skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The current Ebola epidemic may well become the worst human disaster in this century. And we are not doing enough about it."

Ok, I think anyone here generally understands how dangerous Ebola is and could become if it continues to spread.

That being said, already this century:

Smoking has killed roughly 60 million people

HIV / AIDS has killed 20 to 25 million

Malaria has killed eight million

Diarrhoea has killed perhaps 15 million

We're a long ways yet from Ebola competing as a worst human disaster candidate. To put it in stark perspective, it could kill a million people before it's contained (100+ fold more than it likely currently has), and it still wouldn't get near the health disasters I listed. I don't really understand why people persist with inflating Ebola's stature (or downplaying the other health disasters, however you want to look at it). The only conclusions I've come to, are that Ebola has been sensationalized for years by Hollywood and the media (on-going), and its mortality rate and rapid nature are obvious fear points. I still don't see how the fear adds up when compared to millions of children dying from diarrhoea, except that these are things most people think they can't get / won't die from.
Haskell's rhetoric has always seemed a bit Pharisaical to me: "Though the runtime is impure, Our Code is uncontaminated by the taint of side effects".
Timeless indeed, the speed of light won't be changing soon. See also the "cloudlets" research at CMU, http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu/DOCS/satya-ieeepvc-cloudlets-2009.p...
Trader Joe's has had quite a few food recalls lately.
I was going to reply with something along the lines of "modern filesystems should already have meta-data indexes".... because I thought I'd read about that in connection to ext4, btrfs and/or zfs. Now I'm no longer certain ... all I came up with was the following, which might be of interest:

BabuDB (related to extreemfs.org): http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1849822

Spyglass: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/pub/leung09-fast.html

And more from the same researchers: "Scalable File System Indexing":
http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/proj/fsindexing.html

Perhaps I'm thinking of reiser4?

See also:

TokuFS: https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotstorage12/workshop-prog...
https://github.com/esmet/tokufs

I'm still certain I've seen talk of indexing metadata, and I thought it was in an actual, open, system...
Did a Chicago to Vegas trip on Amtrak. We were a day and a half late. Similar story. Never again.
The meat example is a good reason, but it doesn't apply in this case.

> "Pretty much anything I can buy in the U.S., I can legally import into Canada. There are permits required for meat, seafood and dairy. We stick to vegetarian packaged nonperishable items."

> "I would prefer Trader Joe's accept my long-standing offer to follow guidance on how they would like me to operate," Hallatt says in an email."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/30/217210915/bag...

It's really difficult to change the quality of unopened, non-expired, pre-packaged food. The more I read about this, the less reasonable the company behind Trader Joe's seems. Even companies like Apple allow other channels to sell their products.
Hackillinois Landing Page
I read somewhere about a black market for ebola survivor blood. At first I misread the title and thought it meant a black market for ebola-infected blood (or ebola-infected cadavers). Now that is a truly scary possibility - terrorists intentionally infecting themselves with ebola, then going into airports and other high density areas, infecting surfaces and as many people as they can before succumbing (or maybe even blowing themselves up with a suicide bomb - who knows). I think that's one possibility that's been overlooked and underscores why we really need to be funding greater vaccine/cure research (in addition to the obvious reason of potentially saving millions of lives in Africa).
In 2010 when I was doing it, we'd run it thru google maps if validation failed, similar conceptually.
Apple Watch animation recreated using QuartzCode
It's reasonable for the university to regulate what you can do on _their_ network.
With online use, the chip does not come into play.

How would having a having the Chip and Pin have prevented the data from being stolen? It does not. The "Chip and Pin" argument is brought up each time this sort of retail breach happens, like a reflex.
You say it's a security risk "if your AP isn't configured correctly." It would be much more accurate to say "if the university network isn't configured correctly."

If you expose unrestricted access to sensitive stuff to everyone on the dorm ethernet, sinister wifi hackers on the sidewalk outside is the least of your worries. Your university IT was trying to cover their incompetence with random authoritarianism.
Because it has nothing to do with safety, but with manipulating of specialized data-structures. "Instantiation of a value of a given type" in Haskell is what? Calling a "type-constructor" which is just what? Constructor - a procedure which returns a data-structure.

Now, how CL style type-tagging is fundamentally different form what Haskell does

What Haskell does in no more "safer" than if I do tag-checking at runtime. (That's why CL is called a strong-typed language). So this is why it is a silly meme.

The idea that compile-time checks is much better than runtime checks is also not obvious (Java's and other commercial languages nonsense about type safety aside - Java is no more safe than CL).

What is better - to clutter the code with explicit type annotation or clutter the code with explicit type-tag checking in the runtime code is another question.)

I personally love Lisp and Erlang with "everything is a pointer to a tagged value" semantics.
Wow, maybe read the reply to you by @cyphunk. You accuse me of being unhelpful and not contributing, and then you fan the flames by making an arrogant capitalized assertion about something which is well known to be controversial. You will note that my reply was sarcastic (as is your first sentence), but did not make arrogant assertions about that over which reasonable minds may differ.

You might want to review this exchange and think again about who is contributing to the thread in a reasonable way that respects differing views.
Where does it say that this client from hell is not an MBA/manager/product manager? In fact, from some of his behavior, I'm willing to bet this client is not a technical professional. Asking for NDA / repeatedly badgering contractor for delivery after just 1.5 days / weasel wording - all are big red flag banners typical of the "idea guy" in my own freelancing experience.
Yes but that's about controlling access to their own network. They don't ban you from operating a wifi hotspot using a 3G-connected device like a mifi or a phone with tethering.
> They also lose out on quality control issues which could be a major issue.

I don't feel that this is an issue in this case. Hallat only buys pre-packaged foods and I'm sure that Canada's food regulatory bodies don't allow the sale of expired food.

"Pretty much anything I can buy in the U.S., I can legally import into Canada. There are permits required for meat, seafood and dairy. We stick to vegetarian packaged nonperishable items."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/30/217210915/bag....
Probably more like a Tesla VS gas powered go-kart.
InstantClick: Preload pages your website visitors are likely to click on
I would imagine that teleporting is actually quite dangerous, in all it's (fictional) forms.

Imagine it was magical and you just kinda popped into the spot you were thinking about. But what if there's something occupying that spot now? Would you just teleport into it? Or would it swap you and whatever was in that spot? What if there's still more of that object there? Would you suffocate in a newly built wall or get squished by moving machinery? You could always teleport only to places you can see, but I imagine that would be quite disorienting. Zap, your entire field of vision changed without you registering any movement. You'll proably get dissy and accidentally teleport somewhere dangerous.

Or let's go with the Star Trek like beaming. Are there transcription errors that slowly build up? What if the exit node uses a different kind of encoding than the entry node?

Teleportation seems awfully dangerous.
Object Oriented Programming Isn't Bad
>USA to bring the world together

oh you already did, together AGAINST USA
You still wouldn't be able to trust them.

Google's Spanner goes really far down this line of reasoning. Read the paper; it's great.

Basically, highly-precise clocks in a machine-local context would substantially reduce drift, but you can still never really synchronize two clocks reliably across a network (potentially asynchronous send and receive times make it basically impossible)

Maybe there's some literature on this I haven't read, but I don't think it would eliminate the kind of work you currently have to do to solve this problem (ie. what Spanner has done), though it would certainly narrow the bars on their TrueTime values quite a bit.
Secure Messaging App Is Next Snapchat?
And guns have serial numbers and records to trace their purchase, right?
Have you inspected the issue? One issue that makes me worry is the battery connections. These drones have a lot of vibration once they are in the air, and you need to check the battery wires before/after each recharge to make sure they solder is not broken etc.
This is pretty weak sauce by Atlantic standards. Is there anyone over the age of 8 or so who doesn't know that free samples are offered in hopes that you'll buy more stuff?
Four words that strike fear into my heart.
Researchers reveal how curiosity alters our brains
The 20 minute flight time is nothing to brag about... the much cheaper microquad apparently flies for 10 minutes. If you want a drone with real flight time, you need to go with a plane-type craft.
The title should be clearer: E911 is not 911. This is why we still have an overpriced landline at my home.
Mastering the Bézier Curve in Sketch
The hard drive was not user serviceable. The ram was, just behind the battery
Washington Post employees slam owner Jeff Bezos
screen doesn't have history?
Named Entity Recognition in the NLTK library seems to work fine in natural language text. See also http://freshlyminted.co.uk/blog/2011/02/28/getting-band-and-...
Forty Portraits in Forty Years
O2O (Online 2 Offline) is our industry’s stupidest acronym
> The AdHoc Rogue AP sounds very much like what they were doing

I don't think so. This mode targets ad hoc networks. Mifi devices and iPhone/Android tethering set up access points, not ad hoc networks.
Not really. The point of Haskell is not to avoid having side effects. The point of Haskell is to allow code to be referentially transparent - this makes it both easier to reason about as a developer, and easier for the runtime to optimise.
20 of the hottest tech stories on Asia in the past week
Safety as you're using is not the concept that Haskeller's refer to when they talk about the language. "Type safety" is a very precise term that refers to several proofs about the semantics of the language.

See: http://jspha.com/posts/all_you_wanted_to_know_about_types_bu...
Obviously you can't. The geofence (as implemented in ArduPilot) is simply a safety measure; once the aircraft passes outside of a defined zone, it returns to a pre-determined waypoint inside the fence and waits for further pilot commands.

To answer the initial question, the latest versions of ArduPilot implement terrain following (based on terrain data loaded into the flight computer before-hand). Additionally, there is also now support for range-finding instruments like Lidar Lite [0], although I don't believe those are currently being used in the terrain following mode. Such instruments could conceivably be used to implement "look-ahead" functionality to more accurately avoid obstacles.

[0] https://store.3drobotics.com/products/lidar-lite
> The idea that compile-time checks is much better than runtime checks is also not obvious (Java's and other commercial languages nonsense about type safety aside - Java is no more safe than CL).

Runtime checks will only trip up if you happen to hit a code path the introduces an incorrect type. This may only occur in some extremely rare scenario that you never pick up in testing.

Compile time type checking allows you to prove that your program is definitely type safe, with 100% certainty.
Then let's just dig a canal and have the container ship deliver it to our houses, you would eliminate rail, truck and consumer transport costs!

I would estimate 100% of people buy and transport food, and I can guarantee almost 100% would kill you rather than stop.

Making asinine comments is asinine. You might find it concerning that people use automobiles to get "freight" to their homes, but I find it quite reassuring. I for one don't want to be around when they stop.
The Rochester Cloak [pdf]
The windows in demo should resize immediately as I drag them.
Vanishing Act: Movie Trailers Are Going Voiceless
looks fine now
Refer to jacquesm's post [0]:

>Because (1) a jammer is an unlicensed transmitter and (2) jammers do not just jam with discretion they jam for as far as they reach and it is impossible to operate a jammer in such a way that you cover all the territory without extending beyond it in some places.

Jammers can interfere with people's ability to contact emergency services. Obviously in the case of WiFi this is not an immediate concern because 911 is currently reached through a different wavelength, but WiFi is integrating into infrastructure (WoT, etc...) such that jammers can be a real cause for concern (especially if they are operated by poorly trained people).

>If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI.

What about the scenario where you have an ISP that offers city-wide WiFi to its subscribers. A Marriott is within the bounds of this area, they block access to a service I pay for and they have approval to provide me with. Who is in the wrong?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8407399
It seems to spread through pirated software torrents. I found at least one user seeding this dropper:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YOfXRUQJgMjJSLBSoLiUaSZf...
FutureDeck
There could be bounty hunters, who wrangle asteriods and other debris to serve the ever-hungry fleet of elevators. Also, there's legit asteriod/moon mining possibilities to at least partially counter the up-traffic.
Yes, that is altar upon which you sacrifice the abilitity to write print statements to do debugging, and lose the ability to reason about order of execution. But does it really result in more performant code? Every benchmark I've ever seen, more practical languages like Ocaml have come out on top.
Drones are less practical than existing tools for most everything you just listed.

For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results. The only thing a drone can better do is look down at your roof, or over your fence if your fence is higher than nearby buildings.

For assassination, traditional tools are clearly more practical in nearly every case. A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.

I don't really know how arsonists generally do their thing, but I can't imagine that dropping something flammable is more practical than just driving by and throwing it.

I'm sure there are very specific cases where sophisticated drone usage could be useful for committing these crimes, but I don't think it's a major concern, and not even one of the biggest concerns of drones.
"So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"

- "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"

"Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"

- "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

from 'A Man For All Seasons', by Robert Bolt
Not to mention that the vast majority of people who would be willing and capable of pulling off such an attack are probably people in government, so government regulation wouldn't make sense as a recommendation.
I am not sure that this assertion is true for user-defined ADTs, which is the essence of programming.
The reddit thread [1] explains that the worm was posting information on /r/minecraftserverlists, presumably as a way to easily, anonymously, and publicly store and retrieve information.

Just last week in the thread on the twitter image bots [2] someone postulated:

>I wonder if you could build some kind of distributed neural net on top of twitter or another social network. Find some way to get nodes with very little computation power hidden within a free app, webpage, screensaver or something[1], and use twitter as a communications channel instead of IRC or whatever.

...

> Or a botnet, if you're feeling evil.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2i6rte/hackers_have_fo...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8377985
he didnt invoke it from within screen it looks like - it was invoked with the invocation of screen
I don't think kamikaze drones are even remotely practical as weapons for assassination. You'll have big issues with accuracy, lethality, and the element of surprise. It could work, but I don't see any circumstances where a hunting rifle wouldn't be a far better tool in every aspect.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make with two sets of made up (and nonsensical) numbers.

A middle of the road urban fire company gets around 8,000 dispatches a year. Most of these calls are EMS, and run the gamut. The serious ones are all time sensitive -- someone having a cardiac incident or serious car accident needs immediate care from someone wight a clue.

I think the real point here is the bullshit/ignorant knee-jerk reactions "911 isn't there to help you" are just that. Thousands of peoples lives are touched in a positive way by efficient emergency services response.
CSX freight also causes delays between Chicago and New Orleans. When I was delayed, the conductor claimed that CSX was in violation of either state law (IL) or the rail-sharing contract they have. I forget which.
Thus guaranteeing that unregistered drones are dangerous.
Given that we don't even know why they were seized (or how many were seized by each person), it seems like you have an amazing hostility towards domainers in general.

What makes you so mad towards them?
Do you expect to be able to regulate the electronics industry that tightly? You'd need some universal DRM system implemented in every accelerometer, GPS module, electric motor, and microcontroller.
You called it (sort of):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8408766
GWT has long-ish compile times and it involves quite a house of cards, with getting the Eclipse plugin to talk to the browser plugin, for the 1? browser that actually has a plugin. Yeesh :(
Chrome Continues to Gain Ground
It was a social calendaring app exclusive to UofM students. We uploaded the course database so students could pick the classes they were enrolled in and sync it to a calendar (students could also sync their other calendars) and share it with their friends. It was an easier way for UofM students to see what their friends/classmates were upto throughout the day.
Another incident that tells us we need to move towards something more decentralized. Namecoin is an excellent concept and idea, it's a pity it is not used and supported more widely.
Knocking down an AdHoc AP of two guys privately playing Starcraft on a LAN would likely be against FCC policy, for example, and automated AdHoc containment is dangerous unless you can identify the source, as it may not be part of your network or operating on your equipment.
It's absolutely true for any code that's referentially transparent, regardless of whether it uses user-defined ADTs or any other construct.
Lotus 1-2-3 moves into that great recycle bin in the sky
In case anyone was wondering, that wasn't intended as a snide remark about Javascript. The way the "Gallery requires javascript" message appeared in the middle of the text like it was part of the essay just touched my funny bone in the right way.
You only need to pay the $600/month if you need to support clients older than IE7. You can use the SNI option instead which is "free" (relative to the rest of the costs associated with a CFD).
I've taken Amtrak cross-country several times now, each trip combining the Lake Shore Limited and Empire builder. The trains have been on time and service had been fantastic (note: I was riding 1st class with a private cabin, which is quite expensive). I just now priced out a Washington state=>Springfield, MA trip, 2700-odd miles, and the coach price is $223. 1/3 the cost of a flight. For that money I can travel without standing in queues, without anyone grabbing my crotch, and with time and space to work and code. It's a pretty compelling proposition.
At first I thought you meant this wasn't Free software, but then I had a look and realized it was AGPL[1] -- how's that not liberal enough?

What am I missing?

[1] https://github.com/intellifactory/websharper/blob/master/LIC...
There is a namecoin dev introduction thread filled with their various projects and a few calls to action on /r/namecoin if you're interested.

https://reddit.com/r/namecoin
All you really need to read is the language, they aren't people they're 'shady domain land grabbers'.

You can tell from the language that the OP knew of an opportunity to buy mispriced assets and/or renew their domain, and having failed to take the opportunity is now upset at others having taken the opportunities they missed.

You know the kind of people that couldn't be bothered to spend $90 for a 10 year registration and now have to pay a few hundred to get a domain back they wasn't worth $10, or clicking the 'auto-renew' button to them.
First, you said "typically". That's pretty strong.

Second, I know from experience how distorted people's interpretations of these situations can be. You seem sure that you judged one example correctly; I think it's more likely that you jumped to a conclusion.

The first thing PG said when teaching me how to moderate HN two years ago was: whatever you do, don't censor stories because they're anti-YC. I think about this every day and try to stick to it. But that doesn't mean that posts like the OP get a free pass just because they say bad things about a YC-funded startup. If we applied the rule that mechanically, we would fail our primary responsibility, which is to keep the quality of HN high. So we do what we can to balance the concerns.
> I'm still certain I've seen talk of indexing metadata...

This reminded me of BFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System
>I am not sure that this assertion is true for user-defined ADTs

Depends what you mean.

It's safe in the sense that you will never get a type error.

In Haskell terms, it's possible to write a function that's not total (e.g. not implemented for all possible data constructors of a type), which can then crash or fail to terminate. For example, "head" will crash on an empty list (duh).

However, this is easy to avoid, and type safety in Haskell always holds true, as do all the other guarantees the compiler makes (like referential transparency).
Yes, if you want type-checked generic monads.

Dynamic languages can implement generic, but not type-checked monads. Many static languages can implement type-checked but non-generic monads.

Now you need to show how type-checked generic monads are critical. That's much harder than showing that the monadic pattern is useful.
Philips Clock for $10,000 + $59.99 S/H