skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because humans aren't rational machines and there are many things that cause people to take up habits that aren't healthy

I get this, but usually there is some substantial benefit to the habit.

To start smoking cigarettes today, you are well aware of the fact that it will:

1. Make you less healthy while you are alive

2. Will prematurely end your life

3. Will make you reviled by a large portion of the population

4. Will cost you a ridiculous amount of money

5. Will cost you a tremendous amount of time while you seek out cigarettes and smoke them

... there are many more negatives.

What possible positives are there that outweigh these negatives?

Nicotine is no more addictive or harmful to a person in a normal dose than caffeine, and its effects are similar also.

This is just so incredibly ridiculous. I've never smoked a cigarette but I have been addicted to caffeine multiple times in my life. I've gone "cold turkey" several times and the only effect was a slight headache that was off and on for a week. I think it's actually pretty easy to quit caffeine but from what I hear, it's nearly impossible to quit smoking cigarettes.

And if the effects of caffeine are similar to the effects of nicotine why not just use caffeine? It seems to have few of the negatives and all the positives (including the social impact of smoking which can be transferred to the social impact of getting coffee).

I just don't get smoking at all. I don't see any benefits to it in a vein similar to I don't see a benefit of smacking myself in the head with a hammer. It's hard to explain away such things with, "Yeah, people aren't rational" because you don't see many people smacking themselves in the head with a hammer.
I'm working with another team of people who haven't yet tried working with cloud servers, and one of the things they're struggling with the most is that cloud servers need to be thought of as disposable. They can't easily digest the idea that servers can and will go down randomly for no known reason.

I think Amazon needs to put a lot more effort into educating people about the best practices involved here - creating immutable and disposable servers, make it easier (console access) to create availability groups, etc.
Please apologize for insinuating the author is a mysogynist. I see no other comments that come even close to implying that.
But then, MySQL failed you on keeping autoincremented IDs strictly and globally incrementing to all readers. That is not related to keyset paging. It just happens that you chose to `ORDER BY` a non-stable ordering criteria.

In principle, you can order by any (possibly composite) key when performing keyset paging. Actually, all I've just said is equally true for `OFFSET` paging.
I think the verb is 'vape'.
Under Xen, your instance is not quite a process in the conventional sense. The Xen hypervisor lives underneath all the OSes on the host, both those allocated to customers (domUs in Xen-speak) and the one allocated to manage the customers (dom0). Xen starts up before the dom0 kernel, and then loads the dom0 OS as a privileged instance.

This is quite different from KVM, where the hypervisor is built as kernel modules in the linux kernel, and the host linux OS acts as the management instance.

Functionally, however, the results of this setup are similar to being a process: the hypervisor may schedule your instance's CPU time, and your kernel is specialized so that when it needs memory, it calls into Xen for the appropriate mapping (similar to VM in kernel).
I've worked in and out of the public sector for the last 10 years and unfortunately, this actually _PAR FOR THE COURSE_.

This is not the contractors fault. Its the government. Before I left to work with a startup, I was abhorred by the lack of ownership on the client's side. Everybody is looking to shuffle responsibility, keep the lowest profile, and do the least amount of work.

It doesnt matter who's writing the code, unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side, large projects are destined to fail and better left off to be written by the public sector. This is government waste at its best.

I'm neither republican or democrat but just to add, if my rinky dink app I was working on for the Dept. Of Commerce gets shown to the president when its in 'ALPHA' state, there is no way the most informed person in the world didnt know that the site was going to fail from the get-go.
Will you have functionality for submitting / approving content? (YouTube videos etc)
I don't disagree with your sentiment at all, but have you thought about the "curb" being the primary factor behind the increased creativity? Is leaning back and puffing from a vape as effective for you?
Whats the point of this entry ?
Are we surprised that hardware fails ?
I am the complete opposite of an EC2 fanboy but every time they decided to shut down a machine they had the good taste of sending an email to us.
> Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project.

Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable at how rare they are. There are lots of GUI tools, or tools specific to a particular database system, but few that accept plain text as input. (There is erwiz, but it's unmaintained and a giant mess of Java code.)

> I'm working on something similar myself, an entity annotation and relationship builder app to annotate biomedical texts: http://mark2cure.org/

That is so awesome. I can't wait to see it in action! I've added my email to your list. :-)
Boldshare matches your feature list exactly. Client code will be open source. Beta in November:
https://boldshare.com/
Reminds me of http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/379100-there-s-no-point-in-a...
IE6, really? Why not Mosaic? Those who use IE6 these days can be ignored. Put a big red banner on the site pointing them to normal browsers if you detect IE6 anywhere.
> but doesn't inhaling nicotine cause many health problems on its own?

Nicotine on its own causes very little harm.

(A word of advice, though, if you decide to read up on this topic: it is extremely common in the research literature to lazily conflate tobacco with nicotine. You will routinely find abstracts which say something like 'we sampled smokers...' and then in the conclusion write '...we conclude that nicotine damages cognitive performance', as if tobacco was nothing but solidified nicotine. When you find something negative about nicotine, you need to check that tobacco is not driving the results.)
Indeed, as you note there are a bunch of fixes possible for slow back ends. A lot of the data is sufficiently static (e.g. from the IRS, what are the numbers for your 2012 taxes, what's your withholding to date for 2013?) that occasional exports to a database inside of "healthcare.gov" might do the trick. In many cases setting up a fake server mimicking the legacy one with such a static data store behind it could get around some of the "can't change the architecture in 7 weeks" issue. Maybe (that deadline is for those who are learning Obamacare outlawed their old policies, 16 million by one estimate for that subset).

We've also read that Experian is doing both identification and income verification, so they're probably not as hopeless.

The management was, as just about everyone is noting, fatally flawed. However it's been reported to have changed, to QSSI becoming the integrator, and the fix-it czar is saying the right reality recognizing things, like the top item on his punch list is to stop sending garbage to the insurers. Presumably the managers still in the chain of command at the White House on down have been convinced to stop making requirements changes....

We'll see.
As someone who formally got involved in the Gopher Revival, I was going to type up a big response to why Gopher sucks and should continue to be ignored. I decided to leave it for a blog post. See here:

http://www.wumpus-cave.net/2013/10/27/why-gopher-is-awful/
I don't missed it, I ignored it on purpose, for two reasons:

One, I did not understood it well enough to try to explain even the basics.

Two, I could not find a binary or source I could compile easily to make a example image.

Also you can put a "three" there: it is not widely used, while even the recent xBR has a couple of plug-in implementations on emulators for example (and has binaries)

EDIT: Lack of binary is also why I did not made sections for 2xSal, SuperEagle and so on... If people help me finding that kind of stuff or creating the needed images, I will gladly update the article.
C-- is intended for higher-level languages than LLVM. E.g. the latter still doesn't have a modern infrastructure interfacing with garbage collectors. Also, C-- is a lot easier to read in textual form than LLVM IR. Finally, the use of C++ and templates makes the code size of LLVM absolutely enormous (20MB binary).

That said, so much work goes into LLVM supporting new platforms, optimizations, etc, that it's probably easier to hack around LLVM's limitations than use C--, etc.
I never got the complaints of secret interpretations. I have a secret interpretation of what someone is saying when they're trying to BS me about something. This is basically saying "The administration sees this one way, but they're not telling us how they see it"

It's not a secret law. It's just how they interpret it (and even without the secrecy, would it be that surprising to find they consider their actions constitutional?)
EncFS in reverse mode with rdiff-backup would pretty much be ideal, but EncFS currently has two bugs that prevent this from working.

Does anyone know what this refers to? It sounds like a winning combination to me.
E-Cigarettes are going to save millions of lives in the coming years. They're harmless, and, if you get a brand that feels like the real thing, easy to transition to. I hope the tobacco industry takes a huge financial hit from the sale of these things because they literally prevent people from dying.

That being said, when I switched to e-cigarettes, it was very easy to switch back to regular cigarettes. That "narrow bridge of familiarity" was easy to cross back over, especially when I ran out of vapor cartridges. Ultimately for me to quit it took stopping cigarettes cold-turkey. Nicotine gum and a transition to regular gum helped a lot. It's been one of the hardest but most rewarding things I've ever done in my life.
If I smoked, it certainly wouldn't be something I would show off to others readily or be proud of in any way, I'd see it as an embarrassment. Even if these are safer, I still consider them to be anti-social.

I'm not a smoker, but I can't see why e-cigarettes should be anything more than a way to help stop smoking.
Don't piss off the Guild. Their letters are illegible, so you never really know what they are threatening you with until it is too late.
Transmission is fantastic but it's web ui lacks the ability to read trackers from magnet links. That's my only real complaint about it.
> liability to potential jail time

Are there any examples of this? It seems to me the SEC didn't make much use of all the archived emails (guaranteed to be in place due to SOX) during the 2008 banking crisis which makes me generally distrustful of these formal written rules.
Two things, one doesn't store the encfs.xml file in the reversed directory, so it doesn't get backed up automatically, and the other, more important (for my use case) is that there's no way to make multiple directories appear under one (symlinks are exposed as encrypted/broken symlinks). This means that you can only back up one dir per repo, which I found too constraining.
"Finally Start Using"??

If you're waiting for all browsers to implement these CSS3 features correctly, you'll end up never using them.

For example, CSS animations have been around for at least 2 years. Only Firefox and Webkit browsers supported them and you had to rely on vendor-prefixed properties, but animations were exciting enough for me to start experimenting with them as soon as I could.

There is permanent rant towards "fancy" CSS3 features that haven't reached a "W3C standard" status yet. But a website experience doesn't need to be visually consistent across browsers. If you're using a plain hexadecimal color code as a replacement for rgba, it's ok. If your intro is animated in Chrome but not IE, it's ok too. If your last paragraph has a margin that the pseudo-element :last-child should have canceled, it's ok as well.

Front-End developers have waited more than a decade for CSS improvements. You can't wait for a unified browser environment to start implementing them. I'm surprised by this article's tone, as if today, suddenly, everything changed. No way: browser support is a permanent process. Don't wait for that perfect day because it will never come. Just start having fun with CSS3 while providing a decent experience for IE (the main culprit).
Very interesting, I'll be watching that. Thanks!
Howto: Setup pressureNETAnalysis for local development
Show HN: File Party - For those with nothing to hide
I am emphatically not trying to say that.
Another take on portable assembly languages is Dan Bernstein's qhasm: http://cr.yp.to/qhasm.html

An overview here: http://cr.yp.to/qhasm/20050129-portable.txt
Why you can’t play 1080p or 480p YouTube HTML5 videos in Firefox anymore
Since when have they even been good enough at this to critique?

They're going to continue to suck royally, as royalty does.
>That's despite both your instinct and my own that "of course any smoke causes cancer of the lungs". No, cannabis smoke has not been demonstrated to do that.

http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/31/2/280.full

The risk of lung cancer increased 8% (95% confidence interval (CI) 2–15) for each joint-yr of cannabis smoking, after adjustment for confounding variables including cigarette smoking, and 7% (95% CI 5–9) for each pack-yr of cigarette smoking, after adjustment for confounding variables including cannabis smoking. The highest tertile of cannabis use was associated with an increased risk of lung cancer (relative risk 5.7 (95% CI 1.5–21.6)), after adjustment for confounding variables including cigarette smoking.

In conclusion, the results of the present study indicate that long-term cannabis use increases the risk of lung cancer in young adults.
Did not think of letting the users submit something.
Probably not, since I want this app opened and getting to some content as fast as possible. I know it has nothing to do with what you asked, but it seems too complicated for this kind of app.
If the app is liked and being used, content will be added.
I looked at some of the code and there are too many malloc()s for my liking. When I write in C++ (yes I know this is C) I always avoid malloc()s and new's. Eg let the language free the variable by going out of scope, use STL. I would like to see a library that follows those practices.
Are E-Bicycle Sales Reducing Car Sales In Europe?
You also can just use 1password to save the field that was filled in by lastpass, then log into your 1password and copy saved password.
> That's the result if you work for a bad team, sure.

It's the result if you work for wage labor, period. You're not "sharing the profits", you're paid a negotiated rent for your time which is not dependent on the profits. Even if you get some kind of equity or profit-sharing component of your compensation, the basic relationship is still of time rent.

> And I know first-hand that I'm not alone in having a good working environment with an employer.

Having a good working environment with an employer doesn't change the basic relationship from "selling time to an employer" to "sharing the income", in the same way that having a good working environment with a slave master -- which undoubtedly there were slaves who did -- doesn't change the relationship from "being someone else's chattel" to "selling time to an employer".

And if you have to tell yourself a comforting lie about what the basic nature of the relationship is to be happy about it, I think that may be a signal that the "good working environment" isn't so good.

If you are really happy with what the relationship is, that you wouldn't need to misrepresent it.
Definitely hit them on airplanes before with no problems.

If you were flying on an airline based in the United States, you violated their rules.

http://www.businessinsider.com/you-cant-smoke-e-cigarettes-i...

Beyond that, what gives you the right to put other people's health at risk? You have either judged them safe or decided you don't care about the risks. You can't make that decision for other people and you're not in a position to know what genetic or other disorders that someone might have that make them more susceptible to any kind of tobacco (ex: http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/alpha-1-antitrypsin-deficie...). How is this any different from me walking onto a plane with a clump of asbestos fibers and waving it over your head on the plane?
The thorium-powered car: Eight grams, one million miles
> Actually the selling time version is not really accurate either.

No, that's exactly what wage labor is by definition.
Regardless of how hard it was to make a functioning "data hub", they should have, at the very least, built a functioning registration system that is independent of all other fail points. This way, at the very least, they could have the names and contact information of everyone who wanted to fill out a form. Then they can go back and process the forms at a later date.
It was Sphinx C-- http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/tbone/c--/
A reality, often unacknowledged, is that mathematicians proceed largely on the basis of elegance. As Achilles and the Tortoise shows us, basic logic has built-in points of infinite regress, and the only way past them is to agree that the logic is sound.

Mathematicians who must choose between two sets of axioms will pick the one they consider most elegant, every time. The fact that this is ultimately an aesthetic judgement is clear: Erdős Pál, arguably the finest mathematician of the latter half of the 20th century, described proofs that tickled his sensibilities as "Pages from the Book".
"unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side"

The newly appointed fix-it czar, Jeffrey Zients, definitely sounds competent from his current remarks (see elsewhere in this topic his top priority), hopefully he can muster enough passion for the Maximum Effort required.

And, yeah, I've done some work for the public sector and it's that bad, sometimes worse. In the last case, an entity had Lockheed make an at least half-bespoke (custom) system, which worked pretty well. Then put out continued maintenance on bid, Lockheed didn't win that contract, and years later, as the DEC Alpha systems were nearing their end of life (the line was of course killed by Compaq/HP), it was discovered the sources Lockheed left behind wouldn't compile into the binaries used (e.g. they used SCCS (!!!) ... until a few months before launch). First by a guy they had to let go after a month or so because of budget screwups, then by me over a year later. But of course the plan and budget was predicated on a doesn't match reality estimate of work to be done by another contractor long before.

Needless to say the clients didn't understand the difference between source and binary code, or how they'd painted themselves into a really difficult to exit corner.

As for failing, CMS in its role as integrator did do integration tests 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch. They of course failed hard.
Hyperbole aside ("... an act which would border on criminal negligence if it was done in the private sector and someone was harmed ..." - what does that even mean? So all of us who have shipped buggy software for our customers are borderline criminals?) - this doesn't surprise me in having dealt with the VA. They have legacy upon legacy upon legacy, with all sorts of fun limitations like not being able to have a "\t" in your content because that'll screw up their backend which relies on tab-delimited data. Health care in the US is playing catch up technology wise to almost every industry. And not for lack of technology, but for lack of political will power.

My favourite example of this was trying to deploy an app within the VA that was written in Django. I was told "Python is not on the list of acceptable languages." So we came back to them and said, "Good news everyone, we ported it to Java." Of course, it was just Jython, but that's the sort of stuff you encounter.

Multiply this by the complexity involved in trying to herd all these cats into one backend like healthcare.gov and it was doomed to fail.
"The front end technology is not the problem here."

Let me fix that statement: "The front end technology is not the worst problem here."

Looking at the resources loaded for the sign-in page, I counted 58 separate Javascript files. Including one that implied by name was minified, which on inspection clearly was not. I didn't bother counting CSS or image resources. I returned to the page two days ago, which indicated it is down for scheduled maintenance. It remains in this state.

CGI obviously borked this project. The government deserves its own special classification of criticism, but poor planning, change management, etc. from the government is no excuse for CGI not building an architecturally sound web site.

The contract was $350 million? Good grief, they overpaid. Nonetheless, if we could go back in time AND assuming we needed to spend this budget, here's what I would have done:

1. We make investments of $15 million in 20 different startups, and tell them to implement the initial phase -- let's say we call it the "minimum viable product" or MVP. Each startup has the same deadline for delivery.

2. On the delivery date, all companies meet with us to review their MVP. We call it a "demo day" and view all 20 demos.

3. Through some set of criteria, we create a short list of five companies from the 20 demos. Those five companies receive an additional $5 million investment, and another delivery deadline.

4. The companies iterate on their MVP and come back for another demo, this time with a deep dive.

5. We pick a winner from those five. The winner gets another $25 million investment and is responsible for any additional work to be completed.

TechStars for government, essentially.
"case and cooling"

This points the way to an interesting new metric which would be something like average decisions per kilogram per kilowatt input power. To one sig fig (if that much) human bodies at a constant weight around 100 Kg run a constant power level "around" 100 watts and we seem capable of making a decision per second or so. So 3600 decisions at 100 Kg per 0.1 KW gives you about 4 billion, so our figure of merit is about four billion decision kilos per kilowatt/hr. How much energy it takes to control your hands and how capable your hands are and how agile your hands are. Octopi have more "hands" to control and they're lighter so they can accomplish less.

There's probably a very human tendency to fudge the equations to put us on top. Although given the peculiarity of random evolution there's no reason ants or dolphins couldn't numerically beat us, although selection pressures in their environments means they've never as a group accomplished even a tiny fraction we have. This "slacker coefficient" cannot be underestimated, I'm quite sure a theoretical SQ=50 entity from a slacker civilization could make the human idiocracy movie look brilliant. In that way I think the SQ impedance barrier in the article is much more impermeable than the article implies. Idiotic celebrity news in SQ=50 land is probably about the same as idiotic celebrity news in SQ=10 land, although the pace and individual stories might vary. Humans have entire subcultures which seem to exist solely to drag down the rest of civilization, and that's probably not unique to humanity. The tired analogy of crabs dragging any crab back into the pot that tries to escape come to mind. Some factor of civilization signal to noise ratio is required, not just brute signal level.