skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I still don't see the solution - doesn't any solution have to solve the problem of messages being lost?

I think what happens here is that any node that doesn't get the message due to lost message, does not advance to the next block, and hence is working on a shorter chain than the nodes that got the message. Eventually it will receive another message with a longer chain and be forced to abandon its own work and adopt the new longer chain. It's highly improbable that nodes working on shorter chains could ever catch up to those working on the longest version.

There may be some threshold of lost messages where the system begins to break down, but assuming no intelligent attacker is behind it and the losses are random, they affect the whole system, not just the prime chain. The shorter chains would be roughly equally affected.

>How do the other generals know that he hasn't got the final block that is long enough?

He keeps working on whatever he has until he receives a longer blockchain from neighbors, which forces him to abandon his shorter one and start working on the longer one right away.

>Or is it just the case that a majority of generals know when to attack? I thought it had to be all of them, but maybe that's the two-general problem and Byzantine-general's is an easier problem.

Eventually it is all of them. The big difference between bitcoin and the theoretical BGP or TGP is that the theoretical problems have an end state where it is simply good enough for a majority to decide on an attack time, they attack, win, share the spoils, and the process is over. Simple majority is all that was needed.

Bitcoin takes that a step further and never stops. As soon as it reaches a simple majority decision, all nodes abandon their own work and adapt that decision - the longest blockchain - as soon as they receive it, and the process starts over from that new point. Each solution creates a longer blockchain, which forces unaninimity.
"...likely unconstitutional" ya think?
If the law doesn't allow it, I hope the jury nullifies.
I have noticed a trend on HN whenever Vinod Khosler is mentioned, there seems to be a lot of hostility towards him. Is there any concrete examples of them doing shady stuff? I am just curious.
Really bad customer service and overpriced internet for 90% of their customers, to subsidize a small, selected segment of new "low-income" customers. How much lower can they go as a company?
I Flew to Lagos and Got Beaten Up Because of a Nigerian Email Scam
I'm not sure I'm getting any more detail with your last response. It seems that you are wanting to shift the discussion now from "But it's legal!" to more along the lines of "But whether people think they have a chance at changing things is important!" This is interesting, but only if you assume the entire situation is in the toilet and your goal is simply to try to mitigate a disaster approaching on the horizon.

I'm not so sure that such mitigation is possible or wise. As I recall, the entire reason for having a Bill of Rights was the fear -- to the point of considering this a certainty -- that the government would encroach on individual rights and continue encroaching unless it was specifically forbidden to do so. Now perhaps from a civil unrest viewpoint it's better to have the plebians thinking they have a shot at changing the great ship of state by the traditional democratic process, but I doubt the founders would have believed it. For historical reasons.

I have no idea if the "post privacy" world is upon us or not. If I have any say, the answer is something along the lines of "fuck no!" but, unfortunately, they do not ask me these things.

I do know, however, that lots of folks view most all current problems through political filters. They tend to forgive more when their guys are in power and condemn more when they're not. This, along with changing up the figureheads at the top of the corrupt political system regularly, has kept a lid on social unrest for a good long time. Here's hoping that continues along unimpeded.
You kid, but despite how horrifying that is, something like it will probably end up happening.
How is it better than an XML field in SQL Server, which allows indexing, schemas (if you want), and full querying inside the document? I think Postgres also has similar functionality with JSON, now, too.

Certainly a lot of applications would benefit from having a full RDBMS they can opt-in to document-style data when they feel like it?

Built-in horizontal scaling is one selling point for non-RDBMS stores, but large systems seem to just shard on top of RDBMSes anyways, right?
Sorry, but I was far more interested by an irrelevant detail I read in a more detailed article about Lampert: he was kidnapped in 2003. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-edd...

>His notoriety grew in the early 2000s, when he launched a takeover of bankrupt retailer Kmart. During negotiations, Lampert was kidnapped from a parking garage in Greenwich, Conn., and held for two days...

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2004-...

>In exchange for his release, Lampert agreed to stash $40,000 in a garbage can outside a Wendy's restaurant in Greenwich, prosecutors said. The money was never paid. Instead, the FBI took up the case. They found that an associate of the kidnappers had used a stolen credit card to order a pizza delivery.
Can you elucidate? From my naive understanding of the back button API, I always thought Firefox's default behavior (not firing onpopstate on page load) made way more sense than say Chrome's. I guess both vendors make silly decisions sometimes.
>"It cannot be a "Plain Old Telephone Service" (or analog) issue, because it is working with "VoIP"-- and it's digital since the audio enter at the computer."

Just because is entering digitally on your computer doesn't mean that it is completely digital. To make calls to a land line you still need a PBX in between to make the bridge between analog and digital sides
Is this not what https://www.bountysource.com/ already does?
Weirdly the Google 'trends' graph correlates if you click on the 'forecast' button:

http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz%2C%20...

However, a forecast is just a forecast, not happened yet. The 'trend' graph spikes with the IPO which had no relevance for 99% of Facebook users. Take that spike out, ignore the 'forecast' and Facebook is doing the 'myspace curve' and in a similar time frame.

Anyway, where is the Facebook login for Hacker News?
Thanks! Thanks for the ideas. Many are good, my favorite is the guest blogging idea.
I just recently had the opportunity to speak with Slava and Michael after one of my posts hit the front page of HackerNews. They are definitely nice people, I enjoyed speaking with them.

I am no expert on databases, so I don't have much to say on that front, but the admin UI for RethinkDB is definitely beyond anything I've seen for databases before. I know that's also something they value tremendously and I'm very happy to see them doing well.

Keep up the great work!
Every manufacturer brewed their own hardware in-house. Remember this was cutting edge stuff in the early 80s. Things like RAM-based frame buffers were also insanely expensive, so you got tricks like this instead. Some went tile-based, others used custom ASICs or PLCCs to accelerate graphics.
Which two? I'd appreciate being able to avoid those companies.
The anti-American rants on here are disgusting.

Nobody's calling this a mistake except the media.

5 Al Qaeda dead, 5-10 people sitting next to an Al Qaeda member also dead.

Intelligence even pointed out which 4 cars out of the 11 car convoy contained the Al Qaeda members.

If you think there is no war going on over there, the 52 civilians slaughtered by Al Qaeda on Dec. 5 in a Sana'a hospital would disagree with you.

Check out how Al Qaeda operates here at the 56 second mark, where one of them casually lobs a grenade into a crowd of civilians during the Dec. 5 attack: http://www.guns.com/2013/12/14/graphic-cctv-footage-militant...

The US drone strike was a direct response to the Dec. 5 massacre by Al Qaeda.
If you were actually at war with Pakistan, then civilian deaths there might be explainable as collateral damage. But last time I checked, they're a US ally. Killing innocent citizens of your allies is not an act of war, it's terrorism.
Hi alphakappa, we had used an image because the original did not have a permanent home, but now it does. The image is now replaced with an iframe, http://bamboo.io/docs/examples.html#an-interactive-map-of-th..., also here is the map site http://sel-columbia.github.io/egypt-2012/
Ask HN: How does Medium calculate how long it will take to read a post?
Medium and many other sites have a calculation for how long it might take you to read that particular post. How is that calculated and is there a library to add that to any site?
No worries. Pick something and do it consistently for a while--all of these take time in our attention scarce world--well, all of them except the advertising, which is trading money for time.
> I'm not sure what the research is?

at least for infants/children, the research is in favor of introducing bacteria to the immune system.

Exposure to microbes during early childhood is associated with protection from immune-mediated diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and asthma.

...

These results indicate that age-sensitive contact with commensal microbes is critical for establishing mucosal iNKT cell tolerance to later environmental exposures.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6080/489.abstract#aff-...

also some interesting info on children delivered by c-sections (which prevents newborns from getting into contact with the diverse vaginal flora):

CS was associated with a lower total microbial diversity, delayed colonisation of the Bacteroidetes phylum and reduced Th1 responses during the first 2 years of life.

http://gut.bmj.com/content/early/2013/07/09/gutjnl-2012-3032...

there's much more info to be found on the topic. these are just the ones i recently stumbled upon.
Pretty awful to be honest! Way too much sugar and not enough vegetables. (I don't drink juice/cola/etc, though)
Actually a lot more secure then buying anywhere else. You actually get a digital receipt timestamped with your ID attached to it. Not to mention a picture of your ticket. You end up loosing the winning ticket and its anyone's to claim.
There's no inalienable right to a starvation disciplined pool of cheap labor. If Amazon can't make its business work while paying employees a living wage, there's no sound economic reason it should be allowed to operate.
Apple Releases OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 With Improved Support for Gmail in Mail
Nobody said you were technically wrong. They said you are being an asshole. Do you understand the interpersonal dynamics here? Can you comment on that level?
I have a database which stores all the events within the applications I need to capture. I also make use of some third party tools to rip the data I need into something a little more readable.
You are missing the point. It is already "normal" -- and it is a major part of business networking. It happens all the time. An older man having dinner with his younger male business associate, no problem.

If being a young women makes you "locked out" (due to social stigma on behalf of either party), it puts you at a perpetual disadvantage. Either you turn down an invite for useful business networking, or you are never invited because the other party already internalized the stigma.

Due to the majority of gray hairs in industry being men, and the majority of current college graduates being women -- these type of quiet, almost polite disadvantages are worth talking about.
Bargaining power is limited both by competition for jobs, and by fundamental necessity, which was more my point. A group of workers who do not have the freedom to engage in competitive tender, because they are forced to address their fundamental needs, are in a much worse bargaining position irrespective of whether or not they have "skills to offer to society".

The wider point is that structure matters: an organisation that is run dictatorially by a small central group is, by my estimation, fundamentally more illiberal than an organisation that is run cooperatively by its members. I fail to understand why those people who are enamoured with free market principles are such staunch defenders of organisations that internally suppress those principles almost absolutely.

I am skeptical of the limited definition of coercion as only persuasion that takes place by force or threat; in my opinion there are many other, more 'polite' ways of influencing people that are just as pernicious. Indeed, I agree with both pyoung and DerpDerpDerp that your craigslist exchange was coercive in the sense that you exploited that person's situation to your own advantage. A basic test for whether or not an exchange is non-coercive is whether or not both parties would happily reverse the exchange. If not, then there was probably some element of coercion involved, even if it was simply an unaddressed asymmetry of information. Remember that perfect market information is one of the assumptions necessary for market Pareto optimality.
(c), I feel, matches the original problem best when taken to an increasing number of doors, but makes for an absurd game show. It also most closely resembles the odds of the original game show (win by switching (n-1) of n times, or 2 of 3 with 3 doors). Anything else becomes a different game (you don't have a single choice, you have a multitude of choices). And it doesn't turn it into a different problem, it exagerates the odds of the original problem to better illustrate the statistics to people whose intuition is wrong. The case of 100 doors where switching results in winning 99% of the time gets passed the questioners intuition that it should be even odds (switching or staying).

(a) demonstrates that the questioners intuition about the probabilities is off, but (again, IMO) doesn't really offer the clarity of (c).

Re: Summary - I agree, it's not an accident. It was chosen because it was a good number for a game show, and leaving the participant with 2 options (switch or stay) ensures a certain swiftness of decision. While (a) (say they used 4 or 5 doors) offers only a slight improvement on the odds (contestants may lose too often) and (c) (again with 4 or 5 doors) offers a perhaps too great improvement of the odds (contestants win too much if they know the trick).
Many people wouldn't trust themselves with a piece of paper worth that much. At least with Jackpocket the evidence is digitized before the drawing. What's interesting is that currently that piece of paper is the only thing linking lottery players with their numbers. Jackpocket actually creates a layer that makes it more secure.
McCarthy and Hoover's wildest dreams realized.
ThinkGeek's female co-founder here... It's true, I'm a founder and was let go. We sold the company early on and though I had a lot of input on hires, it wasn't all up to me, especially as we grew. I can't comment on how women were or are treated by management, but I always did my best to create an awesome culture for everybody regardless of sex, background or geek/nerd affiliation.
Depends on the geographic location of the largest reader base you want to reach. Try to figure out where you biggest reader base are living and just get hosting there.
If only we could transcend the need to constantly refer to, or take into account, someones gender. Or race. Or age. Does it really matter that its a male working on a ship or a female raising a child? I'm all for human equality across the board but we can also capitalize on our differences without denigrating those who are different. That being said, I cant tell if Camille is being facetious or not.
So, as a New Zealander, I can hire some people to gun down innocents in the US and be on the moral high ground because I'm conducting a 'war' and not terrorism? Neato.
> The NSA clearly at least makes some attempt to rationalize its actions according to the law and precedent (hence the focus on "metadata", exceptions the administrations has made for "national security", etc).

It's misleading to call the NSA's legal justifications "flimsy" rationalizations. They're rooted in two well-established principles of American law:

1) Foreigners on foreign soil don't have Constitutional rights.

2) Information knowingly exposed to third parties (such as banks, accountants, etc) are fair game for judicial subpoenas.

The NSA's programs aren't resting on reed-like rationalizations. They may be unconstitutional at the edges (procedures for ensuring that target is foreign?), but they're otherwise on solid foundations.

Furthermore, the courts won't do anything about (1). It's too deeply embedded a premise. As for (2), courts may very well pull that foundation out from underneath the NSA. But it will be a long process, because it's tied up in the same doctrine that justifies things like the SEC subpoenaing Enron's records from its accountants, and other powers it would be difficult to convince people to abandon.
>Or, it's defined by property rights?

Point to the fundamental particle of property rights, please.

Oh, wait, it's your gun.
I'm not naive enough to think that there are no threats in the world, nor that we can trust our allies to always have our interests in mind (ignoring the fact that "our interests" is a debatable subject).

They have a mountain of data already -- if they can't get a sense of what's going on from that then maybe they're not up to the task.

<snark>
Slightly tangential anecdata: the FBI was warned about the suspicious flight school students yet they bungled the job of stopping the 9/11 attack. So what good is this comprehensive intelligence gathering if the government can't even use it properly?
</snark>
This article is fairly tendentious, but the story itself is interesting and was well-covered in a Bloomberg Businessweek article here: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-edd...

I'm not a Rand disciple, but organizational experimentation like what Eddie Lampert did is a good thing, even though it's been a failure in this case. We know so little about human organizations generally, and so few have been tried, that it borders on insanity to argue that the large business corporation, a form that has existed for only a couple centuries, has been perfected. Specifically, they nearly always have a CEO on top who has the power and trappings of an absolute monarch issuing orders to courtesans, who do the work or delegate the work to lieutenants, who do the work or delegate to lieutenants, etc. Are we so unimaginative that we think this is the SOLE way of doing things? Consider, for example, Valve's success with their novel organizational structure, what Michael Church calls "open allocation."
> Teens likely see Facebook the same way the Facebook generation sees LinkedIn – like a utilitarian place to manage connections.

I've heard it a billion times that teens aren't using Facebook. But who cares? I just don't see any evidence that this heralds the end of Facebook.

It's not necessarily any more meaningful than "people ages 65-70 don't use Facebook". It's a small percentage of the population. And there's no indication that teens are using something else that will replace Facebook when they're in their 20's and 30's -- you can't organize parties on Instagram or Snapchat. Every indication is that teens get onto Facebook once they stop being teens, correct me if I'm wrong.

Can we stop talking about this ineffable "cool" factor, until there's any kind of evidence that it is actually necessary for Facebook's continued success? I mean, I don't remember Facebook ever being cool. It's always been pretty drab, a pretty bland boring blue, with an interface much like an OS. But it just works better than the alternatives, and keeps working better. Why people are suddenly constantly talking about this "lack of cool" is beyond me.
Here's how that would look in the instruction set we use here ($100M commercial product)

; ARM spells it
ADD R0, R1, R2, LSL #8

; We spell it
CLX R0 ; 1 cycles
ADX R1 ; 1
ADX R2 ; 1
LDX N, 8 ; 3
RSX ; N (const 8 in this case)

Try optimizing THAT!
Another misconception. Well two in one post, actually.

1) Capital gains income is often first passed through a corporation, thus getting taxed at the insanely high US corp tax rate before getting taxed a second time at the moderately normal US cap gains rate. So US citizens are still paying more on average, even if it all doesn't show up as such on a tax return.

2) And Mitt's specifically! Let's count the misconceptions (note that I don't blame you - the media never described them and let the infamous "14.1%" figure stand because it's a good story):

a) Doesn't include state tax rate. That right there could easily tack on another 9%. Though it could also be zero if in Texas. Mitt of course lived in Mass, so it's just 4% or so.

b) No one deducted charitable contributions. As a Mormon, that was 10% of his income. So add another 1.4% to his tax rate there.

c) People counted his off-shore income, which is counted as income but not taxed until repatriated, as taxed at 0%. In fact it would be taxed at normal capital gains, which today is ~20% Federal + 4% Mass. Depending on the blend of foreign to domestic income, this could amount to a lot or just a little. Let's say his offshore income constituted 10% of overall income, for a ~1-2% higher average tax rate overall?

d) Most impactfully, no one's counting the Corp Tax rate which was paid before he took the Cap Gains. That's 39% Federal and another 8% Mass (~46% total), assuming that it's coming from Mass based corps. I'd say a solid chunk of his income is coming from this sort of income, probably in the ballpark of 70%, but let's just say it's 30% (of his income subject to this sort of double tax) to be super conservative.

Starting with base 14.1% + 4%(a) + 1.4%(b) + 1-2%(c) + (.3)(46%) = 21.5% just with very simple adjustments, and as high as 31.4% with a corp tax rate blended in a bit.
One of these:

Robert Bellah - Religion in Human Evolution

Frank Kogan - Real Punks Don't Wear Black

Jerry McGill - Dear Marcus

Mark Kurlansky - The Big Oyster
Alcohol can inflame your gums which can lead to gum disease. Best to use non alcohol versions.
I was using socket.io until about two weeks ago when I ran into some reconnecting issues that weren't fixed. I decided to use Primus + Multiplex + Emitter. I have only run into one issue so far with Multiplex on IE10, but that was fixed quickly. Otherwise the package seems rather solid.
So what is the ideal proportion of managers to workers - and do you count a manager who gets his/her hands dirty to be a worker or manager?
It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be
What's your talley of innocent people killed in drone strikes and as "collateral damage" by the US. Do the people affected by those atrocities have the the right to act "in direct response" against the US? If this revenge motive justifies the US, does it not also justify the terrorists?
CartoDB's Map of Beyoncé-Related Tweets in Real Time After the Album Dropped
If nginx caches for 300s and that's the only reason you are installing pdns-recursor, that's unnecessary technical debt in your production pipeline.