skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> their clients are people: businesses, organizations, and individuals with a stake in the society.

Protip: no matter what Romney says, corporations are not people. Having started a number of companies, and having also met a few people, I am quite sure they are different. Only one of them is supposed to be running the government.

> But someone has to present to the legislators the impact a proposal will have on various stakeholders

If only there were some organization that could do that. Maybe we could call it the Congressional Budget Office or the Congressional Research Service. Maybe legislators could have aides who specialize in particular areas. Or heck, maybe our legislators could find some way to hear what knowledgeable people say. Like they could invite experts to come by and hear what they have to say. We could call it a hear-ing.

> But who attacks the evidence of the faceless unelected technocrat?

Everybody. Which is basically what happens now. Also, I am no expert, but I am pretty sure that most legislative aides and researchers have faces.

>Companies like Google merely have money [...] It's a huge credit of the lobbying system that such companies can have as much influence over government as they do.

Absolutely. Thank god money can have incredible influence. Lord knows what would happen if the power were actually held by the people. Cats and dogs sleeping together, I'm sure. It'd be anarchy.
Ideally, shouldn't there be multiple unions within a workforce, to compete with each other, just as there are multiple corporations?
No, Singapore's approach is fundamentally different. Singapore does not tolerate "poor immigrants": instead, it imports a vast menial labor class, who are tied to their employers on fixed-length contracts that amount to somewhere between indentured servitude and slavery.

Some all-too-typical stories: http://twc2.org.sg/
It's fascinating. Corporations and rich owners of industry already have bargaining power by... being big and having money. There's a lot of wiggle room for abuse of power and influence while staying within the confines of the law. And if they don't want to stay within the confines of the law, they have more resources and means to evade it.

But suggest that common workers should have some collective bargaining power and people are all afraid of them going too far and abusing their power. I guess they're afraid that they will have to pay 10 cents more for their coffee at Starbucks because of some greedy barrista union. The common worker banding together like that, that's too dangerous! Better have everyman and woman to themselves, and trust corporations, rich people and politicians to do the right thing.
Is This Ex-Googler’s Pre-Product Approach the Fast Track to Product-Market Fit?
> I assume there's some level of pain that you would prefer to the specks; say a single second of torture, equivalent to a smack or such.

Quite possibly I prefer a world with one person tortured for a lifetime compared to 3|||3 specks if they are evaluated out of context. It's hard to say, because pain doesn't easily sum, there are different qualities of pain, and we are talking about situations where we may be losing an entire persons contribution to humanity. I just don't think any of this is relevant to the conversation, or to the reason that so many people find your conclusion unpalatable - and it's nothing to do with not understanding large numbers.

In the case that they are evaluated in the context of a choice between one of those worlds or the other world, I would take into account what I believe to be the value that the individuals involved would place on the worlds were they to know the details and have minimal moral standards like mine.

Let me phrase it another way:

What would you say the utility of a world where there are 3|||3 people with specks who chose it gladly and voluntarily to save someone from torture is?

Let's say you tell those 3|||3 who wanted to save someone from torture by accepting a speck in their eye that they cannot, and someone must be tortured instead. You've massively increased the unhappiness in the world - not only is an individual getting tortured, but 3|||3 have ended up with a situation that's worse than they wanted. Are you going to claim that it's still got a higher utility? Now that you notice that you're making those 3|||3 unhappy by the choice, you can see that the disutility scales with the number of people - that's why the number of people becomes irrelevant.

> Imagine instead of dust specks, we want everyone to donate a dollar to save the person from torture. Are you really going to say that we should be spending unbounded amounts of money (3|||3) to save anyone from torture?

Your phrasing is unnecessarily emotive here. You seem to be saying that 3|||3 dollars is an awful lot of dollars without giving me any context about what fraction of the dollars belonging to those 3|||3 people those 3|||3 dollars are or what else they could/should be spending it on. If it's a negligible fraction that scales, and I could plausibly think that any sane person should donate that fraction of their money to save a person from torture then yes. You'll notice that when it's phrased like that it does not require that I donate all the money I could get to prevent torture. I in fact do donate a small amount of money regularly to prevent torture, but I would demand much less of the 3|||3.
Fractal trees are not "LSM-trees, but better." Fractal trees are more read-optimized, whereas LSM-trees are more write-optimized.

A fully compacted LSM-tree should be equivalent to a b-tree in terms of read performance. However I don't think any existing implementations are anywhere near that.

I appreciate TokuTek's work in this area but their marketing should be taken with a grain of salt. They've published some stupid stuff before (look at the graph here[1] and tell me how to make something just like a b-tree, but faster).

[1] http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/write-optimization-myths-comp...
I recently learnt that Kuan Yew fought desperately against the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. At the time, he didn't believe Singapore was viable as an independent state.

"Every time we look back on this moment when we signed this agreement which severed Singapore from Malaysia, it will be a moment of anguish. For me it is a moment of anguish because all my life ... you see, the whole of my adult life ... I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories. You know that we, as a people are connected by geography, economics, by ties of kinship..."

Quote taken from transcript of a press conference given by LKY on August 9th, 1965 [1]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140809182331/http://www.nas.gov...
My God the blinking cursor on that page (search box) is driving me MAD.
Genuine question: how is it possible that a union couldn't arrange an election once a year? Over here they can do it, and routinely do it annually or bi-annually (mine does bi-annual).
There is bad judgment, and then there is bad judgment that results in lost limbs and death.

While it is arguable that this process will likely just add 1 more needless death to the ever-increasing pile and waste whatever potential was in fact left for redemption in this one person's life.

EDIT: Someone deleted/flagged the comment. I am not a fan of censorship (at nearly any cost), so what I was responding to basically said: If this was done in Europe, this misguided man would serve a few years and then get on with his life.
Jean-Claude Biver Provides (Some) Details on TAG Heuer's Smart Watch
Could also have had a seizure and not recognized the signs. They definitely screw with your memory, and sleep deprivation can sometimes be a trigger.
Capture setup looks similar to this (from photographer's website): capture setup: http://www.astrophoto.fr/ISS_ATV5_passage_telescope.jpg
Business Angel?
NASA's New X-Plane Design Has 18 Engines, Pencils for Wings
My impression is that Canada does not have such a culture of overwork and that it is not dominated by Puritan ethics.

Tech, however, and games in particular, do have that kind of overwork culture; but they have it everywhere in the world. Reasons include high potential reward, constant change, unpredictability of results, and relatively young workforce. Nothing to do with unions, Puritanism or the like, really. And that culture is indeed destructive for many people, but we only get to hear from the survivors (among which I count myself)
Annotating the web: my new job
Gerrit, a Git server with code review, lets users write custom submit-rules with Prolog:
https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/prolog-...

Shawn Pearce, the author of Gerrit, explains why he thinks Prolog is well suited for this:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/repo-discuss/wJxTGhlHZ...
Ok, this is really obscure but thanks for the clarification :)
Singapore is in for some seriously interesting times. Lee Kuan Yew did a masterful job of getting Singapore up to speed after independence, but like so many leaders over-identified with their nation, he overstayed his welcome. The Lee family's tentacles are firmly entrenched in the politics and businesses of Singapore, and while I hope they will have the common sense to tolerate the inevitable rise of the opposition -- which is already occurring, despite the steep odds stacked against them -- I'm afraid they're much more likely to lurch into outright dictatorship and fulfill Lee's own prediction:

"if there is a freak result [and the opposition wins], within two or three years, the army would have to come in and stop it”
http://leewatch.info/quotes/

That date is not far off: Singapore's next general election must be held by January 2017, and the opposition is all but guaranteed to take a sizable portion of seats. Thanks to Singapore's first-past-the-post politics, if they grow from the current 40% to tip over 50%, they'll suddenly have an unassailable majority... and what then?

I'll give the final word to Lee's last standing arch-enemy, Chee Soon Juan:

“Why is he still so afraid? I honestly think that through the years he has accumulated enough skeletons in his closet that he knows that when he is gone, his son [Lee Hsien Loong, the current Prime Minister] and the generations after him will have a price to pay. If we had parliamentary debates where the opposition could pry and ask questions, I think he is actually afraid of something like that. ...

Mr Lee Kuan Yew fights all his demons within himself to try to shore up his reputation. In the process, however, he destroys the very legacy that he so desperately desires to establish.”

– Chee Soon Juan, Secretary-General of the Singapore Democratic Party
A Tale of Money, Sex and Power. Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher Affair (2012)
HN is nothing compared to reddit when it comes to this phenomenon. I come here to get away from the crazy. And then I go back to reddit when I run out of content here.
It's not hard if you use GMP.
It was not deleted it was flagged by insecure clowns. He has forfeited his life, too bad better luck next time. Anyone thinking the US will ever be soft like Europe should pay attention to Tsarnaevs fate.
Applecare for notebooks does not cover accidental damage
Yea $40 is too much--at least for me. What I find weird about reading HN links is many times I get to the meat of the story by reading the free comments?

Actually, I think the free comments are what make HN great?
Piracetam, matcha, 5HE, dark chocolate. AT9PUiYE1X8FPWLUmo8aZKT7o7pS4Mmc4g
Their economic production is quite remarkable.

Circa 2001 their GDP per capita was 1/3 lower than Japan, and about 1/5 lower than Hong Kong. They suffered a decade of stagnation from the early 1990s until 2003. They've been on a tear ever since, with GDP per capita now 45% higher than Japan and Hong Kong. Quite a jump in just 13 or 14 years.

Likely within another few years they'll pass Malaysia in GDP, with Malaysia having six times the population.
It's not clear to me what you're looking for. Most monitoring systems log to a general purpose database, so can't you query against that database when you want to analyze your data?

I admit I do very little systems/network administration work, so maybe there's something I'm missing.
> I've looked into writing a library for parametric modelling in Python, but then I realized that you probably need to be a PhD in geometry to write a correct implementation with reasonable speed....

Well, here's a video of sympy + OpenCASCADE for parametric modeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUCv7COgzU0&t=25s but see also my other comment for my thoughts regarding OpenCASCADE..
The related patents:

http://www.google.com/patents/US8185551
http://www.google.com/patents/US8489638
C++ is well-understood? I don't get that impression from people who know it.
Do you actually believe that someone like Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise is going to have the Screen Actors Guild negotiate their salary? No, SAG just sets a scale and people can be paid more than scale. The same goes for the various sports leagues where all the players are members of an a players' association of some sort. This sort of arrangement could very well work for developers.
Do you mean if you already have a paid Mac / iOS developer account? That's the only way I've seen that provides the ability to sign an app.
I think the bigger problem is that we manufacture many more guns than we can use, which is basically tacit support for the guns for drug trade.
The last line sounds painfully familiar.
New South Wales, where this election is being conducted, does actually need a slightly more complex UI: it uses "optional preferential voting", requiring voters to number the candidates in order of preference from 1, stopping at any point after that. (The upper house ballot also has the option of numbering either the group boxes above the line, or the individual candidate boxes below).

Not that that requires Javascript, either.
I've used it as the basis for a rules based heads up no limit poker agent (game logic is also implemented in Prolog, GUI is Java/JS...needs a major rewrite though). Constraint satisfaction programming is pretty helpful.

It's mostly a rather simple agent but I'm currently working on a DSL to codify strategies more easily. I'm fully aware a rules based agent will never be strong but I'm mostly interested in figuring out how well experts can codify their strategies and if you can make them comparable (also looking into inductive reasoning and datamining strategy rules from sufficient hand samples of winning online players)

Mostly a toy project these days :)

[Edit: I'm actually going to rewrite it because it used Sicstus and I want to use an open implementation so I'll switch to SWI + while I'm at it I'll drop the Java stuff and go full JS/HTML. Pengines looks pretty good: http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/package/pengines.html]
Definitely not me (and my ~$100,000 in student loans)...

He does quality assurance for a small business and handles other IT stuff. He loves digging around and finding bugs, and will also contributes to Gentoo. A fair number of the blogs he writes end up on the front page of HN, so you've probably read stuff by him.
> The biggest problem I have with all open source 3D CAD systems are the lack of parametric modeling.

I remember doing that in FreeCAD. Maybe I didn't get all the intrincacies and you mean something bigger than what I tried, but there was definitely a constraint system.

EDIT: Found a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY_GGTa9-mU Is this what you mean?
> (this might not always be the case if 'fastboot' or similar features are enabled.)

I haven't seen a computer or laptop with fastboot disabled in over a decade...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-cap...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk

The above two links go to the same essay by author of "The Wire" David Simon in written and video forms. He discusses specifically the problem of unions... and the problem of capital. If you have the time, please watch and/or read this essay.

A very, very brief summary:

Unions are absolutely necessary, but not because of some specific feature they might achieve. Instead, they are a check on capital. (and vice versa). Similar to our "adversarial" judicial system - where each side is expected to fight hard for their own interests - it is the struggle between labor and capital that produces a working economy. If either side actually gets what they want, the system becomes pathological.

So yes, unions are an inefficiency. That was the intended effect. There is a lot of hostility in this very thread to the idea that "those people" - in this case, "people I see as 'lower-quality engineers'" - might be getting something they "don't deserve". Or the fear might be that helping the bottom end would require taking from someone else, as if the economy was some zero-sum game. Yes, some amount of those effect was the goal.

The alternative that says some variation of "fsck you, I've got mine" may betray a lack of empathy in the speaker, but in most cases I suspect it betrays a belief in one of our most damaging cultural myths: the "just world" fallacy we call the "free market".

The question isn't really about unions. Instead, the question to ask yourself is "are we in this together?" Do you want a society with a functioning economy or not? Or do you want to let us continue our slide back into feudalism... and probably some sort of violent rebellion in the long run.

To make society work, it might require occasionally helping those that are less fortunate. Just like we do with "taxes" and "health insurance". Forming a union and participating in it might be one of the ways you can provide input on how these issues should be managed.
AFAIK FreeCAD has a 2D constraint system. I need a 3D one to really work efficiently.
Health Records Breaches: Why Everyone Should Be Concerned
I agree, as the only Canadian city west of the Rockies Vancouver employers seem to think they don't need to compete with Toronto/Montreal/Calgary pay. And to a certain extent they're right. But with more and more US firms hiring Canadians on TN visas, the new competition is Seattle/SF.
Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb
I'm not afraid of airplanes because I don't believe physics or aerodynamics.

I'm afraid of airplanes because I'm afraid of computer programmers.
"10,000 year old stone tools found in Redmond" doesn't sound as good. They were probably just used by ancient Microsoft programmers in building a very early version of Windows, which is why this is on Hackernews at all.
StatusPage.io (YC S13) is hiring dev #3 (Denver, CO)
Are you really saying that the Talmud is comparable to the Odyssey, but not to Plato? I'd expect, since you're talking about a philosophical tradition, that the reverse would be more accurate. Philosophical commentary abounds in the Greek tradition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_Plato

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_Aristotle

Commentaries were also written on Homer, but as the Iliad and the Odyssey are literary rather than philosophical works the commentary takes a different form. Here are a few selections from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_scholarship#Classical_... :

> Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the "Poetics", with regard to the difficulty with some of his language. Aristotle’s main study of Homer did not survive. It is listed in Diogenes Laertius' "Life of Aristotle" as "Six books of Homeric problems."

> Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but the development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals: (1) Analyzing internal inconsistencies within the epics; (2) Producing editions of the epics' authentic text, free of interpolations and errors; [and] (3) Interpretation: both explaining archaic words, and exegetical interpretation of the epics as literature.

> there was also a fashion for allegory, especially among the Stoics. The most notable passage is a scholion on Iliad 20.67, which gives an extended allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods, explaining each god as symbolic of various elements and principles in conflict with one another, e.g., Apollo is opposed to Poseidon because fire is opposed to water.
Yes, It's All Text is great.

A note for anyone using Firefox with Electrolysis (a.k.a e10s or content processes) enabled, e.g. Nightly users: It's All Text is partially busted in that case. E.g. see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042965#c2. It's still usable, though.
Block contention? You mean contention on the locks for individual nodes?
Richard Stallman was brought to UIUC on his birthday (coinciding with the Manifesto).

The talk was titled "Free Software and Your Freedom", which covers the GNU manifesto (more or less). There's also an interesting explanation of how Stallman he feels about open source, and linux (GNU/Linux).

https://www-s.acm.illinois.edu/stallman-uiuc-2015-03-16.webm

If you haven't heard him speak I recommend it... if not just for the awkward moments when he chomps on his doughnuts during the talk.
Yup. I thought about building something like it, and my sleeping habits are pretty bad.
Stock market simulation with cellular automata
Back in '91, there was a mini putsch by the TAs of Columbia GSAPP's CAD course. The existing course and supporting software were based on computational geometry and a scripting language to go with it. The new regime brought in Maya, et al. I think I was the only one who lamented and found it a step backwards..
I like it. It is a nice way to practice Haskell and see how much you can do without a reference.
It's not meant to be a comparison. I am simply asking why most of this thread is celebrating a man that created a police state that is the model for Asia.
I am in the market for a Linux developer's laptop. It looks like the System76 laptops have this beat.

Gazelle Professional:
15.6" matte display
2.8 Ghz quad core i7
16 GB RAM
250 GB SSD
Wireless AC
Price as configured above: $1477

The Pixel might have it beat in weight and battery life, but that's about it.
I'm a massive fan of this sort of 'large-scale micro' optimization. There's a big difference between premature optimization, and having heaps of little sticking points in your project.

One of my favorite examples is Ubuntu - they run their 'One Hundred Papercuts' program [1], which is about fixing and optimizing little things that on their own would never get fixed, but together they are more than the sum of their parts in terms of user experience.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts
What you are worth is not an absolute measure. You would be worth more if you had more power to negotiate your value.

If you have more power when you earn more and the people hiring you are incentivized to minimize your earnings, you create a down-ward spiral of value. Why'd you pick $50,000? If I make $40K and with a union I'd make $60K, then obviously I've lost negotiating power.