skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to be clear in case I've given the wrong idea, my point here is not really to criticise Node in general. I'm just saying, with the benefit of hindsight of course, that it was not the ideal choice for that particular job. In particular, because of the hype around Node, I think the people making the decisions (including the developer who was working on it) honestly didn't expect that, and perhaps weren't sure how to proceed when the problems I mentioned started mounting up.

(Edit: That said, the difficulties with size, portability and dependency management in the Node ecosystem that were exposed by this particular project are more general flaws with that Node ecosystem and not specific to this particular developer.)

You got me curious about the application, by the way. If you let me know what it does, it might be fun to try and implement a prototype in node (with sane dependencies and easy to deploy on a RPi)

It really wasn't anything very complicated by database standards, just storing some settings in a central place. Those settings were a bit more complicated and inter-related in this case than you could conveniently store using something as simple as a plain text file, so a lightweight database was the next logical step. As mentioned before, it was the kind of thing where you could implement the basic infrastructure required within a few hours using more suitable tools.
You would also need to mod your homes HVAC system to pull in air from the outside so it can positively pressurize the house with filtered air as houses are very leaky[1], especially when doors are opened.

[1]: https://www.energycodes.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BE...
required reading on the topic:
http://www.amazon.com/California-Indians-Their-Environment-I...
Stan uses Markov chain Monte Carlo for inference. MCMC algorithms can do very well at approximating the high-dimensional integrals required to calculate the posterior; estimating 1000-dimensional distributions with MCMC methods is not unusual.
Really? All of my dev tools support scaling.
I use/recommend a ASUS PB278Q 27" at 2560x1440. It works quite well for coding.
Very familiar with the dev story and if new technologies on the dev side make it into production, it's yet another new technology that the ops team needs to support. I can't imagine the gazillion things that one might need to know as an ops person. There definitely needs to be a balance and a negotiation between dev and ops on what can be supported and whether these new shiny objects really make a material impact.
There is an O'Henry short story on this exact theme: "The Cop and the Anthem"
Older discussions:

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8701228

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455727
Click the 'web' button at the top of the page. It allowed me to read this article in full.
Feinstein-Burr, Encryption, and “The Rule of Law”
There is a theory by Hinton that the brain uses some variation of backprop for learning, and that it explains STDP.

However backprop is difficult to use on recurrent signals, as opposed to feed forward ones. I have been thinking about methods to train RNNs in real time. As opposed to saving every time step and iterating over it later.

It's a much more difficult problem because you lose the nice properties of backproping error signals over long time spans, and instead have to save any information that might be relevant in the future.

One idea to do that is autoencoders. They can be done recurrently, compressing the information from previous time steps into a single vector. But they don't work very well, or at least no one has figured out how to do it well. There's also HTM which is a totally different system inspired by models of the neocortex, but it also isn't as good as LSTM yet.
They compare the emissions of EVs vs ICE here: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green

TL;DR

Electric cars’ carbon emissions can vary from similar to average petrol cars to less than half those of the best petrol hybrids.
( http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions )

Right now, EVs in the US get the equivalent of ~40MPG when looking at emissions. So we're at 1987 Suzuki Forsa (39mpg combined) levels and not yet at 1986 Civic HF (46mpg combined) levels in the US. It also matters how much electricity you use. Driving 85mph in the left lane in a ~5300# Tesla X @0.24cd is surely using more power than a 1999 Honda Insight (1847# manual without AC, rated 61mpg highway, 0.25cd) or something driving in an attempt to "maximize range".

Our progress in these areas does not impress me greatly.

Here's US power generation by source:
Coal = 33%
Natural gas = 33%
Nuclear = 20%
Hydropower = 6%
Other renewables = 7%
Biomass = 1.6%
Geothermal = 0.4%
Solar = 0.6%
Wind = 4.7%
Petroleum = 1%
Other gases = <1%

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3

Solar at 0.6% (in 2015) is a drop in the bucket. Manufacturing solar panels also requires electricity and rare elements. It also causes more pollution. We moved silicon manufacturing out of the Bay for the most part a long time ago, and got left with some EPA superfund sites because of it: https://www3.epa.gov/region9/cleanup/california.html

Manufacturing lithium batteries is also pretty bad for the environment: http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-bat...

In 30 years or so, it'll undoubtedly be a different picture, but for now, I consider EVs mostly greenwashing and a great effort by savvy manufacturers to sell more cars, especially to folks concerned with the environment. I don't deny that it has the potential to relocate pollution somewhat, but if we keep filling up the air we breathe with toxic gasses, it won't matter too much in the end. We need to drive a lot less in general.
One doesn't need to be poor to experience "immediate and essential need for nourishment". I.e. you couldn't have time to eat breakfast, and you forgot to take your wallet with you.
I'm going to come back to the concrete on this, though. Do we have any reason to believe Italy is in this situation, though? We're not really arguing a hypothetical here. I readily concede the analysis might get more difficult in Somalia or in a war-torn area, but this is Italy. Is there really no other option for this person other than theft? Because I find that hard to believe.

Who cares about hypotheticals that don't apply to the current situation? Well, philosophers, sure, but it's a completely different question than what we're actually faced with here.
Awesome. It's great to see that things like the Fight For 15 movement and the anti-collusion lawsuit in tech are having an impact.

As wages and compensation rise, it'll also be an interesting natural experiment to measure how private R&D spending responds. Productivity growth has been historically low these past few years, and only as short a while ago as 2012 or 2013 private R&D as a percentage of GDP was, according to my google-fu, quite low, while now it's higher.

If companies and the government could somewhat coordinate to see that the working-class demand-side of the economy improves its condition while the public and private sector spend money on R&D to improve productivity, the economy could stand a chance of acting remotely healthy some year soon.
As one of these problem people myself, it's helpful to know that this is considered bad behavior. I'm not sure it should be though...

The thought process is that many times the barrier to adopting a better technology is just the time investment. So if you're sick of working with a problematic system, but the team doesn't have the time to fix it, fixing it away from work might remove that pain point from your life. And since often these projects begin and even end as just an experiment, there's not much reason to tell the team until you have something.

It doesn't really seem to have much of a downside - assuming you're just presenting whatever you come up with to the team later as an option, and not going crazy and replacing production systems without asking.
Much of the rest of the standard library. The compiler portion is a special case.
The cost of making a chip anybody wants to use is not $30,000, though. nVidia gets my money because their GPU technology is good enough to, at a reasonable price point, do absolutely anything I'm likely to encounter in the next 3-5 years. You're fighting against significant economies of scale as well as a significant technical deficit.

Don't get me wrong: it would be awesome if this existed. But I think that, like RISC-V, it's predicated on a heavy hitter getting something significant out of doing it. I'm not sure who will do that without the ROI in play.
The standard library.
> The basic problem with this approach is well understood: As the corpus of content on a given site grows, render time quickly approaches time between updates. In other words, you start waiting for renders to complete before you can change something else on the site.

Is this limit still likely (honest question)? Hugo seems to benchmark at around 1ms/page.

What sort of scale is common for large sites, what speed would need to be hit for this to become a problem that's simply irrelevant at even the largest scales?
I deserved that.

I have a great capacity to become an asshole when I'm being glib. I would like to add that there's nothing impressive with how well casual prejudice becomes internalized because that is literally the easiest and laziest thing a brain can do.
An auxiliary grid independent outlet is apparently becoming a feature on newer inverters:

http://www.sma-america.com/newsroom/current-news/news-detail...

A generator probably beats a lot of battery systems (which along with the right inverter and a transfer switch is another way to use the solar for backup power).
Jet-Powered Hoverboard Sets New World Record
LemonStand raises $1.25M for its eCommerce platform focused on web designers
The concern runs deeper than this. You can go off grid with solar for minimal additional costs, so they fear people will simply disconnect from the grid. Couple this with for profit electric company's and bribing/lobbying is the 'solution'.
> THE HERMIT

> [...]

> NOSTALGIA JUNKIE

> [...]

> TREND CHASER

> [...]

If you enjoy this sort of "laundry list of named stereotypes" format, you might like "Academic Programmers: A Spotter's Guide":

http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/academic.html [1997]

It's got more of them and they are funnier.
Sorry, that was a bit incoherent; I was nearly asleep when I wrote it. Probably better to say that I'm pushing back against a pervasive notion that "you have to move to the USA if you want to succeed".
A farmer may not have to advertise his wheat to consumers, but he still needs the stores to know about him if he's going to sell anything. I'm not a farmer, but I would imagine this would mean advertising or doing direct sales with stores. Also there is such a thing as commodity advertising. :)

Nobody really wants their product to be a commodity though, as that means low margins. Fortunately, software products tend to be complex enough that even if there are generic product categories (e.g. "email service provider"), there are still ways to stand out. Even the "pub/sub service" market has quite some variety.
Yea, those people need to learn to work on their own stuff. I do so much of my own/oss work at work and am surprised at how everyone has always said I'm doing great and my stuff is always out faster and more tested than everyone else.

..expectations are low, and there's value in keeping it that way! :)

(all my favoruite stuff has been stuff I've worked on for myself, that doesn't earn any money. I find almost all of it more worthwhile than any of the technical entrenched garbage I've written in the corporate world for the past decade of my life)
[Update: It’s back] WhatsApp is blocked in Brazil for its 100m local users
I have the same with Twitter's web interface every time I land there to follow some conversation.
> In those times many viewed the lower classes and other nationalities as somehow less human than themselves.

Just look at the current migration issues (I refuse to call it a "crisis" or "problem", as that dehumanizes the refugees) in Europe. These times are (no longer) past, they resurface right now with all the ugliness.

Especially Eastern Europe, where millions of people fled the Sowjet bloc and were accepted by Western Europe, now refuses to aid others. It's sick.
> And there's the rub. Even if we could make 500lb all-tenderloin cattle you wouldn't see people buying hundreds of pounds of beef tenderloin for themselves every day.

First off, we can't make an all tenderloin cow. And second, that's the problem! If filet cost 1/4 of what it did now consumption might go up 100x. And obviously, it can't. But people would try. Until the price went up enough that the market for tenderloin started to clear again. But people have this extra money, right? So they can afford to spend more on hamburger. Congrats, we've raised prices!
iOS 9.4 Cydia Download Using TaiG Jailbreak Update Variants – iOS Jailbreak
Google given access to an estimated 1.6 million NHS patient records
England has something called Local Housing Allowance.

This sets the maximum rate that a local authority will pay as Housing Benefit for various types of property.

I have no idea if there's a central list of all the LHAs across England, or if you'd have to scrape all those sites yourself. But it would be useful information to have.

Here's the rates for Cheltenham: http://www.cheltenham.gov.uk/info/200008/benefits/565/local_...
Delivering the next generation of digital government
What duress are you talking about? No one in the EU or the US will actually die if they don't take some crappy job.

These people are free to live in a tent and dive into trashcans for food if they don't like to work, which isn't nice but this certainly isn't death! It's just a crappy lifestyle.

It's just they don't want to live in a tent and they want to have a smartphone, a car and enjoy all the things that the working population enjoys.
Thanks for the comment, I understand the problem, but honestly I think you can just have a distributed database with Paxos/Raft and some code in the machines, and that's it.
And it's OK! Just that it's not a blockchain, and calling it that way creates this crazy confusion we're embedded in.
Thank you, interesting. I am curious because I've gone the other direction. I began in the latter 1980s on the IBM PC (literally with IBM). At IBM they gave us a PC, a copy of the Technical Reference Manuals, and a screwdriver. It was really fun to learn the machine literally from the metal upwards. Beyond the screwdriver was Macro Assembler and a C compiler. Avoiding reminiscence, the point is that over the ensuing years my career took me further and further up the stack into software only, from end-user applications to a long time in the server "backend" space. During those years I became ever decreasingly aware of the hardware and internals of the OS. Machines themselves became "virtual instances". Thus is the modern world of highly scalable, distributed 'net and [dread] enterprise computing, and it's all great and exciting in many ways -- but, for me I also felt that my heart was happiest when thinking of things at the lower level. That drove playing with embedded systems, which led ultimately to a complete career shift. All is good. And, yes, we are all so very fortunate to be in an economic segment (technology, hardware and software) that allows us such freedom to choose our paths (and then change them).
Sorry for the noob question, but how do you ensure a Debian installation is always updated with the latest security patches? Do you just run `apt-get upgrade` everyday? Isn't there a risk of breaking things?
Ah the fixed-pie fallacy... A foundational pillar for so much of today's political rhetoric (on the right and left).
This link has a better video

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/2/11564304/flyboard-air-video...
Don't tell me you're not a designer
Enterprise companies don't want to buy software. They want to buy a solution to a problem that they have. In addition to software, they need someone to call upon whenever there are any issues. They also need support in terms of integrating software into their existing stack without red flagging compliance, finance and other departments who have a say in the technology stack. Price is a non-issue for enterprise companies - what they want is a reliable business partner.
Lol. I thought they've had money all this time and not spent it on stuff that works. Meanwhile, LibreSSL did more in a few weeks for their code quality than its owners did in a year. Why would I give them money expecting something different?

The right course, if we're talking Galois, is for them to try to ask Galois to donate some time or tooling to improve critical aspects of a widespread-deployed library. They already make money with grants and stuff for code they often open-source. They might even find thr deliverables useful for them. So OpenSSL team can feel free to give them a call.
It bears certain similarities to multiple dispatch, as if a case statement was an inlined multiple-dispatch function, but I'd say that much as objects can theoretically be implemented with closures and closures can theoretically be implemented with objects but I don't think they're best thought of as the "same thing", polymorphism and various dispatch techniques aren't really the same thing as pattern matching.

My real point here is use what you've got; trying to use object polymorphism in Haskell would be as big a mistake there as trying to naively jam pattern matching into Go. Stick to the native idioms as much as possible. While I agree that Go's native idioms are limiting compared to some other languages I also think a lot of people grossly overestimate the limitations.
> It doesn't really seem to have much of a downside - assuming you're just presenting whatever you come up with to the team later as an option, and not going crazy and replacing production systems without asking.

That's a big if. The fear is that such a person doesn't have the judgment to not be the type of person who goes into personal-overdrive into making unfeasible changes (or, worse, into bikeshedding). It doesn't mean that such a person is a horrible person, just that opening lines of communication should be a priority, rather than letting that person put themselves in a position of difficulty.
Be careful with malware ads on Google Search. This happens fairly regularly, and in some cases can mean a direct loss of money, e.g. if you search for 'blockchain', instead of the online Bitcoin wallet showing up, Google ads often points to a malware that is a phishing site and occasionally people fall for it and lose all their Bitcoins [1]. This has been going on for a long time [2][3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27j1gd/i_had_53_bt...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pm4tx/blockchaini...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4e99po/blokchalini...
I'd like to note that all the issues you encountered are because newer versions of Go have exposed issues in your application code and dependencies (with the possible exception of the new cgo pointer passing restrictions).
Seems to be a confusing article and site. It lists AR as a disruptor, but mentions Google Glass and not Hololens. The link to "Augmented Reality" links to an article about VR. Then it says that cloud computing is a threat to the textbook, where most textbooks can happily sit on an SD drive. And then "multi-touch LCD" is a disruptor? Seriously?
Introducing docs.Microsoft.com
Can't agree with this strongly enough.

At Schwab I'm using 31 characters randomly generated by LastPass for a login name but they limit things to 8 characters for a password.

Absolutely crazy. Even if they are not having problems, why should customers like us have to worry about it?
Watman by Gary Bernhardt
>The destruction of your enemy in war with the goal of ending the war and saving the lives of your countrymen and allies is always justified.

The ends can't always justify the means - that rationale can easily be twisted to allow anything.

The US wanted to use nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War as well. Had this happened, the use of nuclear weapons in combat would probably have been normalized, and the Cold War would probably not have remained cold for very long.

As far as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are concerned, I'm not going to second guess what the American or Japanese forces considered to be in their best interests. In hindsight, we know more than they knew back then about the larger political picture and the effects of radioactive fallout.

Given the possibility of years of grueling island-hopping invasion against an enemy as ardently defiant as Japan, I can see the brutal calculus that simply breaking Japan's will and forcing its surrender quickly through a demonstration of overwhelming destructive power would save more lives in the long run.

But even that doesn't make it good that the US dropped the atomic bombs. It was possibly just an evil act which may have prevented a greater evil.
> which actual third world countries seem to still have serious problems with.

If you're comparing the US to actual third world countries, you've already lost.
You can get a QNIX QX2710 IPS 1440p for ~$200 on eBay. Do pay attention to connectors - presumably with a laptop you want one of the versions with HDMI or DisplayPort inputs, not the DVI-only variants. It has a PWM backlight, other versions have DC backlights (Check out the Crossover 2795QHD) but you are stepping up closer to $300 at which point you are competing with options like a refurbished Acer XB270HU or XG270HU 144hz/gsync monitor.

28" TN 4K monitors are regularly going for ~$300 nowadays. Again, Crossover makes a few here, the 288K and 289K. If you want IPS, keep an eye on the Dell Outlet for a P2715Q. They tend to run a lot of 35-40% off coupons for monitors, you can get one for under $350 if the timing works out. You will need DP 1.2 to drive 4K@60hz - HDMI 2.0 doesn't have any significant market penetration yet.

The Koreans basically make all the panels that go into monitors, and they take the ones that failed QC for whatever reasons and sell them cheaply though channels like eBay. You may have to put up with a few dead pixels but you can get a great IPS 27" monitor for the price of an average whatever. Don't bother getting the "pixel perfect" warranty unless you are OK paying to mail it back to Korea for replacement.
A great book on Shannon's work and other things is "Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street". Easy and entertaining to read, as are all William Poundstone books.

http://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Formula-Scientific-Betting-Ca...
Another possibility is to look at the compensation for upper management. C-level officers are usually paid in stock as well as cash, but the staff reporting directly to them are salaried employees.

If you actually look at the graph (presented in the same article) it does not look like "the trend is reversing" at all. It rather looks like a very clear downwards trend with a strong cyclic component. So, when the times are good, the salaried bosses might just be handing out productivity bonuses to their reports, and passing the bill to the shareholders.
I recommend reading Gleick's book in conjunction with Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman" and Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators". Gleick's work is deeper than the other two, but the three books combine to form a fascinating picture of how humans have shaped - and been shaped by - information theory over the last ~150 years.