skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For single-threaded servers, request latency dominates--it's hard to get useful state information out of a dyno, because as soon as it's returned a response, its state has changed. You can add a dedicated stats endpoint to each server, but that requires cooperation from the customer's application. There are... alternate approaches, however.
I don't like the way hellbanning works here, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that crap like the TC/Mailbox Conspiracy comes from a minority we should protect, nor do I think hellban administration is a problem that needs to be fixed first.
There are plenty of Americans who have essentially zero savings.
Uh, what? Those functions are not asynchronous at all. They will run synchronously with either usage.
Hint: this situation doesn't have anything to do with Cyprus's government being irresponsible with money.
Climate change cut from UK curriculum
Deposits in Cyprus and the whole eurozone are covered by 100000 euro insurance per account. The problem in the particular case though is that Cyprus Central Bank in case the banks close down will be required to pay depositors a total of 30 billion euro which it doesn't have.
I don't care what you think is fair. People who write or promote indefensibly stupid comments could be penalized, and doing so would probably make the site better. Paul Graham should try that (or try doing it more).
If you know JavaScript as well as you know CoffeeScript, you're fine. Use CS and enjoy the syntactic sugar. If not, then there's a potential problem.

The problem, in other words, is not about CoffeeScript in particular. It's about people learning CoffeeScript and not learning JavaScript. We are far, far from the point where you can be a great web developer without knowing JavaScript.
Can Hospital Chains Improve the Medical Industry?
I suppose the trick with the navigation only works on certain touch devices? Does not work on my phone.
In the limit of many concurrent processes, yes, this does converge. However, not even concurrent servers have truly independent response times: unbalanced load will slow down a server. Balanced routing is almost always more optimal, if you can pay the cost of maintaining that state. The problem is only aggravated by servers which can only do one thing at a time.

do you have any proof/calculations?

Sure. http://aphyr.com/posts/278-timelike-2-everything-fails-all-t...
If I stopped doing all of those I would be miserable. This is someone writing about how they want you to treat them but is incapable of doing so themselves (we all are incapable).

Happiness is an balance of many personality traits, not some absolute concept.
"Funny" how nearly everybody from each Euro country seems to think that _they_ are bearing the major burden. I hear it from the Germans, the English, the French, the Greek, the Irish...

The blaming and hating is growing. The EU received the Nobel peace prize just in time, could be too late some years later.
One thing I hate about trademark legislation it that it prevents knowingly selling "counterfeit" trademarked goods. If a consumer wants to knowingly buy a "counterfeit" item, then that should clearly be legal. Besides, the sale of misrepresented goods is already illegal because of other laws, so there's not much need for trademark laws.

Of course, trademark laws increase profit for many companies, which is the reason they've been created in the first place. However, the point of intellectual property should be to benefit society, not companies.
Account holders vs those who took (or facilitated the taking of) the money.
Are those clouds I see in that blurred image?

Are you teasing us with the prospect of 3d weather (perhaps by using radar data)?

If not that's cool, but if so, great idea.
I learned recently that Ghostery is owned by Evidon and thus no longer trust it.

For what it's worth, they have a clear statement in their legal docs about the data they send back (or the absence of such data, if you disable things like GhostRank).

Moreover, the source code is unobfuscated and can be viewed directly in your profile directory in Firefox if you want to audit it yourself.

I agree that any conflict of interest should be considered with care, but it would be hard for them to be significantly more transparent than they already are being.
What Hinton’s Google Move Says About the Future of Machine Learning
> So just getting to Mars would exceed the safe limits

This is the problem with your argument that I'm underestimating risks. You're assuming that nobody finds a way to solve this problem or to mitigate the effects of the radiation, and that nobody would be willing to find a way to go even with the health concerns. I know this will be extremely difficult and quite costly, but I think hard work and constant innovation will solve a lot of the specific problems that you pose today.

> Multiple years in space and Mars gravity will also have severe impacts on bone density and muscles. You're never going to be able to fly to Mars, spend a few years, and fly back and resume your life on Earth without long-lasting health effects.

Prove it. Until you do, I disagree. Also, so what if it's true? Hundreds of millions of people on Earth voluntarily partake in long-lasting negative health effects habits. Why can't "living on Mars for a bit" be one of them?
Nice! I think you have me beat, unless one considers using Python + Fabric as a pro (which may not be unreasonable on a home machine).

How do you resolve conflicts? I think that an interesting problem with lots of interesting solutions.
yeah, Google Voice handles this fine. I often type small novels and it chops them up for me.
I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to have the ambition to be the first man to set foot on Mars. I'm stunned that at this late date I could STILL be the first man to set foot on Mars.

But as I grew into adult life, and visited more than one country here on Earth, I began to think that it is an even higher and more challenging ambition to go somewhere you are not constrained to go by desire for fame or for riches or for being the first in a new territory, but rather by a desire to solve intractable problems. Solving a problem of long standing is a bigger achievement than solving a problem that is unsolved mostly just because no one has found it worthwhile to solve it. Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is a problem for which some example solutions exist, just as traveling to other planets has some precedent in the manned moon missions and in robot space probes, but I suggest it is actually a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life. I still admire astronauts, and I've exposed all four of my children to books and films about space exploration, but I'd be even more thrilled to see them or other young people I know take on the exploration challenge of bringing about improvement in the lives of their fellow human beings in the worst-off parts of planet Earth. There is a lot of challenging science involved in those problems, and the contributions to human knowledge that will come from solving those problems will provide lasting benefit to all of humankind, whatever planet our descendants live on.

AFTER EDIT: Two comments below mention "paternalism." Nope. I am talking about "fraternalism," sharing in the life of the people where you live, understanding their problems deeply because they become your problems too, and then building solutions from the neighborhoods you live in. You can't jet-set that in, and you can't phone it in or international consultant it in, you can only live it in. I've asked before here on Hacker News how many of the participants here have ever even lived in (not just visited, but lived in) a third-world country. Not many have. (I have, and it was a dictatorship when I lived there, and as a foreign national I was part of the process of nudging it to become the democracy it is today.) To be a brother of your fellow human beings is a great adventure. It's harder than armchair criticism, but also more challenging and interesting.
> You're never

Unless we can develop drugs that trick the body into maintaining the correct muscle and bone density.
Is the TortoiseSVN development team trolling?
>Minus: My GV calls have noticeably lower voice quality.

I don't mind or notice the quality of the voice but I can notice a tiny bit higher latency that can make a conversation slightly disorienting if you're having some fast rapid in depth conversation I guess.
With Mars there's also that "step outside without a protective suit, suffocate and freeze to death in few minutes" bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
It depends on the niche as NGO's still provides a large scope.

For instance if your NGO's is a non-profit I would immediately go to: http://www.google.com/grants/ and apply for the $10,000 per month Adwords Grant.

After that I would start by reaching out to sites listed in:
http://nonprofit.alltop.com/ and http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/05/08/the-worlds-best-non...
I would reach out to them with the intention of getting a post written about the non-profit in them and/or offer them a guest post to post on their websites.
Yep: http://preview.python.org/admin/
Unless explorers will be given property of sizable portions of martian land and a number (more than 1!) of back and forth Mars-Earth tickets, this will definitely not attract the kind of valuable and resourceful people that would really be needed to create a self sustaining colony! And you'd also need something like a "diversity Mars Visa lottery" open to anyone so that a colony will not only be formed of "boring, super-fit and super-trained" career space colonists.

...but for all this to work, you'd need good, reliable and "cheap" space propulsion systems, not the current toys. This is where all the work and hype should be, not over the colonization plans and how to grow veggies over there: propulsion, propulsion, propulsion, everything else on 4th, 5th, 6th etc. place.
I'm not talking about polling. Presumably the server's response packets flow back through the webserver, unless they are doing DSR. You can piggyback data on that channel in a way that's transparent to the customer.
Have they resolved the important psychological issue of there being no marijuana on Mars yet?
I completely agree. I'm still working on my own but already i've learned a lot (among which, it's a bit more difficult than I expected.)
> The sky is the limit. Literally, when is sky coming? ;)

Definitely one of my favourite comments about the project so far! =p

The rough and ready approach we took to transforming data was to import the shapefiles into PostGIS using pgShapeLoader, doing any manipulation in PostGIS and exporting straight out to GeoJSON using the ST_ToGeoJSON method in PostGIS, or using the GeoJSON options in ogr2ogr. From there it's a simple case of importing the JSON into Three.js and constructing the objects from the vertex coordinates.

Re: Combining statistical data with the geographic data, we can do that with GeoJSON and you can use ogr2ogr to include related data about each location when exporting to GeoJSON.

The choropleth map is something we constructed from scratch. In reality, it's nothing more than a bunch of shapes in Three.js that each have a different material colour – it's very simple.

D3.js is a fantastic place to start. In fact, that's exactly where we started with all this. We actually use the Geo module within D3 for a few parts of ViziCities.

We haven't decided yet about opening the full project but we'll certainly be documenting and releasing aspects of it (most of the juicy bits). We'll announce that via the @ViziCities Twitter account.

As for the sky… it's coming ;)
Mars One did an AMA on reddit nine months ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/iama_founder_of_...

Personally, I remember being most astonished that their team only had one technical person: http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/team
Mayhaps ;)

But seriously, weather and night/day cycles is something we're looking into.
> Starting tomorrow morning.

Do you see the problem?
Nice, but i think it is too dense with information and more confusing then the current one.
There are those two big horizontal menus that confuse me and just moving the mouse over the first page pops up new menus everywhere.

I'd suggest: Put the main navigation bar (about, downloads, docs, etc) to the top and move the current top bar with links to the side, somewhere else.

Also Downloads and Docs is mentioned many times on that page, i'd suggest to leave the link to the Docs in the main bar and get rid of the other ones.

And at the bottom this whole page (takes up my whole screen) contains all this links again.

It's probably that way to decide which design way to go..
The blue navigation bar also is right in the middle of the screen, that's disturbing. The common way to display navigation is at the top or at the left side not right in the middle, where the content belongs (imo).

Anyway, keep going, you're doing a great job! :)
obligatory http://hackertyper.com/
Hadn't considered it. If we need the money we may give it a go!

Re: Music. Do you have any examples of your stuff anywhere? We'll be having music and effects of some sort but haven't yet looked into it much.
Very cool, thanks for sharing it! The multi-device thing is something we're actually keen to explore; we basically want to replicate the Liquid Galaxy thing that Google did.

We haven't yet worked out what we're doing re: opening the project and collaboration but we're open to talk more. Mind reaching out to us via hello@vizicities.com?
I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons.

But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get into a position to even make any change.

Thus, this endeavour is practically impossible — it's already difficult enough to change something in your fatherland.

AFTER tokenadult's EDIT: Your edit clarifies a lot. But fraternalism is still difficult to achieve: if you are from a different race than the native population, you'll have a hard time being accepted as their representative.

An interesting example for this might be Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew pushed the country from third to first world in 50 years. Although he is Singaporean, he brought in a lot of foreign knowledge as he had studied abroad. And the same issues with corruption/illegal methods some commenters mention here can be observed: in the early days of his career, he arrested his opponents, the communists, without any legal process to prevent them from jeopardizing his plans. Later, he made some radical decisions, that were not widely accepted by the population, bu that led to better results for the country (for example, he tore down old villages to replace them by high-rise buildings).
"According to our experts, greater than 60% of the Herve dresses sold on eBay were fake [1]. Heh, that means eBay profited more on counterfeit Herve Leger than authentic ones."

How is eBay compensated? If they are compensated on a flat-transaction-fee then sure. But I thought they took a percentage of the sales price (in which case your assertion would not be true if the fakes sold for a tenth of the price of the originals.)
"...since most people are brainwashed by class-based mechanism" - that is a very constructive language indeed.
Haha, let's make it happen!
I'd be perfectly willing to die on Mars and (being one of the older one here), I'd say it's more likely that I am dead before anyone actually gets there. (Note that my family might not like me leaving them behind on Earth).

As an aside, it's a shame that the artist's rendition reminds me of a trailer park in a Florida retirement "encampment". I have no intention of retiring somewhere that's populated by snow-birds (well ... if I actually retire. Retirement sounds terribly boring).
The thing I'm most worried about is what happens if one of the residents needs medical attention. Mars is going to be a one-way trip and while the pioneers will most probably be young and healthy, they won't stay young and healthy forever.

It is entirely possible to place a doctor within the group and send medical supplies, but it could work only for the simplest medical conditions. I think it would be a long time before it would be possible to perform open heart surgeries on Mars, or even fill a tooth.
> IMHO, it was the rise of _Web 2.0_ (oh boy, that term sounds so corny now) and uncontested Google domination of the web that made Google Reader the RSS client.

This is true. I could use Reader on my desktop, then use my Google account to sync other RSS readers on other devices. Now that I think about it, Google Reader might be the first time I consciously delegated a service to Google for use by other apps.
> It's a problem for anyone using a web framework/server combo that does't allow for concurrent requests on a single dyno.

Or one that allows only k concurrent requests with a routing mesh that schedules m>k per server (dyno) or at least does that often enough.

Even with unlimited concurrent requests per server, similar problems may arise if the performance drops sharply with the number of concurrent requests being served (e.g. due to swapping.)
While I know you're right (I was being over zealous), I'm quite sure it wasn't 2 guys in their spare time with zero budget.
Thanks Ed! That's all I can say at the moment.
Both of my grandfathers did this 100 years ago.

They never saw their homeland or most of their friends or relatives ever again.

They must have known that was the way it was going to be. I often wonder how they felt about it.
Looks nice.

My feedback for what it's worth:

- The home page is very "blue". Personally I think this page will look better if the blue gradient in the background was a light gray gradient instead.

- Search icon needs to be lowered.

- Hovering the secondary menu is not a pleasant experience. I think this is mainly because of the white info panel in the drop down switch from right to left. It makes it look cluttered and disorienting. Another problem here is that there is a menu with drop downs in between the primary nav and the content. Moving your mouse between primary nav and content will bring up a secondary nav drop down which in my opinion is very irritating.

- I think how the menu is aligned under Education (overlaps the content) is the best way.
"If you don't have any of those, then I don't see how the developer tools can figure out what the original source is."

You don't think that un-minifying and pretty-printing the minified Javascript would be both:

a) a lot easier than debugging an error on line 1 at column 28,482?
and
b) technically possible?
The kind of people that have the abilities and desire to "change systems from within" are very different from the kind of people that are good at "making better systems from scratch", or "making new systems in places with limited resources". Dealing with complicated peopleware meshes and solving resource reallocation problems is a completely different problem from surviving and thriving in a harsh environment with limited resources. The people needed to solve these types of problems think and see things very differently, they never get along with each other, and I'd imagine that if an alien psychologist would visit our planet, (s)he could literally consider them different species!
I don't get it. What is the point of sitting in a caravan on Mars and waiting to die?

Is the guy proposing this going himself to set an example?

If there is going to be any kind of colony, it needs some means of sustaining life and babies.
Well said. Tomorrow never comes.
If Mars can be mined for water (and it looks like it can), there is no reason to make it a one-way trip only. Sending people there with the explicit expectation to die soon speaks of poor planning and not a lot of willingness to export the basic tenets of humanity into space with us. It's a bad precedent, it carries the wrong message about the value of intelligent life, and I'm afraid the mission's limitations also impact its overall chances of success.

Although we have experienced a sad regression in our space capabilities, there is nothing in principle preventing us from sending humans and basic building blocks there, let them build a decent base, and then instate a regular shuttling service. Even if building the outpost takes 10 years, that's not the same as sending them onto a suicide mission as the article implies.

We're missing a lot of necessary infrastructure for this though, and without it the stated Sept. 2022 launch date might as well be 2122 or even 4022. We'll need a moon base to stage this thing (not only the initial flight but more importantly the supply line), and if we're serious about expanding into the solar system, one or two space elevators are probably a necessity. The political will to build any of these, never mind maintaining them, does not exist. We're too busy propping up corrupt political and financial systems, not to mention the importance of waging an eternal war the expenses of which could provide enough for a decent colonialization program many times over.

Scraping together a suicide team and shooting it roughly in Mars' general direction is not the answer to this problem.
> Let me show you an example. This link should take you to PayPal.

The href is leading to bitly, making much less people believe you.
Thirty-Five Arguments Against Google Glass
Rails isn't "not concurrent", it simply uses multiprocess concurrency rather than multithreaded concurrency. Unicorn, for instance, uses a forking model, which is why Heroku recommends it. Ruby 2.0 also favors improves the runtime's copy-on-write performance, which makes it cheaper to fork processes.

Still, there's a resource limit to how much concurrency you can achieve within a dyno as opposed to by buying more dynos. You shouldn't have to scale horizontally just because the routing scheme is inefficient with the width that it has.

If Heroku really wanted to abandon Rails because other web stacks are easier for them to scale with, they should have let us know rather than turning around and shitting on the platform that made them as a business.
You're a young man from Switzerland whose biggest problem (from what you say) is loneliness. Could be worse, don't you think?

I was tempted to say that, too, but then it occurred to me that although he's in his twenties he might have recently been told he only had $X years to live by a doctor. If that's true, I wouldn't want to suggest he should spend them with C++. :-P
> Prove it. Until you do, I disagree.

Well I can't personally __prove__ it, but I believe the general belief in the science community of prolonged space-travel is that it will most likely mess you up. Probably in more ways than we've even thought of. I don't think, at least with today's tech, that a human can travel to Mars and back and be perfectly okay.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/space-dangers.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_19158_the-6-weirdest-dangers-...
Another case of re-submission. Here is the original one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371143

The only difference is the URL here has a trailing question mark.

Why does this keep happening?
Sure, if you want to talk about single line items. But if you look at the total rural people are heavily subsided by the rest of us. It's not just mail. It's mail. It's roads. It's electricity. It's airports. Hospitals. Internet service...