skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'patio11 if you're reading this (or anyone else who knows): What does the "Fundamental SaaS Equation" equate to? I mean, it's obviously some measure of the "expected value" of traffic over a period... is it the "expected LTV" for a group of traffic? ie. is ARPU/churn == LTV ? (Possibly as a consequence of the infinite series implied by churn...?)
Programming is not Engineering
Tomorrow is my last day as a professional .NET developer, nothing here to make me think twice about saying goodbye.
Kilgour–Matas report
Digilent NetFPGA board, basically plug a bunch of gig-e connectors into a FPGA, upload some ethernet software and away you go. Upload a softcore and run spanning tree on the softcore.

You won't like the price of the board I mentioned. On the other hand, nobody said a dev board with a bazillion extra features you don't want, made in extremely low quantity, is the cheapest possible way to stick a bunch of ethernet PHY to a FPGA (and you could optimize the size of that FPGA if you wanted...)

The point of that provided example multi-ethernet FPGA development board isn't that its the best you could do financially or technologically, but that if you tried to do your own thing and screwed up, its probably difficult to do worse.

As a practical matter having fooled with much smaller and simpler things the price should end up competitive in the end.

The biggest problem is synth takes a long time, god only knows what the CIA and KGB ops embedded in the source, and the IP licenses probably make distribution of the source rather difficult. Its mostly a business/government problem, not a technological problem.
As you said to toomuchtodo, I think you are missing the forest for the trees.

"Ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages" when honest, but when dishonest they are a mechanism for inferior products to overcome good products and unnecessary products to manipulate people into buying what they don't need.

So what proportion of ads do you think are the former, and what proportion the latter? Maybe you're being honest about your shoes (which still doesn't mean you're right), but what about all the others? What about the big established shoe-makers? So easy for them to claim the same thing, and you won't be able to compete with their large marketing budgets. That's fixed by word-of-mouth? No, you already dismissed that mechanism.

I think most people will agree with me that at least 90% of ads are dishonest on some level. Even if it were only 70%, ads simply replace the information shortage problem with an overwhelming misinformation problem.

The only reason the government needed to spend so much money on advertising the health programs for children is because we've become a society inundated with misinformation (Obama Care is evil!) and news programs that focus on celebrity gossip and missing jetliners instead of truly useful public information (because ratings drive ad revenue). If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. If it weren't for the ad-driven information ecology we have today, there would be much better ways for the government to get that out. For one, it's what the news is supposed to do (as a journalistic duty, not to increase Nielsen ratings/page views to increase ad revenue).

> The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims.

If you in your experience (I'm assuming you're not young) don't see that at least 90% of ads (be it for products or political candidates) are misleading at best, then it's unlikely anything I say will convince you.
Great tutorial on a fun topic!
A few reasons why I'd like to pay by phone:

- It's a bit easier to pull out my phone from my pocket vs. pulling out my wallet, then locating my card, and then pulling that out

- Tapping my phone is an easier process than aligning and sliding my card through a narrow slit

- I'd love it if coin-like functionality is one day integrated into my phone, so I can select a specific card to use vs. digging through my wallet for it, or switch cards quickly and try again if the first one gets denied, etc.

These are all admittedly minor, but many successful technologies are about increased convenience anyway.
Perhaps the legal justification needs to be abstracted from specific cases. Only if a specific case fulfills the justification can that justification be used in secret prior to full execution of that move which then requires full disclosure in post mortem of the event. A non-indefinite yet reasonable time limit should be another requirement that forces either rescinding the justification and/or requiring full disclosure.

This way a justification can be made without details being made public that would alert a sensitive target. It is also necessary to make sure that a potential authorized kill could not be held open indefinitely and the details released publicly in a timely manner.
The people who wrote v8 and spidermonkey are busy writing new things too.
Ask HN: Approaches to storing data from multiple/disparate RDBMS data sources
I was looking at a few SaaS analytics products and was wondering as to how these companies were storing data from their customers/clients.

For e.g., Company A has PostgreSQL and Company B has MySQL as their databases. The SaaS product company is able to store data of both Company A and Company B and provide analytics. Even in the case where Company B has PostgreSQL as its database and the schemas are not the same, still the SaaS product company is able to provide analytics.

My question is - How does one (a) source (b) store and (c) analyze data coming from diverse companies/businesses having different/disparate/dissimilar databases in a scalable and reliable manner? What would be the methodology to follow?
I'm (CS-grad) working as an intern with people working on the LHC and KM3NeT, ROOT/cint is used extensively there. It's unbelievable the blind love these scientists have with c++. The reasons so far I heard are: "it's fast" referring to C++ and ROOT.
Furthermore cling - also used in the ROOT project - perhaps is a more modern approach in the C++ interpreter scene. It's based upon LLVM and can do JIT (and probably better c++11 support)
I gave no such example. The person targeted under the loophole does not have to be an enemy.

The requirement is that they be in military or militia service during a war or public crisis. Any war. Any crisis. If you are shooting Martian invaders with a slingshot, you fall into the loophole. If you are an Indonesian soldier delivering drinking water to tsunami victims in Indonesia, you fall into the loophole. Get it?
I actually almost went and got an English master's after my CS undergrad. I've found that there are more people from the humanities who are interested in code than there are coders interested in the humanities, though there are a number of us :)
Apart from the counterarguments already cited, this seems very one-sided. You don't seem to apply any blame when it comes to the customers to whom the ads are shown (or apparently deceiving).

They choose to purchase from advertisers and ignore en masse most any product that isn't advertised in some way. It's fairly obvious that they want to buy things and they want a certain kind of advertising that leads them to buy those things. What you seem to be arguing for is a place where people just walk around and look for stuff they need/want and if they ask "Where can I buy this thing I need?" for the manufacturer to stare blankly and shrug.
From the comments on the question, it's actually for a joke/complaint about the cost of that very logo: http://pvp.comeze.com/brandgenerator/ (type in Halifax and it shows a message about the cost).

It would be pretty funny if the libraries made to help out this joke end up being used for official uses of the logo, but at present the logo's only rendered inside an image at the official branding site, http://halifaxdefined.ca/#new-logo
Crows will use cars to crack open nuts! I suspect the initial discovery was likely accidental; somewhere a crow dropped a nut and a car ran over it.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543846.

When an item has had significant attention, HN generally doesn't allow reposts for about a year.
Short answer from the website: "The first of its kind and scale, the Award is dedicated to transforming these exciting technologies into practical solutions for improving people’s lives today."

Slightly longer answer: Most of these technologies have been used for military and security applications to date. Those are important, but things are developing so rapidly and become so much less expensive (Moore's Law) that incredible new uses are becoming possible every day. The Award is about stimulating creative thinking about how to apply their potential for positive social application.

TL;DR: There is a important conversation to be had around adapting these applications to the public good. This requires imagination, leadership, and public support. That is what this award is about. Hope that answers your question.
Obama takes out a pen and writes your name on a piece of paper with kill list at the top.
$25 per single class discussion, and I see on the pricing page it's actually not really per discussion, but is priced per entire class of N-discussions, with around 1 discussion section per week. How long are these discussion sections? Is it an hour say?

The "first two are free" claim seems to be deceptive advertising as it actually seems to be that the price is $25 * (N-2). That's a pricing formula and not really free discussions since one pays the full price to "get" them. In general, I forever avoid companies that make deceptive and misleading claims since the fact that they make them means they have unethical management, which is not something that is ever correctable.
Interesting. Wonder if you could use this data to determine most probably age range of a person.
Not a vendor per se, but since they pretty much prevent you from installing any updated drivers I'll also say: Apple's OpenGL support is horrid. Like, buggy, entirely behind the times, incredibly slow. I tend to reboot my mac into windows whenever I need to do actual graphics coding, which is a shame.
And now we're back to the central misrepresentation, which we've already gone 'round several times in this thread, so pardon me if I quote myself.

Your argument is that everyone knows hot coffee can scald you and it's their own fault if they don't take precautions. If I sell you shampoo with unlisted hydrochloric acid in it, and some gets in your eyes and you're permanently blinded, should I be held blameless because "everyone knows that getting soap in your eyes hurts?"

Selling a product that is known to be mildly dangerous, in a state that is cripplingly dangerous and lacking appropriate warnings, is a clear public health issue and needs to be punished.
Switches have sophisticated hardware on both low and high ends, but many widely used entry level L3 switches are essentially nothing more than large amount of ethernet NICs connected to single CPU (sometimes with hardware acceleration which usually means specialized DMA engine). This is even more true for routers (some Cisco platforms even have various acceleration hardware that their software simply does not use).
An 'unstoppable,' cataclysmic glacier meltdown is already underway
Does that happen frequently?
This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733639, although both posts seem to be pretty substantive. If people feel that this one should be the canonical story, we can change the url of the front page item.
What book have you reread the most?
I daresay annoying people is the whole point. Combine that with the logo example given upthread, and you've got a very effective campaign going on. What I see happening:

"Why do I keep getting this bloody message with Comcast's logo on it every time I hit random websites? readreadread Fucking Comcast at it again.."
You have to trust someone, but we can move in either direction along the spectrum from "I have to trust all of these many people and if any of them is untrustworthy I'm boned" to "I have to trust some of these many people and if all of them are untrustworthy I'm boned". There are both technological and political elements to any solution here.
What charge was he hiding from?

It should be fairly simple to find a single charge made by the US government that he was killing american citizens...
From that article: "But these effects are very small, and Antarctic sea-ice levels have increased only marginally. In the coming decades, climate models suggest rising global temperatures will overwhelm the other influences and cause Antarctic sea ice to scale back, too."

If the Antarctic sea ice increase is "very small" and just "marginal," then how is Arctic sea ice decrease not also marginal?

Antarctic sea ice is now 1.3 million sq km above the 1979-2008 mean (19% above the mean).[1] Arctic sea ice is now 0.59 million sq km below the mean (4.8% below the mean). [2]

1: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent...
2: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent...
I don't think production quality is the only reason. Sometime it's cheaper to design one product and sell it as multiple products to capture more value. For example, some people are willing to pay 1k for a graphics card while others are only willing to pay 300. So you sell the same graphics card to both groups but for one you artificially lower it's capability. This allows you to capitalize on the market a lot more efficiently than selling your product either at a low price or a high price.
source, with 4 pictures : http://www.geek.com/apps/google-is-testing-new-web-based-gma...
The github pages intro documentation reccomends using Jekyll; it's built in somehow.
This is awesome on multiple levels, but mainly it unchains the "cloud" from Cross Platform app development. Everything but vanilla Apache Cordova (Intel App Framework / AppMobi, PhoneGap, Xamrian) insist on compiling your code on their servers. The effect is they take away a lot of control from the programmer.

If you insist on plain old Cordova, you end up with a text editor (Notepad++), with a cmd.exe window (for cordova/ node.js) and Chrome (for ripple, the Debug env). It will be really nice to get all of this into an IDE.
Men's Hair Products for the bold professional.
You definitely could. It's a probability curve tempered by a mortality curve, basically.
How-To: Install lolcommits On Ubuntu
How'bout a drone to enforce the death penalty for the open practice of homosexuality (UAE being one of 10 countries in the world to do so):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_United_Arab_Emi...

http://www.arablawsworld.com/uae-laws-in-english.php

Or to assist with the forced deportation of Shi'ites:

http://abna.co/data.asp?lang=3&id=390575

Or torture drones for jails (torture being a "systematic practice" in UAE state security facilities, according to HRW):

http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/27/uae-reports-systematic-to...

Or a drone to help husbands "chastise" their wives (or children) -- being as "the UAE penal code, sanctions beating and other forms of punishment or coercion providing the violence leaves no physical marks" -- as determined in 2010 by the UAE's highest court:

https://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/10/19/uae-spousal-abuse-nev...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/10/19/uae.court.ruling/i...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/UAE-cou...

Or my personal favorite, the Sheik Issa Mark V -- a drone that can run over a man while driving a Mercedes SUV; rub salt into his wounds; and set his genitals afire with lighter fluid -- all while instructing a camereman (filming everything for the world to see), "Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issa_bin_Zayed_Al_Nahyan#Trial...

The possibilities are endless.
thanks for this- incredibly encouraging!
No, they just have a very thorough understanding of the box model and all the different selectors. There's quite a lot of pieces and they can interact in many ways; some people just have the right mindset to solve that puzzle.
That.

Also those drivers are huge (really, HUGE) and have incorporated pieces of code with widely differing IPs, patents previous companies and other sources for which opensourcing would probably be a major legal hassle and lawsuit risk.

Also... if you're nVidia / ATi... what's the gain in giving optimization paths and software optimization database to the competitor? Those drivers are full of application / game specific optimizations to make them look better / run faster / workaround bugs.
So why single out GMail? Why not worry about Hotmail, Yahoo? How about $LOCAL_ISP_UNDER_GOVERNMENT_SURVEILANCE?
Benchmarking Perl subroutine signatures
fyi, unpaid interns can not by law produce work that would benefit your company's bottom line.

[0]Federal labor law clearly states that the employer is to receive no benefit from an unpaid intern’s labor and, in fact, the intern might actually be an undue burden on the employer.

you should probably look into it and word your job description wisely before looking for one.

http://internjustice.com/2013/08/06/californias-unpaid-inter...
It's more "Just because the solution isn't obvious or it wasn't designed with something in mind"... People that push tools past their limits with clever tricks can be very helpful, or very annoying.
Who owns the fish?  A Common Lisp solution to "Einstein's Riddle" (2004)
Interesting. Here's the abstract from the Joghin-Smith-Medley paper[1] in Science (the text of the paper itself is behind a paywall -- boo!):

> Resting atop a deep marine basin, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has long been considered prone to instability. Using a numerical model, we investigate the sensitivity of Thwaites Glacier to ocean melt and whether unstable retreat is already underway. Our model reproduces observed losses when forced with ocean melt comparable to estimates. Simulated losses are moderate (<0.25 mm per year sea level) over the 21st Century, but generally increase thereafter. Except possibly for the lowest-melt scenario, the simulations indicate early-stage collapse has begun. Less certain is the timescale, with onset of rapid (> 1 mm per year of sea-level rise) collapse for the different simulations within the range of two to nine centuries.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/05/12/science....
thanks for this info. Still new to this site and I'd like to be more active in the community but it's good to know it's not a strict requirement.
Ok, we changed it. If that turns out to be inaccurate, we can change it again, although so many users have now flagged this story that it won't get very high in rank.
I've been using Seafile for a few weeks as well, and have been pretty impressed. It's been a better experience then ownCloud, for me.

Having an open source syncing service with client side encryption is great.
This is the very reason why Mozilla refuses to release a Firefox version for iOS[1]. Mozilla would like to ship Firefox with its own rendering engine, Gecko, while Apple policy dictates that all browsers on iOS are required to use WebKit[2].

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-says-no-plans-to-return-to-...

[2] http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/04/04/will-chrome-for-ios-b...
Also what happens if one of the sync volumes becomes read only? Does it start deleting new things off the other volume? That happened to me with bit torrent sync and I lost new image files as a result.
The Cure for Death by CPanel
Indeed it is. And quite funny, as:

Faster than speed of light <=> faster than c
This post was killed by a large number of user flags.
It's 'Drawbridge'[0,1] in the windows world and it is on it's way apparently.

You can run mono in linux containers which means you can run this stuff too.

[0] http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-offer-its-drawbridge-virtu...
[1] https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/
Search for a name in wolfram alpha and it give you the age PDF
In the same way many musicians would argue that music was better in the 70s, one could argue that UIs were better in the 90s because there were less options and trends to confuse developers.
The author's idea was to block upworthy headlines, but I use it myself to block any article links to these upworthy websites, on sites like HN and Reddit.
Of course the "why" matters! What happened to intellectual curiosity? In any interesting problem, "why" is just as interesting as "how," and "how" has now been thoroughly and professionally covered.
I think you can't reasonably claim that without any evidence.
"surveillance competition"!
Consider that the CIA's internal policy is to treat every computer you touch as if it's been compromised. Even the ones at your desk in the CIA.

Remember that airgapped, inside a Faraday cage computer deep in the vault in Mission Impossible where that analyst was typing a report? They really have those buried away for the Uber Top Secret, don't give this to Russia/China stuff.

So, if even the spy agencies don't trust anything here at home, you think they might know something we don't. Trust nothing, it's all already compromised, seriously.
The Philosophy of Bug-Fixing
Well, that's one way you can slice it; but the UDHR and most legal traditions' understanding of human rights doesn't make that distinction in law, and I'm not sure how it's useful to this discussion here?
I was baffled too but that's like it is by default, on my MBP #include paths don't have to match case, just like on Windows. Or you can do a 'echo blub >bla.txt' followed by a 'echo blob BLA.txt' and there will only be a single file 'bla.txt' which contains the string 'blob'.
FDA Approval for Robotic Arm Controlled by Muscle Activity
That's quite unrelated. That's a technology that allows for e.g. the Mail compose screen to run out-of-process while still compositing into the same layer hierarchy as the host application and receiving touches. This not only allows restricting access to Mail accounts to the daemon that runs the remote controller, but also prevents the host application from doing things like hiding the mail compose controller behind another view and forwarding touches to it, so a press on an unrelated button actually triggers an email send.

WebKit2 is done differently. The UIWebView still handles all the user interaction and whatnot, and it talks to the Web Process to send it requests (e.g. "load this URL", "run this JavaScript in the context of the page", etc). I'm not quite sure how the compositing of the web content works, but it's not the same system as remote view controllers.
Most of those things pretty much stem from the fact that OpenGL is nowhere near priority for those companies - D3D game performance in benchmarks is what sells the accelerators. Additional features like HW video encoders are second.

OGL support is far behind.
As usual, both Greenwald and the Guardian leave out the details which would be important: Namely, whether this is generic tampering with exported kit, or "targeted access operations" of the type explicitly praised by such pro-government luminaries as Snowden and Assange, tampering with kit going to known locations where intelligence is needed.

Now I don't have details on which one this is either, but we do know that NSA has only so many people with the know-how and authority to tamper with devices, implant backdoors, and package it all back up in a factory seal, and that this is accordingly not a skill that can be wasted on a router that might simply end up in a church in Guinea-Bissau.
Quantum dots provide complete control of photons
Hi and congratulations, this looks like an excellent tool for bioinformatics.
Just out of curiosity, how can you mathematically guarantee constant time searches independent of the database size?
Beachy Blonde Highlights
It is -- code-signing is how they enforce W^X. Only code loaded from signed applications is given pages with execute permission, and those pages are denied write access.