skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife looks at carbon in the deep earth, but water is a very related chemical in these cases. She says that the amount of water in the core is indeterminable at this time, but it is likely a lot more than a mere 3x the ocean volume (also, volume depends on pressure and temp, which are extreme in the core)

Note: at extreme temps and pressures in the core, water as we know it is not a good guidepost. It may be crystallized or associating strongly with other exotic crystals and 'plastic'-y compounds at the Moho layer and other transition zones deep down. Also, just counting O and H elements is likely to not get you far there either. The story of how we got our oceans is FAR from complete. I'd wager we are in the 2nd page of the prologue though, which, for 60 years of real work, is pretty good compared to most fields.
I'd much rather pay a consultant for an analysis of our business. If we're good, help us present the social responsible side of the company. If we're bad, come up with a list of action items to improve on.
Not all ACID transactions are equal. This is just a key-value store-like test. It shows the potential to scale, yet nothing regarding performance in real word.

32 c3.2xlarge instances have 1920GB memory. Given 1 billion 16B+ 8..100B values the whole dataset fits just into memory.

The Cassandra test mentioned [1] sustained loss of 1/3 instances. That's very impressive! Would love to see how F-DB handles this type of real-life situation (hint hint for follow up blog post).

[1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.cz/2014/03/cassandra-hit...
The problem with Boston tech is having to live in Boston.

I recently heard someone describe Boston as "racist San Francisco with worse weather".
http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11...

DNA has a 'half-life' of ~500 years. Panspermania may still be a viable theory, but it is very restricted in terms of stellar distance/time in transit.
you can't know if I'm overconfident or not, you have far too little information, including a lack of details about what I'm envisioning. also I am an experienced programer. More importantly I'm a systems thinker. Also I'm well aware of the need to do thorough analysis, testing and then a gradual roll-out. I also have no illusions about whether such a thing would ever be applied by the US government. I do think it could be used by a small experimental organization, micro-state or virtual nation. It can be overlaid on top an existing government's domain, but just tailored and camouflaged to be compatible legally with any "host" country. Obviously test and tune and critique before making drastic changes to an existing system, or start having large amounts of money pass through it. That should be obvious to any careful, experienced, intelligent person. But you made the rude mistake to assume I didn't. You could have framed your concern as a question instead, and that would have been more constructive, less acidic. Acidic comments are too common on HN. Let's all try to elevate the game.
For a second I had thought that someone had released an update for the Elm mail client. Color me disappointed (although I am more of a Pine guy myself, up to ~2006 at least).
I website should help someone accomplish a task.

Now that task could be range from buying a faucet to seeing when your favorite band is in town. The easier it is to accomplish the task, the better the website.
Yes on your edit. The origin of Earth's atmospheric nitrogen is thought to be in part due to outgassing (in other words, gas that was stored inside rocks in the early Earth and then released from inside), but is highly uncertain & debated. It's actually so poorly constrained that it may end up being my PhD thesis topic (astrophysics and origins of planetary systems). So not even the experts know, yet, although cometary delivery in cyanide ices from comets is a leading hypothesis (similar to the delivery of water ices).
For web development I'd recommend Bloc.io. Full disclosure: I know the founders.

https://www.bloc.io/
History was rewritten, then? You can't just un-co-founder someone. In unrelated news, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Why do you need a 12 node cluster for 2 TB of data?
This is a different but related problem: instead of trying to prove that there are arbitrarily large twin primes, they are trying to see how the maximum gap between primes grows with their size. I know that doesn't answer the applicability question, but I think the answer to that is "who knows?" Pure mathematicians tend to study these things for their own sake and then someone may or may not figure out something useful to do with it.
> All this to say that the medical industry does not have this same talent retention problem. What keeps the world's best doctors in Boston but pushes away the world's best software engineers? If Boston wants to make up ground on SF (and even NY at this point) I think starting with this question might lead to potential solutions.

It's curious you didn't lead with this paragraph since all but two of your points (lack of anchor and SF envy) are applicable to biotech/medicine - thus unlikely to be [significant] factors.
Yeah, we're working to expand coverage and bank relationships outside of the US. I can't give any specific timeline, but it's one of our highest priorities.
Interesting how he says that extremely high IQ may even be a disadvantage:

And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that. At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess... Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.

And that his big shtick is his focus, intuition, and domain expertise - not his IQ:

No. In terms of our playing skills we are not that far apart. There are many things I am better at than he is. And vice versa. Kasparov can calculate more alternatives, whereas my intuition is better. I immediately know how to rate a situation and what plan is necessary. I am clearly superior to him in that respect.
voltage coffee. clover. tatte. mead hall. etc.
It has to do with banking and regulation. Adding new regions takes a lot of time and effort to get right, but we're working on it.
How do we get excellent stories like this into the broader narrative in America? This is a story that needs to be read carefully. If somebody were to edit this down into a 10 second segment fit for insertion into the nightly news I don't think it would pack as much punch.

It seems like stories on 60 Minutes are the closest I've seen to hitting the mark.

This is one story that is part of a larger story cutting across the country. I don't know anybody republican or democrat in America that would think being jailed for two years without a charge is acceptable. This is the right time for America to deal with these _moral_ issues.

I hope your story takes off.
There's are two levels of optimizations that come into play: AWS setup and the choice of primary language. I'm always happy to speak about both as we love seeing experiments run over the data!

AWS optimizations: For that level of cost efficiency, you really need to use spot instances. A cluster of 100 m1.xlarge machines (1.5TB of RAM, 400 cores, and 168TB of magnetic disk storage) will only cost you $3 per hour using spot instances, rather than $30 on-demand. You should pay on-demand prices for the Hadoop master however.

You'll also want to roll your own Hadoop cluster as opposed to using Elastic MapReduce (EMR). EMR is amazing but the cost overhead when using it on spot instances is ~100%.

For the code itself, this is a situation where you'll want to stick with the programming language that has both the best performance and best ecosystem. I'm personally not a big fan of Java, but it really does win out here -- it's close to C or C++ for performance and has the advantage of the Hadoop ecosystem behind it. Other languages are certainly usable, but even if LanguageX only ran 4x slower than Java, the resulting job would be 4x more expensive due to paying by the hour.

Other than that, it's really just a standard MapReduce job using Hadoop. You can see an three examples for the three different data formats we use at:
https://github.com/commoncrawl/cc-warc-examples/
Did the DA offer just one plea deal or was a series of offers made over the time Jelani was in jail? This seems to me like the DA was using pre-trial detention as a pressure tactic.
Reverse Engineering Plex: Casting High Bitrate Video to Chromecast
You took MDMA while on an SSRI? You really should research a drug's mechanism of action and how multiple drugs may interact before taking them together.

Im not a medical professional, I just want to give you a quick overview so you don't repeat that mistake. Do your own research.

- An SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor) blocks your brain's re-uptake of serotonin and effectively increases your brain's levels of serotonin.[1]

- MDMA acts as a presynaptic releasing agent of serotonin. Increasing the amount of serotonin in the synaptic cleft (space between neurons).[2]

- That means the two of these drugs combined can cause a huge spike in serotonin and potentially lead to serotonin syndrome (toxicity).

Be safe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA
> But with the advent of 8-16+ GB of ram in consumer computers can we really say 2-3GB for windows rendering is heavy?

This attitude is why we have phones with 1G of memory and 1Ghz+ CPU's lagging when just trying to read email.

Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff.

For example if we eat 2-3GB of memory on a system with 8GB of memory, thats over 25% of the usage. Then some applications that are actually used. (Let me use my own process mem counts here...) 1.3Gb for Firefox, 0.6Gb for Android emulator, 0.5Gb for Visual studio....

And there would have gone over half of the 8GB of ram!

I am sure my current memory usage would be half of what its now if developers would actually give some shit about memory usage... Not just allocate too much memory because "there is so much memory it doesn't matter"
Oops, that's a bug with how we're using Angular. Thanks for pointing it out!
My sister produced my all-time favorite - "I flew the bat-plane" by The Eagles.
Show HN: “test-builder”: A Loading Test builder based on the Load Impact SDK
Mozilla is also experimenting with Boot2Servo, a possible future for Boot2Gecko (Firefox OS):

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Workweek-boot-2-servo
I'd love to see Carlsen play a modern game like Hearthstone or Magic. Even just to hear his thoughts on them.
The original plan was to support it at least until 2015. Then they (sort of) extended it. So even according to the original plan, this release is not surprising. If we get another release one year from now, that will be interesting news. Personally, I bet it will happen. Look how long 2.6 lasted. Almost exacly 5 years: 2.6.0 came out October 2008, while 2.6.9 came out 5 years later in October 2013.
The brevity and bluntness in his responses is pretty amusing. I'm surprised he so candidly rates his own abilities and the abilities of his peers - I feel like many people would dodge those questions in public interviews.
Congratulations on awesome tech. Can you confirm the browser still work like this or did they change it to a non-HTML version in recent revisions?
Ha, I'll have to try that. Does it use our icon even if you just navigate to HN directly?
Was digging around and found some good info, looks like tomr already answered the Nitrogen part of the question, which is the same info I found.

As far as methane, it seems to all mostly be biogenic[1].

[1] - http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/methane-on-earth/
That's a different criticism than that their medical advice is unsound.
Similarly, lyrics in a language you don't know. Someone did this to the entire Duck Tales theme song in Finish: http://youtu.be/Xm8WmiKj5go

"your school's stupid, your school's bwaha"
Actually I think what you're referencing is still Dunning-Kruger: "Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others." (from wiki)
Why is it a good thing that it's not an external simulation?
Uber Under Fire
California's non-compete ban (see jhallenworld's post on the issue) is huge. California also bans "we own your side projects" clauses, which is major. Even if, on technicalities, the states may not be very different, the perception is strong enough to scare people into California, a state that otherwise wouldn't have more than weather and inertia.

One of my posts is already linked here, by mwhite, and my perception hasn't changed. I don't see progressivism in Boston companies. I see smart people but old thinking. Then again, the old thinking (reinvented using fratty Young Republican types who get funded) is invading the Valley.

I'm glad to see that Boston is taking on Real Technology. That's great. Honestly, if something can be run by Lucas Duplan or Evan Spiegel, it probably shouldn't be done and it certainly shouldn't be funded at the expense of something legitimate. All that said, one of my gripes with Real Technology (and with Boston) is that there tends to be a militant PhD Bigotry in it. I get that advanced degrees are more common than pigeons out there, but it's a bit irksome to be treated like a junior just because one doesn't have an doctoral degree.

I mean, look, I'm not without cognitive ability. If I weren't a public figure, I could lie and say I was a Stanford PhD in CS and would easily pull it off. Almost everyone would believe me (except for Stanford CS graduates, who could call me out on campus specifics or professors). I have zero interest in lying about my background or history; my point is that I'm smart enough that I could get away with it and hold up. So the lack of a credential shouldn't matter, yet I've had more than one Boston company (when interviewing with them, in the past) tell me that I wasn't a real data scientist or a real quant because I didn't have a PhD. Never mind that I am so much smarter than the person who set these little rules in place that I could claim that I invented the letter "Q" and they'd believe me.

Real Technology can afford PhD Bigotry now because there isn't much of it and (unlike the consumer web space, which is mostly stupid and product-driven but takes more chances on people) it can be picky, so long as it doesn't try to expand. But these academics and ex-academics need to realize that if they want to be relevant again instead of falling into another AI Winter, they've got to drop the pedigree bigotry.

Ok, that last rant has more to do with technology in general than with Boston. I guess I'm here to say that I'm very glad to see Boston's high valuation applied to substance getting it some press. I want Boston's tech scene to succeed. Anything that can compete with the Valley deserves unwavering support. In order to do so, however, it has got to enter the 21st century.
I mean, it would have to be its own research project haha. There's no way I could begin to get a simulation like that going in a weekend.
Google is. Google will make a whole lot if they can make an AQC work for optimization.
Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-ZnPE3G_YY ? Matches the lip reading too.
Is SMS the New Channel for Customer Support?
Personally, I'd prefer SVG over fonts unless they change how using font icons is done in HTML and CSS.
I would guess that he'd feel like there is too much chance. The issue with a game like Magic is that you can play perfectly and still lose. And I say this as someone who loves the game.

EDIT: I read further and it seems like he enjoys poker. So I guess it's possible that he'd enjoy MTG.
Leaked: The Nightmare Email Drama Behind Sony's Steve Jobs Disaster
Why the are not going to python3 ?
> from time to time check in on the state of desktop/app development and see if they've finally figured out html is better for interfaces than any interface builder

Is this for real? I can name numerous advantages of Web Apps have over desktop/native Apps, "Building better interfaces" is not one of them.

Trying to build a UI with CSS and DOM manipulation (not to mention <div> hacks, Bootstrap, Dojo/JQueryUI, different rendering engines, etc) is an exercise in pain compared to basically _any_ modern UI toolkit. (From XAML to Qt, Android, hell even GTK.)

edit: minor correction, I meant to say " build a UI" not "build a native UI"
For basic load-testing Httperf and Apache Benchmark are nice. If you want more complicated stuff (really simulating a user taking actions on your site) I'd recommend leveraging Selenium or even plain PhantomJS (setup a separate server to spawn those processes and hit your main site).

And yes, it will stress whatever site you're testing. In most cases, you'll want to setup another site (make it an exact replica of your main site) and direct your load tests to hit that alternate site instead.
Design will always be a blend of form and function. With an optimal goal of creating a product that is aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.

I would error on the side of making something more useable than beautiful. If something is ugly, but still usable, it has value. If something looks good and is not usable, it doesn't have much value. Unless it's Art or something that is only meant to be looked upon.
Agree with a lot of what is being said here. Have seen vicious anonymous reviews in CS - as we all have - both due to someone misunderstanding the work but also due to people from "a different camp" simply disliking a given approach. This must be common in other fields as well. Someone said on this thread that anonymity is not a guarantee of quality - completely agree. The move towards "open reviewing" for conferences in CS is very encouraging, however we will see how far it gets.
Timeline of historic inventions (1964 – Nutella)
Ancient doodle hints that Homo erectus was smarter than we thought
> the downsides of the material would be

Well, considering how energy-dense it is... As a construction material, wouldn't it be more than a tad dangerous if it ever caught on fire?
Paul left after a couple of months and hasn't been involved with the project for about a year and a half. None of the design or code is based on the original open source effort which he started. We're not trying to hide history, he just doesn't want people thinking he's associated with it anymore.
Possibly, yes. Though I would not recommend implementing it as is... XUL was never versioned as far back as when I used to work with it, which is about 5 years ago. It's messy. Not easy to use. Although still easier than the new flexbox standard that evolved from it.

Anyway I'd hope for something better than XUL/XBL. The potential was always there. Mozilla the platform! —

I massage HTML and CSS professionally since 1996, and I must say I'd prefer something like "XUL2" over my beloved web standards any day. I wouldn't mind if "XUL2" was in actuality created with web components. Though seriously, CSS and DOM (HTML/XML) were created to make you suffer. That's their true purpose.

There is no easy way out of this. And rewriting the web won't work either.
There are numerous people using python for science who just won't acknowledge python3 exists, and if they stop updating python2, oh boy. Not good.
> The Chinese Remainder Theorem works in a similar fashion to Lagrange Interpolation

They're not only similar---they're the same thing. Notice that f(a), for some polynomial f(x), is equivalent to f mod (x - a). Then Lagrange interpolation can be seen as recovering f from [f mod (x - a_0), f mod (x - a_1), ...], using the same mechanism---over a different ring---as the CRT. In fact, the CRT works over any ring that has unique factorization and well-behaved divisibility (i.e., greatest common divisors work as in the integers).
Do any DAs in any case seem to care at all about what they're doing to the future of anyone in the name of being "tough on crime?" Regardless of the situation.

It seem that a fair number of them consider their jobs as simply to prosecute the person in front of them, not get to any kind of truth or justice.
> Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you.

You can write any old thing you like and get someone to sign it.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's enforceable.

Writing unenforceable clauses into fine print -- that you know are unenforceable -- is a legal bluff older than keeping records on clay tablets.
No more secret trade agreements. Release the text
Lowering the Cost of Crime and Punishment: An Economist's Vision
What the scientific peer review needs is not anonymity, but accountability. Authors put their reputation on the line. Let reviewers put their reputation on the line too. Good reviews and good reviewers need to be appreciated, not anonymized.

Let valued scientific reviewers gain reputation in a similar way to how contributors to HN, SE and other sites do.

There could even be a viable business model in this. Publishers, be creative!
I suspect you're right. But for people who can't dedicate all their time to a game, the randomness in some games (like poker and MTG) can level the playing field. It allows a lesser player to win from time to time, but good players will win more often.

To me, this is more "fun". With chess, it's just brutal. Unless both players are evenly matched, it's a steamrolling. No fun for either player. At the top tiers though, I can see it being very interesting. But then again, I find watching top players play Hearthstone to also be very interesting. Especially when you consider the meta-strategizing of picking certain cards for their decks.
What we need here is a more nuanced approach. Anonymity can solve some problems in research, but it will make other worse.

When people are anonymous, they ARE more likely to be truthful in their criticism. They have less incentive to hold back, and it's just human nature to tone down critical feedback when you're critiquing the work of someone with is either influential or an acquaintance. No one likes to make enemies.

On the other hand, anonymity can pretty clearly bring out some of the worst in us. Some people feel little obligation to be fair or honest when their reputation isn't on the line, and so you see people trying to knock down rivals, people they don't like, or random strangers just for the "thrill of the troll."

Imagine if every time you applied for a job your potential employer had access to anonymous feedback on your past work. Some of it might be fair and honest (whether positive or negative), but some of it might be lies from an anonymous coworker with a grudge. Maybe someone is trying to take you down a rung because you got the promotion over them. You could be penalized for any petty reason, and it would stick with you.

Anonymous feedback communicated publicly is much the same. It holds the reviewer and the object of review on unequal footing. Anonymous feedback would be great for an author or even an editor, but it's just not fair to allow the pettiest of people to attack the works of others while wearing a mask. I'd like a system that helps researchers and others invested in the work to solicit anonymous feedback to make the work better. Public-facing commentary, on the other hand, should be tied to an identity.