skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use org-mode heavily. I write specifications in it with ascii diagrams, code samples, figure captions, footnotes, etc... and export it all to a nicely fomatted PDF with rendered diagrams (thanks to the bundled ditaa).

I use it for organizing todo lists, time tracking, and generating time sheets.

I've used it to publish a book.

I use it as a super-powered Jupyter-style notebook for data analysis. It as a sub-package called org-babel that lets me interact with any language using the normal Emacs modes and tooling. This lets me query results from a database, send it to a code-block in my org file which executes on my machine and spits the results back into my org-file as a nicely formatted table. org-mode also has fully fleshed out spreadsheet system. For hacky analysis projects I can't think of anything better.

I use it as a light-weight Kanban board/issue manager for personal projects as well.
The biggest reason going for an enterprise vendor is support! As long you pay them big money you will get something that just works without worries. If something should go wrong, they will be on your door ASAP and fix the problem for you. Very convenient.

If you have expertise and is willing to do self support, creating your own DAS may be fine. Just keep in mind though, that things can go really wrong at the worst time when you are busy with something important.

A lot of businesses do bad resource management and don't do proper planning. This can hurt you.

Because we think most major storage vendors are way too expensive for us, and we don't have resources for self support, we have landed on using Aws S3 and Aws Glacier.

At home I've been running a FreeBSD ZFS system for 8 years. Oh boy I have had many issues over the years because of bad hardware, cheap SATA cables, consumer grade SATA controllers, consumer grade network cards, consumer grade hot swap bays, consumer grade motherboards. But now I use only enterprise stuff, except from the hard drives, which has been very stable for the last two years.
> Can there be anything but a subjective estimate of what someone's health and life are worth?

The requirement is that society reaches an agreement on what that estimate is. Relying solely on the estimate of the victims [and other local people] is not reasonable. There needs to be an equitable way of determining a value. Dismissing studies trying to establish an approach to this is not the way.

Sure, it still has to be subjective. But the line between subjectivity and objectivity is a spectrum. More objectivity is possible, and dismissing this out of hand because complete objectivity is not possible is not reasonable.
2 things:

- IMO, having owned a couple readynas(es) in the past, FreeNAS is a good compromise between ease of setup and functionality. To me, it does not feel over-engineered. In fact, it feels like it gives you enough to do everyday stuff easily through the UI, and drop into ssh if necessary. I've only had to do this a few times. To wit: I would take a stock FreeNAS over manual setup anyday.

- The 2 disk failures I've experienced were independent of each other. I have not experienced a simultaneous failure of 2 drives. I have preventative measures in place, namely in the form of a hot-spare for the pool and an aggressive resilver schedule that runs weekly.
1. I love ‘shop bought’ sandwiches.

2. My wife used to work a night shift at a sandwich factory when she was a student.
I converted to Dvorak over a decade ago, and am happy with the results. My fingers stay on the home row much more, and typing rolls more smoothly. (I have a long write-up at https://www.nayuki.io/page/i-type-in-dvorak )
What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
If there is nothing about you and the current iteration of the economy that is mutually attractive, then you will have to work for money, and you will be unhappy, possibly worse so from lack of sufficient money.

It's good to be Tim Cook.
"a growing number" here is the key to differentiating bad journalism from the good. I bet this number will grow even more as desk jobs grow more in proportion to farm though this may appear contradictory.
Very interesting article. Does the fact that silicon carbide chips work at more than 700K mean that we could built 3 dimensional chips with that (as internal heating would be much less of an issue). I do not have insights what really limits current silicon chips from exploring vertical stacking more but would have thought that another dimension out-competes several orders of magnitude in structure size differences?
The breadth of open resources has never been greater than it is today, but unfortunately, it's useless without some semblance of structure. If you have very specific gaps you're trying to fill, it's easier to pick out from the lot, but what I think will be more helpful is aggregators making clear tracks, as many MOOCs have now done (in many cases as paid offerings, although you usually can audit for free). I'd rather my choice be around what I want to be able to do or what broad specialty I'd like to pursue and someone else with the knowledge tells me what specific courses to take--much like we do at university!
But, of course, the actual navigation of driverless cars (as in, how to steer the wheels and modulate the accelerator/brakes) is probably mostly trivial. The hard parts are detecting paths, junctions, signs, obstacles, etc. and behaving predictably so as to cooperate with other drivers.

I’m sure the actual navigation of sailing vessels is more complicated than cars, but I can’t imagine that experienced sailors and talented programmers and engineers would have much trouble working out an algorithm.
Mathematica definitely predates iPython.
Tacking is only necessary when traveling directly into the wind, thus programming it would be trivial with a digital weather vane to determine wind direction. If desired direction == wind direction, then vary direction by several degrees for a minute or two, then switch to the other direction in a minute or two.

Also, driverless cars may just have two controllable independent variables, but the environments they work in are incredibly complex, with hundreds if not thousands of objects to track at any one moment. Boating in the middle of the ocean would still be complex, but it wouldn't compare to autonomous driving on land.
[Mac] All Apptorium Apps Discounted for Black Friday
Nice, but too many of them are behind some closed service like iTunes. Such stuff should be in public access really and not requiring any registration.
> So I bought a heart rate monitor and checked my resting heart rate. Right around 78. And when the professor said to me in class “Puzhong, I can see that story brought up some emotions in you,” I rolled up my sleeve and checked my heart rate. It was about 77. And so I said, “nope, no emotion.” The experiment seemed to confirm my prior belief: my heart rate hardly moved, even when I was criticized, though it did jump when I became excited or laughed.

Yikes.

> In Communist China, I was taught that hard work would bring success. In the land of the American dream, I learned that success comes through good luck, the right slogans, and monitoring your own—and others’—emotions.

I don't understand the value of this analogy. In Communist China, I was taught (something that is done to you) something false, but in the U.S. I learned (note: not taught, learned) something X.

Is it true or false? Because it matters whether or not something is true or false. I'm sure the author thinks what he is writing is true, otherwise, why write it? But he just directly compared something he decided on his own to something he was taught to be true that was actually false. This is really murky, and I don't care enough about his feelings about Cambridge or Stanford or Costco to try to make any more sense of it.
That's cool and all but it would be more persuasive if you added some arguments in your diatribe.
They microwave them though, eggs are good when they're cooked a in a bunch of fat with herbs and spices.
I agree, that is the message from the US right now, and it is harmful.

I also feel strongly that the H1B itself is a pretty horrendous program. The amount of corporate control over the immigration process, the power to decide who is allowed to come here and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain, the restrictive nature of the jobs an "immigrant" is allowed to work... the whole thing is horrible.

I insist that a person can be both very pro immigration and absolutely aghast at the way this program is run.

I say this with full understanding that for a lot of would be immigrants who lack family connections, this is your only viable path, so none of this blame falls on the people who come here. But of course, that's just extra gravy for the corporations, especially in Silicon Valley - the lack of viable alternate immigration paths just makes their control over the H1B system even more valuable.

Freedom to decide how and where you're work, to me, is a core civil and human right. Nobody owes you a job, but you should have the right to pursue work according to your own personal interests, in response to pay, work conditions, location, and other market signals. If this means people don't become developers in Silicon Valley in the numbers tech companies believe they should, that is not a problem for the government to solve for them, certainly not by handing them control over a huge "shadow" immigration system.

I can't be surprised that these corporations are succeeding in tarring those who oppose the H1B visa with the stink of "anti-immigrant" sentiment. That's how the system works, I guess. But it's pure manipulation. They act like they're champions of the immigrant, but sadly, what they lobby for is a deeply corrupt and manipulative program that allows them what I consider an unacceptable amount of power over an individual's life.

This H1B program is horrible, make no doubt about it. I would welcome a general skilled immigration program that preserves freedom for immigrants (though I would be opposed to overly emphasizing STEM, as I don't believe there is any meaningful shortage of STEM workers that can't be explained as a perfectly rational response to pay and working conditions among people with the talent an ambition to work in demanding fields).
There is ongoing investigation in this area on mother-child transfers of gut bacteria that may influence body weight. The evidence seems to be pointing to diet influencing the type of bacteria that thrive in the gut - so my gut (ha ha) says that a few bacteria entering the gut won’t change things - you need to more or less farm them.
You seem to be implying all eggs taste the same, which is not true.
You might want to look up the definition of necessary!

> Music and the arts have long been documented as wonderful ways to enhance abstract thinking.

That is entirely consistent with them not being necessary to develop abstract thinking :)

I was just being logical, and trying to provide some subtle humor by giving the dry reply of a caricatured technophile rationalist to OP's evident enthusiasm for the arts.
A wetback powering distant radiators is what I want to do. It’s just that the radiators look ugly and aren’t easily removed in summer.
> That's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of economics, then. Capping the number of medical schools can't cause higher demand for doctors. It can restrict the supply, which means that the prices will be higher, but it doesn't affect demand at all.

My lord, that clearly means an excess of demand over supply.
Right on! I’m also super grateful for all the amazing open source available these days. It’s indeed truly fantastic.
Yes, you are mistaken. "only one hop" was actually intended to mean only one hop.
Useful tools for writing a thesis
> The Ethics of Jazz (Lecture Series) - Free Online Video - Herbie Hancock, Harvard
The problem is with the concept of species. It's a very informal concept, introduced because we like to categorize.
I expect to see many negative comments here, but I'll add that one of the most profound books I've read is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...). In it, he observes that it's also possible to create positive flow-like states even in tedious jobs; it's also helpful to try and re-conceptualize even mundane jobs as being part of and important to a greater whole.

I don't think he'd argue that doing such things is always possible, all the time, but I think he might argue that we should try to move in those directions, even when our lives and feelings sometimes feel like something out of Dilbert or Houellebecq's Whatever.
Ublock was enough to make slower Firefox on Android worth using because it makes sites so much faster. Once the quantum features start arriving on mobile its going to be impossible for chrome to match.
New Graphic Design Trends 2018
They failed because they increasingly took a political tone and pressed on alienating everyone center to right. You can't lose 50% of the possible audience and continue on.
I really don't understand this whole fake news crisis bullshit. There's always been fake news. Nobody ever had a problem with people believing crap from the National Enquirer and other shit like that for years and years. You can still buy them at every checkout stand. I've met plenty of people in my life who believe those to be legitimate news. Whatever happened to not giving a shit about the moron that believes in fake news?
After my first few hours using desktop Quantum I thought for sure I was switching away from Chrome. But then videos stopped playing (audio would play and the video would just be black) and didn't work again until restarting the browser. And then it just kept happening every time it had been open for a couple hours. Back to Chrome for now.
It might go deeper. Many societies are not that far away from hunger and poverty in the past.

I can see memories of hunger and war in our collective behaviour and also shaping my family, and wealth including being able to afford to eat whatever whenever cushions that a bit. In Europe, the grandparent generation that grew up with the war and the following hunger years is still alive.
I had some very fresh and tasty sandwiches I cafes in Dublin Ireland.
Several posters mention Jupyter, but there also literate programming by Knuth from 1984.
Instant Gratification Loops and how Facebook was Designed to get you
He doesn't say his parents were poor or blue-collar workers, he compares himself to a child of aristocrat.
Context is everything.

> He was a child of aristocrats; I am the child of modest workers.

When a one-digit millionaire compares himself to a billionaire like Bill Gates, using "modest" to describe
one's wealth would be appropriate in this context.
I love a good sandwich, but would hesitate to call any of the sandwiches from pre-packed places good. Or from Greggs or Pret for that matter.

And I do sometimes eat sandwiches for dinner - on fresh bread of my choosing, with piles of fillings I like, nothing pre-prepared comes close.

That's not to say I object to a packet of sandwiches ow and again, but it rapidly loses its charm if that's all there is near work. I am lucky enough to have street food markets nearby in my current role.
This concept of using 32-bit pointers when running in 64-bit addressing mode is similar to the "compressed OOP" (ordinary object pointers) mode of operation in the 64-bit HotSpot Java virtual machine.
How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
> market prices

I would expect a rather large premium to be associated with a forced sale of any kind. Remember, if they where willing to sell at market rates they would have been sold. I am of the opinion that forced sales like this should provide ~2-3x market rates to reduce the need for such sales, and provide for the loss of property like cars which need to be abandoned if contaminated.
Bikram yoga studio?

I know someone who has a pair of old mining rigs. They were used as heaters over winter. They didn’t make enough to cover their electrical bill but they took most of the cost of heating away. It’s the fan noise that would bug me.
Do you know of any evidence that these players+engines can beat engines alone, instead of each other?
Yes, but foreign investment in China's case depletes foreign reserves. China is also printing money to maintain the current exchange rate, and this is leading to inflation. Their economy is going to result in recession, or they might go to war instead.
Tesla's Newest Promises Break the Laws of Batteries
Spam was nearly dead, then it became a tool for crime and came roaring back
Eh, at least one test seemed to show that there wasn't a noticeable difference: http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/08/what-are-the-best-eggs-ca...
Perhaps use the linked article—not by Cerf—instead?
Inaccessible sections (math, at least) with adblocker turned on. Which is their right.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=math+courses&t=lm&ia=web
Is that still the case if it intends to stop in our solar system?
I tried it on Android, but a few of my app's users complained and a lot of them use iOS. You can try it out at https://usebx.com/app - just click try demo to get to where the animation is.

You'll find the page transitions are not quite as smooth in Firefox when compared with Chrome or Safari.
There was an article on HN a few months ago claiming every neuron in a human brain is genetically unique (my interpretation was that this was due to random errors). So essentially, you won't be able to find a single cell to clone a multicellular organism with any accuracy -- you would need to take a large number and average out the variation to get a reliable estimate of the original zygote's DNA. (And perhaps pump of telomere length as well, or make any other adjustments that would happen consistently across cell divisions).
Jeff Bezos's Net Worth Just Broke $100B
I guess what I'm reacting to is not specifically this interview, but the notion I've seen in a few places that "big tech companies need the humanities". For example, John Naughton in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/how-te...

Ullman's book probably doesn't oversimplify like that, but the title of the article alludes to it.

What I would like to know is, what are some good examples of industries that are doing the right thing, that could be used to guide the way forward for tech companies?

I'm very skeptical that there are any industries that have successfully self-policed in this way. But there are many examples of industries that have exploited shared resources and human weaknesses for a quick profit, and inflicted lasting harm in the process: oil, tobacco, intensive farming, fashion, cars, guns, advertising. (And just like social media, most of those have their good points too!)

Tech and social media in particular is an outlier because it's so successful, but even so it's not totally unique -- the economic and social media effect of oil is massive too.

One possible positive example that occurs to me is nuclear weapons. They could have proliferated massively, but so far they haven't quite. Those weapons are developed by states rather than corporations, though.

I really object to the stereotype of socially-awkward programmers being to blame for everything, because we don't understand how real squishy humans work. The problems we face are the same ones that have faced every highly successful and transformative industry. They're at the root of business and capitalism.
Telus, the big phone company and ISP in British Columbia, does this in downtown Vancouver[1].

IIRC, I first heard about this in Work Like Nature[2][3]

[1]: http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+dev...

[2]: https://leanpub.com/worklikenature

[3]: I have a double conflict of interest here. The author is my wife, and Leanpub is my startup.
Oh yes, thank you. I'd forgotten all about that .. it works well. Overall it'd be nice if I didn't _have_ to do it though.
Does the new Firefox have a password sync feature like Chrome's? I'd much rather trust Mozilla with that sort of thing (especially if I could host my own backend to it somewhere) than Google.

As an aside, one silly thing that tarnished Mozilla's brand for me was the treatment of Brendan Eich. I may not agree with his donation of money but I think impinging on his rights is a far more fundamental immorality than what he was accused of.

It's like Twitter's controversy over blue ticks. If they'd only given them as a result of identity verification, and not used them to indicate Twitter's approval of someone's beliefs, then they wouldn't be where they are now.

Stick to good tech and fighting for relevant causes, e.g. net neutrality, I say.
Everything I know (Buckminster Fuller) (1975)
Just installed 57 to give it a try. Damn it's friking good, gj mozilla!
He does live close to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_B_Nuclear_Powe...
Sandwiches in London everywhere you go are amazing quality, and they pile on the sauce!
Would something along the lines of "React QT" be possible? React Native for desktop!
Also, noticed another thing - on Android, using FF nightly, I couldn't access a local network URL via FF (Unable to connect message), but could with Chrome - example URL http://10.0.130.64/path
Subliminal messages have as shoddy a track record as homeopathy. At best this is a placebo effect.
Well, I have a regular MacBook pro with a retina display with no customization, and it has been well calibrated for most every webpage I have seen.
The solution is to not allow connections from unknown numbers, that is numbers which are not in my contacts. You can do other things like add CAPTCHAs, etc but really if I don't know you, I probably don't want to hear from you, in any capacity.
The Fukushima reactors are not being operated properly. The policy proposed in the article is applicable to Fukushima because its scope is cases when the reactors are not operating properly.
Emotions come from the unconscious. Of course they can be difficult to detect. Nonetheless they can shape our thinking and behavior dramatically. Read Carl Jung, “The Undiscovered Self.”
Literate Programming (1984) [pdf]
Mozilla gave extension authors multiple years of notice. I don't see what else they could have done, realistically speaking.
They are available in Nightly and Beta, I'm surprised they aren't in the main release yet.
Rackspace Social Media Playbook and Guide
We figured it out many decades earlier - we call our ubiquitous convenient sandwiches ‘hamburgers’.
I find it insulting that there are groups out there that demand my aligence, and assert that they are the ones fighting for my own interest.

I can fight for my self better on my own, thank you very much. I do not want an organization, forcing me to join them and forcing me to agree with their opinions "for my own good", because I don't know any better.

I will negotiate, and fight the capitalist class, using the ways that I feel are best, and not through a coercive organization that is only looking out for themselves.

If unions were so great, then they wouldn't need to make everyone join them. They would stand on their own merits. I do not want their "benefits".

And because unions refuse to be voluntary, my only option is supporting the anti-union movements that make them powerless nationwide. They can't force me to join if they are universally powerless.
My must-have list is https everywhere (from EFF) and uBlock origin.

I hope that the mobile browser will get at least the same level of attention as in the past.
I think it will be pretty limited usage too considering if you want it to access database on the same local network.

This will be more useful for computationally heavy usages with minimal data transfers.