skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, that statement is too vague, so I wouldn't comment on it, but for what it's worth I also have an opinion on that matter, so let me reply.

Personally, I don't want to be "ruled" by anybody and I don't really believe in "law". However, I don't assume possible to believe that people actually would be kind to each other and live in utopia: it is very likely that there will be somebody who will want to make use of other's unprotectedness, so the society will have to regulate it somehow. But the real problem is there is a lot of tasks to be done by the members of the society "together" (like building roads and stuff), and the most active/authoritative people in this society are practically the government, so there will be governments. And who has power, can abuse it. Therefore, it doesn't matter how much I dislike current governments: it is as it is, no use to talk about that.

However, it is relatively fair to want "not to be touched as long as you don't touch others". So I don't really care how those, who are "the government" will solve questions like who controls some territory: as long as there's no war between these countries and I'm not doing anything that was allowed in the first country, but not in the second one (like carrying a gun on the street) I'd like to never notice I actually "left country". Somehow it is possible in Europe (to certain degree: to the less degree that I can wish for, by the way, but nevertheless), but not between USA and Canada, who aren't fighting with each other, AFAIK.

Also, it is trendy to justify everything with some "dangerous aggressive nation out there, being terrorist menace for us". But as it happens, things usually have some reason to happen. And "aggressive nations" aren't that aggressive unless you abuse them somehow: say, by invading their country or at least drawing (without any real purpose: just because you can) obviously offensive pictures on public resources about people they love and respect.
What does it mean to copyright an API?
Plants are an interesting case. It's a pretty simple theory - plants need more DNA because they can't change their location. If conditions change around them, they can't just get up and move like an animal. Instead, they have to have dormant DNA that doesn't get activated unless the environment changes. They can't change their locations, so they have to change themselves.
== is not slow when types of operands (in typeof sense) match -- then it's equivalent to ===.

You'll find a lot of == out there, or would if only Google code search were still up.

Hey, I got to answer with the one thing I'd change. There are more than a few, and I had to pick. Losing the equivalence relation I had in the first ten days (apart from NaN != NaN of course) was my pick.
That seems to indicate that clearing your phone immediately prior to crossing the border would also be illegal.
An idea for a uniform syntax guides, for when you're learning your n-th programming language and don't want to go through an entire tutorial. Would love to hear your thoughts!
This is why I don't carry a smart phone. I carry a shit, call and SMS only phone.
Engineer here. I work at a large industrial plant Fortran is used quite a bit. We have numerical simulation code which runs and feeds back into our operating process written in Fortran (mostly Thermodynamics and Chemical kinetic's simulations). Plant Operators make descions based on the output of Fortran models all without knowing or caring that the things are written in Fortran.

You can trace the herritage of the code back to the 80's but it has been more or less constantly maintained since then there is a lot of company IP wrapped up in the code. You certainly don't need to know Fortran to use or understand the models (it's wrapped in a 'modernish' C++ GUI) but the engineers working on improvements to the backend definately need to know Fortran.

I suspect there is a lot of reasons for the prevalence of Fortran in Engineering code. Industrial plants tends to operate continously you can't exactly replace all the infrastructure without large downtime. A large part of our plant was built in 1996, so the technology is very much what you'd expect from that era (RS/6000 Unix boxes everywhere in the control system). The Libraies and compilers etc all have to link against that vintage. It's not slated to get upgraded until 2018 and we will probably try to push that as far back as we can. When the upgrade happens I suspect we will be on Wintel (and in another 20 years that will probably be just as outdated).

The other reason for Fortran is that Engineering processes tend to be stable. A chemical reaction does not change so once some code is written and it works very low incentive to replace it. At my plant our models were first written in the 80's (when personal computers began to become ubiquitous) by senior engineers in the company - these were guys who grew up in the 70's and were raised on Fortran. Eventually the code was handed to the junior engineers to maintain. The juniors passed up the ranks to become seniors and when it came time to write the next generation of models "I'll base it on this existing Fortran Model which I know inside out and works really well" became the mantra and so Fortran become self perpetuating and entrenched across the industry. If it had been a decade later would probably have been C
While good overall advice, I understand that those protections do not cover you at the border. As an American entering the US, yes you just need to provide a customs declaration. As a non-US person, it's not clear what rights you have. They certainly don't need to permit you entry.
haven't read it thanks. are you saying the paper is about how one strives to improve? - because it's not titled that. the title is pretty clear. so is the abstract.

i think we agree that self assessments aren't worth much.

i think our disagreement stems from me applying it from a neutral ability perspective and you applying it to your own self assessment, where you don't question your basic competency.
I worked for a large scada company. We collected large amounts of data from thousands of large industrial installations.

One day we got a new VP who came from a well known firm who was a "cloud expert". He moved (nearly) all of our infrastructure to AWS, after producing untold amounts of spreadsheets/power points expressing how much cheaper/better/faster it's going to be.

Long story short, it was 4x more expensive as running it in house. By the time they went back to our own infrastructure, most of the internal sysops(including "The Glue" guy) had moved on and much of the old internal hardware was re-purposed or gone. It was a fiasco that they still have no fully recovered from yet.

I would be very careful in characterizing AWS as the solution for every large scale computer infrastructure problem.

Conversely, I have had excellent experiences with AWS in my current job, although we still have a rather large HPC cluster internally which would never make sense to move to AWS.
It seems to me, that if there was a large amount of "junk DNA" in our chromosomes, it would be advantageous for much of it to be at the ends, preceding those telomeres. That way, when you start to run low on telomeres, you would still have quite some time before you start losing "important" DNA and suffer that horrible death.

It's also possible that I am misunderstanding how telomeres work.
Because our DNA isn't a literal computer program written by humans in the past 50 years.
Wrong, JavaScript is valid Typescript, so you don't have to rewrite anything.
After reflecting more on the difficulties of a random number generator on a consensus system, we decided to use round robin method to choose the next leader from the validators.

Thank you for the important issues you raised.
Thanks for your comment, VOYD.

For developers, I actually had someone else being worried about the same thing before. My answer to that would be a very clear TOS, which explicitly stated that I wouldn't be able to use the users' data in any way.

Or, do you mean as a user..? Meaning that you're on site X, and it's making you login using site Y..?
> ignoring that some professions are just better for men

I'm not ignoring your sexism.

> ...yet they are almost oblivious to horrible treatment of women that happens region-wide half around the globe...

Is homelessness in the United States also not a problem because of impoverishment in African countries? Is the conversation of the drought in California dismissible because of the lack of clean water in India? You're expressing dire cultural insensitivity.
The article doesn't give a good indication of scale. Is this simmilar in size to a Forman grille? Also where do the juices and fats run off? Do they just collect on the cook surface?
>but 'nations' meaning 'geopolitical entities' is as old as record-keeping itself

This is completely untrue. States as we recognize them in the modern sense have only existed since the 17th Century in Europe[0], and much later in other parts of the world[1]. Before this time, political organizations consisted of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, tribes, and various other small groupings of people.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization
Why does corporate sponsorship have anything to do with it? Any browser that gained non-trivial market share would have felt the same "don't break the web, or you lose market share" pain that the bigs felt.

KHTML only started getting adoption via the Safari fork because Dave Hyatt and others implemented real-world quirks (e.g., residual style), prior to webkit.org.

Gecko had the benefit of `if (document.all) { IE code here } else { Netscape code here }` patterns from the '90s, but we had to add quirks to gain share with Firefox (m/b, then Phoenix) in 2002 and onward: innerHTML, undetected document.all emulation, and of course XHR.

Corporations have nothing to do with it. Any evolving ecosystem with a huge corpus of popular content begets terrific selection pressure against breaking backward compatibility.
I'm really trying, but I am having trouble feeling empathy towards her. Once I realized he was fired because of what she did and how proud of herself she was (this is the bad part), I just couldn't feel any empathy for her anymore.
People in the 1940s were riding the top of an energy revolution, an enormously rapid upward trend in energy production that, had it continued unabated, would today see us with the output of a nuclear powerplant generated by threads in our clothing for a dollar or two. They didn't foresee information technology, for the most part. They foresaw solar system-wide travel and simple mechanical computing devices like slide rules coexisting.

Of course it proved harder than expected to keep that curve going, and we got the infotech future rather than the high power future. We're probably better off for that, given that medicine is driven by infotech, not power.
Thanks for this comment. I have often wondered about this, and I'm really glad to discover that it's above board.
That wasn't stack exchange. We failed over to our secondary data center during sandy.
Non-profit redevelopment corporations have long been a tool for urban redevelopment. Often they are public-private partnerships, but often they are independent.
Microsoft's “dirty little secret”
Software Engineer (Fullstack) | ATTN: | NYC | Node.js, Javascript | 70k - 100k + equity

ATTN: creates content that breaks down complex issues, makes politics interesting, and analyzes the world from the perspective of the social media generation. In lieu of passivity, we prefer to give our followers vehicles to take action.

We are looking to bring on a engineer to help us build our content publishing and distribution platform.

Experience in node.js and mongodb is desired. Experience with React is a plus.

The position is full-time and we are open to local or remote candidates.

Apply here: http://bit.ly/1w7mpP6

http://www.attn.com
I don't pay MailChimp for the dashboard, I pay them to guarantee my mail is delivered. DIY mail delivery is a nightmare.
Show HN: JawsDB – MySQL for Heroku. Need Alpha Testers for Heroku Addon
Hi, I'm launching a Heroku addon, called JawsDB, that allows users to provision a MySQL database for use with their Heroku applications.

Postgres is the default option for Heroku and it is a fine database, but some of us cut our teeth on MySQL and may have apps that use MySQl that we would like to be able to deploy with Heroku's phenomenal hosting service.

I currently need alpha testers to provision the addon and give me feedback on how the experience was with tying it into your application. The only requirements are a Heroku account (free) so that I can send an alpha invite to that particular email.

You can contact me for an invite through www.jawsdb.com or through twitter @jawsdb. If you have any questions, please ask! And thank you for your invaluable help as I try to get this launched!
I think the TL;DR of the argument against p-zombies goes like this: if you have two things that are by definition indistinguishable by any possible measurement even in principle, they are by this very definition the same. Since there is, by definition, no way to tell if someone is a p-zombie or not, the introduction of the term "p-zombie" doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore why would you ever do that?

The people who argue p-zombies often do this because they want to keep consciousness as something fundamentally different than the material world, something inaccessible to science. But it's wrong. Even magic is accessible to science. By the very definition and idea of science, anything that has any causal influence on the observable universe can be studied and is in the domain of science.
Big ups for the "bigger man" type response :)
Wifi?
The title of Yahoo's article is actually misleading.

It seems that Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella is finally going to clarify the real revenues for Azure, while instead most of the article is speculation.

In any case, my view (as an ex-AWS and current VMware) is that Azure's real consumption is tiny. Nowhere near the $5.5B that Microsoft claims.
The Scary-Dextrous Robots of the Darpa Challenge
> My point is that you can be writing useful programs in c in a weekend.

We'll need to define criteria for "useful program" but I believe most people could write useful programs in most languages in a weekend.

> I've watched competent programmers try to learn complex languages like Haskell and Scala

> far more complex mental model

I think its more that those languages are different, not that they require a more complex mental model.
Mobile SniffPhone will detect cancer on a user’s breath
Why didn't you refuse the search?
This kind of thing is a big f'ing deal breaker.
API to extract the most important topics to any Reddit user
Controversial opinion here probably, but vmware has been doing virt for a long time, so it makes sense that it's rather polished if you fit there eco-system.

however qemu-kvm hasn't been around so long, it's still not anywhere near the adoption numbers such as Xen, however I've used it in production in three different large companies with great success.. the beauty is that more people who use it means more eyes on fixing it.

so for small things especially I'd really recommend it, and honestly I like it anyway, it feels very freeing to use libvirt/kvm- you have much finer grained controls than what vmware gives even in it's expensive offerings, and the best bit is that it's free as in beer- you can use all it's features without being in any kind of violation with licenses. the tools to administer it are ssh if you're familiar with unix or a GUI python program which gives you good control and graphs (works over ssh tooo, so encryption goodness) and works cross platform (last time I checked) contrasting to when I last used vmware:- you had to use there vsphere client which isn't ported to OSX or Linux.

I use Windows at work so it's not a problem, but I would prefer to run linux so I can actually use decent virtualisation solutions for small test labs, my company baulks at the cost of vmware workstation, and if I run linux for kvm then I cannot administer our massive ESX clusters..
Interesting, and from the same page, Drake's rule says that similarly to programming, the larger the "codebase", the slower the mutation (new feature launch) rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size#Drake.27s_rule
Definitely interested in watching this competition in June. This group of robots is impressive. The updates to DARPAs Atlas robot, done by Boston Dynamics, are impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0.
This reminds me of Prolog's definite clause grammars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_clause_grammar
You might get a kick out of insect patterning based upon morphogen protein concentration gradients then...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_embryogenesis
Ask HN: How do you learn new technologies?
I'm relatively new to web development and I'm currently trying to learn new technologies like Angular.js, Node, etc.

I'm finding myself reading through all the documentation, but I feel like I'm wasting my time. I don't know if I should just jump right in and start coding.

What's the most efficient way for you to learn new technologies?
Super cool... I can pretend I'm back in SF :) (I'll be there for sure.)
First of all, it has been litigated several times, at least in Germany. I'm on my phone, so here is only one example I quickly found by Googling:

http://www.timelex.eu/en/blog/detail/gpl-license-reaffirmed-...

Second, most businesses already avoid the GPL, but among those that can't, such as Android device makers - well, some of them seem to be fine with avoiding the edge cases by just publishing the source to their kernel modules. Considering this, I suspect that for the other half, it would not be the end of the world to have to reveal some minor secrets about the hardware or whatever; they just neglect to publish source because they are unlikely to be penalized any significant amount for doing so.

Of course, there is the risk of GPL making it into codebases by accident, but really only if you spend zero effort keeping track of it. There are companies like Black Duck that provide tools to scan a codebase for known open source code, and honestly a quick grep should often be sufficient as well. In VMware's case, I'm not sure about the executable loading or kernel module issues, but if "vmkernel" itself has code copied and pasted from Linux, as is alleged - well, they should have known better! No need for the largest software effort since Y2K when you could just ensure someone in the company understands the GPL and how it relates to the company's code, before said code is highly developed.
Companies who have such low expectations already have alternatives in the form of a WebView with extra bells and whistles, like cordova or any of the numerous JS-based native-but-not-really frameworks and libraries. This is just one more among many, many similar alternatives.
Does that make each of us - or rather, natural selection - one big unit test?
a)I understand it's a technical question. But as with every technical question, we have to ask what the changes will be on society.

b)Mortality gives way to other minds to step forward like Stephen Hawking and others. Would have been such a good thing to have an immortal Isaac Newton for a millennia? Would have he realised the the laws of physics outside of earth's standards. Could have an immortal Einstein refine his theories and change his mistakes and adapt to newer findings?
Could have had a Stephen Hawking any chance to share his knowledge beside immortal Einsteins and Newtons?

c)It is a discussion about who deserves it. As for expensive treatments which aren't affordable by anyone in our society right now. We all now this. These treatments or solutions won't be free of charge. Only the rich will afford it. You know, money talks...

d)It's not only mortality that binds us to earth. It's our whole biological build up. Which fits only the life on earth. What about the warp drive, worm holes, etc... These aren't good enough for humanity to reach for the stars?

e)Also we don't have any clue about what effects it will have on the human body to live on another planet.

f)It is silly to say that evolution has stopped for the human race. We are biological creatures which can adapt to its surrounding as any other. But having immortality and not producing offsprings will actually lead to an evolutionary dead end. Having no genetic mutation will prevent the species to create natural immunity against diseases etc...

g)I only wanted to point out that maybe it is not the best thing to cheat death. It is natural. It's not a disease. Stop treating it like one.

As I said. As we are concerned about A.I., so should we concerned about this as well. Logic dictates to examine a possible solution from every angle as possible. Not to put ourselves and the whole humanity into a dead end.
I had the same "wow" moment with two-way binding awhile back. Now I think that the important part is having a source of record that consumers can observe for changes, and a good way to update that source of record. Two-way binding is just one way to give you that. In my experience it's far more common to read data than write it, so making it more explicit where writes are happening is not burdensome and seems more maintainable and performant.
This reminds me of Motherboard's short documentary of Andy Cavatorta, who also made a magnetically driven harp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSkIyocJNTc His technique is more 'rustic' than the studies linked here.
You realize that randomness and "accident" are man made concepts, they don't exist in nature. Something we can't predict isn't random at all, with enough data one could forsee anything, even the fact that you were about to write that message and the exact words I would use to answer you.

It's beyond science, but I don't believe in randomness or chaos, which doesn't mean I believe in religion either( which are just a collection of myth, which says absolutely nothing about the fundamental nature of 'god').
Oh my god - that's we we had line numbers ! To reduce parse complexity - FFS!!!

That's amazing. Why am I so blind?
Good question from The Economist in 2012: "Brazil’s richest man is betting on resources and infrastructure. Can he deliver?" http://www.economist.com/node/21555907
Google allows android users around the world appl by AdWords system
Ask HN: Gulp file.min.js? Asset pipeline binary?
I keep running into issues on windows using tools like Gulp or Grunt. The issues I'm running up against is long file names and deep node_module folders which end up causing errors like "file path too long". Also, if i end up moving or deleting one of these projects after running "npm install" the amount of time it takes is incredible due to the amount of files in the node_modules folder. I've also had to use robocopy to remove the long file names in some cases. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong...

The scenario I'm up against is that we don't use a mainstream language, so no tooling really exists. I'm trying to bolt on a solution(think asset pipeline) and seemed like Gulp would fit the bill. I'm able to get Gulp to do what I want I'm just not that pleased with the amount of steps needed to get to that point and the pain associated with moving/deleting projects.

What I'm wondering if there is a way to take your current gulp build process and convert it to a binary, or compile it to a single .js file that you could script against? Or if there are binaries out there that can do this sort of thing. My starting point with this was the gulp-webapp template.

Any ideas, thoughts, would be awesome!
Nicely done. I'm curious about how do you make this.
AWT sallies forth once again! :)

No surprise that their screenshot shows a calendar widget. Such things are very easy to abstract. We know from bitter experience in the desktop world that the pain starts in more complex scenarios than a few buttons and complex widgets that have thin interfaces.