skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Energy consumption does not equal warming impact.

Jet aircraft produce a number of non-CO2 emissions with high warming potential, and deposit them directly into the high atmosphere where they do the most harm.

The IPCC estimates that the total impact on the climate of jet aviation is 2-4 times greater than the CO2 emissions alone.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=2...
So some dude liked "Gravity"? Good news.
Thanks for the answer, PG! So, would something like the text below be understandable and enough for the answer?

"An API that predicts the buying power of a person based on the address where he/she lives, helping companies to better target products according to the financial situation of their users."
It works for Sweden because the population does the work for them.

They have like 10 different bins for garbage http://blog.liu.se/rhiannonbristowstagg/category/life-in-swe...

So the power plant hardly needs to do any sorting - all the combustibles are already separated (which means much less ash). Of course no one counts the work of the population when factoring costs.
This is an awesome script. I just used it to upload 3600 photos/videos. I might suggest utilizing the async options to speed up the upload process.

Also I noticed one issue regarding photos taken by non Apple camera apps - opening an issue on github now.
Thats actually not bad as a list of traditional ad hominem attacks.

If you really want to troll em, try something like "history is nothing but billions of years of climate change, so paleoconservatives who want to preserve the 1500s eternally are anti-scientific".

Another hilarious one is going into geographic politics. Everyone living along the coasts has roughly the same weather so they freak out at the idea of temp going up or down. Non-coasties (and their ecologies) thrive in areas with dramatically varying temps, but coasties always excrete vast clouds of smug over non-coasties so anything good thats not coastal cannot exist. For example, worst case delta T scenarios are unthinkable for coasties who think +/- one degree counts as "weather" but for me, the worst case is basically like moving about 40 miles south. This is a fun one that gets them all wound up.

There's also a hilarious personal responsibility game. People who build stuff in stupid places are about to have their chips cashed in, displaying their epic fail. And the problem with that is what exactly? Right up there with those people who get flooded out by rivers every other year and get .gov to pay to rebuild them every time, oh how my heart aches for them LOL. Hey did you just hear? The coasts are going to flood in a century. I suggest... moving? You've only got a century best start getting moving or start those .gov financial claims...

Now thats the way to really get them going...
I'm the author of a popular open-source project for my programming-language-of-choice. Before I launched it ~3 years ago, I reached out to a well-known OSS guy in the community. You would probably know his name.

I wrote to him asking if he had any feedback on my project, since I'm about to release it, and because he had a similar project that didn't get much traction. He didn't reply...fair enough, I'm sure he's a very busy guy.

Fast forward a few months, I launch the project and it blows up on HN for a few days, and on twitter for a few weeks. The majority of people love it! But sifting through the feedback online, I'm shocked and disappointed to see is the very person I reached out to trashing my project publicly in comment sections and on his twitter feed. No constructive feedback, only how the project itself was a horrible idea, and the code was disgusting. I was dumbfounded...before, I wasn't worth 2 minutes to reply to in an email, but now I am worth destructive criticism on social media by the same person?

I waited a few months and sent another email asking for advice on maintaining the project. No response still. Yet every now and then, to this day, I still see backhanded comments by him about my project whenever someone mentions it to him on twitter.

Some people are toxic, petty, and childish. I don't really have a lesson from this, but that's my little story.
Wow. These were made in two days? Incredible!
How haughty to assume that the onus is on us to "save" the planet. How absurd to also assume that the only way we could accomplish this is by some quota of human beings.
I'm not sure how you think "counting" works...

As described, the Ethiopian Method would take far more stones and far more time. The larger the numbers you are working with, the larger the discrepancy.
What about a Don't-Globally-Index-This-Image EXIF tag?
"Not all of these defensive arrangements are fully mutual, either in practice (the US has troops stationed to defend Germany but not vice-versa)"

For NATO, that's purely the way it gets executed. The only thing special about the USA in http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm is that it is the place where the treaty is kept. Otherwise, the treaty is symmetrical. There are/were NATO (not only US, but also from other countries; for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Air_Base_Geilenkirchen#Ope... shows there still are 12 other NATO forces in Germany) troops in Germany and not in the USA because that was the most likely front of World War 3.

The USA made tremendous efforts to help Europe in world war 2 and the Cold War, but it could have slowly decreased its effort once the western economies recovered, if it wanted to.

According to Wikipedia, the situation with Japan, technically, also is mutual, but (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_an...):

"It was understood, however, that Japan could not come to the defense of the United States because it was constitutionally forbidden to send armed forces overseas."

Given that this was forced on Japan by the USA and given the huge geopolitical influence he USA has, I would think they could have changed it, too.

The USA may have laws or morals that make it feel obliged to do more, but that are things it does to itself. I remain that the situation is (utterly simplifying and ignoring lots of facets):

- the USA polices the world, but cannot really afford to do so.

- large parts of the rest of the world keep financing the USA by ignoring that 'cannot afford' part. That keeps the dollar as a fairly strong currency.

And yes, the cost of surgical strikes can be way higher than that of a "win this war, whatever it takes" approach.
Infrequent (I don't remeber that it happened to me during the hundred or thousand deploy I made with capistrano) and mostly harmless.

If the deploy fail for any reason, it's aborted, you just have to run it again.
> I'm pretty sure that flying is the least efficient way to travel

You are wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

> Or to cut down on burning jet fuel.

The amount is utterly minuscule compared to how much energy is used for everything else. It's gets lots of press but is a mostly worthless reduction.
How to fill the gap between blog posts with valuable real-time content
I voted this up because I agree with Zed's criticisms of HTML/XML/CSS/Javascript etc.

But he loses me when he starts critiquing object-oriented programming.

This is how I "arrive" at object-oriented programming:

* I begin writing an application to implement an idea.

* My hurriedly written code starts out as a whole lot of functions acting on various bits of data.

* At some point I realise that certain functions are really methods on one or more classes of object.

* I refactor my code into class definitions.

* My code is now better organised and more readable.

I don't have to put _all_ my code into classes - there are often a few utility functions that end up just floating around by themselves, not belonging to any particular class. (So I prefer languages that "allow" me to do object-oriented programming over languages that _require_ me to do it.)

But, for me, object-oriented programming is a natural way of organising code. Despite what Zed says, "things" do exist in the real world, and in our applications, and "types of things" (i.e. classes) exist in our heads as ways to think about those things.

If I have to write code in some programming language that doesn't "do" objects, I get frustrated and annoyed (because I will eventually want to organise my code as classes and methods, but I won't be able to).
"Facebook gets its revenue from ads"

It is interesting to think about today's big tech companies and how they make a majority of their money.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter = advertising.
Microsoft = software.
Apple = hardware.

Of the three companies who make most of their money from advertising, Twitter seems to be the most ethical, although going public might change that (Facebook is creating profiles of non-Facebook users and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that Google is creating profiles of people who email Gmail users but don't have Google accounts).
I always found myself looking for a simple way to backup a hierarchy of folders on an external device and then keep keep both copies synced, then I heard about rsync and discovered that it does just that. Being using it exclusively for all of my backups, really useful.

EDIT: Also since we're talking about rsync, do you think the following options are sufficient for syncing a folder hierarchy from the local disk to an external flash drive?

rsync -aW --delete /source /destination

My main concern is the W option, which skips the usual compression (that delays a lot the already long process of syncing) and might end up writing a lot of bytes and decaying the memory cells of flash storage.
I do dislike the community system on HN. It rewards inflammatory posts and trolling rather than reasonable and rational discussion. And for that matter, it rewards sensationalistic posts.

I think the main issue is that HN is a really high profile community, and with that you get stupid people like these "1st world haters."
If it actually works well, I'd download "Images as Text" as a Chrome extension in a blink.
Ask HN: Source for data on VC firms? (For a university project, not my company)
I am trying to find some straight forward (and not-so-straight-forward) quantitative and qualitative data points on venture capital firms and thought someone on here might know a source or two for this information (other than the firms' website as my experience so far is that a lot of the information isn't available).

Data points I'm looking for:

- Fund size

- Avg # of investments made per year

- Types and sizes of companies invested in

- Major factors used to evaluate potential investments

- Methodologies used to value firms

- Structure, length, and detail of proposals required of entrepreneurs who are seeking financing

- The typical types of financing provided (some firms do VC, loans, partnerships, etc.)

- The percentage of firms considered who get financing

I completely understand a lot of this information is potentially a source of competitive advantage but I want to get as much as possible.

Thanks in advance for your help!
That's exactly what I meant. The thing about being the first constitutional democracy - well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. By modern definitions yes, but what exactly is a democracy and what is a constitution? The confederation that came before the Swiss republic had their charter since 1291, and its cantons, being about as sovereign as a state, had constitutions long before the republic was formed. It was also a democracy, as in a largish percentage of male population had the right to vote, as opposed to all the monarchic rules in the rest of Europe. Before that you have of course Ancient Greece that probably had some sort of constitution as well[1].

The thing is - as you say - it's important to not be dogmatic about these sort of things - and dogmatism often seems to me part of the American way unfortunately. While the latest amendment to the US constitution apparently has been passed in 1992[2], the constitution has never been completely revised. Noone seems to even propose such a thing, since the 'founding fathers' obviously haven known best. Many shortcomings, like the election system and the lack of direct democracy, seem to go back to the limitations of information travel and organization back in the late 18th century. Others, like the president's veto power, are stranger, since the idea of a clear separation of powers go back to well before the founding of the USA[3] - it's hard for me to explain how George Washington was able to get this through, but it seems obvious from a European, French Republic influenced standpoint that it doesn't belong there. And the ability of the speaker of the house to block a vote? Come on, that's a systemic bug that should be squished with the reaction time of a Microsoft hotfix.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Athenians

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers
What, do you think people in third-world countries don't care about family photos?
"Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement."
Oh the planet will do fine without us, but using the commonly accepted meaning of the phrase to mean preserving a familiar ecosystem, then yes, the only was todo that is to consume less. If we abandon modern tech that will happen anyway since we rely on industrial farming.

So we can reduce our load on the ecosystem in a managed way likeChina did, or we can have it forced upon us, but it is going to happen.
Note to self: Never live in mainland Europe.

Maybe I'm viewing the world through rose tinted glasses, but it seems entrepreneurs are very respected in the US.
please read my comment again, you're missing my point. humanity is voting, through their wallets, who should be treated for what. as an individual you despise it from a moral standpoint, sure, but once you reach the level of treating billions far stronger and fundamental rules takes over. very similar to the vaccination debate where an individuals opinion should not be respected for a larger goal, a vaccinated herd of people.
This is why I'm so glad my first name is Reebok. Used to be weird and embarrassing but after a few DUIs I love that my mugshots are on page 3.
Unlike something like Oracle that has been around for decades, at this point the admins I have are probably some of the most experienced MongoDB admins there are.

I, myself, have given several talks at MongoDB groups and without exception have been the most expert user in attendance. The only people who know more about MongoDB at this point work for 10gen.
Vision Quest (Microsoft's lack of direction)
Yes, there are tradeoffs. But for archival PDF has one major advantage: it is actual, widespread standard widely considered being suitable for archival. Fast-forward 50 years, which one do you think is more likely: finding a PDF reader or a MAFF reader?

How do MHT creation tools handle dynamic pages? Another major win for PDFs are that you are essentially requesting a static version of the content if you use the "print to PDF" method, so it works nicely for archiving even if some fidelity is lost.
I don't like the idea of police spying on social media either, but I think your analogy is flawed.

If I'm talking to somebody in a public space, I'm generally expecting the conversation to be private. If a cop were listening in to that conversation, it would be unexpected, and that would be analogous to the police reading my e-mail (which I also expect to be private).

However, when I post a publicly readable message on Twitter or Facebook, that's not like having a private conversation in a public place. It's more like standing up on a soapbox and shouting to anyone who can hear, and I'd expect that any cop within earshot would be able to hear what I was saying.

Common sense dictates that if you do something illegal, you shouldn't shout it out to the entire world.
Our data is 1/10th of available memory and MongoDB still pages back and forth to disk constantly.

This is what happens when you rely on the OS to handle paging.
Right, and that's pretty normal.
for High Availability you would be a fool not to either run your own mirror, or package everything you need into a single bundle.
I haven't dived into the code much so the answer might be obvious. But, where would this trackers live? Would I have to host them somewhere (I presume they can be written in whatever language I want since you have an API)? Or how would that work.

Do you have any plans on adding a "manual entry" form or something? I'd love to use this to track how many cigarettes I smoke per day for instance (currently I'm using a small app I made myself).
It's not so much that it "makes sense", but that you need it to comply with CAM SPAM.

Any unsolicited mail must have an unsubscribe link, even if you just email them once.
Yes, it seems batch downloading won't be implemented, but batch archiving is possible:

http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend-th...
Hey Samy,

I signed up on http://www.reportr.io

But now what do I do? Any instructions on what to do next will help.
The PiVision sounds really useful.
Judge exposes patent troll's "sham" operation and employee in front of jury
The challenge here is that the mortgage has a different valuing scheme than the property. The mortgage is valued against the rate of return and the risk of default. The property is valued against comparable properties.

The whole problem here is that you might have a $200K mortgage which is written to a very credit worthy borrower who is paying on time, against a house with a market value of $100K (probably not in the Bay Area but this is just an example).

So the fair market value of a $200K mortgage, that matures in 2033 might be $100k (this is essentially a zero coupon bond at this point and we're assuming a 3.5% rate of return) could be "destroyed" (which is to say seized by eminent domain) and replaced with a $100K mortgage that matures in 2043 (assuming a 30 yr mortgage). That is worth something like $35,000 (again assuming an annual rate of 3.5%) which quite a bit less than $100K,

So looking at it as an investor you've had $100K worth of "principal" stolen from your retirement account by the City of Richmond, and sold to someone else for basically 1/3 the price, because the underlying basis for this particular investment vehicle was someones home, which is now underwater value wise.

The saddest part of the mortgage mess is that it is so freakishly complicated to figure out what or who owns a mortgage in the world of derivatives. If Richmond is successful (and I hope they are) the next story will be people who have this sudden drop in their 401k investment value with a note "Funds taken by City of Richmond" ) and those folks are going to go "WTF?" and the next round of scare stories will be "Richmond just yanked nearly a billion dollars out of people 401k funds and gave them to a Hedge fund, could you be next?" And nobody will be calling for the real reform which is some level of regulation on what you can and cannot do with a home mortgage security.
Rsync always sends a list of files (and their attributes). But typically most files haven't changed. They could just send the files that have changed since the last sync.
Definitely! But the rails community prefers DHHIADSWAD, and I'll let you guess what the letters mean.
I just want to pipe up and say I agree with you about the new Flickr interface. I find it intolerable.
Is there a script/application to sync a hierarchical folder of 100,000 photos to Flickr, now it has so much storage? One set per subfolder. I found a few Windows apps, but they mostly baulked at that many files.
What tool are you using to back up?
-- Edit: parent was deleted; the suggestion was about a solution to use http instead of https. --

Security nerd mode activated; solutions like this make me a little twitchy, even when I have to employ them myself.

At the risk of stating something you already know, for the sake of pedantry the security implications of this fix are (at least) as follows:

- If you're checking the signatures of the packages you're downloading, this is probably OK, since even if an attacker spoofed your DNS to route to her own package archive, she would still have to compromise the package signing key to run her code on your system. On top of that, if you're using a hosting/PAAS provider, she'd have to compromise their DNS infrastructure first as well.
- If you're not checking package signatures, then hopefully your system doesn't have any "interesting" information (including username/password combinations that might be useful on your or other sites). The hosting/PAAS provider DNS system is still a barrier, but now you're down _two_ of the protections on the chain of code executing in your name.

As always, there are multiple-order-of-magnitude differences in the amount of effort any given element of security is worth; the above fix might be just fine for 99% of applications, while for the remaining 1% some extra thought would be worthwhile. TBH I have no idea how common such "code hijacking" attacks are in practice -- if any "real" security professionals have that info, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

Offered in the spirit of helping folks with managers asking "why can't we just turn off SSL?"
Is there a way to look at the total 'liked' products? I'm wondering if they can be saved and looked at like an amazon wishlist.
I have a mix of Backblaze online backup, Time Machine local backup, Flickr for a selection of non-private photos, and Dropbox for documents/financial stuff.

Before I started doing backups, I was really lucky that every time I got burned it was by having a decently new (<2 months) old drive blow up, and I had most of my data on the old drive.
interesting... but what happens with the data? i looked but couldn't find a way to recall the things i 'liked' and the recommendations didn't seem to be getting any better. as a window shopping experience, it works since i'm just randomly scrubbing through clothes idly, but i feel like i'm missing some context because i don't immediately understand how i'm supposed to use it in the long term (am i supposed to just shop for these things when i see something i like or should i just vote for them?)

fun though for what it is, i spent more time than i expected to just scrubbing around.
Cool special effects and painfully bad physics hardly make a good movie IMO. The cold equations is vary low budget but demonstrate you can make drama without sacrificing much accuracy.
Check out "Track your web navigation" https://github.com/SamyPesse/reportr#track-your-web-navigati...
Or you can use the http api (or the python library) to track events from wherever you want.
Wow, even after you invest heavily initially to buy a house with your own hard-earned money, you are still supposed to pay the government a cut for renting it? What has this world turned into! Shouldn't YOU be the one who should decide how you spend YOUR money, for renting out YOUR property?
When I tried to sell my massive collection of Sci-Fi paperbacks, I couldn't give them away.

Since they seem to effectively be worthless, ebooks at least give me convenience.
Right, so the ruby binary inside the package that you just built would contain the bug caused by that particular compile-time option.
Disagreeing with Wired journal post.
Startup Weekend Borgen reclaims the Danish parliament to the people
Luje 0.1 – a pure Lua JVM