skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you deploy Amazon Prime Air today?
I have no links to Amazon but am really rooting for something like this to become a reality. The few people I have spoken to have been skeptical and rightly so.

For starters, the last-mile problem is the trickiest as you get into urban sites. So in the mean time Amazon could negotiate pre-defined routes with the FAA that link the central warehouse to local depots. Drones would fly between this route and the route would be carefully chosen to mitigate disaster. The initial routes would also need to be chosen so that they have a natural advantage over the existing delivery network (say to and from an island or a mountainous location). Theft could be mitigated by doing overnight delivery where the darkness would provide some cover. It's not end-to-end delivery but it's a great start if you could just drive over to your local depot with the drone arriving at roughly the same time.

I could see that sort of pilot project get deployed tomorrow.

If you really had to make this a reality today and this was your day job, how would you go about it?
I wrote the piece, and I strongly agree with you. To clarify:

1) I see no conspiracy here, just a fascinatingly broad definition of "offensive"
2) I do think a togglable filter is a good feature
3) But this list is still weird. "LSAT"? "Cuprammonium"? "Dominatrices" but not "dominatrix"? I think a sloppy intern might have gotten a little heavy-handed. The word lists for other languages (also available) ban far fewer words.
And all I can hear is George Carlin http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
It's pretty obvious what is going on here:

1.) The Guardian et al. complain about working conditions at Amazon.

2.) Amazon puts out PR hinting that many of those workers will be replaced by automation before too long.

3.) The Guardian says it's just shopping season hype to distract from the working conditions and such.

Basically Amazon just called their bluff, and is now under pressure to deliver some seriously impressive results. How can a reporter complain about working conditions for drones? Will they go full-on Luddite and try to blame Amazon for destroying jobs? This should be interesting.
New mobile app for physical security management
Write your post mortem before your startup dies
Allow for a small subtext under/side of the title submissions that allow some editorializing to spark discussion. So more is know about the link before having to click thru.
There are now some companies which provide non-signature based anti-virus detection to potentially detect zero-day malware. Most of them work by spinning up a vm, run or open the file to check, and verify any changes to the system. Check out http://www.fireeye.com/ (funded by the CIA's startup incubator In-Q-Tel) http://www.fidelissecurity.com/ (from General Dynamics) and Northrop Grumman is releasing one soon too.

Not sure if I'd trust these companies more or less than the signature based companies.
An Open Letter To Customers
> I have the habbit of pushing small commits that tend to border along meaningless. A perfect example of this would be fixing a typo in a README and commiting/pushing instead of waiting to commit/push with another change. I asked myself if I was pushing these commits to meet the daily quota, but this has been a habit of mine since I first picked up git, a habit I've found somewhat hard to break.

I always thought the more granular your commits, the more useful they are. Why would you want to lump a README change with other unrelated updates, especially if it means you need to leave your repo dirty and unpushed until you do something more "significant"?
Not to be pedantic, but the Cluster API uses forked workers, so it's technically a multi-process model, each process with its own single thread.

AFAIK there is no threading support in node.js. Not today and not ever (?).
Did I do the conversion right? Total cost was only ~72 million USD??
DO's offering is certainly refreshing but why does a single provider get that many upvotes on basically any customary amendment? They are nothing more than what Mediatemple is/was to the designer fraction.
What GrabCAD has to do with it?
Nice. See also: http://worrydream.com/#!/Bio.
Because, face it, the Elbonians dress just like Estonians?

Really, why don't the Albanians get up in arms? The two-vowel substitution preserves more of the sound than then two consonants.
Smells of TikZ! Very nicely done.
>"If you think of the market as a "random walk" (a well defined mathematical concept)"

Random walk with a drift is how the trend is described.
Sometimes my bad english really gets me D:

I wanted to imply the opposite.

Is there a time to sexualize people? -> no there isn't, you can do it every second of your life without feeling bad, because everything else is just society/morale babbling etc.
Hmm, Missile Mail would probably have worked much better if you could have made the missiles land properly at the other end, instead of crashing, made them reusable, and maybe stuck a pilot in them to handle the tricky landing bit.
Because writing plain javascript is simpler for the majority of people to understand and will run in more places without the need for custom setups. Module authors will not write to these custom implementations since it would greatly limit the audience for their module.
I think the primary way of compelling people is to make it a nice place to live. A private tiny home for privacy and security, a large garden to work in, a group kitchen, library, rec room, crafts, and of course tv/internet.

Most of these people in question are repeat offenders, so they could be offered the choice of a year in jail or 2 years in the country.

This wouldn't be free for the taxpayers, but remember, they are already paying a lot. I erred in the other post -- apparently it's ~$100M on homeless services. That's a nice chunk of change for servicing ~7000 homeless people.

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/06/04/sf-homeless-services...

http://www.sfgov3.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=4...
Sass Compiler for Wordpress
"Learn Clojure in 24 hours by following this one weird tip."
> there are many millionaries now that only bought a few thousands worth of it a few years back.

Only by selling to people who, at least in my opinion, are likely to lose their shirts.

Besides, BitCoin isn't unique in the "If I had only bought this years ago!" case. Apple made lots of millionaires, too.
incentives... phone keyboard and all that.
I live in Scotland too, what's this toasting thing? Is it the same as deep fat frying my bread?
Old enough to remember, not old enough to have done it outside of school projects.
We assert that a randomized algorithm is unnecessary, and the
problem can be solved deterministically (though of course random
numbers will be used for sampling).

At a certain point this distinction becomes just philosophical wankery. Make no mistake, the proposed deterministic algorithm is a random one in disguise. And that's fine. Over large sample sizes, this randomness becomes sufficiently deterministic. Which is what the original proposal suggested, and it's also why sometimes a random variable can be elegant, too.
UNICEF / New York

DevInfo Open Source Community Consultant

Apply Here:
http://unicefstories.org/2013/11/22/job-opportunity-devinfo-...

Do you have a degree in computer science or information systems? Are you an expert in .NET technologies, service-oriented architectures, database management with Sql Server/MySql, and open source technologies? Do you have additional experience in development and management of open source software communities and integrated blogs? Are you able to work independently and take initiative? If so, you might be the person UNICEF is looking for.

The purpose of this consultancy is to assess the current situation of DevInfo software products and build an open source community of developers around it. Travel may be required to various locations around the globe as part of the assessment.

Start date: 01 Jan 2014
End date: 30 Nov 2014

More information on DevInfo can be found here: http://www.devinfo.org
Scala - Just enough rope to hang yourself
> If you were to invent a language to be used in spreadsheets today, what would it look like?

Lisp. I'd have the cells contain data, and only data. You can type data into the cells like normal. However, when you want to input a formula I'd split the screen horizontally and have it start off with

(cell-name ( ____ ))

Have the user start typing in the middle of the second parenthesis where the underscore is by default - have it default selected to make it clear, slightly grey out the surrounding syntax so they don't immediately have to worry about it but bring it back to the normal colour if they click outside of that.

Clicking a cell back on the cells windows would insert a reference to it.

(cell-name (+ a1))

Dragging across cells would define a group with some syntactic sugar.

(cell-name (+ group a1 b2))

Inserting a graph would show you the code of the graph right there in the code window.

What might I do differently to Lisp? I'd replace the + sign with 'sum-of' and * with 'product-of' to help people get used to the prefix style. So the above would become.

(cell-name (sum-of group a1 b2))

I'd have sum-of inserted when you clicked the + key on your keyboard to make it clearer how it worked.

I think this would be quite intuitive and add a lot of easily seen power. We're used to using parenthesis to group math things, we're used to using variables, we're used to using functions - we just don't tend to think of those things as such.

All your logic would be visible in the code window, finally escaping the horrible black-box style of clicking off the cell and everything vanishing.

Potential problems?

'Ah, but Excel's for non-coders,' you might say. I don't think it is, not really. If you just want to add a range together you have to learn a formula that's quite similar to Lisp to begin with:

=SUM(a1:b2)

And in many ways it's less intuitive than Lisp is. Why is =SUM required to be like that, why do you need to group the references after SUM like that? What is the : meant to signify? And as you go develop more complex things like SUM-IF you're rapidly looking at something that's just a bad programming language.

You can sort of muddle your way into it by messing around - but I don't see that it's not a thing that people have to learn or that it's any easier than Lisp's presentation would be. Have you tried interviewing for admin jobs lately? I have, I try interviewing for jobs I'm not interested in from time to time, and even working some of them, just to keep in contact with the state of offices. Pivot tables and 'macros' are considered advanced excel knowledge - I've been in offices where most of the people working there don't know how to make a drop-down list for a cell, or how to use something as simple as SUM-IF.

Excel's language isn't simple for non-coders already. Where it wins above programming languages that we all are perhaps more familiar with, IMO, is that it gives people an immediate visual hook into a data structure that they can use as a starting point.

Like the REPL - but with a slightly different emphasis.
Do you say this out of direct knowledge, or it's just an assumption? (just plainly asking, no sarcasm)
Most people aren't equipped to use trees, graphs, or queues so they don't use them. (Well, that's not so true of queues...) Meanwhile it is true that a ton of the interesting things done involves trees and graphs of some sort or another.
Broad Coalition Of Tech Companies, Nonprofit Groups Support the USA FREEDOM Act
because it's trendy.

people like trends, especially the technology industry.

larry ellison has an interesting rant about this on youtube.
Don't bother.

The crowd just loves the idea of spies being useless morons based on some game theory musings by a fellow armchair analyst.
So I had 555 comments, 42 of which contained the word Microsoft. I had 5 submissions, none of which were about Microsoft.

Is your conclusion that I was slowbanned because 0% of my submissions were about Microsoft and 7.5% of my comments mentioned Microsoft?

If someone who doesn't work at Microsoft and has no affiliation with them whatsoever other than to use their products is banned for mentioning Microsoft so infrequently, then this place is a ridiculous echo chamber.

EDIT: My last comment mentioning Microsoft was over 3 weeks ago and honestly it's more about stock performance of multiple companies than it is about anything to do with Microsoft.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745233
I like knowing which tweets I've read. If it says that there are new tweets, can click it and see the new tweets appear. If they just appeared on the feed, I wouldn't know as easily which tweets are new. Does that make sense? I guess I just like being able to load the new tweets on-demand.
I read this thinking it was incredibly good tech satire. For a moment, I had hope.

Then I realized that there is a variant of Poe's Law for technology. Only 45 minutes of staring at sciencedog galleries on imgur calmed me down.
I've been having similar issues hitting the OOM killer on RHEL/CentOS with only 90-160mb of ram used total on the 512mb droplets.
They provide an innovative technology for harvesting water in dry locations?
As someone who has no idea what they're asking, how do the different memory sizes affect "buffer bloat".
What makes a great business book?
So, basically, because threading is hard.

Lol, keep killing it web bros.

(Full disclosure: I am, in fact, using Node now, and there is nothing quite so painful as the lack of coroutine or fiber or thread support. Cluster is cool, but only if you want to make a bunch of processes.)
One thing I'd like to mention is using 'you make money in 4 out of 5 scenarios' does not take in to account that each scenario does not have equal probability of occurring nor have weighted risk (how much you can possibly lose) associated with it.
Yeah, here's my solution to the myriad problems with this idea: self-driving electric cars as delivery vehicles. It's far more realistic and practical in every conceivable way.
Is it a joke, or do they actually believe Scott Adams made this comic to make fun of their company?
Worse yet: years ago I noticed that Elbonians is an anagram for 'no lesbian'. Coincidence? Then why are there no female Elbonians present in the strip at all? Answer that, Scott Adams!
My short explanation: every time you call a function, its vars get allocated on the stack. When you return from the function, you "pop" the stack, but all that means is that the stack pointer is now pointing to main. There is no reason to actually clear the stack memory as that would be a waste of CPU cycles. Therefore, if main() calls foo(), then foo() returns, the contents of the variables of foo() is still one frame higher on the frame stack and given the right memory address you can still access it.

As others point out, this is not something you should rely on. On the other hand if you are trying to overflow the stack or somehow break the program, this is definitely something to try.

The converse of this is that local variables of main() can be made accessibly to foo():

void foo(int *x) {
printf("a = %d\n", *x);
}

void main() {
int a = 12;
foo(&a);
}

This of course makes sense: when you are in the middle of foo(), main()'s variables have to be stored somewhere and are accessible.

Edit: here's another fun way to get a from foo():

void foo() {
int *x;
x = (int *) (&x + sizeof(int));
printf("a = %d\n", *x);
}

int main() {
int a = 12;
foo();
return 0;
}
EthOS was Oberon-2 if I am not mistaken. The paper discussed in this link though still uses Oberon (even though paper was updated in 2013).
>As I’m going through all of this code, I’m hoping to start documenting the classes I go through here and explain what’s going on.

YES.

One of my biggest productivity boosters when dealing with understanding code written by others was to use Evernote to document all my ideas, theories of how the code worked, tests to see if it really did work that way and final result. By documenting everything, I can at least rule out theories that don't work; I think this is at least part of what is known as the scientific method.

I hope this becomes a trend and many more people start documenting their findings. Let google loose on all that data and you save thousands of man-hours spent understanding code
How reddit tried to solve the "new link" problem. Why HN doesn't need a new algo
This morning I saw two articles on the front page about how HN should change their algorithms. I would contend that an algo change is not the right solution.

Here is what we did to try and solve the problem on reddit.

First, there is the "organic" box at the top of the page. The first link in that box is always an ad, but after that, it shows pseudo random links from the new page (more on that in a second):

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/89f6f1ad9c1babbf520b83c49fa27f509bb5d0ef/r2/r2/lib/organic.py

What this does is give exposure to up and coming links to a lot of people all at once, which helps overcome the luck factor of who is looking at the new page at any given time.

The second solution is the "rising" sort on the new page:

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/89f6f1ad9c1babbf520b83c49fa27f509bb5d0ef/r2/r2/lib/rising.py

The rising sort accounts for how many times the link has been shown in its ranking algo, which helps better new links rise to the top.

The organic box on the front page uses this rising ranking to choose what is in the box, and also contributes to the view counts.

So I would humbly suggest that HN should do as it has done often in the past, and copy reddit's solution here by implementing the rising sort and the organic box.
Will it though? I can think of plenty of blog posts that were commentary on links (albeit fairly extensive and/or insightful), that didn't get flagged as blogspam. OTOH, if all you do is editorialize on a link, with little to no insight, shouldn't it be flagged as blogspam? Perhaps one of the biggest reasons I don't blog very much is that I don't feel like I'm contributing anything of value by merely linking somewhere and going "isn't this cool?" I believe blog posts should have more substance.
This is actually somewhat big news because, considering the relative popularity of Digital Ocean, this alleviates 2 blocker pain points for european customers:

* The AMS1 region used to be out of available droplets quite frequently, and in recent weeks it was entirely unavailable to book new ones (at least for me)- which is bad news for scaling existing installs.
* The AMS1 region did not have private networking

The fixing of these two points with the new region makes it much more reasonable to deploy multi-node environments to this region.
The stack is a cheap/fast memory allocator. Upon return (out of scope for local variables) its freed. Don't point to freed memory.
i suspected this may be more the case, thank you for confirming. and this has made me nervous, since i don't find sinatra to be all that powerful.

buuuut as retrogradeorbit points out.... the clojure macro system is powerful, so maybe it lends itself better to this type of setup
Show HN: I built a live Bitcoin price aggregator with multiple indexes
Something else this could be useful for is in visualization of historical events on a common timeline.
I would start with a controlled deployment -- either test it for delivering supplies in various corporate office parks, or something like military bases or college campuses. Something where the bulk of the ground being covered is owned by the same organization. Then go from there.
What You Capture and What You Share Is What You ARE
Something like Haskell seems like a good fit for the brevity of working with sequences using higher order functions, but maybe the type system is too verbose... I'm sure there's some better candidates, but it'd be a nice start and maybe an excuse to look at the work of that one person who turned a Haskell dialect that compiles to javascript into a fulltime job.
I think this is the wrong solution. I wrote my thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834705
If you're interested in these types of algorithms, I'm writing a book / running an online course. You can sign up and read past content here: http://bandits.mynaweb.com/

Next section is coming very soon. Just gotta finish the last visualisation. (Interesting that both bandit algorithms and Angular + d3 feature on HN today.)

I haven't had the time to read either article closely (at a conference) but the main issue I'd be concerned with is non-stationary rewards. What is interesting today is not interesting tomorrow. A simple hack to get around this is to decay the prior over time.
Other issues to consider include:

- the amount of data available. Even HN might not have enough readers to get sufficient data on each arm. Here you might use a similarity measure between arms (articles), such as tf-idf so votes for one article can inform the ranking of other articles.

- the effect of ranking on votes. The highest ranked articles probably gets more votes just by virtue of being at the top. There is some work on submodular bandits that might be relevant here, but this research is very new.
I think that if we want civilization, which is to say cities, societies, arts, sciences: there is involved some repression on all biological levels. I would rather lie in the sun on the beach all day but I 'repress' this, so I can find meaningful achievement with my intellect. The same goes for sex: I decide to choose my partners. I can't think of any successful modern human community that survived long without repression.
I know...

"Cloud computing means using a computer that's out there"
The server had a blip making me lose about an hour of data, but I was really excited to show it to you.
"USD" doesn't exist online, instead users are making payments online in paypal-USD, bankWire-USD, or visaDebit-USD. But what about the other side of the world, where payments are made in Alipay-CNY or Tenpay-CNY? If there's a chinese user of Alipay, how can you do business if you only have Paypal?

Paypal-USD is not fungible with Alipay-CNY, they are separate payment networks (if you don't believe me, try to find an exchanger). The situation is like the days before SMTP, when AOL and Compuserve had different e-mail networks and a user of one couldn't send an e-mail to a user of the other. But BTC is easily exchanged for either Alipay-CNY or for Paypal-USD, so it is more fungible than both.
I find having a "standard" way to run tasks enormously beneficial especially when working with developers cross-platform. Whatever OS you are running, just grunt and all is well. :)
Initially this will probably carry a significant premium over normal delivery. However, as someone who lives in a city, I can definitely see there being times when I would be willing to pay the premium. Taking a cab ride to and from somewhere can easily cost $15-$30, so it could actually be cheaper to have the item delivered by a drone if time is of the essence.
that too.

it just seemed like the 'income inequality' is an orthogonal issue.

A headline of 'Fix fundamentals first' or 'You need fundamentals before you can teach coding' would have made more sense to me.

with that said, for me, coding is actually a huge motivator for learning. You can actually see why you need to linear algebra, calculus, statistics, trigonometry, etcc. Instead of some abstract purpose you can very concretely that you need to master all those topics if you want to make a robot function ... for example.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but until all widely used modern browsers support SPDY or HTTP2, the number of requests is still a problem only solvable with sprites.
Precisely. Aside from the "wow cool" factor, this will never be anywhere near the best option in any place that has drivable roads.
Find the invisible cow