skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, death happens in large numbers every day. Why mourn these 10,000 deaths any more than any other deaths from around the world? We probably shouldn't. Because death is natural and unavoidable, it isn't necessarily tragic by itself.

Your community, your system, is able to absorb the deaths which happen within that community. People in your community die from old age, traffic accidents, disease and many other ways, but the wheels of the system keep spinning. In the case of the Philippines, the recent tsunamis and other large scale natural disasters, entire communities were obliterated. These systems have completely broken down. In Leyte, 10,000 people died, but the system which supported tens of thousands more living is broken.

The local economy for many of these people has been pushed back to the stone ages. The rich still have their bank accounts intact. They can jump on a plane and start over somewhere else. The poor don't have this option. There is no functioning system there to support the people who have to stay there. They have nothing to eat, no money for medicine, nowhere to live and they are completely dependent on a government with relatively little resources. Restoring this system will take months if not years. Many people will never fully recover. Future generations will get held back from what they could have been. There's not much of a safety net here.

ETA: And sure, the ripples of this shock won't go much further than the borders of the Philippines. But I think Fukishima might be a good counter to your "natural disasters as a side show" argument. We don't yet know how much this disaster will affect us. It could do serious long term damage to the ecosystem of the Pacific ocean. Could the world see mass cancer from eating fish in the Pacific ocean?
Truisms that assume the very thing under debate are generally considered not useful in moving a discussion forward.
They've deployed ships.

I took part in the 2008 humanitarian relief det when Typhoon Fengshen hit land, and our response time was about seven hours from the time we got the phone call and had planes and helos on the ground delivering supplies and providing medical care.

Those response times are largely based on how quickly we can get supplies from USAID, and receive an actual request for assistance.
Probably around 50 EUR last time I was there, at a decent 3* all inclusive. In Portugal I was paying 60EUR a night half board at a five star.
I may be mistaken, but I think the entire point of this recent change was to force people to use their real names and faces rather than commenting anonymously (due to the fact that youtube comment sections are typically the worst things ever), and if so it seems like google has actually achieved it's goal.

Now, whether it's a good decision to make it difficult/impossible to anonymously comment on youtube videos is an entirely separate discussion that I'm not taking a side on (yet), but I'd be interested in seeing a discussion about that here.
80 liters is only around 20 gallons. A fire truck would certainly have that amount on hand. If you heat an element enough, water that hits it will flash to steam. I think you could make a heating element robust enough to accomplish this but still light enough to fit on a truck. Now, the wisdom of suddenly producing 2700 cubic feet of superheated steam in a residential area -- maybe it's a bit too cumbersome and potentially dangerous to be worth it.
> I do want to point out that Google+, with old features or new, has never violated the ACLs that users set. If you set something to private, it remains private forever.

I know that, which is why I used the example of Facebook.

However, Google+ does make it incredibly easy to leak information that I would otherwise consider private accidentally.

For example, I can't use Google+ with my primary email address, as it's a Google+ account. However, because it's linked with my Gmail account (which does have a Google+ account), some people who have added me on Google+ have been able to figure out my Gmail address (which I haven't used for email purposes in years[0]).

I can imagine all the technical reasons for this, but that doesn't change the fact that it feels a bit wrong for a service to hand out my old email address (which I never give out anymore) to people I've met recently and who have added me on Google+ using my current email address.

Imagine your Google+ email address is something that you can't change, but don't really want people to see anymore - this isn't uncommon; it appeared in a New York Times piece just yesterday, in the context of college admissions[1]. Thankfully, my personal email address is much more tame than that student's, but that still doesn't mean I want anybody to know or use it nowadays.

Furthermore, it's incredibly easy to sign up "accidentally" to use Youtube with Google+ and your "real name" instead of continuing to use your pseudonym.

As for the distinction you point out - I know the difference, and you know the difference. But most users don't.

> To do otherwise would be corporate suicide.

Apparently not completely - Facebook's gotten away with it for years![2]

[0] This may have been fixed, since it was a while ago that I last noticed, but it was still the case for quite a while.

I would have to go through my inbox to remember the details of why this happened - I remember debugging and tracking it down. But the fact that it took that much effort to discover why my new acquaintances suddenly knew my old (personal) email address, and that I can't remember anymore, speaks volumes as to how easy it would be for a less savvy user to accidentally leak information that they wanted to keep private.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-g...

[2] http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ - this graph doesn't distinguish clearly between those which were automatically retroactive and those which weren't, but that's a topic that's been well-reported and is easy to search for.
It's one of the issues, yes. But I wanted to be more general on purpose.
To most people who use MapReduce in a cluster: You probably don't need to use MapReduce. You are either vastly overstating the amount of data you are dealing with and the complexity of what you need to do with that data, or you are vastly understating the amount of computational power a single node actually has. Either way, see how fast you can do it on a single machine before trying to run it on a cluster.
Huh. This is a really good point that I hadn't thought of before (maybe it's a really common argument I just hadn't come across).

Because, come to think of it, the moment my parents joined Facebook, I immediately had to start regulating what I posted too. And I'm in my middle 30s!
Microsoft's Hybrid Cloud Strategy and Recent Research
The main feature is that Bitcoin facilitates cross-border funds transfers. It is particularly difficult in the US to receive funds from overseas and particularly cumbersome to send funds. Credit cards must be used with high fees and the necessity of merchant accounts. Foreign banks are usually a no-go for U.S. citizens. Bitcoin avoids all these issues.
The other big problem with "political correctness" is it creates a society of boring wimps.

Says the Internet tough guy posting from an anonymous throwaway account. Please.
> Do we look at Abraham Lincoln was an "asshole" because he referred to "Negroes?" Or do we accept that he was a creature of the 1860s, and remember him for freeing these very "Negroes" who were held in slavery?

Abraham Lincoln was most certainly racist and did view black people inferior to whites, there are multiple instances of documented statements where Lincoln said as much. Also, we do not attribute the end of slavery to Lincoln alone.
They should make a C.O.R.A. plugin for the Tesla S onboard electronics. Heck, they should make a K.I.T.T.!
Wind is a local potential in this example. An intelligent wildfire would be one whose sparks can go against the wind, because it perceives more fuel in that direction.

Also: my definition is meant to include fish and birds, even plants, as intelligent.
And that documentation would be (the manufacturing and tax base info would be interesting)? I see it quoted a lot, but I don't see much in the way of independent studies (and I am disinclined to believe union studies as much as I won't believe Walmart internal reports).
For doing useful things on Android? I don't think it can be reasonably disputed that Python is worse than Java.
70 hours of TED Talks in 5 minutes
Philippine Disaster Recovery Foundation is accepting donations via http://brickbybrick.pdrf.org/yolanda here's the rest of the info on how you can help: http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/disasters/43300-relief...
Poll: Does the name of a startup matter?
Not really, as long as you make something people want
I'm a full-time traveler these days and my wife and I have probably met around 10 couples (actual offline meetings) via Instagram.

Facebook is more for people you know. (Filled with babies and relatives.. etc) where Instagram has been great for finding like minded folks and following along with their lives in short snippets.

As for how to communicate, Instagram has user tagging. Even in others comments. Basically the same as sms messaging.

( My wife has more followers than me and I need to catch up: http://instagram.com/wandering_tim )
I'm sure they recognize that you clicked all those links in order with very little time between them and then spent several minutes off-site.

I'm very, very sure Google recognises different types of users and how they browse Google
But I know for a fact that "retarded" and "retardation" have not been replaced; they're being phased out for political reasons, but the terms still have a specific meaning and are definitely still in use clinically.

What I doubt (lacking real evidence) is that the person-noun form "retard" -- think about phrases like "discharging a retard", "managing retard behavior", "a unit full of retards" -- was ever in widespread clinical use, as "idiot" or "imbecile" were in the past. The move to stop using those terms was not about just changing the word, but also recognizing mental disorders as something distinct from a person's inherent nature.

(Again, similar to the move from "negroes" to "black people". Either can be used pejoratively, but the former is arguably intrinsically offensive.)
I hope the general populace is against it, but there are so many cases of worse stuff that I have come to doubt it. It seems like if you look good on TV the populace gives you a rather large pass.
If I would have seen this one or two hours ago it could have spared me hate on irc://irc.freenode.net/bash
The only explanation I've seen that makes any sense to me, is that their ad systems are still immature. They haven't figured out how to properly monetize their own platforms fully just yet, much less the rest of the Web.

Which also helps to explain why they get rated so poorly on return-on-investment when it comes to ad spending.

I'd say the last year has been a substantial break-through for Facebook in terms of pushing their ad systems forward and getting wide adoption of it (including finally getting mobile to spit dollars). Maybe a couple more years of developing their advertising platform and they'll get there.

I also think there's a general underestimation of how good the Google ad system is overall, and how hard it is to compete with.
A few years ago, a friend was telling me about a post-colonial African country (I think the Republic of Congo). He mentioned something along the lines of how after they gained independence, the majority of their government was African American.

I almost imminently said something like "thats horrible", thinking that he was implying that America managed to set up our own colonial rule under the guise of independence.
The problem isn't the intent of the speaker. The problem is that the words themselves carry an intrinsic charge; they create an outsized potential for negative thoughts and impressions in the listener regardless of intent. There are neutral, more purely descriptive words that equally easy to use in conversations, and so it makes sense to push the negatively charged terms out.

Fashions will change, but Paul Graham is accidentally creating the impression that fashion is purely random. It is not. The word "retard" as a reference for the mentally handicapped is not going to come back into fashion; it has been obsoleted by a better understanding of both the processes of mental and developmental disability and of the role of the mentally handicapped in society.

Which is all for the better, because the verb "retard" is useful, and it would be great if fashion made it less clumsy sounding in normal speech.
I find it remarkable that this can happen!
It's an interesting idea. My first reaction is to wonder how it would work with the more complicated tests you typically encounter in real-world JavaScript.

For example, see [1]. This is a very simple example of testing a JavaScript drawing app. (It's from my Let's Code JavaScript screencast [2].) In this example, you'll see several things that don't seem like they'd work well with inline tests:

1. Common setup and teardown. The tests work against the browser DOM, so there's `beforeEach()` and `afterEach()` functions that set up and clean up the DOM. The `afterEach()` function is particularly valuable because it runs even when exceptions occur. How would common setup and teardown be handled with inline tests?

2. Multiple tests per function. There's a fairly loose relationship between the tests and the functions in the production code. Instead, the tests speak to the behavior of the drawing app. If these tests were inline, how would you prevent the test code from overwhelming the production code?

3. Helper functions. The tests have a lot of helper functions to do things like simulate events and parse the DOM. This particular example is worse than most, but helper functions are still fairly common when testing. How do you distinguish test-specific helper functions from production functions when you're using inline tests?

Overall, I wonder if inline tests would make this code harder to read, not easier.

I'm intrigued by the idea, so this isn't meant to be a middlebrow dismissal, but more an invitation to explore real-world problems. Feel free to use my example code at a starting point! I'd love to see a clever transformation of this code to inline testing.

[1] The example code: https://github.com/jamesshore/ll11_front_end_unit_testing/bl...

[2] Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, my screencast: http://www.letscodejavascript.com
The site is unreadable on Chrome on Windows 8.

http://i.imgur.com/Si2DqQ1.png
Have you checked out Three's 321 PAYG plan? If you're not using enough to justify a rolling plan, it looks like the best bet - 3p/min, 2p/text, 1p/mb. http://www.three.co.uk/Store/Pay_As_You_Go_Price_Plans
What about, say... showing 5 sample tips on the landing page?
Let an existing user register as a new user, send an activation email and update the account with the new info (if changed) if they re-activate.
What's really funny is that one of the strongest indicators used to prioritize stories is who you comment on. I've successfully moved people over from being buried to always showing up in my feed just by commenting on their stories regularly. So him not seeing the story from his friend about her mother probably indicates he hasn't been commenting much on her stuff or her his.
No, the ripple protocol and ledger are decentralized. The aspects which are more "centralized" than bitcoin are the XRP distribution scheme (with OpenCoin/Ripple Labs initially owning 100%), and that ledger consensus relies on a hardcoded list of validator nodes (unique node list aka UNL), rather than proof-of-work.

Redemption of IOUs is still a centralized process - you can only redeem IOUs through the issuing gateway. So the difference on ripple is that the order book for trading the IOU is decentralized, and the IOUs can freely circulate. For example, you can't send mtgox USD to another mtgox user (this used to be possible, but mtgox removed their "mtgox codes" feature). But you can do this on bitstamp, because bitstamp is a ripple gateway that issues USD IOUs.
What about the weather? Seems like a wonderful place in Summer, but frighteningly cold in Winter. (Both my wife and I are from warm places.)
So assuming the data is one one machine (as I asked), why would an index not solve this problem? And why does Map Reduce solve it?
Maybe I misunderstood what you were asking.

Note both MapReduce and NoSQL are overhyped solutions. They are useful in a handful of cases, but often applied to problems they are not as good.
I agree with the sentiments, but most Google products worked better when they were done by logical programmers. They've all got much less usable since the fancy UI designers came in and screwed them up.
If you've seen what FB comments does on news sites - then you know that using real names doesn't really guarantee improved quality.
I think you originally intended explicit type notation.
I recently discovered actual type doesn't matter that much, and the point is having an interface/protocol which enable compiler validation and tooling support. I learned this truth from Objective-C and Go. That's why I told actual typing system itself not important. Objective-C protocol is nothing about type, but defines nice interface for tooling support. Go interface defines set of promises, so actual object structure doesn't matter.

Furthermore, recent languages offer automatic type inference - Haskell, Go, C++11. They force to retain type information, but also permit to elide them where accurately inference-able/deduce-able.

This is completely different with not forcing type notion such as Python, Ruby, Lua, JS. In these languages, it is fundamentally impossible to track complete type information. But in explicitly type notated languages, it's possible to track complete type informations even they're elided.

I think those type-(notation)-less languages are making some efforts to offer type informations by adding annotations. But I don't think that's really meaningful, because that's not enforced, and community doesn't care much.
Walmart's practice of locating stores just outside of municipalities to avoid local sales tax affects sales tax revenues.
I'm leery enough about commenting on different sites that use Disqus as it is.
This is getting really bad. You used to have to have multiple google accounts due to various things (having multiple youtube or gmail accounts) & now they want to make you have to only have on account & there is no good way to merge them.

I can't believe this is their final solution.
That's not a very helpful context. Lots of people die every year from relatively low-risk activities they choose to participate in, and those deaths don't typically involve the destruction of the entire community support structure in the process.

In other words, the deaths in the Philippines are bad enough, but there are millions of people still alive and put into great distress as we speak. And it's not as if it's their fault (which was the argument brought up for Katrina as well...), it's not as if they can be safe if they move to Japan (as if there were either the funding or political will for that).
In the most polite way, I must ask: what are you hoping to accomplish with this poll? Of course a name "matters:" you can't call your flower company "moldy cheese flowers."
Did you try a columnar database first? Vertica, InfinyDB, MonetDB... There are many.
I experience that not using Facebook has positive filter effects. People that do not understand that I do not like FB are not my friends. Facebook is therefore a good knife to cut me off drivel.
I recently scored a copy of Maxwell's Demon, a book containing a collection of (among others) Landauer and Bennett's papers. As I was skimming them, I couldn't help but think that if there is a correspondence between heat and information erasure, can that be used to move "heat" in a fundamentally different way?

The idea would be you do some computation at point A, the related information erasure at point B, and the heat associated with it get "transported" faster than it would be by moving pipes around. The hope is that sending the bits along something like an optical network would be faster than laminar fluid flow.

I'm sure HN's more knowledgeable folks will tell me exactly where I'm wrong, but it seemed like an intriguing possibility.
Where is the proof that "real names = better quality." That argument gets paraded everywhere but I've yet to see an actual study or proof of this.
Most of the NoSQL cases I have heard seem to be that they could be done at least as well in SQL.

I have asked a lot of questions on this topic, and no one has yet convinced me (please do if you have a legitimate NoSQL case).
If we are looking at the future from this point on, then in a nutshell the precise answer to this question would be NO. The only popular Java use I see is on Android by google, that is going to change sooner or later.
The 'deeper why' of open source
Some big issues with that font (Chrome on Windows 7)
http://i.imgur.com/a2vkcqh.png
There is something that I don't see mentioned too often in articles: Teenagers don't just leave Facebook entirely, they just use it differently. So they'll check Facebook from time to time and possibly have an account, but do more and more interactions with messenger apps with their friends. So I see high school students using Facebook one way, because parents and grandparents are on it, and then using apps for the primary communication with friends. In that sense they aren't leaving as much as they are changing how they use it.

>When people set up events and get-togethers on Facebook, West and her boyfriend tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because...

This article actually mentions it. That's exactly what I've seen happen. Facebook is still used, but it is used differently.
Space is a terrible heat transfer fluid.
Ironically, that really did happen to an African country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americo-Liberian
Bitcoin has always had that...
If Guido Van Rossum can't convince his own coworkers to support Python in their own platform who else can do it?

Meanwhile, Lua is not doing bad in both Android and iOS.
It's funny to see this on HN, because I currently have a copy of one of Dr. Poggio's papers in front of me. I've got to say, from what I've read so far I've gotten more excited by his group's approach than any other's I've seen. If you are mathematically inclined and interested in AI, I highly recommend reading through some of his group's papers, which are available on their site[1]. For those of you commenting that we don't have any theory on how the brain does its magic, this new initiative should excite you because this group is actually approaching the problem from a far more rigorous theoretical viewpoint than before. Specifically, their theory of neurons storing both sample images and common transformations on them fits rather elegantly with what we know about the brain, and seems like a promising route to matching humans' ability to "learn" a new object from just one instance of it.

[1]: http://cbcl.mit.edu/publications/index-pubs.html
Among others(there are many contract implementations for js on github) this one is pretty average, not modern enough, not compatible with code which uses promises. Such implementation should go beyond direct arguments and result value of function call.
Wine and many other alcoholic drinks don't go well with salty food. Clearly it just has to do with the flavor of beer specifically.
If you're using gmail, just use the "filter messages like this" feature to make messages from the given address skip the inbox or be deleted on arrival.

So there's no reason to ever have to deal with the unsubscribe links in emails. It puzzles me that people that people who use gmail still complain about this stuff. Do people not know about this feature?