skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for the performance statistics. We have done a lot of work on other hardware platforms to get them up to being able to saturate gigE or higher, with tuning and things like "Byte Queue Limits" support. The problem with the ppc thing is that most likely it has bufferbloat in a blob we can't fix. (news to the contrary welcomed). And hearing that the APU peaks at 670Mbit is disappointing, but perhaps someone will get some time to profile it and figure out why it is so bad - certainly we get gigE easily with intel based hardware.
I agree that it will help, to the extent that it counters diffraction of the beam whilst is in the atmosphere, hence it having "limited" application rather than no application.

Diffraction still happens in a vacuum. The beam spreads, so photons are lost by not falling on the detector.

The waveguide effect would counteract scattering to some degree. Even then, wouldn't scattering emit photons in random directions, meaning that the majority of scattered photons would be moving at too great an angle to the high/low density boundary to be refracted back into the beam?
>If they implement multiple inheritance I think I'll have a nerdgasm!

Honest question: Why would you ever want to use multiple inheritance? It seems like an awful design pattern.

I mean, in C++, you basically just end up with a more confusing equivalent to Java interfaces.
From the linked NASA article:

> "... knock modern civilization back to the 18th century ..."

and later:

> "According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina."

Is that figure for the US, or the world? Also, while that's a lot of money, it's not "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century"-money. So which one is it? Neither the NASA or WaPo article seems to give a clear answer.
I don't see mention of 4 hours, but presumably that's how long it took to either erupt or transit through empty space.

If it hit the earth it would have slowed down and stayed longer.

The charged particles interacting with the magnetic field of the earth would have produced a planet wide EMP (larger than even a nuke could do). The charged particles would have induced electric current in any large wire and would have acted on the whole planet.
Should've used NTP or PTP.
Iota – Never Lose Sight of What's Important
Radiolab (Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich)

Dr. Karl (JJJ) http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/podcast.htm
We can't blame NetworkManager on vendors, though. wicd seemed great for a while, but development on it just stopped at some point.

Maybe I should just spend some more time learning about wireless and see if I can hack on wicd or create something new rather than just mourning its loss.
It would have wiped out the power grid, no power to anyone for months. (Unless you had a generator and fuel.)

Although we would fix it. Assuming current levels of production it would take years to fully repair, but I assume after a disaster we would massively increase the rate of production and it wouldn't be as bad as some make out.

Poorer counties, and those without a manufacturing base, would be in much much worse shape though.
To defend against it you just need a fuse, or a relay.

Put one on each transformer that cuts power if it exceeds limits, this would save the transformer and would allow us to restore function pretty quickly.
Prolog, another old AI language. Digitalk Smalltalk used to come with Prolog written in Smalltalk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog
Bullets are a hell of a lot cheaper.
Other than computer vision, the most accurate positioning method is "ultra wideband" (UWB). It's possible to get close to cm accuracy, but it can be expensive. There is also a calibration problem: if the readers get bumped or moved, then you may have to recalibrate the system. UWB uses time distance of arrival instead of RF triangulation, so it's extremely accurate, and you can get to 100 Hz.

You can check out a few examples: http://pluslocation.com http://www.timedomain.com/ or google for: ultra wideband real time location

If you have specific questions I'd be happy to help - contact info is in my profile.
One of the only doctors at the second largest (of eight) hospitals in neighboring capital Monrovia, Liberia suffered and died of Ebola too. These doctors certainly are heros. http://allafrica.com/stories/201407021024.html

This video by SkyNews shows the wood-and-plastic rural clinic conditions for Ebola health workers. Urban settings would often also lack any form of air conditioning to limit body fluids. Having lived for several years in similar towns there, it cuts close:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYMOGDI9XkI

https://medium.com/matter/how-to-ignore-a-plague-14ea08694cc
"Sweating profusely in the 90-degree heat....The next day, at the Holy Trinity Secondary School, I saw scores of high school kids playing soccer. Some had removed their white uniforms to avoid them getting dirty, and their bodies glistened. The longer they played, the more they sweated, and the more dangerous the game became for them. But they were either oblivious to the dangers of a virus that can kill nine in 10, often by internal bleeding and organ failure, or they did not care."
I know you are joking, but to take you seriously for a moment, a Faraday cage would not help at all.

A Faraday cage only shields against high frequency fields, but a CME is a very low frequency event. You need mu-metal, and huge amounts of it.

Plus it would knock out the power grid, so all the gear in your basement wouldn't be all that useful.
The Vincennes’ downing of Iran Air Flight 655
NASA seeks proposals for commercial Mars data relay satellites
> There are also occasionally mass casualty events where some of the rigorous safety protocols are ignored in favor of saving lives.

This is an old comment now, but I remembered it when I read about the Ebola specialist contracting Ebola. It just goes to show that bad things can happen even to experienced experts in the field.
Bad news for this model: it's not stationary, due to the 11-year solar cycle, and to other behaviors at longer time scales superimposed on the cycle.

But if you average out over at least the solar cycle, you could come up with a rate of superstorms per-cycle. There have been about 15 cycles since the 1859 superstorm, which would mean that perhaps you expect ~ 1 chance in 15 of such a storm in the coming cycle.
yes, on Chromium/Xubuntu
That seems like a cheap solution that would protect not only against solar storms, but lightning strikes as well. Are these fuses common in transformers? If not, why?
Yep, what he's done has been pretty unremarkable. Woulda happened anyway, in more or less the same timeline. In fact I don't even get why he's famous.
What's the trend around external vs. eventual consistency at Facebook? I ask this comparing eventual consistency in TOA and Google's shift towards external consistency in Spanner.
The power grid where? In every country? Or just one/a few?
In the past, I've committed the unit test like you, branched, rebased the unit test back to some appropriate point in time, and then run git bisect. This avoids applying/resetting at each step, and allows for some trickiness like changing your test to deal with an interface that mutates over the range of commits you're testing. The hash of the errant commit will be different after rebasing of course, but it's easy enough to match it up with the one in the original branch.

I wish there were a guide or some official "this is how to manage your git repository along with your tests so bisect will work wonders" - IIRC, bisect gets tripped up by commits that won't build and also some merges... would be nice to know what exactly to do about those once they're in your history.
For a one-man shop like me, GAE has been a godsend in many ways. I've also deployed toy apps to AWS and Heroku, Azure and OpenShift just to give them a spin, but I'm certainly no expert, and I don't doubt that some or all of these are "better" than GAE, but they all take more time and effort. On none of these other services was I comfortable that I'd set things up properly to suddenly scale. What if your big break comes and you get written up in the NYT or make the front page of HN? All is for naught if 100,000 visitors show up one day instead of 100 and you can't handle it. GAE relieves me of this particular anxiety.

AppScale relieves me of the fear that Google drops GAE or raises their prices too much, and having observed Google over the last 5 years, this is a real fear. I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that AppScale and Google are in cahoots on this.

There are other Google headaches as well. Support is very hard to come by, even with credit card in hand. Compared to Microsoft support it might as well be called nonexistent. And the Google account "system" is completely perplexing to me. My sites just use the old-fashioned username/password scheme, and I try to just ignore Google's because I don't understand it and neither do my customers.

The ease of administration trumps all of that for me though.
It would not be the first time that this happens in history. :)
https://github.com/angular/angular.js/commit/fa6e411da26824a...

https://github.com/angular/angular.js/commit/5dc35b527b3c99f...

http://blog.angularjs.org/2013/12/angularjs-13-new-release-a...
Zareason is the bees knees: http://zareason.com/shop/UltraLap-440.html

They'll ship with the distro of your choice preinstalled, and I've had wonderful experience with their support (where they suggested a kernel upgrade for me a few versions higher than what was shipping with my preferred distro.) Every model except the UltraLap comes with a mini-screwdriver and encouragement to use it. The UltraLap is their competition with 'ultrabooks' though, so it's not put together as nicely as the others - no screwdriver there:(

They just test everything, and only send you stuff that works.
The article suggests that we'd get up to a day of warning. Would it be practical to physically disconnect transformers and other equipment from the grid to protect against damage? Also, how exposed are subterranean power wires?
"Now it should be fairly clear intuitively that at least roughly increments, that is, arrivals of points, are stationary in time and independent."

That's not intuitive at all. They are all produced by the same source, the sun, according to some internal cycle. They are definitely NOT independent.
Yup, read that a while back actually. And it makes some good points. It should be titled "The cortical column: a structure without an agreed upon function".

The cortical column are a lot more well define, referred to as ocular dominance columns, in the visual cortex. The problem is that the structure of cortical columns are very malleable and plastic. So it makes it very difficult to see them consistently throughout the neocortex. So there isn't much definitive proof for cortical columns throughout the neocortex but there is convincing theory, very much pushed by Hawkins.

There is a large consensus that the neocortex stores and acts on information in a distributed way. Most of the well defined theories propose some kinds of neural engrams. But there wasn't any theory about how the neocortex stored information in a distributed way. The function of neocortical columns, as proposed by Rinkus, seems to explain very convincing one such way of creating Sparse Distributed Representations.

In terms of theory, my opinion is that cortical columns seem to be integral to a unifying theory of the neocortex.
I think AngelList is not strictly speaking empirical data -- it is what a company provides as advertisement, not what it is actually paying.

How one decides "empirical data", as well as "comparable companies" and "comparable candidate" are all subject to very broad interpretation.

For instance, GlassDoor has way lower salary numbers than AngelList. But they have their share of problems too -- while the numbers are empirical, they are often dated (and have no account of equity compensation)
I attended a lecture about this a few years back. NOAA has a satellite system to warn us about large solar flares... but it's old and severely underfunded. Which is somewhat surprising, because that 20 minute heads up is the difference between GPS satellites and electric grid components being safely taken offline vs permanently damaged.
Forgot about that issue. That has to be fun providing space for all of the duplication!
Teresa was no Florence Nightingale. They both knew about the power of using celebrity, but from there they substantially diverge.
Sense is a sleep tracker that measures temp, humidity and ambient light
Why Am I Moving Left?
Revenue and Sales Stats for My Desktop App Side Project
I do 1) pretty frequently, and while I don't go so far as 4), I do use total TODO count as a heuristic from time to time.
I have created a standardized code numbers for the output (like 12 for success, 13 for suspended, etc..) and the script will output the respective number as an output of which the list of numbers and their respective output is with them already..

Then, I ll just Zip it, and send them the scripts along with some step by step instructions on how to execute it (with screenshots) and the results expected.. At beginning it will be hassle but on the way most documents will become common for all...
This is Africa, we don't have the luxury of positive pressure spacesuit. They are dealing with a deadly virus with the tools they have.
Looking for some feedback from the Hacker News community! I feel pretty lucky to have a side project making over $4K a year out of the gate and I am wondering if there is anything I can do to squeeze more out of it.
I asked around on IRC after the fact; it was generally agreed that I should have requested other reviewers rather than waiting months for feedback. If only I'd known!

But that's kind of my point. "Mentored bugs" is an interesting approach, but normally people have mentors, not bugs, and I think that having a "mentor/mentee" field on user profiles may be the right approach for Mozilla; the field would show up on comments/patches I post.

That way, the reviewer could have seen on my profile that I'm new to fixing Mozilla bugs and unmentored, and in his first review, he could have suggested, "I think you should fix these things, and BTW, I think you should find a mentor to shepherd you through this process."
National Academy of Science predicted a Carrington-level storm would inflict $1 to $2 trillion in damages to infrastructure and take four to ten years to recover from.

I don't know what "life as we know it" means, but it would be a significant disaster.
Organize your technology stack with the “Startup Workbench”
Because... squirrel!

(argument provided for illustrative purposes)
I wrote a python app/CLI program for dealing with those couple of programs.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wifi/0.3.1

It works ok and just wraps ifup and iwlist. It also reads and writes /etc/network/interface style config, so you can see what's going on under the hood.

But I agree. Getting it all work the first time (or when I encounter a new type of network) is just ridiculous.
and that OpenStack's Object Storage chose the name used by a great Jabber client (Swift: http://swift.im/)...
Probably every country.
In my experience:

A novice programmer will just do the weird thing (no comments).

An intermediate programmer will spend twice as much time as they should, trying to think of an elegant solution, before doing the weird thing anyways (and maybe leaving a comment).

A good programmer will just do the weird thing, leave a comment, and move on.
The problem isn't in connecting our site to an extra shipping carrier, it's in getting the required volume for our rates and service to be excellent. Also about receiving three different batch deliveries daily.

So, once volume picks up, we'll offer FedEx or UPS along with our standard USPS service.

Thanks for the feedback and recommendation. Cheers!
Note that as seems to be in vogue these days (Go, Rust), access to a class's methods and fields is never directly tied to code being "inside" the class; even `private` entities are accessible from anywhere in the same source file. I guess this is a good thing, as it avoids awkwardness with anything implemented as a function rather than a method, and works as a substitute for most cases where "friend" would be acceptable coding style in C++.
You would have to shut down the power grid of the whole world for 2 days.

That would feel like the apocalypse if it happened. It could certainly be done in time, but doubt you could convince people it was real.

There would be a ton of deaths, so it's not something to do lightly.
You are right, that's an option that would serve some of our customers.

We'll definitely expand in our service and shipping options as we grow.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to give us some feedback. Cheers!
Home Care Providers Benefit from Pay-Per-Visit Prototype
In today's recovering, yet still volatile economy, residential care providers continue to seek ways to deliver quality care while increasing profits in a fiscally responsible manner. Many companies have found that providing care in a pay-per-visit format has enhanced this effort... #HomeCareFranchise
>>active WMD program hoax

I've seen those claims a lot. I haven't seen references to all the leaks to support it. Do you have any?

(I have seen quite believable motivations for Saddam Hussein to lie, like keeping Iran and the Kurds short. But I have never seen leaks supporting the conspiracy theory that Bush' administration knew the WMDs was a bluff before the 2nd Iraq war.)
There are some people whose code I'd be terrified to maintain, if their code/comments are anything like their text messages.
“This is my Merrill Lynch portfolio – 1.83% expenses, underperformed S&P 500”
So why was the 1989 storm localized? Just because it was much smaller? Do those metrics for measuring the six did the storm correspond to geographic spread?
I don't think they have them - just watch any transformer fire fueled by electricity.

I say "fuse or relay", but for the power levels involved these are NOT simple components.
"Fun" aside, they should take a page from GRRM, and look at what makes popular fantasy fiction so popular, and borrow some elements from there (such as allowing nations to commit atrocities during worldgen). The occasional godly intervention makes things more interesting as well.

From a developer's perspective, though, there is a lot of "fun" left in their codebase. They handle massive pathfinding, temperature and fluid mechanics, and other resource intensive algorithms. From what I remember (I last played DF2010), there is a lot of room for improvement, and the community has discovered several "workarounds" that reduce the workload for common structure types (such as a lava pump)
Status: Ready for Sale – The Story Behind Building My First App
People are willing to pay for convenience.
bullshit headline
You shouldn't want to share direct links, the directory where the actual content resides shouldn't even be publicly accessible, owncloud does this very well.
You can access it easier by holding down the "option" key and selecting the Wifi menu http://imgb.mp/jxy.jpg
1.83%? That's highway robbery!
Good job, webdav mapping works on Windows 8.1 out of the box at last! Can't wait for the apps...
They mention Punch Ball Mario Bros and say:

> Considering their constant push for multiplayer family gaming, it's baffling Nintendo hasn't considered re-releasing this.

Considering how it was obviously integrated into SMB3 as a mini-game, it's baffling how the writer didn't mention that.
It's an interesting choice, but I think I'd have rather had a sensible default for each type category than one (internal) for everything. For instances: public classes, public enums, private or internal ivars, public methods, etc. Just to cut down on the boilerplate.
Sounds exactly like the now canceled TV show "Revolution".
It was not localized (It affected both the US and the UK), but rather Canada was uniquely sensitive to it because of the very long transmission wires and that there is no conductive soil to earth the power.

These days everyone is "uniquely" sensitive to it.
Warning: Click-bait title.
Was that irony?

People have been arguing since the 1980s (if you count the original claims of the spaces shuttle, since the 1970s) that lower launch costs are possible.

But only Musk delivered.

You really think the established launch companies would have done that, as long as they earned lots of money doing business as usual? (Now their business model is dead, so they use their influence to get long time contracts with the US military just before SpaceX's rockets are verified...)

It would be interesting to see what you base your claims on?
Yeah, when I started getting involved in web operations tools, and realizing all the levels of redundancy that the big players like Google and Netflix have, it really got me thinking about our hydro and communications infrasture.

For instance, Netflix has it's chaos monkey, than randomly kills servers and availability zones and generally wreaks havoc. They set it loose, and learn to keep things operating. I really thinkg it would be a responsible societal effort to introduce chaos monkeys into our archaic infrastructure outside digital.

And as for that underfunded satellite, it's sitting in the sweet spot between the gravitation tug of the earth and sun called the L1 langrangian point, where it takes no effort to keep it exactly in place. But we really need more drills to learned whether the hydro/comm infrastructure on one hemisphere of the earth can actually shut everything down in 20 minutes, day or night.
Really cool idea and nice to see a hardware crowdfunding campaign where the hard problems have already been solved (ostensibly).

I love the idea of growing the network with base stations, but it raises a few key security concerns. Presumably customers would use these devices to track high value items. Is location data encrypted? How easily can an attacker listen to all the traffic on their bass station, identifying the location of all items connecting to it?

(P.s. hi Clancey, it's Miles -- send me a fb message!)
I Surprised Nana After a Looong Solo Journey Around the US and Central America
Martin Fowler's Refactoring says that, possibly paraphrasing here, most comments are bugs.

I do favor putting a short comment on some methods/functions/procedures.
Typically, your fuses at that scale aren't fuses per se, but mechanical separation of conductors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdiJWQmSi0k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Ftv3zt-gI
Mix-ins. Think Java 8 interfaces, with default implementations (so you can still have a putAll method as part of the interface, but the default handles the looping logic for you).

You can also do a layering-up type thing, where you have a base class that implements particular functionality, and inheriting from particular classes surfaces it or restricts it in particular ways.
You are able to code while listening to a podcast? That seems incredibly distracting. I'm curious how you manage all that auditory input. Do you just listen to it when you hear some keyword that peaks your interest, or while you're taking coding breaks?
Things You Should Know About Apple's Swift
Show HN: Bmc – An app for creating business model canvases
"Oh whoops, I accidentally called this function inside of its self! Silly syntax error....but it looks like I traversed a binary tree..."
It literally is unfinished!