skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm starting to tune out whenever I hear someone saying "schemaless". There's always schema. The question is whether schema's enforced at write time, or if instead it needs to be dealt with at read time.

Schema on write is a hassle up front because you've got to start imposing a strict data model up front, possibly before you've even got a good idea what your information domain looks like. And every misstep will be immediately punished with a painful migration.

Schema on read is, IMO, a hassle in the long run because now any code that's consuming the data needs to be prepared to have the information come in any of the ways that it has ever been stored in the history of the database. If folks were being disciplined, then hopefully that's a small number. If they weren't, you may end up with either some sort of combinatorial explosion, or a situation where you've seriously got to null-check every little thing. Every misstep will forever be punished with a million tiny little if-statements nagging at you like endless paper cuts.

I suppose it's easy to guess where my crass sentiments lie.
Just want to note that only Dropbox seems to be able to handle multiple (as in, a dozen) git repos...... the linux client runs a little hot on the memory while it scans the full list, but it actually syncs in a reasonable amount of time without crashing. Which is more than I can say about OneDrive and Google Drive...

So, thanks for that :)
There's only a few million drivers in PA. Soon they'll have queried them all.
Well, there was a host – they shut down years ago, though – which did it.

And there were always the kind of hosts which had no quota, and no fee, but where you’d pay based on how much you wanted to in a given month, but you’d be expected – honor system – to pay more the more you used, with a rough formula how much would be expected from you (but you’d never be terminated).
Hmm. Are you using the language of pickup artists on purpose, or is that an accident?
I'm actually happy to have people move here. I wouldn't be able to live where I do without people having moved up from California. The problem is that a bunch of people from a state with nearly 40 million people moving to a place with less than 4 is that it makes for some difficult adjustments. I'm still ok with it, but California is very much exporting people because they cannot afford it.

The more the merrier for me, but I guess having lived in Europe, living with other people does not bother me to the degree that it seems to for many people in the US.

The racism thing just goes to show that everyone thinks there are some limits to what majority rule ought to be able to do, just as many of us that take a dim view of zoning think that there is probably a line somewhere (your nuclear waste example).
I'm going to nail this on my wall almost above my bed. I'm noticing I'm not reminded by this idea enough. I remember reading the exact same thing when I read a book written by Dr. Seligman many years ago and it just clicked with my personal life experiences.
Last commit 6 months ago
He probably doesn't appreciate you letting us know what he said.
Could be Equation Group burning old exploits. A sorta curious way to do it but it wouldn't be that surprising.
Their UI is much better than their competitors, and they have some great major and minor features being released that others don't have, and they charge the standard set by their competitors.

Sure, compared to buying a physical drive it is expensive, or compared to setting up your own VPS, but there are clear downsides to those options.

I recently looked into moving form our current (really shitty yet fascinatingly expensive) cloud storage solution, and even though I still have a grudge against them for shutting down Mailbox...Dropbox was by far the best solution for us.
Google Chrome, Firefox Address Bar Spoofing Vulnerability
> The pain is still excruciating, though. 24/7.

> He [...] has been eating ibuprofen like candy for the entire time

That's not a ringing endorsement for this wonder drug.
Show HN: Jdi – a documentation generator for literate JavaScript
We created a number of Gradle plugins for our common boilerplate. We publish those as a JAR into our internal Artifactory, and they're easily applied to any of our modules.
Are you saying that neonicotinoids are causing an increase in active hive numbers?

I'm guessing that's not your assertion. But, of course, the argument you appear to be making is just as invalid.
I'm just some guy, but I've got a stack of cards with my short ID on them - what do I do now? Toss them?
Yet Another Article on Zippers, in Erlang
I'd bet on the legacy manufacturers.

Musk has a reputation for firing senior managers that give him answers he doesn't like, or that fail to meet his unreasonable demands. That level of management meddling doesn't bode well for Tesla's manufacturing future. Nor does "putting parts in the car knowing [they] are bad", if the accusation (by a departed employee) is true. (http://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-sets-ambitious-goals-a...) I have previously questioned, and still do, Tesla's PLM.

Legacy manufacturers do know how to do software, despite the general lousy state of in-car entertainment systems arguing otherwise. They also know how to manufacture a quality product at scale. It's an easier task for them to bolster their software than for Tesla to learn what they already know about manufacturing and ramp up manufacturing.
I worked on a project migrating a telco to a new billing system. Somehow the new system churned out, for only one guy, 144 copies of his bill. No idea how a gross became a thing in a computer, but it did.

The mailhouse, rather than do the sensible thing and call us to see why, did optimise the delivery and collect all the copies together and post in a single box. Crazy.
Why Is Silicon Valley Obsessed with Flying Cars?
I wrote this post and am also happy to comment. Hopefully we'll be following this up soon with a post on treating robustness and cost simultaneously in a multicriteria setting. Also, special thanks again to Devon Sigler at the University of Colorado Denver for his help editing this post.
Barnes and Noble Says CEO Boire ‘Not a Good Fit’ and Will Step Down
Ask HN: What are the best product landing pages you've stumbled upon? #2
It has been more than a year since last, amazing and filled with information topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440208

Lets see what are best landing pages as of 2016.
How Is SSD Changing Software Architecture? – CUBRID Blog
Police Can Use a Legal Grey Area to Rob Anyone of Their Belongings
I wish they would add something like a .dropboxignore file. It's unusable for software development otherwise. It could be extremely useful.
Author's employer, Checkr [0], "provides modern and compliant background checks for global enterprises and startups".

[0]: https://checkr.com
Yeah but Azure is also introducing new K80 instances (based on four-year-old Kepler) becuase the M60 is worse in memory capacity and memory bandwidth, and not much better in FLOPS. NVIDIA is just not putting their best hardware out there for cloud providers to use.

Sure I can buy a Titan X for myself (already have), but I can't rent a hundred, or even one, on EC2 or Azure or GCE. And I can't get a P100 yet at all. I don't want to hear NVIDIA claiming unfair benchmarking and citing P100 numbers until P100s are actually available either to buy (and ship immediately) or in the cloud.
Facebook Traffic to U.S. News Sites Has Fallen by Double Digits
WARNING: yes, i am going to be THAT guy...

.

.

.

It amazes me that "thousands" of users sending simple messages is considered impressive nowadays on a machine with a xxxxMHz CPU and at least xxxMB ram.

This was being done decades ago on xxMB ram and xxxMHz.

sister comment says 100MB/1K connections, 150MB for 2K, so 50KB/connection and 50MB fixed cost?!!?

-

Dump Javascript/Go/$RANDOM_LATEST_BUZZWORD_7 and learn how to program [in C] if you actually want an impressive number of users per MHz/per MB

This is doable on a Cortex-M4 and an ethernet MAC...
I don't think the world gets worse by finding out that someone has a bad life. The bad things would exist whether you learned about them or not.

I think knowing about other, bad lives can remind people of all the things they have and take for granted. We tend to focus on the things we don't have, but if you can appreciate the things you do have, you'll be much happier.
"despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype.

Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.
MyHangr – Unique Instant Meet Up App Concept
We've been working on this at Georgia Tech. It's an exciting area with a real opportunity to help improve care in dermatology.

Poster: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_poster.pdf

Paper: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_final_report.pdf
I think it depends on what you are trying to accomplish with the use of the captcha.
This is neat, but those functions can only be used once.
The chat portion was written in Golang, so it's compiled and running on bare metal (edit: okay, PL0 or ring-3, like most software today)
The other interesting thing about wormholes is they don't exist, and can't exist without basically rewriting every law of physics we have. They violate almost every conservation law there is.

They are a mathematical curiosity, not a thing that could actually exist.

If you could rewrite the laws of physics there are lots of cool things you could do, wormholes would just be the start......
Technically, this AR hardware [1] could do Hyperreality.

Technology isn't the problem. It's "why bother"? Zuckerberg is thinking of AR as a social system. That implies something much more like Hyperreality than Microsoft's system. Remember, there is not, as yet, a killer app for VR, even though good hardware has been available for years now.

[1] https://www.metavision.com/
Ford to offer self-driving cars without steering wheels by 2021
Do you know if pessimism/optimism come naturally to people? Does the CBT strategy you described fully change your attitude or do you feel you have to rationally correct yourself when you experience something negative?

I'd like to help someone who I feel is overly pessimistic, but they are very skeptic of self-help books and therapies, did you feel that way? Do you have any tips to help overcome that?
That usually implies something pretty specific, like maybe that's the only terms on which they're competitive?
They also have Andrej Karpathy.
You don't get to narrowly define democracy to mean "mob rule" and expect people to use your meaningless definition. This is not the original nor the currently accepted definition and pretending that everyone should use your personal definition will not make it true.
it's not exactly esoteric. paas, saas, iaas are broadly used terms and have been for a while.
Very nice. As somebody else mentioned, the length of the day would be nice (it could be a third column of times).

The time zone borders map is a bit low resolution so in some places it gets it wrong (for example the northern sides of Roche Harbor, WA and Eastport, MA). Also seems to be a few years out of date (doesn't show America/Santa Isabel). But I expect these are outside your control.

Sometimes it's nice to know the expected daylight in a place that you might visit later in the year, so a way to choose the day of the year would be useful. Perhaps a year-long slider across the bottom of the page that points to a date (defaulting to today)?
not even close to bare metal...

Go runtime, GC, random userspace bits this is on top of

50MB!
Yeah for cargo I agree. I was thinking more along the lines for human rating.

Propulsive landing helps for some failure modes but not all. Like I don't think it would have helped the CRS-7 failure had that been manned.
Except that Docker containers play terribly with virtualization solutions. Still, some sort of configuration/infrastructure-as-code would go a long way.
I like this response. It seems like jamwt is actually trying pretty hard not to be biased. If I were at Dropbox, I'd probably also want to point out that just about every competitor that's been listed here is a Dropbox copycat. On the other hand, we all know that great copycats come along all the time and do something new much better than the original. The real question about the value proposition for Dropbox is how its value proposition stacks up against competitors. I can't speak to Box and I don't think OneDrive has much going for it beyond being attached to the Microsoft ecosystem (which makes it the default winner for a whole bunch of Microsoft-oriented people and companies and the opposite for just about everyone else). On the other hand, Google Docs, Spreadsheets, etc., gives Google Drive a really strong position for eating into Dropbox. I haven't made up my mind yet - I've found a lot I don't like about Dropbox, but I've also found Google Drive to be riddled with problems, both from a UX standpoint and in terms of the basic architectural layout. If Dropbox does the right things over time, they can continue to offer the best value in the market - I'm just not sure I've seen them doing that recently.
Behind the Scenes of iOS Security
The bigger terrorist groups all have websites and/or a social media presence.

As you say any one of those channels could be a CIA operation, that's why asking for verification from two independent channels (i.e. asking for the keyfile on one channel, for the fingerprint on another) is preferable. A terrorist group that actually uses pgp might even entertain you if you ask on more than two channels for the fingerprint. The more channels you chose, the less likely it is that a single attacker controls all of them.

Another factor is that any public channel that is a front is likely to be called out sooner or later as a non-official channel. Most people and organizations are wary of the dangers of impersonation.

Of course there will always be situations where it's impossible to establish trust, like a leak by a group who tries to stay anonymous to the point of not associating with any previously used pseudonyms. Here you can't do anything but trust the first communication. But I think those cases are extremely infrequent: most groups and individuals try to establish a reputation, which nearly always gives you more points to anchor trust.
Reminds me of a sci-fi movie I can't think of the name of... they end up on a ship and it's haunted or something
Have you heard about Narrative Therapy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_therapy

Seems like you are describing a part of it.
I've mentioned an idea in Phoronix forums[1] yesterday:
Since most users won't bother comparing the entire signature (also applies to comparing md5/sha*/etc. hashes), it might be a good idea to map & display blocks of the sig as English words to the user.

Care must be taken to avoid similar-looking and similar-sounding (homophonic) words, but since there are >150k words in Oxford English Dictionary, so it should be possible to get 65k usable ones.

In fact, someone pointed out something like this already exists to a degree: [2]

A contrived visual example (suppose someone matches first two and last two segments!):

Fake Linus Torvalds: ABAF 11C6 32D8 69AE E438 F74B 6211 AA3B 0041 1886
Real Linus Torvalds: ABAF 11C6 5A29 70B1 30AB E3C4 79BE 3E43 0041 1886

With a word salad approach:

Fake Linus Torvalds: lopsided crate threatening hydrant peep bumpy art work earth spurious
Real Linus Torvalds: lopsided crate symptomatic equal kaput chunky kettle include earth spurious

Even with an even-spaced font, it's hard to confuse the two

(random words from [3])

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron...

[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi...

[3] https://www.randomlists.com/random-words
During an interview[1] (with one of the AirBnB founders no less), pg offered the general advice that startups should search for success using a hill climbing algorithm, and not worry about dangerous local maximums; only to be immediately confronted with the counter example of AirBnB (the cereal episode).

That company just seems to be an outlier in multiple categories.

[1] http://youtu.be/nrWavoJsEks at about 7:00
50KB/connection and 50MB fixed cost?!!?
What is 5G and when will it launch?
The whole point of this research was to underscore that PGP key acquisition is commonly broken. You could choose to blame PGP software, users, documentation, or the web-of-trust model itself, but in any case what a significantly number of people commonly do is unsafe.
First of all, can we stop regurgitating the claim that they want 1m BTC? It's an auction, they'll stop when they like the sum, but if they get 1m BTC they will release a different set of files to the public.

Second of all, the Shadow Brokers announcement reads like how a native English speaker thinks a non-native English speaker writes. There's no consistency to the mistakes, they just omit random articles from the text, whatever fits the "Russian accent" stereotype.
Alternative Rust Compiler
It's the creation of wormholes that would violate physics, though, right? AFAIK our current model of physics would work just fine to describe a universe that came into existence with permanent, stable wormholes already in it; that'd just be part of its topology.
Learning Online Alignments with Continuous Rewards Policy Gradient
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

Bending the rules until we win since before bowling under arm was officially banned.
Drink more water
I had no idea that the inventor of the Super Soaker designed real weapons systems as well.

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
Ford to ship self-driving cars without steering wheel, brake, gas pedal by 2021
The "all time" view is also interesting, although it's pretty heavily skewed towards northern Europe thanks to the origins of the competition:

http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-per-capita:all-time

Sic transit gloria mundi: Finland's at the top of the all-time rankings, but doesn't have a single medal so far in 2016 (although there's an unexpected one coming up in female boxing, as an essentially unknown boxer just beat the world champion and semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze).
Will Machines Eliminate Us?
Tell/ask HN: vimtutor teaches vim basics. Is there something similar for Emacs?
In one random comment I saw that the way for learning vim is to go to a command line and type in vimtutor and presto! Now you know enough vim to survive and learn more, all in 30 minutes. I did this last year and it's one of those things that I still think is a really good way of going about starting with vim.

I searched on HN for submissions about vimtutor and not one has taken off, yet the advice is something that I think that any person with the slightest interest in vim should know.

Relatedly, is there something similar for Emacs?
> Doesn't that depend what the representatives then do?

No. If you democratically elect terrible representatives who eat puppies, it's still democratic.

> Also, what about federal judges? None of those are democratically elected, and they get to interpret all the laws in ways that have great consequence.

You don't have to elect every government official for it to be a representative democracy. Democracy means that the ultimate power is vested in the people. If you elect representatives who appoint judges, the judges are still appointed by the power of the people.

> Hence, America's government is a little more complicated than "democracy", although some parts of it are surely "democratic" (e.g. the house of reps).

No government is simple. America is very clearly not a direct democracy, nor are all officials elected, but it is still a democracy.
Yes, Facebook had better strategy. They embraced new tech to streamline the pain factor of navigating the website, whereas MySpace tried to optimize for discrete page views to serve more ads. MySpace would serve an entire interstitial page load with nothing but ads to get to different parts of its interface, whereas Facebook would embrace ways to jump to your friends' profiles or read your messages quickly, often without reloading the page.

It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.

And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.
I'm amazed at the features they've crammed into x86 without breaking compatibility; Definitely impressive. That being said haven't they perverted the whole industry with this tactic? It seems like we ought to have switched from CISC to RISC. From a purely technical perspective at least. Microcode just seems like a run-time mini compiler. If it were just part of the actual compiler wouldn't that save power and heat? Could it hurt performance in some circumstances? Does CISC have any technical merit at all? I would love for this to have been motivated by something other than their x86 patents.
Look like they have now been offline for over 13 hours.
>Do banks still have any legal reasons to not allow paperless statements ?

The more procedures and services offered means a much greater scope for compliance issues. Running a financial institution means having to put a lot of manpower into regulatory compliance.
Fascinating interview! I had just learned about Lonnie Johnson yesterday!

I was reading up on the Lingo programming language[1] and found out that it was invented by a Jamaican computer scientist named John H. Thompson [2], which led me to learn about Lonnie Johnson.

> "After I had settled into my new job and home, I set to work making the parts of the plastic water gun on a little lathe and milling machine in the basement."

It would be super interesting to find out which lathe and milling machines he had used. It sounds like they might have been Sherline machines. [4] I wonder how easy it would be today to 3D print a SuperSoaker prototype given the difficulties due to overhangs in the geometry of SuperSoaker parts (e.g. tube, barrel). Something tells me that manually fabricating it on a small lathe/mill like Lonnie Johnson did would be much faster for prototyping than 3D printing, even today ... but I could be wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)
[2] http://www.black-inventor.com/John-Thompson.asp
[3] http://www.black-inventor.com/Lonnie-G-Johnson.asp
[4] http://sherline.com/
Susskind's ER=EPR posits that entanglement is actually a form of proto-wormhole, and you could build a bridge through spacetime with two entangled black holes... it works pretty well without rewriting physics. though you couldnt send information from one side out the other. Einstein-Rosen bridge
Even better: say, you've opened info for something and are lost in it, and try info info, what you get is a list of all the available info pages, preceded by (on my machine):

This is the Info main menu (aka directory node).
A few useful Info commands:

'q' quits;
'?' lists all Info commands;
'h' starts the Info tutorial;
'mTexinfo RET' visits the Texinfo manual, etc.

You'd think that's helpful, but...

hitting '?' brings a "Regexp search backward" prompt...

hitting 'h' brings... (oh irony) the info man page (but it's displayed by info, not man), and the man page has absolutely no information about how this thing works. Only command line arguments.
With business models like those, it's not surprising they are not still around.
The 5th element, too
What ended up happening? Did Intel breach any contract they had with you guys?
Apparently, 'just five short years away' is the new 'just ten short years away' - an mythically ambitious number, remains irrefutable because nobody, including the people making the claim, can see that far into the research and development process.