skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi guys!
Some weeks ago I announced the plotti.co microservice - the easiest way to embed web live plots with the simplest API, here comes the second part of the service and the full story behind it.

I am announcing the Plottico Tracker Pro chrome extension - its purpose is to track values on websites or SaaS services and send the updates to plotti.co. Think of it as a specialized web scraping product - built for monitoring and controlling processes only. You can directly track data from like google analytics, cloudflare stats, your hosting provider, or almost any other public or password-protected web application. Finally, no code at all is required to plot my server CPU load and data caps as my VPS provider admin panel shows it.

So what is plottico?
Plottico is the way we win the fight against machines.

Guys, we are facing the potential existential risk from artificial intelligence, no joke! Last year we saw a growing serious concern about safety of intelligent systems with some great names like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk joining the efforts to draw attention to the problem. A few months ago I watched a Davos’16 conference panel on the state of Artificial Intelligence. Man, they had it almost the top topic for the whole panel!

So, I came up with this idea last summer but it crystallized only a few weeks ago: no matter how much everything is intelligent and automated - the final decision is still made by humans. It is us, who benefit from all the systems and machines and I want to make sure I have control over it. And how do you control something if a single person can no longer understand how the whole system works? How do you make sure everything is going right?

That is why NASA has its famous control room with all the key telemetry in one place, so do the nuclear plants, large factories, even subways and VISA has its control room. This is the idea behind plottico: to provide an easy way to monitor activities all over the scattered systems and subsystems, either for science, business, hobby or personal life.

And I take a strict approach: when everything is going in the direction of making the APIs and software more complex, plottico’s mission is to continuously make a simpler, cleaner product, with interfaces and code that are more comprehensible by humans having either technical or non-technical background.

So here is the tool that helps to monitor data from any source accessible from the web.

To make tracking more robust, I’ve implemented what I called the “entropy window selector” - it is a selector based on sift4 string-difference algorithm and aims to detect the correct textnode with tracked number even if it changes its position, IDs or CSS path.

And of course the extension is GPL, and as usual is an early beta - so feel free to throw tomatoes at me, I am prepared with a bug tracker :)

Currently I am looking for an investor and a team of civilian volunteers who are not afraid to take this fight with machines face-to-face. Human intelligence strikes back!
Sarcasm? Handling brush can give you a nasty rash regardless. Some types can literally cause your skin to fall off if you're strongly allergic.
Roland Griffiths at John's Hopkins is trying to do proper research on psilocybin, i.e. with control groups. Although it's kind of hard since the effects of psilocybin are rather noticeable.

http://www.tedmed.com/speakers/show?id=526372

Just in case anyone here hasn't already seen this:
https://xkcd.com/1462/
The analysis I read, back when the Hyperloop proposal was released, took this into account and still found Musks's cost reductions versus HSR were so profound as to suggest major changes for all of civil engineering.
A thermostat in a house will have a setting.

Similarly, if it is in your nature (your setting) to be pleasant even when feeling slight emotional strain, you will try to be pleasant. If it is in your nature to let it all hang out, you will let it all hang out.

I'm not necessarily supporting the idea that "there is no free will", but pointing out that it might be a nervous poodle's setting to bite me when I visit my friend. And it might be in my nature to throw it out the window without thinking when bit.

You see this in discussions where people talk about being to choose tea (which they don't prefer) over coffee (which they do prefer) in order to demonstrate their free will. Well, yeah - I guess. But if you're the kind of person who is designed to think it important to demonstrate your free will at the coffee shop, it's in your nature to take your disfavored beverage just to prove your point. Because that's how you are wired.
And it really is more of a measurement device than a detector. The car is there one way or another, it's measuring the speed of it.

Maybe a "Linux Speed Measurer" however that starts to sound like it's related to measuring the speed of your OS.

Maybe "Linux-based External Object Speed Measurer"
What indication was given that there was reasonable suspicion that the laptop was stolen?
Why doesn't my laptop battery last 10X longer? Why doesn't my favorite IPA has 1/10th the calories? Can't Elon Musk fix those things first?
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

(didn't dig too far into this but..) why y'all need to patent this then?

Patents can be beneficial to facilitate constructive competition, but think humanity is best served by neural nets becoming the new electricity rather than the new Apple-esque walled-garden...
>Perhaps no people on earth remain more genuinely isolated than the Sentinelese, one of the few un-contacted people in the world, who have lived in the North Sentinel Islands of the Andamans for last estimated 60,000 years shunning any contact with the outside world.

I took this to mean they've been isolated at least in terms of not having genes cross over.
Yev from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Brian said.

A lot of our customers also restore just for fun or out of convenience. But yea, if you're one of the ones that's doing it out of necessity after a crash or theft, knowing how it works makes everything go a lot smoother.
Is there any motivated, driven person without any form of agenda?

It seems like a norm of human nature.
Useless in court but might get a cop to put down their donuts and come look-see.

If you want to get them to slow down, buy a radar gun off ebay and put it on some kind of timer to randomly turn it on and off a few times per minute, pointed at your street.
Reasonable doubt is not defined in terms of statistical confidence.
I would love to have a contact lens that projected information about the people around me onto my retina. Serious question - what's dystopian about that? I realize there's often a fine line between utopian and dystopian and for me, facial recognition (especially as my vision deteriorates) seems solidly on the utopian side of the line.
Europe's busiest express train line seems to be LGV Paris-Lyon, with a peak scheduled capacity of 13 TGV trains per hour. Given that a TGV duplex fits 545 passengers, we are above 7000 per hour. Now couple two TGVs together, and you'll be well above.

Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and neither of the respective articles on the train itself have capacity information, even though the TGV duplex was introduced for this very reason.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud-Est
This is great advice, all I would add is a close friend or two to share the experience with.
>Never fear, the Daily Mail will surely make a call to oust the Monarchy on this basis..

On this basis? The year being 2016, and those being "blue blooded" privileged rulers is not enough?
Well, obviously they want to keep the hype alive. So it’s understandable that they’d refuse to change the name.

Sadly, this also means we have a lot of people think this is something revolutionary, although I guess that’s intentional.

It’s really annoying when you consider how the US refused a proposal from japanese companies a few years ago to build a MagLev system between Boston, NY, Washington, with capacities around 10k people per hour.
Hmm - I looked at this episode one point about 8-9 years ago, and looked at some sources that came to light after the 9/11 report, and came to a different conclusion. When I get a chance, I'll give it a closer look.
Brian from Backblaze here. This Google study is EXCELLENT and extremely useful, but it leaves off the drive model numbers and manufacturers which means you cannot use it to help guide purchasing decisions.

It's still an awesome study and well worth reading and useful to a ton of people (like us at Backblaze when we were starting out).
> ... entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough...

I don't see how this is an 'entire category' replacement nor do I see how it will happen any faster than say automated checkouts that also replaced droves of clerks. Sure people complain, but it happens so gradually (or gradually enough) that people will just eat crow like they always do.
It can be a drop who is already a developer in Bay Area. But not for a person who is struggling to make ends meet in small cities and rural areas. Especially somebody with a family to feed and student loans. Heck I was paid close to minimum wage for 5 years during my graduate school as teaching assistant.
If you have that much stuff from the same source, destination pair, then you're probably better off using rail transport in the first place.
> As a non-white, we were sometimes bothered by the extreme whiteness and slight red-necky feel of non-East End neighborhoods.

Hey shas3, this is serious question, which I'm asking purely out of curiosity. I'm not judging you or trying to embarrass you. Would you consider it okay if a white person were say, for example, about Detroit, "as a white, I was sometimes bothered by the extreme blackness and slight ghetto feel of many Detroit neighborhoods."
Yahoo simply naming their name might make them more cool and reflect they've changed. Have a page forever saying Yahoo is now _______ would be lame and void the point of changing their name.
I don't think that coming up with a model that matches historical data ensures that the model is predictive in any manner. I also have trouble believing solutions that vastly simplify very complex interactions. Ultimately, I think the data is surely helpful and that there is analysis that could be done with it, but I think it's about as likely to predict the future of rent prices in SF as we are to have a model that predicts the price of stocks based on three simple variables.
Firefox still holds over 30% (#1) market share in some select markets, e.g., in Germany: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-DE-monthly-201504-201604
I think in Johns Hopkins studies they were using amphetamines, and also they recruited people who were hallucinogenic-naive.
I agree, so why be concerned with ppb of rigorously studied chemicals shown time and again to be safe (quack-science excluded)?

Your daily coffee is probably an order of magnitude more carcinogenic than any glyphosate/roundup exposure.
I believe this exists already: it's called the Non GMO project [1]

[1] http://www.nongmoproject.org/
Thank you for the thorough reply. I'll play with it some this weekend.
I think the total costs inform how outraged to be. They are probably less than 5%, so if you permanently reduce them by 1/2, you've managed to offset ~1 year of cost inflation. That sort of scenario is not the first thing you address when you look for systematic ways to improve the effectiveness of spending (you of course try do them along the way, but they aren't worth burning much time or political capital on).
PCM -- coming soon next year since last 7 years.
That frames it as if it were your choice.

If I trusted the NSA to actually do that, I'd have no problem with it.

The problem is, I don't have the choice of being surveilled by the NSA, and I don't trust them. Just as the Senigalese would have no choice in redsummer's proposal, and many reasons not to trust outsiders.
I was a biology major.

If Roundup was only glyphosate, it would be safe. It is made from recycled chemicals. That is all I know.
Here is what Adam Smith said about occupational licenses centuries (1776) ago :

"The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour is a plain violation of this most sacred property."

Certification driven by insurance industry makes sense, criminalizing people without licenses is a conspiracy against poor.
no, it's just a simple snippet and only support promises :D
Ah. got it. I suspect they discourage people older than 30 assuming it will be tough to get a position in a age-biased job market? May be. Just my guess.
Yeah, it looks like the study linked in the original article didn't do the measurement on the subjects while they were under the influence, but rather some time after the fact. In my experience, psilocybin can have a lasting psychological effect long after the physiological effects wear off.
A return to alchemy...
It's been hours and nobody has showed up to call this an atrocity? The JS world really is improving.
Your explanation is appealing because it fits Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." If you're right, then we're putting chemicals of unknown toxicity in homes everywhere. Do you have anything else to back up this assertion?
> I wonder what could be given as placebo tho.

I don't know about this trial specifically, but they usually use something like methylphenidate or nicotene.
Stand-alone consumer desktop photo collection apps that aren't a gateway to a cloud service.
That's interesting. I've had the opposite experience when ending my psychedelic experiences. I find that I get overly critical in my introspection and pick apart every perceived flaw, leaving me in a raw and negative mental state.

Instead of leaving me feeling refreshed I am drained and dread the idea of going back to being "normal" where I become blind to those obvious flaws and complacent with living a sub-par life.
Please, contribute your choices!

Also, not all are available via Homebrew Cask [0] although most are available, for example,

brew cask install font-source-code-pro

Although I'm not aware why one can't search for fonts in Cask anymore (previously you could).

[0]: https://caskroom.github.io/
>Idea that something cool would stay cool forever sounds like oxymoron.

Oxymoron is an idea whose definition competes with itself.

Nothing about coolness is against "staying forever" as such.

An actual oxymoron would be that something can be a "permanent fad" (as the nature of fads is to be transient).

Or that "it's cool to be uncool".
> It's an elaborate scheme

That's an unfair characterization. Licensure is not just about protectionism, it is also about making sure that people who need to know what they're doing actually know what they're doing. And while it's far from perfect, it's pretty effective. In the U.S. it is very rare for buildings to collapse, or faulty wiring to set buildings on fire. That is in no small measure because we enforce building codes and licensure requirements for structural and electrical engineers.
The moral argument only works if there's a real psychological component. You can't consider them in isolation. It wouldn't be morally wrong if it weren't also psychologically harmful.

Can you make an argument that easily accessible kiddie porn is going to reduce child violence? Even if you could, I would hesitate to make even the fake stuff legal unless the science was very conclusive. I'd argue that with kiddie porn, the default should fall on 'no' and not 'yes'.

That said, it's really difficult to draw a line here. Content creators are going to find ways around any laws we pass. That's why we need a moral component, so that we can enforce these things not just legally, but also socially.
In Germany there are some tracks with higher usages, but those are not the same line – they just share part of the line (imagine on the track A -- B -- C -- D, a train going from A to C, and from B to D, both every half hour – between B and C now you have 15min frequencies).

But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.

Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway. And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.
How does static type checking work in CL?

One of the most important use cases for static typing is safe modification of existing code, like during refactoring. So a typical example: I have some struct with a field of one type, say a string. I use it in a few functions, reading and writing it. Now I change the field to a different type, say an array of strings instead. I want the compiler to tell me about all the code that's now invalid. How do I do that?

I quickly wrote up a simple example of the (statically) untyped code I mentioned: http://pastebin.com/f7KWETvT (I can also write a matching example in some common static language (like C or ML), but I think it's clear what I mean.)

What type annotations do I add to make that basic use case work? So what do I add such that it first type-checks when name is just a string, then change the annotation to make name an array of strings, and get two compile-time errors because the functions are now wrong.

(Unfortunately, I only know a little bit of CL (and even then mostly due to familiarity with Emacs Lisp), so my example might be a bit un-idiomatic. Feel free to turn it into idiomatic CL if something is too weird!)
>why y'all need to patent this then?

so someone else doesn't and trolls with it?
I don't know if this is the reason, but I think Google started getting a lot more paranoid about hoarding patents when Apple and Microsoft started going after Android OEMs in the early years. Google didn't really have any "counter-offensive" patent strategy then, which is why it went on a patent buying spree back then, although most of the available ones also got bought by Apple and Microsoft through Rockstar and so on.

So best case scenario, Google doesn't want to be caught with its pants down regarding patents. Worst case, it wants to "own" deep learning, so that nobody can really compete with them. Although I think that would be a little in conflict with their strategy to open source tensorflow.

To really figure out on which side Google is now playing we'll have to see how they respond to future patent reforms, and whether they join Microsoft and IBM to once again kill those reforms, or support the reforms to abolish software patents or drastically reduce their damage.
That data and others I've seen doesn't include < 18. In my experience I've only seen kids with iPhones, often the previous generation from their parents.

iOS seems to have better kids content and iPads and iPhones are quite durable from drop with protection.
That's an ambiguous/misleading "and" in that sentence. Modern humans date back to around 200,000 years ago. And it's thought that there was a great migration from Africa roughly 50,000 years ago. Presumably the Sentinelese ancestors were part of that migration, since they are quite far from Africa. Though I agree that it's worth asking how much the population has diverged after 50,000+ years.
I guess you see really lucky :)
For me Firefox with or without ad block is the slowest Brower on my phone and my tablet.
I really like FF but the reality for me is that it is getting worse and worse . It is noticeable even on my desktop with windows 10 where Bing chrome and edge feel way smoother.
Perhaps Tōkaidō Shinkansen would be a better example? 331 trains / day, 391 thousand passengers / day according to: http://english.jr-central.co.jp/company/ir/annualreport/_pdf... (pdf)
I'd rather google patent them than some other sue-happy company who will abuse them. Who knows, maybe they will open source the patent.
Nope. If Google being sued by someone else with a similar business, having patents of their own might help with a countersuit -- Google would allege that PlaintiffX was infringing Google's patents in the course of its own business. But a pure patent troll doesn't operate any business at all (other than collecting license fees), so they can't infringe somebody else's patents in the course of doing the nothing that they do.
Ask HN: What's the name for an app which someone uses purely for utility?
What I mean is an app that becomes a fundamental part of a person's work ecosystem like Gmail, a CRM, or an admin dashboard for the back-end of a website.

I remember coming across something on HN a while back about how the principles of design are very different when an app is not about attracting and retaining new users, but making people who interact with the world through your app more efficient and powerful. More focus on things like keyboard shortcuts, automation, and speed rather than pure simplicity and ease of use.

Does anyone have any resources on this, or know what the name for this is? Google is failing me.
IBM is spinning the news a lot lately: here they claim to made a breakthrough in antiviral protection http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss (humans, not computers viruses)
We may not have an expectation of privacy in the specific records the phone company keeps to bill us and manage their networks, but we have always had an expectation of privacy in the contents of the calls themselves.
>That's not what happened here.

No, but that's what can happen if providing a password becomes mandatory.
While your answer does help in clarifying some misunderstanding ("magic string" to me is supposed to mean something else entirely), it still conflates programming languages with frameworks.

ASP.NET MVC is not a language, as far as I know.

Also, most "dynamic languages" have linters and syntax analyzers that you can hook up to your editor. If I have a typo in my code, flake8 will find it right away, and I don't need to run the code to do it.
Sigh. We'll see how many Sentinelese are alive after the plagues we've just released on them.
That's somewhat ironic given how durable the word "cool" has been, despite the general trend of slang to go out of style fairly quickly (c.f. def, bully, radical, bodacious, groovy, boss, all that, etc...).
Not true, you'd be surprised what the mind is able to do on its own. Besides both groups should be exposed to "trippy" stimulus, which for the naive would be enough. Seen non-alcoholic experiments where the unknowning participants showed ALL the signs of having had alcohol; that is until they were told they were not drinking alcohol.
Open plan offices are basically terrible in every way
Are the salaries random as well?

Reminds me of this: http://winapp2.com/title.html
The tube isn't the problem. Among various problems include: the building access roads to every pylon base, conducting site surveys and environmental impact studies for each site then figuring out what to do when those studies and surveys declare a patch of dirt to be unacceptable. The original route was also going to need something on the order of kilometers of tunnel through mountains.
Mr. Ellis. Howell