skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recall a comparison being made about how very tenuous the atmosphere really is on Mars. The comparison was something like this:

Consider how hostile the peak of Everest is to life. It has been climbed without oxygen masks only a handful of times. Then consider that to achieve an air pressure on Earth equivalent to the Martian surface, you would need to stand on a mountain around FIVE TIMES as high.

"Living" on Mars will be akin to be parking the International Space Station in a frigid, red desert and cowering inside for 99% of the time. Not really living in my book.
I guess everyone is slow after a two hour lunch having three or six cervezas for an extra hour or two of the afternoon?

I don't know, that's a good question.
Of course, in a world where there was no proprietary software, the GPL's restrictions would not be very restrictive. That is kind of the point: to create such a world, or at least to create such an ecosystem.
As you pointed out Cali is 10%. NYC, Detroit, Phoenix and Chicago all have city ordinances.

You missed that your State is on the list and you didn't know it. I didn't know I needed to cite Every ordinance for every City... I'm sorry, I'll do better next time.
Agreed, this looks like a third technology named Err (perhaps a Bayesian-focused offshoot of 'R'?) is involved somehow.
Yeah, you know, I still don't see it anywhere. The citation you included doesn't say it anywhere - only for hepatitis B, which is much more prevalent. SF and Alameda County public health departments don't ask for vaccination records for employees, nor does LA's.

Nice try.
As requested, providing an update to this post which hit the front page of HN last month!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6289664
PowerRanger.js
Very interesting, I guess it's just a function of not knowing much about that part of the world but I'd never heard of this problem before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

Reading that article it's a wonder they didn't come up with a mode-switching character, similar to what the article says about ISO/IEC 2022 or (cringe) Unicode bi-di chars.

Unicode is one of those things that naively sounds great and everyone talks about as solving every problem, but it ends up having lots of warts...
I have friends that swear by the calendar, but it doesn't work for me at all. I tend to think in terms of dependencies - my plans and goals are basically one big DAG. What's nice though is that you only have to focus on the nodes that don't have edges pointing to them. I even use software for it; my life is basically a graph.
The truth on HTTP GET vs HTTP POST
Programming will always be a matter of modeling your own thought process. That's what domain knowledge is: a model of the problem domain so precise that a machine can follow it.

The important part is how easy that model is to communicate to the other programmers on your team, because that's what source code is. And that's going to depend upon their backgrounds. Hire a bunch of hackers that are all familiar with idiomatic Python, and Python is a great tool for communicating. Hire folks who like things spelled out in more detail, and Java is a great tool for communicating. Hire people who all think at the level of the machine and C is a great tool for communicating.

I do think that one of the major benefits of choosing a language is that you pick the people who will be willing to work with you. If you pick Haskell you will end up with a lot of folks with mathematical backgrounds and an interest in programming languages for programming languages' sake, which may or may not be a good thing depending upon problem domain. If you pick Python you will end up with a lot of folks that have command of large toolbox of scripting functions, although that toolbox may not perform great when adapted outside its original domain. If you pick Java you will end up with a lot of folks that don't want to think too hard about their language.

Of possible interest: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html
I heard this for months and only at home in North East England. I ruled out the nearby wind turbines as I heard it when they weren't on.

Never did get to the bottom of it as it disappeared as suddenly as it came.
I think you forgot to verify that an octet doesn't have leading zeros (unless its value actually is zero).
I did, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out !
Engage HN: Anyone else interested in analyzing Fitbit/M7/other tracker data?
== MY DATA ==

Google spreadsheet with my data is at
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgRNvp9NAd5TdE1PTWFTMGN2MkVpeG9LWUtJTk1UNUE#gid=0

== ABOUT ==

My name is Mark (aka Skram) and I'm a software engineer dedicated to the health and wellness sectors. Earlier this year, @Geek_Nurse and I founded Social Health Insights to do impactful things in the healthcare IT space. We do custom application development, data analysis visualization, and strategy consulting.

Simply put, I thought it would be interesting to compare my Fitbit data with the data my iPhone's 57 coprocessor is collecting on me (the Argus app reports this data). Please feel free to donate your data to this mission and add ideas, comments, and questions to this spreadsheet. A more sophisticated data gathering app may be devised if there is interest.

Let me know if you're interested by commenting here, adding to the spreadsheet, or finding me on social media.

Thanks!
Clickable link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgRNvp9NAd5TdE1...
Goldscott,
I would like to compare notes with you. Would you send me an email?
Regards,
Jim
Could you share with us what you use? I often feel the same way. Thanks.
This is one of the greatest pieces I've ever read.

The anecdote where Hamming went to Bode's office to talk about Turkey was like a lightning ! Is it possible to see so many great names in one paragraph !

I've always seen some analogies in things with half-life and the charge and discharge of capacitors.

I'll give an example: I've always thought about learning as a capacitor charging through a resistance, and thought about the RC constant. In my mind, it takes relatively a short period of time to get to 63.2%, but it takes a very long time to get from 63.2% (it will never reach that, since it's an exponential).

What this tells me about learning ? Pick a field and then decide how much do you want to master it. Then know that it'll take you longer to get from 63.2% to 100% (which you will never achieve). An example would be the fact that English is my fifth language, which I only started speaking in 2009. Do I want to be an English major and write in a Kipling way, or do I want to have a command good enough to get my message to you (and possibly learn other languages) ?

It depends, but I find it a fascinating subject.

The other funny thing is that I used a mix of cramming and spaced repetition to study: I used to skip college for a year, and then get a month and go hard-core. Five courses. I'd draw a pentagon with the five courses and study two courses a day. 1,2 - 3,4 - 5,1 - 2,3 - 4,5 - 1,2 ...

You'll notice that I go back to each module each other day. The results I got from that are just astounding, as I was capable to memorize entire pages, chapters and I would see them. I would know exactly where I've written my notes on which pages. I aced the final exam of physics and had the best grade with questions that were never asked before (it was theory, and no 'values' or 'calculations' were there). I was writing things I've never written before, but I knew my maths checked out because I just knew. These weren't exercises or something.. I've been accused of cheating many times. A part of me found it insulting, the other part found it flattering as you only accuse someone of cheating if what he did was an accomplishment.
I just saw Indie Game on Netflix last night. Highly recommend it.
Cofounder of FeatureKicker here...

>> "I checked the website, looks promising so congratulations on that. I do have a comment, your entire website is still linking to your Heroku subdomain."

I hear you. We were being as cheap as possible and didn't want to pay for SSL certificates, etc. while building early version of the product. But we're hearing this more and more, so perhaps it's time to move on :)

>> "If I'm not mistaken, this pretty much feels like A/B testing with the implementation being a survey."

It's interesting and refreshing to see someone else boil down our product. Thank you!

So I agree that it "feels" like A/B testing because you're adding a new element (and potentially removing it based on our rules engine). But it's unlike A/B testing because our tool is not designed to split your traffic across page variations.

Here's what I would add to your distillation: it's being able to ask the right user, the right question, at the right time. And this is where our product is like a "hyper targeted survey".

>> "So have you tested users' sentiments about trying to use a feature only to realize it isn't implemented and then being promoted to answer a few questions? I'd speak for myself, I'd rather not see a button to for example Authenticate with my Twitter account if it doesn't work, than to see one of which when I try to use it, I get asked a few questions. I'd feel that's a bummer."

Absolutely. This was our primary risk. After user testing, we're finding that this concern is more of a theoretical anxiety than actual feeling in practice.

>> "To that point, why would I use FeatureKicker instead of a service like Qualaroo, which works fairly well."

I think the tools and use cases are different.

With Qualaroo, you get a pop-in question based on a timeout, and those questions are typically related to overall customer satisfaction or net promoter score. But we believe that using Qualaroo to ask a specific question about a specific feature on a page will not work as well as FeatureKicker. Why? Because the question may be irrelevant to whatever the user is doing at that time. This gets even trickier when you want to ask a question about an unbuilt feature. Then you have to worry about showing the experimental feature only sometimes and coordinating your Qualaroo question to pop-in when you're selectively displaying the experimental feature.

In contrast, FeatureKicker allows you to ask the right user, the right question, at the right time. Let me unpack that. It's the right user because it's the person using a particular (built or unbuilt) feature. It's the right question because you're going to ask something relevant, specific about that feature. And it's the right time, because you're capturing the user at the point of interaction, which is the peak of their curiosity. We believe this explains why we're seeing up to 64% response rates to our clients' questions.
by that token living in earth orbit is not much different. The only question I have is, other than proving we can do it; living on Mars; what are our goals for being there? Do we truly expect people to establish a autonomous existence?
Can Ruin Your Career/Business in 5 Seconds, and it is Not Taught in Schools
For those who are keen to travel to Mars: may I suggest a stint in the Peace Corps first, or on a nuclear submarine, or a tour in Antarctica. If that's not ambitious enough, please try attempting to terraform a desert, or establishing a colony under the ocean or on top of K2, or constructing a city that's mostly buried underground. All of these are cakewalks compared to Mars, and may give you a taste for what the best of times will be like there after the excitement has worn off after the first month or so.

Personally, I think Mars is a destination for robots and tourists, not permanent colonies, as it's basically a hostile shithole. Of all the hostile shitholes in the solar system, there are others I'd rather visit, like Europa or Io. But to each their own.
>>430 square-foot apartment with a wife and a baby while making six figures

Just because you chose a horrible situation doesn't mean that should be the mean. Many people live in a dirt-floored hut with no electricity or running water and that doesn't indicate that we should find that to be acceptable rather than trying to raise the global standard. That sort of thinking led to the ridiculousness that is SF/NYC real-estate.

There are other parts of the country where you could be living in a house you've purchased and still make "six figures."
That is kinda an English problem. If we need those qualifiers, the language could use some work. The whole purpose of language is to abstract complex thoughts into communicable ideas, and if we keep getting hung up on the fact that everyone using "free" slightly differently, the language has sorta failed at its job.

I say this as someone who know English and a little bit of French.
What happens if you don't train them and they stay?
I agree. I also think that education level might have something to do with it. As a farmer or factory worker, you’ll likely work hard, but your contribution probably won’t be reflected as much in GDP as an engineer’s work.
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch & What Is Telemetric Data
1) A mismatch between the "2 bedroom" metric
and the actual mix of occupied dwelling spaces.

2) Marginal demand - current supply and demand has
more effect on currently available properties than
on previously existing leases. If rent control is
in effect, long-time rentals may cost much less than
the current market rates.
$20/hour on ISP. in latin america. this is stupidly cheap, sportsbook companies pay more but will try to screw with you. i dont know how you guys earn more. maybe im on the wrong stupid country
Really like the site, and love the templates! I definitely went in with the pre-conceived notion that this was going to be another bootswatch clone, but I really like it!
might as well use webhdfs these days
more likely it's the opposite, the reason for the unemployment rates and poor GDP is because of this attitude to work. Its like trying find a ton of explanations for something when the big pink elephant in the room is being ignored. Ever since the British defeated their "invincible" Armada Spain has tried to compete with the rest of Europe and struggled, culminating with the current financial crisis. The time zone nonsense has nothing to do with it.
Also featured on http://cssdeck.com/labs/te0fhq9j
Fair enough.

If we ignore the numbers and just look at the situation a little more generally then, Spain has gone through a massive construction boom that was typified by speculative overbuilding, which is part of the current problem now that too much has been built and the real estate prices have collapsed.

Building far too much is not often associated with lazyness on the part of the workforce.
In fact, the Microsoft IPO was so long ago that it didn't even start out at a billion. The IPO valuation was $519 million.

But what really established the options mentality is that Microsoft grew another 1000-fold to the peak of the dot-com bubble. Someone who joined Microsoft before the 1986 IPO got rich. But so did someone who joined after the IPO. In fact, even someone who joined in 1995 would still get rich. That's why there were tens of thousands of Microsoft millionaires.

The other key difference is that Microsoft was mostly-bootstrapped. They did take investment, but not enough of it to significantly dilute the founders and employees. At the time of the IPO, Bill Gates owned 45% of Microsoft, Paul Allen owned 25%, and Steve Ballmer owned 7.5%.

It's very different today. You get tiny slices of equity, often junior to the VC investment. The company is more likely to be bought out for cash than to IPO. And when you're bought out by a larger company, your options are either cashed out or converted into options on the larger company. Those options are highly unlikely to grow another 1000-fold.
GovindKabra: Thanks for your feedback. Recently my co-founder asked me to build a google map for a feature showing all thumbs up it received displayed by location. Rather than building this feature, I kicked it like this: http://goo.gl/jvutby

We also have javaScript API's which can be used to show an overlay.

Here is an example of it being used after a customer does a search: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB-Cks_tO7g

"It asks customers, do you like the search results? and can we improve our search feature?"

I have one beta customer showing overlay after 90 seconds have passed on the "buy-now" page and another beta customer showing overlay when anything is clicked besides the "buy" button.

I hope these examples show how beta customers are using featureKicker to solicitate feedback
Google uses Java because they were able to pick up a lot of really skilled Java developers during the 2001-2004 recession, and those devs built many of the products that were introduced in 2004-2007. Once a product's been built and adopted by the marketplace it's very difficult to change the implementation language.

Most of the devs who were hired at Google from 1999 - 2002 still prefer C++, and products built in that era (Search and much of the infrastructure) are still in C++. In general rewrites from C++ -> Java have not gone well; I know at least one such frontend that was rewritten back in C++ a year later.
Awesome and timely feedback. Thanks, Scott.
Unfortunately, it's a student design concept, not an actual product. (This means there are likely to be major functional flaws in the design, as feasibility is generally not a consideration in these design competitions.)
What could they actually do, other than frown? Ban people who shop there several times a day? Seems like a shitty business move.

If I understand correctly, Trader Joes is using a rather flimsy trademark claim against Pirate Joes, but that claim could be made even more flimsy with better branding.
We improved our Go support on Codeship (https://codeship.io, I am one of the founders) over the last couple of days. Give it a try and if you have questions let me know.
I would recommend you to go through it.
Mountains actually do move, you don't notice because your lifetime is too short.
Desegregation and crime were major reasons, sure, but housing prices and taxes didn't help the situation. And today, even though there is a big trend of young people moving back into cities, questions remain about whether they'll stay while taxes ratchet up to support underfunded pensions, etc.

Also, rent controls depress the quality of housing stock.
So NYC: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/living/cd-hepa-vaccine.shtm...

Phoenix (county, because city had nothing): http://www.maricopa.gov/publichealth/services/immunizations/...

Detroit: http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/Departmentof...

Chicago (county, cause city had nothing): http://www.cookcountypublichealth.org/faq

Yeah, I kind of can't find anything relating to a required hepatitis A vaccination for any of those cities. You'd think searching something like "x city food handler vaccine" would show you something other than post-exposure news stories if it was really required. I actually had to dig around for the public health department sites.

And nope I didn't miss my state. I can't be held accountable for like the one county in CA where my certification isn't accepted, but the rest of our lovely state really doesn't care that much for food workers specifically when it comes to that particular vaccination.
Mocking is always a problem if the code wasn't written with testing in mind, regardless of the language.

Dynamic languages, make such cases a bit less painful, because you can go in and override the code.

Static languages with bytecode generation also allow for some workarounds, with help of frameworks that rewrite bytecode.

With generated native code, things get really ungly when trying to rewrite the generated machine code.

So in the end, things are way much simpler if the code allows for testing.
The bug seems to be in my learning efficiency and time management. To learn some material for the long term, I would need about a year or two between having the lecture and the exam. Plus I'd need about six to ten times the amount of time to study. Time I just didn't have to spare.

The big misunderstanding is that an education is not about the amount or ratio of details retained in memory, but rather the mental infrastructure that was built by learning it, even for a short period of time.

I don't even agree that there is such a "disparity between academic achievement and actual competence". Anyone who demands more long term strategies has to demand a big reduction in the amount of information studied or increase the duration of the educational programs.
(T-20 Min To Webcast End) SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 Makes Its First Launch From Vandenberg, AFB

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4C9bydkX8
Google's styleguide makes it clear that the reason they don't use exceptions is because all code that calls a function that may throw an exception needs to be exception-safe, and Google has a large body of code that was written before exceptions were reliably supported by many compilers and so isn't exception-safe. It's a historical accident, in other words. The styleguide is also clear that if they were designing the it in the present without having to deal with a large body of legacy code, they might make a very different choice.
> Do we truly expect people to establish a autonomous existence?

Yes.
What's Overcast? He talks about it like I know what it is. I even follow him on Twitter, I must have missed a tweet. Is it a podcast app? Is it out?
All of this can be done today in the Sahara, or underwater, or on the top of K2, but nobody has done them there. Why should Mars be any different?

Yes, one can do these things, but will the economics work out such that it's actually feasible? For example, solar power on Mars is pitiful, and there are no fossil fuels. Where does the power for industrial production come from? Nuclear reactors? How expensive is it to bootstrap a reactor on another planet? Where does the coolant come from without a nearby river?
It's a helpful article indeed.
Estonia: President Explains Their Tech Boom And Why US Is Falling Behind
Your excitement and story are really compelling! It's wonderful seeing someone adopt a new passion. There are so many benevolent people willing to root for you if you show them who to root for. I wish you luck on your journey! You're off to an amazing start.
great article helps me lot.
Hacker rant: Augmented reality, How to build a decentralized opensource Facebook
All the servers are agreeing with each other. You could just as well wait for any other reliable servers to come to a consensus amongst themselves and it would work just as well.

It is true that today we control the majority of validators that other important servers trust. We're working now on increasing the number of validators because that will improve the reliability and robustness of the network. We absolutely do not want people to have to trust us, or even think they have to trust us, so this is a real priority for us. Open sourcing the server was, obviously, a step in this direction.
> Plants don't take very kindly to baking in the sun for 116 days and then having a 116 day absence of light.

Some of them don't mind that much, actually. There have even been experiments growing plants with 2 weeks of light followed by 2 weeks of darkness, as on the moon. It can work if the 2 weeks of darkness are also at lowered temperature, which is easy to achieve in the absence of sunlight.

The exotic species of plant used in the experiment? The pea.