skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, and combined with NIMBY it'll be damn near impossible to build in densely populated areas. NJ Transit has been dealing with this for decades as people keep claiming they want more rail lines but don't want them in their own towns, they want them in the next town over so they don't have to hear the train. There's no reason to believe that trying to build a high speed line wouldn't face the exact same complaints.
How I Got 2200 Pre-Signups for my SaaS in 2 Weeks, then Failed Hard
It's not just margin calls but leverage in general that turns downcycles into crashes, if you believe Kindleberger (and you should). [1]

1. http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-Financial-Invest...
they adjust wings, tire pressure, gear ratios or change points, etc

This year the set of gears is fixed over the entire year (there's some wiggle room the details of which I forget, but that's the gist). A team has to elect at the beginning of the season what gearings they'll put into the gearbox.

The tradeoff for this was that this year they've got 8-speed gearboxes compared to last year's 7. So in the past they had to pick 7 gears optimal for one track, now they've got 8 gears that must compromise across the whole season.
I realize this is a stupid question but I'm going to answer it anyway.

"Why are they all taking slow NJ Transit instead of high speed Amtrak?"

1. There are few stops in NJ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Amtrak_stations_in_New...

2. It doesn't go much faster than the regular train.
Rich people have been considering it for over one hundred years. Lucis Trust, Hitler, Monsanto, UN Agenda 21, Bill Gates Foundation, and many more. Frankencorn is already quite a few steps ahead of you.
>> the government is corrupt, incompetent and beholden to interest groups

> Which in turn is because of the 2-party oligopoly.

We were able to accomplish a lot in the 20th century with that 2-party oligopoly. I don't support it, but it's no excuse for our inability to get things done.
http://www.pewresearch.org/files/2014/08/FT_14.08.13_NonMart...

What a wildly misleading graph. The scale for "non-marital birth rate" is adjusted to make it look higher than total birth rate.
Flash updates arbitrated by firmware? In theory, yes, but in most systems they're not. [1][2]

[1] http://www.syscan.org/index.php/download/get/6e597f6067493dd...
[2] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/30773.html
Alternatively, if you're a network neutrality advocate, you should consider whether this is really the kind of thing you're advocating against. It's one thing to complain about ISPs intentionally throttling or dropping traffic, or shaking down services to get paid twice for the same traffic. It's something else entirely to complain about services going out of their way to establish CDNs near their customers and reduce overall network load.
I don't know... I don't think that the point of a leash is to know where your dog is but more to keep him under control. This does nothing for that except ring bells and stuff which can be more annoying then helpful.
Excellent points! Thank you.
I read that entire OpenConnect Deployment guide PDF, and I have to say that it looks like a really great, well-thought-out program. I'm impressed with how many moving parts there are and the time it must have taken to develop a system like this; they don't even touch on the details behind the Cloud Control Plane, and I'm sure that must have taken a while to develop. Netflix has said in the past that they only want the most skilled employees possible, and it certainly shows here.
The reason you haven't heard of it is that it is a new phrase that he just made up in the article to refer you back to the case of the philosopher selectively applying logic so he can take his neighbors cow and justify it by this being a new cow. It basically means that you are grasping at whatever logic supports your pre-existing desire/belief rather than using logic to determine your desire/beliefs.
Thousand-robot swarm self-assembles into arbitrary shapes
Yes, that is strange. I'll work to resolve it as soon as I can.
it seems to me that calling this an "internet fast lane" is a false equivalency. my understanding was that the internet fast lane concept was something that users would pay more to use, which leaves the isps free to render the "regular lane" unusable so as to bump the pricing. additionally, there was the whole notion of the "bundles" of websites available at different cost tiering.

openconnect appears, at least to me, like it's a collaboration between providers of different services to enhance the value for their shared customers.

edit: directed at both mmalone and condiment
That, or if the startup gets acquihired, the purchasing entity may just pay all the cofounders directly and declare the value of the stock to be zero.
I think it's fantastic that on the eve of the Ferguson, Missouri disaster future leaders are developing autonomous robot swarming technology‽

But hey, even though I'm pessimistic, the video is quite illustrative.
When talking about breaking even, does that include the energy needed to make the deuterium? Or rather to collect it, considering it has to be extracted from water or something. IIRC deuterium costs quite a lot of energy to produce and as a result for a while it was only produced by countries having large amount of hydroelectricity available.

Not exactly related, but this made me wonder : inside a tank full of liquid hydrogen, do the DH and DD molecules lie on the bottom? Is it possible to just siphon them from there?
Congrats, Amit!

I met Amit at Yahoo (he was in Search; his Outlook entry read "Amit (Web Search) Kumar" and I still think of that sort of like his middle name.

He founded Lexity, which Yahoo acquired, and he's moved up since.

I was an investor in Lexity, mainly because Amit was able to actually ship things at Yahoo. It bodes well for him and their future.

PS - It's amazing how pointlessly hypercritical and condescending HN has become. Are you really saying they can't relaunch a product that they acquired once?
paper confiscation isn't what he's talking about when he says capturing back dollars.
I'm all aboard with being pleasant and respectful of others, but find some aspects of this distasteful. Specifically, the portions of the author's "politeness" that involve performance, or adhering to a script I find off-putting. For example:

"Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: 'Wow. That sounds hard.' "

While it seems that many aspects of "politeness" are intended to trigger pleasant feelings in the other person (which seems harmless enough), I find it hard to be in favor of something so disingenuous. Even when it comes to small talk, I think one can be both respectful and charming without having to fall back on a script and cheapen the interaction.
Sure, there was some luck (there was also some educated guesses involved) but I'm simply arguing against use of the word "never". Debt can be good if it is the right kind of debt.
Hadoop Embrace the Internet of Things
The risk of #3 is that they don't create fusion but they do develop a machine that can emit streams of hot plasma which is then turned into the Navy's weapon of choice for close weapons support on carrier battle groups.

Why is that a risk? I'd like to live in a country with that technology, because otherwise other countries will have it and we won't.
Can someone explain why this team is confident that they can build a commercially viable reactor in 3 years? Conventional wisdom is that nuclear fusion is "decades away". What does this team know that others don't?
> Western countries are experiencing reproductive failures

Umm, people choosing not to have children (or as many children) is not a "reproductive failure", it's a choice.

Notwithstanding this, the idea of "restricting reproduction" is a non-starter in a civilized world. History shows this can't work if the power is given to governments. If people educate themselves and then choose, different story.

Part of that education is to realize that the human population may already be three times larger than its long-term sustainable level:

http://arachnoid.com/peak_people

But the bottom line is that people must choose based on free will, not be "restricted" in their choices. If this isn't so, the cure will be worse than the disease.
Don't forget rollback. That has saved us a number of times.

One of the things I like about Octopus is rather than deploy over the existing instance it deploys a version alongside. Then if everything is hunky-dory with the deployment process it simply tweaks IIS to point at the new deloyment folder. I don't believe that MSDeploy does that. I think it just overwrites the existing source. Also, can MSDeploy deploy to multiple servers?

Anyway, Octopus is very neat and tidy. We also recycle app pools and restart windows services using Powershell scripts as deployments out of Octopus for some legacy apps that don't support distributed caching and the cache is stale. It's quick an dirty but it works.
I don't understand why this was downvoted. I'm not going to discount the possibility to invent something worse then our most powerful fusion bomb, but if we talk probability here, developing processes that allow greater control is likely to result in a worst case scenario where we have a weapon that is at most as powerful as what we already have, but more focused.

IMHO focused fusion destruction is likely to be far more humane than the indiscriminate destruction caused by the weapons currently in our arsenal. i.e. a highly focused weapon is likely to to result in instant death for the victims instead of minutes to months to years of suffering for victims depending on their exposure levels.
Wanted to add a little bit more to my previous comment since I've been thinking about this for a while. The story I heard about broadcast was that they pursued this sort of peering arrangement with smaller ISPs so they didn't have to pay for transit -- basically to reduce their bandwidth bill. It was really a brilliant move on their part. Since then lots of other large bandwidth consumers have done the same.

I'm not against net neutrality but I do think the issue is more complicated than people make it out to be. Once you understand that this is common practice the position of Comcast, et al. does make more sense. If Netflix is saving a shit-ton of money and providing a better service to their customers by peering, and Comcast has less upside, why shouldn't Comcast charge Netflix for the privilege?
It does reduced slightly with objects in the way. Perfect for dog parks, etc.
As it turns out, the text IS being selected....just with no colour associated to it. Not sure what happened there, but I'll get the fix up ASAP.
> air travel isn't that expensive

I would argue that air travel has become very expensive. I hardly can get a ticket, even for hour-long flights, for less than $400.

Most Americans cannot afford that (take your two kids, and its $1600). Combine it with the increased price of gas, and many Americans cannot afford to travel outside their hometowns. We need better public transit.
Safecoin
Rest stops have all of these features. So do busses. And planes.

Trains don't have a monopoly on this.
Say what? The majority of Android devices have ARM processors, and Chrome is available for Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch...
Getting Through The Dark
For me this is a symtom of heat stroke, usually the first I notice.
I see 2 feet, not 2 arms.

I also don't see a whole lot of angst over it (in the article), just that it's polite to give people that much space.
Its a failure of the country as an organism. Countries can have crime problems, economic problems, and reproductive problems. They're all measured statistically.
> You’ll hear things that you don’t normally hear,” Zeiger had said as he prepped me in his living room. “Your heart beat, your blood flow. A lot of people report hearing a quiet, high-pitched whine, which is your nervous system.”

I think that's called Tinnitus, and it generally means you have damaged the hearing cells in your cochlea. Still technically correct, but not as romantic as implied here.
Umm, people choosing not to have children (or as many
children) is not a "reproductive failure", it's a choice.

Biologically, it's still reproductive failure. From an evolutionary standpoint, choosing not to have children is exactly the same as choosing to press a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. A culture that chooses to not have children is a culture that has decided to stop existing.
SSLOL: “Proceed Anyways” for Scala web requests
You can do a wall jump or a double jump, at the moment all powerups are enable from the start since I'm missing out on the animation for collecting them an all other sorts of things. I tend to deviate from the gameplay aspects of programming and spend a lot of time doing optimizations and tooling, just recently I wrote my own assembler to cook the whole thing into the final ROM image https://github.com/BonsaiDen/gbasm
Nice, I remember the LPS-20 :-) My favorite though is the person who figured out you could pwn a printer by printing the right document on it [1]. For network attached printers you could print this guy's resume and he would then have a node under his control on your network. Scary and cool all at the same time.

[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4780.en.h...
Funnily, besides the "sticker shock" comment, there's not any other comment I found insightful in this post (including mine, but it's a meta-comment).

People reminiscing about ViaWeb, other's name-calling Yahoo, asking if it's "written in Perl", etc...
Scoring by "status" or by compensation, the variance among tech jobs in the first 5 years of a tech career dwarfs those of a medical doctor.

The variance among law jobs in the first 5 years dwarfs those of a medical doctor. You cite your sister who got a biglaw job, which is more or less the legal equivalent of stanford -> google. Most lawyers don't get to biglaw just as most engineers don't work at google.

You've done a great job explaining why medicine has women, while law and computing don't.

But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.

How does this differ from most other fields? Do you think HR, lawyers, accountants or management consultants don't have hazing rituals?

As for my last paragraph, it's simply an anecdotal observation. I'm not pushing it . I'm not accusing anyone of lying or disagreeing with their experience. I'm just pointing out that your theory predicts incorrect facts.
While proofreading my novel (shameless plug: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...) I wrote a bit of Python to do the following:

1) break the original text file up into about 200 chunks of a few hundred words each (always breaking on paragraph boundaries)

2) randomize the chunks

3) display each chunk with the font faded to almost invisible in a UI with a "play" button that revealed one... word... at... a... time at an appropriate reading pace (more on which below.)

I kept the original document open in an editor and made changes as I found them (there was also a "pause" button, obviously!) The application kept track of what chunks had already been proofed.

The randomization of chunks helped ensure I never got caught up in the story, but the word-at-a-time reading was what really made it powerful. There were still a few typos that crept past (there always are) but only two or three have been found by readers.

The important thing is maximizing the degree of surprise you have at discovering the next word. By tuning the reading rate appropriately I could digest one word and have a few tens of milliseconds pause before the next one showed up. This forced my attention to focus on what that word would be, and brought stylistic problems to the fore as well as simple typos.

The process is not fast: there is a "speed of light" for proof-reading that seems to be about 10 pages per hour (which is about what professional proof-readers do) and I found I could only reasonably do a few hours per day, but that was still only a couple of weeks to proof a 140,000 word novel.

This was also done after running the thing through various automated grammar checkers (LanguageTool was the most useful: https://www.languagetool.org/) which caught a lot of more mundane errors.

I also had a decent editor and excellent feedback from first readers, which is indispensable, but much more of the process can be automated than is generally believed.

It is a truism that authors can't proof their own work, but with the right attitude, reasonable tools and a modest amount of human backup it appears to be practical.
Ask HN: If you have written and sold Ebooks, please share
Please share your stories of your Ebooks, how you wrote them (or in the process), marketing, sales numbers (if you desire to disclose) etc. Also, the inspiration behind it. The ebooks can be of any genre and not just tech specific.
FWIW, with neurons, there's always the option to override markup generation on a field-by-field basis, so if you don't like the generated code for a certain part of the document, you can change it to your heart's content.

You'll even be able to pass templates down a certain object hierarchy, but that's further down the pipeline.
>>> I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine.

I agree on this point. But if you have three people with the integrity and high moral cause, there's no reason a group of people can keep a secret.

Look at all the secret societies we currently have just in this country.

>>> Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.

This, however is not true in terms of serial killers. Most get caught because they want to get caught and like the media attention and the trying to out smart the police.

The only reason the unabomber got caught was that he was upset about the 9/11 bombing overshadowed one of his recent bombings and was stealing his media attention. Shortly thereafter, he insisted his manifesto be published, which then led his brother to turn him in after he read it.

It was the very pursuit of attention that you say leads groups to not be able to keep secrets that did in many high profile serial killers who often worked alone.

The one exception being either the Zodiac killer or the Golden State killer who you could just as easily call outliers.
Yeah, Google got this one wrong. Just read up on the Google Penguin penalty.

Google used to change the value of "bad" links to 0 rather than negative. The problem was that there was no risk to spamming. You might waste time, but you might get some links that Google didn't realize were spam.

There are a lot of problems with what srean suggested above, namely that it favors big brands who work with other big brands and creates additional barriers to entry for new companies.

I think Google has gone too far in link-based penalties, but the solution isn't to stop them altogether. Their current solution for weighing anchor text and trust is pretty weak. I've never seen a confirmed case of "negative SEO" working to penalize, but I have seen Google penalizing people for things that were not meant to manipulate the algorithm.

There's not an easy solution, but I think it's a far more sophisticated spam-fighting algorithm.
Scheduling software is a tool. Management still makes the decisions. At the end of the article, management helped this woman out and gave her a more bearable situation.

Software may magnify the problem but this is fundamentally about how management views employees.
Unless I'm reading this incorrectly this is a peering arrangement, which is qualitatively different than just hosting a box in a DC run by Comcast (which doesn't exist, as far as I know, so I can't do it as a normal citizen). I could colo a box "near" Comcast, but I'll be more hops away (worse performance) and I'll have to purchase transit from some ISP that does peer with Comcast (more expensive).
The attention to detail is awesome - I played for a little bit, then started reading, and when I scrolled up the little bunny character was sleeping!
+1 it's amazing how great you'll feel once you officially quit. In addition, try to remove any crutches from your life i.e. drinking, smoking etc... It's very rewarding long term.
Yes that's what I meant, I think this is the future of transport.
>D-He3 fusion produces less neutron flux than D-T, but it's hardly aneutronic-- otherwise they couldn't breed 3He from it.

You can't "breed" 3He; you have to breed tritium, which decays to He3 with a half-life of 12 years. D-3He reactors do produce some neutrons, roughly 1% of the flux of D-T, and almost entirely from D-D side-reactions.

Actually, a big problem with D-3He as of today is the lack of neutrons -- since you only get one neutron per 100 (e.g.) reactions, you can't possibly breed enough tritium to break-even. You have to come up with some other neutron source, or send rockets to Jupiter.

>After a decade, the whole reactor will be nuclear waste.

Fusion reactors are generally made from boron carbide -- a material unique for the fact that it does not become very radioactive when irradiated with neutrons. 14C which is produced can be extracted by oxidation and centrifuging, and in any case is not nearly as scary as, say, 90Sr. No other concerning radioactive isotopes exist with atomic masses between 10 and 21 (cf 22Na).

>commercial helium comes natural gas fields! It's literally a fossil gas, which is why we're running out of it:

Nope, that's 4He. There's basically no 3He in natural gas (because the helium there is radiogenic), so obtaining fuel that way wouldn't work even if we wanted to.
When people refer to interest they often are referring to investment gains, rather than actual bank interest.

Specifically, it is generally assumed that a diversified investment portfolio will earn ~4% after inflation on average, and by spending 4% of your portfolio balance at any time you are reasonably safe in the assumption that your money will not run out. At 3% it's all but assured that your money will not run out. These are conservative assumptions and take into account the fact that in any given year your investment performance could be significantly less than 4%
The video had a good example - you let your dog out, he escapes out of the back yard. No leash involved.

The problem for me is that I already know he is missing, and this thing doesn't tell me where he is.
BitTorrent Sync Apps Offer Escape From Big Brother
Simon Elisha, CTO and Sr Manager of Field Engineering, Australia and New Zealand
T-Mobile to throttle P2P traffic and excessive tethering, leaked memo shows
> I think one can be both respectful and charming without having to fall back on a script and cheapen the interaction.

Sure, one can be. But what about with people you find incredibly boring or distasteful? Usually we'd just choose not to interact with those people, but that's not being charming.
Why You Need a Business Coach But Won’t Admit It
Bluetooth LE performance is a bit spotty and unpredictable in my experience. Obstructions can really mess with the range.
I still want to try to glue a magnet to my finger. It is possible to get implants, but that's scary. Being able to feel magnetic fields must be awesome!

(http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-fin...

http://io9.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-getting-magnetic-...)
That's just straight-up cultural norms; just because it's customary in the US (and maybe even then only in certain areas), doesn't mean it's the same everywhere.

To wit: a former coworker of mine was Romanian, and a rather tall fellow. Whenever he wanted to talk about something, he'd sidle up within about a foot and start chatting. This was unnerving because he was probably 6'4 or 6'5, and suddenly he was all up in my business--once I realized that it was just different norms, I was fine with it.