skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure it's warranted to call him a rich little snob. I read this article and one that it linked to, and it seems like he worked hard earning and saving money to build the collection. Maybe his parents are rich and are really the ones funding this but I didn't see anything to back that up.
No. There won't be more "information economy jobs". You need to index the work week, wages, and entitlements to productivity. As less labor is required, we ask less of labor and pay it more for what work it does do.
There are satellite that use the STT system almost entirely independently of all other systems. Particularly ones that need to remain in a certain orientation for 100% of their service life, such as geostationary telecom and weather satellites that orbit along the equator and are always aimed towards the visible hemisphere of earth. On those, the directional hemisphere and spot beam antennas are fixed in place (or can only move a few degrees motion at best, such as Ku band spot beam antennas), relying on the body orientation of the satellite to service a certain area of the visible hemisphere.

Satellites are designed to go into "safe mode" if certain fault protection events happen, or the multiply redundant control systems/onboard computers don't agree with each other. Safe mode usually means shutting down all nonessential electrical loads and trying to orient themselves so that solar panels receive the greatest amount of charge, while listening for command and control data on their omni (L and S band) TT&C antennas.

With this event it sounds like something REALLY went wrong since not only did the satellite try to correct a nonexistant wrong orientation via its reaction wheels (reaction wheels are not nearly as powerful in real life as they are in kerbal space program), it then decided to start expending propellant and spun itself up to such a RPM of revolutions that it tore off its own solar panels, and anything else that would be vulnerable to high centrifugal G forces. Automated code that expends propellant is usually checked much more carefully than this, since the amount of propellant is fixed and non renewable, usually the primary constraint on the total service life of the satellite. Most satellites run out of stationkeeping/orientation propellant (or propellant for ion engine delta-V changes) long before their multiply redundant solar/charge controller/battery/computer control systems fail.
I'd argue the opposite: software quality is generally about as low as it can possibly be while having any value at all. I do my best to interact with as small a quantity of it as I can manage, since it generally frustrates me so much that my life is better if I continue to do most things manually.

A couple decades of work on compilers, dev tools, drivers, firmware, and other sorts of system software may have warped my perceptions somewhat.

(Edit: I don't say that to pretend some kind of superiority; my code is just as buggy as everyone else's. I've just had many occasions to dig around in other people's code and figure out why it stopped working, after we tried to change something that shouldn't have affected it. Hardware, too, you can't trust that either.)
Some of those sites have good information that you'll miss out on.

I think there's an even simpler and more realistic solution: someone needs to make a Chrome extension that is like uBlock Origin, but unblockable.

It should be:

* an adblocker that also blocks tracking scripts

* ...with no "acceptable ads" whitelist like Adblock Plus

* ...open source

* ...with workarounds for ad-blocker-blockers

Here's how I think we can do that: we maintain a list of domains that are using ad-blocker-blockers, and for those, rather than blocking ads at the HTTP request level, the user agent loads them and simply doesn't display them.

In principle, you can do this in a way that is completely undetectable by the site owner. There doesn't need to be an "arms race" between ad-blocker-blockers and the workaround developers--you simply win outright by having DOM look exactly the same as if it had ads, but rendering, say, a box with a tasteful light grey smiley face instead of the ad. (You can even make it so that canvas.getPixelData returns the ad that the page thinks it drew, but the actual screen output doesn't show it.)

At that point, sites are actually incentivized to stop using ad-blocker-blockers, because the only difference they'll make is that site will load slower, since the user agent has to load and pretend to display all those extra resources. The user never actually sees the ads either way.

--

For extra credit, this hypothetical browser extension can also simulate a click on YouTube's "Skip This Ad" button as soon as it appears, etc.

You could even keep per-domain blacklists of bloat resources and simply not load those. That would make the internet feel a lot faster. A user with this extension would visit The Verge and instead of getting a janky 5 megabyte page load, they'd get a near-instant load with just the text and images.

Finally, this extension could keep a mapping of desktop sites to auto-redirect to the lightweight mobile equivalent, with a body{max-width:800px} thrown in to keep things readable.

I know I'd install this hypothetical extension immediately and never go back.
The Left's Delayed Reckoning
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=neo4j+import+csv
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=neo4j+visualization+tools
What's the hardware compatibility like? If you're open to it, there is a market for something that will boot with the bare minimum non-specialized generic drivers on all hardware into a shell or some form of UI.
Your eyes adapt, though. Compare the shadow patches on the right side versus the shadow patches on the left. The left side is much clearer in the light patches, but the right is more consistent overall (supporting what cauterized says above about shadows).

Another sleeper issue with rapidly changing light and dark patches is that if you manage to get them to flicker around 10-14Hz (driving through light+dark patches), you're going to provoke the occasional photoresponsive epileptic seizure. This has been seen in some roads in France where the trees were spaced in such a way that when the sun is low in the sky, it creates such a flicker. I don't know what the rate would be for driving along that road at a normal rate, but I'd be curious to find out. If it's a relatively short road, it would be unlikely to flicker long enough to provoke a seizure, even in the right frequency ranges.
Recent Graduate from McGill University with a B.Eng in Computer Engineering. I am interested in working with C, C++, and Python. I want to work for a company that will invest in me and help to develop my engineering and software skills. Preferably looking for a back-end position or a position that integrates closely with hardware. I can also do digital design work, and have experience with VHDL.

Location: NYC, Northern New Jersey

Remote: Depends on the job

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: C, Python, Java, GIT, VHDL. Getting to know C++

Resume: http://tinyurl.com/zzmc5hy (Please email me for soft-copy)

Email: scarter1293 at gmail dot com

https://github.com/scarter93
One of the funniest and free productivity app
> after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of SQL

Did you not research this beforehand?
Ambiences for your home & office.
The system is actively malicious - maybe not in the sense that it goes out of its way to be evil, but definitely in a sense that it's not a static system. It's not like gravity that always points you down and that you can learn to work around; it's constantly adapting, evolving and adjusting to be more effective at exploiting your weak sides. When we invented aeroplanes, the force of gravity did not suddenly triple. But marketing does react to people learning to work around its influence.

> I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.

Sure, in many cases it is true, and in some cases the product in fact has a lot of valuable properties and marketing may do a fair work of informing about them. But more often than not it is not the case.

My experience of working alongside marketing people (as a programmer who got transferred to a sales&marketing company) is that quite often they tune out the "irrelevant" issues like "is this product actually useful at all?" and focus on technicalities - on how to get people to buy it. So they may expound various features of the product and construct elaborate use cases, while conveniently ignoring that compared to the competition, the product is crap, or that the whole product idea is something the customer is better off staying away from.

(Oh and BTW, the amount of bullshiting I saw in social media marketing is beyond belief; I think I'll have to write a post about it one day. My experiences led me to believe that a lot of business happening in Internet marketing is people who understand absolutely nothing about maths & statistics using complex tools to bullshit themselves as well as their customers, who don't understand squat about statistics either, so the money flows, everyone is happy, but nothing of actual substance is happening for anyone.)

> I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.

Yeah, I understand. It's something you have to engage in - because everyone else does too, and those who refrain from it get outcompeted by those who don't. Personally, I value what you call "finesse and decency", as well as honesty, and try to gravitate towards people and companies not afraid to tell me their product may not be a best fit for my current use case.
Currently it is because a large part of the Republican party consists of what we call the "religious right", a group that seeks to make political change based on what they believe to be religious truth, or morality. Ted Cruz was the arbiter of this ideology in the Republican primaries, until he dropped out last week. While this group does not represent the entire party, they are definitely the most vocal, and many liberals conflate that group with the rest of the party as a whole. This belief is not helped by the fact that many "core" republican platforms come from religious conservatives, like outlawing gay marriage and abortion.

Many people who belong to the academic community consider these people to be a bunch of uneducated backwater hicks who do not belong in intellectual conversations based on logical thought. So when an intellectual states that they are an evangelical christian, many consider them to be flawed in some capacity, and thus have nothing of substance to contribute.

EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible; in that the world was created in literally seven days, and that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, a story which in its literal translation is of course not supported by science. So when a person who professes to follow science also professes to be a member of this faith, it can seem paradoxical to many.
Drop the comma and it could very well be correct.
This seems to be part of a wider campaign by a Twitter user going by @tehBVM
It's also helpful to have exterior LEDs that can change color on demand; for example, there are regulations in Florida on the coast as to what color lights you can use due to sea turtle nesting behaviors, but their nesting/mating is seasonal (and short window of time).
They re-ran their analysis after post positions came out, but they didn't really have a big impact this year, since none of the top contenders had particularly unfavorable gates.
I guess nobody ever solved a crime before the iPhone was invented.
I was a bit pissed at the shiny marketing talk about dynamically generated programs. I wonder how new this is really or if it's just a way to appear fancy by hiding behind USPTO curtains.
6 years industry, 5 years prior to that doing academic development & grad school (M.S.C.S); now as a SWE in a SRE team. Hobbyist for > 15 years.

I'd have started and finished at the same university; moved to SF in 2005 immediately post-graduation; generally I would have taken on more risk. This would have essentially allowed me to semi-retire by now.
It would be really awesome if you could provide a quick and easy way to test it. If this is really so small one possibility would be to port to run on one of the many JavaScript machine emulators like:

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

It would let you try the OS in the browser.
N4JS, JavaScript with sound types and an IDE
Also one thing to add here is that the client libraries are a lot of the work and you can use the snowplow js/ios/python etc.. no matter what server-side setup you use. I like to think of snowplow as pushing the open-source analytics standard and then hopefully an ecosystem of server-side products grows around that, led by their own product.

We're doing something as dumb as using logs from cloud storage and parsing those with a ~100 line python script into a DB. S3/GCS deal with the collector uptime and as long as you aren't time-sensitive it is a great solution.

The biggest issue with self-hosted analytics is visualizing/sharing the results with non-tech parts of the team. Piwik has some advantages here because it's closer to Google Analytics or Mixpanel than to a DB of event rows...
Given these things are apparently generating millions in revenue for crooks, it isn't too surprising to see the lengths they will go to to build them. I wonder if anyone is pursuing the manufacturers of the hardware.

Maybe the singularity is when technology makes it impossible to do anything any more because either nobody knows how it really works and can't fix it, or anyone can subvert it to hurt you.
It depends on what you are looking to achieve.

If you take a look to e.g. McSema https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema, these guys have been able to use LLVM to transform assembly back to LLVM intermediate representation (IR). The IR is an abstract language used by LLVM during compilation to optimize the generated code. Being abstract basically allows to use optimizers across all LLVM supported architectures.

In these terms, I think LLVM has a clear advantage over competitors.

The following blog post give a nice overview of the McSema achievements: http://blog.trailofbits.com/2014/06/23/a-preview-of-mcsema/
> Only grip I have is calling Linux anti-security and anti-privacy given how much good work in those used the platform. Gotta be a kernel by kernel and distro by distro judgment on that.

That caught my eye as well; lumping Linux in with Windows or even OSX is insulting in the extreme on the privacy front and only slightly less on the security front. To be sure, the focus on many Linux distros is not security at the forefront, and there are some that you definitely shouldn't trust if you're paranoid (those that use binary only kernel modules), but just being on Linux is a step in the right direction if you value privacy, freedom and security. Hell, can someone tell me if it's dead simple to install OpenBSD with full disk encryption? Debian has offered this for quite some time, and it's why I wipe and re-install even pre-installed Linux systems with it.
Yes, I can see how this can be interpreted as that but I don't see any evidence of this in the report. All it says is, some un-named higher up sometimes made the call of what to show and what to not? Based on what? Liberal talking points or carefully measured clickbait titles that had previously led to more user engagement. Given their recent earnings report, what is more likely?
I've run into a case where we model an ID as a number, then added a partner that uses alphanumeric IDs.

But I'm still pro-types, and think they solve way more problems than they cause.
Cos your Redis will never go down? Or need to be upgraded? Patched?
You almost certainly want Postgres, unless you have a compelling, specific use case to use a database optimised for a specific workload, or for some reason Postgres isn't usable in your specific environment. It's a reliable, well-designed general-purpose RDBMS which will scale up pretty well to cope with fairly large workloads; performance and latency will not be problems with a sensible schema.

VoltDB, as an example, is very different: it seems to be designed for simple OLTP workloads. It's an in-memory database, which offers opportunities for impressive performance, but if you have a large amount of data, you'll need a large amount of memory. And horizontal scaling is cool, but cross-partition operations will incur significant overhead

(IANAL, but the AGPL requires network users of software be able to download the source. Since a presumably proprietary application is the client in this case, this isn't likely to be an issue.)
> Would it be possible to dynamically choose the padding at server start time?

I doubt it. Allowing the compiler to generate accesses with lea et al. is quite beneficial; and that'd likely be gone by making this not be a compile time constant.

It'd also end up being a tuning knob very very few knew how to tune...

> Given that cache line sizes vary that seems like it might be a prudent choice.

They usually only vary between architectures. Netburst IIRC was the last time x86 cache line sizes varied. If there's any doubt it's usually ok to just use the higher (128 byte) line size, the "unused" padding cache-line will never be accessed and thus not occupy cache space.
Companies don't merely produce products, they also produce culture. And in fact, that's mostly what they sell. CocaCola isn't going to put their product in white cans that say "sugar drink" on them are they? Nobody would buy it.
Dear YouTube: An Open Letter from Irving Azoff
In the long run we're all at the next startup.
The base cost for a rack is about $85/mo. Convox is extremely cost effective for small businesses and up, but would be expensive for running a single, low-traffic hobby app.
I hope you're going to push your ~200 back to the project! Would love to see it free of the AWS dependency.
Buy Google at $375 – Because the Stock Is Headed for a Decline (4/21/14)
I wasn't aware of that book, thanks for the title! Sorry for the late reply.
The way I read it, the bug is something like this:

There are three components, one is a Controller which goes out into the world and calculates how we're oriented, the second is basically just a Model in the MVC sense (the IRU). The first Controller has a responsibility to update the Model with whatever it finds out.

The third component is a separate part of the IRU which is essentially both a view on the model (where am I pointed, where am I supposed to be pointed?) combined with a controller which fires some thrusters to try to point you in the right direction.

The problem was that the first component wasn't updating the model. Therefore the second component set "fireThruster1: true," but then never got any information that it was approaching the right direction -- therefore kept that variable set.

The thruster continuously fired, spinning the satellite around and around until it was ripped apart by centrifugal forces.
Statistical model of Eurovision 2016
Kind of. The really high efficiency LEDs are blue. The problem is with the efficiency of green LEDs.

I suppose you could just use red and yellow LEDs and completely solve the circadian light problem. I think that such streetlights would be hard to sell.
Interesting. Have you used this?
Why do you object to self-hosted analytics? I understand blocking centralized trackers (I do so myself), but self-hosted doesn't seem problematic in the same way GA being present on half the pages on the Internet is.

It also strikes me as an unwinnable battle for all but the largest sites.
I know this was a science and LEO (low earth orbit) satellite, but here's something to consider when thinking about the difficulties of engineering hardware & software to work together in a satellite.

Geostationary telecom (and weather, and SIGINT, etc) satellites: In the entire history of manned spaceflight no human has ever visited geostationary orbit. Once placed in a geostationary transfer orbit (about 450 x 36,000 km) and then onwards to final geostationary orbit, nobody will ever see a satellite again. The largest ones weigh 6000 kilograms and are the size of greyhound buses. They're out there right now operating with multiply-redundant everything and cost $150 million to build and launch. It is highly unlikely that any time in the next 25 years any human will ever visit one in person or touch one. When a satellite is encapsulated in its fairing/shroud for launch that is the last time anyone will ever see it until its ultimate end of life in hopefully 15 years. Every one of its control systems needs to be so thoroughly debugged and multiply redundant that it can operate out there with absolutely zero chance of repair or parts replacement.
The actual article link is http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...
>> whitewashing of Viet Kong atrocities and Cambodian genocide back in the 70s.

He's done nothing of the sort. He was suspicious of the official account of the Kambodian genocide and he had good reason to be suspicious of that account. It turned out it was true, and he admitted it.

>> The side these are applied to is of course 'the evil West'.

Duh. The West is evil. You don't realise it because you're in the West and you don't live in fear of hellfire missiles from a clear blue sky or a mechanised army rolling over your village. But the rest of the world knows it very well.
Saw The Big Short movie--does the book go into much more realistic (ie. non-Hollywood) technical detail?

Will check out Margin Call.

What about outside of huge industry shifts like The Big Short portrayed? I'm most interested in how this plays out in the day-to-day when there isn't a huge industry-wide scandal at play.
On Compelling (or at Least Different) Job Descriptions
I don't know about the grandparent, but I'd imagine anyone interested in using something QNX (http://www.qnx.com/products/neutrino-rtos/neutrino-rtos.html) would be interested in Minoca, if it became a real alternative for a RTOS.

It'd be interesting to see more information about licensing for Minoca, as I could see it as an interesting alternative for small projects on the RaspberryPI.
Time Warner Cable Outage in New York City
Put Rabbit or Kafka in front of MySQL then?
If it was so easy to win this bet, why did BING (with billions behind them) blow it. They got one horse right out of four, and they did that by processing all the available information. It's easy to say a pick was easy after the fact.
If the malware was created by and distributed by the site hosts, that might be a reasonable argument.

But of course, it isn't. In fact, there is no way the site owner can guarantee to avoid the indirect distribution of malware without ceasing all use of third party resources on their site.

Given the usefulness of third party resources (not just ad networks) and the relative rarity of malware being distributed through those channels, I don't think the argument that the only decent choice is to eschew all the third party functionality of the modern web is reasonable here.
Ethics and laws are distinct, legally.

You are required to follow the law
You are not required to follow ethics, though it is generally advisable