skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This whole project just seems so insane to me. A medium sized damn in my area was built for a bit less than $10 million back in the 50's and has a capacity hitting around 1,000 Mw.

Obviously dams are highly location dependent, and are somewhat on the shadier side of environmental impact. But 900 times the cost for half the power output is just crazy. Is there really no better way to get power into the country? Or is this just some publicity / money burning stunt?
It really depends on if you are only responsible for analysis, or for gathering data and analysis.

The former is more math focused, the later is a pretty solid blend of Math and Comp Sci / DB work.
>The other is about increased infectiousness.

Perhaps the additional damage is caused by increased infectiousness since the virus would be spread through more diverse intermediaries on its way to various centrifuge systems?

>This article is almost completely devoid of any evidence, or even a plausible logical explanation/motivation.

Well this article is reporting on what is stated in a forthcoming movie, not performing an investigation
Does libc even support static linking?
I find it hard to believe that top secret information like this would be confirmed by top US officials.
Why declassify this information? what possible outcome were they hoping to achieve?

It's obviously a smear campaign against Israel, i'd take it with a grain of salt.
Just Asking Questions is a technique that's often used to derail or humiliate a verbal opponent. Forgive me for being cautious.

Also, my statement was not that general or vague. Maybe it could have been clearer, but it appears to have also been misinterpreted by pcwalton.
Actually, your mistaken. Cockpit avionics upgrades are relatively common, even in small aircraft like Cessna 172s. Considering a new Cessna 172 is around $250k, and a refurbished aircraft, with new glass cockpit is around $50k (and sometimes significantly less).

Aircraft have whats known as a Supplementary Type Certificate, which permits changes to a certified aircraft. Even a major upgrade from radial engine to turboprop has been authorized for some aircraft, including DC-3 transports made in the 1940s.

Another example is Southwest Airlines. The 737-300 series jets have glass cockpit upgrades for a common configuration between a 737-300 (Classic) and a newer 737-700 (NG).

If the ICAO mandates upgrades, it will happen. It might not be cheap, but its quite doable.
Robots/Automation has already made food cheap. Modern farmers are literally 1,000x as effective as their medieval equivalents. At this point the human factor is generally fairly negligible compared to other inputs (seed, land, machinery, etc.).
Einstein's amazing theory
Financial Times' response to ad-cutting threat from HP is great
If they can find the wreck, they have a decent chance of debugging the cause, and implementing corrections to prevent it from happening again. Depending on the cause, that can be worth a lot.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
I was just wondering. Why on earth would a dubious post from an Israeli newspaper end up on hacker news? Is the article more important than the fact the Israel occupies territories illegally neglecting UN resolutions, pushing out Palestians and using humuliating tactics as well doing immense practice shootings at young palestinians protecting their home( before it is brought down). What angers me though, is that international community does not say anything about the jihandis getting treated in Israel when they get shot doing their "mercenary services" in Syria. One more thing: while there are americans dying out in the street being homeless, american goverment supplies fincancial aid to Israel that covers up to its 25% of its budget!
I see your thesis - that "startup" implies a desire to be big some day. I'd assume that most small business owners intend to do the best they can and make their companies as successful as possible. But who can really know these things.

Maybe we can agree on "slow startups" as a good way to describe companies slogging through this new investment environment.
Don't use SQL or PHP either! These are vulnerable to bugs!
This shouldn't be taken as a negative per se. If that is your target market and your business can become sustainable only serving this tranche of consumers, good on you. There is a lot of money to be made serving the top decile of earners.
Israel has as much as it needs of Syria... it occupies the Golan Heights. You can see Damascus from there on a clear day.
I think this article nails exactly what's right and wrong with R.

This in particular sums up the learning curve of R.

> Thankfully, I’m long past the point where R syntax is perpetually confusing. I’m now well into the phase where it’s only frequently confusing, and I even have high hopes of one day making it to the point where it barely confuses me at all.

Warning personal opinion ahead...

R, the language can get you up and running alot faster than other languages for statistics like say python with Pandas or scipy but even people who use it on a daily basis will curse the languages "quirks". I find most of the confusion comes from R trying to be too friendly to the user via type conversions. The ease in which the R's type system will convert values has probably caused me more grief when first learning the language than any other issue I ran into.

And this illustrates the down side of using R

> library(Hmisc)
apply(ice.cream, 2, all.is.numeric)

> …which had the desirable property of actually working. But it still wasn’t very satisfactory, because it requires loading a pretty large library (Hmisc) with a bunch of dependencies just to do something very simple that should really be doable in the base R distribution.

Since R is rarely a programmer's most used language, I find there tends to be an above average use of google and paste type code that pulls in 50 different packages, each of which is used on 1-2 lines of a 1000 line script. Perhaps this is just a function of most programmers not really understanding the mathematical domain and hence they slowly google and iterate their way towards a solution.

Often I'll see people pull in 5 different time series libraries just because each of them operate on a ts object, so they all can work on the same object, and each one provides one additional method the other's don't and the programmer needs to create their solution.

You'll hear people talk about writing R in the Hadley universe or the basic R universe but there isn't much talk about what a canonical R solution looks like. R is a great language in the sense that Perl and C++. It allows you to do anything but there often isn't an agreed upon way of writing it and two different programmers can come up with wildly different but valid solutions to the same problem.
MetraLabs Tory – inventory robot scans RFID while roaming a store
Not taking Statistics in high school. Ended up taking it in College, but found I enjoy it quite a bit and would have been able to enjoy it nearly a decade earlier.
All the time, otherwise you'd buy the 35mm F2 and save about $1.2k.

Depth of Field is a function of Aperture , Focal Length and Distance to plane of focus.

The focal length drives how wide the "scatter" of the blur is, so wide angle lenses like the 35mm have a very "soft" blur as opposed to something like a 400mm F2.8 which just obliterates backgrounds. This is also driven by how close you are focusing so you can shoot a 35mm F1.4 wide open, focusing around ~15ft away and the detail of the scene is very much preserved. It lets you focus on a subject and give them a slight "pop" of focus while keeping the rest of scene coherent.
I had 4 of the 3 IBM "Deathstars" I bought fail. Yes, all 3 failed and then one of the replacements failed too.
Nope, the pendulum is at it's other extreme. Go is going all in on static builds, docker containers freeze ALL THE THINGS \@/ and "immutable" package managers like Nix which in effect is like static linking without the speed benefits.
glibc is generally not statically linked. MUSL libc generaly is.

You _can_ statically link glibc, but then you lose some stuff. https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/FAQ#Even_statically_linked...
Have you looked at CCured?

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~necula/Papers/ccured_pldi03.pdf

"CCured is a program transformation system that adds memory safety guarantees to C programs by verifying statically that memory errors cannot occur and by inserting run-time checks where static verification is insufficient."
> How fast it gets there is an implementation detail.

Only if the investors aren't looking for a better than market average return on investment. And if they're only looking for an average return, why risk their money investing in an unproven company?
A time waster. Also agree with other commenter: whoever redesigned it deserves to be fired - what an unintuitive navigational mess. its a conglomerate mess with no consistent theme amongst the products. nobody looks for tech or podcasts. We look for Specific markets like productivity podcasts or marketing tech.
Ah, so is it something like $HugeHealthCareCompany can't send this kind of data to AWS or something because of HIPPA or whatever? Along those lines, I'd bet banks and finance places can't ship anything outside either. Makes more sense now :-)
Always look forward to this report, thanks for sharing the data.

Amazing the 4TB hitachi with twice the platters of the 2TB fail less.

(and I will never buy seagate again for home pc or servers, even before this report I could have told you they are unreliable)
I think you're misreading what he says. "...replacing it with Rust /or pretty much anything else/" (emphasis own). The point is we should be replacing C with /pretty much anything else/. Rust looks like the most obvious (but not necessary correct) candidate.

Also performance is not such a big deal as dictate security considerations. One's fancy medical web app is worthless if it leaves the potential for theft of medical data.
I like this variant: Complete this sequence: 1, 1, 1, ?, 1, 1, ...

If you said infinity, you're right! Number of exotic differentiable structures on R^n.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_R4
Compared to 35mm 'Lux, Canon is a Coke bottle bottom. It's worse than Nikon 35 f/1.4, and it is really an f/2 lens at best, with inflated specs. Rent a Lux if you get a chance. I held Canon/Nikon in much higher regard until I tried Leica.
Relatedly, if I point dnscache in djbdns to Google's DNS server as a temp fix (8.8.8.8) in /etc/resolv.conf , will that mitigate the threat?
Assuming it's CryptoLocker style malware, they're probably one of the few hospitals fully satisfying the encryption requirements of HIPAA at the moment.
I think you're right with all the new opportunities for optimization in Rust.

I wanted to encourage developers to be open to compiled Rust being nowhere-near an order of magnitude slower than equivalent compiled C and still have it be an acceptable architecture choice for systems-programming.
Statistics should replace algebra II or maybe trigonometry as a high school requirement.
See it in action in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGTkL_gacvU
And when it happens a second time, you will be asking why we never bothered to find out what happened the first time.

Honestly, $130m is not a lot of money to an industry such as that. I'll bet the majority of it was covered by insurance anyways.
At first glance I thought it was a parody and looked if both Angular and React were included.
> I was and still surprised they didn't grab a bit of Syria.

Eh, there's no reason to be surprised. There is no strategic benefit to Israel in "grabbing" arbitrary chunks of Syria just because they happen to be undefended at the moment. It is in an excellent position right now to not just defend itself against any attacks from Syria but indeed deter them, and military overextension would weaken that.
35 benefits significantly from f/1.4. 50 benefits too, but to a lesser extent. You get better subject separation at greater distances.
I grew up in Kansas but lived on Oahu for six years. I will never forget the first time my squad leader took me body surfing at Sandy's. That is the interface of the most powerful force on our planet.
Would it be possible to create a nuclear power plant detector by trying to detect neutrinos?
"doesn't seem so hard" ... "you just"

Ah, the classic sign of someone about to say something rash about technology.
Firearms actually allow humans to defend their right to life. The reason is that they are the ultimate equalizer. A gun allows the 4'11", 89-pound, 79-year-old female to protect herself when attacked by the 6'4", 240-pound, 27-year-old male (or the 5'11", 160-pound female, etc). Then, after said defense takes place, the law sorts out the consequences: right-makes-right, rather than might-makes-right.

Or, in the absence of law enforcement, (e.g. the American frontier), it at least allows potential victims the potential to defend themselves, and gives potential attackers pause: even if they don't have to worry about being arrested and put on trial, they have to consider that their next victim might be armed.

Conversely, in the absence of firearms, the biggest and strongest wins. And in the presence of law enforcement, by the time the police arrive, it's too late.

For this reason, one of the first steps an oppressive government takes is to disarm the population. Examples of this go all the way back to even feudal Japan. It's kind of amazing that we still haven't learned our lesson. Idealism is great, but human lifetimes are relatively short, and human societies are clearly not a succession of "standing upon the shoulders of giants."
It looks like any WSGI-compatible app would work. Note that your code itself would need to work within Lambda constraints (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html).
> Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.

Well Wikipedia says a Boeing 777-200ER costs $261.5 million[1]. That's about double the cost for the search. If it's possible to prevent even one future mishap as a result of learning anything the cost is justified.

Besides closure is important for the families and friends of the passengers. Especially with crazy articles saying the plane could have landed in Kazakhstan[2]. Imagine the suffering people must be going through thinking their loved ones are 95% dead but 5% possibly maybe caught up in a crazy conspiracy. Even if it's 1% or 0.001% likely it could be enough to keep one awake at night.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777
[2] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370...
still doesn't answer why that platform though.

100k gets you lots and lots of servers with crypto hardware.
HORMONE BALANCE AND FERTILITY: A STORY OF HOPE
I guess my point about hard drives is most people never back them up and kind of always expect them to hold up over 5-10 years. They have years of photos, videos and documents stored on them. Then there are friends savvy enough to setup a raid system and invariably the raid hardware fails before the drive does and they can't get a replacement.

Thanks again for sharing the drive reliability statistics.
I bet there'd still be gnashing of teeth and consternation. :-)
> But Israelis have bought our corruptible political system...

This isn't Stormfront, or a British newspaper. Please take your Zionist conspiracy theories elsewhere.
My number one hack is to take the conclusion from the third paragraph/wherever and, since it's the most important thing to communicate, move it to be the first part (in front of all the tedious "here's the background on the problem we were trying to solve").
Samsung warns customers not to discuss personal info in front of smart TVs
Yeah that was me.
Would it be possible to sue the hospital for ignoring the court order? Might be a way to make some progress. It's a shame the system functions so poorly.
The enterprise software world didn't leap off C++ and onto Java because it was faster. They did it because it didn't segfault all the time. They then leapt to Perl and Python and Ruby because they didn't segfault all the time and seemed a lot faster to develop in.

To the vast majority of people and organisations writing software, performance of the software, to within an order of magnitude, just isn't a big deal.
I gotta say, this is a really cool project, I don't see how the end users wouldn't / didn't find the maps interesting or useful. I would love to have one of these for my areas.

Perhaps the pages they were landing on could have been better optimized so users would view the map, or the map could be on every page.
Microsoft C before Visual C++ being popular?!

Not on my country, it was all about Borland compilers, even in the Windows 3.x days.

Microsoft was even the last vendor to add support for C++ on the last MS-DOS version of Microsoft C, version 7 if I remember correctly.
This is just anecdotal but the problem with spending a large amount of money on a great bed, pillow, and other comforts is that you get extremely use to it (ignoring medical issues).

So once you go to a hotel, friends house, etc it becomes impossible to sleep there.

For example what is the deal with hotels not having fitted sheets. Or just spending a little more for higher thread count. I remember as a kid I could sleep on anything. Sadly now if I don't have 500 thread count Egyptian cotton and down pillows.. its going to be a shitty night.

Thus some sort of travel bedding solution might interest me otherwise if I start traveling again I'm thinking about practice sleeping on the floor since that is at least consistently available :)
Absolutely. I think trading a bit of speed for a bit of safety is the right choice 99.99% of the time. I've just been excited to watch the benchmarks improve :)
Lol, media management!

The mainstream (and wannabe mainstream) media care about lurid headlines, and not much else (apart from the occasional agitprop piece, maybe). Even the most guarded of press releases are regularly distorted beyond recognition. Good luck with the media management!
Freelancers, Here’s How You Can Make Taxes Less Painful
My guess is that it's probably significantly simpler than that.

The US is not threatened by Iran. At all.

Israel is threatened by Iran and Iran's leaders have said they would wipe Israel off the map.

For Israel, there was probably a greater sense of urgency than the level of patience that we were willing to use.
That website looks awful, full of clickbait titles and stupid scam adverts. Doesn't seem like a trustworthy source at all.
R is a language with a lot of gotcha's. I usually get burned by characters being converted to factors in read.csv() and converting factors to numeric (it works, but not how you intend). The R Inferno (http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/) has a lot of other gotcha's and is worth a read for people who use the language.

That said, the power, flexibility and user community make it my go-to for any first crack at an analysis of data.
Just guessing, since I have no specific knowledge about this area... but perhaps Morocco doesn't have a river they can dam? Also, perhaps it is an investment in the technology and skills required to build solar power plants, so that as things become less expensive and more efficient in the future they are poised to be experts or leaders in the field? (So it's an "R&D" investment of sorts).
As always, Wikipedia is informative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_stati.... The numbers there suggest a capacity factor of 26%...PV at that latitude might get about 2/3 of that.

Also from Wikipedia: they have a contract to sell the power at 19¢/kWh. For reference, coal and wind in the U.S. sell for more like 3¢.

It's great to see the world embrace clean energy, but the money in this project seems nuts to me.
warning: site has auto-play audio ads. (for people that only block flash, and not ads in general)
I keep wondering why TV control is still mostly IR based. How have we not graduated to Z-Wave/ZigBee style control yet? Especially on the high end with all the hubs around the house.
Yev from Backblaze -> when you have 200 of 'em you lose count :P
> What freedom does a user of a software have if all the open source code is used by some proprietary software?

Exactly the same freedom that the user has if that proprietary software did not use the GPL software. It's unchanged. These two worlds do not differ, either the proprietary product doesn't exist, or it reimplemented whatever code was GPLd. The GPL has had no positive impact, there is no more source code available.

Meanwhile, the GPL has restricted the freedom of users from distributing the code as part of a different project.

The GPL is not about freedom for users, it is about control for the original authors. It is about making sure that nobody benefits from the GPL code without making all the rest of the code GPL. Now you may say, that this control of users and programmers means there is more freedom for users. I don't know how, but presumably because there is now more GPL code out there than if it had been an open source license. THAT'S the assumption and the leap that I do not believe, based on the data at hand. I do not believe that the GPL makes more source code available than BSD.

And further, I take umbrage at the unwillingness to even acknowledge that the GPL denies the freedoms granted by open source licenses, all because "freedom" has been narrowly redefined into one thing only: the "freedom from" somebody else using your code without contributing back the changes. Which is a lot like the "freedom from" somebody else using your code without paying you. "Restrictive" means less "freedom," just using a different word that is not loaded with peculiar definitions.

Compared to something like BSD, the GPL is about freedom for the code authors to restrict use of the source code. That is absolutely 100% fine! Go to town! But don't tell me its about user freedom, that's not OK. It makes no sense at all to me. It comes across to me like War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. IMHO, history has proven that the "user freedom" arguments about the GPL are wrong, it's about "programmer freedom." People and companies, including me, use GPL when we want to make code available but still want to control it. It's all about having less freedom for people that use the code.
I've never, ever in my life seen a rebranding or redesign that wasn't widely complained about. How can we differentiate between this kneejerk reaction that all humans seem to have to changes in a UI/design they are already familiar with, and actually bad redesigns/rebrandings?
Yes, "slow startups" is definitely a good term.

In general, I don't think most small business owners have any goal or aspiration to "make their companies as successful as possible" if that means turning them into a huge corporation. Most of my relatives own small businesses and none of them aspire to grow huge. In fact, my mother specifically sold her stake in her original landscaping company when it was getting too big (at 30 employees) to open a new, smaller one.

If you look at surveys of small business owners, most of them go into it from a desire to have more flexibility or to be their own boss—not necessarily to create a large and financially rewarding company. In fact, exponential growth is frequently at odds with the primary goals of small business owners.
The Top 20 French Startups on Product Hunt