skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Intelligent life tends towards simulation, rather than expansion.

Someone didn't take the Internet away from them when they were young, so they grew addicted to it. Bunch of navel-gazing nerds.

> Intelligent life is actually very dumb on a macro scale, and falls prey to Malthusian collapse, either by falling into a significant energy gap or by destroying their biosphere.

Looking at the Homo "Sapiens" species with a critical eye, I fear this is the most likely explanation.
Also, I don't know how it's done in the U.S., but here (Uruguay), state agencies prioritize companies that have done work for the state in the past, so the only way to enter the "system" is to underbid on a low-budget project and hope to win, then do well and have a good reference under your belt (or pay a bribe, but let's not get into that).

And RFP equivalents are a pain to write, it's usually a valuable skill to have people who have done it in the past.
There are regions of relative temperature stability, such as towards the poles.

I think the outlook for intelligent life in the solar system, other than us, is very bleak for them. If there are whales on Europa, Titan, or Enceladus then it would seem easier for us to damage their ecosystem than the other way around. Unless, of course, they've infiltrated our political systems and are steering us towards self destruction.
Hacker School Application, Part I
Hacker School Application, Part II
It's not. Take for example the pushbutton switch on the arduino uno - it has a very specific one-of-a-kind footprint. So if you don't have the mfg part number, there's no way to populate the PCB. You're literally going to have to re-layout the board and choose your own. And what if the debouncing of the new switch is different than the original and doesn't work with their firmware.

Providing the mfg for ALL the part numbers is critical in hardware design. In a lot of cases, where hardware is mission critical (like space or medial), if one single mfg part number changes or the source manufacuture changes, the entire system needs to be requalified/tested because of the larger ramifications.

If you start willy-nilly grabbing parts off the shelf that might work, you're going to eventually get burned.

My request is simple - if you're publishing an open source projet, please publish the offical BOM that the platform was validated under, and put the BOM in source control should a part become discontinued and need a replacement. This is standard for any hardware product.

Edit: The switch mfg part number is actually a real problem. See this person who tried to reverse engineer the part number. Notice the ??? in the mfg? Google doesn't return much with that part number. If you can find the actual mfg datasheet for that part number I'd love to know. I have no idea where to order that switch.

http://mburdis.com/BOM_Ardiuno_UNO_Rev3.html
teachers report just getting their class logged in to
an app takes 25% of class time on average

That sounds made-up to me. That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40% of their time logging kids in to an app?

Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.

How? Also how is faxing/emailing attendance sheets any less secure than routing their precious data through your servers?
As long as you cover LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter, I'm good. Then again, GitHub could be good too.

Good to hear about contact sharing/syncing. Ideally, I'd contacts added in either my gmail (personal) or my GAE (business) accounts to be available to both [1], and for contacts to be tagged as personal or business depending on where they were added.

[1] Right now, they are available to both on my phone (Android), but not on the web. This is a real pain. For historical reasons, the vast majority of my contacts are in my personal gmail account, but there are great many I use primarily in my GAE business account, and quite a few I use in both, depending on why I am conversing with someone (I keep personal and business emails as separate as I possibly can; just the way I like to do things).

That level of sharing/syncing is my killer feature.

Having said that, I am so used to using Contacts+ for messaging, making phone calls, writing short FB updates, etc., that I would miss those features if I switched to your app.
Thanks :). To plug myself, I quite like http://robertheaton.com/2014/01/06/how-to-win-at-dinner-part...
Some things I wish:

- I could write on paper and have that sent to a document on the computer as if it was typed out. Something like those digital pens do, but actually ocr the text.

- To learn Stenography (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g)
> booking confirmations, purchase receipts, etc

But these are _exactly_ the things I, the user, want encrypted. I would probably even stop doing business with vendors that did not encrypt their transactional communications with me.
Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck
I remember accounts of Westerners in Russia at the time. Supposdly the official exchange rates were rubbish and you could get 10 times as many rubles for your $ from most taxis.
I would agree if this was yet another Todo-List app.

But this is a product that targets Linux novices and asks them to upload all their data under a hand-wavy promise of protection.

There should be a tad more explanation on how privacy is ensured and how the actual protection works, no?
Yes, but in a way that makes the person saying it feel superior to others.
Honestly didn't expect this submission to go anywhere, and only had a minute before jumping on a call :-)
For one, post your code.

Also, if I can't get to it from the front page of your website (and it doesn't look like I can), it doesn't exist.
> Ad-blocking is a necessary form of protection from corporate stalking

To give a concrete example in support of your statement, here is what Dr.Dobb's does in the web page of the article on topic (and I did have click-to-play enable, might have been worst without it) for someone without a blocker:

cmp.112.2o7.net
a.adroll.com
d.adroll.com
ct1.addthis.com
m.addthis.com
s7.addthis.com
ib.adnxs.com
secure.adnxs.com
adserver.adtechus.com
imp2.bizographics.com
js.bizographics.com
www.bizographics.com
admin.brightcove.com
i.cmpnet.com
disqus.com
content.dl-rms.com
drdobbs.disqus.com
googleads.g.doubleclick.net
www.drdobbs.com
a.disquscdn.com
img.drdobbs.com
s2150.t.eloqua.com
s657486201.t.eloqua.com
img.en25.com
connect.facebook.net
s-static.ak.facebook.com
static.ak.facebook.com
fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net
www.google.ca
www.google.com
www.google-analytics.com
partner.googleadservices.com
www.googleadservices.com
ajax.googleapis.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
tpc.googlesyndication.com
www.googletagservices.com
ml314.com
platform.linkedin.com
www.linkedin.com
static.licdn.com
i.techweb.com
ins.techweb.com
ng.techweb.com
platform.twitter.com
cdn.syndication.twitter.com
twimgs.com
thewallstreetwiki.com
i.ubm-us.net
dev.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

Ads are just the visible tip of the data-mining iceberg.
/dev/random gets all the attention, it's high time for a /dev/null hardware implementation.
So early progress may be slow. Changing infrastructure paradigms takes time. We have to be patient. The number of customers who really need a DCOS today is more limited than it will be in five years. But this is where cloud computing is going.
What if both compilers are backdoored?

It's not like you have a large choice of good compilers for any given language/platform pair.
By what process that you have ever done does a chargeback take 2 seconds, or anything less than 60 seconds? At best it would be:
* Meticulously file your receipt for purchase.
* Log on to bank/credit card web site
* Find the correct process for a chargeback
* File the required form, uploading the receipt in the process.

This is at least 60 seconds. At best. And normally, much longer, especially if you add up the time you spend meticulously filing all receipts.

I don't think it is asking too much that a third party (like FedEx) engage in transaction assurance for Internet purchases. They can get a slice of the pie (they do anyway.)
The third and most likely option is looking up the poster's HN profile and checking out historical comments made by the poster.
Yes.

In Moscow we could use Dollars more or less at most places, but deeper into the country it was harder for the Russians to use dollars so the local economy was Ruble only.

If the Ruble continued to fall, and someday the exchange markets reopened, they could buy more Rubles with the dollars they exchanged with us. This is important because while the exchange rate continued to worsen, their income stayed relatively the same. If they made (pulling a number out of thin air) $10,000 a year, or R15m at the start of our trip, they were only making $2,800 a year at the end even though the number of Rubles they made stayed the same.

If the Ruble continued to fall, say to 8,000:$1 they'd end up making less than $1,900 a year. However, if they bought USD from us at 5500:1 it meant that if it fell, they could buy back 8,000 Rubles for each dollar later, keeping them closer to $2,800 exchangeable dollars.

If the Ruble reverted back to the original rate (1500:$1) then they'd lose their shirts because they just gave us their currency at less than 1/3 value.

Just as importantly, if they were making about $10,000/year, exchanging $400 or whatever with an American kid meant that half their monthly salary was locked up in nonexchangeable USD. The USD had value, but it was non-liquid at that moment.

IIR they weren't able to exchange the dollars until later that year and there were caps on the amount that could be exchanged at once. The next year we repeated the exchange program and I believe some of those dollars we exchanged with them were brought with them to use here.

A few years later, in 1998 the Ruble was reformed on a 1,000:1 basis.

Things were devaluing so fast that people still had Kopek coinage sitting in coin jars that were unspendable and stacks of low denomination currency (1 Ruble to 500 Rubles) that while spendable, were incredibly inconvenient.
I think this about sums up the quality and obvious bent of this article:
http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/57216937.jpg
I think there was a lot of "write for free until you get a job for a company that will pay for your work, like Dr Dobbs."
The eagle schematic doesn't not have all the mfg part numbers listed. Lots have to be reverse engineered - a good example is the pushbutton switch.

Edit: Also, if you read the first page of their schematic they pretty much say don't use this schematic as a legit source. So if it's open source, my question is where is the "real" source. Answer: they don't publish it. It's locked up internally in the company under a private repo.
That assumes that Apple fulfills the role of "someone you trust do A through C." Even if you trust Apple's intentions, they don't do a very good job of checking apps for actual damaging stuff (as opposed to irrelevant crap that offends their sensibilities), so it's not helpful.
Hi there and thank you for taking the time to look into JARVYS. I'd happily go through and answer your questions. Some of them are answered here[0]

> No word on encryption.

We encrypt data in motion, but not at rest (yet). Since this is a beta product we wanted to get it out there first with a free version that would bring the barrier down and allow us to learn as much from users as possible.

> No word on what is actually backed up, how to include or exclude files.

By default it backs up everything except /proc and /sys, which you can change here (with detailed instructions): /var/jarvys/etc/include

> No word on when anything is backed up and how (cronjob, daemon?).

It's a cronjob that checks in with our servers every hour and backs up once a day. The reason it's not a daemon is because daemons die, and we needed something as bulletproof as possible. Checking in every hour allows us to tell you when your server hasn't been checking in (which means you can proactively see if your cron daemon is broken or if something else went wrong before it affects your backups).

> No word on how running services and databases are backed up that may need special procedures for a consistent snapshot.

We include a special script that allows you to run things like mysqldump before the servers back up to JARVYS: /var/jarvys/etc/run-before-backup.sh

> No word on how to restore or access backups when the backed up host has failed.

That's also included in here[0] - that feature is still in testing and hasn't been released yet.

> All things considered I have a strong feeling you are not qualified to run a service like this. Your expertise seems to be in webdesign, not in Unix and servers.

Another backup concern you didn't mention is bit rot, which we're using ZFS to mitigate.

Thank you for your kind words regarding our website, our designer actually wrote a detailed blog post on how they came up with the logo[1]. We've been providing managed backup services (among other managed services) for our SSD Nodes[2] clients, which is for whom we originally built this service.

[0] https://my.jarvys.io/docs/home
[1] https://blog.jarvys.io/2014/11/04/the-jarvys-logo-design/
[2] https://www.ssdnodes.com
AMERICAN COFFINS FEMA CAMPS
AFAIR Adobe Viewer does give that option, generally I'm sure you're right.
That's quite a narrative.
This is a big shame. Freebase was by far the most consistent of the open data graphs.

With my cynic hat on I think they're being forced by larger strategy. The existing Freebase dumps are far too useful for a Google would be competitor, and I suspect the Knowledge Graph API will be somewhat more restrictive in what you're allowed to do with it.

The thing is the more you get into this stuff the more you envy Facebook's position where people give them structured data on a plate.
There's a respectable contingent of scientists that believe Martian microorganisms were already confirmed 38 years ago by the Viking Lander experiments:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120413-nasa-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_experi...

A future mission should definitely include a biologically-useful microscope, as suggested by USC neurobiologist Joseph Miller in the National Geograhic article linked above. Miller, also a former NASA space shuttle program director, is one of the proponents of the idea that the 1976 Viking results already demonstrated life.
For me at least, this would be completely unacceptable as a search replacement, as I frequently search old message bodies. ... However, based on the experience of desktop search, I think pure client side search would probably have reasonable initialization time and space overhead, and would certainly make searches faster, at least compared to my current Gmail experience.

Just install Mozilla Thunderbird and use IMAP. Client side search, all your devices sync via IMAP, no ads, and free software.
Defensive Programming Done Right, Part I
The two I'm familiar with are BitShares and NuBits. BitShares uses contracts-for-difference and price feeds to create stable "BitAssets", like BitUSD, BitCNY, and BitGold. NuBits is a central bank on a blockchain, and it uses its control of the monetary base and interest rates to peg its value to the dollar.

Disclaimer: I own some BitShares. I won't answer more questions here to keep things on topic, so email those to me.
(posting under new account because I don't think anyone can talk freely about their employer under a real name)

Stack ranking is not a well defined term. It can mean any of

1. The result of the review process is that people in a team are ranked, the top X% are rewarded and bottom Y% are punished.

2. Reviewers are asked to rank people they review (possibly not all in the same team) and this information is part of the input to the review process.

3. When making decisions, all the people in consideration (possibly not in the same team) are ranked.

Case 1. is a problem because we can't expect the law of large numbers to hold within a small team, and because it gives people bad incentives.

Case 2. is less of a problem for incentives because people being compared can be from different teams. This also provides comparisons across teams that let people be judged relative to the company rather than their teams, and so the law of large numbers does hold.

Case 3. is not really relevant to anything, since when deciding the outcomes for N people, you obviously want the best outcomes to go to the best people. Stack ranking is just an aide to turning subjective impressions into numbers. I've seen it used in essay grading, and also assigning final grades in classes (ranks are based on individual test scores and not altered, then cutoffs for letter grades are determined).
Or intelligent life doesn't leave the sort of markers we have been looking for up to now. I don't buy the sim theory at all and think it's a dreadful philosophical cop-out.
The GPU on the other hand (which is part of the chip) is much more documented on the Raspberry Pi than the Beagle Bone.
Thanks y'all for taking a look at our latest product release - the Scarf. We are excited to share this ultra thin iPhone case with the community and are here to answer any questions. Every kind of feedback will be much appreciated.
The other issue is the absolutely bonkers number of attorney-hours racked up in reading all of those documents once they've been systematized.

That's where I see potential in this market. Ediscovery is a pain-point for law firm clients - especially large corporate clients who are constantly involved in complex litigation.
Document review has to happen in order to effectively litigate (gotta find the smoking gun!) but when a bill comes through with hundreds or thousands of attorney-hours devoted to reading your opponent's old emails, ouch. The client hasn't even seen a work product yet.
I usually say two weeks, but yes. Immediately after you've lost all your data, you don't really have anything worth backing up any more...
People have been complaining about it for ages. Firewalls for outgoing connections are ancient technology. Like a lot of things that people rely on, the functionality is gradually moving into the OS proper.

A lot of people get upset at PC programs that do things like query for updates without permission.
Oh God No Uncle Jeb Is In
Wrong. Your assertion is easy to debunk: if this was true, then, since they hold many bitcoins, why don't they make the price go up to increase the value of their assets?

I think the point the parent was getting at is that it doesn't take much buying/selling to really move Bitcoin's value.

Why wouldn't they make the price go up? They could, but what good would it do? You need to sell Bitcoins to realize a return and selling will push the price down.
Data accuracy is important but sometimes the bigger problems to solve are discovery, advanced filtering, and readability. I've played around with Mattermark a little bit and I think it does a fantastic job in solving the later problems.

From a hacker's perspective you can do curl/wget, awk, etc to aggregate and filter data from various sources yourself. But to make the same tooling available to a wider audience is what gets you to the market. Dropbox is a solid example, for instance, that made rsync super simple to use for anyone.
Close, but it was before the 98 crash and reform. I was there in 1995.

Here's some information I found on the time period http://www.photius.com/countries/russia/economy/russia_econo...
My recollection is the plan was to use the kickstarted funds to put together a tech demo, then raise funding to turn that into a game. That second part never happened for a few reasons; mainly, it is not as easy for a semi-famous author to raise money as people think.

Of course that's on Stephenson, and he acknowledges it. He didn't understand the investment market. It probably wasn't a great plan in retrospect. But this seems like an odd place to complain when a risky investment doesn't pay off like you'd like.
The tarsnap-keymgmt utility allows you to create a key file which can be used to create backups but can't read or delete them. I think this satisfies the concern you mention at the end?
Goodbye Mode X!
Alexa is saying that it is the ~40,000 most popular site, not 40K visits per day.
Thank you, Beagle!

And a big thank you to TI, for this project. I hope that if TI views their involvement in BeagleX as successful, they can extend what went right with this project into other product lines (open design files, reasonable pricing, accessible documentation, accessible IDEs/compilers, transparency with design decisions, and a true sense of community). My company has begun transitioning to Nordic for RF and it feels like dealing with a startup (Nordic) vs. an incumbent (TI).

The ability to run android on BBB is a wonderful advantage of the BBB vs RasPi. The Beaglebone was my introduction to exploring embedded android and it was perfect for it. The community is smaller than the RasPi but it is very strong. I hope there are more tools supporting the BBB as a point of entry into android.
The Krunch Launches Dog Treat Subscription Service
The concept of WOM isn't completely pointless for non von Neumann architectures, and could even be useful for von Neumann-esque SPMD or MPMD systolic array (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array) architectures that have strict execution models forced in the core to core wiring. While not completely free form, you would still have instructions and data being stored in the same space, it would be only readable by the individual PU is corresponds to. That PU would not write-back to that same memory, and instead could only write to an adjacent PU's memory, which then would only be readable (and not writable) by that next PU in the line.

I've been wanting to implement such an architecture on an FPGA for a while now... may do so over this winter break.
from the inventor of scrypt

It's more the other way around - I created scrypt because I wanted it for Tarsnap. :-)
Mesosphere stole the enterprise spotlight last week with the reveal of a commercial offering that strings together various components from the open-source ecosystem into a distributed data center operating system.
Ask HN: What are the most beautifully written tutorials for beginners?
5 years ago I spun up my first EC2 instance after reading the tutorial called "EC2 for Poets". I have never forgotten how well it was written for an absolute beginner. What are the most beautifully written tutorials for absolute beginners across a variety of technical subjects (besides codeacademy - which is amazing)?
I'm one of those - after almost three years with MongoDB, I left it behind when I formed a new start-up using PostgreSQL.

I have zero DB issues now, and all the MongoDB experience really worked for my employees as they now work full-time on it at a dedicated MongoDB provider, so win-win.
Companies like PayPal tend to see dispute mediation as a cost of business rather than their core competency. Innovation in this space is rare.

PayPal started as a security company, back when they were above the bike shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Their original business was selling crypto tokens. They wanted to store money on PDAs.

Then they discovered that business model was going nowhere, and went to a more centralized system for sending money. The big problem remained security. Most of the effort goes into preventing theft and fraud, not merely sending the money.
I have wired money, mostly one-offs. Sure, if it is just you wiring money to yourself it can be merely days. When you add in additional steps required to unlock funds and have the recipient transmit acknowledgement, it can take weeks to set up, fund, and use an escrow agreement. It still costs a lot of money, especially for international wires.

And fees. $40 on a $1000 wire is %4. $1000 is a small amount of money to wire. If you're moving around $millions then sure, you don't care. I don't move around $millions.

Here we are talking about turn around times in under an hour, and fees under %1, even for small transactions.