skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edit: I'm mostly retracting my original comment below, my argument is flawed. See my sibling comment.

----------------------------------------------------------

Here is probably a better version of my argument:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498742

Essentially, pharmaceutical clinical trials yield experimental results (new science), they are expensive (need incentive to take the risk), and any system that prevents execution of, or obfuscates the results of, the clinical trial phase is a threat to science. Maybe there is a better system than the patent system but it's the best system we have right now, given the alternatives. It could certainly be improved, maybe even replaced, but abolishing it wholesale is not a good idea.
Makes me think how much we need a revolution in batteries.

I am wondering if there will be a new type of batteries soon or maybe we'll get improved capacity by slapping a software layer that manages charging/discharging.
Ah yes, that makes much more sense.
> I can guarantee the technical skills

What are your technical qualifications?
It's 8. This isn't that accurate because I just finished a 3 hour bike ride.
This was one of the original arguments for patents. It is actually the reason they're called patents (opposed to "latent"). There had been, in UK, cases of formulas for making certain things, which had been lost because they were kept secret to preserve then-defacto monopolies.
One thing people fail to appreciate is that Oakland is geographically enormous. You can live here for years and fail to visit the majority of it, as I have. It's unfortunate that there's a lot of parts not worth visiting. Some parts are just brownfield industrial relics, some are just endless housing.

But you can say the same thing about SF. I doubt for example that when people talk about the hot SF real estate market they are referring to the Excelsior. If you center yourself on the SoMA area in SF, many parts of Oakland are closer to it, in terms of travel time, than most of SF. It could take you an hour to get to 1st and Folsom from 48th Ave & Noriega in SF. But you can get there in ten minutes from West Oakland.
[citation needed]

The corollary of Sturgeon's law is that there is a significant portion of everything which is so crap that you wouldn't believe it actually exists.

The more people you have interested in any subject (flowers, stamps, virtual reality equipment), the more likely it is that you have "crazy people" who become emotionally attached to a particular product and react quite irrationally to any news about the product.

I'd love to hear your explanation of why "crazy people generally don't know what an Oculus is" that doesn't work on the flawed assumption that everyone who knows about virtual reality is perfectly sane and in all other respects just like you.
> don't think we're on the same page here. I meant to say that Haskell protects against inconsistent states: you literally cannot create a dead player with HP and Inventory records. I don't have a strong grasp on the visitor pattern, but I'm not sure how it can be used to accomplish compile time guarantees that the properties of an object will always be correct.

An example of the visitor pattern:

class LivePlayer;
class DeadPlayer;

class PlayerVisitor {
public:
virtual void VisitLive(LivePlayer *p) = 0;
virtual void VisitDead(DeadPlayer *p) = 0;
};

class Player {
public:
virtual void Visit(PlayerVisitor *v) = 0;
virtual ~Player() { }
};

class LivePlayer : public Player {
public:
void Visit(PlayerVisitor *v) { v->VisitLive(this); }
LivePlayer(int hp, std::vector<InventoryItem> inventory)
: hp_(hp), inventory_(inventory) { }
int hp() const { return hp_; }
const std::vector<InventoryItem> &inventory() const { return inventory_; }
private:
int hp_;
std::vector<InventoryItem> inventory_;
};

class DeadPlayer : public Player {
public:
void Visit(PlayerVisitor *v) { v->VisitDead(this); }
DeadPlayer() { }
};

This is equivalent to the Haskell code

data Player = LivePlayer Int (Vector InventoryItem) | DeadPlayer

including the fact that in this example the objects are immutable.

Instead of using a case expression to pattern match over the player, you'd have to construct a PlayerVisitor and implement the visit methods on that type.

Things can be made a bit less cumbersome than that, for example in a language with lambdas, you can just have the Visit method take a lambda for each subclass, and each subclass's implementation calls one. That makes it arguably equally convenient to use the types (with some extra parentheses), but it's still much more annoying to define the types that way in the first place.
Not to defend this but it kind of goes along with a company whose app was originally named "Bang with friends."
I'm only half way through, but so far, I find it very disappointing that CBS has not given credit to anybody else who Musk has worked with.

They discuss "you decided to start a car company", but it was started by two other engineers, and Musk came in as an investor first, and joined the company later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors It would have been nice to see Musk give some credit to the original visionaries. He's still very responsible for Tesla's success, but it wasn't JUST him.

Same with PayPal, it would have been nice for Musk to say "I stared PayPal with a few friends to..."

This report sadly gives nobody else any credit in the development of this empire.
I have been where you are. If you have $5K then you are doing well. It may sound insane but here is what you should do:

1: what's something that your girlfriend wants/needs? A bike, a computer, how about a silver necklace. Go buy it for her and give it to here. It should cost you about $1,000

2: When you give it to her, tell her you are taking her on a holiday. You are paying. Spend the $4K on the holiday.

3: Do steps one and two NOW. Get up from your chair and do it now.

After this, you will have a very happy partner who will love you more because you put your relationship ahead of stupid business.

Alternatively you could spend your last $5,000 on one of your ideas or you could spend your $5K on someone elses idea. In either case the idea probably won't work, and even if it is a good idea it does not need your $5K. Your money will be gone. You will never have invested any substantial money into yourself/your girlfriend/your relationship which will fall apart because it's no fun and there's always money pressure and you are always stressed because you never have a holiday and are always working. You'll be in exactly the same position you would have been if you'd spent the $5K on her.

In the meantime, pursue your personal business ambitions as a hobby and stop gambling everything you have on it.
And generally a good clue as to what is wrong (or at least where to put the next couple checks...).
Better idea. Give up on some fake dream, put in the hours now at your job. Give your girlfriend the attention she deserves or do her a favor and get away from her. Find your own mental stability, and go from there. You'll feel a hell of a lot better.
I'm pretty sure you weren't working in business in the United States in the late 90s. The Palm devices were the fancy gadgets to have.

The were vastly more mainstream than the Newton ever was. They lost traction when the Blackberry phone emerged in the early 2000s, but if they had been able to get in the phone game faster, Palm could have beaten Apple to the smartphone.
Completely agree. That's all I got out of the article. Those guys are so out of touch with why people are pissed.

Death threats are obviously unacceptable regardless.
That's not necessarily a good analogy since you're talking about a COW (copy-on-write) situation, not always, granted, but in this case it seems true.

DigitalOcean admitted that in some cases they are using qcow, so I wouldn't say I expect the image (e.g. Ubuntu 13.10 x64) to disappear when I hit 'Destroy!' (with the appropriate bits set for secure destruction) but any changes which I have made should certainly be gone.

Single Layer: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Riw7y.png
Multi Layer: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/_images/docker-filesystems-m...

In Docker parlance I would not expect the base image to disappear forever, that's a separate layer, but I would expect that were DigitalOcean serving up containers with a 'Scrub Data' option then the contents of my writeable container would be securely erased.
Superfluid helium
I think they're turning a blind eye to the way many people view Facebook, Facebook's habit of making decisions that compromise user privacy (since that's how they make money), and so on because it's in their financial advantage to be bought out like that.

Zuckerberg's comments about potential paths that VR will take (with Facebook's backing) already admit that he's planning many of the things that people are saying they're worried about, and the Oculus people are just going "Huh? What? I don't know what you mean...."
Hi. At your company and other Haskell teams that say they hire elite engineers, is an engineer's compensation higher than comparable non-FP shops?

Please forgive the bluntness; as a guy who is about halfway down "the road to Haskell", it seems like none of the shops that say they value FP are willing to pay more for it. For me, it's been easier to extract money from a javashop that's starved for talent and just figure out a way to install FP there. DK effect might also be clouding my self valuation.
No, lisp doesn't allow you to specify your own syntax. You can't just start writing stuff without parens and define what that parses to later.
Author here.

> I believe the author meant between frameworks, patterns and compilation styles. To a lesser extent syntax (that's probably the most visible but least painful).

Spot on.

> To be honest, I'm not sure what that point was about I still feel a context switch going from server side node js in my apis and apps to client side angular / backbone.

That's not a point I was trying to make, perhaps I wasn't clear. The context-switching I was talking about wanting to avoid was Go (or some other language) and Javascript, and the fact that my tooling is JS means I'm gonna be switching all the more often. I don't really have a problem switching between client and server-side JS.

In fact, context-switching isn't that hard for me, but being able to avoid it is a nice bonus that comes with what happens to be my favorite stack.
What causes you to conclude that there is no benefit to the economy?
Your premise is wrong, as another commentator pointed out.

If anything, there's an above average correlation between the early adopter tech crowd and crazy people who drastically overreact to news of things.

Also, because of things like Minecraft associations, a widely popular Kickstarter (which generated news), and the general media love of new technologies (such as VR), I think more people are aware of Oculus than you're admitting.
that's in there, with the assumption that you're using the promises based node.js api, but if you aren't, and you're using Q, that part looks like this

var readFile = Q.denodeify(FS.readFile);

which doesn't create the promise. it just wraps the readFile method so that it returns a promise when you call it.
> It's actually impossible to delete the snapshot as a single operation, first you have to 'Restore' it. Oh the irony.

Now that's a bug! DO staff, fix this!

> so you're still vulnerable to your instance contents potentially showing up down the road when a hard drive ends up in a dumpster somewhere

From my experience in the computer refurbishing industry, any US corporation with a legal department has data-disposal-related asset-liquidation procedures. If the company is sensible, this results in giant magnets or DBAN; more often, though, it just results in a concrete warehouse floor and a sledgehammer. Either way, client data isn't getting out of the building. (see the sibling comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7499125 for more details.)

It's true that someone who hacked into DO's live snapshot servers could dump and examine the disks and possibly find your data[1]. But they could, equally easily, hack into DO's live compute servers and dump your keys from your VM's memory. Until we've got homeomorphic machine-emulation software, instance memory, not snapshots, are the weakest link in your security.

[1] If the user-provided-snapshot servers are themselves a cluster of DO droplets--running, say, OpenStack Swift--then those instances would certainly get secure-erased. This is probably the way I'd set up the system myself, though I have no idea whether DO does.
Great article. I've recently had to walk some more junior engineers through these tools. I would through in Electric Fence as one to consider.
Eh, there's a certain logic to saying 'boys are going to beat each other. Supervise it and let them vent it in a controlled manner and it's better for all'.

We didn't have boxing, but teachers realised pretty early on that boys were going to play tackle rugby at lunch time, since from about grade 6 onwards it was offered as an extracurricular sport. The idea was that the kids and teachers reached an agreement that they'd let us play it if a teacher (usally one of the coaches of the school teams) was present to referee it and make sure we did it safely. It was a pretty good, common-sense solution to something that was going to happen anyway, so they instead went with risk-minimisation.
I think most people with tax knowledge expected Bitcoin to be taxed in this way in the us. To think the us would give Bitcoin some sort of special treatment is absurd.

People will gamble on anything, as long as the price isn't fixed (and it will never be), there will always be those willing to throw money at it and dream big.

Keep in mind: Big players haven't really yet bought in yet, Bitcoin is currently inflationary, and so on. Bitcoin certainly has little hope to become stable any time soon.
> I think learning risk-management is a key thing that kids are missing.

I agree completely. Call it 'common sense', 'street smarts,' whatever. It's having the nous to think through what you're about to do and judge whether you're at risk of ending up in trouble, and it starts with learning the hard way that the branch you're about to stand on to climb up the tree is woefully rotted and is about to give way under you. You can't teach this stuff in classrooms, either. It's really something that has to be learned through running across a slippery piece of ground and falling over.

I still remember back when I was 6, I was playing soccer in the school grounds with other kids at lunchtime and went to slide tackle some kid. Turns out he jumped, and I didn't realise until it was too late that there were big wooden plank hurdles right behind him. I slid into them and split my eyebrow open pretty decently (I still have a patch of no eyebrow from the scar, 2 decades later).

When the school first aid room called my mum to have her come and get me, she told them that she was busy at work and I'd have to wait a bit. She knew I was alive and not going to get any worse and so knew it wasn't an emergency. Kids get hurt, it's what happens.

The other cool thing was that we had quite a bit of bushland on the school grounds and the children were allowed to play in it. We ended up forming fiefdoms and building forts and having little mock wars. It is fascinating to look back at because on top of the flagrant OH&S issues it'd raise (kids stabbing and beating each other with sticks), there was a huge political aspect to it all. Every year, you'd work out which teacher had a classroom clock that was slightly ahead of the rest, and therefore would get out to lunch slightly sooner. Those kids would be super valuable as they'd be able to run to the forts and protect their own / sabotage others freely, before the reinforcements arrived. There was serious negotiation and political power play going on amongst kids and it would've no doubt made a bunch of child development PhDs happy had they known about it.

It's hard to quantify, but I am sure that the exposure to this sort of playground environment had undoubtably a huge role in my upbringing and subsequent approach to risk and risk management in life. As such, I've been fascinated by the OP's study for a bit now and I am really glad it's being done. A lot of people talk about the problems with bubble-wrapping children these days and it's going to be good to see if it is an actual phenomenon instead of just rose-coloured reminiscence.
Isn't this just a link to an advertisement?
Thanks for pointing this out, nearly 1 year ago we implemented a backup mechanism which stores a destroyed machine for 24 hours. This is only enabled for users with a valid paying account and we used this mechanism sometimes to return a droplet to a customer who accidentally deleted it, other times there were problems with an integrated third party where we were able to recover customer droplets because of a security problem.

We will take the necessary steps so that if users are enabling scrub all data permanently then we will not store this temporary image and therefore destroys will be immediate and permanent.
True, if you hold the investments long enough, a small difference in price would even out. Investor are only trying to "out trade" HFT in same sense that are trying to make a fair trade without the secret tax that front runners extract.
As far as I can tell - there's lots of "interesting" energy storage technology being researched, but there's nothing that's close to being ready for at-scale manufacturing.
The Utility of Erlang Records: Where Maps Should and Shouldn't Replace Records
I'd say the latter because Oakland experienced a significant windfall in real estate transfer taxes prior to the real estate crash, and it was all squandered by Ron Dellums[1] and cronies.

The current government are hardly better. Mayor Quan is a semi-literate career politician. Her ideas are basically terrible and stupid.

1: True fact: I couldn't remember his name so I just googled "dipshit mayor of oakland" and his name popped up #1.
1. Do you think the people living in that house in the background appreciate that?
2. All I can think of watching that guy on the motorcycle sans helmet at the end is his brains splattered over the pavement.
Great article. A key quote that the editors highlight: “Reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development." As a teacher, I want kids to ask questions, explore, and inquire in the classroom. Why shouldn't this extend to physical and social exploration on the playground? It strikes me that in most Western culture, we reward risktaking behaviors in academic and business environments, so why should we devalue it in in childhood recreational environments?
Yep. The only really-real difference is compile time checking.
I mentioned DR-DOS for a reason when I was discussing the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. And yea, personally I have several things on my wishlist for Satya: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...
That's a very good reason, and the first real one I have heard, thanks man.

Also, I used to work for MapBox, and I know we did one project on mongo which I was not involved in, and afterwards we built everything with CouchDB (which is how I got acquainted with it).

For the geo stuff we actually used a lot of sqlite and to a lesser extent spatialite. We would pre-calculate things and build them into the rendered tiles in mbtiles format, or stream the point/polygon data from the couch database for realtime client-side compositing.

But yeah, routing is pretty high level stuff. I think they are only now putting the finishing touches on their openstreetmap driven routing system many years later.

[1] http://mapbox.com
I like the balanced tone you employ here. Not a fanatic but reasonable about the analysis.
Its worth pointing out that due to Sarbanes-Oxley, some of this will not happen on the stock market this time. So if you are just looking at P/E of publicly traded stocks you are going to miss the signs.
Agreed. IMO helmets are one of those treatments against a low-likelihood, high-consequence risk. The treatment also comes at very little inconvenience, so it's a no-brianer (pun not intended) to choose to do so.

Banning kids from riding bikes around cars? I can understand why that's considered a bit too overprotective, but helmets to me seem like a common-sense method of resolving a significant risk with insignificant inconvenience.
Started working at 17. Worked a full-time job or two part-time jobs ever since. Was always drawn to CS, landed a professional role at 23 while still working towards my degree.
UN climate panel calls for urgent action as risks increase
Mason55, I work for Rackspace. The ObjectRocket service does not run on the cloud servers you get from RS. It's actually a different architecture just for MongoDB: flash drives all over, containers, pretty much tuned for MongoDB across the stack.
While we don't describe the full details of the architecture, you have a very valid recommendation that we will take into consideration to make sure it is clear what you are getting for your money. Thanks.
Yawn. Given iPad for Office was started before Satya was CEO, Ballmer made serious bets on mobile (yes, the WP ecosystem, but something different for MSFT), AND Gates was on the board, discounting Ballmer and Gates at the start of the second paragraph is ... I'll say interesting, my gut says "dumb". Both Gates and Ballmer are on the board and were likely well aware of what's up and Gates gave up chairmanship to help Satya on technology issues.

I suspect parts of Redmond are still Windows uber alles, but, Microsoft has been doing non-Windows products for 30+ years.
Agnostic, borderline atheist here. I've always wondered something. If theists scoff at the idea that the universe was created from nothing and just came into being, convinced that it must've taken a higher power to create it, then how do they explain where god came from?
I was about to say "define God" but then I realized that's a lot like "define insert racial or gender classification here" - for the purpose of polls (among other things), it's about self-identification. So I voted "yes" even though I'd probably put "atheist" on a survey because I have my own definition of "God" and I believe it relates to this question closely enough to count.
I'm a bit confused. You've spent the last 5 years on your own start-ups? Or working on other people's ideas?

If you've got the technical skills, why is the $5000 so important. I'm sure you've read about being 'lean', why do your start-up ideas require such a cost input, if you already have the technical skills.

Where in the world are you? Technical skills seem more in demand than business skills, but you also say that the people you know, know nothing about business, so I suspect you aren't in one of the technology hubs.

I'll bet that if you look around in your community, you will find business leaders. They may not be running multi-million dollar ventures, or start-ups, but they know the basics of business. See if one of these people can help you flush out your ideas. You'll probably find somebody willing to do it for free. Maybe they'll even want to invest in you (later) if they see you getting the job done and believe in your business.

Don't go blowing your $5k, but make sure you are doing what will make both you and your GF happy. A vacation doesn't have to cost a ton, you can get creative and have an amazing experience.
I couldn't find any background on the authors, so how can I tell if this is solid?