skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man, I just wrote you a big long explanation of how you can update your filesystem even if your parent ship is gone, with shell command examples, but then my battery died before I had a chance to post it, and I'm totally not rewriting it now because I'm sure you don't care that much, and the real punchline is all of this information is about to be obsolete anyway.

The long and the short is, there are carriers (I have one), who are enumerated in the source code (like by public keys) and they are not dependant on each other, except for the sake of being able to route to child ships. So if ~zod is down, and everyone depends on ~zod, the network is indeed hosed. Everyone with active links can continue talking to each other, but nobody new can find anyone, and nobody can find anyone new. Every ship depends on a carrier for routing.

By convention, every time you launch from your pier, you get a new random port number and any ship that was looking for you at your old address needs to hear about your new address from a higher-up ship.

So it is distributed, but finitely distributed. There are only 256 carriers allowed, and they are the only ships that are really independent. Though there has been talk about fleshing out how ships can be separable from their "sein" domain, or parent ships, currently almost everyone is from the same lineage and thus depends on the same pair of servers for pretty much everything regarding the network.

This "centralized" design is indeed a core feature of the network, and it even relies on DNS to be bootstrapped, another centralized system. Now, can you show me a decentralized system that doesn't need any of that? I don't know exactly how magnet links or tor, or freenet work, but I am skeptical that they are honestly less centralized than this when it comes to bootstrapping.
That doesn't answer the question: what should they have done instead? We struggle with this at our company all the time. It's very easy to point out the shortcomings in any course of action, because these kinds of decisions almost always have trade-off. As pointed out, the alternative was to leave potentially compromised packages online. If you do a risk/outcome matrix analysis on this decision, they clearly made the right one.
What is the future of emoji in mobile apps?
U.S. approves first genetically modified potato for commercial planting
Off topic: but my favorite response so far:

"Aren't we all just killing time until Google does it?"
A trailing forward-slash was the difference.
Thais is a very good question. As much as you need their cash, you also need their connections and friendship. I would love to see the answers for this question.
For those of us who it hasn't clicked for, could you lend us a hand?
>in last 35 years no terrorists came around... anywhere in EU

Are you sure? Wikipedia has a long list of incidents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Union

>since the plant was paid by public money.

"The plant"? You do realize this happened at 15 plants already? i.e. Someone is systematically doing fly-overs.

Bonus fact: I've been dragged to a police station before for photographing a national key asset - wasn't EU though. All a misunderstand of course... :D
Darn. Most of my interest in it just evaporated.
So, there were lots of MBAs in 2013, but not so much in 2014? Even if you grant that MBAs are a good indicator of startup success, two data points doesn't make a trend line. And I don't think many people on here would be inclined to grant that.
Ah, that's unfortunate. It wasn't earlier.

I cannot edit my OP, but apologies, that link now leads to a paywall.
To be fair though, you have to keep in mind in what part of history this was written. That may have been very modest behavior in that era.
Stepping away from the Algol keyword tradition is obviously a risk. At the same time, after using a keyword-free syntax for a while, reserved words feel really weird.

Someone just emailed and pointed out that he couldn't check out Urbit on Windows, because it has a file con.c. Oh, right, reserved filenames. How are reserved words different? The difference is - you're used to them.

Also, perceived usability (while it matters for marketing) is not the same thing as actual usability. Actual usability is something you only find out when you try to actually use something. We have a good bit of experience inflicting the syntax on coders of various abilities and backgrounds, and we're pretty satisfied with the result.

It helps that the syntax is quite a bit more regular than it appears at first glance. It's much more regular than Perl, and it also comes with a vocalization model that makes it easy to say out loud.

For instance, "=+", which more or less declares a variable, is "tislus." A lot of things like "=+" also start with "=", ie, "tis." You wind up learning about a hundred of these digraphs or "runes," which is a lot less than, say, Chinese.

Speaking of Perl, have you heard - Larry Wall is a Christian? I don't think this makes Perl a Christian programming language, though.One of the joys of our engineering inheritance from the 20th century, which was really humanity's golden age of political insanity, is that we get to stand on the shoulders of loons. We fly Christian astronauts into space on Nazi rockets programmed by Communist physicists. And it works...
Yes: 1-2 hours a week
Yes: 3-4 hours a week
Yes: 5-9 hours a week
Yes: 10 or more hours a week
W/r/t/ TeX: Is it not possible to use the MathJax plugin on WP?
I read it more along the lines of "some folks and I have come up with a reasonable solution, but it's nowhere near production ready so no one would want to test it."

My bad
> "No problem!"

I feel indifferent about the parents. Perhaps the writers and directors wanted me to feel that way. I feel absolutely no sympathy for the kid. I am clearly unfit to be a parent.

I am just sad for the dog.
Nice article. I love databases too for similar reasons but, as someone that designs database engines, some of the technical points are off the mark. I never really stop learning in this area, the technical range is incredibly deep and nuanced.

Some of the points that caught my eye as being quite off:

- Contrary to footnote 2, modern database designs bypass the OS file system cache and schedule their own I/O. This has an enormous performance impact versus the OS cache (2-3x is pretty typical) and is a good litmus test for the technical sophistication of the database implementation. It is the primary reason many open source database engines, even "write-oriented" ones, have relatively poor write performance to disk.

- The three data retrieval models enumerated are textbook but if you were designing a new engine today you probably would not use any of them for a general purpose design. Modern spatial access methods (ex: Hyperdex, SpaceCurve, Laminar) are superior in almost every way though the literature is much sparser. Also, a number of real-time analytical databases use bitmap-structured databases (ex: ParStream), which are incredibly fast for some types of query workloads.

- Many distributed database challenges are a side effect of "one server, one shard" type models. It is not necessary to do things this way, it is just simpler to implement; some distributed database systems have thousands of shards per server. The latter model is operationally more robust and better behaved under failure and load skew.

- Tombstones are usually trivial if the database engine is properly designed. Complications are a side effect of poor architecture. The big challenge for tombstones is deciding when and how tombstoned records are garbage collected. It is outside the scope of the normal execution pathways but you also don't want a Java-like GC thread in the background.

Of course, any of these is a long blog post in itself. :-)
As Horace wrote around 14 BC:

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. - Ep. II.i.156

"Greece, once conquered, herself conquered the artless victor, and planted the banner of civilization in the farmlands of Rome."

I have translated freely and taken considerable license.

By Aurelius' time, familiarity with Greek for the ruling classes was a given; as a matter of preference, it is a more supple language and probably more comfortable to use for putting abstract reasoning to words.
Follow-up: As I suspected, regarding magnet links

> The first time a client joints the DHT network it generates a random 160-bit ID from the same space as infohashes, and then bootstraps its connection to the DHT network using hard-coded addresses of clients controlled by the client developer.

This sounds really quite like the process of creating a submarine, and reaching out to the carrier ~zod. The fact that the init process is hardcoded to trust ~zod doesn't change that you can really init your ship's filesystem from any other ship, provided you can reach it.

Carriers are all found through the existing DNS infrastructure. Other ships are able to be reached "in-band" by asking a carrier for an introduction. Without this seed or hardcoded list (or by conducting a brute-force search), or some kind of broadcast mechanism, bootstrapping a distributed network is not actually possible.
Maybe they're fleeing as a consequence of culture? Virtually every story I've heard about MBAs in SF can be summed up as "we didn't hire them because of their MBA, but rather, in spite of it." I don't know how well-regarded MBAs in SF actually are, but the cultural grapevine suggests there isn't a very high demand for them.
RUSSIAN TANKS ON THE MOVE
So literally one school (Stanford, mind you) saw a one year shift for it's ~800 students and conclusion is "MBAs are leaving tech!". If just 8 students decide to do finance over tech, it represents a 1% shift. 80 students means 10%...
Back Orifice was an awesome tool.

Very fun to play pranks on less knowledgeable friends.

I even remember starting to learn Delphi 3 because I met a guy that did a similar tool called Hacker's Paradise, but was later renamed to Admin's Paradise I believe, as he realized this could be used for and sold to admins.

He was kind enough to send me the source code and give me a few tips here and there, and man, Object Oriented programming was so hard for me at the time
Ride the Sky
We supply chemicals and supplies to nearly all DIYBio facilities (plug: http://store.p212121.com ). The number of facilities is definitely increasing and it will be interesting to follow as a long term trend.

The article is correct about the trend of people looking for inexpensive alternatives to common lab equipment (centrifuging using a hand drill: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/diy-drill-centrifuge-174651/ ).

The big jump will happen as the quality becomes competitive with commercially available equipment.
So the entire premise of the article is based on the recent Stanford GSB recruitment report:

>That’s according to newly released employment data from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, which is a particular bellwether of the state of startups given the school’s proximity to Silicon Valley. About 24% of MBA graduates in the class of 2014 headed to tech jobs, down from 32% in 2013 and equal with the proportion back in 2012. Of course, those profiteering graduates are returning right back to where they belong in finance and consumer products, which each saw notable upticks in employment.

Apparently we can now make statements about entire industry sub cycles from the whims of 350 students.
Fascinating read. I'm generally not too concerned with science being 100% accurate in my sci-fi movies, but to find that it is all grounded in real science - even the far out, funky, stuff of the last act - is pretty cool.

I personally loved the movie, and the cinematography brought me back to the same feeling I had as a kid watching 2001 for the first time. I grew up completely enamored in space and all of the things in it, and some of the shots produced a very visceral reaction. Almost enough to make me regret that I didn't follow the oh so ubiquitous dream of trying to become an astronaut.
Thanks for the response. I've been working on a project to manage Internet connected lights automatically. It sounds like you've got the lights doing exactly what you want, but are there things you'd like to do that you can't presently?
Show HN: MakeItRain.js, JQuery Plugin to Make It Rain Money
Well, there are no DRM issues with HDMI. The board manufacturer has to be a signatory to the HDCP [1] contract in order to be able to decrypt content. There are other design requirements, such as you decrypted data bus traces can't be on an outside layer on the PCB. It's been years since I looked at that stuff, there's more but I can't remember it. In terms of licensing, yes, if I remember correctly there are two tiers, either a $20K or $5K licensing fee and a couple of levels of per-device fees.

In general terms, from what I remember, the content protection agreements in place pretty much favor designs where the HDMI receiver is build into the main board as opposed to daughter cards. Again, in an effort to prevent illegal copying. Which is funny because to a knowledgeable engineer capturing the decrypted data is an almost trivial exercise. The only thing that can make it more difficult are SoC's where the HDMI I/O is built into the chip and you just can't get at raw data anywhere.

Now sure how I feel about the system Hollywood put into place. I do understand the need to protect their product from mass duplication. Perhaps they thought this was the largest threat to their industry. I strongly disagree with this position. I have not purchased a DVD or BlueRay disk in years. I haven't because there are plenty of content sources, including Netflix. I have just-about zero interest in "owning" their content. For the most part there's vastly more useful and interesting content freely available on the Internet covering a myriad of subjects. They may have shot themselves in the foot by wasting so much time and effort with HDCP.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_...
Not if it's hosted by wordpress (.wordpress.com)

Source: I've been using Wordpress to blog about math for over three years and have had a small amount of (indirect) contact with the Wordpress devs. Apparently they are considering alternatives to their current setup which renders tex formulas to images.
A dose of reality + MBA Friends making way more outside of tech = "I've made a mistake"

Startups are hard. Very hard. Startup life is not glamorous. And failure hurts twice as much when you've lived a cultivated, high-achievement life. Building a company may have gotten cheaper, but it hasn't gotten any easier. If you imagine your life being an uninterrupted string of success by following a relatively conservative game plan you may find it difficult to adjust. Leaving is perfectly reasonable.
Do you have any thoughts on how to organize something like this? It really takes developers with a built up knowledge of a code base and a shared set of code standards, architecture choices, etc in order to build something. That's why open source projects tend to have a core team. Teaching non-profits how to work with open source communities (and vis versa) would probably go a long way.
Early Warning Labs Partners with USGS to Create an Earthquake Warning App
All of the fields you've listed are largely about the representation of data.

A database is simply data that's structured to support an algorithm that models some aspect of reality based on that data.
Ah, I see. I hope it won't crash with my Privacy Guard blocking contacts. Offline maps is a win!
No; the stack of return addresses is required when the variable mutations don't have a consistent inverse.
From the same report. Finance has median 150k base pay, median 40k signing bonus, median 100k other guaranteed income. Tech has 125k, 20k, and 20k. Sounds less likely that they're making some informed decision on the future of Tech, and more likely that they're going where the money is at the moment. Those numbers are very different.

Actually, that hasn't changed in the last year. A more significant fact is that in 2012 24% of MBAs went to tech, in 2013, 32%, and now in 2014 it's back down. There weren't any huge shifts in the industry in the last two years, so the data seems inherently noisy, determined by the acts of 20 people who go either to one or the other.

Poor article. Looking for a story.
I'm going to quote two paragraphs verbatim, because they distill the practical extent of a universal, collect-it-all surveillance.

Anne Roth, a political scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.

Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another. Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.

This is not tinfoilhattery or paranoia, not anymore. Get flagged once for any reason at all, and EVERYTHING in your communication history gets reviewed, re-interpreted, with the already established bias of guilt. This is not even a perversion of justice, because the term implies that justice system was actually involved.

And that was in 2007.

I once quipped that Orwell was an optimist. In the brave new world we live in, that statement has finally lost its amusement value.
You are making an unauthorized copy of their copyrighted software.

Copyright infringement is illegal.
One week ago, it worked.

Two weeks ago, it didn't. I even googled it, how I'm supposed to find it. The street view strip just wasn't there.

It's unpredictable. Nothing subjective, just seek-and-hide UI, which was always hallmark of bad UI.
Taking some leaps here but

AI/Machine Learning/Computer Vision - online index selection / query plan optimization.
Computer Graphics - geo 3d indexes
Numerics/Simulation - query plan optimization
Robotics -if you go meta here there is a lot of overlap with distributed system coordination
Bioinformatics - minimal except that this by definition requires uniquely rich data structures that need to be able to be accessed and stored in a database
Computer Architecture - databases certainly are themselves architected to perform on computer architectures and the reverse is probably true
Cryptography - databases often employ encryption and other security capabilities that are of critical importance but true this isn't the field you mention
> You cannot give up partition tolerance.

It'd be more accurate to say you don't want to give it up all the time. You don't want CAP; you want PACELC.

http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...
I wonder what the stats are regarding success stories with MBA founders vs technical founders. Perhaps SF is catching on to some as yet established reality that an MBA doesn't bring to the table what a technical founder can for an early stage startup.
If coordinated enough, a sudden and unexpected total load drop on the whole power station may cause total mayhem due to turbine runaway; combined with a total loss of grid energy due to every grid HV connection being blown I am not sure if plant ops may be able to keep cooling up.

These things are very rarely tested in production (esp. turbine containments). Right now we're just sitting there and pretend there are no terrorists or political extremists. We're rather like sitting ducks waiting for potshots.
Have you considered that democracy is not actually immune to authority, and it's really a reflection of this, rather than a window into the designs of one crazy person? (hi Curtis)

Maybe every system that comes along and says "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" in reality is just saying "come and try to stop me, Federales". Do you think that is that what we all should be doing instead?
> truly bizarre notions that happened during their youth: duck and cover, public bomb shelter drills, etc.

Duck and cover wasn't bizarre, in context: it's a way to survive a nuclear explosion that isn't in one's lap.

Public shelter drills, also: if one expects one's country to be bombed, then knowing where one's nearest shelter is makes sense.
What's https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/ ?
sure. I didn't elaborate in my first post because its slightly off topic considering the article posted is about the science of the movie rather than the writing of the story.

that's where my problem is. I think its a kind of poorly written story. hollow characters, implausible social explanations, and a bit too much deus ex machina. I understand that the deus ex machina elements of the story are at least partially explained by the conclusion, but they are also largely unexplained and creates a premise that we are forced to accept on faith. that harms my suspension of disbelief.
Ok, ignore the part about nuclear safety. My point about shooting down drones vs. actual improving safety still stands. If the stability of your power network is important to you, then do something about those attack vectors, i.e. build more redundancies or reinforce the roof yet again or deploy ground to air missiles (that last one sounds utterly crazy, but it still would make more sense). Those reactions remind of companies who had a security vulnerability disclosed, and instead of fixing it they sue the researcher.
You put forth very good examples of legal transactions that most people would prefer remain private.

I think the DETAILS of all your transaction history have to be private.

I also think privacy is not a synonym for anonymity.

As long as the record of transactions remains secure and private, I can still be me and transact, and use my identity to my advantage in terms of creating trust.

I'd add to your sentence:
"People need privacy and trust in trade to be free."

"Only a sense of honor can lead to commerce. Any commerce." -Taleb

It's easy to see that those with non-anonymous identities will be able to build trust way faster than those with anonymous-identities.

Anonymity can only protect you from being related to parties that would tarnish your reputation or put you in a undesirable, perhaps even dangerous situation.

I think in the scale of possibilities we're trying to create, privacy and identity will be more valuable for the majority of trade on the network, anonymity will serve a very small percentage which I know is going to be taken care of to some extent by developers such as yourself, however, I think we can't ever promise anonymity as a feature, unless there's integration with a cryptocurrency that can somehow promise this, along with other layers of anonymity protection.
The Real Reason ‘Stupid’ Startups Raise So Much Money
"In other words, what we know about the past signals that we are in a truly traumatic phase of the planet’s history that could affect much of life on Earth, including our species."

'traumatic' is an emotive non-scientific word. From who's perspective? From this one person? From the perspective of humanity? The biosphere? The Earth?

Were the previous mass extinction phases 'traumatic'? If not, why not? If it were not for those previous phases then perhaps evolution would never have come up with talking monkeys. And what if the by-product of our current mass extinction phase is something that could not have happened without this mass dying off. What then?

Maybe if you want to be a palaeontologist actually use scientific language rather than non-scientific judgements.
> We feared an accidental launch,

For a while I stood sentry at a post that, I always felt, was a candidate for attack. At least, we had a bomb shelter and drilled on relocating, and living in that thing.

At 03:00 on cold mornings I wondered if, looking up, I'd see the re-entry glow on a warhead.