skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cities in North and South Dakota are so small, though. I don't see how you could include Sioux Falls or Fargo in a map like this. You'd have to include about twenty cities in Texas. (Des Moines's inclusion is suprising to me, but the Des Moines area has almost as many people as all of North Dakota.)

When you're talking about any sort of economic or tax impact, cities of around 100,000 people are barely a suburb on a map like this. Hell, even after the super-charged growth of the last decade, the combined GDP of North and South Dakota is less than $100 billion. The Minneapolis metro area's GDP is over twice that.
Huh? F-35s are in production
For me this sounds like saying, "he's more of a painting designer than someone who sketches or paints himself". I mean sure, artists often have plenty of people help with the work. [1] But still, I don't think you get to be a good software architect without writing a lot of code. Even if we imagine that minions did every brushstroke on Michelangelo's famous works, it'd still be worth looking at his sketches, which are amazing. [2]

[1] http://www.widewalls.ch/the-world-of-artist-assistants-featu...

[2] http://www.michelangeloago.com/
The big shift to mobile, however, means that people can no longer use their computers to host a server. Napster would probably not achieve critical mass nowadays.
can you comment on why you wouldn't use it? I am somewhere in the middle of software engineering and (biological) data science. I have seen some jupyter notebooks as companions to genomics software and I enjoyed those presentations. I was considering using it in the future based on that; so, I wanted to hear your thoughts.
For the immediate future at least, federation seems much more feasible than wholly decentralized systems. At least for websites / applications that are expected to gain any mainstream traction.

Building a federated Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, App Store, etc. that does not have a single point of censorship / failure is perfectly doable.

Hell, any of those websites could start federation initiatives today if they so wished (Waiting any day now for a Big Name to experiment with a federated model).

However from my experience p2p services (IPFS / Freenet etc.) still require a combination of technical skill and political awareness (to go out of one's way to use a service that is much less convenient -- and to develop for a platform that will make you no money) that the average user does not have.

Not to say they have no place: the internet itself was a fringe, nerds-only technology at one point. But it only became a mass phenomenon once uses were found that brought 10x improvement on things the nontechnical user already needed (sending a letter, looking up information).

Decentralized technologies (today) offer no such improvement.

And let's face it, for the average Joe, p2p offers nothing: a p2p service can at best be of equal quality as a centralized service. There's no way around it: there's nothing simpler and more performant than talking directly to a central host.

With federation, the user needn't even know the difference.
Nah. I grew up in Fargo and, like everyone in Fargo, spent most of my time aspiring to spend more time in Minnesota and Minneapolis. Both Fargo and Grand Forks — on the border of the state, on the Red — share a ton culturally with Minnesota. If anything, I'd probably split North Dakota in half: east and west, which is growing into more of a divide lately anyway given the Bakken.

It could be that Minnesota doesn't want North Dakota, of course, but tbh Fargo's getting fairly cosmopolitan, surprisingly enough, and is closer to the Cities culturally than most anything else in a few hundred mile radius.

Anyway, this discussion is probably completely irrelevant to about a billion percent of normal Hacker News readers. Gotta represent your people, though. :)
I'll point out that the parent comment was specifically targeted at federal government and not government as a concept. Many of your arguments may still hold true but at least some can be reasonably painted as responsibilities for state governments, not Washington. That was presumably the desired (tired, 200-year-old) sentiment.
Exactly. That's why they are going to abolish it.
Then again:

"The food supply chain is so vast and so complicated. It has yielded extra-virgin olive oil that is actually colored sunflower oil"

That's not "complicated", it's outright fraud. More objectively so than the subjective "local".
So you suggest that we should put even more emphasis on Computer Science fundamentals?

Ad of most jobs don't already put too mich emphasis on mindlessly coding reference implementations of naive classical algorithms and data structures as proof of competence.

Encouraging inexperienced devs to embrace NIH (Not Invented Here) Syndrome is not the answer.

Even poorly supported open source projects will often have better edge case coverage, testing, and battle hardened code than a prototype produced by a reasonably experienced dev alone could provide.

The issue isn't whether or not to embrace third-party libraries. Thr issue that it's very hard to get devs to join/support existing open source libs.

As a dev of multiple libs, one of which is widely used among the JS community, it's very difficult to promote my lob and draw more users/support. Despite the fact that the lib has been battle hardened, tested, and in common use by hundreds of thousands of other devs for over 4 years.

Somebody could easily create a framework specific wrapper of my lib that garners more stars/forks on GitHub in a matter of months; and worse, most wrapper/clones never bother to update from upstream so their users are left using old/outdated code.

If you want to stick to 'old values' then do the work to make existing libraries better. Don't waste time/resources producing one-off garbage that contributes to technical debt.

Not sure if you got the
memo but the one distinctive benefit of employing software developers is that we provide the ability to automate away repetitive work and save the business money in the long-term. Including, saving development time, effort, and future maintenance by leveraging existing bodies of work.

Where the code comes from and how it works Is only relevant to software devs. The everybody else, the only thing that matters is the result it produces and how costly it'll be to maintain and update in the future.

The sad truth for devs who pride themselves on a strong knowledge of algos and data structures is, most jobs don't require those skills. Software produced for profit requires mostly composing an application of existing code, not writing original implementations.
Every time I try to do some data crunching in a python notebook, I find that I really miss the variable explorer from spyder.
Theranos valuation could go back to zero
In that case, if the design itself is still viable, it seems like it would make more sense to just produce more A-10s. Tooling up won't be cheap, but it might be cheaper than throwing yet more money at a wastefully expensive replacement.

(Also, I think that a bunch of the A-10s in service were recently overhauled, which according to the article added "many decades of service life". I don't know if that's literally true, but it does seem like a thorough rebuild of a military airframe might be more economical than doing the same for, say, a mass-produced civilian car.)
As a gamer with a 4k monitor... no.

The closest to a feeling of presence you can try right now with little effort and at lost cost is to setup track-IR with a webcam and see what you are missing out on.
Geb – very groovy browser automation: web testing, screen scraping and more
I find Jupyter great for the single-user use case, but I'm often frustrated with how it "breaks" with version control, when collaborating.
Show HN: TestingCatalog – Collection of android apps for beta testing
Also, state government is far less democratic. Very few people vote for their state legislators or know what they do, making it easier for a small, powerful group to control them. That's the main reason many political operators push for more power in state capitals, IMHO.
If there's a consensus on what's wrong with pentagon procurement, the bullet points are:
(1) no 'feasability feedback' mechanism to reject wishlist items that inflate complexity or delivery date,
(2) focus on 'joint procurement', i.e. one product that solves army / air force / navy problems, i.e. a flying submarine with wheels,
(3) lead times are too long for bespoke products (by the time it's delivered your needs have changed).

A-10 was built based on CAS lessons that had been learned the hard way in Nam, where helicopters had to take the place of fixed-wing airplanes that couldn't do the job. (meaning it was built to do one thing well). It wasn't a swiss-army knife.

If you believe that it's not practical to build a swiss-army knife aircraft, then you probably weren't surprised by the crappy fighters we turned out in the 90s and 00s. The head airplane designer on china's F-22 killer basically laughed when he was asked about the F-35, and said 'the best thing that ever happened to us was when the US decided to put VTOL in their main fighter -- and not even in all of them.' China could never afford to do that but arguably the US can't either. A post-IOC F-35C had its wings fall off (yes) and the pentagon lockheed liaison's explanation was 'the pilot was too heavy, we're looking into it'.

Even more interesting than the A-10 is the F-16; it was a backburner project at lockheed and the pentagon tried to shut it down because they didn't want it stealing any PR thunder from the bigger badder F-15. These days the F-16 is doing every job because it's cheap, easy to maintain, lots of people can fly them. Lockheed just shut down the line for these but the aftermarket is booming.
Honestly, "elif" is terrible! If you dare to use the "long" keywords such as "sizeof" and "alignof", please, use "elseif" at least! Or, in this case, what's wrong with "else if"? The single word makes sense for languages like Python.

Outside of ^^^, the language is beautiful. Thank you!
It would probably cost more to start up the A-10 lines again than finish up the F35. There's a lot of tribal knowledge that goes into building an airframe and most of it has been lost for the A-10. You'd pretty much have to start from scratch.
Wouldn't the Marines want the aircraft to be carrier-based, which the A-10 is not?
https://www.codenameone.com/ is the only answer here. It's been around the longest (longer than RoboVM) is mature and run by ex-Sun/Oracle guys so no complexities over the licensing issues with Oracle.

It's open source and has always been, supports all IDE's etc.
As a foreigner.. I don't get it. Is it all about pork/creating jobs in various states rather than over-all value to the country?
In a world with scarce resources, everybody competes. It is just who you compete with... Author attempts to say that the union is one group against management, while non-union compete against each other.

Another view is that white collar employees do there best for their employer--thus competing against the employers' competitors. The incentive for doing so is that a rising tide often raises all boats... (See e.g.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-rising-inequality-more-un...) This would lead you tho the conclusion that only an idiot competes within their own company.

Alas, as always, the truth is somewhere between the two extreme viewpoints.
Isn't the control latency a problem here? Firing a missile at a residence or car on the highway is one thing, but engaging an enemy who is engaging you back in a battlefield situation would seem to require that the pilot be experiencing and responding to the situation now, not a satellite roundtrip halfway around the world ago.
> personal theory

Yeah that's just your theory. I don't fit into any of those bullet points. My path to red pill started after being married to someone with severe depression and she could never be happy about anything. Since discovering red pill my wife is doing a lot more than just sleeping all day. Not ALL women act entitled, but geez the ones that do can seriously screw up your life if you don't take action. Just passively trying to meet her endless irrational needs never worked.
Your comment implies that using a Jupyter notebook is a programming crutch for those who are not skilled. That's far from the case; Jupyter notebooks allow for logical separation of code and output, which is important for comprehension.

It also allows for reproducibility of results, which is arguably even more important, especially in the data science case.
Is anyone else getting the following JSON for all requests to 1drv.ms?

{"error":{"code":"generalException","message":"General Exception While Processing"}}
She really didn't get it right. As others have pointed out, § 103 states:

(2) Ist die Tat öffentlich, in einer Versammlung oder durch Verbreiten von Schriften (§ 11 Abs. 3) begangen, so ist § 200 anzuwenden. Den Antrag auf Bekanntgabe der Verurteilung kann auch der Staatsanwalt stellen.

... which points out that the state can decide whether to prosecute or not. And Merkel is deciding to prosecute, which means that this man, even if the courts are on his side, is going to have no choice but to fight an absurd case for weeks if not months. So much for freedom of thought and expression, at least in this case.
Could one make the case that the liquidity this adds to the housing market justifies the tax savings?
Intel releases 58th edition of the Software Developer’s Manuals
I agree that "decentralize back to states" is no solution. States have, for the most part, shown themselves to be poor stewards of power. Achieving the right balance of power at each level is the challenge.
To be fair, author should stick "Great" in front of each region.
Huh? Your comments are completely ahistorical. The US federal government played a massive role in creating the states.

Examples include the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, massive Federal armed deployments against natives, the Mexican-American War, the Homestead Act. My brain is starting to break trying to fathom how completely and utterly ahistorical your assertions are. The article even makes explicit statements that contradict your claims.

Setting aside the historical facts, there's other problems with the blithe claim that "markets and states know best."

The primary fallacies in your proposal are that decentralized states will be (a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, (b)able to out-perform centralized economic decision-making of planners, (c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts state and local governments now.

See, that's the problem with your line of thinking - it rests entirely on the assumption that markets and smaller government units are always and everywhere better at decisions than centralized governments.

A more intelligent and balanced perspective would be that sometimes centralized decision-making makes sense and sometimes decentralized decision-making makes sense.

Can we please get past this puerile debate about centralized and decentralized decision-making? It's completely dependent on the context and requires deep thinking not comforting ideological platitudes.
martha mcsally of the arizona 2nd flew A-10s in kuwait and is the loudest voice in congress to keep them flying.
> Devolution of economic and political authority has been a model for success throughout history

I disagree. As examples, the U.S. didn't get going until the Articles of Confederation were replaced with the strong central government of the Constitution. Devolution of political power is what led to the Civil War, segregation, and now attempts to legally discriminate against gay citizens and deny votes to many more.

Devolution is generally advocated by people who don't like being democratically outvoted in the current arrangement.
the way in which notify/listen interacts with transactions is interesting; from the docs:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/sql-notify.html

"... if a NOTIFY is executed inside a transaction, the notify events are not delivered until and unless the transaction is committed. This is appropriate, since if the transaction is aborted, all the commands within it have had no effect, including NOTIFY.... Secondly, if a listening session receives a notification signal while it is within a transaction, the notification event will not be delivered to its connected client until just after the transaction is completed (either committed or aborted). Again, the reasoning is that if a notification were delivered within a transaction that was later aborted, one would want the notification to be undone somehow — but the server cannot "take back" a notification once it has sent it to the client. So notification events are only delivered between transactions."
> c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts the Congress now.

You seem to be operating under the belief this is harder than corrupting State and/or local governments.

Hint: It is easier, not harder.

> b) able to out-perform the decentralized economic decision-making mechanism of the market (prices),

Corruption is done via the marketplace at market prices within an ideological range the constituency will accept. I'm uncertain why you think that isn't market-based.

> a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit

If they were paid the market price to perform this function then, yes, they could do so. Nothing prevents that.

> Here's an alternate proposal: decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies. Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.

Corruption at the local level is pervasive, extensive, and frequently impossible to fight due to the fact the only people with the financial resources are the ones who bought the local government in the first place [or nonprofits who cover a greater area, such as the ACLU, and able to bring in out of area money to compete against the corruption].

If you think this is a recipe for reducing corruption, I suggest you get involved in local politics and try to support a minority candidate in a heavily white area. Hell, they'll do all sorts of legal [but shady] shit like hire a guy with the same name [different middle initial] and put them both on the ballot to split the vote. You only need to pull of a few percentage points of support this way to win in many situations.

> The fantasies of central planners never end.

The fantasies of people who think decentralization reduces corruption never end either.
Startup PR: How I got my product featured in Time, BI, etc with a $10 budget
And to make explicit an obvious fact, because of Prop 13, revaluations on homes are only made when it's resold. A person whose family has owned a house for decades has very little incentive to ever move on.
The Future of Wearable Contact Lenses
> In western countries it's almost unimaginable to not be able to rely on banks to store your money safely

My relative lost seven figures from Cypriot bank just a few years ago. In Greece bank will not allow you to withdraw money or transfer it to foreign country.
Realtek RTL8192EE was the default wifi card in T440s. It would have been clever to choose a configuration with an Intel wifi card, which was also available. The current model, T460s, comes with a Intel card by default.

The driver for the Realtek card may have improved by now:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1239578

Another solution is to buy a suitable Intel wifi card from ebay for $10-$20, open the laptop, and switch it in.
What Happens to Your Data When You Die
Also, those regulations provide freer markets - free from the distortions of corruption and abuse. They provide safer markets which attract more investors, because they feel they won't get cheated.
Worth mentioning Gnumeric, a nice and clean spreadsheet counterpart to AbiWord.
Show HN: WhitestormJS framework example
For a while I was hoping they meant wi-fi. We sure as hell need WPA3, with some decent security for a change (for example, preventing everyone who knows the key from snooping and injecting traffic or getting rid of this DEAUTH nonsense).
I think E.T. refers to alien. If he means from outside of Earth generally ... well that is tautological. So I assume he means aliens.
Redis also has these operations. See http://redis.io/topics/pubsub

Note that these simplistic operations (both in Redis and Postgres) don't handle many important parts of message passing (e.g. handling retransmission of failed messages, ensuring the application has processed the messages after receiving it, and so on).
But does the state level apparatus provide the best balance today?
In order for states to use their self-interest to diminish quality we have to ask "diminish relative to what"?

If your comparing the actual to some ideal then, of course, your always going to see a diminished quality. But that's just a tautology.

We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative.

Unfortunately, realistic alternatives almost always require trade offs with special interest groups. Sorry dude, that's just reality.

It's a simplistic analysis to compare something to an ideal optimum point and bemoan how far we've fallen from the ideal. But it's not terribly useful.
It helps okay. I recently used it to slowly and mostly automatically introduce more and more C++11 across a bigger code base. For example it does a great job introducing nullptr [0] and an okay job turning classic for loops into range based for loops [1] where possible.

[0] https://github.com/swift/swift/commit/eddd92ed76ae68cb1e2026...
[1] https://github.com/swift/swift/commit/3c560e31b0f168da917e8d...
I think I can summarize the OP thusly: "All economic and political powers should be in the service of the interests of big urban centers".

No thanks.
herbicides:
http://www.agbioforum.org/v15n3/v15n3a01-fernandez-cornejo.h...

pesticides:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Thank god we have this article from the New York Times to tell the rest of the country how we should be organizing ourselves.
IIRC, he wrote a lot of original NT code himself. But you're proposing a false dichotomy. The core NT team consisted of people who designed and architected their code, and then wrote it. A programming technique sadly rare in today's world!
> When you devolve power to a lower body, you are doing a form of central planning because you're determining what those lower bodies should be. So wee should do it right. That might mean that states aren't the only body to consider.

In software development, we've moved power from a Big Design Up Front (aka waterfall) planned by a few to a series of teams, each with core specialties, areas of control, and many degrees of freedom but still have interfaces, agreements, and goals to tie them all together.

It's because we know that the waterfall process can't have all the information up front, can't see all the risks and opportunities, and can only be as good as the experience and foresight (sometimes guessing) of the few in charge who also happen to be the furthest from the problem.

Why is it bizarre to consider a similar approach to a much more complex system?
True, but backup scripts that make use of rm -rf should have been really thoroughly tested, and contain a check that they are really only about to delete the thing they're supposed to delete.

Also, perhaps they shouldn't be running as root. There's no reason why any script should have permission to write everywhere. It just needs write access on the backup device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement most often called the Treaty of Key West in my readings.