skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ansible is my choice too, but here's the things that trip me up or could be improved. Apologies in advance for not raising them in the proper manner. (mailing list, issue list)

The inventory docs is a single page. Specifying a directory or a host file as an inventory seem to work but it's quite unclear how the two differ in behaviour. One problem with specifying a directory is that everything in the directory is interpreted; I had a README.md in there which resulted in baffling errors.

Dynamic inventory is also way under documented; a brief intro then two giant examples (ec2 and cobbler). It needs a tiny 'hello world'-ish example. My first attempt produced output in 'ini' format'. It was almost by accident that I tried json and happened across something that worked.

But error reporting is the worst. So often ansible will produce error messages like 'please specify an inventory' when you did specify an inventory. The problem is that you misspelled the inventory file or it couldn't be read. No mention of the file's name or whether even any attempt to read it is made.

(tangentially - This latter problem seems to be endemic to Python and Java and perhaps most languages that have exceptions)
Can someone point to a good Calibre tutorial?

My use-case: I download material in various formats from online, mostly in PDF, ePub, or some markup format (LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, etc.) I've got a large set of downloads, which I then try to import into Calibre. This is in support of a large research project.

1. It's difficult to tell what I've imported and what I haven't.

2. The import process itself is slow. Enough so that I'll fire it up, get caught up in other stuff, and ... well, tend not to get back to it.

3. The corpus is fairly large: around 1000 books and papers, plus another 5,000 others pulled from web archives.

4. Tracking this by metadata is crucial. Title, author, publication date, and tags. Managing _that_ is a headache on its own, especially adding metadata to works / confirming automatically extracted content is accurate.

5. Once I've got the information organized, reading, referencing, annotating, and other tasks should be supported.

Again: calibre is about the only tool out there I'm familiar with, but it's a pain. Zotero and various LaTeX bibliographic tools are also of some use.
I read somewhere once that it's not actually true that special relativity permits time travel into the future. Such time travel would require leaving Earth, accelerating to a relativistic velocity, travelling some distance, then accelerating back toward Earth, again reaching a relativistic velocity, then finally accelerating to match Earth's velocity and position, and landing.

The argument was that although it's true that your time will pass more slowly than time on Earth while you're coasting, you also clearly have to do a lot of accelerating, and acceleration itself also has an effect on the apparent passage of time in your reference frame -- and in this scenario, where you start and end in Earth's reference frame, that effect cancels out the effect of velocity (perhaps even more than cancels it out; I don't recall).

Does anyone here know if this is true?
Stream Processing with a Spreadsheet
Many people chose CoffeeScript, RubyMotion, and so on, because they address very real problems in the existing toolchain.

With RubyMotion, you gain the ability to work from the command line.

Cupertino (https://github.com/nomad/cupertino) gives you a chunk of that for pure Objective C, but with RubyMotion, I can build an app and deploy it to my iPhone without having to touch Xcode.[1]

Thats a big bonus in my book. I've got a great toolchain on the command line, and don't much care to have to change nearly every aspect of my working environment because Apple wants everybody to use their all-singing, all-dancing tool.

Being able to reuse a bunch of business logic across mobile and web is also a plus.

[1] If anybody wants to share resources on doing this in pure ObjC, I'm very interested.
For instance: speech recognition in android with unprecedented word error rate and facebook face recognition with human-like performance, and other language processing applications as sentiment analysis.
I would be curious to see your source on that, beyond Eurocentric racism.
It blows my mind that XBMC is still being developed, let alone relatively popular on several platforms. I used it pretty extensively on a modchipped Xbox ~10 years ago as my first real "streaming" box (i.e. to play pirated movies from my computer on my TV). Strange that they didn't drop the 'XB' from their moniker earlier.
There seems to be two bits of water involved, as you probably realize. One bit, several gallons, is sitting in a saggy plastic sheet, whose bulge forms a lens. You ask a good question, could one float a skin of oil on that to keep it from evaporating?

The bit that gets purified is in a separate container held (manually?) at the focal point of the water lens, and gets hot. But as the sun moves so does the focal point, so a very patient person has to be shoving the heating container along every few minutes. This doesn't seem very practical to me.
My own research (which I hope to publish soon) shows a slightly better link rot rate for bookmarked URLs (which are presumably ones people are most interested in keeping). The attrition rate I see so far is roughly linear and about 5% a year. Which is still shocking by any non-web standard, but a little better than the figures cited above.
The Parable of the Perfect Connection
Is it just me, or is it odd that we rejoice when things like this happen? It just doesn't feel right to reward companies who release locked-down hardware. Don't get me wrong, I share in the excitement for a $35 XBMC capable android device. But on the other hand, it seems a better idea to spend money on a product that isn't locked down in the first place.

I haven't followed the Chromecast, but why is it locked in the first place!?
‘Geek Sublime,’ by Vikram Chandra
You do research using bookmarks on Pinboard as your dataset? May I ask how this data is used and disclosed to others?
The honest answer is, unless your profession is in the physical sciences or hardware engineering, learning physics from this or other sources will probably not be useful.

Whether it's worthwhile is to at least some extent a value judgment, and also as I see it, depends to some extent on what else you would have done with the time. If you have a block of time allocated for work, and you're thinking of spending it reading about physics instead of reading documentation on something you do actually need, that's probably suboptimal. If you've finished work for the day, you have a block of time allocated for intellectual leisure and you're trying to decide between reading about physics versus, say, the latest Dungeons & Dragons rules, in my opinion the former is more worthwhile.
exploited a new vulnerability in the Chromecast which allows root access

Normally, vulnerabilities would be considered a bad thing. Heartbleed is a great example of that. But in cases like these, it's a very good thing. This is why I always like to remind those whose goal is to build more secure systems to consider the implications of their work, lest our devices become even more secure against us. They usually have in mind a world where everyone has full control of their devices which are then highly secure against attacks by others, and that's a good thing; but I think it's far more likely to turn into one where corporations have all the control and devices are secure against their owners, especially as typical users continue to choose security over freedom.
I try to use function names that carry a 'declarative mindset' when I write Clojure. E.g.,

(sections x)
instead of
(get-sections x)

(refactored (styled (second-half divs)))
instead of
(refactor (apply-styles (take-second-half divs)))

~ evoking a feeling that defn is merely a parameterized form of def (which it truly is)
'Data Science' explained in an interesting context
Reminds me of the villains boat in Tomorrow Never Dies [1]

1: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/06/19/article-2005464-0C...
https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/
Indoor cooking fires are a significant source of pollution in developing countries. A solar-powered solution would be a significant improvement.
Galileo Satellites Launched into Wrong Orbits
What do you think of this generalized architecture?

HARDWARE: differs depending on whether you want local search/analytics or just network storage.

For mobile use, either a VPN back to your personal home/cloud server, or a hackable wifi hard drive proxy, e.g. Seagate Wirless Plus + HackGFS.

For non-analytics home use, hackable router with USB3 storage and Linux software RAID, connected to a USB3 drive chassis with room for 2-4 disks.

For analytics home use, a microserver like HP N54L, Dell T20 or Lenovo TS140. Up to Xeon processor with ECC memory, plus 4-6 internal disks and up to 32GB RAM. Sold without a Windows tax, supports hardware virtualization and Linux. Possibly FreeBSD with ZFS.

SOFTWARE: generalized multi-tier cache AND compute. Camlistore and git-annex are tackling multi-device storage sync. For archives, we need a search interface that will query a series of caches, e.g. mobile > home > trusted friends private VPN (tinc overlay) > public paid cloud archive (pinboard et al) > public free cloud archive (archive.org).

It's important for usability to have a simple, local UX that will take a search string, propagate across all private/public federated tiers of storage and compute, then aggregate the metasearch results on the client.

With this approach, we can collectively pool resoures to improve on CommonCrawl.org, without locking up the 300TB index at AWS. This would turn web search engines into a secondary source, rather than a primary source. First search your archive + trusted friends, then trusted verticals (e.g. HN, StackOverflow), then a generic web search.

Let's be clear: the goal is not to archive "everything" in the world, only that which is personally important to the viewer. This attention metadata has long-term value. With this architecture, it is always optional to escalate a query to a public archive or search engine. Most importantly, there is technical autonomy and low-latency compute for local queries.

For web pages, wget of WARC formats (per HN advice on another thread) and wkhtmltopdf (available as Firefox plugin to print to PDF) will keep local archives. Recoll.org (xapian front-end with user-customizable python filters) on Linux will search full text and provide preview snippets, or lucene/solr can be adapted.
Show HN: Dota 2 pre-game stats tool
I made a really simple l-systems lib if anyone is interested. If fits in the same general vein of natural-computing.

https://github.com/Azeirah/L-Systems
Pygal – A Python SVG Charts Creator
On Machine Learning
One thing it may allow is grabbing the private key it uses for Device Authentication and emulate a Chromecast on other devices. It would enable streaming from Chrome to anything using the Chromecast protocol. See [1]. I had a go at implementing the protocol server-side on node, so it's basically waiting for a valid cert. I couldn't test it much though it should work. See [2] and [3]. Any help welcome.

[1] https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2/issues/2

[2] https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2

[3] https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2/blob/master/lib/serv...
Winning solution for the DecMeg2014 challenge
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=git+simple+guide#!/story/forever/0...
Interesting, I have built a similar product for a slightly different vertical, but we both have things in common. I'd suggest that you focus on the search algorithm so you can return bullet proof tweets and then automatically post predefined replies. I'd be happy to help, let me know.
Show HN: Psdash
I didn't mean to say that real name is the only way to have good answer. There are definitely other ways of enforcing good content for your site. I'm just saying that the defining feature of Quora is the "real name" - at least that's the feeling I get from it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184430, but since that hardly got any discussion, it's Saturday evening, and certain people like both stream processing and spreadsheets, what the hell.
> Even if every archival node deleted some old blocks, all that'd mean is you had to start your node from a snapshot of the database taken at the earliest block time and work from there.

Why would every archival node delete the old blocks? Wouldn't it be prudent for at least a significant minority of nodes to keep copies of the entire blockchain in case there is ever any dispute about the provenance of the snapshot?

> Given that outputs which store only files cannot be spent

Is that a hard requirement? There is no feasible way to encode both a file and a legitimate transaction into the same block?
That was a really nice read (it's a quick history of programming languages through a particular lens, with a glowing endorsement of Julia at the end). I couldn't find the link to the second post (which is the one about Julia), it's this:

http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/189377.html
Which is still absurd. There is absolutely no reason this function shouldn't be built into the Chromecast.
> Prediction: like all other human behavioral traits, sleep length will turn out to be influenced by multiple genes, each with small effect. That is the consistent finding of all human behavior genetics research in the genome-wide-association-study era.

You are 100% correct. I cannot think of a single behavioral attribute that has any correlation with only a single gene. Physical traits and diseases, absolutely, many are associated with just a single gene.

However! Your comment comes across to me like because it won't be just a single gene what's the point? Well because science is an incredibly iterative process and finding the first gene then leads to the second, and the third, and so on. As such, patience is a virtue for unlocking these complex puzzles.

Regardless, the way most science is reported by the media - even sources who ought to now better - is insulting to science as a whole.
Show HN: Macdown
Show HN: Dollar.swift
Another military device using supercavitation is the Soviet (now Russian) supercavitating torpedo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval

Max speed is 200 knots (230 mph) and it can go for almost 10 miles. That seems almost unreal, an object that size, going at that speed under water.
It would be nice if OEM performance on delivering updates was tracked for all first-tier OEMs and more devices. This is great guidance for buyers of Android devices, but there needs to be more of it.
The real "feature" of the Chromecast isn't technical. It's the ecosystem and particularly the fact it "just works" and is built in and enabled by default on a large number of Android apps. So for example, my friend can come over to my house and fire up his Google Music and his phone automatically sees my Chromecast and he can play to it. Or movies, or photos or ... etc etc. You can get any number of devices that do this, but only the Chromecast is built in and enabled by default on every Android device (not sure what iOS status is ...).
Yes but the point is that Ebola doesn't work like that. While it presents as a fever, you're also not particularly infectious in the early stages. Viral loading matters.

The West then benefits from the fact that all we have to do is push the alert button, and even if we have inconsiderate actors with Ebola out there, people will avoid contact and they will not be well enough to remain mobile for very long.

The problem in Africa, if you've been following the news, is that there is a paucity of education about disease response, hygiene and handling of the dead, as well as a fair amount of "it's definitely America's fault and also it's not real!" going on.
To run the experiment, I am going to be drawing a few thousand links at random from the entire pool of Pinboard bookmarks. This will include private bookmarks, which make up about half the Pinboard collection.

You chose to include everyone's private bookmarks in your research without asking their consent? What?

I will publish some aggregate information about what I find, and use it to seek glory, and persuade people to sign up for archiving. But I won't release anything that could lead back to specific users or links.

There is roughly a boatload of evidence that anonymized datasets can be deanonymized in unexpected ways.

Even if you don't release any anonymized datasets, it's really not good that you decided to take such liberties with people's private links in the first place.
Is this an IRC client or an IRC server?

Looking at the code, it appears to be a client, but in that case why does the site talk about it providing support for "Channels, Users, Permission, Private, Public and much more", why does it claim it makes my channel contents more secure (under "Secure Your Logs"), and why does it talk about setting up an IRCd (" With a ZNC bounce, a simple ircd server and 5 minutes you can avoid paying for communication and keep your company chat logs secure and on your own infrastructure.").

If it's a server, why is how to set it up not described?

Not sure if OP is actually part of the dev team, or just somebody who found the site, but a word to the devs: your website should clarify which of the above you are providing. If it's a client, the site shouldn't talk about the benefits I'd get running my own IRCd (security of communication, IRCd features like channel modes and permissions, or lower cost). If you are intending for folks to run their own IRCd, the site needs to have information on where that software lives and how to set it up, and why I'd want to do that instead of just making a channel on OFTC or Freenode or similar.
Sancoff began contemplating ways to give back to his country. To him, that meant shifting his focus from medical devices to weaponry.

That's a disappointing comment.
You're right re: large numbers of small-effect variants - and it's also true for other genetically determined traits (such as cholesterol levels). Now, there are some high-impact, low-frequency variants in the non-behavioral sciences, but so long as they work additively (and generally are not recessive traits) they usually get picked up in the GWAS anyway.

Obliquely, this leads me to argue that you may well find great drug targets among the behavioral genetics GWAS hits (for certain traits).
CSS matching is one of the more resource-intensive parts of the computation the browsers do; the given implementation is very instructive for understanding the algorithm, but would be too slow for any nontrivial page. The total possible number of comparisons is basically {number of rules} * {number of elements}, which can be extremely high, and avoiding this is quite important.

I am reminded of how IE uses a single integer to identify each CSS rule: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/05/14/10164...
It's not clear to me that bacteria and other pathogens could evolve around heat sterilization. I'm sure they can adapt in some ways to some amount of temperature change, but at some point (maybe hotter than this device can achieve) surely no organism can survive.

It's like the old saying, it's easy to destroy HIV - the hard part is doing it inside a human body. In the case of sterilizing water, we don't have that problem, the water will remain usable.
I think that description is pitching it as a tool for small businesses or development teams (that don't already know about ZNC, HexChat, irssi, weechat, freenode, etc).
I'd say users choose convenience over freedom, the security is in the back of their minds. Make a more convenient but free phone and people will use it.
Wow chalk one up on "completely missing the point." Gone35 was drawing a comparison between the Greek's transition from orality to literacy and our transition from literacy to a more digital communication media.
Surely it's both? Embedding a headline is a great way to prove it wasn't generated in advance, but there are thousands of headlines he could have used, and he picked that particular one.
I was playing with all those, then I found kiwiirc
Books are clearly worse in virtually every context than one on one dialog with the author.

The advantage of contact with people separated in space or time seem less meaningful at the time. But, venerating books over one on one contact is a huge mistake.
This relates to the idea that certain hours of your day are more valuable than others. If you want to spend your time wisely, you should first make sure you're wasting the most valuable time. If you're a coffee drinker, the hours after drinking it are probably the most valuable of your day - when you're most motivated, productive, and focused. So you should use those hours for what your value most, whether that's writing, learning, working out, etc. And then save other activities like cleaning, watching TV, or commuting for times when you're not feeling so sharp.

So the article makes sense in recommending different activities for different people - it just reflects their priorities.
Nothing like this will ever compare with a submersible in terms of "stealth". Who knows, maybe there already exists a supercavitating shallow draft sub for the spooks to use.
There's only 2 types of products in the world; which are you building?
This comment seems to simultaneously assume that Bitcoin will last forever and that Bitcoin can be seriously harmed by a few individuals. These two ideas seem to me to be fundamentally incompatible.
Nice POC, but if a "developer" can't handle irssi.. then I have bad news for him.
Might the deindustrialization of the United States have similar causes? Bad governance by stateless corporate colonizers?
Without acceleration, the system is symmetrical, so each observer thinks the other's time is passing more slowly. But that also means they can never meet up again to compare ages and see who's "right".

The observer who accelerates is the one who breaks the symmetry, and thus travels into the other's future. I haven't done the math, but Wikipedia has pictures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
>Actually, it was the way Satoshi showed that he hadn't pre-mined any bitcoins,

I doubt it. He could have picked any news article, or the winning lottery numbers, or anything of that sort.

It's extremely unlikely that a headline about bank/government collusion, stuffed into the genesis block, was chosen "just because".
If that's the case, it really needs some strong docs to walk somebody setting it up for their small business through setting up an IRCd.
A thermophile is an organism — a type of extremophile — that thrives at relatively high temperatures, between 45 and 122 °C (113 and 252 °F) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile

So, 150 °F is not really all that hot as some organisms thrive at 250°F or well above boiling. However, I suspect organisms that thrive at 150+°F are unlikely to also thrive in the human body. A more important issue is the effort to sterilize water by hand is unlikely to be made with any real consistency.
>seriously harmed by a few individuals.

It's not serious, but it's harm.
kiwiirc has it's own set of downsides. Primarily, the lack of registration requirement makes it a haven for spammers and other network attacks and their practice of putting all users onto a limited number of IPv4 addresses makes it nearly impossible to block the abuse without affecting legitimate users.
I imagine this is it. What would you do at night if there wasn't technology enabling you to keep yourself preoccupied? The list of things we can do takes a pretty big hit when we can't see well.