skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But that is just one little cosmic ray particle. Is it different if we're coliding a huge stream of matter? Maybe there are other variables that are important.
The big thing about the Press Your Luck incident that people seem to overlook is that finding the flaw was half of the con, exploiting the flaw was the much harder part. (that is, getting selected to being onto the show, answering the toss-up questions, and getting the patterns/timing correct). It was more-or-less luck that everything worked correctly, and as noted in the documentary, the con almost failed at each point.

The Monopoly incident in comparison is just boring manipulation of insider information.
By spending sometimes 80% or more of their post tax income on rent.
I'm lucky and spend only about half, not remotely broke but will never be able to buy in London either.
In the us a similar income would get you a nice house, a pool and even a tesla, in the uk a Prius plugin will cost nearly half of my yearly post tax income and a 2 bed where I live is about 10-12 years of post tax wages.
Ask HN: How do you use a database when prototyping a web application?
I wonder how other HN users approach data storage when iterating on a web application product early in its development. Please share your approach here.

To elaborate on the question in the title:

* Do you use a "traditional" SQL database like Postgres or MySQL and deal with schema migrations from the start? Do you keep your data denormalized (e.g., as JSON in Postgres) until a certain point in the development process?

* Do you use a NoSQL database like Mongo? If so, do you then keep it or do you migrate to SQL?

* Do you go with a BaaS?

* Do you avoid a database altogether and store your data as flat files?
Last April I decided to work on open source every day for a month. I saw a gap in the Elixir ecosystem (a driver for RethinkDB) and I just started hacking on it. The help and feedback I've gotten from the community have been fantastic. It's a community where I can tag José (the creator of Elixir) on a github issue for my driver and he'll chime in with very useful feedback. Imagine pinging Guido or Matz about the right way to do connection pooling and them responding. It's a pretty awesome community.
From my experience, SDL, Ogre3D, and Dragonfly BSD were great. There are other projects I've made contributions to, but many of them are a lot more challenging to engage with.
You'd need a pretty serious pressure vessel. I think time is a factor here.
Write your first Android app: an open source workshop
My wife and I were in a crazier situation. A phone number was associated with someone with big debt problems.

What made it more complex was that store loyalty cards (CVS in our case) caused her to get associated with our new number years later. Retailers sell this info to skip trace people and collectors.

We didn't realize it until we received a mailing addresses from CVS a year ago to a familiar name -- the debtor. Around the time we got really weird calls from bottom of the barrel collectors who buy debt about to age out for less than a penny on the dollar, re-animate it by "making contact" and then reselling it for more money.
Evaluating ClojureScript in the Browser
"according to this theory"
Another vote for Elixir. Very enjoyable community to participate in.
The space mining act had to do with internet balloons how exactly?

Also oh no, these American companies are being companies and expanding service. How dare they build infrastructure and be successful.
I'm in the US and I haven't seen any Minions Sweepstakes promotions, just NFL stuff for the past few months.
I am on Nexus 5 and had a similar experience as OP when trying the home screen replacement.

A bunch of the home-screen icons were missing and when I clicked on them they opened a completely different App that wasn't even on the screen. Trying to click on rows in the settings App did nothing, or hung, before finally responding. I'm not sure if a jank is the right word (it wasn't in the scrolling performance sense) but it felt quite buggy and unresponsive.
Ask HN: I'm 18 in Sydney. Part time work at unicorn, or go to uni/college?
I'm an 18 year old self taught developer in Sydney. After graduating from high school, I applied and got a contractor job at a local office of a super-unicorn. I love the company and culture, have got nothing but stellar feedback, however the local engineering work is drying up to a part-time workload. There's just a limit to what's left to do in a local operations/support office.

The options I'm considering are the following:

- Do part time for this unicorn.

- Find a full time job in Sydney.

- Go to uni (college) for something else I'm interested in.

I love the unicorn, but I'd like something more stable and a bit of higher-impact work. I've discussed this slightly internally but haven't pushed as things are still in a bit of flux.

Unfortunately, the tech scene in Sydney is quite limited and due to lacking a degree, I'm ineligible for US E2 visas. At this stage I'd prefer to join a larger company and learn from bright people; instead of working at a bland consulting company for example.

I'm interested in more things than software engineering and is open to studying other fields, although my current experience & FOSS contributions are all coding-related.

Where do I see myself in 5-10 years? Who knows? Maybe making a startup, because when I made one I loved every moment of it.

What do you think I should do?
Another interesting aspect is someone may not realize they're interested in a project until they've spent sometime in the code.
That particular incident gets a memory due to the fact that nobody before or since has called me that particular thing. During the time I went to that school, it was an everyday occurrence that I would be singled out for one reason or another (primarily because my skin was different, I suspect).

Sitting in public was not an option in that area. Walking down the street wasn't really something that ever happened either. You might get shot doing that. We had drills in school for what to do when, not if, but when gun shots were reported in the neighborhood.
> PHP is quantically dead.

PHP 7 is a revolution by itself, cleaning up a lot of issues in the language and moving it forward. I'm not sure what your message is about, but it certainly seems you have issues with the PHP team.
This is why I loved the original Motorola Droid series, and wish we could get another modern Android phone with the slide-out, Sidekick style keyboard.
Can you explain the con and how to exploit it? Seems interesting.
It's almost like there's a "scale of the problem" effect. If you see a picture of one starving child, you're much more likely to give than if you're presented with statistics on the three-some billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day.

Maybe our minds bucket each tragedy we're presented as 'one problem,' then estimate our ability to make a difference on that 'one problem' before expending energy on it.

This heuristic produces inconsistent results, but it's not a crazy heuristic if boiled down to: "fight the battles you can win."

One solution could be to remind people to subdivide problems and tasks into goals that can be accomplished, not sure.

See also: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/05/36143385...

Citing: http://globaljustice.uoregon.edu/files/2014/07/Whoever-Saves...

And:
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...
Blockchains distilled – for dummies
Going to look for a job without a degree is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute - you could survive, but your chances are greatly improved by the parachute.

You're 18. Get the school done, work part time if you can. By 22 you will have a lot of doors open, whereas the 'unicorn' will just grind you up and replace you with another willing (undegreed) 18 year old in a few years.
Suggested viewing: documentary about that day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ
What would be the mass of matter that it captures as it passes through the Earth? That matter has a momentum of zero relative to the Earth[1] and the total momentum of the black hole would therefore be reduced as it drills through. Would this loss of momentum be enough to reduce its velocity below Earth's escape velocity?

I guess it depends on the length of the "drill hole", the mass of the original black hole before it left the vacuum in the lab, the size of the event horizon and the original velocity?

[1] Technically I suppose it has some momentum due to the rotation of the Earth but I assume that's not significant. If it were significant, it would just mean that there's are "good" and "bad" directions for the escape so a worse case scenario could only get slightly worse, not better.
As a species, we have been generating electricity by nuclear fission for 60 years, and in the process, have produced hundreds of thousands of tons of extraordinarily toxic waste. In all that time, no one has found a final resting place for it. Only one serious DGR has even begun construction— and that's Onkalo (Finland), set to begin receiving waste in 2020, should things go to plan.

All that spent fuel is just sitting on the surface at hundreds of sites worldwide, in pools, dependent on a power supply and ongoing maintenance to the pumps which circulate cooling waters. If those pumps malfunction, or the power supply ceases, the water will boil off, and the wastes will be released into the biosphere. If the US electrical grid ever fails, fossil fuels will have to be trucked to these sites, forever. As long as the grid never fails in the next, oh, few ten to hundred thousand years, we should be all good. How confident are we in the political and economic stability of the US, for millennia to come?

Is it not immensely immoral to be generating power this way, and handing the problem to our distant descendants to deal with? How are they supposed to pay these costs, when we were apparently unable to, despite enjoying the front end benefits of cheap power? Can you imagine if instead of building pyramids in the desert, the ancient Egyptians had left behind a monster that required ongoing babysitting even today, to prevent unleashing catastrophe on the planet?
Going to uni is a good chance to interact with some very smart people in an environment where people are largely motivated to learn. It will give you a chance to learn quite a lot of fundamentals at a quick pace, and if you spend your time well, you'll get quite a lot out of it. It won't turn you into a good dev, but it will give you lots of pieces that you'll start to connect later in your career.

You can also pick up lots of good stuff from working, but you need to be very careful about what habits and practices you keep. You're going to be in an environment where people are motivated to just get things done. Some people will focus on improving, others will not. You will have your own project deadlines to meet. You might get mentored by smart people, but it's not guaranteed, and politics can play a large role here. Nobody is obligated to make you great.

Working will inevitably be the thing that crystallizes your developer abilities, and I don't think anyone gets good without it, but going to a university helps you learn things that people will often just take for granted in the workplace (unless they don't know them- those unknown unknowns can be tricky)
This is a very strange comment for HN. I get the gist of what you're trying to say here, but your terminology is completely off base. You really should look up the definitions for "computer," "touring complete," and well, actually learn a bit about the R-pi and arm computers in general.

The R-PI is very much a full fledged computer or "PC" even. Microsoft's reluctance to fully port a desktop operating system to the device has nothing to do with it's technical merits. It's perfectly capable of running a full windows OS, if Microsoft were to choose to do so. BTW, their IoT platform is rumored to eventually offer desktop variants, so this argument will probably be null sooner than later as well.

Otherwise, it's capabilities are damn near identical (functionally) to an X86 machine running Linux, BSD, Android, and a few other operating systems. There are limitations with IO and that sort of thing, which one has to take into consideration for any PC, but otherwise they are 100% functionally equivalent.
I will have another look too, on fedora 22 and 23 the 1.6 version segfaults every time when opening files from a removable drive.
Wikipedia has a good written summary of the con: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson

The linked documentary is well worth watching, though.
Did you read the article? Men are currently over-provisioned in that availability zone.
When it comes time to pay up, you better believe it.

If you're a declared "non-smoker", and die, and there's a picture of you taken after your policy data of you smoking a cigar, weed, or cigarette... good luck to your family's collection efforts.

Many health insurers are collecting lots of trivial under the new "wellness" programs that are popping up. You can be sure that they are trying to correlate gym attendance vs. various claim events.
You don't get to have a brand as profitable as McDs by quibbling over minor gifts to charities
Well there is the Steve Jobs solution: don't have license plates.
going to sleep so you won't be getting more comments from me, but thanks for the interaction and your article! great result. I hope you'll have a chance to incorporate the new numbers/savings into your write-up.
Silicon Valley didn't invent capitalism.

Silicon Valley didn't push America to abandon space exploration.

Silicon Valley didn't lobby for austerity, for Reaganomics, for the Iraq war, or any of that other bad stuff.

So why are they going after SV? Because SV doesn't retaliate. SV is a soft target and professional complainers prefer soft targets.
tldr; I use a nosql db because you don't need to worry about schema which should give you an initial iteration speed boost, but the database type should be decided based on the data. In the SQL case, you should decide on a migration technology sooner rather than later. Either way, keep good schema documentation (if it's not already in code).

DISCLAIMER: I'm highly partial to rethinkdb (http://rethinkdb.com/), though I think I have good reasons

- Since I find document stores a little easier to setup/work with (especially when they have nice convenient web UIs built in) I've often started with those. The obvious benefit is letting your schema change while you prototype the application. You could easily do this also with JSON in Postgres obviously, but I find the web interface/ease of use that databases like rethinkdb (http://rethinkdb.com/) offer to be refreshing.

- When you decide what database you should use in production, it should be based on the data. Note that most document stores are not actually "schema-less", it's just up to you to properly interact with the tens of schemas that are true at any one point in time. A sane set up will often have the schema documented somewhere.

I find myself writing documentation in files like SCHEMA.md (sometimes in it's own folder with a file for each actual model/collection), if I use a NoSQL database.

If you find that a relational model fits your data best (if your data is highly relational, and very inter-connected -- a lot can be said about when you should use a relational db vs a non-relational one), then I would still suggest documenting your schema, and picking a migration strategy BEFORE you start. Find what technology you're going to use to migrate your database, and start using it from day 1.

- If you you are rapidly prototyping, it might slow you down to add a BaaS. At least I've found that it's really easy for me to download the binary for a database I want to use, run the binary, connect to it in code.

- Many frameworks start you out with using an on-disk SQLite database (django, rails). If you mean like an actual flat text file, it really depends on the guarantees you want out of your database. If you are writing a highly functionally-minded app, and know that you are going to essentially keep a append-only log of what's happening, a flat file might be all you need (and of course, you'll need some locking if you want to do more than one thing at a time to the file)
How Tech Titans Know to Pull the Plug on Projects
We definitely had Minions but it was a lot more scaled back.
Also mostly unrelated, but a fun read... here is an article from 1986 about Frank Maggio beating a scratch off promotion to the tune of millions of dollars through a combination of finding a pattern in the way they were printed, and the loose rules of the game: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-19/news/mn-1227_1_scratc...

Another article I read said he later went on to settle for "undisclosed amount of millions of dollars".
touring complete, hehe :)

Anyway, yes yes I agree with the things you (and others) have said. I failed to say what I wanted to say correctly. The short and sweet of it is, sometime ago I proposed to a friend that I'd help him do some things really cheaply ... (because the R-pi is cheap!) and we eventually couldn't because we couldn't use things like Labview and so on. I shouldn't have extended this issue to terminology, whether R-pi is a computer or not, sorry about that.

Basically the source of my complaint is being sliiightly bothered by the fact that when people call R-pi a computer, the everyday joe-shmoe takes from it that they can run x86 windows on it. They can't. They can maybe run Windows embedded on it (I think?) but certainly not proper Windows. I know and understand that R-pi is a computer by any reasonable definition, I'm just lamenting the reality of things in this one small respect.
An Obfuscated PL/I Program (2003)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Morozov
Thank you, I tired watching the video, but wasn't that invested in the whole thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson#Preparations). That was pretty straight-forward and kinda simple. I wonder why the selections and big money squares were not randomized, could it had been a computing limitation?
www.writingbydaniel.net
I think that – just like how they say every sufficiently complex program is doomed to reimplement Lisp – every insufficiently well thought-out programming language is doomed to reimplement INTERCAL.

(Seriously; Thread.raise is just COMEFROM with a non-deterministic line number.)
Why is this racial ?
Modern statistics and statistically modelling are actually just confirming the validity of the majority of widely held stereotypes.

As statistics in the academy become more common and advanced, more and more old stereotypes are just confirmed to be accurate. This is considered a crisis right now in social psychology, for instance, because there are almost no stereotypes that research has debunked. Again and again, research confirms stereotypes, and shows that humans in the aggregate are very good at creating accurate inferences.

Stereotypes create injustice when they lead to prejudice--failing to give an individual a chance because they belong to a stereotyped group--but prejudice is wrong because outliers deserve a chance, not because stereotypes are incorrect.

How can liberalism persist in the face of so much science that dismantles its most sacred beliefs?
These are great points. Thanks for this.
Have you heard of Mozilla? http://mozilla.org

I'm a Mozillian myself and I can tell you I wouldn't have been one if the community wouldn't have showed me such a great and kind support since the first minute I decided to step in a introduce myself. Plus we breathe OSS and have multiple talents of every kind.

Mozilla works serving, promoting and protecting the Open Web, and provides the tools to do so by ourselves. Firefox is -mostly- a community effort, with translators, designers, and coders from all around the world.

If you decide to join, feel free to say Hi in the forums of the community: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/
You don't even have to be a criminal to come up with nefarious uses for this info.

Health insurance companies could raise your rates if they see you parked near McDonalds. Retail chains could use the data about your traveling habits to enhance their habit tracking of you. etc etc etc
As a person who runs (as my main phone) a FirefoxOS (2.5) on a LG Nexus 5, I'd like to note that those who would like to try out FFOS on a device (maybe an old left over one, if you're not sure), are welcome to! The water's nice and warm, just dive right in :). The build and flash documentation is nice and relatively easy to follow, given the technical level of the goal that you're trying to accomplish (building a mobile OS and flashing a phone).

I'd love it if the page that was linked noted more ways to contribute to the community -- at present, it seems like there are two (but should be more):

- Port FFOS (I'm actually doing this on one phone I had laying around, and it's actually pretty difficult because I am new to porting mobile android-based OSes)

- Try FFOS on android

What about app reviews? last I checked, that was also a great way to contribute to the platform (assuming they're still done by volunteers). Also, contributing code, mashing bugs (a link to the bugtracker), i18n help all seem like things people could do to help (when I last built from master, some translations were still lacking)
That article didn't say shit. It just asked me to go read a book..
Old school: I work in DOS for an entire day (2014)
One of the largest is of course Mondragon in Spain which employs 74,000 or so workers.

Flat is usually called "Socialist" in the rest of the world.
> So if the debt can be "bought" for pennies per dollar, why can't it be settled for this amount by the unfortunate people at the end of the bludgeoning stick?

This is basically what an attorney will do for you (especially if you get one before sent to collections). Because of the vagaries of attorneys and creditors, your mileage may vary.

I'm guessing the availability of quality legal services is also poorly distributed, compounding the entire problem in the article.

I can't help but read these stories and see them as a continuation of problems with redlining and school district funding that are providing a relentless headwind to racial equality.

For more frustrating neighborhood disparities:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/h...

Basically any TAL coverage on schools makes me want to pull my hair out.
There is one very tangible benefit to doing this for Apple. Namely, it would block all of the existing Square etc. readers for magstripe cards. Who needs all those silly external accessories for outdated payment technologies when you have Apple Pay, right?
Yes, this. Threads are not a resource to be monitored and managed; processes are.

Similar wisdom hides in the pthread_join(3) man page:

There is no pthreads analog of waitpid(-1, &status, 0), that is, "join
with any terminated thread". If you believe you need this functional‐
ity, you probably need to rethink your application design.
That I shouldn't post about debt on the Internet until I've purged all association with people in debt? Help me out here.
That reminds me of a situation on the Price is Right where someone figured out the pattern.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7922/price-is-right-pe...
+1 They also help specifically label contributions that would be good for newbies to try.
They understood napster just fine.
So, McDonalds bundled lottery tickets with all their products. The lottery structure was set up to deceive people who didn't think about it too hard, by making buyers collect sets in which one out of the set was orders of magnitude rarer than the others, but getting the common ones would make them feel like they had made progress. Then, for six years, every single one of the large prizes gets stolen by an employee.

Why are companies allowed to bundle lottery tickets with their products? It's no less of a tax on stupidity than the standalone lotteries are.