skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nick Winter describes an interesting approach to building habits and reaching goals in his ebook, "The Motivation Hacker" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Motivation-Hacker-Nick-Winter-eboo...).

He talks about using overwhelming pre-commitment as a way to force yourself to adopt a habit or reach a goal. Try to set up an environment where your success is over-ensured. Rather than tell a few friends that you'll stop smoking, destroy all of your cigarettes, pledge hundreds of dollars on Beeminder that you won't indulge in the habit, ask people to publicly shame you if you relapse, find and use the absolute best treatments and programs in the world for quitting, etc. Attack the habit with overwhelming force, much more than is probably necessary to overcome it. Doing so makes it easier to win.
Sex? Add in commitment, caring, affection, intimacy, romance, joining of lives, a good version of passion,
a collection of memories, activities, traditions really
like, don't want to lose, can't get anywhere else, and, thus,
cause 'lock in', vows, supportive families, children ("most rewarding thing we did"), etc. One night stands are not
very good on passion; it takes a while for a caring, loving
couple to be good with each other with passion. One night
stands are at best just mutual friction, and a simple electrical appliance can replace that.

She has two legs. He has two legs. If she breaks a leg, then she is down to one leg to help her broken leg get well. But joined with him with good vows, commitment, etc. they have four legs with three good legs to help her broken leg get well. Can rattle off 10,000 such cases faster than can say them.

People don't want to be alone. Being alone is scary. Nearly all baby mammals know this. Being joined to someone is much more secure.
The Startup Valley of Death [video]
The lack of birds and fish is striking. However, the trawler is still catching fish. The tsunami may have some natural effect too.

Also striking is the lack of photos - I suspect it wasn't literally "like sailing through a garbage tip" (as opposed to occasional debris, much more than usual).
The Soviets went to great lengths indeed making shittier copies from stolen blueprints from their western counterparts to show the rest of the world how great we were. The magnitude of failure only becomes evident when you consider that 90% of the 'GDP' went to fund projects like these while the general population was starving and didn't have sufficient clothes or housing. Very proud to be Russian indeed.

Oh yeah also check out the Byran space shuttle program, doesn't that thing look familiar as well?
Ha, let's just wait until the Oculus Rift hits mainstream.
This is how customer service should be
It's really really sad, and no less ironic, that in the midst of this government shutdown, particularly with the zealotry from the tea party about the evils of government, that a problem which so obviously needs addressing, and should naturally and probably only can be solved by governments, goes unaddressed like this. Surely we must all be able to agree on this. What is government for at all, if not to harness our collective will to solve problems that economics deem impossible to solve by individuals?
I was on a British Airways flight from London to Chicago that had a similar alarm problem on a 767 which indicated landing gear failure. But on that flight, they shut it off manually after 15 minutes or so. I did notice that while we were still over the UK, the flight info system with the map kept showing all kinds of odd locations as our destination, as if the pilots were planning to set down at the nearest airport if anything else strange happened. Before landing at Chicago they warned us that the alarm would sound again, and that we should prepare for a rough landing in case the wheels did not come down fully. We also made a pass over the airport for someone on the ground to look at the landing gear with binoculars. The landing was normal.
Nice story, but the "ocean is broken" is still linkbait. Its not in any way true as a statement or even as a concept. The article is a story about "how my pre-conceived notions" are broken, signed--The author. That hurts the credibility of the author, and diminished any (actual) point he was trying to make.
Why wouldn't you use the package manager that your distro comes with?
Oh yes, another proposed silver bullet to latch onto for improving education.

The presentation makes this out to bring very profound changes, but this is something I honestly doubt. A voice-controlled information aggregator might prove useful for quick lookups, but it won't dispense in-depth research.

It's almost as if they think Siri will make schools obsolete. Then you have the ethical conundrums of proprietary software to contemplate as well for such a core part of your curriculum.
And to be honest I don't understand your social compass if being judged by a random restaurant cashier is that big a burden on your conscience.

My moral compass is not dictated by the presence of witnesses. If I'm at a park and no one is there to witness it, I still dispose of trash properly. I pick up after my dog without scurrilously looking around for other people.

One's "moral compass" should be internal, and might also be considered like karma. Most people do things because they believe it is right, not because they are being judged (though there are those people in this world, and they are the ones who dent and run and leave a big doggy steamer cooking in your yard). And in Western society one of the biggest burdens you can drop on someone is the sense of reciprocity.
How about the best advice I ever received? Here it goes...

Focus on becoming the best at something. In ten years, you will be the best (or one of the best). Then all that other stuff many people focus on will just happen naturally: fame, fortune, etc.
It seems an expedition of 2012 which included the NOAA did confirm this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#ci...
I didn't mean to imply that I think he works for Google.

>Also, his attitude is not particularly common within google.

So the majority of Google engineers disagree with the policies of the management? Do people internally push back against this stuff (trying to force account consolidation and making everything part of G+), or are people too afraid to speak out? If people aren't happy with it, how far does it have to go before morale drops and people start looking for other jobs?
Hormonal birth control? Environmental factors reducing births?
The Strava Files
That's one of the things mentioned in the post, which seems like a reasonable place to start. If their goal is that older customers should ideally stay on the old servers, that's more likely if it's basically autopilot. If someone has to manually decide to renew, they're much more likely to notice that they can upgrade to a newer offering, instead.
“Upgrading to Rails 4” eBook is now open source
Show HN: Buster: Static site generator for Ghost and Github Pages.
You do know that Pinger has been around on iPod touch
> We are talking about some non-zero (lets just say integer) chance of global catastrophe if the oxgenation of the Pacific ocean is disrupted by mass radioactive spoiling of biomass.

Well, the trees on-site are still green.

I'm not trying to minimise the problem. I know there's a lot of uranium in there. But not enough to sterilise an ocean.
The article also mentioned the other effects of the tsunami: telephone poles, styrofoam, pieces of buildings, etc. were all still floating. Again, an accident, but it's hard to deny that it's preventable; at least one town was saved by a sea wall that was relatively inexpensive to build [1].

That said, overfishing is probably the worse problem since it's not tractable to enforce regulations (since police aren't on site to ensure that there isn't too much "extra" catch thrown back, etc.). At least it would be possible to mandate the construction of seawalls.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...
But Google wallet can't be used if you sell physical things.
The Tu-144 was more of a real ripoff than Buran; while Buran used a very similar profile to the space shuttle (to save on costs relating to aerodynamic validation, essentially; early designs were quite a different shape) it was very different in detail (kerosene boosters rather than solid, external main engine, largely automated).
Agreed that it's challenging to determine from an interview how someone will respond to a site outage, but site reliability engineering involves more than just being oncall--it's about the decisions you make in setting up interoperating services and the infrastructure you put in place to allow for straightforward scaling.

In general I'm a big fan of this sort of interviewing because the work the person did on the server can give you great insights into what sort of systems administrator they are--do they give you a good insight into how the system has been altered from the default install? Do they document the "why" of any changes they made? Were they able to craft a readable shell/python/ruby/whatever script to cover any automated processes they had to hack together?

I don't know what Google SRE technical interviews are like, but I can't imagine a one-on-one giving as many useful insights for an entire team as the artifacts left behind by someone setting up an entire server from scratch.

Not to mention the ability to weed out people who don't have the basics in place--when someone can't even figure out how to ssh to the server, you know pretty readily that they're probably not suited to the work.
because I'm in a hurry, and neither have time to cook, nor for a sit down meal.
I saw some people comment on a thread similar to this yesterday called, "Sailor says pacific is lifeless form Japan onwards for 3k Miles". I am guessing it is the same gentleman in this article and this is the full article. Some comments there were skeptical and suggested they had been at sea and hadn't caught anything or had not "seen any whales or dolphins". Let me say that there are countless counter arguments but try to view it from another angle. Lets say you are a developer and you do that most of your life day in and day out for years and years - just as this man sails the seas. After years you will have certain observations that will be a culmination of your experience and accumulated knowledge for doing that job for many years... And perhaps young developers will not understand it or will question how you came to such a conclusion, although it is evident to you and experienced peers like yourself. You can't put it into a white paper because of several reason's like time, money, and test conducting. This is like that, its experience and years of wisdom that are talking. Maybe a state will fund a study which will cost 10 million bucks and 5 years to do statistical fish and trash sampling to confirm it later on but without doing such things in the immediate term such a keen observation has and should have the weight and impact it deserves, by that I mean not being brushed off as there is not data and " I didn't see fish either", its deeper than that and the approach should be constructing rather than deconstructing.
Reminds me of some fascinating other tibits you may enjoy googling:

* M-50 "Bounder" bomber, which was believed to be nuclear powered

* how to count the "bomber gap" of M-4 "Bison" bombers

* how to spy on the USSR by using the moon as a reflector

And so on. The truth is often wilder than the conspiracy theorists ever dream ;)
..and if everyone could afford to pay 2x-4x the price of a McD's. And spend 3x-5x the amount of time sat around in a restaurant instead of grabbing and going.

Yeesh, what a useless comment GP is.
I will not speak for the parent - But in my case it is because my business uses Google apps for domains and we have accounts shared amongst various people such as the customer support. This is an account because Google required accounts (not aliases/lists/groups) to access certain resources – but it is shared because multiple people have the need to perform the function. This however results in Google trying to link that account with every support agent's personal Gmail account which gets annoying…

And this in spite of the fact that we do not have any agents actually login to read mail - we manage all of our support in zendesk.
But then you'd have to print the GPL on the nose cone. End users have rights.
You are right to be skeptical in the fact that anecdotal evidence from a yachting voyage could establish a general case for mass bio-mass (or lets just say a sub-set of bio-mass, like catchable fish) decline, and your point that large portions of the Pacific are normally dead-zones is true because of the way that anoxic regions can develop due to oceanic circulations of nutrients and dissolved oxygen concentrations.

But, you might be concerned to learn that the NOAA typically only reports on mass die offs fairly close to US shores, at least within our EEZ zone- because they are only adequately funded to do so- [1] is an example of such a report. There is no well-funded transnational environmental authority that can make a reliable 'alarm' about the potential of mass common-water oceanic die-offs (think 'tragedy of the commons'); Greenpeace is more of an advocacy organization than a scientific or monitoring authority.

One thing we can indirectly empirically gauge is the size of these large garbage patches at sea simply via imaging. In fact NOAA has put together a fact sheet on this [2], although it is rather simplistic. What we can glean from this is the fact that they are real, quite large, and if you look at the map it looks as though the OP's voyage passed through it at least once if not twice. Which would explain much of what he saw, but not necessarily the consistency (pervasiveness) of the dead zones observed..

Finally, just food for thought (er.. perhaps bad choice of words.. haha) that there is a sort of conflation in the article about the long-going decline of fish stocks and accumulation of garbage due to dumping and the more acute poisoning/death of fish stocks due to radioactive leakage from Fukushima in the areas off-coast Japan specifically. There is academic evidence [3] that large fish, specifically tuna, are acting as vector to transport large amounts of spoiled biomass as far afield as California. How much of the biomass die-off does this explain? I have absolutely no idea, but since both issues are quite concerning in their own right we should probably keep tabs on both..

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/30/1227489/-Mass-Aquat...

[2] http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/pdf/patch.pdf

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/24/9483.short
Their profit margins are likely not huge as it is, and it costs them just as much (probably more, given changes in power usage in servers over the last few years) to run a Core 2-arch server as an Ivy Bridge one.
Yes. And I don't own any console since my uncle gave me a used NES clone 20 years ago. When I was kid my parents thought they were too expensive, and now in my adulthood I don't own TV and still think it is expensive... By the way, PS3 at launch here was 3000 USD
There's no easy way to tell how good a charger is just by looking at it. Generally you get what you pay for - if you order a "Genuine Apple iPhone OEM charger" on eBay sent from Hong Kong for $3, I guarantee you it will be a low-quality fake. But a $15 charger from a brand-name manufacturer should be reasonable quality.

Fake chargers will copy the UL marks and labeling, so that doesn't help you. Of course, if it says "Designed by Abble" or "Designed by California", that's a pretty good indication of non-quality :-) (I've seen both of those on fake iPhone chargers - it should say "Designed by Apple in California".)

The one thing people notice from bad chargers is their touchscreens malfunction when plugged into the charger. Bad chargers let through enough electrical noise to overwhelm the very small signals that touchscreens create.

When you say your laptop gets a lot hotter at 110V, do you mean the charger or the laptop itself. Chargers are generally a bit more efficient at 240V than 110V, so I wouldn't be surprised if it is a bit hotter. But the output is exactly the same, so I wouldn't expect the laptop temperature to change. If it's hotter, I suspect ventilation is different or you happen to do CPU-intensive applications on planes.
I think part of the problem is just being honest and complete about what is in the world. As opposed to what should be.

This was a problem for me, growing up. A lot of what should be, that left me somewhat blind and poorly prepared to deal with what is. Especially when the latter suddenly reared its head and I had to take quick action. Or, not take action and thereby let events roll over me in a less than optimal/desirable fashion.

So... write the "manual" -- or description -- of civilization as it is. Warts and all. Trust the readers, en masse if not always individually, to have good intentions moving forward -- the better informed for your efforts.
Is Wikipedia for Sale?
I would guess on a micro level the best thing you can do is recycle, reducing the amount of refuse that ends up in landfills and often times out at sea. A lot of it from coastal areas ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it's not like storing it on land is awesome either.

The problem really is that even decently sized macro action can be largely negated by economic freeriders. Unless some body like the UN or US sets out to enforce universal cooperation with agreements on pollution, or fishing, whole states that don't follow the regulations will continue to take advantage. Witness the failed Kyoto Protocol, which had 191/192 nations in agreement, but the very worst polluters (read: the US) who refused to be party to it.
> For some reason the old customers do enjoy upgrading their machines though

This is largely their own fault; they make doing this relatively cheap and easy, and are thus punished for it.
This is exactly the same question I had.
This is the premise of the science fiction book, Foundations. The human race is statistically expected to fall into a galaxy-wide "collapse" and a group tries to write a manual/encyclopedia of know how to be placed on every planet.

http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553...
I think Mozilla is right to tread carefully and not commit to yet another format for a minor improvement. In my opinion our web clients are bloated enough as is, and they're only getting bigger. Once you add support for a format and it gains mainstream traction on the web, it'll be really hard to remove, and we'll be stuck with software that has to support so many things for reasons that do not make sense in the near future.

As for the study, I have to admit I did not read it. But the first thing to note is that computed metrics (SSIM, PSNR) are not reliable approximations of perceived quality. Optimizing for either will produce a codec that pleases the computer, not the eye. This is why the tuning of image and video codecs for psychovisual effects is such a laborious, manual process -- you have to have a human viewer to assess the quality.

In the long term I think it would be good if a new still-image format was derived from the intra portion of some reasonably advanced video codec, as they all beat JPEG handily. This is essentially what WebP is, but if I recall correctly, Google didn't really give VP8 the love it needed when they acquired On2. Instead they rushed with a "release early, release often" mentality, presumably hoping the community would jump the boat first and do the grunt work for them later (this was during html5 video wars when some thought Theora sucks and others thought h.264 is too encumbered -- VP8 was Google's resolution). The details are shady but the curious should search for the debate around early VP8 (I think the x264 folk did some extensive notes). Needless to say I think, VP8 (and WebP) wasn't and isn't the game changer Google would've hoped.

To avoid patents, a reasonable choice would IMHO be to look at Xiph.Org's upcoming video codec Daala. Curiously Mozilla has the right man in house since Monty moved from Red Hat to Mozilla like, almost like yesterday... Daala however isn't quite ready yet as the Xiph guys are busy researching out new ideas and unicorns. But the results so far are very interesting to say the least; anyone interested should check out Monty's demo pages.[1]

As others have said, JPEG is "good enough" for most of us, and even JPEG is used rather inefficiently, often with too high quality. So there's no compelling reason to push for a new format here-and-now. Give it some time and commit once there's something significant I say. In the future we'll thank ourselves for not having deployed all that junk over minor increments.

[1] http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/
Checkout isn't mentioned on Gwern's predictions for google product closure: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns

I hope he updates the page now that we have this additional data point, I'd love to see how his predictions performed.
How To Get Unlimited Wifi on Korea Rail
South Korea Rail offers wifi access points for each two carts, but they block users very quickly, after around 5 minutes of 360p streaming video.

Their blocking mechanism is implemented as MAC address filtering and they pass your MAC address in as a url parameter at the 'login' page.

So to get unlimited wifi on Korea Rail, every time they block you simply login again with a modified MAC address parameter in the URL, eg:

http://ems.ktxinternet.net/login/?gw_address=192.168.17.1&gw_port=3553&gw_id=08-13-14&url=http%3A//google.com/&mac=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
On Ubuntu or Debian? Use apt-get.
On RedHat or CentOS? Use yum.

Homebrew replicates the behaviour of Linux package managers for Mac.
Zuckerberg sweating while showing his illuminati jacket
Google Checkout has been depreciated since May. It's not like this come as a suprise.
>With a Soviet aircraft that could counterpose Concorde nowhere near in sight for at least years to come, the Tu-144 programme was becoming more of a political embarrassment rather than a source of pride to the Soviet Union, a symbol of a technological race lost to the West, and was quietly ended.[citation needed]

yuck, such over-the-top emotionally loaded writing.
If you need the most packages and the quickest then you should use ARCH linux. Otherwise use your package manager (like others have pointed out)
It should work on both. Ubuntu is built on top of a debian core.

Plus Im running 12.04 - which is a old, stable release - so should be more in sync with upstream debian.
This looks really awesome - like a fully grown up Backbone.js! The nested/complex modeling, thoughtful subview handling, and ability to use backends other than rails/rest pretty much solves some of the biggest complaints against Backbone, while keeping the good parts. (Not to mention the other considerable niceties hr.js lists)

I may actually give this a shot for a project of mine.