skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think it would require a calculation of how fast the wave would disperse in the tube, which OP has not done.

True. Two points though:

a) The rate of dispersion would be enormously dependent on the "stiffness" of the tunnel wall. If the wall is flexible at all a lot of energy would escape in its distortion. How much is a very complex calculation.

b) Ideal propagation for a ultra low frequency sound wave is probably very good. Why do I think so? I've heard that "shock waves" (actually their low frequency components) from various blasts often travel several times around the earth and are registered at least on their second lap. This knowledge has been incorporated in my gut and used to guide this "design".
"But no-one was complaining when Silicon Valley was dominating the feed? So isn't it racist to complain when Indian topics dominate?

There are two main reasons why most people find it not too irritating to have a Silicon Valley dominated social network. First is that most social networks are initially dominated by Silicon Valley, so in general, people are used to Silicon Valley content. The second, and more important reason is that many people in other countries are interested in keeping tabs on what's going on in Silicon Valley because they feel that the same thing will reach their country in an year or two. So, too much Silicon Valley content is usually not a problem for most people."

This pretty much invalidates the argument... Do they really want silicon valley content or is it just the authors bias?
Irrespective of anything Chomsky says on the whole Snowden affair, Chomsky is bad American/borderline traitor. If there's an anti-American government position to take on an issue, he'll find it and take it.
>A: Foot pedals.

That's hilarious.

I get that emacs has technical merit but the keybindings are horrendous. Even if they don't cause hand pain they're long-winded and distracting.
Does anyone know more games like this? Thanks.
He is a great intellectual, but he MAY also be acting as just another control mechanism, a gatekeeper:

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/noamchomskygatekepper26sep05....

https://startpage.com/do/search?query=chomsky+gatekeeper

Bio of the author of the first article - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-abrahamson

(Has the mention of this simple possibility offended you? If you think it's impossible, tell me why.)
Copy and paste template letters tend to be treated as less important than letters written in the constituent's own words[1].

If you genuinely care about this issue, make the time to write about the concerns you have yourself.

[1] http://www.writetothem.com/about-qa#formletters
How Apple Gets At-Home Workers To Work
Surely people who are not interested in SV content exist.
Yeah. It's worth noting that for engines in stationary devices like fabrication tools and machinery, electric totally won. So what made the difference with cars wasn't just the engines themselves, but rather the energy storage/distribution network. Now that we have batteries that are good enough at a cheap enough price, electric is gaining fast despite a lot of cultural opposition.
I've been a big fan of Noam Chomsky for years. I had to implement a recursive descent parser for a project recently and stumbled onto this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

He laid out the classes of formal grammars clear back in 1956. Every time you use a regular expression, compile code or run a script, you're applying concepts that he helped pioneer. I almost couldn't believe it.

I have a new appreciation for his work, and a better understanding of why his logical approach to ethics/civics/philosophy always resonated with me.
> I've been waiting to see a .dmg equivalent for Linux.

In a very literal technical sense I have no idea what this means. Linux can mount a file as if it is a disk with -o loop. I suspect you're really talking about something else. App bundles perhaps?
Like with apple iPhone / iPad speculation, it garners pageviews. If this were forbes.com you would call it blogspam.
While not entirely disagreeing, I would ask whether there's room to question any of those requirements. WHY does the 911 call center need to interface to all those systems. WHY do I need an interface to the FBI or court records in order to respond to a call from a woman whose husband is having a heart attack in the living room?

Tight coupling of many separate systems is a classic anti-pattern in software.
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If you have something specific to say about their science or tips and suggestions then please say it. Ad hominem is somewhat counter productive to the spirit of HN.
Well you need to decide then really. If you're not infringing any terms (or the spirit of them) then the opportunity can easily outweigh the risk.
1. I respect the fact you don't want to discriminate when it comes to matters of health and safety. I, on the other hand, would like to discriminate. If a person who led unhealthy lifestyle knowingly requires medical attention, I want to have a default option of not paying for this out of my own pocket, because I don't know that person at all. Now, say I'm a Canadian citizen too: would you give me the same amount of respect and not require me to pay tax money for the things I have no intention of supporting and allow me to only pay to my insurance company?

2. In my world what's most likely to happen is that this guy would be helped immediately, but the hospital stuff later will report the incident, the guy will lose his driving licence forever, will be unable to buy alcohol and will be required to pay to the hospital over time. I'm not gonna go into detail of how it is achieved without a government, but it's quite very possible and would even be enforced more effectively.

So, yes, my main point is: forced universal anything is bad and immoral. Everyone should know exactly how and where their money go and be free to decide what to do with their money. If I dislike how my charity works and if I dislike that it doesn't help drunk drivers, I switch to a different one which does. If everyone in a society agrees to pay for universal healthcare voluntarily without a threat of IRS or similar agency showing up if they don't pay, then I have no problem with it.
What's amazing is that this story seems eerily similar to when they upgraded the call centres for the London Ambulance service 21 years ago, and a more recent failure in 2006. You would have thought anyone dealing with these systems would have read that case study at some point?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ambulance_Service#Syste...
I remember when the Stanford Bookstore was the largest bookstore in the US west of the Mississippi by number of titles. It had a tremendous technical section, and all Silicon Valley engineers shopped there and at a few smaller technical bookstores like Stacey's. Stacey's and most of the others are gone, and Stanford gradually went from being a giant bookstore with a gifts nook to a giant gift shop with a book nook.
I think many gun rights activists are applying the same concept to privacy. One of the most encouraging things I've experienced in this debate is that while it certainly seems divisive, the divisions don't seem to be along party lines, or even particularly obvious ideological lines. I've argued with people I almost always agree with and agreed with people I almost always argue with. It is actually refreshing that there is actually a debate happening and that the debate seems to involve more individual opinions and less of the usual blocs.
Monopolies? 911 dispatch centers should really not be a battleground for competing commercial entities. They're a public service. You may disagree with the general idea of a public service, but it's really one of the very few areas where government can do (and frequently does) things for the good of everyone.

Call centers might be bad sometimes regionally, but that doesn't mean they can't work in principle. For example, in my home country (Germany), there is a public dispatch system for all emergency services and after having had to use it repeatedly for a range of things from routine to disaster response, I have to say it works really well. And I wouldn't say Germany is exactly the paragon of efficiency when it comes to public services either. So with a little bit of political will, it's achievable - as it should be.
To where? To another country which is going to tax me the same or more?
wtf emergency system costs one billion dollars???
Dissent isn't treason, even if you do it a lot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy1w6rTpC2g
So being smart equates to not being able to put oneself into question ? Not the way I'm used to think about intelligence. Though, programming cultivates the habit of rethinking your premises, I think we can all testify.
Define "Anti-American" please.
some managers seem to believe exactly this
I suspect they'll wait a few more alpha-beta point releases before updating PyPI, but not sure. Any devs reading?
Using arrays for relations, like tags, is a bad idea. If you try to do anything more complex (joins) later with them you’ll find yourself creating temporary tables with UNNEST and your performance will plummet. This is especially true since materialized views are still WIP.

Arrays are best used for logical units of data that you’d otherwise serialize or put in several columns. They are for avoiding having to create additional tables for non‐relational data not the other way around.

Think of them as complementary DIY solution to PostgreSQL’s geometric types, like Point or Box[1].

From PostgreSQL manual[2]:

> Tip: Arrays are not sets; searching for specific array elements can be a sign of database misdesign. Consider using a separate table with a row for each item that would be an array element. This will be easier to search, and is likely to scale better for a large number of elements.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/datatype-geometric...

[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/arrays.html
Excellent! I always wanted to read a completely unbiased (and totally not cherry-picked and wasn't compiled by a fanatical detractor) resource on Chomsky's collected works.

Clearly, this is it.

Worth noting, Paul Bogdanor contributed to The Anti-Chomsky Reader : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anti-Chomsky_Reader

While I'm educating myself, I really should tune to Rush Limbaugh to learn about contraception, feminism and LGBT rights.
What are you trying to say? Maybe you can grow an orange but I can't, I live in an apartment in New York even if I had access to the ground and room to grow an orange tree the climate is wrong. You might be able to grow your own oranges but can you make your own clothes, build your own furniture, manufacture your own car, fab your own chips, or drill your own oil? We have been codependent since whenever your ancestor stopped being subsistence farmers. This could be centuries ago if you come from an old money family, or weeks ago if you a recent immigrant from the poor rural China or India.

Next it sounds like the growers are actively working on fixing the problem of a plague killing their oranges. Do you think they should be working faster or just that their isn't a problem in the first place? In the end I don't really understand your comment.
It would be fun to have hackathon to design a better 911 system - I'd bet 24 hours worth of work would produce some amazing stuff (probably not super-ultra reliable production ready, but some cool stuff that could save lives)
So apparently the existing legacy technologies make reliable and scalable systems? A 'fad' technology that works is better than old technology that doesn't.
You're not flying to LA tomorrow. They haven't built the plane yet.
If they are a few larger clients of ours (FTSE 100) will shit a brick.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you seem to be expected to know a deal of music theory for this book. Are you considering a similar approach? If you explained music theory from the ground up using Clojure with Overtone, that'd be my dream book. Have you considered leanpub?
How complex is whack-run? A setuid binary should be sure to minimize its attack surface. It's just a quick look but when I see your shit-ton of .py files and then you say there is setuid involved it does not fill me with lots of confidence.
I've never trusted the SMS auth; too easy to play phone routing tricks, and most high security environments don't allow phones or have coverage (of course there's also the same problem for no-phones for a phone-based TOTP; the solution is a physical token).
"Chomsky is one of the greatest intellectuals of our time"

This is undoubtedly true. He is one of the most cited authors of all time.

It is unfortunate that the american media does not give him the attention he deserves. In fact, in Europe Noam Chomsky and his opinions are very highly regarded and his writings are taught in schools. I am Greek (living in the U.S for the last 5 years) and I was first introduced to Noam Chomsky during a writing class in my (public) high school.

I guess the fact that he is an anarchist and very often criticizes the U.S government and foreign policy does not make him popular within the U.S.

Btw, some of us, no matter what country we are from, need to understand that when someone criticizes our country's government and its actions, it does not mean automatically that they are criticizing us. I honestly find it very naive when someone defends their government's policies just because they feel somehow they have to do so.
I'm not sure I understand who this is intended for. (Then again, most apology advice I've read about is like that.) It seems like it's aimed at people who act in bad faith, but then, they're the last people we need to teach how to make a genuine-seeming apology!

Case in point: "Don’t Make the Apology about You ... 'I was trying to…'"

What? I would certainly want to know what led to the wrongdoing so I know whether it's a systematic problem. That doesn't make it "about the apologizer"; it's conveying useful information.

My guess is that the writer has in mind lots of people who are narcissistic and so generalized that lesson to good-faith attempts to help the recipient understand what happened.

The article can be summed up as "throw yourself at the feet of your customer while conveying nothing but easily-faked feelings".
I am a rails developer and recently shifted to using postgres. it's stuff like this that I love about the rails postgres combination. It makes writing code so easy. agreed that it may do 80% of functionality of current gems but with a little tweak it can achieve the same while keeping your code minimal and readable.

another example is the hstore feature in postgres. it makes storage of json type data in a rdbms a breeze.
This is very cool. I hope others copy your idea - very nice way to marry programming with games.
India's media is the only one allowed to openly lie on television. True stories are never shown. And me, who laughed on conspiracy theories like "Illuminati" as childish imagination, I know how foreigners are ruling India even today. To keep control over the population you have to first monitor their activities! This is what they do
This is huge security issue. Is there a bug report? An estimate when it will be fixed?
The NY Post? Really??
It's possible to emit "Please forgive me" regardless of any intent to make things better or prevent the incident from happening again. I don't understand the focus on the choice of words.
"My boss is comfortable saying "this didn't work, that's fine, let's figure out why it didn't work and make something that does.""

The taxpayer is much less forgiving about "failures" and tend to trot out pitchforks and torches at the drop of a hat. They're much more guided by perception than actual facts. So for them, there's very little room for a distinction to be made between utter failure, failure, almost failure, not quite a failure, maybe a failure, no failure...
Mashable's current design is based on Bootstrap. You wouldn't know it to look at it, though - we used bootstrap-sass, ripped out the pieces we didn't need, replaced others as the design called for it, while still getting the benefits of the scaffolding.

When you treat Bootstrap as a foundation rather than the entire presentational layer for an application, it's really quite good. Unfortunately, many people throw Bootstrap into an application and call it done, resulting in a very homogeneous look-and-feel across a tremendous number of websites.
I think that mil-spec or nuclear QC standards are probably overkill for civilian systems such as 911. Granted there should be some high standards in place, but the systems are a) not secret/classified and b) not as high liability. Yes, failure to handle a 911 call is serious problem, but not like a failed nuclear reactor shutdown in terms of cost, number of people affected, and as a last resort, ability to fall back to a paper-and-pen backup system.
Why would you think that criticism of something is the same as being fundamentally against that thing?

I'd say what you're doing here is "emotional thinking". Try being more rational when thinking.

When you love your country, you actually have the duty to point things out that are wrong. That's the only way problems can be corrected. Otherwise it would mean you're ok with your country decaying.

(Just like with your boy/girlfriend or husband - if you love them, you need to openly talk about the problems.)
I am tired of HN (and the rest of the country) taking shots at government employees. They're talented. They work hard. They take pride in their work. They do a damn good job. If you look at any good technology product that's come out of government, it's almost always been a creation of federal employees: CFPB. Data.gov. Healthcare.gov. Some neat things coming out of the OPM. Accumulo.

There are Github repositories:

https://github.com/GSA

https://github.com/GSA-OCSIT

https://github.com/cfpb

https://github.com/opengovplatform

To quote Deputy CIO of CFPB Matthew Burton:

Got two out-of-the-blue emails today asking
"who is behind http://CFPB.gov's great graphic design."
I'm proud to say: civil servants" [1]

On the other hand, feel free to tear apart the contracting system all you want. The system of "who can check all the boxes for the lowest price" is an unmitigated train wreck. It basically mandates a waterfall-designed usability disaster. The sooner we can tear apart that system, the better (and I say that as someone who has spent a majority of my career as a government contractor).

[1]: https://twitter.com/matthewburton/status/359747466339418113
I'm not sure we're talking about the same usage scenario.

If this was a problem there would be an exemption process for large companies, but I'm talking about private usage. I believe big corporations are not all that likely to use privacy-as-a-service VPNs. Or do you mean normal corporate VPN, as in dial-into-the-office VPN? That would obviously not be blockable or even blockworthy.

But as far as the privacy VPNs are concerned: If proxy sites are being blocked, isn't it reasonable to expect the same for VPN providers?
They got a grant from the Sloan Foundation several months ago to fund IPython development. It was originally going to be the 0.14 release but after the grant they updated the release roadmap, so now it's 1.0. It will replace 0.13 in pypi, I believe.
I love those cheap refurbished IBM X servers. I use the tower models as workstations.
You don't need to know very much music theory to read this book. You do need to know some, though. If you don't know any music theory, like what chords and scales and rhythms are, it won't make much sense. That said, the book isn't worth reading.
Interesting, maybe I'll give it a try. Do you feel any kind of impedance mismatch from using emacs w/o the native emacs bindings?
The most important tech company you’ve never heard of.
Funny how that works! A company that can't even get a website right probably has a few things wrong. First it's likely they take their customers for granted and don't care. However, it's likely the guys at the top actually think they have a good website. Companies like that make every decision by committee and as long as the boxes are checked, the 'product' works.
So let me get this straight:

You (and I) truly believe that the telcos have proof positive location on our landlines and cells, and this data is collected whole hog by the govt, but BUT somehow they cant locate a caller having a heart attack on long island.

You know, the govt has the systems it deserves, and I really dont care to hear whining about pencil and paper.

It takes no longer to write down on pencil and paper a 911 call and theres a mandatory handoff anyway.

This has nothing to do with the folks working the phones not being up to par. They are. It has everything to do with big telcos and govt contractors holding taxpayers hostage.

We dont need them. Use the pencil and paper, make a phone call to the next dept. That takes the same amount of time as data entry.

Grow up, be a human being and stop pretending that life and death situations are some variant of farmville.
You could also just replace the incorrect part of the previous command with ^old^new. I use that a lot when I want to doublecheck before taking a permanent action.

eg. Check what you're about to delete

$ ls *.backup
a.backup b.backup c.backup

$ ^ls^rm
rm *.backup

Something else that saves a lot of time is to incremental-search backwards through your command history using ctrl-r instead of arrow keys. eg. cycle through every "grep". Press ctrl-r, type grep, and it jumps to to most recent command that contains "grep". Each time you press ctrl-r it will jump further back in time. If it's something you expect to search for a lot, you can even tag commands with # comments then search for the comment. (There's a fine line there though... if you reuse a command really often you should probably alias or script it)

Command history uses the 'readline' library so all(?) the other editing-related emacs chords will work on it ctrl-a/ctrl-e to jump to the start/end of the line, ctrl-r/ctrl-s to search, alt-f/alt-b to jump words, etc. Oh, and an emacs kill-ring too, that's pretty useful.

Enjoy.

...

...

But there's one more thing.

This is a feature of GNU Readline, not a feature of bash. Other apps that use readline will also accept these chords.

Things like the ruby and python shells, mysql, etc.

You think you can do a lot in those tools now? Learning to leverage everything that readline gives you will take you to a whole new level.

Have fun exploring :)
If you are emacs user, that's not a problem. You just change them to whatever you want. Besides, food pedals is not so crazy ideal. Any time you must do something meta- or control with any software, you end up doing movements that are not so natural.
It's a tabloid, what do you expect?
Meh. You folks should have misspent more of your youth burning shit down. Gasoline is highly flammable, but it doesn't light without a spark. Also, the small amount of gasoline he's got in his carb will only produce so much flame. I'm glad he appears to be running this outside. I probably would have worn safety glasses, but then I only have one eye.
> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs.

Citation needed.

If you actually have evidence, I'll bite, but my anecdotal evidence tends to indicate otherwise. Generally, issues are caused by good people being hamstrung by ridiculous rules, not by bad people.
You may want to adjust your sarcasm detector.
>Taxes are spread out among the population. Financial debt is burdening only one individual.

Well, that's true, but it doesn't change the truth of what I said. The people who never go to college have less money to spend on themselves because they're subsidizing people who will go on to make a lot of money.
Go-lang really killed it on this front.