skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably the most balanced, level-headed article on gun control I've seen recently. I am fairly biased on this issue in favor of maximizing personal freedom, I am and always have been very Libertarian minded. I don't even own a firearm, but have several friends and family that do. My father is retired PD (narcotics undercover), and my mom still works as a dispatcher.

I do hope that people can simply be more civil, and that we can come to some sort of consensus on revisions to allow for forced treatment of mental illness. All the watch lists in the world do effectively nothing, as they aren't proactive. If someone is truly believed to be dangerous, then they should be actively removed from the country if they're resident aliens or under psychological evaluation and/or treatment. Restricting travel and other rights is problematic to say the least. Either be proactive, or drop the thing.

I don't know what the next 8 months will hold, let alone the next few years. It'll be interesting to say the least.
I am more interested in which station that is in those pictures that is so damn clean.
The vendor can usually see a little farther than just one point on the price elasticity curve by employing price discrimination schemes, such as coupons, sale prices, and volume discounts. Extrapolation from there is iffy, but interpolation is usable.

Checking whether you could make more by raising prices is a bit more difficult. No one is likely to use a coupon that entitles them to pay 10% more for your product. What you could do is start your day with an auction, where larger buyers can bid on your supply, and then you sell off the remainder (if any) afterward. If your unit price should be higher, someone comes along, buys up your entire stock at the auction, and sells it off at a profit after you are sold out.

In terms of honey, you basically pay honey scalpers to reset consumer price expectations for you, then when you raise prices on direct sales, you become the heroic middleman-eliminator, instead of the villainous price-gouger.
Hey! I'll bring it up in discussion and see if there's anything we can do to make this easier for you. In the meantime, have you thought about using your own authoritative DNS servers?
Car traffic has to flow through a 1D cross-section (N lanes) one after another.

Air traffic can flow through a 2D cross-section. Which also means that vehicles don't have don't to line up like a pearl necklace. That should reduce collision probabilities if vehicles talk to each other and are able to reserve sufficiently large safety buffers around each other.
Many PSUs do have bleed resistors, but plenty (especially cheaper ones) will not. More importantly, a damaged PSU may have a non-working bleeder circuit, and you'll only know when you discharge a cap. Hopefully across a resistor, rather than a screwdriver, and very much hopefully not an open wound on your skin.

A CRT stores energy because it acts a a large capacitor. Some better monitors (especially late '90s open cage arcade monitors) had bleed resistors on the anode of the CRT to make servicing safer. It's not actually a ton of energy; the voltage is very high, but that's about it. A charged, unpowered tube will sting, but it's seldom a killer. The flyback transformer will give a potentially lethal shock, though. The anode cap has the thick insulation and is surrounded by aduadag for a reason!
The Ehang 184 [1][2][3] looks like it's going to be the first usable flying car. It's all-electric, with four sets of two contra-rotating props. This provides redundancy if a motor fails. They showed a prototype as a static display at CES last January. This is from the people who make the Ghost drone. They're in Guangzhou.

The range will probably be short, but I expect that executives in Beijing will be using these to get around the traffic jams in a few years.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4nDFgVx2o
[2] http://www.ehang.com/ehang184
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/the-ehang-184-is-a-human-s...
Congress pushes for NASA missions to Europa
The volocopter can still fly and land safely when one or more engines or rotors fail (up to 6 out of the 18, provided they're not all adjacent, if I'm not mistaken).

In case of a complete power failure, a light-weight ballistic rescue parachute will let the whole thing glide to earth. There might be some altitude where the parachute doesn't have enough time to deploy, but that's really the same problem as with a helicopter (where autorotation is only possible from certain altitude/airspeed combinations) - so you have to avoid staying in that critical region.

I think it is premature to make pronouncements on the safety - piston engines don't really have a great safety record. Turbines are amazingly reliable of course, but the entire helicopter ensemble still fails occasionally.

Electric motors and batteries (plus maybe petrol powered generators, or fuel cells) are just an entirely different technology stack, whose reliability remains to be seen. I'm optimistic, though.
I would like to add that Apple has a history of changing markets it enters, and in such a way that Apple takes most, if not all of the profits. Smartphones is a gigantic market, and all the profits belong to Apple.
Very inspiring :D
Perhaps because the large mass of consumers only care about the first point (how the hardware looks in their home)?

Point two comes in play only if the user experience is horrible, otherwise it's acceptable.

Regular consumers rarely think about point three.
I don't think they would be considered fraudulent at all, and in fact I'm pretty sure that's the "safety valve" built into the system and why public encryption is now being encouraged. I share your tinfoil hatted feelings wholeheartedly.
That one's quite different; it sounds stupid but turns out to be interesting (if whimsical) and certainly unpredictable, which is a desirable quality on a site that's about intellectual curiosity.
But he clearly does understand, and some gentle mockery at the other side is called for when they play dumb.

I'm sure the fundamental theorem of arithmetic has a non-obvious proof. And perhaps that's precisely what a mathematician means every time they say "non-obvious". If that were all just made explicit to this general interest site in the first place, perhaps we'd have nothing to discuss.

But if we are trying to play coy here, 1+1=2 also requires a non-obvious proof to anyone not versed in formal methods. I looked a proof up:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/51551.html

I don't know how long it would take me, working alone, to come up with that proof. It's non-obvious because it took humans probably 100,000 years to come up with it, even though we've had the IQ to do it for a long time. I don't think we could agree on what constitutes a proof of it without some social aspect and convention, so non-obvious by means of proof.

But, we've been using and making predictions about the world using 1+1=2 for very much longer. That seems like a pretty worthwhile definition of obvious.
Indeed it can be.

I was at a company that was the big customer asking for special features etc. It was great for us, and I think the provider really appreciated the steady paycheck, the massive patience and customer testing and so on.

We definitely had our own way of doing things and we had to sort out if this made sense. (Should we change our way of doing things? Should they incorporate it in the software?).

Maybe they felt much worse about it in their private time and complained about us after we left. I never felt it.
It's more than just overfitting: e.g. if a neural net model with several hundreds or thousands of parameters can be trained on a dataset of billions of observations, and may even be OK at predicting behavior both in and out of sample, but it still remains a black box, since we generally do not know what phenomena particular parameters (or their combinations) represent.

On the other hand, IMO there is nothing wrong or unscientific with having empirically estimated relationships as part of the model -- I just see them as shortcuts whose purpose is to parcel the problem so as to allow other analysis, and as something to potentially investigate further to see why the relationship takes a particular form.

Some ML methods are more amenable to this type of analysis than others though.
Donald Trump Bullshit Generator
When I last brought a Motorolla phone, the Maxx was a bit more than double the price of the similar, but thinner one I brought.
The same mechanism in cert generation provides that functionality. Hostnames are hostnames. SAN certs just take a list of them.
Scala 2.12 M4 still manages to leave experts perplexed,

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/lv4s...

The fact that the 2.11.x series had a number of "dead on arrival" minor releases also confirms: better not to hurry to adopt a new Scala release.
Quite a few apps on Linux depend on Python as their go-to extensions/plugins language. Here is a small sample

nearly all the system config GUIs relased by Redhat
inkscape
quodlibet
csound
ntop
samba
ranger
libreoffice (but this supports a few other languages)

Try to run any modern Linux distro and tell me how far you get without installing Python.
It's a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949278, and not a strong story for HN to begin with. That's why the discussion turned generic so quickly.
I meant someone whose morality specifically insists that there be bird meat. Sorry for being unclear.

So again here there is a difference adding a problem ingredient, and there being an ingredient you don't put in. For the former you need to ask about dietary restrictions and respect that. Which they did. For the latter, I don't think you're in much risk of violating anyone's moral system.
Yes, I'm aware of the mean vs median distinction. But if someone states that the majority of the country has an income below X, and I find out that the average wage in the country is actually 8X, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of the original statement. The amount of income inequality that is needed to produce a situation like that, is so extreme that no one should believe it without supporting data.

As it turns out, I was right. The other person to reply to me, dug up evidence showing that only 22% earn below the intl poverty line. Not "the majority" as was stated.
Has anyone else here read Nick Lane's new book - The Vital Question - I just finished it and this article really seems like a continuation of some of his theories he talks about.

I found about the book from HN, and have since bought every single other book by him, almost done with Life Ascending now, which is also amazing
You would never even keep up with the updates.
Sublime Text Dev Build 3116: new show_definitions functionality
[some people seem super annoyed that i pointed it out, and it seems to have brought out the brigade, so i'm just editing this out]
If they chose to expand the road, the assumption is that they considered the obvious cons (displacement during construction, cost of land and labor for construction, added pollution and noise, change in demographics, etc) and were hoping for the obvious pros (reducing traffic). I always hear people quick to say it won't reduce traffic, but I never hear alternatives that are proven to work. By dismissing expanding a road over that one thing, they also seem to dismiss the other pros (I mentioned possible gains in economic throughput) and the cost of inaction.
I hold some viewpoints that I know are less likely correct than others I know about, because the benefit of being right (if it is correct) is far larger than the cost of being wrong (if it's not correct). I find I have to embrace a viewpoint in order to think through all the consequences of it and arrive at an insight, which could either be a contradiction (and thus a proof of it's falsity) or a good strategy if it turns out to be true.
Except it can't drive?
I love this tech! If the FAA allowed for cheap urban short haul using these, it would be amazing. Its external operations (the need for helipads, maintenance etc.) would basically be like a helicopter though.
I understand, but your opinion doesn't change the facts. Scala.js is more than mature, with some huge projects already built in it. I'd not heard of erlangonxen, but it would take a lot of convincing to re-write something in Erlang to begin with, when I could write it quicker in Scala, and run on 2, eventually 3 different platforms.

Scala Native is not very far along compared to Scala.js, but it is actively being improved, and is considered an official extension. Additionally, Dotty will bring huge improvements for JVM scala.

I am not super happy with JVM most days, but I'd far and away prefer to be chained to JVM than BEAM. I mean, it's not even a question at this point, considering the billions of dollars spent developing JVM and the work of the brightest minds of several generations. Joe is a cool guy and all, but Erlang is objectively a niche platform compared to JVM.
How This Solo Founder Got into YC
> The downside is that they may insist on over-fitting the solution to their particular needs.

They will have a strong sense of entitlement regarding this, considering how helpful they are being with their investment and their willingness to deal with pre-1.0 bugs and instability.

That just means you have to choose this kind of customer carefully, because you'll have to do what they want, and you should make sure that what they want will also be wanted by other customers in the same space.
TSA isn't really for hijack protection, that was solved quite quickly after 9/11 with effectively impenetrable cockpits.

It's really for preventing destruction of the plane itself. A large bomb on a train underground could cause way casualties, which is why the strictness of the TSA is puzzling.
And when we visit your site for the first time, having never heard of you before, why should we trust you?

That's the point. Having some authority who did at least some minimal checking, to extensive checking, and who will verify you really are who you purport to be. Trust but verify probably plays a part in this.

But, remember, you don't have to go to HTTPS. There is no requirement for you to do so.
With `os:perf_counter/1` also comes msacc aka microstate accounting. Thanks @garazdawi :)

http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-8.0-rc1/lib/runtime_tool...
Very true. Even in the worst train derailments you never hear that there were no survivors.
Yeah; but that's just the deal with programmatic. Everyone knows that it's probably 50% garbage, so they just pay 50% less than they otherwise would. It's a game of moving averages and benefit per dollar. Fraudulent impressions are a problem, but ultimately I think that a bigger problem is the huge number of low-value impressions that just drive the price of the entire market down. When an advertiser has 30 ad slots on a page, not all 30 are really worth buying...
> I don't think they would be considered fraudulent at all

Er, by whom?
> Those should be distributed by the service providers, who are the actual trustworthy entities in the user's minds.

That's what HPKP does, basically, unless I'm misinterpreting what you mean with service providers.

HPKP is Trust on First Use, so it's not perfect, but the alternative - some kind of Web of Trust - is not really practical for non-technical, not-security-conscious users, IMO.
How much information is 473 genes? How many bytes does this represent, in a compact but "raw" encoding? What about if you compressed it with gzip?

Also what are the raw/compressed sizes for a human genome?

I have wondered this for a long time but never seem to find a concrete answer.
I suspect that if a crawler is being used to farm email addresses for spamming, it's highly unlikely that robots.txt would be any deterrent whatsoever.
What is the meaning of Object-Oriented Programming?
Why would someone write an article like this if they didn't have an agenda? Every author has biases, whether or not they are conscious or overt.

The better approach is to use your critical thinking skills and avoid ad hominem judgments about the author.
I'm pretty sure they've thought of avoiding single points of failures. It's my understanding that there are multiple busses, and I assume that failure of a single battery only shortens the range, not leading to a catastrophic failure.

The 18-rotor Volocopter can have several rotors fail with no problem before the ballistic rescue parachute becomes necessary.
Just as coffee "beans" are actually seeds. This information is of no use to the vast majority of people unless one finds it enjoyable to be pedantic, but it is a neat bit of trivia all the same.
Isn't U2F a Chrome only feature at the moment?

Are you using that seriously already?
Well, the whole idea is to pick simple axioms, so it's harder to get wrong. And also, every successful prediction that math makes based on the axioms, is in a sense a verification of them.
Voxel visualization using DrawIndexedInstancedIndirect
Again, this boils down to the rationalist vs. empiricist stance. Hidden variable vs. probabilistic approximation and so forth.
The partisan error is to consider these two stances as mutually exclusive. They are not, as illustrated by decoherence for example.
On the other hand, it is, I believe, undeniable that the rationalist endeavor is much more complex than the empiricist one and therefore also less linear. Less predictable and, please, let's not forget, less financially profitable.
Chomsky's position has always been to advocate for the rationalist stance in a world conveniently inebriated with its empiricist successes to the point of turning this one aspect of thinking into a belief system.
It is a waste of energy to argue for a monopoly of the yin over the yang or the other way around. They are complementary but not mutually exclusive. Privileging one over the other will result in an increase of ideological/mystical bias and essentially miss the whole point: it is their interaction, the transition from and to one another, that holds the key to a global understanding.
Many years ago I worked as a cashier in a supermarket. There tomatoes had their own classification as "salad".
https://m.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/h9q1u/til_hone...
I suspect that regulation will result in more censorship.

For example, EU regulations regarding the "right to be forgotten" have resulted in Google being legally required to remove items from search results that Google would not have removed otherwise.
A-ha. Thanks, that makes sense.

I was just having a hard time getting past the idea that I'd never have had PINE working if I didn't have the source. :)
I believe you can still sue for an injunction (e.g. to compel them to distribute copies of code as per the GPL).
The correct spelling "contractible" yields useful Google results, namely that spheres in 3 dimensions (point 4) are not contractible to a single point.

Edit: ... and maybe circles (point 2) too? Not a mathematician.
Oh, I agree, it's weasel worded (on purpose, I'm sure). I just wanted to point out that they seem to be going to great lengths to ensure people it's not happening on FB, Twitter or other US social networks.

I personally don't think it's right regardless but I also thought the discussion was devolving quickly with comments about them doing it in the US when the article clearly states otherwise.
This is where it helps to have a little emacs foo.
spacemacs does not entirely remove that need, ime.

In your .spacemacs there's a function dotspacemacs/user-config.
That runs _after_ spacemacs loads and inits all its layers.
It's a good place to configure all the various modes in ways that the layer may not have exposed.
Regarding indent, I have this kind of thing:

;; tab for indent, me like
(define-key prog-mode-map (kbd "<tab>") 'indent-for-tab-command)
(setq web-mode-markup-indent-offset 2)
(setq web-mode-css-indent-offset 2)
(setq web-mode-code-indent-offset 2)
(setq css-indent-offset 2)
(setq-default js-indent-level 2)

but for any given mode, you can find the variables to set, usually involving the word 'offset' and go from there.
You can also use the customize feature -- space colon customize.

I've really found emacs and spacemacs worth the effort, but there definitely is effort.
The VoltAir Project
Ok, we'll use that phrase in the title above.
but there is RPL1 up to RPL41, and same for RPS and then MRPL and MRPS , so despite the similarities, one can argue different organisms may have different rRNA genes.
Yes, batteries don't have the energy density of petrol yet, but they're improving. Also, hybrids are an option, with a combustion engine (running at optimal speed throughout) driving a generator recharging a battery - best of both worlds, potentially.
And yet he is the head of the most intrusive spy platform on the planet. These globalists need to feel the wrath of the American people.
That's a perfectly possible reason! So, as a conference organizer or attendee, do you want talks from people who seek reputation and fame, or do you want the best speakers?
Forgive my complete ignorance, but how do they even count genes? Given a very long string of base pairs, how is it possible to know where one gene ends and the next one begins? Do genes overlap?
^^ I believe this may be a real world example. The irony hurts.
This is exactly what I've been looking for. Where can I pick up some cheap adapters to get an outlet on one end and male plug on the other?
If we can empower users build their own pipes between devices and online services, then we spur competition which could lead to better security. We need a gateway that gives users that choice. I've been working on command line interfaces for devices that can be used to pipe data/state back and forth between command line interfaces. These interfaces to devices and online services can be written in any language and run nicely on small computers like the $35 Raspberry Pi. The downside is setting these pipes up requires familiarity with the command line... But if there was some funding there we could build a UI that was easy to use... So I actually built that, but don't have the time to maintain it. For the time being I'm maintaining these command line interfaces.

https://openpipekit.github.io
Tell HN: HackerNews is the greatest site to browse in Cuba
I am in Cuba for a week for business and pleasure. Internet here is, unsurprisingly, incredibly scarce and insanely expensive. Even for foreign businesses, 1mb connections can cost in the thousands of dollars a month.

In my downtime, I have tried surfing the web, and every experience under the sun has been pretty painful, even for sites technically optimized for slow connections like Gmails HTML view.

But damn it, I´ve been browsing HN just as well as if I had been back home.

Thanks, dang
That's exactly it. An experienced programmer finishes tasks without writing a crap ton of code. A new grad cranks out zillions of lines, tons of technical debt, and gets very little done.

Line count is inversely proportional to ability, to a certain limit.

There is no steep decline in programming ability after 35, or 40, or 50.

There is often a steep decline in interest. There are many interesting things to do in the world, and people naturally gravitate to new things after doing one thing for 10, 20, or 30 years.

As long as the interest is there your programming ability can improve pretty much indefinitely.
I keep hoping they will help address non-Internet TLS. For example if you run a HTPC, fridge, printer, device controller or anything similar on your LAN and want to talk to it over the same LAN using TLS. Getting a workable cert is currently not possible: for example the LAN names aren't going to be unique.

Plex did solve this in conjunction with a certificate authority, but that solution only works for them. The general approach could work for others if someone like letsencrypt led the effort. https://blog.filippo.io/how-plex-is-doing-https-for-all-its-...
You have email.
Will repo deploy tokens ever be a thing? I would like read-only deploy tokens associated to a repo, and not a user. I just don't like having to create dummy users with repo access to generate deploy tokens.