overseas contractors aligned with non technical founders?
I recently chatted with a startup. The two cofounders are in a space I'm interested in (food). We had engaged briefly a while ago, but this time I was just providing a sanity check for their development process. Neither founder is technical, though one is a project manager.

They are dismayed with their current development team. This is an overseas team, hired through a site like oDesk (not sure which one). This is the second team they've worked with, having parted ways with the first one. The founders were wondering about ways to keep the current team engaged and productive. When this team was first hired, they were very productive (in terms of stories completed, etc), but now the pace seems to have slowed down.

I've worked with overseas teams occasionally, but usually with technical talent on both sides. I suggested a few things to help keep everyone aligned, but was curious what HNers thought.

I'd also be curious if anyone has found engagement to be more difficult because of time zone and/or culture differences.
I remember buying books of logic problems for road trips as a child. Definitely contributed to my ability to think critically.

I wonder if they make those anymore. Now I only see books of crosswords (they had those too when I was a child) and Sudoku (that fad was still a decade or two out).
In my experience, GoFundMe enables it more than other platforms, since they really don't give you a good way to complain. (I've received spam from someone with a campaign there)
Hooray!

Shifting to Electric cars is good for everyone!

Now for Electric Airplanes!
Will check, thanks. I shuffled things some during editing and might have missed that.

Edit: it was in the picture with the surfboards. It is the blue trunk in the lower left. Coffee table/trunk/changing table
Ask HN: Advice?  Engineer until (in hindsight) too sick, then "overqualified"
What should one do if: Engineer until too sick, then "overqualified."

After employee stock options vested, net ~500K USD, resigned because had felt fatigued or burned out, progressively for 8 yrs, had had energy for only one of {work, social life, hobbies}. Now for time for the latter two and easier jobs; career change may cure malaise?

But over years, burned through the money, trying alt careers, experiments to reduce burn rate, volunteering, self-employment, hiking, camping. Manual labor possible before a spinal injury. During attempt at grad school, uni's "learning center" suggested an integrative MD, who diagnosed some alt diagnoses but didn't refer to conventional specialists, thus other doctors were dismissive. Latter didn't offer treatments that helped as alt med did. But payment for alt med = out of pocket => less affordable. Now after 15 yrs, broke & then some!

Now /conditionally/ able to work, w/ expensive uninsured treatments. Haven't done great work in software engg in many years, if ever. Lower-paying jobs will not pay for the meds I need to endure the stress of working. Applications do result in interviews, iff I apply for software engineer jobs, which now (esp. w/o adequate treatment) I feel quite unable to do well.

Perhaps am "Disabled." Relative works for large insurer, says I'm as disabled as most qualifying. But don't covet label "Disabled" & don't know how to sustain self during the (>=2yrs) for diagnosis and approval. Feel worse on cheaper food. Eat a lot; perhaps my gut doesn't absorb well. Have little medical documentation. Maybe should've been examined by a neurologist, but when I requested referral, got none. MDs pushed antidepressants, which hadn't helped during multiple academic years. Also, more than once, waited 4-6 months for appointment with specialist before latter informed me my insurer does not cover...
Thanks for writing your experiences down so precise and readable. While reading, I had to think multiple times abouts the movie The Five Constraints[0], where a profound link is made between restrictions and a boost in creativity and new thoughts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Obstructions
My college is forcing me to install their SSL certificate
How to open a file in 10 different programming languages.
An aside prompted by your aside:

A girl from China joined my class in England, when we were 16¹. She mentioned that she didn't like British newspapers, since they were always so negative (we had to read and analyse them in class sometimes). Chinese news was much more positive.

It took a while for her to realise why this might be the case. I think it helped that the physics teacher regularly said things like "That bloody Tony Blair…".

¹ It was a private school, so her parents were paying the full cost.
Yes, it was bought by AOL for $4.2 Billion. Wish someone would crush my company that way.
OK, how do you know that's the best office?

Students sleeping in a hospital gives them the feel of how it is. Then they can argument their position better. While they really don't know if people are going to be healthier in their design.

This is exactly what I was talking about. You can measure if it's good. Have you?
Naturi yogurt has even lower sugar. (But looking at their website, they don't seem to be available nationwide -- east coast only)
He is a shame for his country.
Never heard a man speaking english so badly when thats his job.

And he never said anything good.
He was one of the worst minister of the state i'm living in.
Clearly only one guy after him was worse.

He is totally stupid and he and his successor managed it that people started to vote other parties on state votes, after over 50 years the CDU dropped out of the state cabinet.

And now here is the fun fact. Most german politicians inside the EU are politicians nobody wanted in the foreign country.
The problem is even if they do completely bad things these politics never needed to fear about any judges against them.
Thanks for replying! I see now I was looking at the coffee table in the old "bachelor setup"
After playing Eu4 for a while, I'm kinda disapointed the knights aren't mentionned.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
> there’s certainly a shortage of long term think and creativity

You don't say. And the solution is to start a youtube channel for exposure? Ok then.
Reading news is addictive so you keep coming back for more.
Reading Hacker News and using Facebook is also addictive.
It's like mental sugar for you brain you keep coming back for more. I keep saying reading HN its to gather industry news but how much of it is relevant?
UFO+FOUND+ON+FARM+IN+UK,POLICE+GUARD+-+YouTube
Yeah, it doesn't seem like they could move the price any, limiting any impact on non certified mines.

I guess an analog to the Forest Stewardship Council could make people feel better by creating a system to track the production of certified mines and then allowing the first buyer to use their label.
The same is true with Detroit which is replacing all their street lamps with LED's. This is doubly sad because Detroit is a leader in establishing urban mesh networks.

I've met with some of the volunteers building the mesh network and they're helping cities all over the world. An amazing group but sadly outside of the tech world their efforts are virtually unknown.
The Viatron schematics are on line.[1]

[1] http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/viatron
sustainable implies you can continue doing it indefinitely, but the first approach is more likely to fail that test due to increasing demand.
A lot of attacks don't require root/admin to be effective. Some Key stroke loggers run entirely in user space.

edit: https://github.com/w8rbt/keycap
Sarcasm, rhetoric, and other meta-linguistical information doesn't come across well over the Internet.
Completely agree. Twitter needs a real user perspective, not a Facebook or non-user one.