skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically, we use nitrogen fertilizers derived from oil, pesticides derived from oil, harvesters which run on oil, herbicides derived from oil, irrigation which runs on oil, and the transporting infrastructure to delivery all of that food.

My question was more about the connection to Borlaug. What does Borlaug have to do with fossil fuel usage. The link you gave does not make this connection at all, and neither does the Wikipedia article. How Borlaug could have fed these these people without using fossil fuels and how did he advocate fossil fuels specifically as a technology?

Whenever you substitute another gene "part" into an organism, you lose your net output of energy

Organisms get their energy from the sun through photosynthesis. It has nothing to do with their genes.

The entire point of sexual reproduction is to make it so there is as much diversity in the genome as possible. This makes it so one bacteria or virus can't unlock the genome of an entire species and wipe it all out.

I think this also explains the last piece. We're exposed to a virus getting the code for a specific piece of that gene and wiping out all of that system very rapidly.

Sounds like the case you are making is that there is a higher risk of losing the whole yield at once.

While that may be true, what you are describing is a risk. Considering that GMO plants make considerably more yield, the farmer has to weigh the risks and benefits. This is common to for all businesses. GMO yield would be more expensive than non-GMO yields if the risks were too high. Farmers aren't stupid.
An open source prosthetic hand costing $1000
Doesn't PulseAudio do synced multiroom audio fairly easily?

http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal//whole-home-pulse...
Perhaps Onion should not be randomly capitalized...
Welcome to modern democracy, where the people who win elections are really only knowledgeable about and good at winning elections...
This is an interesting point though I don't think it would tip the scales in the favor of driving. However, another factor is that the total number of actual flights is a subset of all flights, the main filter being weather and mechanical problems. Whereas with driving, people drive regardless of the weather and sometimes, mechanical problems. I wonder how the risk changes further if you delayed your driving as much as airlines delay their flights?
They broke SWIFT ?! WTF!
That's every inter-bank transfer - I mean everything. If they have swift they have everything. I should have thought of it but really this is breathtaking.
This article is very telling of the attitude that the NSA has... references to 1984, identifying the iPhone as "Big Brother" and those who purchased it as "zombies", etc.
Yes I was about to post this! It has shadows and everything!
The great thing about being the government is that even when the law is not on the government's side, all they have to do is investigate and prosecute you to death. They don't need a conviction to screw your life over for some years of a drawn out prosecution.
> Why are we not seeing a proper debate on this issue?

There are two reasons.

First is the coalition, who started on the wrong footing: arguing about technology choice. This made it pretty easy for the ALP to take attention away from the project itself.

Second is a vocal band of people who want super fast internet, dammit. Now that it has been promised, there is a constituency for it. Public debt seems rather abstract and besides, the NBNco promises that it's all going to be profitable somehow (without actually releasing their modelling to the public).

As a properly-run public infrastructure project over a decade or 15 years it could have been the envy of the world. Instead we are going to get something that will be an expensive mess, no matter how you slice it.
You're right. These 3D printed gears are clearly driving each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGAnmRb66s0
I don't believe it is exaggerated. Air travel is about 10X safer per mile. If you are not a high risk driver, that will narrow, but it's still true.

Comparing total casualties is very deceptive, since cars rack up many more passenger miles than airliners. Still, cars kill lots of people and car safety is a high-value goal.

Once we get self-driving cars that are significantly better at avoiding accidents and mitigating severity of accidents, this all will change in very significant ways. It will certainly result in many more people avoiding the TSA.
"Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost."

How about this: the coalitions plan is crap because it provides less service and less future adaptability at almost three times the unit cost.

$44.1b/100mbps estimated FTTH = $0.441b/mbps
$29.5b/25mbps estimated FTTN = $1.18b/mbps

The numbers get even worse for the coalition when you factor in an additional $2B to the NBN plan to move everyone from 100mbps to 1000mbps.

Your analogy of town water vs tank water is not relevant as the plan is not to provide the same service (ie fibre) to all areas. That debate happened 3-4 years ago and has been NBN policy for almost as long. Fibre in dense areas, Wimax in less dense areas and satellite in rural settings. Wider roads exist for more capacity but I guarantee your parents farm has at least one road around it. That is what the change.org petition is talking about.

The problem we're running in to is our physical plant (the copper) is antiquated in standard and age. The coalition has loved talking up how bad the plant is as a negative for the NBN plan (asbestos boxes and viaducts, tree roots, electrical shorts, flooding, etc).

The NBN has planned and has budgeted to replace this plant with newer, modern equipment and techniques.

The coalition plan attempts to bend reality and ignore the dilapidated state of most of the inner city/suburban Telstra equipment. Instead they are going to buy 60,000+ new DSLAMs and just magically integrate them without having to deal with 50 years of bad maintenance.
How I started testing my rails projects
> The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added costs at airports after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination instead

"Inconvenience" is putting it mildly. Even before my recent experiences with airport security[0], I preferred to drive or take the train for short distances (NYC to Boston, Philly, DC, etc.). As one can imagine, that aversion has only increased.

Nate Silver puts this well:

> According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.[1]

Emphasis mine.

[0] Previously submitted to HN, but for the lazy: http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont-fly-...
[1]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/the-hidd...)
phpMyAdmin gets dumped on a lot but it was a big help for me when I was just learning to write my own queries. The way it shows you the query that powers each action you run is a great learning tool.
I tend to agree with Ian that it's confusing to conflate probabilistic programming and libraries that support Bayesian inference. In PyMC variables represent random variables, but these variables can't be used with Python constructs like conditionals and loops. Python is used to construct a DAG, which is then executed.

I think a better definition of probabilistic programming languages are languages where you can replace any variable of type T with Random<T>. The line isn't entirely clear, but library approaches in languages like Python don't fit, since they can't handle control flow. Bugs/JAGS/Stan might qualify, although they are very limited declarative languages. Their motivation is primarily to have a compact modeling syntax, not a real programming language.

There's no need for probabilistic programming languages to be some esoteric DSL. You can convert languages like Python or Matlab into a probablistic programming language with a lightweight compiler transformation: http://www.mit.edu/~wingated/papers/lightweight_pp.pdf. Actually doing inference efficiently, however, remains as challenging as always.
What a bs post. The writer observed some sites using a specific pattern and now somehow "it's the future of the web" Please.
> 25 mbps is fast enough

Of course it's fast enough! You can fill your entire 640 kB of RAM (who needs that much anyway?) in 200ms with that raw speed.
Postgresql 9.3 Released
> if these leaked emails show anything there is a political agenda behind it and data was concealed and cherry picked to support climate change.

They really, really don't. You never see more than a sentence or two out of context in what you would call "the news media", because as you say it is manipulated to provide the impression of a scandal, which sells much better than "climate scientists proven honest".

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." That there's barely anything even out of context that's quot-ably dishonest in 5000 emails is if anything a testament to their integrity, given that the whole premise is that they thought they were "talking freely".
Well I'm biased since it's our product but I think JackDB[1] is both nice and efficient. It runs entirely in your browser so it's naturally cross platform.

[1]: http://www.jackdb.com/
That seems like a great idea, but then new cases would have to be accounted for. For example, what happens when someone plugs two micro usb cables into the one micro usb3 connector? Dealing with that would add complexity and therefore expense and size.
The US Department of Defense isn't sure where Damascus is: statistical proof
After the tube-bombings in London a friend's mom offered to buy him a car so he didn't have to get the tube and risk being blown up.

Ha.

He refused (mostly to spare her the cost I think) while pointing out that would have been a good way to increase the chances of him dying while traveling.
Yes, that's exactly what the article says. In fact, it says the TSA inconveniences are the main reason people chose to drive instead.
I'm a big fan too, not only is it a nice mysql interface it's a really nice example of generally well designed software. Lot's of lovely little touches in the way it remembers the state of various views as you're working with it make it really hassle free.
The issue with this comparison is... How many times has "feeling safe" resulted in saving a life?

Statistics isn't a feeling, and the comparison is correct in that, on average, air travel is significantly safer than car travel. One should note, however, that the "on average" is the key bit, as one might argue that drivers in accidents have some special characteristic at work making them more susceptible than most, but claiming that Schneier or his source is making a false comparison somehow is simply unfair and untrue. Moreover, plenty of fatal auto accidents are not the explicit fault of those that die (drunk driver, someone else texting while driving, semi-trucker not paying attn). So "feeling safe" is worth nothing when you're staring down the grim reaper in the grill of the semi that switched lanes without signalling to pass without seeing you.
how about a demo link for me to take it out on a test drive? :)
Except that, while China is "big and scary", it's not proven to have launched a spy campaign on the same scale.

Sure, they have tried to hack the US on multiple occasions, but that's geopolitics, and very different from selling bugged devices.
I think this is a very misleading poll. Most people don't have the same definition of what back end work is. For isntace I do a lot of ai and machine learning work which I would consider far more back end than someone doing back end work for a web app where their code might directly effect the front end.
http://mywebsql.net/ ia an interesting alternative.
I left my hometown in East Borneo when I was 13. I now live in Cairo, Egypt, which is my 7th country. I started my company in 2003 back in Chicago. I just got married to an Italian woman three months ago.

Bottom line: What's normal is not the same for everybody.
I'm one of the "people that commented" and the thread is here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/17578/96
> tits as well as tit jokes are damn entertaining.

For some only. That's the point.
Yeah I think we all do. In fact not too long after posting a link to our app in this thread I got another one:

Sep 9 12:58:29 [41.66.xxx.xxx] GET /phpMyAdmin/translators.html [1 ms]
Actually Roger Ebert did make a movie in the 80's called "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls". And it's good too.

But anyway, your point still stands aside from the small Ebert error.
Sure you can write incomprehensible context-free grammar, but yes, in my opinion, context free languages tend to be easier to understand or at least understand unambiguously. Natural language (which is obviously very context-dependent if you can even apply this name to a language without formal grammar) is easy to understand but is not a good language for giving instructions to a computer (cue classic "Time flies like bananas").

Interestingly enough, I personally found understanding Lisp, once I got the idea of paradigm, pretty much instantly. I do not think that the reason for us not using Lisp is syntax, but rather a combination of non-traditional paradigm and difference from the mainstream imperative languages. On top of that you do need to keep a lot of context while looking at Lisp program, but this is execution context, not the grammar context.
Just to be clear -- by "unverified source code", you mean a github checkout. You can definitely clone github by HTTPs if you like.

Ansible does in fact use your home directory for writing files by default and the locations are not predictable.

There are also OS packages available.
Cable is the only high-speed option in a lot of places in the USA. Most cable providers offer 20-30mbs where DSL options are stuck in the 3-5mb download and 512k-768k upload range. Those speeds make for very unenjoyable internet experiences.
How Young Entrepreneurs Can Finance Their Dream Business In Financial Crisis
At Cosmic(http://www.cosmic-api.com/), we are working toward making web APIs more consistent and easier to build/consume with higher level framework. We take care of transport work, as well as data structure work. The data structure work(https://github.com/cosmic-api/teleport.py) is similar to Thrift, Protobuf, Avro, etc but with more emphasis on 'information on web' rather than dealing with raw bytes.

Cosmic is trying to achieve similar goal as Docker, as we are trying to build a framework/tools/services which solves APIs X languages matrix(Slide 14 of http://www.slideshare.net/dotCloud/why-docker).

FYI, the project is still in very early design stage, any feedback is very appreciated.
It really bothers me that API isn't capitalized in "Api Documentation" :)
It's not sexist to make an app to encourage men to ogle random women's breasts and submit photos while doing so, to an audience of men and women.

Men are doing it anyway and there's nothing wrong with that either.
Put that way, it may make sense...My problem is that almost everyone is reacting as if the intention of that presentation was to demean or objectify women rather than make light of the fact that men do stare at tits. Still, I'd go for both men and women understanding each other over political correctness. Reason, this will eventually lead to men only events http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=5811.

I wouldn't go for making men uncomfortable around women any more than making women uncomfortable around men. The solution, I believe, lies somewhere in between men appreciating that some things are rude in certain contexts and women appreciating that men may make certain jokes without any ill intent. Also, in my experience, in offices that are balanced, gender wise, such jokes are not uncommon; it's a thing people do.

I just think that such arguments simply trivialise misogyny which actually exists http://www.policymic.com/articles/30922/adria-richards-why-a....
> > IPSec didn't exactly take off
> IPsec (s is in lowercase) is the standard to securing L2 connectivity and it has been ubiquitously used for site-to-site and client-to-site connectivity for ages

The question wasn't whether the standard exists but whether it's widely used. Your claims don't sound plausible to me as I've yet to work on a network (corporate, .edu, .gov) where IPSec is used – everyone focused on protocol level security like SSH or SSL instead.
For some reason I misread the title and thought this was going to be an article criticizing the new product
Our irrationality in the face of minor but "scary" risks (vs. chronic ones) is brilliant for Schneier to point out -- it's really one of the pivots on which the whole surveillance issue rests.

Throwing away our freedom to prevent rare, statistically insignificant events is equally stupid. By doing so we are risking a much greater danger -- the chronic danger of a corrupt and possibly deadly police state.
MySQL workbench is a good alternative. I wish there was one similar to it for postgresql that was also native.

http://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/
:) exactly... thats part of what I was trying to convey as well by saying we are "nomads" -- a wandering family.. but that doesn't mean its all bad. cheers.
Looks like a flop to me. We need less devices hanging off the back of the TV, not more, and anything this does the PS4 should be able to. It will probably cannibalize PS4 sales too with these low-margin devices, as well as cheapen the Sony brand by running low-grade games, which will look even worse blown up on an HDTV.
If your company has 10 teams of 10 people, your most important action is not saving $500 a month. You're (hopefully) earning a proportionally higher amount for your 100 people and you should continue to focus on that. If the software stack helps, don't fiddle with it to save a few bucks.

The challenge for iDoneThis is not to make it cheaper per user, it's to re-invest the highish costs in order to beat the competitor who is charging 50c per user. Make iDoneThis better at managing the ever-growing complexities of syncing information when you have 100/1000/10k staff members and you have no damned idea what they're doing.

Especially because quite a few hackers are thinking "you know, I could make that app and sell it for a few bucks less." Don't race them to the bottom, because Twitter is at the bottom at $0p/m.
The Problem I'm Having With CS Jobs
Actually ansible has quite a few abstractions available, namely you can use the 'group_by' module to dynamically select machines by OS, and 'roles' which allow abstracting away behavior from applying state. The 'when' conditional can also be used for OS variance.

One thing you may want to look at are the playbooks that we use to set up AWX, our UI, which works on both CentOS and Ubuntu and has some very different steps in place.

You can also see some examples in github.com/ansible/ansible-examples

We don't believe in hiding too many OS details from you -- for instance, not only do package names vary between distributions but think about how Apache is managed so very differently between Ubuntu and CentOS -- in fact, we've observed in many cases that trying to pave over those things can make content a lot harder to work on.

Generally people know what infrastructure they are running on and I think it's best when you take advantage of that, though you can easily have certain steps (see the 'when' conditional) that apply to specific OSes.

Another thing Ansible does is make it easy to do conditionals at runtime, such as "if this file is present, then do this", etc.
It appears to have been fixed. It now points to https://github.com/jcopenha/pyflix
> Mac users are much worse than Linux users
.

I guess GNU/Linux users are smarter than everyone else across the world :-)
Flat Design - The Next Step Forward in the Evolution of Web Design
Air Couriers post 9-11: How they still operate
Universe May Contain “Tardis” Regions Bigger On The Inside Than The Outside
Hmm, that's interesting, and not something I hear often at all. What github bugs have you filed? Have you stopped by the mailing list to ask for help?
This is a great idea, but personally I'd have preferred it if the product was a docking station that came with a Vita. And had an option of getting just the docking station if you already have a Vita.

One of the things I really like about my PSP Go is the docking station that allows for easy TV play.
Sure. And there are even simpler ways of accomplishing that.

But first you have to know that you can use an Arduino (pretty obvious). Then you need to know that you need a relay and what kind. And you need tools, connectors, enclosures, etc.

I agreed with some of what he said: getting started in hardware hacking can be expensive and complicated. But this is a side effect of how people get started these days. Jumping into hardware by building small radios (me at age 11) cost a few dollars and some scrounged parts and I slowly amassed tools and equipment over years. Jumping in by starting with microcontroller development immediately requires more money and equipment.
Polar Pageviews: A tool for annual traffic comparison
Given they mostly have business / law / academic backgrounds, I am not sure that anybody has ever put the case for fibre speeds to the Libs in terms other than 'this is what people want, and it is good.' The use cases used in Labor promotions were patronising to the extreme. Don't be surprised that they've concluded it is simply a 'nice thing' that people want but will loathe paying for.

To be honest with you, the things I am planning to do when I get a gigabit line are not exactly in the 'nation-building' category, either. I'm not sure how to fix that PR problem.
> Why do we need to do both steps at the same time? The last mile is incredibly expensive and difficult

Well, it does work out cheaper in the long run, doing FTTN now involves buying the copper from Telstra, then later on pulling it out and replacing it with fibre. This article does a nice job of going into more details on the costs of it: http://theconversation.com/can-australia-afford-the-coalitio...

> as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated

I can't really comment as I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the rollout progress, but this may be worth a read: http://delimiter.com.au/2013/09/05/factcheck-will-nbn-take-a...
My “office” is a small corner of one of the bedrooms and consists of a 5yr old MacbookPro with a broken fan.

I don't get this piece. If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford. Why have it so miserable to make it more of a punishment than a happy environment to work in.
> If you have 20 employees, many, many, MANY things with less certain value than this software cost you more than $100.

It seems like you're arguing that if you have 20 employees, you're probably wasting more than $100/month on other products and services, so spending another $100/month on iDoneThis isn't a big deal.

You might be right in certain cases. Some companies have tighter financial controls and are more thoughtful about managing expenses than others. But as valuable as it might be, iDoneThis is very limited in scope and, perhaps more importantly, is not a "checklist cost" that companies (justified or not) expect to have each month. As such, I think it's very precarious for iDoneThis to depend on the old "companies waste more money on other stuff" non-value proposition.

As I noted in another comment, I think it would be wise for iDoneThis to reconsider its pricing model as $5/user/month seems very likely to create agita as the number of users scales. As an example, consider that a Silver Github plan costs $50/month, and can easily support many companies with a 20 person development team.