skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"like fertilizer" - fertilizer by definition contains elements besides hydrogen, carbons, and oxygens. It is not a "long chain hydrocarbon."

The brine issue is not non-existent. http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/environment/desalina... "Between the tankers, pollution from urban centres and the brine disposed from desalination plants, the Gulf is almost dead."

Well, I guess if it's almost dead then the effect of the brine has a less overall impact. What would the effect be on the shrimp industry in the Gulf?

Saudi Arabia produces 450 million liters per day. That's 5.2 m3/second or 0.16 cubic kilometers/year, or about 1/20th what the Ogallala Aquifer provides. I found that Qatar produces 1.5 million m3/day = 17 m3/second.

http://www.cvwd.org/about/agricultural.php says that the "Coachella Valley Water District delivers 280,000 acre-feet annually ... to irrigate nearly 60,000 acres of farmland." That's 11 m3/second on average, so about the same order of magnitude. Also, "Overall crop production exceeds half a billion dollars a year."

By comparison, Israel has about 460,000 acres of farmland and California has 9 million acres of irrigated land.

Now, how much will the infrastructure cost to build the desalination plants, and the canals, and the pumps needed to make the entire system work against gravity? Even if you assume the power cost is free, there's a lot of maintenance overhead, and the system is more fragile then a gravity fed aqueduct.

I'm definitely not saying that it isn't possible. I pointed out that Australia would be an excellent place for this. That's why I said that it wouldn't be that useful in the US. While you're correct about Texas, that's still only a small percentage of the US farmland, and Texas doesn't have the same weather that makes California so successful.

But using desalinated water for irrigation isn't free/cheap by far, and the cost of power is not the only constraint in making it successful. Any analysis which doesn't include the costs of moving water uphill and delivering it is necessarily incomplete and inadequate.
I love the "takedown" of Keynesian/mainstream economics in the middle of this rant.

Any other centuries-old disciplines your knowledge of Big-O notation and compilers qualifies you to discredit? Oh, modern medicine? Good for you.

This guy takes the "hubris" as a virtue line way too seriously.
Anything with an off-switch can be offed. Anything else can have the batter run down.

If it's a safety device on another piece of hardware, like a GPS tracker for a bike, they can always destroy the tracker separately from the item.
That's unsurprising; people are much more concerned with actual harm than potential harm. A teenager driving badly does not generate the same outrage as when a teenager driving badly kills someone.
And why do you think Google likes it?
"I kept the Glass video recorder going" yeah, these need a manual physical sliding camera lense cover
Yes, capability is a fine word for this. I'd say the practical consequences are still exactly the same, regardless of the label.

Ugh, no thanks. The system you describe is more like cash. I have to actively dole out the necessary amount, and then receive change that is counted at each transition. I abhor these types of transactions.

Not as I imagine it. I think the merchant would be able to set up a transaction, and the consumer would have to take a minimal step to approve it.

Also, if this system would annoy you, I'd be fine with allowing individual consumers to opt out of it. Personally, I would absolutely opt in.

The fact that consumers and merchants haven't fled from credit card use as fraud rates (and costs) have increased is evidence that the market is willing to bear them.

Partially. But this fact can also be attributed in large part to the major barriers to entry.
How long would the Mailbox app line be in real-life?
I guess it depends on the position, but the point still stands. Given that you spend x amount of time interviewing, what does it matter how it's spent? (with the obvious caveats that if they spend, say, 3 hours screaming at you as a stress test, you probably don't want to work there, etc etc).
$2K/unit? That's a gigantic overestimate. High quality head tracking is practically free today thanks to advances in cameras and MEMS sensors; you don't need laser gyros. The Oculus Rift costs $300, and is almost good enough for a home console. The only major improvement needed is a better display, which needn't cost more if sourced in quantities large enough, which Sony or Microsoft could definitely do. $500 for a complete system with display, controller, and console is definitely achievable, and that's the price point the PS3 started at. VR is absolutely feasible today.

As I said further downthread, I think a lot of people got disillusioned with VR because there's a lot of crappy hardware out there. Even the expensive stuff is crap. I tried Canon's augmented reality system at SIGGRAPH last year and the latency and FOV were awful, despite the $120,000 cost. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the Oculus Rift is the proof.

Nintendo saw the possibility of doing something new with the Wii, using then-new technology (MEMS sensors, tiny low-power cameras) to make an old, lame, expensive concept (motion control) work for the mass market, and was rewarded handsomely for it. If someone had that foresight with VR they could be making a killing right now.
Check out their main webpage. They are better than most of the other "NoSQL" dbs out there in explaining the strengths/weaknesses of their product compared to a typical relational DB.
You and I can't probably photograph it, but the Glass marketing people should be perfectly capable of doing that, don't you think?

I mean, c'mon, it's an interaction product. With no images of the actual interaction. How odd is that.
"he thinks every white collar worker will need to adopt a similar regimen soon"

God, I hope not! I like the idea of recording metrics, but on a personal level, it needs to be near seamless or it becomes an additional interrupt, and ultimately a burden. Then you have to review all this crap and decided if it means anything?! It's like going on a trip and taking 3000 photos and then having to go through them. It's an additional job with unclear benefits. Sure, I track my personal fitness, diet, and some sports activities but everything! Seems like a make work activity to me.
There's a saying among sailors: "Waterproof means that once the water gets in, it can't get out again."
The basic question is whether it is a good idea to ask questions which humiliate a sizeable portion of interviewee simply because this maximizes your personal utility?

I don't even know for certain if such an approach does maximize your time versus finding-good-programmers ratio but let's assume it does.

The thing is you are willing to maximize this ratio by doing things that treat some portion people who have ability as if they don't (even it's also treating people without ability fairly)?

I'd claim that doing that sets you for up an adversarial relationship with everyone in the workplace - the people hire you can feel they're under-the-gun. I strongly suspect that the "almost no one can code" crowd are the people who live in these adversarial environments, which produce bad code through all the emotional and organizational games this implies.
I'm may be wrong here, but isn't it the case, that Facebooks re-activates your account, as soon as you login with Facebook Connect on a 3rd-Party site?

I really hate that, but what if you're using something like coughBangYourFriendscough Spotify, deactivate your Facebook account and can't use Spotify anymore? Maybe you're a paying customer to Spotify? How do you cancel your membership if you can't login anymore?

To me this seems like a Big Communication Problem™ between the User and the App/Facebook. The Facebook API needs a functionality that says "Using a deactivated account for Facebook Connect re-activates your old account automatically".

I totally disagree on methods like this, but i seems plausible in that way.
Yes, you're absolutely right that a lot of what I'm complaining about would be solved with sufficient FOV and things certainly have improved since the SU2000 system in that regard. But we're not at 'sufficient' at the moment, at least in my experience based upon trying more recent examples, like an obscenely expensive Sensics kit. It's possible that it will be sufficient long before eye-tracking winds up in consumer HMDs.

But yes, the other part of my previous remark regarding 'dumb joystick' was more directly related to using the head for aiming/pointer duties, which also unfortunately has cropped up before and I quickly conflated the two issues together.
A very non-obvious modification of objects that are passed in as arguments to the constructor.

Looking purely at the code calling the constructor, there is no good indication that the behaviour of the objects I pass in will fundamentally change.

If you are going to mutate arguments like that, I would at the very least expect naming that made it far more obvious, but much preferrable would be to not do it at all. They are implementing the observer pattern in a way that obscures the fact that notification happens in the implementation of an external class (the Glue) class, and so a consumer of the classes that are modified have no immediate reason to suspect that calling methods will trigger behaviour on other objects.

In a small system you can expect people to know the whole implementation, but in a larger project, this is a recipe for surprises where people have no idea which methods have side effects because they can't read the implementations of a class itself to find out if it does.

If I saw code like this in projects I manage, I'd have someone rewrite it.

The are good use cases for aspect oriented programming, but they tend to involve cases where the aspect that is extracted is orthogonal to the normal operation of the object. E.g. logging.
It depends. They also rely on the element of surprise. Everyone I know who's been mugged or seen one happen on public transit has had something grabbed right as the doors are closing, so the thief slips away before you have time to squeeze through the crowd to run after.
It is easier said than done - you'll be lucky to develop 5 products that total $25,000/month. It takes a lot of manpower to make 1 hit, let alone 5.
The idea that there is nothing special about Haskell, or that Haskell is all that closely related to lisp, is patently absurd. Haskell comes from a different, more mathematical background with a much more extensive underlying theory than lisp.

I actually came from the background you advocate--61A (which really was an awesome class) was my first CS course in college. (Unfortunately, they have since ruined it.) I certainly appreciate lisp and have actually used Racket in a practical setting. That said, I've found Haskell and OCaml to stand out both from purely pragmatic and theoretical considerations.

Haskell is the only moderately popular language that lets you control side-effects globally. That by itself is extremely special. This makes writing maintainable code easier and gives the compiler considerable freedom in optimizing code.

Haskell has an incredible but also surprisingly simple type system. You can't just ignore that. There is nothing in lisp--not even typed Racket--that even comes close to Haskell's type system.

Even aside from language qualities that make Haskell special--which I haven't even come close to covering--it also stands out because of its community. Not only is the community particularly nice and welcoming, it's also special in not being afraid of a bit of math. This doesn't mean you as a programmer have to know much math, but it does mean libraries tend to be simpler and more self-consistent because they rely on very well defined mathematical abstractions with simple algebraic rules. These abstractions also allow for significantly more general code.

Haskell comes from a different theoretical background and philosophy than lisp. It has different practical advantages and a very different philosophy. So claiming that it's nothing special and that you will understand all of it just coming from lisp is completely wrong.
That's extremely interesting. Thanks for the detailed description. How many pages were your transcribers able to get through and at what rate? I've heard about the Whitman archive (it's often cited and quite famous I think). Are you still in the field? You know about Nines (http://www.nines.org/ for those that don't) I presume :)
Great, now I have two problems.
Seconding this; even for internships I've not once paid for travel costs. Everyone from small, YC startups up to MS/Google paid for cab fare, flights, and hotels.
I can personally attest to the fact that sleeping outside is not as ridiculous as it might seem at first. As a skinny, 80-90lb Boy Scout in Alaska, I camped outside overnight many times every winter, in temperatures that got down to -30F. It was cold, sure, but a little preparation and it's fine.

The most annoying part about sleeping outside isn't the fact that you are cold, it's that everything around you is - we had to keep our water bottles in our sleeping bags at night so we could make oatmeal in the morning.
I feel the problem is that, few of us actually being neuro-scientists; While saying something like "people don't perform well under stress" is something that is close enough to common knowledge, instead saying "adrenal glands will effectively reduce the output prefrontal cortex" leaves the reader with a whole bunch of unanswered questions:

* Does a stressful interview necessarily actually increase adrenaline?
* Is there actually a link between incresed adrenaline and reduced prefrontal cortex output?
* What role does the prefrontal cortex play in answering interview questions?

And while these may all have good answers, it just throws up a whole bunch of mental '[citation needed]' annotations all over the whole argument, that can just be skipped entirely if we aren't talking about neuro-science. And if we insist on talking about the bio-chemestry, we should probably go into the details.
It is a source coding problem. Kind of like a Huffman code. Depending on how theoretical or applied your information theory coursework was, you might have worked out simple codes like these in class, and that might be an advantage.

It's actually very similar to your tree reasoning above. The information theoretic outlook uses the probabilities of each of the N states to make a more efficient code, but since there are no probabilities in this case, the two approaches pretty much coincide.

Incidentally, there are three possibilities with each weighing -- scale tips right, scale tips left, scale stays balanced. So your logs should be base 3. In coding language, you are transmitting ternary valued symbols.

And, you should dispense with the O() notation, because the lead constant matters very much in this puzzle, and it happens to be 1.
.run() is also bad. What connection is it being run on? The most recently opened connection? In a global variable somewhere? For anything larger than a short script, you should use query.run(conn), or conn.run(query).
should be good now.
That time warping has already been implemented in the project of Lagless MAME. It compensates for input and display lag by always rendering a few frames into the future. It's commonly used for games where frame-accurate timing is critical, notably 2D scrolling shmups and fighting games.

Lagless MAME renders into the future assuming that the state of the input controls remains constant over that future time, and saves the emulation state every frame. When a button is pressed or released or whatever, Lagless MAME rewinds to the saved state for that frame and quickly re-emulates from that point forward. So the result is to send your input back in time past the lag, to the moment in the emulation exactly synchronized to when you saw it on the screen. The experience isn't perfect -- your spaceship would jump a few pixels then move smoothly -- but by and large it's far superior to playing with the actual lag.

This technique could be used for lag compensation in almost any environment. The limiting factor is the cost of re-computing several frames of game state on every input action. Of course, as Carmack says, actually eliminating lag is far preferable to masking it with such techniques.

The lag compensation in Guitar Hero and Rock Band games works essentially this way too.
The homepage mentions you can use your account here to stream content to any device, including consoles. How does that work? Can we connect to it as a network file server?
True... I was referring to the concept of babies sleeping in the cold.
I was actually thinking about this same question earlier. There are dialects of Lisp and dialects of BASIC, but most other languages are not considered dialects of anything similar. How different do two programming languages have to be before they're no longer considered dialects?

It seems like Scheme and Common Lisp, for instance, have more differences than Java and C# have from each other. Why wouldn't C# be considered a Java dialect? Visual Basic is very different from BASICA, yet they are both considered BASIC dialects. Why shouldn't Pascal and Ada be considered ALGOL dialects?

The line-drawing process seems completely arbitrary.
Vacationing with Foursquare
One problem is that lots of people think they know what they are doing, but actually don't.

You also have the problem of people choosing to use "expert mode" because it's faster, obviously.
Even if you eventually get the money back, fraudulent credit card txns are extremely stressful and can easily have real impacts on debit card accounts. Saying so matter of factly "there is no consequence" is obviously wrong.
Someone in a Reddit comment coined the term 'glasshole', likely in reference to the type who walk around with the bluetooth piece talking loudly about 'important' things.

For those who have seen the film Children of Men, there's a scene in there of a young man in a nice apartment who is playing video games on a strange, futuristic headset which, if I remember correctly, somewhat resembled Glass. He looked like he had psychological problems.

We're getting closer and closer to Surrogates/Gamer/Sleep Dealer/etc, something I'm not excited about at all.
Well, "how aggressively he was treated" was within 1 delta or so of how the average CFAA case is handled, so I don't think that's the reason either, unless this is the first CFAA case that has ever become known to the majority of the hackers on HN.

In fact I think the notable thing was how very quiet the reaction had been. A lot of CFAA cases that did acquire wide acclaim (including places like HN) were for things like accessing the "wrong" publicly-accessible URL, or finding security vulns and getting in trouble for just trying to let the organization know that they were vulnerable.

In this case it seemed to me there was a strong sense of "huh, this guy [Swartz] actually did break into a network, and server closet too" and therefore there was not nearly the outcry as we'd seen for most.
It should be emphasized that many variations and modifications may be made to the above-described embodiments, the elements of which are to be understood as being among other acceptable examples. All such modifications and variations are intended to be included herein within the scope of this disclosure and protected by the following claims
I don't think counting commits is a good metric, because I know if it were me, I would start splitting my commits up into trivial changes in order to meet the count ("added comment", "added line break", etc).

It supports going by issues, which is better, but how about counting additions/deletions?
I think having a fake display would be taking it too far. However, having a frame that puts an extra battery and/or the 3G chip & antenna over on the other side would make it nicely less visually lop-sided and have functional benefits.
Well with a "regular" interview, it's pretty unlikely that the company is going to make any money off of the direct output of the interview. When helping them develop a feature or product, it's slightly different.
Also known as "hard work". If this blog provided any insight or new ideas to you then ... god help you.
Yeah, but people aren't stealing a smart phone to power off and display on their mantle, or trade inert as a representational currency, and you can hardly smash the GPS out of it. People are stealing smart phones to use, or to sell to other people to use.

Local hardware access is ultimately unbeatable, but it should at least be hard.
Spotify up on the front page of HN 2 days in a row now..and for all the wrong reasons. Hah
Clojure is so closely tied to the JVM that it's hard to imagine it being the "100 year language" unless the JVM turns out to be the "100 year platform".
Somewhat clever but signing an 'X' didn't make it not your signature but rather just what you 'signed as'. :P
Yes, it's actually pretty easy.

First, create a zone file that all of the domains will share. I put mine in /var/named/master/dummy:

$TTL 1d
@ IN SOA ns1.localdomain. hostmaster.ns1.localdomain. (
2012100601 ; serial
8h ; refresh
2h ; retry
7d ; expire
1h ; default_ttl
)
;
; Name servers
;
@ IN NS ns1.localdomain.
@ IN NS ns2.localdomain.
;
; Host addresses
; Leave commented to return NXDOMAIN
; Uncomment to resolve to IP address
;@ IN A 127.0.0.1

I prefer not resolve these hosts at all (NXDOMAIN), because it seems to be faster and I don't want client machines to probe themselves, but you can uncomment the A record and use whatever IP address you want (e.g. for sinkhole monitoring). Remember to increment the serial number with every edit (which will be rare or never, once you've set it to your liking).

Next, create a simple file with each domain you want to block on one line. I put mine in /var/named/dummy:

ads.example.com
tracker.example.com
example.org

Now create a conf file in the format bind expects, pointing every domain to the zone file (for convenience, put this in /var/named/Makefile in a 'dummy' target):

sed 's/.*/zone "&" { type master; file "master\/dummy"; };/' < dummy > dummy.conf

Which will result in /var/named/dummy.conf containing:

zone "ads.example.com" { type master; file "master/dummy"; };
zone "tracker.example.com" { type master; file "master/dummy"; };
zone "example.org" { type master; file "master/dummy"; };

Finally, add to your named.conf:

include "/var/named/dummy.conf";

Restart bind and you're now authoritative for those zones on your network!
You're not even doing a good job being selfish, since you'd actually benefit a lot more from more people having the opportunity to create value.

The "it is better personally for me" argument could also have been made against women working in your role, or black people. Do you realize how screwed up that line of thinking is?
Two, possibly ancillary points:

As someone who was part of a lawsuit involving public key cryptography I can assure you that the barrier to deploying it in the US rested squarely on RSA Data Security (patent holder) until the patents expired.

To understand how to deploy better security look at Stripe. Stripe is displacing (with pre-existing card technology) the connection between card companies and merchants with a better experience. With an established customer base they will be in a position to drive the replacement of cards.

No system with as many moving parts as the credit card system has, can be "quickly" changed (and by quick here I'm talking demi-decades) however it can be disrupted and replaced.
Need 1 hour? (My attempt at making extra cash while I bootstrap)
That's if the cardholder discovers the charge and if it hasn't already caused any problems (such as leading to bounced checks or inability to make an important payment). Your language is much to strong, especially since is wrong.