skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you misinterpreted that section. It's a section all kickstarter campaigns have. Eg video game campaigns don't talk about the dangers of playing video games, they talk about the risks of the not shipping..
Makes for a nice twist on the recurring meme "what space could the world's population fit in?"
I see your point, but this sort of work would be coming more from the makers of stuxnet than the makers of health insurance websites...
From both sides, what we're really dealing with is scarcity. We need more health care than we can provide. In this situation, no matter what mechanism we use to allocate it, we're going to end up with rationing either by government fiat or brutal market forces. There are two things we've got to get a handle on.

1) It doesn't matter how we allocate it, there are going to be losers. The moral thing to do would seem to be to diffuse the loss onto the greatest number of people, not let it break the unlucky randomly: "we're all in this together". Sidebar: Anyone who says that they can provide healthcare for all is lying.

2) We're actually ridiculously bad at providing healthcare. We spend most of our time (and political might) trying to find some sucker class to pay for it without trying to take the more rational step of trying to make it cheaper. This is because the latter is freaking hard.

The only thing that will finally put this thing to bed is to figure out a way to care for ourselves that is within our means and then agree on a political system that will distribute it (if not fairly) evenly. Hard?

"We choose to ... do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
St microelectronics is a firm who provides radio chipsets for apparently 80% of all phones out there
> An oversized hosts file can have a negative impact on DNS and overall network responsiveness

how many hosts entries would you say it is before the negative impact is significant? 20? 100?
Mercury Azides. I'll Get Right On Those For You
That's not going to solve overpopulation problems here, because it would be cheaper to feed someone for life (ie it would require less energy) than it would be to send that person outside of Earth's gravitational field.
This is fantastic! Such a good idea, and a very clever way to launch it. As I was browsing through the videos (very intuitive interface), I was wondering why I hadn't heard of this "giveit100" site before. Hit me midway through that these were videos of you developing the site I was looking at, and by then I was already on board.

A few things:

* There were details in some of the videos that I wish I could've full-screened to see, but I don't know of a good way to do that from a UX perspective. Keeping video transition delay to a minimum I think would be key.

* This method of auto-playing videos onmouseover is brilliant. Good job Finbarr.

* I think at its core, this is a video Seinfeld calendar. I want to feel some kind of social pressure for skipping a day.

Again, great job, and congrats on the launch! It looks like you had an excellent time making it.
The big ball of mud architecture is quite popular in the business world.
I get where you are coming from.

It's only in the last year that I've actually realized that I have no sense of smell. I didn't even know such a thing existed.

I've always noticed that something was off and smelling a flower, or coffee, etc. didn't hold any meaning to me.

Now I know that its due to my practically non-existent sense of smell. I don't know when this happened but I was either born with it or it occurred at an early age.

It's tough to feel you are missing something when you've never experienced it.

I do know its much much harder for people that have had some kind of nose issue and lose their sense of smell.

Curiously, I do tend to really enjoy food.
“After knocking on his door, FBI special agents witnessed Mr.
Levison leave the rear of his apartment, get in his car, and drive away.”

Maybe his car was parked out rear?

Maybe he needed milk?

Maybe the local convenience store wasn't within walking distance?

I'm just saying that we needn't jump to any hasty conclusions. This does look mighty suspicious though.

Seriously though. Ladar Levison acted contra to his own best interests and in alignment with _all_ of our best interests in thwarting the FBI's attempts at quickly locating and apprehending Edward Snowden. Whatever we may think about Dark Circle it is clear that his heart is in the right place. I wouldn't have the ability and guts to do what he has done and I praise him for it. Yes, he could have designed his previous system better, seems like he's going to try harder next time. We should help.
And worse pay for people who can't get certified for some reason.
>the faults of government can tend to take root in any power structure of any significance

Absolutely.

>cynicism, while justifiable and oftentimes necessary, can itself be a blinder

I agree with this as well, and think that the proper course of action for the individual citizen is to uphold his civic duty and actively dissent, rather than merely resorting to cynicism.

Dissent can take many forms, but generally ought to provide a check to the tendency of government (or any kind of institution) to abuse its' power.
That's a really cool link. Easily one of the more interesting things I've read in a while, thanks!
Will it ninja-proof my home? Because we have a real ninja problem in my neighbourhood. Anything that can keep them under control gets my vote.

(Sorry. I'm just sick of this ninja-meme. I'm sure it's a wonderful product, and all that, but using ninjas to sell home-automation??)
> at some point developers start asking why they aren't just using Java in the first place...

Hasn't held anyone back on non-mobile systems, right?
So, here's the nasty undercurrent to all this, right?

Drone warfare (whether by land, sea, or air) is about using disposable machines to kill and injure human beings. Engineering dictates that we'll eventually optimize away the part of the control system that is slowest and most prone to failure: the people.

The discussion of "How can we keep people running the robots" is uninteresting, because the entire deck is stacked to guarantee that it will be rendered moot.

~

The real discussion--I posit--is somewhat darker and more chilling:

In order to field a drone army, you need capital. You need factories to build the devices, you need command and control infrastructure to deploy them, and you need bright minds to develop them. Drone warfare is difficult to conduct in any meaningful fashion as a third-world nation, or more importantly as a populace in rebellion.

To put it bluntly, the use of these engines of war is limited only to the rich kids, and there is no chance for appeal or mercy when you are identified as a target.

Think about that for a second.

The wealthy murderer who decides to unleash these does so without any skin in the game, without any chance of dealing with repercussions back home for lost sons and daughters, without any care whatsoever except for a line-item expense. Stubborn rebel holdout? Spin up more terminators the same way we spin up dynos to deal with spikes in load.

The teenage kid holding the rusted AK their parent just dropped, looking at the robot which just made them an orphan? No chance in hell that they'll be spared because they are obviously not a threat--they are a human wielding an automatic rifle, p = .975, execute.

~

This whole thing needs to become verboten, forbidden, the same way we nominally treat chemical and biological weapons.

If we support our .gov and .mil in the use of these weapons, we'll be doing everyone a disservice, and come the day we decide to rescind the support which backs those bastards, we'll find that they no longer need our support for they already have the drones and the capital to make their whims felt.
OP here. I'm currently on the keto diet; fat, in moderation, fat is definitely not unhealthy.

The problem is, McDonalds meals are not healthy, full stop:

Mcdonald's - Big Mac Meal With Fries and Coke With No Onions

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/mcdonalds-big-mac-...

1130 Calories, and 67 grams of sugar. Call me when McDonalds modifies their meals to consist primarily of protein/fat calories.
Pay gaps vary for S.F., N.Y., L.A. tech workers
It is not safe to say that. By many measures, including height, disease burden, and hours worked per week, paleolithic man was better off than his descendants until pretty recently.
I've done the opposite of your suggestions going on 10 years now and only ever gotten one virus.

AV used to kill performance, but if you have even a mid-range system nowadays its rarely very noticeable, especially if you have an SSD.
Edward Snowden is Almost Broke
Renault introduces DRM for cars
Seriously? "Nobody held a gun to their head" is your criterion? For guys and gals fresh out of high school?

Will you also tell me that employees can't sue for unpaid overtime, hazardous work environment, sexual harassment etc. because nobody held a gun and they could always quit? Such sheep, those common workers.
Not to bikeshed, but what about Postgres makes the big scalability story any different than the MySQL story, unless you're talking about a commercial distributed RDBMS built on top of Postgres like EnterpriseDB?

In terms of scalability in the small, many of the MySQL 5.6 replication features skew this comparison in MySQL's direction: multi-threaded (optionally row-based) replication, global transaction ids, and the like make it easier to improve availability, add read-slaves, and host multiple databases/shards on a single machine (replication afaik is no longer per-server, it is now per-database).

There's also been work on tuning innodb for SSDs (which is a near certain recommendation for your dataset -- it gives plenty of breathing room to forestall horizontal partitioning).

I'd also look very heavily into performance with large buffer caches, compression (great way to reduce IOPS and squeeze the most out of SSD or memory space), etc... I am curious to see if any of these were compared between MySQL and Postgres. As far as I understand, innodb's compression is somewhat more advanced than Postgres, but running either on ZFS is an even better bet for this.

On the other hand, Postgres has a better query optimizer, supports more complex data and relation formats, and so on. However, most of these features aren't going to be used at scale (I am presuming you're talking about OLTP workloads).

Honestly this is a bit of an unusual decision -- I'd probably start a project with Postgres and avoid using MySQL until later, but choosing Postgres out of scalability reasons seems a bit odd. I'm curious to know why!
Banning Killer Robots is a great. But I'm fairly certain they are built by Killer Humans. These are just a natural extension of a society that values warfare and hegemony over social justice and peace. Note the differences in robotics applications between countries per the number of wars they've recently engaged in.
We should help him. How we the HN community could? I'd love to hear ideas from all of you.
I come at it from the other end:

A strategic AI system commanding human troops is reasonable; the deployment of tactical AI (more honestly dumb targeting and fire-control weapons systems) is not.
For argument's sake let's say you are right, that it is not maximalist. That would imply there is a more extreme interpretation that would qualify as maximalist.

Can you describe what that interpretation might be? What is more extreme than saying without exception that the "right to copy belongs to the copyright owner, not the person who owns a copy."

Meanwhile, I'll just leave this right here: http://www.ripshark.com/
Good find with the meteor.com link! It covers several memory leaks; the last example is the one that is relevant.
In the case of a heavily annotated song, I agree that's a decent comparison.
I noticed XBMC listed, can I control it via gestures?
Because a million bucks in nerdy preorders without any marketing to speak of suggests that there's a large underserved market.
It is, in fact.

hash(pwd) -> attacker can build a rainbow table and password cracking becomes a table lookup. Required storage depends on the length of the hash value, and md5 is only 128 bits.

hash(salt|pwd) -> no rainbow table because of salt. The attacker can use a dictionary attack. Time depends on how fast she can compute the hash, and again md5 is pretty fast.

Solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching
Fun With Midgets
I also have this question. There are technical reasons that PostgreSQL is better than MySQL, especially when it comes to features, but none are mentioned here.

> From the development perspective Postgres was a necessity. Not a slam dunk but objectively a better tool for our use case.

In what way?

> And if we have countless reasons, all good, but they’re nuanced and technical and tricky to impart to a non-technical audience, where does that leave us?

HN would be interested in those reasons, I know I am.

> The vast majority of the company probably still doesn’t get why we went through this painful contortion at the expense of doing, well, a lot of other things.

Neither do I, since none are given.

Though I also understand that the point of the post was about trust. It's great that there is that trust within SparkFun, I would love such an environment.
I think you are reading too much into it. They never said that there would only ever be one PostgreSQL db with everything. As you point out there are advantages to separating certain functions into separate dbs, but for most businesses that go that route, it makes sense to use multiple instances of the same core tool.

Also, wanting to have a single authoritative view of inventory and order data is NOT a big ball of mud. Nor is a single big db with everything. The bid ball of mud generally starts with the link editor and developers who think that the only way to integrate functionality is to link it all into one big binary. For all we know they are planning to use RabbitMQ as their main integration tool, and build lots of small single purpose apps that work together like an orchestra.
The critical difference is this:

Eventually, you can expend your supply of Killer Humans if you get too bloodthirsty. You can wage war to the point where the populace is no longer willing to support you--even the elaborate decoupling of war from daily life the US has accomplished was still not enough to prevent the slow tide of opinion from shifting.

Killer Machines, however, can be replaced as they are expended, and the plans setting them in motion proceed without issue. The populace never stops it--as long as there is money to buy material to make the things, they can be used.

Thus, the use of drones in warfare is not self-limiting the same way that the use of humans is.
What three women learned launching on a college campus
What's the hold up?
This sounds counter-intuitive, but the best (from the technical angle) companies I worked at -- or know friends at -- are muddle the "internal enterprise tools" and "public facing applications" divide quite a bit, but (and here's a catch) when their perceived and actual primary area of competence is building applications that at least somewhat resemble the internal tools in question.

Sparkfun is in an odd place, they could call themselves a store, but then again so could Amazon -- it's not clear that selling technology is requisite to technology being a primary area of competence.
The largest firmware images shipped with Ubuntu in /lib/firmware are for network adapters:

ls -Sl /lib/firmware | head
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1845305 Apr 10 2013 phanfw.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1531932 Nov 8 2012 i6050-fw-usb-1.5.sbcf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1334532 Nov 8 2012 i2400m-fw-usb-1.5.sbcf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1251036 Nov 8 2012 i2400m-fw-usb-1.4.sbcf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 707392 Nov 8 2012 iwlwifi-2030-6.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 701228 Nov 8 2012 iwlwifi-135-6.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 695876 Nov 8 2012 iwlwifi-2000-6.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 689680 Nov 8 2012 iwlwifi-105-6.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 679436 Nov 8 2012 iwlwifi-6000g2b-6.ucode

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=phanfw (QLogic qlcnic)

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=i6050 (Intel WiMAX)

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=i2400m (Intel WiMAX)

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=iwlwifi (Intel WiFi)
When you have limited developer resources modular balls of mud (AKA big glob of Buckyballs - like the magnetic desk toy) with single login identity and shared well structured DB are far better and easier to maintain than a half dozen+ separate applications with differing architectural choices, languages, and abilities to integrate with each other.

You do not know hell if you've never encountered a medium sized organization without much in house tech talent who've somehow ended up with 5 different application with database contents and business functionality overlap and completely different architectures and languages with no ability to integrate with each other.

This is actually also the main reason I've come to dislike Rails - for complex businesses with single small teams or single developers it's hard to encapsulate different site functionalities as modular components of a larger system (more like 'apps' in Django) as compared to running multiple rails sites.

This same need is also why many business (prepare to shoot yourself) try to do everything with Drupal.

The ability to meet a need quickly with something that can just plug in easily to an existing system far outweighs anything else in most non-giant non-massive-scale organizations.

This is part of why Rails is so successful despite not making it easy to modularize your site functionality - the components and libraries of the application overall are highly modular and community package resources make it so stuff can be built quickly even it's hard to modularize within the Rails application itself.

The big bad ball of mud is more an outgrowth of business trying to move quickly and demanding their flavor of the week without being able to understand, plan, or manage the quality of their developers, modularity of their code, or the development process, rather than complex single (but modular) systems being bad.
My guess is you are also inherently troubled by what soylent is in itself, regardless of how it is made.

On the one hand I'm deeply suspicious of replacing food with something that is in a very approximate sense "equivalent". But he does make an excellent point that making healthy "food" convenient could prove to be a great boost to public health.
Does anyone know if the Firefox OS replaces these proprietary RTOSes?
Well, it's worse than bcrypt/scrypt, but it's still not primitive md5/sha without hash, or just symmetric encryption as in Adobe...
>Try to focus on what I am saying rather than the bad guys that you falsely assume I represent.

My apologies. I did mis-read the link that you were drawing between people who owe money and the poor; or rather, that your very point was that there is not necessarily a link.

I don't agree with your conclusion, however, as there is a large and growing swath of people who may not be "poor" enough to receive welfare per se, but who struggle financially and are in over their heads. That may well be largely who we are talking about here. So, my confusion came in because I hadn't linked what you were de-linking in the first place. That is, I don't see this as a scheme to bring equity to poor people who are already served by welfare and other transfers under the tax code.

So, let me rephrase. Why is it that we use value-judgment loaded phrases like "misplaced sympathy" to describe people who owe money? And, why do we emphasize fears of market distortion and moral hazard produced by debt-forgiveness so much more than for bailouts, corporate welfare, outsized CEO pay, etc.?
What do you suggest he should do now?

Let the people die from malaria, do nothing about kids getting crippled from polio, let kids suffer from malnutrition??

What do you suggest he should do instead? Play golf and write management books all day?

A man made richest fortune on earth, and has now gone on a mission to tackle tough problems for the betterment of humanity and all you can do is find mistakes in his work?
Google has lots to do with intelligence (2008)
https://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume

Trade volume has skyrocketed. IE: people are trading more BTC for USD than ever. It wasn't since the Crash of April since we've seen trade volume this high.
Everything about modern warfare is for the rich kids.
What about TRON? http://www.t-engine.org/
Re: Yahoo!, I guess you must be in the A group and I must be in the B group, because on my browser they look very different.

About a year ago, yahoo.com and yahoo.co.jp looked rather different. Yahoo! Japan's portal was astonishingly cluttered. Then it seems that Yahoo! HQ cracked the whip and ordered everyone to get in line, so the Japanese site became more like the US one. Still pretty messy, but nowhere near the sensory overload levels it reached before.

Now, it looks like Yahoo! have cleaned up their site more, and turned it more into more of a "What's hot!" portal. But, on my browser, Yahoo! Japan hasn't changed yet.

Of course, the article is cherry-picking a bit, but I don't think it's being unfair. Popular Japanese sites, including big e-shops, are garish and cluttered to a degree that would be unacceptable in the West.
Nike Glow Shoes (Shoes that change color when you run)
You only had a complaint about one point of all those? :-)

It is funny when you show someone completely wrong with lots of examples -- and just get a down vote. If I have a thesis in life by now, it is that idealists lie, not only to themselves,

About your claim that V broke up with the East European dictators:

V had camps, got alcohol, money etc from those dictatorships after they "broke up". They took some principal decision in the 1980s about not having enough resources to analyze and criticize "everything everywhere"... And so on.

I lost my saved newspaper clippings from the period in a move (not much was ever written about all this in Swedish media). But you can easily add more. Like that Ohly had an anti Semite as favorite blogger (until it was pointed out to him), etc.
I hope he doesn't start burning classified documents for warmth...
no doubt, the single-disciplinary researchers use bad statistics, too. My broader point is that multidisciplinary researchers are less likely to use statistics correctly, if for no other reason than that the fact that they are multidisciplinary means that they are less likely to be able to handle depth from a personality/self-habits point of view.

Perhaps that's a little bit of projection, but I don't use any but the most rudimentary statistics in my publications and I don't make claims about significance.
Are you sure that PNaCl bitcode is typed at all?
Classic movie posters redone within simple contraints
This is not so much a software book per se but Managing Humans by Michael Lopp is a great read and very worthwhile for anyone working as part of a software team regardless of whether the person is the manager or the developer.
Thanks for that insightful perspective.
Ubuntu's Passive-Aggressive Pre-ISO Download Funding Page