skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this is a crazy idea, but wouldn't market forces drive down the costs of mining/processing the material if the consumer or the companies purchasing/processing REEs had to pay into cleanup efforts?

Apple makes some pretty serious claims about its environmental impact (http://www.apple.com/environment/). But it doesn't mention refining REEs. Lots about carbon, reducing chemicals such as PVCs, and recycling... Perhaps the market forces that brought carbon to the fore could help correct REEs and reduce the impact on the environment these mining operations incur.

If I were a resident of that area I would be concerned about the plant. While I am suspicious of the technical reporting it seemed clear to me that Lynas isn't being entirely transparent about its environmental assessments and who exactly is approving their projects. When engineers involved are talking to reporters about suspicious activity and large firms are pulling out of the project it does raise some concern that perhaps Lynas isn't doing as much as it could be to ensure even minimal safety concerns are met.

Either way I don't think it's unreasonable for Malaysia and other countries in these sorts of situations to raise awareness about the environmental impacts these kinds of projects have and to enforce a higher degree of scrutiny in approving them. It may raise prices on consumers receiving these goods but it's clear that enough wealth is being generated that we could afford a price-bump.

With enough investment in better recycling technology and hazardous materials management we might be able to slowly reduce that price-bump over time.

But then again, I don't understand enough about economics to believe that is even possible.

The article may be making a rather strong appeal to emotion but it does raise the question of whether there is enough being done from an investigation and regulation angle to protect people from the hazardous side-effects of mining REEs.
I agree 100%.
I was just confused and the coupon terms were not in an obvious place, to me.
This is a html version:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/fu...
Or the, "Chinese hackers dragnetted my account after they found a hole in GMail". Something to be said for being a small fish when the big boys go at it.
having freebsd is a great decision. i don't have a nice experience with mysql on freebsd but for apache or nginx on serving on freebsd is a breeze.
https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.00x/2012_Fall/about
Just make real sure you don't change the formatting of a hard-coded SQL command or you'll have to add a 'validCheckSum' attribute to cover up for your past mistakes.

Otherwise I can also recommend liquibase, especially since they've since added support for non-SQL (JVM code) updates and rollbacks as well.
Ah, I was unnecessarily flippant; stopped paying much attention to it in the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd#GNU_distributions_run...

So what would be a compelling technical or business reason to use this, either now or when they get to wherever they're going?

I suppose it would be great for study.
It's a cool idea, thanks for making it!
I also think the discussion of medical problems was lacking context. Miscarriages and mentally handicapped children are also common in countries with better environmental regulations, so I'd be a bit more careful about attributing every disease to the same cause.
Stallman's vision of an ecosystem is one in which you're not locked in by your data, since it's all in open formats and under your control. That makes his ideology very easy to get along with.
Yes... sometimes it's fake but often you just get a hand-me down ID from an older friend/relative who may look like you
From the FreeBSD product page[1]:

Please note that for technical reasons this AMI
only runs on high-performance (cluster & high-I/O)
instances.

Looking at Mr. Percival's other resources, other contributed AMIs don't run on arbitrary instances, either.

Being a broke student, I wanted to put it on the smallest micro instance. What are these technical reasons that prevent me from doing so?

In any case, thanks for the great work.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_...
I was in high school 7 years ago so yes, it is hard to imagine because I really don't know how things used to be. I do appreciate the condescending tone though.
How was your experience with MySQL on FreeBSD different than other systems? Were you installing from binaries or ports?
In general, no. But when someone is so generous, and I want to add to their karma, why put myself through the misery of finding and clicking on his upvotes? Like any tool, it should be used responsibly.
The tech community is smart enough to know that removing your ability to do these things in order to improve user retention is a net win. Because most users might complain but will still use it anyway as long as your marketing is good.

You don't want a smarter tech community, you want a more altruistic or socially conscious tech community. I completely agree but ... HN is not a place where that message is well received in general.
KILLED VIOLENT GERMANS JUST BECAUSE GERMAN JUGGERNAUT DOESN'T INFER KETCHUP
In my past experience, the micro instances are slower than molasses when it comes to the ports system. All the initial install/verification sucks a lot of CPU and the micro's can't handle it.
>A .01% yield on the energy incident on earth would power everything we ever need.

This sounds like the Chinese soda analogy [1] in a different form. The fact that we only need 0.01% doesn't indicate the ease of capturing 0.01% in the form of usable energy.

[1] http://lake.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/05/the_chinese_sod.html
The frameworks looks pretty decent, but what I would really like is to be able to do TDD-style database migrations.

Right now I spend quite a bit of time carefully prepping Liquibase changesets, reverting the DB a couple of times, tweaking the script, re-running it and inspecting the changes.

That sounds just like what TDD was designed for...
I use http://www.ghostery.com/.
That is really interesting to hear. How much power were these blades pulling per rack out of curiosity?
vimwiki + dropbox user here too. I was a big time OneNote user until I needed my notes on all the major platforms at once. I realized that I would much rather keep them in a text-based format, rather than in a proprietary encoding with no API, even though I think OneNote is a fantastic tool.

So far it's worked fine for me, even though I wish it supported Markdown out of the box (there's a plugin for it somewhere), rather thank its custom markup. It's somewhat painful to have to remember yet another syntax to achieve the same exact thing.
This is probably only of historical interest but: in 2001 I started building a Linux-based Active Directory replacement, XAD. I first demonstrated it in 2003 and I think we shipped around 2005. The underlying technology was OpenLDAP and Heimdal, but obviously with a lot of homegrown code (many RPCs, support for multimaster replication, etc).

XAD was sold to Novell in 2007 and was rebranded Domain Services for Windows. I haven't really followed its progress since; of course, Samba4 is also now an effective Active Directory replacement.
Honestly, if you're the kind of person who enjoys problem solving so much that you spend your free time solving other peoples' problems-I want to work with you. Everybody procrastinates, and I'd rather hire someone who procrastinates in a productive way.
I believe it's because the "normal". EC2 instances are paravirtualised through Xen, whereas the types listed are hardware virtualisation. Not sure though.
For some reason I'm really getting a kick out of the notion of "FreeBSD: Sold by Colin Percival".

At any rate, this is excellent news! I've been looking for an excuse to do more with kqueue/libdispatch in a server setting, and this looks like just the excuse I need. Congrats, Colin, and thanks!
We would even if they owed us money. You can't hold a domain hostage for bills.
> I resent the idea that an architect must be some neckbeard who spends his days conjecturing and drafting and doesn't contribute

That does match my experience of working with an "architect." At a relatively small company (just under 100 employees.)

Maybe you are luckier (or the person doing the hiring is smarter.)

How many employees does your company have?
I've always found hard to write scheduled log entries. I feel more confortable with task driven logs, think about a log made by commits of a repository of my work life.
>A free smartphone is still tied to a non free network

You know what else is a non-free network? The entire internet.

Clearly humanity would still turn if computers didn't exist at all, but I would argue that the internet has been directly responsible for more social change than the text editor and the compiler. If you want to trivially argue that the text editor and compiler are prerequisites for the internet, then I would point out that James Maxwell should deserve far more credit than either Steve Jobs or Richard Stallman.

>The same is not true for the text editor and compiler.

Now I know you're joking.
That's because utilize is web scale.
"designer items"

"Designer clothes typically sell for 8 times what they cost to make. But it doesn't have to be this way. We've set out to challenge conventions and build a new retail model. We have no physical stores, no middlemen taking their cut and no crazy brand markups. Instead, we create our own luxury basics and sell them exclusively at everlane.com."

One thing this model is missing is that part of the reason designer goods cost more is because people are paying for the name as well as presumably better quality. To the point where people knock off designer goods and there is an entire IP infrastructure in place to police those brands.

So while this is pretending to be the "Louis CK" model of selling it's really not. First, they don't have a known "Louis CK" brand. 2nd removing the middleman only removes a part of the markup of a luxury brand.

This might be similar to someone offering to sell a Hyundai that performs on the same level as an equivalent Porsche or BMW but is a Hyundai. By "performs" I mean same quality of materials, same cornering, acceleration etc. (Let's suppose they could do that). What you would end up with is only part of the allure of the Porsche. The brand does mean something and that's part of what you are paying for. (In addition to the commission the dealer makes and the salesperson makes).

Part of the money that goes into a brand is what you are paying for when you buy the brand. If what they want to do is simply sell better quality goods and cut out the middleman that's fine. But they shouldn't dismiss the value (in some people's brains) of having a "brand" of anything and paying more for it either.
worked fine for me, I picked out 4 titles I've had on my reading list for a while.
> I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order

Post-scarcity doesn't happen all at once, it happens to different resources at different times.

There are a huge number of us slogging into the office for IP as well as the challenge of erecting artificial barriers in front of newly non-scarce resources in order to extract profit by imposing artificial scarcity on them.

So I have my doubts that the revolution would arrive in "short order" although I'm optimistic enough to believe it would arrive sooner or later.
Portugal Moves Forward on Open Standards
What's wonderful about science is that the facts don't change just because someone doesn't understand them or misrepresents them. It's just the cold hard truth of our universe. Regardless of what anyone says or wants, the world is as it is. So I realize it's tempting to get angry at sloppy science reporting. I don't like to be half informed and I don't appreciate the smugness of decorating bad information with an air of unearned authority. It's on us to teach our children to think critically and point out bad science reporting when it happens. Yet I take comfort in the realization that good science will prevail, because it's just measuring the way things are.
I completely agree. The word toxic is used almost interchangably with radioactive, but heavy metal poisoning isn't mentioned as a possible cause at all.

Radiation is easy to detect and easier to vilify. But notice that no actual numbers we given in the article. The best they could get was "up to 88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines." A statement so emotional and devoid of actual content.

That said, I wish companies would try to properly dispose of their toxic (and/or radioactive) waste products and not give it to people to paint their houses with.
>Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money?

Anything? I can have anything I want? My own personal Tal Mahal? One for all my friends? How about a full-size replica of Jupiter? Oh, and I's really love a Dyson sphere for Christmas.

Our current capabilities are immensely greater than anything dreamed up during neolithic times, but we're still unsatisfied. There is no reason to believe that further technological progress will change that condition.
RFID can't either, unless you severely overpower the readers. You'd think the antichrist would be able to come up with something that couldn't be defeated with aluminum foil.
Show HN: A unique iPad web browser for designers.
"you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z)"

Almost exactly what happened when I installed nmh. Wasn't at all obvious from the dependency list that I'd get qmail, didn't pay attention to the warning prompt and said Y, ...

Bonus, I have a bunch of new system accounts in my Display Manager's login screen. Bleah. Fortunately my scorched-earth reinstall is coming up, so I just leave them there to make it easier to hate what happened.
http://i.imgur.com/Zw7pY.png
To be honest, the German site (dufragst.es) reads exactly like that ;-) You might want to look into getting some translation help, some parts of the site sound quite unnatural.
This is the one, at my first company:

http://www.miniclip.com/games/stunt-pilot/en/

Two people, two weeks, normal working hours (Coffee Hero was an absurd crunch).
Facebook makes it official — an external advertising network is coming soon
The point about hackily downplaying independence by raising the product to a fractional power was nice.

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/03/09/monkeying-with-baye...
> This article isn't very good.

Mother Jones is an overtly political operation, so you're unlikely to read reporting that's not trying to Make A Point. Compare to Reason.com or Mises.org or similar outlets whose positions are extremely predictable.

That's not to say things are necessarily wrong, but I tend to take what they have to say with a large grain of salt, and am not all that enthusiastic about seeing them on this site, as they tend to be sort of the opposite of 'intellectually curious' and more along the lines of "See! Big companies are EEEEEVIIIIL!" or on the other side "Look! Free markets are always the best possible thing, in every situation!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones_%28magazine%29
Android is an interesting example. Google did use a linux kernel but threw out everything GPL they possibly could above that, to the point of writing their own libc. So I wouldn't really call it an example of GPL winning. It's equally an example of how it was necessary to throw away piles of code because it was GPL's and couldn't be used in commercially compatible way.
Why do you get goosebumps listening to music?
You can't write out that coherent of an argument and expect any free market ideologues to answer you.

Cognitive dissonance is painful!
I use it for a couple of projects including my first major upcoming release.
Boyfriend Maker sneaks violent sexual content onto Apple’s app store
Controlling access to your JavaScript Objects properties
I had read the original post as being open to the authentication method of choice. What you describe is certainly one authentication method (inherence, aka what you are or do). Most common is knowledge, aka a password or unique URL. NFC would be ownership, or what you have. Two of these would allow you to keep your own database. I guess the confusion came from our different interpretations of what the original poster meant by "recognize". I linked recognition with authentication, of which there are three methods to be used, and picked the most likely in my mind. I'm knee deep in authentication principles most of the day.

Sorry if I came off as hostile, it was a miscommunication.
Do name-your-price models yield revenue?
This system works just as well for free software as for non-free. Downloading a binary blob from somewhere would be easy, just a few lines of code in the package description file.
It works just fine for tourists.

And regardless, creating a communist style fixed price centrally managed system is not the solution to tourists being scammed. It doesn't solve the problem, raises prices, and limits supply - it's a lose lose for everyone (except monopolists and city hall).

The regulatory framework is outdated and unnecessary.
How we came up with our mascot
Great idea. Puts the incentives in the right places.
Meet the economists who are making markets work better
"is substantially better"

That's ... not the normal definition of "substantial".

Your life is materially more convenient, probably much much more so. The argument here is that the small and widely distributed negatives inherent in that model affect social things that are literally "substantial" and the gain in individual convenience is a poor tradeoff.
Monetize, improve, rinse and repeat.
Used to be that only the Windows instances were HVM (thus the defenestration hack using them to get FreeBSD onto AWS) and all the Unix ones used paravirtualization - has this changed?
Barclays Bank buys 8,500 Apple iPads in one go
Some Advice for Celebrities and Startups Seeking Their Endorsements
You can run FreeBSD on all instance types, but some of them (everything except cluster, high-I/O, and the new m3 instances) need to have FreeBSD pretending to be Windows -- meaning that you have to pay the higher rate for the Windows license.

I don't think Amazon wants to "officially" support a route which involves people paying for a Windows license they're not using, but the route does exist.
I think cluster instances are always HVM, not sure about high IO.
Three Black Friday Deals For WordPress Geeks
It's the whole chain. Labels decide what is played on the radio.
Paging Alan Turing...
Homebrew packages are Ruby files, and in practice this doesn't seem to be a problem.
Web Development Libraries: good or bad overall?
You can run FreeBSD on an m1.small, but it costs more (Windows license) and isn't in the marketplace.
Other methods mentioned in the thread such as Google's fast button or binding touchstart/touchend don't handle everything this does, such as input fields/checkboxes. This works also well with responsive AngularJS web apps without needing any custom directives for taps/clicks.
"the attitude that results in a taxi passenger bill of rights"

Those extra words do actually make quite a difference in what was meant. I was unclear in another way though, it's the attitude that results in both the laws being written and the laws being effectively enforced. That is an important part of the equation.
Most of the internet runs on a kernel that is GPL'd.
That's what i'm saying. Stop worrying and go back to sleep.

Everything will be fine.
A Glimpse Of The Apocalypse: Walmart Customers Fight Over Phones On Black Friday
Use at your own risk. On our website it brought a lot of small unanticipated errors in the user interface that we only uncovered slowly.

It didn't work in IE8 out of the box. Some users reported they had to double tap very fast on iPad to actually activate any link (I couldn't reproduce it on my iPad). On some older Android devices it made links and menus behave erratically.

In the end we disabled FastClick completely.
Breaking out of templates to build customized reading experiences
I'd be curious to see if "name your price as long as it's not $0" options are any more successful—maybe entering payment details is too annoying for users, so given the $0 option, they'll take the least time consuming path.
Unless you feel that those that write software have more influence in the direction of the community than those who just apt-get/yum install it.

Then they are a small fraction of users but are not irrelevant.
In particular, they tend to track the accessibility of prenatal care.
FreeBSD: Sold by Colin Percival

Right now this is something I'm doing as an individual -- the project has "blessed" it to some extent (e.g., the core team said it was fine for me to call what I was providing "FreeBSD"), but it isn't "official FreeBSD" since it has local changes to make it work under EC2. At some point this will probably turn into "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Project" or "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Foundation" (even if I'm the person actually rolling the images).

Congrats, Colin, and thanks!

We're not finished yet -- I'm still hoping Amazon will find a way to let FreeBSD run on all the instance types without any Windows tax, and I still have to tie up some loose ends up get "stock" FreeBSD running on EC2.
"By the way, there are two exceptions to the name-your-price models
that seem to be working in the marketplace currently; Kickstarter
and auctions. I suspect that social proof that there are others
backing a project motivates Kickstarter users to name a price
(starting at $1 minimum bid)."

Kickstarter is name-your-price in the same way that McDonald's is: small fries costs $X, medium fries $Y, and large fries $Z. Choose X, Y, or Z, and get the corresponding sized item. On Kickstarter, you can't choose to contribute $1 yet still receive the same item as the person who contributes $100.
How does the VimWiki plugin improve it?

I have used vim for journaling and as a wiki, but I only used standard vim features. For example "gf" is practically for a flat file wiki-it opens the file named after word currently under the cursor.
UK spies unable to crack coded message from WWII carrier pigeon
I was about to say the same thing, but timeshifter (whose account appears to be hellbanned) beat me to it:

>If they actually can provide, but claim they can't, it's false.
"cost of operating retail outlet"

The cost of the retail outlet though is spread among many goods. While there are stores that are certainly devoted to one product (and run by the manufacturer or designer) there are more stores that contain many designers. So what what matters it the incremental cost of adding one extra product to the store and what their markup is on the goods.

Also, you will most certainly sell more total products (and lower your costs) by having, in general, multiple channels for those products.

Lastly, as the point I made in another reply here said, you can't discount the amount of what you are paying that goes to the designer for lending their name to the product or getting involved. Tiger Woods is paid to put his name on golf clubs. Ralph Lauren makes shirts and all sorts of goods. People like and buy the label. Some of it is about quality and some is about cache. By eliminating the retail outlet you only remove one part of the costs.

"We eliminate the middleman" is a pitch that has been around for a long time. And yet, people still manage to do business selling through retail channels at the point of purchase. And there is certainly room for both.
Cluster, high-I/O, and M3 all have HVM available. Basically, all the new instance types released since I started complaining to EC2 engineers about how HVM is so much easier to work with than PV... ;-)