skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a simplification which overlooks the parent point.

It seems reasonable that the gyres have always collected crap and sealife has avoided it. Now that crap is plastic.

But, the gyre already provides the function of avoid-getting-killed-by-plastic, so it's not clear why we should aggressively reduplicate that effort.

The garbage patch may offer benefits to the ecosystem which are not immediately obvious. Whereas, filtering is likely to damage the ecosystem in some ways.

Human record of tending to the ocean has not been very good and we're not good at predicting consequences. I recommend watching documentary film "The End of the Line" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1176727/ before assuming that filtering is a panacea.
Thank you. It's 1200 UTC and dropbox is hosed.
Significant changes to one's life, such as deaths, sickness, and births tend to pull people's perspective on this direction (at least temporarily).
I imagine the idea is applied to teenager, where it's supposed to teach them hard work and the value of money.
Kernel: Scheme macros aren't first-class.
The idea is not to duplicate gyres, rather supplement those with cleanup.

Gyres collect it, we harvest it on the spot.
Unless your kids are stupid then I don't see how that is going to work. They will realise.
I don't understand why anyone would want to raise an entitled brat.

No one wants to raise an entitled brat for the sake of it, it's just that raising an entitles brat is so much easier and less time consuming.
A couple of differences - the private individual probably does have access to records of who the car belongs to (which is far more useful information), and they also typically can't use the data to do too much damage, such as implicate you in a crime because you happened to be driving past 3 places where similar crimes happened in the past.
Invoice Ninja
My point is it's the same thing, just faster/cheaper. Perhaps it should be banned or controlled. But calling it unconstitutional is a stretch I think. If that's the case, regular "dumb" surveillance cameras should be too.
It's only the most important one as it's the only one we're allowed to use.

More like: Can functional paradigms be used in a procedural language
Regarding Postgres vs MySQL performance in conjunction with programming languages, this is kind of interesting:
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...
History Will Remember Obama as the Great Slayer of Patent Trolls
To me the crux of the issue is the interface. If you can define a very clean interface without having to do a lot of contortions to get the data you want where you need it, then extracting a service can be relatively low overhead. But what often happens is at the 30,000-foot view it looks like a service makes sense, but then when you get into the details you realize the separation can not be as clean as you first envisioned.
I think just setting up a baseline income for life would be sufficient. Say 100k/year. Enough that they can comfortably pursue whatever makes them happy, without being rich.
Yeah, strace/dtrace/truss/whatever is your friend, but it seems like it is probably alien to most Ruby developers given how many obvious performance issues you can spot with it (then again, most developers in general seemingly have never bothered to look at a trace of their apps)

I don't think Bundler and Rubygems' path handling would ever have been written and released in the state they are now if someone had seriously looked at the actual system calls it generates for any app with dependencies on more than 2-3 gems....

Especially because there's a simple-ish solution: create manifests of files for each gem, load them, and check a hash of the combined set of files first, and fall back to a much trimmed down load path if the file isn't from any of the specified gems. Bundler could even easily create an aggregate manifest of all the gems the app depends on to make the check very cheap.

I keep meaning to try to hack something together, but for now I have something half-assed that cuts enough seconds of my app start times that I haven't been able to prioritise it.
PHP: C++ ain't good for the web.
What impresses me most about his epic win is that he's still #1 in the world for net worth (or occasionally #2 or #3) -- can you imagine if he was still actively trying to get even more personally wealthy?
It’s a matter of deliberate focus! If you are interested in browser stuff, you can either combine Speaking JS with the content on MDN [1] or buy a different book. I like the books by Nicholas Zakas and “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
Dieet Ervaringen Werkt het Mentale Dieet Plan écht? – Dieet Ervaringen
PHP was created before ASP. And it wasn't intended to be a full programming language.
DhtmlxGantt 2.1 – Build Customizable Gantt Charts with JavaScript
I could care less if their children are leading productive lives. Leaving them some amount of money is probably not going to change a lot either way.

For that matter I don't care much if anybody "has to work for a living". Anything else would be jealousy.
According to GP your app contains in-app purchases.

Yuck. How much for that 2048 tile again?
How to abuse a C++ compiler?
I just watched "All Is Lost" with Robert Redford, and I can't help but think that if you are going to have your boat sink in the Indian Ocean, now would be a REALLY good time to do it.
How we make immune cells that keep the body from attacking itself
I think spot's formulation is closer to the original intent. The purpose was to create a language for web pages, not an exploration of functional paradigms in procedural languages.
Beta Testing as a Service
Hi all,

Does anyone know of a service that, for a fee and with well defined parameters, will gather a bunch of users to perform beta testing on a product?

So, say there's a browser extension that someone has developed, and she wants to get, say, 15 people to install it, use it, play with it, and provide useful feedback on it (more than just,"this is awesome" or "this sucks") - feedback that can be used to shape the product.

I've heard of Betalize, but, visiting their site, it's very hard to tell how it works and how to launch what they call a "contest". Does anyone know if they're still in business? Anyone know of a worthy competitor?

This seems like an obvious idea and a service just about every startup would need. But I haven't seen anything like this. But maybe one of you has, and so I'd appreciate any insights you can offer.

Thanks very much!
Ideas opensourced.
This is great advice. If you can work remotely then, work remotely now. Make sure it works for you and your employer.
Love Zesty! Makes a huge difference actually going in the kitchen and 'healthy-fying' the process. Less guilt, more yum, just perfect.
Remote employees still go to meetings.
I think I could've guessed this about Bill and Melinda based on what we already know about their non-billionaire like lifestyle.

It's an approach to be lauded, but one thing their children will always have is that they started out privileged which is itself a huge inheritance.
As regards replacing Evernote, there is already the very capable and stable Zotero[1], which provides source to roll your own server[2]. It integrates well with LibreOffice and LaTeX/BibTeX.

It does nothing to address the anonymous or secure aspects however.

1. https://www.zotero.org/
2. https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/dataserver_setup
Show HN: How I created and promoted my first OS X app for $304
Essentially a family-only basic income guarantee? Sounds like the best idea in the thread so far.
I've known quite a few remote workers (and I work remote myself about 1/3rd the time), but I don't know anyone who has used this.

It seems like it hasn't broken the creep-factor yet from people I've talked to.
I've emailed for the Matasano challenges three times from two different email address and never received anything.

Is it okay if I ask somebody here to send me a copy?
Why Workers Can Suffer in Bossless Companies Like GitHub
Many of the comments in this thread are depressingly similar to same-sex slut-shaming.

"I can't or don't want to do that, so I don't think you should be allowed to do that either. I'm going to judge you and speak badly of you, to try to punish you for doing something I don't want to, and discourage you and others from doing something I don't want to."

Meta is a start-up (cool) creating augmented reality (very cool) hardware (even more cool) for interactive interaction with virtual overlays (just unbelievably cool). I'm a computer vision / computer graphics guy, and everything about this project looks technologically awesome, with potentially world-changing applications.

They went through YC and are still getting positive press, so the start-up is looking about as successful as a start-up at this stage can be.

I bet you that every single one of the employees loves this idea, loves working on it, and honestly believes that Meta is going to change the world and be the next Apple. When I was in my twenties, I worked crazy hours and slept under my desk for a lot less.

EDIT: Added the word "same-sex" before "slut-shaming" to clarify the comparison I'm making.
neither am i
"A team of researchers in Shanghai has now been told it has 10 instead of 25 years to develop the world's first such plant."

Or else what?

Oh. Ohhhhhhhh.
That kind of "retreat" is a bit more conventional I think. It's fairly common at large companies to occasionally send a team to Vail or Hawaii or a cruise or something for a week for team-building / brainstorming / etc. But you don't usually bring your family and actually move in with your coworkers; it's more of a business trip.

In a more researchy direction, there's a German institute that organizes these kinds of events. They have a castle in the middle of nowhere, Schloss Dagstuhl, which accepts proposals from people who want to use it to organize 1-week residential seminars on different subjects: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/dagstuhl-seminars/
What's wrong with that? No need to overcomplicate stuff. That's a perfectly good solution depending on what reliability you want.
Can someone create thetakingpledge.com/ so that I can sign up?
Just because MS has a separated division doesn't mean Google has to follow. A lot of the google come out as both product and paper. That's already a research lab. Why do we bother to discuss this in the first place? I really don't see any difference in having a dedicated research lab and a place where research and products are mixed together, true a lot of employees at google don't publish papers and they do boring works like fixing bugs.
As far as I can tell, doing production work in Prolog would be an order of magnitude more difficult than doing production work in Haskell. This is just a guess, as I only have experience with the latter. This is similar to the reason we don't use Idris, Shen, and so on (yet!)
Show HN: Precess , a real-time sass compiler
My first sinatra app!
Off topic: Can anyone list ongoing software based research projects, that are critically interesting, preferably in the sphere of compiler design, low level system software or high performance computing?
That's a terrible title. A Uranium fuel cycle would combat smog just as much. Thorium plants can in principle be less risky, though is you factor out proliferation and reprocessing risk it is possible to make Uranium fuel plants that are inherently safe from meltdown, too.

The news is that China is about to outrun everyone in bringing nuclear plants online. They have a lot of construction under way.
http://xkcd.com/1344/
Not only that, but Reuters data services are questionable as well.
There's abstraction and then there's abstraction. One of the benefits of Haskell is that it actually uses good abstractions rather than leaky ad-hoc ones. Making a Car an instance of Vehicle is not a good abstraction. Making a List an instance of Monoid is.
Off topic: Rust from Mozilla is provably the first thing I think of outside of Google that matches the compiler part.
Cars are too dangerous to not be tracked.

I used to think a lot of things were justified, because on balance they would help to protect innocent people against relatively minor illegal activities, and while they could theoretically be used for major abuses by governments no democratically elected administration would ever get away with doing it. Many of those had to do with balancing everyone being accountable under the law with anonymity and privacy.

Unlike some people, I prefer to learn the lessons of history and change my views when the evidence warrants, and I am increasingly of the view that the democratic accountability of our governments is far too weak and the price of trusting governments with the power afforded by a surveillance state is far too high to pay for some modest benefits.

A case in point: 'omh mentioned the London Congestion Charge in another post to this discussion, linking to news that (contrary to clear assurances given when the cameras were rolled out) the London mayor now wants to give police direct access to the cameras. Now, to be fair, this isn't an absurd idea: no doubt these cameras do help to catch some people who are trying to escape justice after breaking the law (they are careful to cite examples of this) and reportedly this was in the Mayor's manifesto at the last election so it does have some degree of democratic mandate.

Of course, there have also been stories where the system has gone horribly wrong and incorrectly fined people[1], or just not been understood and penalised people who were trying to behave reasonably and do the right thing[2]. Given that the way our court system works means that it can be prohibitively expensive to challenge automated penalty notices issued by such systems if you live a long way away and were just visiting (assuming you really were ever there in the first place) I have significant reservations about how easy this kind of "enforcement" becomes under a surveillance state, and whether even the genuine benefits of better enforcement against minor offenders are enough to justify such schemes, which makes me even less trusting of the long-term motivations of those involved.

[1] I can't immediately find a link, but the one I most remember was an elderly gentlemen who lived in the north of England and rarely if ever visited London any more, yet who wound up getting many fines sent to him, presumably because someone cloned his plates.

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/23/congesti...
Largest Redis Cluster Ever
Watch as American states change over 200 years(timelapse map)
I've picked up on this theme in my reply to another post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7435043
I don't know about Portola Valley zoning regs, but I hope this article doesn't draw unwanted attention to Meta's arrangement.

Many/most towns would frown on the number of unrelated people living in a unpermitted hotel, operating a business with more than a certain number of employees in a non commercial district, etc.

Legal or not, it sounds like fun for a couple years, if you're young enough to see appeal in dorm life.
15 benefits of online invoicing
Interesting insights about hiring software developers in Croatia
Hopefully they will leave something in case one or more of the kids "fall down" later in life. I think Bill and Melinda might be discounting the luck factor that they have had in their own fortune. While I'm not saying that they didn't work their butts off to get where they are, there was a lot of luck involved as well.

Imagine how they would feel if, after they were gone (and I realize they can't feel anything at that point...), one of their kids was in their 50's and lost everything because of bad luck - cancer or other disease for example. Then the "kid" had to live his/her life out in poverty. How sad would that be that he/she had the richest parents in the world (due to good luck) but lived in poverty because of bad luck.
"Don't Read the Comments" by Jonathan Dale
What exactly do you mean, they are too dangerous not to be tracked?
You are correct.

You start with thorium plus a fissionable isotope of uranium or plutonium. The fission neutrons convert the thorium to U-233, which is fissionable. After that you rely on U-233 fission for neutrons and keep feeding thorium to it.

It can be done with solid fuel but with liquid fuel it works out really nicely. You can fission pretty much everything and have just fission products left over, which means a lot less nuclear waste that only has to be contained for a few hundred years. And you're not shipping anything fissionable to or from the reactor.
"CrashPlan doesn't delete your backups after 30 days (they keep everything as long as you're subscribed), but the upload speed is so horrendously slow I couldn't upload the entire photo library plus videos (~300 GB or so) in the month I was subscribed."

That problem, at least, seems to have improved. I backed up ~250GB a couple of months back and while I don't recall the exact time - might have been several days - it was certainly well under a month.
It is absolutely worthy of attention -- my point was: what are the editorial guidelines of HackerNews? There are guidelines, as was pointed to me. Those guidelines are not exactly followed by the chunk of the community who confused my open question with a complaint and downvoted. I was curious how people read those guidelines in those two cases: are both up-voted by the same group? If human interest is key, why isn’t every Vice documentary here?
He's getting to jail for ... screenshots ?
New startup Pracly: Connect to timely expert advice on demand
For that there are already several good, stable JVM lisps, though. I assume people are moving to Clojure because they specifically want Clojure, not just a lisp on the JVM; otherwise the more conservative choice would be to use ABCL (if you want CL) or Kawa (if you want Scheme).
The word here is investigators, I assumed that this was some legal entity (FBI?) doing it with court orders.
In A Perfect World, This Is How Web Sites Would Handle Login Forms
Apple Looking Into A Stylus With Light and Motion-Sense
How is it disingenuous. You have presented a bunch of opinions of what you think is going to happen and say that therefore, the statement is false.

The Gates' have billions of dollars. I have seen it stated that each kid will be inheriting something like a million dollars, which yes, is a lot of money, but nowhere near enough money to do nothing for the rest of your life, and a drop in the bucket compared to the family fortune.

Just because you "presume" the family estates, etc., will not be sold for charity despite all of their statements otherwise doesn't make it true.
It's not disingenuous. The Gates family could instead choose to direct their fortune to dynastic wealth. Only an imbecile would believe that the children of Bill Gates would face any of the challenges that a poor child in East Saint Louis would. Gates himself said that his children would have the freedom to do "whatever they want" - that's an enormous gift. One his grandchildren might not have, unless his children work for it.
he sent more than screenshots, code as well
http://libcello.org/ ?
or else funding stops?
Is it time to start talking about civil disobedience and removing large numbers of number plates from cars in an organised protest?

Judging by the number of people who go screaming past me when I'm driving near London, and how they set off speed cameras all over the place with no apparent concern, I am assuming that plenty of people already did remove their own number plates and install clones of someone else's, though possibly not for quite such ethical purposes as you mentioned.
The things he leaked don't really looked like "Trade Secrets", but more things you wouldn't ever release if you worked at a company and had any semblance of sense at all.

"Trade Secrets" is a little extreme, except for maybe the windows activation source code. That certainly makes windows activation easier to crack.
It doesn't really matter if they realize. Just because they know you have money doesn't mean you have to spoil them with it.
> Out of security concerns, Bill has likely arranged for bodyguards and ensured that they will be able to travel via private jet for the rest of their lives.

Body guards are no-one’s idea of luxury (I’ve dated someone who had an escort). As for private jets, I’m fairly certain that is part of the things that they won’t get unless they work for it.

> Most people are motivated to work, at least in part, because they will starve and be homeless if they don't.

Interesting take worldwide, but I don’t think this is true for anyone close to Gates' family.

> Hopefully his kids choose to be productive.

The point of the article is precisely to say: they won’t have a choice. He took legally binding steps to make sure that he won't be able to help if they end up in an unacceptable position by their own actions.
Giving Back to the Developer Community
Is it just me, or are many of the recent acquisitions relatively senseless?

Facebook do search, google do social, amazon do streaming video, alibaba and ebay do messaging - I really do not understand why all of these big players seem to feel the need to increase their competitive surface area, and therefore compromise on their core businesses.

We're going to end up with a bunch of corporate jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none, to nobody's benefit, not even theirs.

I mean, from TFA, Alibaba regard themselves as "social media giants". They're a marketplace. If that's not a profound misunderstanding of ones own business model, I don't know what is.
> I love how easy it is to get started with MySQL and historically it's had a great user manual for beginners.

s/My/Postgre/

Seriously, on any platform you might reasonably use in the last five years, PostgreSQL is in the package manager, and installation is one command, just like anything else. Some packagings even create an initial database for you; for those which don't, it's just:

sudo -i postgres
initdb
createuser wildutah
createdb -O wildutah wildutah

I think the PostgreSQL manual is very good. The one weakness that i can see is that there isn't (that i know of) a single-page soup-to-nuts getting started guide for someone simply using PostgreSQL locally. There are blog posts which do the job, but it would be nice to have something official.
that's what I thought too initially but re-reading they say "corporate investigators" and, unless they are being very liberal with names, a corporate investigators is not someone who works for some public agency
RudyMQ – A message queue in .NET
Kotlin is Scala--
Metaballs are too expensive for more than a few particles. There are probably some other algorithms that would work better, or not doing metaballs strictly.
plenty of those, but the biggest and most succsful one I am familiar with is uTest.

http://www.utest.com
We're aiming to go beta sometime in the middle of this year hopefully.
> Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals?

Name one that is only used by criminals.
> A knowledge company in 2014 is different to a factory in 1893 and they are both new on the grander scale.

Yet this living situation isn't that much of a stretch from the dormitory-style housing you still see in China for factory workers, or the company towns you saw in the U.S. for mine workers and the like.
$215 million for any software is simply bullshit. Somebody is lining their pockets BIG TIME. How many engineers do you need for a single freaking Chat App? 10 or 20 at absolute MOST. If you can't build a quality messaging app for less than $2.15 million you are failing HARD.
Which isn't a bad thing
Trademark issue will cause $30,000-worth of multimeters to be destroyed
Yes, but the exact URLs are oxfam.co.uk, redcross.org and telethon.org

Organisations focused on the people in need, but operated by people with money have been too much under the spotlight, allowing many to give hardly anything yet enough to set up a photo op. The point of the Giving Pledge is to focus on how much someone can give without harming a reasonable lifestyle.