skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1935, U.S. Adm. William H. Standley saw a British demonstration of the Royal Navy's new remote-control aircraft for target practice, the DH 82B Queen Bee. Back stateside, Standley charged Commander Delmer Fahrney with developing something similar for the Navy. "Fahrney adopted the name 'drone' to refer to these aircraft in homage to the Queen Bee," Mr. Zaloga wrote. The term fit, as a drone could only function when controlled by an operator on the ground or in a "mother" plane.

A stern googling will get you the Wall Street Journal article this comes from. If I link it, they won't let you read it.
What would a control group have added? If you boil water in a beaker, do you need a control beaker where you monitor the temperature but don't light the Bunsen burner?

Also, how would you run a double-blind test of the foods people are eating? It's pretty hard to disguise steaks ;-)

Most nutritional studies are observational, so the numbers are not very reliable. In this case, "subjects were provided with all food for 18 wk, which was prepared and packaged by staff in our research kitchen." That's one reason why the numbers were so small, though it would have been better if they'd been bigger.

The most reliable evidence would come from controlling what people ate and what they did. I'd have thought this would be something that could be done with volunteer prisoners.
Cool idea worth testing.
I think the kqueue API is worse than the epoll API. They make it try to do too much by dealing directly with all kind of events. epoll on the other hand simply deals with file descriptors and there are other APIs to get file descriptors for events (timerfd, signalfd, eventfd, inotify, etc.). That makes epoll a lot more flexible. It's more of a "do one thing and do it right" approach and it adopts the "everything is a file" mantra to "everything is a file descriptor".

One way where the problem with this is showing, is the filesystem notification API of kqueue. It is a ridiculously bad API. E.g., you can't properly watch a directory with it. Replacing it with something saner would require changes to kqueue. If it had been designed like epoll then it would only require adding a different API to create a filesystem notification file descriptor.
To me, the most interesting part of this is the way that it fosters entrepreneurs. If it were "just" about guaranteeing people have enough money to buy food, it would still be good to do, but a much harder sell. But this looks more like YC for the bottom of the pyramid. That might be the greatest wealth creation scheme of all time.
Sure, but Alice's and Bob's grocery stores expenses have risen, right? Because taxes have risen to support BI.
2nd Avenue subway [0] requires about 8.5 miles worth of tunnels (several hundred feet of which were already dug back in the 70's) and it's budget is $17 billion. Of course that whole cost isn't just for digging tunnels, but it's a clear indication that digging tunnels (especially in dense urban areas) can be extremely expensive.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
heh, no: http://i.imgur.com/ohETHFD.png
Voxer is a really interesting case, as they have run a similar production load on Linux, then switched to SmartOS (Solaris), and now switched to FreeBSD.

Their staff are technically savvy, and I don't know of anyone else who has tested the options in this way, in production. They have a popular mobile app which turns your phone into a walkie talkie and more, and have millions of users.

I saw them interviewed about their move to FreeBSD recently: http://youtu.be/NGT3jpilYfE?t=15m

I like FreeBSD, but I have yet to run the same stack on multiple operating systems in production. That's a LOT of work!
Wireshark, Openshot, Unity, and every app in LXDE has / is switching to Qt from GTK.
I really hope these guys succeed, even if they don't replace conventional batteries everywhere. One thing I've been thinking for a long while is that: the future of humanity is in how advanced drilling equipment we can make. Think about it: asteroid mining, colonizing planets or even just conventional mining...all require drilling. If this technology catches on, there will be so much research done in finding better drilling techniques. In fact there is so much resources to be found in our Earth itself, if we drill deep enough.

Also, imagine if we have a base on the moon powered by solar cells: having the technology to drill quickly and cheaply would be indispensable in storing energy captured during lunar "days". Although I imagine you would need deeper holes because of the smaller g.
External rails on a mountain don't allow for the optional compressed air part of the system that (according to the page) can double the efficiency of the system at less than double the cost.
The difference is in a BI system like we usually talk about, the BI is funded by local taxes.

In this case, foreign dollars were used to fund the cash grants, so your parent is arguing it's not a welfare-type BI system but simply a different form of aid distrubtion.
How would you explain Emacs to a non-technical person?
Ants. This is a drone in the insect hierarchical sense. It implies independent behaviour of duties and expendability, mostly.
Is it bad to have a depressed local market though (to launch a company to)?
At least Kwin primarily runs in OpenGL mode, rather than GLX mode, so it never uses X for compositing and always does its graphical effects (which include translucency, blur, wobble windows, desktop cube, etc) as OpenGL only effects with no X library dependencies.

Its transition to Wayland is depreciating any latent X dependencies in its internal rendering code as well.
"Everybody who has ever claimed that something is doomed because of an exponential function was wrong."
This is going to be epic. It really gives me a sense of living in the movies I used to watch as science fiction as a kid.

Even more interesting for me was he tweeted the X-wings [1] which make total sense. On re-entry you don't need to burn fuel to provide attitude stabilization and drag if you can do that aerodynamically. I realize the first test failed due to an out of control spin, but if you remember the old rotary rocket days you may note that one could use reentry to spin up the F-9 then flip the pitch on the x-wings to provide an auto-rotation type of re-entry into the denser atmosphere. That would save fuel needed for the landing.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/22/space-x-x-wing-rocket-drone...
It's theoretically possible but not practically so. Computers are actually analog, not digital. There's a lot of effort that goes into making sure that the analog signals behave enough like the ideal digital ones, but they're still analog.

So we've got very, very good at the engineering analysis to make sure that even though it's actually analog we can have a meaningful conversation about things and pretend it's not.

Pressing a key on the keyboard would never do that because there's a little microprocessor built in that actually handles getting keypresses and transmitting them to the real computer. Could you crash that computer by pressing a key at exactly the right time? No. Because they've designed it so that even in the metastable state it handles things correctly. A key defaults to off. If there is enough evidence over a sample period that a key was pressed then report on. If there's not enough evidence, it's off. Switch debouncing is a well established and practiced discipline. http://www.ganssle.com/debouncing.htm
We can use steel cables. I can't find concrete reference atm, but I'm sure it can be done
Tutoring meets the 21st century
Most tutoring services ask you to "request information" and don't disclose prices. They also don't let you know what the process is like whatsoever (until you pay).

We created Sultan Tutoring to create the tutoring service we wished existed. Students can schedule themselves in directly, see pricing upfront and find out what the process is like BEFORE paying.

For now, our focus is on the new MCAT. However, we also offer tutoring in Chemistry, Physics and Genetics and best of all:

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More like a QML theme. You don't need a library at all.

And KDE's breeze theme and Plasma animations in Plasma 2 are really close to Material as is.

And I know of at least a few themes on kde-look that are already mostly material.
Warning, more highly simplified economics. Another possibility is that the redistribution acts as a true Keynesian stimulus, giving money directly to those who will immediately spend it (rather than banks), increasing demand and bringing us out of a recession. But who knows.

The economics are so complex that unless someone tests it at least at a town-wide level, nobody can predict the outcome. This Namibian town and Dauphin, Manitoba are two such sites. Some other experiments have failed because tests were not done with 100% of the local population, which creates an unwanted interaction between the BI and non-BI group.

A very simplified view of a basic income is that your new post BI income becomes a percentage of the population's average income plus 1 minus that percentage of your current income:

> I_post_bi = aI_ave + (1-a)I_pre_bi

If a=0 we have capitalism, a=1 communism.

For small 'a', this does change individual incentives a bit, but not much for those with very high income. That is because your incentive to produce is a function of how much more you will make (as a percentage) vs. how much more time you invest (as a percentage). For incomes much larger than the basic income, this ratio remains the same.

What is the optimal 'a'? Who knows. Just start with a low one and slowly increase it to find out.

If one really wanted incentives to be neutral across the board, one could try:

> I_post_bi = a*(I_pre_bi)^p, where 0 < p < 1, a<1

This would be a subsidy for lower incomes and a (pre-Reaganeque) progressive tax for higher incomes.

The more important question is what will happen to the group that is around the cusp of working/not-working. Some may choose not to work post-BI. Some may choose to stay home and take care of the kids, elderly parents (which is not necessarily "bad" for the economy when you factor in future earnings of children and reduced health care costs of parents). Some might even choose to start a business.
"Artificats" makes it sound like errors in the the compression algorithm make felines appear in the image.

Come to think of it, given how many cat pictures there are on the Internet, I wonder if there's a place for a compression algorithm tuned for cats (which could make artificats a reality)…
While not your biggest issue by far: you can change the colour scheme of the Lollipop keyboard in its settings. "Material Dark" is a far more attractive setting (and I think the "Holo" settings will make it look like the older keyboard).
The assumption for that kind of scenario is that supply is static, which is clearly not the case for a lot of things. If supply is entirely static, then injecting $500 extra demand might drive the combined price of the supply up $500..

Of course it misses the elasticity of the supply, but also that the supply is not exclusively paid by people for whom $500 makes up all that large part of their demand, so even if there is a price rise, the primary effect of that price rise will "just" be to alter the degree of redistribution (making the $500 worth a bit less to the recipient, and make providing it cost a bit more to the people eventually footing the bill).
History as Clickbait
It's pretty much always that easy. Even for big long wounds. You can apply pressure to the wound, or to the artery proximal to the wound. If one doctor needs his hands then a nurse/junior doctor/medical student is recruited to stand there for up to hours
I've had a lot of people have good experiences with the Unity launcher. It is highly divisive from anything else on the market (it is a search frame always with filtering tabs) but does its job nicely. Homerun from KDE acts the exact same, except it is a full screen version.
You mean a tiling window manager?
> * Every tried crossing a NASCAR raceway on foot?

This is one of the interesting advantages a public transit system has over a self-driving fleet of cars (which, incidentally, I also look forward to). Mass transit depends on the concept of "stops" or "stations". The way people get between destinations (like their home, the shop, etc.) and the transit station is largely by walking. Thus, mass transit necessarily builds in pedestrian friendliness.

This isn't true for cars, which do not have such nexi. (Indeed, this lack is generally agreed to be an advantage.) This means that such designs will have to deliberately include pedestrian friendliness in order to have it, rather than being forced into it by the facts of the design requirements.

I'm not saying it's a sufficient advantage for one or the other, but it's a definite thing.
found more info here as well: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/11/20/246390302/beer-t...
You just described the new "picture" element. It's an element with one or more "source" child elements which each have a media query and a uri, as well as an img child element to use as a fallback for non-supporting browsers.

Browser support isn't really there yet but it's coming and since it has a built-in fallback you can use it now without requiring JS workarounds.
Here in Saint Louis riding the bus is an efficient way of getting robbed by basketball Americans. Public transportation would work in America if the country was more racially homogenous.
I'm getting the impression that they are wanting to start their own distro using the UI to pull in users.
Google news is likely based on algorithms and big data based on user searches and the # of times articles with keywords are getting selected. Nothing wrong with that, but far short of what an informed and active community can do. The two are complementary but quite different.
The Difference Between Uber and Airbnb
But their demand has risen, which may help them secure better deals with suppliers. It is not automatically a given that their overall costs would increase.

Also, even if they do raise prices, the price rise will be averaged over all their customers, most of whom will be spending far more than whatever the added spend from basic income would be, so will alter the degree of redistribution and the cost, not in any way eviscerate the benefit to those it is meant to help.
Saving the query in localStorage won't make it any faster. If anything it will make it slower.

The performance issue the article mentions is that deciding which format to use in JavaScript breaks preload scanning and essentially serializes resource requests that would otherwise be parallel.

Doing the check itself is fast. It's just decoding a very small image in memory. Storing the result of that check persistently just adds more cost.
Fab's failure
I would be more interested in this as a desktop environment alternative, or a skin of an existing one. Not as a new distro though. The message is a bit mixed but I gather they want to control a new distro ecosystem and are starting with the UI as a way to draw in users.
That doesn't explain what it actually is, though. How it does multiple frames.

It does clarify that it's at least not quite WebM, but it doesn't explain how far away it is.
Well, yes. To be fair, if there was like a farm of these devices, it might makes sense to swallow that expense.

I wish gold wasn't so rare! Its such an amazing material, and our economy is not based on precious materials anymore (except the commodity markets or course), so it seems like a really sad thing that we can't have more abundant gold just yet
One idea is to develop credibility and reputation over time by contributing useful facts. It's not raw crowd numbers but rather contributors with reputation which will yield results. Think of StackOverflow but for news instead of computer Q&A.
There you go.[0] I believe it's called the 'arbiter problem' in that context, and your description seems basically correct.

[0]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/b...
> physicists are more than happy to allow laymen to misinterpret their terminology when it leads to their work sounding more exciting and getting more funding

Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head here.
Did you happen to run any benchmarks against CPUs using one of the simple examples? For example, what's the difference in run time for 1,000,000,000 iterations of the Monte Carlo for finding pi?
Giving off good vibes in interviews
benchmarks like that coming soon :)
Without ECC RAM it is entirely possible that upon reading a file may be marked as damaged when it is not, and it is entirely possible ZFS may write a file that has a bit flipped to disk (this one is silent and unrecoverable). While there is a chance, it is unlikely. In my case my zpool's have always given me early warning when one of my hard drives was having issues, even before SMART or anything else started showing warnings. Due to having multiple backups (desktop machine backs up to 2 different networked machines, and it is checksummed end to end) I haven't found any silent data corruption while writing data on any of my zpool's even without ECC RAM.

There is no file system that can protect against corruption if a bit is flipped in memory while reading from/writing to disk, at least with ZFS it can warn me and re-read the data from disk and give the upper layers a valid file.

Even without ECC RAM ZFS's end-to-end checksumming can help save your data and give you piece of mind that it is not silently being corrupted once it's on disk.
Yep, and as the maker of the most efficient of those batteries, he can make a nice clean profit. Good on him though, he (and the whole Telsa team really) did put in a lot of effort to get there.
Actually its more a collective exploitation of third party IP. The factories that build the chips, the people that put together the boards, the places that build the screens etc. They have generally at one time or another been contracted to or licensed to produce some product, which they do, and then well they make more for their friends without so much cost.

In a fascinating sort of way it works like folks who burn copies of DVDs and sell them out of their trunk except these folks have access to much more sophisticated manufacturing gear. By and large its "harmless" in that none of the people buying a $12 phone are going to buy a $60 legitimate phone, even if that was the only phone available. So its hard to argue to economic loss as well.

Very little of the stuff built into these phones and gizmos though seems like the original creator was doing it to give away.
A namespace implementation for Emacs Lisp
The Chinese president’s favorite blogger hates America
That's the hard part though, isn't it? Telling the difference between bad ideas and good ones. Even professionals at it (AKA venture capitalists) get it wrong all the time. So the questions is- knowing that you don't know whether you're looking at a bad idea or a good one, how should you behave?
There's interesting variations here - at first glance a single big weight is the same as many small ones, but you have to think of the engineering challenges of cabling and motors for a 1 kilotonne mass. So you could use many smaller objects in a stack and move them one at a time, but then you've got the problem of decoupling/recoupling the cable and reaching through the ones that are at the top while lowering/raising the ones at the bottom.

Now, the next obvious consideration is using mountains instead of a pit. The rockies are full of 4000M peaks. But a mountain means suddenly we have so many new considerations - mountains aren't exactly a constant slope from peak to foot. But extreme loads on rails are a solved problem - the world's heaviest single fully-loaded rail-car was about a kilotonne (a special schnabel car carrying a reactor up to the Alberta tar-sands).

Of course, then you've got a new construction problem - building a train-track that's a near-straight-line up a mountain and can support incredibly heavy trucks.

It's probably not workable because of the energy-density concerns, but it sure is neat.
What I haven't understood about Plan 9 is if it does process migration. If you run a multi-threaded, computation-intensive process will Plan 9 automatically distribute the computation to all CPU servers and gather up the results?

EDIT: It turns out the article does talk about process migration, but still doesn't answer the distributed computation question.

"Process migration is also deliberately absent from Plan 9. Although Plan 9 makes it easy to instantiate processes where they can most effectively run, it does nothing explicit to make this happen. The compiler, for instance, does not arrange that it run on the CPU server. We prefer to do coarse-grained allocation of computing resources simply by running each new command interpreter on a lightly-loaded CPU server. Reasonable management of computing resources renders process migration unnecessary."

EDIT2: Ah, there's no automatic thread distribution. But you can fake it but forking multiple processes on multiple CPU servers and sharing their address spaces. Does this mean you have to write your own CPU server allocator?

"Plan 9 does not implement lightweight processes explicitly. We are uneasy about deciding where on the continuum from fine-grained hardware-supported parallelism to the usual timesharing notion of a process we should provide support for user multiprocessing. Existing definitions of threads and lightweight processes seem arbitrary and raise more questions than they resolve. We prefer to have a single kind of process and to permit multiple processes to share their address space. With the ability to share local memory and with efficient process creation and switching, both of which are in Plan 9, we can match the functionality of threads without taking a stand on how users should multiprocess."
UW statistician, philosopher win prize for detecting bias in peer review
> I guess I could have dodged heartbleed if I'd written my own TLS library and avoided any software that depended on OpenSSL. Considering the effort involved, I think I'll take heartbleed and rotate my keys.

Although I actually agree with the conclusion of this essay (that, to paraphrase, "don't re-invent the wheel" really means "don't re-invent the wheel if you're trying to invent the car"), I thought that this was really the weak point in the posted argument. Sure, if everyone wrote his or her own TLS library, then we wouldn't have Heartbleed—but instead we'd have a litany of tiny bugs leading to everyone getting exploited in his or her own way. Similarly, the advice "don't roll your own cryptography" doesn't mean that there's no room for new cryptographic schemes, just that it's a lot more likely that the bugs that your scheme would include will have been ironed out in an existing one.

Taken to extremes, the argument becomes "don't use an existing OS, because then you'll get bitten by any bug in that OS"!

P.S. Just to be clear, though I am replying to you, the arguments above (to which I suspect you are sympathetic) are rather addressed to the author of the post.
Is It the Beginning of the End for Cable or Just a New Beginning?
Right, that's the kicker. It's really easy for 1st world people to inject trivial (to them) amounts of capital into 3rd world places. But that's microeconomics playing out, not macro. In this case the source of the money was completely decoupled from the people receiving it. If they had to pay themselves a basic income, the story is different.

Here in the 1st world any basic income which we try has to be paid by us too. It's doable. But it's not a panacea. http://www.vox.com/2014/10/8/6946565/progressive-taxes-are-n...