skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife and I were talking about a property we found in Central America that was pretty amazing. Having been a backpacker when I was younger (in the 90s) I always wanted to set up a small hostel/hotel type thing somewhere beautiful.

I wonder if you could build a business serving the Digital Nomad. Basically offer a place to live + a coworking space. The traveling hacker gets the benefit of having a good place to work, plus the benefit of hanging out with other hackers whom you can chat with, maybe even pick up new work.
Why are there so few male programmers?
Great news, gotta see what is going to happen after this announcement.
Rich-Get-Richer Effect Observed in BitCoin Digital Currency Network
How did a 14 year old get life in prison? Is the judicial system in the UK still calibrated around medieval times?
It's a little long for a TLDR, but:

> The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor. Just when you think you’ve got the right narrative, another one comes bursting out of the footnotes. It’s the informality. No, it’s the taxes. No, it’s the mining companies. No, it’s the regulators.

> And that’s what makes fixing it so difficult. Does Zambia need better schools? Debt relief? Microfinance? Nicer mining companies? Better laws? Stronger enforcement? Yes. All of them. And all at the same time.

> You can’t fix the land issues without tackling the corruption. You can’t fix the corruption without tackling the politics. You can’t fix the politics without addressing the culture. Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?
>unattractive, resource-intensive, usability damaging

Subjective, compared to what, subjective

> simple, efficient, usable flat design is in.

subjective, subjective, subjective.

I don't know where this utterly moronic "flatten ALL THE THINGS" design meme comes from, but I wish it would die in a fire.

Flat UI, at least Microsoft's implementation of it, has a great deal of fail about it. It's hard to tell what's clickable and what's not, things are not organized in a logical or easy to reach manner, and on and on.

Have a look at this if you have about 20 minutes to spare. Someone goes into a great deal of depth on the 8 UX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
I guess this is the core reason

"It’s easy to paint all of the problems in Zambia with this brush, to talk about kleptocrats wringing their privilege for as much income, as many perks, as they can squeeze. But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around.
In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything."
No, it doesn't.

Complex programs and dependencies are handled the way complex projects and dependencies are handled: visiblility, simplification, and just-in-time architectural support. Works at the team level, works at the program level.

Fixed calendar dates are also not an issue. Remember, the goal is to separate delivery from scheduling. There's no magic fix to make you automatically hit dates, but you can generate real numbers on what it takes to meet arbitrary calendar dates if that's your situation. You should know, for instance, that 2 more teams need to be spun up within the next week if your group is going to hit the date.

It's a myth that Agile team techniques don't scale out. This was true several years ago but a lot has changed since then. A better way of describing the situation is that there are multiple models for scaling out Agile teams and estimation, many of which have years of real-world traction. We don't have the same number of data points as we do with, say, how well stand-ups map to the average team, but we have data and we have demonstrable traction on the problem. All of the normal project and program management tools are available to Agile teams and programs.

For a discussion of how simple systems can scale out into complex projects, check out my 15-minute video. (Sorry for the additional plug, but it is relevant here) https://vimeo.com/57146799 Also for a review of the various Agile Program management systems out there, https://vimeo.com/64452664
I know someone who runs a hostel in New Zealand in the southern summer and travels in southern winter. Totally doable on a budget.
Of course they (and other overly secret governments) did. Wikileaks reason for existence is transparency. US Government's secrecy forced the eventual creation of wikileaks or things like it. Same with Snowden. Protesters, leakers, et al don't spontaneously erupt. They are created by bad governments.
Shortly thereafter, the author also writes:

> A week after I leave Lusaka, I meet a Zambian expat in Zimbabwe. She left Lusaka four years ago, and she says every time she returns, there are more cars, more roads, more restaurants, bars, gyms, decent cappuccinos.

> I tell her that in Lusaka I saw construction cranes on the horizon in every direction.

> “It’s all malls,” she says. “Zambians love to go to the goddamn mall.”

> That’s not the only reason for optimism. Inflation is down to seven percent from 20 percent last decade. International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure. The new draft of the constitution limits presidential powers and confronts the MP-hopping problem. Fundamentally, Zambia is a stable country sitting on top of an El Dorado of fertile land and lucrative minerals. In the long run, things will probably get better.
so.... the reason they are poor is that they don't have a lot of money?
Anyone interested in the arts vs sciences debate should read this fantastic book as well as that fantastic article:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intellectual-Impostures-Jean-Bricmon...

I've studied history, art history and computing science at graduate level, and have to say I agree 100% with this engineer's statement: "The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas [...]"

As a trolling aside, I found the computing science degree far easier than the arts ones...
I work for KeepVault Online Backup and we've heard similar feedback from customers regarding Windows built-in backup solution.

Our software provides both local and cloud-based backup. If you only need local backup to an external, you can sign up for a free KeepVault trial account and use the local backup forever. KeepVault Pro also provides versioning, so a file corruption or deletion isn't going to wipe your backups.

KeepVault backups are also fully encrypted end-to-end and incremental.

http://www.keepvault.com
I agree, that would be extraordinarily useful. But well-intentioned security experts usually (a) don't really track their hours on side projects, and (b) have a status-derived incentive to lowball.
http://libgen.org/scimag5/10.1021/jp406274e.pdf http://libgen.org/scimag5/10.1021/jp406273p.pdf
Are crowdsourced maps the future of navigation?
Boy Eats Too Much Yogurt
And even then, large capital projects are routinely wildly off estimates. I think the delta in "how far off we were" just tends to be larger more frequently.
Been there, done that. My recommendation is, find your family. Think about your contribution to the future.
I thought I might have been this site's loudest proponent of Nacl, but maybe not? Here, though, Nacl isn't a useful suggestion; it isn't compatible with PGP. (There is a project that wrapped PGP's UX around Nacl's crypto, but one presumes it's virtually unused, since it can only talk to itself).
South Australia also has third highest electricity costs in developed world and on the way to become the first. [1] As I mentioned, burning money. Serving economy's energy needs assumes serving them at a price that doesn't cause economy to seize up.
SA also has some geographical advantages to wind power, which aren't present elsewhere, and still their wind farms operate at around 1/3 full capacity.

And as far as I can see, it is driven by massive government investment and regulation. Which again makes one doubt the viability of the idea - if it were that good, why would it be impossible to find someone willing to invest in it without forcibly taking money from people and prohibiting them from making choices according to their preference?

[1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/power-pri...
The Samsung Challenge
> free big data for onselling to marketers.

What user data has microsoft ever sold to anyone? Maybe they have.. I just dont recall any specific instance which didn't turn out to be clickbait FUD.
I'd actually like to see the comparison. It seems to me that there is a case for us understanding the long-term evolution of climate.

We have a decent record of atmospheric composition and temperature in ice cores, and, after all, we do know something about the effect of greenhouse gases -- the direct physics is not too complex. It's the feedback loops -- clouds, biology and so on, that are the challenge.

Likewise with economics. But it seems that the details of the dismal science are even more turbulent...
> The fact that we get bogged down in a discussion of whether the ozone is being damaged and overlook whether our lungs are being damaged just blows my mind.

Not to diminish your point, which I completely agree with, but the current discussion about climate change is not related to the ozone layer, but is primarily about greenhouse gasses and associated global warming. The former was down to pervasive use of CFCs, which have now mostly been regulated away; the latter is down to (in particular) carbon emissions.
And I believe the codes on the TWIT network are not limited to a single term like this one.
I do agree with this point of view, dislike having to write h/w emulation code for qemu, and have upvoted you; but two points:

People do want to run Windows. More importantly (to me) they want to extend the useful life of ancient Linux distros (usually for software certification reasons) which no longer run on real hardware but could run indefinitely in a VM. For both of those you do need to emulate real hardware.

Second point is if you take it to the logical conclusion, a simple Unix process is the ideal VM: lightweight, secure, well-defined ABI to the OS. From that point of view, jails/cgroups/LXC/seccomp are likely to be even better than your hypothetical ideal-but-doesn't-work-in-the-real-world hypervisor.

Or to put it another way: If you define the goal as "want to run only a mix of recent Linux and FreeBSD guests which happen to have modern but slightly different kernels from the host", then BHyve is certainly the hypervisor for you (except for all the other hypervisors which are battle-tested and have had years of performance improvements, massive community and loads of documentation). If your requirements are even slightly different from that, then you'd be better off with KVM or LXC.
> "every line of code is a business decision" (slide 18)

That's one of the best quotes I've ever come across. And it's a great counterpoint to the idea that programmers should be isolated from the business/strategy, as opposed to participating in it.

Still, I'm not sure that "ranking" is inherently bad, as long as it's just division into junior/senior/etc developers for salary purposes. I mean, there's always going to be a ranking based on salary, even if that's not made public. Job titles can be considered a form of partial salary transparency, no? And just because you have multiple job levels, doesn't mean that quotas are necessary.
The govt loans are subsidizing them via tuition.

If loans were given out on a ability to repay standard, instead of govt guaranteed, humanities would get fewer loans, therefore, govt loans are subsidizing humanities faculty
And thus "right ascension" is measured in minutes (and hours). Astronomers don't use degrees to measure "longitude" (right ascension) on the celestial sphere.

Face North (at night) and look right. Everything on that side ascends. In astronomy, East-West distances are measured by how long it takes things to rotate past a fixed observational direction.

Every night, a slightly different chunk of sky will also be directly overhead at midnight, due to the difference observed earlier between solar (sun-relative) day length and sidereal (star-relative) day length.
Design snobs used to have the opposite of the opinion that they have now about after-period spacing, and had valid semantic reasons for having that opinion. People whining about how a wider space after a period is absolutely wrong are more fashion snobs than design snobs.
What confuses me is why it is so expensive? The ones I've seen go from 5$ to 10$ a month while for a little more than $3 I could have mutualized hosting from OVH or any other host. Hell, I could probably have it preinstalled with a CMS and it would require even less work. Is the dropbox sync worth that much, or is there some benefit I am not seeing?
@drivebyacct

I have given 8 a shot. You know what I've decided? That Microsoft's ideas on UI design are about as good as their ideas on advertising (i.e. head-scratching at best and migrane inducing at worst)

I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired. Yes, I know this can be disabled. The fact that it's on, and the default, is the problem. (If you're wondering what the problem is, it's that there's no difference from a "swipe" gesture and just moving your mouse from left to right across the pad)

Same with the whole start screen business which has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. Suffice to say, its information density is low, its disruption to whatever you're doing is high.

And then there's this Microsoft account malarky that they shove down your throat at every other turn. I 'm already using an OS which more likely than not has backdoors for the TLAs, made by a company that admits they give new vulnerabilities to said TLAs before fixing them. I am sure as HELL not going to make logging onto my system reliant on some random cloud service!

Whatever tangible benefits 8 has over 7 do not at this point tilt the cost/benefit ratio enough in that direction for me to shell out the roughly ~$1000 it would cost to up(down?)grade my 7 enterprise infrastructure.

*ed

I really wish you'd get a real account that isn't dead. It's impossible to respond to you.
This is a harder problem than it sounds, and something I've given a lot of thought to. I think the underlying issue is that all machine learning was discovered through a combination of applied math and intuitive ideas/models. Without the intuitive model no one would have thought to discover the method, and without the math the intuitive idea would be a pipe dream. Both are fundamentally linked, and it's a bad idea to separate them.

For example, one of the most basic and oldest statistical methods is linear regression. The first thing anyone will tell you when they are teaching it is the basic "idea and model" - finding a line that fits a scatter plot (and then extending that idea). But this doesn't give you a real understanding of linear regression: where does that line come from, and why does a clean, algorithmic solution exist? Why does the standard solution often lead to numerical errors, and why is regularization a valid solution?

These questions require an increasing amount of math, but they are essential to really understanding linear regression. I agree that some textbooks just throw you a wall of math, but many actually do a solid job of explaining what is going on as they do so.

If you don't want to know the details of machine learning methods, which are inherently mathematical, you might as well as just remember the names of libraries that implement the solutions for you.
I'm not sure what the purpose is of this article. Is it a tongue-in-cheek argument? Humorous? Part of a science fiction novel?
OSHA just federalized it. Electrical safety has been regulated at the state and local level since practically the dawn of electricity.

Even the trade organization of electrical manufacturers disagrees with you. Quoting the National Electric Code, "the NEC takes on real significance when it is adopted into law by states and local jurisdictions."

Source: http://www.nema.org/Technical/FieldReps/Pages/National-Elect...
CO2 does not damage the Ozone layer. CO2 is not soot. CO2 does not damage our lungs. Even though it has recently been added to the EPA's list of pollutants (because of the climate change debate), CO2 is not even what people would readily identify as "pollution" - like chemicals that irritate eyes, lungs or sinuses.

The debate is how much - if any - negative impact is being done to our climate by a chemical that is an inevitable byproduct of the combustion of carbon-based fuels (which, outside of nuclear and hydro, offer the cheapest source of energy), and is combatting the risk of negative impact worth the economic impact to our economy.

I am not making a statement about climate change. I am only saying, respectfully, that you deeply misunderstand the debate.
No, but many of these may be used in much the same way as why Wikipedia links to tons of Twitter pages even though it's 'an aggregator of user-submitted content without much oversight' - the users themselves confer the the reliability. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a pg comment used as a source in the Paul Graham article.
It would. But you can always open the article in Incognito / Private Browsing / etc. mode to see it -- it's never failed so far.
So you rage hate the Start screen. Could've spared me the 5 paragraphs. And yeah, there are lots of reasons to pick 8 over 7, not my fault you don't know them.

And if you'd even paid half a bit of attention when evaluating 8 for your enterprisey scenario, you'd know that MSA accounts are a complete non-factor in corp setups. AD accounts and group policies and everything else works just like normal.
(Shrug) Many technical people have learned to be cautious when dealing with complex, incomplete models that don't always yield good predictions.
This is an excellent commentary on the worthlessness of evolutionary psychology to explain social mechanisms or, in fact, anything at all. But I'm still not sure what the piece is trying to say about the software industry. Obviously that women have in fact had a big role in the development of computer technology, but I'm getting the feeling that the author is trying to say something more than this...
Sorry about a'me too' but I'd like to second that suggestion because it is indeed a shocking revelation of the nonsense some people have peddled.
chrome OS is the best modern next generation OS - it forces u to login with a google account and it provides all the benefit because of that (sync of data/setting seemless setup/better prediction using google now etc..)....Windows 8 how dare you ask u to login with a account that can provide you the same sync capabilities and benefits.. we want you remove it so we can bash you for not keeping up with modern cloud capabilities and chaining us to old WinXP way of not providing all these functionalities that a modern OS should provide...
AFAIK there are already two libraries that can deal with OpenPGP messages, it'd be better to improve one of the existing ones than rewrite it yet again from scratch :)

* NetPGP (BSD licensed, recently imported into OpenBSD 5.4): http://www.squish.net/pipermail/odc/2013-March/014482.html

* GPGME (GnuPG Made Easy, it invokes the gpg executable behind the scenes):
http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.en.html#gpgme
http://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gpgme/
Both companies (Apple and Samsung) are in strong position right now and both are equal threat to each other.

In the highly competitive market, the company which keep innovating will sustain. Now the question is out of these companies, which one is better at innovation?
The cure for your confusion might be some immersion therapy.

I suggest a quick glance at `Why so few violent games?', http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/. That should get you started!
The simplest answer is that he got it by beating an 11 year old boy to death with a chair leg. The sentence for murder is life imprisonment or "detention at Her Majesty's pleasure", which is much the same thing. Most murderers do eventually get released on life licence.
I don't know another explanation. https://backlift.com/ appears to be an effort to maximize profit, by having brace.io look like another service.

And the only scenario where this is useful is maybe a website for a client that cares shit about tech and just wants to manage his site on his own, to save his freelancer cents.
Google Streetview Car Involved in Car Chase, Two Hit and Runs
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right."
-- Donald Norman

"""

Engineers get paid for not being wrong.
Preventing Cheating at Hackathons
Difficulty in earning a degree is usually a function of program, and not necessarily institution.
I'm not an expert in economics, so maybe someone with a better understanding can weigh in.

But what I think the writer is trying to say here the economy (value of the total goods produced which is reflected in money circulated) is too small to support the population of zambia.
The brace.io homepage also looks like "drag&dropped" from the backlift folder
What I believe to be the relevant post that prompted these releases: http://www.mail-archive.com/django-developers@googlegroups.c...
Note that this is not a watered-down course! It's the same course as the students at Caltech are taking, and in fact they will have the option not to attend the lectures and watch them online instead. The homework assignments will be the same ones as well (AFAIK).