skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is the statistical analysis from the paper:

The method of Roe et al. is summarized as follows. Let 1L be the change in
glacier length over the past 130 years (∼1.9 km), and let σL be the standard
deviation of glacier length due to stochastic fluctuations in mass balance, b, from
natural, interannual climate variability. The signal-to-noise ratio is defined by
sL =1L/σL
. Likewise, sb =1b/σb
. Ref. 12 demonstrates that the two are related via
sL =γ sb
, where γ is an amplification factor that depends only on the duration of
the trend and the glacier response time, τ . The probability density function (PDF)
for sb
is generated by combining the signal-to-noise ratios of the observed
melt-season temperature and annual-mean precipitation trends, normalized by the
summer (bs) and winter (bw ) mass-balance variability (Supplementary Fig. 1a,b,c),
respectively. We take σbw = 0.3 myr−1
and σbs =0.5 myr−1
, based on the observed
mass-balance variability at Gulkana Glacier and the analysis of the global datasets
of glacier mass balance33. The glacier response time is given by τ =−H/bt
, where
H is a characteristic glacier thickness, and bt
is the (negative) net mass balance at
the terminus. We set H=590 m, based on the scaling relationship for glacier
geometry suggested by Haeberli and Hoelzle34 and measured cross-sections35; and
we set bt =−7 myr−1
, estimated by extrapolating the vertical mass-balance profiles
calculated by Flowers et al.8
, thus giving a central estimate for τ of ∼80 years. A
PDF is estimated assuming τ follows a gamma distribution incorporating a broad
uncertainty of στ =τ /4 (Supplementary Fig. 1d). The PDFs for γ and sb are
combined to give a PDF for σL
from the relation σL =γ 1L|
obssb
. This, in turn, is
used to evaluate the null hypothesis that 1L|
obs occurred due to natural variability.
Supplementary Fig. 1e shows our estimate that there is only a 0.5% chance
that the observed retreat of Kaskawulsh Glacier happened in the absence of a
climate trend.
We are in the age of "smart regulation," and have been for about 40 years. Prior to the 1970s and 1980s, you had government regulation that tried to micromanage markets (as the article explains, regulating "prices and routes"). Airline regulation was representative: the airline told you what you could charge, where you could fly, what your customer experience had to be, how much profits you could make, etc. The problem is that the government was terrible at making these sorts of decisions.

In the late 1970s through the 1990s, we rolled back that sort of regulation all across the economy. Instead of micromanaging prices and routes, we refocused the government on regulations like safety and maintenance standards. And it was a huge success: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/AirlineDeregulation.html. So much so that Europe copied it: http://www.economist.com/node/146627. It's not just because ticket prices are way cheaper than they used to be (though it's partly that). Carriers like FedEx and UPS (and companies that depend on them, like Amazon) wouldn't have been able to exist under the previous model where bureaucrats micromanaged the air cargo industry.

The article isn't espousing "smart regulation." It's asking for the government to get back into the business of micromanaging prices and service:

> There should also be rules on how many passengers an airline can cram into a plane, and what extras it can charge for. And there should be limits on price gouging. It makes no sense to allow airlines to charge an astronomical fare just because a flight is nearly full, and a dirt-cheap fare for an advance booking.

There is no economic rationale for the government to tell airlines what extras they can and cannot charge for, any more than there is for the government to tell app or game developers what kinds of DLC they can charge for.

Airline service is crappy for the same reason pop music and fast food are crappy. People are willing to give up almost everything in the way of amenities in return for saving a few bucks on the ticket price. It's not the government's place to tell them they shouldn't do that.
Very Heath Robinson by Sheldrake Press – Kickstarter
I feel pretty naive. When I read the headline, I assumed the hotel industry was going to adapt and innovate as opposed to using legal maneuvers and regulations.
I think that the this "vim mode" plugin for Visual Studio Code has the best roadmap/checklist for supported vim features out there.

https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

Every "vim mode" plugin should have something like that
> so coal and oil will remain economically viable without getting any kind of penalty

I think oil in Norway is taxed at something like 80%. Not for environmental reasons, though.
This reminds me a lot of the (I think) very underrated YaCy project: http://yacy.net/en/index.html

I know there are a ton of technical reasons why this is difficult, but web-scraping and the like always seemed like a problem that could be done fairly elegantly with distributed systems.
Feds Arrest Another Engineer for Theft of High Frequency Trading System Code
Readers understand this isn't close to being an operating system right? You get the first boot sector of a floppy for free from the BIOS. This isn't even as complex as the most simple boot loader. It doesn't handle loading more sectors of the floppy let alone being like an OS.

It's hello world in assembly, loaded onto the first sector of an emulated floppy. That's neat, but nothing to do with operating systems. Other than you've now learnt the very first stage of bootstrapping from a floppy disk back in the 90s. Which is cool, and good info to know and start out with.

I get the vast majority of people seeing this post have probably only ever experienced nodejs, or Ruby on Rails or something equally high level. But this is trivial with respect to an operating system or even a boot loader.
>But what if Netflix can be a role model for other companies? Doing the right thing, and being successful.

Unless privately owned, or run by a very strong CEO with very specific opinions and total control over the board, that's just not what companies do. As soon as profit is to be made, they'll sell melamine as baby milk.

So, not sure about how Netflix plays it, but there's another case I hand't covered: making enough money elsewhere to not be interested in such things.
I agree such a change is difficult, but I believe it's difficult precisely because it's currently not very democratic.

Deeply direct democracy is self-sustaining - people would agree to move over to a new system because it would give them more power than they have in the current parliamentary systems.

The problem as far as I see is the current political class (parliamentarians and people in the executive branch), which would lose power. And since this is who currently has the power, and it's always nearly impossible to make somebody give up power, that's the reason why this won't happen.

But Europe is in a state of crisis now, and maybe this crisis is great enough to motivate this class to move to a more open system.

If you think about it, the current indirect democracy (with parliaments and the electoral college etc) is a remnant of a time when a decision took days to travel through the whole land, and to be reasonably fast and decisive, you had to have them. Thanks to the internet, we could even go past such direct democracies like Switzerland and allow each citizen to vote at each bill, or if she didn't want to spend the time, leave that decision to a parliamentarian of her choosing, but with the option to take power again or give it to a different parliamentarian at any moment. Now that is true democracy. No back-hand deals, and no favoritisms anymore.
From the article: An industry that is not naturally competitive went from being a regulated cartel, to a brief period of ruinous competition, and then to an unregulated cartel — with predictable effects on the quality of service.

That also happened with the long-distance phone industry. Remember MCI Long Distance, Sprint Long Distance, etc. Also banking, where the US is down to four big banks.[1]

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/big-bank-theory-char...
Searching the Skies for Alien Laser Beams
I'm referring to the term used by the parent.
The problem is that "consulting bonanza" with open source software is really hard to do. It is really, really hard to draw a line between what is custom engineering and what is a non-upstream patch you will have to maintain forever. And that's why Red Hat's mantra is to do everything upstream first, even at the cost of sometimes delivering features later.

Everybody got that completely wrong.
Open source works, but you still have to understand how to engineer it. So far, companies that succeeded are mostly following an "open core" model where they control the core too (Atlassian, Automatic). Red Hat is the exception, and with Red Hat putting a lot of effort on upstream OpenStack development no one could pull off open core for OpenStack. Mirantis has plenty of non-upstream code and last I heard wants to sell SaaS to work around that.

Plus, no one devoted the right amount of engineering to the lower levels of the stack (at least QEMU and libvirt). You cannot seriously expect to partner with vendors for guest operating systems without knowing all of the stack---this was something else that Mirantis and others missed.

So the problem was not that OpenStack was bad, it was that everybody thought open source is magic. But it isn't magic, and if it looks like magic, it means you don't understand it.
NVIDIA has been "casually" helping out Hackintosh users with driver updates for their cards that aren't realistically used anywhere else for a while now (nobody has that pre-"trashcan" Mac Pro with the swappable PCI Express GPU slot anymore).
I find it so frustrating that there is only 1 airline flying the SFO-YYZ route. Virgin canceled theirs in 2011 I guess because they couldn't make any money. But looking at AC fares, it's clear a single carrier is making too much money on this monopoly.

How do we get free markets to work in a system like this? 50 passenger self-flying planes?
I have never considered moving though, because although the other editors may emulate vim itself pretty closely, I highly doubt that the vim econsystem of plugins which I'm used to (my particular flavoring of keyboard-only window management, autocomplete, file tree navigation, searchability, etc) would be portable over. Vim is more than just hitting j to go down a line and ce to replace a word to me.

At the absolute minimum I need a port or something very, very similar to NERDTree and vim-easymotion in the new environment.
> if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt).

OpenStack is at the same layer as AWS, GCP or Azure. It's not an abstraction over them -- that's a PaaS. I'm not sure OpenStack was ever seriously intended to work at that level.

I work on a platform, Cloud Foundry, which provides the kind of portability you're talking about. Red Hat have OpenShift, which is another such platform.

Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.
> If plugin/loading speed is really an issue then switch to using Alacritty and Neovim, use vim-plug for async & lazy loading plugins.

I already do.

> Silver search is great, but if you understand how to execute terminal commands from vim (:!) then you can grep everything and remove the need for silver search

I used that for CtrlP and in my experience returned better results. I know how to use grep and I use it frequently outside of Vim.
Given a long string it will make insertion into the middle of text fast. Have you ever opened a file in Atom, added one character, and the whole thing locks up? That's the use case this solves, among others.
The article is not about carrier pigeons, but about the passenger pigeon. This is a North American species of pigeon famous for the huge size of its flocks, large enough to darken the skies on a sunny day. It was commercially overhunted to extinction by the early 20th century, a famous example of extinction.
You could also try giving Linux Mint a shot, too. Unlike Ubuntu and Windows 10, you don't deal with copious ads in your file manager and launcher and things like that.
To be honest, I have a long list of friends, especially in creative professions where people struggle with setting up reliable backups. There is a reason Dropbox and other cloud drives were so successful. Any improvement on the data integrity front is very welcome.
For photos, sure, it's not that big of a deal. But not all files are independent like that. A single bit flip in an executable can be a huge deal. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
This article explains it:
http://tech.co/twines-ceo-creative-marketplace-brings-qualit...
See? Now you're sounding like an old fart :-)

You give an example of Object-Oriented Programming as an idea that has software engineering idea back by decades but really isn't it the misapplication of that tool that does the damage? Consider that time and again software engineers have developed a code base of functions which all need a bit a shared state, and technique of calling all those functions while including a reference to the 'context', was more simply expressed as calling a function "from" the context itself?

The tools help with the cognitive burden of understanding the entire system. And tools that allow one to make durable assumptions about part of the system allow the engineer to 'free up' space in their brain for other parts of the system. That desire to add abstraction in order to 'move up' the conceptual tree and get a wider view of the overall system has been part of how humans think since they first started collecting into tribes[1].

Certainly "over abstracting" is a huge issue. There was a great story about the Xerox Star system (first word processor that was multi-lingual and multi-fonted) that Dave Curbow used to tell about how the 'call stack' to get a character on the screen had reached insane levels (and that made things very slow). All due to abstraction. And yet there are good examples too where at Sun the adding of support for the 3b2 file system was accomplished quickly, and everything still worked, due to the Virtual File System (VFS) abstraction.

My point is that it isn't the tools that set computer science back, it is the misapplication of them that does that. And what I liked about Raph's discussions on Xi is the exploring and testing whether or not a tool he had available was applicable to writing text editors.

[1] Can you imagine the challenge of having to talk to someone in the tribe for 10 minutes to determine what their role was and capabilities? So much easier to say "You're a hunter right?" and when they say yes just assume various hunter capabilities are available.
Ask HN: Any car recommendations for my parents?
I want my parents (who are getting up there in age but still drive) to get a new car with safety features. They don't need anything fancy, but lane assist, collision avoidance, help service like On-Star, are some features that may allow them to drive a few more years.

I agree these features are not a substitute for a good driver, but would give everyone more confidence behind the wheel.

So, which car would be a good pick? Is there a safe car for the elderly?
It IS nice having Photoshop working in a real UNIX like environment.
Well, the stats are true and available online.

I admittedly lack evidence on the enviro-tourism aspect, but it seems logical that tourists from heavily industrialized 3rd world countries return with some desire to improve their home environment.
IMHO if your product and company works, you're in it for a long time. That means your co-founder should keep their motivation long-term as well.

If your first sale happens within the next few months, I would keep a 50/50 split just because they will put in a lot of effort in the future. Alternatively, you could start your vesting now and and the other founder could start vesting as soon as he joins full-time. Not sure if this is legally possible.

Another option would be to count the difference in time you spent on it and translate that into equity and ask your co-founder to give you that (like 45% vs 55% equity split). I wouldn't go more than 5%, since I prefer to keep things even. Again, you've got a long road ahead of you, so make sure both of you feel comfortable with the split and with future obligations as well.
New York’s Taxi commission to propose in-app tipping requirement for Uber
Sure I understand about the logistical concerns and population densities but how do these spokes allow them to "defend their pricing power"?

Is it simply that that they can charge customers in those small secondary markets a premium on fares into the hub areas? Is that the pricing leverage?
According to an article I read last night (might be the same article as this one) - they are trying to figure out if this is the case; in short, they believe there are effects (seems a reasonable thought!), but they don't know just yet what they are, or how severe they are.

So they simulated this with a bunch of crabs - caught a bunch, let them sit out in the sun for a while, transported them, bled them, let them sit some more, then tossed them back in. Half of them they didn't bleed (control); before they tossed them in, they attached tracking devices to their backs, and are monitoring their movements.

Now - they don't say what the data they got back is or means or which crabs they came from. But from the article, it's apparent that at least some of the crabs are still moving around and are alive. How many, what they are doing, if they are acting normal - none of that is mentioned.

It will be interesting in what they eventually find. I don't think it's reasonable to say there isn't any effect from the practices they describe - it certainly seems like there could be issues based on the conditions and amount of blood drawn (and the fact that they aren't breathing while out of water - for what sounds like several days minimum!). What I hope they find is that things aren't as bad as feared, but that some minor changes can be made to make the creatures less stressed.

Hopefully we'll find out very soon...
AMD has had cheaper/slower processors for many years. Is something different about Ryzen?
It's so upsetting to me that they don't make bands like this available for general public use. If we had clearly defined rules about interoperability we could reserve a band for essentially free low bandwidth cell phone usage, at least for text and basic data.

I've imagined that the towers could be open hardware that sell minutes on the fly for bitcoin transferred by the user.

But no, instead these corporations pay billions with the expectation that they'll recover that and much more from us who have no free option for mobile wireless.

It's really frustrating to me.
Do you know how to remove 5 stupid menus on the left; explorer, search, git, debug, and extension.

I don't agree with all these as default.

Explorer (basically the nav tree): Just give me a toggle key and hide it by default please (I mean hide its icon nav too)

Search: really? something + F is fine for short key like the others do.

Git: I haven't even tried to use version control inside text editor. It is just illusion of ease. It's not significantly different from switching to a terminal. A terminal has its jobs to do, please use it. You will use it anyway for other tasks.

Extension: This is even worse to be default. I don't think I have something to frequently do with extensions.

I like its light computation compared to Atom. I had switched to VS Code for a while, then switched back to Atom. Maybe I'm just lazy to remember new keys.

Edit::
Just found it, "Hide activity bar". Sorry for being lazy :/
Tackling hard human problems with an app and ML
This was only after some incidents. As far as I can remember, Turkey was already harbouring 1M+ Syrian refugees.
Unsafe cars are also raise the death raise inside and outside of the car and raises health costs that are borne by all members of society. People should not be allowed to drive unsafe cars.
several of my blog posts have had high google scholar citation counts; doesn't make them scientific articles, though. still just my personal opinions.
I totally agree that money raised is irrelevant. The hope was our journey can be useful to others.

The hard work is just beginning.
Radiolab had a pretty good podcast explaining where these economic estimates come from and why they are important to have around. It's part 3 at the following link:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/worth/

Basically, if you do not make a monetary estimate of the worth of some feature of nature, it's assumed worth is $0 when governments are making decisions about policy and land use.
I'm not sure either, but I do know it's included in the top four networks' and their advertisers' future plans for TV and that an article discussing said companies future without discussing Hulu is incomplete.
Hmm. I'll wait for "why I moved back Vim" post.
Excited to see this work in print!
You can view it directly here:
slideshare.net/stuartlogan2002/the-pitch-deck-we-used-to-raise-over-1-million
You have to ignore the "big talk." Truth is money is worth some level of aggravation: how much is for you to decide.

But these are usually the same people that don't have the money, in my experience.

Sometimes you will have tough customers: but there's a difference between working with someone who is a no-nonsense person and working with someone who's impossible to work with.
> We barely know anything about it at this point. Unless you've got an uncle at Nintendo, your assertion that it's an "expansion" is unfounded.

True, we don't know the specifics, but my point was that the core game doesn't feel like it was intentionally broken just to make way for DLC like we see far too often with games these days. Any new content is an expansion on what is currently a masterpiece.

Sure, we don't know how expansive an expansion it is, but I'd still argue that even a small release is an expansion at this point. I'm also giving them the benefit of the doubt considering how excellent the core game is.
But these money are tiny compared to the Impact they will/should get from AMD Ryzen.

To remain price competitive with AMD Ryzen, Intel's Gross margin will likely take a dive from the current 60% to below 50% over the next few years. The Data Center Group represent 30% of the Revenue, and my guess it represent 60%+ of the profits.

OpeX is increasing, R&D required for each node is increasing. They are not in Smartphone, they are not opening up their Fab. Basically their future looks pretty grim to me. They wont disappeared all of a sudden, they will likely have 3 to 5 years more time to figure it out.

But, again none of this has to do with Intel withdrawing from so many project. I cant believe saving money from these event / project are the motives.
It's making way for 5G service on mobile devices...
4G dragged the internet from our desktops to our phones, forcing business models around the world to change. 5G is sure to have a major impact.
Only caveat there is to make sure you're ISO's are hacked.