skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not just possible. Likely. The Brunhes–Matuyama reversal was 780k years ago and the average gap is only 450k years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal. Such reversal events can cause thousands of years of fluctuating protection from solar radiation.

I'd be fascinated to see a study of how we might protect ourselves during such an event.

Sadly I imagine nobody wants to be the guy that spent billions on EM shielding 50,000 years before anyone needed it.
Should probably add (2007) to the title.

Four months later the previous record holder, Harry Hong, took back the title with a 4,988-line run (about 5x Lori's run), which remains the record to this day.
Show HN: Succinct Team Messaging
What happens to all the bitcoins that are being sent in now if ethereum fails? In startups, investors almost always have a liquidation preference, which means that if things go south they get their money back first (or at least what's left of it).

I haven't heard any mention of this and I'm wondering how this is structured? If the ethereum founders were able to fail spectacularly and still walk away as millionaires that'd be quite a perverse incentive structure!
On the other hand, what's the problem in using TLS for cases you don't think it useful ? I can see a few reasons here, but I don't see any of them being enough not to use TLS everywhere:

- TLS is expensive: my gut says it's wrong, but I'd love to see some numbers. Ilya Grigorik [0] has done some experiments here, and I don't see TLS as really bad

- TLS is complicated: true, and we have to rely on tried and tested implementations. I'd say you'd need to do it whatever security we use (and we want security, right?)

- TLS requires certificates from the flawed CA infrastructure we have: wrong, public-key authentication isn't even the only authentication scheme possible with TLS, it's just the first one we think about (and also the most tested one).

Do you have other counter-arguments ?

[0] https://www.igvita.com/2013/12/16/optimizing-nginx-tls-time-...
The thing is, I never use Uber when I'm in my area, because that's where my car is. I use Uber when I'm travelling.
Redirects to http://hosted.ap.org/specials/bluepage.html
Graphic designers with passion for flat design, give us comments
We're looking for passionate graphic designers who are passionate about flat and modern design to give us feedback on our results page. Please use your mobile and tablet to view, feedback is welcome, positive or negative ! http://www.tittle.co
A Plea for an Equal Opportunity Random
The similarities between growth hacking and catching grasshoppers
Why did they have to kill her?
Hopefully we develop new societies/governments that benefit the "non-working" class.
You have to understand that the number of people who could benefit from a secure, decentralized medium of exchange over the internet is many, many times larger than the anarchist-libertarian bubble that subscribes to your economic theory.
"Too much media/computer use isn't good for your brain. I worry computers are making people less creative in some ways, and too much time online is certainly bad for your soul. You need sunlight, air, dirt."
Such statements abound but actually don't make much sense. It's just the progress our society is making and we should be proud and happy of it because it absolutely enhances our productivity. People just need to adapt to new things over time and overcome their resistance. I bet when pen and paper became popular similar statements were made of them! Which are of course quite nonsensical examined by time.
This is exactly right, and I don't think enough businesses appreciate it. The notion that you can 'save money by going to China' is somewhat of a misnomer, you can get a product built at a lower price but if that cost is lower than what it costs to build in the acceptable level of quality, you will get a low quality part.

What I found interesting in the one time I was part of a negotiation with a Chinese manufacturer (Quanta at the time) they really would build the gadget we needed for what ever price we asked for, except they knew that building it for less than $X would mean (probably unacceptable) corners would be cut. And perhaps more interestingly they knew many of the corners they would cut to get to the price, so when contract language was added/proposed that cut off that shortcut it forced a revisit to the price negotiations.

It really was you get exactly what you pay for, but more importantly if you didn't understand what you were paying for then you ran the risk of being surprised at what you got. One of those times where I saw how little I would be able to really know about the ins and outs of that process without dedicating a lot of time and running a lot of projects through that channel.
> Most of it, yes, in the form of estate taxes.

Estate taxes in the US are 40% and the first ~$5 million in value is exempt. So its impossible to lose most of any estate to estate taxes in the US, and very few estates (0.14% [1]) are subject to any estate tax at all.

[1] http://www.cbpp.org/files/estatetaxmyths.pdf
Many people in the EU, including myself, don't bother with the localised versions of Google since the results can be annoying. Having said that it really is frustrating not to be able to easily restrict a search all the EU ccTLDs.
Challenges Remain for Technologies to Fight Ebola
When windows 95 came out, I got hooked on solitaire. I played for hours till I could finish it under 100 seconds, then to 90s, 80s, 70, and 60s. It was really hard to finish it below 50 seconds but once I got to 49s then that was my mark. Hard to do but got some games done under 50 seconds and then suddenly I got a lucky shot with all cards in an easy setting which I finished in 37 seconds. My own world record.

I considered myself the fastest mouse mover of all universe.
The fact that you were downvoted is extremely sad. Downvoters, good luck understanding how the next crappy project[1] you'll inherit was supposed to work without even a one-line specification describing what the reasoning behind certain choices was!

Everything about methodologies should be taken with a grain of salt, what works somewhere, with a specific set of people and for some projects is not guaranteed to work anywhere. And not every aspect linked with "old" methodologies should be viewed as pure evil.

Consider that many of the ideas that ended up in the agile manifesto could already be found in Peopleware from the eighties and that no methodology is the last. There was Waterfall, RUP and other clones, with the Agile wave someone defined XP (now dead) and after that Scrum. Now even Scrum is seen as something with too much overhead and people start turning to custom solution that use kanban/kaizen/etc...

[1] Referring to a project that has some logic worthy of benig explained, interaction with external components, ecc... not some CRUD.
The commercial business/licensing was sold off to Digia, which eventually bought the whole Qt division.
There are an infinite number of intermediate points in the design space in which you trade off lower testing costs for higher risk. But what does "higher risk" mean? It means nothing other than costs borne by the public. And at $1 million per person-decade, those costs add up really quickly.

Those 90-95% of drugs that fail clinical testing have to go somewhere. Cheaper testing might mean that only 75% of drugs fail, and 25% end up in the market. Could this be more efficient overall? Maybe. Or it could be a lot less efficient, since 80% of those drugs are harmful or ineffective and would've failed more stringent testing!

It's not testing that makes drug development expensive. That's just the symptom. What makes drug development expensive is that the science doesn't exist to let us improve on that 90-95% number.
> it wanted MySQL as a dependency! For me, if you cannot build a well focused tool with a GUI toolkit it's not worth using.

How is Wireshark not well focused? It probably uses a mysql database for its activity history (note: I didn't look, its just a common design pattern). I mean, it seems like a program like Wireshark would be better suited by a simpler sqlite database, but its really up to the project lead on these things.
Great points. Especially about having a structured day. I'm sure that the biggest hurdle people have when working for themselves is they forget to treat themselves like an employee.
Beware - this site throws up 40 or 50 cookies. If you have cookie security turned on with Firefox, you have to abort Firefox in Task Manager.
IiNet’s stand against mandatory data retention in Australia
I think we're in agreement on content if not tone... and, honestly, I think your tone is probably closer to reasonable while mine was a bit facetious.

I said it that way to emphasize the argument that existence of a referentially transparent semantics isn't enough, though. You need extant and useful.
Then he's not thinking of Haskell when talking about referential transparency and variable assignment, or the other points of his post.
This debate has been going on since the 1960s when jobs started becoming computerized. Yes, lots of bue collar manufacturing jobs were lost then. And workers were afraid of automation. In the 1990s workstations and the internet replace white collar clerical jobs. There are far fewer travel agents and bank clerks now. The newer robots may replace the more sophisticated manufacturing, delivery and service jobs.
I’m also fairly certain that the very vast majority of people - particularly those who evince a ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle, are going to be drawn in any way, shape or form, to Burma, of all places. Not exactly a friendly government, just ask.
Please Come to Palo Alto City Hall Tonight to Ask for More Housing
Palo Alto City Hall will have hearings tonight at 7pm about the future of development in Palo Alto. This hearing began on Monday and you can read more about it here: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2014/08/05/new-voices-join-palo-altos-growth-debate

So far, the overwhelming majority of opinions that the Council has heard have urged for no new residential or commercial development.

I reside and work in Palo Alto and I know I'm not the only one disheartened that it's almost impossible for people to live and work in the same place, much less the elderly and those in need of housing assistance. I'm also disappointed that there has been a failure to recognize that the housing shortage and increased rents have been caused by protectionist development policies and not by "evil tech workers." Please read more about this at: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

I encourage everyone to come out and have their voice heard. It seems that the we have been quiet for far too long.
Despite the page, I will mention this: corporate vendor support is sufficient for teams that don't have the technical expertise to either roll out a new technology or troubleshoot problems on their own. This is partly why Red Hat Enterprise Linux is so popular, among other reasons. When there is a technical, competent, and strong administration team in house, most of those concerns go away. When there isn't, licenses for commercial support make sense.
It may sound like a great idea, but you should make sure it's suitable for your needs. The main reason I couldn't live in Cape Town is how limited the internet access is. Try finding a coffee shop with "free WiFi". They may exist, but they'll hand you a voucher for a 5MB bandwidth cap. There are cheaper markets in America, including the South or Midwest, where you can find lower cost of living and gigabit fiber.
Would be interested to know the R-squared on the room-price correlation.
Wireless Charging via Ultrasound
I'm guessing that manual labor will be a thing of the past, and I struggle to see how this is a bad thing overall.

If the same work is being done without human intervention, why not just give people who're unemployed the products of that labour?
I don't work in a lab, but I assume you'd pour it into a cup/beaker and drink out of that
Am I the only one who initial read HURD?
They also have a bunch of addon packs that are proprietary-only. A few of them would be really useful in the free software community too, which sucks, like their graphing QML library.
- Where can you find a good co-founder ? Best if it is someone you have known for a while. If not meet ups and places where people with common interests gather.

- What share would you offer him (already working 2 years on the project already and invested money in it etc.)? It depends on what type of skills they bring to the table. A vesting schedule is best so that over time they are compensated, but if they walk away a few months into it you aren't screwed.

- How would you organize it legally ? Depends on how your projects are organized. LLC or C Corp managing the other entities probably works, but there are a lot of variables and this is where a lawyer would come in.

- Would you meet him in person first ? ABSOLUTELY! This is basically a marriage...you don't want to start that on a blind date.

- Are there other things you should be careful for ? Be careful of over committing equity and not knowing the person well enough.

Another useful thing might be to read this article by Mark Suster: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/09/the-co-founder...
I'd like to see this list adjusted for "salary an entry-level {Google, Facebook, Twitter, ...} employee would make in ${LOCATION}". Does a ${COMPANY} employee in Greece actually make the same $100 000 USD as one in SF?
people often hand-wave that "new technology creates new jobs". but it seems to me there's a simple economic proof that it's true, based on demand and supply. Is there one?

my favourite commentary on the singularity (comic) http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/
Ripple is trying it, but they have issues. As far as I know the issues are not technical, but business related.

https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus
The article mentions King of Kong, which is great. But I think the better documentary on this whole scene is Chasing Ghosts. It's a broader look and really gives you a feel for the type of people involved in this scene. Makes it even more surprising that this lady was a world record holder, if only for a little while.
Thanks, that's kind of you to say. One of my favorite parts of my job is I am surrounded by really smart engineers who I constantly learn new things from. In this case, Marek spent a bunch of time with me walking through the innards of how Linux sets up a socket. Was a lot of fun to learn about and write up. If you want an even more technical post on the subject, you should check out his blog:

https://idea.popcount.org/2014-04-03-bind-before-connect/
Rather than explain in detail I recommend people just try eating unprocessed food (with minimal grains) and see what happens. The lifestyle choices rub off on others. Weight loss is the most visible benefit, but measurable markers of blood cholesterol improve too.

The easiest benchmark: you should never feel tired after eating.
I stand by that what I've mentioned looks fake (especially the strawberries and the sauce) but I think that would be a great exercise. Your brain believes what it expects. I had the expectation that these were renderings so it was easy to pick out flaws.
Good thought. The freedom of working for yourself can promote laziness and reduced productivity since you don't feel accountable to anyone but yourself.
> The question is: who needs the jobless people?

If we ever end up really asking ourselves this question it means that capitalism has been running for too long; that it grew into an entity that serves its own goals rather than ours. By that time it might be too hard to slay that particular beast though.
But Haskell_2005 presented more difficulties (and research opportunities) than Haskell_2014. It was always interesting but now it's also proven to be powerful and meaningful in a way nobody had gotten around to at that point.
Here is your answer from Vitalik Buterin himself: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2bssfx/ethereum_sca...
I'm pretty sure Zakalwe asks Sma in Use of Weapons what the humans in the Culture are for - given that the machines are so much better than humans at pretty much everything - the answer is essentially "for having fun".
The deal was that before Nokia Qt was GPL or commercial but after Nokia bought it they relicensed the open-source offering to LGPL. This obviously reduced the demand for the commercial version but there's still plenty of companies who would buy it for both license and support.
Be sure to read to the end!
IMO it depends a lot on the timescale. Give it 100-200 years and all the positive scenario are the likely outcome.

In 200 years, people will only have hobby because that will be all they have to do and most of their needs have been automated.

The problem is the transition to there and that's the annoying thing in all those discussions, nobody ever talk about it.

For example, Industrial Revolution and the 2 World Wars were the fantastic drivers that pushed EU and US in an unprecedented golden age. I'm sure the majority of people would have been happy to get the golden a few years later rather than going through the mass loss of lives or the misery of those years.

> This is not a technological consequence; rather, it’s a political choice.

Not quite sure how it is reassuring. Except China, there seem to be no move to even acknowledge that we may have something to do other than "the invisible hand of the market will solve everything"
Father of Net Neutrality: I'm crowdfunding my political campaign
Exactly. An analogy is with password salting: you don't salt passwords because it makes the hashes unbreakable, you do it to increase the amount of work attackers have to do to successfully recover the passwords.

Even without verified certificates, mandatory TLS would require a MITM attacker to be present at the time of the connection (not passively record traffic and attack later) for every connection they wanted to snoop on. For a stateless protocol like HTTP, that's a massive amount of work to do if you want to snoop on any large scale. The increase in work required is probably even greater (relatively) than the increase achieved in the example of password salting (which is considered a security no-brainer)!
USB2 has a fairly sane external PHY specification though with lots of parts in the market. I was thinking about USB in the context of the data layer, which (to my mostly-software eyes) seems comparatively straightforward and sane.

But absent some random hackery on opencores.org, no one seems to have really put effort into doing it on an open part in a serious way.
You are right. My bad. I'm showing my age :)
The most difficult role to hire for in tech right now
This is terrible. I was just in Tokyo last month. I don't know what it is about Japanese culture but you should never take your own life. Humans are the only mammals that do this.
Dress codes: Suitable disruption
donate here: https://teachoutwu.tilt.com/save-teachout-wu-from-governor-c...
I'm not sure it's going to affect it at all. What makes you think it will? All they're doing is spinning off a subsidiary to do what the Qt division is already doing.
So the commercial version indeed is not open source at all? I can't buy the commercial version and give it to my friends? Hm. That's a pity.
That's interesting - he has 9,999,999 points
Wait... so are you proposing a metaphor where we are the horses and mules?
> They sell a commercial version without any restrictions on usage.

I understand I can't give it to my friends? That's would be a restriction that free software/open source doesn't have.
Wireless Charging, at a Distance, Moves Forward for uBeam
>I disagree.

I'm not sure with what, we're both saying the same thing. ;-)

I haven't read too much of it yet but your link looks very interesting, thanks!
The are very good. Knowing they're renderings though, you can see it in the face and hair.

DanBC made an interesting comment - it would interesting to see renderings like these in a double blind test with photographs and see how well they stack up.
Snowden makes first public appearance, secretly visits Moscow’s Bolshoi theatre
I skimmed the article looking for information regarding IPv6 support. Is it possible for a client to establish an IPv4 socket to CloudFlare and then CloudFlare talk to my server over IPv6?
Lovely article, thanks for the repost.
Oh well thanks — that's quite a compliment.

This is pretty cool!
I'm glad you raised this. I share your sentiment, I've been getting a lot of nuisance calls that I reported to www.callercenter.com in the hopes of bringing the issue to the attention of the proper authorities. I'm afraid these laws are not as effective as we hoped.
Crawl an entire domain in one line
So little litter. So little clutter in general.
That paper just says that the effects of SSRIs scale with with the severity of depression, averaging an effect size of .2 greater than a placebo for people whose HAM-D is less than 23. That's a small effect, smaller than the placebo effect, but it's statistically significant and we're talking p < .0001 here. ALso, a HAMD of 23 can be called anything from "very severe" to "moderate" depending on who you ask.

But part of the reason you see such a small response is that according to [1] some people have significant positive responses to SSRIs but the average is brought down by people who have significant negative responses to SSRIs.

For more information about SSRIs and the controversy around them than you could possibly need, see here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-yo...

[1]http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11074...
This is not true, per US Copyright Compendium 202.02(b)
http://www.copyrightcompendium.com/#202.02(b)

"The term "authorship" implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable."
Nah, it's not as bad as the article says. It's much worse.

1) If you don't lose your job to a robot, you'll lose it to an emulated human. An em requires only a tiny chip and a little electricity, and is every bit as capable of doing empathy and creativity as you are.

2) If you don't lose your job to an em, you'll lose it (and your life) to unfriendly self-improving AI that has a use for your atoms. If you think there's a law of nature against such awful things happening, think again.

3) Even if you learn about that bleak future with 99% certainty, you'll keep living life as usual and hoping for the 1%, instead of trying to change things.

4) And even if everyone on Earth sees that the bleak future is coming, we won't coordinate with each other to stop it! Look at poor people today, they are already suffering but don't coordinate to improve their lot.
Question: What do you think "government benefits" are? As in, in what do they consist? What is their form? Of what stuff are they? Are they corporeal or spiritual? If corporeal, whence did they come? Who created them? Are they extracted from a mine? Built by a machine? Contributed by working men?
> Most people (and I'd include myself in this) are simply not mentally capable enough to be trained to outperform automation in any task automation can perform.

Well, they shouldn't. I see automation as a way to end slavery, on which our society is based. People in the first world don't see this because their chains and whips are made of gold, but if you think about it, it's slavery nonetheless. We are all slaves to the system that requires us to work long hours on increasingly pointless things in order not to starve. I strongly hope we'll liberate ourselves from this situation with automation and technological progress (though I don't feel confident we will).
Seems kind of strange that suddenly this guy goes from 600 pts to almost 5000. It's also weird that his total points from marathon mode was 9,999,999.
What to look for in Internet bandwidth Managers