skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious about possible coupling between the ongoing drought in the western US and seismic activity.

There is published work indicating correlations between rainfall and seismicity (1) and rainfall and volcanic activity (2). There's other work relating seismicity to fracking, filling the Oroville reservoir, etc.

A study (3) this week indicated a median land uplift of 4mm ranging up to 15mm uplift in some California mountains due to a mass deficit of 240Gt of missing rainfall since 2013.

I wonder if the drought-related uplift could alter underground strain patterns enough to influence earthquake frequencies or magnitudes? Any geophysicists wanna weigh in?

(1) http://www.geophysik.uni-muenchen.de/~igel/PDF/hainzletal_gr...
(2) http://envam1.env.uea.ac.uk/matthewsetal2009.pdf
(3) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/08/20/science.1...
This is what Ross Ulbricht described his goal as on LinkedIn:
"I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind."
Is that clear enough? The guy studied organic solar cells and EuO thin-film crystals for 5 years as a grad student, describing his goal then as to expand the frontier of human knowledge.

And then twice paid money to (what he believed) have somebody killed that was causing him a problem.
I highly recommend haskell-vim-now [1]. The author has a nice demo showcasing this setup, along with his virtual pair-coding environment [2].

With one install command, you get a polished Vim/Haskell setup with tab completion, type inspection, Hoogle, hinting, unicode symbols, etc.

Also has a nice dark theme. In fact, I use it as my go-to Vim configuration on new systems, even outside of Haskell.

It also lets you pipe code to the Haskell REPL for live evaluation (via tmux).

[1] https://github.com/begriffs/haskell-vim-now
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sr8cAIwdBs

EDIT: Add video
Alignment of what??

Not left edges. Even in non-monospace fonts, every blank is the same with, same with every tab.
The rest of your post misunderstood a hypothetical I raised to compare and contrast with your argument, and I won't be addressing it. However, there was one part that I feel I should respond to:

> We very greatly vary in our regulation of those substances. And of everything, for that matter. Alcohol's sold in corner stores, Percocet is only (legally) available through a pharmacy with a prescription. Owning a concealed firearm requires a permit. If we're going to legalize 'harder' drugs, where should they fall on that spectrum?
Should we allow people to buy heroin at the corner store? Maybe! Should advertisers be allowed to buy huge billboards advertising their brand of crack? Possibly. We should evaluate what's going to provide the most overall utility for us as a society. If the answer is to legalize cocaine but disallow advertising of it, then that's what we should do.

Three points on this:

1. When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.

2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.

3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is. Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids? Well, that's incredibly hard to assess, even once you pin down several of the subjective aspects. Instead, courts have been deciding the merits based on the impact this has to freedom and how consistently that reasoning is applied across similar cases. I greatly approve of this method of decision making. It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never. It's similarly reasonable to look at how people raising objections apply those same objections to similar cases - if they're consistent, then perhaps they have a real objection; if they're not, they need to explain this either by differences between the two cases or concede that's not their true objection.
C# 1.0 (the spec) and especially Visual C# 1.0 (the IDE) were recapitulations of Delphi in Java skin.

Now, C# is by far my favorite language (even though I think in ML), but I'm now a bit envious of the Java approach: One of the big ideas of OOP going back to Alan Kay is that OO languages should be extremely dynamic, and that you achieve performance by building better hardware (or tuning it)†. This is what Java and Objective-C do. And, this is why Java programmers can create classes and objects with reckless abandon and still get excellent performance. Meanwhile, in C#, I find myself worrying about whether something should be a class or a struct; it doesn't happen often, and I know that I ought not be thinking about it, but it's there.

So, in summary, I now appreciate the value of putting the performance knobs on the machine rather than in the language, which represent the two different philosophies of Java and C#.

†Said by Alan Kay, and repeated by Steve Jobs: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
Assuming this is accurate, what I find especially interesting is that if you hover over each of these languages they all have a significant overlap with JavaScript. I think everyone of these languages widest band goes to JavaScript.
Yes, I know that the browser has bugs but my question is how can you get malware installed using the web browser
I can't make any sense out of the xkcd figures. How do you mentally navigate them, where do they take you, and what do you know at the end?
2014 Christian Louboutin Sales Online
Please read the wiki op linked.

> A subset video bitstream is derived by dropping packets from the larger video to reduce the bandwidth required for the subset bitstream. The subset bitstream can represent a lower spatial resolution (smaller screen), lower temporal resolution (lower frame rate), or lower quality video signal.
All those languages look like a combination of Java and ML to me. Of course they use different features and small additions here and there but overall: ML+Java.
In this case, a picture is worth a 1000 words:

http://imgur.com/Sunh0Iy

That was from Napa this morning. Imagine if someone were standing under that? Now multiply by tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

The buildings themselves are designed to survive, but many are old and not up to code, because you only have to make a building earthquake safe when you sell it or renovate it.

Also, many people do not secure large objects to the wall. And sometimes it is the small objects that are the problem. Wine bottles, mirrors, anything that can shatter and fling glass everywhere.
I also use monospace font when publishing bits of source, it helps set it off from the rest of the text.

But in the code itself, this isn't a consideration.
The difference is the rounded edges, you see.
> You're going to notice it.

If the whole of the Americas was wiped off the Internet tomorrow then, for those of us in The Rest of The World (TM), life would go on. I think the only web property that would be annoying to not have would be Wikipedia. Second to that is the Google search engine but I take it as a given that they could cope just fine if America just mysteriously vanished one day.

I think that there are some that think that Silicon Valley is the centre of the universe, some indispensable magic place where all of the innovation happens. If there was The Big One (for the valley) we would soon find out exactly how important things like social networks and iphone apps really are. Life would go on. If anything, a big earthquake in Caliphonea is far preferable to a big eathquake in Japan. In Japan they make stuff the world needs.
Ha. Good point. ;)

Still I wouldn't call a lot of the 1900-1970s housing stock prevalent across SF and the Bay particularly earthquake ready.
Nasa satellite to help farmers combat drought – The Times of India
The article appears to say: they both have

* first class functions

* single inheritance with traits/protocols

* extension methods

* distinction between variables and constants

* a few builtin data structures (tuples, arrays, maps etc)

By this, most "recent" PLs look like Scala. The omitted differences are where most actually disappear (i.e. handling of variance/generics)
Is this data scraped via an API or something or are you managing it manually?
Hermit 14pt

https://pcaro.es/p/hermit/
I raised a clearly wrong hypothetical (which necessarily must be hyperbolic) to contrast the features of your argument (I think both have a couple of the same fallacies in their structure) with something we can clearly see where it lands, and not because I thought the two were identical in nature, equally defensible, etc.

It's unfortunate that you decided to write a post which failed to address the point of that argument (the weakness in your own argument), and instead pretended that I had somehow meant what was clearly a rhetorical flourish.
Awesome. The first thing I did was run my finger across the qwerty row from left to right, which immediately made me think of Toccata and Fugue, prompting me to pick out this excerpt:

8[8 [;plol mum yhtg cec esaqa qwertyuiopluyn
tgytgytgytgy huyhuyhuyhuy 4iu4iu4iu4

Transposed down a half step to D-flat minor to better fit this thing's range. It's not a perfect transcription by any means (the arpeggio suffers from limited polyphony, for one), but it's pretty cool that it was so easy to get this far!
My favorite change in 0.3 isn't even in the changelog:

Startup time has been massively improved. It used to take 5-10sec to start the REPL or run a test, now it's about 0.2sec.
Ageism, sexism, racism, you don't look like me/model(ism) I would say runs rampant in many industries that are fueled by egos and trying to out do each other.

I have had more negative experiences dealing with tech douchebags at meetups and in tech communities in general then say attending hiking meetups via meetup.com. Everyone at a hiking meetup is there to make friends/not try to out do each other.

Not to say I havent met some nice people who are not douchebags, but you don't expect to have to deal with dBags in tech communities whose age range from 20 to 45.

I attend and have attended tech events to meet similar nice people and share interests, but half the time or more you run into Dbags who aren't genuine, friendly and make you feel like it's high school all over again.
(2013) Monsanto Wins Lawsuit Filed by U.S. Organic Farmers
Phoenix. Sure they have drought, but not much other weather or natural catastrophes to speak of.
I believe it's your phone. The emojis are unicode after all. 😁
> . Allow algorithms that can be wrong

isn't this by definition a heuristic ?
"In its ruling Monday, the appellate court said the organic growers must rely on Monsanto assurances on the company's website that it will not sue them so long as the mix is very slight."

"In its ruling Monday, the court noted that records indicate a large majority of conventional seed samples have become contaminated by Monsanto's Roundup resistance trait"
It's automated. With around 500 TLDs and 7 providers, manually maintaining it would be a nightmare.
Each individual company can probably use the time and money to mitigate against much largar risks to its individual business.

(I did not downvote, btw)
nice, it's good to know .io domain can be bought by $39.

There are quite a few big ones not on list though. Like 1and1?
#YouCanLearnAnything
> I do foresee a significant drop in overall productivity in the area for a longer period though.

True, though there are a lot of people working in that area. Deaths at the wrong time could be catastrophic.
Quote:
"After several phone and in-person interviews, the company flew him and his wife to their location, put them up in an expensive hotel, and conducted a final interview. However, in that interview he was finally introduced to the person who would be his immediate supervisor, someone twenty years younger. The next day, he was told that he was no longer a candidate."

Wait... they passed over all this to figure his age in person? His résumé hadn't age?
Okay, that's one. Where do we put the other 300 million people?
It's invariant for any company I've been at. Pretty much what I said: Be clear and be factual about what you've done, including how you did it and what happened as a result. I'm looking for evidence that you've done things that are interesting.
You are entirely right that there is an overlooked advantage here iff the kind of older people who are willing to work for you are at least as good as the kind of young people you can hire.

Intuitively the longer a person has been on the job market the higher the chance that person has either developed deep expertise in some subject or gotten a strong network. Most people who have either shouldn't have any problem getting employed (in the tech industry anyway) and so the kind you can hire are probably less likely to be as good as your younger employees. Note that this doesn't disagree with your anecdote, you just can't hire those people.

In addition, and this depends on how old they are, you might not want to make your first hire a person who is likely to have children soon. If suddenly half your workforce is on maternity/paternity leave that might sink your business (yeah discrimination based on this is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't a risk anyway).
It need not be a 1989 level earthquake. That's the biggest worry here.
I noticed the author wrote

let emptyArray = String[]()

That's actually old, and no longer valid.
The current syntax is

let emptyArray = [String]()
> The rest of your post misunderstood a hypothetical I raised to compare and contrast with your argument, and I won't be addressing it

No, I didn’t misunderstand it. It was dumb at best, and incredibly insensitive at worst (I’m sure the gay community appreciates you appropriating their plight).

> When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.

My point is that we vary greatly in our legal attitudes towards those substances, even recreationally. Tobacco at 18, Alcohol at 21. Can’t advertise tobacco much, but beer commercials are literally everywhere. What are we going to do with cocaine? Heroin? Is there any difference in our stance towards those two?

> 2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.

Well, ignoring that there are tons of other legal recreational drugs (caffeine comes to mind), there are actually some pretty general laws regarding them (e.g. tobacco at 18, alcohol at 21) and more specifically, advertising them. Implementation details of how we’re going to transition those drugs into the general populace is actually THE most important question in my mind.

> 3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is.

Horse shit. Deaths caused by drug warfare, death rates caused by complications (e.g. liver cirrhosis). Two metrics right there that nearly everyone cares about.

> Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids?

Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.

> It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never.

“by getting permission from his peers” is essentially what we do with alcohol and tobacco (hence the age restrictions, if we think of minors as individuals). “should be allowed to on a whim” is what we do for caffeine. They’re treated differently. What should we do for other drugs?
Aw, but what about utterly fast to develop in, utterly awesome at concurrency, utterly easy for ruby/python/dynamic-language devs to pick up and gain huge performance boosts, utterly easy to get in to the ecosystem, and utterly simple to use?

I'm not a language geek mind you, but if people find it useful (and plenty of large and small companies have had huge wins with it at rapid pace) who cares if it's utterly boring?
Octave dev here, which packages are you looking for?

I'm curious if it's as sophisticated as Simulink and Mupad, which are completely different programs that happen to be associated to Matlab, or if it's just the image package that we have almost all in Octave already.

Where's the demand? Where is your demand? :-)
Probably he did not know yet what the epicenter was.
I agree - the examples given are almost infuriating. Whilst I can't comment on how idiomatic the Swift code is, the Scala code is anything but. There's little benefit to using a language like Scala if you're going to count the number of apples and oranges in a list by incrementing a mutable var for each type.
That doesn't suggest it at all - it does suggest that the solution isn't likely be to change something that is unique to the gaming industry.
Ask HN: How many HNers strongly prefer silence at home?
The article from a few days ago ("This is your brain on silence") got me wondering how many of us here search out silence at home? And if so, why?

As I get older, I'm finding my preference for silence increases. Nature sounds are included in my definition of silence, thus I'm more talking about an aversion to man-made noise. I want my home to be free of noise and commotion, as those two things, in my mind, are related to the outside world and being in public. Basically, I want that option and contrast to always exist, between public and private…and I think an attempt at silence should be the norm, even in public (which makes me think I might enjoy living in Japan).

In terms of why I feel the way I do, well, I'm not quite sure (but it may have to do with liking nature, being an introvert, a minimalist, a writer, and with growing up in a house where silence was a pipe dream).
I'd love to buy the PDFs, but they're DRMed and I refuse to rent ebooks.

I guess I could buy them and then download the "pirate" versions from somewhere.

Instead, I'll stick with my hardcopy edition.
Atlanta is right on the edge of all of these, but it's rare that they come this far with enough force to matter.
That hold true for any computer.
Feeling spoiled with earthquakes? Shut up.
John's blog post sure has a hell of a lot of conjecture and opinions in it for someone so hellbent on discrediting closed source forensic tools for doing the same. John would have a lot more credibility if he would shut his mouth and stuck to reporting unbiased technical information like he asks for from everyone else.
> (which necessarily must be hyperbolic)

Why?

> to contrast the features of your argument (I think both have a couple of the same fallacies in their structure)

You were assuming I was arguing about something completely different (something about kids getting their hands on drugs or some such nonsense). It’s like you didn’t even take the time to read what I had written, and instead had some canned response ready to go.

> It's unfortunate that you decided to write a post which failed to address the point of that argument (the weakness in your own argument), and instead pretended that I had somehow meant what was clearly a rhetorical flourish.

I took what you had written and used it as a podium to argue something completely different. Sound familiar :)?
Because they care about performance in multi-core contexts.
> prefer

Not only prefer but sometimes its required based on compliance and regulations and such.
not sure if this is the case for all domain providers, but at least for name cheap: transfer and renew price are quite different from the new price. Also, different contract will have different prices. Longer terms will normally be discounted. It will be nice to display prices based on different use cases.

Anyways! Great work! I wish this can be maintained up-to-date. So many bullshits / price traps on domain registration.
Quake.usgs.gov has accurate data within seconds of quakes. Back in the day you could get latest quake info on their finger server.
One way might be to make the regular C extension API have a performance drop (e.g use it through some translation layer facade) and introduce a new C extension API alongside it that plays well with the necessary changes in the language.

Do you think that will be feasible for Python?
In the words of doug stanhope, the drugs sell themselves.
I know it's off-topic but I every time I heard 'Swift' I feel sorry for 'the other Swift' i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_langu...
It's mostly garbage. SF and California generally were supposed to be disposable. People didn't think beyond the bonanzas.
Ask HN: Good accountant/Tax Advisor for early stage pre-revenue startup
We are looking for a good accountant/Tax Advisor for early pre-revenue startup (we can't afford someone expensive).

Any ballpark estimate on how much should annual taxes cost would also be very helpful.

Thanks
I'm just going to say this: I'm actually bisexual, and your insistence that gay/queer issues are taboo for analogies, and that I personally mean clearly conjured examples of things that other people have said in the public arena (which I, many others, and federal judges think are flawed arguments), are both a form of ad hominem/strawman weakening your other points considerably and incredibly offensive.

I was otherwise enjoying our conversation, but far from it being me who seems to have an issue with topics involving gays, I think it's you. You're unable to have a real discussion about the logical fallacies of well trodden, publicly expressed arguments from recent years (eg, I've seen all of these expressed by people fighting against gay rights in the past 5 years published in major news articles), and how they're similar to the argument you're making about drugs.

> Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.

I'm not ignorant of homosexuality in any manner, I just think you're advancing arguments on the topic of drugs with the same flawed logic that I routinely hear trotted out against me when discussing people I have sex with or might want to one day marry. That I chose personal examples of flawed arguments doesn't tell you anything about my stance on those topics.

Again, it's very unfortunate that you've chosen to attack me personally rather than address the topic, but I'm going to have to stop conversing with you.