skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've come a long ways.

Consider that the Coliseum in Rome was originally designed to be flooded, so that mock naval battles could be staged. The losers would die of drowning. Later they staged gladiator battles, where the loser would be run through with a sword instead.

The populace of Rome regarded that as great entertainment.

Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, the author of "Don Quijote", was drafted by the king of Spain to fight in a war. When the war was over, Cervantes was left to find his own way home - the king didn't provide any return transportation. He was kidnapped, then held for ransom for five years.

The United States Marine Corps was formed specifically to put an end to that sort of hostage ransoming. The Barbary Pirates would capture merchant ships that were trying to enter or exit the Mediterranean, then send word to the crew's friends and families that they must pay a ransom if they wanted to ever see them alive again.

I'm not saying humanity is free of evil, but surely it is far better than it once was.
The only thing affecting these stories is that many users are flagging them.

Edit: perhaps more detail would help. The story was initially flagged by enough users that it was killed. We unkilled it for reasons I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711660. That caused the process which is affecting all these stories to pick up where it left off: lots of upvotes and lots of flags, with the flags winning over the upvotes. As a result, the story fell in rank again—but didn't get killed, because once we unkill something flags no longer have the power to kill it.
Further research shows my numbers are outdated. Current pricing, for 20 year contracts, are $USD 0.36/M^3.

http://www.waterworld.com/articles/2013/09/singapore-s-secon...
As much as we ask ourselves whether the price of living is one worth paying, more than often we would prefer to pay down due to the inherent nature of survival in us all. Even for those who experience a lot of suffering that possibly brings one to prefer death, whether one thinks that life is worth living is subjective. It not only depends on how much suffering you experience, but how much you value everything else relative to suffering.
Yes, there are vitamins in vitamin water. OP is lame.
I don't understand how you can do a full on attack on the OP without knowing him or his situation.

You seem to think that a person has nothing else during his day than read every piece of news that comes their way. It might be a good idea to consider the fact that some people are extremely busy (with work or other tasks) but still want to stay informed. Those people would probably come across a piece of news or article that looks interesting, bookmark it to read later (because, you know, they have work now) and never get around to actually reading it because of work load.

If you can stop whatever you're doing and follow up every article that seems interesting to you, you might not be doing important work, or your time is very flexible to allow such a thing. It probably isn't a good idea to generalize that this can apply to everyone.
I am so happy to see the negative comments down voted and the positive ones float to the top. I see HN as a positive but realistic and analytical community that eschews the knee jerk reaction comments so common across the web.
45-year physics mystery shows a path to quantum transistors is the original and better title. Given that the desired behavior still requires the substance to be supercooled, I'm not seeing the 'just around the corner' claim in the headline reflected in the article. This sounds many years away from commercialization, neat as it is.
I assume that you would want to run a tight loop in the actor? Otherwise, you will be spending much time sending messages, especially in a relatively cheap computation such computing the next number in a stream of pseudo-random numbers.

If the tight loop is in the actor (or process reading from a channel). You have the same problems again.

tl;dr: I don't see how the actor model helps here, it will either be slow or have the same problems (you should know what functions lock a data structure).
In order for DASH to work you need Media Source Extensions support. Firefox for example doesn't support them yet.
Is such a trade-off a good thing?
An introduction to functional programming
I'll point out that there is no required software for GTD. You can implement the system for yourself with just paper and pen, or a text file and an editor. (I use a few text files and an editor.)
The difference would be, that in addition to getting $3bil, they would also have peripheral local benefits - Food Security from the plentiful crops.
Yes, we buried the meta post as off-topic. It's not a borderline call.

As usual, we didn't close the thread to comments, so ongoing discussion can continue.
Playing devil's advocate here, but couldn't the company have picked its name from the Latin ubertas? (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ubertas)
not rely that weird for the site to target keywords like that, considering their ad revenue focus. when i visit the page i see an ad for the ps4.
The wrapper can be found here https://github.com/alexbilbie/proton
http://gtdfh.branchable.com/ is my write-up of how I use GTD, in case it helps.
Imagine what your life would be like if you never saved those 800 articles. Feel happier? Go delete them.
> Charlatan or stupid? How provincial one must be to come to that conclusion.

It's a reference to Chomsky's criticism of postmodernism: http://www.critical-theory.com/noam-chomsky-calls-jacques-la...

(Not that I particularly agree with Chomsky here, mind you...)
“If the news is that important, it will find me.” [0] is the quote that came to my mind.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27voters.html/
North Korea denies 'righteous' hack attack on Sony
Is it possible for someone who understands Continental philosophy to disagree with it?
Gmail on iPhone supports Bold/Italic/Underline formatting for me. A bit anemic but there's something there at least.
Is it fair to say Bantu farmers colonized most of southeast Africa approximately 1500 years ago ?
Laughable names are what we do in Sillicon Valley. Our biggest companies are named after a child's gurgle (Google) and a "crude or brutish person" (Yahoo). The more laughable your company's name is, the better off you are. It's like wearing something really unfashionable in public. If you can pull it off, you must have confidence.
I Don't Agree That There Really Is a Tech Worker Shortage
I know lots of engineers who are unable to find work.

I do believe the hiring managers who say they can't find the workers they need. What I don't believe is that the workers aren't out there, hoping to get hired.

I speculate that the reasons for the perceived - and ONLY perceived - shortage is that it's far more difficult for employers and potential employees to find each other. Another problem is that us engineers are expected to have real-world, paid experience in whatever technology the hiring company uses, rather than these companies providing on-the-job training.

At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed. Companies were happy to train. No longer.

What really kills me is that when a new technology is introduced, one is _immediately_ required to know about it before getting a job where that technology will be used. Consider that Swift, a new programming language that Apple hopes will make it easier to write iOS Apps, has only been available for a few months, yet one cannot get a job writing Swift code, unless one already has PAID Swift experience on one's resume. It's not enough to just read a book. Neither is anyone willing to train.
Bastian had shown the lion the inscription on the
reverse side of the Gem. "What do you suppose it
means?" he asked. "'DO WHAT YOU WISH.' That must mean I
can do anything I feel like. Don't you think so?"

All at once Grograman's face looked alarmingly grave,
and his eyes glowed.

"No," he said in his deep, rumbling voice. "It means
that you must do what you really and truly want. And
nothing is more difficult."

"What I really and truly want? What do you mean by
that?"

"It's your own deepest secret and you yourself don't
know it."
BTW, you can model a thread-safe random number generator without using a lock, replacing it with a CAS operation on a reference.

You still have problems this way, but at least it is non-blocking, in the sense that if the scheduler blocks any thread for any reason, then the other active threads can still have progress. And at least in Java, for a number of threads less or equal to the number of cores available, it will have better throughput, as locks these days are optimized for the common scenario of adding "just in case" synchronization (i.e. biased towards the thread that last acquired that lock), which hurts performance because of the extra management required.
Street parking has almost no place in the suburban lifestyle.
>I think the point is that he didn't know there was a lock.

One could argue that if you decide to go concurrent for performance reasons it's your responsibility to check for implicit locking behavior. Otherwise you're just doing cargo cult programming.
Quite!

I don't follow the logic at all; other than altruism, why would anyone buy shares of a company that wasn't trying to make an excellent sustainable profit over time / increase its share value?
Ask HN: Is there a universal time measure to use as a spacefaring civilisation?
I've been watching the Human Universe series recently and it got me thinking as to how we would measure time if we were to become a spacefaring civilisation.

As I see it there are a couple of problems,

1. Once we colonise another planet our concept of time (e.g. days, years etc) will be different to that of life on earth due to the shift in a planets orbit. Presumably every planet would require it's own measurement of time e.g. a martian year so that those living there can keep time in relative terms. We'll want a universal time however to synchronise events in time across all of our colonies. This would be the easiest problem as we can base it off of earth time.

2. If we were to encounter intelligent extra terrestrial life then we would need to agree on a concept of universal time to explain the history of our/their planet & species.

Does an idea for this universal measurement of time currently exist? If not then how would you expect it to look?
My Instapaper account has 250 unread/unfilled items, ranging from interesting algorithms to neat libraries to interesting articles. Any time I find some interesting tidbit I put it away to read when I'm not working. I can't read anything I want whenever I want, I have stuff to do during the day, can't justify to my boss if I spend 6 hours reading articles on neural networks and trying the methods if I have a project at hand that won't benefit from it
Very cool! I attempted a very primitive version of this for generating band names[1]. Now I'm tempted to port it to Rant :) One bit of advice though - the "getting started" section could be a bit more helpful for new users... it should at least mention the language it's written in (C#)!

[1] https://github.com/dandelany/band-name/blob/master/templates...
Thanks. Changed title as suggested. :)
When in Go, do as Gophers do
I took your advice and read a "short piece of his" (http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Di...)

I found this monstrosity in the third paragraph:

"I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly."

This is a single sentence.

Is it that Derrida's thought is so complex that it is simply inexpressible in simpler language? Or it this sentence wilful obsurantism?

I find many supporter's of Derrida claiming that if you don't agree with Derrida it must be that you don't understand him. This is a dangerous intellectual cul-de-sac - verging on mysticism.
I tried this as a college project inspired by the Roger Alsing post. Unfortunately I didn't create anything usable. If I was doing it again I'd use a SA approach or pure hillclimbing like Alsing - as antirez points out in a sibling post, crossover between diverse individuals rarely gives viable offspring with this problem.
Slack's app release notes are fantastic
Uber cab driver accused of sexually assaulting woman in Delhi
And the risk in legal costs of one woman and her small design agency going up against Uber? If it happened, Uber would find a way to milk über completely dry.

Normal, human-sized companies can't go up against venture-backed empires run by people with egos the size of football stadiums because the costs and risks of legal action is so massively stacked in favour of the rich and powerful.
Except that Uber's current funding and valuation depends on them taking over the taxi market globally, not just in NYC. Branding themselves as an NYC taxi firm wouldn't give the right message to investors and the media at all.
Poshmark Hits $100M in Annual Revenue
Those articles merely state the Army doesn't want to upgrades, they want to wait until a new version of the M1 is available in a few years? I took the above conversation to mean that there's a (universal?) consensus that heavy armor's time is past. These links don't support that.

At the end of the day, it's kind of hard to do a thunder run [1] without tanks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_%282003%29#Th...
A drone shoots off its missiles and turns into an observer. An A-10 can hang around and shoot enemies that threaten the ground troops. No drone that I'm aware of has been built to provide continuous troop protection for a long period of time.
There are many good answers, like Vipassana, Dzongchen, even Yoga - any of derivatives of Upanishads and Buddha's insights. The problems is that for most people it means nothing, or just a mythology, so they dismiss it with a first mention.

This could be rationalized, because, like it is with every "good idea" in the world, "other people" piled up such mountains of nonsense, and pushed that nonsense using the best manipulative techniques available to humanity, that some people developed an aversion, like for ads. You could think of teachings of various prophets or programming paradigms, economics or even physics and medicine - crowds of idiots ruined and discredited everything.

The essence of most of eastern "spiritual traditions" is remarkably straightforward - "stay alone and use your own brain". It is that simple. The difference is only in wording . Some traditions call it "primordial awareness", some call it "our true nature", others call it "god within" or "That" or "Tao" - it is not important. Like they said "Truth is one (it points back to us - to "our nature") the wise call it by different names".

So, stay alone and use (develop) your own brain. It doesn't mean some radical bullshit like going in a desert. Rather it is more like Kerouac's "On the road", which is about being an observer of what is. Kerouac, by the way, didn't get Buddhism - he mere confused himself with that popular Tibetan folklore, but he was intuitive practitioner.

Another example could be like this - stop reading all that nonsense in internet - blogs, forums, HN and do read one or two great books, like SICP or PAIP or watch a serious course, like CS61A on youtube. These courses and books are for developing your own understanding of fundamental principles. Then you would see what piles of nonsense are 99% of these internet postings.

So, the answer is not go to Vipassana retreat (btw, "retreat" means solitude (to avoid distractions), so all these groups is mere business) or to turn off all the electronic devices. It means to stop paying attention to blah-blah-blah around you (that's why ancient sages went to forests or mountains) and develop yourself.

Basically, it is about using (focus) your own awareness the way children before age of 4-5 do, before their minds would be polluted by piles of words and artificial, wrong concepts they learn from others. This ability of "direct observation and knowledge extraction" which is the very essence of so-called "our human nature" is, roughly, what they worship in Dzongchen.

All the answers are thousands years old.

Oh, by the way, two-three weeks in a solitude easy trekking in Nepal (Annapurna Circuit trek or Jiri-Gokyo trek) makes wonders. You could "realize" how good it is to be alone most of the time.
http://skimlinks.com
Youtify is no more
What is it we need almonds for?

Macarons.

On the other hand, we could always let them eat cake.
You're hinting at an abuse of the site that we should probably look into, so I'd appreciate it if you'd email hn@ycombinator.com with details.
Time is observer-dependent, any universal measurement of time is going to be somehow "inobjective" given relativity (and FTL travel).

I haven't seen the Human Universe but e.g. Voices of a Distant Star, A Fire Upon The Deep, and Interstellar all touch on time dilation as major plot points.

Gundam standardised space colonies on the Universal Century (earth time) but that was over much shorter distances.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711660
Being one to get distracted by irrelevant details, I wondered why the "CHECK FOR PACEMAKER" sign was so prominent in one of the pictures. It turns out pacemakers causing explosions in cremator furnaces is a major problem, in some cases damaging the cremator entirely or injuring staff: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279940/
If you do an HN search for "shortage" you'll see many links, to things like:

http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac... - which points out that it's not "difficult for employers and potential employees", giving an example of how Facebook decided to not employ the people who became the founders of WhatsApp, then paid $19 billion for their company a few years later.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth... - titled "The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage: And what it should mean for immigration reform."

If you want the economic details, you might look at at http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-... , which (among many things) points out that two people get a STEM degree for each STEM job available.

The general conclusion is that there is no shortage, and that complaints by various large businesses about a lack of trained people is a strategy to pay lower wages and spend less on training. This has been known for over a decade. Eg, http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back130... concludes """Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is used to import workers at the very bottom of the wage scale. The wide gap between wages for U.S. workers and H-1B workers helps explain why industry demand for H-1B workers is so high and why the annual visa quotas are being exhausted.

Many in industry have called for an increase in the number of H-1B visas, citing the early exhaustion of the cap as reflective of widespread need for skilled workers. However, the fact that very few H-1B workers are earning salaries as high as U.S. workers in the same profession would seem to refute that claim, and should make lawmakers wary of increasing the H-1B quota. The exhaustion of the H-1B quota may reflect employers' interest in lowering labor costs or widespread fraud rather than an insufficient number of visas."""

HN comments include those of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 and more .. again, search HN for "shortage".
Maybe a lightweight proxy server (running a r-Pi? or another headless server) on your network and routing traffic through it? I offer this as an extension to my post many comments down, which basically covers my belief that you must first filter/proxy the mind. Not trying to control how to hand everything the world has available but instead only allowing yourself to focus on what you need available and saying no to the rest.

Anyways, it's bit of a time consumer setting up said software initially but you benefit from a lot of angles once done. (Network security, content management, less likely to back track on systems that take more work to implement, as well as having a sophisticated and global system across all devices routed through the proxy server.) I believe some software packages even allow for the management of access times as well as content type. White list only a couple sites/ url's / IP's you use and white list them for only the time you need to be able to use them. Have someone else change the computer password on the server that you trust and boom. Just don't get distracted trying to circumvent security now...ha ha

Just a casual suggestion based upon experience as a school system administrator. Normally though if I am having a problem that starts in the mind, I develop a solution that either starts there or starts at whatever triggers it in my mind. Just a thought. Hack yourself you know?
I went to a talk the other day [1] that argued that the really low end were too small to do crypto so their use cases were limited by that to non networked applications. Mid range eggs Cortex can though.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/CohesiveFT/chris-swans-pres...
The tiny space satellite that you can build and launch yourself
And you did nothing to explain why. Thanks for your input.
This was also brought up last week here at HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8676464 through a link to the Scientific American article "An expert system outperforms mere mortals conquering the Dungeons of Doom."
No, actually you don't have the responsibility to transition the project. It would be the nice thing do. But not a requirement
I mean the extension itself is very easy to bypass. Just right click on it and remove it or disable it. You can also go into incognito, or a different user, different browser, etc.
Of course. There are several significant families of thought within "continental philosophy", and they don't agree with each other. Just like any broad tradition.
What is e-Residency?
The kernel switched to LFU in 2.6 if I'm not mistaken. But, yes, we are.
There are quite a few caches with separate eviction algorithms if you follow the rabbit hole all the way down.
The article says there is "a high-resolution telescopic camera" on board. Does this mean we will get high-resolution pictures of Pluto's surface, like those we have of Mars?
"country of a billion people". Oh please, not that tired cliche again. Police verification of employees is standard in India, even for software jobs. Uber as usual seems to be cutting corners, playing fast and loose, operating outside the law. The drivers aren't really 'employees' just 'licensed driving partners' and so Uber has no responisibility.

If this had happened in the USA (" a country of 300 million people") everybody would rightly be looking into how Uber operates and what to fix. But hey some third world country half a world away and it is just people being unreasonable.

And this "numbers" logic is fallacious. Why is the police shooting of an African American causing such ripples in a "country of 300 million people" with millions of police/citizen encounters. Surely the proportion ending in unarmed citizens being shot for no good reason are really really low? Then why all the hoopla? Why are people so outraged?

Yeesh. Some people.
How is putting a tar.gz of the file, saying people can use it under an open spouse license NOT open sourcing it? You can open source your code without putting it on github.