skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Queen Elizabeth truly believes that her government is in error, it is her sworn duty to refuse Royal Assent to erroneous laws, and use all her reserve powers to correct it (when asked, 'Will you to your power cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgments?' at her coronation, she answered, 'I will').

Yes, it would provoke a constitutional crisis (which is British political speech for 'we want to change the rules, now that someone is playing by them'), and it would very well lead to the end of the Windsors, and probably the monarchy. But it would be her duty. That's the thing about duty: you have to do it, even when you don't want to, and even when it may cost you everything.

I don't think she should have stepped in in the instance of the war, but she definitely ought to step in if she believes her government is unjust or unmerciful.
A literary magazine written by machines
To be that nitpicky asshole, "pizza" as an example doesn't really do anything to argue your case because there's plenty of non-English-language brands that Americans typically pronounce with an English pronunciation (Volkswagen, IKEA, Nutella, etc.)
Anyone using NixOS as a server in production? We're on FreeBSD now but I think Linux in our stack is inevitable (many servers, like Aerospike, are Linux only). There's always Ubuntu, but this looks lovely. I've had my eye on it for a personal Linux workstation but haven't heard anything about it as a server.
They may have been just following our example.

'Meshcheryakov, the Soviet physicist, like all of the international observers, was not allowed to see any more than the reporters. But he still saw much. The mushroom clouds from Able and Baker interested him some, but he was more taken with what he saw in the people around him. The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine.'
The points are (also) an estimating mechanism. They let you estimate a new task in points (effort measurement) instead of hours (time measurement), and then use history to predict a likely timeframe based on your typical rate.

The extra layer of indirection helps to account for uncertainties in the task, imprecision in the estimate, and chaos (in the scientific sense) in how long individual tasks take relative to aggregated historical metrics.
>> _I'm merely stating that it is not the government's roll to determine if the individual should or should not have access to a certain product._

Like an Atom Bomb :) ... Or an AK-47. It's completely government's role actually, and again, that's why we elect them. Your ideas (after reading multiple of your comments) are very close to that of anarchy.
Starting with version 9 Mathematica has built in integration with R. So you can use R in a seamless way from you Mathematica notebooks:

https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integr...
Though they also say "zero personal information" is retained.

This is hacker-honey.
NC IDs only have a 2D barcode and iirc the data is encrypted so I wonder if they're able to pull data from them.
For what purpose? Document specifications, data serialization, schema-ful data?

JSON's data model lines up much better with common data structures in programming languages, while the often-maligned child-element vs. attribute distinction in XML makes a lot of sense to me to distinguish between globally relevant metadata (attributes) vs. data that can stand on its own (elements).

When HTTP APIs started winning out at the expense of SOAP or XML-RPC APIs, JSON became preferred because there was no schema to validate and a client could just parse out the fields they were interested in and ignore the rest.

Nowadays, more and more deployments add a JSON Schema, officially discouraging that practice and negating one unique differentiator it had versus XML. They're both text-based formats you have to parse, and for internal, non-outward-facing purposes I'd rather use a binary serialization format instead for compactness and because I control both endpoints.

My other preferences are, for outward-facing purposes (like a HTTP API return payload), a custom mediatype based on JSON or XML (in that order, because JSON has more community goodwill); for configuration files, neither because the're both awful to type in a line-oriented setting; and for protocol or file-format type things that could conceivably stand on their own and be called a 'document' (like a self-contained file at rest), XML or binary because they allow strongly typed, well-specified formats with less developer effort -- not JSON.
The Age of Entanglement
GNU/Linux distribution with revertible package management.

EDIT: I believe that my description is more accurate and if I am wrong I would like to be corrected. But I'd appreciate if you didn't downvote me simply because I use the term "GNU/Linux". I don't downvote you if you use the kernel's name for the entire OS. Thanks.
Agreed. Anyone who wants to read some intelligent thoughts about the advantages of the Tandem system should read what Joe Armstrong wrote about it, in his own work developing Erlang:

http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
QuadRooter: 5 things to know about the latest Android security scare
It's probably insensitive to make any sort of comments about an article like that but the line from the first story: "perhaps this will be my entire life as long as I’m “affirming” my labor-power in the factory" was a kick to the head after a good beating. Not only do they work excessively hard but they suffer "corporate speak" like us on top of that. I would've thought that would be the one thing they would be spared.
Is science curiosity more cognitively valuable than science comprehension?
to be fair their API endpoints are https
Management is just going to leave it at 0% the whole time. Once in a great while, if you're lucky, you might get 5-10%
I think in practice, I have far less trouble with the actual diamond dependency problem - binary A requires libraries B and C, which depend on two different versions of D - than the boring version - system A runs binaries B and C, which depend on two different versions of D. NixOS solves the latter.
Red Queen Syndrome[1], those productivity gains also created increased demands on the workforce.

1. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/redqueen.html
For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.
Hoosier Contractors
If I remember right Ron Johnson was brought in as CEO for JC Penny (former Apple Retail chief).

He brought in that pricing experiment. He was canned when it didn't work out.
QuadRooter Scanner – Android Apps on Google Play
Sounds interesting, is a repo available?
I did some work on a similar app a few years ago so I have some insight on the subject.

The magnetic strip varies by state but the PDF417 barcode is supposed to follow DL/ID Card Design Standard (CDS) as defined by the AAMVA.

Unfortunately, there isn't a national system for encoding the data as described in the specification and some states still maintain different fields than others. As a result, it's a real pain to try and use the standard without accounting for each state's unique set of quirks which tend to change from year to year.

I assume they've built a system to handle all of these unique cases and use some type of OCR to verify everything matches up with both the encoded barcode data as well as the Driver's License number which is partially derived from the demographic data. The facial image comparison is nice but it's not the most reliable test (especially when it depends on the phone's camera and a 2cm x 2cm photo.

Combining that process with a background check of some type will guarantee that the person actually exists but the whole system system can still be duped by a good enough fake ID if the data checks out.
The idea is inherently flawed. depandancy installation should be done as needed by people who are conciously aware of what they are doing. A better solution would be integrating NPM into your editor, so that package installation is trivial, but still explicit. M-x install-from-npm-region, anyone?

(defun install-from-npm-region (start end)
(interactive "r")
(call-process
(concat "npm install "
(shell-quote-argument
(filter-buffer-substring start end)))
nil
(get-buffer-create "*NPM Output*")))

That function MIGHT install random things through NPM if your mark is unset, but it is, at least, explicit. And the random thing in question is your last region, so it's far more likely that NPM will just throw its hands and shout "what the hell?" Than actually install anthing...

Also note that that code hasn't been tested. I wouldn't copy this into my .emacs just yet, if I were you. Run it by somebody who actually knows elisp, first.
I think there is a bit of misunderstanding of what Tandem really is. It looks like it relies on communications between processors to never fail and be fast, which makes a lot of things easier, but at the same time this also doesn't make it into what we consider a distributed system. It's more like a single big computer, that can fail.

Btw, Erlang OTP shares many ideas with Tandem. And Joe Armstrong actually discussed them in his thesis [1] and talks and articles [2].

[1] http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
[2] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/9/98014-erlang/fulltext
"It's also why I like cheese, yogurt, and nuts. None of them require any preparation whatsoever."

Don't tell Solyent. That's their marketing plan beaten and it probably tastes better.
That's not weird at all.

It's lightweight (and thus fast!) and curated by a reliable news source.

It gives, at any given moment, the 10 most important news items. Try that on a news site.

I use it more than a dozen times a day...
> Far too slow for any real trading.

Maybe if you're a day or mechanical trader. Although, I personally don't know if that's actually true. Have you tried it? Can you share any data or citations?

> Exchanges exist for trading quickly

Agreed

> they must be centralized due to this.

Have you encountered any definite proof of your conclusion?
See also GNU Guix.

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
>even if it's not Amazon huge

are your serious?

Walmart's revenue was $482.1[0] billion in 2015 and amazon's was $107b[1]

[0] - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

[1] - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

edit - sorry, i missed the .com part
Are there Tandem programming manuals or tutorials online, both for the instruction set, for TAL, and for T/TOS/Guardian? I'd like to learn enough about the programming model to be able to get a feel for what it was like to write and debug programs on it.
If you are asking about a single application depending on conflicting libraries such that it can't be built at all, I don't think NixOS can solve that. What it can do is have multiple conflicting libraries installed simultaneously and individual applications can choose which completely-defined environment they want to run in.
US only it seems. The world is bigger then that. Although that is obviously less obvious to some...
There could be an opportunity for a competitor depending on how some Amazon issue play out over the next year or so. A lot of commentors are focused on the tech (which makes sense, being HN and all), but Amazon has some issues with counterfeit products, unequal product commingling, and unreliable third-party sellers.

Right now those issues are mostly side-line grumpling, but I could imagine a few big incidents could possibly blow up into a substantial reputation issue. The unknown, of course, is can/will Walmart do any better.
The tricky thing about that is that most highly-reliable distributed systems these days evolve from startups that are not-at-all-reliable.

Tandem's technology is incredible, even by today's standards and certainly by the standards of 1974. But they were designed for a world where you sold computers (hardware + software) to big established companies for millions of dollars. Once you saturate that market (which Tandem, Stratus, DEC, IBM, etc. did by the late 80s), what's next?

Since the mid-90s, most tech innovation has been driven by creating new companies, new networks, and new value chains to replace the old incumbents. This process is inherently experimental, and requires that you start out with a small system that grows into a large system. Buying a Tandem computer for the sharing-economy company you're starting out of your apartment is a non-starter; even if you could afford it, it couples you too tightly to a set of applications that probably isn't relevant for what you want to do.

That's why most of the interest in distributed systems today is in taking clutzy single-box programs that used to be Rails or Node apps and then turning them into robust, fault-tolerant systems that serve billions of users and never go down. That's where the money is. The market of existing big companies that will pay a lot for software is largely tapped-out; the upcoming growth is in working for small companies that are rapidly becoming big by replacing those incumbents.
My first thought as well: why am I trusting a middleman with this? IMO if you're trusting a third-party to provide government-issued ID verification you're asking for trouble.
If Google's responsibility is to the vanity of governments, then it is very political.

If Google's responsibility is to accurately represent the situation on the ground to their users, then it may not be easy but it isn't all that political.
The problem is that the OpenBSD team doesn't want to write and maintain a tool like that, and they also don't want to utilize their sparse resources hosting the necessary package build infrastructure for all of the architectures they support. They are volunteers, so it really is up to them to work on whatever they want to work on.

Additionally, the amount of security patches we're talking about here is so small that just updating from source code really isn't that big of a deal for most people.
On dealing with backpressure, I would recommend what Zach Tellman writes about in his video "Everything will flow":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0

Tellman also tells his own adventure about a system something like this:

"a system that would latch up into an overload state because in overload it would log errors at a severity high enough to force the log file to be flushed on every line"

He talks about some problems he faced when writing to Amazon S3, when S3 stopped accepting requests. It's a fascinating talk.
Ontario's rental laws are great compared to other provinces with the exception of maybe Quebec.

Once you sign a lease you and roll on month-to-month it's unlikely you will be evicted. Landlords either need to sell the property or move into it themselves to get the property back.
I'm unclear as to what you mean by parsimonious.
I think NixOS is the future, but there needs to be more time put into UX.

Distros like Ubuntu are still much easier to get running and this scares many people away :/
Between a spat of terror attacks and a generally weak economy, I'm surprised France is so low.
From the website, it looks like they're doing image analysis on the ID scans to verify its authenticity. Given that it's hard for a human to spot a high quality fake, I doubt that some machine learning model can do much better. The only thing I'd imagine it being useful for would be for checking off a regulatory requirement.
Even Emacs'll do that.
Airbnb forces to use a 3rd party service too. I hated it, and then I had to do it again for no apparent reason after a more than a year.
If you haven't yet, check out Noam Chomsky - he holds the US up to their supposed 'good guy' status - fascinating. Andrew Bacevich, a retired Colonel, also has lots of interesting things to say on this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFpXFFPEZ9w
All Delta Flights Stopped Due to System Outage
You can configure the MX record of your domain to point to your server (receive mail) but you can still send mail using a well known SMTP service.
In Paris Buying a 3D Printer Is Cheaper Than Renting Machine Time
Author here. Thanks for the share! :)
WalMart has experts, but they are already busy current problems. To get into online needs experts who spend their time on the problem - but WalMart cannot afford to let their current experts leave their current jobs or the company would go under.

That isn't to say WalMart can't (or shouldn't) transfer some of their experts to Jet, and some Jet experts elsewhere. Just that they cannot afford to lose all their experts in the core business to the online dream.

I too expect this to turn out to be a terrible decision, but I've been proven wrong on my expectations before. Reasons like the above is generally why.
> Google already updates their phones every month for three years

For 18 months actually.
"The simplest design consists of a pair of contra-rotating drums mounted on collinear input and output shafts. A pair of cords or belts wrapped around the drums connect two arms mounted on the input shaft and output shaft."

From http://www.meccano.us/differential_analyzers/robinson_da/tor....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12246490
You're not wrong, and it doesn't. This reads like a pretty weak attempt to soothe ethical concerns by citing cases of chimerism which occur in nature, but, as you point out, intraspecific chimerism isn't really germane to the matter at hand.
The problem is that over time the miracle has proven to be largely a fluke of the labor market at the time (there was a large demand for low skill workers when the program was started) and people who went through the former style of retrain and reeducate do better over time. In that case I don't think the solution can be called good since it has poorer results than what it replaced.
I am not quite sure why you want to stick with the scientific method. I brought one very specific idea of Popper, falsification, that I think is relatively ideologue free and very useful to separate science from pseudoscience. And which happens to say that there are fundamental parts of economics that remind much more pseudoscience than proper science.

This discussion is _extremely_ easy to bring forward. All you need to do is to tell _one_ properly scientific theory outside economics that is not falsifiable. If you can't do that, we can hopefully agree that economics is one of the rare species that seem to have some (questionable) scientific credibility without too strong foundation on falsifiable thinking.
Database Buying – Oracle License vs. EDB Postgres Subscription
What a great way to open your company up to a huge liability. When (and not if) this place gets hacked, expect to foot the bill for identity protection service for a few years for anyone you have scanned using this thing. The burden is usually on the person who originally handles the identity documents, even if a service they are using has been compromised. There's a reason why many nightclubs no longer scan ID's.

Also I don't see any data or information about any guarantees, no case studies, etc. A service like this is worthless unless they are willing to provide something for when fraud does occur, or provide a guarantee that the service actually works and the results can be trusted.

Reading through their terms of service, there is no warranty what so ever. Their technology could be completely bogus, or do nothing for all you know. It's a black box.

You're basically opening yourself up to liability for questionable benefit.
It’s hard work printing nothing
Yup.

I've worked at several places where there has been battery backup, diesel generators, and a a disaster recovery site with generally nice and thorough strategies for replication including really expensive "sysplex-mode" for mainframes, topped with regular contigency tests where one half of the site is shut down.

And somehow, at every place, eventually something bad happened in a way that took down the applications.

It could be a power outage in the exactly the wrong circuit, fluctuating power messed up exactly the wrong storage system, someone dug up exactly the wrong fiber, the fire extinguisher set off by mistake and sprayed just the wrong cabinet with water fog through a door(!) that was supposed to automatically close, the diesel generator caught fire and the backup battery had to be taken offline, etc etc.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't try, but it's damn hard.
The same title wouldn't worry me but I would want to see a variety of projects and technologies (says someone who has worked on the same software for fifteen years).
Airbnb Instant Book turns mandatory for some hosts, learn more + hacks to avoid!
Airbnb hosts have been blowing up on Reddit, Twitter and Airbnb Community over the introduction of a policy in which some new hosts are being forced to use Airbnb instant book. Concerned hosts from all over the world have reported the issue, with many cancelling their listings after not being able to turn it off. Countless established hosts have also said they would leave the platform for alternatives if it became mandatory for all.

Could this move be a method to tackle recent findings of widespread discrimination on the platform, or could it simply be profit driven?

Read on to find out more, as well as our top tips to get around it!

https://guesthoo.com/2016/08/06/airbnb-instant-book-mandatory-new-hosts/
That would be great if the US had eID cards, which we don't, and probably won't for decades. If the states hated REAL ID,[1] then they sure won't like eID.

When someone solves a problem in a particular technology stack in a suboptimal way, it is generally considered unhelpful to tell them they should have just used a totally different stack. "Why bother working around that registry issue in Windows, when you could have just used a superior operating system, such as OS X?", etc.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act
Not every mishap in computing is the fault of Unix. :) SBCL and ACL2 run quite nicely on Unix, and their authors haven't been deterred by it. Neither have the Mathematica authors.
Here's how you represent eight in Binary Corgi Digits.

https://i.imgur.com/KKc8qfU.jpg
But this is obvious! Hiring admin assistant is the first thing to help the business. Where is the controversy there?
check out demonstrations.wolfram.com too - it's a place you can put manipulations if you want to use them in a class, etc
It's largely mitigated by allowing multiple versions.

Imagine A depends on B and C, which both depend on D. The diamond dependency usually pops up when B and C need different versions of D.

But in this case, Nix allows you to simply install another version of B or C such that they can share D.

This doesn't help you if there's no set of A ... D that are jointly consistent, but then you would've been SOL anyway.
not voting for you =/= not supporting your new policy, Similarly, a vote for a candidate does not necessarily reflect agreement with the entire platform.