skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People need to stop doing meta-analysis * . Have you ever heard of meta-analysis of mathematics or physics papers? No? P = NP meta analysis maybe? Haha.

I can tell you why: Because if it's solid science, you don't need 100 papers to describe an effect. Besides, it is a proven fact that the results of meta-analysis are weaker due to how the underlying statistics works (at least if you do it in a naive way, and I do not know if it can be fixed by altering the procedure. I have to brush up on my statistics knowledge, it's good for machine learning.).

* EDIT: I should have added here 'to investigate the ground-truth of underlying papers.' Of course there's nothing wrong with meta-analysis to investigate researcher behaviour and methodology.
To add some specifics to this pile-on:

- The classical example of a randomized experiment is a perception/psychophysics experiment: the Lady Tasting Tea. This introduced the idea of a null hypothesis as well as Fisher's exact test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea

- Visual and auditory experiments more or less invented signal detection theory and used it to probe visual and auditory processing. Those ROC curves everyone loves predate "machine learning" by decades.

- A lot of the fancy hierarchical and Bayesian modeling work have come from psychologists and social scientists (e.g., Andrew Gelman)
For a century, replacements were not much of a problem. Most of the components were either from Union Switch and Signal, or General Railway Signal, both in the US, and they still made them. Then US&S (which used to have www.switch.com [1]) was sold to Ansaldo and then to Hitachi, and General Railway Signal was acquired by Alstom. Alstom continues to make some GRS relays.[2] But not the whole line of them. Ansaldo offers a remanufacturing service for the older components.

The New York City system uses mostly General Railway Signal components, while Boston uses US&S. NYC had to rebuild old relays after the big flood a few years ago, because all available spare stocks, both theirs and the manufacturers', had been exhausted. But they were able to get new ones from Alstom over time. Boston seems to be having more of a parts problem.

These relay-based systems are designed to fail safe, in a very literal way. "Vital" relays (the ones in safety-critical circuits) open by gravity, and the open direction is always towards a red signal. Broken wires always force things towards a safer condition. This is not a property of computer-based systems. There are modern replacements, such as Ansaldo MicroLok II, which are programmable logic controllers which emulate relay systems.[5]
These, unfortunately, can be Internet-connected.[6]

Here's a simulator for a GRS relay-based signaling system, down to the relay level.[7]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080103132002/http://www.switch...
[2] http://alstomsignalingsolutions.com/OurProducts/WaysideProdu...
[3] http://www.rrsignalpix.com/grs_relays.html
[4] http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/en/about-us/ansaldo-around-world/...
[5] http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts.message-asp.com/...
[6] http://www.westermo.com/web/web_en_idc_com.nsf/AllDocuments/...
[7] http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/NXSYS,_Signalling_and_Interloc...
Hiawatha – A secure webserver for Unix
They have a login form here¹ that is vulnerable to an SQL injection, but Hiawatha apparently protects it. Anyone with more experience care to explain how?

――――――

¹ — http://sqli.hiawatha-webserver.org/
repeated typo/spelling things like they are sounded to my ear rather than how wikipedia tells me to spell things :)
I think it's time we tie criminal/civil fines/fees to income. I'll even accept net.

All I know is when I'm fined, there's a possibility that it might be the last straw. The last straw to homelessness.

When a rich man, or remotely successful corporation is fined it's just someting to talk about.

It seems to violate one of those admendments that people seem to forget about--the 8th? It doesn't matter because nothing will change.
Yes, that's right. I would also add data provenance, eg where did a data set come from and how it was computed. This flows directly from the features I mentioned of content addressed storage and recording compute job history.
The post is a cool example but I'd be shocked if Spotify doesn't have a contract for up to X events/mo and overages at some reduced rate. No way they're paying per request. The only place I've never seen negotiate rates is Bloomberg.
…do you disable CSS?

My websites would fare a lot better unstyled than most websites built on top of frameworks like Bootstrap and their 'classy' HTML, but it's still not going to look good without CSS and no online business is going to make more money without CSS than with it.

I'm a big fan of terse, straightforward HTML, plus nice CSS on top of that. I've made (and get a lot of use out of) a basic.css stylesheet I built that supports a few basic themes: http://staticresource.com/basic-test.html

Let's see some of your HTML J_Darnley :)
In fact, there was a pretty good recent article on this phenomenon of "social pressure" (and how Slack, Facebook, Whatsapp etc. leverage it): https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack-became-a-b...
For example you are running an ASP.net+MSSQL app and you are tired of dealing with IIS and/or Windows Server. Now you can run Nginx+ASP.net+MSSQL on Linux, for minimal effort.
Your Drunk Neighbor: Donald Trump
A Night at the Museum with Project Tango
Such conspiracies are not even remotely confined to capitalist systems, this is a problem with human nature that no system is capable of fixing.
> With no competition an important downward pressure on price is taken away

True but there were competitors to Microsoft (such as Linux and Apple), and there was no evidence of an upward march in prices. The free software revolution was gaining steam rapidly.

I've been in the software business for 40 years, and the free market free-for-all in software has been legendary. Pricing has trended to $0 for lots (most?) of products, and yet innovation continues at a furious pace.

The only really bad part has been the execrable patent wars.
Think of it this way: do you cringe at the thought that 70 years ago, there were almost no antibiotics available? That if you had a serious infection that you'd probably die? That such an infection would now be trivial to cure?

That's how people will view our healthcare of today 70 years from now.
Want to be a better writer? Type with only one hand
Maria Sharapova tests positive for banned substance
I think this demo is pretty rad:

http://jxnblk.com/rebass/demo/
Outside of Silicon Valley, it's not so cut and dry.
When you get a message, it used to show it right on the screen, you don't have to launch the app (like text message). Now they just show the notification. I am not sure if there is a way to get the old style back, I am too lazy to experiment.

This is similar to those stupid emails which would force users to click through, login and then read the message instead of just including the message itself in the email. Which to me is insane.
The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait but Why
A couple points;

- Is this cheap in the US? They present it that way on the product pages. As an Australian I thought we had expensive mobile plans and this seems expensive to me.

- I cant see this being popular without doing an all you can eat option on data, even if only presented that way via pricing/marketing. People live the security of knowing they can use a service without worrying about additional costs. I suspect they'd be much better offering 'all you can eat' price ?Gb and then throttling data speed to reduce effect/abuse of the outliers of data use.
The saddest thing is that since "ego depletion is a normal thing for every human" is no more a reliable concept, people will miss an explanation for their forthcoming loss of will power or failures in their life :)
Most longitudinal studies of heroin users suggest that they frequently transition between periods of use and abstinence, and that most living users undergo spontaneous remission in middle age.

Also, it seems unlikely that the $hundreds of billions/year hard drug trade is driven by proceeds of petty crime+bottle redemption+welfare+other money sources traditionally associated with the destitute. It seems much more likely that the people buying most hard drugs are people with stable income.
ADO.NET, not ODBC.
I thought HN would be the last place to see advice that would derail people from diving into their independent endeavours.

The difference: From what I've seen/heard, working for a Y-Combinator startup is a far better environment than working for a lot of game companies.
you're welcome, thanks for the feedback.

You're right that at the moment you need to step through each change separately. I'll soon add some more information to the popup so you can get a better idea at least of the size of the changes.

Since I started working on the project 6 months or so ago, I've also been fascinated how much the stories change. I knew before I started that changes were being made, but the frequency and size really surprised me. Most of the changes are grammar/spelling, additional content (as new information comes through) or updating images, which is what you'd expect. But it's surprising how often I've seen the wording altered to give a slightly different meaning, perhaps where an editor has come in with different sentiments.

These edits also obviously mean that when you share an article with someone, what they read is different to what you shared. So I'd also like to add the option to share a fixed version of an article.
I'm not sure I agree. If P-value is really low then it implies either the existing data set is bad or your new data set is bad. Either way you haven't used data to get to a confident decision.

Put another way: tons of stuff in prod dev gets done without p-values entirely because it's the first time you have any data at all about something. I'm questioning whether this is hugely valuable and obviously better than using my intuition or not, since we really don't have a good understanding of the baseline.
Might that not imply that the implementation is relatively little tied to a particular OS? Taking your example, as long as there's a way to get the block size for a disk, there's not much more OS-specific code to deal with -- in particular, adapting your code to the file system doesn't need to be done since the DB will essentially create its own anyway. Similarly, only a few threading primitives need to be used -- the DB isn't going to tie itself heavily to the vagaries of the async IO implementation, which does tend to differ heavily and pervasively between platforms.
Last time I checked it also uses a lot of RPC protocols, e.g. NSPI.
When people say "Linux" in a context like this, they usual mean "a typical GNU/Linux distribution", not "anything that happens to be running the Linux kernel"
Batching could mean they're aggregating calls prior to handing then off to google as a single request. If you have 64k minimum block size (guessing) you can stuff in many small requests before sending them off.
More importantly, why do Android devices insist on providing haptic feedback by default? It annoys the crap out of me. It's the first thing I disable when I get new Android.
That is not what I've read, but rather it merely allows Apple to match lower prices elsewhere for the same product, so I still don't see how this could be price fixing.
That's actually a reasonable response. From my first read the numbers seemed a bit inflated, so I dug into their blog post out of curiosity (I develop on GAE), so the comment was not ill intended. Now that you have pointed out they do seem a good estimate!

Thanks for the great articles David, keep them coming! :)
“A demographic arbitrage between aging societies with a
shrinking work force and youthful societies would be good
thing, if the whole thing could be managed,”

So basically that well off and aging societies brain drain the youthful societies leaving them with far fewer of the people with the brains and ambition to create jobs in those economies. What could possibly go wrong?
Planet Earth is by far the best nature documentary I've ever seen. I'd recommend it to anyone who's yet to see it.
Yes, but if I'm reading their blog post correctly, their individual messages are much smaller than 64K

"Pub/Sub passed the test with flying colours. We published 2M messages without any service degradation and received almost no server errors from the Pub/Sub backend. Enabling batching and compression on the Event Service machines resulted in ~1Gbps of network traffic towards Pub/Sub."
https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs

This guy is writing a windows driver for Btrfs
"Much like San Francisco itself, the Society hadn’t felt like it was intended for people with money—until, suddenly, it did."
Who says it should be a "get out of jail free card"?

I think that's a good approach: someone openly breaks a rule that they think is unfair and/or outdated, and then society can decide whether to re-evaluate the rule or fine them (even into bankruptcy, if they're a company).
Linux kernel: PostgreSQL pain points (2014)
I honestly think that the $954M original price tag is a bigger problem than the 3X overrun.
The title is also a bit clickbaity. Yes, QC are "closer" to breaking RSA... but...

"Briefly, the new work uses Kitaev’s version of Shor’s factoring algorithm, running on an ion-trap quantum computer with five calcium ions, to prove that, with at least 90% confidence, 15 equals 3×5..... So, what’s new is that a QC has now factored 15 “scalably”: that is, with much less cheating than before." - (Scott Aaronson).
Ok, we changed the URL from http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/. Thanks!

Btw, http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2673 (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11235186) is also about this.
If you mean hacker in the sense that you want to learn about breaking into computers, then you've come to the wrong place.

Hacker news is a startup/technology oriented news aggregator with a comments section.

Not a den of criminals. (depending on your views about capitalism i suppose)
For those curious, the relevant PRs/issues appear to be:

https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/issues/1095

https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/pull/1109
Right now, I don't blog much because I tried to make money off blogging and failed.

I used to blog on & off since early 2000s. It was mostly about my daily life, interests, and photos. It was a lot of fun and many friends read it.

Then I added ads and affiliate links. I hardly made any money from those ads or links but once I accidentally ended up making $200+ from one affiliate link. This got me greedy, and I started to think I can become a professional blogger. I cleaned up my personal stuff from my blog and started to write with a focus of gaining views. This ended up being work and boring. Also my blog suffered negatively as my friends stopped visiting it. I lost my interest too. Started to blog less often.

But this year I will re-start personal blogging. I don't have anything important to say to the world. My blog will be just for my friends & family. Also I removed all ads and affiliate links from it to remove any temptation of making money.
AdBlockers will still block iframes and already does. Those I've seen blocks the full request based on a list of known domains. Many 3rd-party tracking cookies is often placed with help of iframes or a img-pixel.

With Google Analytics you have the option to actually do all the tracking server-side so AdBlockers shouldn't be an issue tracking-wise.
This is definitely cheap for people who could rely mostly on Wi-Fi and use normal data only when you are out. It is probably little cheaper than the regular carriers(Verizon/AT&T),but definitely expensive than T-Mobile.(I am in a family plan & pay $35 for unlimited text/talk & 10GB LTE data).

But T-Mobile has really low coverage outside cities. I will definitely switch if they come up with a reduced data plan since network coverage sucks for T-Mobile in Suburbs.
If you enjoy programming games get a regular job that you work at 9-5 and use the time you would've spent working unpaid overtime at a games studio to work on a game at home. You will have creative control and freedom to choose any tech and tools you want - neither of which you'd have at a games studio.

This is precisely what I'm currently doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22VD_8gi5wc

http://www.emergencevector.com
I've watched plenty of GIFs trickle in – over a 1200 bps modem back in the day – and it's not the same. An interlaced GIF displays every other line first, leaving a visible comb pattern between the lines until the rest of the data loads which is visually quite distracting unless the background is transparent or a compatible color with the image content.

Here's what interlacing looks like, with whole areas being empty until the data is received:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adam7_passes.gif

With something like JPEG 2000, you have a completely experience because the image renders immediately with less detail and becomes sharper. Using this example from Wikipedia, it'd basically start with the 1:100 frame on the bottom and rerender as data streams in until hitting the final 1:1 quality at the top:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/JPEG_200...
4chan founder Christopher ‘moot’ Poole is now a Google employee
So I don't get this. 1gbps and 2 million events/s could be comfortably handled on a single beefy 10gbps server. Add a second for failover. That's maximum $20K/year which is far cry from $3.5 million. How does this even begin to make economic sense? The economy of the cloud has never made sense to me, since it's cheaper to overbuy your capacity by 5x in dedicated machines than use AWS or GCE. After just one year you've paid for all your capital expenditures and then you're minting it. For a startup the appeal of the cloud is obvious, but for a big established company with known technical requirements I don't get it at all.
Stevia: Human-readable auto-layout in code
Half of Marketing Jobs Will Be Replaced by Machine Intelligence
Here is a quick edit that you should make.

Where you write:

> In laments terms

You probably want to write:

In layman's terms

"In layman's terms" is an idiomatic way of saying, simply put, or explaining something to somebody who might not be technically inclined.

To lament is to feel upset about something, it often refers to the grief one feels when a loved one has died.

Overall, this was an interesting read, and I'm looking forward to your next installment.
aww i remember that app. i thought it launched ages ago!
No, your life is a source of proverbs.
I did hear about OpenBSD having good support for the Broadwell series. I will give it a shot. Way too many binary files to deal with in Linux. I cannot bear that logs are now binary.
Elegant Async code in Swift
There are loads of interesting fruit and veg not available in most supermarkets. I'm growing: medlars, perilla, quince, kohlrabi, sloes, rosehips, wasabi, horseradish, kinkan, yuzu, naranjilla, damsons ... In fact the reason to have a veg patch is to be able to source these ingredients.
I don't think it does. I'm trying to find flags or anything to make it know what gb is. In the gopath, things just work. In a gb project it just says "no buildable files" because it doesn't know to do `gb build`. Tried some other projects like atocker but then they don't seem to play nice with docker-machine.
I wonder what would happen if you repeatedly downloaded and uploaded an image to imgur or something. Maybe something like this? http://gizmodo.com/5555359/the-weirdness-of-a-youtube-video-...
> it merely allows Apple to match lower prices elsewhere for the same product

Exactly, and I quote the exact formulation of MFN from the court's decision in my other (possibly harder to read) comment here.
sounds like "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. needs to be updated to just "you are the product"
>LinkedIn most definitely has its warts, but I think as an online resume and a way to connect professionals, it succeeds.

Exactly. And very importantly: it doesn't have any real competition. It is the social network for professionals to network on, get contacted by recruiters, post their resume, etc. Facebook doesn't have all that, and FB is for your personal stuff anyway, and anyone who mixes their personal life on Facebook (with inane posts about politics or cat videos or whatever) with their professional life is asking to never be hired anywhere. Twitter obviously is useless for the things LinkedIn is used for.

So until something comes along which does the stuff LinkedIn does, but better, we're stuck with it.
Hm, you could probably hack something together with the PerformanceTiming API, which makes a lot of these timings available to JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Performance...
I don't think it generalizes to full legalization, but (as I've long said), it does justify a right to some sort of "padded room use" exception. That is, there should be some legal, monitored route to ensure that:

a) You can use the drug if seek it out (very limited advertising).

b) You will be monitored to make sure you don't go out in public in a disoriented or dangerous state.

c) You will be aware of and have easy access to treatment programs if you are showing signs of addiction.

Such facilities would have to keep an insurance policy against harms resulting from the clients' usage, including e.g. pre-funding of rehab for some percentage of them.

To the extent that most governments don't allow anything like this, that is the rights violation.
Tolerance of victimless crimes that hurt no one is a Kafkaesque nightmare?
typically the oldest part of a business that's kept around in its current form is the database which stands as the point of record.
It's 2016 and we still don't have a ultimate disposal place for nuclear waste. No one knows how much the whole process will cost in the end. At least in Germany law says whoever produces nuclear waste has to ensure it will be stored securely. I don't see how this is possible with a startup. Startups usually take high risk in most of their decisions. Most startups fail within few years. Who will be responsible for the waste produced by a startup that goes bankrupt?

There's no other solution than to stop nuclear power now and investing all we can to care about reliably storing the waste forever (in human terms). And even if there were ways to store something reliably for 1,000,000 years, it's impossible to keep future civilizations from opening what shouldn't be. The pyramids weren't meant to be opened either. ;)
That's why those systems shouldn't use mining. They should use something like PBFT. And the incentive to run a node is that you can catch other people cheating.
> The three best Microsoft products are their natural keyboard...

The Natural Keyboards [0] have been getting less and less durable as the years go by. My first one lasted for ~five years. My second, two or three. My third is less than a year old and already suffering from intermittent failure to register keypresses, as well as surprisingly rapid breakdown of the faux leather material that covers the bottom portion of the keyboard. (The faux leather breakdown is a first for me... all the other keyboards suffered mechanical failure long before I saw any sort of wear on the bottom portion material.)

[0] Specifically, the MSFT Natural Ergonomic Keyboard X000 models that have the stupid, useless zoom slider.
Are you suggesting that I support drone strikes against civilians? If not, I'd ask you to retract that as an argument against my position.

In point of fact, I'm an ardent believer in single-payer healthcare, and think it both tragic and (to the extent the notion of criminality applies to nation-states) criminal that the US is the only first-world nation that lacks it. So, yes, I do believe taxes can be very well spent in "help[ing] people".

I'm merely taking the NAP to its logical conclusion, and using that to argue against another Libertarian plank.
GrubHub changes terms of service