skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There's definitely a cultural thing at play

This is not a cultural thing. It's just a stage in the country's industrial development. Once upon a time (when most people on HN were not alive) Japan was the country that rolled out cheap knock offs.

Then, once they became good enough at it, they graduated to the stage of out-innovating the industries they were previously rolling out cheap knock offs for.

Many western countries including America followed the same cycle during the industrial revolution(s).

>That being said, I think it's a losing strategy in the long run for consumer devices manufacturers

It's not a long run strategy for China any more than it was for Japan. It's not even a strategy, really - it's more of a "market configuration", actually.

Chinese companies have a currency advantage but less capital and brand equity available to take riskier (innovative) gambles. So it makes sense to go the cheap knockoff route. Once they have brand equity, capital reserves and have lost their currency advantage they will out-innovate or they will die.

They're already a long way along this road. A "Xiaomi" would never have happened 5 years ago. The idea that a Chinese company could rival the industrial design of an Apple phone was seen as something close to laughable. 10 years ago they could barely even consider designing a smartphone at all.
If the choice was between certain death and an experimental drug that might or might not work, I'd certainly choose the latter no matter how unsafe it could be.
Here are some practical elements that mean that seasteading is not going to work the way it's current proponents want it to.

1. Seasteads will require enormous amounts of hard, barely rewarding work to be even marginally functional at first.

2. Much of that work will be farming, and much of the rest will be weather-related; preparing the vessel to deal with storms and dealing with the damage wrought by weather.

3. Speaking of weather, the volume and intensity of open ocean storms has been increasing for the past three decades and will continue doing so for the forseeable future.

4. Ocean aquaculture can be quite a difficult proposition, particularly if you're in an area that lacks an existing nutrient cycle.

5. Political autonomy doesn't work the way people think it does. Sure you can give yourself some breathing room, maybe a new set of building codes; some structures that will let you run business a bit more freely; and those tend to be beneficial. But what about human rights? What if a group wants to experiment with allowing human slavery? Or post natal birth-control where only worthy warriors are allowed to become people? You can generate a whole menagerie of horror stories, but for the most part the upshot is "Autonomy within limits." And then you have to have an open debate about what the limits are. Or not, maybe the seasteasds will be a giant set of floating Dubai's without Islamic temperance to limit the abuses. Either way seasteads are likely to be fragile enough in the first few years that cohesive social structures will be a requirement for survival. Which argues against the Spencerian libertarianism that seems to be the default position of many interested in the topic. I rather suspect that successful seasteads will have social structures that look more like Kibbutzim than libertarian autonomies.
Show HN: General purpose AST generator written in python
It's easy to say "it worked! We cannot justify to not help those people who will die anyway", but there is NO guarantee that it will work a third time. It could dissolve the organs of the next person. And then it wouldn't sound so great anymore, would it?

Even if it dissolved the organs of the next 2 people it'd still be a better survival rate than Ebola itself (I understand this strain has a 60% mortality rate, not 90%), so yes, it would still be great.

Either way, this is a choice that the patient should make for themselves. It may be ethically dubious to offer experimental drugs to dying patients, but it is obviously and completely morally and ethically reprehensible to deny a possible cure to someone who is dying and wants to give the cure a try.
Thanks. We are making the demo video and will update the website ASAP.
Wow... you've done a hell of a lot of work on this app and it shows! Great job! Your video is well done too. I'm working on something right now that does a portion of what you've got here and it was the same thing... I had an itch to scratch :-) Best of luck with it!
> Damage their genome? So, they live but their children will have horrible deformations?

Unfounded assumption. I'd love to be given the opportunity to maybe live, and have to avoid reproducing, instead of being forced to consider possibilities that may have no basis in fact. If I'm days away from dying, and my only alternative is that I can take a magic pill that means I shouldn't have children, then I won't have children. It's not exactly a dilemma.

> Is it right to use patients who fear for their live as medical test subjects?

Is it right to give someone the opportunity to control their own destiny?

> Is it really an "informed consent" if a person who fears for its live gets promised a "possible cure", even if that cure could do ANYTHING?

The 'cure' showed some positive preliminary results in lab animals.

> It could dissolve the organs of the next person

Ebola doesn't literally liquefy your organs, but the virus destroys your liver and kidneys.
I like the fact that it scans a live system and reports back packages and files that are not in packages. This way one can quickly check the functionality of a server and could also be helpful in multitude of other situations such as decomissioning.

As this is currently only SUSE-specific I'd like to see a more general solution that produces a standardized output and this output could then be turned into puppet/chef etc. scripts automatically.

EDIT: blueprint seems to do just that, but the website is not as nice.
You might be interested in the Openstack deployment tooling called 'tripleo'[1] which has similar questions and has avoided all the current config management tools. The general gist is that what you're describing can be done using tools like Cloudformation/Heat or the newly minted Terraform, since they can both orchestrate the hardware/cloud resources and pass data in/out of the guests.

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO
Salt is also ok I think. I don't quite understand custom DSLs though for configuration management. Giving users a library of idempotent code components like chef does I think is way better than a custom language that is almost but not quite or maybe turing complete. At some point you are going to want to iterate and loop over stuff and if there is anything that ant has taught us is that imperative things are better handled with imperative language constructs. Trying to shoehorn everything into a declarative format is the wrong approach.
Kudo's on the speed up, but can you guarantee that the calculations are bug-free ?
You can do this with jOOQ (http://www.jooq.org), provided you're actually creating the original query using jOOQ...

Unlike MongoDB, the DSL really resembles SQL, which makes it far easier to read / write queries for someone who is accustomed to SQL
The US phone comes with a one year warranty, which can be extended to three years for $99.
I can be your friend.

The popular one.

xD
A bit more about American fuzzy lop
What I hear in the market is that people are scared of a (already rumoured earlier this year) takeover by MS. Because it's not totally open source, that is a very real danger and companies need to take that into account. I love Xamarin and how it works but experiences from the past after acquisitions does make us cautious in going all in on it.
Right now, the lethality of this outbreak of Ebola is around 60%, so an infection is definitely not certain death, particularly with the supportive care possible in the U.S.'s best hospitals.

When you've already dedicated yourself by traveling across the world to help people fight a highly-contagious disease, it makes sense that you'd be first in line to test a serum (which, while experimental, uses a method that has had great success in the past).
You can embed Muut on your site and it becomes a true part of the page. You'll have complete CSS control and there is no need to pay for that. The free version is a full forum and commenting solution with unlimited data and traffic.
> No masters. For Ansible this meant using ansible-playbook locally, and for Salt this meant using salt-call locally. Using a master for configuration management adds an unnecessary point of failure and sacrifices performance.

There are two models for delivering state to your infrastructure nodes. Pulling and Pushing configuration. Ansible Pushes code from the controller to your nodes, while salt, puppet and chef all pull state from a master somewhere.

Like twic says, Ansible does not have a master.
The original author says no masters means faster performance. What he means is that pulling configuration from a remote checkout equals faster performance, which is true because it can be loadbalanced etc.

A chef/puppet master can have features such as search and service discovery that should be a large red flag for SPOF problems.
It layers a custom DSL on top of a perfectly adequate language, uses standard terms like classes in non-standard ways, takes away the linear top/down flow that most programmers are used to, forces sequencing through notification chains, steamrolls over error messages willy-nilly, etc. Although I'm a bit biased so a few more data points would be helpful.
OpenWorm: build first comprehensive computational model a microscopic roundworm
Content is King, Distribution is King Kong
It does. It's the best native development system currently around imho and will, one day, be replaced by HTML5 probably. But that's not now ; especially with Forms and our own iOS API on Android/WP8 implementation, we are much faster to market with much better results than possible with HTML5.
Doctors risk their lives. If and when they get ill during their work we should spare absolutely no expense to get them well again.

Also, if I were a doctor in a situation like that it would be good to know that my back is covered in case I do get ill. It would substantially increase the likelihood of me continuing to risk my life. If I saw other doctors around me being abandoned if they got ill then I might have second thoughts about staying in that line of work.
Anything could happen. Imagine the Virus will adapt to this cure and is now more worse than before and is faster and will spread now more easily by air (no one can say that this will not happen with this cure). Or to say it in a more satirical way: Have not you seen any Zombie movies... it all started this way. This is like playing roulette and you will not know what impact this cure has in a bigger and longer perspective (not looking at an individual).
I don't know for same day but I usually use comparison sites like skyscanner for example.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias
Could you recommend any of these data collections if they are open to the public?
Top 3 Bluestacks Alternative For Installing Android Apps on PC
This is brilliant, especially with Halloween coming up!
This is still very early in the works but I wanted to get some feedback from the parser and compiler developers out there. The inspiration for this is Scott McPeak's ast tool for generating code for an AST given the DSL. What I had in mind was that the code generator itself did not have to be in the same language as the target language. Additionally the same spec should be used to target different platforms or languages.

Would really appreciate any feedback on how I could improve this (documentation as well as features).
While I do not have any beef with the idea of government making regulations, policing cell phone usage in planes (or busses or trains or inside mcDonald restaurant) is not what I expect them to do.
It is an indicator about the Kolmogorov complexity of chess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
>actually with lower speed limits you would gain more time

Right, not sure why you have 'actually' there because that was my point. When you picked 60 vs. 70 you were picking the speeds most likely to favor not going faster.

>the speeding people commit usually doesn't earn them much more time, but disproportionately endanger themselves and those around them

It's the 'disproportionately' that's at argument. A tiny-per-person cost for a noble purpose seems like an obvious choice, but when you repeat the action a billion times over it gets more complicated.
Most people who complain about ORMs complain about the input - the querying aspect of them. And it is true, particularly for complex queries ORMs can be pretty hideous. If a query goes beyond a certain level of complexity I would much rather replace them with a series of views or stored procedures. ORMs are not good for complex queries.

For me, where ORMs do shine is with their output. If you have two tables, A and B with one to many relationships between them - with pure SQL running a join on these tables will return a single result set. Table As data will be duplicated for each row of B. With an ORM you can get back a single object A containing a collection of B's rows.

This is enough reason for me to reach for an ORM for anything but the simplest of problems.

Lazy loading generally also comes for free.
No:

wget 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomasahle/sunfish/master/sunfish.py'
egrep -v '^$|^ *#' sunfish.py > sustrip.py
wc -l *py
388 sunfish.py
263 sustrip.py

(or: equivalently:)

egrep -c '^$|^ *#' sunfish.py
125 #Comments, empty lines
egrep -c '^$|^ *#' sunfish.py -v
263 #Non-empty lines, non-comment lines

I believe the actual chess engine might be 111 lines, though.
cabs in sf are an utter shitshow. Uber's original innovation was -- and this is only remarkable in sf -- they where a taxi that came.

I was on crutches for 9 months and took cabs daily to work from near mission and 23rd. All these cab companies are utter assholes: I booked cabs 3-5 days a week, from a population hub, and tipped well, but none of them could provide decent service. Each one would say "10-15 minutes" when I would ask how long the cab would take to arrive. I collected stats for a couple months: the median time was over 30 minutes and the 90th percentile was 1.5 hours. I even had a cabbie come more than 50 minutes after promised; I'd already begged a friend to drive me to work. Dude had the big old brass balls to call my cell and bitch that I hadn't cancelled, after I'd waited over three times their maximum arrival estimate. One dispatcher even admitted on the phone that they just tell everyone near where I live 10-15 minutes.

Uber in other cities may have a harder row to hoe, but in sf, merely being a cab that comes (or -- and this is amazing -- treating your customers with a tiny bit of respect and telling them you won't come if you can't) gets you really far.

Fuck sf taxes -- yellow, desoto, luxor -- I hope all those assholes get unemployed. I'm not sure Uber is a good thing in a city with working transport systems, but that doesn't describe sf. They made my life even harder than it already was; there's no good reason I should have had to call cabs more than an hour and a half before I wanted to be to work (an 18 minute drive) just to have a greater than 90% chance of making it. And when you have doctors appointments or surgeries or something else with a hard start time, I have no idea what you're supposed to do in sf besides use Uber. Hire a black car maybe?
You usually don't check for exfiltration at the workstation level.
White + American appear to have been far more important than doctor:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Leading_Sierra_Leone_doctor_dies...

http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/657141-ugandan-doctor-dies-o...

http://www.sjcatholichospital.com/2014/08/03/br-patrick-nsha...
Great integration with other services reminiscent of a slightly similar app 'Drafts'. Automatically creating a list reminds me of org-mode. I wonder if I can automatically sync org files and swipe off todo's.
Fleet part of CoreOS does orchestration by leveraging systemd.
I am actually working on stateless deployment of interdependent docker containers by pushing docker state to VMs much like Ansible.
That's crazy. Does look more like APL than C though...
There's a much more safe alternative with almost same possibilities - a kinda "balls-and-magnetick-sticks". In that case, spheres are just metallic, not magnetic. Only joints, sticks, have magnetic ends capped inside the plastic. These spheres are much safer and the visualizing abilities of that toy is almost the same.
Crazy slow, linguistically poor, parser breaks in every release, really hard to test locally.
Pandora to PlayList Converter for Google Chrome
so, 2,700 additional lifespans of time saved in trade for 10,000 people killed, let's pretend each of them was halfway through their lifespan (40) so we lost 5,000 lifespans of time, or net loss of 2,300 lifespans. Sounds like it's not worth the time savings.
I do the same but looking at homes in the Bay Area. Cannot believe that mansion in Detroit. That would be $6m or more in SF.

It's interesting seeing old films or pictures from San Francisco. The city has clearly had its ups and downs. If the 1906 earthquake had not happened I wonder how different it would be compared to today.
They picked up again, planning for 0800 UTC, T-12.
Ask HN: Recommendations for “24hr” work chairs?
Hi HN,

I am in need of a new comfortable chair for when I work/is at my desk. I spend pretty much all my wake moments in front of my desk at home, working and coding in general.

I have problems with my back (it's straight, no curve) and I can really feel I should have invested in better office equipment (Chair especially).

So I thought I would ask you/HN, see what recommendations or even just hear what you are using as your go-to chair and maybe even table? Hopefully this may help others as well.

I currently have the "MARKUS" from Ikea, but I found it to be very uncomfortable for my neck sadly.

I hope you guys and gals can help with some recommendations for a new chair, I know nothing of chairs or which brands to even consider or stay away from.

Thanks in advance!
6 reasons to learn JavaScript
I know Raphael (tech lead) and I know a bit of the history. This project has legs...
Being American is a possible reason because the Americans tend to get more attention in America. White has nothing to do with it though. There is no evidence of that. Get over your hangups.
A 45-minute Intro to Rust
How is it easier to use than Tumblr, where there is virtually no setup involved (besides pointing a domain to your blog perhaps, and it's completely free).
Show HN: lpepfinder.com – online vinyl shops search engine (using CSE)
Deep-Sea Explorers Angle to Solve Mystery of Missing Malaysian Airliner
Q-derivatives of data types
Reminds me of a sci-fi novel, where inhabitants of a planet too primitive to create spaceships still build a spaceport just in case someone comes :).
This is a poorly considered view of experimental treatments. Particularly in the case of aid work, experimentation on the patient population is not only unethical in every formalizable sense, it is quite likely to inculcate a sense of distrust in the treated (justifiably, and moreso if there are unanticipated side effects), making treatment and control of future outbreaks more difficult. A chance at life for a single patient may damage the chance for hundreds if not thousands of future patients.
But Ansible doesn't have masters! It has a machine where you run Ansible. But that can be any machine, as long as it has Ansible installed, the Ansible code checked out, and an authorised SSH key. If your usual machine goes down, just check out the code and run from a different machine. The idea that you need to use local playbooks to use Ansible masterlessly just seems mistaken to me.

Moreover, any scheme which involves running local configuration (whether in Ansible, Chef, or Puppet) involves either pushing configuration updates to machines, or having the machines poll for configuration updates, in which case it's no different to running remote configuration or having a master, respectively.

I don't get the point about open ports. Are you running machines without SSH? If you are, well done. But if, like most people, you're not, then you already have all the port you need open.
> The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today unveiled … a Web portal that will link to full-text papers a year after they're published.
> Open-access advocates such as University of California, Berkeley, biologist Michael Eisen slammed CHORUS when publishers announced the program it last year. They prefer a full-text government archive like PubMed Central so it is possible to "text mine," or search across the entire body of papers. “Under this [DOE] plan, the public's ability to download, text/data mine, and digitally analyze these articles is severely limited,” SPARC’s Joseph agrees.
> But Frederick Dylla … says there is little demand for text mining. He says AIP has never gotten a request for its more than 1 million articles; Elsevier, the publishing giant, gets only about six requests a year, he says. Text mining journal articles is “a field that's just beginning," he says.

12 months is a joke in the timescale of scientific research, most papers already went through up to a year of prep time before publishing. I would like to see a plan that isn't just paying lip service to the ideals of open-access. And Eisen is right about data mining, most journals are terrible in that regard. Even the wonderful arXiv.org doesn't provide citation/reference metadata in their API and they are a groundbreaking leader of the movement. I had to write a scraper to map out an arXiv citation network and there are only a few subfields with enough info to do that. Maybe scientists would make more requests if the APIs were better and the citation information wasn’t copyrighted or obfuscated.
I had hoped from the description this would be more like the latter, with vulnerabilities you had to exploit to advance to the next level. As a format, multiple choice quizzes are not that interesting.
Guys just have too much time...
IDF Army Find and Destroy Terror Tunnel In Gaza Mosque | RAW VIDEOS
Targeting the 1-3% percent of developers willing to work on Linux doesn't make much commercial sense.
CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts) near my apartment has a decent industrial design department. Chinese companies are also willing to employ international talent, and competition for jobs in the field of industrial design is tight enough that they have no problem filling those roles decently (too many kids what to be Ives).
i'm using this for my git repos now. (I version control my word docs and pdfs.) here, I even made a post about it http://www.aphex.cx/2014/08/using-git-for-pdf-and-word-doc-f...
Show HN: Instantly Understand Any Spreadsheet
Glad to hear it. I hope you learned from the experience.
Interesting case: i searched "screw you" and it als turned up results like "are you screwing with me?" , "we would have been screwed..." etc
This is a small tool made for a friend. He seems to be satisfied with it, but maybe one could come with some feedback/feature ideas?
"...F#. It's basically Swift..." - that slow after compilation???
Contributing to Ansible is Super Easy
If someone asks, I say that I'm ITP. I deliberately forgot whether the last test I took showed me as slightly S or slightly N, and introspection doesn't reveal a preference between them.
Cool game ! Are there any beginner friendly resources out there to learn more about this?
But is commercial software dirty? Heck no. Ask any SaaS company :)

The pedantic in me feels compelled to point out that commercial SaaS doesn't have to mean closed; the company I work for is a good example, where our products and service are based on an third-party AGPL licensed software called Odoo[1] (and are therefore AGPL licensed themselves).

In any case, we do use Ansible here, and are happy with it :)

[1] https://www.odoo.com/