skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20140...

40% don't have access and a bunch more never use it. And that is including people who use VOIP and services like cable company voice services.

>In any event though, you're really missing the point here; the problem isn't abandoning copper. It's not providing an equivalent grade of service to one we've had for decades now.

We aren't owed a super reliable voice backup service. Especially if its not economical.

>You know how the push for net neutrality is gearing towards Title II classification for internet? That's precisely what they're trying to steer clear of; they still want to offer phone service, but offer it as an unregulated Title I service - much like the internet is classified right now.

Verizon is abandoning it and nobody is rushing in to take over. I wonder why? It's an unprofitable business. Are you going to invest your lifesaving's in a POTS service? Of course not.

>Technology is just the excuse being given to getting around Verizon's obligations as a common carrier.

Not get around it, Verizon is seeking to avoid being one. Unless you are willing to regulate the shit out of Apple's facetime, skype, google video, etc. etc, it should be no shock that Verizon wants out.

Buy an old flip phone if you want a back up for a major outage.
Nike built an amazing LCD basketball court in China called the 'House of Mamba'
Been there. Started as an MS dev and learned a lot programming straight Win32 in C++. College bridged me into Unix, and OS X pulled me in full time. (I prefer Unix now generally). Playing in other ecosystems is fun. You learn slightly different ways of thinking about things (process-centric v. thread-centric), and the toolchain experiences are vastly different. But it's just a stack. It's a really crappy thing to get passionate about, because it's just a set of transient APIs. It's here today, gone tomorrow.

Instead, you should consider trying different programming paradigms entirely. Investing in skills themselves yields disproportionate returns that you can apply to whatever hip thing every insists you must use. The tech industry only moves fast if you're trying to learn every stack everyone's salivating about...which usually isn't that different from what's already being done.
> I suppose random king-making could be an example of just the kind of black swan events he talks about.

I feel reminded of the George RR Martin quote that "chaos is a ladder". I don't think the rise of Antifragile is a truly chaotic event though, it's largely due to whatever the opposite of the Black Swan idea should be called. I guess the words to use would be planning and brute force...

> Is it really organic? I'm skeptical of that. I suppose it's possible...

Initially, these things are probably orchestrated by influential PR connections. It can't be entirely predetermined, but I guess some careful research was done to map out the pop-intellectual vacuum where this book was going to position itself.

What really put me off was the arrogance with which he casually claims to be the first one to understand what would have to be pretty old concepts in chaos theory, risk management, and engineering. However, I think it's also a clue that he knew exactly what area he was going to successfully claim ownership of.

My guess is this book was helped along massively from the outside, but how ever that came to be, at some point the critical mass was reached anyway. By now it doesn't really matter anymore except to a few of us (including me) who bemusedly like to analyze how things are expertly steered by powerful forces.

The point is, no matter what my personal feelings about the book and its heritage, it's now the reference everybody has to use when addressing a whole slew of things. Which makes it required reading. Which perpetuates its authority.
Uber and Lyft both 1099 their drivers. I'm not sure specifically about Instacart but I imagine most "on-demand" companies that can get away with it, will do it.

If they're having you use your own vehicle and not forcing you to adhere to a specific schedule, they can probably do it.
This actually relates to areas where they've already deployed fiber; they don't want to keep maintaining the copper plant in those areas.

Verizon issued a press release a while back saying they'd no longer deploy FiOS in new areas. Fire Island was one of the few exceptions to that, and only because people weren't happy with Verizon trying to give them cellular service in place of the copper network the hurricane ruined.
Are you using += like I suggested in my comment?
You separate your load generation tools from your system under test to eliminate confounding factors of shared resources like CPU, thread scheduler, memory allocator, disk, etc. This benchmark doesn’t do that, which means it’s impossible to distinguish between a queue system which is being saturated with work and a queue system which is out-competing the load generators for CPU. Also, it’s a laptop running OS X. Do you plan on fielding a queue system in a DC built out with Macbooks? No? Then this benchmark might as well be on a phone for all the inferential value it provides to people running Linux servers.

A single producer and single consumer means zero contention for either for most implementations. How well does this scale to your actual workload? What’s the overhead of a producer or a consumer? What’s the saturation point or the sustainable throughput according to the Universal Scalability Law? It’s impossible to tell, since this is a data point of one, which means it can’t distinguish between a system which has a mutex around accepting producer connections and a purely lock-free system. And that’s a shame because wow would those two systems have very different behaviors in production environments w/ real workloads.

Finally, measuring the mean of the latency distribution is wrong. Latency is never normally distributed, and if they recorded the standard deviation they’d notice it’s several times larger than the mean. What matters with latency are quantiles, ideally corrected for coordinated omission (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/latency-pitfalls).

This is not a benchmark, this is a diary entry.
While I understand and agree with most of this post, I prefer the all-in-one aspect of YouTube. Having six different apps for different categories of video is not ideal to me.
My impression (as someone that went the GNU / Linux / Perl / Python route) is that .NET languages are likely to land you a more corporate type job.

If you want a bit more autonomy, go the other way. If you prefer having more structured career options go MS.
Not necessarily, you could make a .zip/.tar file with filenames like these that could trip up the end user trying to clean up after unpacking.
Of course if we had universal healthcare, some of these startups loose half their competitive advantage...
Thanks. The reason I said that unschooling done wrong can set your children up for not being able to make ends meet was perhaps a bit harsh but based on experience. Out of my wife's six cousins they all regret being unschooled. I don't blame them. Their father didn't do it out if some sense of enlightenment. He is an unintelligent man who made his livelihood working with his hands. Unfortunately it's much harder to make a livable wage these days in a job where you sweat. Other than building a cabin (a very well made cabin I might add) his children are weak at reading and writing and are horrible at math. His daughter wanted to be a nurse but couldn't make it through nursing school, one of his sons is a prison guard, the gregarious one is a fantastic jewelry salesman. His kids have a fantastic work ethic but will likely never come close to their full income earning potential. Had the parents focused more on academics and less on grooming horses they might not have to work in retail, a prison, or be restricted by a spouses earning potential.

The great benefit of unschooling is that you raise emotionally very well rounded kids. I don't know what it is about the outdoors but it sure does work.
Unfortunately this is the truth about just about the entire western food industry. I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against. Without some sort of government intervention, it's just too difficult to make healthy choices for most people to be successful. I feel like the food industry is in an arms race as to who can make the most addictive product possible.

The new Doritos Loaded product is a great example, it reminds me of a designer drug. I'm sure it is absolutely delicious, crafted specifically to incite pleasure in our brains, but processed to be faster to digest and give little nutrition so as to not fill us up so we stop eating.

Edit: As another point, prepare a meal of healthy food and see how much harder it is to overeat. Without the intensely pleasurable flavors that drive you to eat "until you hate yourself" as Lous CK would say, I find I enjoy the flavor until I am reasonably full and then don't want to pack anymore food down because it just doesn't taste good enough too.
I know about the problems around the DSM. That doesn't make ADHD less of a "thing" though. Turns out that a questionnaire can diagnose ADHD. This diagnosis predicts anatomical, physiological and psychological differences, and on top of that certain negative consequences and suffering on the part of the patient. Treatment reduces that suffering. What more do you need?
I'm not sure what I'd use it for exactly, but I still want one
Several responses have focused on rail games where you watch a predetermined story unfold.

I learned how to make an automatic egg/chicken factory in minecraft from watching a video. I'd never have imagined something so crazy without seeing it live in 3-D first. You do what with wooden signs, and then pour flowing water on them, and then throw chickens on it? Madness! Yet it works!

I imagine this has a lot to do with 3-d and open world type games where having an experienced field guide walk you thru a real world-ish experience helps.

(edited to add, I live in a geographic area where many people make a living as hunting and fishing guides; the "experienced field guide" phrase for video games is very intentional, I suspect in the next decade or so of video gaming, there will be people making a modest living off literally being field guides for video gamers... just kinda escorting noobs and showing them the ropes, maybe not a lot of money but more than they'd get off the mechanical turk)
Yeah, this sort of "takeover of a field" infuriates a lot of people. I know Wolfram got a ton of flak for implying in A New Kind of Science that he basically invented the study of CAs. He didn't.

Like I said: what Taleb is talking about was talked about under the name "cybernetics" in the 60s and "complexity" or "chaos theory" in the 90s.

It was a major field of interest for me when I was a student, and the more I think back on it the less I think "antifragile" is anything more than a vapid neologism for ideas that have already been out there.

Here's some rough synonyms for antifragile from days gone by: autoadaptive, evolvable, autoconstructive, chaordic, etc. I think autoadaptive is the closest, basically a perfect synonym.
It's considered a very good idea over here, I think, but it requires the government to redistribute money from people who work to people who don't, so everyone gets security without needing predictability. I don't think it's very popular in southern Europe, though.
I tried in both FF and Chrome, no issues with performance noticed. Do you have a lot of plugins with FF?

I actually had an opposite problem, the game was incredibly generous with its imprecise collision. I could rotate twice and catch two rectangles falling at the same time on the same paddle and finish a group. I was overwhelmed by the number of sides I had to simultaneously defend and the number of different falling pieces. The animations, I don't think, made much difference in difficulty or ease. Mostly I wound up surprised that I had cleared a group, rather than the opposite problem you described.

Funny we both had very opposite experiences.
MEAN.

Mongo, great for unstructured data where horizontal scalability is important.
Node great for many concurrent asynchronous connections. Angular is apparently very good at what it does, but is probably overkill unless you want to specifically develop larger scale single page apps.

On the other hand if you want to develop useful software quickly and efficiently for the other 95% of use cases, choose something more general purpose like a relational database and Rails / Django.
> There is no such thing as a proper regulated market.

There is a distinction between the absence and presence of regulatory capture. Preventing regulatory capture is obviously a hard problem but that's hardly any reason to countenance its presence.
First of all ADHD is not a "normal consequence" in the sense of being the majority.

Second, ADHD is so much worse than not being able to sit still and quiet for hours...
Git 2.1 Released
Spacebar is a natural fit.
Ask HN: Show us your abandoned (and probably incomplete) side projects
I think most of us have some abandoned projects collecting dust on Github. Post them here so others can work on it or you even get enough motivation to start working on it again.

For example, I started an user mode network stack in Python: https://github.com/fotcorn/pynetworkstack which responses to ping requests, but nothing more.
The "service proxy" load balancer is on localhost for the individual container in k8s.
I meant empathise.. of course!
I do wonder if that's the case.
Some people feel nice -but in special ways- if they listen to certain sounds. Imagine a bit like listening to a special piece of music that makes the hairs on your neck stand up.

Some people record videos of those special sounds and share them. Some of the people who listen to them are the people who feel nice.

A group of people with a shared interest is a community. There is a community for people who like listening to the sounds or who like making the videos.

Some of the sounds that give people joy are: whispering or quiet talking women; quiet ticks and tacks of fingernails on wood; rustling paper; fingers stroking card; and so on.
Makes some good sense: where no natural predators exist, introduce one. Humans work.
NY Times is on it: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/rustle-tingle-relax...
Bitcalm – backup service for servers
Yes, you're correct. "Benchmark" is a very unfortunate misnomer.
When Sherlock Holmes met Bruce Schneier
White flour hits the bloodstream quickly, similarly to sugar. The best carbs are complex and fiber-rich, like sweet potatoes or whole fruit.
I've used org-babel, but I'm still interested in Lit. The 'watch directory' feature interests me, as does the 'proper and complete' aura of Haskell.

I'd previously played around with getting org to do stuff "on commit", via git hooks, but I didn't make much progress (and given the environment I was committing from, I was sure that I was going about it backwards anyway).

Org still doesn't have a universal character escape mechanism!
It's kind of disturbing that the mythbusters link posted is better quality nutrition science than a lot of the nutrition that gets upvotes on HN.
Thanks for the link, do you have more of those?
In Europe customers have the right to return online purchases within one or two weeks. It is possible that a previous "customer" damaged the DVDs and returned them.

In that case, excellent online stores would sell the items in a separate category at a reduced price.
Albert Hofmann (legendary chemist who synthesized LSD) and Shigeru Miyamoto (godfather of Nintendo who created Mario), both cite walking around and playing in the woods freely and unsupervised as a child being transformative experiences which (they believe) led to their later life accomplishments.

[1] http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play
Just before the article turns to the television show, the author points out that "every piece of art I’ve ever loved is about the loneliness of other generations."

Does anyone know where i could find significant pieces dedicated to loneliness in different eras in history? I also find the topic fascinating, and would like to see how technology has changed the art in form and subject.
Elegant n-gram generation in Python
Previously submitted a few hours ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8189722

You knew that because you commented on it. That doesn't excuse you submitting it again on the same day after it died. (it was mostly likely flagged-to-death because Top X lists are low-quality content)
There are lots of Lionfish around Florida, and people have come up with all kinds of recipes for them:
http://www.lionfishhunters.org/Recipes.html

There are also Lionfish derbies to encourage people to kill them:
http://www.reef.org/lionfish/derbies

I spearfish near Tampa every once in a while and was always told to kill Lionfish on sight. The state now has a special exemption that allows spearfishing of Lionfish in areas where spearfishing is normally illegal.
Automated Puppet Agent configuration with SMF sysconfig profiles
The Unnerving Universe of 'Unboxing' Videos
Computers are inherently imprecise? Floating point is imprecise, yeah lets generalize that to the entire computer..
> Could you explain it anyway, for those of us that are interested?

Not well, because I don't watch sports. I also don't watch unboxing videos - I just watch videogames, for the reasons I explained above.

I'm just sort of assuming that sports are fun, and they're also fun to watch, and a lot easier than spending thousands of dollars and hours of time on equipment.

(I also hate watching coding videos - they never go at the pace I prefer. I'd much rather read a blog entry with code inlined that I could copy, paste, play around with, etc.)
I had this Facebook tunnel idea but I switched to Mac, and the original code was intended for Linux/tuntap:
https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/facebook-tunnel
Ask HN: Some advices for my life
I just turned 22, studying CS and earning enough money with freelancing for living - I should be happy how my life turned out (yet) or?
This was always the idea of my future life - learning and getting paid for something I like (programming).

Recently someone spontaneously asked me what my goals are, but I had no answer.
This got me thinking because there has never been a point in my life where I had no goals.
Without goals I can't be sure if it's the right thing I am doing - so I am questioning everything everyday and have no clear answer.

But that's not the only thing I am worrying about. When I started with programming I was fascinated and spend all my holidays learning programming. Now I am struggling to find enough motivation to really dig into something new (e.g. for side projects). I feel tired and overwhelmed when I am learning and that scares me - because I always loved learning something new and I want to get better.

And one last thing… I always feel dumb because I am not able to express what I really want to say.
You probably see this from my writing style (reason for grammar mistakes: i am not native) but I am just not able to say my thoughts precisely.
Most people suggest me to read more but I don't know which books, I don't like novels and getting tired from reading (seriously).

What should I do? I appreciate every advice, thanks!
(If everything I wrote was too confusing to you, please ask)
Command-line n-dimensional plot tool-- it works, but haven't touched it in ages:

http://adam.ierymenko.name/flatland.shtml

https://github.com/adamierymenko/flatland

An evolvable code artificial life engine that I wrote while in college-- its quite sophisticated and still runs:

https://github.com/adamierymenko/archis

Nanopond is another, an attempt to condense the above into its smallest possible essence and in C. A number of folks have ported it to other languages, and I got one e-mail a while back that they were using it for burn-in testing on some supercomputing hardware at Lawrence Livermore:

http://adam.ierymenko.name/nanopond.shtml

Java n-dimensional array library-- also works but haven't touched in a long time:

https://github.com/adamierymenko/hyperdrive
The Blub Paradox in Swift
I can't hit the south west corner :s
Withholding school from children (in a developing country) in a long term experiment is completely unethical. You can't ruin a child's future just to make a point. Such an experiment should never be conducted.

I think you should really research ADHD more thoroughly. I don't understand how you could be writing so much nonsense about it if you even took five Minutes to read the wikipedia article.

ADHD medication has been tested in double blind studies in hundreds of thousands of cases, in dozens of seperate studies, for several different substances. It doesn't get any better.

ADHD diagnosis in terms of questionnaires PREDICTS anatomical, physiological and psychological differences. It also predicts negative consequences: higher risk of depression, higher risk for delinquent behavior, low academic achievement (compared to IQ), lack of social skills etc.

And many of these predicted (and well-observed) consequences can be prevented by medication and therapy. How much more "scientific" can it get?

Insisting on ADHD not being a diagnoseable, treatable syndrom is almost as dangerous as saying "vaccines cause autism".
This surprises me, though:

> Done wrong [unschooling] can set your children up for a fantastic career barely making ends meet.

I will direct you to this comment from the original article: But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests”

I homeschooled my sons. At age 16, my youngest officially became a high school drop out so we could evade local reporting requirements, essentially. I was going through a divorce and living with relatives and it didn't look to my relatives like my kids were doing anything educational. One of their projects that year was a study of AI. We discussed a list of movies and TV shows and some learning goals (and went with that because AI -- the three laws and all that -- is intimately interrelated with fiction in part because it is still being dreamed up). I watched a lot of those things with them and had high level discussions about it with them during and after the viewing. But it looked to outsiders like my kids just dicked around all day.

They want to make video games for a living and want it to be kind of "next generation of AI" type video games. However, they are, currently, basically losers who can barely make ends meet. (We all are -- we are still together.) But that's in part because I and my oldest son have a very serious medical condition that we are dealing with in an unconventional/alternative manner and that is even harder to explain to outsiders than "unschooling."

So, basically, unschooling looks like the kids just dick around all day and, if the parents aren't on the ball, it can actually become the kids just do, in fact, dick around all day.
Until the bits flip in your code instead of your data :)