skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The writing on the wall became apparent to me with the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, when I was getting my PhD in physics. I didn't know the numbers for a cost-benefit analysis, but I couldn't then nor can I now see cancellation as helpful to the U.S. The U.S. would have stayed way ahead of the rest of the world in particle physics and all the accompanying jobs, discoveries, and innovation. Instead we look to the rest of the world for leadership.

The Forbes article paints a picture of a United States full of ambition and curiosity driving innovation. That part exists, but it has just as long been a country of puritanism, self-righteousness, and fundamentalism.

The article points to politics as a major problem. That politics reflects this tradition among the people. A large fraction of the population here genuinely dislikes science, no matter how much they like the computers and cd players it brought.

I grew up liking idealism because I thought I was right about so many things. I since dropped my need to be right a priori in favor of what works after testing. Politics in this country does have an idealistic view of the individual -- each person should do for him or herself and anyone helping them will decrease their ability to achieve and lower their motivation. Healthcare, welfare, education, and so on are viewed by a large block of voters as detrimental to the nation. We, as a nation if not readers of this site, stick to this principle in the face of nearly the entire world providing evidence to the contrary.

We put down other countries for doing things against our ideals, saying they don't work, even as they pass us in countless measures of quality of life and community.

Choosing idealism in the face of contrary evidence of what works is a recipe for disaster.
Check out 'Deploying Ruby Applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Git' [1]

[1] http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-Ruby-...
Gene transcript patterns visualized for the first time in thousands of cells
"Even if they left my personal account alone, they could still mark socialfixer.com as being a risky and/or spammy site, like they have done for http://FBPurity.com."

That is seriously disappointing to see. I understand that, like Google and others, they have a right to filter on behalf of their users (and in some cases may be legally obliged to do so), but they're clearly in a position of power and trust in doing so. If they want to tell a user they can't post a site, and that site is neither illegal, risky or spammy, but simply something they dislike, they shouldn't suggest it is. Abuse of user's trust sucks, especially when the reason is this pathetic.
how could it be possible since not any relative new version of kernel can be claimed rock solid stable?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

For more realistic figures rather than theoretical maximums.

And I especially found it interesting to note that as typically used, cars are better than busses.
Air travel do matter and there is nothing irrational in doing our best to decrease it. Just because Americans first compare it with cars that is the most inefficient way to travel doesn't mean that air travel is efficient compared to busses, trains or boats. (Also, 91 passenger miles per gallon is slightly less than me and my wife gets when travelling in our Prius together.)

The point is that we have to learn to live with travelling much less. Both me and my wife are scientists, and we have become used to 2-4 intercontinental trips (back and forth) per person and year for conferences and collaborations. That contributes much more to our total carbon footprint than everything else we do summed together. It just have to stop.
Matthew Yglesias described Amazon as "a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers." [1]

There are many things Amazon could do to transfer cash from their customers to their shareholders. Bezos justifies not doing these things because he claims there is more value in long term customer loyalty and trust. Because it's a good faith business decision, I don't see Bezos being ousted or sued by shareholders.

Likewise, it would be easy for Facebook to say "we think there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us" - it's a good faith business decision, why would they get ousted or sued where Bezos hasn't?

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...
For the most part, Mozilla concentrates on releasing software rather than storing copious amounts of data about users. (Perhaps their "startup" Persona service is an exception to this, but I doubt it.) NSA is more likely to target all that juicy user data that Google has. They might also seek to undermine the security of software, but Mozilla aren't going to make that easy for them.
This looks pretty rad and a good start to build upon for a completely open-source tracker. Will follow up with some thoughts/contributions after checking it out more.
I'm in a very similar situation - graduaded in cultural anthropology, working in insurance, started studying CS last week :)

My attitude is that I don't think it will give me a better paid job, or a passive income, or become terribly smart - I just find it an amazing and interesting field of study.

Good luck to everyone who pursues his / her dreams!
"That's terrible advice because people will drive instead."

More likely, given the time, and $XYZ in the bank account, people will probably find something to do other than pointless movement. The local, momentary optimum of what to do with my spare time and spare money rarely randomly rolls the dice "fly!" although on rare occasions it does.

If he buys land and plants a forest on it while meditating, well, thats probably a net positive. On the other hand, having the extra money laying around maybe he gets a second car or a ski boat or spends the time installing a fireplace in his house, that's probably a net negative.

Rather than fly to Ireland this summer my kids drove out in the country where my cousin at his vacation cottage pulled them around behind his speedboat and/or rode around on my cousin's son's jet ski. I'm not sure which possibility ruined the earth more. Probably the amortized environmental capex of a vacation home and all the gas powered toys greatly exceeds any actual consumed fuel environmental cost by a couple orders of magnitude so they may as well burn a little gas to get something out of the damage caused by creating the infrastructure to burn it. Merely not flying isn't going to automatically fix anything.

The real tragedy of the story is the inhumanity of it. So flyers are treated like worthless cattle by employees, like freely abusable guilty until proven innocent enemy of the state terrorists by .gov, ripped off by the airlines, and all that inhumane treatment is perfectly OK with this guy, its just that he doesn't like some numbers on a report that won't really affect anyone anyway. And that is the inhumane tragedy of it. It would be like protesting the holocaust ovens not on moral and ethical ground but merely as an air pollution issue. Or protesting slavery pre-civil war not because the whole thing is inherently wrong, but because human slavery messes up financial reports somehow. The whole concept of the story makes me feel icky when seen in this light.
> - Why is this a manual process?

Partly it's a tradition handed down over the years. Many years ago it was much cheaper to get glass blanks and grind them yourself to get a good mirror than it was to buy the mirrors. So there are many documents from old astronomers telling how to grind a mirror. You learn a lot about lens terminology.

For smaller mirrors you don't really need jigs or automation.

For bigger mirrors there is plenty of automation.

As I understand it it's a self-calibrating process. The friction and movement of the tool create the shape, which is why they talk about moving the tool around a lot.

YouTube has some interesting videos of home made contraptions to polish rocks into spheres - you have 3 cones with a ring of abrasive, and some abrasive slurry, with a lump of rock in the middle of the cones, and you just spin the cones and end up with a nice sphere.
My money's solidly on ruby-install for this, but only to build packages - not to run in production. You just end up with rubies in /opt/rubies/ruby-X.X.X-pXXX/bin. Picking one is as simple as plonking that on the front of $PATH.
I'm pretty sure that flying is the least efficient way to travel that's not a partially-filled car, and it's only more efficient than individual car travel when you assume that less available or more expensive air travel will result in an equal expansion in the mileage of car travel.

The low price of air travel causes people to travel when they normally wouldn't travel and wouldn't be reasonably expected to by employers.

>The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants.

Or to cut down on burning jet fuel.
If your current deployment procedure is "I just scp this directory or zip file up", then yes, rsync may be slightly better. It ultimately depends on how much actually changed between your new build artifact and whatever is actually on your server. If you're deploying using just scp though, I'd strongly suggest looking at a deploy tool (e.g., capistrano).

Where I've found rsync really valuable is for good ol' regular file copying ("I just need to stick this one file or directory on a server"). I've pretty much stopped using scp and replaced it with rsync. rsync is awesome because:

1) you can resume interrupted transfers

2) it's much faster than scp when sending lots of small files

3) it's actually you know, a sync tool, as opposed to just a copy tool

If you miss the little progress bar that scp gives, you can also use --progress with rsync and then it's basically a drop in replacement.
Well, yes, but you're still qualifying the actions building customer loyalty and trust as actions that're ultimately in shareholders' best long-term interest. So the meme in question is just trite, not inaccurate or invalid.
The main problem with the standard rsync utility is the protocol. Check out the Rsync Protocol section of this document:

"A well-designed communications protocol has a number of characteristics."

<list of characteristics>

"Rsync's protocol has none of these good characteristics."

...

"It unfortunately makes the protocol extremely difficult to document, debug or extend. Each version of the protocol will have subtle differences on the wire that can only be anticipated by knowing the exact protocol version."

This is why it is very hard to implement a client program that can communicate with the standard rsync deamon on a server. You can always use the rsync program itself to communicate with the server, but this is not always an option. If it is - it can get ugly. On windows, you need cygwin or similar to run rsync.exe, which can complicate the deployment of your desktop app or shell extension.

An easy rsync client API would be useful if you were building an app that can store files on an rsync server, because the rsync utility and the rsync algorithm are great ways to efficiently syncronize files.
East Bay (Walnut Creek / San Ramon area) has houses ~700-800k in top 1% of school districts in the country. Check zillow where each house for sale has assigned schools and their ranking. Commute is 45 min to city by Bart and 1hr to south bay.
Well, it differs from AUR/yaourt in quite a number of ways:

- With AUR, you need someone to maintain the package. With Bedrock Linux, you can use packages aimed at other distros without alteration.

- With Bedrock Linux you don't need to compile anything - you can grab the binary package straight. Or you can compile if you want - with Bedrock Linux, you can use AUR/yaourt/packer/etc from Arch or portage from Gentoo, if you wish.

- With Bedrock Linux, the special stuff is integrated deeply into the system. AUR/yaourt is optional on Arch - on Bedrock, if you ignore the Bedrock-specific subsystems you'll have an extremely minimal and near useless system.

- Bedrock Linux's design results in some neat side-effects for things like robustness against broken packages/clients. I completely fubar'd the /lib -> /usr/lib move in my Arch client on Bedrock, and most if not all of my Arch packages broke. However, the core system continued to work, and I could still use packages from other distros. So I installed whatever packages I cared about from Debian Sid for the time being. Then, later, I blew away my Arch client and installed it again fresh with the /lib -> /usr/lib move completed. There really isn't an equivalent with AUR as far as I am aware.
Generally agreed. rbenv is just a nice convenience layer atop that.
This is very exciting.

I cannot count the times that I've wanted this "one specific program" which isn't available in my distro's repo, which also depends on a version of a library that is also not available in my distro's repo. Will definitely take a look at this.

Kudos.
Not disputing or supporting your particular point about the style here, but problems with PHP as a language and problems with PHP as coded by a particular developer are two different things.

Weirdly, people seem to ascribe the latter to the former rather often around here.
The title isn't descriptive of the article. The author discusses serious issues with decreasing funding of science in the US, but there is no exodus of scientists.

Let's hope Mars can be the national (I include Canada because of the close relationship) project that fuels science and innovation for our generation.
Good thing chromium is open source. I'll make my 'anonymous' GUID simply: googlebot
Addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6505227

I don't work in a Ruby shop anymore, but I'd look at Bundler if I was looking to manage multiple gemsets on the same installation. As I point out in the above thread, maintaining multiple gemsets on the same machine is an antipattern that points to technical debt.

Ruby 1.8 is over. EOL. You need to port everything forward or suffer the consequences.
Damn straight it's a drug. It's one your body just happens to produce. It's having a biochemical interaction at concentrations far less than would be required for a chemical reaction (such as neutralizing acid in the stomach with calcium carbonate). Similar to using the pill to modify the reproductive cycle.
Given that the birth rate has dropped below replacement level and our society is headed for Darwin's bit bucket unless we make some drastic change, the answer to your question is very much yes.
I actually lauched a WebCite kind of service back called Svonk back in 2009, unfortunately it got VERY little usage - like just a couple of hundred hits a month, and it got no external promotion. Here is a tutorial video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9b2Xgi-xLM and the old press release if anyone is interested http://www.prweb.com/releases/meronymy/svonk/prweb2900644.ht... It had a RESTful interface and everything. I guess could re-launch it as I still have the source code, if there's an interest for it that is.
At a DefCon (15, I think?) I got to ask a panel of FBI/CIA/NSA bigwigs a question at an open Q/A panel. I asked how they made the decision of which exploits they'd keep for themselves and which they'd help the project patch.

The response was 100% boilerplate. "We have a system for evaluating it," was the basic answer, in more words than that. I didn't really expect anything more, but it was worth a shot.

I've never believed that their "system" was in any way primarily for the public interest. I can't point to any specific evidence, it just never felt like the type of thing they would do. Good exploits just seemed far too useful to be worth giving up.
Thanks for the awesome software.. I just started learning about capistrano recemtly, just amazed by how simple it is..

I believe when you said that PAAS will go, only reason I use heroku and dokku(from docker) is due to its easy deployment.. and for no other reason than deployment..
It's an interesting hypothetical, but presumably there is data about how much mortgages are worth along all these axes, since they are traded fairly heavily. We don't need to guess about it.
It's been a pleasure, I'm really proud of what we've built so far. I hope that following a long and well deserved break you'll find yourself itching to return. No-one can deny you've gone above and beyond with a very demanding project, maybe with v2 retired and some additional support the overhead will come down to a much more manageable level.
Bedrock Linux is relatively kernel-version-agnostic. You can go ahead and use just about any kernel from any major distro and it will most likely just work. So, if you want, you can use an older, proven kernel. My desktop still runs the Debian Squeeze kernel, I think.
Woman Claims She Is The Real Voice Of The iPhone’s Siri
This is an important point, but it also shouldn't be overstated. There are many examples of where professional managers lacking passion and personal interest in a business's market have hindered more than helped.

As Thiel often says a variety of ways, copycat behavior is unlikely to produce success in a high risk/reward context like a startup. You need an information advantage, and often that advantage is someone who knows their own itch very well.

I also hate that the meme for this has become "adult supervision." It's such a patronizing and self-aggrandizing description.
Founders that had had successful startups before don't count.

That's why I was referring to "experience BEFORE you try to do your own thing."

And yes there are a few startup founders that were older than 30, I give you Larry Ellison.

However none of the 4 horsemen had founders >30, plus the other founders except for Peter Thiel had already sold their previous startups.

Regarding Palantir, they had Peter Thiel as a cofounder, I don't give you that one.
Airbnb makes small admission on tax issue, saying its hosts should pay
Interesting. Which kernel does it end up using? Could it handle packages which wants a special kernel or different modules for different kernels?
Worth less than it costs to build is a more appropriate way of phrasing it. Houses in Richmond are substitutable, to some extent, by buying where mortgages are available. So the depth of the house "order book" in Richmond would be very shallow. It wouldn't be $0, but it would be a lot less than in places you can get a mortgage.
Sources for the first two accusations?
You're truly a life-saver! I ended up using Python today due to the lack of session handling in Requests-php. Thank you so much <3
'Gravity' soars to top of weekend box office
Japan PM seeks overseas help on Fukushima leak
The sales incentives make no sense. He made 1/3rd commission on the smallest bags, 1/5th on the medium and 1/6 on the largest bags. It is better for him to sell lots of small bags than 1 big one. In addition, assuming most customers buy the small bag, then upselling to a medium bag would bring no extra financial reward. Putting aside the idea that buying the biggest bag might lead to faster consumption, and assuming that the customers were tied in to the supplier, he would have been better off downselling as the customers would still buy the same amount, just in more transactions, leading to higher returns for him (especially as his transport costs were paid).
He isn't very prolific, but each thing he writes is incredible.
> The code is overbloated with complexity thus close to unmaintanable (evolution and correction) and there are stuff that feels wrong in my guts: https://github.com/rmccue/Requests/blob/master/library/Reque.... the naming is WRONG: flattening a list is not what he is doing: it is transforming a nested data structure in a level 1 associative array. Each wrong naming is a landmine waiting to explode at your face.

Uh, ok? What would you propose naming it then? transformNestedDataStructureIntoALevelOneAssociativeArray? The only person this might seem fundamentally wrong to would be a first-year computer science student prepping for a test on a standard library - names are chosen by the author for the context.

> This language now strikes me as an odd frankenstein that has no advantages anymore for coding.

What a novel idea. Perhaps it "strikes" you that way, despite the fact that many people still use PHP for some reason.

> And this code is hiding its weakness in ridiculously complex OOP

Static methods are "complex OOP"?

> every single methods are static for me it is the sign it should have been a namespace exporting functions.

That "strikes me" as a design choice. Furthermore, in PHP the autoloading convention is to translate the class and the namespace to a file path (PSR-0); there isn't a convention like this for namespaced functions. Furthermore, namespaced functions are not that backwards compatible.

I am not a PHP fan myself, although I have used it in the past, and it seems to me like you just want to jump on the anti-PHP bandwagon for fun. Your criticism is pedantic and shallow.
Wow, what a de-empowering article. Good luck guys.
You don't need experience to start a startup, you get the experience by doing a startup.

And you don't get the BS experience in big companies, you get it in its purest form from the market itself, not compromised by any company politics BS.
I actually do not understand why mugshots should be public in the first place.

We already have a way to check someone's criminal record - why the need for public access to a record of someone being arrested - even though no charges might have been filed?
My deployment process does this too. One thing to be careful of is to make sure you're not deploying a different revision than the one you are on locally. For instance, if you have uncommitted changes locally, they will be reflected in your assets but not in the rest of your deploy.
For anyone interested in an overview of Capistrano v3, I wrote an introduction last week - https://medium.com/p/ba896a142ac
It's not just about efficiency though. From carbonfootprint.com - "Emissions from planes at high altitudes impact climate change more than if the emissions were released at ground level. To take account of this you have the option to factor up the CO2 emissions released by aviation Radiative Forcing Factor of 1.9"
Just to add a Point about - System76 provides the best ubuntu based laptops which is totally customizable.. If any System76 people are reading this - "Add Keyboard Backlight - People will rush to buy the laptop"
The city I grew up in, did just that with all of its garbage in the 60s/70s and had to shut down in the 80s because it was a net loss once the full cost of exhaust scrubbers, disposal of whatever they scrub out, etc, was taken into account.

They were having profitability issues as it was once labor costs, boiler certification and related costs, maintenance, and ash disposal were factored in, so it didn't take much environmental cleanliness regulation cost to wipe out any profit from the incinerator.

Or rephrased, you can burn trash to make X units of electricity, it'll just n*X units of electricity to operate the plant, pay the workers, clean the fumes from the smokestack, maintain the boilers, operate the facility... Some factors are O(1), some O(n), some probably O(polynomial) if not exponential so simply making a bigger facility doesn't help (and a bigger facility means burning more diesel to haul the trash, no free lunch...)
The law applies, no doubt, but it has no affect on the sports in which the athletes compete.
That Big Break
Yes. At the least,all the ones I've seen come with 12.04.
It's a "game" so it's acceptable.
I think you meant to reply to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504843