skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flashback is indeed a killer feature. I'd like to see something like Flashback in Postgres. PITR is possible with Postgres but it takes very long to replay log files to a certain point, if you need to restore data. I know this because I've had to do this quite a few times.
The answer would likely be to just price up Oracle. Not just buying it, but over three years or whatever. Particularly if you virtualise, and get stuck by the varying definitions of what that means for core licensing. That might help you out.

As for "killer features", the zero downtime version upgrades has always meant a lot to me.
In Norway, there is no dedicated public defender system. Instead what happens is that the bar association negotiates rates with the government, and most lawfirms will take cases paid for by the government.

There are still limitations. E.g. someone going private could hire a team to spend whatever time necessary while someone being defended under the public system will get one lawyer subject to billing limitations. And people relying on the public system does not get to pick and choose. But at least you have a good shot at getting someone good, that is not overloaded with cases.

As an example, I was sued by the government for refusing to accept formalities around my refusal to accept conscription (a small number of people go to jail in Norway for it every now and again for 3 months or so, and they keep making the accepted reasons to get out of it more lenient to make people just pick one of the accepted reasons rather than make a point; for my part it was very much to make a point, though I didn't end up in jail in the end), and my government appointed defence lawyer was one of the top lawyers in the country, who had argued cases in front of the Supreme Court multiple times, and who had conscription related cases as a special interest.

It's quite tragicomic to me that left-wing Norway has privatized the public defender system exactly to provide more equal access, while the US hold on to a socialized system that practically guarantees unequal access to justice.
Actually, that makes it more believable, not less. Let me explain why: A voltmeter can't just measure volts, it has to make a tiny current flow through a resistor. The value of that resistor will be lower for cheaper volt meters because the cheaper volt meters need more energy extracted from the circuit under test to function. A more expensive one has a very high internal resistance, and so loads the circuit under test far less.

In this case being able to supply 8 volts into a meter with a low internal resistance is actually a plus ;)

That said, the current is still tiny, even a crappy volt meter will pull no more than a few hundred micro-amps from the circuit that it is measuring. So let's be generous and say that it pulls a whopping 10 mA (very likely on the high side (edit: it turned out to be 37 uA)), in that case the power generated would be 0.08 W. Not enough to charge your phone by a long shot, but enough for a pretty demo with a moving needle.

Finally, these cheap meters tend to output complete nonsense values when presented with high frequency AC, one would expect that they would at a minimum measure power transfered using a dummy load and some kind of dedicated power meter.

All in all this does not make things look any better for uBeam. I'd really like to know who did their technical due diligence.

What's really bad to me - but I'm a nitpicker - is that in the video the lady refers to the volt meter as a power meter, which it definitely is not. It measures potential, not power, any power that it takes from the circuit can be chalked up to imperfect design and the laws of physics. Maybe the person doing the demo was not knowledgeable about the physics behind the equipment but that's betraying a complete mis-understanding of the basic concepts involved.

The transducers used appear to be of the piezo-electric type, those have a fairly high internal resistance and the voltages produced by those devices would be relatively high, the currents correspondingly tiny.

What gets me about this whole saga is that uBeam makes it seem as if they invented wireless power transfer using ultra-sonics, but any sound is wireless power transfer and that includes ultra-sound. The whole crux is how much power can be generated and whether or not there is a practical way to overcome all the obstacles.

To transfer some power doesn't prove a thing, when I whisper in your ear I'm transferring power using soundwaves...
You can always ask someone you know how would they say it. Works most of the times when Google isn't there for me.
Apple – Safari – Safari Extensions Gallery
Sooooo tempted to downvote you just to try and prove you wrong :)
Holy shit, 55,000 HN karma? And I thought I had a problem.
I google for "define:word" to check for spelling, but a thesaurus is usually available in the drop down menu. Then I search words with similar meaning to find the word on the tip of my tongue.
> Only if there is a Safe Harbor II coming where the US guarantees to not spy on data without warrant/open procedure and legal recourse by EU citizens.

That guarantee would be completely unbelievable at this point.

> I know this EUGH ruling does not make sense with UK and France having the same intransparent all-people are spyed on.

The EUGH ruling makes perfect sense, it's just a partial solution instead of a complete one.

Given the US is believed to be the most powerful of the bad actors (i.e., they NSA have the most backdoors and other capabilities) removing them from the system is not an insignificant step. Shutting out UK and France as bad actors will be more complicated.
I sometimes start typing a part of the sentence in Google Search and see what comes up in the auto-complete.
Never mind pointless apps – our best minds should be solving real problems
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I am no expert but I suppose if they start new company (and they are successful) you could sue them. The prior work that was justification for the vesting was market-tested by the startup. The result was negative but I suppose your share was not conditioned like this. Also the pivot happened while you were still part of the company, right? In general I would say the best option for both sides is to reach a consensus somewhere in the middle.
Right from the start, I don't have a good feeling about protonmail. On their About Us page, the CTO self-proclaimed himself a crypto expert. The CTO has a phd in particle physics and has never published anything on computer security.

Turns out they are the type of people who pay to make the problem disappear.
Net Active Users: Backbone for Business Growth
Does it mean that the new traffic predictions, as well as the
increased waypoints limits, are not accessible via the JavaScript API
except for Google Maps for Work customers, but they are accessible to
the general public via some other API?

It appears so, but they state "for now" so I'm guessing it will be available (hopefully) soon.

What is the non-JavaScript Maps API?

There are Java and Python client libraries: https://developers.google.com/maps/web-services/client-libra...
Green Lantern theory says president should have sway over Congress. That is not the issue here.
Me? A problem? It's tptacek you should be worried about... he's got 226,754 karma.
> Data hosted in Germany won't be accessible to Microsoft US nor the US government.

How do we know? Is Microsoft planning to release the source code?

> If the German government can access that data so what? Do you really expect to escape from that?

Yes.

I agree with your general point that this is a step forward, but I am also wary that people will perceive this as solving the massive problems we have with securing ourselves from pervasive surveillance.

Keep in mind this is basically just a promise from Microsoft that they'll keep your data in your country, so it's only as good as Microsoft's willingness and ability to keep that promise. If you trust it it's a step forward, but Microsoft is far from being worthy of that trust, so it's a very small step forward, so small it's barely worth talking about.
There is a comment in this thread that discusses slaughtering people in order to reduce their carbon footprint.

Also see this ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDXQsnkuBCM

This kind of attitude is one of the reason why I do not want anything to do with the climate alarmists. Quite possibly the cure is worse than the disease.

As regards the climate change itself, even the pessimistic projections of its effects are not too bad as I see it.
Those blog posts about HN trends and stats remind me a bit of stuff about SEO. Lots of tricks and hacks, but essentially it boils down to relevant content.

So yeah, you can probably gain a bit of an edge by posting at a certain time of day, or using specific keyword etc. but nothing beats an interesting post or a great comment.
Not sure this is entirely relevant to the core readers of HN. That aside, let's wait and watch spending in these areas rise in the lead up to the next general election, and the tories applaud themselves.
Boot To Gecko (B2G) is the underlying open source project. "Firefox OS" is the official Mozilla-branded product.

It should not be a problem basing it on B2G.
Interesting that patent wars were a thing in 1914. Bad idea then...
Show HN: ReShape Craigslist
Pharmacies are a complicated issue because of regulation

But you have 'regular' grocery stores in NY and also the small ethnic product ones.
I usually use thesaurus.com and oxforddictionaries.com

If that doesn't do it I check quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl and english.stackexchange.com and maybe books.google.com/ngrams to find out what's commonly used ...
Tor can anonymize traffic but only against passive attackers who cannot perform traffic flow confirmation on a global scale.

> A global passive adversary is the most commonly assumed threat when analyzing theoretical anonymity designs. But like all practical low-latency systems, Tor does not protect against such a strong adversary. Instead, we assume an adversary who can observe some fraction of network traffic; who can generate, modify, delete, or delay traffic; who can operate onion routers of his own; and who can compromise some fraction of the onion routers.

(https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des..., Page 4)

I read an interesting article in the ACM last month, titled "Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon" (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/10/192387-seeking-anonymi...).

> The most well known global-traffic-analysis attack—"traffic confirmation"—was understood by Tor's designers but considered an unrealistically strong attack model and too costly to defend against.

They explain a number of attacks against Tor (both active and passive) and introduce Dissent, "a project at Yale University that expands the design space and explores starkly contrasting foundations for anonymous communication".
I suspect your single downvote would be have been countered by several people supplying corrective upvotes, so they could have ended up with more upvotes than they would have done without the initial downvote.
MIT 6.849: Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra (2012)
We can only hope that control of blue light emissions will be natively implemented by all phone and tablet manufacturers, to protect the future health of billions of humans. Here are some articles about the impact of blue light on eyes and sleep.

http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2014/04/23/7-things-can-righ..., "Blue light is able to pass through what is called the retinohypothalamic tract, or pathway. This pathway is responsible for regulating our circadian rhythm and a number of other biological and behavioral processes."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/, "Hastings and Sweeney’s paper, published in the December 1958 Biological Bulletin, gathered dust for decades. No one thought these findings might hold any relevance for humans, whose circadian rhythms were then widely believed to be relatively insensitive to light. But scientific discoveries in the past two decades have changed all that."

https://theconversation.com/a-dark-night-is-good-for-your-he..., "In the last decade or two it has become clear that the genes which control the endogenous circadian rhythm (the “clock genes”) also control a large part of our entire genome including genes for metabolism (how we process the food we eat), DNA damage response (how we are protected from toxic chemicals and radiation), and cell cycle regulation and hormone production (how our cells and tissues grow)."

There is room lighting with low-blue content, e.g. the G.E. Align PM bulb, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PLR3M0M & https://gigaom.com/2014/09/01/what-is-the-blue-light-from-ou..., "It remains unclear whether our screens themselves will soon emit less blue light — Hansler is pessimistic because he says that changing the amount of blue light will be like admitting that the screens are causing health problems, and lawsuits could ensue."
I always use spotlight search on mac [CMD+SPACE], which returns a dictionary result in the list of options from what you type.

From there, I open the dictionary app and check the thesaurus.

I seldom need any other sources that what is already on my Mac :)
The work from home Slack bot
Load testing: preparations and prerequisites
I have 80628 karma. That and £4 will get you a coffee in London.

Edit

Less cynically, it reassures you that you are "in sync" with the HN culture. It is correlated with the idea that what you post and/or what you say is found interesting and/or useful to those who hang out here. There are things I post that I think are important, but which get little or no attention. There are other things I post that get lots of upvotes but which I think are less important. That's the way it goes - we have smart-phones to look at pictures of cats, and argue with strangers.

However, as the article you reference says, mostly it says that you've been here a long time, and posted many times. In short, it's cumulative.

And now I have 80629.
Custom AngularJs validation directive for Stripe
Big Bang left us with a perfect random number generator
Web Security Resources
MS Azure gets all emotional with machine learning (AI services detect emotions)
It is kind of interesting that people actually need to look for synonymous words, because if you have one word that describes what you want to express, why do you need another word for it?

Well, it seems that when writing English prose, it is considered bad style to use the same word more than once in a paragraph, and the offense becomes greater when using the word more often. This "rule" is, from a logical standpoint, of course complete nonsense, but nevertheless it exists.

So, this makes me wonder, can't we write a program that automatically "synonymizes" a text, and thus fixes any problems with this style rule?
Slightly related: I only found out recently that The Guardian has a subscription option in their app (the 'Premium' tier, Euro 3.61 per month) that removes all ads:

https://www.theguardian.com/info/2013/aug/12/1

It's great to see that at least some publications are experimenting with models outside the traditional paper and the obvious plastering content with ads.
Good point, but even if the loss of privacy was symmetrical, it would still be a problem. Somewhat smaller problem, perhaps, but still a very serious problem.

In a world without privacy, the only things you could do/say/write would be the things that would offend nobody. You could not drink alcohol, since that would offend the teetotalers. You could not fly somewhere on vacation, since that would offend the environmentalists. You could not watch pornography or hire prostitutes since that would offend some feminists or religious conservatives. You could not eat meat, since that would offend vegans. You could not drive fast since that would offend those obsessed with safety. You could not make much money, since that would offend the socialists. You could not eat potato chips or drink soda since that would offend the health nuts. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Because, if you offend someone, that person will like you less and punish you in various ways. Not hire you for a job, not rent you an apartment, not invite you to a party, not cooperate if you're a co-worker, not have sex with you, not do you a favor, not do business with you, not greet you, not open the door for you when you have your hands full of groceries, not hold the elevator when they see you coming etc. etc. etc.

A world without privacy, even if that lack of privacy was totally symmetrical, and you could observe everything the government did, would be a world where you could not do/say/write a whole lot.
Most innovative service I know: http://www.netspeak.org. It does exactly what the article talks about: offering a word by filling a hole in a sentence or phrase.
See my other comment regarding the UK, where serving lawyers actually earn less than the national average. So yes, it's a bit puzzling. On the other hand, a law degree is a bit of a "I don't know what I'm going to do but this will at least give me a firm backing" type of degree.

You can take a law degree and go into any number of professions such as jobs in the police, human resources, journalism, areas of finance, all kinds of compliance roles and oversight or strategic positions in-house in companies etc. Basically you can treat being a qualified lawyer as having proven that you're able to work hard, learn fast and pay excellent attention to detail, which is often just as valuable or more as domain specific skills.

E.g. my ex recently went from one of the Magic Circle firms as a 2 year post qualification lawyer (UK system for solicitors - for barristers (litigators) it's slightly different - == 3 year law degree, 2 years training contract and passing the legal practice course; the latter can be done as part of/during training, especially if you get a contract with a top firm) to a director-level human resources position at a major bank on the basis of being a qualified solicitor with some lower level HR experience years ago, before her degree. Her legal training is by far the most relevant to the role vs. HR experience, given all the regulatory/compliance issues and general legal issues an investment banks HR department has to deal with.

But certainly, going into law to work in a law-firm is far from lucrative for most people.

(not that the overall cost is much lower in the UK,though: the law degree is a first degree, and costs the same as any typical first degree, and if you get a training contract the training is paid and many firms will then cover the cost of the legal practice course as well; even if you don't get a training contract before your LPC, it's possible to do the LPC for about GBP 5k I think)
Kumulos Project Karma
I could be wrong, but I think the demonstrator in the video is the CEO.
While I don't have any use for it, my systems programming geek soul loves the spec list, given the board size.
Yes, but then it was a failed biz. Since the IPO business is going quite well, at least they could further reduce their stake in T-Mobile USA.

Usually the next wave of technology also implies new investments into the network and less profits, so IMHO right now it would be a great time to sell as much of the T-Mobile USA stocks as possible.
There's a minimal karma level required to get the flag button.

There's a somewhat higher (500? 750?) karma level to get the downvote button.

There's a karma level to get the ability to change the top bar colour.

I'm not sure if karma is used to place comments on a page - someone with high average karma may find their comments appearing higher on a page (and then rising or falling based on votes on that comment).

Other than that, nothing.
Not on multiple spindles, because of ordering.
Except that verisign is also replaceable in this whole thing. If they ever screw up they can easily be replaced.
Honestly: I don't know, haven't tried it so far. But Mozilla's Nightly (Aurora?) does on Android, so it should be possible.
Myths about the Alexa Traffic Rank
Anyone reading this would also enjoy reading this special issue on Santos-Dummont life [1].

In the text shows Santos-Dummont as a really applauded guy, recognized on the street, with incredible PR skills. He called the press before any presentation and even meetings, he did not applied for any patents and shared his prizes with workers that needed it. Just the opposite from the Wright Brothers.

Sadly, this special issue is in Portuguese only. But I do think it is worth the pain of the automatic translation if you are interested in comparing the stories. It really shows how important it is to share and to see science and technology as the social endeavors they are.

[1] http://infograficos.estadao.com.br/especiais/a-redescoberta-...
Netspeak – Search for Words
That thread yesterday about companies cutting snacks and soda was a nice contrast to this. Public services have gone way past cutting snacks or cutting back office stuff and are now cutting services.
This is way cool, and the writeup is excellent as well. Very much worth the read :)
Designing for Second-Order Effects
This is the most telling part for me:

they were unwilling to show the machine to anyone who
might steal its design, since enforcing their patent
rights could be a long, laborious, and very expensive
process. Having conquered flight, they wanted to cash
out before going any further.

What happened was the exact opposite. I still have trouble convincing young people with startup ideas that there's really no point being secretive about their 'invention'. Ideas are rarely stolen with impunity. When they are stolen successfully, it's usually because the inventor was so secretive that a clone was regarded as the original by the public and the media.
> So, this makes me wonder, can't we write a program that automatically "synonymizes" a text, and thus fixes any problems with this style rule?

Write this then run some well know writing through it, and put it in a blog.

The absurdist prose that results would be amazing.
62 Tips from Y Combinator’s Startup Instruction Manual
You receive the equity not for being around on the day the decision to found a company was taken, but for being around from day 1 until the company stops being a startup. (Well, some of the equity may also be for other reasons.)

The other founders expect you to be around during that period. One commits in part because the others do.

When you leave earlier, you should estimate how much of the period is left and talk to the others about the portion of equity that corresponds to that period — how big it is and how you can use it for the betterment of the company. Are some new people taking over what you would have done? Perhaps they should get some of the equity, on fair terms?
Can I just get a decent sized capacitor on the power rail to the SSD to keep the half second of power to empty the state that's cached and avoid these problems? What's the capacitor doing in enterprise drives that triples the price?
Also slightly related:

Facebook is actively blocking a rival community that "pays" users by passing ad revenue to users (users get incentives to post content and invite friends)

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-soci...
In that case we might hope for an accidental slip or a deliberate simplification for the audience but she certainly should know better than to call that thing a power meter.
Means that the karma system is good.

Anyone can point out what are the features that can be unlocked with more karma? I'd like to know what I'm missing.
Why does every move have to occupy the same number of bits? That looks inefficient to me. Why not make the movement of pawns occupy fewer and the queen more bits?