skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You want to "take on the end of life", you want to "redesign death"? you want to be radical? and that means putting the metaphorial mirrors on the gurneys, and creating an iphone app "After I Go"?

I had my doubts about the title and how pompous it sounded, suspecting that it wasn't nearly as radical or visionary as it sounded. But jeez, that's it? Thanks for saving me the trouble of skimming that thing.
For anyone reading this thread later, I should point out that my response above was to a now-deleted part of Austen's mail that accused me of stalking him on the net, and told me to stop commenting on his posts.
Thank you! I tried Coca-Cola Life last week on a whim and was disappointed in both the flavor and that it was still loaded with sugar (and thus calories). There is no taste to it other than sweet - none of the citrus, caramel, or other types of flavors you expect in a cola.
Don't want to diminish SpaceX achievements, but for some comparable systems results could be similarly interesting. For example, Soyuz rockets are launched at least twice (at least 12 per year, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_R-7_launches_%282010%E... ) more often than Falcon last year (highest frequency so far), their pumps and chambers, modules of first stage are manufactured in corresponding numbers (6 pumps per rocket, 20 main thrust chambers for 1 and 2 stages alone, 4 modules of first stage), the rocket is largely - though not completely - manufactured in one closely tied cluster of companies (in Samara city on Volga river, where it is also designed and upgraded). Admittedly these results came after half a century of incremental improvements - but it's interesting to compare SpaceX results with some other offerings.
I think that's a bit of an over generalization. I find many of its buildings quite breathtaking:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Center_for_the_Performi...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/240_Centre_Street
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Farley_Post_Office
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alwyn_Court
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_U.S._Custom_...

Yeah, I might have to agree that American art and beauty might not best be showcased at liquor stores but lets not use that brush to paint the rest of the country.
Having managed a VPS yourself is very useful (fun, I think, and definitely educational), and takes you a long way in realizing more of what it takes to put up a website, and makes you a better developer I think.

It's not that the web apps CAN'T be run on regular hosting, but when you try and do more and more ambitious things with the sites you build, you will need/want the control (even if you scale back later when you realize you don't need it).

For example, if you wanted to try using some new database or ORM to build a project, your hosted option might not support it (yet).
Lucasfilm is Disney now, right?

I don't think Disney would know a "playful homage" if they read it in a book of traditional fairy tales.
I think HN should add a new item in the menu on top: NEW | THREADS | COMMENTS | SHOW | ASK | JOBS | SUBMIT | STARFIGHTER-STUFF

:)
How much does a driver cost in the US? For well paid tech workers I'm wondering if it would be worth it to have a driver rather than spending X hours driving themselves.
It's only relatively recently that travelers could visit Myanmar (legally). For a very long time it was very much like North Korea - a hermit kingdom ruled by a brutal military junta under international sanctions and completely dependent on China.
dang, "reply" is not available for your reply to A07bei3s - I suggest it should, and not to start that conversation (agree it should be done separately), but in case someone would like to reply to you.
> Move Fast and Break Things

Funny, but it raises a concern: You can't take that approach to White House IT. If something breaks, the consequence isn't that users' feeds of vacation photos malfunction; instead people die, nuclear codes leak, etc.
If you listen to his interviews, he qualifies most of his statements, certainly more than 90% of the professional business BSers I know. Definitely he qualifies and hesitates much more than most CEOs, that's probably why people emotionally invest in his statements, they trust he at least performed some critical analysis before spitting out the conclusion or tweet.
If one is making those comments about homogeneity and sophistication, it's always interesting to look at small but diverse Singapore.
Impressive PR machine, yes. However, von Braun reportedly said "Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell - and advertise" so underscoring the importance of PR.

We need to judge both by PR and actual performance. So far there is plenty of both to talk about.
Chromium Issue 67587: Add ToBlob to Canvas Element (WontFix)
On that note I'm going to ask specific question. What kind of VPS set-up would I need to comfortably run 3-4 very small websites and still have a little headroom for experimenting with web apps etc.?

The reason I'm asking is I'm thinking of getting rid of web hosting and put everything on VPS.
Thank you for your input, but 1. this is not a random link, 2. the explanation is all inside the link i posted, so why to be redundant? anyways, if i didn't care for a discussion i wouldn't post it at the first place and i wouldn't later ask why was i downvoted, thank you again for your opinion lucaspiller.
Okay, supposing you've done that. How will this help people who are dying, supposing these people still exist?
Facebook Turns Messenger into a Platform
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay, which is a very well known text. It's freely available online at:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
How to Strike a Match: White String Similarity
Isn't this what CloudFlare has built a reputation for defending against?
I think that the comment was confusing not because of a positive/normative distinction, but because many economists would use the word rent only to refer to inefficiency. While patents are ex post inefficient since they grant a monopoly, they are ex ante efficient (in theory) because they provide incentives to discover new things.

It seems like a real stretch to call a drug company that researches a completely new drug and patents it "rent seeking", even if they can be said to enjoy "monopoly rents" ex post.
Tcl and Python
That's the easy way out.
Same number of crashes, but people can drive faster? That's a win in my book.
What's funny is that I have come across small shopping places, not quite large enough to be called centers, which only allow the old-style carved in wood, probably with a precision router, but non the less, only visible with the aid of daylight and at night focused lights. Depending on lighting conditions, and the contrast, they can be hard to read.

That appears to signal 'upscale' and cachet, I guess, as I have mostly seen it in tony areas.

As for LED vs Neon, I think it all depends on the design and how well it fits in to the design of the rest of the business.

If it's simply for utilitarian purposes, like say a dry cleaner's, all you need to know is that they are open or closed. Aesthetics, don't come much into play, except for the new 'green' dry cleaning, so i suppose LEDs would reflect conservation a little better.

Anyhow, I think one's preference for signage depends on your exposure. If Neon signs remind you of Bail Bonds, dodgy motels and other peripheral businesses, you'll probably think they are tacky. If instead they recall a great BBQ joint or sushi bar, you probably have a favorable view of them. Same for the other signage technologies.
Why can't you go around Myanmar (China -> Laos -> Thailand)?
Antitrust laws are couched in vague undefinable terms and do not define what is "monopolistic" in advance. Any and all business can be considered monopolistic under antitrust law. Rulings are ex post facto. No business can know whether they have committed a crime or not, and will never know, until government decides to bring a case.

It is vain, however, to call simply for clearer statutory definitions of monopolistic practice. For the vagueness of the law results from the impossibility of laying down a cogent definition of monopoly on the market. Hence the chaotic shift of the government from one unjustifiable criterion of monopoly to another: size of firm, "closeness" of substitutes, charging a price "too high" or "too low" or the same as a competitor, merging that "substantially lessens competition," etc.
Alas, our style guide insists on final variables...
Exercise. Walking. Biking. Lifting.

And sometimes overeating and then sleeping all day.
I thought http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-price-la-approaches-robocar-chea... was interesting in that light. In short: as the cost of a ride approaches the cost of operating a privately-owned vehicle, it approximates owning a driverless car.
Musk: Tesla car is ‘sophisticated computer on wheels'
Could analog computing accelerate complex computer simulations?
I actually asked this same question to their support team and was told full iOS 8 compatibility is coming later this year. No hard timelines yet though.
Did you actually confirm that by going there?

I ask because what you describe is pretty much how the international media described Fiji in the aftermath of the 2006 coup. Meanwhile it was business as usual in Fiji, with tens of thousands of tourists enjoying their holidays without obstruction, and citizens working and partying just as they were doing prior.

When it comes to describing regimes/countries that don't fit the Western democratic ideal, you simply can't trust the international media to give you a fair picture of life on the ground.
A Rabbi, Three Sums, and Three Problems [pdf]
Richard Branson hints at Virgin electric cars to rival Tesla
Terlelap, Rumah Wartawan Disatroni Pencuri
I'm not into the history of signs or placards at all, and I still thought that museum was superb. I took the guided tour with Tod himself. His enthusiasm for signage made the whole thing all the more interesting.
My comment from a few months ago might interest you then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8307584
The default debian droplet configuration is to use Digital Ocean's mirror for the main archive where delay doesn't really matter, and security.debian.org for security updates. That is exactly how you want to be configured.
From some people I know and even have consulted for, who have applied (and not been accepted), there seem to be many who do it for the status. They went to a prestigious school, they don't like the idea of doing something which isn't successful yet (starting a startup) without a bestowal of a mark of prestige that they can refer others to... I.e. hedging against being viewed as unimportant or a failure, as that would rock their identity too much.

(This radar often goes off when I hear someone refer to YCombinator as 'the Harvard of Incubators.')

I think to be a great founder you have to not only know how to handle failure, but to also be OK with everyone dismissing your venture as a failure, as something even laughable.
How can Google index content it can't scrape?

It doesn't seem anticompetitive to me - it seems like common sense.
Apps are a temporary state of affairs (but isn't everything these days?). In a few generations, your phone will be little more than a terminal that connects to your personal virtual machine hosted on Apple/AWS/Google servers. This VM will run the respective company's OS as well as its native apps. These apps will be unrecognizably more powerful than the ones currently on your phone, and your phone itself will be significantly lighter and more efficient (and, yes, probably wearable).

Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual spaces will have private and public modes.

The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to 'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.
Excerpts from FTC Google Report
It's not likely that this "autopilot mode" is close to the state of the art. See for example what kind of technique Audi has put into their prototype A7:

http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1029470_autonomous-audi-a...

I can't believe Tesla has all these sensor already build in.

Plus Audi, Mercedes, etc. have all enormous experience in vehicle dynamics, which is critical in handeling automatic reactions like full braking and sudden fast steering at higher speeds.

The critical part is what does so car do if it requests driver interaction but the driver does not response. Brake? On a highway?

Autopilot will come, but not in the three month. That's just hilarious.
Defining “Meaningful Human Control” Over Autonomous Weapons
We’re Not Ready for the Next Epidemic
And a solar energy company. Well technically he helped his cousins start it and serves as the company's Chairman[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
But it's not a natural monopoly. I know because I have three high speed ISP options at home: cable, fiber and (decent) DSL.

Three providers would be unthinkable for a true natural monopoly, like roads or water.
Similar questions apply to cars, and arguable to any automous decision-making systems.
Exaggeration? Small jobs are everywhere (washing dishes, hauling, yard work) that put off starvation. That means you can take a (little) while to decide on a job, and reject jobs that don't appeal. Its not "take the 1st job you find or die".
To me it sounds like Google wanted to scrape the content and re-present it in search results (i.e. "Zappy's Pizza Place ★★★") meaning people didn't have to click through to the sites.
There are a lot of LEDs that have controllers embedded like the WS2812.
The ones most people buy from Sam's club [1] look a lot better than the samples he shows in the article (and look better in real life than on the Sam's Club site). I had one of these in my store, and the fake neon actually looked pretty good. And it had the handy feature of telling customers when the store was open.

http://www.samsclub.com/sams/double-stroke-open-sign-super-b...
Probably missed TFA entirely. This is not about what McConnell thought, nor is the Wikipedia version the state of the art of that research.
Are couples so egotistical that they can only imagine having a kid that is genetically theirs? If you want to delay family life and work on your career, why is it not an obvious option to adopt when you're ready?

Also, I do think companies need to start offering 6-month packages for parents, both the father and mother. There's too much wealth floating around for this to still not be a thing.
I was in Yangon (Rangoon) last weekend - it was nothing like what I've read about Naypyidaw (didn't have the chance to go). So I would recommend not using this to stereotype the entire country.

Yangon was beautiful, and ridiculously crowded. It honestly felt like a version of Delhi, down to the horrific traffic. Most impressive was that any sort of data was unavailable on AT&T roaming, but there I was standing at the [real] Shwedagon Pagoda, in a country that hadn't been open to the world until a few years ago, and I had an abundance of free wi-fi to check in to Facebook.
Idunno... its a matter of opinion I suppose. But a drag and drop editor is just foolish, and they have never worked well. Here's how you adjust kerning:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7370013/how-to-set-kernin...

They really should have woken up and done a nice markup language and a styling language to go with it a very long time ago.
Haven't seen it, but a large switch can be for implementing a state machine. Which is a good structure to put a whole lot of application code in. You can tell if all the states and events are handled; you can find exactly where code for a state transition lies.
Do PhD students have written exams? I thought they did research and wrote papers? How can you write an exam to test a PhD student when they are the ones coming up with the knowledge in the area?
I'm looking forward to summoning my self-driving car from my Apple Watch and living out my childhood Knight Rider fantasies. (I know, only on private property in the early stages -- but still, pretty darn cool.)
If they just scraped and indexed content, it'd be fine.

>According to the report, for one example, Google took content from companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Amazon. In the latter case, Google lifted product rankings and placed them in their own search results for those products. When the companies complained to Google about the process, Google threatened to remove them entirely from results.

That sounds pretty bad, if accurate.
Hm... this was posted on hn a while back, but didn't receive any comments. An implantation of part of the libtls (client) api by piping to the tls implementation in go's standard lib. If it really is this abstract, it should be possible to do this for both GnuTLS and NSS?:

http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/goreSSL
Definitely worth reading: The FTC report makes strong statements claiming anticompetitive, "unlawful" practices at Google.
An earlier boom in the 1880's was fuelled by the citrus industry and ended with the freezes of 1894/5. Tourism also played a role to such a degree that Roosevelt's Rough Riders were quartered at the Tamap Bay Hotel prior to the invasion of Cuba. That boom is what gave enough population density to run service as far down as places like Conway [or Orlando itself] by 1910.

The The Coconuts boom ended with the onset of the Great Depression...at least for those who believe it soft started with events like the Florida land crash and the Boll Weevil infestation across the South. Two post WWII booms were triggered by the wide spread availability of residential air conditioning and mortgage derivatives respectively.

https://www.floridamemory.com/photographiccollection/photo_e...
Pssst...memento mori. :)
Here's a thought: Just make society pay for the better, more expensive insulin for everyonen.

Oh wait, that would be the European / communist solution. Can't have that.
Its easy and inevitable. Better than a moratorium: an open database to help track what works and what doesn't, to help you decide.
A Dark Theme for Hipchat
How can you judge programming (not security) skill with a video game? I find it hard to believe that there's any way to gamify maintainability.
I'm not very familiar with this style of programming puzzle, but I wonder how this is less arbitrary than whiteboard coding topcoder or kaggle. I know people who were hired based on all of these, but the latter two are different from Starfighter in that they exist for their own reasons (competition for its own sake, and getting answers to data science questions) with providing a signal to employers being a side effect. I wonder if the selection bias in a system set up for the purpose of employment will be better or worse.
The Tesla Model S has forward-looking radar, ultrasonic sensors on all sides, and a forward-looking camera. That's marginally enough for automatic driving in routine freeway situations.
A game is by definition contrived, no?
Death, or rather the bits leading up to death, absolutely need to be redesigned. <it's personal> It's shouldn't take someone's death to advance a waiting list to get Medicaid to help pay for the proper care of someone with Dementia. </it's personal>

Proper care for the elderly can cost anywhere between $2000 and $6000 every month, depending on how much care they need. I can't think of a single self-funded retirement plan capable of paying out $72,000 a year for an unknowable number of years. This means the financial burden will be on their families.

Those without such money will become a burden on those families as they become more and more unable to care for themselves, and where improper care can result in tremendous pain from broken bones, infections, and open sores. If they're scheduled to die in the next few months, the families may be able to get some inexpensive care from hospice, which while a blessing, isn't free.[0]

Those without families, or those unable to navigate the complexities of Medicaid(!), are relegated to nursing homes and put in the care of overworked and underpaid orderlies.

Such is our fate, folks. We'll all die eventually, be it to accidents or old age. What life do you want to live when you reach that period of time in your life?

[0] Actually, that last bit isn't fair to Hospice. They take care of so many of the details surrounding a death at home, that they make a painful passing as simple as such a thing could ever be. Thanks for your work, folks. The passing of my grandfather-in-law would have been so much harder without your presence.
This looks good.

BTW -- I really liked the initial 7 steps -- convention over configuration of various things. But my heat sank once I selected a template and I found a fully configurable page. There's no way my mom would be able to use that (she would have gotten past the initial 7 steps).

Perhaps you want to add more steps, and ask for details lile: top level pages, would you like a contact form included someplace?, a map/location?, etc. You really could get more milage from the initial wizard, and automagically setup a site.

Good work so far!
Amazon drone trial gets US regulator approval
Ruby has put food on my table for the better part of the last fifteen years and there's a lot I love about the language. But it also feels increasingly unlikely that it will escape the Rails ecosystem to any significant extent. In the dynamic language space Javascript seems unstoppable and with the ES6 and ES7 features and vastly better performance I don't see much advantage in sticking with Ruby in the long run other than the excellent Gem ecosystem. And for larger codebases I think opt-in typing a-la Typescript is a huge win.

I'll always applaud creative projects like this but I'm not optimistic about the longer term health of Ruby at this point.
I think you may be underestimating the amount of neon signs in Norway!

It's no longer being used very much, but I can think of tons of signs in Oslo and in the industrial parks in the Oslo suburbs such as Lysaker and Sandvika, going back to the 1980s and up to recently and even today. You must have been to Karl Johans gate and Stortingsgata in Oslo? For many years had quite a lot of neon signs [1]. The big blue neon Aftenposten logo is still there [2], I believe, as is the old Freia logo above Egertorget [3]. Cinemas like Saga, Colosseum and Eldorado had neon logos until just a few years ago. Peppes pizza is another one. Tons of neon.

Small neon signs in shop windows (like beer or soda ads) like you often see in the U.S. are/were very uncommon, however. But those tacky animated LED "we're open" signs? Those are everywhere.

Finally, is neon itself tacky? I don't think it is at all [4].

[1] http://media.mediatemple.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/u...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/A%2FS+Stortingsgaten+28,+S...

[3] http://www.viewolux.com/img/s2/v1/p184160343-3.jpg

[4] http://www.elektrovakuum.no/wp-content/uploads/DSC7393_1280p...