skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You must also play out the game theory in time, not just an instant. Whatever the fine may be today, should they be caught doing this again, the fine will be (or so the theory goes) much larger. The fine is not just about the negative payment, it's also about the fact that if they do it again in the future, they'll pay out more, making doing it again in the future much less attractive, and also doing anything like the thing they just did much less attractive.

I realize it may emotionally feel good to demand larger fines, but I'm not sure it would have all that great an effect above and beyond what it already has. And the HN gestalt would be among the first to complain about what happens to the workers of Verizon if a fine that actually did greatly hurt them was issued, so "much larger fines" could well go to a negative value to the HN gestalt if a full accounting is done.
Oh, I think the "states" are unnecessary in the US. I agree with that. But borders between nations are, outside of a worldwide utopia, are rather necessary.
That's a good point. I always tend to forget about loop because I don't use it all that much, prefer using the Iterate library. Loop is a whole extra language all on its own.
Curious how he fits into the goals of "Googliness" for new hires.
That's actually pretty cool. The difference is that here people are completely aware that this study does not in any way tell us whether P = NP (even if it was 100/0) as long as there's no solid proof on the table.

A meta-analysis in those fields is usually only used to analyze the behaviour and methodology of researchers, not to investigate the ground truth of the papers.
Massive under certain use cases, and major reliability and feature differences too. A lot of BtrFS is still "in progress" like the copy-on-write stuff and fault detection.
The quality of the simple is not reached by simply pursueing simplicity for the sake of simplicity. That will take you instead to the realm of the simpleton.
SpeedOf.Me API is out of beta
> Being windows-only meant it was simpler, less complex code, faster and less buggy.

So you don't think that, maybe-just-maybe, it's gotten a little easier to write cross-platform code in the last twenty-three years?
Collective Memory Discovered in Bacteria
Ask HN: How to invest in the VR industry?
VR seems like a no-brainer for an upcoming technology that's going to change how we interact with computers (and maybe our world). As a person outside that industry, I'd like to invest one way or another and be part of it.

HTC and Facebook/Oculus are the most notable providers right now, but overall it seems like a tiny piece of their overall puzzle.

AMD and Nvidia seem like a good secondary investment in this industry (i.e. picks and shovels). Any other companies that stand to profit off of a booming VR industry?
If you edit to replace your asterisks with [STAR], your post will make more sense. To the best of my knowledge the only reliably way to get an asterisk to display in an HN post is to use only one. (Maybe sometimes stick it in the middle of the word.) Backslash does nothing useful.
They didn't just offer a different pricing model, they colluded to get the whole market to raise ebook prices in all venues.

The case has been argued or reviewed by every level of the Justice system and Apple has lost every time. They simply violated the Sherman act and the result was noticeably higher prices for the customer. Interestingly there are no apparent winners in the case because Apple hasn't had success selling ebooks and the new higher prices resulted in significantly less sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
The cult of ignorance in the United States (2014)
I guess I see this as a) not surprising, and b) not a problem.

If you're using Backbone in 2016 (like I am), it probably means you want your "framework" to be simple, stable, and customizable. Given those priorities, using a wide variety of plugins doesn't make much sense.

If you want 3rd-party code to do a ton of stuff for you in an opaque way, you're much better off using Angular or Ember.
Compare and contrast with pigs, chickens, sheep, cattle, horses, dogs, cats, and so on. There were far more in Europe/Asia that lived in close contact with people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals
Can you correct me if I'm wrong but now Apple can repatriate some of it massive overseas cash hoard and offset it against the $450M fine without attracting any tax on it as it is a loss.
technically their balance books will be $450M worse off but they wouldn't have been able to use that money anyway without attracting a high tax on it.
is that correct?
Why would you force your users to have inferior font smoothing? This is really bad, don't do it. Subpixel rendering is there for a good reason, don't turn it off. http://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothi...
Ravi Rajwar: Specialized Evolution of the General – Purpose CPU [pdf]
T-Mobile is cheaper.
Based on US Navy interviews with Japanese officials after the end of WWII, it seems immensely improbable that Japan cared about the US takeover of Hawaii per se. They cared about the US fleet that was based there, and about US actions to oppose Japan's attempts to conquer China and the Dutch East Indies. So if Hawaii were independent but the US had a fleet base there, no, Japan wasn't going to act peacefully in that imaginary situation - not unless you're postulating an actually peaceful Japan, one that isn't attacking China and the Dutch East Indies.
A Ted Baker Adventure in London
They are wrapping small events into fewer larger ones. Hence the word batching.

I have 64 1k messages? Ok, I am going to put them inside a single 64k message and reduce my request count by 64x, and profit!
> medlars

I love those, too bad they are rarely available in Germany. It's one of the fruits I always show other people if I can.
Could you take a more nuanced and defined stance? What sectors, markets, or users are you referring to?
It's not pretty, but just put a space after the stars:

* * *.
I just started a job where mssql is used extensively. They're trying to get a PHP 7 application off the ground and the lack of a mssql driver (non-PDO) for PHP 7 is a big pain point. As of Jan 2016, they had released a beta release and were taking a poll on what platform they should support next (I'm not kidding, the entire history is here: https://github.com/Azure/msphpsql/issues/58). Unfortunately it seems support is secondary in this case to Microsoft, as they are unable or unwilling to allocate the necessary resources
On theory, this is a nice thing, but in practice, switching between the two worst carriers isn't something you can rely on.
Show HN: 2015 Python GitHub Issues Report
That's all well and good until that rich person/corporation has applied some creative accounting to create a net loss on the books, thus negating their fine.
You outsource some of the sysadmin work, but not all of it. Cloud servers have plenty of their own failure cases, some of them unique. Physical hardware is actually quite reliable and if you follow the same practices you should in the cloud - namely automatic failover, eliminate single points of failure, etc then the differences decrease.

Dynamically scaling load is only really interesting if the load is extremely variable. You could just buy 5x the dedicated hardware, which will likely be able to serve 10x the traffic and may still end up paying less. Who cares if it sits idle most of the time.

Now Spotify, like Netflix probably has extreme variance in load, much more so than a normal company. So maybe the cloud works for them. But that's not a common situation at all.
> I did mention a plasma converter and the possibility of chemical options coming up down the line.

Yes, you did. You also (correctly) suggest we aren't actually going to solve all chemical pollutant problems with plasma converters. That's an interesting tech that should be useful in some areas, but even then chemical pollution is still a far bigger problem than the nuclear power industry ever will be.

> Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.

I did mention a breeder reactor and that nuclear power converts a microscopic[1] amount of fuel into waster for the same energy. Not only is nuclear waste a solved problem, it's utterly ridiculous to compare such trivial amounts of waste to what other industries produce.

[1] literally micro- as in 1/1,000,000 (because we get much more energy[2] from U or Th)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...
I phrased it as a "possible license incompatibility" very carefully. I'm personally ambivalent about whether it is; I know enough to know I don't know. And even those who think they know will generally agree that you don't really know know until it is tested in court.

The real problem here is that Oracle is the sort of company that does "test it in court". Is Canonical really big enough to be able to afford this level of risk? Even if they win I would be surprised if they managed to talk the judge into awarding them lawyer costs from Oracle. There's definitely enough ambiguity here that it wouldn't be a stupid suit. Legally, anyhow.
> SQL Server <-> PostgreSQL is the closest commercial to open source comparison (core database engine-wise) I can think of.

Can you store / query JSON-like data in SQL server? I'd like to be able to store a structured object and query a keypath.
the aforementioned food-maker and Soylent are rather orthogonal technologies.

Soylent 2.0 effectively reduces the entire loading step to "order Soylent. Retrieve from porch."
It works well to commercialize existing knowledge, or take some existing knowledge that is 80% complete and then do the other 20%. Business is good as capturing value, not at creating it. In terms of technology it's much the same, the people who created the knowledge often did not benefit from it... someone else did. The ones who did benefit were scientists first in usually a university environment who then sought to commercialize their inventions and formed corporations to do that. Businesses often do not discover these things they commercialized, and maybe it's right to say that some things may not have been as profitable if not for business. And maybe some things would not have been properly commercialized.
Not to be an ass - but I've got to ask. Does the "reproducibility crisis" have any policy or political implications for the "global warming" threat? I know nothing about climatology, and since I can't judge the "conservative" critiques of the consensus on their own merits, my tendency is to dismiss them as politically motivated and hence unreliable. As folks keep saying, "The science is settled." But if the science was settled in this instance, is it possible that my strategy for sorting through the debate - which I suspect is in fact a pretty common strategy - is in fact premature?
From the SQLOS announcement: "Keep in mind SQLOS doesn’t provide OS abstraction layer to SQL Server. It doesn’t warp any of Windows APIs for portability purposes. Contrary it continues further binding of SQL Server to Windows by exploiting scalability and performance features of the Operating System."

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/slavao/archive/2005/02/05/367816.asp...
Slack Introduces Productivity Mode
Wow, $3.09B for 4.3 miles of track and 4 stations? In possibly 7 years, if everything goes according to plan?

Elsewhere in the world, the Delhi Metro Phase 2 cost $2.9B and took 3 years. 77 miles of track, 85 stations, and countdown clocks. The Bangalore Metro (phase 1) is expected to be $2.5B (including a 25% cost overrun) for 26 miles and 40 stations. It also includes countdown clocks. Barcelona spent $200M for a 5.8km rail tunnel.

Where's your money going?
Microsoft Brings SQL Server to Linux
Rakuten Platform as a Service and Apache Kafka
Are ALTER TABLEs transactional yet?
Well the theory behind plea bargaining is that it's really only for guilty people; which is a tricky concept in itself pre-trial. The idea is that with open-and-shut cases where the prosecution has so much evidence it's pretty clear the guy is guilty, they can plea bargain the sentence down to avoid wasting the courts time and prevent overburdening the system.

However, it is commonly abused by prosecutors pressuring less obvious cases into pleading guilty. People who may well be innocent but can't afford decent representation, are so afraid of the potential 20yr sentence that they plead out for 6 months in minimum security.

So yes, every guilty person should plea bargain (unless they have great lawyers), but unfortunately the plea bargaining system means a significant number of potentially innocent people are pressured into pleading out.

Not a particularly just system.

That's why I was saying that it's not a good sign for a justice system if plea bargains are better for innocent people. They're only meant to be better for guilty people, in order to speed up processing in overburdened courts.
ISP cost, backups, patching, hardware upgrades, co-location, DR, insurance, paying for physical and cyber-security, personnel etc.

outsourcing allot of those things saves money it's also a different expense of you buy infrastructure it has value which means depreciation overtime which affects how your accounting is done.

Cloud makes sense for allot of companies not just startups the biggest reason why companies with eatablished infrastructure don't migrate is the initial cost and regulation.
There seems to be a dichotomy between those who say that a psychological achievement is no achievement in reality and those who've experienced times where the basis of this or that psychological state has been fundamentally undermined. The latter are more prone to question the reality of any subsequent experience.
Imagine I handed you a 20-sided die. I claim it says 7 on every side, but I might be lying. You roll a 7. What are the chances it actually has 7 on every side?

You can't actually say unless you either (1) roll the die more times, or (2) assume something about the probability that I gave you an all-7's die to begin with.

Doing (2) is useless, because that exactly the question we are trying to answer.

For example, suppose I perform this experiment all the time and I know that I give an all-7's die only 1% of the time. With this new information, you could actually calculate the probability of an all-7's die given a 7 roll. Of all the possible outcomes, you could add up the ones where I gave you an all-7s die and the ones where I gave you a normal die but you just rolled 7. Then you could divide that by the total number of possible outcomes.

But this would give you a totally different number than if I give you an all-7's die 99% of the time. And the problem is that you don't have any information about what kind of die you have before you roll it. You're trying to figure out which world we live in -- one where your hypothesis is true or one where it's not.

(I am pretty sure that what I wrote above is true. But one thing I'm not as clear on is how multiple rolls of the die actually can establish confidence percentages. How many rolls does it take to actually establish confidence? Would love to hear from any stats experts about that.)
The Defense Department Got Mad at Darpa for Creating Email
Some tool for data upgrading/rolling back when doing updates. We got so many nice tools for programs, its about time to have a DB that could do as such... and versioning?
There must have been a steep discount given that Spotify has been an enormous reference customer and blogging about how much they love it.
Kudos on this @jonsneyers! I've been looking at it ever since we talked at FOSDEM. Glad to see you getting some press on the work and good luck with Uproot Labs!
The original draft had more detail. As did the backstory piece we wrote. Editors cut it down for page count. (It was originally a foreword to a book on web form design, which was all about the buttons and the fields.)
I thought that video was hilarious!! Thank for posting! :D
Apple set a specific price ($16.99 or so) for iBooks, then used MFN to make sure that that was the "lowest" price, effectively increasing prices elsewhere from say $9.99 to the same $16.99. That is, they fixes the price at a higher level than before.
I'm not sure that such facilities could be insurable at any reasonable price. How can you have Heroin or other heavy drugs without eventual fatalities? Families could sue for negligence no matter what rights the users sign away.

Very complicated topic.
That's a very good referral for the OP. I think you're the rare bird.
this has been Nr 1 on the front page for the last 2 hours... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241430
This would never happen if Steve Ballmer was still alive.
That's not unreasonable in principle, but then it gets more complicated: do you propose to hold the entire company accountable for the actions of a small part of it? If not, then it devolves into the kind of accounting complexity that results in random internet outrage because it's beyond the understanding of most people.

If you do propose to hold the entire company accountable for any action taken in its name, then consider what you are enforcing: this would mean companies would be immediately obliged to disempower their entire staff from making decisions at any level, and require review and approval for all actions, to make sure that nobody ever makes a mistake that could be punitively expensive.

Neither of these is going to turn out to be a simple solution to a complex problem.

Worse, you can't even use a simple rule here, because what do you do about companies that aren't making a profit? Do they effectively have carte blanche to violate the law in order to improve their situation? That's probably not what you want, so you'd end up with some complicated mix of both systems.
I wonder if the UI management tools will be web-based like GCloud/AWS/Azure, or if they will be OS-specific. Still, it's very impressive that Microsoft is moving outside its own OS.
Or, we will have sure fire cures for baldness, and sexual dysfunction?

I keep thinking about this new antidepressant called Rexulti.
The patent ran out on Abilify. It went to generic status. Drug company panicked.

They changed the Abilify molecule a tiny bit, and a did <400 patient study. The patients were evaluated over a two month period, using a 10 question happy test. From mean change from baseline, -5.2 people got better by Placebo. -8.4 got better from drug.

In big bold letters, it screamed to doctors, "62 Percent Greater". In small print they said vs. placebo.

Does it work? I don't know, and I doubt they know. Do they have a new, dubious drug they can con doctors/patients into buying--yes!

And yes--if we knew the actually efficacy of a lot of drugs, we would be astonished.

I sincerely hope we have better medications in the future.
Deeply moving. People fighting the death penalty in Texas deserve our respect no matter where we fall on the issue.
They are willing to invest their soul in an uphill battle where the odds are heavily against them.
Good tip. Coincidentally, a couple of years ago someone suggested my wife audition for Voice Bunny to be added to their talent pool for contract jobs. She never did though.
I like the idea of making reputation data available to everyone and let them run their own calculations however they want. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you're wary of the privacy implications), most online applications that have some notion of reputation don't share reputation data don't allow you to just grab the whole database.
>Quince

I have a quince tree I planted. They used to be very common in New England because they contain a lot of pectin. So, prior to the availability of commercial pectin, people mixed them with other fruits to make jams and jellies.

They're hard to do a lot with though outside of whatever you can separate using a food mill. You can make quince "applesauce", butter, jelly, and paste pretty straightforwardly. But because they're so hard and tend to have a lot of scattered seeds (probably depends on the variety), it's a lot of work to cut clean fruit that you can use for poached slices or preserves.
> I would be surprised if they don't keep the niche features Windows-only.

For some definition of niche, which in this case may very well include "enterprise class features" such as replication...

This is a way for MS to increase exposure and draw people into their ecosystem (at least for a part of their infrastructure) in an increasingly OS agnostic world. I don't think it makes sense for them to cannibalize their current revenue sources to do so, and a part of that is requiring expensive Windows Server licenses for high-end MSSQL features.
The reason this has my attention is because 'R' is being integrated into the engine.
I do agree with all that. Modern conventional reactor have achieved admirable safety. But they've done that with a lot of complicated and expensive safety mechanisms. With a reactor that's inherently safer due to the physics of fuel and coolant, you don't need as much of that, and have the potential to achieve lower costs.

I also agree that proliferation is an overblown concern, but the international community does have some level of discomfort with nuclear power in third-world countries. If we could provide them with, say, a Transatomic reactor that runs on very low-enriched uranium and produces very little plutonium, that would go a long way towards alleviating that concern.
http://hrpartners.com does not resolve without www. Check that issue.
They probably have this in petty cash. What use is a fine of this amount? It is like fining a football player 1500 for an illegal hit.
When Everything Is Magic Nothing Is Magic, and Everything Is Terrifying
You might try to learn the facts of the case first. The agreement was that Microsoft would simply offer users a choice of browsers on the first launch of IE.

They then managed to not ship this selection screen for a year or so on Windows setup disks and ISOs. Hence they got the $1b fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239674
I get where you're coming from, but I think your idea moves too far in the opposite direction.

Vaccines are somewhat different as "drugs". They are typically inactivated virus or bacteria (or fragments of them), so the safety risk is somewhat muted in the sense you aren't introducing something completely new into the body. The risk is still there, but not as much as a completely new molecule.

If you were to test new drugs on terminally ill patients and the patient died, was it the drug? Or did they die form their disease? Sometimes you can, often you can't. When you do clinical trials you're trying to eliminate any many variables as possible by running the trial on a relatively homogeneous population. That's why they do phase 1 with healthy volunteers.

The other challenge is that when human testing goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong. Check out the clinical trial of the FAAH Bial compound where people died. Also, TGN1412.
Weren't the publishers those that set the price? Apple just agreed not to insist on low prices like Amazon (it's in the court decision). As far as I understand, the publishers weren't able to increase the prices by Amazon until they renegotiated their deals with Amazon.

Why should Apple be guilty that the publishers made new, what they saw as better for them deals with Amazon once the Apple's store opened? It's the Amazon that got the competition at that moment, not that Apple behaved anti-competitive. Amazon effectively haven't had any competition before. Once it had, the publishers wee able to renegotiate.
Serious question: What are HN's thoughts/policy on humor, comedy, and satire?

>The Flipped Bit is a satirical news site that pokes a bit of fun at the world’s tech companies.

This is entertaining but I've seen a lot of grumblings around in comments lately decrying a perceived increased sense of humor for the sake of humor (think slashdot's +5 funny). This is the first purely satirical link I've seen on the front page in recent memory, so I am legitimately curious.