skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you carry more than liability past a certain time, you could drop it. Then you don't get coverage if the accident is your fault, but your cost may go down quite a bit.
If I am cured of some nasty illness it certainly makes me happier. I think Gregg Easterbrook is full of shit.
While there are many useless critics, i wonder - was it really that hard to imagine Facebook("the identity layer of the web"),Reddit("democratic news"),The internet("duh") or smartphones("The versatility of computing, everywhere") becoming valuable under the condition that everybody uses them ? Doesn't seem so.

But there are many apps, that even under that condition, that it would be hard to imagine any unique value over what we have today, And do warrant criticism .
Ask HN: How Facebook finds my friends given it is a new email account?
I had a facebook account some time back and I deactivated it once after I had some alternatives to get in touch with friends.

A month ago I signed up for facebook with a new email account to get FB developer key.. after a week or so, I started receiving friends recommendations from facebook and it was so horrifying that it suggests my friends' profiles exactly.. This email account was new and I had only one email communication with one of my friend's official email address which is also different from his facebook connected email account.. after few days, the recommendations became pretty obvious it sent the profiles of my colleagues from my previous company... I am totally on the black here.. Any idea of how its possible or Am I missing any piece....?

PS : The previous fb account was connected through a Gmail account and this new account was opened with an Outlook account..
> The incentive to take whatever job you can is that even if a job pays very little, that's on top of the basic income.

The goal isn't to provide largess (is it?) its to provide the basics with no strings attached free of charge, anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.

> "citizen or legal immigrant"

I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals. This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right? Why should specific people starve?
It's well-known that you can incrementally free objects that are known to be garbage but it's not usually implemented for reference counting since it's not typically seen as a good fit because it undermines the advantages of reference counting a bit: now, objects aren't freed deterministically when they become garbage (that is objects are destroyed at unpredictable times) and you're now introducing unpredictable pauses into the language runtime to free garbage objects (short though those pauses may be). Maintaining the free stack also adds overhead. It's just not a very good fit.
IBM Builds A Scalable Computer Chip Inspired By The Human Brain
Here's Vodacom's (in South Africa) $50 Android KitKat phone: http://www.techcentral.co.za/vodacom-smart-kicka-review/5018... -- it's at the very least prettier. :P

(This smartphone at this price-point is actually an extremely big deal for the gigantic emerging African market.)
There's a pretty obvious difference though between criticism for the sake of stroking your own ego, and criticism as a means of trying to better a product or legitimately point out its flaws. One introduces better conversation, another one is crowding around something to be kicked.
Ask HN: Historical data sets available online?
As a former History major, turned software engineer, I been wondering lately where software and big data might be able to assist our historical perspective. I'm sure there any data sets that are ripe of aggregation and visualization. What are some interesting data sets available online?
"Give us full access to your drive to know who can read your drive", says the page designed to look like an official google page with barely any mention of it not being from google (no mention that mr everyone will see anyway).

I'm sure the intent is good but if the goal is to let people know that they give permissions too easily then pages like this aren't really helping.
please forgive my ignorance, but aren't you basically describing a "mark and sweep"[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_sweep#Moving_vs._non-...
> For a very small energy cost (P<<F c), you can generate a magnetic field to propel yourself forward. The opposing magnet won't move for D/c seconds, so you're transporting momentum at a much lower cost.*

The mechanical moment, i.e. the moment of the object you can see (for example magnets, electrons, ...), is not conserved. The total moment is conserved, i.e. the moment of the objects and the moment of the fields, in this case the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field is quantized, and the particles are the photons. So in this case the photons travel from the electromagnet to the static magnet, and they carry away some moment and energy, so the moment is conserved locally.

It's important to consider the moment of the fields, because some of the photons don't go to the other magnet, but go to other directions and are never absorbed, the thecnical name is "radiation". If you don't consider it, then the system will lost some moment and some energy.

> As a thought experiment consider a stream of photons carrying a large amount of power P through a cross section. Now suppose your "device" is a mirror aligned parallel to the stream.

This is a solar sail. The solar sail is a real device. But I think that this experiment is not trying to build a complicated version of a solar sail. To test a solar sail, you should put the device in a strong light. I suppose that the test chamber is in the dark.
I think you're suffering from hindsight bias. Less than two years ago, I was still explaining to people that the emergence of online social networks is a Big Deal.
> Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact.

Couldn't this just be explained with power laws? Some small percentage of companies will have a disproportionate share of the impact.
Totally agreed. I think the biggest issue with the Gen XYZ (I am part of X) is that we as a whole (a big generalization, of course there are exceptions) tend to be too self-centered. We are always concerned with our goals, our aspirations, and we don't think about, care for, or appreciate others nearly enough.

Our parents' generations (baby boomers) had responsibilities that involved caring for siblings, raising children, tending aging parents, and they often put themselves LAST. Not to say that it's better, but after talking to friends my age who have started families, I think it really sheds light into why so many young people are lost, confused, and unfocused. People are wandering around wondering what their purpose is, why they're unhappy, this and that, when they just have to open their eyes to see how blessed they are, how good they have it.

I think at the end, the purpose that Gen XYZ seek is right around them - if they will look up from their smartphone devices - human connection. We need to appreciate more what we have, the help that people give us, and start to give more to others and the world around us.
Very cool!

One suggestion: Although it's an extra click, maybe try out a "search artist only"/"search song only"/etc... approach? I was searching for the band "everything everything," which only turned-up results with songs with the word "everything" in it. That or tweak your results ranking mechanism to favor exact matches?

Keep up the great work.
"Someone said something that actively works against improving the direction of the conversation."

This includes what I assume the "mean/racist/sexist" choice refers to -- obnoxiousness that raises the level of antagonism with no corresponding up-side. It also includes not only the useless comments (thanks, cool story bro), but also the kind of silly joke comments that invariably turn into threads where the participants are primarily showcasing their cleverness and entertaining themselves, rather than shedding light on the subject. Everyone is generally better off letting reddit be the designated location for that sort of thing.
Yes command (Unix)
Excavator mulchers – Land clearing equipment
It's about the bigger picture since "progress" brings also negative stuff like living in cramped boxes instead of in nature.

Are in general western people happier than inedegenious people without access to said medicine ? Not sure , but it doesn't seem so.
Yep. This kind of thinking is actually healthy for our mental health as well.
Is something different
Most of it is. Your dad can be LeBron James and you can inherit all his genes, physical characteristics, and natural abilities, but if you don't want to practice 4 hours a day, practice while the other players are playing video games, staying up late, drinking beer and eating junk food, you're not going to be successful in basketball.

Being born into a better family gives you a better chance but it doesn't guarantee you anything, just like being born into a worse family gives you a worse chance but doesn't completely eliminate the chance of success for you. 90% of it is your effort in either case.
He never said or implied that medical progress doesn't lead to happiness. In fact he said that it does lead to happiness. You're arguing against a straw man.
I wonder what the possibilities are for adding a neuromorphic chip to a normal stack for specialized tasks such as the image/video recognition (cpu, gpu, npu). GPUs are very similar in their need for specialized code vs cpus.

Just an uneducated wild-thought.
Thanks for the reply :)

I suspect an ideal state to be in would be that there was no firmware flashing at all, the various bits of hardware would have some version of the firmware in ROM and could load a replacement firmware into RAM, but never be able to store that in a PROM, thus guaranteeing that no malicious code could ever persist between tenants.
Probably a lot harder to arrange with hardware people though.

I guess my concern with signed firmware is that it's increasing the attack surface of the firmware by adding in crypto code. Identifying malicious code is going to be hard enough to start with, let alone hunting down its attack vector, let alone getting a decent fix from some vendor in a useful timeframe!
This reminds me of one of PG's old essays, "The Power of the Marginal" - http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

People never see disruption coming and by its very nature, the best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked, by insiders early on. And probably the same is true of the founders behind them.

WhatsApp and Jan Koum are perfect examples of this.
Tabletop simulator doesn't implement any rules. It is a physics sandbox with the focus on game related physics. It's a ton of fun to play with, and infinitely flexible, since there's no coding of rules. It does have specific coding for cards, dice, and a few other things, but no game rules.
I think it means he can't math.
Sport data feeds – anything other/better than Opta? Potential for disruption?
I'm working on an app plus web site for football (soccer) fans and I'd like to create a number of widgets with fixtures, tables and results.

Opta http://www.optasports.com/ appear to me the market leader provider (and something of a monopoly). They also charge monopolistic prices.

I feel that sports has huge potential, but seems like it's dominated by Opta and ... no one else.

Are there any other FOSS or lower-cost sport data providers out there? If not, why not? Is the field open to disruption?
I think it's great to express detailed skepticism about experiments like these, but I find the high levels of attitude to be tiresome. It doesn't add anything of substance to the skepticism, and it seems like an anti-pattern for good science. Scientists need to maintain some level of humbleness about their certainty. Not be credulous, but not be sarcastically smug either.

NASA is not universally populated with geniuses, but they're not high school idiots. I don't think they should be ridiculed for reporting a best-effort attempt to test surprising or controversial results. Otherwise how would surprising results ever be found?
Good to see other Utes on here :)
There's also deciphering the ancient Greek written language "Linear A" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

It was recently added to unicode, and we don't even know what the characters mean.
Wikimedia Receives More Than $140,000 in Bitcoin Donations in First Week
Images of the World – Top new Species of 2014
The Skill Combo That Earns a 10% Wage Premium
I believe what your parent was looking for is being able to pin a specific goroutine to a single CPU. If you are doing network traffic analysis, if a goroutine will jump between CPUs, you get the cache-miss overhead. This is the reason snort[0] (all in C) doesn't even use threads and sticks to a single process. To be able to use multiple threads when network processing you need hardware support (or something like PF_RING[1]) to distribute your load between cores. You want to be able t keep a data stream (TCP stream) pinned to a given CPU core, and doing that in Go is near impossible with how go-routines are scheduled.

[0] https://www.snort.org/

[1] http://www.ntop.org/products/pf_ring/
>'The council has not yet advertised its services directly to MOOC students'.

Thank you for pointing this out.

While I'm all about Hanlon's Razor some of this just feels so shady.

In the case of the CSU offering there no direct advertisement, but a slew of articles pointing out that no one signed up.

Looking a bit further I found that my own local University system where I'm registered as a CS major started offering roughly the same deal last fall [1].

There was no announcement and even now I can't find a single thing about the specifics on either site. This is while there's an ongoing study by the Gates foundation on the effectiveness of this sort of program.

Could it be that these institutions want to give the impression that no one wants the $100 MOOC alternatives to their $800-1500 courses?

1: http://technical.ly/baltimore/2013/09/05/umuc-to-offer-credi...
ESPN Public API Retirement
How to solve the App Store pricing problem?
It looks good, but the results are mixed.

Premium/pre-registered names are shown as available when they are not, similarly other names that are registered show as available.

(Example of the former "edinburgh" shows ".pictures" is available, but it is a premium-name. Example of the latter dns.zone shows as being available but it is not.)
"The best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked" is a tautology.
I think he's pointing either to this:

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

or this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function
Jesus fucking christ the first amendment has nothing to do with downvotes on HN.

I would much rather have people downvoting comments they hate than have to read through tiresome boring arguments about stuff hat has been endlessly argued about in the past.
So I believe I fixed it. I think it was b/c the socket.io server was emitting on the 'io' object on every db query, and it should have been emitting on the 'socket'. I think. It was definitely all jacked up, though. Thanks so much for checking it out...
I agree with what you said but some of these problems could be helped by a better public education system. Just because your parents don't understand finance or the tax code doesn't mean you should have to figure it out yourself. There should be a high school class or two on these kinds of practical subjects (USA).
That pit and the various efforts to "find the treasure" remind me of a father that was spending $15,000 per year on his young daughter's softball efforts (coaching, training, traveling) in order to help earn her a scholarship to college. She eventually blew out a knee and her softball career ended before she even finished high school. If only he had instead invested that $15,000 a year himself he would have had her scholarship all taken care of.

This pit is like that only with less light at the end of the tunnel.
> Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving history.

I don't doubt that those books have better survivability, but they also represent only the tiny fraction of written information that was worth publishing in book form.

archive.org is a great example of how a relatively small nonprofit organization can now afford to archive historical information at volumes that were previously impossible.
I think the real issue is not that these companies might not be changing the world, but rather that a lot of these companies don't have sustainable business models.
This is not hindsight. At the beginning of those products, at least some people described it that way.
The thing I like about pools is that they seem to actually reduce the cognitive load required to consistently get memory management "right" in a large application.

With manual memory management you have to worry about the ownership convention of each chunk of code, with GC you have to worry about architecting strong/weak references so as not to inadvertently retain everything (not to mention latency issues), and with reference counting you have to worry about ownership cycles. In practice I haven't come up with a better strategy than enforcing some sort of top-down hierarchy which effectively smashes most of the differences in cognitive load between manual/refcounting/GC. GC has slightly less upfront busywork but in practice the tooling tends to be poor so it's a wash (if that). In GC and refcounting it's easy for one inexperienced/tired/sloppy individual to create a massive leak completely out of proportion to the footprint of their immediate code.

Pools, in contrast, allow the same top-down approach with the very significant benefits that I don't have to think about the hierarchy at a finer level than the pool itself (which I have to do for the 3 other approaches) and that memory management mistakes don't typically lead to the globally-connected-component of the dependency graph sticking around indefinitely.
Unrelated - One thing I've always wondered. How does one create a poll?
Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management is the original book, whereas The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management is the new and updated version. I have the original, but it would be nice to know everything the new book adds.
Show HN: Smart Coos- Rosetta Stone for Babies and Young Children (feedback wanted)
Bought an Amazon gift card to test it out. Says it will arrive in 24 hours. Would be nice if instant, but looks good so far!
Blink and you'll miss it, but Chrono Trigger actually showed what the inside of the 1999 domes was like pre-apocalypse. It's in one of the secret endings; you can see it here starting around 4:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WR0AmpABjk
That's actually the book I had in mind-thank you! My memory flaked on me.
Yeah, but intelligence, beauty, work ethic and all those other things are inheritable. We can (as always) separate the causes of financial success into genetic and environmental traits. The entirety of one and most of the other is determined at birth. The rest is chance.
Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma getting to see the grandkids grow rather than waiting for holidays/care packages that may never come. Twitter, though, has never struck me as serving any use than as a shitty RSS feed for celebrities (including 'celebrities' in your field).
Everything is worse with IPMI :)

(as for half-way mitigations like dumping firmware, I would suggest that that is a fairly worthless option, malicious firmware would likely be able to return clean data to the dumper, unless it was a hardware dumper)
If you have >200 karma, you can visit http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
> ~10 minutes = a few minutes.

10 minutes? More like an hour. 10 minutes will get you one confirmation. But that's rarely good enough. 6 confirmations is usually considered a good threshold to protect against double spending, and that means you're waiting an hour.

> People realize that having BTC on hand is useful, so they start holding it.

"People" have been holding it ever since BTC launched, because a lot of people see it as an investment vehicle (albeit a highly volatile one). But BTC is still too volatile for most people to want to hold onto any for any real length of time.

> It is not true that BTC is far from decentralized.

I don't think you understand my argument. I'm not saying that there's a central point of failure that will take down the whole bitcoin network. Heck, that's true of Stellar too, despite the more centralized nature there. What I am saying is that all of the various gateways and exchanges and bitcoin services are still effectively centralized points of failure for the various services they represent. Yes, a company can switch from Coinbase to BitPay, but they won't be able to accept BTC for however long it takes them to move all their services over. Imagine if the company only accepted BTC, that would be a disaster! Similarly, people who use exchanges are taking on the risk of the exchange going under. This is largely due to the fact that people maintain balances with the exchanges, which means the exchange has actually issued them credit, and if the exchange vanishes, the credit is worthless. In that sense it's actually very much like Stellar. In fact, it's nearly exactly like Stellar, because Stellar has both the credit, and has the decentralized trustless currency STR, the big difference is with Stellar people are expected to trade credit, and with BTC, people are expected to redeem their credit with the exchange/gateway in order to trade BTC directly.

Bitcoin does allow you to operate in a completely trustless, decentralized manner where you never leave the network, never deal in any currency except BTC, don't use any online services to manage this stuff (i.e. keep your wallet on your local machine, run the full bitcoin client, etc). But most people don't do that, because it's wildly impractical.
Weekly Newsletters for Front-end Developers
Well, it's not useful for HFT. What makes 10ms too much for the rest of the financial industry? Aren't most transactions processed over several days?
Joel Uckelman's a colleague of mine (we write computer forensics software for our dayjob). He's on vacation in Wales for the next few days, but I'll direct him towards this thread when he's back online.
Google shows off Mesa, a super-fast data warehouse that runs across data centers
> 90% of it is your effort in either case.

No, it's not anywhere near 90%. That is a number you pulled out of your ass that is diametrically opposed to every finding from the study described in the article.
And as a heuristic for wealth, the ability to purchase an expensive ring is a reasonable metric.

And that is what it is.

As a heuristic for a good partner, it is next to useless.

On its own? Certainly. But wealth is an aspect to a good partner. All else being equal, the wealthy one is better.
If you look at the happy faces of indigenous people, you experience survivor bias: you only see the smiles of the people who survived. Perhaps you could argue that it's better to live short and happy than long and miserable, but I think a lot more research would be necessary.

As for cramped boxes: is the population explosion due to progress? Maybe better health care and food? On the other hand, also better contraceptives, and the biggest population growth seems to happen in places with less progress. And with modern transport, at least you can get to nature at times.

Also, people flock to the cities because they have no good opportunities in the countryside (look at China). If they wouldn't go to the cities, perhaps they would just starve, or start wars with their neighbors.

Living in nature undisturbed Thoreau style is actually a great luxury.