skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the anthropic principle, and applies to some of the coincidences. But there are open questions ...

If life can adapt, why isn't Mars green ? Why isn't Venus ? At the very least, why aren't the landers picking up cells constantly ? We're seeding those planets with fresh living cells on a daily basis according to a number of papers published 2 years ago.

Second it is very unclear how it applies to other required coincidences, like the fine structure constant, or the speed of light. If they weren't in a very narrow range, and at a specific fraction of each other, there wouldn't be any real amount of complexity in the universe. No way in hell there'd be life. You should consider just how narrow the range is and the fact that there's over 20 constants that each have their narrow range. If you wanted to "try" them all, have you considered just how huge a project it would be to search a 20-dimensional space for the right values ?

But yes, at the moment the Copernican principle stands in the "consensus" sense, I personally don't believe in it. I don't know where people get it from, in my data space does not look uniform at all. So, please, do realize what it is : it is an article of faith, nothing more. There is no data, nor theory, to justify it.

I will say, of course, it is a useful principle. Any pattern you see should be assumed to be nothing special, as that will make you search for new science, which is good. That's just good practice, a way to avoid over fitting. But in popular science it is a dogma, and that's not at all what it's intended to be.
In Central Africa, Bananas and Plantains can make up over 30% of the daily caloric intake for the average person.
We found that a GlusterFS filesystem is a good way to go for our case of 100s of terabytes of unique files with some failover. Amazon S3 would simply cost far more. The file metadata is in the RDBMS, obviously. But storing the binary data in the RDBMS wouldn't be a good idea, and would choke long before it got to our scale.
"Snobby"? Do you think you might be biased?
The SQL Server group (and their product) is one of the very few things in Microsoft that has earned my deepest respect. Not Windows, not Exchange and, certainly, not ShamePoint.

I frequently rank Microsoft's product line as follows:

1 - Natural keyboard - the one there is no reasonable replacement for (the kinesis keyboards are 5 times as expensive). If there is a reason my none of my machines is 100% Microsoft free, this is it.

2 - their mice - simple, precise, comfortable, inexpensive

3 - SQL Server - it almost makes having a Windows server around worth the pain.

Having said that, I have enormous respect for PostgreSQL. It's a very solid RDBMS and it's my database of choice most of the time. It is more comfortable to use from a command line than SQL Server will ever be (which is OK, because a CLI is not a high priority over there).
The problem is, of course, most people will assume "all bad" because of the ongoing narrative.
Related, if someone knows of an API to get commercial links (buy/rent) from tmdb or imdb ids, it would be useful for me.
I personally like the emacs.sexy icon better than the current one (Emacs 24.4 on OSX). I actually liked the older icon better than the current one too.
Seriously?

I had plenty of space before about a decade of whittling away space in coach without whittling away at the price (plus removing meals, adding bag fees, and so on).

I've had a choice for decades. Coach used to be a half-way pleasant one. Now it's steerage, and the passengers treated as such.

Well, most airlines. I'm partial to Southwest, for a number of reasons - one being I don't have to sit with my legs spread to accommodate the seat in front of me (6' tall).
I agree but what happens if someone posts under someone else's name?

It would probably be best not to perpetuate these things and to just end the vitriol now.
I'm pretty certain that when someone actually tries to hire an assassin to murder the creator of a free software project simply because they disagree with said software project, things have gone way, way too far.

People who support systemd are not launching personal attacks, calling for physical harm against non-systemd supporters. This is a unidirectional attack. And it needs to stop.
See also https://www.virusbtn.com/virusbulletin/archive/2014/01/vb201...
Doh! Thx.
"While these death threats and the like are in no doubt horrible..." Then let's stop there.

No bridge is sacred enough to warrant physical threats when burned. No attitude poor enough to elicit the response that this did. It's bloody software.
The problem is that the decent people who dislike systemd don't deserve that criticism, and the deranged people who issue death threats will ignore it.
In some ways we're still stuck with the old Spanish views.
Did you actually try? Search engines are powerful, e.g. googling 'context tex' or 'context typesetting' returns pages of relevant results.
I just can't replace the keyboard.
anecdotal but I have not had such issues, but being fair I have mostly not had to deal with non-english scenarios.

It is one thing to say 'SQL Server takes some effort to import CSV files with X scenarios'; but to say it does not import them at all?
HCI (as a CS science-based discipline) is not design and never has been (though there are definitely aspirations).

We need people who have actually studied and practiced design (interaction, graphic, visual, industrial, ...), the latter being important because design is as practice based, if not more so, than programming. So developing junior designers under the mentorship of experienced designers is essential and often left out in companies (especially startups) who don't get design.

And this is what gets me about the "designers must code" meme: if they are coding, they are not getting experience designing.
Just curious as to why the article merits this type of vitriol. I'm a .NET/SQL Server guy from the states, so I have no skin in this game, but it just seems to me that this is unwarranted.
More information from Tollef Fog Heen:

http://err.no/personal/blog/tech/Debian/2014-11-16-23-55_res...
Japan Falls into Recession
> It's bloody software.

Worse. It's bloody open-source software.

You don't like it, you fork the last version you did and start from there. If enough people agree with you, you'll be fine. If not, you are probably wrong.
Unless we move to open public metadata for common needs, with optional private annotations for those who can afford toys.

A possible role model is Apple's support of OpenStreetMap as a defensive response to Google Maps, which has improved the quality of open GIS data.
Read the article. Click the link. It will tell you what tracking id I got.
Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer
Interesting to do a where-are-they-now with the names here. Don Beaver, for instance --- the "charismatic preacher" --- is now a Sr. Software Engineer at Apple, after a 4-year stint at Google doing stuff like security for GFS.
Package management is the big one, and the poor integration of BiBTeX/references. A more straightforward way of figuring out clashing packages would be nice.

I also generally disliked how some features were environments (document, abstract figure) whereas others are commands (sections, subsections, paragraphs, etc). Inconsistencies in what things are passed to various commands as options vs. arguments were irritating, and it's always a bear, for example, if you need to pass say math-ey stuff an argument. E.g. \caption{$a+b$} Nope. Can't do it.
The "email" clients of the future are going to be dealing with multi-terabyte caches[1] with lots of high-bitrate audio and 5K+ video and images. A robust and competitive email client should be able to do real-time summarization, translation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and index into media files (I should be able to query for a phrase and get the relevant portion of a video or audio clip in the search results).

We have all of the algorithms now, so the hardest part is probably developing a good UI. So, you need to a super fast computer so that:

(1) You can power the UI

(2) You can rapidly iterate in response to user testing.

[1] By "cache" I mean stuff that is stored locally rather than in the cloud; I'm not talking about CPU caches which will probably stay about the same.
With all of the valid criticisms of systemd, you've chosen an imaginary one. Systemd provides better process handling and failure reporting than the initscripts it replaces (and mostly better than upstart, as well).
Can't you just create an alias for

`emacs -nw -Q` or `emacsclient -nw`

when you want to open an instance in a terminal?
Just checked, I am still transmitting the X-Uidh header.
More in his blog: http://err.no/personal/blog/tech/Debian/2014-11-16-23-55_res...
The NSA helps the companies find weaknesses in their
products. But it also pays the companies not to fix some
of them. Those weak spots give the agency an entry point
for spying or attacking foreign governments that install
the products in their intelligence agencies, their
militaries, and their critical infrastructure.

That's probably the most frightening thing imaginable, but where is this info coming from? What are the sources on all of these accusations because it feels like a pretty casual mention that all of the hardware/software manufacturers in the US intentionally leave in back doors.
On the food side, I agree with you about there not being much room for creativity in my setup. I'm comfortable with that. I like it, even, since coming up with new items or menus was never a part of the work I particularly enjoyed. Plus, that work complicates ordering and increases the risk of food waste. Sure, I do some of that, but not much and not on a regular basis.

Yet there is plenty of room for creativity. I focus on trying to bring that to customer service. I've worked diligently to make it so that all my customers know I will do whatever I possibly can to help them, pretzel-related or otherwise. Some things are across the board, like not requiring specific lead times for orders (in this field it can be up to 48 hours). Others are customer-specific, like getting an order at 9:15AM and delivering it by 11AM (fresh-baked goods, remember), or doing dishes for three hours because I've got time and my customer's dishwasher decided to no-show, or bringing a customer a giant 5-pound pretzel to help that group of people celebrate its first anniversary of being open.

All of that contributes to my business doing okay despite the lack of marketing on my part. People rave about the products I make, and the businesses to whom I sell are comfortable recommending me to other businesses. I mean, we all know word of mouth is the best marketing—not just for its low cost but mostly for the weight it carries—and since I’m a wholesaler my best opportunity for generating word of mouth is through customer service for the businesses buying from me. That’s an area where there’s always room for creativity since circumstances and the people involved provide diverse opportunities for me to respond well.
A solution to this is to setup openvpn on a VM someplace and route all your phone's data traffic through that. I've done this using the Fedora open vpn guide (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Openvpn). To get it working on the iPhone I also had to add this to the server config:

push "redirect-gateway"
push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8"
> when someone actually tries to hire an assassin

What???
This is ranty, but also quite insightful into how a mistreated developer would feel and should give pause to other designers listening in. For what it's worth, the digital design crusaders have been pushing for tighter integration with developer style tools to make the hand-off more carefree. That being said, I do love to let my mind run wild with ideas and then pass it along to tomorrow me that is tasked with making that happen. It's a shame I have so few people to review code for security, scalability, known conventions and best practises. If it works, I'm happy out.
Link to the post please? It should make for interesting reading.
In interactions with the police gender and race always matters.

Even in Germany, police can be a bunch of racist d.ckheads.
Because most of it is circa 1998 Slashdot-esque content which really isn't constructive and only damages what little faith people have in this industry even further. The article itself is vitriol.

Not only that, the site is designed to intentionally hide the author obviously because being accountable for an opinion is probably bad for them in this case.
The TC had nothing to do with this particular developer leaving, and it is disingenuous as hell to suggest it. He is leaving the systemd package maintenance team at Debian because of threats and personal attacks, despite supporting the team.
Because I have loads more privilege than most, being white, male and from Norway.
A visio/VBA script to parse a Tivoli Maestro job configuration file and create a flow chart of the dependencies of each batch job. I was asked to manually document this and would have spent months documenting the hundreds of jobs. Also, the jobs changed on a frequent basis.
> I like how the article looks at the absolute skill levels among professional competitors in chess and professional performers in orchestral music...

The chess example is controversial as it is not correct to consider the Elo ratings "absolute". They work poorly when players are separated into two groups, e.g. by time or geography, with little interaction between the groups. Many chess players believe there has been "rating inflation" causing 2700 today to be weaker than 2700 forty years ago.

Personally I don't believe the claims of rating inflation and broadly agree with the article that there are 30+ players active today making moves as good as the top one or two from the 70s.
You get mostly TV shows because most of the good content on Netflix is TV.

They can show you movie recommendations, but I'm guessing you won't like many of them.
'best he in the glass house not cast stones'
Amen. Actually that would have been the better outcome anyway since it adds entropy to the gene pool. Cross pollination of ideas could have benefitted both parties. And even if your side doesn't take the cake, enough people would have flocked to the source that we could have fixed some bugs and resolved potential security issues due to the addition of more eyes.

Looking from afar, you'd think this was some tiff over imaginary lines on a map or something. Now that would be silly.
But no one is making them use it. Furthermore, they could have warned people.
Making it a "systemd critics" issue will just alienate sane people from the debate. Disliking systemd is not a club, requiring approval for membership. Even if this is a one-sided issue, that doesn't mean it's an issue of the whole side.
No, but I am also not a Twitter user.
Given they're active on the list in question and while the content crossed a line, the style was not out of character, nor was it later claimed to have been posted by somebody else, so I think we can rule this out.
Thank you for clarifying. It makes the last sentence of the article make sense, but I think one would have to already know the difference between GMail and Inbox in order to understand the article with confidence.
The consensus interpretation is that FTL is not possible in normal space, since the speed of something is just another way of looking at how "fast" it travels through time - FTL becomes impossible by definition.

However, there is reason to assume a lot of things may be going on that are not strictly speaking taking place in normal flat space.

The article mentions the expansion of the universe as an example, and that's actually a good point to start. By virtue of the universe expanding, the distance between points grows faster than the speed of light as long as those points are sufficiently far apart. This becomes more interesting when you realize that new space in between these points is being created. Sure, the galaxies traveling on this expanding medium are not actually speeding apart powered by classical movement, but they are nevertheless changing position relative to one another in an interesting way.

In fact, what we're interested in when we talk about FTL is not classical movement at all - what we want is to change positions instead. There are places in nature where we know this is happening right now, for example we do know space can "flow" faster than the speed of light on the far side of event horizons.

So if we abandon the idea that we need to accelerate towards a destination, FTL becomes a broader idea of manipulating spacetime in order to be somewhere in less time than if we had actually flown there at the speed of light. There exist proposals for propulsion systems that go in this direction, for example the "warp drive" ideas that cheat by simply shortening the amount of space a vessel has to travel through. Some of these concepts seem to work in theory, for some definition of work.

The trouble with all these ideas is they need impractical amounts of energy. Which is wasteful, since we only need to bend spacetime for a short while and then return it to its original state behind us, something that works analogous to a catalyst would be much better.

At the most fundamental level though, what we are missing is a way of hacking spacetime. Huge masses and energies are how nature bends it, but ideally we would need some other way of manipulating the fabric of existence directly. This is the reason why drive systems in science fiction all have some kind of yet-unknown mystery substance critical to their function. Given how little we actually know about the basic fabric of the universe, ways of doing these manipulations may well exist. They might not. We most likely won't find out for centuries, if ever.

Until then, we must answer the question so that yes, FTL is most likely possible in theory, but it's not even remotely within our grasp right now. It might never work in practice.

Another observation worth considering: cosmic travel times seem utterly problematic right now because we individually live for extremely short periods of time. Spending a few thousand years in transit is much less worrisome if you're, say, an autonomous machine carrying an AI through the galaxy.
The GP didn't assume a stable price, they said the price would increase. I think it's very likely a price increase would result in increased supply.
The 5 Milestones of Bionics
You're not stuck with anything. Any major transition will have bugs that need to be ironed out. In a year or two, assuming you don't switch to Slackware, it will be more reliable than sysvinit.
http://err.no/personal/blog/

For folks looking for more detail.
Dumb question, but are you actually using the cellular network while you test it, and not accidentally using some associated wifi network?
"stuck" ? How was your init system choice enforced ? Did you have a gun pointed at your head ?

Is there absolutely no working alternative ?

You don't have to use systemd. If you keep using it when there are other working systems and you don't like it, the fault is entirely yours.
That is not the point here, neither in my resignation or my blog post. Something being controversial does not mean it's ok to be a dick to the people pushing for it, which is the core of what I'm trying to say.
As of 2012, apparently IPv6 support/performance: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-June/...
If we assume an average time spent dealing with each email of 15 seconds, that adds up to around 2 hours per day. If most emails require replies, then average time/email will be much greater than 15 seconds.

That looks like overhead to me.
A good deal of it is change lists (CLs), which are sort of like pull requests on github, and issue tracking. With inbox I have all CLs that mark me as a reviewer explicitly in one bundle, all the ones in my "domain" but not with me as a reviewer in another, and all the remaining in a third. This bundling helps me keep vaguely on top of what's going on while only spending a second or so per email reading the subject line. Obviously, I spend more time on things where I'm marked as reviewer. If none of the CLs stand out to me as something that needs digging, I can just click the check mark for the whole bundle.
Cops' lives (in a particularly uncharitable interpretation) revolve around reinforcing their own masculinity by winning fights and exerting dominance. Using that to protect damsels in distress from creepy male others/sexual predators is a highly masculinity-reinforcing, fatherly/brotherly and desirable thing to do.

An effiminate man (using the again uncharitable notion that nerds with desk jobs are not manly in the eyes of police officers) walking into the station and asking for protection from other effiminate men is more likely to be seen as a pathetic whiner.
One thing that confused me about your article, for a moment, was a matter of terminology, as applied to lexical tokens in most programming languages:

[]: these things are square brackets, or brackets for short

(): these things are parentheses

{}: these things are curly braces, or braces for short
On that topic, this is a much better talk:
http://commonsware.com/presos/8469_Murphy.pdf
The "fatal flaw" is belied by the empirical data

> look up the date of the relevant EO

> count the number of presidents that have not changed it

> compare cost of serveilance today versus the EO date

Technology has changed the meaning (practical ramifications) of the EO.

POTUS can re-ballance the EO without congress.

IF potus is unable or unwiling to do that, what makes you think he's going to sign a law doing the same?

Congressional obstruction-ism is no excuse for his 6 year inaction.
> Up until I read this article, I would just sample randomly in the [0.0, 0.0]-[1.0, 1.0] space and avergage out the value.

What does it mean to sample “random” points in a fractal? In practice you’re probably sampling in terms of numbers at some specific precision (e.g. the limit of your floating point type for the range in question). This is still going to be points in some particular discrete lattice. Depending on the way the fractal is constructed, this could bias your picture.

Again, I’m not sure that the color of an “area” is meaningful for a fractal. But yeah, I think fsloth has the right idea: if the purpose of the images is to be pretty, then do it in whichever way gets you results you prefer.
https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx... (Ctrl-F hitman)
I have always felt that learning code as a designer is no different to learning to take the production of print work into your own hands. Foil-blocking? Better talk to the printer. Six spot colours on a 64 page handbook? Best check with the printer. Half fold gate sleeve design with laser cut matte finish front over a high-gloss neon backing? Jesus, I better check with the printer.

With digital design, the turn around is so short that it can be incredibly beneficial to learn similar digital techniques yourself instead of waiting for the reply that tells you "can't do it".

You specifically mentioned interaction design as the first discipline (and i would URGE companies to hire classically trained designers), and ffs, of all the disciplines, it's the most tied to coding. It is integral to learn of the production processes to be worth your salt. In college, we made books by hand. We made websites without frameworks, exhibition designs in foamcore real-life mockups. Any course worthwhile will continually stress the understanding and competency in the production methods. I'd like my architect to know the theory and have some practise in building a basic wall, wouldn't you?
I wrote a little preprocessor that translates slightly augmented version of C (with Golang-like "go" and "select" commands) into the kind of code described in the article.

http://millc.org
I think they're trying to say that a male might get a stereotyped police reaction that is "Toughen up!"
The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It