skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tail risk decisions are never easy. Because we lack sufficient data by definition.

Should we focus on preventing terrorism? Well, if 9/11 was the worst case scenario then no. If on the other hand a terror attack could bring down the entire country it's certainly worth being paranoid about. Suppose terrorists poison our food and water supplies to the extent that we get country-wide food riots. A civilization is only 9 meals away from anarchy after all.

So the essential question is this:

- Is our civilization essentially fragile or fundamentally robust?

If our civilization is fundamentally robust we can simply focus on growth and deal with setbacks (global warming, terrorism, imperialism, wars) as they come. In the long term prosperity will go up and up. Not always as fast as we'd like and not always in ways we deem fair but if we keep making progress we'll get there eventually. This is the whiggish view.

The opposite view is that civilization is fragile. Kingdoms come and go and foolish decisions can and have lead to centuries of regression. The upward trend we've seen in the past couple of centuries does not mean our species has grown up in the slightest. Every new weapon of doom we discover we play with and we're no better than our imperialist and bloodthirsty forefathers. Our civilization is determined to self-destruct by either nuclear war, environmental disaster, political insanity or runaway capitalism. A civilization that is not capable of planning ahead will eventually walk like a lemming of a cliff. The best thing we can do is put tons of safeguards and regulations in place to improve our odds of surviving at all.

Those are the two main views. And the kicker is we don't have enough data to know for certain which view is correct.
Do you know of a mail scanner service that works in Canada?
Even if you were able to ignore the economic factors, the ability to use the show of force represented by the tank decreases the marginal utility of peaceful de-escalation, which most people would agree to be the superior tactic for community policing.

If you have a tank, you don't need to negotiate a peaceful surrender.

Think about how Icelandic cops are wringing their hands over killing their very first person ever, in their entire history. Now think about American cops driving tanks over someone's family dog on the way to punching a hole in a house and using flashbangs and tasers indiscriminately on the people inside.

It was a mistake to give Barney Fife even the one bullet.
> If you want to pay for it you get a crap load more from O365.

Might be true, but Google Docs has more than enough features for me so I'm not going to pay for O365.

And I am surely not going to use a WP8 handset as long as the ecosystem is so poor compared to Apple's App Store/Google Play.
Wow that is so far from my own personal experience it's difficult for me to understand. I am occasionally forced to use Outlook and/or Excel and it tends to ruin a large part of my day. Real time collaboration isn't just a cute convenience, it's the primary staple of my workflow. Strange to have such differing experiences.
And casein paint. Non-toxic, solvent free; used in 'traditional' building, along with other wonderful materials like lime plaster and wattle and daub.
The median has its problems too. If you only look at the median page load time, you won't even be aware of huge problems like 40% of your visitors with slow internet connections not being able to load your page at all. If huge effects don't move users across the median, the median won't reflect those effects at all.

To me, it's not clear that there is a "most appropriate" number. All mappings of a distribution into a number will throw information away - the trick is to pick a number that keeps the information you want. And that seems to depend on the context.
I'm not sure I follow. Wouldn't you still have to check your mail anyway for something that is non-marketing material? Once you're at the box, you might as well take whatever's there, right?
The ABC's of Design - A Project for Charity
I find it extremely distasteful to describe backing down in the face of slaughter as "complicity." If that's the sort of thinking that follows naturally from the model of power dynamics being discussed here, then I think the model is likely intensely flawed.
I really wish Apple, for instance, would enable the same process/network namespacing that enables LXC to work. I'm not sure what the state of Windows is with respect to virtual network namespaces and process namespaces and control groups, but if the two other major OSes enable these basic features, it is easy to imagine universal containers that run everywhere.
You're doing it wrong.

sharepoint/svn avoids these issues.
The most lucrative part of mail delivery, parcel post, is doing well. Canada Post also owns 91% of Purolator, another parcel delivery service similar to UPS or Fedex, which is also doing just fine.

To me, this is the same as telcos complaining about the last mile problem. It's expensive to deliver something to someone's house, particularly when people choose to live in sprawling neighborhoods with little connectivity in terms of roads. If I have to drive to someone's house, would I rather deliver a letter for 60 cents or less (bulk mail), or a parcel for $4 to $10?

Just like the telcos, the government grants the postal service a monopoly on first class letters so that they, amongst other things, guarantee connectivity to remote parts of the country at a flat rate. If that's important either the government has to pony up tax money to provide the service, or the cost of the service has to go up. One thing the government has been unwilling to do is charge different prices depending on how much a letter actually costs to send. I'm certain people in remote communities might balk, but maybe dynamic pricing makes sense, particularly when anyone can print their own postage with cheap laser/inkjet printers.
3 Reasons Google Should Embrace the iBeacon
Apocalypse, New Jersey: A dispatch from America's most desperate town
You should suspend your project until you understand enough crypto to implement a cryptocurrency wallet. Follow the cryptocat project to understand the risk you are facing.
Pixar Veterans Launch Vellum, An App To Help Authors Craft Pixel Perfect Ebooks
New OpenSSH Encryption Cipher
Maybe my article http://michael.stapelberg.de/Artikel/coreos_and_docker_first... will increase your understanding :)
I'm currently doing this right now with 30 instances. I'm currently operating at about 7 MH/s. At current rates, it's not exactly "profitable", but I'm using up some AWS credit that I have. I don't intend to sell the LTC until it hits about 40 or maybe 50, but in any case, it's still all profit for me, other than the fact that I lose out on the AWS credit for other uses.

Edit: I'm also not paying $6/hr... That would be absurd. I'm not unprofitable by much.
People forget that you used to boot your PC into a game disk to play a game. When people started playing games in Windows (full-screen), people like the grandparent poster would RAIL that booting to a game disk would always be superior to building a game on top of Windows.
This "rest of Canada" that you refer to, what is that? Isn't Toronto basically Canada? ;)
I use it in both environments and have no issues with the L&F.
Sure, it's just that usually you don't control the instance sizes of <insert your favourite cloud provider here>.

It's useful to be able to subslice your provisioned resources. That said, you can do it with plain LXC, no need for Docker.

It's just a nice way to package components and make them run together in a predictable way and. That's the aspect I miss most from the discussion around Docker.
Edward Snowden is not a member of HN
FreeBSD jail isn't dead yet.
Multiple applications can be run on same "instance" using some configuration, but for a elastic setup which requires to spin up and down instances according to demand, Its not a viable option. Since, it complicates things too much, which is why I haven't mentioned that in the article.
For being a developed country Canada has pretty terrible parcel and mail delivery, largely due to wonky regulations. Canada Post is horrible and UPS is excessively expensive for no good reasons. It's held back the advance of e-commerce there significantly.
As an ex-excel power user, this is a huge step in the right direction. F4/F2 now seem to work. Unfortunately there is no way to turn of editing directly in cells. There are strange bugs like auto column sizing doesn't work correctly. Merging cells is a cancer, it would be nice if the drop down offered centering across selection.

While this is still not Excel for windows, it feels better than Excel on the Mac. I think I will start using it.
Docker is a very lightweight VM. Or a much nicer chroot. However you want to look at it.

The underlying technology is LXC. It is very cool stuff.

But the top article is full of bullshit. It doesn't run "virtually anywhere", it runs on a few systems that support LXC or you have to build a VM that does support LXC, so you can host your Docker VM, inside that VM.

How does that "Yo Dog" meme go...?
Hence I don't understand what's the point of KVM for the POWER platform. Could you shed some light?
The median can be just as misleading as the mean, if the outliers matter. Properly played, roulette can have a positive median profit for the player, but the mean will always converge on a loss.
But drug cartels will still be part of the picture

I'm having a difficult time understanding this position. If it suddenly became as legal to grow marijuana as it is to grow tomatoes, why would someone purchase their marijuana from a cartel? Assuming a country like the US regulated pot the same way that tobacco or alcohol is regulated, why wouldn't a customer just buy pot from the local supermarket?

Supply would increase quickly eroding the high-margin that attracts the cartels. They'd still be around as long as there was any drug to smuggle, but I'd expect they would bother with pot any longer.

I'm more curious what would happen to demand. And how much of the increase in demand would be as a result of actual new pot users versus current pot users who are now allowed to be open about their use.
Well, they do come to the conclusion that sex trafficking involves tens of thousands of minors a year in Europe. That's enough to make me sick. It means that there must be hundreds of thousands of men who pay for raping minors, since technically having sex with unconsenting minors is called rape in most countries.

On the other hand, prostitution isn't considered an honorable thing, and exploiting/raping minors is even more frowned upon, even these conservative numbers are "extremely common".
The lack of change tracking just blows me away. It's a killer feature for Docs.
Here's a background piece on containers that I wrote a few months back: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-are-containers-any...
That is unnecessarily harsh. Docker legitimately represents a new idea, and some claim, a better idea. Yes, it won't run on RHEL5; but Java probably did not run on DEC mainframes either (back when its selling point was Write once run anywhere).

The question seems to be this: does this container model represent a step forward? I think it does. (And is it hyped a bit too much? Probably :-)
The Best Companies To Work For In 2014
The reason this poster spends so much energy setting up his naive socialist straw man to burn it with glee is because libertarianism offers no solutions. David Simon is not prescribing a solution, but at least he argues we must agree to one.

Blithely hoping voluntary donations by the greedy will eliminate the systemic Apartheid of class is the worst kind of snake oil medicine. He needs a straw man to burn to hide his elephant in the room.
Writing a modern web app with Go, TDD, REST, and AngularJS
Why? If you can get your data out as CSV? How are you locked in at all, or at least, any more than with Microsoft?

p.s. According to a sheet I have saved I can download my info as:
.xlsx
.ods (OpenDocument Format)
.pdf
.csv
.txt
.html
Or, we could automate production and distribution so everyone's happy.
> But you can't really call them food stamps anyway as they have become their own form of currency and you can buy nearly anything with them.

That's not true at all: http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items

You might be confused, because some states provide other forms of benefits (SS or TANF) on the same debit cards as SNAP ("food stamps"), but the food stamps program only pays for food--and not even all kinds of food.

You wrote a lengthy post, and you seem to have strong opinions about this subject, but you are badly misinformed about the underlying facts.
Not every older are is more affluent. Houses in Parkdale get direct-to-door delivery.
Facebook Wants to Be a Newspaper
JetBrains gears its IntelliJ IDE toward Android developers
Linux runs virtually anywhere.
That is the commonly stated reason for the enactment of the minimum wage, the so-called 'baptist's reason' (in the bootleggers and baptists paradigm [1]). Historically the minimum wage has been used to discriminate against minorities and other targeted groups by making their wages higher than their value to an employer[2], this would be the so-called 'bootlegger's reason'.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
[2] http://www.amazon.com/State-Against-Blacks-Walter-Williams/d...

edit: if you follow the money on the bootleggers side, you will see that unions and companies with high capitalization support increasing minimum wages.
Is there a way to invert the Y axis? (up -> nose down) This looks like it would be rather fun with a gamepad, as well.
I wonder if a certain type of software business is most amenable to this.

For instance, if you are a growing SaaS that doesn't need to pivot, but rather to scale and add features.

In that case, a certain number of your objectives are inherent and obvious. Features that exist should be stable. Features that work now, for the current number of customers, should continue to work as more customers are added.

Well, if your SaaS is doing something valuable, just meeting those criteria is likely to involve a lot of work (otherwise it seems the product wouldn't be valuable), and profitability (customers indicate that it's valuable with their wallets).

And at least for some subset of SaaS companies, up to a certain number of developers, those criteria can be met by developers looking at metrics and saying to themselves, "hmm, this or that bug exists that I can fix", or "I wonder if it would be worth it to containerize the app and write tests that work against the whole container," and do a feature branch and then a PR, and if this initiative turns out to be new or valuable enough it eventually gets written into a blog post and may become part of the nature/value of the product, or contribute to the culture of the company.

So for companies with the right circumstances, I can readily imagine that the jobs that bosses do can be replaced by IRC, Github and the obvious objectives the product itself provides.

I don't know how it would work for companies more generally.

For companies that are still trying to decide what to do? Or what to do next? That seems quite experimental. For instance, Valve software; they have had such a headwind from Steam, for so long, that we may not really know how well the "bossless" approach will work for them until it produces their Next Big Thing.
I'm using SBT 0.13 on a fairly complex project. Not sure why it wouldn't work for you. What kind of project is it? Any specific frameworks you're using that are causing compilation errors?
DigitalOcean (DO) is VC funded so its very different from some "hoster" started by some guy with rented server(s). DO can grow really quickly due to that funding which you need to achieve economies of scale. The biz has thin margins and you need volume to achieve profitability.

Ben Uretsky, the CEO of DO is also the CEO of ServerStack. I think I've heard that DO is a sister company of ServerStack, but I could be wrong. The two use the same datacenters: https://www.serverstack.com/infrastructure So very likely one is piggybacking off the other and they're able to get much better prices that way through higher volume.

DO also developed their own control panel so they don't have to pay a licensing cost. Most "hosters" use WHMCS and SolusVM. Granted those aren't hugely expensive but it adds cost if your talking about a $5 VPS. Also the custom panel allows them to further automate most everything.

It can't hurt that DO is also giving away tons of free credit to new sign ups. They must be getting tons of new customers from that alone.
The question I always think of when people raise fears like this about bio-weapons is what what motivations are there for "bad guys" to release indeterminate killers like a bio-engineered virus? It seems like the principles of MAD still apply here. Why launch an initial attack that has the potential to "destroy the world" that either you or you leaders would still hope to inhabit? It would require someone illogical and/or desperate, but yet still had the technological prowess to create the weapon in the first place. It would basically need to be a Bond villain.
Yes, shipping to Canada from the US via USPS is generally the best option because they'll handle customs clearance. I've had FedEx abandon packages in the oddest places and had to go and pick them up and clear customs for them myself.
Reminds me of this short film.

http://vimeo.com/7306050
> But another possibility is that we engineer the perfect
> happiness drug, with no bad side effects, and no one wants
> to do anything but lay in bed and take this drug all day,
> sapping all ambition from the human race.

How does this compare to properly administered medical-grade morphine?
I always hear the situation put this way, but it rings false to me. If you gave me a perfect happiness drug, I wouldn't want to sit in bed all day and take it. I would want to take it and go about my normal day only without the burden of misery — debug Java without wanting to claw my eyes out, help out people I meet because I don't feel stressed over my own schedule, etc. Being happy naturally has never driven me to sit in bed and has only ever made me a better person; I don't know why we assume drug-induced happiness would do the opposite. I suspect this is just because many of our current drugs do this as a side effect of inducing euphoria, and we're imagining that instead of a real happiness drug.
Does government certs mean backdoors?
A common problem is that people simply don't pick up the marketing mail (or worse, drop it on the ground next to the community mailbox). It piles up until their mailbox is full, and then the local postal worker knocks on your door and reminds you to be a nice person and pick up your mail.
A lightweight component that help you to save texts
You are not nice.
Have you actually used office? It has change tracking, diff and merge and has done for over 10 years. The problem here is network locking which is totally different.
The spot market prices have been going up non-stop. I finally pulled the plug today when my expected daily revenue was down to about $5. (There's some risk inherent in doing this, because a market crash could leave you saddled with a day of Amazon bills with nothing to show for it. So it becomes less attractive at low margins.)

I was only able to run 60 nodes for the first two days. After that, spot market prices in CA and Oregon went too high for profitability.

At this point, the spot market has gone insane. Mining with my code isn't profitable over about $0.130/hour with the current exchange rates, and the market is at, um, $6/hour in some places. I hypothesize that people are typo'ing in their EC2 spot bids and typing $6 when they mean $0.6, because otherwise it's completely irrational: You can get a normal instance for $0.65/hour. Not that people are rational, but...

It also requires some care and feeding. The $17k isn't really free passive income. The pools go awry, the exchanges go awry, ... At larger scale, you could amortize all of that management time and automate the majority of it, but at a few bucks here and there it's simply not worth it.
I'm surprised by their removal of all these wifi drivers.
Yeah, I think I am more excited about the new linux distro than the hardware. Only two more days to go.
It's already taken hold in countries spanning a very large number of people. It matters in Pakistan for example. Pakistan has nukes. There's a threat there to everyone.
Thanks. FYI, I just posted this to HN [1]. Seeing as you put in all this effort, you should have people reading it, outside this thread. Looks like you made the front page too!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889679
That's not true.

I worked at a place that ONLY cared about the longest response time. Imagine! They ignored everything else!
Yes, take X. Treat Z as zero or just say something like, "I wouldn't be interested in joining without an equity share."
> No, please no !!! We have the Amazon fork; various Chinese forks; and now a Nokia fork ?!?

Excuse me, what do you think would happen when Android was released as open source?

Forking is essential to the health of open source code. The interesting part is when features from FireOS and this supposed Nokia OS are lifted and put back into Android.

Yes, Play Service is definitely Google's attempt to keep up with Apple while at the same time not closing up the Android source. We'll see how well that pans out.

Perhaps "Android" as a marketing hype term will die, just like "RSS" - in the sense that it dies like Obiwan Kanobi and just moves into a higher plane of existence.
worst idea ever?
True. In Toronto at least, old city single-family homes do tend to correspond to affluence though (with exceptions like Parkdale).
To me vim means 'text editor.' This is a really awesome command-driven 3d Modeller. It's great but is it really a vim clone?

It offers a big improvement over the GUI of 3d modellers. 3d modellers interfaces are way, way, way, too complex because they are trying to stuff wayyyyy too many parameters into standard UI controls (i've used mostly blender, but way back in the days of 3d studio, infini-d, and ray dream the interfaces were also very complex, to the point of having a very steep learning curve). It makes more sense and is much more expressive to interact with the modeller via commands
Big fan of gdocs here. Some of the new functions are going to really be great. My only complaint is the display changes. The default row size has increased to 21 from 17 and size 10 font no longer fits in a 17 pixel row. The best option now is size 9 font on 19 pixel rows. It may seem nitpicky, but when I design a spreadsheet, I use a lot of screenspace and this really adds up.
I understand what you're saying, but I'm actually inclined to think that (in our case) it doesn't matter what they do. We learn what we need to know from our customers and we have our own roadmap. We can keep tab on the competition, but getting periodical detailed reports seems counterproductive to me.
The main point of the article is not a point which is widely discussed, known, or accepted. It has nothing to do with oversight/regulation. The point is that offensive biotechnology has progressed way ahead of defensive biotechnology. In other words, we know how to engineer viruses but not how to engineer the immune system. The human immune system is vastly more complicated than viruses. Therefore, the author appears to be calling for vastly more funding into defensive biotechnology. In other words, though research into dna modification technologies (such as viral engineering) is already heavily funded, resarch into therapeutic methods and immune response should be much greater than most are even considering.

My own personal opinion is that that funding should be increased orders of magnitude; a few trillion over the next decade seems judicious.
Step one (always): Look at your data.

Only then should you choose the statistic(s) you 'care' about.
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