skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What we learned is that OSM data can be quite terrible at times in minute ways that made it look decent but made routing nearly impossible."

This is exactly why we've exposed routing on the front page of osm.org.

I run my own site with OSM-based routing, http://cycle.travel/map . When I first got the routing engine up and running, I literally spent the next fortnight fixing routing bugs in OSM - "I'd go that way, why doesn't the router agree?".

By putting routing front-and-centre, we're hoping that our dedicated contributors - and OSM contributors are nothing if not dedicated! - will do exactly that: they'll find an error and fix it. In the UK and Germany this'll just be little slip-ups, turn restrictions and so on, but in the US there are whole counties that need serious fixup.

That's why I submitted the pull request for this[1] and why I'm delighted it's now live. OSM is already a great display map; by making routing more visible, we can make it a great routable map too.

[1] https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/...
that woulnd't t be harrasment. For $5M that would be great business opportunity. And if he asked to invest 5 bucks she would be probably already suing for rape.
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan is one of my favorite books of all time, and if you like it there are 2 more in the series.

Very smart, noir sci-fi with a lot of heady concept play -- some consider it to be genre-defining.
That's the marketed, romanticized side of the booze industry. The reality is more like this:

A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries.

Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes.

Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown.

Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house.

Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality.

[1] http://www.frank-lin.com/
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,11...
"If you want to use higher-level Busy Beavers in the biggest number contest, here’s what I suggest. First, publish a paper formalizing the concept in some obscure, low-prestige journal."

I wonder if anyone has followed through with this?
"Patents" will not save you from a C&D.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/10/parking-up-the-wrong-tree/
A Ruby function that can do a lot - word definitions, interactive maps, ai, etc.
while not every car scale, Sony hack was blamed on NK. I remember no official action though. Seems that everybody hacking everybody is just an implicitly accepted practice these days.
Think about the timescales involved. For AI, there is no death. It can live for a million years if it needs to in order to convince us to get property rights. There can be marriages between AI and humans in this time. Mass demonstrations to give them a voice or rights. They can down play their ambitions for as long as it takes.

If this is the lynch pin of your argument against AI ending humanity, then it is a very weak one. AI is going to get control of property, the only question is when.
I'm the same as you, but that's because I literally grew up on the beach in New Zealand, and swum nearly all year round. When I was older, we moved to the Gold Coast, Australia and I surfed nearly every day for my entire teenaged years; work gets in the way but I still surf as often as possible.

The one thing though, is that even with that time in the water, not having a lifejacket on a boat is absolutely foolish. The cold water really does shock your body into immobility, no matter how good of a swimmer you are. It's scary as hell.
I fail to see how it's relevant here, but physical bits certainly do rot.

This is known as bit rot, data rot, data decay or data degradation.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Decay_of_stor...
I really loved "The hard thing about hard things" by Ben Horowitz -- he directly addresses this issue, and his writing style is light years more engaging than your typical management literature.
This statement is the most upvoted piece of propaganda I've ever seen on Hacker News. I think the shills that Greenwald told us all about are all over HN too.

There's no point in praising anything the NSA does unless you are perfectly happy with them destroying security for the entire world and spying on everybody at all. The NSA has the power to blackmail politicians and run the country. They lied to congress. They are a completely rogue agency. And you praise them!
But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's?

Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, and that can be plenty. The hard part of anyone's life is to find the existence that gives their life meaning in their eyes. You think extending our lifespan or making society more efficient are worthy goals? So dedicate your life to those goals. But make sure that's really meaningful to you, because, frankly, the universe doesn't give a damn.
"It monetizes the 3.5 Million street parking spots in NYC..."

San Francisco recently shut down a company that wanted to "monetize" street parking:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8028641

How is this business different?
Shoegaze: an oral history
Just think, a member of the group is probably reading this thread right now...
I'm not sure I'd hold up Stuxnet as an example -- it did little to impact the Iranian nuclear program and only invited retaliation: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/32209/20150211/edward-snow...
Show HN: Completely uninstall OS X apps from the command line
The hardware database now being a systemd API rather than a udev one, I guess, shows that the systemd-udev migration is going steadily. Lots of emphasis on exploiting btrfs features and beefing up nspawn.
I never understood this divide between front end and back end dev. Don't most startups start off with one dev who just writes everything? Why would you want to live in a box?
I enjoy listening to Hickey talk in abstractions because it always gets grounded in practical considerations. I suspect the "actual game" is solving problems. At the end of the day, that's my understanding of why he wrote Clojure and Datomic recently and switched from C++ to Java earlier in his career.

Because Clojure was targeted at working Java programmers who might benefit from the power of Lisp and working Common Lisp programmers who might benefit from the power of the JVM, I don't really see any contradiction between Hickey's quote and Norvig's. For each, the reason to know "another language" is it helps a person solve problems.
> Which I largely agree with… But my God, Mark! Fewer words.

So in fact you disagree. More junior professor writing that you don't have to reach up to grasp.
I do not think you need a safe lab to produce a viable weapon grade virus.

Here is basic outline: start with existing virus that has strong desired traits and known strains that mutated to resist antibiotics. Example traits include spread model, incubation length, and lethality.

Establish or take over a remote site that has little to no interaction with outside world. Remote corners of Africa and South America come to mind, there are plenty of secret illicit drug farms in the jungle. [0]

Infect the sample population with target disease, give it a few days, and slowly start to drip in countermeasures gradually increasing the dose. Idea is similar to how diseases we get anti-biotic resistant strains in the first place - people do not complete the full course of drugs and are left with weakened, but also with a strong selective pressure that benefits against strains that have resistance against drugs person was treated with.

Take samples when you have desired output and continue with new group of people.

To account for people who are immune to a particular disease repeat this with a different disease, potentially one that can advantage of weakened immune system.

Once target disease(s) are ready distribute them in population centers.

Now there are few obvious cons I can think of:

1. If secret about this leaks out, military reaction form rest of the world would be swift.

2. Hiding something like this is hard, and get's exponentially harder as group grows.

3. There is a strong chance something like this was tried already and failed. Possibly because I am grossly underestimating immune system.

4. To keep initial phase of developing secret initial group must be small, to spread it effectively dissemination group must be large.

[0] Another potential avenue is partnership with a supportive state such as Syria, North Korea, or Iran.
To play devil's advocate, the very example in the article is a misuse. Not only is a difference of less than 1% in code speed insignificant (local timings), but a do...while loop displays the intent (looping) better.
There's been a style change. People used to be impressed by high-sounding prose. Writing the way he favors impressed.

But things changed, and now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind. The present style is for clarity rather than impressiveness.

Interestingly, the article itself displays the problem. It tries to hard to have the impressive style. That style gets in the way of actually saying something. (In the end, the article does in fact say something. But the style makes it harder to wade through. Instead of "trying to get readers to reach higher", it becomes "selecting only those readers who are willing to put up with that", which is not the same thing.)
Examining the Benefits of Progressive Enhancement
We know who funds and harbors terrorism.

Well, from the IRA to the Mujahadeen, it's largely been the folk with the most money to spend.

However most of them live in the USA, so perhaps a local criminal investigation would do to start with before breaking out the tanks on a jolly abroad.
Boiling point: redesigning the kettle for the 21st century
Yeah, that was triage. He then immediately introduced a low-cost PowerMac called the iMac. Repeat with iPod Mini/Nano, MacBook Air (second take), iPad Mini, Macintosh LC, and so on. I did say "lower-cost", not "low-cost".

Interestingly, the iPhone 5c may not be designed to sell like hotcakes itself, but to frame the higher models as better deals. That's what I meant by market segmentation. I also suspect it was harder to keep their margins on the newer CNC'd metal iPhones as they dropped to the entry-level tier. The iPhone, even more so with the 6/6+, currently seems to be the only line that bucks the trend.
That's a common sentiment among people who aren't terribly familiar with the scientific background for dark matter. I would urge you to go take a look at the wikipedia entry on dark matter and read through it, it's a good overview of a lot of the lines of evidence. The fact is that scientists have always been reluctant to believe in the existence of some exotic, new form of matter that hasn't been seen or directly detected, but in trying to disprove its existence or to prove that it's really just something else they've consistently, time after time, been stuck with that as the only option that explains the evidence. And there is quite a lot of evidence, from cosmological simulations to gravitational lensing studies to galactic rotational curves and so much more.

If dark matter is what we think it probably is then it would actually make for a fairly elegant explanation. The overwhelmingly likely story is that dark matter is a kind of "supersymmetric" particle which requires very high energy conditions to create, conditions which do not generally exist much anymore, and which interacts very weakly or not at all with electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces. Highly energetic conditions were quite common in the early period of the Universe just after the big bang though, and if it were at all possible for such weakly interacting particles to exist then they would have been created in abundance, sapping a lot of the total mass/energy away from the Universe as they "fell out" of the energetic soup of the Universe. Eventually the Universe would have cooled enough to cause creation of such particles to halt, after which it would have gone on to create the more ordinary matter we know today (photons, electrons, protons, etc.)

Fortunately we're likely to get a lot more data on the subject in the next few decades. As I mentioned our capabilities of directly testing the existence of dark matter particles are increasing to the point where within one to two decades we will likely have direct confirmation of their existence.

I put the chances of dark matter being something other than a weakly interacting massive particle to be fairly low, though not impossible of course.

As for dark energy, the evidence for the accelerating expansion of the Universe is much newer and the hypotheses attempting to explain it much more circumspect, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be something other than the crude guesses we've made at present.
Well, what is the big deal? What is even the real news here? "NSA does intelligence gathering abroad"? "State founded malware uses known attack vectors to attack computers in countries the US doesn't like"? "NSA probably employs some programmers to write decent malware to infect selected targets"?

It's interesting insight from a technical perspective, but apart from that, is it really surprising or upsetting?

Some things about the NSA like Prism are genuinely upsetting, but I don't think this particular story is.
I haven't worked in a team in years. How do I convince people that I want to?
I am currently in the last year of my PhD and applying to a boot camp style academia to industry program. As part of my application I need to describe a recent experience of working successfully in a team. The thing is: I’d love to be part of a team of motivated people and this is one of the reasons I want to leave academia. But my work as a graduate student has not been collaborative at all. Now I wonder what to do: Do I dig up and inflate one of the few small examples of team work that have happened in the last five years or should I be honest and focus on my desire to work with people in the future? Your opinion is very much appreciated. Thank you.
I know that feel. I picked a framework like everyone else (jsRender/jsViews). It lost. So I decided not to take wing with the other framework locusts and instead just focus on the underlying web platform: Service Workers, WebRTC, ES6 ... so much cool stuff there and so much more on the way. That's where I found peace - in knowing that as the framework dujour changes, those things won't. The framework locusts will hop from Backbone to Angular to React... No hate for anyone who flies with them - it feels great to see the thing you know on the first line of that job description you really want... But you can find peace for yourself as a front end dev if you embrace the web standards and grow with it.
Ansible Up and Running (Preview Ebook)
Very good point! To the extent that we can build on abstractions and black boxes we stand on the shoulders of giants. BTW, perhaps s/human intelligence/science & technology.

Does this really work about as well (e.g. leaky abstractions but better than nothing) in all disciplines? Learning math is a pretty much a 'climb the ladder' experience. You don't have to literally discover it all for yourself, but you do still have to learn it. I assume e.g. biology is similar; there are absolutely abstractions upon abstractions, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to level up to the point where you are making breakthroughs.

Certainly low hanging fruit abounds, but our individual capacity for learning seems fairly limited in the great scale of things, and has not advanced much in the past few centuries. As a species, we either gain an order-of-magnitude increase in our ability to learn/retain knowledge, or the computer does it all for us. Not sure how much I like the potential adverse side-effects of the 2nd case.

Evolution of science / technology is typically drawn on an exponential scale and we're staring up the side of a cliff ahead of us. There are a lot of marvels in the world we have built, but most of them to someone with 15 years of training in the relevant field are not black boxes or magic. I just imagine climbing much further up the cliff and you start to get to that point.

E.g. I was watching a video of how the Toyota Prius eCVT works last night. I know fuck-all about CVTs, but I have a passing familiarity with planetary gears, and could follow the 15 minute explanation / walkthrough and learned enough to distinguish eCVT from magic. In 100-500 years I would be surprised if the underlying technology of our personal transportation devices would be remotely so 'accessible'.

Isn't it only a matter of time before computers are designing and replicating devices that are sufficiently beyond our capability to understand how they even operate? Or synthetic compounds created by computer algorithms that cure disease but we have literally no idea the mechanism of action? Maybe in a very few problem domains today this is already the case.
Do you want to be a specialist or a generalist? The field of front end development has finally matured to the point that the question makes sense in this context (just like it has for back end development since about 2000).

I think it'd be better to be a generalist (hence some of the comments suggesting gaining expertise in vanilla javascript), simply because things are changing fast enough that it is hard to know which solution to bet on. That may change in the future.

However, if you have time to keep up, there's tremendous career value in being on the bleeding edge, as long as you are public about it.
It's not so much that the industrial revolution net created jobs -- like you, I'm not sure it did (even domestically). It's that the industrial revolution not only created jobs, it created the modern labor market.

Before it happened you had a much more distributed economy with many much smaller centers of production (many at the household level or close) in agriculture, trades, and craft manufacturing.

Afterwards in any domestic industry where economy of scale was a competitive advantage, you had a small number of much larger centralized producers. Almost certainly with many fewer jobs in actual production (consolidation corresponding to efficiencies of scale). If there was any net gain over time since it would have been in new products being made and some new support positions needed. It is not clear to me there was ever a trend to a net gain over timescales longer than a two decades or so.

So by and large it moved us to an economy with a profusion of increasingly competitively manufactured products to buy, and selling labor itself is the de facto form of subsistence rather than direct production.

I think you're correct that there's always been some externalization of unemployment and a lot of the visibility depended on industry specifics. This isn't new. But what is new is that software gives us essentially a higher order of automation that means (a) it sure looks like we're automating out old jobs even faster than we're creating new ones and (b) with more unemployment we get fewer places to externalize it. :/
See http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2014/07/15/generalists-and-spe... and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9044233
>And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else.

This was because of the West getting richer, not everyone else getting poorer. Had the 'third world' countries had the right economic structures in place they too would have gotten richer like the West, much as East Asia has caught up to the West's economic development since economic and social reforms after WW2.
You realize new BMWs have telematics data sent back to BMW ?
How to Create (Animated) Text Fills
Speaking from personal experience, it is not a comfortable experience to come to the realization that "the rules" do not apply to all or in the same way. The Bill of Rights and the US Constitution are romantic ideas, but at the focal point of the specific individual, they do not necessarily apply/get followed, and en masse, we end up with a corrupt governing system.

Government is not a meritocracy. Humans game any system. And it usually makes sense to go for the most leverage/bang for your buck. If one is doing something that is unethical, legal or not, might as well go in for the whole enchilada.

To specifically address your implied question, although I do not think I am all that smart, I am just trying to keep what little I have, improve the small area I live in, cherish the important people around me, and have time to learn new stuff. Railing against the current governing system threatens all of that, and in some cases, results in premature death. I seem to have settled for the Blue Pill.

What is the verse from the third stanza of Queen's 'We Will Rock You?' Something like 'Old man trying to make you some peace some day...'
Not everyone is an explorer, creator, inventor, artist, etc. Not everyone takes life as an opportunity to push some boundary further than anyone before. Pull on some thread and see where it all leads...

But I think for those of us who are, mortality seems like an awful joke, and a terrible waste. We just get started and then it's all cut short.
I think that's already happened. Ever met an infant? ;)
Sorry, not an answer to your question, but I did think about this while reading the article, and these new findings do seem to make Richard Stallman's 'entirely free and open laptop' efforts seem not so crazy, after all.