skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And a whiskey shot ;)
The city live in (Maplewood MN) recently built rain gardens in our neighborhood for catching rainwater.

They are basically deep pits filled in with gravel with slightly sunken garden on top. The water runoff from the street is diverted into them where most of it is absorbed into the ground.

http://www.bwsr.state.mn.us/images/ww-box.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-31kb5tVYmJU/Ub9T22Hgy_I/AAAAAAAAAv...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLZpvg9e-H8/UbY86YdLjzI/AAAAAAAAAn...
It's true that they are different, though I disagree that the next-best option is always going to be "vary close"). However, in this case the "shareholder value" problem is systemic, meaning that there really isn't anywhere else for shareholders to put their money. This potentially helps explain some of the asset bubbles we've seen, as well as the startup bubble (if one exists). Regardless of how the analysis falls out for the shareholder, then, the situation is almost certainly sub-optimal for the economy as a whole.
Yeah, and he admitted himself that retrospectively it was not such a good one."Shareholder value is an outcome—not a strategy." - Jack Welch http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/...)
Interesting, but is this really an obstacle, or one of those relatively fixable obstacles that's exaggerated by people who really want shiny new planes?

It just seems strange to me -- computers have gotten faster, batteries have gotten smaller, etc. If all of your avionics are theoretically lighter and smaller, how is it an issue to pack more functionality into the same airframe? Hell, remove the pilot and armoured bath-tub and make it into a drone.
Show HN: IRMFT – A web app for sharing first time experience
Take a look at the article, there is detailed comparative data on volume, response time, merge rate, split by Docker inc employees and non-employees.
Its not blocked for me. Never seen it blocked anywhere in the UK
All of them except B.

Unfortunately, B is the only one whose interests are commonly represented in publicly traded US companies these days. B is the prototypical Fortune 500 CEO.
They are looking into something similar in the UK to manage floodwaters, so that instead of funneling water fast and out, which massively increases erosion and sometimes overwhelms bridges down stream, you work out where you can let the water hang around in times of flood and make agreements with farmers to have flash flood basins.
I've been using this for some months now and it really makes my daily job with IIS site management a whole lot easier!
Better yet it's in active development and they listen to peoples ideas and integrate the best of them. Try it!
I run and visit the gym without gym, gym gives me great posture. Working at the desk most of the day it is hard to keep muscles on your back to support yourself while running at least it is the case for me. Everyone has different diet, genetics...
Jason Calacanis on equity crowdfunding
I can't tell if this is meant to praise or insult Tom Stoppard.
Ripple/Stellar Consensus System May Have Serious Issues as Stellar Forks
I thought that was obvious.

The greatest utility of these programs though isn't in suppressing dissent or busting crime or terrorism. It's in routing pork to government IT contractors.
>there are a lot of studies that show companies where management has skin in the game do measurably better than companies where they don't.

There are studies that show that management 'skin in the game' compensation policies have cause an epidemic of control fraud:

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/11/ceo-compensation-...

>that being said, there aren't data that would tell you, companies where the CEO will earn $1m or $10m depending on how well the company performs don't do as well as companies where the CEO will earn $20m or $200m.

Actually there is data, but it demonstrates the exact opposite:

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/CEOperforma...

Lower paid CEOs perform better.
While Montier makes a good (and unoriginal) point, I'm not convinced by his argument.

The first example: IBM and JnJ are in wildly different industries, competing in different markets against different competitors employing vastly different strategies. To use an arbitrary time period (who is to say IBM’s returns 10 years from now won’t trounce JnJ’s), and employ a metric (shareholder returns) that is often out of whack with reality (as Montier himself would acknowledge) isn’t persuasive enough for me.

The second macro example of comparing returns between two totally different time periods also isn't exactly apples to apples either. And also completely ignores the effects of hundreds of other potentially significant factors (interest rates, gdp levels, global trade etc)

This article seems to be a strong case of confirmation bias on his part. Ironical given that he's written a popular book on behavioral investing. (And yes this comment can also be viewed as suffering from a similar bias)

Yes SVM has pitfalls, yes focusing on the customer should be a high priority, however the agency problems Montier describes (management extracting undue value) are solved by neither.

Borrowing from churchill(?) — SVM might be the dumbest idea in how we organize our public markets, except for all the others.
Google at some point stated they will always prioritize long term interests of their users vs. short term interests of their shareholders (paraphrasing). I think that's the key - when you focus on your users, financial success follows and stock price will reflect that.

As far as satisfying the shareholders, A and C wouldn't invest in the same company (growth vs. mature), Bs are speculators which you should almost always ignore (except when you need to throw them a bone to avoid activist situation). D/E don't really exist in the world of institutional investors, which are the investors you would have a dialog with (retail investors are generally just along for the ride).
bullshit. pure bullshit.
How Did Jeff Bezos Start Amazon? (2001)
The original transscript of that interview, in French.
http://www.lesinrocks.com/1997/08/20/musique/ornette-coleman...
Interesting. What do you do if the client is not interested the value-add but only in a rewrite for the web, say? Decline the project?
> I would not be surprised if someone soon announces a "JSON Transformation" tool that can convert one JSON schema to another.

I'm not exactly guilty of that, but I do have some use cases, where one json document needs to be mapped to another one.

In a weak moment, I actually sketched a simple protocol for using javascript to express these "transformations":
https://gist.github.com/miku/620aecc5ad782f261e3b
The first part of the first quote is incorrect. The problem XML solved was bloody hard, though most people nowadays have forgotten what it was. It was to get the world's programmers to stop creating binary file formats, to put an end to the situation where every time you went onto a site, the first thing you had to do was reverse engineer binary files with a hex dump utility. XML, to its very great credit, solved that problem.

Now if you want to start asking whether it solves the problem as well as today's competing technologies like JSON, at that point I will step back and hold my peace.
The reason it's less economical than it could be is because of excessive regulation. We've come a long way with automation and safety engineering. Next-gen nuclear plants could produce energy far less expensively than coal if handled properly - with zero air pollution.

Then there's the promise of thorium power: http://energyfromthorium.com
I think you are overstating the difficulty of achieving good network throughput on modern hardware. Architecture definitely matters but saturating 10GbE is pretty achievable without going to extraordinary lengths. While doing kernel bypass for networking is more efficient (and preferable for other reasons), it is not necessary for pushing a huge number of messages in my experience.

The biggest bottleneck tends to be the computational cost of parsing the protocol format. Nonetheless, I've seen GeoJSON documents moved over networks at per node messaging rates similar to those in the article.
I read a claim that said AF have a higher drone loss than the other branches, because they let their "pilots" do manual landings...
How to Impress Your Sister
A larger issue here is the very idea of different armed services. If you were designing a military today, would you have Army and Marines? I don't see how it makes sense.

Let's fast-forward a few decades. If we have combat robots (not that I'm advocating this, but I think that's where we'll end up) then brain-wise one soldier can know everything that another can. I.e. there's no need for different MOS. You can have one brain that is both a special-operations infantry assaulter, and knows how to service any aircraft in your arsenal. The real differentiator would be morphology of the units.

So, if every unit could conceivably be trained in all tactics and doctrine, what's the point of services vs. just specialities?
Yeah I'm with you on that, for the first couple of episodes I wasn't even convinced that it was really the same show... feels like a spinoff since they killed Brody
This article isn't very good.

I actually agree with the idea. The quote about shareholder value being a dumb idea from Jack Welch, yeah, sure.

This article is sloppy though. The author side-by-side compares economists speaking in abstract aggregates, press releases from PR-generating-feel-good-organizations (the CEO roundtable thing), publicly stated metrics used by companies for success (IBM), and distribution/influencer strategies (Johnson and Johnson).

It just seems like throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks. Pulling out a 1980's feel-good-PR and contrasting that against Johnson and Johnson remaining focused on doctors, nurses, families...

That's before getting into cherry-picking, survivor's bias, good and bad strategy (Rumelt would savage later-day IBM, not for being profit-focused, but because "doubling earnings per share" is not a strategy)...

...ok, too many problems to list them all. Agree with the general idea; the article isn't so well-thought though.
If the link doesn't work, you can read it here: https://view-api.box.com/1/sessions/6570005e923b4513914b56fa...
To be fair...

The guys in those Harriers were Marines. The guys in those F/A-18s were Marines. There are really good reasons for not allowing suppression over ingress routes with those platforms. Think about it... the BEST guys in aviation were slated for Harriers... because you just couldn't have nuggetheads flying Harriers. For a lot of really good reasons.

We don't need us against them type arguments. We need only solve problems. And problem solving requires employing different tools, with different strengths and weaknesses at different times.
So you are a religious person after all?
I should have been more specific... it's not really about trees per se, it's more about custom types. (I was thinking of trees of custom types).
I think "Stay Young to Run" is a much more truthful.
Particularly if you have a complex and multi-faceted problem domain at hand, ecosystem and library support can be a dealbreaker, for which many people would sacrifice expressiveness and language power.

Just to reiterate: I think the current situation is perfectly understandable. Obviously the ecosystem does make a huge difference to how productive someone can be in any given programming language, and the choices of language that projects are making are perfectly rational given their constraints and objectives.

It's just unfortunate that this creates momentum behind languages like C, PHP and JavaScript, which then concentrates the effort of library development within their ecosystems, creating a vicious cycle. In terms of robustness and productivity, the industry would be better served by moving almost all development work away from that sort of underpowered, poorly specified, error-prone language as soon as possible, but you can't do that without the libraries. Developing that ecosystem for any new language takes huge amounts of time and effort, so to have any realistic chance of catching on, you first need an excellent bridge to existing libraries. Sadly, the FFI infrastructure even in relatively good languages tends to be clunky at best, and that is a huge barrier to adoption for all the reasons you mentioned.

Starting off from first principles can be quite impractical these days, so stitching together others' work is becoming a common paradigm.

On the other hand, the trade-off for that reduction in NIH early development effort is that you now have a discovery problem up-front and a dependency management problem indefinitely. I don't think that as an industry we've really found a good balance yet between not reinventing the wheel and not spending forever choosing which of 57 pre-existing wheels to use.

What I'd love to see is a new generation of languages that accept the modern reality of combining packages from diverse sources and so place much greater emphasis on supporting that kind of software architecture. Interoperability between packages, each with their own related but probably slightly different concepts and conventions, needs to be much more of a priority IMHO. When we can compose data structures and algorithms across packages from different sources, and have all the marshalling and type safety and error handling mechanisms just work with minimal programmer intervention, then we'll be getting somewhere. But of course that's just one more substantial issue that any new language has to address on top of everything else, which is no small thing to ask.
The world need more serious analytical tools.

I driving an effort for a major bank to combine all sources of different data (traffic logs and external treat intelligence feeds - all of different formats) to create a comprehensive fraud alerting and security investigation system. And we got pretty impressive results utilizing Splunk as a data swiss army knife.

IBM is certainly capable of offering a competitive solution to this industry although they need to move faster.

WatsonAnalytics is a good start even at it's current "teaser preview" stage.
Great reply.

I wasn't expecting to make you fill out a survey. I was just trying to show off scars I and others I know have accumulated over the years :)
> the only pilots that ever allowed us to shoot 81mm suppression over the top of the ingress routes to target when training to run CAS were the ANG A10 guys. All the active duty fast movers weren't game, and that included the MC Harrier pilots

I can imagine this must be harrowing for the pilots. You actually shoot the 81s over their flight path?
If you ever find yourself somewhere you have to work with XML data and the people there use things like XSLT (and suicide is not an option) you should consider using Joost. Joost implements the lesser known STX language. It's a far cry from Haskell or other better tools but nonetheless more useful and practical than XSLT for tasks like cleaning and extracting interesting things from blobs of XML. It's available here: http://joost.sourceforge.net
Heh. No worries. Excellent list of questions. Like antirez, I am evernoting (is that a verb now?) this for future references.
That plant is a battery, it just uses potential and kinetic energy instead of chemical processes to store it. However, your comment, and Ufo's comment, got me thinking and exploring, and realizing that some of the biggest users of electricity in california, like the Edmonston Pumping Plant [1], don't have forebays or the like to store water to balance out power consumption throughout the day. Power consumption really needs time-of-day based metering on it so that power consumed during peak hours is more expensive than off-peak hours, to give incentives to better even out the load.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant
One reason why people ask questions in private is for fear of looking incapable and dumb. It's not an entirely unfounded fear when you consider that we're knowledge workers. Our worth and opportunities are heavily influenced by how others perceive us.

Most people are probably aware of the benefits that others would get from asking questions publicly. The people that are not aware may pick it up when you publicly post the original question and answer yourself, e.g., "Someone recently asked me how to make a perfect soft boiled egg. Here's how I go about it."
A-10 stories are always amazing and fun
to read. But there is another side
that maybe should be mentioned:

Supposedly the argument against the A-10 is
that (1) the most important weapon the A-10
has is no longer that amazing gun but one or more of
just various missiles and (2)
can use an F-16, maybe an F-15, likely
an F-18, in time the F-35
to fire such missiles but do it at higher
speeds and altitudes where the plane is
not so vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire
from the ground.

Or, it's great that the A-10 can take so
much punishment, but a claim is that it would
be better still to fly higher and faster
and get nearly no punishment at all.

I'm sure the astounding advantages of the A-10 are
well understood. So, if some people want
to put the A-10 out to pasture, maybe
there is a reason.

I'm just repeating the story I heard and
am no expert.

But, to argue for the A-10 again, to destroy
an ISIS truck with a 50 caliber machine gun
in the back, want to use a ~$1 million missile
or a few shots from that amazing A-10 gun?
So I Told These Nomads About the Big Bang…
>This article, like most others, overlooks the primary reason the A-10 has been slated for retirement for so long even though no one contests its effectiveness in its role. Due to the way the aircraft was designed, it has very limited upgradeability compared to most US military aircraft.

The real reason is that it has always been the red-headed step-child of the ch-Air Force. There has never been any real interest in the CAS role from the mgmt, other than to keep that turf away from the Army and Marine Corps.

>While the airframe still makes for a great weapons platform, the sensor suites, avionics, and countermeasures are obsolete, and not in a good way. They've been doing a lot of nasty hacks to allow it to support modern weapon systems and electronics but there are a growing number of important capabilities that simply cannot be "backported" to that airframe.

I was about to make a similar comment that the A10 performs its role well despite having relatively primitive weapons / targeting systems. But I disagree about the reason for the obsolete weapons / electronics. Sensors and computers have only gotten smaller and better, and I am afraid I don't understand why you think that the A10 cannot be fitted with proper electronics and sensors.

>This has been increasing its vulnerability to more advanced threats

The definition of a CAS role practically implies that the airplane can only operate in an arena where air-superiority is assured. The A10 is by definition vulnerable to "more advanced threats" and so will any acceptable substitute share similar vulnerabilities.

>Its shelf-life has been extended by virtue of it being used in practice against adversaries with unsophisticated weaponry.

Exactly the kind of adversary it is being deployed against, though it has proven itself against others as well.

>It is a relic of the Cold War not just in its history but, unfortunately, also in its defenses and weaponry with no obvious upgrade path. To replace it with something that could support the capabilities they desire, they would need to design a completely new airframe.

I agree, and I hope they call it the A10-mkII, and that it is practically a modern rebuild of the A10.
The A-10 was the first plane to come to mind when I saw the description, as well. Living in Tucson as a kid, I saw these planes flying around quite a bit.
I like curated content. In fact a lot of my reading about programming now comes from things like ruby/python/html/javascript/open source/etc. weekly email lists. The internet has too much noise when it comes to programming stuff and the weekly emails cut through the cruft. This will be another set of articles I add to my reading list instead of trying to find gems on HN or r/programming.
The whole article including your quotes praise this weapon made by US which was designed to "take apart a Soviet tank". It is “the ugliest, most beautiful aircraft on the planet.”
It's like an ad for the army or something. America's toughest airplane, a flying zombie tank, is resurrected to destroy the evil ISIS. War is so cool.
To quote Haskeller Michael Snoyman (linked elsethread):

Please don't insist on calling your bastard child of a language "functional."

It's a declarative language. It's functional language if you squint at it, sort of. Maybe. It certainly doesn't fit with the most broadly acceptable (stricter) definitions of what a functional language is.

The biggest problem, with XSLT 1 at least (and that's primarily what I'm talking about because that's what exists in the wild), is that the output of a template function is a string, whereas the input is a node tree. So to get generalised recursion or perform function composition over the input data, you need to do some evil tricks.

To give the impression of Turing completeness, you need to first parse the input stream by splitting it up into strings and then call functions that perform string processing, which means you can no longer use xpath, or any of the things that really make XSLT. At that point you're not really writing XSLT anymore, you're doing simple recursive string processing using XSLT as a horrendously overweight and improperly-equipped wrapper around your native string libraries.

Incidentally, I don't accept the linked article as a proof of Turing completeness, since it only implements some trivial programs using Turing machines. That's not the same thing as proving equivalence with a universal Turing machine. However, others seem to have done it, presumably using tricks such as string processing, or ignoring the input altogether.

You could for instance, recreate Conway's Game of Life using pure XSLT, but it wouldn't contain any actual XML transformation code and all the state would exist in the running XSLT program, not the XML document. It would also blow the stack as most XSLT engines don't support tail recursion and there's no other way to loop indefinitely.

What you certainly can't do is have one function that outputs a set of XML nodes and another function that has a for-each that consumes that set, or have the ability to run apply-templates over it. That is nothing like functional programming.
just for the record, i have been subbed to hacker news for awhile -- just checked, i formally joined 168 days ago -- but i had been reading hacker news for a year or more before i guilted myself into joining and that was just so i could respond to something i had read.

only recently have i stepped up to the plate and started posting links to articles i come across in my daily news dredge and if and when appropriate, made comments on news items that piqued my interest.

but it is in search of your kind of posts that i come to a news aggregation site like hn because i do want to see what the comments are -- they act like a reality check -- so please, don't despair. i am sure there are a lot of people like me who check the "new" section and are able to discover what you have posted before it gets locked. and now you have me thinking that probably most of the stuff i post, get nixed too. cuz only once did i notice something i posted show up in the first 5 pages, but it like #60 and it only got that far because the article was being trashed.

so you go me wondering if i should just go back to being a free-rider. posting and commenting on hn takes a lot of time and effort, probably better spent elsewhere.