skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tying internet access to free refills of soda on one day, paying Medicare/Medicaid bills for their diabetes the next.

What a wonderful world.
I bet that Tesla gives automotive insurance underwriters massive hard-ons.

I want one of these cars so badly. I had plans to buy the new 2017 Mazda RX-7 and keep my '88 10AE RX-7, but I might just sell the old one and figure out how to make the Model S purchase happen.
> Other feedback I got on the post was that in some countries you don't need several days of checks before getting the surgery. In some places they do it on the same day.

I live in the U.S. and had my surgery done in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. I didn't have to go through several days of preliminaries -- just an eye exam from a local optometrist in advance of the surgery.
Normally I would just downvote you and move on, but in this case your comment is frustrating enough that I have to say something. I found the comment you responded to (by nsrivast) quite fascinating. A well-written but brief analysis of the problem, with sources attached for further reading -- what's not to like? In-depth and thoughtful comments like that are what keep me coming back to this site, and are what make the community great.

I for one am very thankful that nsrivast took the time to write something so technical and detailed. However, I found your response to be in extremely poor taste. It added nothing to the conversation, and IMHO was rude and unnecessary.
I'm sure glad I didn't get this. I wore glasses for years and hated them, until I read about vision therapy. My vision has definitely gotten better, without any lenses or surgery, for free (well ok, I bought a book about it), and I'm sure it could be even better if I wasn't lazy about it.

It makes sense to me, how could humans naturally get such bad vision, when it can be so disadvantageous in an evolutionary sense? Environmental factors (such as staring at a computer screen...) would seem an obvious cause, and the evidence seems to confirm it.
While I agree that the charging logs are completely damning, I think it's worth pointing out that Broder probably wasn't taking minute-to-minute notes as he drove (which, as a fellow driver I appreciate). More likely, he simply wrote the relevant portions of the article from what he remembered the night after he drove. Which, in my mind, isn't unreasonable - Elon calling him out to say "Broder never drove 45 mph" when he was driving 52 would seem somewhat nitpicky were it not for the article's inflammatory language.
I'm skeptical that it will. Broder pretty much is their go-to guy for coverage of energy/big oil. His articles fit their editorial vision.

If the NYT cares about their credibility, they'll get rid of him, but this isn't an isolated incident for them. I stopped reading them a decade ago for that reason.
This is hilarious! Gimp's interface (separate windows) is based on Photoshop 1.0?
That can only be true if you choose to ignore a lot of photoshop features.
While we now get accusations and nice graphs, as long as we don't get provably unaltered source log files, we'll never know who is right.

Even if Tesla were to release the log files used to create the graphs, it would still be impossible for them to prove that the logs weren't being altered prior to release.

It seems to me that either the reviewer or Tesla (or both) is playing unfairly here, but it's impossible to say who.

Instead of coming to articles linked here and commenting how clearly the party not currently defending themselves must have been wrong, lets just just ignore this mud flinging contest and move on.
MQ might be a solution but certainly not in the "just use" class. Unless you want to introduce a bottleneck and a single point of failure, this queue has to be distributed.

Managing a distributed queue is hard, for reasons similar to ones making the original problem hard - DQs require global state in a distributed environment. There are tradeoffs involved - the synchronization cost might become a bottleneck in itself.

Pushing the problem on the distributed brokers is making a big bet on the queuing solution. Nope, definitely not in the "just use" category.
I think this is fantastic, especially given that I had recently purchased some Tesla stock. However, I wonder, is anyone perturbed that Tesla has the ability to monitor all of this? I know that other car manufacturers are getting closer and closer to this kind of thing. But is anyone else perturbed? I know there must be precedents set already because of technologies like OnStar. What is needed for the police or a court of law to be able to demand this type of data from Tesla or the vehicle owner (not sure where the logs are kept, in the car or in the cloud).
He's a journalist. Taking notes is his trade.

Journalists are well-accustomed to using voice recorders by now. Heck, most car reviewers videotape everything they do now.

I think Elon makes a pretty convincing case that this guy was going out of his way to write a hit piece against the car. No sensible person would drive any car in the manner this reporter did.
I guess where we are attempting to be different is we are providing this functionality in a vendor agnostic way (ie. also for Linode, Joyent, Telefonica - Digital Ocean and Rackspace coming soon, and support for standalone servers in Hetzner, or your private cloud, or even under your desk for example)

As well as just supporting your preferred vendor (based on price, location, guaranteed location, SLA etc) it means that we can offer you a way to switch between vendors if that vendor has some down-time, or doesn't meet your changing requirements as you move forward.

Also, we are really trying to be as application centric as possible - everything stems from your application code - and then provide the ongoing management tools you need on top of that (for easy scaling, backups, scheduled tasks, migrations, reporting etc)

Great feedback from everyone! We didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night!
Here's what I posted after the NYTimes review:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204109

Our culture is badly broken. When "the social contract" for broad swathes of society is so little regarded that lying is a matter of course, then we have already reached worrying levels of dysfunction, of the sort that historians point out when they discuss the fall of the Roman Empire, Czarist Russia, or the USSR. A point all of those have in common: The denizens came to assume public information was false as a matter of course, as a time and sanity saving measure. Large swathes of our society think of lying, even when deceiving large swathes of the public, as a kind of sport, and profiting from such lying as a kind of serendipitous fortune to be exploited without conscience, like finding cash on the sidewalk.

Such attitudes are shoved in my face when I see exclamations like, "Pictures or it didn't happen!" It's the same when big media corporations trade in innuendo and conspiracy theories and deliberately sabotage the dissemination of knowledge for their own ends. Such attitudes are so pervasive, that large swathes of the population actually disbelieve in any kind of objective truth, and accept mere social proof as its substitute and superior.

It's entirely possible that the journalist in question is innocent of deception and only guilty of poor journalism and/or poor trip planning and/or insufficient UI design. However, the issue with the review and that of the social contract are entirely related. In a world where reality itself is relative and subject to social proof, there is no need to double check your facts or to prove the null hypothesis. In a world where science is just another fabricated self-serving belief system, there's no need to apply one's scientific literacy or application of physics learned in school when doing things like taking a car trip in winter. One only need know enough to read the dials and gauges to be a good consumer, then complain loudly if things do not go one's way.

True competence, be it in programming or journalism or any significant endeavor, requires diligence with and prostration to the truth. Our society as a whole has forgotten this and our society as a whole is oblivious to the price it is paying as a consequence.

Another way to think of it: Our society as a whole doesn't have the epistemological foundation needed for the level of technical sophistication it has.

EDIT: Some of my fellow HN-ers seem to suggest they hold such relativism as a world view. This warrants much reflection.
Great comment.

I love Quora as a Q&A vertical focussed on startups.

As a content creator though, I'm increasingly tempted to put it in the similar StackExchange site http://answers.onstartups.com/, where at least my content is CC licensed and easy to link to.

Quora doesn't live in a vacuum, it has competition.
elon musk accused the author of a significant detour in manhattan and not charging to max in his tweets. he provides zero proof the first thing happened and the article is very clear that the test driver/reviewer did not, in fact, charge to max when elon musk claims he didn't.

i'm also appalled elon musk would use charge remaining charts that show the battery dropping into the low single digits to prove the car never ran out of battery when the tesla runs on lithium ion battery technology. lithium ion batteries are ruined by complete discharges. if the tesla doesn't shut down above some safe threshold it's a poor piece of engineering. elon musk is definitely aware of this fact and is cherry picking facts and misleading his audience to gain sympathy for his argument.

elon musk also cherry picks a quote from a response to his tweets and attributes it to the original piece to further his argument

regardless of the new york time's behavior, elon musk is not acting in any more honest a manner and is harming his companies reputation
I had LASIK done in 2002. Only diagnosed with myopia in high school, it was relatively mild, and I hated having glasses/contacts on my face/eyes. My experience was very similar to the one described, including the halos, which faded within months. I was in my early 20s so I was told there was a small risk of needing further treatment in future, as I was relatively young, but fortunately that hasn't been needed. Unless I'm reminded of the surgery, I forget that I had it done at all - except for 20/20 vision in both eyes.

At the time, if you had asked me, I would have assumed that most short-sighted middle-class South Africans would have done the operation in 10 years time (at about R15-20k, prices have fallen in real-terms over the last decade). Instead, it seems there's a lot of FUD surrounding it, and people prefer to struggle with contact lenses.
An Inside Look at Google BigQuery [pdf]
> However, I wonder, is anyone perturbed that Tesla has the ability to monitor all of this?

Tesla has made a public policy statement that they will turn on logging and monitor media test drives -- but they won't be automatically monitoring the private uses of their car. That would be a public relations disaster.

Also, to get to the log, they have to get to the car. It's not as though the log is automatically transmitted to Tesla by wireless.

EDIT: Apparently, with the user's permission, Tesla can log car data remotely. How they go about this isn't clear, but it's apparently an option.
They actually turn it off by default except for the press.

I think when insurance companies, technology and public opinion catch up, it will be an always-on thing. I want that kind of logging if my car gets stolen. I want that kind of logging if I get hit by a cop and he calls his buddies to alter the evidence to make me at fault (this has happened to people).

This kind of log data will only result in lower insurance premiums for everyone and evidence useful in court. The potential savings to society are tremendous.
Custom notebooks with QR codes as digital tethers
if you buy a Tesla you get to decide whether this is enabled or not (at least as of today). It's on by default only for journalists after the Top Gear "experience".
Abstract:

"This white paper introduces Google BigQuery, a fully-managed and cloud-
based interactive query service for massive datasets. BigQuery is the external
implementation of one of the company’s core technologies whose code name
is Dremel. This paper discusses the uniqueness of the technology as a cloud-
enabled massively parallel query engine, the differences between BigQuery
and Dremel, and how BigQuery compares with other technologies such as
MapReduce/Hadoop and existing data warehouse solutions."
This is one aspect of the security situation that I haven't been able to wrap my mind around: if someone were to attempt to hijack a plane with a pen knife/nail clipper/etc in any year past 2001, they'd get their shit stomped in. The public is well aware of the fact that terrorists don't always merely force landings and take hostages like they did before 9/11. Why do we continue to ban the most trivial shit?
Synced autocomplete data is pretty sweet.
Doesn't it become another tooth brushing?
A manager of mine (actually the best one I ever had) in the past told me this.
"If you are going to argue with someone, just state the facts".

It was when our team was arguing with another team about some problem.

Still true. 'Just the facts'.
I disagree - they are building a valuable repository of knowledge. If a simple login form is a deterrent for you in learning or understanding something new, that's unfortunate. Don't get me wrong, I also get a little dissapointed when it happens, but don't really mind logging in.
> I think in fact this has a lot to do with the stickiness of religion -- it's completely mixed up with family identity.

When you're Jewish religion and family identity are one.

But that still does not mean that you will end up believing in god.

When you're born into a Catholic family you can opt-out at some point, you can renounce the faith. But when you're Jewish you can stop believing in God all you want but you'll still be Jewish.

Being Jewish is a state, not a religion.

Edit: On another note, being Jewish is also something forced upon Jews that want to opt-out by the outside world. They can intermarry, they can assimilate all they want the rest of the world will still treat them as Jewish. The Jewish religion states the conditions for being Jewish, it's circular reasoning that could only stop when everybody involved would stop believing that this is true. But as long as there are people that believe that when you're born Jewish you will always be Jewish this will be to some extent true. There is an element of virality in there.

The Catholic faith (and most other Christian denominations) considered this a 'bug' in earlier religions and fixed it by having procedures where you are voluntarily (as far as you can speak about that after being instilled with certain ideas practically from birth) join the body of the church. There are also procedures for opting-out on a voluntary basis as well as a way of punishing those that fell into dis-favor with Church officials (for instance ex-communication).

Religion and being part of some religion is a very tricky area in that it all centers around what everybody believes in and it appears that to some extent these beliefs can effect real change in the people that have such beliefs. If you believe that some woman gave birth being a virgin then a lot of other things suddenly also become possible. If you believe that God chose a certain family blood line to be the chosen people believing that you can't opt-out from that can be a very real thing. After all, who can deny their mother is their mother?
To play devil's advocate, I wonder if it's possible that there is no foul play on either side - if the car had issues displaying accurate data to the driver but logged properly to Tesla, he might have thought he was discontinuing the charge with a fuller battery then he had. Same for the speedometer (a chilling thought) and temperature.

As for the circles in the parking lot - I'd probably do donuts too if I was given free reign over a slick sports car.

Obviously it's far fetched to think that display inaccuracies were really the case, but food for thought.
I've found the IRS to be incredibly reasonable. I had a high tax bill due to non-realized gains (sigh...), but was able to get them to do a payment plan at low interest for a couple years. They were nothing but polite and accommodating.

I also spoke with IRS CID on another matter (someone was making death threats to IRS agents, and they had mail through my anon remailer). Way saner than FBI or even USSS. (I had no information, by design, but being able to tell someone that and explain how remailers worked without them threatening to seize servers was refreshing.)
He has a new article from February 12

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

More strange things are claimed

At that point, I was already experiencing anxiety about range and had called a Tesla employee from the New Jersey Turnpike to ask how to stretch the battery. She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage.

What?
login form. bam, you have your page.
edit. works just fine on a mobile phone.
> I don't really understand why reST is so unpopular compared to Markdown.

There are two reasons: first is that Markdown is much simpler and is more narrow scoped and second is that reST implementation only exists in Python and Haskell - to some extent, not supporting extensions, obviously. Both of those reasons make entry level higher.
I find it interesting that they didn't actually show the car going in circles on a map. Either they have the GPS logged and they don't want to show it (customers could think "oh this car is going to record my location?!") or they just don't have it and are guessing?
Also HN doesn't rely on asshattery sign up tactics for you to read other peoples' content.
> While we now get accusations and nice graphs, as long as we don't get provably unaltered source log files, we'll never know who is right.

What!? Piffle! There's this powerful tool scientists use called replicability. Just have some other journalists make the same trip as stated by John Broder in the article and compare. 3rd parties can also try to replicate the same result achieved by Broder, using the log information as published by Tesla.

> Instead of coming to articles linked here and commenting how clearly the party not currently defending themselves must have been wrong, lets just just ignore this mud flinging contest and move on.

My money's on Elon Musk. I'm pretty sure his world view is compatible with mine. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204109 "Move along" would only be an effective damage control strategy for John Broder.
>This particular source code is from an extremely old version of Photoshop, there would be no potential commercial harm whatsoever from allowing people to reuse this source code however they want.

It's not that easy I guess. Even Photoshop 1 has tons of patents in it's algorithms.
I absolutely agree with you; there was definitely a contrived scenario going on.

However, I also think that Elon's taking a bit of an overzealous approach, especially given his Tweets. I can see where he's coming from - the company's stock did dip after all - but his rebuttal is somewhat inflammatory in my mind as well. Any person able to read a basic graph can see the untruth in Broder's article by looking at the charge graph, and I think that a more cool, professional approach could have given Tesla a very big PR boost as the more mature company in the situation.
> The Germans murdered all children and pregnant women.

That's false.

> How could a newborn survive?

By having at least one very determined parent and an absolutely enormous amount of luck.

Have a look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010n3tz
Julia v0.1 released
The logging capability can be turned on at the owner's request, and only at the owner's request.

Unfortunately for the NYT, Tesla Motors was the owner of this particular car.
That there are two sides of a story doesn't mean that they're equally likely to be true.

I'd wager my house for a donut that Tesla's data is closer to the truth than the vitriol spewed by a guy who's had nothing but bad things to say about electric cars in the past.
I would expect the car to show a higher speed to the driver (by 5%) not lower
Don't mean to be a China basher but this will end in no time once China decides to act.

Pretty much EVERYTHING that N Korea gets/needs to subsist comes through China. But unfortunately leadership of China believes it's better to have N Korea (despite the threats of N Korea with nukes) as a leverage/buffer against apparent threat from US and her allies.

So there you have it. You want to see the suffering to stop? Pressure Chinese govt to act.
And for the source link:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/v0.1
> Even if Tesla were to release the log files used to create the graphs, it would still be impossible for them to prove that the logs weren't being altered prior to release.

Think about what you're saying. If the logs were reported dishonestly, someone in Tesla could (and would) make a million dollars by being a "public-spirited" whistleblower.

A secret plan to twist the truth about an automatically-generated computer log would eventually unravel. In modern times, there are few truly secret secrets. I can think of just one exception -- where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. But that example only proves that someone was paid more to keep quiet than he would be paid to speak up.

> It seems to me that either the reviewer or Tesla (or both) is playing unfairly here, but it's impossible to say who.

On the contrary, I think this release shows who was telling the truth. Especially because Broder now has the option to sue Tesla and Musk for defamation of character -- if he dares.
Did anyone else try to find the citations made in the blog post back in the original NYT article? I did and couldn't trace some of them down.

The third bullet point in the blog says "In his article, Broder claims that 'the car fell short of its projected range on the final leg.' Then he bizarrely states that the screen showed 'Est. remaining range: 32 miles' and the car traveled '51 miles,'"

When I do a Command-F on the article, I can't find "32", "51", "final leg", or "fell short". Where is Tesla getting these quotes from?
> As for the circles in the parking lot - I'd probably do donuts too if I was given free reign over a slick sports car.

Yeah, but the middle of a range test without mentioning it in the article is a bit suspicious. Also, thanks for implicitly revealing your standards for an acceptable white lie and acceptable journalism. ;) (Okay, devil's advocate, so it only reveals about your devil's advocate persona.)
No, this is a Jayson Blair-level screwup. All opportunities the NYT might have had to spin the logs in their favor ended when Broder deliberately drove around a parking lot trying to exhaust the battery.

He's done. As in, "Yes, Mr. Broder, I would like fries with that."
This wasn't "embellishment" - no reasonable person can look at those charging logs and not believe that this "reporter" deliberately set out to discharge a battery and then write a story about it.

I do blame Tesla, somewhat, for not having the good sense to realize that this guy was going to do a hatchet job. Perhaps they'll learn from this and deal with actual journalists in the future.
It's there if you want to help :)

The reason it was forked is due to people selling recompilations of it.