skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Deep threads have an increasing delay attached to them to prevent flamewars, because HN assumes the quality of a comment is inversely proportional to its depth. Like a lot of Hacker News' attempts at social engineering, it doesn't really work but it is annoying.

This is one of the details which should probably be considered when trying to spot the presence of shills or agents here, that HN is engineered with a bias to begin with.

Although, according to that clearly authoritative pastebin, questioning a conspiracy is evidence of a conspiracy.
3,000 Great Plague Skeletons Excavated
From RethinkDB docks [1], I am still a bit confused how this locking system works for read/write and also a bit skeptical regarding their claim that 'in most cases writes can be performed essentially lock-free'.

I am using MongoDB and didn't have many issues when my databases had 120,000 documents either, the problem began when we hit the millions... The combination of write locks and our need for dynamic queries (meaning: we can't index) made the database the worst performance bottleneck in our system by far. Although I must be honest that we haven't yet tried MongoDB's new 3.0 version that promises a boost in performance [2] and also has 'document-level locking and compression' [3]

Is anybody aware of any benchmark that perform random writes (inserts/updates) and non-indexed reads for RethinkDB? (Is it even a common use scenario, anyways?)

[1] http://rethinkdb.com/docs/architecture/#how-does-rethinkdb-e...

[2] http://www.mongodb.com/mongodb-3.0#performance

[3] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/release-notes/3.0/#wiredtiger...
This looks identical to "Dots", an app on the app store, but I guess there could of been versions of the game before that.

I'd be interested to know who created the original.
Major market NPR affiliate developer here. We need ads (digital) and underwriting (OTA) to operate. Member donations are great but don't make up the entire budget.
This is hilarious. California is so liberal that people are taking my sarcastic comment literally.
I don't agree.

The problem I see with news is distraction. What I really need is a high-precision system for getting things that are relevant to my business with little effort. I am willing to supply training example and/or rules or hints.
This is awesome. Future feature ideas: Would love a daily email of new tracks & a way to add them to a Spotify playlist.
I can also understand that. Now these people, not making a lot of money. They at least had a social support system, happy with friends families etc. They had a place they could call their own, and the pride that comes with it. You've taken their support system out.

In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.
A big problem with this concept is jobs. The working poor are almost exclusively employed in the service sector at or near minimum wage. Worse yet, many are essentially day laborers, even outside of the sort of fields normally associated with on-demand labor (to wit: startups like workpop.com and shiftgig.com are responding to market realities).

Finding a food service or house cleaning or landscaping job in a depressed, but affordable, city like Redding or its ilk is going to be way, way harder than in a more expensive place.

Add to this that once you lose your car, you can't live or work outside of a city with functional public transportation. None of those are cities are going to be dirt cheap.
"the problem with ChromeOS, imo, is how limited it becomes once you pull out the net connection"

The other problem with ChromesOS is that it's a gigantic privacy sinkhole.

Everything you do in the OS is tracked and recorded by Google. Even printing to your desktop printer. None of this tracking is anonymous either since you must sign in with your Google account to properly use ChromeOS. (Just a reminder that a Google account equals your name, gender, email, date-of-birth, location and mobile phone number).

Google fail to state in their lengthy privacy policy how long they keep your data (presumably forever) or whether your activity is disassociated from your identity when viewed by Google. In my view, this is simply unacceptable when you consider the gargantuan volumes of private date collected and the unprecedented degree of tracking.

The reaction on this site to an entire OS that tracks you by default has mostly been: "Yeah, you're being tracked. So what? Get over it." Presumably everyone happy to recommend ChromeOS would be equally happy to switch on their Mac/Windows/Ubuntu machine and have it track everything they do, have that information sent back to the OS manufacturer, and for none of that data to be anonymous?
The whole point of a chromebook is that the storage is in the cloud. I was surprised they offered so much storage.
I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a time-pressure based test, this gives you a big advantage. Of course, the reading comprehension parts are still hard, and engineering gives you no advantage there. There's also lots of selection bias potentially going on - engineers who go on to take the LSAT are rare. Who knows how that prior correlates with ability.

Somewhat relatedly, it's been well known that for CS PhD admissions, at least with native English speakers, the GRE Verbal is a better predictor of PhD performance than the GRE Math. It's unclear how much of this is top-end compression in math though (almost everyone going to a top CS PhD school gets a 790 or 800 on the GRE Math, so there's no signal left there, whereas verbal has a higher spread. A 720 on the verbal is 98th percentile).[2]

[1] I know this because in 2009 as a college senior, I took some practice LSAT tests, and found the logic section endlessly delightful and challenging in a timed setting - I was this close to applying to law schools before I changed my mind and did a CS PhD instead. I know it sounds like a weird choice, but 2009 was a weird soul-searching year for me for various personal reasons.

[2] All of this has changed since 2011 when the GRE scoring system changed to a 130-170 scale from the old 200-800 scale, along with changes to the test itself. All of my points are probably obsolete.
My sentiment is not classist or elitist.

The fact you fail to recognise it as elitist doesn't mean it isn't. You are elitist because you fail to understand that life can be a great deal harder for other people. "I did it so they can too" assumes that other people don't live in circumstances that prevent them doing things. That is plain wrong.

If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more.

One of the things you might have had to sacrifice is having enough money to relocate.
Considering "wind speeds as high as 291 km/h" I would think that one of the greatest challenges of the Google Loon project is making sure there is always a balloon above a targeted coverage area. I would wager that unless there are an unbelievable number of balloons deployed, the coverage would be intermittent.
"ai" is Chinese and Japanese for "love"
"Astroturfing" is when a corporation shills for or otherwise defends its own products while acting like it is a regular person authoring the post. It is "fake grassroots" (hence the name).

What JTRIG does is far worse, and should really be called the continuation of COINTELPRO. Astroturf-style posting is only one of the tools in their toolbox.
WorkLife (YC W15) launches to end bad meetings
Pretty neat. And caveat the port issue[1] pretty nice. I wonder what the battery life is like with Linux installed (probably not 12 hours :-) Now if they added a wireless charging option so that when I set it upon my desk it was powered/charging wirelessly that would be pretty neat. I'm amazed as how closely it tracks the macbook 13. They could be twins.

[1] The whole one port to rule them all which is fine except that it becomes a single point of failure for the device, I would be totally ok if it came with two C connectors and either could be power or data or whatever, then if one failed or got gunked up it would still be usable until I got it repaired.
One is promoting a completely wireless way of computing and the other is promoting a completely cloud based way of computing.

Apples to Oranges, no pun intended.
This is just empirically false. High rise construction is massively cheaper than the current property values. Per square foot, suburban Palo Alto is $1409 per square foot at the median [1]. Heck, even the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and hardly a bastion of affordable housing, cost only 1.5B / 3,595,146 = $417 per square foot. [2]

More reasonable construction of 10 - 20 stories could easily be put up for that cost, even once you factor in the high cost of labor in CA.

1 - http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/
2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa
I just came in here just to ask/comment on: I hope Arq implements this. It's great to see such a prompt response. Thanks
This is the "just move" solution which, as mentioned by someone else, is not as easy or possible as it sounds.
Impressive. I imagine it being useful in almost all my projects. But how fast is it? Is using `shiftReferences` to enable pre-rendering comparisons a good idea?
Bad title - it's actually about how to change the language setting on your iOS device - nothing to do with learning a new language.

Flagged.
I don't think that anyone may confuse a react javascript library with the Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer. Yet, being the author of Baobab the PHP library (http://www.sideralis.org/baobab/), I would have preferred a different name :-P
What a load of crap. The author has no idea how medical research is actually performed. It's very hard and expensive and data-collection/analysis is a tiny, tiny challenge relative to the complexities and costs of developing novel therapeutics. I'm not saying ResearchKit is a bad thing, but I work in the pharmaceutical industry and this isn't even a blip on anyone's radar. Get real.
Really cool idea but how do you plan for this to pay for itself? I imagine the time commitment is pretty high to have to go through all toy recalls and/or safety hazards. It's one thing to only need to pay for servers but a humans time? Maybe you could use Mechanical Turk and then just feed donation into a bank account linked to it.

I love these little one-off sites but I worry that in a few years time they will all be graveyards.
Starting at $999.
It's quite unfortunate for these folks. I don't have an immediate solution other than what has already been said about increasing the supply of housing.

But the thing is there's this very valuable network in SV that's been built. Everywhere where some new innovation is happening, anywhere wealth is being created, you are going to get this sort of thing happening. People who are at the cutting edge will be moving ahead in income, but there's always going to be folks who aren't part of the party. So an income gap will pop up where there's all this wealth being generated.

I lived in London for a long time, and you saw the same. Millionaires' apartments in the same neighbourhood as council flats. Kids with chauffeurs, kids with free school meals.
Contentbot
All the details are here:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/d...

Depending on your device, you unlock things by pressing Power-Refresh; that switches the device to unlocked mode. You can continue using ChromeOS, build your own ChromiumOS, or install another OS.

You can also kill off the bootloader completely. I've never done that before, but I believe the linked doc describes the process. I'm not exactly sure how to install Ubuntu, but the hardware is not going to stop you and never has.

The Pixel-specific instructions are here, though this is for the old revision and I'm not sure what (if anything) has changed:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...
Well the goal of all the Google integration is that the majority of things are stored in the cloud.
I am old school in the sense that I like to run my os as a native install directly on the machine without any chroot / vm / hypervisor trickery. This guide walks you through how to do a native linux install and blow chromeos away on the pixel. http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/chromebook_pixel_linux.txt
but are usually single and/or have no dependents, right?
I don't think moving across the bay is going to fix their terrible public education problem.
Also I hear that computer automation is taking out the low hanging fruit in the legal profession like sifting through massive amounts of documents.
"Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo."

Beware flat rate service providers - it's not a consumer-friendly model:

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...

Your interests and the interests of your provider should be aligned, not opposed.
Consider the audience, who will overwhelmingly shift to problem-solving mode. Empathy feels nice but doesn't provide a roof or full bellies.
Dave Kashen, co-founder here. Happy to answer any questions.
I've moved plenty in my life, both as a child and as an adult. The most common reason people don't move is because they are afraid to leave the social circles. And what a lot of people don't realize is that their their social circles may not actually be that strong anymore now that they have become adults and had children... which then it just comes down to them being afraid or "just don't want to".

Of course there are an infinite number of other factors involved, especially when money is thrown into it, but this has been my experience when talking with people.
Build Up a High Availability Distributed Key-Value Store
Doesn't this have 2 USB C ports?
your social media accounts comes at 2nd spot when i comes to "Who Know you best". And calculating you interest from your tweets/statuses is not a hard problem NLP is much advance now .
if you use a hub as a charger i don't really see a problem. At home i have a usb hub and outside i don't even use usb.
One cable ought to be enough for a portable device.
> I am still a bit confused how this locking system works for read/write and also a bit skeptical regarding their claim that 'in most cases writes can be performed essentially lock-free'.

Hi, Slava at RethinkDB here.

RethinkDB uses MVCC to do looking. Essentially, when we lock down a block for a write, we make a copy of the block. If another query comes along that wants to read, it reads from the copy. When the write completes, the old copies are destroyed.

There are lots of details I'm glossing over -- optimizations to avoid copying too much, copying entire subbranches of the btree to have a consistent view of the shard, etc. All this stuff isn't unique to RethinkDB -- it's pretty standard database internals stuff, and we haven't done anything new in that department. It's just an implementation of standard database architectures (as far as the caching/query engine/storage engine are concerned).
Selling all your belongings to move to SV when you're single, educated, and high employment chances is not as similar as you feel. I know you probably struggled to make it happen, and I'm not trying to understate that.. but that sounds completely different than poverty.
Actually it’s used as a bludgeon to kill all debate, not something to strive towards. The point that’s always made is that something already is this magical and perfect meritocracy with the selection process already working perfectly. The term meritocracy is thrown into the faces of those that question the selection process as a defense of the selection process. Perfectness is just assumed, not something to be strived for. Your statement makes just no sense at all when considering the context in which meritocracy is typically used when defending exclusionary selection processes. It’s downright absurd.

And that’s even ignoring all the grave moral quandaries you get into when you base who can participate on merit – if that is even possible and if you can even coherently define what the hell merit means. Merit is hard to nail down and as such can be easily used as a convenient tool for exclusion.

In light of the long and heated debates about how to best conduct job interviews (nobody knows, really!), often seen right here on HN, this all is especially absurd. It seems that put into a slightly different context (of a job interview) everyone knows that selection processes are frail, complex, complicated things, hard to get right – and even at its best you will make mistakes. Selection processes are fucking hard to get right. Doesn’t everyone know that? How, in that context, can you then turn around and claim that there is no issue because meritocracy. It sounds like a bad joke. A horrible joke, one that kills all debate about selection processes and how we can improve them (or even where selection is necessary and where not and based on what and how and how we should deal with the frailty and difficulty of evaluating human fucking beings.)
Engineering has exploded with foreign students who will leave the US with a degree that prints money in their home country. Not so much in America. They need to look at the numbers closer to see where the US students are actually going.
I did not attempt to update the version of SeaBIOS installed on it. Do you think upgrading SeaBIOS will allow me to install FreeBSD?
It has an SD card reader. You can double the storage for super cheap.
>> The total (when including desirable features such as AR coatings, etc) always came to ~$200 for each pair.

I'm guessing you have a strong prescription. I was always jealous of people who had a comparatively 'weak' prescription being able to get glasses from PearlVision or what not for $99.
Well, you just store all your data on the NSA cloud from your NSA terminal.

To your point about he MacBook one port. They do offer a rather smart "splitter" dongle at $60-$90 that allows you to charge while I/Oing other data when that uncommon scenario uncommonly arises.

I just don't get the whole Google approach. They think far higher of their "OS" than is warranted. They should have been selling this thing as a loss leader at around =<$800. I don't know too many people ... as in none ... who want to spend $1k on a Google "OS" machine.
How is ChromeOS? Can you get a decent terminal or terminal app? Install and keep up to date the basic terminal utilities (ssh, tmux, vim, rsync, etc)?

What about other software? Is the browser like the regular Chrome? Can you play regular media files (flac, x264 mkv)?

Are there any unpleasant surprises?
Looks more like a Dell than anything.
The classic standard normal + chi-squared example is also one worth remembering:

Let X ~ N(0, 1), and Y = X^2.

Cov(X,Y) = 0, though they're obviously not independent.
I've got about 17 years' worth of passwords written in the pages of a book I acquired 17 years ago.

I did back it up about three years ago with a photocopier. Probably about time to do that again.
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
arq (which we love) + rsync.net = success.

We have a "HN readers" discount which is fairly substantial.
I read the OP as holding out that sort of 9 to 5 as a de facto great thing. I was pointing out that not everyone would see it that way.
Getting the poor out of the city won't be easy. They don't have enough capital to fund a relocation on their own. The government will probably need to ship them out on rail cars. Once the undesirables vacate their homes, those structures can be replaced with housing more fitting for the well-off residents of the city.
Is there enough storage?
+1 to using RethinkDB! I'm also using RethinkDB in production, and I love it! The only issue is that you have to set up persistent filters via iptables in addition to having an authKey. They do have a guide[0] for that, however they do not provide any instructions for ensuring that the filters on iptables stay up, or how to restore them if they are temporarily wiped out :/

[0] http://rethinkdb.com/docs/security/
Grapes of Wrath, iPhone edition.

edit - it seems strange that many well paid technocrats will happily hold sway on the possibilities of sea-steading, or building fusion reactors, or anything involving a giant laser, or suchlike, but throw up their hands and declare the problem of houses for the poor people they or their workforce are displacing to be an insurmountable fact of the economy that can only be solved by the poor people moving to somewhere that hasn't yet become cool. And to be utterly cynical about the whole thing, if rich folk really want to build a city on a hill, they probably shouldn't price out all the trades if they want it to function in the long run.
I'm not sure why this is better than the cheapest macbook air?Similar battery life, similar processor. 4gb more memory, smaller hard drive. And the cheapest pixel is $100 more. What do I get for that $100? For me the downsides are: can only use apps from the chrome web store, no unix command line (maybe it exists and I don't know?).

I'm really happy someone is trying to compete, but not sure why I would buy this.
What most people have missed is that USB allows charging and data over the same port. So you can easily get a power adapter that has a charging tip which has on the same cord another USB-C port (socket) which you can plug into your display chain, or port replicator or what not.

In Apple's case I fully expect they will make it so that when you plug your Apple display into your laptop it also charges it since the charger is permanently connected to (or built into) the Apple monitor/display.
They do add 1TB of Google Drive storage for three years so, if you have a good connection, it's not that big an obstacle.
The Rise and Fall of the 'Wilhelm Scream'
> There are also many areas zoned for a maximum height of zero feet.

The smartass in me wants to say, "then build subterranean homes/buildings" :)

Would suck in terms of natural lighting but it would be nice to see the faces of people who want those zones to be like that.
The backlash against skeuomorphism has really led to some serious regression in design affordances. In a similar vein, there are text inputs in the latest OS X that are indistinguishable from labels. I'm not anti-fad but these are real usability issues.
Here in Brazil it's been a trend, more and more people going into engineering so that last year it was the undergraduate course with most applicants. And we have A LOT of law schools, probably more than any other country (no joke). Why so many going into engineering? Simple, there's a shortage and a job is almost guaranteed if you're a reasonable engineer, and the pay is good.
Confusing because in their FAQ they state the following:

"We are flying in the stratosphere well above commercial air traffic and weather events, at around 18 - 27 km or 60,000 - 90,000 feet. "

I wonder if the "around the world" flight was done under different conditions?
Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.