skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article hints at schools inability to justify their ever increasing prices. Why is tuition continuing to rise so much faster than inflation? Is this simple supply and demand? Government backed loans create infinite supply to anyone who wants them? How can not for profit schools justify gauging their students?
And I thought I was original and unique for learning and planning to use Elixir (and) Phoenix. With or without Dave Thomas.

Microseconds I say, microseconds! :) in development!
I think the significant design decision is that in a 64 bit world, virtual address space is no longer scarce. This allows a simpler implementation, roughly half the code.

The micro benchmarks are great, the whole program level benchmarks show nothing earth shaking. But I'll take ok performance and half the code any day.
Thanks! I am a developer, not a writer so I am the greatest at this. I should have had our writers do the copy. :)
Show HN: W|ASH: The Wolfram Alpha Interactive Shell
“Wrong Way” security problem: Open ports expose VPN users’ real IP
It's a sideproject from a cyberfriend. He created it in a couple of days. I think it's kinda neat.
I've had this open on my screen for like ten minutes and it's still blank. I'm on MS Edge.
This "total package" typically includes room and board, as well as other normal living expenses (food, transportation, clothing, etc...).

You would be spending that same amount even if you did not attend university (anywhere between $20K-$40k per year in living expenses).
I said: any strong evidence that no human action could improve the poor's fortunes.

That's not an answer, it's just a tautology. "Anything that
meets the criteria of the question you asked" is not an answer. I'm asking for specific measurements. E.g., "data showing that holding economics constant, certain groups wildly underperform".

Of course, if your views are faith based then no such measurement exists. Given how carefully you avoid stating such a measurement, this is my belief.

I, too, would oppose a violent solution, and not only for egotistical reasons, but your example is a non-sequitur.

A hypothetical designed to probe the limits of your morality is hardly a non-sequitur. Similarly, the trolley problem probably never literally happened in real life. That doesn't mean it's a non-sequitur to ask.

Anyway, good to know that there is little in this discussion beyond assertions of faith and dodging the core questions. Have fun.
There are a myriad of ways companies could develop and implement internal controls. I have no particular knowledge that would make qualified to proclaim the single best way for handling these problems, but from a historical and empirical standpoint, the world is full of examples of companies solving complex problems previously thought to be too difficult by the majority of people.

>Something automatic?

You seem to be assuming pilots and passengers have no regard for their own well-being. Just like the discretion shown by the OP in their story about canceling a flight, pilots have strong incentives to not fly if there is an increased likelihood they can't do so safely. I would see the "automatic" aspect likely being conditions which prohibit flying while even further discretion still being available to pilots.
Modest proposals considered harmful? :-)
It's just four ships on the West Coast, though. In total, Dole owns 19 vessels: http://www.doleoceancargo.com/vessels.html
How to know if your A/B tests have gone on long enough
Packaging and Deploying Your Electron Application Across Platforms
Why Can’t SaaS Companies Just Mint Cash?
I wrote this over the weekend and have found it tremendously useful already. It's very simple (less than 250 lines, nearly 100 lines of which is the template for HTML output), but it's quick and easy to do large amounts of math. I hope people give it a shot and enjoy it! I'll keep an eye on the comments; let me know if you run into any problems, or drop an issue into Github.
> Check out the UNIX man for tail, grep, ... to see how strange above quote about 'unix philosophy' is.

The "UNIX philosophy" is good, it's just that UNIX doesn't really follow it.

The C and shell programs that make up UNIX commands are actually UNIX's own little programming language, complete with ad-hoc data types.

Look at `cat` for example. It might as well be `str + str...`. Or look at `grep`, it's basically `filter` or `reduce` at heart. But it has to do this per-line, and it has no metadata about the line, it literally just works on string contents. The `head` and `tail` commands aren't much different than `take` and `drop`. Heck there's even a `sort` command.

That's why shells that actually use a programming language (e.g. eshell) don't seem so crazy to me. To be honest, I use eshell way more than I use bash, and half the functions I use there are written in lisp rather than bash or C.
My tuition fee in a top-notch european technical college (automation engineering) was roughly 3000$/year. But yeah, let's keep cargo-culting the US model.
That number is nowhere near accurate as we learned during the South Carolina floods back in October. The state estimates there are between 10,000 and 20,000 unregulated dams in South Carolina alone: http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article41315256.html

Those are the dams that pose the greatest threat. You can't plan for something you don't know about and the threat posed by such an extensive system of "invisible" dams is immense. A small earthen dam on a farm may not pose much of a threat by itself but its failure can cause a cascade of failures further downstream if it breaks when those dams are already at their limit.
In many ways the cloud is one step forward, two steps back. I look forward to the day when I can use my phone as my "cloud".
Free Ebook: Little Book of Python Anti-Patterns
The Top SaaS Metrics of the Most Influential Venture Capitalists
Let's be conservative and say that it takes the average person 3 seconds to read a transaction, recall whether it is a retail or subscription service, and if it is a subscription service decide if you want to keep it or investigate it. Then in no more than 10 minutes you would have generated a short list of subscriptions to investigate and potentially cancel.

Do you really not have 10 minutes per month to review your transaction history?

The service may be free, but(!) you have to hand over your financial info (to a random company) and credentials (to plaid/intuit). Protecting that information is worth a lot more to me than 10 minutes of my time.

Not to mention, reviewing one's monthly transaction one by one is a great opportunity to reflect one's spending habits and rein in superfluous purchases.
It's true that space-time itself did expand, but it's only speculation that space itself was created at the big bang. There may be theories that go far enough to explain the creation of space-time, but that's not the big bang theory.
Intelligence 'networks' discovered in brain for the first time
Or the 10 cessnas crashing into private houses a day that would happen if the regulation was that lax?
23 Inspiring Quotes for Growing Your Business in 2016
On more serious note, we can always specify which gems we want to use. This will just bring a lot of negative energy into a fairly positive rails community, it will be a little like MongoDB, it has a use case you should not use it for, but everyone keeps bringing it up. I think it will be similar with rails, with all the ignoramuses will bring this up as a case against rails, where in reality it is not any more bloated then it is now, once you start using it, you would probably add way more gems.
Sediment loads aren't really a problem. The sediment drops out as soon as the water goes slack so it all accumulates at the far upstream section of the reservoir and raises the river level rather than filling in much capacity.

The Grand Canyon is filling in with Hoover Dam sediment while the reservoir remains unfilled. In fact, the Grand Canyon is now a mud lagoon starting above Separation Canyon and the water below Pearce Ferry has very little sediment. The upstream sediment slackwater continues to migrate upcanyon, not downcanyon.

On Glen Canyon, the sediment accumulated 40 meters deep over Hite but did not slip downcanyon. Instead, Cataract Canyon continues to fill in upstream. Moab will be covered in Glen Canyon's reservoir before any serious capacity is lost because sedimentation moves upriver, just as in any ocean delta.

The same effect has stopped the main flow in the San Juan and covered all the rapids up to Slickhorn and even above.

---

Above I said, "sediment loads aren't really a problem." I mean they aren't a problem for dam operators. They're bad for the environment, of course.

But that should be obvious. For all the selling of hydroelectric as green and sustainable, we should know that it's the most destructive and damaging of all electric generation technologies. Even a failed nuclear plant in full meltdown isn't as destructive and harmful as a properly operating hydroelectric dam. Hoover dam makes Tchernobyl look good.
Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money

http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-...
While he's misusing the word there's still value in the things that he's reporting.

What the article talks about is how there is a benefit both from focused thought, and involuntary thought. There has a growing trend towards trying to avoid 'wasteful' thought and on focusing attention on task, but that there's evidence and a counter trend showing that letting your mind do things without conscious direction is also beneficial.

I think it's definitely ironic that he's using the term mindfulness in the way that he does, but it's just a word. The concept that he's explaining is something that people who have actually practiced mindfulness have already learned.

Despite the fact that he's using the wrong words, I think it's a net gain for people to become more aware and comfortable with the things that our minds and bodies do without a conscious directive, and to learn to trust that they have value.
Prompt is worth every penny
That's strange... have you tried a different browser? I haven't experienced that bug/
FX Trading Idea – Short USD/CAD
How Cute is this
Jason's follow up post to this: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4352
An application should never try to invoke your package manager, unless its specifically for that purpose. That's just totally backwards.
This seems to be more of a philosophical stance than an argument based on outcomes. It's also a call to think before knee-jerking "the cloud". And I do see the philosophical argument it has merit. But it does lack a business argument [for service consuming businesses] which will win out in most cases.

In other words, in real world usage, the cloud is more dependable and flexible than internal IT infrastructure providers, for most businesses.

That said, there is a good philosophical argument against the cloud.
As you probably gathered from your references, concrete curing is a continuous process - every time a stray water molecule binds with some cement the concrete will get a little bit stronger. We use 28 days to call the concrete 'cured' because it's a reasonable time on construction schedules (why it's in an even number of weeks) and hits a nice fat part of the exponential strength curve. It's a bit like asking when a pile of plutonium is done decaying. What will happen is that at some point, the strength gains are so marginal that various degradation processes will cause the concrete to start losing overall strength.

But - the idea that the concrete is curing and will be finished in 50 years is fairly goofy. No one is doing high-temperature long-duration concrete curing research, but the idea that you can extrapolate the laws of heat transfer to figure out how long some bubble of superheated wet concrete in the middle of the dam will last isn't very reasonable.
The Universe is not infinite
This article is a lot of fun with the Cloud To Butt Chrome plugin installed.
> As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the average graduate.

We agree there, but doesn't the next sentence represent a fundamental shift in thinking? I would think it much more likely for businesses and managers (particularly HR) to simply shift their signalling from Bachelor's degrees to Master's degrees rather than from Bachelor's degrees to a context-sensitive review of your body of work. It's much easier to say "I have a Master's in CS from Stanford" than it is to say "Here's my GitHub portfolio, let's talk about a few of my projects."

I'd much rather folks focus on what they've actually accomplished rather than the institution they happened to attend, but I don't see it happening, particularly from HR folks who are not technically inclined and are simply trying to get a pile of 500 resumes down to a dozen. And like you said with SV, in elite circles you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a job ad looking for someone from {Stanford|Harvard|MIT}.
While Jason Scott raises interesting points six years ago, the principles of data management remain the same as the days of dedicated servers with on premises systems. If you have only one copy of data and that machine goes down, then the data goes with it. In my experience in a business context 'the cloud' discussion is about the business' desire to expand capacity without the need for the capital expenditure needed to buy equipment and server admin salaries. By the numbers it is just better to rent instead of buy at the infrastructure level.

The cloud is a murky, ambiguity-laden concept though. Both Netflix and my 92 year old grandmother on Facebook 'use the cloud', but the former is much more sophisticated in their network and data management practices. My grandmother just wants to see fun pictures of her family and great grandkids.
Recommended Reads on the Energy Beat This Week
electron beam would fit better in the sentence
451 is "approved for publication". It is not yet an RFC.

Source: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2015/12/18/451
This is an old article and is almost entirely op-ed. No idea how this got to the top of page on HN. :/
What It's Like to Be Noam Chomsky's Assistant
Is The Be Book available in PDF or ebook format anywhere?
Dunno, I've been working on a large Typescript project for the last year (10+devs), and I have to say, it has been an absolute godsend.

I see transpiling a key part of JavaScript going forward.
Hello Lektor (a new kind of static site generator)
How to use your fear to find your passion
Show HN: Enso.fm – Discover new music / Tinder for music
Many schools require taking said "total package" for the first semester or first year. I know at my university, all incoming freshmen were required to live on campus and purchase a meal plan. For anyone who lives nearby or planned on shopping around, this is an additional cost.
I think the author is extremely misguided.

1) Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA. Iceland is fully within the U.S. orbit. Iceland, actually does not maintain a standing army and its defense is the responsibility of the U.S. In addition, banking is a significant portion of Iceland's economy, and thus vulnerable to the U.S. cutting of access to SWIFT. Basically, if the U.S. really wants something from Iceland, it will be able to get it.

2) By making the front page of HN, the author is sure to have been noticed by somebody at the NSA. Because, the NSA has pretty broad authorizations for intercepting and decrypting foreign messages (that is actually why they exist), there is a very good chance that they are probably reading the author's email right now. If the email server had been in the U.S., there would have been at least some political/legal considerations about reading the email. By being in Iceland, there are none, and I am sure the author's email presented a very easy challenge (and probably is the butt of an inside joke about how this naive person thought their setup was NSA-proof)
You probably forgot taxes in that cost (that you will pay for the rest of your life as a high earner) but, that said, that is a great model: the country makes an investment in you, you prove you are serious about it (the $3000 a year), and in return, the country gets a higher wage earner (and more taxes) to pay for the next generation.
Right; the gun is fixed and the beam is "deflected" (that's the term).
As always, thank you for the clarification. My 6 month old is teething and waking me every 40 minutes starting around 3am. I'm mostly recalling from hazy, caffeine fueled memory. I like your posts -- so informative.

I admit to knowing little about Haskell's history. I had assumed it was an outgrowth of ML -- itself having an interesting history intertwined with the LCF theorem-proving system. Thanks for the clarification.

>> it was a standard developed by a committee

> That's basically nonsense.

In my much-abridged comment, yes I understand it could sound that way. I was referring to the entire process but mainly the ANSI committee. I was also under the, apparently mistaken impression, that there was more than one Lisp involved.

In April 1981, after a DARPA-sponsored meeting concerning the splintered Lisp community, Symbolics, the SPICE project, the NIL project, and the S-1 Lisp project joined together to define Common Lisp. Initially spearheaded by White and Gabriel, the driving force behind this grassroots effort was provided by Fahlman, Daniel Weinreb, David Moon, Steele, and Gabriel. Common Lisp was designed as a description of a family of languages. The primary influences on Common Lisp were Lisp Machine Lisp, MacLisp, NIL, S-1 Lisp, Spice Lisp, and Scheme. Common Lisp: The Language is a description of that design. Its semantics were intentionally underspecified in places where it was felt that a tight specification would overly constrain Common Lisp esearch and use.

Quite right.. it's all there in ye old Hyperspec. Thank you for pointing that out.

Cheers.
> I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned.

I really like this idea. The biggest benefit is that it stops people expecting these services to act like an archive. With the current system it's easy to think "Oh I can just look this photo up again on Facebook if I want to". Instead we should be treating these services as publishing platforms while we maintain separate archival versions of our data.
It's always smelled bad.

http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-bac...

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
Even worse: It already has screwed up my webserver.

Script crashed while trying to verify, left the apache config files in the modified state.

Trying to get that back to work took another half hour of the server being down.

I’m gonna use the simple website someone made to generate certificates from now on.
I'm definitely going to start renting my own server somewhere in Europe starting from January. I absolutely agree with everything he said and I really want to claim my own data again (run my own email server and things).
Thanks for your response, Dr. Sotos, and welcome to HN!

Without diving into the book - it certainly seems from the Atlantic article that Lincoln, on multiple occasions, exhibited suicidal tendencies. A primary source is quoted as saying, "Still when by himself, [Lincoln] told me that he was so overcome with mental depression, that he never dare carry a knife in his pocket." Do you believe that the article is exaggerating these reports, or otherwise putting them out of context? Regardless of whether Lincoln had MEN2B, these quotes certainly indicate to me (as someone without medical training, to be fair) that there remains a possibility that Lincoln separately suffered from depression, and therefore give me pause when you say as a medical professional that you "don't think there is a chance in the world that Lincoln was depressed as President."

(For others interested in this research, http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071130/full/news.2007.226.ht... goes into a bit more detail without requiring a full read of the book, which is not available in electronic format.)
already on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771627
RT is a channel founded, funded and ran by russian government.

Pavel Durov repeatedly denied police and FSB access to user's data while running VK (basically, Russian Facebook).

Finally, his company was stolen from him by shady businessmen with government connections.

Just keep these three facts in mind while reading this article.
When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account?

I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities based on capacity, but we've had time-sharing (albeit, slightly different) for many years.
Oh, right, this is the guy that wrote the "facebook is the worst thing ever" screed.
Huh. This is a resource I'd never considered, then. I've always thought IRC conversations to be mostly ephemeral.
1. Infinite supply of loans. Dept of Ed isn't even allowed to deny a loan to a person.

2. Culture since the Clinton era of "everyone should go to college". Massive cultural stigma for those who don't.

3. Colleges continue to justify costs based on lifetime earnings delta of people with degrees. Sadly, this data is backwards-looking and not indicative of what today's students should expect.

The most heinous thing though is that student loans are exempted from American bankruptcy laws. The gov't will give you a loan, without doing any diligence on your ability to repay, but make it impossible to discharge your debt if you go bankrupt.
Or alternatively roll them into inaccessible private space after X amount of time determined by user.
> This seems to be more of a philosophical stance than an argument based on outcomes.

I agree, but its fundamentally simple: Always be in control of your own data, because no one else is going to be looking out for it.
A better way to state this, rather than a reason/unreason lens:

"In every job that must be done / there is an element of fun. / You find that fun and snap! The job's a game."
Reading List: The History of Drugs from Ambergris to Zedoary
Question re inflation and dark energy: current claims are that big-bang started with a very short period of inflation. Haven't heard/understood much on why inflations started or stopped. Now we posit dark energy, that causes accelerated expansion of the universe, with acceleration greater at greater distances and therefore earlier historical times.

So... is it possible that inflation and dark energy are related? When we see distant/ancient galaxies accelerating away from us, is there any chance we're looking at the ramping down of the original inflation of the big bang?