skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Catherine Austin Fitts has a happiness and social health measurement that she calls the "popsicle index". This a measure of how comfortable a parent is giving their child money to walk to a neighborhood store by themselves to buy a popsicle.

I would add a general "comfort index" of how people feel about the future. In the USA we have a strange situation. We have lots of raw materials, good education systems, and we are relatively geographically isolated. All nice advantages. Yet, we have very poor governance. A huge majority of our population does not trust Congress and the office of the President. Statistically, people respect our military and the Supreme Court and that is about it. Couple this with a general uneasy feeling about the future of the dollar vs. SDRs, etc. and lack of confidence our ability to be highly productive, and I would have to give my own country a mediocre "comfort index."
This would be a great time to change the HN title to match the link.
>They used two frameworks on top of JSF though.

The interview mentions OmniFaces and PrimeFaces. These are not frameworks on top of JSF.

PrimeFaces is a component library. The entire purpose of JSF was to make such libraries possible. It introduced a component model with exactly the intend that a marketplace of components would appear.

This indeed happened. There's PrimeFaces, RichFaces, IceFaces, Trinidad, and a few others. They don't "fix problems" in JSF, but are what JSF was created to provide.

OmniFaces is a little different. It's a utility library. It does fixes small inconveniences in the JSF API, but it too is not a framework and makes use of the very extension points that JSF explicitly has provided.

Compare this to Eclipse. It's weird to say that JDT is a framework on top of Eclipse, since Eclipse was specifically made to host plug-ins.
I find it odd that it has yet to reach the Nordics, given that one of their big partners are Telenor (the former national monopoly in Norway).
The airlines don't even automatically rebook passengers for the next flight automatically when you don't board a flight (you scan your ticket when you board, so they know). I've missed several connecting flights, and every time I had to spend 10 minutes talking to a person - why not just automatically email me a ticket for the next available flight, along with a phone number to call if I want to change it (or let me walk up to a person)?
http://typedrummer.com/v8qz8f
How do you feel about improvements in GWT development speed? In terms of development mode, compilation times and the whole process of making a java code change and seeing the result in a browser? Is there a lot of work on making this better?

GWT is nice, but I remember a lot of frustration came from buggy dev modes and compilation times.
Hmm, why not write a fruityloop style of interface. That would make it more predictable.
Not I. Discreetly keeping an eye on the time without fumbling with a device is my most common watch need.
I understand the complexity in python of tying together Flask + Celery + DB + app server etc, but what would you use instead (your comment seems to imply there's a language/framework that has the aforementioned things bundles/more integrated)?
What a disappointing article. Most of the points they make are just noise (87% vs 92%? come on). The #1 key fact is that $350/kWh DC at 500 cycles is not at all impressive. It's somewhere between 50% and 200% more expensive than existing products. Despite claiming to be familiar with a range of battery chemistries, they failed to note that the 2 kW output limitation would not apply to those existing solutions.

There are three good things about the Powerwall, only one of which seems to be getting any airtime at all:

1. It offers much higher energy density than VRLA, especially in kWh/kg (kWh/m^3 is somewhat less impressive). This makes it suitable for applications where lower mass is critical, like laptops and cell phones. Residential grid-tie backup is not one of them, however.

2. It's a sealed unit. Taking maintenance-free to another level, this is a "no user-serviceable parts inside" design. There are no terminals to touch (or corrode), no vents for electrolyte or gases, no series wiring to be done. For people who are intimidated by anything involving electricity or chemistry, this is a tremendous marketing achievement.

3. The operating voltage presented to the system integrator is much higher than 48V. As they mentioned, this makes it easier to integrate with grid-tie inverters, which while less flexible than the do-it-all off-grid/grid-tie inverters usually designed to work with 48V batteries, are also somewhat cheaper and more familiar to installers.

That's it. If those advantages outweigh the high price per kWh, poor power output, and low cycle lifetime of the battery itself for your application, the Powerwall is right for you. Otherwise, it isn't. Look for a VRLA or (if you're willing to do occasional maintenance to save even more money) FLA solution instead. You could even look at other chemistries like nickel-iron. Lithium just isn't the right chemistry for this application; it's too expensive and the advantages it offers are unimportant.
shout out to p'unk avenue! philly represent!
Remind HN: Call your mother
It's Mother's Day! Remember to look up from your monitor for a bit and thank the person who conceived and gestated you, raised you, or both.
When did secret global laws become a thing?
Right you are... I was thinking of the "Repeat alerts" message notification setting.
"In this week's podcast, we talk to Nick Bostrom, the Oxford University philosopher who originally came up with the simulation hypothesis. According to Bostrom, it makes at least as much sense for us to be living in a simulation as it does for us to not be."
Painting an android figure peeing on an apple logo.
Are You Sick, and Sick of Hearing 'Everything Happens for a Reason'?
Just a remark, I guess http://getmagicnow.com/ is the correct link(notice the now)
I assume they are referring to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504

I saw it first on HN, but there were stories about it on Google News a few hours later
In all honesty, I'd call it a table. This plot stood out for me as being unnecessarily a plot. It's tabular data, plain and simple. The x and y axes are simply used to order the margins of the table. They've added colors, which I guess are a little plotty, though I'm not sure the color adds or detracts here.
The move towards profit at all costs to the general public is seemingly global at this point. There's not much escaping it. We all know the trouble with the U.S. Harper's government in Canada has silenced scientists who would speak out about the negative impacts of government policies, the UK is seeing university tuitions triple and then some, with student loans becoming more and more normal, despite the huge flashing warning sign the U.S. is about student debt...

All over - stories about propping up the rich on the backs of anyone not rich. The thing is, the middle and lower classes are complicit in their own demise, voting in conservative governments or lackey liberals who don't even make attempts to keep their corporate connections secret anymore - let alone their desires to make life easier on those that already have it the easiest. Just toss a few "abortion" quotes around and the public will distract themselves with infighting while their standards of living are being destroyed, and for the first time in modern history, your kids won't be better off or live longer than you.

Used to be we could say that at least there were scientists and other altruistic professions out there fighting the good fight. But even they are being actively stifled in order to boost corporate profits (US, Canada, others.)

I don't even know. I hate being pessimistic.

Apologies. End rant.
The negotiations and drafts are secret (except to Congress), but it's public when it's signed and debated/ratified by Congress.
Supporting local distrbutions of Lattice/Cloud Foundry on OpenStack or vSphere is what Pivotal makes its money from.

Lattice is, among other things, about "taking out" things from Cloud Foundry to make it simpler. Hence the delegating to Vagrant or Terraform.

Supporting OpenStack or vSphere is not simple. (IOW, Terraform doesn't support either yet). That's what BOSH does, but I suspect Lattice exists with a "no BOSH required" constraint, because some have a hard time with BOSH.

As for Micro Cloud Foundry, bosh-lite is the replacement, where you can run a full CF deployment in a 6 GB VM. CF proper already can deploy on OpenStack (I hear some have deployed it on their laptop) or vSphere (this needs 64 GB RAM, thus more than a laptop).
Attacking Z-Way Controlled Home Automation Devices
I call this one Java Utopia

http://typedrummer.com/6haxm2
I was also surprised about that, and I'm from the Norway, Telenor's home-country of all places.

But looking at Firefox OS, the truth is that it aims to enter mobile from the deep bottom of the market, especially in emerging markets where smartphones has yet to establish a foothold across society. From there it aims to work its way up, rather than trying to "win" the lucarative ends of the market from either Android or iOS.

And in the Nordics, to be honest, we're just buying the highest end devices, and barely anything else. Firefox OS would (yet) not be able to compete in here. Maybe later, if it improves and matures, but only time can tell.

But hey. This strategy once worked for Google. I kinda doubt it, but there's no reason Mozilla can't make it work for them too. After all, supporting Firefox OS, mostly consists of writing a proper web-app, and we're all making those anyway.

And as a developer, god knows, I'd love to not to ever have relate to the Android API again if I could just deal with HTML and JS.
It's in the FAQ for Hacker News.[1]

[Q:] How do I make a link in a question?

[A:] You can't. This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I'll look into it. Thanks for pointing it out.
This list is very very basic, most of the things like style shouldn't have to be discussed and design should preferably be done before the code is written.

Just adding "error handling and potential bugs" as a generic bullet on the list just doesn't cut it, these should basically be the only items on the list but specified in much greater detail. A serious code review checklist should contain concrete scenarios of these, preferably tailored for your specific application.

Examples of this are: What happens during system startup, before all other modules are ready to answer to requests? What happens if the user enters malformed data (sql injections etc)? Does this function shut down gracefully (transaction safe)? How will the algorithms scale? Race conditions and deadlocks? What happens if the network to the database goes down? Is localization handled properly? Backwards compatibility?
Maybe it's easier technically, but nobody really needs tablets. Firefox OS targets the entry-level market, most people in this market will buy just one device.
I believe that ugly code is usually buggy code. If someone didn't take the time to deal with trivial issues like formatting then it makes me wonder if they spent time thinking hard about the actual problem they were trying to solve.

I usually explicitly do code reviews in 2 passes. I look for low level problems first, and also try to identify ways that they can be tested using tools so that next time they are caught before the code is sent for review. My second pass looks at higher level problems with the overall design and checks the functionality to make sure it matches the objectives.
It's a problem for small teams and people with little experience with code reviews. The 'walking on egg shells' thing happens ALL the time.

I've never seen this get solved overnight. Your management really needs to sit down and explain their expectations around code reviews - that fixing things based on co-worker suggestions is a positive thing, that having negative comments won't affect their performance reviews, etc.

I also find that with people like that you really do need to let more things go. If it's not a critical bug or an actual problem with the code then let it slide. Some people just cannot take criticism (even constructive) and the bad blood you'll get by persisting with it will not help you.

I also tend to find these developers are not necessarily the strongest devs and often have other personality problems. This likely indicates that your company needs to focus a lot more on the hiring and culture.
Fantastic article, and a highly recommended read.

TL,DR: a NYTimes op-ed article by a famous Russian writer, arguing how communist Russia's "victories" during WWII and after resulted in the slavery and suffering of its own people.
New Atheism’s fatal arrogance
With ATC, I don't think there's a worthwhile intermediate between the current insane system and full automation. You'd still want a few people supervising airport traffic, but everything in between is exactly the kind of routine-but-hectic task that's best done by computers.
I'm too lazy to listen to a podcast, but didn't Zuse originally come up with that hypothesis?
A few weeks ago someone edited an area in Pakistan to show the Android logo robot urinating on an apple [1,2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/24/android_google_maps_...
ActiveX is generally considered as an old tech, but what are the alternatives outside the browser? I mean for desktop apps.
Analysis of 17k songs finds hip-hop had greatest influence on pop music
The Exponential Technologies Institute
Pangu Jailbreak Testing for iOS 8.3
Nice job. With the advent of Swift, mobile developers may benefit from something in a sweet spot between Java and Scala. Looking forward to testing this out and further developments.
There will still be Internet Explorer for the dinosaurs that need ActiveX.
Seems very dystopian, but truth in it. Is a revolution really the only answer?
I'm going to differ on the 'don't be a blocker' thing.

It varies by team. If your whole team agrees that the code reviewer is the 'gate' then people understand that they just need to fix the thing and move on. I personally love that style of working because you tend not to write trivial suggestions and everyone knows that what people have written isn't meant as nit-picky and just has to be changed.

If you don't think it's the right change then the other person can just ask why it's important and hopefully get educated. I also tend to just trust my colleagues enough that what they suggest is a good change. I often find I may miss small things through like lack of documentation or whatever (get tired after a while) and those reminders in the CR are the equivalent of a spotter getting you to do one last rep at the gym.
Ability to stack beats would be sweet!
Ironically one of my best hires was just finishing his degree in particle theoretical physics at a top school. No puzzles at all - all questions were focused on would we want to work with this person.

I figured his physics background pretty much proved he can figure puzzles out. I did call his thesis advisor as a reference.

Your comparison with music kind of reminds be of people applying for unique faculty positions in Universities. It sounds like is that there are lots of qualified applicants and not many decent jobs.
I get that it returns a wrapper, but the functions like map and toUpperCase would have to wait for the asynchronous callback somehow. How does this work?
Oh my $deity! I sometimes play a bit with recording music and I always hate drum machine programming. If I could actually program it in some sort of programming language it would be so much nicer!

Seems like I've just got a new side project :)
The drafts will be secret for everyone not involved directly in the negotiations until it'll have to be passed in the national Congresses. Which is of course how things work in a democratic society.
Remind HN: The Mother of Your Children Is a Mother Too
You can thank Po Bronson, author of "Nudist on the Late Shift", for letting the whole world know that he forgot to do anything for the mother of his infant.
Why not use a Promise library instead?
Dodging Abilify
From what I understand, only certain members of congress have access to it before it is finalized.

"Congress, and the American public, will be fully informed of what’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership before lawmakers vote to make the agreement part of United States law. But he has a point that lawmakers won’t know what’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership before they cast a separate, precursor vote -- the vote to authorize Obama to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership on a fast-track basis in the first place."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/...
This Week in Science: A Chip That Mimics That Human Brain, DNA Research
I guess the middle class is in denial. Global feudalism, directed by an unelected superclass, does indeed seem inevitable. Liberalism was useful to capital when labor was regionally tied (democracy improving morale and public education improving labor quality), but now it's back to basics. I'm interested in what belief systems will be employed to move people away from identities based on citizenship.
It seems related to Pandora's Box. After Evilness and other Bad things escaped it, Pandora opened it a second time to release the Hope/Expectation to make life more bearable.

Religion was never intended to find "truth", its just something that helps people making their day even when life sucks.
What about if you stop speculating and making stuff up?
I've been an advocate of transparent discussion for some time. The TPP represents a huge constellation of laws and it is absurd that the negotiations are done so secretively.

But discussion about the TPP, too, is done in an opaque way. Everyone seems to have their favorite issue with it - for example information and piracy advocates will point to how grossly IP law is expanded internationally - others questions why only 5 or so chapters of a couple dozen have to do with trade if it's merely a trade deal - others will alarm at international corporate tribunals, worried that the largest and most aggressive corporations may abuse the liberal world order's tools to concentrate wealth and control.

But to understand the TPP - why it has few trade chapters relative to international law chapters and why IP and American corporate legal capabilities are strengthened as well as all of the secrecy - one needs to understand why the US has been pushing it on the Asia-Pacific region.

Washington Thinktanks and Defense Officials have come to the conclusion that the meteoric rise of China represents an existential threat to the supremacy of US hegemonic world order. The US's grand defense strategy has always been to 'balance' regions of the world where one country may otherwise dominate so that they can not then 'grow up' to play the global power game.

Take Blackwill's recent publication: Revising US Grand Strategy Toward China.

http://www.cfr.org/china/revising-us-grand-strategy-toward-c...

Blackwill suggests a series of measures: the first being to get the TPP out the door to isolate China from international trade in its region. He goes on further to suggest that the DoD should invest in cyberwarfare and other capabilities - indeed these measures are being taken, as the DoD is now partnering with VC firms inside the Valley to steer funding toward national defense.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/23/defense-department-sili...

Secretary of Defense Carter penned his interest in the TPP, publicly stating that he would rather have the TPP than another aircraft carrier.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just visited Congress, whereupon he spoke to them about the new unprecedented collective defense pact (think Asian NATO) being entered into by the two countries which required Japan to reinterpret its constitution. In the speech he discussed the importance of the TPP for defense purposes, and took questions about the rise of China.

None of this is a defense of the TPP. What it is is a call for transparent discussion. We can do one better than those discussing the TPP behind closed doors. We can speak openly about what it gets the US and its allies.
Writing a book is another way to raise your profile. Just don't expect to make a fortune from publishing the book. Making YouTube videos is along those same lines. See Derek Banas or SlideNerd on YouTube.
The negotiations and drafts are in fact secret even from Congress at this point, and there's a movement underway to give "fast-track authority" to the president which would also remove the debate from the bill.

"Obama has asked Congress to pass so-called Trade Promotion Authority legislation that would prohibit congressional amendments before an up or down vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership"

http://www.abqjournal.com/582278/news/nms-dems-oppose-trade-...
How is that any different from Hotmail or Yahoo? (Web)mail as a service is about as old as http, smtp and imap. Hotmail even was a cool startup runnning on all FreeBSD before MS bought them up...

I don't think it makes sense to compare X as a service, to implementing X as a service. Of course it is a bit of a hassle to set up email. But it's not really that hard: the hardest part is probably setting up SSL certs. Now, if you want to complicate things with spf/dkim, anti-virus and greylisting -- things do get a little complicated.

Personally I think spf is strange band-aid, and luckily I get bye quite well with just greylisting against spam (most spam I get is actually to a throw-away address that got leaked in the Adobe/Macromedia hack: yay site-specific email address!).

This here, is an example of what I mean:

https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.h...

It's not exactly rocket science[1] for someone that is able to set up a secure server with password login disabled and only regular-user login via ssh keys -- which I consider the minimum for any internet-facing system unless you have a very special use-case, and a really good plan.

Now, if you can't set up a server -- you can't set up a server. I'm not saying we shouldn't make it easer -- eg:

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html

or:

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html

(Note, these both rely on sandstorm.io handling incomming smtp, as far as I can tell. At least for now. Not sure if allowing stmp/imap in/out of a sandstorm.io-container is likely to be implemented -- but then again setting up a sandstorm cluster/cloud isn't likely to be as easy as using sandstorm to run apps... such is the nature of things).

[1] https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.h...

[ed: re: email and sandstorm.io -- I was both right and wrong it seems. When running sandstorm.io it is possible to set it up to send mail (requires a working smtp-server), and receive mail (requires some twiddling and ability to set up a (sub)domain with proper MX records, or a traditional smtp server set up to forward email into sandstorm.io. For more info see: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-y... ]