skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely do not have as much of a voice as, say, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times. And I never will.

My most realistic option for making my voice heard would be to contribute money to a person, campaign, corporation, whatever, that accepts money from other like-minded people and uses that money to advance our shared position.

However, I would be quite hesitant to do that if I couldn't do it anonymously. Aside from the chilling effects of the Brandon Eich debacle, there is also the practical consideration that volunteering contact information in this day and age is an invitation to incessant harassment from entities that operate under loopholes in do-no-call legislation.

I believe my voice is diminished by any political funding legislation that disallows anonymous donation.
Comcast donations help company secure support of Time Warner Cable merger
Taubes touches on it in this article a bit: http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%E2%8...

It's not a scientific study, but it addresses the obese people not eating significantly too much.
Clearly you are afflicted by not understanding the concept of 'infinity'.
Is there some Calibre plugin to convert scientific articles with math formulas to epub or mobi?
Investment banks have people working 100 hour weeks? This is like 14 hours every day a week with nothing else other than eating and sleeping. I don't think I've ever done anything that grueling in silicon valley.
Writing a path tracer in Rust, part 4: tracing rays
You seem to think we're trying to stop people from anonymously posting their opinions. We are not.

We are trying to stop people from spending millions of dollars on paid ads advocating the defeat of a candidate they don't like (over 90% of independent expenditures go to negative ads).

That's a little different than the federalist papers, I think.

If someone has a powerful message, they can make a YouTube video and it will spread. If someone has a message that requires millions of dollars to be powerful, then it's not unreasonable to know who is spending those millions.

> it is very easy to cut down an upstart candidate by an entrenched incumbent by just attacking their supporters and intimidating them before the challenger even becomes a threat

Can you cite any examples of this happening? Typically the attack is on the upstart candidate, not their supporters.
My guess would be the new tool's requirement of PostgreSQL v9.3+ (new features).
I do think there is a big difference in academic computer science now and then. Rob Pike has written about it from an operating systems perspective [1], and Richard Gabriel from a programming language perspective [2]. It seems that until the early 1990s, there were lots of projects focused on building "systems", i.e. big pieces of software which are in themselves practically useful; then there is a sharp shift and academic research focus on "theory" (in PL research, e.g. a type safety proof for small core calculi, or a particular algorithm for program analysis).

People have always pursued "small" ideas. But I think the fact that we stopped writing "big" systems is a real change. (I guess the reason is that off-the-shelf operating systems and programming languages gradually got better, until it became impossible to "compete" with them. C.f. the Lua langauge, which got written basically because "western" langauges were not easily available at the time). My impression is that there is a lot less diversity of ideas now than there used to be, because everyone is incrementally improving the same set of OSs/langauges.

[1] http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
[2] https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf (see the section starting on page 10)
Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay?

I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/

Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934
I completely agree. I talked with the Calibre leader some years ago offering my help with the UX, and he didn't seem to have any interest in simplifying the UI. It's his app, and he wants it to have as much features as possible. It's great for many people but not for the majority I believe.

I stopped using it because I can't stand the UI :(
>>> Money can be used to drown out competing messages

"Drown out" is just another way of saying "speech". Unless drowning down is done by non-speech ways - like getting the speaker beaten up or jailed or sued into bankruptcy.

>>> large companies using litigation against smaller entities that can't afford to fight regardless of their message

And removal of privacy would fix that how exactly?

>>> groups whose sole purpose is to publish findings to the funding entities' benefit.

If those entities do that, they are PR companies. It is a completely legal business, nothing wrong with that.

>>> It can be difficult if not impossible to figure out the sources of funding in a lot of these cases.

Which would lead to more and more restrictive policies, and more and more instances of abuse, where incumbents, unable to compete on message, would instigate "campaign finance" investigation against challengers and destroy their campaign, only for the investigation to peter out immediately after electoral threat is gone. More power you put into this system, the more abuse it would generate.

>>> increasing the transparancy in the shady world of campaigning.

There's nothing shady in anonymous speech. You do not have the right to violate other's privacy, and somebody's refusal to disclose their private matters does not make them "shady". "Honest man has nothing to hide" is a lie.
I see someone watches "How I Met your Mother"
Identifying Changes in Conversion: Bayesian Analysis Using Python
You are going to die of thirst in the next few hours. There is one merchant selling bottled water.

There is no price at which you say, "fuck that, I'll live without it." You won't. You'll die.

So you pay whatever they're asking, up to and including everything you have. If you had more, you would pay more. That's what I mean by infinite value.
The horror - horror! - of rich people having more stuff than poor people is not alleviated by preventing prices from rising in times of scarcity - rich people can just pay others to stand in line for them.

Equity of distribution doesn't strike me a particularly good metric for dealing with emergencies anyway since it's easily maximized by not letting anyone have anything, which is essentially what 'gouging' bans achieve.
Having recently used Uber for the first time (a nervous but not wholly unpleasant experience), I decided to calculate and compare the cost of Uber to owning and operating a car. At least around my area, if you travel less than average (10,000 miles per year seems average; I checked at 3,000 miles), Uber is cheaper. Mostly because of fixed costs like the car itself, insurance, registration, etc. If you travel about average, then Uber is ~2x more expensive. This is with what appears to be reduced UberX fees right now (in my area?).

And to be honest, 2x more expensive could certainly be worth it, if your average trips are long enough to allow getting some work or other things done during the ride.

P.S. As a video gamer, I find it hilarious that Uber is effectively an MMORPG mission/bounty list. Passengers are submitting "missions", drivers accept missions off their "terminal", and at the end "credits" change hands. And depending on your preferred MMORPG flavour, the megacorps exact their transaction fee for the privilege.
The most suprising thing about this article was that it mentions following: "too much carbohydrates and insuline makes you fat" and "low carbo, high fat diet to rescue" as hypotesis. I have long treated it as 100% sure, proven fact. I even lost 15 pounds by following Dukan's diet. Most articles I read, mostly in health and fitness magazines they also mention this as a fact. Should we add [1990] to HN link as a warning ?
I'm going to wholeheartedly disagree with you.

I've posted here about this before - I got involved with weight watchers through my two roomates as moral support for them, and have personally seen and been involved with many hundreds of people losing many thousands of punds - and keeping it off (that was over 10 years ago).

I've always thought of weight-loss like everything else we learn and do in life - start out simple and make it achievable while getting "beginner" results, then work your way up making it more and more complicated.

When you're 6 and learning to count, you are not taught differentiation and complex numbers.

When you're learning to surf, nobody would through you in at the world's biggest wave.

When you learn a new language, you don't learn the most complicated conjugations first.

Losing weight starts simply by reducing the amount of energy you're eating (calories) to a level lower than your body is using on a daily basis. I don't care if you eat raw sugar or fat, as long as you eat slightly less calories than your body is using for a prolonged period of time. (yes, you'll likely feel like shit if you eat raw sugar or fat, so I don't recommend it). Like you said, the body must obey the laws of thermodynamics. The longer you keep that up, the more weight you will lose.

I genuinely believe anything else at the "beginner" stage is noise and over complication. The mere fact so many books exist on the topic, and so many "new" theories come out each year is proof that it's too complicated for beginners.

Once you have some good "beginner results" and are losing weight consistently you will and start to move from morbidly obese to just obese down to a somewhat healthy range. THEN you can start making it more complicated, and start focusing on WHAT you're eating, not simply how much.

It's an advanced topic that isn't required for the basics. (just like you don't need complex numbers to count the number of marbles in your bag, or almost all other functions required in a normal adult life.)
Video + tutorial: basic load balancing with Apache mod_proxy_balancer
I read an interesting article a while ago about who they have tried (unsuccessfully) to track

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri

from land artifacts. I supposed it is a bit more difficult as google maps didnt make it to Waziristan yet.

It sort of reminds me of this article from a while back

http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/03/crowdsourced-amateurs-outp...
Actually, there are prices, where I will say "fuck that, i'll live without it". Easy example (but I would probably hold out for less): Would you trade torturing person X for water? (assuming assurances that they would be otherwise unharmed if I died of thirst)
Perhaps I didn't select the hardest from the recent archive. My basic point was more to show that people have the tools to a lot more digging with a lot less context.

Sure. Not intended to be a slight, more a nod to our Defense brethren doing this with a lot harder targets!
Maybe I have grown overly cynical over the years, but I was not aware that this kind of thing still works on most people. I pretty much sed 's/feel like/not/' as an habit without noticing.
But Warren Buffet invests in individual companies using valuation technique to discover under valued companies which the market is ignoring.

One peculiar thing about Warren Buffet is that he has strayed away from technology companies, he's always invested in very stable ideas like brand and other economic moats unlike the tech sector which is susceptible to unexpected disruptions, like two boys working in a garage to build a better search engine. He even stayed clear of Microsoft and seems like it fit his plan of holding onto a good stock forever.

For those that do not know how to come up with a intrinsic valuation of a company, for example, reading through K's and Q's and figuring out if there's discrepancies in what it actually says and what the market thinks, it's best to invest an index, a large basket of companies and you bet your ass that for a country like United States, it's going to go up in valuation, seeing how well aligned the NSA's global surveillance is poised to benefit American corporations, I'd definitely back American companies, although the intrusion into individual freedom and privacy is jarring, I'll play the dirty capitalist, if it means I can make money work for me.
Clearly you don't understand talking about infinity with approximations. Should I have added a liquid sapphire swimming pool attended by angels?
I guess some people won't be impressed until a bug is found featuring a manual transmission with five fully meshed forward gears, sliding reverse, and synchronizers.
Are Alien Lifeforms Living Among Us?
More likely to be killed by a terrorist
That's exactly the approach I'm recommending :-). Basically, put thought into the api up front so that later, performance improvements are a master of improving local code, rather than architectural changes.
Now that you mention it, my one bug report was met with a frosty reception.

Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?
The permission model in Android goes through the APIs. If you can bypass the API to go lower-level, then you're effectively giving up the security, and just waiting for some cool researcher (or attacker) to find ways to exploit them.

The above makes sense if you want to assume that you need /proc at least at some permission level. If you don't (which I think you don't), then it should simply be unmounted in the sandbox.

IPC is the standard way to get out of the sandbox, and should be used also for whatever features the APIs need /proc for.
> This seems intellectually interesting to me but it's frustrating because I feel it takes what is a relatively simple issue and makes it needlessly complex. Yes, maybe there is some amount of optimization you can do with your diet, but the simple fact is that there is a not a single study in the history of science which has been able to demonstrate eating at a caloric deficit and gaining weight. Show me an obese person not eating significantly too much.

Taubes would say that an obese person eats too much precisely because he is fat, not the reverse. The arrow of causality has been flipped. His body is demanding increased caloric intake (via insulin, leptin, and ghrelin) to maintain fat stores. Those fat stores can't be liberated when insulin levels remain high. If this hypothetical obese person keeps eating carbs and has become insulin resistant, those fat stores aren't going anywhere without a fight. A calorie restricted diet will help some, as less food produces less insulin, but it's far easier to restrict insulinogenic foods. This allows the fat stores to be utilized, and weight loss is the natural result.

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but this theory states that the human body knows how to maintain caloric intake. That's what hunger is for. But it can only do this if we allow the endocrine system to function normally.

Before dismissing the idea, listen to Taubes's talk: http://youtu.be/ywRV3GH5io0
>auctioning algorithm?

Sounds like you're saying that something is a market, then.
I don't think genetic disorders should be considered as they're exceptions to the rules.

I stand by the statement "Show me an obese person (with no genetic conditions) that eats less energy than they use".

It doesn't exist, because it's not physically possible
If running PostgreSQL on RDS, does this provide additional value?
Because it's a hipster tie and not a suit tie?
What do you use instead? Calibre has a rather large amount of features, but they are hard to find :)

Edit: if someone were to publish independent mockups for a new Calibre UX, it could motivate community feedback and/or dev contributions. The ebook market is larger now than a few years ago, given the rise of mobile.
Raise #ALS awareness without water waste. Try this
"Distinct models" != "Distinct devices"

I have a distinct device in my pocket. It's different from the distinct device that was adjacent to it on the assembly line.
Am aware of a high school that tried to use a Chromecast for digital signage (not this particular software) on the same network as students (woops)... needless to say the screen wasn't showing their digital signage for long! After a prankster played a few "educational" videos for the whole cafeteria, school admin panic ensued and that was the end of the Chromecast for signage plan.

(This scenario wouldn't happen of course on a network where you have 100% trust that no-one else is going to hit the Chromecast button on their browser or phone...)
I think that the culture of NYC has a lot to do with why it's not particularly associated with tech.

New Yorkers take pride in their reputation for toughness. New York is about projecting strength. New York is about old money. Tech people, not in all cases but I believe the majority, take pride in their intelligence, ingenuity and adaptability.

The west coast is about doing things your own way. The west coast is about not being afraid to be different. The west coast has a reputation, deservedly or not, for embracing unique individuals and that appeals more to tech people than New York's toughness.
Show HN: Swift-compiler-crashes – collection of Swift compiler crashes
For those curious, on PostgreSQL it executes

CREATE DATABASE "snapshot" WITH TEMPLATE "source";

and on MySQL it loops creates the new database and loops over all the tables running

INSERT INTO snapshot.table SELECT * FROM source.table;

https://github.com/fastmonkeys/stellar/blob/master/stellar/o...
Fans of Roller Coaster Tycoon would do well to consider entertaining themselves by playing OpenTTD, a community reverse-engineering / rewriting / extension effort based off Transport Tycoon (Deluxe), which was in turn the predecessor of Roller Coaster Tycoon. (RCT was originally going to be Transport Tycoon 2, but when Chris Sawyer tried out the new track-layout features the idea of roller coasters became obvious, and the game was history.)

Of course, this unusual legacy has some interesting side-effects and it can be a little weird to get into the game (e.g. there's two completely different models of doing signaling, and there's a complete rewrite of the passenger-traffic distribution algorithm that makes things a lot more challenging and fun but is buried in some sub-sub-submenu in the settings' Advanced Mode...)

Think of something a little like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but you get to do more network-design work and make tradeoffs between the expense of building a system right the first time or doing something more scalable for the future, and then seeing it blow up in your face when you try to run too much traffic down a congested line :D
> I'm not dismissing it, I'm explaining, quite verbosely, why it is wrong.

Not clearly enough for me to understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_averages
Surfing internet?
This Ask HN probably warranted poll counters. I would imagine it's heavily "no" based on the response so far.

I like that I'm not tempted to compulsively refresh HN to see if I have new notifications like with every other thing that says (#) in the tab title, this means a LOT to me. I only have so much will power to go around.
I'd say the best way to have a great career is to choose a job where you get to be with other people you really like, respect, and can learn from. This network is how you'll find the best new opportunities in the future, and where you'll be able to recruit people into whatever you're working on.

Optimize for having the best coworkers (and manager) you can find. You can never start too soon.
All this theoretical bottleneck debate, but it really boils down to this:

If you're writing frequently-run code in Python/Ruby/JS, or any such highly-dynamic-at-runtime language, then chances are very good that your CPU, memory access, CPU cache, etc are going to be part of your bottleneck.

Write in something that doesn't effectively turn an i7 into a Pentium 4 (and be sure to use efficient memory management techniques), and your chances of main bottlenecks being IO-only are much better.

The belief that IO is the only bottleneck is a self-defeating prophecy. It leads to code and techniques that cause CPU to become a bottleneck once again. Don't forget Wirth's Law.
If this is really a problem for you, here's a solution:

1. Get a Nexus phone.

2. Flash to a custom ROM.

3. Don't flash Google Apps.

4. Sideload APKs or use an alternative store.

5. Enjoy.

The reason you can't have everything is that the app devs and most people prefer the store situation. If this is a particular problem for you, there will be sacrifices.
1) Then don't use it in your scripts.

2) Restart policies are exposed in the API, so daemon managers can leverage this feature to hook in their own restart policies in a consistent, supported way.
OK. The disconnect here is that I think there are things more valuable than my life, and you are selfish, and think there is nothing more valuable than yours.
Yikes, that makes sense. Thank you for spelling it out a bit! :)
We are being sued for refusing to take down a website
(I'm the lead moderator here.)

You did nothing to deserve it. That kind of trollery seems unfortunately to be a cost of being on the internet. We banned those accounts. The comments had already been killed by user flags, so your fellow HN users were looking out for you. Most are nice, so I'll hope you'll do what the rest of us do, tune out the noise, stick around, and keep sharing your work.
Preference menus need the most work and the giant toolbar with icons is nearly useless.
Dispatch a function based on the value it is expected to return. The version of this that exists in some real programming languages at the moment (no "fantasy semantics") is dispatching based on the inferred type of the expression. Depending on your POV, that's quite arguably a part of the value returned. It obviously can't be chosen dynamically by the call, or we would be dealing with "fantasy semantics" (or a time machine).
Why would an expert have to "guess" when they have piles and piles of data? I think it's 100 years too early for you to reply to me.
I was amazed by lisp, also encouraged by Paul Graham's work. When I came to questions of packaging for use by end-users, I didn't like what I saw. Explorations into my options led me to Haskell. Since then I've started asking more interesting questions and haven't looked back.
Do you mean you simplify the UI yourself with the configuration settings or that you wished it was simplified ?

I found calibre less clunky and very clean once I hid icons, menus and submenus I don't use.

Maybe there should be some kind of toggle mode (easy, god, expert, etc.).
Samsung sinks to new low with ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video
Problem is, this won't get them any new users, but it may be just enough to drive away a lot of remaining ones.
We have come to a similar conclusion, with our first. This is really hard since, as has been echoed, these really are magical times. I'm wondering, in what ways have you shared with family the most?
I think it would make much more sense to instead have the journals publish articles in more formats, rather than just HTML and PDF. For example, they should offer them in EPUB[0].

Since EPUB is much more accessible to blind/visually impaired people than PDF, perhaps the federal government could step in and mandate that all articles with content produced using federal grants must be available in a format that the blind/visually impaired can consume as well.

0: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/03/19/is-it-time-for...
> Over the past decade, SSD drives (popularly known as Flash)

Does this mean popular among datacenter folks? Most of the time I hear "flash drive" (as opposed to SSD) it involves something with USB and a keychain hook, not an internal component.