skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting question, both in its own right, and in terms of what Wikipedia should do about it (something I've had an interest in [1] for a while). Looking at the university databases I have access to, I don't really find anything substantive beyond what you've found on Google Scholar. All the stories allege that he suffered a brain injury in 1915 that left him unable to sleep, but the stories themselves are never earlier than the 1930s, and are relatively short newspaper articles (at least, those surviving reports that are digitized and searchable). Is it a real case? A hoax? Something in between, misreporting a real case? Something well documented in an undigitized archive somewhere, waiting to be discovered? No idea.

[1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...
I'm curious, how does he manage that? I would have expected that an executive position involved a lot of time at work, and that it would be difficult to combine that with being an involved homeschooling parent. Or is there some version of homeschooling where the parents aren't spending much more time with their kids than they would if at school?
Last I checked, you can at any time be requested by the US government to do exactly that: to keep logs or give them access.

My point is that they are on the radar, it's a matter of when not if they get an order to start keeping logs or an agency deems it okay to seize their hardware again.
It's an interesting matter of perspective. I've been on the teacher's union side of things for a long time and our main complaint has been how the school board is change adverse and is the greatest impediment to fixing the schools.

For instance, back in the eighties, a local district did implement a performance based system for teachers. High performing teachers were rewarded with salary bonuses, while poor performing teachers did not even get raises to match inflation. Then, after a couple of years, the school fired all of the high performing teachers as a cost cutting measure. The incompetent teachers, whose salaries were much lower, were kept on and promoted to fill the departmental roles previously filled by the competent.

As much as you hate lazy, incompetent teachers, we hate them even more. After they waste a year teaching the students nothing and handing out the As like candy, we're the ones stuck teaching all their material on top of our own curriculum to get the students up to speed. We want these idiots to get fired.

Our problem is that the school board never fires them. They give As to all the rich kids, Cs to all the fat kids, and Bs to everyone else. This makes the parents happy, so the idiots keep their jobs year after year. When the competent teachers then grade the students on the little they've actually learned, they're the first on the chopping block.

This is similar to the aversion to non-certified teachers.
I knew a brilliant teacher who taught French for twenty years. During the summer, she'd do consulting work for the french consulate. You couldn't ask for a better French teacher. Unfortunately, this isn't a story about the quality of her French. Instead, this is a story about lowering qualification standards. One year, the state lowered the certification requirements for foreign language education. Initially, this seemed like a great plan. Until the day came that this incredible French teacher was told that she would now be teaching Spanish. The new, lower licensing requirements qualified her as a Spanish teacher, despite her not having even spoken the language in twenty years. Due to her professional pride and dedication, she spent her own money on a three month summer immersion plan to gain some proficiency, but she still wasn't at the level of competence required by her professional pride and she resigned at the end of the year. The teacher who replaced her was just as (un)qualified to teach Spanish, but didn't have the professional pride and is still teaching. While changing the certification requirements has the potential to bring in some brilliant teachers from industry backgrounds, its mostly used to hire a whole new class of idiot.

Granted, I'm not naive enough to believe that it's this way at every district. I've heard the horror stories of teacher union defending complete monsters. I don't want that to happen any more than you do. However, reading a proposal from the school board is like reading an e-mail from a Nigerian prince: no matter how great the plan seems, you know that it's all part of a larger scheme to screw you over.
>>That means that in many cases, a good-but-legally-drunk driver will be vastly out-performing a terrible-but-sober driver.

Not really. Drunk-driving is illegal due to increased reaction times, not decreased driving ability. You can be drunk and properly follow the traffic laws, but if you run into a situation that requires quick reflexes you're much more likely to not react quickly enough.

Whereas terrible drivers are generally terrible in other ways.
In oldschool firefox, maybe in navigator too, pre-loading was implemented as a tray icon. The tray icon would load at startup, and could be used to launch the browser. It still felt overly heavy.
That is one service, Chronos, which is a distributed cron. Marathon is much more.
So, she lost many hours of work, and the results of that work, and the views and comments attached to that work, and the chance to continue to monetise that work, and all of that loss happened because Google didn't have adequate warnings?

She can re-upload all the content, but she's lost all the comments and people are confused about why she's doing that and and and. I don't know where she is but uploading content can take ages.
I was going to be a smartass and put in unicode, but it worked. At least $∫$ did. So that was a very pleasant surprise.
So basically we can now replace the painful SQS with hosted Redis! Yayy!

RE: Mongo. If you're using EC2 for MongoDB you're most likely doing it wrong. Not sure if there is much written about the Foursquare problem out there, maybe I'll get around to writing about it, one day. Pretty much the only company that I know off doing bullet-proof, scalable and fast Mongo hosting is http://objectrocket.com/. There's a reason Rackspace acquired them. Unless you're able to get placement of your SSD loaded servers in the same datacenters as Amazon, go with them. It's well worth your time to not muck around with Mongo.
I explained my reasoning in more detail in the paragraphs starting with "Vector clocks are good at helping clients with simple merges like the above user object, but it’s important to understand that vector clocks only tell you that a conflict occurred, and not how to resolve it" and "What Cassandra gives up here is the ability to create custom behavior for updates-based-on-existing-values. However, as counters illustrate, vector clocks are often inadequate for this as well. Usually you end up having to store the entire version history, which Cassandra supports by clustering with uuids."

I think what you and aphyr are getting hung up on is this last part.

In any case, I wrote this because I got tired of people who read the Dynamo paper but haven't thought it through reacting to Cassandra with ZOMG YOU'LL SURELY LOSE DATA WITHOUT VECTOR CLOCKS. When in fact, this decision represents one that we made deliberately, for the reasons I've tried to describe. Maybe some not casting aspersions on other valid designs might be in order all around.

Thanks for reading!
In which case the question would be the wrong one to ask. It doesn't really matter which logo people "prefer" - their personal aesthetic taste has nothing to do with an effective logo (well, assuming your logo isn't goatse).

It would be more effective to ask people what descriptors they'd use to describe the company behind the logo, using a fictional company name.

The rest is millions of dollars of marketing.
Nice tutorial. One critique is the use of the "ng" prefix for your app's modules, which I believe is discouraged by the angular core developers since it's supposed to denote core angular functionality.
Ah. They could have worded that a little different then. It did sound as though they picked 5 logos and then surveyed the people. I can see it the other way now as well. I've never known a survey to be run like that. Seems odd to me.
And it has a hilarious website!
2011 Report by McKinsey predicted a 50-60% shortage of "big data" talent in the US by 2018. Later Gartner projected 2/3 talent shortage. But as productivity is increasing, the gap between supply and demand is easily filled. As Forbes Adam Ozimek said, there is no shortage just “a large demand for more workers at current market clearing wages but not a penny more”
Yeah, that's still a weak point in my spelling. I'm generally pretty good and most misspellings are only typos, but that one's always an issue for me. Curious.
Yes, there are a number of voluntary, tax-privileged retirement savings options, some of which may only be provided by employers, but not all employers provide (e.g. 401k/403b).
uh, do you care to give a citation for that 'most africans' claim? Are you talking about people living in Africa, or about African-Americans?
Thats really cool
I created a Docker image that runs Redis 2.6.16 under Supervisor
For a definitive weapon against sleep you could look into modafinil. I haven't tried it because all the shady websites where you can buy it only ship to the US, but apparently it turns off your need for sleep completely with next to no effects of sleep deprivation.

But I wouldn't use it to skip more than a night of sleep. Sounds like a bad idea because you do need to sleep. Sleep is good for you.
Wut?

I went to the Delete G+ account links in my Account Overview page. There are two links - Delete profile and Close account. Both of them clearly state what they do to their YouTube videos and associated profiles. The Delete profile link also only makes the videos private and deletes associated profile stuff.

If this person's videos were deleted even though the instructions say they don't, then it is a bug and then I agree - "Fuck Google Plus".

Otherwise this person has not bothered to read anything and this is pure false accusation and blame.
I found this article - http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/02/the-end-of-... - which mentions some other cases and claims that Paul Kern didn't sleep... but did close his eyes and rest for a couple of hours each day. The whole thing's setting off some skeptical alarms in my head. I think it's pretty telling that all but one of the examples are unverified and from before 1950, when things like EEGs weren't available to verify if someone was sleeping or "just resting their eyes". The only modern case was followed for just four days, which is a long time to go without sleep but certainly not impossible.

It reminds me of credulous studies of people who claim they don't need to eat and drink, surviving off sunlight or air or something mystical. Dig into them a little and you invariably find that they were only monitored for a few days or they were left alone to bathe or pray or whatever else provided some gap where they could go and get food.

EDIT: Did a little more research and I came across a possible explanation that does seem to have some decent scientific studies to back it up (more than any of the non-sleeping examples, at least). "Sleep state misperception" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_state_misperception), where a patient doesn't think they've slept much or at all, even though they actually have.
Last time I checked WWDC slides it only does this when connected to Wi-Fi.
I couldn't help but think of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URupBZbfbJg
But... you will lose data if your conflict resolution strategy is LWW, unless you do all writes to unique objects. Siblings+vclocks are provably equivalent to that strategy; they just allow you to garbage-collect unnecessary parts of the causal history more efficiently. Neither strategy frees you from having to define a commutative, associative, and idempotent merge function to perform a read.
Who would you consider the leading authority?
Based on the algorithm described in the link here: http://www.slideshare.net/kakugawa/distributed-counters-in-c... -- the insert path does not perform any reads, unless the column is already in the memtable (so no disk read). Am I missing something?
Nokia issues Samsung a KitKat death threat on Twitter
It didn't take long for Apple to accept the app of my recent former employer, and AFAIK, they have been accepting updates. So Apple might have gotten better about turnaround times.

I feel that Apple is generally not all that friendly to developers: they make it hard to just start hacking on your device, with lots of bureaucratic hoops, app signings, developer accounts you need; you can't do any development without a Mac; they make little or no effort to ease the transition to their platform for developers new to Apple development -- there's only one programming language that's credible to develop in, and it's one that no one else in the industry uses; documentation is spotty and there don't seem to be a lot of good books out there. They obviously have a lot invested in ObjectiveC, and it goes way back to before they had a platform that stood to attract lots of new developers, so I get that it would be impractical to just drop ObjectiveC as the core language. But they could definitely do more to support standard scripting languages as viable alternatives to ObjC. I gather that they flirted with Python (or was it Ruby?) for a while, but then they dropped it. Google clearly did developers a favor by using Java and Linux as the platform. I'm not that personally fond of Java, but it's way better than some language that's totally bizarre and used by only one company (I'd make only one exception, if that company happened to be Microsoft, because MS has been big enough for long enough to create their own language, and I don't think they'd ever force something like ObjC on you anyway).

I'm reminded of something I do like about Apple development -- I like that it's fully POSIX and BSD compatible, even on the phone. And they integrate and encourage popular open source libraries. But I'm not sure if they did that to cut developers a break, or just to save themselves time by using stuff that was already available.
As a mobile app user, I don't want daily updates from your app as you "iterate" away and try to figure out what to build. I want to download the finished product that works.

I'm not your free beta testing service. If you want to test concepts, do proper market research.
I used the very first version of C# and enjoyed the language. I found it an improvement (and obviously a reaction) to Java, for sure.
Riak/C* noob here. Couldn't I just store data as column cells in Riak?

bucket: 'users'
'jbellis/email', 'jbellis@example.com'
'jbellis/phone', '555-5555'

What would I lose by doing this?
With regard to Facebook (what the article focused on), the right generalization seems to be that virtual social networks do, in fact, largely reflect actual social networks https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/anatomy-of...

The article struck me as paranoid, but I agree with your assessment that the authors' reserving their kids' digital real estate is not contradictory with the authors' concern -- it leaves the choice up to the child.
Some thoughts on this issue. Some of these have been expressed by others like pg already.

1. Workers are not a commodity and not interchangeable. You can't a take a network-layer programmer who got laid-off from Cisco and ask that person to work on big data and reasonably expect success.

2. I suspect a lot of tech workers are not motivated by money as long as it's above a threshold. I know for a fact that I've taken jobs that paid me as much as 25% less because I got to work on "cooler" stuff. This also fits in with the stories of Google's early days when they actually paid less in dollar terms than MS but were able to lure workers away from MS because they had better "perks" and more interesting technology.

2a. If progammers were optimizing for money, most of us would be working for wall Street, and we'd all be contracting in our free time instead of building open source apps. Clearly this isn't happening.

3. Anecdotally, I know for a fact there is huge demand for competent programmers/engineers because I have standing offers from multiple employers. The reason for this is that a good programmer is orders of magnitude more productive than an average programmer so good managers will move heaven and earth to get their hire. On top of this, an average programmer in a good team will have effective negative productivity. So restricting your supply pool even a little bit can leave you with a drastically less productive team.
To speak nothing of whether or not that is actually true, what is the problem with opting for cheaper hardware?
This is one of the most basic principles of capitalism.

And, like many basic economic principles, only works in the artificial environment of a fictional, deliberately simplified economy.

House prices, for example, have a very strong dependency on the cost (and availability) of credit; people will spend as much money as the bank is willing to lend them. Turn on credit, price of houses goes up. Close off credit, price of houses goes down. This is but one example of many; the extraordinarily simple model of a commodity price, "supply and demand", is not inherently wrong, but is so simple that to rely on it alone in the complex economy we have is wrong.
Not this again.

The point of learning math is there's an inflexible scorecard of reality for an incredibly complicated logic puzzle, and the only determiner of adequacy in the subject is persistence. Now if you want to excel you need the knack or genetics or whatever, but mere adequacy only takes a certain amount of sweat.

So it teaches that at least some times there's certain logical rules where one follows from the other or can be combined with another, and if you're persistent you can figure it out. Or just summarize to persistence and logic.

I really don't care if your wife can solve 2x=4 for x, but I would be unhappy to be under her care if she would give up on complicated situations (oh he's not breathing AND no pulse? I'll just give up), or refuses to notice cause and effect relationships.
Not an Android user/developer so I'm completely ignorant on this topic, but is advertising revenue on Android apps not enough to make it worthwhile?
Key lessons I learnt from doing ASO (App Store Optimization) for the first time
FYI available on audible.
Does it support CNAMEing? I really like that I can add a DNS record on some subdomain of my personal domain and have it just work, without even a web server.
Is there any performance difference between the Chrome app and the original JS port? What are the benefits?
Ask HN: I'm on my last dime in a country far way from home
I find myself unemployed and on my last dime in a foreign country (not US) - with no college degree, going back will make it harder to leave again or even find a job there. All I have now is 2 weeks stock of noodles and a computer. No cash, no credit card, no place to sleep next month. Selling everything I own.

Rewind a couple of months ago: I quit my soul-crushing but well paying job confident I'll find a new gig in a matter of days. Job offers poured in and I was on top of the world, then something totally unexpected happened (totally out of my control) and I can't start a new job until that's fully sorted out, which might take a couple of months.

I've been trying to freelance online but have had no success so far. I can't freelance in-land, that's too dangerous and might break employment law. What can I do to make some quick cash online? I'm a generalist web applications developer and I've done desktop applications in the past.
And the original original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751
I quit them when Alex tried to takeover Programming Praxis by force when negotiations didn't seem to be moving fast enough for him.
at best you can run OS X Lion. That's it. Before you even get to that, though, you have to upgrade to Snow Leopard for silly arbitrary reasons.

OS X is currently on Mountain Lion, going to Mavericks real soon now. I would not count on Xcode running on Lion for any real length of time now. After that, you're 100% screwed.

Contrast that to Windows XP, where I can still run the latest iTunes and sync the latest iPhone 5 with. Can't do that in Leopard, either.
Isn't this just subtle confirmation bias? The favorite is basically the old logo with some things pushed around. Show someone 30 logos , they will subconsciously like the one that triggers a familiar pattern.
You need 500 karma to get a downvote button.

"Why don't I see down arrows?"

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Put a little tag on the zipper of your laptop bag that says "Don't forget the power cord". Somewhere you can't avoid seeing it.

...or superglue/tape/tie the adapter to your laptop.
> Well except you have to model the position of the sun for every hour and day of the year

That sounds exactly like some things xkcd has done in the "what if?" series. He's done all sorts of variations on similar calculations.

And while xkcd is smart, he's not superhumanly so (his fame is due to the unique combination of creative thinking, humour, geekery and smarts).

In other words, this is possible and a good engineer should be able to calculate this. Especially when you know that any concave reflective surface is going to focus the light somewhere. In addition you know that due to the movements of the sun during the day and the year, this focal point will in 3D to different positions. So yes, odds are that it's going to hit some spot, somewhere, where it's going to be able to do damage, at some point during the year. Then you get to make a simple risk calculation about expected strength of sunlight that time of the year.

And then you will remember to realize that over the course of the lifetime of this building, climate always has a non-zero probability of powerful outliers[0], and the conclusion is:

Simply don't build gigantic concave mirrors in residential areas.

[0] I'm not 100% sure if this is the case for strength of sunlight, since it's mainly dependent on what angle the sunlight arrives, which is not really up to chance. Still, even in the winter when the sun is quite low, as long as the sky is clear, I can easily light an incense stick with an A4-size fresnel lens. And I guess a whole building-side has a "slightly" bigger margin of how narrow the point of focus needs to be.
I didn't say journalists weren't allowed to write anything that has ever been written before. I do mean though that, this article is not "breaking news", and John Taylor Gatto has substantially more information about this subject than what was covered in the article. It's also too bad that the journalist did not cite Gatto.
Video from Casual Connect 2013: ways to get into real-money gaming