skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This whole article is a reflection of a belief that I really don't like but is all too common these days. It's the idea that nothing is better than anything else, everything is a trade-off and strong positive are inherently wrong.

I don't buy it.

It's a tacit assumption that, somehow, everything is on the Pareto frontier. Profoundly implausible. In the background, it's basically a hybrid appeal to moderation (all extreme positions are wrong) and popularity (if so many people are doing something, it can't be wrong). Never mind the fact that popularity is almost meaningless, driven by fashion more than anything, and that what's "extreme" is arbitrary and largely driven by popularity itself...

This is how we get "worse is better"; this is how we get standards that are compromises ideal for nobody but still widely adopted because they're standard or because that seems like the thing to do or because that's what everyone else is doing or because " engineering".

The worst part is that this all goes unsaid, assumed correct by default. Just the fact that we're having the discussion the article wants, and not this meta-discussion, implicitly elevates its premise!

Some things are better than others. A strong debate between strong positions is healthier than an artificial social force reverting everyone back to mean.

Now, all this is not to say the usual message about types is perfect. It could definitely be improved in many different ways. But not by muzzling, weakening or qualifying: not by most of the argument's suggestions.

Especially ironic is the rhetorical techniques the author uses to argue against rhetoric. The one I personally find the most grating—beyond the ambient implication that everything is equal that I've just written about—is establishing cheap credibility by aligning himself with the camp he's arguing against. "I like X, but..." Or, in this case, "I use OCaml, but..."

Then again, my pointing this out is probably ironic in the same way. Or is it?
Is your concern that if the four Magna Carta copies are destroyed, power reverts to the British King?
> Today’s garden-variety incandescent bulbs aren’t much different from the ones Thomas Edison sold more than a century ago. They still waste 90 percent of their power, delivering roughly 16 lumens per watt. Fluorescent tubes do a lot better, at more than 100 lm/W, but even they pale next to the best LEDs. The current state-of-the-art white LED pumps out around 250 lm/W, and there’s no reason why that figure won’t reach 300 lm/W.

If 16 lm/W is 10% efficiency, why isn't 300 lm/W an impossible 187.5% efficiency?
BioShock Vets Face Life After Irrational with the Flame in the Flood
This story is 'revised'. The original idea of the OXCART was to fly so fast that it would not be in one place long enough to rise above background noise on the radar screen. Think of those CRT radar screens and the 'mark' corresponding to the plane not being a big green dot, but more something that just would not excite the phosphor and therefore not show.

The OXCART contract was won by Lockheed because Convair had little experience of black projects plus Lockheed delivered the U2 under time and under budget. The OXCART A12 was the 12th revision, sure it might have evolved to have stealth as we know it, however, the original idea really was just to be too quick to register on the phosphor.

The big problem as far as radar was concerned was the gigantic plume of exhaust out the back. They tried putting stuff in that to hide it from the radar, however there were problems with that too.

Anyway, my point, this is revised history.
Yes I would! I could have bought a $5 lamp of comparable efficiency, and also have had ten years life; I specifically paid more to get the longer life, damn it! :)

Maybe the vendors are banking precisely on your thinking; that people in the future will lose their receipts, forget the dates, or consider $12 from ten years ago a trifle matter that isn't worth their time and so on, and yet that people can be conned into coughing up more cash today.

By the way, how long an LED lamp will last depends on multiple factors. It's not just the silicon itself, but all of the components in the complex power supply that is integrated into it. It could be zapped by a power surge. (Do these things incorporate TVP's?)

Notice how no electronic appliance that you can buy claims to be good for 25,000 hours of continuous use. No smartphone, no television, no home theatre receiver, no computer. Typically you get a 1 year from the date of purchase, whether it's used or not and you can pay extra for more coverage. One year gives you a little over 8000 hours if you fire it up right away and leave it on continuously.
There are many professions stuck on C and C++ for various reasons. I don't really know why, but yeah, maybe the modern languages just aren't suited for what these people are doing.
You can't tell that if you don't try. Given the situation[1] people who are actively fighting Ebola in Africa need all the help they can get, in any form, even if that's brainpower from amateurs. Of course, it's a very advanced topic (medicine generally speaking is...) where anatomy, pharmacology, (molecular) biology come at play, no one can predict what people all over the world is able to come up with.

[1] The situation is that the Western World at government level doesn't really care about what happens in Africa. It's still too far and away (still). The scary thing is that there's not known and currently approved EbolaVirus treatment that we know off, except rehydration and symptomatic treatment.
Mobile websites work poorly on my Moto G. Apps are smooth and pleasant to use.
So say the death toll in the U.S. ends up being ~2 people, are you going to revisit your assumptions and conclusions? Or would that outcome be easily dismissed as belonging to luck?
Out of curiosity I looked for Isaac Asimov, but he wasn't there. Instead, I looked at Mark Twain. The site only lists his novels, and curiously one of his short stories. Twain wrote a lot of short stories (also available in collections) which aren't on the list.

Also, it uses a line graph to connect publication dates and word counts, but the line between those points is meaningless. At best it should be a step graph, where the height is based on the number of words for a publication divided by the time between publications.

Otherwise it looks like Twain wrote less and less from 1875 to 1880, until finally publishing The Prince and the Pauper.
>I could get this instead of waiting until all merchants support chip and pin (which is never going to happen in the US).

It's going to be supported unless the merchant is happy eating fraudulent charges, which will make them a hotspot for people committing fraud. There's various dates for when that liability kicks in[1]. General trend is 2015 for PoS and 2017 for gas station pumps.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV#United_States
From the guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Please take this trash back to Tumblr.
>As the CDC has acted, nobody wants to actually lock down an infected area, clean it with appropriate HAZMAT gear, and "level 4" quarantine those exposed. We don't, so we won’t

We don’t even need to do this. All we need to do is get to R0 below 1. What this requires is 70% of patients are treated in properly functioning hospitals. Right now the hospitals in the affected area are totally overwhelmed so in practice no new cases are being treated at all.

Putting in place a functioning hospital system on the required scale is now beyond the resources of the countries affected, the WHO, and NGO’s like MSF. The only organisation with the resources and the ability is the US military (with some help from other countries). Every 3 week delay makes the problem twice as large so lets get going right now since full scale mobilisation is going to take months.
Elixir v1.0.1 Released
If the garbage collector were turned off and a cycle were to be present, the file would simply never be closed. Though I suppose that would, indeed, be deterministic.
My parents have a well, I live 2 hours away in a city with municipal water. My parents' tap water contains enough iron and sulfur to taste like diluted blood, while my tap water tastes like drinking from a swimming pool. But I do not consider either myself or my parents to be living in an undeveloped society (Florida has its issues but it's not THAT bad). A tap filter (of the Brita/Pur/whatever variety) makes both waters far more drinkable.

In terms of taste, filtered well > filtered municipal > unfiltered well > unfiltered municipal. But that's just me. I prefer the taste of too much iron and sulfur to the taste of chlorination.
Strictly speaking they only claim 10% improvement from the previous release, the 50% improvement is from a release 16 months ago.
The Amazon app lets you subscribe to physical goods (just like you can on the Amazon web site).
Just wanted to drop a comment on the awesomeness of your app.
Hacker News 2 is by far the best Hacker News app, not just on Android, but on all mobile platforms i've tried (so, iOS, Android and Windows Phone)
Awesome work you are doing.
An alerting system that was smart enough (or configurable enough) to alert the doctors that a patient had visited West Africa would have prevented unnecessary contact by 100+ people in Texas. Instead we are left blaming the broken communication system between the admitting nurse and the doctor.
The current assumption should be that they are always targeted. This has always been the case, even before Snowden or any other events.
Ask HN: How do you track your API keys from ending up on GitHub?
I have seem many people leave twiiter, yelp, rotten tomatoes API keys on open forums like Github. Is it aceepatbe if you are the API provider? What problems do you see?

Do you know how to mitigate/detect this situation?
Microspeak: All-up
I've tried your app, it's functional but obviously I wasn't satisfied with any of the existing options which is why I wrote my own ;) It should be coming out this week, just a few finishing touches now...
Polishing up a tiny corner of the tedium to make everyone's life a little easier is generally a rewarding effort that becomes out of date almost immediately.
There are plenty of ways to get random, emergent and simply chaotic outcomes when building a system without thought or care. I wouldn't call those things 'designed'.
But historical sites are disappearing at the rate cities develop. There is no waiting.

Previous preservationists were often actually amateurs i.e. civilians with no professional training. Today's experts are certainly far more capable than previous amateurs.

Surely another century of science will be able to do a better job. But that's moot. The documents have to be treated as we best know how today.
Implementing Apple Pay isn't a technical feat. There's a standard for it.[1] As long as the banks let you access their token generation service, it's straightforward. However, I haven't heard of anyone other than Apple getting that permission. It'll happen soon enough, but the chances that these guys are the first seems slim to me.

[1] http://clover-developers.blogspot.com/2014/09/apple-pay.html
Hey does this apply to college students?
How to Get Your Boss Off Your Back
> You have to count to figure it out.

It's actually worse than that because one method application that takes an argument can return either an object that can have a method called on it, or a function which can be immediately applied, or some object that doesn't have the appropriate method but can be implicitly converted to one that does - so without knowing the implementation, there is no unique translation of that string into method calls and objects. Your IDE will probably italicise random words in your DSL code for no obvious reason.

A separate issue is that without knowing the implementation you can write code and not know when or how many times it will be evaluated, because if you pass it into an argument that argument may be call by name.

What it all adds up to is that you can look at a piece of code and have very little clue about what it is actually doing underneath. And what is much much worse - it's usually a leaky abstraction so you actually need to know what it's doing underneath and this happens all the time in common libraries in the name of providing a nice DSL.
Mouse Speedometer
I think most people in the market for something next-generation are going to be looking for more than just "how do I consolidate onto 1 physical card". They're going to want to fundamentally improve the payment system with a completely cardless, PIN-less (save for unlocking it once in the morning), wrist-based device.

Plastc is $155 and you still have to:

1. pull something out of your wallet

2. select a virtual card

3. enter a PIN to unlock it

4. share your real card number with the merchant with all the fraud potential that carries

5. sign the receipt or enter your card's PIN (another PIN!)

Apple Watch is going to leapfrog all that so hard.

- it lives on your wrist

- it stays unlocked as long as it's on your body

- you just tap, no signing or card PINs

- it uses tokenization so you never have to worry about stolen card numbers

- it does craptons more stuff than payments too

One advantage Plastc has is it will work everywhere right away while Apple Pay needs NFC terminals. But those upgrades are happening thanks to chip-and-PIN.
Usertik – User Management Service
Does Apple Pay actually reduce branding that much? I bet I'm not the only one who saw the Apple Pay demo and noticed that it displays a nice, large, full-color image of the card being used. Cards with a certain cachet, then (AmEx black, other high-end cards) will still be quite prominently displayed. Indeed, a backlit display might even make more of a brand impression than the physical card, in some situations.

I also am not certain that Apple Pay "massively encourages" a single default card. It looked quite easy in the demo to display multiple cards and switch between them. Looked easier than taking a card out of a crowded wallet and putting it back in, actually.
I'm just wondering if you'd consider releasing a regular data dump, possibly via bittorrent.

As I'd like to do some analysis, but don't really want to thrash the API, downloading all data.
There's an interesting criticism of this over here: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/219717-ftc...

If it had been published by an advocacy group, [the article]
would have simply been the latest in an unending series of
baseless, pseudo-scientific attacks on online advertising
over imagined harms. But coming from the chief technologist
of the advertising industry’s primary regulator and
enforcement agency, the post takes on a far more coercive
tone.
A review article (academic) then...
Wait, MeteorJS was funded? I'm starting to think investors are strangely out of touch with the projects they throw money at. Famo.us is the one that stands out the most to me; I have no idea how they got funding or were able to pay employees. Now Famo.us is open source, like it should have always started as, with nowhere to go for investors. Meteor seems like a similar thing, a web framework of sorts with no concrete way to monetize, also in a very weird niche space (Famo.us for people who think they can get away with not making native apps, Meteor for people who think they can get away with undocumented voodoo in their web development). Now Meteor somehow has enough money to purchase a database company? It seems like the only exit they could have is sell their souls to enterprise. Look at Django, which is a complete, robust, mature framework compared to Meteor's collection of magic. Django is a non-profit entity, which makes sense for this type of software. We've all built a web framework or animation library in our spare time, since when did investors start dishing out cash thinking these things were monetizeable?

To me this just smells of bubble, of too much money for too small projects / markets. Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do something unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right now.
This is sorely lacking in details. Is that really all they did to try and tune storm? As in - nothing? I would be interested to see what other direction they could have gone in with Storm to scale it better for their workloads.

Additionally, it doesn't say much of anything about "what we learned about storm". It just says they stopped using it. There isn't really a good, generalized takeaway here about the system as a whole. This deserves more in-depth analysis.
Five years ago I had 20 casual friends and 2 close friends and then I met my wife. Now I have 60 casual friends and 3 close friends - including her. Getting married has been nothing but good for my social life.
Incandescents tend to be cheap enough that nobody cares. Even if they are longer in the long run, the per-burn-out cost is cheap enough that it will rarely hurt somebodies wallet. Easier to stomach 10 $1.00 burnouts than 1 $10 burnout.

See also: the reason why poor people tend not to shop at Costco.
I've used a service which is a bit like TaskRabbit for Travel to plan a trip to Hawaii - you can see it here https://www.triptips.com/#!/place/maui-hawaii

It's more about the "how" than the "what". If you have a general idea about what you want to do the trip planners give you unbiased advice on how to do it and save you maybe 3 or 4 weekends of trip planning
There can be propositions about that text.

Yes, however, those propositions are not types.
Skype to end calls to phones in India
>While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.

I have donated money, but I now think this is distracting us from what is really needed. No amount of money poured into any NGO will allow us to get on top of this outbreak. Even with tens of billions of dollars a NGO like MSF is not going to be able to put in place the required treatment facilities needed, nor have the authority or ability to enforce an effective quarantine. We should be putting all our efforts into lobbying the US government into getting the required UN security council authority to act and activating the full scale mobilisation of the USA military. This is as about as serious as anything gets.
Stalin's oppression took quite a lot of man-hours.
Cool thanks - like the website and glad to hear you fixed it so quickly.
Former Infosys recruiter says he was told not to hire U.S. workers
Another way of using bistatic radar is to look for holes. Pick a frequency band that has significant background noise and search for places where the background is consistently lower than average. Essentially, invert the detection algorithm. Nice thing about this approach is it can be done non-cooperatively; that is, the EM sources do not need to be controlled by whomever is running the receiver.
Vindinium, gameplay-wise, is definitely the most similar. (vindinium.org)
The header links to a 404:

https://realtimehackernews.firebaseapp.com/news
I wish they had these things for drop-outs like me.
Brackets 0.44 Release: Split View
It was a great language - in its day.
I seem to be inside your parent's "most people" and you seem to be outside of it. I have no idea if the word "most" is appropriate, but at least "some" is.

The sense in which that post intended "weakly typed" is the one in which it means that types are checked neither at compile-time (statically) or at runtime (dynamically). For instance, (most?) assembly is "weakly" typed, because I can "pass" whatever data I want into a subroutine without it noticing whether or not that data has the correct type. On the other hand, Ruby is "strongly" typed, because I get "NoMethodError" if I try to call a method on a type that doesn't implement that method. And Rust is also "strongly" typed because I get an error from the compiler if I try to call a method on a type that doesn't implement that method. But Ruby is "dynamically" typed because I get that "NoMethodError" at runtime, while Rust is "statically" typed because I get that compiler error at compile-time.

I guess you know all this stuff, but you seem to think the terminology is less common than I do!
Watson isn't smart enough. That's like asking Waston to write code for you.
Another frequent contributor, edw519, has published an ebook of his or her comments: http://hn.my/edw519
It does, I just added my *.edu email address to my GitHub account and submitted my request.
I suggest you guys to host documentations of some major free software projects.
It benefits both you and them.
They get nice documentation, you guys get some attention.

Edit: Feel free to contact me if you like the idea and would like to do it for KDE project. I'm a minor contributor and I might be able to ease the process.
That was my exact concern. Chip and PIN is kind of broken. Someone else linked to sources, so I won't. From what I remember researching about a year or two ago, was that one of the attacks on Chip and PIN was to generate fake transactions with the card. If you replay those transactions to a POS terminal in the same order, they will be valid. If you use the actual card before the captured transactions, it throws off the order, making the captured ones invalid. My guess is that this card is either taking advantage of this vulnerability, or making some kind of deal with individual banks.
s/99/89/ :)

I would not be so radical about Lua not being fit for general purpose use. Historically turning Lua into a general purpose language has been the goal of the whole Kepler project. Whether they succeeded or not is a valid question...

And now with LuaJIT there is a clear incentive to use Lua as a general purpose language: it is the fastest dynamic language available. At my previous company we used a lot of LuaJIT on the backend, and I would say it is very doable with the help of a few popular libraries (Penlight + LuaSocket is a good base). The FFI helps a lot too (and makes it an incredible glue language: you don't even have to write bindings anymore).

I still think Lua is not the best language to write Web applications. We used Python and the Pocoo stack (Flask...) and there is nothing so advanced in Lua (yet?), although frameworks like Lapis have to be considered. But for other things Lua(JIT) is a very decent standalone language.

Note: I don't know if everyone realizes this or not but OpenResty is an embedded use case. You are running within nginx.
Torturing Databases for Fun and Profit [pdf]
s/phone/iphone/?
Correct, but long-wave radar suffers terribly from noise, I believe. The difficulty is finding a tiny needle in the proverbial very busy, noisy haystack.

The F117 shootdown over Serbia had the advantage of having been able to tap the NATO radio network, and subsequently position their AA batteries according to that information. Even with that they only had a 20 second window or so to fire whilst the F117 had its bomb bay doors open.

I wonder if the B2 or F-22's radar profile is similarly expanded noticeably enough to stand out amongst the noise in long-wave radar during bombing runs. I doubt we'll known that with any certainty for 20+ years, if at all.
I think your definition is "good", even if it isn't widely-agreed-upon. There may be other "good" definitions, but I don't think the one your parent post is one, because it doesn't seem to permit a "strongly typed" language to define methods that take different types and convert them before operating on them, which would make all languages "weakly typed".
Bad idea. We don't need another process to slow hacker news down anymore. It's already operating at crawl speed. Why the hell is this site so slow?
Fixed! Thanks for letting me know.
Preventing big projects from becoming big headaches
> its all in the median for my comment to apply

I don't know what this means.
Unfortunately Swift is not open source or cross platform
Great news.Thanks