skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a reasonably fair article although I want to make a couple key points.

The comparison point of the Haiti earthquake Makes No Sense! Deaths in Haiti we're maybe 230,000. Deaths in Peurto Rico are < 100.

Troops Deployed comparisons make no sense! Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. It's GDP is $8 billion for 8 million people vs $100 Billion for 3.5 million people in PR. Peurto Ricans are 28x more productive per capita which has huge implications across the board for the level of response required. But it's not unfair to consider the average Peurto Rican is 28x more able to prepare, endure, and contribute to recovery efforts than the average Haitian.

Also Peuro Rico has 10,000 local US National Guard which are not being counted in Atlantics figures. That means actual US troops in PR are roughly equivalent to Haiti deployment actually.

Other reports I've read are that USMS Comfort did not initially deploy because PR locals wanted field hospitals not ship-based. Not because the Federal gov decided themselves not to send it.

And finally - to lead with "Almost two weeks after the storm abated, most of the island’s residents still lack access to electricity and clean water." First of all it will be months before most residents have power, mostly because the pre-existing state of their grid. I've read it needs to be rebuilt entirely. Second, clearly there is access to potable water as you can't live this long without it, and NYT reports as of yesterday Oct 4 a total of 34 deaths attributed to Maria including 15 "indirect" deaths which occurred after the storm passed.
AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my generation (at least in my social circle).

So much drama went down in those short little notes.
The ~7,000 warheads that the US and Russia still have are a clear and present danger to humanity, but I would hesitate to get rid of all of them and have world scale conventional war return. Maybe a few dozen very well protected and spread-out nuclear warheads and delivery systems per country would be the ideal situation.
They actually have a way to show this. If you play around with the other buttons and modes they seem to use colored for on/connected, grey for on/disconnected, and grey with a line through it for radio off.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11886318

Another good page on image dithering: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/
Nice to see FF picking up momentum again. I don't want to use Chrome because I don't trust Google with my data (using Chromium right now). Can't wait to switch back, once it's GA.
I'm not certain that you understand how China (as in the People's Republic of China) works. They have a completely different tradition of philosophy and ethics from the west.

Yes, from our perspective, they should ease those laws. From their perspective, there is no disadvantage to them in keeping them in place as long as it is possible. It would literally take international pressure similar to the Eight-Nation Alliance, Boxer War, and "century of humiliation" to temporarily stop China from favoring domestic companies with operating restrictions and to stop sweeping it under the rug whenever those companies blatantly cheat, steal from, and infringe upon the imaginary property of foreigners and foreign corporations.

The existing Chinese government sees international trade partners as resources to be exploited for the benefit of China (and also its government officials, naturally).

Foreign companies are cutting their own throats to try to access the billion people of the Chinese domestic marketplace, and the Chinese companies are catching the blood and making sausages from it. People are going in with Adam Smith in mind, and getting Sun Tzu in response.

Facebook should not be operating in China. It shouldn't even be wanting to operate in China. It either gets eaten by Tencent directly, or Tencent copies every last byte of technology Facebook deploys in China, then the government tweaks their Firewall to block Facebook long enough for people to switch to the copy, and Facebook can no longer compete.

If you are not Chinese, there is no long-term future for your business in China. And in China, that is considered virtuous governance. In the west, fair and non-discriminatory dealings are considered virtuous, but China is not the west. They have been their own thing for thousands of years, and their thing is not your thing.

You can make money in China in the short term, but the only way to continue that into the long term is to viciously protect the secrets of your competitive advantage. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks won't help you. Well written contracts won't save you. The only reasonable way to operate in China is to keep all the critical elements of your operation somewhere else. Never give a Chinese company your source code or engineering documents, unless you want to see your work in a competitor's products.

If you want to work with all those brilliant Chinese people, make it easier for entire families to emigrate to your country. As long as they remain in PRC jurisdiction, or have significant ties back to people remaining in it, they will never truly be working for you, or even with you.
wonder if Backblaze is buying directly from HDD manufacturers or wholesalers and how much volume discount?
Yep, sorry for the confusion!
Fairly well documented in the CA media:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/hepatitis-crisis/sd...

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-pl...
Ask HN: What are some cool things you've done?
For me:

I found a new way to abuse the market in an MMORPG and made $50k+ from it as a high-schooler

Re-invented myself in college. I was something of a loner in HS and became a highly involved very social person in college, while improving my personal life substantially.
Thanks for your comment, I'll take a look.
Because it's 2017 and we shouldn't suffer non-Free Software any longer.
Capers Jones is a well-respected expert in software metrics. He's done some ground-breaking work in this area. Unless you're an expert too, I wouldn't denigrate him.
[Resolved]
> You don't navigate in insert mode. This is why its important to have some alternative to esc.

There's one that's already built in: ctrl-[.
Bitcoin.org to denounce “Segwit2x”
I've been following https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/Firefox56AddonW...

It's surprised me the amount some people rely on addons for their workflow and the amount of effort they will be going through to resist this change come 57.

For my usage, I've found Firefox Klar/Focus (which I believe already include the speed improvements from 57+?) on Android and have been extremely impressed.
Ask HN: Linux foundations training material for junior colleagues?
I'm finding myself often teaching junior colleagues command line and other Linux basics, then sending them material (be official docs, a blog or a StackOverflow page or a man page command) to look at to review what I've explained. It's in the context of work so I have to rush through it, so I can finish my own projects.

All this to ask: do you have recommended fast-paced training of Linux command-line, bash scripting, then core systems stuff (how ssh works, strace, /proc and so forth)? I was looking at the Linux Professional Institute as I once took a kernel class there, but their partners don't have great reviews and the training seems video-based (from what I could tell).

Any suggested resources? I was thinking Red Hat but it's quite pricey and RH-centric.
How Gutenberg Is Changing WordPress Development?
China is logically interested in Russia's natural resources and military technology. It's not as if they were proposing an equal partnership.
Apple must have statistics about this (from people who opt in to it like me).

If they made this change I imagine the number of people who actually toggle the radios on and off a lot (manually, not airplane mode) must be very small.

I’m sure th know how many people have written them about the ‘I ran up my cellular bill and it’s your fault’ thing too. I know I’ve heard that from people.

It’s a change from what it’s been doing for 10 years but I think it makes sense.
$50/month at $0.005/GB/month.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
This would be paid for by the employer, btw. Online preferred.
Elon Musk could help Puerto Rico's electricity issue after Hurricane Maria
Preemptible VMs exist in part to avoid leaving capacity sitting idle.

We hate idle resources. :)
It was text messaging before everyone had a computer in their pockets.
When I see devs are talking/fighting for tech trends or programming patterns or frameworks, Ken's quote ( or message you say ) come in my mind always:

"Many if not most of the software we use is probably obsolete according to the latest design criteria. Most users could probably care less if the internals of the operating system they use is obsolete. They are rightly more interested in its performance and capabilities at the user level."

From The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate[0]

[0]. http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html
This is just plain silly. They might as well award the thing to my old friend Paul, who styles himself a peace poet, and writes shit poor poems about how we should all just, you know, not make war on each other anymore. At least he really needs the money. Nukes don't go away because profiled do-gooders whine about them.

The litterature prize, btw, really, really, really needs to go to Randall Munroe one of these years. Yes, I'm dead serious.
In the Engagement Economy, Advocacy Trumps Loyalty
As you say it is very much not, at least for now, a trivial attack even with unconstrained physical access, nor is it an unknown problem. That said I think you might be a little too blasé about the ever increasing importance of maintaining at least some security in the face of physical attacks.

>The textbook example of a setting where fault attacks matter is smart cards: they're computing devices that perform crypto operations and their users are naturally adversarial (the card controls their access to some resource they'd naturally prefer unfettered access to).

Smart cards (and more specialized HSMs), along with on-cpu/soc dedicated crypto black boxes, are also utilized by users to provide an additional layer of redundancy or at least compromise-detectability for keys and authenticity of operations in the face of attackers who gain physical access. In many countries national IDs, financial tokens and such depend on this. Obviously modern smartphones make use of this too.

>The paper mentions IOT as a setting that will increasingly implicate fault attacks. To some extent, maybe. Most IOT devices aren't adversarial with the people whose custody they're in; in other words, if you can get your hands on an IOT device once deployed, the threat model for that device basically already says you own all the "secrets" in the device.

This is definitely at least somewhat wrong. Particularly as IOT gets deployed more, they will commonly be in settings that aren't "public" per se but certainly do not enjoy high levels of physical security against anyone who might pass by either. Private individuals, educational institutions, businesses and organizations often have guests who they want to have temporary limited resource access but do not want to let leverage that into persistent/unlimited resource access.

How much this matters depends on whether this sort of attack could ever be made easy and fast enough, and it can be at least partially hardened against for relatively low cost. But I wouldn't discount the importance of manufacturers at least always keeping in mind whether that threat scenario implicates to their customers or not. This shouldn't be a big deal and is very much not headline territory, but it's part of the shift to ever more ubiquitous networked inputs that we may have to rethink from time to time how much physical access restrictions are a defense right?
I thought it were merged into ICQ, weren't it?
> How comes that the best paying gigs for c/c++ coders are all code review?

This has not been my experience.
Pharo doesn't need to be "installed". It can run from any directory. Typically your Image may be 30MB and the VM 5MB, so you just need to drop the two in the same folder via a zip file or whatever platform packaging tool you like.

Typically with Smalltalk you would have an Image live on and on and maybe forget how to create it from scratch. And depending on your audience, you may have wanted to strip out development tools, something like this old example for Squeak... http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/205.html

Pharo has put a lot of effort into "bootstrapping" the Image via CI to address this weakness of Image based systems. So you only need to load the parts you want in a reproducible way.
Yes, I configured a 64 cpu machine in a matter of minutes, ran a test on it for 24 hours, then shut it down and deleted the instance. Total cost was around $200.
Sorry but it is hard to take seriously someone who thinks AI and automation won't take away jobs.

They will and it is a good thing.
Band uses delay from Facebook Live to loop a song
Cool. So, where do you put that server? does it have sufficient power, AC, generators, UPS? How much does that cost per month?

Who monitors that PC, and does preventative maintenance, etc? If a part looks like its going to fail, where do you migrate your workload to, so you can take that server offline for repairs. (you need multiple servers)

Since you have multiple servers, how much does your 40GB networking cost (with 100GB uplinks) so you aren't constrained by the network? And what kind of storage network do you have, so that you can live-migrate these running machines around to different machines?

Lastly, if you co-locate the server somewhere, what does it cost for multiple redundant internet connections to the facility? And where is your failover facility, that is at least a few hundred miles away?
Completely agree with this. The post where Martin derides modern, type-safe languages (Kotlin and Swift) [0] was just unbelievable to me.

"Ask yourself why we are trying to plug defects with language features. The answer ought to be obvious. We are trying to plug these defects because these defects happen too often.

Now, ask yourself why these defects happen too often. If your answer is that our languages don’t prevent them, then I strongly suggest that you quit your job and never think about being a programmer again; because defects are never the fault of our languages. Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects – not languages."

Arrgh! Until we get out of this ridiculous, macho, victim-blaming mindset, software development will be stuck in the relative dark ages. More, better, safer languages, please!

[0] http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/01/11/TheDarkPath....
I use this approach in most cases combining it with BEM class naming. However, the point of having single-file components it to have all the required code in one file, including CSS/styling.
I'm torn. The post-WWII era has been amazingly peaceful, but at what risk?

If nuclear weapons mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for, say, a one-in-a-million chance per year of annihilation, that might be worthwhile.

If they mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for a 1% chance per year of annihilation, that's so very much not worthwhile.

What are the actual chances? It's impossible to tell. I suspect it's closer to 1% than one-in-a-million but that's really just a guess.
You don’t, which is one of the two big issues. You can only try it everywhere and try to remember what happens.

(The other problem is the light touch/hard touch thing)
Isn't the PM the one who leads project? (I don't work in a team that uses these terms so genuinely asking.)
How old is that server? I do not see ECC RAM if you care... also are the other pieces of the server going to fail anytime soon?

How loud is it? How much energy does it consume while running? How hard is it to configure and keep running? What kind of firmware does it have and will it be a problem updating?

These are all the questions I would have before buying a beast like that...
I'm really curious as to why you'd only want our mythical billionaire to build it just in one language?
Building the Super Tiny Compiler with Reason (part 1)
It's awesome that you've implemented unsnoozing on the client side. That's a major plus and I'm hoping to recommend mailspring to my team after giving it a try.
The point is, you've got to think it through and see if it's a good deal for you or not. Right now I own a house worth about 400k. If I rented and put that 400k in stocks history says I'd probably make on average almost 20k per year above inflation. Plus the landlord would pay the 4k property taxes and the new roof ill be doing next year. In my area I could easily rent a similar house for 20k per year. So in my case with the market the way it is right now I might be better off renting.
We are spending $200 million per day. NYT reports that 19 people died during the storm and 14 people have died since "indirectly" from the storm.

You claim what we are doing is "not enough to meet the challenge". By what metric? It was a "catastrophic event" which will take months to rebuild. It's been about two weeks, and a dozen people have died. It seems like the immediate challenge has been well and fully met. The long term challenge is already shaping up with Trump statements like "wipe out the debt".

By comparison deaths in Haiti were about 200,000. Please let that sink in when MSM tries to make the comparison.

One of the things we learned from Haiti is the deploy everything now mentality is counter-productive. You get a baseline then you assess, assess, assess and then figure out how to send the right resources that are actually needed on the ground.
For my first point, I infer that you know your body and lifestyle best. Education exists to help people avoid preventable conditions (which are leading of health problems) and there isn't any reason why an individual should be compelled to seek the advice of a medical professional other than their own volition.

Sudan has recently experienced 15 deaths due to a botched vaccination. In countries like Sudan, workers may not be properly trained, there are less legal protections, and doctors are much more time-resource bound, leading to rushed care.
The assumption that hermits are insightful is probably derived from an image of some experienced meditating wise soul, contemplating in solitude the meaning of life. While people who genuinely want to meditate upon life might sometimes wish to do so in solitude, the converse is not true and finding a hermit will definitely not guarantee finding some enlightened spirit. I'd bet on there being a larger probability of finding someone who is mentally unstable, whose condition was made more extreme by the solitude.
For me these howto posts is the method the OP used. YMMV, but feel free to cherry pick ideas that may work for you. I skimmed the article and found some useful info on tabletop that I did not fully understand. But agree the best way to learn is to just use vim !
Martin has built up a large following of acolytes, some of whom are very active wherever software development is discussed, in a very dogmatic way (such as the guys for whom TDD is the one true solution to every problem.) He has encouraged this through his didactic style of writing, which focuses on a few of the most basic faults in current development practice, and elevates them to being the roots of all evil, without any regard to the problems that you will run into once you have these surmounted.
I would LOVE to see someone run benchmarks about how much battery WiFi and BT use on modern iPhones (when disconnected). I would be amazed if the difference was more than negligable.
Discovering truth through lies on the internet–FCC comments analyzed
Thank you. I haven't paid much attention to what vaccines my kids have, so I really have no idea if they are vaccinated against hepatitis. I remember being surprised that chicken pox was on the list of required vaccinations, but I eventually got over that (incidentally, after I made comments on Hacker News about that vaccine being silly).
I watched a talk on Dask

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA_2qdipVng

... looks awesome, and something that seems only possible with dynamic code... or at least code that can introspect it's own AST.

EDIT: the cool part about it, I think, is that you don't have to shoehorn your algorithm into any particular model like map reduce or something else. You just write idiomatic Python code and... magic
Ask HN: Advice
How to start web designing business when you do not have any programming or design skill?
Is this his new meme-hustling? "Algorithm"?

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

I've never liked how Tim O'Reilly frames his discussion around vague terms like "open" which could mean participatory, transparent, available, or any other number of vague, feel-good terms. Now he seems to be calling "algorithm" things like economic models and government policy.

These are widely disparate things, but by using vague terms in different contexts, he pushes discussion towards the direction he wants to steer it: in the case of "open", away from free software. In the case of "Web 2.0", towards anything that involved crowd participation.

With "algorithms", he seems to be wanting to push the notion that technology is both scary but liberating and we need tech messiahs like Bezos or Musk to bring it under control.
I wish the author had held off his piece to get into another convention and to a more interesting table.

I don't know why, I just seem to have a facination to trying to figure out how these people think. I certainly don't understand nor empathise with them - I'm just attracted to news articles on them.
No. Scientific workloads rarely scale well when having to do a lot of communication over a commodity network. You're also assuming people would rather have a bunch of machines lying around that they had to pay upfront for than just paying for an occasional single instance? You're oversimplifying things if you literally think it never makes financial sense to use the cloud. It's the same as saying it's never cheaper to have health insurance. Objectively, that has to be true on average, yeah, but then why do so many people buy health insurance? You're managing complex risk at the expense of overhead. Even when it sucks, it's not feasible for everyone to keep enough cash laying around for when they get hit by a bus.
> Firefox Quantum’s new engine uses 30% less memory than Chrome

This is a pretty appealing claim. I'm ashamed to admit that one thing that might keep me on Chrome is the trove of passwords in my sync'd up account. But I'll definitely give Quantum a test drive.
Gamma correction is very important when dithering at low bit depths. Demo at 2 bits per channel: https://www.nayuki.io/page/gamma-aware-image-dithering