skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fully understand the idea about motivation (and my "let's muddle through"-oriented brain is always tempted by this), but I think it goes both ways:

If it takes short to refactor the program but, because of the lack of safety checks, what seemed to be working "in some limited way" turns out to be a big ball of bug-ridden mud in the end, and maybe the whole approach wasn't sound, wouldn't that also kill motivation for future refactors? And what if keeping the motivation high for the more impulsive programmers leads to worse software?

Doesn't this look like something analogous to the old carpenter's motto: measure twice and cut once? "But I don't want to measure, I want to cut it now, it'll be faster! Measuring kills my motivation!" :)
Stonehenge is a fascinating site, and if you haven't ever visited I encourage you to do so at a time (eg, Solstices, especially winter) or with a tour that allows you to venture inside and between the stones (standard visitors are restricted to a safe distance, which is not nearly as impressive).

I found (and have found, across a lot of physical sciences) incongruity in this piece between some mild slander of past amateur archaeologists without perspective for how primitive our technology will one day look.

To wit: In 1839 ... Captain Beamish dug out an estimated 400 cubic feet of soil...Beamish’s “big hole was probably the final blow for any prehistoric features...that once lay at Stonehenge’s center.”

Followed shortly by modern day expert Vince Gaffney "acknowledging that it will require digging—“the testimony of the spade”—to discover precisely what was there."

Magnetometers would have been an unimaginable possibility to Beamish. I can only assume that at some future point there will be technology unimaginable to Gaffney (and us all) that may render his "testimony of the spade" as cruel to Stonehenge's secrets as those we mock from the past.

This isn't specific to Stonehenge or Gaffney. I think we as humans tend towards a little modern day hubris - "Look at how they used to do things, terrible science, we're so much more protective of things." And then we shovel Stonehenge, slice up the Shroud of Turin[1], and discuss opening a 2,000 year old bottle of wine because that's the only way to find out what's inside [2].

[1] I'm less concerned about this, because it's a fraud.
[2] http://www.thelocal.de/20111209/39405
SD cards are much like SSDs - they are a combination of NAND flash and an embedded controller. Upon power-up, the controller has to initialise by reading the block mapping tables (BMT) from the NAND. This wouldn't be a concern, and it wasn't, in the days of large-geometry/high-endurance flash where the controller would power up and just sit idle waiting for commands after initialisation. Any power interruption would just reset the controller and it'd try again.

However, newer higher-capacity (and smaller process size) flash is far less reliable - endurance and retention are orders of magnitude less, while raw bit error rates are correspondingly higher. MLC makes this even worse, but manufacturers have been masking the problems by using stronger error correction. This strategy mostly works, but combined with another characteristic of dense NAND flash -read disturb - makes for memory devices that are far more fragile and sensitive to power interruptions than before. Read disturb means that repetitive reading of the same blocks in flash has a writing effect to adjacent bits to the ones being read, so even read operations are somewhat destructive. What this means is that the block management controller may have to perform a copy (i.e. a write) and erase after a certain number of reads. Furthermore, blocks which have been idle for a long time also need to have their contents periodically refreshed, since the data slowly fades away as the electrons leak out.

All these characteristics together mean that at any one time, even if the SD card is "idle" or only being read, block erase/program operations maybe occurring internally. If a power interruption happens, then depending on what was being written at the time, anything from silent data corruption (if the block was storing user data) to a complete failure of the card (if the block was part of the BMT or other management data) can occur.

Most applications of SD cards don't often cut power abruptly, which is why this problem doesn't occur. The RPi is an exception. If you want to reduce this problem as much as possible, my recommendation is to use older, low-capacity SD cards, which may contain large-geometry SLC flash. This is not going to cheap (per capacity), but will be cheaper than new "industrial grade" cards (which may actually be worse). I've had good luck with cards from relatively unknown Chinese/Taiwanese OEMs - many of them explicitly specify "100K program/erase cycles", something that the "consumer" brands don't even mention.
Wittgenstein turns over in his grave every time someone makes that comment. It's not correct. Unless the system you're talking about is an axiomatically consistent superset of Robinson Arithmetic, GFIT doesn't apply.
A new app that I have just released. It allows users to communicate with others around them, or by traveling to a new location and participating there. You can think of it as a live Yik Yak app.

It could be used to get help with travel plans, give shout outs, or share funny/embarrassing things going on in your community.

In a way, it acts like a real life version of a public chat in an MMORPG.

Would appreciate any feedback!
"What if we only build half of it? Then they'll spend decades scouring the country-side looking for the rest!"

"Dave - you're a genius."
The Slideshow language in the Racket ecosystem: http://docs.racket-lang.org/slideshow/index.html

One of the authors is Matthew Flatt, and he wrote it despite knowing LaTeX well.
Great to have these, but if you're interested in a classic, five minutes' research will save you a lot of pain. The wrong translation can put you off a book or author for life, and a bad edit, abridgement, or lack of notes can render a work incomprehensible or weak.

Just take a second to look up whether there are any modern translations that might be up your alley, or whether you prefer accuracy over readability, or what have you.
One to add to the reading list:

Ordinary People As Monks & Mystics: Lifestyles for Spiritual Wholeness by Marsha Sinetar
http://books.google.com/books?id=hxzvdKqddzQC&printsec=front...
> It's becoming standard practice

Its been a common practice for, I think, about half a century. Its certainly not "becoming a standard practice" now.
Unbabel (YC W14) – Sales and Marketing – First hire in SF
Hundreds of millions of people rely on Tor? That's at a minimum like 10% of the internet.
They do. Because they can operate in much thinner air.
The current XKCD is very relevant: http://xkcd.com/1410/
I've recently spend a few weeks in a region without light pollution and mostly clear night sky. An experience I probably share with every six year old kid which lived some thousands years ago. Even if I put all math I've learned aside it was clear the sky rotates. The band of stars we call Milky Way took same place every night. I can imagine after a few month the moon's behavior appears obvious and after a few years seasons, the sun and constellations start to match too. Perhaps people recognizing this pattern told it every next generation because this is powerful knowledge. It doesn't need much to accidentally find geographic features indicating the longest or shortest day. The moment someone artificially build such a monument he gained the power of prediction - the stars followed his words, provable every night and day.

I wish every kid had the opportunity to spend a night awake and follow with open eyes our home galaxy moving over the night sky. After a week they can name the planets.
Exactly. He just made a claim that can't be disproved, in fact won't even be denied, but which he also doesn't need to present any evidence for.
My wife and I recently purchased this entire set, excepting books 1 and 5, at our local library book sale. We are now looking for the missing volumes, so if anyone happens to have them laying around, and would like them to go to a good home, get in touch :)
To be clear, I don't think there's any value whatsoever in trying.

There's zero scientific evidence I've seen that supports a claim that iodine has antiviral properties. It's germicidal properties are because it's an oxidizer - the presence of organic matter (the contents of the stomach, not to mention the stomach itself) would quickly render it ineffective at that.

Lots of people are advocating colloidal silver to treat Ebola virus disease right now. Other claimed cures are drinking saltwater, strong tea and coffee mixtures, and kola nuts. These people are also misinformed.

EDIT: Because I don't think the above comment carries the tenor of what I'm looking for...

The response I predict from you is along the lines of "well, with all the human misery, why aren't we trying (...)". It's a common statement with this outbreak.

Here's why we aren't: there are significant ethical quandaries involving giving an undereducated, desperate population experimental drugs that we think might work (ZMapp, TKM-Ebola). The population as it stands is extremely mistrusting of the intentions of aid workers, as evidenced by beliefs that range from "Ebola doesn't exist" to "They're taking you there to kill you!" Some MSF EVD treatment facilities have started showing the bodies of deceased victims to their relatives to prove there isn't an organ harvesting conspiracy occurring.

The absolute worst thing you could do in the middle of a public health disaster is to advocate treatments that make no sense whatsoever. This will accomplish nothing but spreading further distrust of the local and foreign aid groups that are almost overwhelmed as it is.
On Jet Blue (ESE)? It wouldn't be the first, RavenDB http://ravendb.net is based on ESE.

I remember awhle back doing work on a system that (ab)used MS Exchange Server 5 as a database, mostly because of the Outlook integration.
Unlike those other professions, technical people have power over information. This makes them universally feared by just about anyone who has something to hide.
I think showing a small benchmark like that somewhat indicates the target use case. I would just guess, it's something to use for single-user apps. Perhaps storing user preferences or something. Most likely an app that is storing data locally.

I think it's fairly safe to assume that this isn't going to be a wise choice for a server back-end.
GifMojo
We changed the linkbaity title to a sentence from the article that seems to describe what it's about.
1. Beware multiple tests: agreed. We could apply corrections (e.g., Bonferroni-like), but don't underestimate the logistical complication of this. Before a month starts, we don't even know how many experiments will be run (although we could try to predict). A different way to address this problem: use other information. Do the results make sense (good)? Is there corroboratory evidence (good)? Are there crazy outliers or things that smell funny (bad)? Of course the experimenter often has a bias (it worked!). Can they convince others? etc.

2. To compute statistical power, you need an estimate of effect size. For many experiments, we don't know; we could run pilots, but in the naive case that doubles the number of experiments to run, and time to wait. By default, we recommend a sample size that will detect a certain effect size (but not smaller ones). That is, we decide we are not interested in small effects, because it makes our life simpler.
Taking the Temperature of Java App Security
THIS THING IS A BEAST!!
It is absolutely bad ass
I always wondered in this situation:

var topFiveSongs = low('songs')
.where({published: true})
.sortBy('views')
.first(5)
.value();

If any db engines figure when the dataset is really large and the limit is really small (no idea what the cutoff would be), if instead of sorting and giving the first five, it instead just looks for the 5 largest/smallest. Anyone have any idea on this?
No a damaging earth quake will just make prices rise even more because of further supply reduction. Is Google going to move it's HQ because of an earthquake?
visuaLOG – Visualise your website access logs using an iPad app
But it's not especially in keeping with Radical Self-Reliance or Participation.
I can definitely see both arguments. I think that they both have merits, and it's just a difference of opinion. :)
With a name like "National Security Agency," you'd think that filing bugs would be part their official duties in securing the nation.
I'm not from here but the nonchalance most native Californians have about the drought is quite alarming. "We're always in a drought" they say. Anyone who's read just a little bit of California history will find that to be somewhat true.

However, the current drought situation is the absolute worst it's ever been though and there really seems to be no fix for it.

Its very much a "kick the can down the road" mentality in California about the drought. It reminds me of the pension crisis in my home state of Illinois.
They did that. He was fired, and now there's a new CEO.
MAL – Mac Address Lookup by Mac Address and Vendor
> Nope. Naive approach is: for every byte of the modified file, compare against every position in the source file and find the longest match. If less than the cost of encoding the pointer+length pair, then add it to a queue of raw bytes to write. Flush the queue whenever you find a long enough match. That is of course O(n×m), which is easier to just say O(n^2).
>
> Tried exploring string-search algorithms like Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore; tried keeping a tree list of 16-bit matches (which in fully randomized data reduces search overhead to O(n×m/{between log2(65536) and 65536}) ... but in a file of nothing but null bytes slightly hurts performance), tried skipping by S bytes per compare and then backtracking when long enough matches are found (hurts patch size efficiency as N goes up, but reduces overhead by O(n×m/S), and so on.

A helpful idea is first to consider what you consider as the "correct" alignment. Often the Levenshtein distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance) is used and an alignment is considered as proper if the number of necessary steps (insertion/deletion/replacement of 1 character) equals to the Levenshtein distance. Obviously this does not necessary define a unique alignment (consider "a" - "aa" or "ab" - "ba").

An idea that I find interesting to consider is whether you could construct a o(m * n) (i. e. asymptotically faster than O(m * n)) algorithm that computes k elementary operations (insertion/deletion/replacement of 1 character) that convert the first string s into the second string s' such that there exists a fixed constant 1 < C with

k <= C * d(s, s'),

where d(s, s') is the Levenshtein distance between s and s'. How small can you get C? I really don't know the answer (I haven't even thought much about it), but perhaps this idea is helpful to you?
Getting to News Feed Zero: What happens when you hide everything on Facebook?
Born and raised here. It's bad. We know it's bad. But like you said we can't do anything about it. Articles like this help though spread awareness of global warming.
"some have speculated that the Jews adopted this after their exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C."

Citation needed. The Torah would clearly put the 7 day week as one of the earliest doctrines, far before the Babylonian exile.
I liked everything about it until I saw the API for the Python client. What a catastrophe.

I pray Microsoft is looking for Python developers: https://gist.github.com/whalesalad/2142f0075c6896f4547c
This is what an index is for on a SQL database. You declare an index on 'published' and and index on 'views' and the engine can now optimize selection of the records you requested. Without those indices, the engine must necessarily scan every row of the table at least once.

Yes, there are analyzers with the smarts to recognize that indices on particular fields would have helped a given query, but even if the engine's going to auto-create those for you, it then has to scan every row in the table to create the index that first time.
So much of the value of going to a place like Stanford or Caltech or Harvard, etc. is in the people you will interact with. In an online program, that value is probably completely lost. Given that, I just don't see why someone would choose this over a much more cost-effective program. While a "top tier" university does look nice on the resume, I don't believe it is mandatory, anymore. If you're competent and work hard, you can build a reputation in Open Source software that will get you a job at most places, including the really sought after places (I've gotten two recruitment letters from Google, and a handful from other places), regardless of where your degree is from.

Of course, if you're competent and work hard, you can probably build your own job from scratch in any number of software and technology fields.
Oh, I completely agree. I have a project on Sourceforge that I've moved (recently) to Github.
FBPurity [1] can literally remove the feed, it's been wonderful. My FB has been reduced to just private groups and private-messaging (no chat).

[1] http://www.fbpurity.com/
You need a massive multi-stage rocket that is 90% fuel (+ reactant etc.) by mass to get a couple of tons of satellite into orbit 160km up; yet a fraction of that fuel mass can take a plane and hundreds of passengers thousands of kilometres at a stretch, but only 1 or 2km high.

In other words, going up is hard.
I don't know. If you want to pay-to-play, it's not a terrible deal, especially considering that it can be just one year and you don't need to leave your job to do it. Opportunity cost is the largest outlay when it comes to masters and doctoral degrees, and this format essentially eliminates that. But yes, networking beyond your cohort would be difficult. It would be really nice if they had a good placement program, but I can't speak to that.

The real kicker here though is that these classes aren't open to other Berkeley students. There are general equivalents in the Stats department, in CS, and in the iSchool, but not tailored to generalists looking to add some kind of "Data Science" specialization. The curriculum is really walled off from the rest of the students, which is annoying because I want to take some of these classes.

Anyway, I think the real question here is how much opportunity cost you can avoid in the online format and the placement/salary you should expect coming out of it.
Federal Court Shuts Down Aereo’s Attempt at a Comeback
Yeah it's a consideration, but the mere use of an existing old wive's tale doesn't completely discount the possibility of there being some truth to it anyway...
This comment was the icing on the article. Thank you.
How I hacked my home
The lead researcher, quoted in TFA:

"The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting, but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly.

"Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life."
MAST: Obfuscation during compilation with LVVM
Since it is a drought, there is literally no "fix" for it, and California has been responding per their plan to the length of it. You need only drive down the central valley (I-5) and see the thousands of acres of farmland reverting to desert.

The next step is mandatory rationing of drinking water. At some point one might consider the option of building an aqueduct to connect the Missouri river to the west coast, or at least to headwaters of the Colorado.

Since we cannot manipulate the weather, or the ocean currents, we're unable to 'fix' the root cause. When mandatory rationing hits, people will gripe more loudly. When importing water in trucks from Oregon becomes profitable people will really grumble.
Software estimation considered harmful? (2011)
Honestly I've always thought this would be a bigger use of VR.

I mean, I would totally pay to get HD 3D surround video of say, someone wingsuit flying.
"The state also provides grants of as much as 500 euros ($670) a month plus meal support and loans of as much as 400 euros a month. While education is a safe haven for students, the economy suffers when they put off joining the job market and don’t have skills the labor market needs, said Hannu Kaseva, an economist at ETLA research institute in Helsinki."

The first part sounds like classic labour market whining about having to compete for employees. Improve your working conditions and compensation and individuals will choose your organization instead of education. If organizations require a particular skill, why do they not develop it themselves, why should the individual take the risk for their benefit?

I too reside in a jurisdiction that fails to train a sufficient number of its own health care workers, a problem that the Finns have. I suspect the Finnish schools are full, as are ours, they and we just failed to create enough seats.

I consider not having to work to survive to be a pinnacle of humanity. Health care is already free of charge in most of the modern world without having to prove one's worth to anyone, why not extend that to food/water/shelter/tertiary education?
I used to (and still might) get spam from this university, so they seem a bit sketchy...
I would gladly move to 10 hour days for four days. Hell I'd do 12 hours for 3 days
Having worked as a developer for several large retailers I have inevitably pondered whether a public API would be of any value to either the developer community or the business itself. The Gallery[1] offers a small number of use cases but I still have trouble grasping how upper management, as forward thinking as they may be, would see any ROI for the time and effort required to establish and maintain such a large, brittle piece of software. Not to mention the risks of potentially providing tools for competitive advantage to others in the electronics space (however few there may be nowadays) or a security slip of some kind.

At any rate, kudos to the team for trying to move the industry forward.

[1] https://developer.bestbuy.com/gallery
Ask HN: Is my argument for the existence of free will correct?
The argument is that subjective experience would not have evolved without free will.

If there's no free will, then an animal with subjective experience would not have an evolutionary benefit over one without it.

P.S. I'm assuming that subjective experience exists for at least one animal, which is true, since it exists for at least me from my perspective and for at least you from your perspective.

For a definition of "subjective experience" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Great suggestion, please vote here to make it a reality: http://feedback.azure.com/forums/263030-documentdb/suggestio...
I tend to avoid pub trivia nights since they tend to focus too much on pop culture, which is one of my weak areas of trivia knowledge. This, on the other hand, sounds right up my alley. Too bad it's invite-only.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (all 3 volumes)
Look at it as the funding of 3rd party R&D in a non-zero-sum-game.
We Blasted Past the 20k Mark, not a sexy movie OR a bowl of potato salad
He can't attribute the bugfixes, but he can obviously identify which ones they are. He's made an extraordinary claim. Let's see some data. I'd sure like to know which Tor bugs he thinks NSA leaked him.
I really hope you're just starting out because this was the first app kids at our uni built when they were 18...this idea has been engineered to death...heck you could probably find 5 of these projects on github...