skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great!

I'm really no expert, but I think that language-specific persistent in-memory databases are the way to go.

Deep inside, what I really want on my backends is just a data structure. A single big tree (or graph) of objects. Some primitives to make it thread-safe somehow (immutable collections, or mutexes, or just old-fashioned single-threadedness like Node - whatever), and that's it. Requests from the client query and mutate that data. In very many situations, I wouldn't need anything special to make this work fine with an application up to a pretty large number of users. Not all apps do big data analyses. RAMs are gigantic these days, bigger than the SQL datafiles of swathes of webapps.

However, there's that pesky problem of code upgrades and crashing servers. If my server would never crash and I could hot-swap the code, I wouldn't need persistence at all. But I do, so I don't just want an in-memory datastructure, but a persistent in-memory data structure. I want to use this datastructure as easily as the programming language could possibly make it be for me while still guaranteeing some sane level of persistence and fault tolerance.

Redis is a nice idea, but the fact that it's a separate server, with a client and a protocol and data structures that just not precisely map to my programming language's data structures force me to write a whole bunch of boilerplate anyway. Even more so with other databases like Mongo or Postgres.

If I understand it well, Loki doesn't entirely do what I'd want: it does not save the data to disk on every change, but less often, if I get it right. That might be good enough if my problem allows for many little independent Loki databases, but if the dataset is a gigabyte and persistence means flushing that whole gigabyte to disk after every data change, it probably won't work very well.

I'm really curious if other people here have similar ideas, maybe implementations, of these concepts. Maybe Loki could be extended with a snapshot+operation_log type of data storage like Redis has and then it'd be pretty close.
Though the Direct Debit guarantee gives an automatic right to a no-questions asked instant refund.

Not even having a provably validly signed mandate protects merchants against a refund (merchants recourse is small claims court), so while it's a nuisance, and while some people do get de-frauded by not paying attention to their statements, the article overstates things: If he "lost" money it'll be because he chose not to demand a refund.
I can understand the negative impression of the recent GA, drive, and Gmail - but how exactly is search awful compared to five years ago? Unless you're referring to the algorithm changes, I don't see the argument that the interface itself is harder to use now than five years ago.
Yep. Unless there is a bug in the bot or their implementation isn't as described, no one will crack it so its a very safe bet for them.

This contest basically admits its crackable for more than $300k as well. They even reduced the number of bits for a collision. :/
Google Drive has no Linux client. There are only unofficial clients.

Also, on my Macs Google Drive regularly crashes and is not able to upload some files (usually retrying works). With Dropbox I never had such problems.
I think you found the bottleneck you were looking for and not the one that actually existed. 31 doublings gets you from 1 byte to an out of memory exception on your 3GB machine. I doubt that a pure alloc and copy 30 times took several minutes. You would have only moved 4GB total, worst case. Either your vector implementation was not using a doubling strategy or something else was at fault.

What was the structure of the object you were putting into the vector? Did you have an expensive copy constructor? Perhaps some deep copying was happening (possibly chasing lots of pointers)?
the O(1) complexity is achieved as an amortized result, when taking the average time to append. which is exactly what we are allowed to assume for asymptotic analysis. however, i think we should be sensitive that real computers are machines in the real world can run into circumstances that differ greatly from the mathematical result.

for example, if you allocated a slightly too small array and then append to it just slightly too many items, you will trigger reallocation every time. ideally nobody ever writes code that bad and we get to assume that the O(1) behavior is always true. in practice we need to know how the actual algorithm works and make sure we don't accidentally code perverse cases.
One thing I didn't see mentioned is moving goalposts. If you think something is easy, you're more likely to accept adding some bells and whistles. So it will take at least the time you set aside for it. Or more.
(Disclaimer: I work for Estimote)
Indoor location works much better if you utilize data from other sensors in the phone (like accelerometer etc) and apply machine learning to make better sense out of all the signals. I'd suggest you take a look at our SDK that works surprisingly well even with just 4-5 beacons. You can also map your room with our iOS app by just walking around it. You can find it here if you're interested: http://estimote.com/indoor/

We've also implemented some adaptive algorithms to optimize the battery life in our beacons, so with conservative settings they should work for 5+ years now.
Wow, did not know Tim Cook was gay, but I disagree with Russia's actions.
How do you manage 1,100 beacons at once App side?

I thought Apple limited you to 20 region monitoring locations at a time, or are the beacons treated differently? Just logic around which 20 you're looking for at any one time?
The Naming of America
Fake Phone Number – Decoy Digits
Workday predicts if your top performers are at high risk of leaving the company
When evidence of behavior proving a conflict of interest appears (conflict: personal beliefs demonstrably incompatible with stated position of company), the correct action to take is not to downplay that conflict with transparent and inane language.
This is where "The presumption should be that the engineer used due diligence and the situation was unforeseen" clause enters into play.

I've seen many folks in management just always assume incompetence or rabbit holing on the part of engineers. It's good to ask clarifying questions. But as a manager you should be aware that adopting a style of second guessing and interrogating everything your reports do comes off as insulting - after all, you likely hired them, so why don't you trust them?

That being said there are no hard and fast rules here, and being aware of the different histories of different folks is important, but defaulting to a critical attitude is likely to lead to all types of efforts to hide things from you just to avoid questioning, feeling insulted, having their time wasted, etc.
I liked your comment and voted you up but Microsoft's Linux on Azure is really weird. It's obvious there's a windows thing somewhere up in the higher levels because of the way certs are done and ports are used. It's all very non-linuxy. If Microsoft is going to do something with linux they should do it right.
Unfortunately, development seems to have stalled:

https://github.com/Grive/grive

There is also a FUSE client written in OCaml:

https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse
Is it possible to run a KVM VM inside one of the containers? I have an application for launching and managing VMs and letting people spin up a Google container to try it out would be neat.
Some people call it the many-worlds interpretation. I just call it quantum mechanics. An important part of this view is that the scientist running an experiment is not an external observer but he is subject to the same rules of physics. Just as an electron can be simultaneously in many states, so can the human observer.

The interpretation I subscribe to is that measurement is a situation of entanglement. In the electron slit experiment, when you observe the electron traveling through lets say the right slit, subsequent behavior of the electron and the "memory" in the person will be correlated.

I don't know how memory and the brain really work here. I think that is the real question - the mechanics of the brain and an observation.

Regarding Occam's razor, to me this seems like a much simpler explanation of observation than having the wavefunction of the entire universe collapsing when a random human is in the loop.
Interviewing for Female Friendliness: Tips from an Engineer
They use 128bits of a SHA-1 key in 2014. I'd say its pretty clear their security is a gimmick only.

https://konklone.com/post/why-google-is-hurrying-the-web-to-...

From the contest:
"This can happen if a security check is failed, or in the case that the first 128 bits of the SHA-1 of the newly created encryption key don‘t match on both parties’ clients when this stage is completed (this corresponds to Paul and Nick comparing the key visualizations for the Secret Chat in their Telegram apps)."
I find that this often comes from a very shallow understanding of a deep issue. This ardent noncomformity seems to occur when a problem is discovered, no one knows what to do about it, and it becomes "cool" to take an antithetical stance to its superficial faults.

For example, it's now "cool" to hate suburbia. Most of the kids in Williamsburg go on about how much they hate the suburban environment they grew up in. Now, there's a lot to dislike about the typical suburb: whether it's the low-quality and unattractive housing, the racism and classism behind it, the restructuring of life around child-raising that (paradoxically) results in it being done poorly-- kids are better socialized if their parents have adult friends who aren't all parents-- and finally the expensive environmental catastrophe of billions of unnecessary, pointless driving miles. And yet... hating suburbia is about as "suburban", in the negative sense, as it gets.

The hipsters are rebelling against middle-class conformity and insularity by taking attitudes and tastes from the lower and upper classes, often haphazardly without knowing what they're doing. It's a vote of no confidence in the old, mostly suburban, middle class... maybe it's also a bet on peak oil, and the unwinding of car culture is one thing I really like (but you don't need to be a hipster to ride a bike) but... mostly it's about class. The problem is that this rebellion strengthens many of the bad things that it seems to be fighting. Jersey suburbs may be out of style, but Williamsburg landlords are making out like bandits. No real change. On the whole, most of what's billed as "hipster culture" is just lame Cali suburb culture in an urban environment.
Appeals court takes on NSA surveillance case
The best free WordPress plugins for November 2014
I assume the BBC paid a fee for the use of the facility. Maybe they piggybacked onto some testing or scheduled activities that were being done anyway. I'll bet once the location scout saw those huge doors close, the deal was set. ;-)

Similar large facilities exist at many national labs, and they are used only sporadically. For instance, in the Bay Area, NASA Ames has a very large (11 foot square) wind tunnel that can reach Mach 1.45 (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/orgs/aeronautics/windtunnel...).

The inflatable bags that landed Spirit and Opportunity on Mars were tested in Mars air pressure at the Glenn vacuum facility: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/history/marspbag_prt... . Many spacecraft undergo "thermal vac" testing meant to simulate space conditions.
exactly, his "unaligned" test does exactly ONE unaligned read per whole array .....
All I know is that in Firefox, putting the minimum TLS version to 1 makes the page refuse to load.
Dataviz on racial trends in Disney princesses
I'm pretty sure Dropbox doesn't change the binary data. What service changes it?
This is not incompatible with treating obstacle discovery with forward progress. Often the outcome of discovering an obstacle is making a decision at a higher level to go around that obstacle, and either changing the product concept or architecture so that it's a non-issue. You can't make that decision unless you have the information that what you're trying to do is difficult or impossible.
The Pirate Bay's 3rd and Last Founder Arrested After 4 Years on the Run
Ridley Scott to produce sequel series to '2001: A Space Odyssey'
Beacons are being used as a micro-surveillance tool [1,2]. And that is the only prominent use they have found, among all the ones listed. Interestingly Gimbal, is a Qualcomm company or rather was a Qualcomm company as it was spun off [3]. Gimbal also had $5 beacon giveaways [4]. Gimbal had embedded its beacons in phonebooths in Chicago, LA and New York [1, 2].

[1] -http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/exclusive-hundreds-o...

[2] - http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/hidden-beacons-were-...

[3] - http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/qualcomm-spins-gimbal-be...

[4] -https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2013/12/09/qualcomm-a...
Can we ban techcrunch please? http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/11/google-cloud...
What I think is the future for workstations and laptops is a web-integrated OS. Take Chrome OS as an example. These devices become more and more powerful as more and more of our data moves into the cloud.

I don't think anyone actually reviews, comments on or edits large documents on a tablet. That would be a nightmare. The most I've found bearable when reviewing papers on a tablet is highlighting. On a laptop you have the power of a full keyboard, which I can use to comfortably compose this comment, yet my laptop has almost no internal storage and all my documents are stored on the cloud.

This move is important for maintaining relevant, but I do think the insistence on tablets and phones is missing the whole of point of us making the data mobile.
There also StickNFind. They do customer sensors.
The Bitcoin Fluid Dispenser 2.3
Looks pretty darn cool.

Seems like Facebook can own the peer-to-peer payments. Integration with retailers would be even better. Retailers certainly would LOVE to allow me to pay & share my experience via Facebook...
Japanese Whisky Named Best in the World
I noticed this year that almost every article I read about court cases that I care deeply about were either defended or brought by either the ACLU or the EFF. Then I started a monthly donation to both. Both organizations are doing a lot of good work.
A quick comparison of Mesos and Yarn
For region monitoring (typically used for the "notification" case) the limit of "fences" is indeed 20...it gets into a bit more detail about "what's a fence" [edit: most of the time you can assume one monitored beacon == one fence]. But for "ranging" meaning "what beacons with this UUID are around me", the system gives you a report of visible beacons every second with no (defined) upper limit.
Non-local, in layman's terms, means things in vastly different places being able to affect each other instantaneously. The implication is that it is impossible for one particle to very quickly affect the other by sending a virtual particle (or even message), as this would mean the particle travelling faster than the speed of light (and that would be 'a bad thing'!).

So instead of breaking c, we assume things with non-locality that particles 'spookily know'/are affected by things that may possibly be on the other side of the universe. This causes a myriad of problems in the actual physical interpretations.

I remember thinking as well, hey why don't we just accept non-locality, but, actually doing physics with it you end run into myriad headscratchers that even make the broken Copenhagen look attractive! One that I did for my MSc was for the case of an single electron in a (harmonic was it?) potential well and solving for a stationary state. By dealing with the Bohmian waveguide model you end up getting that electron is experiencing no overall force - therefore it is literally stationary (serious problems there!) or moving at a constant speed, and could be ANYWHERE in space (non-locality). So your could have 'bound electrons' that are over in Mars or... aren't moving? I'll put up a work through of that if anyone wants to check! Just one example, but my professor (a very thoughtful guy) thought it was cute, had its uses in some applications, but sadly probably not the right story.
Some time ago someone posted that SkyDrive (now OneDrive) did
ISIS CALL 4 INVASION OF JERUSALEM
And a clever browser plugin or something to decode it seamlessesly
Chocolat 3
This is interesting, but the features aren't comparable to Dropbox and this is a sideshow for Amazon. I don't want to store my precious files at a place where storing files isn't the primary focus of their business.
> Personally, I don't understand how anyone gets real work done on tablets and phones.

I think very few people do, aside from simple tasks like sending emails.
Ross Anderson has an interesting recent paper on network effects in surveillance partnerships.

http://weis2014.econinfosec.org/papers/Anderson-WEIS2014.pdf

"My first big point is that all the three factors which lead to monopoly—network effects, low marginal costs and technical lock-in—are present and growing in the national-intelligence nexus itself. The Snowden papers show that neutrals like Sweden and India are heavily involved in information sharing with the NSA, even though they have tried for years to pretend otherwise."

"[P]layers in an intelligence network may come to see their relationship with the other agencies as their key asset [...]"

Lots of other interesting things there.
I absolutely agree with this. I pushed beacons really hard internally, and got a couple projects with them. Unfortunately, they're an absolute pain in the ass as far as reliability goes. One iPhone 5 detects the beacon immediately, the other has to sit around it for 3 minutes before it's detected, one can't detect it at all. Makes life pretty difficult when my only answer is "Is your bluetooth on?".

I hope that some OS level improvements give us some free reliability and performance increases. Supposedly Android recently got some updates re: beacons.
The simulation seems broken when you increase the box size... If the band is good, most people (black and red alike) will push towards the band.
O(1), or O(log N)? Small difference but I was just having this argument yesterday. Each reallocation takes O(1) time (we assume), and you need O(log N) reallocations to grow by a cumulative factor of N.
How technology is transforming and saving microfinance
I'm looking forward to accessing Dropbox files from the Office app and saving new files to Dropbox.
It's been awhile since I've done any greenfield projects. As such, I'm usually stuck with some ancient/crappy libs. I'm definitely a fan of Bootstrap and jQuery though. I've also been looking into sammy and ko mapping as well, but I haven't had to do a SPA recently (but one is on the horizon)
Since you brought up stats:

Annual Fatality Rates by Profession
(Deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalents)

Miners (2000-2010): 25
Commercial Fisherman (2000-2010): 124
Alaskan Bush Pilots (1990-2009): 287
*Alaskan crab fishers: 300
U.S. military in Iraq (2003-2007): 335
Everest Sherpas (2000-2010): 1,332
Everest Sherpas (2004-2014): 4,053

Source: [1], except for your entry, marked with a *.

Anyway, the "no one is forced" argument has been used to justify (or minimize the negative image of) all manner of free-market labor abuses since the beginning of time. Of course, it ignores the crushing poverty levels which drive people to "choose" most high-risk professions on the first place.[2] Which tend to be basically unimaginable to most people making the "no one is forced" argument.

[1] http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/moun...

{2] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140418-evere...
It's vastly more plausible that your brain is good at seeing patterns where none exist than that you have psychic powers.
I'm on of the founders at Rainforest - any questions, feel free to reach out via olark / email / etc.
> Office already has "direct" OneDrive integration and it's pretty useless, how could it be any better on Dropbox?

Useless?

Across my phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop, I would hardly call cloud file syncing useless.
Pretty sure we're gonna see a similar offering from AWS in a week.
Bruce Schneier on Crypto Cracking Contests (1998) - https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9812.html
I think that Amazon AWS/S3 is significant reason to not call this a sideshow.
The apexes of all possible parabolic trajectories for a given initial speed
Usually I try to make things that are a need in certain niches that I am into.

I have no problem with projects, I just can never finish/put any of them into production
> but you can derive almost as much experimental entertainment by dropping, say, a ping-pong ball and a similarly sized marble or ball bearing.

in a vacuum chamber, right? In air they wouldn't behave same.
Even in the 1950's plenty of people hated the suburbs. But when looking at larger trends you need to consider larger changes that made city living much more pleasant in comparison.

First a dramatic drop in crime. In many ways there were similar rates of criminals in the suburbs, but the lower density defused their impact. EX: Kids throwing rocks through car windows spend more time walking and less time destroying things in the suburbs. But the same applies to pickpockets or home invasions etc. Coupled with local reporting looking at the absolute numbers of crimes vs and ignoring the rate of said crime. (That's 5 blocks from here fells vary different than that's 20 miles from here.)

Second, dramatically increased air quality due to the loss of the manufacturing sector and improved pollution controls on cars.

PS: One of the more interesting ideas on urban renewal basically goes like this. The Gay community does not care about local schools and is willing to trade poor schools for cheaper housing. They raise the rates slightly and push out the poor population. Fewer kids and higher property taxes improve schools which attracts young people who further drive up rents pushing out the Gay community who don't care about schools. And the cycle continues. Crime rates can be dramatically different over just a few blocks, but having a stable buffer zone is very important. (You can substitute young people without kids in the model they serve the same function but they tend to spread out more diffusing the impact.)
Java 8 Streams: Micro Katas
GCE doesn't support nested virtualization.

But if you are running Kubernetes on bare metal, there is no reason you couldn't map in /dev/kvm and have k8s run VMs for you. I haven't done it though :)
SublimeLinter is looking for new maintainers
More disappointing than the team playing at Levi's?
Honestly I'm excited. 3001 was an interesting book, albeit very short.

So far we're getting a Childhood's End TV miniseries, and a 3001 movie. How long until we Rendezvous with Rama movie? I really would like to see that.
As a Tesla owner, I actually feel like the press is too generous in their comparisons to similarly priced vehicles. Unless I was buying a car for a special purpose like track racing, I can't imagine spending the same amount or more on a legacy vehicle with a lower passenger capacity, less storage space, more mechanical complexity, and the constant hassle of having to stop to buy gas.

We're in the process of replacing our second car and that will end up being less than half the price of the Tesla. But if I were going to spend > 60k, I would buy a second Tesla without the slightest hesitation.

In 37k miles I've never experienced limp mode and don't know much about it. I regularly drive for over 2 hours at Midwest highway speeds.

Can you describe your half-day jaunt through the mountains in more detail? I'm having trouble figuring out how this is out of the question.