skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, doctors do not randomly assign tests to patients. Their prior that a patient has a disease is a lot higher than the background frequency of it occurring.

Getting them to estimate their prior would be interesting.
This post was written in 2013 and some things changed since, Medium lets you have your own domain, and most importantly, they don't own your content anymore:

>You own the rights to the content you post on Medium. We don’t claim ownership over any of it. However, by posting or transferring content to Medium, you give us permission to use your content solely to do the things we need to do to provide Medium Services, including, without limitation, storing, displaying, reproducing, and distributing your content.
I doubt this article is right about Google's motivations.

That said, I think it's a good idea to try to avoid anything Oracle related. It is an aggressive and lawsuit happy company. When Oracle inevitably starts to decline, they'll use their IP portfolio to sue and inflict a lot of collateral damage.
> It’s better to think of BDR like other eventually consistent data stores […]

with the exception that this will never be consistent.

Silently corrupting data goes totally against the usual Postgres spirit (which might be one of the reasons why the BDR patches haven't been accepted yet). Normally, if $THING can't be guaranteed to be done right, then Postgres just doesn't offer the feature (or throws a specific error).

If handling transactions isn't feasible for BDR, then it should refuse BEGIN's instead of accepting them and silently corrupting data.

If handling transactions across tables isn't feasible for BDR, it should blow up once you touch more than one table, forcing you to roll the whole transaction (which has so far only touched one table) back.

It's totally fine if your tool can't do $THING. Especially in matters of multi master replication which is a really hard problem. However, I would really want your tool to be honest about its deficiencies and tell me so I can try to find a workaround.

(Of course this could also just be a "simple" bug at which point, you can disregard this rant and just fix the issue :p)
The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.
SMS has a 160 character limit, and Twitter was originally supposed to be SMS driven. I personally don't know anyone who has ever Tweeted via SMS though, or whether that is still even possible.
Property levies would ease the robot attack on income tax
Yes, definitely a strawman. I am not aware of any mainstream politicians or economists proposing to eliminate inequality. Perhaps you can find an anarchist or a communist or two who are proposing that, but it's not on any agenda that has any policy relevance.
> Perhaps X00 million people is simply too many for our existing legislative structures to accommodate at this point in history.

It's interesting. The US, and I assume the EU, has a mechanism for solving this. Simply devolve authority from the federal level to the state level. The states can, theoretically, better tailor solutions to their individual populace than the federal level can to the entire country.

However, things only seem to ever go the other direction. Maybe I just don't see the things that are devolved? Or does it genuinely just not really happen?

I suppose one could make an argument that marijuana legalization is an example of states taking back power from the federal government. They pass the laws regardless of the fact that it is still federally illegal and nothing is technically stopping the DEA from busting every single seller in, say, Denver for distribution.
I don't think the size of tweets will have much of an effect on load. I imagine the bulk of the cost is in processing a request, rather than the size of it.
FWIW I just bought it but I wouldn't have for $20. 10 is better than 0.
I was already quite puzzled about why Google would make the apparently quite significant change (millions of lines of code will need to be rewritten according to this post, too) and still stick with Java, instead of going Go or something else (even if it would be even harder to do it). But this article made me go "WTF are you thinking Google?!"

The only explanation I can come up so far (also in light of the recent partnership between Google, Oracle and HPE for RISC-V) is that Google kind of "admitted" that it's not supposed to use Dalvik without paying Oracle, so they went to Oracle and "reached a deal" - Google won't have to pay anything to Oracle, but Oracle gets to control a large portion of Android now, and will also likely get to be paid by Samsung, LG and all the major OEMs who will pay Oracle for a "custom proprietary license" so they can modify pieces of Android.

As the article concludes, this seems like a major win for Oracle and a big FU Android users! from Google. Can we even trust Oracle won't introduce some "accidental" goto fail-like backdoors in Android code, now? Oracle code is already full of security bugs, so nobody would even bat an eye - just Oracle doing Oracley things.
Generally from my observations it just seems that when you have traffic congestion its best to just fix it anywhere its happening, because after any thoughts to environmentalism, when you run out of infrastructure capacity your growth is crippled.

A city with good public and private transit will see continuous growth. A city that does not invest in it, maintain it, or fix it will suffocate itself.

Thats not to say you should write blank checks or do impossible feats of engineering, but if you want to live somewhere that has a bright future rather than one that remains stagnant, you don't want to see your transit systems fall behind.
> Oh look, a Google employee throwing shade at privacy concerns.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't.
The amount of data/bandwidth used in 10K characters is far, far less than the amount used for videos/GIFs which anyone can upload now.
Ah... we built http://www.twlng.com as a way to work around the Twitter limit.

Without the ability to format the longer text, 'Tweets' will just end up being unreadable.
Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest.

To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.

If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
A good solution would be having a 10000 character limit, but formatting under-140 tweets differently so they stand out more. This would encourage people to keep things short, while giving them a way to publish longer posts if they really want to.
I think they should allow each account to be increased to 280 for $280/year.
Why do you say there's no way? This is US law, not Apple's policy, and US law is fully capable of being that dumb. (Whether Apple allows developers to lie to Apple and violate US law is beside the point.)

Debian's archive software used to send an automated mail to the US government every time a new package is accepted, just in case it involves crypto:

https://github.com/Debian/dak/blob/master/templates/process-...

(Looks like the government told them "Okay, okay, we don't care" at some point, but that was what they determined their legal obligation was after consulting with lawyers about what the law actually said.)
Hm... can you find anyone who honestly disagrees with "inequality is good", and therefore claims that "inequality is bad" and so "equality is good" (and also proposes a reasonable and practical implemntation)? Even communists only preached, not practiced, this.
I haven't used conky in a while, but can you interact with it now?

I was checking the plugins and some of them allow clicking on items in the dropdown and having an action execute.

The clipboard history now has code for this.
Check out how many earn more than 150% of the minimum wage. Otherwise it's still minimum wage driven.
Multiple network round-trips to find a 'good' back-end is undesirable. If your client is browser-side javascript, for example, then these can directly affect responsiveness and time to page usable.

Random is significantly easier and cheaper to implement. As you scale your service to multiple back-ends for the first time, you pragmatically start off with a random client-side load balancer - because it is cheap and simple.

Load balancing is one of those things in your product that once working to some minimum extent, nobody cares about improving. Swapping out the client side load balancer for a 'real' load balancer is the last thing on team's mind. So, you'll see a very large number of mature products continuing to use them.

Last point, random-client side load balancing provides a true solution for SPOF where as in the other methods, you still have at least on SPOF somewhere in the system.
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter Issue 164
Sorry, I meant "interquantile range" (e.g. 25-75th quantile).
> “Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and feared bit of code.

... only if you don't understand machine learning.
Nitpicking. Unicode is a blessing. Life before it was endless encoding hell. Who cares about a few smileys.

I don't mean it doesn't deserve criticism. Just don't think a few code point allocations matter, especially ones that people actively use. Emojis are probably some of the most popular astral plane code points.

Edit: meant to reply kevin_thibedeau. Not deleting it because of the reply.
Apple hit with lawsuit amid claims it stole tech used in the Apple Watch
Twitter was originally SMS-based and 140 characters fit in a normal SMS message.
They might not want to go to Google. Doing this, an acquihire, they can at least get a couple years out of the team, holding the vesting of the shares over their heads, before the team breaks up.
I also think the type of cube makes a difference. I currently work in a cube with high walls (at least 12 inches higher than my head when seated) and somehow the psychological effect of that is much better than a low cube where you're staring in someone else's face all the time.
Fascinating read, this one individual blazed a trail from "independent research project" all the way to "National Center for Injury Prevention and Control", a US Government Agency.

Also amazing was with how much lackadaisical disdain everyone treated personal safety...
TWITTER
Twitter Basics: Why 140-Characters, And How to Write More

We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.

The origins of the 140-character limit
Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.

This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.

So why the 140-character limit?

Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.

And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.

140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-basics-why-140-cha...
I must be the only one who thinks this is a good idea (not the 10,000-char limit in specific, but something much higher than 140-char).

Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.

But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.

(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
If Twitter is finally willing to increase the limit, maybe they should consider options to monetize it. Like my suggestion from years ago that they should sell a $1 per month subscription for users wanting to double their limit: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65
crowd sourcing is out and AI is in...
The Missing Chrome Browser Features
The Japanese "import" was a one-time occurrence and a standardization and unification of existing defacto "standards". It's not terribly different from the much earlier import of Wingdings into Unicode.

Moving forward new emoji have to follow proposal tracks like anything else and "some Japanese handhelds" have no more pull than anyone else; in fact at this point it seems like the intersection of Microsoft, Apple, and Google seem to have the most skin in the game in making proposals and verifying them and the three tech companies may be biased in there own ways but obscurity is not one of them.
PG's simplified essay and a lot of its proponents seem like people, in the middle of a drought, start warning about the potential for flooding.

Yes, inequality is inevitable. Yes, the poor you will always have with you. Yes, central planning has been tried and found wanting. But that doesn't mean that the state of things is good, nor does it mean we need further deregulation, less taxes on the wealthy, and so forth. It's really weird to see threads where people argue against that the very existence of progressive taxation is some sort of statist plot.

We need less philosophizing, and more evaluation of the current state of affairs and discuss what pragmatic steps need to be taken to alleviate the situation.
It would have the side effect of improving and propagating best practices. Most scientists are self taught programers, and it shows. The data models and codebases used by most labs are . . . amateurish.
Yeah, my first thought was "The Death of Twitter has been announced". Although, I left Twitter for G+ quite a while ago precisely because of the character limit.
140 seems pretty short, but 10000 seems very excessive. Why not something closer to the hundreds. 500 maybe?
A lot of the characters could be separated out into their own data fields. There's no reason to have links & hashtags in the main character text.
Film à télécharger – regardez Antigang, une œuvre avec Jean Reno
Visionnez Antigang, un film que vous pouvez télécharger en HD en utilisant l’application Playvod. Jean Reno joue dans cette œuvre de Benjamin Rocher.
This article covers the supply side (people stating that AI is a risk), and it is good have a counteracting force showing the lack of proof. There is also the demand side: fear. News articles that tap into fears will resonate. It is good to challenge Killer AI as a myth, but we will probably need more than expert opinions to dispel it. IMO, more should be done to figure out why it is that people fear intelligence, such that they expect it to seek to destroy others (and, if I am remembering right, there was an article posted here relating that to Machiavellian mindset), and how to address the specifics of those fears.
Globalization/free trade has caused wage stagnation in developed countries by allowing capital to more easily move jobs to the developing world. This system has created way bigger profits for capital, increased wages for millions in the developing world, and more wealth overall.

All this has been enabled by the great triumph of "free trade" treaties that are the first way that humans have figured out how to create enforceable laws across countries. For example, the US recently repealed meat labeling laws due to a WTO ruling. This mechanism has allowed capital to bypass democratic forces that tend towards protectionism.

But the free trade treaties arere heavily rigged towards manufacturer's interests with intellectual property industries now trying to influence them more. If labor had a seat at the negotiation table for creating cross-country enforceable rules the outcome for workers could be better. Some ideas I can imagine off the top of my head,

- free movement of labor, not just capital

- environmental rules that prevent capital from shopping for the jurisdiction where they can pollute the most

- prohibitions on child labor, slave labor, trafficking, etc

- all countries provide free education through teenage years

- global tax shelter rules to prevent capital from hiding its profits
To extend on this with an anecdote; A buddy of mine lived and worked in Cuba for many years, and has very positive things to say about life there. He lives in Canada, and enjoys life in Cuba as much as he does in Canada, which I think says a lot.

Every single person has healthcare, food and shelter. Every single person has a job, and their kids go to a good school. Because everyone is paid the same, work is not the focus of life, social interactions are (which echos my experience during 2 years in Latin America) There is no point working harder or longer, it doesn't get you anything, so you go home to your family.

When you see a friend or distant acquaintance on the street, you stop and talk for 20 minutes. You prioritize family and spending time with them, rather than prioritizing work.

Obviously it's not perfect, but it's very far from the disaster it's made out to be.
> Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and would-be partners balked. When China State Construction Engineering Corp., the world’s second-largest contractor, approached Izmirlian about stepping in, he said yes. The company directed him to Export-Import Bank of China, or Exim, which promotes trade and investment under the direction of Beijing.

> Seeing a way into U.S. markets, China State Construction promptly invested $150 million. Exim kicked in $2.45 billion in construction loans -- with the proviso that Izmirlian could never fire the Chinese builder, no matter what, and that workers from China would do the job.

It seems his business partners ditched in 2008 and he agreed to a bad contract to salvage the project via an Exim loan.

> In May 2014, Izmirlian appealed to an independent mediation service based in Washington, D.C., but the troubles multiplied. Pipes burst when inspectors tested the fire sprinklers and faulty balcony railings had to be reinforced, people with knowledge of the construction said. When Izmirlian complained, China delayed its money, one said.

Exim then used its control of the purse strings to put the screws to him whenever there was a problem.

> Christie says he’s still optimistic the resort can open. In December, Exim said a number of potential investors had expressed interest. These include Guo Guangchang, chairman of a non-state Chinese conglomerate called Fosun Group, people familiar with the situation say. Fosun already owns stakes in Club Mediterranee SA and Cirque Du Soleil Group.

Yeah. :/ He should have abandoned ship the moment he needed an Exim loan.
Non-alphabetic languages: Why we can't encode all text in 8 or 16 bits
But the subtitle answers it fairly (IMO):

"A small team of engineers in Menlo Park. A panel of anonymous power users around the world. And, increasingly, you."

And they not claim they know themselves.
Yes. It's bizarre to see everyone responding to something that wasn't actually said.
NativeScript – what's in the box?
I originally agreed with you, but after thinking about it I think the devil is in the details of how this is released. That is, Twitter's uniqueness is that it is geared towards short, real-time "bursts of consciousness", but people with lots of followers still occasionally put out long "blogs in tweet form" with multiple tweets.

If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what makes Twitter unique in the first place.
On the other hand, one could argue that whenever the Church of Scientism sees someone using one of their favorite tools to argue in favor or a subject considered taboo, said church declares the use of said tool to be "invalid" or "out of scope".
Explaining xkcd's “missing 11th of the month”
You might find Jekyll and similar stuff interesting - basically, software for building fully static websites from a similar starting point. I don't know that it's strictly necessary, as the real problem is front-end bulk.

But yes, diving in and making something that works is a good impulse.
Yeah, I mean, you dump 100 hours into one crappy anime dating sim and they never let you forget it...
Exactly. the issue is that economic growth over the last 20-30 years appears to be accruing at vastly different rates to different income brackets ( even if you remove top 1% out of the analysis ), not the starting level of inequality. Since it's the case even for say top 60% bracket vs 20% bottom bracket, having taken out the top 40%, it has little or nothing to do with startups.
2016 Shipping Rate Changes: Adjust Your ECommerce Budgets to Accommodate
I assume there are property taxes (and capital gain taxes?) in Boston...
I can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I'm fine with shorter message, but 140 is way too short. Modern phones combine SMSs into a bigger blob. Use that and just make a limit of 5 SMSs or something along these lines.