skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"surprised that some NoSQL DB could do a query on hundred million rows in a few seconds"

The tone seems to suggest this is fast, a simple index query in an RDBMS of even a hundred million rows will take milliseconds on even a weak computer.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't "insurance" a criminal activity a mere century ago?

If so, why is it bad for it to disappear again?

Can't read the full article, since wsj have a competently implemented "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In" shield.
You're ignoring genetics.
The US has a bunch of foreign workers employed under some not great conditions either(maybe not compared to Qatar?).
I evaluated flynn (an earlier release) previously and noticed issues when one of the servers in the cluster went offline suddenly. The stack couldn't fix itself and along with it the DB was gone as well.

There was a Github issue before about, but I don't have that link around.

Could someone from the dev team at flynn comment about how flynn self heals currently if there's a server issue? eg. especially the one where the DB is hosted

Thanks and congrats!
This is a pretty nice demo of the process of turning a basic page into a "design" (in the sense that applying positioning, spacing, contrast, and things like typography is visual design - I might call it layout instead).

However, if you run Chrome's Accessibility Audit (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/accessibility-deve...) on this page, you get warnings about low contrast for 100+ elements and a link to https://github.com/GoogleChrome/accessibility-developer-tool....

So although you claim black text is harsh on the eyes and gray is more comfortable, it in fact is not - it just makes it harder to read. The very first time you load the page and see black Times New Roman on a white background is actually a better user experience for a larger number of people, purely from the point of view of legibility.

Try having someone with less than stellar eyesight look at this page. Or someone who's trying to read it on a smartphone outside in sunlight or with the brightness of their screen set at less than maximum. Design isn't about what looks nice, it's about what works well - pages that a portion of your audience cannot read don't work well.
competition?
I thought this reader comment was pretty spot on: "So let's see, panel to discuss reusable heavy-lift rocket systems that includes no one from companies actively and successfully running such systems. Moderated by someone who could not do it at NASA, thus refused to believe anyone else could do it. Biased much? This panel is ridiculous."
The solution seems obvious- we need a second heart. And enhanced ribcages to hold it
What they get from the customer covers operating costs and payouts. Insurance makes money by investing that mountain of cash. Smaller mountain, smaller profit.
In Canada you can't get HBO Now without a tv subscription, which kind of defeats the purpose.
From an early democratic institution, the Citizens Assembly of Athens, http://www.agathe.gr/democracy/the_ekklesia.html

"In an important democratic innovation, pay for attending the Ekklesia was instituted in about 400 B.C., thereby ensuring that everyone, including citizens of the working classes, could afford to participate in the political life of the city. Bronze or lead tokens were issued to those attending the meeting, and these could later be redeemed for the assemblyman's pay of two obols (one-third of a drachma) per session."

The citizens assembly met every 10 days, so there were many opportunities for citizen participation.
Ebb is a programming language for writing physical simulations
I have no idea. Castroville had a radio direction finder station during the war, but that didn't open until 1943. Maybe it was just a lightly defended place they could shell to cause panic?
The other bubble that driverless cars are going to pop is ticket revenue. There are a lot of police departments and cities who have structured a lot of their budget on heavy-handed enforcement of motorists.

That's going to decline significantly once driverless cars are scrupulously following the rules of the road. And any tickets that get written will be going against a giant corporation like Google, with detailed information about what the car was doing at the time of the supposed infraction, a lot more financial ability to fight the ticket, and a lot more incentive to protect their reputation.
Scale (YC S16) is an API for human labor
To see the corrections made to the article to reflect this information, see the following link.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160726000303/https://trln7wscq...
Extracting the Python Stack Using Ptrace
>I also agree that not 100% patients with severe chronic pain will consider suicide, however the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population. You may believe so right now, but that's totally irrelevant

It doesn't matter if the "the percentage of people considering suicide in such group is much higher than in the rest of the population" if that percentage is still small within such a group.

E.g. if 1% kills themselves in the general population, while 2% or even 5% kill themselves in such a group, that's still 95%, an overwhelming majority, that do not.

In which case, what the parent thinks now is not "totally irrelevant" but mostly correct.

>And there is no notion of being brave (or not) once it actually happens to you - there's only despair and suffering. Really, only that. Nothing else, at all.

I've seen people with chronic pain (including long-term fatal cases) that are not just "despair and suffering". Including people who have dreams and follow them (creative work etc) despite the pain.
Hence my question of why Castroville was a possible target. No oil fields, just lots of artichokes...
They can't do that because other companies will undercut them to gain market share. They could collude to set prices, but that's illegal in the US. Also, some auto insurance companies aren't organized as corporations, such as the Auto Club of Southern California, which is a not-for-profit mutual. They aren't saints, but since they redistribute most of their profits to policyholders, they don't really have much incentive to keep prices high.
The comments below about productivity are interesting. One person works 30 and not more, another is happy to do 55 hours a week for years. For others, it depends on how interesting the work is.

You salaried folks are fun to watch. The reason why the debate between 30 and 55 hours continues, and from the perspective of the bosses, how to steer you (in the U.S. at least) towards 55, or even higher, is because you don't get paid in proportion to what you work.

I'm on 40 hours a week in my current contract and (with full consent) soliciting more work on the side with other clients. I promise you, when you're paid hourly, putting in longer hours and doing more work is far more 'rewarding' because the rewards are less philosophical, psychological and political - they're material.

Edit: come to think of it, I am FAR more productive in my 40 hours now than in the 50, 55, etc. hours I was 'putting in' in my salaried years. But maybe I'm just an old cynic who doesn't drink the same kool-aid as those who run the company or own significant shares in it.
Is that accurate? Was insurance illegal in the early 20th century? Illegal to buy or sell?
Wow, these people really seem to like you! Have you considered putting some of their endorsements on your résumé?

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Only if the industry as a whole agrees to not cut rates, and nobody new enters the market. In a competitive market, if the cost goes down (as would happen with fewer accidents) then the rates will drop.

I'm curious if we could see a future where the car manufacturers provide insurance for their product, and you would buy a combined hardware/software/updates/insurance subscription package from a manufacturer. It seems like the inevitable conclusion of all the debate around who's ultimately responsible for the actions a self-driving car takes.
Researchers keep pig heart beating in baboon belly for 2 years–a new record
I appreciate the metaphor to feudalism - it certainly can describe what we are seeing now in the concentration on corporate powers, but I it is misleading to characterize the internet as a whole system of government, rather than a new dimension or frontier of an existing one.

A better metaphor is probably a comparison to the wild west. The early internet was government-sponsored, and the government's wait-and-see attitude is much more akin to their attitude toward early homesteaders heading out into the wild - they wanted the country settled, but could not offer anything but space to the early settlers. The government didn't really know what it was offering. That initial rush into the west came with the promise of fortune and glory and freedom, but came with no security, no guarantees.

That state that we think of as the wild west - boom and bust, saloons, gunfights, and stage coach robbery - really only lasted for around 20 years though, and was eventually replaced with a much more standardized, civilized world by comparison.

That is where we are with the internet now. The frontier is colonized, and the issues that remain are the industrialization of the existing claims. We're at the age now where the internet frontier yields to human habitation and comforts, and supplies us with guarantees, trade, economies, industries, mass production, and jobs.

The internet isn't industrial yet, but we're seeing the beginnings of it now. The original booms are mostly gone (Yahoo was one of the last), and now the more corporate, more focused companies have grown large. Now, the established businesses, too, are moving in, and the frontier is looking pretty tame - just an extension of the existing world order. Just like the wild west though, the original frontiersmen don't take well to reintegrating.
There are many forms of gambling that were prohibited until they were renamed in a way that appeased influential religious communities.

Off the top of my head I can think of insurance products and the futures market.

But if you can find citations that will be very helpful for me!
Can't agree with this post enough.

I find their whole writeup to be terribly myopic. When they started their service, Postgres was almost certainly the right choice for what they were building and their MySQL setup was not. Now Postgres is less effective for them.

These kind of tech switches are _inevitable_ if you're making the right choices for your organization.

This strikes me as very similar to the article where Twitter ditched Rails. The focus should be inward... how they chose a tool that didn't support their use case and how they solved the problem, but instead they're about the flaws (that aren't really flaws) of the tool.

It's always the craftsman.
thank you for more accurately stating what i was trying to say earlier.
If a large company like Google, Tesla or Uber owns a fleet of self driving cars, they can just self-insure. (The claims will average out to a well understood statistical distribution, and they simply set aside enough money to pay those claims.)
I'd argue that the lack of scaricity makes owning a work of art less problematic. Someone can always make a new one.

I was born into a world where every peace of land I could use to survive on is owned. But there are an unlimited number of songs or books that can be written. What's the harm in letting a person own the book they created. There are an unlimited number left.
It says "I got a phone call" at the end as the entire punch line. It's not even a written or emailed request, it can just be ignored.
What other people? People I actually know? I would know it's them (contact list/caller ID). It would still probably go to VM as I am not usually just sitting around waiting to answer a phone call. I will just call them back when it is convenient for me.
I think you are confusing HBO GO (the TV subscription companion streaming app) with HBO Now (the independent-of-TV-subscription streaming service); it is more accurate to say "HBO Now is not available in Canada".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBO_Now
Any feedback would be highly appreciated ;)
> The government mandates we MUST have insurance, so they know they've got a continued source of business. The average American has absolutely no way to correlate the amount they pay for insurance to what it costs the insurance company.

I have a hard time reconciling these two sentences. In the first, you sound like a passionate advocate of the free market. In the second, you act as though you have never heard of such a thing.

N.b. Personally, I am much happier knowing that (almost) all the people potentially plowing into me on the highway carry insurance.
Sounds like an accidental oversight, but one I'll gladly accept for the preservation of free-distribution of information; a force that's essential to democracy.

Much in the same way that a well-meaning country have police officers that shoot innocent people, or engage in bad wars, but that misstep doesn't invalidate the whole.
Why did they not consider Oracle or MS SQL Server? They can afford the licensing and both have numerous replication technologies to choose from.
From the briefing:

We will demonstrate that, by forcing your browser/system to use
a malicious PAC (Proxy AutoConfiguration) resource, it is
possible to leak HTTPS URLs.

Would be interesting to see the exploit in action. However, malicious PAC redirection has existed for a while [0].

What isn't quite clear is whether this would work even with HSTS sites.

The takeaway seems to be that never trust any unknown network.

[0] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2014/02/28/maliciou...
Not sure how it would affect prices, but if driverless cars (let's call them autopilot-mobiles) take over the world, they may not be owned by individuals anyway, but instead bought as-needed from corporations (e.g. "Just $100 a month for the Commuter Plan".) This would shift insurance industry focus from insuring millions of individuals to thousands (or maybe only dozens) of corporations, so they could also save money on advertising. I will miss the gecko. And Flo (a little.)
To me it depends on the meaning of where they are applying quality.

For content to be preserved I would personally hope that the direction is more on the preservation angle, personally.. There is very little cost for storing information these days, so there's no real reason to me not to cast a wide net on exactly what content is archived. There is no single good definition of "quality content" after all; even the works considered "top quality" can shift over time, plus there are people out there who really get into niches that a group of curators seeking "top quality content" might miss. (Some of these niches after all deliberately include kitschy or trashy "low quality" content.)

From what I gather from the article, the barrier was more on the technical side of preservation. This is easier to see: the "barrier to entry" is more making sure an e-book isn't fuzzy low-resolution junk, or making sure the e-book has correct title, author, etc.
Considering tall people earn more on average, it's pretty reasonable to expect them to pay more for certain services for which they have a preference.
Why not build a bigtable-cassandra fusion row-store too ?
Since updates are async and all nodes are the same (cassandra) while the data model is sorted-by-primary-key (bigtable) and the schema fixed (low cost in storing tuples) and sql available (easier for devs).
An improvement in safety is wonderful news. The public spending less money on insurance is wonderful news. All the individuals busy managing an auto insurance business have plenty of time to find a better use of their energy.
That's fine, you are a biologist then. That's about what I thought, as it is the natural science most removed from mathematics and proof.

All of the above are nice indicators, but not above being faked by people who know exactly how these things are normally verified, except maybe the "finding lots of fossils nearby" point, which is unlikely if that fossil finding was so spectacular.

I am not emotionally involved in this argument, as you seem to be, sorry for trolling you, I just couldn't resist. You basically cannot win this argument: in the end you will have to admit that none of this constitutes proof. Another Ph.D. here who knows one or two things about proof.
The scariest thing is, it's only a matter of time before some biohacker would make this a reality.
My understanding is that it is very diversified in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality identification, etc.

Make no mistake, they are all great mathematicians and deserve a place in math pantheon.
Eh? "Insurance" has never been illegal as far as I'm aware...

You're probably thinking about racketeering, but unless you actually believe your home insurer will set fire to your house if you don't buy fire insurance, the comparison probably isn't apt.
> It sounds like Uber is using MySQL as just a data bucket with primary keys

They have a couple posts about "Schemaless", but I still don't understand why they used MySQL as the data store instead of something like Cassandra. ( https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/ ) From that post it looks like they basically built a no-sql database on top of a relational database.

The only reason given was operational trust ( "If we get paged at 3 am when the datastore is not answering queries and takes down the business, would we have the operational knowledge to quickly fix it?" ). The project took nearly a year to roll out, and in that time the operation knowledge could surely be trained, hired, or contracted.
I use Cloud 66, so I'll use that as a comparison in terms of price. Their price is $19/mo for the first server + $9/mo for additional servers. It's a little bit of work to get set up and running.

To compare with Flynn, their current pricing is $74-75/node, which is quite a bit more. However, Flynn appears to offer more 1 on 1 support whereas Cloud66's is extra.

Nonetheless, there's quite a bit of difference. I think the range of $20/node may be reasonable. Anything less, the company would be unable to grow. In fact, especially for early stage startups, I'd probably err on the side of a higher pricing (eg. $30-40).

The paid plan is not for the side project but for funded projects or ones that already have money coming in.

Flynn is also a whole lot easier to get set up. Again, just what I've observed based on an earlier release.
Top Programming Languages Trends: The Rise of Big Data
What I don't understand: no system gets to maintain open transactions for free. MySQL keeps UNDO logs, so the effect there, much like Oracle, is possibly running out of UNDO space, as well as slowing down reads that have to apply UNDO to get the last-committed row version. So what gives? Did Uber Engineering fix the dangling transaction issues while migrating off, or are they relying on some other property of MySQL vs. Postgres?
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need insurance (everything would go right all the time). The closer we get to that perfect world, the better.
I noticed this too, it's easy to fall into the trap of subtlety when designing. Subtle often ends up as low contrast which can definitely hurt accessibility. I think the first body color #555 was nice and it gets a good accessibility score too[0] whereas the second edition of the body color #566b78 is a bit too low contrast and subsequently gets a non perfect accessibility score[1].

> So although you claim black text is harsh on the eyes and gray is more comfortable, it in fact is not - it just makes it harder to read. The very first time you load the page and see black Times New Roman on a white background is actually a better user experience for a larger number of people, purely from the point of view of legibility.

I'd say this is a half truth. Yes completely black text feels unnatural and a bit off, but done correctly you can pick a color that's still legible without being #000. There is an intersection of legible black on #FFF that's not pure black.

[0] - http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=555&bcol...

[1] - http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=566b78&b...
I eagerly await your blog post. May it be as interesting as Notch's was.
> The government mandates we MUST have insurance

Actually, in California, the government does not. You must have either a certain specified minimum level of insurance or a post a specified minimum surety bond.
> The DNC leak for example includes lots of social security numbers and credit card numbers.

Someone should teach people that you don't put SSN, CC, and other information in emails.

Also, best not to put in emails things that you'd later not like made public (like getting angry at people and writing things you'd regret).

I believe people got fired for what they said in the Sony hacks.
Perhaps you should re-read this subthread from the top :)
How does it compare against Tableau/Qlik/infocaptor ?

Visualization has become commodity, it is what you do to simplify the path from data to viz is important.
http://infocaptor.com/visualization-gallery.php
I couldn't agree more with this. I generally prefer command-line tools like vim and gdb, but for getting a view on things like file history or browsing the output of tools like callgrind? GUIs are the way to go. Horses for courses.
Love it except when I came back here to upvote the navigation was totally broken!
Just by breezing through the hardware specs, using the stuff they recommend, I'd estimate around $35k -$40k...

So let's call it $50k, built and ready to use =)

those cameras are $1.5k each...17 of them.

Edit: Actually, those lenses are around $700/each as well. And you would definitely want a professional putting it together for you with that kind of money. So $100k probably. Definitely made for industry/production use, not for someone trying to film a weekend trip in the mountains haha.
No, that's incorrect - counter strike was first made in 1999 and purchased just one year later by Valve. Whatever tournaments there were they didn't look anything like the esports scene of today.

That's nothing like the DotA acquisition - DotA was more popular as a custom game than WC3 was itself and had been for nearly a decade. DotA is pretty much the genesis of the entire MOBA genre. There's no way you can discount that just because it ran on top of another game.

I played DotA for many years and am a huge fan of MOBA's. I don't disagree with you that it was a big revolution in the DotA genre, but if that's as high as Valve was aiming with the game, it's very disappointing given Valve's history of doing so much more than that. That's my point.

It was a boring, uninspired safe bet by a company that can do a lot better.
While clever, there's a few problems with the navigation on this site.

1. The back button doesn't undo the changes. Abstractly, clicking on a link performs some navigation which the back button is supposed to reverse. That doesn't work here.

2. Fragment links don't work. http://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/#centering should take me to the 3rd step. Instead it just dumps me on the first step.
Very well done! kudos