skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even more, I think!

Days in a year: ~365 x 8 = 2,920; 1,000,000 / 2,920 = 342.5 miles per day

W/o weekends: ~260 x 8 = 2,080; 1,000,000 / 2,080 = 480.8 miles per day

That's more than 5 hours of driving, every. single. day. Unlikely.
That's really cool. However it's important to note that it nonstandard analysis does not 'live' in the real numbers. It turns out the hyperreals aren't even a metric space!

I'm not intimately familiar with them though, and have heard that they are a lot more lucid abstraction for some things when compared to calculus on the reals.
Starbucks to Revise Policies to End Irregular Schedules for Its 130,000 Baristas
Competition is excellent validation. If there are competing products that have been around for a while and appear to have a budget (are they spending on advertising?), then people want the thing your product does.

Now all you've got to do is figure out how to out-compete the competition enough to capture a financially significant chunk of the pie.
I sort of laughed as well, but everything he launches has a big PR launch day, and I imagine there was excessive engineering time spent on making oink scalable.

I think the statement makes sense if you are Kevin Rose, but it is ridiculous as a general insight. Worrying about scaling before you find out if the dogfood is any good is nuts.
entertaining read! and learn 2 important things: 1) don't ever go to collection, your personal data will circulate across the globe for many years, 2) look at statute of limitations before taking any collection call seriously.
Looks akin to Scriptogram ⌘ http://scriptogr.am/about/

»Put simply, Scriptogr.am is a tool for generating simple, elegant, static weblogs by reading Markdown files stored in your Dropbox folder.«

And you can host your own domain, too.
In fact, if you thoroughly investigated someone and found nothing that was 'abnormal' in some way, that would be suspicious!

I've heard spies are sometimes caught this way. Their life-profile is so deliberately normal that, having no quirks, they actually do stand out as such.
Yes, but they don't want the hacking to be traced back to them. So they're hacking random servers online and using them as their bounce boxes to attack their actual intended targets from.
I'm pleasantly surprised to see pypy beat go by an order of magnitude in the select_default benchmarks. Could it be a bug, or is it real?
The Theoretical Limits of Video Conferencing
- Joins that know about the foreign keys already declared in the table definitions.

- Structured rows to kill all grouping special cases and the distinction between where and having.

- Hierarchical rows so that join(Planet, Person) doesn't repeat Planet columns in each returned row.

Linq already gets you 1 and 2. See http://www.linqpad.net/WhyLINQBeatsSQL.aspx Xml gets you 3.
This is why we get competitive bids from multiple banks.
Everyone should understand the FDCPA. Once invoked, any legitimate debt collection company will get in line. The problem ones are the fly by night places being run out of a strip mall.
Oh, this would be right up my street! I like your meemoo website too. I'm busy the rest of the day but I'll be in touch over the w/e after I've had time to take a closer look.
Always this argument.

It is only that expensive right now because of the way
credit, loans, and debt work and are tied together with guarantees provided by the government (same reason why college tuition goes up when the government guarantees student loans).

Removing an appendix does not inherently cost $33k. Competition is there to lower prices, but when the government provides ulterior incentives, then it trips up the normal flow of the market.
THE OPEN SOURCE REPORT CARD
Intel paid ASML ~$4.1 billion to deliver 10nm lithography. That was ~ 1.5yrs ago (http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=690165). ASML stock is a good indicator what's happening in this business.

Intel has running 14nm which is 16% better on SRAM cell than 16nm TSMC.
Oink was invite-only at launch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/kevin-rose-oink-app-store/
Basic income might make it reasonable to eliminate TANF, some portion of SNAP, and some unemployment, but it doesn't eliminate the core need for Medicare and Medicaid.

In the basic income scenario outlined, the poor and the elderly will still need subsidized health insurance (assuming the current employer-provided health insurance model) or health coverage of some sort.

Social Security is also something of a dicey proposition. While it would be possible to use basic income to reduce social security benefits, it's role as a social insurance scheme to provide for the elderly couldn't be substituted in its entirety by simple basic income. Social security disability and death benefits would also need some more thought.
> It's always been my understanding that the normal laws of physics don't work at big bang time as well.

That's wrong. As soon as the universe's mass/energy expanded sufficiently for there to be a time dimension (IOW as soon as the universe was something other than a singularity), the present physical laws applied. Some of the physical constants with which we are familiar may have had different values, but the same set of rules have been in effect since there were four distinct dimensions. This is borne out by the existence and properties of the CMB, as well as other observations.

Your use of the term "big bang time" implies that there was, in fact, time, which means four dimensions existed, which means our present physical rules were in effect.

One idea has it that the natural forces we evaluate separately now, were unified by the conditions of the early universe, but this idea doesn't contradict the notion that basic physical principles were in any way different then.

One of the more interesting cosmological ideas is that the positive mass/energy of the universe is exactly balanced by negative gravitational potential energy, as the universe expands and continuing to the present, but only at one specific expansion velocity: what we call escape velocity. If this idea is true, it means the universe could have sprung into existence spontaneously, like a virtual particle pair, without violating the law of conservation of energy. Stephen Hawking explains this idea in his book "The Grand Design": "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
I actually replaced PointerEvents use in Polymer with https://github.com/polymer/polymer-gestures/ a couple of months ago: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/ba4aDyOo...
Thanks. I might try posting again and see if it can some traction. There is obvious a large interest in the topic of spelling reform here so maybe it is just luck what gets picked up.
> It's staggering how low accountability is on law enforcement's priority list

Huh? Why would they want to be accountable? Accountability would be a priority of the populace.
These are all great ideas.

Media embedding is already possible using markdown. I plan to add a feature to embed media that you put inside Blot's folder.

Here's what I'm planning to add to Blot, roughly ordered by priority.

1. Comments

2. Support for other file formats. RTF will be the easiest to add next, then DOC and perhaps PDF. There are libraries which make this relatively straightforward but I need to evaluate them first.

3. Custom blog post URLs. More generally allow you to customize each post's metadata.

4. Photo posts
> People might believe lots of things the first few thousand times, but eventually it will make the officer look pretty bad if they walked into an adverse situation without their documentation device running.

This isn't some hypothetical about the future. What you describe is very common today, with no loss of credibility having attached to the police.
The moment you say somebody should be forced, you massively increase the burden on you to give a sufficient reason why any such thing should be done.
But its much easier to fix those edge cases like channel islands Andorra monte carlo etc all it would take is action by 2 or 3 states.
They are sold in parcels. There isn't like a list of debtors in default the bank maintains that you can go pick from. It's more like here's 1,287 loans defaulted on, worth a total of $4,342,230 that you can bid on.
How Would You Detect a Stealth Aircraft?
People say this about every kind of bad interview question. It's actually hard to come up with any interview question you can't say it about. So, you'll need a better reason.
Anyone know of any other similar type organizations?
Part 1: Creating Better Entrepreneurs With A Building Mindset
Open Letter to The American Association for the Advancement of Science
Free Photography E-Books
debt collector friend....ha
On my list, adding even better support for fast full text search:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/images/2/25/Full-text_search_in_...

Many of the changes already went into 9.4 but for PostgreSQL to be a 'killer' of external tools would be ridiculously awesome.
What about allowing people to store wealth in a non-depreciating, attainable, liquid asset (something besides USD or mutual funds or a home made out of plywood), and limiting liability for health providers?
Assuming social security is replaced by basic income seems to be a fallacy.

SS payments are not the same for everyone. Knowing the distribution of pay rates for SS is very important.

Reducing SS payments, perhaps by a dramatic amount, is not going to go over well.

Likewise, giving straight cash versus Medicare/Medicade does not work. You are basically telling people "I'm sorry, but you can either die of a treatable condition, or starve".

(Unfortunately the latter is more palatable in the current American political climate...)

1k per month for the elderly who have multiple medical conditions, is not acceptable.

IMHO the author is viewing this through the lens of someone who is young and healthy.

It is also odd that the author highlights some jobs (plumbing, cleaning) that are likely to be the last that will be automated. A Roomba is a far cry from a proper janitorial service. While eventually we will get autonomous bots that can do such tasks, we are really far away from that goal.

And finally, statements like

> It is not clear to me why it should be significantly different, as a 12 year old needs basically the same as an 18 year old.

Make me wonder what sort of reality the author lives in. (And only further confirms that the author is likely young, and has obviously never had children!)

The price of child care alone is huge. Medical expenses are higher for children. School expenses exist. Children are not cheap.
Does every search-term hit an external service to see if it matches something ruby related?
I remember Kevin Kelly blogging about this. Fascinating project.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/2012/11/the-average-pla/

It's interesting to consider that if you just take a random lat-lon, and go find that place ... most of the time it'll be the middle of an ocean. Hey, 75% of Earth's surface is water, right?

If you find a random land-based location ... as Kevin notes, it's interesting how rare it is to see a building, and how often it's wilderness. As developed as the world is, there's still quite a bit of wild out there.

Even without buildings, farmland appears often, which makes sense ... so that's one cue that civilization is around. Look up and you may see jet contrails during the day, or satellites swimming across the stars at night.

A few more cues ... it's just surprising how rare a random spot on earth shows more than that.
It might be simple or maybe it's OCD but I sure wish there was a way to reorder table columns in the table schema without having rebuild the columns.
I was listening to the conference call and Musk also mentioned a goal of Tesla is also to service your vehicle before you even realized it needed service. Here's an excerpt:

"And another key metric we measure is the average time to service something. So our average is less than a day. So the car is -- so, in most cases we can actually pick up your car, fix anything that's wrong with it, and give it back to you, without you even knowing it was gone. So you just tell us like my car is at my office and this is where it is, and we'll pick up the car, fix it, and get it back to you before you finish work.

Our goal with service is sort of invisible up, which is, is there even -- it's like elves [ph] service delivery [ph]. Like you don't even see it. It's like -- it happens so fast. And once done, you'll love it.

And so I think there's like -- there's an interesting opportunity to revolutionize service as well. It's not just like, oh, let's do the same thing as before. I think it was a lot of lessons learned from a Formula One car approach. So, because we're not trying to serve customers for the most amount of money possible in a service, which is typical of the conventional auto industry, we want to get the job done super-fast, and then also make sure that you don't -- like we want to anticipate issues so you don't have to come back again.

And so we actually bring the car and we kind of hit with a pit crew, like a Formula One pit crew. So instead of having one person per bay, the car gets slowly worked on over several days, it actually comes in and a team attacks it, and we're constantly improving the tools and the metrics to say, how can we get the car perfect as fast as possible. We actually bring in people from Formula One to help with the training on this. And I think there's a real opportunity to revolutionize the way service works."
Have you met Comcast?
That is because individual states implement eu directives in their own way - some with more attention to the letter of the directive and less to the spirit

Compare TUPE in the Uk and Spain.
> I'm not saying writing secure software in C is inherently impossible, but I'm not aware of it having ever been accomplished

Kinda proves my point.
They're programming/math quizzes (puzzles?), which you submit for automated testing.
"IMHO the author is viewing this through the lens of someone who is young and healthy."

And always will be.
I think this is more the norm. I wrote software for a large debt collection company for years and being courteous, professional, and legal was extremely important. For example, all calls were recorded. Some were even QAed in real time. Do anything illegal and the agent was fired on the spot.

As a large debt collector, they were easy to find and sue if one of the agents did anything wrong.

The horror stories you hear about collectors are often these fly by night places with 100 people crammed in a strip mall location. They use illegal tactics and hope to collect enough money before being shut down and forced to sell off the rest of the portfolio.
Well... things that are mathematically equivalent turn out to have physical implications more often than one would expect. Not always, but often enough to be worth a look.

Does the mathematical equivalence mean anything more than "maybe somebody ought to look at that a bit more"? No, but that's still more than nothing.
A related article is https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/15/cat-video-hack..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184061.
Honest question here, where would I purchase some of this paper?
From what I recall, other companies call this kind of warranty an "X year, unlimited mileage" warranty. "Infinite miles" is just some marketing bullshit Tesla have come up with to make it sound like they're offering something new and different and more generous.
> The idea of "millions of dollars" worth of debt being traded for around on thumb drives, and that all those thumb drives really contain are excel spreadsheets is mind boggling. Those people in those spreadsheets are real people, and they're being completely duhumanized.

The moral concerns aside... this is the question to "why haven't we replaced excel yet."
Century Of Enslavement – History Of The Federal Reserve
Journalists in Ferguson are crowdfunding to cover their costs
"non-depreciating, attainable, liquid asset (something besides USD"

What does that even mean?
What are the specs of your system?
This is probably one of the most offensive things you can do in Islam.
Can you imagine the Germans talking like that about their car industry, or the French about cheese?

We don't need to "balance" the City. We need to take the gloves off and do what we can with the last remaining world class industry we have.
How unfortunate in our hyper-PC world that telling someone to work hard and stay out of trouble is somehow bad or offensive.

The point is--if he wants to escape his situation in Yemen it's going to take some risk and it won't be easy. If he's not willing to work for it, why should I feel sorry for him?
> At some level this becomes tiresome and unhelpful.

It would help, if those promoting the new old technology would present it as bringing back something from the past, instead of a magic new technology.
Ya, this is always the fallacy Basic Income proponents keep claiming will come to pass.

The only vaguely realistic way to generate a Basic Income situation is, frankly, to raise taxes to provide for a good fraction of the benefit [I think you can get to something like 6k of the 12k on spending cuts].
> in my accent they both have two l sounds - hol-lee and hole-lee

If your spelling scheme spells words differently depending on the writer's accent that is a problem in and of itself.

But what accent is it that has a double L sound? I can't even conceive of what that would sound like. If you say two L sounds temporally adjacent to each other without an intervening pause they would be indistinguishable from one L, i.e. "hole-lee" sounds indistinguishable from "hoe-lee". (Hm, how do you cut-spell "wholly"?) Putting enough of a pause between "hole" and "lee" so allow the two L sounds to be distinguished would sound really weird. Is there some audio of this accent on the web?
No, I'm pretty sure police don't have universal access to (reliable, effective) recording devices.

I'm also pretty sure that large segments of the population don't trust them at all.
Um, there are more not-for-profit hospitals than there are for-profit hospitals, which doesn't dramatically change the pricing equation.

http://www.aha.org/research/rc/stat-studies/fast-facts.shtml

One man's profit is another man's stash for bonuses and building a new wing of the hospital.
Just a side not that light in other medium than air travels slower. It's not 300k km/h but ~200k km/h in FR4 microstrip (6"/ns where 1ns is equivalent to 1GHz clock).
Weren't the Channel Islands forced to join Europe in the 1940s?
If you honestly want to defend Anne Neuberger's "Intelligent America" scenario, go right ahead.

It is in fact a grossly dishonest chunk of wishful thinking wrapped in Soccer Mom-friendly platitudes.
It does right now, yes. But it's completely asynchronous and it falls back gracefully, so you shouldn't notice any performance impacts.
Especially not if you are in Dubai, where you will be imprisoned for bouncing a cheque.
> Will he? What about the tens of thousands of other people that can run that tool? What about people that can type queries into SHODAN? Why are they not problems?

You seem to conveniently ignore the fact they are doing this with the intent to exploit.

Its cute and all but honestly, anyone who is going to do that then seek to compromise a box is a problem. Its the intent of compromising the box that is the issue, not simply scanning.

Did you not RTFA?

"The covert infrastructure includes so-called Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs), which are used to hide the location of the attacker when the Five Eyes launch exploits against targets or steal data (Figure 18). Several times a year, the spy club tries to take control of as many machines as possible, as long as they are abroad. For example, in February 2010 twentyfour spies located over 3000 potential ORBs in a single work day (Figure 19). However, going over the port scan results provided by HACIENDA was considered too laborous (Figure 20), so they programmed their OLYMPIA system to automate the process (Figure 21). As a result, the spies brag that they can now locate vulnerable devices in a subnet in less than five minutes (Figure 22)."
They go back to Occam and Modula-2, among others, way before your list.
I realize I'm pulling a huge cop-out by expecting that there aren't malicious users in terms of input (especially since the text fields are entered by an admin who presumably doesn't want to destroy their database), passwords are stored in the clear, etc. For this reason all that's in this database is volunteer names and hours, as the coordinator and I agreed that the less personal information is present, the better. :)

I'd love to get others involved in the project whose needs are slightly different and thus might have a motivation for doing a security audit, etc.
Vessel – Automates Dockerized Development Environments
You are totally right! +1.

The article had me at "stolen".

If you owe a bit of money, some of the dipshits that call you may actually have misappropriated the collection account and are not connected to the original debtor in any way, who did not receive and will not receive a red cent.

This passing of the buck helps to explain why numerous agencies may be involved: people get calls from various toms, dicks and harrys about the same debt.

The fact that debt is being purchased cheaply is totally believable. Because when people don't want to pay, it takes work to extract money from them. Some people really don't want to pay, because they believe they have been wronged. No matter how much effort you sink into it, there won't be any income. Some people will pay the full debt, after a bit of effort. But that effort cuts into the revenue. If it costs $400 worth of effort to collect $1000, then you only collected $600 in reality. There is a very real risk that it may cost $999 to collect $1000, so you're left with a buck. Because of this uncertainty, it makes perfect sense to sell the $1000 debt to someone for a mere $83 and make it their problem. The $83 is a sure thing, and better than nothing, whereas the $1000 debt could well be nothing.
Pay it off and go without credit for a few years... your score will be trashed.
I bet a Flipboard-clone wouldn't be too difficult for a few engineers to bang out in Famo.us. But then again, the value of Flipboard isn't in being a beacon of iOS beauty and functionality, but instead lies in the apps wonderfully-curated content.
TIPS?
The title made me think of planet labs' goals (http://www.planet.com), but the actual ambition (photos from the ground, rather than from space) seems more challenging in many ways.
I created http://www.learneroo.com which lets people solve programming challenges (and other challenges) online. It's not currently open-source, though if there was interest I would consider open-sourcing it. (I would first need to clean up some code that I didn't think anyone would see!)
It's true that computers and automation are rapidly eliminating most low-level jobs, but it doesn't follow that a non-merit-tested basic income is the best way to deal with this new reality.

Even with an automated workforce, I think there should still be social incentives, and incentives require merit-based income differentials and some concept of "earned income".

We've already witnessed the first large-scale social experiment designed to replace the dog-eat-dog nature of conventional human society, and everyone knows how that turned out. But doing nothing while most jobs are absorbed by teams of obedient robots, and expecting society to rearrange itself optimally with no new ideas, is naive.

This is an open problem, and the solution is not obvious.