skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this article trite. It's merging 3 disparate concepts which have complex explanations, and deciding instead it's to do with risk.

Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large, with people then demanding to see the results of all the money being spent which isn't needed - so enter military surplus and suddenly every small town has an APC and a SWAT team but absolutely no need for one (and usually insufficient training). And once you have those things, every problem starts to look like it needs a SWAT response since you've got to justify having them.

Of course that's just one facet of it, there are others but it's totally disingenuous to pretend its some irrational fear of risk driving any of this.
Quote: "To test out this theory, a team of psychologists ..."

... performed a study that's neither scientific nor falsifiable, that tests a nebulous idea so vague that different people would have a difficult time agreeing on what the idea is, and that will be completely forgotten six months from now.

Even though such studies aren't science, they produce a huge amount of article copy, and that's the point. But worse, a large percentage of psychology's content is simply made up:

Link: http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
The American football season starts on Thursday but most games will be played on Sunday. The next day Congress takes up the issue of bombing Syria...
Can it do Mac and Windows builds?
The deal closed in August 2013. It would have been inaccurate to refer to it as Nokia Solutions and Networks when giving 2012 results.
Quite the opposite - I've always wanted to replicate that part of his site.
This statement seems specious. I'd rather understand the idioms I'm using, otherwise their meaning and effectiveness becomes diluted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEyoJKSPL_I
> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working.

So what?

> You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers.

We already have that; the latter class is called "capitalists". With a BIG, the public commons become an equally-owned, dividend-paying asset, which in effect makes everyone at least a very-small-scale capitalist.

> I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear.

Reducing the necessity of continuous wage labor for those without large personal fortunes increases labor market mobility, opportunities to explore higher-risk, higher-potential return activities, and opportunities for job retraining for better fit to changing markets.

Yes, a cost of that is that some people will opt-out of work without engaging in even potentially socially-useful activities, but this is to an extent self-limiting (the more people do it, no matter the nominal level of the BIG, the less goods and services the BIG will suffice to purchase, so that the more people that opt out, the less attractive opting-out becomes.)

> Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty.

We actually understand poverty quite well, and understand very well that the combination of limited goods and inequality in the distribution of goods cause people to be in poverty. What we don't have is a mechanism that works with human nature to encourage enough production and equal-enough distribution of goods to eliminate poverty, and BIG isn't, itself, intended to be a solution to that. Its mostly a self-regulating partial solution on the distribution side, since, as productivity increases, the sustainable minimum level under the BIG increases as well.
Look at Linus... he's gotten further than most, but there's no end in sight. He pretty much stopped resisting.
I found the relational beauty in being able to "store every unique value just once." It resonated with the programming concept of "write a function so that you don't need to change things in many places." This in turn gave me a lens to viewing how businesses operate independent of what systems you put on top of the data.

Does this mean SQL is pretty? Not really, but it gets the job done. Though I did have to spend a lot of time optimizing SQL to force certain query optimizations.

Does this mean relational should be used everywhere? No, but it has a distinct place. I think beer is beautiful too, but I won't drink it for breakfast with the in-laws.
> 2) Someone else was going to buy them - I wondered about this with Apple's Maps fiasco, they had much better maps than Apple did, although I don't think Nokia would go for a breakup with partial acquisition.

Am I reading the news wrong or is this a partial acquisition? It actually looks like Microsoft just made it easier for Apple to buy the part of Nokia it would want (maps).
How Our Traffic Grew by 118% in 1 month
Very cool idea. We'll definitely think about it.
Thanks for the feedback!
Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large,

This seems like a contradiction. It has nothing to do with risk, yet the people who want it are the "tough on crime" type. Don't you think that those people see NOT being tough on crime as a risk?
Unix Background Queue (ruby extension and gem)
I can do more with the Surface, but it is not beautiful, nor do I enjoy using it - or being seen using it.

You come across as someone that went into the Surface not wanting to like it and you found a bunch of reasons from reasonable to erroneous not to like it. Does it seriously bother you what other people think about the devices you use?

Word doesn’t save your work unless you click on a 3.5” disk icon regularly.

This is an example of one of your contrived reasons. Word auto-saves at a user-definable interval. It also creates AutoRecover files at a regular interval. I've had situations like power outages hard shutdown my computer and AutoRecover restores them up to the second.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/help-protect-you...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686

Some things are saved on SkyDrive, some on the local disk, which isn’t automatically backed up either. So now I am forced to be aware of this leaky abstraction, to manage the remote and local state and at this point I might as well just have a MacBook Air and be done with it.

Just buy a MacBook Air because that's obviously what you want. This is another contrived reason. Backing up the local and remote (Skydrive) data on your Surface RT is pretty darned easy to set it and forget it:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/music-photos-...

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/set-drive-file-...
Looks like it has been fixed now (at least here in the US). http://www.memrise.com/
> Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them?

The put-down is that Asian Indians are "the other kind", which implies second-class.
clicking on forfeit gets you the answer ( which is a shortcut for hitting "ESC" ) but it looks like you can only use Escape to go to the next question.

pretty cool quiz, i definitely don't know hardly any of these...
> What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money.

And...so, what's the problem with this?

> What would be the way to deal with this?

Why would you want to deal with this? That's a feature, not a bug.
The point about the back button was just weird. It's a button, which is for going "back". In literally every app with multiple screens this is a fairly obvious concept, but on Android you have the benefit of not having to allocate screen real estate to it, and having the button conveniently thumb-reachable.
Typo in article heading. "Free as in freedo"
Nope, just a top level makefile and a readme that says to compile you only need to

make all
I know, I had trouble with that as well, but then I read the explanations you get if you click the question mark in the upper right corner. I will try my own explanation here.

Type your answer in the box, if you type 2 or more characters, there will be an auto complete list of matches.

If nothing happens when you choose an answer, then it's wrong.

When you choose the right answer, it will immediately switch to the next question.

If you don't know the answer you can click Forfeit or press Esc. To get rid of the correct answer that pops up when you do so and go to the next question, you have to press Esc (I didn't find a way to go to the next answer just by clicking with the mouse).
I expected that, thanks anyway. Really I was just checking there wasn't some sort of "Rackspace is fundamentally opposed to the concept of spot pricing" belief I had missed somewhere. Cheers.
Moore's Law Given A Potential Boost
One tip I'd give for writing docs is to get Dragon Naturally Speaking and a really good microphone. It's saved me countless hours over the last couple of years (but only because I stopped counting once I reached 500.)
Unfortunately this doesn't work in mobile Safari...
National Library of Medicine Releases Restored Silent Film From 1921
IBM is actually older than the computer, it was founded in 1911. (Unless you count Babbage's machine.)
That high-pitched noise you heard was the point, zinging swiftly over your head. All the pre-9/11 "experts" who told us to bend over and let the goat enthusiasts have their wicked way with us, didn't do so in a nuanced, situationally-aware fashion. They said, "always cooperate with hijackers." The fact that organizations existed the purposes of which were to kill Americans and destroy American resources, was blithely ignored by the "experts". Only through long conditioning did they cow the general public enough that four or five dudes with really short knives could hijack a plane. While the last plane was still in the air, the general public realized what bullshit that had been.

When "experts" talk about "risk", it's never "things are pretty good and getting better". (I.e., it's never the truth.) They always want us to fear more, and as a result pay more. It's not different now.
> I'd find it interesting to consider how we might let people decline their BIG stipend in return for... something.

Why would we do that? We could instead just sell the
"something", which has the same effect, without defeating the point of BIG by complicating the BIG administration.
I'm not sure that "plastic" is as bad as popular opinion thinks it is in the case of something the size of a phone.

If we say "polymer" does it sound any better? I mean there's plastic.. and then there's plastic.
3D in the Browser: WebGL versus CSS 3D Transforms
On the one hand, I love that MS made an Arm OS that embraces the file-system instead of hiding me from it. Android often suffers from making me think about the files (like my downloads) while trying to pretend there is no filesystem... Win8RT accepts the burden of files and goes to work trying to make them pleasant to handle.

But yeah, the save thing, the lack of automatic cloud support... that seems anachronistic. The disconnected, versionless way people still handle their documents is incredibly haphazard and it's staggering that we've allowed it to persist like this so long. You can't really blame MS for this - everybody has a blind spot with office documents, even people who try to compete with MS - It's not like LibreOffice avoids these problems.
Some sort of feedback other than yes|no would be nice. I guessed visual basic for basic, and APL for J. I realize that is a lot of work above and beyond your MVP here, so it probably won't happen. Cool site though, it was fun to play with.
Developing. Organizing. Tracking.[Mozilla Festival]
Imagined of developing an idea but never knew how to start or got lost while in the midst of making it a reality? By empowering participants with tools such as Sublime Text, Github and Jira Atlassian, your ideas will definitely turn into a reality in no time. On top of that, it enables one to solve issues in time and at the same time, shows the correct procedure in order to solve problems using correct procedures.
Thinking about this, this is a casing issue after all. The makefiles include Makefile rather than makefile
My apologies. I misread the code and what it did, because of the use of the word 'sorted' and my belief that branch prediction should not affect this code.

I still don't believe it's due to branch prediction. I believe it's due to cache coherency.

Here's a more extensive example, where I shuffle the last N elements:

import time
from random import shuffle

x = [i for i in range(1000000)]
tick=time.clock()
sum1=0
for i in x:
sum1=sum1+i
toc=time.clock()
print "ref", toc-tick, sum1

for N in (0, 250000, 500000, 750000, 1000000):
y1 = range(0, N)
y2 = range(N, 1000000)
shuffle(y2)
y = y1 + y2
tick=time.clock()
sum1=0
for i in y:
sum1=sum1+i
toc=time.clock()
print "shuffle last %d: %f %d" % (len(x)-N, toc-tick, sum1)

assert x == y, "These should be identical when N==1000000"

print "== Two summations of the same array =="

tick=time.clock()
sum1=0
for i in x:
sum1=sum1+i
toc=time.clock()
print "ref (again)", toc-tick, sum1

tick=time.clock()
sum1=0
for i in y:
sum1=sum1+i
toc=time.clock()
print "final range (again)", toc-tick, sum1

When I run the above, the output is:

ref 0.158759 499999500000
shuffle last 1000000: 0.254425 499999500000
shuffle last 750000: 0.228932 499999500000
shuffle last 500000: 0.252207 499999500000
shuffle last 250000: 0.224307 499999500000
shuffle last 0: 0.255656 499999500000
== Two summations of the same array ==
ref (again) 0.158914 499999500000
final range (again) 0.250253 499999500000

As you can see, the last two tests use arrays x and y where x == y == range(1000000), but their timing numbers are quite different. Branch prediction shouldn't cause that difference. Poor cache behavior might.

Here's an attempt to double-check my view. I use an array.array(), which stores the numbers sequentially both for the sorted and random versions:

import array
import time
from random import shuffle

x = [i for i in range(1000000)]
x = array.array("i", x)
tick=time.clock()
sum1=0
for i in x:
sum1=sum1+i
toc=time.clock()
print "sorted", toc-tick, sum1

x = [i for i in range(1000000)]
shuffle(x)
x = array.array("i", x)
tick=time.clock()
sum1=0
for i in x:
sum1=sum1+i
toc=time.clock()
print "unsorted", toc-tick, sum1

When I run the above, I find that both timings are essentially identical:

sorted 0.159446 499999500000
unsorted 0.161541 499999500000

This gives very strong evidence (unless I made another mistake) that branch prediction does not play a role, while cache prediction should be the actual suspect.
GNU Emacs Manual by rms, 1st ed, 1985 [pdf]
> That's not what the 'semantic web' or 'semantic html' is though

Semantic web != semantic html. Maybe that's the source of the problem here. The article says absolutely nothing about the semantic web.

Semantic html is absolutely about using tags correctly.
I'm curious if the problem here is splashtop--does it work when you go to cafes with spotty wifi? For example, running vim from an ec2 instance might give you better connectivity.
Well, on my system (Ubuntu) at least this is not the case and renaming the files gets past the errors and on to actual build errors:

runtime/cxx.cc:74:41: error: ‘operator new’ takes type ‘size_t’ (‘unsigned int’) as first parameter [-fpermissive]
runtime/cxx.cc:84:43: error: ‘operator new’ takes type ‘size_t’ (‘unsigned int’) as first parameter [-fpermissive]
make[1]: *** [runtime/cxx.o] Error 1
I think they will operate it as long as it runs a decent profit.
if the Brazilian government is so concerned w/ civil liberties, maybe they should focus their attention on addressing rampant police brutality & overreach rather than geek-pandering gimmicks like this.
Ah, thanks! The help says to click again to go to the next one, but that doesn't seem to actually work.

Edit: ahh, it does work, but the first time I did it the red bar completely covered the forfeit link. Subsequent times it's been above and fine.
I'm not so sure they have a copyright claim here.

The camera is shaky, leading me to believe this was filmed by someone in the audience working with Greenpeace, so to the extent that there is copyright in the cinematographic aspects of the video, the copyright would belong to Greenpeace or to the director (who was probably also the camera operator). (Which would depend on the relationship between those two).

That leaves the issue of copyright in what they were recording. The only element I see of that which has a good chance of being copyrighted is the music and the performance of the music. Neither of these seem likely to be Shell.

The ceremony itself could be considered a choreographic work, but I don't think (at least in the US) that it would qualify for copyright under the Feist v. Rural Telephone standard. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an accused infringer who had literally copied the white pages of a phone book. The Court said that it is a Constitutional requirement that there be creativity in a work for it to be copyrightable, and that taking a list of customers and ordering them alphabetically is not creative enough. I'd expect that taking a line of winners and having them stand on a platform while music plays fails in a similar way to be sufficiently creative to support copyright.
Yeah, my winphone doesn't do any of that stuff. That said, I also don't have the kind of access to the filesystem win8rt gives you.

The biggest wart on my WP7 phone is the way the Notes were relegated into the ghetto of MS office apps, meaning all the overhead of MS office got in the way... Notes are meant to be convenient.
Who cares about that when it comes to phones, though?
(not rsync, just a happy customer!) It may be a tiny bit of a chore but you can get sub-accounts set up if it's a potential problem: http://www.rsync.net/resources/faq.html#7a
Is it really slow or only because trafic from HN?
What specific grouse do Sikhs have against the Taj Mahal?
It's Official: Apple Will Announce The Next iPhone On September 10
Apple announces special event for September 10
You could write an app which does this, it would just have a huge permissions list.
For my technical book, I was getting frustrated with the page breaks
interrupting the code sections in weird places.

There's a bit of a hack you can do to create a continuous
single-page PDF if you're generating your book from html/css:

@page {
size: 216mm 17600mm;
}

That tells the PDF printer to make the page 8.5 inches wide and
really really long.

It's dirty, but it works!

Derek Sivers said this about it when I sent him a copy:

"I love that continuous-page PDF format. Never seen that before,
but it's so much handier than artificial pages."

For my upcoming book, I'm releasing both a page-breaks and a
continuous version of the PDF.

http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

The continuous PDF doesn't work well in some PDF readers, so
unfortunately I have to also provide a version with page breaks.

## Full Setup

For the curious, here's the rest of my setup:

I'm using Jekyll so I can just do everything in markdown/html/css. It
uses pygments for the syntax highlighting and I'm using my own
customized syntax coloring styles. Then I use PrinceXML for generating
the pdf.

It makes for a nice workflow...

First I start the jekyll server with the --watch flag so it will
auto-recompile the html:

jekyll serve --watch

Then I use PrinceXML to generate the pdf:

prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf

If I want to have the pdf auto-generated too, I use fswatch (OSX
utility similar to inotifywatch):

fswatch dir_to_watch_for_changes "prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf"

Jekyll is handy since I can have multiple versions of the book, but
still keep things DRY via includes. For example, I have the book
version with page breaks (breaks-yes.html) and a continuous page
version (breaks-no.html).

I tried several other pdf generation utilities, but none came close to
the quality and consistency of PrinceXML.

The pro license for the server version of PrinceXML is pricey - $495 (
http://www.princexml.com/purchase/ ). So, I'm only using the pro
version for development and for the final versions, I'll be using
their SaaS product which is only $15/mo: http://docraptor.com/plans

Anyway, that's the process so far!

## Book Launch Tomorrow

Manage servers? One of the biggest wins for making your systems more awesome is to use a configuration management tool like Puppet, Chef, Salt, or Ansible.

If you want to make sure your systems are fast, scalable, and secure, the first step is having full control and power over them.

Tomorrow, Sept 4th, I'm launching my book "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible" which is designed to save you the days or weeks of research when picking one of these tools.

In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with. You may be surprised at which ones were super easy and which ones were really difficult to work with.

To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...
> Forget society, she's doing a service to ME.

And hence "society". Social costs and benefits (also known as "externalities") are simply costs and benefits to anyone outside of the decision to engage in a excahnge.
Yes. This is an extremely high priority
There have been a number of studies -- middle class children in Western countries now never go more than a couple of meters from their front door on their own.

Growing up in the late 60's in New England, my parents kicked us out of the house in the morning during summers and no one thought twice about us unless we didn't show up for dinner.

Children in American live under house arrest, they are used to having people with guns in their schools. They have no freedom to play, think or do much of anything which isn't scheduled. The whole concept of a "play date" is so twisted and sick as to be beyond comprehension. And all of this is because of some weird belief that children are in more danger today than any time in history. It's not true, the rates of child abuse, kidnapping, and everything else that parents are scared of haven't changed much from when I was a kid.

I would never ever raise a child in the States....
That would be way too easy to game. I.e. set up an Amazon Marketplace account, "sell" yourself and/or accomplices lots of books for "reasonable" prices, with the money minus some vig including Amazon's charges going back to the "buyers", then they buy el-cheapo Kindle copies.
1. I don't want to dabble with templating on a server. It's annoying, and separates two layers that I don't want separated.

2. It needs to work offline, and for me to support that, I would have to double up on work, and maintaining two levels of templating.

3. No framework has made this easy, in fact new frameworks seem hell bent on making it even harder. See http://bone.io

4. Telling us to "do that." is not going to make it happen. It has to be easier, and clearly it is not: Otherwise more developers would be doing it. I want someone to convince me, but I have yet to see a post going in depth on the technical implementation of such a solution (- that adheres to the 3 points mentioned above).

5. Document-oriented sites (blogs, wikis, maybe even forums) should never have been implemented with only JS in mind anyway.