skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Starivore Extraterrestrials - Interacting Binary Stars as Metabolic Systems
Now there's a scary thought - truly autonomous... Soon the NSA facility in Utah will be fully automated and impenetrable :-)
Fresh Leak on US Spying: NSA Accessed Mexican President's Email
I wonder at what point the cost of cleanup for this one thing will eclipse the cost of replacing the entire former nuclear output of Japan with offshore wind and storage? Probably already does if you include the amortized cost of the real estate now ruined for many years, and the cost of relocating and compensating over 300,000 people.
Ideally, the old servers would have (1) paid for themselves, and (2) generated a reasonable amount of profit, before they became so obsolete that the market demands drastically reduced prices. A high revenue stream from that server after that point should never have been part of OVH's business model in the first place.

A host that expects customers to keep paying the same monthly amount for a 2-year-old server is no different from a rotisserie that expects customers to pay the same price for last week's leftover chicken. If the rotisserie's business model depends on selling stale poultry at a higher price than what the market would bear, it is clearly unsustainable and deserves to have its revenue reduced.
People who want to know a bit more about the particulars of this economic thought should check out Distributivism. While I don't know much about it, it seems like the idea of reconciling private property ownership with the spread of the means of production to all people goes well with open source / maker movement ideas.

"According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or of accomplished individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership and, according to co-operative economist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.

Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributivism
It is incredibly intellectually dishonest to claim that Western civilization hasn't vastly improved in its general "civilization" over the last century - respect of human rights, medical knowledge, technological capability and respect for human life and welfare.

You can certainly point to many areas where things are still very sub-optimal (we don't even agree on what "optimal" means). But just the fact that we have stopped waging all-out industrialized war on each other, a tradition which ended in 1945, is enough of an improvement to make it better even if there was no progress in other areas. And there has been massive progress in most other areas as well. I don't think this is a claim which needs citations.
When comparing against JPEG, it's always worth pointing out that most JPEG compressed images aren't optimal and you can reduce their size further with no quality loss - http://www.kokkonen.net/tjko/projects.html jpegoptim will improve the compression in almost all cases.

This highlights a big problem with work on better image compression - we can already do better, but no-one bothers. If you're trying to introduce a whole new codec, you've got a big hurdle to jump.
As with most new js frameworks, the first thing I'd like to see in the docs is a comparison with similar popular frameworks, and a brief description of what makes this one different and better.
That's a curious effect. Consider:

Situation 1) You drive up to pay for your food, you pay the price you were expecting, you leave with the same mood you arrived with.

Situation 2) You drive up to pay for your food, you find the person ahead has paid for you, you pay nothing, you leave happier because someone has been kind to you and you get a free lunch.

Situation 3) You drive up to pay for your food, and you find the person ahead has paid for you. You feel happier because someone has been kind to you, and in turn you pay for the person behind you. You pay an unexpected amount, possibly more than your own food cost. Now you leave with a lunch you may as well have paid for, but you leave happier.

In situation 2, the free lunch looks like the thing that makes you happier.

In situation 3, you might pay more than your lunch price and yet still leave happier.

In situation 3, everyone in the chain has gone to get some lunch, got some lunch, paid for some lunch ... and left happier.

And yet, if you tried to set it up to work this way - either the drive thru had a rule where you always paid for the person behind you (and if nobody was there you paid a random amount, or the average price of the previous N orders), or if there was a social expectation of same (i.e. like tipping, unwritten but obligatory), then I don't think it would work. In fact, going there expecting to pay an unknown amount seems like it would make me feel worse; and going there expecting a 'free' meal would tend to make me either order much more (it's free) or feel obliged to order less (someone else is paying), but either way be less comfortable about the whole deal.

It's not surprising to me that in the small scale, receiving kindness and/or doing something kind feels good. But it is surprising that on a wider scale, one system where everyone orders/pays/eats has minimal effect on mood and another where everyone orders/pays/eats results in a chain of tens of people feeling happier. (Side questions: It's easy for the article to present this as a chain of happiness, but how many people in the chains of tens of cars didn't feel happier, and felt indifferent? And how many felt worse yet obliged to participate to avoid looking stingy?)

My guess is that if it expands to be a social norm, it will hit the same kind of backlash as tipping does - arguments about whether taking your food and not paying for the people behind makes you a horrible person, or whether it's okay to pay for just the price of your meal for the people behind / whether you should be willing to pay 10% or 20% more than your meal, or whether if you're paying a random price because there's no car behind you, is it okay for the restaurant to come to depend on pocketing the difference for its profits.

Could we systematise the kindness/happiness effect without ruining it?
This is not stupid article. The journalist in question used these few people just to add human interest in a story full of statistics.

1. Increasing number of Japanese have just casual sex.

2. Increasing number of Japanese don't have sex (with other human) at all.

There is statistical data from several surveys backing this up.
> I agree that society and technology could evolve us through a much more desirable path. But the more time we can buy for that to happen, the better.

I would inflect this differently. An open and free society is much more likely to figure out a desirable path for the future than one steered by central authority.

(In fact, it is the accumulation of thousands or millions of small improvements that will, in retrospect, be seen as a desirable path.)

Desiring "extra" conservation of the resources that today seem most limited, might not necessarily be incompatible with an open and unplanned society. But it usually is.
Using gawk-only features means sacrificing portability, but gawk is so much more refined than the other awks. I don't know why it's not the default awk on a lot of OSes.
"Hacking" (old) Hacker News: fun with weak passwords, timing attacks, and Arc
Although to the extent that there may be some shared resources between threads, which may be shared under an architecture where the more threads you have contending for resources, there is a performance penalty....

...you _may_ seen performance improvements by having more than one worker even on jruby or rbx, without the GIL.

It would really have to be benchmarked, with some apps with realistic profiles.

But yeah, I'd expect the advantage of having more than one worker on rbx or jruby to be less. But it gets confusing.

(The ActiveRecord database connection pool is the prime example of such a shared-under-contention resource)
This has been provided as a nice solution multiple times. I thought the consensus was that this would be a good idea. It also ensures the post is not seen as sensation headline trolling and gets downvoted or something.
The last discussion in this regard also happened after the submission of a "Silk Road Asia" article with a beautiful site from CNN or BBC (?) I'm searching but can't find it yet.
thank you tux1968, will consider learning perl! I did have a query on the post asking how perl would fare and you just gave that answer.
Great products come from the heart
Are you working on a great product?
Actually, we know that these types of frameworks are not created in the dark. Instead of a comparison, I'd like to see what elements of Backbone.js, AngularJS, KnockoutJS, etc. this framework developer chose to mash up.

We don't need comparisons. We need to see evolution. It's like the transitional species problem. We can always discover a startling fossil and [compare] them with the rest of our findings, but I believe we need to get better at understanding if we are seeing something [new].
Authoritarianism is not much of an argument. None the less, I'll see your making fun of comedians (and who is better to comment on the human condition than a comedian?) and raise the stakes to Zen Buddhism. "And Buddha said, the eightfold path to enlightenment begins with posting to your facebook wall and ends with spend lots of time making your linkedin profile look pretty" Oh no wait maybe I misquoted.

I have observed as I get older that teens suffer from many self caused maladies, although an excess of calm introspection has never made that top 10 list. Given observation that teens are legendary for causing enormous amounts of suffering because of a lack of even a tiny amount of thinking, that would imply the scales are likely tipped far in excess away from a healthy level of introspection. Its unlikely given an extreme situation that a return to something approaching normal would be seriously controversial.
It's apparently been superseded by Google Wallet for digital goods and discontinued with no replacement for everything else, if I'm reading the announcement right?
> Features return a glorified tuple (Feature<TOutcome,TResult>) that combines an enum value that represents what the outcome was, with a value that represents the result of the operation.

Sounds similar to my understanding of what a monad is. If you have many cases of this, it might simplify the switch statement and improve maintainability.

http://devtalk.net/csharp/chained-null-checks-and-the-maybe-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/674855/help-a-c-sharp-dev...
Japan hasn't quite embraced foreign immigration the way many of its European counterparts have. It's an interesting demographic and economics experiments whose results we shall find out in coming 30-50 years.

I'm willing to bet a lot of money that the low-birth rate trend will reverse at some point. A country with 1.2 birth rate will cease to exist in 200 years, and I just don't see that happening.

More interesting questions to ask is:

1. What will trigger the trend reversal, and make young people reproduce more? (My guess is, vast reduction in standard of living and GDP)

2. And how long will it take for Japan to recover from the damage sustained?

In a long run, I think Japan can pull it off. It will be in better shape than Europe 50 years from now.
I upgraded 2 laptops and a PC to 8.1 without a single problem. I didn't have too many complaints before but I'm definitely happy with the changes.
I recall reading an article saying that there is actually quite a lot of undeveloped / rural land in Japan, but people tend to live in the largest cities because large businesses want to be close to the areas of greatest political influence.
MVC is something I've never really been able to wrap my head around. I wonder if this is why... All of the guides/articles that I've read on the subject have acted as if MVC was how the entire application was handled.

Could you recommend any references for back-end patterns?
In the reddit thread for this same article, I found this the best comment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elal2/have_you_ev...

A much better "pay it forward" story.
It appears to me they have underpriced their servers to the point they can't offset the ratio of existing customers upgrading servers. Seems like they should implement longer term contracts if they want to keep offering these rock bottom prices people keep snatching up. I'll admit looking at their pricing I can see why they sell so many.
Yeah, especially this:

May 20th, 2013	Last day to sign up for Google Checkout
Could we systematise the kindness/happiness effect without ruining it?

Kindness by definition isn't kindness if it is not voluntary.

I think the best you can hope for are social systems that don't reward cruelty.
I too, like many of you find their policies a little strange. Where the entire business world practices reducing prices of older products and replacing them with superior products at old or even slightly higher price points one must wonder the reasoning behind their, "newer must be cheaper than older" strategy where they do not pass on the benefit of the older hardware to the customers.

If an existing customer reads that page, and this thread there's just one thing that they will immediately deduce. Existing customers are being used as a subsidizing agent to capture new audience. Which, again is quite strange. In a game theoretic way, this drives the point to existing customers that it is beneficial to not be loyal to the service (i.e. cancel/re-order).

If they reduced cost on older hardware while introducing newer one, they could also list those up for sale. Surely people on a budget or people who don't need a Xeon will simply settle for an older Atom at a cheaper price. This also allows OVH to retain and milk the box till its ROI is hopefully achieved.
If you are top level government official and your mail is hacked by the NSA it is your fault.

I don't think that Snowden should have disclosed that kind of things. These are legitimate targets for SIGINT.
Title switching to slightly less informative "Retiring Google Checkout Announcement" in 3, 2, 1...
As for 8.1 itself, it's definitely a step up for me. Just having a start button back and being able to set the start menu background to be the same as your desktop background makes the whole experience far less claustrophobic.

Yes! It's funny how different it feels. I wonder if it would feel even better if they made the background transparent with your actual desktop blurred out in the back. This way you never feel like you left your desktop to view the menu.
---

No, Google is not offering a replacement processing solution for physical goods and services. We’ve partnered with three premier players in the payments industry to offer alternatives for your eCommerce needs. The links below will guide you to more detailed information about each offering, including negotiated discounts for Checkout users:

Payment Processing: Braintree Payments

Hosted storefront: Shopify

Email invoicing: Freshbooks

---

Increasingly often I'm associating Google with poor customer service, poor design and being indifferent to user worries when discontinuing products. Not sure they realize the harm they are causing to their brand, even in the eyes of people who don't actually use the affected products.
Yes, but i think, the problem is far easier to solve.
In vector graphics, you just set a (repeating, bending) "texture" along the path (between tiletypes). From a higher view, it looks very simple, but looking deep in those vector algorithms is difficult.
In the other hand: using a grid, like in the question, is from a lower view very simple, but it grows lots of complexity, when going upwards.

So, if you know your math or have a VG toolkit, its as easy as having no problem.
I'm not sure if the initial use of this is large enterprise applications. It's a fairly unexplored paradigm it'll be interesting to see where this goes with a company like Microsoft exploring it.
I'm guessing by the time I get to the window to pay, they have already taken the person behind me's order, and know the expected price right?

Sometimes I wish I had the option of tipping the fast food joint employees, as I think it would make them happier. Starbucks too, if you pay with credit card (as we are increasingly doing so), then we don't have that option anymore.

To add to the last point, I'd like to be able to give money direct to the employees, as I feel they wouldn't get a fair piece of it if the company was allowed to disburse it.
Also, we see a lot of [dependency management] does this and [asynchronous module definition] does that slideshows/blogposts/tutorials/guides/stackoverflowquestions/etc.

There is a clear initiative to most gracefully integrate/weave/combine Script Loaders and MV* frameworks for On-Demand Resources that give thoughtful memory/state management. These framework developers should explain how they are achieving this with their contributions, and why we should care.
oddly, i do get occasional mms messages on my google voice #. most of the time, it doesn't work though.
Poor logic. The algos get shared and replicated, especially given open source. For example:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...

The algos can be created by fewer people. Traders are being replaced by the algos, and fewer people are required to create the algos than do the original trading. So your point does not have a 1-to-1 job creation-destruction ratio.
If definitely already does, and I think there is a systematic under-appreciation of just how catastrophic Fukushima could become if there is an additional criticality if not a series of them, it is truely an order of magnitude bigger of a concern than Chernobly ever was. The upper band for relocation might be in the tens of millions instead of hundreds of thousands:

"a newly stated concern is the proximity of melted fuel in relation to the Tokyo aquifer that extends under the plant. If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, serious and expedient discussions will have to take place about evacuating 40 million people from the greater metropolitan area"

Of course this is a 'worst case' but given that the likelihood of a perfect mitigation is so extremely rare planners need to be at least considering this at a non-zero probability, which is more than a bit frightening.

More here:

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/
Anecdotally, this is directly correlated to the price of real-estate, and other parts of the world are only now catching up to Japan in this regards.
Happily, I now get to marry my husband because I want to be with him, instead of simply making a bid for economic survival and trading sex & childbirth for food & housing. As someone living in the US, I also get to continue my work which brings me great pleasure and independence. There are certainly difficulties and compromises, but I for one am delighted that I'm no longer required by law to resign my position upon marriage. My husband seems pretty happy that he's not the sole breadwinner, too, as he can contemplate things like quitting work and going back to school.

This messy compromise seems impossible for women in Japan.
You know what they say about javascript browser crypto, but for what it's worth, it worked fine for transferring a file from my desktop to my phone (Firefox on both ends).

I wonder: when using WebRTC between two devices on a single LAN, is my ISP involved (possibly: beyond bootstrapping the process)?
The Information Age Knowledge Class
Google search: 'mac screenshot shortcut' displays the shortcut on results page
I am from north India, but I didn't get it either. If it were spelt as "Ghera" I might have had some luck, but the moment you swap 'h' and 'e', I am lost.

As someone else suggested, stick a sentence somewhere right on top indicating what this site does e.g. "Claim and share your favourite route maps with friends" or some such thing.

Good luck
Nobody's hacked up a straightforward way to hook into SC2 externally afaik. It's less likely to happen in a stable way with a currently active game, because bot hooks can be used by cheaters, so game companies tend to change around interfaces in patches to thwart them. Whereas SC/BW is old enough that BWAPI has been stable for years now, and Blizzard hasn't moved to disable it (either legally or technically): http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/

I have seen one SC2 bot, based on the rather impressive feat of intercepting raw DirectX calls and reconstructing game state from them: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mdfisher/GameAIs.html
wow, I'm glad I didn't use Google checkout for anything important..
No more bloodshed, the winner is determined by the amount of technological progress they manage to achieve and put into use.

Both sides will simply send an adequate amount of people into disintegration booths. No blood necessary.
My biggest complaint on 8.1 is the removal of windows 7 backup[1]; at least the easy way to do it. They left it in windows 8 - I was using it; dropped my laptop ended up restoring to 8 again and that's where I'll stay for now.. I think their push was to use skydrive but a mirror to the cloud isn't an image.

[1]http://www.howtogeek.com/167984/how-to-create-and-restore-sy...
To be fair, Facebook has had this for close to a year now (albeit on on an iPod, but other cellular devices.)
This is probably because requestAutocomplete has been moved into Chrome Beta, and will probably feature tight Wallet integration.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/using-requestautocomplete
Airbnb SRE Challenge
No question you can do more with Perl. But I wonder if you've checked out more recent versions of gawk. Modern gawk is a better language than the awk of 20 years ago, so there's less reason to dump it and use Perl.
Except they arent merging. Goolge is no longer sulporti g pyshical goods.
It is unfortunate that you had problems upgrading and I feel your frustration (been there and it sucks) but... You cannot compare Windows upgrades with OS X upgrades for the simple reason that Apple dictates and extensively tests all the hardware components that go into the mac for compatibility. The number of hardware components and combination of components that Windows has to support is substantially larger than OS X's and it is not feasible to expect that Microsoft (and its partners) will be able to test every possible combination. I do not like Windows but comparing OS X upgrade issues with Windows upgrade issues is naive.
thought it was about the currently busted Silk Road not the real one.