skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are good reasons for this

They all seem pretty bad to me.

> When the battery has just started charging, the voltage will not be high enough for the phone to actually work, because the draw from the battery exceeds the plug pack input

What type of battery has an innate "draw"? They need a certain voltage and have a certain internal resistance, but it's easy to efficiently increase the effective internal resistance by boosting voltage with switched capacitor circuits (or whatever). If there's a "smart battery manager" you can bet the hardware to do this is already there.

"Draw" would be an excuse if you were hooking things up manually to a car battery. It's not an excuse in the highly integrated environment of a cellphone where corrective circuitry is dirt cheap (and free relative to what's already probably there).

> Sometimes when transmitting, the phone uses more power for a fraction of a second than the power pack can deliver.

That's what capacitors are for. They're almost certainly more efficient, too. Efficiency slumps away from the optimal I,V much faster for batteries than for capacitors.

> Having some amount of battery means the phone can soft-off correctly when the plug is removed suddenly. The alternative is an un-expected hard off which is usually bad. The user might experience data loss.

I'm pretty sure this is the actual reason why it's done. It's an awful reason.

First of all, you claim that "an un-expected hard off is usually bad". WTF? Does your ext4 linux partition usually die when you hard-off it? I've probably hard-offed ext4+linux 1000 times, never had any problems. I would go to great pains to avoid hard-offing a production server but you must acknowledge that in the age of solid journaled filesystems, hard-offs almost never lead to actual bad consequences, especially for light usage patterns. I'm sure it's worse on some hardware configurations but I've never met a system where it got all the way to "usually bad" territory.

On the other hand, having a power manager lock me out of my phone for 15 minutes after I determine I need to use it has led to loss of data. Significant loss of data. And worse. Pictures that were never taken, phone calls that were delayed at significant inconvenience, the inability to look up contacts for others... these are real world negative consequences that are 1000x more important than a .1% chance of filesystem corruption times, say, a 20% chance of actual power failure. It seems hopelessly myopic to suggest that the cost/benefit trivially favors the prevention of uncommon filesystem errors over addressing the immediate and possibly time-sensitive needs of the user.

I think that whichever organizations choose to implement the lockout feature are doing a massive disservice to their customers, foisting significant hassle upon them in order to save a few pennies/customer of repair costs, if that. Your arguments haven't convinced me otherwise.
Sublime Text Development Status – July 2014
The problem with Bitcoin as a remittances disruptor
This article is based on the flawed assumption that where the rocket explodes is irrelevant. His criteria for success is frontal impact which the author claims is the only way to destroy this midair. Regardless of this, if the impact alters the trajectory to bring down the rocket in a less populated area, fewer people die.

The author has been a vocal critic of missile defense systems for decades. While that doesn't negate his arguments, it suggests a potential motivation for his artificial definition of success.

Edit: As the comment below points out, the rocket's trajectory could be changed so as to increase casualties. While that's true, it won't do so on average for several reasons. A rocket is only targeted if the system believes it has a high probability of striking a populated area. Since the expected losses are high, average will be better. In fact, average should be much better because the distribution of population density is so skewed. A small percentage of land is in dense regions. In this particular case, there's the added advantage that the most populous cities are relatively far away from Gaza so early impact is better.
Zero is also less than two.
Have you researched the Libyan addressing system? A quick google search gave quite a few results. First you need to confirm the existing system and how people find a business.

I can understand asking people for directions once in neighborhood but how do people get to neighborhood first. How do they know which neighborhood has a particular business. For example, it appears Canadian embassy is in Tripoli Tower but how people know where is Tripoli Tower.

This is a very common way to find places in developing countries. Landmark based, block based, direction based, ...
The size of the allocated block is often not the same as the size passed to malloc, so the "duplicated" length is usually actually necessary.
technology-wise the thing like Iron Dome could have and should have been deployed 20 years ago. Today the missile based defense system against short range relatively slow missiles is becoming obsolete (and thus whether the Iron Dome missiles are effective is becoming not that important) with coming up of the systems like this http://defense-update.com/20131214_us-army-tests-high-power-...
There have been a shockingly low number of deaths on the Israeli side, does this mean that if the Iron Dome wasn't even deployed, that the rockets launched from Palestine would cause little to no human losses? I had assumed that the large imbalance of deaths between Israel and Palestine was because of Israel's technological advantage (Iron Dome), and not that the Palestinian rockets were largely ineffective.
I agree. Consumer Reports did a survey of Model S owners and found that it was reliable enough to warrant a strong recommendation, and that "no owner in our survey has reported problems with the electric drivetrain". http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/10/tesla-model-...

Edmunds also seems to have had a long history of writing negative Tesla articles, oftentimes ignoring any positive aspects of the car in favor of oddly nitpicky complaints. See http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/22/hatin-tesla-model-s-seem... Some have speculated that they might have a hidden agenda when it comes to Tesla, though obviously that's very difficult to prove one way or the other...but it certainly seems odd that nobody in the Consumer Reports survey experienced a single drivetrain failure while Edmunds went through three in a row.
to continue with the example above - would also mean that Russia engage in some sort of compensation with the victims
All such agreements are non-exclusive, by law, as you pointed out. It is fairly universal in franchise agreements to require universal buildout and public-access channel service in exchange for certain amenities the local government can provide. In the case of Google Fiber, they chose not to pursue a TV franchise and Baltimore was smart enough to stick to their buildout requirements. It has the same effect: Google can't sell TV service on terms it likes, so Baltimore is not a market. In the case of FiOS, it's far more likely that Verizon would like to have -- and could not get -- a piecemeal franchise in the city, and simply decided that not being able to sell TV meant it was more cost-effective to try selling 4G access as broadband in the city.

In either case, Comcast signed a buildout/franchise agreement, and the economy has shifted since then to render such agreements less profitable. That, combined with Comcast's boilerplate 'most favored nation' clauses it generally gets into their agreements, renders all of your arguments moot, as far as the end result for the populace goes: there is only one game in town. The fact that it technically shouldn't be that way is just academic.

The Sun article you linked regards Baltimore County. Baltimore is not in Baltimore County. I wish you better luck with your future research.
This is the exact same thing involved in Bitcoin funds transfer.
A musical map of Mt. Zion Park
By nontrivial I mean 'application which, in your document database, requires multi-document updates to perform some individual logical operations'. This is a rather low bar :-).

The fact is, the vast majority of projects that programmers are working on are less computationally complex than stack overflow. That's not to say that forum software is all that complex, more that most problems are pretty simple. Of course there are real reasons to use scale out - I simply advocate thinking hard about whether your problem will ever truly need it before taking the substantial complexity hit of coding for it.
ISC being under DDOS attack
Yeah, if you don't care about privacy and save such data to disk as active session, active browser tabs, history, cookies, etc. Those should be RAM only for privacy reasons and never stored to any medium which can store those for extended periods.
Online editor Nicholas Thompson, who is spearheading today’s relaunch, put the
challenge succinctly:

“What we’re trying to do,” he said, “is to make a website that is to the
Internet what the magazine is to all other magazines.”

And then there's this gem;

While The New Yorker originally provided magazine writers— who sign a contract
each year promising a salary in exchange for the delivery of a certain word
count—no extra compensation for blogging, doing it instead as a sort of favor
to previous web editors like Avi Zenilman or to Remnick, it has recently paid
about $250 per post, sources told Capital.

It seems like writers of this caliber should be able to maximize their earnings by monetizing their own content directly. But then you realize, wow, monetizing distribution, especially at a micro-scale, is a really hard, and really interesting unsolved problem.
It really is a foreign world to me where a loop is considered a "verbose idiom".
The New Yorker opens its online archive to non-subscribers
Ask HN: Is this list missing any valuable Ruby, Python, or R libraries?
How is TypeScript compiled? I only find .ts files in the repo.
Why does your co-worker do that? Redwood City, or even areas in the south bay are reasonably affordable, especially if you adjust for the cost of fuel and attrition from that commute.
That is awesome! In a project I'm doing we are currently assessing payment gateways and Stripe comes in as a clear first, but since it wasn't previously available for Denmark we had dumped it. Looks like we might not have to do that now!

The alternatives were a bit lacking in Denmark for the kind of payment flow we need. It is reminiscent of the one from Airbnb where the fees are collected in two steps - first from the customer and then for the merchant. We went through Braintree, Paypal, and Paymill among others, but there wasn't a good fit. And it was surprisingly hard to find information about the different payment gateways for a specific country. Really hope we can get access to this beta!

How do you draw invites for the beta and do you do the drawing more than once?
This is 100% true. If you have ever watched ntpd ignore a stratum 0 clock (and every other time source) because some stratum 6 device reports the wrong time, you know the pain. Yes, this isn't supposed to happen, and yes it has happened to me many times.
To this European some American laws appear just weird and, I dare say, corrupt.

The telecom - and cable industry in the city of Zurich - yelled "bloody murder!" and foretold all sorts of doom and mayhem if the publicly owned electric utility would build a publicly financed fiber network. This happened about ten years ago.

The same companies argued that fiber is not economically viable and the investment not worthwhile.

They pored massive funds into a NO campaign for the referendum, which was accepted by the public in a landslide, twice!

After construction started the biggest telco, Swisscom, actually jumped onto the train. Now, thanks to the foresight of a public utility and the spending of public money Zurich has one of the densest, most modern, high capacity fiber networks.

Oh, the argument that a public utility smokes out poor private companies? That's not happening and that's very easy to avoid:

EWZ (the utility) does not act as an ISP. They sub lease the network to ISPs under equal and transparent conditions, who in turn sell network capacity to the consumer.

This also avoids the "censorship issue", which, in my opinion, is a spurious argument, at best.

I'm aghast about some of the arguments used in order to keep the public from pursuing its best interest.

I'd wager that a private company, whom's business model is built on force and coercion provides rotten service and will not act in the best interest of its customers.

When you look at where broadband stands in the US, compared to the rest of the world, I think my argument has merit.
Your argument could apply to a book too; why should an author NOT be able to veto whenever a copy of his work changes hands, or gets lent to a library or ends up in a second-hand bookshop?

But the law of copyright is clear when it comes to physical goods. The consumer has rights too, and one of those rights is to treat physical copies of copyrighted works the same way as normal everyday physical items. It's one of the limitations that society has seen fit to impose on the rights of copyright holders; in exchange for their monopoly on the right to make copies of their works, the customers get the right to borrow, lend, resell or otherwise alienate themselves of the product. You'll find the doctrine called 'exhaustion of rights' or 'first sale', and in US Law, it's to be found in 17 USC 109.

What's happening here is that with the internet switched on and the mass trade in digital goods, the copyright holders have been spending years making the analogies with physical goods that require capital and cost money to reproduce ('You wouldn't download a car') and now the physical items analogy is being applied to the rights that everyone else has too.
Don't trust client data
> alters the trajectory to bring down the rocket in a less populated area, fewer people die

It might also cause more deaths.
Ask HN: Why not have a government awarded email for every U.S. citizen?
I'm curious of HNer's take on why a government based email system for U.S. citizens would be a bad/good idea? I figure the notion of 'privacy' is already out the window with most adopted email and messaging platforms hence a government based system that ran in parallel with staunch laws that allow the user to overtly own their own data and have legal privacy protection is something I'm curious to hear peoples opinions regarding. I doubt its a popular idea but I'm wondering as to why it would be any worse that not having it.
Just wash it off.
Sweet! And is Stripe going to obtain stripe.com.au ?
rm -rf / is not quite the same as the f7 key restarting all machines sitting right next to the f6 key to restart a single machine.

you cannot fat finger rm -rf /
I remember when this article came out. I found it fascinating and engaging, although the ending was very disappointing (what happened in reality).
It's caused by multiple factors (some of them are based on Israel's technological advantage) - shelters are everywhere, Israelis are trained really well (even falling to the ground before a rocket impact reduces casualties), they have sophisticated warning system - they even have an app for that [1]

Obviously I cannot tell how efficient Iron Dome is but they certainly have other effective tools at their disposal.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249866/Red_Alert_app...
My experience is very similar to that of Charles Bloom:

http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/10-04-13-reality-o...
Out of interest, what is the trigger mechanism for the rockets warhead? Would an Iron Dome missile have a higher success rate if it had a strong enough blast radius that meant it only needed to explode near an incoming Hama's missile, rather than actually having to hit the warhead directly?
It probably would have failed.

The Gulf War Patriot was designed to shoot down Mach 2 jets, not Mach 5 Scuds.

Detonating slightly late against an aircraft is actually a good thing, since it makes the Patriot explode near the aircraft's middle instead of its nose.

A Scud is a short range ballistic missile. Once it's burnt out its fuel, it just carries on under the influence of gravity. From that point on, the only important part is the warhead in the very tip of the nose.

Detonating by the mid section of a Scud means you're just shredding empty fuel tanks. And the huge speeds involved might actually make Gulf War Patriot missiles detonate against the rear of the Scud and just shred the non-functioning engine, or even detonate behind the Scud entirely.
There's a real difference between consumer and enterprise grade SSDs.

For comparison, for a while we nearly had a 1 to 1 dev to killed (consumer) SSD in work machines (see: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive...). Granted, we did adopt them (see: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-state-of-solid-state-hard-d...) for local dev use much earlier than we started putting them in servers.

I've killed 2 in my time here, though I do horrible big-ish data things that are either not SSD friendly or actively hostile.
attention to detail is a more valuable skill than people realize
The question is - how often do you reboot? For long running high uptime applications "ntpdate at boot" doesn't cut it... and the other solutions are nasty. In my experience, ntpd will ignore clocks almost at a whim even if they are stratum 0! Some stratum 6 clock decides to report a different time, and suddenly all your other sources are ignored until an ntpd restart. If your clock drifted too much... even ntpd restart with options to "force the time" can fail if the clock is too far out of whack. The you are back to forcing ntpdate - hope none of your processes are time dependent when system time jumps by 3 or 4 seconds.

Half of the GPS PCI devices require you to hack ntpd directly to get anything working, and the Ethernet sources have a strange tendency to go belly up after a year or 2 of running on non-120V sources. Not to mention that if you run the antenna cable too long, you might not notice that your GPS amplitudes are a little low until the next cloudy day. Or if someone adds a new hunk of metal on your roof, or blocks line of sight to some portion of the sky...

Long story short, time is a nightmare and I am glad other people think so too.
What?

Oversight is a legal measure applied to police and security agencies to ensure that they are obeying the law, not something you do to the general public.
It might but it is unlikely, considering that a rocket is aimed to be most efficient. Deviating it from it's course should be enough to decrease the effect.

An exception to this might be that the rocket aims a city of thousands, who get sheltered successfully, which means the rocket would kill about zero people. When the rocket now gets deviated it might hit a target with hundred people who didn't get sheltered. Therefore the result for the population might be worse. My feeling (and I am definitely not an expert) is that this is comparatively unlikely, though.
All I'm saying is that I read the initial version without any "boxes" that was published for a few minutes, and much preferred that.

I thought maybe you'd like to know that the extra work you did "improving" the comment has negative value to some of your readers.
Aaaah, a new Dune tune! It's like all the good memories from 15 years ago came back and smacked me in the brain.
Chrome has the memory profiler for that.
It wasn't until Windows 95 (or was it 3.1?) that usability and standardization were taken very seriously in the PC world. I recall vaguely using an 80's-era DOS-based word processor at my father's office, and pressing "F1" for help, and wiping out my work.
What would be the "good" alternative ? I often tries "rmdir" or "rm -r" if the directory is not empty and very often there are some "protected files" so I add -f.
Thus it happens that I directly lauch "rm -rf".
Learn everything there is to know about SLAM. And then perhaps contribute to open-source navigation projects and the like.
Ink Review: Sailor Kiwa-Guro Carbon Nano Black | Wonder Pens
Music Video “Mahiya” by Hricha Debraj Das
# rm -rf /tmp/bla

# rm -rf / tmp/bla
I'm guessing family ties in the current location and then the abstraction of fuel use from fuel costs?

I complain about my 6km (4 mile) commute which takes about 10-15 minutes. Cannot fathom driving hours daily to do work. Even with ridesharing or podcasts or whatever else, that strikes me as a huge waste of life time.
It would be a wrong term.

"A pride of lions", "a pack of wolves" are examples of collective noun.

Lego does not fit that pattern.

Sugar, Bread, or water are example of uncountable nouns.

"A gram of sugar", "a loaf of bread", "a litre of water", "a bag of Lego".

You also wouldn't say "one lego"; you might say "one Lego piece" or "one Lego 2x2 piece".
link[0] for those interested.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
IWeather Pro: A Weather App for iOS and Android
That's good in theory, but is it actually true that cities are currently full of mostly Uber cars to the point where it's a problem? Or unregulated cabs, in cities that don't have medallions.

The optimal economic solution would be to tax all traffic, have toll roads, or some kind of technological solution. I can't see any city ever doing that though. But it's only relevant if it really is a serious problem.

The parent comment was ridiculous. It asserted that eliminating $100k barrier to entry, eliminating a monopoly (their own words), and increasing competition would drive prices up. You could maybe argue that congestion would increase, but prices almost certainly would not.
If it's not working, that's a pretty bad sign for the US ballistic missile defense system. I'm assuming it's easier to hit a Mach 3 Grad than a Mach 20 ICBM
It's painful to see someone try a scientific approach (which is good!) but already fails in the assumptions. There are probably many ways a defense rocket could harm an incoming missile without hitting it directly up front. Destroying it's back might and should result in the warhead not reaching it's designated target, which is already a success. Even exploding near a missile might change the air environment of this rocket enough to harm it's target trajectory. Last but not least every kind of pressure might result in damage to the rocket's proper functioning and thereby result in it's early triggering or not triggering at all.

While I also believe that a tool like the Iron Dome might be inefficient for it's pure militaristic purpose (it might have psychological purposes as well) the article is not much help in deciding whether this assumption is true or not, because the assumptions are already flawed.
For a bunch of distributed systems nodes need to be roughly matching real time, but also within some tollerance of each other; it's simplest to make everything as accurate to real time as possible.

I work in broadcast automation. It's a distributed system and the clocks need to be within a certain tolerance of each other. Historically that's done by having a dedicated piece of timekeeping hardware that dictates the station clock, but recently we've been experimenting with using NTP.

We have one node (A) where you author time-sensitive events, and another node (B) that polls for pages of those events, loops through them and takes some action when they should occur. Without both nodes agreeing somewhat on the time you'll end up missing events.
You also may be giving too much credit to Hamas and Islamic Jihad's ability to aim rockets at the intended targets. Plenty of the time they hit the middle of nowhere, or they've actually even hit Palestinian-dominated areas (Hebron and Bethlehem) [1][2]

In many situations, it makes far more sense to save the Iron Dome counter-missles.

[1]: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=712463
[2]: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4542242,00.html