skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The story I heard, and I don't care enough to even go looking for a link, was that some executive's wife couldn't make a phone call while on their yacht and thus the idea of Iridium was born.

Whether or not that is true (and I would guess it's either not, or heavily exaggerated), either your story or mine does seem to drive home the misplaced optimism of the Iridium investors.

Speaking for myself, when I'm touring the US on a motorcycle I can make do with some lack of cell coverage. If I really cared that much, and needed emergency communication, I'd bring a handheld amateur radio with which I can just about always hit a repeater when a cell phone has no signal. If I were to absolutely, positively have to have some means of emergency comms, I'd go buy a SPOT for a lot less than Iridium. And if Iridium ever had a chance to at least be viable, SPOT seems to have put a nail in that coffin.

So the market we're left with is folks that have a need to vocally chatter to someone else no matter the circumstances. There are only so many war zone reporters and mountain climbers to go around, though.
Stop the Spies – Australian Campign Against Mass Surveillance
Grafana, Open Source Metrics Dashboard
This article is unreadable on mobile. Anyone getting it working?
except when you need uniq -c
Right, and I'd probably spring for the $5/mo if I just got a more open ended chance to test it. I have ran into the most trouble setting up linux as a new OS and with Virtualbox. I've gotten both installed and then tripped up on getting sandstorm to execute properly. It's a tad frustrating but I have no experience to fall back on and sandstorm hasn't been around long enough to have tons of problems posted w/ fixes online.
Besides what others have mentioned, it's worth noting that at this point is almost impossible to hand pick most of your loans. They get dumped onto the market at set times, and most of the "good" looking low grade loans are snapped up almost immediately, so it can be difficult to build a portfolio with exposure to those grades.

What I ultimately ended up doing, and maybe this was their goal, is just to sign-up with their auto-invest system. They lowered the minimum down to something small like $5000, and you can twiddle a few pretty coarse knobs to say what kind of risk exposure you want. At that point it's completely hands-off for me, and I just track the progress - every time I accrue $25 worth of cash from the existing investments, they buy another note on my behalf.

I'd definitely be careful how much cash you throw at this, I thought it'd be an interesting experiment and my portfolio has done fine, but it's hard to quantify the risks. If the economy tanks, how much will the default rate increase? Also as others have mentioned, the secondary market for these notes is really poor - you'd take a huge loss to liquidate your position.
>Currently, the biggest threat to our approach is likely some kind of rapidly switching FPGA.

Finally, a project for my area of focus. Man that would be fun.
The D programming language introduced transitive immutable types in 2007 with version 2.000.

https://dlang.org/changelog.html
They've refunded the additional legroom extra cost. They haven't come close to refunding the difference in value between the seat I paid for and the travel experience I had.
"Undefined behavior" affects the entire output of the compilation - it allows the compiler to change anything, anywhere (dropping overflow checks on the assumption that overflow can't happen is perfectly legal, for example).

An "unspecified value"/"undefined value" seems to mean that the associated operation can return anything it wants, but can't affect adjacent code.
Heh. A while back it looked like Nokia's market cap was on a trend to dip below that of Nokian Tyres, but it seems to have turned around now.
One could waste one's entire life trying to correct rubbish attempts at physics on the internet, especially when it's full of non-sequiturs like the video. But as a start, the description of quantum mechanics is nonsense and I'm guessing the narrator got their understanding of it by reading popsci books (I'm trying to avoid a personal attack on the author, but it's hard when they've said a lot of wrong things so very confidently). The dimensionality of a typical QM Hilbert space is infinite, not five. People get wound up wondering what the N^th dimension is, when all dimensionality is, somewhat simplified, is how many numbers you need to describe the position of something.

The top comment on this stack exchange thread has more: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55824/is-imaginin...
Peter Watts's “Echopraxia”: Ferociously Intellectual Pulp Writing
I really dislike his notion of using the commit logs as the correct place to explain your code. First, it means that any time I need to find out why something is being done in code I need to leave the code and switch from my IDE to my source control. Second, most tools like blame will only show the most recent change. Minor fixes and changes happen all the time. What are the odds that the explanation I want will come up instead of something like "Fixed a typo". Third, what about code from other branches and external code drops?I may be using code from somewhere else and not have access to the full history of changes, just stable versions. Fourth, what happens when you change source control? If all of the comments are in the Git commit logs that'll be a big problem if the company switches to Perforce.

Instead of just making meaningful commit logs part of the code review process why not make "reading the comments" part of the code review process?
How Netflix came to pay Comcast for Internet traffic
I think FizzBuzz is so popular that if you even needed me to describe the question, I'd be a little confused. I don't think I know any programmers with more than a year or two of experience/schooling that have never seen FizzBuzz before.

Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't think poorly of someone or of their programming skills because of that. But not knowing about FizzBuzz is like not knowing the name of the current president. Have you been living under a rock for the past 5 years? It seems to be mentioned at least once a week on any sort of newsfeed, forum or blog related to programming.
If that's what it really means then a perfectly good way to say it is: "To test your understanding, make sure you can do this exercise before continuing."

I suspect many mathematicians like being intimidating.
> citing "undefined behavior", compiler writers will gleefully do all kinds of goofy shit and, if confronted by developers who actually program for a living,

Do you imagine that compilers are created by lawyers or something?
Movies from the net, popular music: what my friends recommend + a collection I built up over a lifetime of buying CDs and LPs, news: nu.nl (no ads there with adblock+ghostery+some tweaks), don't play video games and I don't know what other cultural expressions that promote materialism would be, specifics would help here. Product placement in movies is hard to avoid but super easy to spot, I make a point of not buying anything advertised in that way if I come across it.
I also mentioned Canada (or any other country really) as a possibility. There is already precedent for a US version vs international versions of phones, with the US versions usually being customized by the carrier, and the international version being unlocked and more vanilla. My wife's Samsung Note is a good example, rather than getting the T-Mobile one, we got an unlocked one from Amazon without all of the carrier bloat.
This being hacker news, I can't help but wonder about the implications for quantum computing. Maybe this is already an answered question, but can one read a Q-bit without interaction that might break it's entanglement?
I'd like to see a company like Samsung say "okay, we won't sell our phones in California."

In an increasingly integrated world I think it's bad that a single state has the power to change an industry impacting people who are not its citizens. New York State pulls the same sort of thing too.
Google will collect $1.3M from patent troll that sued its customers
Pfft, a trillion miles is roughly a 1/5 a lightyear. If it only sucks for a trillion miles, that's not so bad. Our home galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across. And there are hundreds of billions more of them.
Its like saying the movie sucks because the guy sitting in front of you is too tall.
(Too late to edit this, but Thomas clarified that the team is from Toronto but based in Menlo Park)
Just saw this on my account, awesome!
I don't really see what's to be accomplished by most of the points of this. A program that invokes undefined behaviour isn't just invalid; it's almost certainly _wrong_. Shifting common mistakes from undefined behaviour to unspecified behaviour just makes such programs less likely to blow up spectacularly. That doesn't make them correct; it makes it harder to notice that they're incorrect.

Granted, not everything listed stops at unspecified behaviour. I'm not convinced that that's a good thing, though. Even something like giving signed integer overflow unsigned semantics is pretty effectively useless. Sure, you can reasonably rely on twos-complement representation, but that doesn't change the fact that you can't represent the number six billion in a thirty-two bit integer, and it doesn't make 32-bit code that happens to depend on the arithmetic properties of the number six billion correct just because the result of multiplying two billion by three is well-defined.

Then there's portability. Strict aliasing is a good example of this. Sure, you can access an "int" aligned however you like on x86. It'll be slow, but it'll work. On MIPS, though? Well, the compiler could generate code to automate the scatter-gather process of accessing unaligned memory locations. This is C, though. It's supposed to be close to the metal; it's supposed to force-- I mean, let you do everything yourself, without hiding complexity from the programmer. How far should the language semantics be stretched to compensate for programmers' implicit, flawed mental model of the machine, and at what point do we realize that we already have much better tools for that level of abstraction?
Most programmers already write C like it is "friendly-C".
Forgive the long post - I still am missing some clarity.

1. Holier than thou / positive thinking

This just irks me : "I breast feed, therefore I am better than you" is the short hand I can give. It smacks of the same rather arrogant and unforgiving Oprah-style idea that you can have good things happen to you by positive thinking (as opposed to selection bias) and therefore if bad things happen to you it's your fault for not being positive enough. It is closely linked to the faulty thinking that leads people to turn off their mobile charger before getting on an airplane.

2. Bacteria is not a grey goo

The theory seems to be we have destroyed our bacterial ecosystems and this will have some effect. - it seems a very likely and good theory. Except that instead of making the leap to "1/3 of us have wiped out bacteria X, or bacterial group Y" we leap to "good Bacteria and bad bacteria" and we should somehow replace it with other peoples fecal matter.

I will go with Tokenadult on this - or perhaps one step further. My conjecture is one set of bacteria is responsible for the allegen protection (probably one set per allergen) and that may well have a genetic jigsaw component to match. This is a wildly complicated picture to assemble and will be quite provable. Add in the next most likely cause - some hitherto unnoticed poison we are throwin around like fire retardants, and there is a lot of research to be done.

3. The causes don't seem to match the sufferers

Obese != allergic. Sedentary != allergic. At least use tobacco smoking and lung cancer correlation rates as our gold standard here. Maybe we do (I am lacking the google-fu to find it) but I will be amazed if every obese sedentary Caesarian born anti-biotic taking person is allergic to pollen - in fact I would bet there is a large and worthwhile study to be done for those that aren't.

4. The comparisons are apples to oranges - I think.

I was struck by the 1/3 of us westerners and 1/1500 of those hunter gathers statistic. That's an enormous gulf - how did they test these hunter gathers for asthma? Did they ask their GPs? Apart from glimmers of point number 1 (noble savages) I am amazed at the vast spread there. As those people and their children start to get eaten By the modern world perhaps we could take samples ...

But overall I worry that we blame our "lifestyle" as if we forgot to unplug the mobile charger, and use it as a chance to demonise those who do not meet our cultural standards, and idolise those who would rather swap asthma for our maternity care.
6% returns in a ZIRP environment are actually quite fantastic. Even junk bonds yield less than that.
You're just reinforcing the parent's point. Take this sentence:

> <PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE> is not without it's shortcomings and hidden pitfalls. After all, there is a reason that any style guide for <PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE> will include a large list of features that should not be used.

This holds true of pretty much any language. Take a look at Google's extensive style guide library [1]; they all contain language features that should be avoided for any language. It all just reflects the iterative nature of programming language design.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/
San Diego Hacker News Meetup 54 This Friday (7/25)
Stupid "free market" ideologues. Edward Lampert is another one, doing the same thing and killing Sears.
What is OPC-UA?
What if women weren't allowed in the Freemasons?
That's partly an exception that proves the rule and partly not a typical case. Uniquely, OSs get to reserve names for themselves (like time, syscall, reboot, etc.). Third-party libraries and other code have to do funny prefixing to avoid name collisions. OSs also have relatively few source code dependencies and, when they do, they get to dictate them.

There are other reasons that C doesn't scale well to large software systems. For example, C's relatively limited compile-time error checking, which leads to using conventions (especially naming conventions) to enforce good practices where tools and good typing would do the job better.
I think you're on the right track when you ask people to prove you wrong. If you offer a bug bounty, someone will pentest your product and you'll be quickly debunked. People are so negative because 1. This is HN, they're always negative, and 2. Because your claims are REALLY incredible if true, and you've offered little to no proof outside of "try it and see". If someone said, this computer program lets you go back in time, just try it and see, I wouldn't bother trying it. I'd say prove it.
Your anecdote is not data. There will always be exceptions or as Houshalter points out factors that are easy to overlook.
"The block time is decreased from 60 seconds to 12 seconds"

Now this, I like. I went to a ethereum meeting in Toronto a few months back, and the block time was the only question I had for the speaker. Reducing the block time to something reasonably quick will allow for usable user applications.
Show HN: Personal email to fax service in 5 minutes
Banks don't really care about these types of loans. They do their unsecured individual lending through credit cards. At the retail level they are more concerned with mortgages, HELOC, high net worth individuals, and collateralized business lending.
thanks. i clearly need to brush up on my designer domain names.
There's negativity because you're making some pretty incredible claims, and you need to back them up with more than just "well you haven't tested it yet". If you're claiming that you can prevent government actors like the NSA from accessing the webcam and microphone without knowing the password, then you're in possession of some pretty serious crypto and you should be willing to talk about it. Tell people what you've done and why it works, instead of asking them to break it before they judge it.
Optimizely has very reasonable pricing also
https://www.optimizely.com/pricing
Ask HN: How many daily users/visitors are on Hacker News
How can you estimate such numbers in case you don't have such information available?
IANAL (I just read all of Groklaw as it ran), but: estoppel. If you make big loud public noise saying you won't sue, then people take you at your word, then you sue ... you probably won't do better than "desist", and you may lose entirely.
This is one of those situations where the legal pananoia clips back on itself. Clearly this is not a contract and wouldn't expect to be enforced as one. So the conservative assumption has to be that it carries "little" weight and that Google might change its mind.

Nonetheless, if you imagine the flip side, the legal advice flips too. If you have a company whose employees made a statement to a partner about their intent not to enforce IP rights, you certainly would expect that to be an important bit of evidence in any subsequent trial. It's routine in big companies for employees working with partners and customers to be warned by their legal departments not to make statements like this becuase of the risk involved.

In the real world: I think we have to take this for what it is. It's just a promise, apparently in good faith. Short of legal action by our governments, there aren't any permanent solutions to this problem. This is as good as we're going to get.
Yes, you can make me think about pink elephants (though I'm not convinced you can make me associate them with a warm fuzzy feeling). But you can't change my values or my memories by writing me a paragraph like that. You could if you kidnapped and brainwashed me, but that's also something I plan to avoid. It is precisely because my mind is vulnerable and malleable that I want to limit other people's write access to it.

My house has windows, and you can see in, and you can put up a poster outside my window and I might see and read it and think about something. That's not the same as letting you walk into my house and touch me (or remote control my toilets or whatever).
This is not evidence that your diet had anything to do with it. Correlation is not causation. It could have been the end of the allergy season, you may have cleaned your house or replaced something you were allergic to. It could have been a whole host of other things.
Does it support playing youtube videos like reddit does?
Paper describes development and refinement of detection of thatched versus metal roofs in an area of interest from satellite photography.

The use of this data to target communities for foreign aid is touched on in passing.
The importance of the money isn't just determined by how large of an amount it is compared to Amazon's budget.
Shell scripts can be pretty powerful if you know what you're doing, but I do agree that sometimes the shell script paradigm can be more of a hurdle than a help.

However your point about every command being a callable as a C library is kind of possible already. Some commands do have native language libraries (eg libcurl), but you could also fork out to those ELFs if you're feeling really brave (though in all practicality - it's little worse than writing a shell script to begin with). In fact there's times I've been known to cheat with Perl and run (for example):

(my $hostname = `hostname`) =~ s/\n//g;

because it's quicker and easier to throw together than using the proper Perl libraries (yeah, it's pretty nasty from an academic perspective, but the additional footprint is minimal while the development time saved is significant.

Of course, any such code that's used regularly and/or depended on will be cleaned up as and when I have the time.

As for your XML or JSON parsing; the same theory as above could be applied:

use JSON::Parse 'parse_json';
my $json = `curl --silent http://birthdays.com/myfriends.json`;
my $bdays = parse_json($json);
print "derekp7's birthday is $bdays{derekp7}";

Obviously these aren't best practices, but if it only running locally (ie this isn't part of a CGI (etc) script that's web accessible) and gets the job done in a hurry then I can't see why I you shouldn't use that for ad hoc reporting.
Can anyone offer an explanation as to how this product just became the biggest Kickstarter ever? In no way was that a dig at the product -- props to them for their success -- I'm just having a hard time comprehending how a coolbox has exceeded every other project on Kickstarter.

Is it an American thing?
Potential Therapeutic Effects of THC on Alzheimer's Disease
Looks like a neat game, but I'm skeptical how it would work in reality. For example, it looks like the 4th dimension (time) gets frozen (for the observer) when you want to traverse it. That means, the second you 'travel in time,' the Earth, at its current velocity, would already be 30km away.
Would something like an Oculus Rift VR help reduce the number of projections from being "4D->2D" to be "4D->3D"?
This exact problem exists today if someone takes code from the Linux kernel that is compiled with things like -fno-strict-aliasing. Undefined Behaviour makes programs unpredictable in the first place, given that you can't reasonably ensure you're not triggering it. I would expect a lot more people to use friendly-c (or simple-c or yes-this-is-how-your-cpu-works-c) than standard c.

As he notes, people who need the undefined behaviour-induced optimisations are in the minority.
My first guess is that, in a perfect world, you would reduce the internal competition accordingly as the external competition grows.

When you are the only one making phones, internal struggle is good; when you are one of many, internal struggle makes you vulnerable.
Are you in touch with your inner drive?
This is absolutely true. I've had attacks that have landed me in intensive care for days, yet my lung function is great otherwise.

edit: took Flo-Jo out because of bad memory. It's actually her cousin and equally successful athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

-----

“I was always told as a young girl that if you had asthma there was no way you could run, jump, or do the things I was doing athletically. So, I just knew it was impossible for me to have it. It took me a while to accept that I was asthmatic. It took me a while to even start taking my medication properly, to do the things that the doctor was asking me to do. I just didn’t want to believe that I was an asthmatic.

“But once I stopped living in denial, I got my asthma under control, and I realized that it is a disease that can be controlled. But there were things I had to do to get it under control.”

In 1984, Joyner-Kersee won the Olympic Silver Medal in the 7-event Heptathlon. In 1986, she was the first American woman to set a world record in a multi-event competition. In 1987, she was voted the Associated Press Athlete of the Year. In 1988, she won two Olympic Gold Medals. And in 1992, she won Olympic Gold and Bronze medals. Sports Illustrated voted Joyner-Kersee “The Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th Century.”

“The most important thing is to be able to run, jump, and get up in the morning and see my family and do different things,” she says. “And to do that, I have to take my medicines regularly. This disease can be controlled.”

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/fall11/ar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Joyner-Kersee
... or did the rest of the universe move 30km the other way? :)
Mumsnet? Pinterest? There are already women-only social networks, but as far as I know, no men-only.
Of course furniture is an absurd example, but I do know of smokers who loaded up on cigarette lighters from other countries with no safety after law was passed in the US requiring safety switches.
We did it because we were curious about it, do we need more reason than that? Funded the work ourselves too.