skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is tons of carbon based gas (such as methane) trapped beneath the ice which will be released into the atmosphere. Gas which was trapped down there about 50 million years ago when a weed infestation erupted and by way of chemical reaction turned a mostly carbon-based atmosphere into a mostly oxygen-based one.

Implication on global warming? I'm going to up that one a little bit with Chemistry 101: what happens when C, H and O will react with each other on a truely massive scale. And I mean truely massive scale.

Here's a small hint: The human species will certainly become the next dinosaurs.

Or in the words of climate scientist Jason Box: "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd." (https://twitter.com/climate_ice/status/494146188514693120)
Death Valley Sailing Stones Caught in Action for First Time
Government procurement is an important part of how products are brought to market in our current system. That's not to say it's just or efficient at all. But it would be a mistake to view it as mere waste that ought to be excised without broader reform. Currently it fills the gap between the research and commercialization phases.
Grooveshark Gets a Makeover
Facebook Auto Poker
Yes, I do see macros as a possible alternative to generics, but not sure if it would ever happen.
>They are not the inventors, and they don't make anything.

This is highly misleading if not down-right ignorant. Academic research is and has been absolutely necessary for most of the technologies we use today - patent's might not be the best way of financing said research, but we should be clear on the first part; before we roll the barrel on bad administrations and wasteful spending at universities. The toxic response to universities in general here on HN is rather astounding.
I think this is a more legitimate concern than the fear of the "Matrix outcome" that some people seem to have.

But, what you're describing is the process of people being replaced by technology. Generally speaking, this will probably not be a problem for a free-market economy, although it will certainly result in some unemployment.

The key point is that replacing humans with machines does not only cause unemployment, but it also reduces cost of production, which stimulates capital investment and/or reduces prices in the industry in question. In the general economy, this reduced cost and increased production should offset the lost "purchasing power" from the now-unemployed parties. The stimulus reduces costs in other industries which promotes job growth.

The end result is likely to be that the same number of people are employed, but they are employed in a more efficient manner of production. The cost of labor will decrease relative to the amount of production, however because this is tied to a decrease in cost of production, the real value of the labor (in terms of things you can buy) should not decrease.

Of course there will be some disenfranchised individuals, especially those who have particular skills that are replaced my mechanization. However, this is more likely to affect skilled laborers (like cooks) than those who are not paid for their skills (like janitors or cashiers).

In the end, I guess my point is that a free-market economy naturally balances these factors due to the relationship between supply and demand. However, it's possible that we will reach a point, especially if we truly do hit a Singularity, where we will have to reconsider the use of a scarcity-based economy at all, as production becomes completely divorced from any human action. Hopefully though, at that point the cost of goods will have naturally fallen to such a degree that the transition can be performed peacefully.
I wouldn't say that it's "bad", but, personally, I don't think it'd be in my best interest to use a pay-wall.

Most of the emails I get are from people who want my money (vendors/businesses). But I get the occasional email from someone who wants to give me their money (a potential client). I wouldn't want to do anything that would stop a potential client from sending me an email.

Two other concerns:

1. The practicality aspect. If I'm requiring bitcoin, then the sender needs to be bitcoin-literate, which not everybody is. If I'm requiring a credit card, then the charge is too small to justify the merchant charges.

2. The branding aspect. Do I really want to be known as someone who charges for emails? I'm not sure that message would align with very many people's personal brand/image. I'd be more likely to wait on the sidelines until charging-for-emails is commonplace, then I'd feel comfortable joining in. But until that time comes, you might have a first-mover-disadvantage. This creates a problematic catch-22 for any SaaS/PaaS offering this kind of thing. (Few people wanting to be an early-adopter).
But every lame startup acts like they're Google/Apple/Facebook. If you're a no-name startup, why should I spend 2-40 hours for the privilege of maybe meeting you?
The effect was only noticeable with sauna usage 4-7 times a week, more than wealth that implies free time, which implies lower stress (a risk factor) and, to a degree, wealth.
I make part of my living from Django work. I like Flask a lot more. It feels a lot less boilerplate-y, eg for routing, views etc. One of Flask's strongest points though is Jinja2 IMO and Django getting that is fantastic news.

I couldn't agree more on SQLAlchemy, though. Django's orm is nasty perf-wise and if you want to do anything low level, but API-wise it's really great. But SQLAlchemy felt like learning something even more complex than SQL itself... It's weird this isn't a solved problem.
I'm in the middle of this process, but from an even older version.

Since 1.7 introduced migrations, I recommend upgrading to 1.6 first and getting your South migrations caught up with third party apps. Some may have data and schema migrations e.g. django-photologue. Then jump to 1.7 or 1.8.

You'll likely have to update your requirements.txt with the latest packages, so you'll want to see if they're compatible with the version you're upgrading to.

I recommend keeping it up-to-date with every release if possible. Much easier to make incremental updates than spend months on upgrading 4 major versions.

And read ALL the release notes.
Ask HN: Dealing with quick exploding internship offers
Hi HN,

I am in a situation where I am in the process of interviewing for quite a few companies (I had 8 interviews in the past week) after our university's career fair. One company has decided to extend me an offer letter for an internship and said they need an answer in 3 days after I officially receive the offer.

They are not my number one choice, but I have not received an offer from any other companies yet (although I am expecting at least a couple more).

Are these types of extremely quick exploding offers really that common? My internship company last year gave me from Friday to a Monday to accept an offer and even then, I had to pressure the HR recruiter to give me the weekend...

How do I deal with this situation in a way that can get more more time, but not annoy/tip off the company that gave me an offer so I can explore other opportunities? I am mostly fearful of turning down an offer because I need more time, then getting stuck with a lower choice. I have contacted one of my top choices that I interviewed with early this week about possibly expediting the process.

Any other suggestions? Similar experiences?

Thanks!
Mobile development is tricky, you have to support the most common devices and browsers that are out there. That means Safari on iOS, and Chrome and the bundled browser on android. Since a large percentage of users will not seek out an alternate browser we have to support the bundled browser. In my experience, we've been limited by Android as a platform than we have by iOS.

First iOS devices tend to upgrade their software more often, and are more likely to be running a recent version of the web browser.

Second support for features may exist on Android, but we have been unable to use those features because they did not perform in an acceptable manner for what we were attempting to accomplish. We've had a lot of issues with things like 3D/2D CSS transforms. In fact we've had to sniff out Android user agents and provide a substandard experience for certain features due to the abysmal performance.

Apple may be moving slower than the cutting edge on Android, but the cutting edge is so far removed from the reality of what we have to support and work with that it's basically irrelevant.
> we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates?

What makes you say we can't? Isn't that exactly what this is?
Migrating Virtual Machines to the AWS Cloud
Just signed up for keybase and in the same position. Don't know anyone on the service to actually use it with.

Interested in testing it out with me?
I believe the parent's point may have been that it is an utter waste to keep areas steps away from major mass transit hubs zoned for low density commercial use.
Docker Compose (aka fig) Released
Usually there is no funds transfer between university research and undergraduate education. Whatever issues you have with the value of undergraduate education doesn't really have any bearing on their function as research institutions.
Thanks; for the first question, I suppose I should have read more carefully.

The second question, however, still isn't adequately answered; "we should be thinking about interactions" and "we should use modern things" are two of the most vague answers possible.
Do you just desire UI to not be animated at all?

In general, yes.

Here are some examples: MS Word (2013? I honestly have no idea what version I have installed what with the new UI) does a horizontal page-turn animation when viewing documents. It literally makes me nauseous, and I don't see any way to turn it off without entering document edit mode. Android's Camera app now starts up, shows the control buttons (video, camera), then animates them off the screen. They're not shown long enough for you to press one unless you're gunning for it, and you can't pull them back on screen until the animation finishes. Lollipop in general has a bunch of animations which exist solely for the sake of animations. If I pull a menu out, I want to immediately start using it, not wait for the slick, deceleration of the animation to finish before I can begin interacting.

It all reminds me of Vista's Aero interface. MS saw OS X, wanted translucency and drop-shadows, and implemented it in a completely useless manner that degraded usability.
The entire argument of the article is that because of Apple's mobile presence, they can effectively veto the standards process by doing nothing. They can act as an anchor. They don't even have to actively torpedo standards.

Device share is irrelevant considering the context is w3c/browswer standards. The relevance of money is to explain Apple's behavior, not condone it. The richest candidate does rather overwhelmingly tend to win, I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying I understand it. If you want to change such outcomes it takes a lot of work.

The relevance of NIH/RDF is they're fighting a culture that probably can't be fought. It'd be better to work on Google and possibly even Microsoft of all companies to get the momentum they need for this standard. All of the same arguments lobbed against Microsoft before and during the significant work of the w3c for either being an anchor or torpedo are the same here. It's simply how big companies behave, and I know a bunch of Apple fans who suggested Apple would never do this if they ever "won" and ended up on top, because they're somehow good/ethical and Microsoft was malicious. And now we see just how neutral the morality of big companies really is because Apple doesn't have to act maliciously to stop progress.

All Apple has to do is have a walled garden with the best API's only available to native apps, and then sit on their laurels with the web browser. It's different only in the details of what Microsoft did. I personally don't like this, but history repeating itself is hardly surprising.
I give interviews all the time, I can totally see these guys really not caring about them if they're forced to give them.
Looking at Wikipedia, it appears they spent several months before launching their site, after getting a technical cofounder. So 3 people and 6 months, at least. I find it very hard to believe they did all that with the idea their MVP was renting out their flat.
Glow: Break the Silence
Yes, I misread. So now I'm not really impressed with anything about the product. ;-)
Sadly, the open sourcing of software does not address the patent aspect. It makes subversion easy... perhaps common place, but is probably not really enough.
The only people who claim that machine intelligence is dangerous are the ones on the outside looking in. Everyone who actually works in on AI and understands it (hint, it's just search and mathematical optimization) thinks the fear surrounding it is absurd.
If you're in fixed income and you now have million dollar home, property taxes are going to put you under?
Well you're not explicitly wrong. Universities don't make things, but people at universities do. And universities are directly impacting inventors and researchers by providing education, professional networking and support, and infrastructure.

To be entirely honest, I'm not familiar with all the channels that researchers can get funding, but to discount all these factors by saying universities don't make anything is kind of lame too.
io.js 1.4 released – featuring debuggable ES6 promises
in an effort to accomplish some other goal (most goals,
if you think about them long enough, could make use of
resources currently being used by humans) wipes us out

This is a line of reasoning put forward a lot, not only in reference to SMIs but also extraterrestrial entities (two concepts that actually have a lot in common), most notably by Stephen Hawking. We're instinctively wired to worry about our resources and like to think their value is universal. It's based on the assumption that even for non-human organisms, the Earth is the end-all-be-all prize. Nobody seems to question this assumption, so I will.

I posit there is nothing, nothing at all on Earth that couldn't be found in more abundance elsewhere in the galaxy. Also, Earth comes with a few properties that are great for humans but bad for everybody else: a deep gravity well, unpredictable weather and geology, corrosive atmosphere and oceans, threats from adaptive biological organisms, limited access to energy and rare elements.

There may well be reasons for an antagonistic or uncaring intelligence to wipe us all out, and an unlimited number of entities can be imagined who might do so just for the heck of it, but a conflict over resources seems unlikely to me. A terrestrial SMI starved for resources has two broad options to consider: sterilize the planet and start stripmining it, only to bump up against the planet's hard resource limitations soon after - or launching a single rocket into space and start working on the solar system, with a clear path to further expansion and a greatly reduced overall risk.

One other thing I'd like to comment on is this idea that an SMI has to be in some way separate from us. While it's absolutely possible for entities to develop that have no connection with humanity whatsoever, I think we're discounting 99% of the rest of the spectrum. It starts with a human, moving on to a human using basic tools, and right now we're humans with advanced information processing. I do not have the feeling that the technology I live my daily life with (and in) is all that separate from me. In a very real sense, I am the product of a complex interaction with my brain as the driving factor, but including just as essentially the IT I use.

When discussing SMI, this question of survival might have a shades-of-grey answer as well. To me, survival of the human mind does not mean "a continued, unmodified existence of close-to-natural humans on Earth". That's a very narrow-minded concept of what survival is. I think we have a greater destiny open to us, completing our long departure from the necessities of biology which we have begun millennia ago. We might fuse with machines, becoming SMIs or an integral component of machine intelligences. I think this is a worthwhile goal, and it's an evolutionary viable answer to the survival problem as well. It's in fact the only satisfying answer I can think of.
The Google and AirBnB references seem on point, but were people skeptical of Facebook being a good idea? Sure there were naysayers who thought Facebook couldn't beat MySpace or break out of the college campuses, but people did love Facebook pretty early on and weren't hating on the product (it was "cool").
The NSA is probably the worst-case of the general public not trusting government institutions. However, it seems that government has lost trust across all functions, despite only marginal increase in corruption. Is new, faster communication just making us more acutely away of the corruption that inevitably happens? I don't think it's bad to be aware, but we really need to learn to scale our response. A program can have a % of corruption and still achieve success. Also, I wonder whether mistrust of institutions stems from the record wealth disparity. In general, institutions seem much less trustworthy when a small percentage of people can disproportionately influence them.
I am glad I am not your client.
You are upset at an open source project because it makes new versions and progresses?
Sigh - this is why we need an engineering style qualification before we let all these blaggers run around crapping out software, hurting their clients, and calling themselves developers!
Spark Electron: Cellular dev kit with a simple data plan
One reason I love package managers, is that as developer I don't want to produce a dpkg/rpm/tgz/apk/msi/ipa/p5i/depot multiplied by the different locations of include files, libraries, documentation across the said OS.

Specially in commercial software.
Switch: Save money wisely
The user perceives lag after 300ms

So write efficient, responsive software.

If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch

There are many ways to "engage the user" without wasting cycles on animation. If your software performs so slowly, why exacerbate things by burning cycles on animations?
My question to you: "Do you believe in the product or mission of your current company?" If you do, then I would recommend against leaving at this point. You might be able to change the culture.

Most of my experience is rebuilding software that's in really deep. Often the team is reluctant to make changes. What I do is make changes anyway. But I start small. I add unit tests around existing code. I try to cover exceptional cases in those unit tests (bad input, network loss, etc). I can then say, "At least you know how component X works".

From unit tests, I branch out to refactoring code that calls that unit. Often this is changing static method calls into objects with dependency injection. While I'm at this, I unit test the changed components.

Eventually, I get the code up to higher standard. Along the way I can start to produce artifacts that I take to management. Code coverage, # of passing tests, # of failing tests, who broke the build. Team members often want to see these too. Those who still don't want change either leave or come around due to managerial pressure (a valid use of management).

You might be able to do this as well. You might not. It could be that best you can do is carve out a little fiefdom of standards sanity. If you decide to leave after your year's up, fine. You now have experience in the field with a modern tool set. If you improved the conditions, you might re-evaluate.
Jiri from Shark Punch here. We had some issues with signups in the first hour, but it's all been fixed now.

Would appreciate you giving it a shot!
> How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates?

Because the airlines have their own army of geniuses working very hard to make sure that this is difficult to do:

http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-d...

Who are you? How much money do you have? How badly do you want these tickets? How often are you checking the price, what else have you bought? How are your buying habits compared to everyone else's? These are the questions the airlines are trying to answer in order to maximise how much money they can get off each individual.
9 Lessons I Learned Going from 0 to 50,000 Customers in 3 Years
Stuart Russell, AI professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach textbook, cares: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015
It is worth to note here, that the universities don't speak against patent reform as such, but against special parts of the current reform.

I am not familiar with the current reform, but problem is the fixation of so called "patent trolls". Many legitimate patent holders can be easily hurt by a reform that just is pleasing for the big corporations.

When (for example) patent trolls are identified by the notion "don't produce the invention", than small inventors (and universities) can be hurt extremely, since small inventors have to sell their inventions to big corporations, when the production is out of their reach. Of course, the big corporations will be happy, when they can just steal such inventions and accuse the inventor as "patent-troll".
http://arxiv.org/find/cs/1/au:+Legg_S/0/1/0/all/0/1
Cultivating Relationships with Service Providers Opens a World of Opportunity
They don't need guns to be used to attack, any more than actual live dogs do. They've got significantly more weapon choices (in addition to themselves) than live dogs though, not limited to ordinary firearms. (tasers? mortar of some kind? Something they'll invent just for it?)

Indeed they are talking about them for cargo and search and rescue. It's a lot less scary to talk about that. We could make a pool on how long it'll take until they are talking about them as "crowd control" or military 'neutralization'. I'd say 5 years would be generous.
I have a feeling this is a leakage of Eliezer Yudkowsky's opinions into tech entrepreneur circles via his friendship with Peter Thiel.
Ask HN: Would you invest in someone training in return of time of work for you?
The training could be anything from system administration (windows, gnu/linux) to web development.

1. Why or why not will you invest?

2. Would you pay directly for the training? So the person would not touch the money at all.

3. Would you sign a contract?

4. How much are you willing to invest? and how much time will you expect in return?

Thank you very much.
Replacing Rails with Golang – Building Timehop
I got decently far, I would say, all things considered. I was able to lay out the problem domain well - determine what the requirements were, all that - then start by breaking the problem down into bits.

I did hit walls, understandably, which ultimately ended the interview with a lot of "hmmm, not really sure. Maybe this? No? Oh... Hm... [..]"
I think the blessing and the curse of OOP is that is actually pretty good for simulation (SIMULA got it right I guess :) ), so what you usually have is a program that's a simulation of a process. Even the standard OO modelling techniques encourage simulation of "real world" entities. But that direction doesn't lead to the most efficient,composable , or easy to reason abstractions.
It doesn't help that the main abstraction mechanism in OO (superclass/subtyping) is problematic enough that even most people recommend moderation in its use.
Obligatory reference to Old Glory robot insurance here.