skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My friends run a small rapid response disaster team organization. They've been some of the first on the scene of a lot of the most recent disasters, including the 2011 Japan tsunami, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (they are also in Texas now).

They've brought back depressing stories about the amount of bureaucracy and thumb-twidiling that goes on during the first couple days of a disaster, where large organizations are struggling to coordinate efforts. In one case, an entire plane-load of bottled water from Red Cross could not be distributed because they didn't have the "approval" from higher up.

Similar to startups, small orgs can be much more nimble than their incumbent counterparts.
What's dishonest about it?
The 5% is to cover 501c3 vetting, mostly. It's not a profit center.

In this particular case, the fees are waived.
Personally I would prefer a diversified portfolio of stocks whose value haven't displayed correlation with previous market corrections.
TL;DR

1. keep emotions out of the exchange

2. discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum)

3. listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately

4. show respect

5. acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion

6. try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews.
There is nothing misleading about this headline
Markets also did not collapse when Donny won. But, hey, what do markets know?
It's also bubbling up nicely, and one good crash deserves another.
Safari’s new tracking rules, and enabling cross-domain data storage
The best organizations to support I find are regional food banks or healthcare groups. I've given some fund to Direct Relief and the Houston Food Bank. Your local food bank may also be providing support, so check with them first.

I'm generally reserved about going crazy about supporting aid efforts, since the nightmare regarding aid projects post-Haiti really did dampen my enthusiasm. Exhibit A: https://www.wnyc.org/story/272660-what-happened-to-the-aid-m...
Let's do some research:

Red Cross:

Mostly OK, but... there are some occasional issues.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
https://www.charitywatch.org/ratings-and-metrics/american-re...
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-find...

Meanwhile the Center for Disaster Philanthropy ... is smaller.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

I actually can't quickly find any issues on them, though comparing the one common source they seem to have far better transparency, and lower internal overhead (I suspect more volunteers?).
Poor planning and poor infrastructure may have contributed to the problem:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...

This is not "rhetoric" and there is also nothing "partisan" about it.
NPr followed up Lieutenant General Honore (of Katrina and Rita experience) and he disagreed with the decision of Houston mayor.[1] And now they are evacuating areas because of impending breaches.

[1]http://www.npr.org/2017/08/29/546978194/with-much-of-houston...
Conway's Game of Life can be implemented naively in C/C++/Java/etc, using a boolean for every cell's state (on/off). This will require at least n*m bytes (probably more in Java). Using bits to store that data will require 8 times less, which will most likely greatly increase the performance because of the data locality and the amount of data that will fit into a CPU cache.
Fair enough. Now that I reread the whole article, the mentioning of the incident does actually seem a bit out of place in this as well; it doesn't explicitly connect it to the preceding paragraph or the rest of the paragraph.
"group works to change how donors think about giving during disasters, focusing on long-term recovery"

But many other charities do this too and they got panned for doing so, including Red Cross. When people donate for a specific cause, many do it with expectation that fund will go to that particular cause in expedient manner, rather than rainy day fun or worse, diverted for different cause altogether.

Perhaps Red Cross should provide 2 options for donating:

1. Use my fund for immediate needs.

2. Use my fund as you see fit.

And if all immediate needs are met, then simply disable option #1 and inform users, "Thank you, there is no longer need for immediate needs. We can still use a lot of help in recovery fund" or something.
This hardware [1] is a bit long in the tooth but you do not have to pony up $2K to get started.

[1] https://www.apple.com/us/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
The Red Cross has had this 'PR Problem' for ages. It came under a lot of criticism for its handling of funds after 9/11 and even then it wasn't a new story. It's a sort of disaster evergreen that doesn't seem to affect them very much, for some reason.
vidir is another one of these. Despite the name it works with any EDITOR.

https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir

Seems like the main difference compared to Roamer is that it just uses numbered lines instead of hashes.
Are you suggesting Yellow journalism is some new phenomena? It seems quite a stretch to associate this article for some cheap readership trick.
The "git" tool holds an entire copy of the repository wherever you check it out. You had no checkouts at all?
NOVSIGHT 9000LM 70W Car LED Headlights H7
Summary: The herbicide dicamba can evaporate from where it was applied and drift to nearby fields harming plants that are not resistant to it.

This is causing a disaster for those farmers, and an ecological problem in general.

The manufacturer claims the new dicamba is less like to evaporate and the problems are from farmers using old stocks. Others don't agree. Lots of noise and wind, little hard data - (the lack of data it itself part of the problem).
Models actually showed a disaster of this scale as far back as 2005: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Models-show-...
NPR followed up with Lieutenant General Honore of hurricane Katrina and Rita experience[1] and he disagreed with the mayor's orders.

[1]http://www.npr.org/2017/08/29/546978194/with-much-of-houston...
I got up to the part where the author talks about including the test results in the patient's file. Up to there, every point of contention either seems whiny or completely valid on the institution's part.
The best way to avoid weeds...

Hydroponics inside of greenhouses farmed by robots.

Ultimately that's just costly, but the shortest path to reducing that cost is more affordable energy.

Until we get to sealed greenhouses maybe exotic solutions like poison resistant Genetically Modified (Organisms?) should be avoided as food and industrial sources.
In the same category a bit, Neuromancer. Note the publish date, 1984.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/888628.Neuromancer
Reviews of Scarguard MD Cream
Their abrogation of laws worldwide is only possible via their organised conspiracy.
For direct sources of the information

Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/publication...

CDP: http://disasterphilanthropy.org/who-we-are/financials-annual...
AWS has a map that shows the physical location of all data centers. us-west-2 for example is split up among three cities in Oregon. Probably 60-70mi between each of them.
That's not true at all. I can visually discern 4K from 1080p on my desktop monitors (4K 27 inch) and even on my 15 inch Retina MacBook if I try. On a large TV it's generally fairly easy too.

Sure, if you're looking at a little 40" TV five meters away, not so much, but for many screens in common use 4K is useful (but getting close to the point of diminishing returns, sure). Whereas as this article says, higher than 48kHz audio should be literally impossible to discern for any human in any setup.
Robot weed-pullers might be OK at some point.

Any chemical approach is just going to select for resistance sooner or later (often sooner than expected).
The Development of the C Language (1993 !!!)
It is also saving farms too:

Critics say that the approval process proceeded without adequate data and under enormous pressure from state agriculture departments, industry groups and farmers associations. Those groups said that farmers desperately needed the new herbicide to control glyphosate-resistant weeds, which can take over fields and deprive soybeans of sunlight and nutrients

--

So a more honest headline would be:

"This miracle weed killer is saving farms as well as sometime devastating their neighbors"
> Therefore, extra temporal resolution helps.

But it's not resolution, right? It's extra frequencies outside the audible range. Is there any natural process that would make those affect the audible components, if I were listening to the music live instead of a recording?
Social Media Success Factors for Small Businesses
I thought there was a time like that too, but then I found chapter titles in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" like "A Formula That Will Work Wonders for You" (published 1936).
I have a feeling that there is a reason, these small businesses stay as small businesses; They are not the most economically rationale decision makers
Look at this license plate collection
Sure, but recessions and depressions are not something that is really all that rare. Unlike doomsday predictions, if you predict a crash you'll probably be right within a decade at least by pure chance alone.
Absolutely; Neal Stephenson's latest book ("The Rise And Fall Of D.O.D.O.") touches on this, in asking what series of "small" changes it would take to unravel the modern world. Was a good read.

From where you sit, what is the impact of the intermix between those two technologies?

As a layperson, I can see tailor-made medications becoming cheap and common over the long run. Not only might that read "goodbye, cancer!", but also mitigate the resultant threat of biological warfare.

After all, if you can cook up tailor-made anticancer and antiviral drugs in a machine at Walgreens, then you can counter a tailor-made bioweapon pretty easily.

Food production is another obvious boost, so we might have a second Norman Borlaug that once again lifts the carrying capacity of Earth. We can probably also assume foods engineered to grow in extreme environments.

From that, you also get biological air and water recycling for spacecraft, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Some sales-related challenges faced by companies I've worked for:

1. incentive plan - you'd be surprised at how much a poorly-thought out plan can screw things up. For example, let's say you're growth focused and don't have a lot to spend, so you think it's appropriate to only pay 20% commission on order revenue if the order belongs to a customer within the first 3 months after a customer's first order was completed. Genius right? Wrong. After that 3 months, your sales team is going to ignore that customer, and that unhappy customer at best won't be coming back as you burn through all of your leads; at worst they'll disparage you to everyone they know which includes your potential customers.

2. recruiting pool - this is not just a sales problem, but if you choose a crappy location because it's cheap or an easy commute for you personally, you're in large part defining the edges of your recruiting pool to reasonable commuting distance to your office. This is a great reason to embrace remote sales, but then you have to ensure a lot is in-place. Also, be aware of the general culture where you're recruiting. Do you accept it? Will the rest of the company and your customers?

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11... many other things like: cell phone plan(s), travel reimbursement (don't give them a hard time about buying bottled water, do set realistic common-sense ground rules to ensure you have a sustainable plan through good and bad times, show them how to use a cellphone app to quickly scan and collect receipts, etc.), SalesForce licenses (or at least don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to CRM software), quality leads (ABC doesn't stand for "always be cold-calling"), automated contact resolution, sales training (and training for everything else!), customer training (and ensure that everything is legal in every way as it relates to the customer which is public exposure), network, IT/app support, product planning and ongoing FULLY RELEVANT communication about what is and isn't possible to do with your products/services.

...

9999999999. Last but not least, the selection process and effective sell of the position itself. You have to be ready and able to sell the position to a salesperson that you expect to be better than you at sales. You also need to recognize when they can't sell. You probably can't really accomplish this easily during selection, at the very least, ensure there's a clear understanding of quota, etc., and, like the reimbursement plan, it needs to be sustainable. If you keep changing the quota and they get pissed, they will know how to use Glassdoor, Google reviews, and tell every customer they run into at their new company about all your faults.

Some extras:

* Your smartest salespeople are going to make mistakes, probably be sneaky at times or try things that don't make sense. Encourage the creative things they do, but also listen to the others that provide better ways to handle those things. These are the ones to keep if they can really sell.

* Sales is about the company's success, not each sell itself. A bad sales staff will tank a company if told to do whatever it takes to make the sell, which includes selling at a loss.
This is actually a really interesting problem because depending on how you set it up, you'll get very different answers. To illustrate, notice the difference between these questions:

1) Suppose I flip a coin 3 times and repeat that experiment on 10 different occasions. What's the probability that I get all heads at least once?

2) Suppose I flip a coin 30 times (same total number of flips). What's the probability that I get at least 1 string of at least 3 heads?

(1) is more like the binomial calculation you've set up, but I think (2) is closer to the question we want to be asking.

This is important because, as it turns out, (2) is much more likely than (1). You can tell intuitively that there are more sequences of coin flips that would satisfy (2). For example "THH HTT ..." would satisfy (2) but not (1).

So how should we pose the hurricane question? I propose: What's the probability that in a 100 year period, across 100 cities, there will be at least 1 city that experiences a 500-year flood for at least 3 contiguous years?

Solving this analytically is non-trivial, but it's easy to simulate:

// Scala

val rand = scala.util.Random
def coinFlip(p: Double): Boolean = rand.nextDouble <= p

// Simulates 100 years and returns true if there's a contiguous string
// of three events with p=1/500.
val targetEvent = Seq(true,true,true)
def threeIn100Years = Seq
.fill(100)(coinFlip(1.0/500))
.containsSlice(targetEvent)

// Simulate this 100,000,000 times
val simulations = 100000000
val count = Stream
.fill(simulations)(threeIn100Years)
.foldLeft(0){case (acc, cur) => if(cur){acc + 1} else {acc}}

// Estimated probability for a single city.
val p = count/simulations.toDouble

// The probability it will happen *at least* once in a population of
// 100 cities.
// This calculates the probability if *won't* happen 100 times, and
// then takes the complement, giving us the final probability
1 - Math.pow(1 - p, 100)

The final answer I get is 9.5E-5, so still very unlikely, but 100x more likely than the binomial calculation.
This situation is a result of small farm consolidation and commoditization imho.

My grandfather was a small farmer.

He farmed about 120 acres in his retirement when I knew him and it was enough to keep his family well fed and well funded until the day he died.

He knew everybody in town. He went to all the farm shows. He bought the best animal breeds he could find and had a whole host of different animals, fruits, vegetables and legumes living happily on his farm at any given time.

Cows, chickens, ducks, wheat, peaches, onions, etc.

I remember he used to feed ground up eggshells to his chickens because he swore it made the strongest egg shells which could be shipped into town unscathed.

He fertilized his fields with manure.

And when a crop was lost to locusts... he didn't spray the entire field with insecticide.

He invited me out into the crops with a torch and we burnt it all down to the ground in order to kill off their eggs.

He lived where he farmed.

I couldn't imagine him ever agreeing to use the world's most dangerous herbicide in order to grow a crop that did not want to be grown where his farm was located.

What would his neighbours think? Where would his livelihood come from if he somehow poisoned his land?

Nowadays when most farms are 10,000+ acres in size and overseen by absentee landlords... I'm not surprised in the slightest that they are tossing around dangerous chemicals like candy without a care in the world.

Shame on them. And RIP Grandpa ;)
You could bounce each track as an individual audio file
I have a serious question. Should this be a web visualization? Doesn't all the abstraction lead to performance hits? Tons of data needs to be pulled off the hard drive, network, RAM and shoved into the graphics card. Is putting a web browser in the middle of that pipeline the most efficient use of resources? I feel like it is a hammer situation.
Because it's useful to be able to access the same state from everywhere, and to not have to worry if the computer in front of you gets destroyed or stolen. Plus Chromebooks are more resistant to viruses and tampering.

Thinking about a Chromebook as a restricted computer is kind of like thinking of a USB keyboard as a restricted computer. Yeah, you can't really use it as a general-purpose computer. But that's not the point. It's an ultra-reliable toaster that you use to access some other general-purpose computer in the cloud.
It did ok for the most part, except it also suggested "goofys" as a tag for https://github.com/kahing/goofys.
Yep, the opening claiming leaving your money in an index fund amounts to "speculation" seemed bizarrely backwards to me. So trying to pick winners and losers isn't speculation, it's investing, but investing in a balanced portfolio spreading risk over the long term is? The latter is only speculating that over the long term, there'll be more winners than losers in your portfolio. The former relies on making individualized bets correctly.

How many portfolio managers beat long term returns to the S&P 500? Not many that I've seen.
The discovery of Pāṇinian grammar by nineteenth-century European linguistic scholars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini#Modern_lin... probably comes close, although of course Pāṇini was never lost or unknown in India.
Developing countries are the least hurt by global recessions. And the point isn't that the capital has to go somewhere, it's that it's not actually there to begin with. Besides, the article says it's the US specifically that looks like it's in trouble and that foreign stocks looks much better.
Heh I've used emacs for years and never knew about this.

I actually don't tend to use emacs as a file manager for whatever reason. I find shell file utility commands along with sed, awk, xargs to be adequate.
Ask HN: What's been the best customer service/support experience you've had?
Authoritarian states can be successful, for sure. But they're still immoral. Rome did really well with slaves, for centuries. Does that mean that slavery is good?
The only time I think we changed the slugs at my college newspaper was when I did not realize my terrible memey titles in the cms would be on the public url. Got some angry emails over that.
Blogspam of

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/marketplace/20170828/califo...
This is more troubling given the author's support for eugenics.
So your point is people are either genius or they must simply resign to fate, do nothing to improve their lives or chase a good career, and must simply give up and go flip burgers at McDonalds?

Being persistent at something, and then course correcting on feedback is how any under dog ever does anything.
Has he? I've always read him as being quite measured, saying that his index (10 year average) was not good at predicting near term returns.
There are plenty of perma-bears, though. Although, in my opinion, being wrong on timing by years is still being wrong.
Thanks for the resource, I had a brief look into the laws of California. As it is, I am not a lawyer, so don't take my word as truth.

According to California Elections Code, Sec. 102 and 2101, those circulating petitions are required:

- to be a citizen of the United States
- to be at least 18 years of age or older
- to be a resident of the state
- to not be in prison or parole for conviction with a felony.[0]

So I think that rules out my own involvement. I'm bummed I'm excluded from participating in an activity that I want to lean about. This, despite the fact that I do, on virtue of paying taxes and actively participating in civic live, support the government and country. I should have an avenue to learn about how these institutions function in government, even if my role is strictly participatory and non-voting.

0: https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces..., Section on Restrictions to circulators.
Glad to see Wildberger getting some recognition, even if some of it is mixed. His rational trigonometry is an entirely rigorous and interesting piece of mathematics even if you don't think it's particularly pragmatic.
Looks like Jupyter Notebooks is a new standard for sharing Live Python code, as my Python for Bioinformatics book: http://py3.us
What web technology would you use when dedication is not high?
Hi all,

I am a freelance developer specialized on geographical information systems (GIS). Essentially, I do custom developments involving maps, many of these developments being web applications.

However, web development is not my main activity. Apart of it, in my projects I may clean data, do some spatial analysis, style some maps, tune some database and map servers, etc.. Building a web application is a relative small part of my workload.

This low dedication contrasts with the web technology development pace. I walk slowly along learning curves just to find at the end of it that it is not the right technology anymore. It is hard to obtain a return of the investment when I am doing two to three relatively small web applications a year.

I would love to find an approach that:

* Allows me to build modern looking web applications. Responsive at the very least (Disclaimer: probably I don't know well what a modern web application now is).
* Reuse parts from one project to the next. Web mapping applications are not an innovation paradigm and I end up having the same functionalities all over my projects.
* Smooth learning curve, long term life. I want to have time to apply what I learn, to build on that and to know well my tools.

In my last attempt I build up a custom solution with a message bus pattern and requirejs modules. Requirejs was on fire when I took the decision but it just got marked as "uncool" few months later (bear with my sarcasm, please). It did the trick for a while though (and still does).

What technological choice would you do in these low dedication conditions?
How do you know in which cases the fees are waived?
Yes, and the only difference is the lack of unwanted ultrasonic signals.
> Our burn rate was closer to $22k per month.

Seems like this should have been mistake #1. That is an awfully high burn rate for a startup still trying to find product market fit.
11 Books All Software Engineers Must Read