skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm an Elon fan, but his comment about the old Russian engines his competitors are using deserves some scrutiny. He's talking about the NK-33 which has a thrust to weight ratio of 137. That's better than any current SpaceX engines though the Merlin 1D under development is apparently aiming for a ratio of 150.

As for the engines being in a warehouse in Siberia since the 60s - that part is basically true. There was an Equinox (UK) documentary called "the engines that came in from the cold" about it. When the cold war was over the Americans finally found out about these engines that were left over from the space race, 20 years old (at the time) and better than anything they'd developed since. Now they're over 40 years old and still the most efficient!

So credit where it's due eh Elon? The NK-33 was and still is a masterpiece.
Your second point is completely irrelevant. Apple sold it, Apple is responsible. The buck stops at them. They cannot divert responsibility, at least not in front of the customer.

If they want to get back to whoever sold them the hard drives, fine, they can do it. Just don’t use it as an excuse.

(Though I’m really not sure why he had so many problems calling Apple. That has always been very easy for me and there have never been two week wait times. What’s going on there? Also, yes, Apple Stores prefer you to have an appointment, but they will try very hard to squeeze you in if you don’t have one. What’s inexcusable to my mind is waiving the appointment if you are five minutes late.)
There is one interesting question here: Is is harmful to the electoral process if there is far less of a perception of uncertainty about what candidate will win?

I'm not certain that there is. The modern political media largely follows politics like sports, and analyze whether a particular event is likely to be good or bad for a candidate, and such shallowness does not make the electorate more informed.

However there is a case to be made that more certainty would lower voter turnout, and that that would be bad.

I think that the only thing that could clearly improve our political situation is proportional representation and limits on consecutive terms.
Our personal answer to this ties to our sense of humanity and how humane we are in the practicing of our humanity.

This question becomes less and less of an issue the more and more we take just one minute to turn a stranger into a person. Strangers can be overlooked, discounted, marginalized, ridiculed, brushed off, trivialized, dehumanized, or worse. It's harder to do with people.

If we value society, we have our part in it, and our response for our own backyard. Everything and everyone's well being is connected ultimately.
Slide To See Before And After Sandy
If Silver were predicting the race going the other way, Democrats would attack him. People tend to attack things that don't fit their desired outcomes. Leftists attack Fox for bias but they have no problem with the bias of MSNBC. It isn't bias people care about, it's bias against their own views. There are very few objective people.
My favourite way to learn new languages & platforms was implementing a du-like ('disk usage') tool. It was also the exercise I proposed to my students. It doesn't require complex algorithms but touches a lot of the basics: recursion, filesystems, command line parsing, output formatting, etc.
but his methods do lean towards being relatively unverifiable on a short timeline.

Perhaps. But I think a lot of his critics fall into this trap of thinking that what Silver thinks is that he is offering some sort of revolutionary and perfect prediction, or that he thinks he is doing some sort of groundbreaking science.

He's just trying to make a prediction based on all of the available information. If election predictions are inherently "relatively unverifiable", Nate Silver isn't capable of changing that - just working with what he is given (and doing a great job of explaining all of the ins and outs of this stuff to the layman).
Thanks for the Github suggestion - looks like exactly what I need.
How a Norco case killed 13TB of our data
You cannot mandate voting in the U.S. because the sovereign right to rule originates with the people. The government simply does not have the legal authority to mandate such a thing, any more than it has the legal authority to force people to speak if they don't want to.
Thanks, these will be useful for next time. Hopefully AWS will add the capability to migrate the EBS snapshots to the console soon.
Windows 8 basics: Tips, tricks, and cures
Great variety (and quality) of the sensory input and stimuli from the very first breath?
Joan Didion wrote an article in the 1980's titled "Insider Baseball" who made an analogy between reporting on elections and reporting on the going-on in baseball locker rooms. Typical election journalism gives the ready the illusion that they're getting an inside view, but ultimately the voter is disenfranchised because the story isn't about the voter's choice, it's about the campaigns.

I remember an Issac Asimov story about a future where only one person had to vote, because, based on that person's vote, a supercomputer could predict who would have won the election. That's the strange future of 538. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, it's just like betting on sports.
Biofuel breakthrough: Quick cook method turns algae into oil
I once got banned for hit F5 too much during a noprocrast lock out. The ban lasted until I waited a full day without visiting HN.

The exact message I got was that the server sent an invalid message to the reverse proxy.
I don't think most people would put polling in the "gut-based journalism" category. When people dismiss horse-race reporting and the "gut" stuff, they're dismissing pundits telling us what they think will happen based nothing on the other pundits they talk to and what the campaigns are telling them.

In a world where people place less importance on what people like Mark Halperin and Dick Morris think, news organizations would still have plenty of reason to conduct polling - that would be a world in which people value data over what "thought leaders" are telling us what they think.
House effects for 2012: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculat...
Did Democrats attack 538 when Silver predicted huge losses in the Congressional races in 2010? I don't recall this.

It's not for nothing that one party is considered the anti-science party.
Sure, the same way there is no danger to heath in fast-food, every advertiser will tell you for sure.)
It looks like as far back as the 2009 model, it does involve removing the screen. The recall notice I received was for models sold 2009-2011.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+and+...
"Journalists get access to privileged information. . . , then evaluate, filter, and order it through the rather ineffable quality alternatively known as “news judgment,” “news sense,” or “savvy.” This norm of objectivity is how political journalists say to the public. . . .

The author uses the word "objectivity" when the right word is "subjectivity". 'savvy', 'news sense', 'gut feeling' are never objective. The author himself says so a few sentences later:

Where political journalists’ information is evaluated through a subjective and nebulous professional/cultural sense of judgment.

And yet, he concludes by going back to "objectivity" :

When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried.

The bottom line is: this is the age-old war between what I'd call 'science' (Silver, given his methods) and 'art' ( the journalists ).
There's actually a fairly major independent test that will be concluded on Tuesday, November 6th.

... but you're technically correct :)
I understand that you are making your suggestions with good intentions, but they are fundamentally impossible in the U.S. because of how seriously we take being a republic. The government simply does not have the legal authority to create or enforce these types of restrictions under the Constitution as it exists today. I happen to think that is a good thing. You might disagree about that, but the fact is that your ideas would require at minimum a few new Constitutional amendments.
We got a list of our machines, called Apple, and a tech did the work. Low pain.

I have had the best luck with Apple and IBM since they send techs. HP (which has some sort of hard drive problem with the netbooks Verizon is selling) is a call / RMA / Ship company. Acers were just eat the cost when they fail.
Ask HN: Education in a kindergarten
Lately I've been thinking about working in the education field, using my programming knowledge(web, ML, NLP). My parents have a kindergarten(250+ kids from 2 to 5 years) so I thought about starting there and then expand.

I've no idea what to do yet, so I'm starting to analyze the possibilities.

Does someone has any experiences or ideas about this to share?.
"his livelihood - online poker."

Nate was also an incredible asset to the early online poker community. He was one of the most respected members of 2+2 and really helped pushed poker strategy forward. His detailed and analytical approach to the game helped make a lot of people a bunch of money during the poker boom.
one of the comments on the post noted that it should probably have used 'pundit' rather than 'journalist' throughout, to be more specific as to the kind of journalist who objects to silver.
Regardless of all the other issues here, that is a triumph of form over function. Consumer hard drives are not noted for their reliability (or they'd come with 5 year warranty like the enterprise version).
Now is as good a time as any to disable Flash and Java in my browser. Not sure why I haven't done this earlier.

Props to Microsoft though. Nice! :)
Would you rather find a certainity that every now and then turns into a lie? I wouldn't.
People may value data, but they don't value a datum. Individually, none of the dozen polls that report in every day are newsworthy except insofar as they feed the commentariat's need for something to hang stories on. 538 is newsworthy because his statistics can draw meaningful results from multiple polls. In aggregate, polls are valuable, but without poor journalism their value to each organization funding individual polls is probably less than the cost of conducting them.
The example code for cat is only half of cat, which reminds me of Rob Pike's criticism of "cat -v"---Unix programs are often more complicated than they arguably should be, are "reimplementing" Unix programs often means implementing a small subset of the features.

Or, look up the manpage for your locally installed "tree" and see how many non-standard options and features have been bolted on.

I think it would be helpful when reimplementing Unix to try to work in more core features of the language, like its object or module system, which are more important than parsing argv or touching the filesystem.
That's not Apple's responsibility.
ISIS launched in Austin and Salt Lake City
I hope more supposed "journalists" come out and criticize Nate Silver for his methods. Then maybe we can start having a real discussion based around facts and data with real analysis across the board.

Take for instance discussions around social security. I swear most of the arguments I hear have no real data to back it up. Nate Silver represents a new generation of reporting that threatens the status quo journalist. Notice I don't say traditional journalism because I don't believe you can replace true journalism (go out and actually do investigation and reporting). I just believe Nate Silver is leading the way to more fact based approach.
I didn't see it until I checked in the comments on HN...
Clearly a wager is the way to solve this problem (Bayesian interpretation of probability). Is it legal to gamble on an election result? They could use the following payouts - J represents a regular journalist using 50/50 odds, N represents Nate Silver using 75/25 Obama/Romney:

Romney win:

J: +1000

N: -1000

Obama win:

J: -600

N: +600

With those payouts each side has an expected value of +200 dollars for this wager, using the specified odds they believe to be true, so both should be willing to take it.
Try out hourly backups with Time Machine. The incremental backups are quick and comforting.
"The Tesla Roadster was a modified Lotus Elise with off the shelf components combined with an off the shelf electric engine and a container of common laptop batteries all coordinated with on board software"

You call it evolutionary I call it a leap, IMO it still took quite a bit of effort. The point is nothing in between was working good enough to show as the famous MVP.

Giant leaps are also sometimes called by people who did the leap itself, even if it did not look a leap from the outside.
But we do live in societies that are fair (compared to other animals). In fact the most fair (liberal, democratic, law abiding, accountable) societies fare the best the past 500 years at least.
For those who want a very clear, concise set of userland code to try translating for practice, consider using 9base: http://tools.suckless.org/9base

It's not quite Unix, but it's still quite lovely and it's rather succinct:

"It also contains the Plan 9 libc, libbio, libregexp, libfmt and libutf. The overall SLOC is about 66kSLOC, so this userland + all libs is much smaller than, e.g. bash (duh!)."
It's hardly a war between epistemologies, journalists just have to fill time. They've had Nate Silver on to celebrate his work a dozen times when he serves the purpose, lets them tell a different story than the day before.

They're not against his methodology, they're against his current results, which don't make the race as interesting as it could be. (If Nate was the only one saying it was a close race, they'd be pushing his narrative above all others.)

News is biased, but not how most people think, it's biased towards conflict (and novelty, doomsaying, and sensationalism).

It's just entertainment, there's no permanent epistemology to entertainment.
In fact there are some solutions out there for code injection using bundles on iOS, e.g. the following video:

http://vimeo.com/50137444

It packages it all up as a plugin for Xcode.
FBI ordered to disclose “Going Dark” surveillance program
Help Sandy victims with image processing and your Twitter pic
Agreed. Apple has replaced two logic boards in an old MBP (one for bad video card and one for fried firmware), the drives in my iMacs and swapped out a faulty power supply for an old Mini. I've found that if you're polite and competent the Geniuses will help you out. Doing some preemptive research and work like making sure you have backups, etc also goes a long way to ensuring a smooth experience.
Most Wanted Windows DOS Commands
I really hope they get reamed by the judge again for this. It would be great to see them forced to place the verdict at the top of the page. Unfortunately, the judge probably has no idea what JS is.
This is a project we built with the Red Cross to help drive donations. Particularly relevant now.
And then, god forbid, perhaps politicians who are not innumerate? A man can dream.
Moral philosophy is a vast field. I suggest Landau's 'Fundamentals of ethics'
How secure is your electronic vote?
Elections already are about the campaigns. If there is more certainty about the outcome of the election, they will inevitably be less about the campaigns. That would lower turnout... but would it be bad?
Freeman Dyson on Norbert Weiner (intentionally raised as a prodigy):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/jul/14/the-tra...
Want To Make Your Company More Creative? Kill Some Rules.
There's a very good reason for returning a result as (error_code, resulting_data) instead of just returning a single value of resulting_data and then having the caller check to see if resulting_data is an error.

The problem is that if you count on the caller to check on the error value for the data, he might forget to do that. And the code works just fine in testing, and it seems like it works. But in the error case, we merrily continue on and try to pass the error around as if it were data.

When we return two values, error and data, then the developer is forced to think about the fact that the result could be an error, and think right then about what should happen. THis is a good place to be thinking about it.

Also, the developer may not even know at-a-glance that the function could sometimes return an error, unless consulting the documentation.

Or more succinctly: it's not about making the code easier to write (which the version you mentioned does); it's instead about making it easier to do the right thing.
Just for the record.

var HeroResize=AC.Class({initialize:function(b){this._height=null;this._hero=$(b);
AC.Object.synthesize(this);this.__boundResizeHero=this.resizeHero.bindAsEventListener(this);
if(typeof window.ontouchstart==="undefined"){this.resizeHero();Event.observe(window,"resize",this.__boundResizeHero)
}},setHeight:function(b){this._height=(b<0)?0:b;return this._height},resizeHero:function(){this.setHeight(parseInt(window.innerHeight||(window.document.documentElement.clientHeight||window.document.body.clientHeight),10)-310);
this.hero().style.height=this.height()+"px"}});Event.onDOMReady(function(){var b=new HeroResize("billboard")
});
I think you are complaining too much. You should realize that the majority of Apple customers are not technically-inclined, so the support procedures will be geard towards them. Seeing as how you are smart enough to read and submit articles to HN, you should know to expect these kinds of things when dealing with any kind of tech. support (let alone, a drive replacement). You should have already backed-up your data and wiped the drive before going to the Apple store. You submit articles to HN and you expect (and trust) Apple to move your data from one drive to another?! Come on, man...You should know better... And posting stuff like this just makes you look bad.
You can also run arbitrary code from the standard debugger although it may not be possible to actually change the code substantially it can be useful for exploring and experimenting.
I don't see the Samsung verdict anywhere on the page or in the source.
3 iPad Mini Design Considerations For Developers
The page says I have to login using a facebook account without any information on what it's supposed to do.

Either this is spam, either you'll have to put a page explaining what it does.
Man, this just keeps getting better... You think after the first time they would just have accepted the loss, put up the message, and gone on with things. It's amazing the extent they are willing to go to subvert the verdict. Of course, this is only if the script is indeed meant to push the ruling out of view...
var HeroResize = AC.Class({
initialize: function (b) {
this._height = null;
this._hero = $(b);
AC.Object.synthesize(this);
this.__boundResizeHero = this.resizeHero.bindAsEventListener(this);
if (typeof window.ontouchstart === "undefined") {
this.resizeHero();
Event.observe(window, "resize", this.__boundResizeHero)
}
},
setHeight: function (b) {
this._height = (b < 0) ? 0 : b;
return this._height
},
resizeHero: function () {
this.setHeight(parseInt(window.innerHeight || (window.document.documentElement.clientHeight || window.document.body.clientHeight), 10) - 310);
this.hero().style.height = this.height() + "px"
}
});
Event.onDOMReady(function () {
var b = new HeroResize("billboard")
});
> On facebook you see idealized lives of others and it can be pretty depressing.

I'm very sorry that you feel this way, but if you feel depressed for other peoples idealized lives, you have a problem that has nothing to do with your friends or Facebook.
What page of the apple site should I be looking at to see this script in action?
It only shows up on http://www.apple.co.uk, since the ruling was made in the UK.
> One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be.

It is always the states near the middle that matter. This is because if you are going to lose the election anyway, losing by a smaller electoral college margin doesn't help, and conversely, if you are going to win anyway, winning by a larger electoral college margin doesn't help. Candidates campaign to maximize the probability that they reach 270 electoral votes. That is why Obama and Romney are campaigning a more in Ohio than they are in Florida even though the polls are closer in Florida than they are in Ohio. Florida is a toss-up, but if Obama wins Florida, he probably also wins enough slightly bluer states like Ohio to win without Florida.

Also, California or Texas flipping would require an absolutely massive popular vote landslide. Probably at least a 15% margin.
Why C as opposed to C++?

I'd love to know because my current understanding is that C++ has the same performance as C, but includes the STL which prevents you from having to reimplement more convenient data structures that handle memory nicely (like vectors) yourself.

The ability to create classes/objects is nice too and the language doesn't take away any of the freedom you're given in C either.

Am I missing something about it? Is it just more familiarity with the older language that makes it more comfortable?
It is not often that I find myself agreeing with Krugman (who likes to ignore data that does not fit his views). But in this case -- possibly because no data is actually invovled -- I agree completely.

And unfortunately, that's true for most of the people, most of the time - if you asked your physician to substantiate any non-trivial recommendation he makes, you'd find that data supporting those recommendations is severely lacking or irrelevant. But most people want the magical insider (the doctor, in this case) to tell them what's happening, rather than the facts.
Additionally, there is a script to measure what fraction of people scroll down. That script is not new; Apple knows exactly how many people this will prevent from seeing the notice.
this is not 2001. Plenty of judges know this stuff (heck, some been favorized Facebook by slightly skewing their decisionsm, because FB helped them connect with further family) and I am sure well presented and explained case will make it through. I hope they get punished hard.
Do we know whether or not this was the behavior on the site prior to them having to post this ?
Next time buy your computer at Best Buy and see how that goes for you.

Not to be too terribly snarky hopefully you've learned some valuable lessons here in dealing with Apple. You should have expected tech support to have regurgitated the contents of the email. The only reason you would have had for calling them is finding the name of the 3rd party company that would be fixing your computer and how to go about arranging that service.

The second thing you've learned is the Apple geniuses aren't, well, geniuses. They're simply more knowledgeable than average, which takes care of 80% of the problems a typical customer will experience. The important thing to know is they're not doing the work. And, hello, since this was a general recall there were probably a boatload of machines "upstairs" waiting to be repaired. They told you 2 weeks because they prefer to under promise and over deliver and have your machine back to you in a few days.

I know Apple can do seemingly amazing things, but good grief you need to have realistic expectations.
I guess this was posted as look back to before they were successful? They've launched the Falcon 9 heavy to the ISS now, so no one would consider them not. Maybe all those failures with the F1 light model are part of why the Falcon 9 was designed to and managed to do its job even with one of the engines failing...
Why the smell of cannabis is associated with the effect