skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without getting into politics or ideology, I find his initial comment from the second chapter tremendously insightful: that people see what they expect to see. So foreigners expecting North Korea to be rotting hell-hole full of unhappy people will see exactly that, and will express disbelief at any nicety they see: "surely they are hiding something horrible".

This made me think... a while ago, I saw this website by a Western photographer who took some recent pictures of North Korea (it's worth looking at the pictures, they are fascinating: http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder). The pictures allow comments, and predictably most people comment things like "how terrible this dictatorship must be, poor oppressed North Koreans!" When presented with pictures of workers commuting to work, they comment "look how unhappy everyone looks." And they comment the same for a picture showing a band of schoolchildren practicing music, presumably at school: "look how serious the children look, they must feel really unhappy."

In my opinion, regardless of the realities of the harsh life in North Korea, these commenters are projecting their own preconceptions of the country. They see what they expect to see. But I don't think their perceptions are necessarily accurate, because if I took a picture of commuters going to work in my country, they'd see similar unhappy faces. Almost no-one looks happy while taking the train to work. And regarding the schoolchildren... what people see in those pictures doesn't mesh with what the author of the book says: that regardless of everything else, children are truly happy in North Korea.

Maybe life is truly harsh in North Korea, their leaders lie to the population all the time, and it's a truly impoverished country, but still the people are happy, or at least not stereotypically depressed all the time?
Also, a lot of users don't give a shit about how something happens (all the gritty details). They just want to understand what is happening.

Most of the time this is because they have better things to do.

When it comes to documentation: if the implementation details are not important to the user, you should skip them. Words on a page that a user reads but doesn't care about is wasting their time and they could be reading about other important details.

If you have a broad user base who largely don't care about implementation details you're better hiding them from everyone rather than showing them to everyone.
Look up "administrative court".
Sometimes - but they ARE metabolized through the same pathway.

Essentially:

Glucose ->[0] pyruvate ->[1] acetyl-coa -> TCA cycle

vs

Fatty acids ->[2] acetyl-coa -> TCA cycle

The TCA is cycle is the actual main energy generating step.

Other times fat absolutely is converted to sugar. It all depends on the metabolic needs of the body and one building blocks are available, and what protein "workers" are able to use the ones that are available.

For example, fatty acid synthase converts acetyl coa back to a fatty acid [3].

[0] Glycolysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycolysis

[1] pyruvate dehydrogenase: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyruvate_dehydrogenase

[2] beta oxidation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_oxidation

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_synthase
Standalone Mail Servers
Oh shit the LES is pretty damn red
You needed iTunes to act as a conduit to get songs onto the iPod, but you could either sync it with one iTunes library, or leave it in manual mode and load songs from any iTunes.

It worked then exactly the same way as it does now[1].

You couldn't sync songs on the device back into iTunes though[2] - if you had it in manual, put some songs on it (from another iTunes library, a third party app or anywhere else) and then tried to sync it with your iTunes, it would remove everything on there before syncing over your iTunes library.

1: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201593
2: Without one of many third-party helper apps. Sentuti was a lifesaver!
I spoke to a horizontal well driller about this and he was more than happy about the prospect of a boom in solar, partly because he was interested in trying out jobs in the industry. He also had an eye on the geothermal business as he could take his existing skill-set there. Also, while coal mining may collapse, I do not see a collapse in mining happening any time soon. The biggest threat to the overall number of mining jobs is robotics, not solar.
Bernard Huang on How Quora Helped Him Grow 42Floors
Some probabilities approach zero faster than the universe can approach heat death.
No, you're correct.

I believe this refers to the case going on right now [1] where RealPlayer Music that was sold in '05 or so as 'iPod Compatible' was locked out more than once by iTunes updates.

The thing is it worked (like PlayFair before it [2]) by circumventing/faking FairPlay, which was/is quite likely a violation of the DMCA. Apple patched the bugs and thus "excluded competitors".

So because Apple "excluded competitors" (who where breaking their encryption) they artificially keep the price of music high by stifling competition (ignoring record company contracts and the fact that Real had a 3% market share at the time).

You're right thought. Throughout the entire life of the iPod you've been able to play DRM free MP3s that you got through any method, legal or otherwise.

Don't forget, Real didn't have a good reputation. And they were breaking Apple's DRM so you could play files that had their DRM so it's the "they were fighting for people's freedom" card isn't very strong.

I see this as the same as when Palm faked USB IDs so the Pre would sync with iTunes. Someone else hacked their way into taking advantage of Apple's software and then got mad when the hack was removed and claimed "unfair competition". Sour grapes.

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/03/steve-jobs-video-t...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay
There you go, being condensing again.
Totally agree on that front. Efficient software = fewer servers. You can't know when to invest in new capacity if you can't tell the difference between hitting the limit of the hardware, and a fixable performance problem. Seemded like Twitter wasn't sure what was going on there for a few years :)

We do a lot of finding ENORMOUS performance problems with customer servers - simple stuff like a thundering herd, a vital missing index or a filesystem that's being overtaxed That's the kind of scale we work at. But those sorts of insights can make the difference between "help we might need a new server" and "oh thank god it's all working again".
Build Christmas toys, don't buy them
MasterCard Rails Against Bitcoin's (Semi-)Anonymity
Apologies, I'm not sure what it is you are trying to say. :(

The fact that the underlying system is von-Neumann seems just completely non sequitor. That is my only point. Every point you make afterwards is just as true of the "Harvard architecture" as it is of the von-Neumann one.

In the rest of what you are saying, it honestly sounds like we agree.
We are using this research to help people learn languages in VR.

Take a look here: http://learnimmersive.com
Looks crazy compared to checking /etc into git.
It will also kill black lung.
Have you considered a chloropleth[1]? Similar effect to a heat map but likely much easier to implement.

Just shade each of your already defined regions by [sightings/area].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map
> I'd really like to see someone make a home device that can test for nutritional deficiencies at home.

Home health monitoring was the end goal of the "Intelligence Toilet" system made by Toto (Japan). I'm not sure how far they've been able to take it since 2005, but it was suppose to start with urine sugar level monitoring.
Hopefully dirt cheap oil industry companies.

Eg. Halliburton (HAL) is currently 40% off. Or Continental Resources (CLR), currently 50% off (assuming I think their balance sheet and earnings hold up well enough to the pricing pressure and there's no threat of insolvency).

I'd love to get Exxon (XOM) in the $50's or $60's on a bearish run. Its earnings will fall with oil, and its valuation should come down according (despite holding up currently); it hasn't had growth in years, this will make that much worse. Despite the lack of growth, Exxon would be a great dividend at lower prices. I view Chevron (CVX) in a similar light.

Solar companies will plausibly take a beating as well, the lower oil goes. Emotion will likely cause investors to make typical mistakes here, and push valuations too low. First Solar (FSLR) is near its 52 week low, and will probably drift lower with oil. SolarCity (SCTY) is also near its 52 week low. This while the stock market is at all-time highs.

I think the damage will get worse yet, providing great bargains. If the market happens to turn south as well, at the same time oil is down, there could be extreme bargains, ala the oil lows of 1999/2001 and the great recession crash.
oops, was too early when I typed.
>when this process seems interesting and fun, I doubt someone will say it is hard

That doesn't mesh with my personal experience. I know some very, very smart people, who have found the process itself interesting and fun, but who still find it hard and also don't think they're that good at it. Perhaps your personal experience is difference, but I've seen that interesting and fun does not preclude subjective feelings of hardness.
i have become a frequent visitor to your site in the past couple of months. and it always struck me as odd the fact that you don't have any way of contacting the site owner(s) -- offline - in case something is not working (e.g., i have posted some articles, using a different handle in case you check, and my score is still sitting at "1") or you have a question (that doesn't concern the list as a whole).

i'm sure i can't be the only data tau user with issues.

plus those of us coming to your site, after being schooled in hn etiquette, have high expectations on how a site like your's, as a hacker news clone -- and not some out of the box knockoff -- should operate/behave.
For reference

https://mesosphere.com/2014/11/10/docker-on-mesos-with-marat...

https://mesosphere.com/2014/12/03/docker-on-mesos-with-chron...
Corruption a 'problem for all,' latest global index shows
Smell a lot like an MVP collecting email address, before they really have a working product.
> What makes you so special versus someone from Asia with better skills? I'm supposed to hire you because ... what? We share the same passport and so I owe you some special heightened loyalty beyond what I owe any human being born on our common planet?

Well said!

This is what always makes me quite sad and angry every time there's a discussion about immigration. Shouldn't we as a society be past this entitled way of thinking? Why does anyone deserve a job more just because he already was lucky enough to be born in a rich country like the US? Sure, allowing in people from other, often poorer countries might reduce the local wage slightly, maybe even take a job opportunity from some local developer, but so what? That developer is still very well of and the possible wage reduction that US workers might have to live with is minimal, but the gain for the immigrant from the poor country is huge! How about a bit of social conscience and empathy for your fellow humans?

The H1B is already heavily restricted to 65k per year, which is a ridiculously low number for the US so I don't see this being able to do much harm in the first place (Switzerland, a way smaller country has roughly that immigration per year), but it will allow at least some people the chance at a great opportunity. Admitably, the way the H1B currently gives to much power to the employer, but many people here seem to strongly argue against immigration in general which I just cannot understand.
They're calling the Int 3 debugger instruction, I believe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT_%28x86_instruction%29

I'd prefer to see this either with inline assembly, or using __debugbreak() (and variants for other compilers). I'd say it's a deref because many compilers don't generate inline-asm for 64-bit skus. This makes the instruction always emitted, and then 64-bit platforms ignore it. But not always (recent claims say it works: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3634124/where-did-int-3-g...).
Perhaps it is so they don't give staff incentive to leak a vulnerability. If they offer 100k it may be more tempting for a staff member to tell a friend of a friend, and share the prize. It would be stupid of course, but possible.
‘Superbugs’ Kill India’s Babies and Pose an Overseas Threat
I work construction, I managed eating a very strict ketogenic diet for several months. There's a brief window where your energy is low in the beginning, but after a month I found I had far more endurance than I did before, and than I have now since stopping the diet. My job performance not only improved, but I stopped eating lunch because I no longer needed to recover energy. (edit: an extra anecdote here, it's the only time since I was a kid that I've been hyperactive in the evening. It's also the only time I've actually wanted to exercise, and often times not only wanted to but had to otherwise I'd get insomnia due to my body feeling 'too awake'. I'd be making a cup of tea and doing jumping jacks waiting for the kettle to boil. I can't count the number of times I got out of bed to go work out because I couldn't sleep.)

Also, doing a 100km bike ride with fat as the main fuel would actually be exceptionally easy if you used the proper technique, because the entire purpose of the gearing system on racing bikes is to ensure your exertion remains the same. It would just require training with this goal in mind, like Timothy Oslon who's a successful ultramarathon runner.

> I suggest you actually go ahead and try it, before thinking you've formed any sort of informed opinion on the subject.

I would suggest you do the same, because you don't seem too well informed either.
Ask HN: How or where to begin learning mathematics from first principles?
A little bit of background:

As I've become more skilled with programming and electronics I have felt myself begin to near a wall. My knowledge of and skills in math is relatively poor and all the interesting things that make up the more advanced programming and electronics pursuits seem to be heavily based on math.

When I butt heads with these more advanced topics I find I resort to scouring the internet to cobble together pieces of various tutorials and guides. While it does feel good in a way to hack together limited understandings to make satisfactory solutions I'm beginning to feel less like a hacker and more like a hack. The knowledge I gain is shallow and I don't think my tactics will get me much further.

Instead of working backwards from implementation I would like to start from the beginning and learn math the proper way. Unfortunately most of the resources I find online seem to more focused on teaching me how to solve math problems. I have no interest in solving specific math problems on a test, I'm not going to school and I doubt I will ever take a math test again in my life. I want to work up from first principles and gain the tools to reason about the world mathematically and understand the cool things that are currently out of my reach like antenna design, machine learning, electromagnetism, cryptography etc.

Unfortunately I so know so little I have no idea how where to start. What websites are helpful, what books I should buy, etc. I was hoping someone here could share. Thank you.
Am I understanding this table correctly?

http://www.bls.gov/oes/CURRENT/naics4_212100.htm

My read is that there are about 40,000 people "in the mines" and another 40,000 with skills that are already workable in other industries (this looks true for many of the people in the mines too).

40,000 is a lot of people (and their families make the number bigger), but it doesn't seem like a big enough number to be dominating national policy.

Maybe the BLS data isn't comprehensive?
With YARN, Hadoop has built a more generic scheduler comparable to Mesos.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-YARN-compare-to-Mesos
I had the same experience on a keto diet. There's also nothing like the euphoria of having so much energy after a long day (I work construction) that at 2am you have to get out of bed, still wide awake, and go down stairs to do a hundred push ups to burn off some energy.
Didn't notice it last week and the docs are a big deal, so up it went.

Somehow I'll resist the temptation to submit a new one linked directly to the docs! :-D
Location: Boston,MA,USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes Yes Yes !!

Technologies:

* JVM: Java, Groovy, JavaEE, Grails, Scala.

* Other Programming Languages : Python, R, C, Scheme.

* Data: Big data, Data mining.

* Mobile: Android.

* Javascript : EmberJS, jQuery, etc.

* Databases : MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MySql

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/u4pvmm5yjmv9fyz/Resume_Anuj.pdf?dl...
Email: anuj@ccs.neu.edu

LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/anujku

About Me :

* Avid lover of open source technologies, Software Engineer with passion for Computer Science, with 3+ years of experience working in industry with Database Systems, Software Engineering.

* Desire to work on Android development, Data Analysis, MapReduce, Innovative business ideas and solving challenging problems to help grow the business.
Corning Glass Ad
GoBe Groups
A few corrections / comments:

Panel lifetime is generally given as a nominal 20-25 years. That's not a minimum. The reason is a gradual degradation, mean of 0.8%, median 0.5% of output per year, due to multiple causes. See: "Photovoltaic Degradation Rates: An Analytical Review", Dirk C. Jordan and Sarah R. Kurtz, NREL

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf

I would like to know how the employment numbers here are calculated, and how they're allocated across the lifetime of solar plant. I'm not trying to knock solar, I'm showing that it's quite possible to have too much of a good thing though.

CleanTechnica is generally a pretty reliable source. US EIA gives 3.2 GW nameplate capacity for solar as of 2012: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_03.html Installations have been going at a major clip, so 4.8 GW sounds highly plausible.

"I think the calculation is more complicated than you make it seem."

It almost certainly is. However my point was that it's also a bit less straightforward than the BusinessInsider piece presents. Believe me, I'd like to see good jobs in the solar sector. But I'd really like for those to be productive jobs.

I do think that solar will continue to see cost reductions (and those will be key to its success). Addressing factors other than just efficiency (mostly overrated), and in particular, the installation, durability, and maintenance costs, are what I suspect are key.

Jobs ... are complicated. My point isn't so much that they're good or bad, more that if the trends reported are projected forward, we'll see a very large portion of the labor force directly employed in energy harvesting. This isn't the end of the world, but it does mean that roughly 1 in 5 present jobs will be supersceded. There was an earlier time when energy harvesting occupied a similar or larger portion of the workforce, though it was called "farming" at the time. In some countries it still comprises 90% or more of all work.

This plays into another discussion -- that of EROEI and what levels of it are required to support various levels of economic and technological complexity.
The problem with this is that singular systems require a lot of engineering effort and produce interesting side effects when you attempt to make them reliable.

Any singular system is going to fail.
I don't know which kinds of enterprise orgs you're envisioning but when I think about "traditional" enterprise IT orgs, I'm picturing companies in healthcare, insurance, certain finance business units, non-profits, public sector, and defense, not any place ever mentioned a lot here on HN in a technical discussion. I've worked with a LOT of them and I'd be surprised if the ratio of ops engineers to servers was anything better than 1:10 as a ball-park number. Network guy, storage guy, DB guy, VM guy, automation guy, net-sec guy, system-sec guy... that's pretty typical for maybe a 20-server rollout and grows shy of sub-linearly with number of users (wild guess of O(n^1/2) ). If you mean specific to SRE-type of roles or auto-scaled groups in EC2 / GCE to count as servers perhaps that may be the case, but my idea of a traditional enterprise IT org is that it views automation with fear and hesitation preferring to add more people before trying to "disrupt" their business with automation tools and so will be stuck somewhere around 1:30 at best.

Admittedly, I probably have a bad impression of enterprise from consulting because who would pay for automation consulting at $$$ / hr when you do it pretty well with existing resources in the first place?
Wow.. Very cool.
Interesting how there are definite clusters here and there.
How to Convert 2D Blu-ray to Anaglyph 3D
There's opportunity for solar in pretty much all states, and if not solar, then other forms of renewable energy, conservation measures, or activity.

I would expect to see large concentrated solar installations in sunbelt states though.
Google Ditches CAPTCHA for Simple Checkbox
"the stupidity of solar, it works best when there's less load"

That's a new one. Apparently peak electricity usage isn't during the daytime, when the sun is out.

Oh wait, that's exactly when it is. If HN mods had balls, they'd ban worthless shits like you for arguing politely but incredibly fucking dishonestly. But dang has no balls. dang just wants to suck pg's sweet sweet dick.
What is the “soap opera effect” in newer LCD TVs?
Show HN: When women rate how their employers support them, change is possible
Yep. The proper reply would be, "Thanks. But, I don't work for your company and am not bound by those rules. In fact, it's the policy of journalists to seek the truth regardless of your company policy."
book:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/ivan-savov/no-bullshit-guide-to-mat...

world.mathigon.org

mathworld.wolfram.com

good luck!
Yesterday's News
Ok, get two huge systems instead of a datacenter of small systems. You still have made great strides in reducing complexity.
I strongly suspect we're going to see a shift of the power grid from demand-matching via dispatchable generation to supply-matching via dispatchable load.

High-intensity manufacturing processes, banked chilling or thermal storage, pumped and other forms of direct electrical storage, and electricity-to-fuel synthesis are all examples of dispatchable loads which can opportunistically take advantage of excess generating capacity.

It is a different paradigm.
Dollar Shave Club, by way of comparison, has a white-label relationship with a brand you've never heard of. (Dorco, originally a South Korean brand. Their US office is here: http://www.dorcousa.com I would assume they're also behind a lot of house brands at e.g. Walgreens or what have you. )
Martin Rees: The world in 2050 and beyond
It is weird -- I think SCM should mean "source control management" NOT "software configuration management", but the latter is what the website has.
Also curious, I thought YC pretty much just took on startups that applied.
Thanks, it means a lot!

It'll actually be pretty easy for me to port this over for HN, or any of the other things you mentioned, and I'll definitely work on it.