skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the west coast, those cars run forever.

My old '89 Corolla has something like 350K miles on it. Runs great, drives great, 40 MPG, and it's got a throttle body fuel delivery too. Insane!

It's possible for a person to almost completely disassemble, understand and reassemble and modify a car from that era. People do it all the time.
It reminds me of the astounding naivete of Aaron Swartz's girlfriend (or whatever she was at the time) in talking to the FBI and then being surprised that they were just looking for shit to pile on him and nothing else.

Don't talk to the cops:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
When it comes to really supporting non-english languages well, you kinda do have to know gory details of Unicode. (I had to.) Otherwise, stuff will mysteriously not work, and you won't know what to do. OS X / Windows filenames will surprise you. Python on OS X / Windows will surprise you. Javascript will surprise you. URLs will surprise you. There's a lot of surprises in store.

If you have some real-time large-ish-data need, you'll need to evaluate your options based on how they manage concurrency and locking. You may even have to implement a custom cache or archive layer. (I had to.)

I'll admit, I haven't dealt with SVG rendering, and it wasn't important to any company I've worked for. In cases like that, you can say "whatever, fast enough on today's computers, this one doesn't work so I'll replace it with a png." But if you really need stuff to work right, if you want it done right, you don't have to do it all yourself, but you do have to understand it all yourself, otherwise you can't correctly choose and marshall the pieces that do it.

EDIT: I feel like adding an addendum: yes, the specific views described in OP are historic relics. Still... the number of levels that exist today between do-it-yourself c programming with an alternative/minimal libc, and a ruby/rails/activerecord/auth-gems/assets-gems project, is really amazing.
My point was that the quantity of the effect matters. If the science can't quantify how bad having a population of 150 is, then we can't say we understand things well enough to recommend "outbreeding", as the original post did.
My favourite part is how scrolling loops around - scrolling past the bottom takes you back to the top
Why do you think it can't be quantified?
I don't think it really applies in this case? It's pointing out a new scientific theory that raises a question. The author isn't poising a question him/herself
What makes "interesting projects" a good way to measure happiness? Within the workplace there must be many more factors that can influence happiness like relationships with coworkers and superiors, and then there's personal lives etc.

The world happiness reports come from the data in these surveys, they look at a lot of different things -

http://www.gallup.com/poll/105226/world-poll-methodology.asp...
It's possible just to enjoy the beauty of words, you know.
The existence of poor designers isn't a good reason to never design.

In fact, the more design you do, and the more you're exposed to, the better you can get at design. And the better the design, the easier it is to understand.

An "ugly generalized abstraction" is pretty much by definition not a good abstraction. Moreover, a good abstraction is simple. It's easy to understand and it's easy to manipulate. [1]

But you need to practice to get better, so it may take a few ugly monstrosities before you can start creating masterpieces.

[1] Granted 99% of the code I've encountered in Java qualifies as ugly abstractions; Java's nature seems to encourage poor abstractions. Or attract poor developers. Or both. But even in Java it's possible to create beautiful and easy to understand abstractions.
Just a bit of advice that app developers get asked to work for free on the next big idea a lot. Unless you can front up some cash then I think you will struggle to find someone.
relentless and very demanding (at least for me) and this course took my grade to abyss.
This article may help; http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/recalculating_space.html
Copyright law is there (in part) to encourage people to pay the legitimate copyright owner so that it can continue creating content.

If there is already no way to pay the legitimate copyright owner, the law is pointless. It's still illegal, but the reason for it being illegal is invalid. At that point it's not running a busy urban intersection, it's crossing at a 4-hour red light in the middle of nowhere at 2am with no cars around for miles.
"The information provided herein may be displayed and printed for your internal use only and may not reproduced, retransmitted, distributed, disseminated, sold, published, broadcast or circulated." That's a curious definition of "open."
I think it would be cool to study defect rates of a serious kernel implementation vs historic rates in linux and others.
If you let the Tor developers know about this, they can mark it as a BadExit.
I'm with Roger Bannister. It's inconceivable.

How could it possibly be true that in the 100 years between 1770 and 1870, the fastest milers lost a full 30 seconds (25% performance decrease)[1]? How could it be that men like Thomas Horspool[2] were widely recognized as champions and world record holders while running so much slower than amateurs from only half a century before?

Anyone who has trained seriously on the track would know the type of all-encompassing effort--nutrition, sleep, physical therapy, training--and modern science--VO2Max, heart rate, running economy [3]--that go into training for a four-minute mile. The idea that people were doing all of that in Britain in the 18th century is laughable.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/d3c109a21...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Horspool
[3] http://sportsscientists.com/2007/12/running-economy-part-i/
That's actually a really fantastic idea. Maybe even enough to break the priceline/expedia market grip and bring people right to the chains website.

Some marketer's boss is going to get a nice bonus for that "initiative".
I think the idea is, yeah, we can have untrustworthy exit nodes, but that's already anticipated as a potential threat so everyone should know better and use https as much as possible, among other means of encrypting exit data. Doesn't Tor at least try to encrypt even exit data as much as it can? Like the browser bundle even comes with https everywhere.
Who are the people in the dark corners?
Makes me want to be in school again. Wait... haven't finished grad school yet. Damn.
Which renders it all moot as the goal is to produce product that actually get used.

Fantasy products are impractical due to costs and generally a lot of other assumptions.

Toyota got known for cars that were good and cheap but not so fast in the 70's and 80's. Their cars quite simply did not break down.

Detroit made cars that were not as good, but were quite fast and comparable in price. Way different set of tradeoffs.

One was utilitarian and efficient and reasonably safe. The other was VROOM!

A look at the odometers from that period revealed very few manufacturers bothered with anything over 99,999 miles. Many American cars would not go that distance without requiring some very significant service, or encountering some critical failure. Timing belt, pump, etc...

The Toyota cars would go much longer times between failures, and those tradeoffs have played out in the market.

Today, big American cars aren't as cheap, they still are pretty fast, and pretty good. I've an SUV that's going to demonstrate a service life profile very similar to that old '89 Corolla, both of which I probably won't retire until 400K miles.

The vehicles are that good now.

So that triangle can bend, and it's not binary as others have mentioned. It's a continuum where a whole bunch of things are always moving and changing.

The other thing about time and money is how the markets play out. Sometimes it's good. Apple took that path a few times and ended up with nice margins and in some cases great share. In other cases, modest share, but margins that are worth it.

Fair enough.

Other times, being that late to market may well render the time and money expense moot as the use value is already being actualized in other products, leaving a superior entry with a saturated market that has very little incentive to purchase again.
Ask HN: Recommendations for Computer-Science Fiction?
In this recent post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447097), the author talks about CS works that seem so advanced as to be science fiction. The following quote comes up:

> This term stands in contrast to Computer-Science Fiction, which is indeed fiction about computer science.

Any recommendations for Computer-Science Fiction, that is, interesting, well-written fiction about CS? I'd love to read good fiction that tackles hard CS in an informed way.
CDMA, a radio interface used by some cellular carriers (e.g., Verizon Wireless and Sprint in the U.S.), is spread spectrum.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access
That fails to convey the "threat" that the authors are trying to highlight.

The goal here was to say: "The world is moving too fast for our pace of basic and applied sciences."
How do you implement "no really, this request should not return until the server has successfully completed external communication"?

You can do some sort of websocket-y mechanism to tell the client that the server has completed a previous request, or polling, but both of those bring a lot of infrastructure overhead.
http://gernot-heiser.org/OSHoF/
I wonder what became of the National Commission on Forensic Science[1] ?

[1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/new-commission...
Multithreading on a single CPU doesn't have parallelism. You are just switching between tasks very fast serially.

A multi-core CPU for all intents and purposes has multiple CPU's. For the discussion on concurrency and parallelism, the distinction is on one execution unit vs multiple execution units.
Even donation to charitable foundations is dubious to me. I have no idea where/what they are going to use the money, even though they promise on certain contribution. In personal opinion, instead of providing financial aids, i would say providing working opportunity is better for their future, as they will be more skillful and independent.
I've had one really fantastic engineering manager (miraculously my first solely programming role, wish I was still there), and I have yet to have another good engineering manager. The degree to which time was spent improving the product under the good manager was phenomenally higher under the good manager than the others. Granted this seems to be rare but a good tech manager can deliver crazy outsized returns on the line developers and also make their days easier.
Beggars can't be choosers - literally.
You may already know, but in case you don't:

Tor exit nodes get access to:

1) The network traffic that they've been asked to proxy.

2) The IP address of the previous hop in the Tor network that relayed that traffic to them.

IIRC, Tor currently runs a regular request through an entry node, a -er- middle node, and an exit node.
Let me put it another way: Can you or anyone else provide scientific studies that would directly back the claim

The level of inbreeding on that island is quite scary. Although if they purged a lot of the deleterious alleles from the population, if they outbred with others, they could produce much healthier offspring and a lower likelihood of various genetic ailments.

And not the general statements that have been made in this thread, but something that would pin down a specific numeric relationship between population size in humans, and health.

EDIT: and for reference, the prevalence of Asthma may be purely due to the founder effect, not an effect of inbreeding per se. Two or three of the original settlers suffered from asthma[0].

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.1974....
I found it easier, for some reason, to just subtract 7, 14, 21, 28… from 100.
http://www.skepticnorth.com/2010/11/levitt-and-lai-peddling-...

There are a lot of papers which have failed to reproduce these effects. Granted fractal antennas are weird in and of themselves but cellular ones fail to pass the sniff test.
some hotels actually offer free minibar services now. They figure it's a nice addition to the customer experience as it differentiates themselves away from the competitors so much.

I've experienced this in the Galaxy hotel, Macau
I feel like there's a lot of negativity with the way that hotels handle their mini bars. but not all are bad! During checkin while I was at the Galaxy hotel, Macau, the concierge informed me that all items in the minibar are free.

They figure it's a nice addition to the customer experience as it differentiates themselves away from the competitors so much.
Project Takeover Blues Part 3: Psychological Attrition
Show HN: A CLI tool to update package.json's dependencies, and show changelogs
It seems to me like you burned bridges for the sake of it or to get more income, is that true?
Plants have also survived for hundreds of millions of years with no brains.
FatNav – Fullscreen Menu with Hamburger Toggle
Thanks for the kind words and feedback! I'll try and make the rows more static for some of the lessons -- it's tricky because I feel like the responsive interactivity is important when learning to write queries, but it just might not make sense for some of the lessons (like the update, as you mentioned). Really appreciate the feedback!
That's not completely accurate. If you consider the water to also be the antenna things are much more complicated.

The ocean blocks radio waves because it is much much larger than them. A small (very small) ocean would act like an antenna, not an insulator.
Which is a fair point, but NETFLIX KNOWS WHAT I'VE WATCHED.

They even added profile selection so different individuals using the same account get a better user experience.

Watching a show at a friend's house (and thus on their account) should be considered the degenerate case. LIFO order also has the added problem of showing screenshots for the latest episode which may contain spoilers.

Even if the service (Hulu) doesn't require users to login, cookies can still be used to track which episodes have been watched.
> it can lead to race conditions like double purchases

"Let's return as soon as possible rather than blocking" is not the real way to handle race conditions. All you are doing is reducing the surface (time) that such a thing can happen in. It makes more sense to plan these things out using something else (e.g. locking).
Good luck keeping your domain name.
Yes, I half expect to see something like:

//Not sure what this line of code does, but if you
//delete it, you'll break the whole application

in a bill one day.
6 Best Code Editors for Real Time Collaboration
Excerpt from Stephen King's "Hearts in Atlantis":

[After talking on the books with good story but not good writing, and the ones with good writing but not good story] "Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words---the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
I didn't know that. Thank you.

I was under the impression that all traffic was encrypted. It sounds like that's up to the users; they can encrypt their traffic, but they aren't required to. Of course, failing to encrypt illegal traffic would be as boneheaded as sending a ransom note on a post card, with a correct return address.
When I can, I buy them some juice or food but in most cases I say that I don't have anything to give them. The worst thing you can do to a homeless person is ignore them. It makes them feel invisible and unwanted - think of how you feel whenever you're ignored. Now imagine that rejection of comes after you ask for things as simple and essential as nourishment or shelter. If you don't have anything to offer, a simple "I'm sorry sir/miss" should do. It acknowledges their presence and their humanity and in doing that you've done more than most.
I looked into the quote from Pascal. It turns out to be from his "Pensées" (Thoughts). In the original French, the passage in question reads:

> Quand je m'y suis mis quelquefois à considérer les diverses agitations des hommes, et les périls, et les peines où ils s'exposent dans la Cour, dans la guerre d'où naissent tant de querelles, de passions, d'entreprises hardies et souvent mauvaises, etc., j'ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.

One English translation (http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-...) renders this as follows:

> When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

I think I would translate that last bit as "... I have often said that all the unhappiness of men derives from just one thing: not knowing how to sit still in a room."
I never got a chance to take the Systems Programming or OS Dev courses while in school- does anyone know of any online courses (or textbooks) that, by the end of it, will have you with a working toy OS through the exercises?
Whether or not 9/11 was a priori suspicious is irrelevant. It's not September 12, 2001, it's nearly 15 years later and the investigations are long-finished and utterly conclusive.
One of the things on my wishlist is to make open source JITs compliant with the Windows x64 ABI.
YAGNI doesn't say to avoid using a general purpose framework, it says that writing one to solve the problem at hand is usually a bad idea.
You're doing a disservice to yourself and the people who have to work on (or more likely fix) your code by having this attitude. Plenty of people are capable of producing great work and still spending the time to actually understand the systems they are working on.

There aren't that many giants; there are a lot of people with a few years of experience that think/claim they're giants.
Sure, with infinite time and infinite money you could make a perfect car. But even if you think Toyota has infinite money, they definitely don't have infinite time.

Time is a cardinal constraint. Money can buy time, but only so much.
Do you think this is an effective teaching style?
Oh man, that word 'design'. You have a problem and you think, "I should design a good solution." Now you have two problems.

I was deliberately avoiding the d-word because it is vague enough that I'm not sure there's anything useful around there. The good designers are all good at designing within some domain. Jonathan Ivy, Christopher Alexander, Ralph Lauren, they all had their specialty. You wouldn't ask Ralph Lauren to design a rocket ship. Software is even wider a set of domains than meatspace. So I'm not sure you get better at design by 'practicing design'. That's just a set of vague words like 'simple', 'good', 'beautiful', 'abstraction', 'decoupled', 'coherent', 'cohesive', etc., etc. I think you get better at design by better understanding a domain. You get better at design by avoiding premature design.
Your mom's a hologram.
> not going to outcompete free & easy.

The ease of setting up the TV in my living room to watch Netflix far outcompetes the difficulty of setting up a whole system that involves Plex and bittorrent/direct-dl, especially for someone non-technical that just wants to buy a box from Best Buy that "just works".
Polling is super easy. It's just one more API endpoint.
Empirical sciences are based upon this, you can only prove theories to be false and you do that by demonstrating a contradiction regarding its predictions and the observations.
You have a choice to go to a trade school instead of a college.

But why not try to learn something new? Engineering may be fun, but it won't put you in touch with humanity, if that's all you ever study. You may regret that in 60 years or so.
The comparisons to Galton's studies were dominated by selection biases. They're not indicative of much of anything in particular, except perhaps how not to do this kind of research.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/22/the-wisdom-of-the-ancie...
The Royal Australian Navy does this too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Stirling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Albatross_%28air_station%2...
Abstractions that never leak are extremely rare. Because of this, trying to write a general purpose abstraction is very hard. A special purpose abstraction only needs to not leak for its intended purpose which is a lot easier to get right.
Blocking is even easier, it's zero more endpoints.
Consider that in those times a large fraction of the population engaged in very hard labor since they could walk, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. Is it inconceivable that in such a large group of people, there might be some athletes comparable to today's? I wouldn't be quick to dismiss it.
> Mozilla must walk a narrow line between protecting user privacy and angering publishers such that they block Firefox users.

No. Either Mozilla makes a browser for its users, or it makes a privacy invasion tool for its funders. Please choose.
Is the Apple Watch Worth It? – WSJ
His book, Outposts, is a really decent read. Not as good as his original bestseller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outposts:_Journeys_to_the_Survi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_of_Crowthorne
I interpret this filing as Overstock initiating a dialogue with the SEC about whether the SEC will authorise the issuance of securities that will be traded on an alternative trading system[1] (as opposed to a traditional stock exchange like NASDAQ) and whose ownership will be recorded on a blockchain[2] (as opposed to a traditional, centralised clearing and settlement process, such as the Depository Trust Company).

The reason they haven't specified whether it will be debt or equity is because they have opted to list all the possible types of securities (six in total), presumably to see what the SEC's reaction is.

Basically, they're asking for permission to do everything, to see what the SEC's response is. If the SEC approves the application, happy days! However, it's far more likely that there will be a lot of back-and-forth before the SEC makes a decision.

To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has formally filed to get SEC approval for crypto-issuance of securities. IANAL but I would expect that the SEC's response will set a de facto precedent (but not a de jure one). In other words (and at the risk of adding a bit of hype), this could be a small but significant step towards reshaping our financial system and reducing the power of Wall Street.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_trading_system

2: Or, as Overstock describes them, "digital securities, meaning the securities will be uncertificated securities, the ownership and transfer of which are recorded on a cryptographically-secured distributed ledger system using technology similar to (or the same as) the distributed ledger technology used for trading digital currencies".
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6717/abs/397344a0...

Rougly 1.5 new deleterious mutations per diploid genome per generation. If you have closely related individuals having children, there is a greater chance that the deleterious mutations will overlap.
At least the headline wasn't, "He started SpaceX. What he did next made me want do dance."
0.0.21.24 is an invalid address.