skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 11/34 powered the Schlumberger wireline logging units in the offshore Gulf of Mexico, beginning in about 1980. Schlumberger designed dozens of Unibus cards, one as a controller for each logging tool. So most of the system was a giant slotted cage for sliding the appropriate cards for the job, into. The main peripherals were a TI thermal printer and keyboard, a tape drive, a Tektronix display, and a continuous film recorder unit that captured the scrolling Tektronix image. I found this image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O6FC-DLQI5w/ThWTeDxv2-I/AAAAAAAAB2... The PDPs are lower left; behind the panel directly in front of the engineer is a whole mess of Unibus cards. The most amazing thing about the system might be the number of cards you could plug into it.

Edit to add: The plugin cards were way more than controllers. They were (analog) computers too, fulfilling signal processing functions, and other computations, the poor little PDP could not hope to keep up with. For example, one device detected, I presume using analog circuitry, the peak of the first arrival of a sound wave transmitted through earth and mud, across a couple of meters. The card would report the time between the click and the peak of that arrival, back to the PDP. Nowadays you'd digitize the signal and write a program to look for the peak. Back then you designed circuits!
MAP: Every Country's Highest-Valued Export
Please read my topmost comment, to which you previously replied. I've not proposed eliminating downvotes, nor limiting them to a smaller group. Instead there's a specific proposal: a two-axis voting system, where people can cast a 'disagree' which has no effect on ranking/fading.

The other axis remains and still has a traditional censorious downvote – but my hypothesis is that it will then be used less, avoiding the negativity created by its current overuse for multiple purposes.
Despite our minor squabble on an internet forum, I suspect we'd get along pretty well...
I really hope that in the next few decades we see a deescalation of the drug war. But I think many people overestimate how far along we are in terms of the general public's attitude.

It was only last year that majority of those polled supported legalizing marijuana: http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/04/majority-now-supports.... At the time of the last dot-com bust (2001), it was 60-40 against legalization. Since actual voters skew older and more conservative, it's totally unsurprising that it has only been in the last few years that legalization efforts have gained traction.

Yet legalization of marijuana is just the first step, and one that's easy to take for middle class voters, whose kids may use marijuana or who may use it themselves. It'll still be a long, uphill battle to convince these voters that it'll be better to disengage from the drug war completely. A lot of the people involved in drug distribution are not sympathetic figures to the general public: uneducated, often minorities, and usually with long criminal records. The idea that disengaging from the drug war will mean "going soft" on these people will be a powerful one.
"Anybody here remember working on TOPS-20 on a DEC-20?"

Yes, I did a lot of work on DEC-20s in grad school. It was the first machine I used that was connected to ARPANET (precursor to today's internet).

I also spent lots of time on a PDP-11/45, although it was running Unix (Version 7 from Bell Labs), not RSX-11. That machine had the old-style console with a toggle switch for each bit:

http://devilanse.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/6a00c22525688b8...

To boot it, you'd have to toggle in the address of the boot ROM into the instruction address register.
The Economist wrote a near perfect editorial about the war on drugs a few years back:

http://www.economist.com/node/13237193
(you might need to Google "The economist failed states and failed policies" to read the article)

Regarding drug policy, the biggest misstep of the past 40 years has been taking a public heath issue and turning it into a crime and punishment issue.

I highly recommend anyone curious about the history of the war on drugs, and the major problems it has created, watch "The House I Live In" -- arguably one of the best documentaries I have ever seen -

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/
Analysing the Lyrics of the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
The End Of The Acqui-Hire?
The entire basis of the "Snowden is a Russian spy" hypothesis hinges on "OMG, Snowden is in Russia right now" but ignores the fact that the entire reason Snowden is in Russia is entirely due to the actions of the US State department.

Snowden's original plan was to fly from Hong Kong to Cuba via Russia and then eventually seek asylum in a Latin American country. The US failed to pressure Hong Kong but successfully pressured Cuba which is why he got stuck in Russia. This is such an unlikely series of events that no sane person would use it as a basis for a plan.

On top of all the other absurdities of Epstein's piece, the biggest hole in the theory to me is that if Snowden was a spy for anybody, why would he have chosen to reveal his identity in Hong Kong? It makes no sense for any plausible goal he was trying to accomplish.
How did you get from "less or no prosecution of drug crimes" to "the police will stop enforcing law entirely, turning the inner city into a Plisskenian hellhole"?
I thought "Too overqualified;didn't hire."
I'm curious as to their funding goal. Sounds like a couple salaries for a year or two. It almost seems appropriate to test the waters here with a KickStarter. OpenSSL is pervasive in technology, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were able to achieve even somewhat lofty donations from a combination of both individuals and private organizations.
Ah yes I think you're right - I guessed the I stood for intelligence and couldn't come up with anything.
Yes, but a comment simply to say "+1" or "me too" or "I agree" doesn't scale. (In fact, on HN, it'll usually get a downvote for its banality and waste of vertical-space.)

Hundreds or thousands can issue a single tick that's tallied and displayed in summary form.
I appreciate the manner and content of your response. I agree that conversations on HN, for the majority of the time, are cocktail party conversations, ie. good faith collegial conversations. However I think that the "Source: XYZ" is also inappropriate for discussions among friends. Elsewhere in this discussion people were discussing lethality and volts/amps. If you, a friendly well intentioned internet stranger, make some reasonable comment that "volts blah blah, and amps blah" I am going to take you at your word and carry on our discussion. If it sounds like bullshit I am going to call you out on it and ask for proof just like I would to a friend at a cocktail party. It seems that if I am going to accept your allegation that you are an XYZ simply because you, a friendly well intentioned internet stranger, said that you are an XYZ I should just accept your original comment.

Adding the "Source: XYZ" is troubling for me because it seems to evoke some magical air of authority from thin air. Summoning this cloak of superiority/authority is out of place among friends, just as out of place as someone showing up to a cocktail party in a lab coat. Good faith comments made among colleagues should not require sources, but if sources are required, legitimate verifiable sources should be used.
Choose your own semi-ironic response now:

☐ "Which totally doesn't happen now. Oh wait..."

☐ "Yeah, Amsterdam is completely run by gangs. Oh wait..."

☐ "Yeah, gangs would get richer and expand as price of drugs plummets and they get commoditised. Oh wait..."

Edit: downvotes? I was trying to summarise the inevitable counterpoints.
HN was written in a language where functional style is the norm, and yet HN couldn't have been designed via spec. I say this as someone who has thoroughly studied HN's codebase. If you spend time examining it, it becomes evident that most of the features were extemporaneous. There is little which was thought out in advance. The recipe for HN was: do the most important thing each day; repeat for 2000 days. Such a recipe is fundamentally anti-spec, because by day 5 your spec is outdated.

Spec xor exploratory programming. The codebase is the spec.
Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt established an extremely pronounced correlation between a pregnant mom's night-time wireless exposure (2.4 GHz = cordless, Wi-Fi, cell phones as well as microwave ovens) and incidence of autism.

Heavy Wi-Fi/smartphone data use has some serious negative effects that have been documented, but aren't popular!
Yes. Atleast that's what's worked for me. Once I started writing compact notes to help me remember stuff, I found that I still forgot that stuff after a while but re-reading the notes was a great optimization trick in re-learning/remembering the subject matter. I don't think this would've worked for me if my notes were verbose. There is probably an art to this, some sweet spot of information density to verbiage ratio.

Do other people do this too? It would be interesting to hear how other's solve this problem?
Nutella is awesome--it tastes great, is shelf-stable, long-lasting and packs in very good calorie density.

That being said, it is only 11% nuts by mass. And 92% of its calorie content is from either fat or sugar. "Hazzlenut Spread" is a misleading description for what it is. It is a palm-oil and sugar based (ie, synthetic) cake frosting, that is only "flavored with" cocoa power and hazlenut flour.
It is <not> a "nut butter" or "nut spread".

That should be somewhat self-evident from reading this history of the product--it was a war-time substitute. (It lacks the protein of a true nut butter, which is a shame from a health-perspective.)
> The tax is not being levied directly on voters, but indirectly, by creating a monopoly that provides poor service, when they could instead have competition providing great service.

But isn't the point here precisely that without the tax or other barriers to entry, "they" would not have great service? Some might -- but it seems likely that far fewer would get it than with build-out requirements and so on in place. I think the government has an obligation to avoid leaving those people behind in this case.
(Pre-disclaimer: I think it's great that the author spent some time benchmarking and hacking, and I don't mean for this comment to tear down their work, but rather I'm just answering the above question which was also the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this.)

The slowest URL router benchmarked there[1] does 10462.0 runs per second, which is just under 0.1ms per run.

I'm not sure what performance is expected of Rails handlers but the first stackoverflow thread[2] that came up on a simple Google search had twitter doing 600 req/s across 180 instances which comes to 300ms per request.

By that math, the slowest URL router costs 0.033% of the request overhead.

Caveat: 300ms/req is slower than you'd like for an interactive website; real websites may have more complicated routing tables than this benchmark. Counter-caveat: 0.1ms is not enough to matter pretty much anywhere except for the stock market.

[1]: https://github.com/c9s/r3#benchmark

[2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/373098/whats-the-average-...
Seems like a nice fit for cloud environments.
Since no one has said it yet -- (maybe it is too obvious?) -- thanks to anyone who takes the time to improve old crufty code that most of us rely on. (Yes, even if you weaponize Comic Sans.)
Russia: Historic 30-yr gas deal with China set to be signed next week
AFAIK there is a well-known correlation between father's age and autism risk.

This is correct, here's a source:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3645857/
So why is this better than how we do it today? Let say just MongoDB and node.js?
Eh, this is the lowest form of argument. Whatever merits this whole thing may or may not have, she's in hospital because of amongst other things, a massive staph infection, not because WePay removed her campaign.
I don't think a company helmed by the inventor which actually sells a product based on the patents is a patent troll.

How do you know the company is failing? And why would that knowledge lead you to believe both that their inquiry was trollish and that it was responsible and appropriate to reply as you did?

Forgive me if I'm just missing the obvious; I have not studied the patents in question and I wouldn't know whether they were legit if I did. But I think of a patent troll as an entity which acquires patents from other companies/inventors for the sole purpose of litigating them, and this company does not appear to fit that model at all.
Wow that quote is totally spot on.

It's interesting, because I am experiencing this first hand. I just started an internship working inside a large DOE facility, PNNL. The team I'm working on just makes sites for other large projects, sites to allow scientists and researchers to communicate with each other, share data, manage content, etc. It's very much not sexy work. But it's work that keeps thousands of others productive. So that quote really hits close to home.
Isn't some part of their culture "be disruptive"? How does that square with "OMG Don't fuck it up!"
NYT v. WaPo on covering the FCC vote on Net neutrality
Wife will never allow nerd tourism, sadly.
+1. It would be great if they would set up some a kickstarter or another mainstream mechanism for people to contribute (?dogecoin?).
Whatsapp Pulled from Windows Store
"I always rely on perceptual evidence"

so you are anti-intellectual.. or are you just trolling?
Yea--I feel the pendulum has swung too far. I like a home page with a lot of stories, and links. Actually, I wanted a old fashioned front page with links to the papers I read, so
I put up newsranch.mine. It's a terrible website--doesen't
work on mobile devises, and has a bunch of dead links, but
it's my homepage. Please, don't go to it and tell me how
bad it is; I don't care. I'm it's only visitor. One day I
will clean it up, and fix the dead links. My point is I
don't like homepages with just a few headlines, or links.
I'm really surprised Google didn't do a better job with
their news site. I really want to like it. I just figured
they would do a stellar job, considering the talent they have.
Complete agreement. Instead of a squabble I think you should consider it "holding your friends accountable to the same standards as your adversaries."
> I don't know if a union would make sense for writers

Writers have unions, and quite a few of them (remember the Hollywood strike?). Some work, some don't; but generally speaking, they did improve compensation and arrangements for the profession.

The problems of the writing world are well documented, and mostly common to other creative fields: oversupply, intrinsic difficulty in quality judgement, and output that can be hard to monetise. I honestly don't understand why they were dropped with janitors, which have a completely different set of problems (mostly related to social status).
It's amazing that the OpenSSL Foundation seems to do so little work on their actual code base give that they actually seem to take donations and have developers.

OpenBSD by comparison gets things done with 10% of the OpenSSL budget?

The current maintainers of OpenSSL have been doing a shitty job. It's not that heartbleed itself was the problem.

OpenSSL scares people away, the code is such a mess. I've looked at it for 5 minutes years ago. You hope to compile it, let alone understand it.

Finally people had to take a look at it, and what they found was a scary unmaintained mess vs other open source projects.

Specifically considering the importance of OpenSSL the maintainers seem to do a terrible job.

As people have mentioned. OpenSSL is basically a "FIPS" consultancy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Information_Processing_...

FIPS is real world useless to 99% of the population that doesn;t live in the US and do business with the US govt.

They are worried more about maintaining the FIPS then patching or improving the code base for something that has become so universal.

That's fine for them, but a couple million a year in consulting fee's is messing with a much larger audience.

OpenSSL will be able to keep its outdated code base and FIPS, while the rest of the world moves on.

Key takeaway from Bob, is they need to raise money to pay some super knowledgable developers to get some of the more lengthly parts done.
Exactly. Software engineering practically surely involves programming, the reverse does not hold. Adhering to rigorous coding standards, static analysis, deep understanding of the program structure at hand goes a long way in the software engineering field. Not every programmer (or coder) does that, so not every programmer is an engineer.

Of course, going to school for an EECS degree also should instill such values, including engineering ethics and codes of conduct.
That's a good question, and I've thought about it a bit over the
intervening three years.

tptacek was shooting from the hip that day, and posting a lot of his
ideas (and regular annoyances), one per post, in rapid succession, but
without the time needed for a lot of planning or analysis.

His idea of "sincere flag" could be improved by combining limits and
disincentives to prevent high-karma accounts from just always setting
the "sincere flag". There could be the usual limit of a karma threshold
for the feature. There could be a limit on how many times or how often
the flag could be used. There could also be a disincentive such as
making each down-vote or flag cost a lot more (10x/100x/1000x), or
making the use of the flag cost something substantial like -X% of all
account karma.

With the right combination of limits and disincentives, his idea might
work, and only be used on special occasions rather than be (ab)used
constantly.
Gang Leader For A Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes To The Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudhir_Venkatesh) is a great read as well.
Of course there is an inherent conflict between profitability and social benefit: The morality of raw profit optimization is indifferent to human concerns. For example, it made more financial sense for a tobacco company to generate FUD about lung cancer and avoid the truth as long as possible, because it was of greater benefit to shareholders, which is what a publically-owned corporation is legally obligated to optimize, human consequences be damned.
Insofar as the algorithmic government was democratic and optimized public opinion, there is no reason to expect it will be better at long-term planning, which is largely a human logical deficiency; we know the likely dangers of global warming at yet we do not much care -- seemingly because it is a long-term concern.
The point about grants brings up what I consider to be one of the Federal government's most pernicious behaviors: micro-managing local government through the use of grants and other funds (see also education and school nutrition).
I've played with this ... it's close to being a distributed version of channels ... mature and well designed.
"We don't do them any good if we're dead or injured"

Not only that, we then actively risk the lives of others in our crew.

For similar reasons, fully involved empty building? I'm not sending my guys in there without a very good reason.

Source: another FF/PM
When this topic of marijuana legalization comes up, it seems like most conservative news agencies ask the loaded question, "Does this mean you're in favor of decriminalizing hard drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and meth?"

I don't know a good response, though. How would you answer?
I took one computer programming class in college. PL/1 with a PL/C compiler using punch cards. Said no way, this is absurd.

Three years later (after graduation) I was introduced to an 11/34. Then an 11/44 with 1MB on internal memory and removable disk packs. On to a VAX 11/780, an 11/785, an 11/750, clustering, an 8650, a 6310, etc. I even built a MicroVax I from parts purchased used.

There's a ton of us who still remember 30 and 60 amp power supplies and sequenced spin-up of drive stacks.

And we walked uphill both ways to our jobs with nothing but a TI calculator in our pockets.
Dietrich Klinghardt is not necessarily the most credible source of information.

See, e.g., http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/26/your-friday-dos... for some critical commentary (from a source consistently critical of all That Sort Of Thing; read with appropriate caution if your general opinion of "energy medicine", "integrative medicine", kinesiology, homeopathy, etc., is more positive).

So, when Klinghardt established this extremely pronounced correlation, where did he publish the results and by whom have they been checked?
You would think they'd consider to drop DRM to gain 1/3 of users who they otherwise lose. But they don't do it. That doesn't make sense to me.
Honestly, I think gangs would lose power as legal outlets took hold, but we'd have more widespread addiction problems and more trouble with jobless addicts stealing for their next fix.
I love when they say "Hands Free permits easy browsing while eating or multitasking, finally bringing an end to the dark era in which a comfortable individual would have to physically move in order to click, scroll, or type.", like if our sedentaries lives where not sedentary enough already.
And yet, CUDA is currently dominating in many HPC applications. There are reasons Hadoop/MapReduce is a poor fit for HPC, but your argument points above aren't very universal.
Cutting off Federal Highway funds has been the threat of choice to coerce states to toe the line on Federal priorities and policies.
>My point is, Wadlow's death was effectively a matter of poor luck - a blister popped up and went septic that he didn't notice soon enough, but others had previously been spotted and dealt with.

It wasn't a matter of luck, it was because of his condition that he couldn't feel his feet and thus developed blisters.
It was just a matter of time until one of his blisters or other feet injuries got infected. And in the bronze age with no knowledge of germ theory, much less antibiotics, these infections would likely prove lethal.

Robert Wadlow wouldn't have lived very long in a tribe in ancient France with a condition that caused chronic blisters and foot wounds. Furthermore gigantism causes extremely high blood pressure leading to varicose ulcers in the legs and again, infection.

However, the blister alone wasn't what killed him, he had an autoimmune problem caused by his disorder that contributed to his death, and he had an enlarged heart and was generally unhealthy.

>Who's to say that no Iron Age 20 year old could possibly do better?

It's not do better, it's significantly better with vastly inferior medicine. Even if his growth rate remained at the rate it was during the last few years of his life he would have to have lived almost 20 more years to grow another 3 feet. In addition his growth rate most likely would have slowed or stopped eventually.

If he had continued growing the strain on his skeleton and circulatory system would have killed him way before he got to 12'. This kind of gigantism is a disorder that causes immense strain on the body, humans just aren't build to handle that level of growth hormone.

Have you noticed that there are only 3 people in all of recorded history who reached 8.5' tall. The reason is because that is basically the upper limit of what is survivable.

Even if it were possible for a 12' tall man to live, given a population 10 times larger (all the people who ever lived compared to all those born in the 20th century) what's the chance that this population produced a man 3 feet taller than the tallest in recorded history--Keeping in mind that people with this disorder would have been likely to die even earlier than the giants of the modern era due to the lack of any semblance of modern medicine.
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