skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you know an eco- and privacy-aware server provider?
I am looking to rent a bunch of dedicated servers. The optimal provider would be serious about green IT and operate in a jurisdiction that reasonably respects privacy (e.g. handing out data for a warrant is fine, sucking up all traffic is not). The product should include DDOS protection.

So far, I’ve narrowed down my options to:

- Orange Website, operating in Iceland [1]

- OVH, operating in France in Canada [2]

- ArtMotion, operating in Switzerland [3]

Orange fits nearly all requirements, but their pricing compared to OVH is steep. OVH, on the other hand, is a French company and I am not sure if data hosted in their Canadian datacenter falls out of the recent French surveillance law [4]. ArtMotion cost a bit less than Orange, are privacy-aware but don’t seem to have a green agenda.

Would you have any others to recommend? Or do you have experience with the aforementioned that you can share?

Thanks!

[1] https://www.orangewebsite.com/green-dedicated-servers.php

[2] https://www.ovh.com/us/about-us/datacenters.xml

[3] https://www.artmotion.eu/swiss-datacenter/

[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/france-new-surveillance-law-a-major-blow-to-human-rights/

[edited for readability]
Thanks. Though I was thinking of how to also save/restore the program counter.

There is (or was, a few months ago) actually a bug in luajit that debug.setupvalue doesn't work on JIT compiled functions. From my reading of the source, it's not a major problem to fix it, and someone mentioned that they might do so.
And that would be just 15 of the largest ships, with 100,000 other big commercial ships out there burning an especially polluting type of diesel fuel:

"The world shipping fleet consists of over 100,000
vessels larger than 100 gross tonnes ... Oceangoing
ships running large slow-speed diesel (SSD) engines generally burn low-quality residual fuels that tend to contain high amounts of sulfur and heavy metals. Smaller vessels, such as tugboats, fishing vessels and ferries operate medium-speed diesel (MSD) engines that use mostly distillate fuels within nonroad equipment fuel quality standards [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2004]. International commercial shipping vessels operate across international waters with little or inconsistent regulation of fuel quality or pollution emissions".*

* Particulate emissions from commercial shipping: Chemical, physical, and optical properties
http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/black-carbon/lac...
Preprocessed Strings for Asset IDs
A letter from America
you are probably being downvoted for these

> That's why there is to this day an almost inconceivable hatred in eastern Europe towards Muslims.

> You can see it for example in the refusal of all eastern European countries (in the EU) to take even a single refugee from Syria. If the EU tried to force them they would likely leave the EU over this.

which are neither historic, nor facts.
If you have to ask random people on the Internet, no.
I wouldn't recommend anything by Yudkowsky as an introduction to anything (other than maybe an introduction to contemporary techno-cults, aimed at the graduate level). As a "philosopher" he is exceptionally inept at questioning his own assumptions and reasoning. His writing lack any philosophical rigor (they try to obscure their axiomatic assumptions rather than articulate them, let alone explore them). As a result, his "philosophy" -- and in particular his views of rationality -- feels very antiquated (some read as if they'd been written in the 1700s) or something Sheldon Cooper would write. It has all the philosophical rigor of a child; or Ayn Rand. In any event, it is very uninformed and limited (not to speak of his nomenclature, which deviates from that of philosophy, and so makes orienting his views in the grand scheme of things difficult).

His writings are more of an interest to people who are interested in researching particular modes of thought in various sub-cultures. In this case, how antiquated views of "rationality" are gaining popularity in Silicon Valley pop-philosophy: http://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-want-...

He is a cult-leader, not a researcher, and like all cult leaders, his talents lie in charmingly convincing gullible victims that his thoughts are profound, when, in fact, they don't exceed those of a very intelligent 14-year-old know-it-all. If you approach his writings as actual philosophy (rather than intriguing historical documents of a techno-libertarian cult, which is what they are), after reading them you are certain to know less of philosophy than when you've started, even if your original knowledge was absolute zero.

His writings are to philosophy what Fox News is to news: inspire and agitate unquestioning followers, while making sure they don't learn about the world by constructing an elaborate -- and enticing -- virtual world to isolate them from reality.
Apple Pay in the UK is limited to £30 (like all contactless transactions). Is it the same in the US?

Because I don't see how the phone can be much quicker when plastic cards support the same contactless transactions, and have no buttons to fiddle with.
Omnisharp is mainly community members getting together to produce it. The idea was originally devised by Jason Imison. A couple of MS guys wanted to get involved and now VSCode uses Omnisharp under the hood. So whilst there are a couple of MS guys involved and VSCode uses it, Ominsharp is a community project
Bonus link: A panel on automating science which I greatly enjoyed watching.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VchrEoimSO8
In what kind of parallel future are you? Thought we all realized an internet-enabled fridge was just an artifact of our internet-philia and past lack of imagination.
This will be my new go to sentence to describe hip/trendy things.

Talking about site itself, design looks stunning and impressive - lots of work in it. But as tool itself, I do not see much value in it.

I have scales at home to measure my weight, and sports watch to track exercises. Also whole tracking is way too detail. I can see my health trends in no less than a week, but usually in a time scale of months.

Also this tracking sucks my time, attention, etc., and it probably won't tell anything if I have some scary illness growing inside me until I can tell it myself, without any tracking.

Finally, most of devices used have accuracy problems, if you want to track your heart rate in detail you must use a chest band, not a wrist one.

All in all it's just a very very cool toy. It needs too much attention from user. Too many devices to manage/charge/connect/wear, etc.
Coreboot isn't the issue. You need a payload for Coreboot. For x86 architecture, people use Seabios, but that won't work with the Pixel C, because it's ARM based.

Some people suggest you might be able to get Tianocore working, but I've no experience with that (I'm running Xubuntu on a modified HP Chromebook 14). ArchLinux has a Samsung Chromebook guide - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samsung_Chromebook_(ARM.... So it might still be possible with a lot of effort.

[Source](https://plus.google.com/115981076197658979302/posts/2QXBZ16G...).

Incidentally about your closing comment - when PCs were towers it was a simpler matter to install your own operating system and make sure you choose compatible parts. It becomes a lot more difficult when they're pre-packaged laptops - you can't really build one yourself. Google doesn't want you to switch away from ChromeOS because their business model centres around their apps (Google Drive, etc.) and ads for their searches. So that's why people have started caring about whether it can run a certain OS easily.
i somehow doubt jp morgan lacks the means to fight them
Julius Caesar and Augustus?
Those conquests lasted for a few centuries.
Looking great, congrats!
nytimes clickbait! ;)
Their parents initially accepted the contract for them, since obviously newborn babies can't be fully-autonomous legal entities.

Most "executives" are part of a socioeconomic class who could have left for a different society/jurisdiction if they had wanted to. Staying and then quietly flaunting the "contract" is, if not "fraud", at least acting in bad-faith.
Using a library without using it in C++
1 ship producing the same pollution as 50 million cars? I find this very, very difficult to believe. Let's look at some numbers: The biggest ship engine in the world has around 25,000 litres displacement, weighs 2,300,000 kg, produces 109,000 hp and has a fuel efficiency of 0.26 lbs/hp/hour.

Using very conservative equivalent estimates for a car of 1 litre, 100 kg, 75 hp and 0.6 - 50 million cars would displace 50 million litres (2000 times more than ship engine), weigh around 2175 times as much, produce 34,000 times as much power and use 79,000 times as much fuel.

Keeping in mind the ships engine is very fuel and thermal efficient, 1 ship producing equivalent pollution to 50 million cars just does not seem plausible, in the slightest.
What's Missing from Language Apps
This blurb links to an article that says the same thing but was published in 2009. No clue how old the original Guardian article was.
Honest question: Why don't they employ catalytic converters? Is the amount of exhaust just too much for them to be able to practically build them, or is it simply "We haven't been told we need one, so we're not going to bother."
Definitely a DAS. Cell site simulators look rather different and are almost never placed in fixed locations.
This is a 2013 summary of a 2009 summary of the actual article?

Actual article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...

I think the original article interesting and current and worthy of being on HN :)
Texting insincerely: The role of the period in text messaging
Great idea and pretty cool execution, with the only caveat that the interactive maps don't work on my FF browser, it shows a blank page. If anyone involved with the project sees this comment, I'm using Firefox version 41.0.2, on Mac OSX.
Announcing GopherCon 2016
Do Words Have a Place Over Images in Web Design?
It sounds a little hard to believe too, but I think it takes into consideration that most of the time cars are idle while big ships are utilized nearly 100%.
They don't burn the 'clean' fuels that your car does. This is described in the article.
The article lacks a description of which specific form of pollution is compared.

When talking about pollutants is important to keeps the following points in mind:

- Is the pollutant effecting health?

- Is the pollutant effecting climate change?

- Is the amount of pollution locally concentrated or very distributed?

Cargo ships typically have a very high emission of nitrogen Oxides (NOx) and sulphur dioxide. When emitted by cars / factories on the mainland these often strongly contribute to harmful smog especially in megacities or cities with poor ventilation. Also they can be generally bad to the ecosystem also on the water due to causing acid rain etc.

The main pollutants on cargo ships have a very strong short term effect but are often out of the air in a few weeks. Because of that they don't rise to the atmosphere and don't directly contribute to long term climate changes. Thus I think the comparison in the article is very dangerous. When considering pollutants that effect climate change cars are more dominant.

So depending on which effects are discussed reducing pollutions from cars can still be benefitial. As an additional thought, the polutions of the cargo ships are spread out over a very large geographich area while the exhausts of cars are much more concentrated around cities. So when considering ones own quality of living, cars have a much bigger impact.

I think an article that better manages to discuss the subject is this one from the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...

Excerpts:

- Shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world's nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution.

- Shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions
> One thing I have grown to appreciate about Perl is its mentality of helping you getting the job done no matter what.

It is incredibly effective at helping prototyping rapidly small ideas.

> the Perl community is awesome, there are so many friendly and helpful people around willing to share insights, code, and words of encouragement.

And CPAN helps a lot too! It can be considered as an important part of what makes this community so special, it is a very serious repository of modules, I mean not only code: it is incredibly usable, with lots of documentation and a crazy test infrastructure (http://www.cpantesters.org/) that helps to build quality distributions.

The good thing with the Modern Perl book is that, before explaining the language itself, it explains the Perl philosophy. And then it explains about the community and the CPAN. Being modern is also about not writing code and re-using long-tested modules from CPAN with cleans APIs: it helps to compose quality code and make maintenance easier.
If you think drug houses in the US aren't a thing, you're sadly mistaken.
1. Ships have a much higher duty cycle than cars.

2. This measure of "pollution" is sulfur oxides, which are extremely low in automobiles since sulfur is almost completely removed from their fuel.
Contactless was introduced by the European banks well after Chip+PIN, to speed up low-value transactions. (5 years after in the UK, but more like 10 years to become popular.)
^ agreed. They should
show the math.
The video says, that the magnetic cage has been optimized by a super-computer.

Does someone know, why it looks like it looks? Why is it circular? Why are the path and the surrounding magnets twisted like this? Please ELI5.
Yes. Product management at Google sucks so hard that it isn't even funny anymore. Android could have been something interesting, but it seems to have stagnated and there seems to be no vision behind it. Sadly innovation in mobile devices seems to come mostly from Microsoft, since Firefox OS (RIP), Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish don't seem to have enough resources to challenge the Android hegemony.
> That means we have massive amounts of capital available to invest in new endeavors. It explains why interest rates are low and there is fairly little that central banks can do about it unless they figure out a way to dramatically reduce investable capital – they can certainly shorten their balance sheets but even that impact is likely to relatively small in the overall scheme of things (eg US Fed about $3 Trillion).

I'll never understand this line of reasoning. It's completely backwards. Does anyone really think it'd be so easy to borrow money for consumer goods with suspect credit or outlandish business ideas without central banks pumping liquidity into the economy? Anyone looked into savings rates lately? You know, where natural capital formation occurs?
True for 2G, but for 3G and 4G most deployments are using full duplex (FDD) where reception and transmissions can happen concurrently and use different frequencies.

The only exception for 3G is China with its TD-SCDMA standard. Everywhere else, 3G is FDD.

For 4G, there is a TDD variant. It's mostly used in China and on some specific high bands (2.3/2.5 GHz around Wifi, 3.5 GHz). But in western countries when one use 4G it's FDD.
they are registered in places like panama that have no regulation on such things
> My 3% came from this article (which I linked, but which is fine to have ignored):

...really? From my reply:

> From that page:

> "About half of the Japanese respondents indicated that they need less than 30 minutes to go to work/school. On the other hand, one fourth of the respondents need more than one hour."

I read and commented on everything that you linked to. The only time 3% appears in that article is "3% take the motorcycle, while 7% indicated not to commute at all." The bar graph that is titled "International comparison of commuting times (one way, in minutes)" has no Y-axis label or grid lines, and is small and low-resolution so determining what percentage is represented by the 120+ minute bucket is tricky at best.

> For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here)...

Folks feel that people who are spending four hours every weekday on the road are doing something strange and aberrant because that's an enormous amount of unpaid time to spend doing something required by work. It doesn't matter how much of a population does it, it's aberrant and -to a degree- self-destructive behavior. [0]

> For controversial stuff like [LGBT "membership"] in the US, WP is pretty good.

Sure. I'm making the argument that the studies are suffering from under-reporting. This is something that you have to ask others to disclose, rather than something you can test for.

> But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.

No, the Japanese commute time stats sound about right to me. The numbers for Japan were more like what I expected the US numbers to look like, actually.

[0] As always, remember that if I were assigning blame, I would do so explicitly.
9 Tools to Take Back Control Over Your Data
It's named after the eponymous mountain in Bavaria, referencing Princeton's "Project Matterhorn" where early work on fusion was done
some areas in many places have high cloud levels for all or part of the year. Thus they are less suitable for solar.
That said, large areas of India and many coutries are suitable for solar, build it, maintain it and get 50 years out of it
How noise cancelling headphones drastically improved our productivity at Spindle
He takes a while to address/spin Apple debacles. Maybe there'll be something on Monday.

I've found it more interesting that Gruber has been directly critical of Apple lately. When even Gruber says "If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within Apple, something is very wrong", then something is very very wrong:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/01/sketch-leaves-ma...
How the penis disappeared from the sex toy
I don't get this. Don't all roads lead to all non-isolated cities?
The problem here, is that when one wants to understand how scientific progress is made, the particular perspoectives of the subjects (a.k.a. current implicit and explicit understandings of scientists) is the matter for research.

Postmodernism has its place, also in 'real' science.
All this movement towards "online cars" really worries me as more often than not, security and privacy lags behind. "Develop&sale fast, patch it later" philosophy doesn't really work in car industry where human lives are at stake.
Why can't Android run a full blown Chrome browser able to run the web versions of Docs and Sheets?

I need a cheap and lightweight computer with a keyboard for work traveling and personal use. I now use an iPad with a logitech bluetooth keyboard, but it is not ideal. The main problem is that it cannot run the full version of Google Sheets (with filters), which I need for work. There are many other problems, as iOS does not support keyboards well (even though it is improving).

Furthermore, I now own an Android smartphone, which I like, thus an Android tablet with a keyboard would be ideal.

The Pixel C seemed perfect. The keyboard is very nice and it runs Android. I thought that, being a Google product, it would be able to run the web versions of Google Docs and Sheets. But it can't.

The alternative is a Chromebook. But I would like to run some Android apps which I already own. A computer that can only run a browser is too limited.

This brings me to my question: why can't an Android tablet with 2GB of RAM run a full Chrome experience? If it could, the pixel would be much better than a Chromebook, at least for me.
America’s secret arsenal
I wonder what would be an example of a "connected device" in this context for Firefox OS, as it feels really vague for the moment.
today they're called #-mafia. as in PayPal-mafia.
I'm no expert, but the stellerator design makes confinement of the plasma much easier and energy-efficient. AIUI, the twists ensure that the particles making up the plasma are evenly affected by the magnetic forces from the coils.

Hopefully someone who knows what they're talking about will be along soon ...
Splendid interface. I'll never stop saying I'm scared of the future but we have to embrace it.
I am paranoid to use this as there isn't a TOS or maybe it's just me that couldn't find any but what if early sign-ups will just be experiments for them to work on? what if there's some way this affects the users later?
For frontend they use TypeScript: https://www.palantir.com/2013/12/announcing-three-open-sourc...
The article addresses this in the paragraph containing the line "...these powerplants are some of the most fuel efficient units in the world. The real issue lies with the heavy fuel oil...lack of regulations applied to the giant exhaust stacks"

Have you ever been stuck behind a car with a broken exhaust system? The amount of pollution coming out of such a car is surprising, and that's with relatively clean gasoline.

"But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use." [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...]

I'm not saying you're wrong. 50 million does seem high, but there are other factors. A a former Navy nuke technician, I'm wondering why these ships aren't nuclear powered. I suppose it is the cost.
I'm looking forward to having all my settings, preferences, and layouts as a separate app that I can use in any car without having to relearn the controls and UI.

My Toyota has a terrible set of climate and information controls, divided between a clunky joystick and a multi screen touch interface, both of which require the driver to take your eyes off the road for the most trivial tasks such as turning up the fan.

Apple and Android aren't perfect themselves, but they at least have a process for updating iteratively until it works.
Agile with Remote Teams
While anecdotal evidence is useful it doesn't prove anything. Research is stronger, but more limited in scope.
working in private banking, can confirm this is very true.
regulators(=government) can shut you down in a minute, for a single action taken by a single employee, who somehow manages to break all possible rules in the company. the environment changed drastically in last 8 years (in many ways in good direction for customers, but it certainly raised costs massively, and guess who pays these costs)
How to reinvent app crowdfunding
Why cant the developed countries have regulations which stop the ship from coming in its waters?
In fact, christians also raided muslim lands and sold the victims as slaves. Everybody did this.

You can read, for example, David Abulafia's history of the Mediterranean.
Best Power Bank for iPhone
"Smart" TVs is one of the few things I can think of that seem to fit somewhat: Have a display, apps make sense, ... A lot of IoT stuff is little boxes without flexible UI, that does seem to miss the mark with FirefoxOS.
> But you missed that there are 9 8-hour blocks of leisure in a week, not 7.

Unless his partner is unemployed or a "housewife", there are childrearing and housekeeping tasks that are certain to occupy the "work" time on the weekends. Until the kid gets is own job and (if you live in a place with poor-to-nonexistent public transit) can be trusted with a car, having a kid is work.

> So it's half of 5/9, or simply 5/18. Which doesn't sound that bad compared to 2.5/18 which is what a 1-hour commute gets you.

No, it still sounds bad. A two-hour commute kills half of your leisure time every work day. A one-hour commute kills a quarter of the same. In both cases, that's a lot of time to lose.
Napples and Sicily also have been part of the Spanish crown for centuries.

The Spanish kings held half of South America for centuries.