skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The only place megafauna has survived to some extent to the present day is in Africa where people traditionally have lived in harmony with nature."

Bullshit.

From what I understand it's attributable to megafauna evolving alongside humans as they emerged in Africa. They had time to "learn" how to survive in the face of this new predator. In places like North America humans slaughtered and multiplied faster than their prey could adapt.
Heartwarming adventure video of a kayak brand reaching a milestone
A groundbreaking survey of the site has turned up tantalizing new clues to what really went on there.
Because they've released a vendor lock-in Azure-only, proprietary NoSQL database, 5+ years after everyone else?
Hm, good call, thanks for that. Looks like there's a binding for Nodejs out there too: https://github.com/peterbraden/node-opencv
33% of Indiegogo Tech Employees Women, 43% of Senior Leadership
> If you need specific versions,

Who doesn't need this? Do you really want different people on your team accidentally using different versions of dependencies?

> the standard, idiomatic Go approach is to vendor your dependencies.

How does that work with transitive dependencies? Do you vendor those too?

> Google, for example, does not use any Go-specific tool for vendoring IIRC.

How much third-party code does Google actually use?
Many, many times have I considered isolating myself, separating myself from the seemingly vacuous concerns of a society riddled with senseless traditions, layers upon layers of societal band-aids and pointless struggles over ridiculously subjective arguments.

I spent most of my life being disgusted by the frivolity of most people's desires and qualms, and for this reason, I feel I deeply understand why Chris Knight did what he did. No reason, no justification, no particular aim, just life.

While I still catch myself wishing for such a life, I realized I could not blame or reject what I do not actively participate in. Furthermore, I came to the conclusion, possibly wrongly, that a life worth living is a life worth sharing, that society will always be able to offer you more than you can offer it.

I now believe that the solution is not to reject society, nor be tied by its requirements or norms, but rather behave as a free agent, with independence, compassion and mental fortitude.

Law, Economy, Politics, Religion, Science, Technology, ... are, in my opinion, mere relics and artifacts of thousands of years of civilization, localized attempts at guiding the seemingly mis-guided, while becoming eventually meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

These civilized relics are not necessarily bad, but as with anything else attachment becomes the issue. While becoming a hermit is possibly the quickest way of severing those ties, attachment is the burden of the mind, not of society at large. Isolation diminishes, or even wipes attachment issues altogether, but it does not resolve them.

This might come across as preachy, though it certainly isn't my intention, I simply wanted to share my view with anybody who, like I used to, wishes for isolation as a remedy.
Is it the same update?
If a developer fails to check the return value of a function that can fail, all bets are off. There is no sane default that can safely hide a developer mistake.

Granted, the specific kill() API could have been designed better, but since it's very well established by decades of history, the burden of understanding it lies with the developer.
The poor people get to decide what is important. The rich people decide how to optimize for the important things.

For instance, if the one-person-one-vote decided, for whatever reason, that a metric of importance was grams of marijuana sold in a year to people older than 18, minus (18-age)^2*grams for any weed consumed by minors, then rich people would decide the best way to repeal marijuana prohibition while keeping it away from kids.

The prediction market would decide the policy. But this is where I get confused about the payouts. The predictions have to be tied to reality in some way to have any value. So the backers of a given policy choice have a financial incentive to see it exceed predictions, while the opposition has incentive to see it fail completely.

They could game the metric to avoid paying out as much, and do something like pass out pot brownies to kids in day care. They have an ongoing incentive to influence the metric. But if you remove the influence incentive, you also remove the motive to predict accurately. I feel like I'm missing something here. It seems like if you tried this with government, you're making renegade behavior potentially profitable.

In the article example, it seems that if banker wanted a bailout, he would go long on bailout and short on no-bailout. If the no-bailout policy won, he then has a giant incentive to do anything in his power to crash the economy and keep GDP down. Can anyone explain what I'm missing, if anything?
that article is wrong wrong wrong. I hate that article. I've seen it many times, it just sounds like some dumb reporter got into an anechoic chamber and thought it was crazy so he says you will start hallucinating and nobody can stand it for more than 45 minutes. that is plain wrong. I've been in an anechoic chamber to setup equipment to be sound tested, it's a very weird sensation to have the pressure of sound lifted off of you, and to hear your insides working, but everything about that article I loathe.

edit: oh what the hell, I never saw the certificate picture of the world record before, and that chamber is only -9.4dBA when there are plenty now past -12dBA (though I don't know the rating of the chamber I was in)
it's microsoft, how is that not an achievement?
Thanks.

What's your take on the possibility of damage suffered from exposure to RF radiation? There are reports from credible institutions (/u/jamoes mentions one above) that RFR, despite causing "only heating", may have detrimental impacts.

When I see lists of studies like this [1], it's hard to know what to think. Are most of these weak studies or unsettled science?

I know this is a really broad question; I'm obviously not asking for comments on specific studies listed those tables. I'm curious about comments on the seeming contradiction between the observation that at a theoretical level RF radiation at moderate intensity is thought to be known to be provably harmless, and the large number of reports of observed non-trivial(?) effects.

[1] http://www.bioinitiative.org/rf-color-charts/
Since we're actually talking about things buried in the ground, I have to ask: is that literal groundbreaking, as in they literally broke the ground, or is "groundbreaking" a metaphor for new and unexpected?

Edit: it looks like you just copy/pasted the subtitle from Smithsonian. Do you have any additional commentary that might enlighten the rest of us who are trying to decide whether to read the article?
> I felt the need to move towards Gulp and Browserify

Dude, you're so behind the times. It's Yeoman and Bower now. Wait, Broccoli and Duo.
One company of the same ilk I'm familiar with is a certain tree-cutting company in that area (I'm sure you know which one I'm talking about). They make fantastic money and have a virtual monopoly on the cyclical need of homeowners in the area for trimming branches of the towering trees in their yards, so that high winds will not knock them down onto their homes. Each homeowner needs to spend a few thousand dollars every 3 years or so for this service.

However, this family business has been in existence for 60+ years. I don't think that starting a new tree cutting business and going head to head with them will be nearly as profitable if at all, because you wouldn't have the same contacts and good will that they do. Contract work is often a word of mouth and referral business, not dissimilar to the legal world.

I totally agree that such small business owners can make great money. I recall from The Millionaire Next Door that many of the "millionaires" profiled in that book have the unsexiest businesses that they'd been working hard at for decades, saving wisely. I do know of an electrical contractor that worked on our house a couple of years ago has a healthy, very profitable business going on. But I think there's more than what immediately meets the eye, and just going into an unsexy business for the sake of going into an unsexy business is not a sufficient condition for financial success in one's business.
AngularJS: Up and Running – Enhanced Productivity with Structured Web Apps
I was selected for jury duty and was seated for a 6 week civil trial last year.

Post-trial after talking to the defense attorneys it seems likely I would have been dismissed by the plaintiff (they were dismissing 'engineer types'), but because of the rules of selection the plaintiffs were basically out of arbitrary passes (I don't know the legal terminology but at a certain point they can appeal to the judge to pass on a potential juror, but only if there is a very specific reason (like I know somebody on the case), but there's a limit on how many arbitrary passes they get ("we don't like this guy, he won't see things our way"). So I guess my point is, you may be selected even if you are not ideal for one side or the other just because of the rules of the dance of voir dire and random luck of the draw (I was the last one seated, if they had avoided on passing one less person I would have walked out on day 1).

The trial ended up being about cold therapy devices and a guy who was suing a local corporation saying the device caused problems in his knee. I was initially surprised the defense (who still had passes) kept me around because in the original juror questioning I'm sure I came off as the liberal/borderline-anti-corporate-socialist lefty that I am.

In any case, the defense did a really good job of rationally showing that the device didn't cause the harm and the harm was the result of medical malpractice from the actual doctor; but the plaintiffs had a way more charismatic law team and almost won the case; in the end it was a mistrial with me and a few others holding out for the defense, plaintiffs would have won with one more vote (since it was civil it wasn't required to be unanimous); 3 days of very painful deliberation, trying to calmly explain to others on the jury how badly they misinterpreted the testimony and evidence and how they were manipulated by the plaintiff's attorneys (but, you know, not saying it outright like that).

The whole experience was actually pretty interesting though 6 weeks was at least 5 weeks too long. At least we had Fridays "off" (though I went to my regular job on Friday and worked a lot on the weeknights on days I was at court to keep up).
Theses aren't open access?

In the UK if you're funded by a research council (like almost everyone is here), your thesis is normally open access because the public paid for it. Students are generally awful at disseminating theses and dissertations, but in theory it's available for anyone to see (if only through library services). Whether this extends to copying and posting to Scribd I don't know, but in principle I don't see why it would be an issue.

In some cases if your work has commercial applications you can request to withhold publication for 6-12 months, but ultimately it becomes freely available.

I assume if you have private funding then things are a little different, but most progressive universities are moving towards open access publication across the board. My department will pay the cost to get papers with 'gold access' or whatever they call it, it's not like we get any money from paywalling our research and it's more likely we get citations if it isn't.
What's to keep someone from going short on a proposal and just going from house to house wrecking mailboxes with baseball bats?
It's true, web or mobile startup are in the "cool/shiny" category with a lot of competition. Still it appears that you find more people willing to put up with horrible conditions and low salary in the game industry.

I know most game developers make more than the minimum wage, but
I'm talking in reference to the article - that illustrates that these people exist.

"I’d like to be able to pay myself a wage of ~$1k/mo (around 2/3 minimum wage) for future projects, to accommodate a similar lifestyle."

Later: "Altogether, this is a somewhat exciting success for me. I’m making just barely what I need to keep going, which allows me to stay independent without the burden of success or wealth. Cutting so close to my bare necessities is frightening and unstable, but ultimately it’s an emotional trade-off."

That's why there was a race to the bottom in mobile games prices, and that's why you'll find 10 similar games when there should be a market only for one.
I thought for sure futarchy had to have something to do with futa as a governmental system...
Windows 9 unveiling set for September 30, report says
If Amazon is no longer letting foreign companies use Mechanical Turk, the obvious solution is to incorporate a US company (or a US branch of your foreign company) and then sign up for MT.

Seriously, it's not rocket science. Incorporation can take as little as a 5 minutes using a service like LegalZoom, and acquiring an EIN (which is part of the incorporation process) can be done online in a minute or two. Then you open up a US bank account, which may require you to physically show up at a US bank. Once you have the EIN and bank account, you sign up for Mechanical Turk.
The Myth of the Successful One-Person Business
Having been there, as I stated in '95 and '14 (19 years difference), the story is exactly the same.

Only the marketing and front end has changed. The cogs that drive the machine and the revenue mill have the same components and structure.

The market position is pretty much the same. Bar some new consumer markets, they have almost total domination of the business and enterprise sector. They even made a big dent in the entertainment sector with XBox with the piles of cash and losses they incurred and came out on top.
the video is 2 years old
I wish someone read my thesis, let alone found it interesting enough to share it with their friends.
Wow, how disappointing with the $60k price tag. Berkeley should be ashamed.
If I understand futarchy (I haven't studied it extensively, so I may be wrong), you need over 50% of the money in the system to be voting yes in order for it to be profitable to vote yes. If, say, 75% of the money was voting no (the "correct" decision), then the rich people voting no with 25% of the money would be losing money. In our current system, rich people are incentived to vote yes, even if they will be vastly outnumbered by the people voting no, because there is very little cost to voting for the "incorrect" option (if we're ignoring the cost of educating yourself about the effect of each vote, which we assumed away previously). In this system, rich people are incentivized to vote for the "correct" option, because voting for the "incorrect" option is costly.
I've had a recurring dream of building a little shack out in the woods and I've constantly wondered if the Ted Kaczynski would have turned so dark with modern access to the internet.
Though by many standards I could be considered an environmentalist, I find the "harmony with nature" trope to be laughable. Nature is not harmonious; it is a vicious battle of killing, eating, and survival. We should absolutely preserve and protect our environment. We can never live in "harmony" with something that is far from harmonious.
Here's a recent one:

http://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2014/08/11/man-arrested-after-...

More information: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/08/man-arrested-for-u...
>Capitalism and Communism are not the only possible forms of human organization.

What alternatives do you have in mind? Everything listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_systems#Types looks like either a form of capitalism, of communism/socialism, or a mix of the two. (There are one or two that might be considered distinct, but they look like they are only applicable at a very small scale, and even then they ultimately look pretty similar to capitalism or communism.)

I assume you're not just trying to draw a distinction between communism and socialism, since you're calling socialism a form of communism. You have another comment claiming it's the other way around, but regardless, the point is that they're very closely related.

>And while the gun to the head probably happened more than a few times

The gun to the head is a necessary component of any communist/socialist system.

>it's probably not relevant to this discussion

The original comment I replied to connected a dislike of capitalism with Zen Buddhism. Buddhists are supposed to care about peace in the world, not just silence for themselves. Communism is anything but peaceful. So it seems very relevant to me.
Fairly sure we're not talking about the theoretical bottom limit here.
> These articles need to go away. Burning Man has always featured wealthy participants. Radical Inclusion is one of the 10 basic principals of the event. We welcome ALL burners, whether you've flown in your private plane to the BRC airport (yes, we have our own airport), or you've rented an RV with your friends, or you've arrived by bus and are camping in a simple tent.

What if the people BM includes don't want to include others?

From the article:

> Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in.
PonoMusic Raises More Than $6M in Equity CrowdFunding in One Week
Show HN: IQ News – Tinder for News
I have not used Windows 8, but was expecting to have this new version sooner. glad it is out and looking forward to the added features
If you were around here back then, you'd know that it was pretty common for anti-Apple things to get down-voted quickly on HN. I think the pro-Apple / pro-Android voting has pretty much gone away since the comment scores have been hidden.
the fieldwork took about 120 days, spread over four years.

new finds, including the more than 15 possible new or poorly understood Neolithic monuments. Gaffney emphasized possible, acknowledging that it will require digging—“the testimony of the spade”—to discover precisely what was there.

Two pits, marking the midsummer sunrise and the midsummer solstice, set within a monument that’s meant to be something to do with the passage of the sun.”

The “sunrise” pit was visible from Stonehenge, but the “sunset” pit was not

“Until you dig holes, you just don’t know what you’ve got,”

“It’s going to take years.”
groundbreaking - a colloquialism referring to new discoveries

ground-breaking - related to the actual act of breaking ground

Not sure how you don't know this, unless opening a dictionary would be a groundbreaking experience for you.
> "Efficiently producing law" and "producing economically efficient law" are rather dissimilar concepts

Sorry, I didn't intend for you to infer that. I meant the same concept in both sentences. I am not talking about some more specific type of efficiency like fuel efficiency, which has nothing to do direct with the concept of economic efficiency.
15 possible new or poorly understood Neolithic monuments
Protecting You from Yourself – JS Bin Documentation
Your objections to MongoDB's model seem reasonable, but I don't see any evidence in either this comment or the linked blog post that DocumentDB is better (especially in the absence of benchmarks). What is this "battle-tested distributed systems framework"? Several of your complaints about MongoDB have to do with the interaction between persistence to disk and replication to the network; as the Multi-Paxos algorithm does not specify when data should be written to disk (much less what the format should be), what reason is there to believe that DocumentDB does this any better?

I'm totally willing to believe that DocumentDB beats the pants of MongoDB on just about every axis (in fact, that seems pretty likely) but it's going to take some actual numbers and a better description of the internals.
Depending on where he lives, he can't say anything about his thoughts or the deliberations in the jury room.
He may be able to tell you the verdict.
My totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that the police intentionally contain crimes to Cal Anderson and Pike/Pine to prevent crime from spreading outwards to the more gentrified areas of northern and eastern Capitol Hill, as well as to provide downward pressure on gentrification within the Pike/Pine corridor.
Releasing proprietary software behind a walled garden is not exactly a celebratory-worthy achievement, even Oracle and Apple can obtain this kind of achievement.
Panamax Docker Best Practices
Does Your Company Have a Culture of Testing?
Man builds working HDD in Minecraft
For the record, I am also a person with autism.

I am "writing it off" because the author writes in a way that suggests that their experiences represent all people with autism, but I feel that they do not represent me.

I am not saying that the author's opinion is not valid. I think that it's a perfectly reasonable position. What I'm upset about is the tone the author chose to use to convey their point.

(Edit: I find it ironic that I'm writing this, because the author has written articles saying they're upset with Autism Speaks because the tone in Autism Speaks' materials don't agree with the author's experiences.)
Though I've advocated for more metrics-based accountability in the past and agree with the author on that level, I don't know that tying a profit incentive is necessarily a good thing. It encourages people to vote for which policy is more profitable, which may or may not equate to which policy is more effective. If the goal was, for example, to reduce crime rate, it would be more profitable for me to vote for the Sheriff who's slightly more likely to fail but simultaneously more likely to cook the books than the one who has a 50/50 shot of actually decreasing the crime rate.

What if the policy in question is a rather difficult problem where all solutions are equally likely to fail? Would that discourage everyone to vote on that policy except for those who are already wealthy enough to make a risky investment?

Stepping back further, this would likely discourage anyone who didn't have sufficient disposable income to vote, thus making policy more lopsided. If I lose my job, how do I vote on establishing/expanding a safety net when I have to worry about feeding my family? If I can't vote, does that effectively mean that welfare and similar programs will be voted out by those that have no use for it?
Serious question - why should I use this over MongoDB or any other NOSQL solution?
Been following you guys since anno tree, congrats on the new venture
10 Branding Tips for a Great AngelList Profile
Advice I got from a lawyer friend is that getting out of jury is very easy - just ignore the summons entirely and nothing will happen.

You correct that they won't accept any excuse but the system mails summons more or less at random and so the summonses go to many non-existent persons. Moreover, a letter isn't legally binding by itself - you can always say you never got it but since they get to so non-shows, the system never bothers to hunt-down those who never show.