skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, now if it were the Boy Genius or one of the folks from the verge, it would be easily defensible.

Anand was a great hardware reviewer. The only other reviewer I think of that compares to him would be Lisa from mobiletechreview.com. Her reviews aren't as technical, but not everyone needs that. What's important is that she's got integrity.
Not only do you hold up things that Apple hasn't released, gloating about their grand innovation of vapour, you apparently don't realize that credit cards have NFC. There is nothing "impossible" about fitting NFC in just about anything, and your strawman simply makes no sense at all.

Fingerprint authenticated NFC? That would be solving a complete non-problem, misunderstanding the whole role of NFC.

You can get business cards with NFC. Every Skylander action figure has NFC in it. Credit and payment cards have NFC. But here you're comically holding that putting it in a wearable will be a grand innovation.

This sort of bubble and ignorance is extraordinary. But yes, I fully expect that after Apple releases something, years after so many others embraced NFC, you'll go forth telling all how innovative they were.
I think it's just a rhetorical device that, had Dawkins thought a bit longer, he would have avoided in that specific context. Or it's meant ironically as others have suggested.
How about parking? In Dublin (Ireland) where I live, you're paying 50/month (600 a year) euro for parking at home, AND then paying your daily rate of 45-50 a week for city centre parking.
Even better idea is not to host the databases at all.

Only those who have never experienced a corrupted backup or failed slaves think a database is something that is relatively trivial to manage.

You're much better off looking at platforms like RDS, MongoHQ, Cloudant etc.
Annie Murphy Paul, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is a very thoughtful author on psychology and education research. I see she cites the path-breaking article by Daniel Willingham, which led to his Learning Styles FAQ,[1] which I encourage all of my friends here on Hacker News to read to better understand what this issue is about learning styles. People do tend to take somewhat differing approaches to learning new material, but at least part of what I have noticed about effective learners is that they learn new ways of learning, and gain "learning styles" as they grow up and become more versatile in what they can do.

[1] http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html
I find the references to the nano text editor endearing.
What precludes you from submitting the app for review with fairly innocuous ads, then flipping the switch to show malicious ads? Or, perhaps have someone who only wants to show ads every once in a while? For example, an app for handling trade shows where you only want to show ads while the person is at the event space. There are a number of legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want to show an ad right that moment.
> If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this.

I think Dawkins is simply using Plato's idea as an intellectual roadsign, not assigning moral responsibility. If I refer to Karl Popper when discussing falsifiability, I might simply be providing a convenient reference to the idea, not holding Popper responsible for the idea (which he isn't).
Did you really name a variable "X"?
don't forget to add costs for getting TO the airport. BART costs ~$15 (for either Oakland or SFO), by cab (Uber) ~$50. So while $250 might be on the upper side of things, I think $150 isn't exactly right either. so the low $200 range.
Memorizing stuff is good for excersizing long and short term memory capacity, which is a big bonus when you get into programming... though then again, I built my memory skills more from developing my programming than much other stuff... I'm sure if you talked to someone who has a degree in child development and higher learning they could give you the ins and out that both rote and process learning are valuable for cognitive development.

And sometimes all you need is a factoid to get by and not the process that went into its production.
What I want to know is what the difference between ghostwriting for school purposes, and ghostwriting for literary purposes, is.

Hillary Clinton and Ronald Reagan (and many others) had their autobiographies ghostwritten [1] and no one seems to really care. The definition of "autobiography" means a biography of yourself, written by you. So why do we hold different standards to academia as opposed to non-academia?

When you hire a web designer to design a website, you aren't obligated to credit the designer (if the designer doesn't mind).

I can certainly see why copying someone's essay or test answers would be cheating, and should be penalized. In a standardized curriculum the students should become proficient at the subject matter by the degree program. Allowing students to cheat would lessen the value of the degree and thus no one would want to attend that school.

But ghostwriting for college admissions? It's doing whatever you can to increase your odds of acceptance. Some people pay money for test prep (most of which is just vocabulary drilling). Some people pay money for "college counseling." Some people pay money for personal statements.

Some commenters here are saying that ghostwriting personal statements makes it unfair for the lower-income families, but test prep is definitely not cheap. SAT prep could go anywhere from $500 to $1000, for a weekend course. No lower-income family could afford SAT prep, so if we view ghostwriting as "unfair" then test prep should be unfair by the same logic.

If someone doesn't want to hire me because we hold different views on the definition of cheating, then I respect the person's opinion but I certainly wouldn't want to be hired due to too many clashes of views most likely.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter
I'm curious to what extent model testing is better than CFD calculations, still
jayhuang
I'm not sure where you are coming from that Unix reboots are frequent but please stay away from any that I have to interact with.

Windows on the other hand still require reboots fairly regularly.
I live in a bike-friendly city, and am an avid cyclist myself. I've learned that debates over the relative merits of different bike configurations are irreconcilable.
> But Dawkins is so blinded by his ridiculous, anti-intellectual scientism that not only did he find himself unable to discredit just one single scientific idea

This is nonsense. Dawkins' topic wasn't scientific ideas ready for retirement, so it's not surprising that the issue didn't come up. Also, those who understand science realize there are no accepted ideas, ideas beyond challenge, ideas that have become truths. Scientific theories can never be proven true, only false -- this is one of the most basic scientific principles. I'm sure Dawkins fully understands this, but it happens it wasn't the topic of this article.
I recently had a fantasy of building my own house, so I did my research and realized that meeting the code and housing bar is fairly difficult.

So... I bought a house to learn other skills.

This project is a fantastic proof of concept. The problems you listed could be solved with appropriate planning.

The open question is whether or not this has a market. If the cost is right, then this could be a great toy for children... or even in parks. Or just large scale art.
If your DB is ACID AND your underlying storage has not lied to you about committing the write...
mozu
No, HN doesn't avoid long threads. Incivility is what's being targeted.
I didn't catch this when it was first posted, I'm glad it showed up here.

Possibly you didn't get negative responses because you were sincere and introspective. Most people can understand the idea that when in need of money, you slowly make concessions and compromises that you wouldn't otherwise make.

I remember when I was at Red Hat, one of the engineers had found a way to clear a worm off Red Hat servers using our auto-update tool, but we weren't allowed to push it because of the possible unintended consequences.

I'd be really curious to hear about whether you had to face any of those kinds of things, were there any catastrophes (technically) when doing so much low level wrangling? It seems like one false move could drop half your nodes, were there any fail-safes?

Also, unrelated (and apologies for the Quora link), here's a really cool answer from someone who used to spam people: http://qr.ae/Ga85e It's very different from your experience in that they were non-technical and in a poor region, but still interesting to see global perspectives on similar work.
> Scientific ideas don't "have to" contain some "failure".

That may be true, but all of them are subject to falsification by new evidence, and none of them move beyond challenge -- none of them become true in a final sense -- only false.
Yet is the key word.
Or just turn off mobile data and Wi-Fi. Re-enable when you have time to kill for social media.
The real problem is that they don't know the game, which is most of the battle.
LOL! It was intentional. :)
Something that a lot of Ruby deployment setups seem to be missing is setting up proper user permissions for apps and deployment.

The first step is to have separate user accounts for everybody that's going to be deploying apps. You really don't want shared accounts (like a single 'deployer' user), because you get no audit trail on who-does-what, and you effectively lose access control to your machines.

The second step is to run the app itself as a limited-privilege user -- no write permissions to anything except for logs and tempfiles. A lot of attacks depend on your app being able to overwrite parts of its own code; if that can't happen, the attack fails.
Build It Break It Fix It: A Secure Coding Contest
My writing was just not that great at times before attending college - ironically, when I took a philosophy summer class the summer before the semester started, everything just clicked and I suddenly started to be able to write pretty well.
Heroku apps aren't performant in many areas of the world e.g Australia like where I am, Amazon EC2 has an Australian region which is amazing
I find these admissions games silly too but what process could you use that is ungameable and can filter or rank candidates?
The "learning style" mentality can also have the opposite effect, though. My mentor says she never understood programming when she first started learning it and thought she was just inherently bad at it and was going to give it up. Then she started learning in a different way that she says was more in line with her "learning style," and it came much more naturally to her. Now she talks about learning styles as a reason NOT to give up.
So it wasn't the content per se?
Part of it was my fault - I only applied to a select 5 schools initially, since an Ivy was supposed to be a fallback due to connections & strength of academics. In hindsight, it was pretty foolish of me.

I ended up attending a state school, applying last minute in April.
The Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm, Or, Making Minecraft Faster
I'm usually at my desk at home or the office, or in bed, or some other place with a real computer, or doing something I actually want to be doing, or driving. In none of those situations do I want my phone.

In the remaining cases of "waiting for something but not equipped with a full sized computer", I'm quite happy to use the phone.

The greater problem is "spending time doing less-productive stuff on the Internet" -- I just prefer doing so with a real computer.
Apple Campus 2 construction video – shot with GoPro [video]
I haven't gone as far as this guy, but I recently removed Facebook and Twitter from my Android phone and it's been a breath of fresh air.

I still use both apps via their websites when I've got my laptop out, but not having them in my pocket all the time is really freeing. You don't realise how much of a slave you are to these things until you force yourself to let them go. I waste a lot less time on my phone now. Wouldn't go back.
Or `ufw` if you're on Ubuntu -- very easy to set up, much easier than crafting rules by hand.

I'm also a fan of running `sshd` on an off-numbered port to add another layer of protection against zero-day attacks. Most worms spread by compromising a service on a host, and then hitting everything around that host, but (to my knowledge) most of these depend on targeted services living on their default ports.

It won't buy you anything against a direct attack, but security is all about layers of defense, not just having a hard outer shell.
It's interesting? Not to mention software dev. is probably teeming with similar racial biases.

How many black people you work with? I don't work or have worked with any.
Ocean-Wave Spectra
> Parking cost

Yeah, I can see that. And hassle. If I lived in a sufficiently dense city with good public transit, I'd get rid of my car tomorrow. In my area, you can get reserved spots for ~$250/mo. L.A. seems to run ~$100/mo to $300/mo depending on area.

> Otherwise your model is not very predictive.

No, it's perfectly predictive. I have a threshold that I will not exceed in a single repair on my car or in more than n repairs over some period of time. Once that threshold is achieved, I get rid of the car and make it the dealer's problem. I know from lots of prior experience that I can always get rid of a car for cheaper than what it would cost to fix it.

For example, I know that I will never ever pay more than $500 to repair my car. Ever. For any reason whatsoever.

I also know that once my car costs that much in repairs over 12 months, I will get rid of the car. Period. $400 over three repairs over a year? I'll keep it. $500? New car and hopefully 12 more years of almost trouble free driving.

> Lexus an Mercedes rank

Last time I checked, Mercedes had terrible reliability w/r to CR ratings. Like most German cars they have all kinds of issues with the electrical system. It's just something the Germans don't seem to have ever licked. It might have changed, but decades of not caring about the problem has made me put them in the "do not ever buy" category. Some UK sites regularly list Mercs in "least reliable" lists next to long lists of Renaults and Peugeots.

Anecdotal, all my friends who buy Mercedes cars, never buy another one because of all the time it spends getting fixed. Somehow Mercedes earned a weird reputation for reliability that I've never seen play out.

Of course, the only cars I've seen people actively work to get rid of after buying them were Land Rovers and Jaguars.

Strangely, high end Hondas (Acura in the U.S.) have much lower reliability scores than low and medium level Hondas.

Fords are getting better, but American cars are basically garbage. Lists of cars to avoid are dominated by American cars (mostly Chevys), followed closely by German cars. Mini is usually on those lists.

I've never figured out why people who buy American cars are confused by all the repair time and money they have to put into their vehicles. It's not like this isn't known and reported in virtually every car reliability survey.

"Wow my used 2006 VW Jetta diesel spends all the time in the shop? I never would have guessed something something German engineering blah blah diesels are more reliable"

You could have guessed this by actually looking up car reliability ratings.

"I can't believe that the trim and fittings started to fall off my 2005 Chevy Tahoe right before the engine required $3000 in repairs!"

You could believe it if you'd managed to crack open a used car reliability guide, any used car reliability guide, before buying it.

It could be worse, at least the American market doesn't have to contend with French cars shudder.

Here's actually decent free site built on the glassdoor principle. You share your info to get access to all the cars they have sufficient data on.

http://www.truedelta.com/car-reliability-results/06-2014
You seem to be saying the ghostwriter is a Chinese person living in China, but she wrote, "I’m a second-generation Korean American." Some quick Googling suggests the U.S. median income is around $50,000.
CC fraud in America, contrary to popular European belief, is not a problem for American consumers. American consumers are not liable for fraudulent charges made with their card; resolving them is a simple matter of telling your CC company that the charge was fraudulent (the majority of the time, the CC company has already figured that out themselves).

Chip and Pin buys American consumers fuck-all; it is merchants and CC companies that benefit.

European consumers seem to want American consumers to have chip and pin more than American consumers want it for themselves. It is truly bizarre. Are you guys getting a "refer your friends" commission or something?
I can say, with some exposure to the issue through my own work, that as time passes CFD modeling, mostly in the form of numerical differential equations played out in a supercomputer simulation, is rapidly replacing physical models, partly because computer modeling is becoming less expensive, and partly because one can try more design variations in a shorter time than one can with real models.
I think going so far as to disable Safari outright and deleting email accounts is too extreme but I definitely agree that most Apps are counterproductive.

It's important to moderate use of addictive services that provide a stream of instant gratification like facebook, twitter, reddit, 9gag, pinterest, etc. The first step is being conscious of excessive use.
It sounds intriguing, lots of folks are critiquing off the cuff. I remember Spell Catcher for the Mac has a you-made-a-typo sound, which was helpful, then again it at times was irritating as it was like some guy behind your shoulder kibitzing as you were typing and interrupted your flow.

Though I would think that maybe keysounds might be a good thing though, as an audible confirmation you typed the right key... not as a punishment, just a confirmation.

I'd go with something as minimal as possible at first and then try variations... you might even be able to take some OSS editor and hook some test code into it.

Lastly How many folks would want to turn on a Hacker's "Gibson Keyboard" sound just to have the cheap thrill now and again?
In a similar vein, I almost always have my phone set to silent without vibrate. This small change has made a huge difference in my interaction with my phone. I reach for it less and just generally think about it less.

The downside is people are sometimes annoyed at me not reacting to calls/messages immediately. I should probably experiment with the iOS Do Not Disturb feature, but it hasn't been too big of an issue so I've put it on the back burner.
You know what would make my life really distraction-free? Ban Hacker News on every device I have access to for a prolonged period :)
In my experience, hosted database providers are almost
always either cost or latency prohibitive.

Nowadays, in PostgreSQL is quite simple to replicate a db via log shipping[1]. You can even stream the WAL to an S3
bucket.

[1]: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/warm-standby.html
Question -- do you have any background as a sysadmin? If not, then I can totally understand the attractiveness of something like Heroku. It really does take care of a lot of nastiness.

From my side, I've got a fantastic Ansible setup for databases, security, ssl certificate distribution, and so on, and so Heroku doesn't really buy me anything for the extra money.
I used Do Not Disturb a lot during the peak hours of my dissertation writing. It was pretty helpful. That of course means I would miss new emails and phone calls but those could be responded to later
What about backup, check out Duplicity for backing up to S3.
Rackspace has quite a nice built in tool for backups too if you ever leave your current setup.
Duplicity
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
Advlo – The Adventure travel marketplace
So the proposal is another layer of indirection, à la namespaces, à la where-have-I-seen-this-before.

I'd appreciate it if they'd stop thinking that what they're doing is for the benefit of everyone instead of in their particular interests.

I wish someone, anyone, would officially pull udev out of systemd for the sake of all Linuces.

But in reality, I'm betting on hypervisor-based micro OSes as they way to go. We don't need another "app" format, like what Docker/libcontainer and this proposal are gravitating toward. We already have one, it's called HTML5/REST/HTTPS. Get that in your skulls people! A tar-ball is an app that serves the directory tree, okay. A POST virtualizes this, like a copy-on-write fork(). Now you have to determine how you virtualize on sessions/user logins/etc. There is nothing in this decade that needs to be done any other way!
Is it really so hard to believe that a man who is abrasive has no problem dealing with other people who are abrasive? There do exist different cultural attitudes and standards for abrasiveness, tact, manners, and respect. The standards currently used in corporate America are not universal; some people have stronger standards, others have looser.
I personally have a mixed feeling about disabling password-based login. What if you've lot your key and you need to access the server for reasons such as getting the data out, how do you do it without root and without login password? Is there a way to go around this issue? Let me know if there is because right now, I have login password that I don't re-use. Well, I guess for real deployment, serving real users, you'd have shading and a good central logging system so losing an instance is not a big deal, but for me I run a personal server and this is so far the way I protect myself (have login and ssh) in the case of lossing my key :(

Anyhow, DO droplets allow people to "reset" root password and it is important to protect your DO account.
Most important: disable password login to ssh. Optional: disable direct login for root. Optional: limit hosts that can login with whitelist for sshd in hosts.allow (and ALL:ALL in hosts.deny). On Linux I generally don't lock down ports w/iptables - better to not have anything listening on a public interface that's not supposed to be publically available (most distros have sane defaults when set up as a server config these days).

As for DO upload your/a pubkey for root access to the control panel and have it installed for you in new images.
Top Programming Trends by Google
I have never heard of anyone not using DO-178 though.

Me neither. I can imagine that would be harder than just using DO-178, as the auditors are used to dealing with it.

Have you seen level A software written using C++?

Not personally. I have heard of a level A flight controls project that was planning to use C++, and was in the process of getting their C++ compiler (GCC C++, I believe) certified. I don't know how it turned out.
I did something similar.

All I had to do was use a Blackberry 9900 as my primary phone.

I did not have to disable anything. I primarily use it for emails, calls and SMS. Those are also the only things that seem to work.

When travelling out of town I usually carry my backup devices as well(iPhone/Nexus)to find directions etc.
Scale models of nautical craft have always been limited by some unrealistic assumptions -- assumptions that are recognized but not well-adjusted for.

One important aspect of a scale-model ship/boat is that as you change the size of a model but keep the relative dimensions constant, its surface area changes as the square of its length, but its mass and volume change as the cube. If you halve the size of a model, its surface area is 1/4 the original, but its volume and mass will be 1/8 the original. Simply put, this means a scale model won't behave very much like the full-size craft.

As models become more sophisticated, these unavoidable limitations of scale modeling begin to argue for computer modeling, where you can model the full-size vessel using a carefully designed numerical simulation, including many factors that can't be realistically modeled in a laboratory tank experiment.