skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Metric users generally do not use organic units to describe extraordinarily large objects. That's it stuff like xx Olympic swimming pools or xx football fields (american nontheless) doesn't sound natural at all. It's all in meters/kilometers, etc.
You can get those in Poland too, not sure about the export terms and regulations but it should be similar. This place is fairly close to the city I grew up in.

http://www.motodemont.com.pl/pl/podstrony/id/4_sprzet_wojsko...
Work on improving your income. It's easy in IT, if you are willing to invest some hours in self-improvement and are willing to switch around jobs.
> This release was unusually delayed

I've heard that about Haskell Platform releases for 2 years now. I doubt that's suddenly going to change.
> vendor-neutral browser plugin

It might begin that way, but it could evolve into a standard that is supported by many browsers. The "HTML6 email module".
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the 95% of the planet that uses metric systems (including dollars and cents - a decidedly metric-friendly currency) has not ended up starving due to an inability to split a food bill by the number of people at the table.

Of course, you're right that if you and 59 of your closest friends were out for dinner, it'd be easier if currencies were based upon divisions of 60, that certainly makes some sense.

Maybe whoever thought up the metric system was smart in ways that you don't yet fully appreciate?
Two misunderstandings: the kid also thought that 1.5 means 1 remainder 5.

That's a profound lack of knowledge, he does not understand decimal notation. If you do not know what these number symbols mean, how can you communicate using those symbols? It all degenerates into futile pattern matching.
> Become a cupid for your friends you think will fit best. It will never be post.

> LIke each other

Don't think I'd trust this site if the grammar on the homepage is bad.

... 6 times Mashable logos...

Uhh.. absolutely not.
Which, of course, is still wrong... again, not understanding what he is doing.
That seems insane! I know Australia is a bit more used to drought but it does seem to do astonishingly better at water conservation.

My water bill tells us our water consumption is 200L per day, or 100L per person. Brisbane average is 400L per day per household.

Let's assume our house is very conservative and twice as good as average and everyone else is using 200L per person per day - that's around 7 times better than the 360G (1362L) per day in California [1]! A 20% reduction seems completely unambitious on that scale.

Most of the solutions seem to be around water conservation (low flow toilets, showers and taps, water tanks, water efficient washing machines and dishwashers) and education (have showers lasting no more than 5 minutes, no baths).

Usage-based water bills were also used to drive down consumption, but it's now got to a point where 75% of our bill is fixed access costs - as people consumed less water, the access costs increased!

[1] http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-c...
I would upload the Slides, but I can't find it on the disc that every one gets with a ticket.
Show HN: Dhcp leases sniffer
Show HN: Pythonpy – the swiss army knife of the command line
If I take a contract job which pays $X / deliverable then I may end up doing some "free" work as well if something comes up that I hadn't accounted for. Same goes for my day job when I work past 6 (exempt, of course).

Not all jobs are hourly. Why should this change for truckers and no one else? Are you proposing that all jobs should pay for every minute of work? I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I'm interested in your reasoning.
sorry, i am still working on it. I will fix the grammatical error and remove the logos.

thanks for the input
Forex uses pips which are 1/10000 for EUR/USD, GBP/USD and the like or 1/1000 for USD/JPY. There are "sub-pips" that are 1/10 of a pip.

Pips are decimal, similar to millimeter that's 1/1000 of a meter. The point doesn't stand, imo.
But - that was actually a great (though perhaps unintentional) example of the dangers of having two systems and switching back and forth between them.
Here in Melbourne, water is priced on a tiered basis. 0.23 cents per litre for the first 440 litres per day (averaged over the quarter), 0.27 cents per litre for the next 440 litres a day, and 0.41 cents per litre beyond that. Plus a flat fee of about $100 a quarter.

If I used 736 gallons a day I'd be paying... hmmm, six bucks a day for water. Actually that's not that bad, I pay more than that for coffee.
There's a dark half of this market that wasn't mentioned in the article-- as prostitution moves online, so does human trafficking. Here's a report on the topic: http://technologyandtrafficking.usc.edu/report/
It looks like a brilliant idea indeed. Where do my friends receive my invitation, facebook? It's also open to abuse by teenagers with bad intentions (but life is so, too:-)
A link for those who may be interested: http://shoup.net/ntl/
Ask HN: How do disruptions to submarine Internet cables affect the internet?
I've been reading recently about major disruptions to the submarine internet cables, mostly affecting parts of Asia [0] [1]. Have some of you working at large companies seen the impacts of this on your engagement numbers? There's lots [2] about how such disruptions affect speed, but no so much about how it might affect things we rely on the internet for. I'm hoping to write this up for a class essay or as a short paper, so any inputs would be helping an academic cause!

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/28/damaged-undersea-cable-internet-disruption
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption
[2] http://www.renesys.com/2014/03/beware-the-ides-of-march/
I doubt security guard is really required, at least in US, Europe and most other developed countries. Container is closed and it's easy to install device that calls police in case it's opened mid-way. Also most trucks transport goods that are difficult to steal and sell profitably (low price, high weight - think groceries, furniture, etc).
>Any person who has looked at any science at even small depth needs mathematics to express concepts. Mathematics are the lingua franca of the universe. You can't do Physics, Chemistry, Biology or even social sciences like Economics without a basic understanding of mathematics.

I think he was more interested in applied mathematics, ie mathematics that is useful or used in real life scenario than math itself.
In the article this jumped out at me: “From the moment our children step into a classroom,” Barack Obama said in 2007, “the single most important factor determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.”

That's just absolute nonsense or he was pandering to a constituency. Their parents and their family income and where they live are absolutely the most important factors. You take a school where the average kid lives in a single-parent home, with an uneducated, unemployed parent on welfare, who moves three or four times a year, or whose parents are in and out of jail, meth users, or otherwise completely irresponsible and negligent, and you can put the best teachers in the the world in that school and it will still be a failing school on every standardized measure.
The text looks really great. I lament the fact that like so many other introductory texts it includes exercises with no answers. This makes it just about useless for an independent student.

I don't understand why people do this? Is it just too much work/don't have time to actually work through the exercises/don't want an answer key to leak out so lazy professors can't set exam questions directly from the textbook/I'm just really stupid and no one else has this requirement?
yes, it will be at facebook messages.

Also on the app, on the send match page, you can click on your friend and send the message directly (from your own email)

regarding the abuse, the 2 person being matched to each other dont know the identity of each other anyway, and at anytime one of the party can decide not to continue that chat. In anycase they know who "the person" that is trying to become their matchmaker, thus i think the abuse will be minimal.

thanks
You shall count only the prime ones, both have only 2 prime divisors.
Then 60 would be of real use (and it has been used in the past[1]... and still is in angular measurements with the famous 360 degrees) but it contains only 5 as extra prime divisor.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
either than or you're on windows, where unfortunately next to nothing is implemented
I was really confused when I read "the constrain() call takes expressions that define the relationships you want to impose" (emphasis mine) and saw this code:

container.constrain(button.TOP == container.TOP + 50)

Python doesn't let you pass expressions! Why isn't that just getting evaluated to true or false? Is this not vanilla Python? Is there a pre-processor?

I dove into the code and found the answer here[1]. button.TOP and container.TOP are both Toga Attributes, which have their equality operators redefined.

Very interesting and clever use of operator overloading.

[1] https://github.com/pybee/toga/blob/master/toga/constraint.py
Former Apple Designer - How tinkering got him into the game.
The spaceship reinvented for new frontiers
Your keyboard will have the same temperature in summer as the heated one does in winter.
The fact that insurance companies are fine with entrusting 80000 pounds truck to somebody who got CDL after six weeks tells me that it's adequate training and accident rate of new drivers is not much higher than accident rate of experienced drivers.
5 seconds is too fast to acquire even a GSM fix to send the data.
My impression from riding along with my parents is that every day is filled with mostly improvisation. From dealing with bad, aggressive drivers who will get you and themselves killed, to rapidly changing road and weather conditions, to widely disparate entrances and loading docks, inaccurate GPS, etc. it just seems like the times that the self-driving would benefit are so infrequent with regular cross-country driving and delivery. This seems so different than a self-driving car that mostly is going to take you to and from work and the grocery store, etc.

There is also the liability issue, I mentioned that things are rigged to dump the hassles on the drivers and this is one of them. You're economically pressured to falsify log data, so when you nod off and accidentally kill some people, your employer is off the hook. A nice working self-driving truck would reduce fatalities caused by gross driver error, but I guess it would put the trucking company back on the hook in the cases where a catastrophe did happen. In the short term self-driving vehicles might be undesirable to some companies because it might eliminate their ability to shove negative externalities onto a third party (the drivers.)

self-driving commercial trucks will happen, I just think 5-8 years is not likely.
Oddly enough the SI unit is Pascal (Pa) or N/m2, not atmosphere. The technical atmosphere is: around 98KPa, it's not really metric.
I had the opportunity to work with Donn at my first job out of school in 2007. Literally could not have happened to a nicer human being, but I guess that's how it usually goes.
The book is available in hardcover too, which means it probably gets used as a university textbook. In this case, getting the answers usually requires being a lecturer...
This is a pretty limited view of distributed systems engineering, particularly at the high-end. Some topics that are essential for designing efficient, massively distributed systems:

- Greedy routing theory i.e. protocol design that is robust in a Nash equilibria sense. It still amazes me how many distributed systems are built on protocol designs that are provably unstable and inefficient.

- Space decomposition data structures. The only class of data structure that is efficiently distributable at massive scales due to their mathematical relationship to space-filling curves. Hash tables are often inadvertently implemented as space decomposition structures but there is a much richer and more expressive universe of data structures that exist.

- Game theoretic schedule awareness. This is a concept sometimes used in massively parallel systems for HPC but distributed systems designers seem to be unaware of it. It allows extremely high throughput by eliminating much of the need for distributed coordination with respect to accessing shared resources because every process can dynamically schedule its operations based on its modeling of the decisions of other schedulers it interacts with such that it almost never conflicts. I've never seen a paper on it but people have designed systems based on it (hell, I've designed a number of massively parallel systems based on it).

- Practical topology. On the surface it is about understanding how to maximize the throughput of a fabric of switch fabrics and most messaging patterns used in distributed systems today are naive at an elementary level; HPC has a much better understanding of packet flow optimization. There is also the more theoretical algebraic topology that hints how you efficiently do computational operations over space decomposition structures (mentioned above) with minimal data motion. Algebraic topology is enormously relevant to massively distributed and parallel databases but I rarely meet people who understand it outside of Oracle and similar (not that most of them are using it well).

A lot of distributed systems were engineered without any awareness of these things. Most of their fundamental weaknesses follow from that. The kinds of distributed systems that you can design if you really know the above topics greatly exceed the capabilities of popular distributed systems used today.

To reduce it to a simple metric: if you can show me a competitive algorithm design for the Graph500 benchmark, you actually understand massively scalable distributed systems. The efficiency at scale demonstrated in that benchmark is so far beyond common distributed systems because the designers of the top entries actually understand the above points I raised.
No, he deleted the records his users had.
Yes, yes it is a profound lack of knowledge. But he's still a fifth grader, and once you diagnose the problem (pattern matching gone wrong), you can fix it. In this case, the teacher identified that there was a sloppiness error (note it and allow them to work on being less sloppy using grades as motivation), as well as the misunderstanding of "remainder" vs "decimal part". The goal isn't just to grade the student, but to actually fix the things that are blocking their learning.
One thing though that is a bit hard to explain, and I would like to hear your thoughts/understanding on this.

Establishing causation includes at least establishing precedence in addition to correlation. In other words, the very definition of time is intertwined with the relationship between causes and effects. And Physics does not yet claim to have understood what time means (AFAIK): It is really real? Is it something just within our heads? ...

If you do not treat causation as a fundamental notion, do you treat time as one? If yes, how do you explain the dependence between the two. If not, well, that becomes a subject of even more basic discussion since then I would ask what do you treat to be fundamental notions. :-) (There does not seem to be a way for us to get around fundamental notions completely.)
To each his own, but I find this an exercise in futility.
After having 3 collections stolen / destroyed, I will never buy physical CDs or DVDs or vinyl ever again. I don't see the point.
But if it makes him happy, why not.
Agreed. This is the first system that checks websites I've seen that isn't focusing on competitive intelligence. Maybe that's their idea, is that they're going to a different market. I'll be interested to see this progress, whether they maintain or pivot. However, a service like this that charges per check, and allows API access...and allows you to check multiple/unlimited pages/sites...very powerful in competitive intelligence.
Show HN: Pi Approximation using Monte Carlo
Barack Obama said ... "the single most important factor determining their achievement [is] who their teacher is."

An alternative hypothesis is that Obama's intention was to shift the Overton Window. The budget for public education is huge, and it's not unreasonable to assume that some of his campaign donors are associated with charter schools or testing services.
SMS doesn't use GPRS, it's sent on a special channel
This article rambled and jumped around and was too sensationalistic for my taste.

Not that it didn't contain some good points but it was unduly alarmist in tone and kept lumping all chemicals in one class. Lead is a different case from fluoride is a different case from agricultural pesticides (themselves many different classes of compounds...some more harmful than others).

Certainly there are toxins in our environment and this is an issue. Well known toxins like lead have no place in our biological system. But this is not a new realization. Measures have been taken to address lead, maybe more are needed, I don't know, but people can't freely disperse lead in the environment anymore. (Except NRA members of course).

The article contained a dash of conspiracy for good measure and appeared about as scientific as a 1980's anti-recreational drug commercial...."This is your brain on fluoride!". Exactly the same type of hysteria (albeit from a different political spectrum) as well.

Here is reality...we can't live this lifestyle without chemicals so there will be some trade offs. That's the bottom line. Want to use plastic and drive a car and buy raspberry pi's? Then there are going to be some toxins. Maybe things have been too lax and more research and regulation should occur. No argument. But all chemicals and all pesticides are not evil and we are going to need some for the foreseeable future.
Exactly, correlation does "point to" causality. The question is what "establishes" it.

Also, agreed, use of controlled experiments is probably the best we can do to validate the hypothesis, and then assume its correctness beyond doubt till counter examples show up, if at all.

Correlation does not need to be 100% though. We live in the world of quantum mechanics today where you can successfully predict the probability distribution, but not beyond (at least as yet).
A reliable crypto module built right into the browser, with strict access controls, would indeed be a very welcome addition to the web. No need to mess with crypto in JS anymore!
pretty basic. nothing past a simple inner join and group by. nothing to download as far as I could see (completed all chapters).

Anyone aware of similar online lessons to learn and practice SQL interactively ?
The World Of Everything-As-A-Service
The fact that the price of something is high does not mean the elasticity is low.

Even if we agree that the total cost (including time) of acquiring and reading a book is high, that does not indicate that demand is inelastic.
For many purposes, you can consider trains to be automated trucks.
> "Cheap food with /almost no/ risk of developing a condition or losing functions of the body is better than expensive food with a marginal reduction in risk."

Precisely. Any statement like 'x is bad' should either provide a realistic alternative or discuss the cost/benefit of using x.
This actually has the same physical interpretation, right? If you took 500ml volume of beer and stretched it out to 1 km long, the stretched form would be 0.5 mm^2 in cross-section.
My wife(Australian) and me(Canadian) are in California at the moment. She is constantly commenting on the fact that despite all the drought warnings and conserve water posters everywhere we constantly see people watering their grass and fields to the point of forming large puddles of water. Like everywhere we have been there has been constant watering of plants. As someone that has lived through drought it has been really confusing to her.

It really seems like no one there believes their is a drought or at least it isn't changing anyones personal actions.
There are probably quite a few Qt apps you haven't noticed because they look perfectly native. What you mean is "a badly designed Qt app".
I am not sure actually that gravity "causes" things to fall to the earth. Gravity is the "name" with give to an entity in a mathematical model that somehow fits the observations of things falling very well. What is the "cause" as to why things fall down, AFAIK, that question is still ultimately unanswerable beyond what would be just semantics. Having found the model though, it would be now correct to say that if someone brings a meteor to the field of the earth (cause), the meteor will fall down (effect), as far as the model is correct.

I am not yet seeing how your second example is relevant to figuring how to establish causation.
Any lists/specific resources you would suggest that cover the things you mention well? This is a topic I'm actively trying to break into the basics of :)
I still remember the formula by heart C=5/9*(F-32), learned it a kid while reading books on electronics. Mentally I still use it to convert while watching a movie for example.
However I still don't know how people prefer it over Celsius, the latter feels a lot more natural.

Pound to Kg is rather easy as it has to be multiplies by 2.2, adding 1/10 after multiplying by 2.
Microsoft slashes IE support, sets 'huge' edict for Jan. 2016
This is really awesome. I've been spending my nights on improving my understanding and was wishing for a resource exactly like this. I've been going through Prof Aspnes (of Yale) notes - http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/469/notes-2011.p...

A question to the HN folk - For a programmer who spends his day time writing web applications and no systems experience, are there any good project ideas you guys have to better understand Distributed systems? I was thinking of implementing Paxos in Go / Scala but something more practical would be better.
I'm still pretty fond of fish myself, mainly for the sane scripting. Wondering if it might be worth switching to zsh for the extra plugins and community support, though.
An independent crew is taking control of a NASA satellite
Optalysys has 340-gigaflop optical computing system in works, exaflops to follow
This is an aside, but I really enjoy following Ken Perlin's blog. He usually posts something small, but he posts every day. One month he posted an elephant based detective noir. Other times he posts computer graphics experiments or talk about virtual reality. If you use an RSS feed, I highly recommend subscribing.
some ORMs do operator overloading too, i.e. SQLAlchemy http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_9/core/sqlelement.html
Is it actively maintained? The article is from May 2014 and last commit in repo is 4 months ago.
Is selling military vehicles in the Ukraine at the moment wise?
Looks so useful, can't believe I never thought of hacking something to do that. Will experiment with it!
It's a lot of computation, granted, but I just wanted to point out that it wasn't completely ludicrous. The proposed algorithm doesn't work anyway since there are no non-degenerate hash functions that map all words within D edits of each other to the same hash value (as I pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158942).
Why not just contribute the optimisations back to ohmyzsh? This was made to be a drop in replacement anyway.
Taban Air flight crashed with 40 passengers near Mehrabad airport
For a computational introduction to algebraic number theory, you can take a look at William Steins' book on the subject: http://wstein.org/books/ant/ant.pdf. It deals with more advanced topics but has concrete examples in Sage.