skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taiwan was a one-party dictatorship until the mid 90's. Singapore is generally not considered a functioning democracy, given that the country's politics is totally controlled by the People's Action Party and there are severe restrictions on things like rights of assembly.

Hong Kong also had very limited democratic control until the 80's (being a British Crown Dependency until then) and was in an extremely special situation by acting as a place that received a massive inflow of people and capital fleeing from the PRC when CPC took control, and that was able to capitalise massively on trade with the rapidly growing Shenzhen.

It is in any case moot, as the point is not that it isn't possible, but that if faced with the choice - whether or not the choice is a false dilemma or a total fabrication - it is not at all clear, nor even likely, that people will pick freedom over material wealth.

It is not an excuse for dictatorship, but an explanation for peoples willingness to put up for them in certain situations.

> The poverty was to a degree due to the lack of individual rights. In Maoist China, you literally didn't even have the right to the grain you farmed in your field; you had to give it to the Party and then wait in line for whatever they decided you deserved. There was no opportunity to save up and improve your lot; starting a business, privately buying and selling things, was literally grounds for execution.

The poverty didn't start when Mao gained control. This was a response to widespread poverty previously.

One can certainly make the argument that they could have developed faster with a different system.

But that is not the point that was being made. The point being made was that when your population is poor - to the point of starvation - their priority is material improvements, not freedom of speech - and this largely explains why a dictatorial government that manages to feed their population and produce growth gets so little opposition. It's not that there might not be better alternatives, but that if most people feel they're doing better than last year, they will not rebel.

It's worth noting that the effect of steady improvement on people's overall happiness is quantifiable, and there are theories that claim that major societal upheaval in general can be tied back not to high degrees of poverty or oppression, but to "backsliding". That is, people will for the most part put up with bad situations, but not put up with things getting steadily worse for long periods. Conversely, societies are at their most stable not when they are wealthiest, but when they see slow, steady growth.

(Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis" covers this in more detail and with some references to related research)
This is not really new stuff (but good to see nevertheless). Search youtube for hitbox lag compensation (particularly in "Source" games like tf2).
The silver back
Is there a test command that asks the operating system to run a program but cause the nth fork to fail? I would be more diligent about writing code that handles rare errors if I could create test cases. Writing code that I cannot test feels wrong.
Questions vs. Answers – What would you collect?
Please forgive my ignorance, but what is the problem with bundling n different versions of a library? Is it just that the bundle size increases? Or are there additional problems?

(That's not to say that the bundle size isn't important -- just that I would like to know if it's the only drawback)
> Is their government evil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...
I cited the book as reference ... I didn't claim anything else.
Leave it to Microsoft to give it the most generic sounding name possible.
Banks in china use every loophole available to lend more than the gov wants them to; the government is more reactive than proactive in reigning the banks in.

Of course, the government is incredibly multilayered and not cohesive, so usually this simply means local government vs. central government.
Just wrote a dirty Ruby script to download them. https://gist.github.com/lasombra/a489f715985715663595

P.S.: This is my first Ruby script. I'm still learning it.
If I remember correctly, according to Umberto Eco the flat Earth myth (attributing this stance to catholic church) was made up by Darwinists in the heat of the debate over evolution theory. It wasn't true, but they'd throw everything in the kitchen sink at their opponent for propaganda purposes.
How do you verify answers? Say there is more than one correct answer to a solution: do you run the code in a sandbox (with memoization) to find out if it works properly? Or is there only supposed to be exactly one proper answer for each question?

EDIT You should also provide a "reset" button if I screw up the form.

EDIT The horizontal scrolling is messed up, Google Chrome	36.0.1985.143 (Official Build 287914) m on Windows. I cannot see the right two or so characters on a wide question.
> they forget that there are another 800MM+ Chinese still waiting inland on the farm for anything good to happen to them.

As of 2012, more than 52% of China's population was urban. Granted, at the time that still meant something like 640 million outside the cities, but not by far all of those are "waiting on the farm" either.
Lattix announces Compound Project support for Java and C/C++
What is a Compound Project? Lattix, the leading innovator of enterprise architecture and complexity management solutions, is excited to announce Lattix 9.5 with support for compound projects. A compound project is a Lattix project that is created by combining multiple, smaller Lattix sub-projects.

An example of a compound project is a software architecture that has been created with C/C++ and Java. You can create projects that go from language to databases or from software to hardware elements. You can even create projects that show how your requirements map to your architecture or unit tests.

When to use Compound Projects?

• When you are working with large projects: You can create a project for different parts separately and then bring them together into a single compound project to create the big picture view

• When you are dealing with multiple technologies: Your system may contain multiple technologies. For instance a system consisting of Java and C/C++ code or SysMl and C/C++. Lattix provides support for a wide range of technologies including C/C++, Java, .NET, Fortran, Ada, Javascript, Actionscript, Pascal, Python, UML/SysML, Rhapsody, SparxEA, Oracle, SQLServer, SyBase, LDI and Excel.

• When you are working with multiple versions: If you want to examine multiple versions of your system, you can create a project for each version and then combine them together into a single compound project

Lattix, Inc.
352 Park St, Suite 203W
North Reading, MA 01864
+1.978.664.5050
info@lattix.com
www.lattix.com
Next Gen Drones Taking Off via Kickstarter
How complex? In one second a modern processor can do ~1 billion operations (ish, some are faster, some are slower, sometimes multiple are done in the same clock tick). Even if its slow, core2 architecture.

This means they have the time for about ~200 million instructions per request (Ignoring internal disk I/O, or network I/O).

That amount of work is insane!

:.:.:

I want to say their doing something fundamentally wrong. And it has nothing to do with their language.
>How to migrate from DigitalOcean to Linode?

Did you try this article? It is a tutorial for moving a wordpress blog from a Linode VPS to a DO VPS (the opposite of what you're asking), but contains many steps and general tips that you will find useful. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/migrate-you...

In general terms, you'll be looking at something like this: boot a fresh VM at Linode, apply updates, and install all your needed packages. Stop services on both hosts. Copy the necessary data/config files to the destination host, using a tool such as scp or rsync. Set permissions/ownership on destination files if needed. Start services on the destination host, test everything, reconfigure dns, and you're all set.

FWIW, I've been a happy linode user for 5+ years. I have nothing against DO, I've just never had cause to use them yet.

Incidentally, you mentioned in your blog that you tried a range of shared-hosting providers (HostGator, Bluehost, iPage...) finding them all unsatisfactory, before deciding to move to a dedicated VPS. You may or may not be aware that all three of those providers (and many more) are actually owned by one parent company, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group (i.e.: by trying a set of commonly-owned companies you may not have ended up surveying a particularly diverse cross-section of the market).
London among Europe’s least ‘liveable’ cities, according to index
Morality and Abstract Thinking – How Africans May Differ from Westerners
As the only source of DocumentDB is as an instance within Azure you are limited to that vendor. You can obviously take redis/monogo/couch and put them on any 'cloud' providers infrastructure as needs be.

Not sure if your interpretation of his point was wilfully incorrect for some reason, but it was quite obvious what he meant.
Fortran has bound arrays and more explicit pointers. If bounds checking isn't enabled, it is still possible for some level of aliasing to happen, but it would most likely be an error, not the intention of the programmer. In general, there are far fewer places in Fortran code where the compiler must make the assumption that array references could be aliases of each other.
Haha. Good idea.
> “It’s our job to make sure people feel safe and in control,” he says.

So people just have to feel 'safe and in control,' rather than making sure they are actually safe and/or in control? It sounds like an admission that the whole anonymity thing is just a marketing gimmick: as long as you have a name like "Secret" and make people feel like they're safe, they'll share whether or not they have strong security at all.
It's pretty efficient, O(N), where N is the number of cells (partially) covered by something (which means some pruning of the cells that need to be processed is desirable otherwise you'd have to evaluate all of them for quadratic complexity). The algorithm is also embarassingly parallel, every cell can be processed independently so it scales perfectly with the number of processors available (if you forget about contention effects).
C++ is the counterexample in nearly all such cases, for better or worse!
If you don't rant how do you learn from your mistakes?

It makes you reconsider what went wrong like The Mythical Man's Month (tools considered harmful aka silver bullets) by F Brooks the project manager that nearly killed IBM and OS360 is such an example.

Coding is about creativity and innovation. Not about respecting the authority. It is a hard mix of conservatism (standing on the giants' shoulders) and like the other giants ... to rant.

At one point the best developers new ideas are rants ex robe pike vs Unix (plan9, Go) (all his rants against unix (see cat) are a very good source of knowledge for unix devs)

And rants are always instructive when done by great person.

* http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ (I learned a lot with http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/symlinks http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ )
* computer for cynics on youtube (a rant against computer industry in general)

“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” — Keith Braithwaite
Neither Taiwan, Singapore, nor Hong Kong were democracies until quite recently, and in the latter two cases there are strong arguments that they still aren't and won't be so in the future. They did get lucky with a lot of benevolent dictators though (CKS's son, the Lees, and the British).
This might be of use to you:
http://open-zfs.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware#Error_recover...
Nope, I just tried and went into a pitch-black room with a remote control whose LED on the Mac camera looks very bright, and tried to look at it while activating the LED - nothing, not a blip, I can not see the IR LED with my eyes...
This sounds like something Sqitch would help with.

http://sqitch.org
It misses an elephant in the room, India. Current policy from Beijing is driving Japan and India to become long term allies with a goal of containing and defeating China no matter what US policy is.
Swap on zvols is not fully stable on Linux yet. I have patches in the works for 0.6.4 that should improve things.
Reminded me of the blind camera by Sascha Pohflepp:
http://www.blinksandbuttons.net/buttons_en.html
Can SQL help solve crossword puzzles?
I think "erlang definitely" is more accurate. That's is erlang's domain and it does it better than any other solutions right now AFAIK.
The port was abandoned as no one was willing to finish it. FreeBSD developers have since written their own hypervisor called byhve.
MySQL: Why “My”?
Great, you take issue with these things. Do you have a source you can point to? Could you use your time improving Wikipedia or at least pointing us poor saps on HN to more detailed information? That seems like it would be more useful than looking for a minor UTF-8 character to "prove" your point.

What are the definitions in common use that you know? Is it possible there are others you aren't aware of?
I really hope he has some kind of foam pad under that RPi, sitting on top of that metal table.
Huh, weird. I'm going to ask a few friends to see if they can see it, thanks.
Samsung to Pay $2.3M Fine for Deceiving the U.S. Government
Remote Attack Could Damage Your Pebble Smartwatch Easily
I have regularly used this with database that's nearing 1000 megabytes. I don't particularly mind slow snapshotting because my workflow is more about restoring database back to baseline than taking copies.

Please don't use this for production. It is not stable enough and you only end up with lost data.
Tips to Become a Better JavaScript Developer
We need the individual public-domain works to be separated out of the Harvard Classics (or other collections) onto github as individual epub files with unique metadata.

This would simplify discovery of works which are not available elsewhere, as well as discovery of works which have been (re)translated and are available for purchase.

Something like http://openlibrary.com at the level of individual works, assigning unique identifiers to each, since ISBNs were not around back then. Maybe there's already a project or standard within the library community for identifying these works uniquely.
EU-Startups – Limelight on EU startups
I am learning Perl's FP features and really liking it, and teaching myself common lisp. I enjoyed the article quite a lot actually.

I find it is very hard to define functional programming for many people but this is what I have come to explain to people:

Functional programming means thinking in terms of mathematical functions in the f(x) sense. Once you get that basic promise, that for any given input you have a single correct output, then it transforms the whole way you think about and designing your software.

The better I get with lisp, the more everything else changes. I may have to try Racket.
Collaborative Software Development Platforms for Crowdsourcing
Hmm, That's why all of these shared hosting provider works on the same way. Great insight and thanks a lot for replying on this thread.

And the article on digital ocean covering WordPress moving tutorials is great, hope this will work when finally come up with the situation to switch Linode.

Thanks again for valuable comment :)
Advice for Mobile App Developers Turned CEOs
OTOH if you only explain why you add this feature and not how it is done, then
1) the 'magic' sense of the feature may bother developers who likes to know how things work
2) you don't understand the limitations of the feature linked to the implementation.
So both how and why are needed, me I prefer an explanation of 'how works X' before 'why use X', a short 'why' followed by 'how it is implemented' and a more detailed 'why' is best but YMMV..
Any databases that you would recommend for for temporal logic?
Barn raising for products
Without a hint of sarcasm... How about with a doctor instead of random, faceless strangers? How about someone who can actually help?
The i7 can dispatch 4 instructions per cycle. In practice, I find it can realistically execute about 2 per cycle. So at 2GHz, that's closer to 4 billion instructions per second, or ~800M instructions per request as per your calculation.

The slowness of their system can probably be blamed on slow database access, or some kind of initialization cost they're paying for every request (i.e.: calling into a binary like in the old CGI days, initializing the Python VM every time).
> Without the ability to make some sort of estimate you cannot assess whether the work is likely to be worth the investment.

I completely agree. But I'll add that without some notion of risk, the estimate is itself risky. In other words, when building a business plan around software estimates, getting a one number as an estimate (30 days) is a bit crazy. It would be much more useful to attach a range or confidence to the estimate

What happens now is that Project Manager asks Team Lead for an estimate. Team Lead pads the estimate a little and says 40 days. If Project Manager expects a 20% ROI, there's a significant risk that the project will still end up in the red. Or the team ends up crunching like crazy to "catch up", which is basically the same thing since your spending other things (quality, employee health and goodwill, etc.) instead of budget. Whatever the exposure, there is significant risk that is not clear in the business plan, which is a failure of management.

In contrast, maybe Team Lead could give a 50% chance that Project Jabberwocky will be done in 30 days and a 95% chance we'll be done in 120 days.

Wait, Project Manager says, that's a wide range of values to plan around! He's right, but the emotional reaction is due to him being educated about risk, not due to the Team Lead dragging his feet or something.

So what is a Project Manager to do with that estimate? Take the risk into account. Plan around 95% estimates (keeping in mind that 1 in 20 projects will still miss the mark) or make sure the risk is mitigated in other ways: lots of little projects, relatively low cost projects, projects with huge expected ROI, etc.
I didn't see this news in HN, but in Brazil a judge forbidded the app stores to let brazilian users download Secret anymore.

The app is being extensively used to bully people - non-authorized pics of naked people, messages with ofenses and etc. It was covered all over mainstream media and there is a consensus that it was a right decision (in this kind of press I mean).

Edit: here a TechCrunch about it: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/20/brazil-court-issues-injunct...
It was submitted to HN but got no comments or upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8202444
So Go 'system' is the cybernetics/communication one.
Not a very scientific approach. The article starts with a conclusion and then tries to leverage the findings to explain it.
I've worked extensively in government, although not at the Federal level.

That distinction is a double-edged sword. Life in a government bureaucracy is different than in the real world. There is very little distinction in terms of compensation, so leaders measure status by other measures: control, headcount, etc.

If you're trying to affect change, the smart bureaucrats will "support" you, but stand back and do little to help you. (Remember the President has a shelf-life, they just need to delay two years) But when your elite programmers wearing shorts and flip-flops have any kind of issues, they will immediately turn on and marginalize them. It's easy to target "them", because they stick out like sore thumbs.

As a self-contained group working for the ultimate big shot, your air cover is then at risk, because the people surrounding the commissioner/mayor/governor/president will distance their principal from any potential of failure.
So, in typical Hacker News fashion, I'm going to ignore the article and just say that this website is beautiful, and if I could read every news article this way I'd be thrilled.

Sent from my desktop computer.
Android Ecosystem
once severe Data errors happen, one can easily recover from them using a simple Editor.

Unfortunately, in this case, you can't necessarily. One of the issues here is that holding on to handles to multiple collections doesn't do what it seems to, and also doesn't fail. Try running this:

var low = require('lowdb');

var foo = low('foo');
low('bar');

low.on('add', function(collection) {
console.log("this should be foo:", collection);
});

foo.insert({ name: 'foo' });
Ha! Yes. I'm an idiot. And sadly, while I grew up with the Onion and such, this is not the first time in recent history that I fell for something like that.

I don't know if I'm getting older, or the weirdest news is getting too believable.
Yeah. Instead of giving it a reasonable, obvious name they should have gone with something hipstery and vague instead, like UberDcmntor.io.

No thanks. I think this will do just fine.
> In products estimates are used to work out which features provide the most value, in the shortest amount of time.

With products, estimating the value of a feature is even harder than estimating the implementation time/cost. And calculating the future revenue of your product is also harder than calculating the future implementation cost.

You might argue that your product must be finished before you run out of money (which you can calculate with estimates), but MVP's don't rely on estimates that much and you can test your product/market fit at the same time.

In theory, product profitability and selecting features seems highly depend on estimates, but in practice I always saw that gut feeling was good enough, for both features and how long a development will take. You can't drop the must-have features, and nice to haves can be implemented after your first release.
What Steve is referring to is how fonts up until the Mac were monospaced. The Mac included proportional fonts in different sizes.
Landscaping contractors
In that topic I found the following quote to resonate strongly with me:

"I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqzmEtLe8PM
Sorry, monkey photographers, you can’t hold copyright
I heard this one before but they were numbered hogs, greased up and released into the school lobby at around midnight! Good laugh, thanks :D
A refresher on perspective drawing [pdf]
Like I said something fundamentally wrong. With their approach.

Un-Indexed databases, databases far away from front end servers (in terms of network topography), or weird VM things with python.

Something is bad, and if changing languages solved their problems, they are just sweeping an issue under the rug. It'll hit them in the face later, and harder. Be it developer knowledge, or architectural choices. It'll surface again, they'll (hopefully) be large, and the problem will sting harder too.
Places are about parallelism. For concurrency specifically, the most interesting features are threads, channels, and futures and can all be found here: http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/concurrency.html

Distributed places is pretty cool, however!
Look on the bright side; it's good news for the people with the content-creation skills. It isn't as though the ever-increasing complexity of software has had a negative effect on the industry.
Very annoying that it started playing music by itself.