skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stop fracking. It's the most expensive way to get oil out of the ground, and wouldn't be cost-comparable to renewable energy sources if the industry wasn't empowered to use dangerous amounts of water in drought-stricken areas, use eminent domain to steal land for pipelines, and generally externalize every cost, making everyone who doesn't have lobbyists foot the bill for their reckless behavior. At this point, the only reason fracking is profitable is because government is propping it up. Solar and wind (particularly in places like Texas, California and the southwest) is cost-competitive (or even cheaper, if you calculate long-term, because solar panels and wind farms have a very long productive lifetime and quite low ongoing costs, unlike oil and gas), if you take away the crutches that our government provides oil.

As for food, meat and dairy doesn't need to be produced in water-starved environments (and probably doesn't need to be consumed at the rate that Americans consume meat and dairy). Again, industry gets a pass and gets to socialize environmental costs that they simply shouldn't be able to externalize. But, he who has the money and the lobbyists makes the laws.
Well, same here.
ES6 modules aren't higher order AFAIK
32 at the time.
Florida woman released in jailing over son's circumcision
I think you made a lot of decisions in a young person's mindset - some of them got you into the debt hole - but this one saved your life.

Thinking about my acquaintances there are four kinds of people among them who carry automatic handguns. Cops. "Shooting enthusiasts" who spend a lot of time and money practicing and are highly skilled. Former military. And wankers.
GovHack: AU/NZ Annual Open Data Competition
Fair point, but if I were to use RSA (sure, better avoiding it at all), I'd still go into a 4096 bits key, hoping to outsurvive the algorithm long enough for a safe migration.

Anyway, I don't get your (as in most security experts) aversion to long keys and multiple algorithms. As an engineer, I see cryptography taking a very small amount of the resources, but holding a huge share of the risk of any security application. My guts are always pointing into moving more resources into crypto.
I would really like to see a long-term study of heavy Soylent use. It would be awesome if we're getting close to an optimally healthy meal replacement, but I have some serious doubts about the stuff due to the lack of phytochemicals. Vegetables contain thousands of organic compounds that are metabolized by our bodies in poorly understood ways -- my hunch is that Soylent doesn't have enough ingredients to keep human bodies running optimally. I guess it depends on where your baseline is, though; a soylent meal seems better than a fast food meal. I'll be watching the scientific literature with interest!
> Unfortunately the Pro 3 uses an n-trig 256-pressure levels sensor, which has a much lower resolution than the previous versions which were Wacom based. For writing/jotting down is ok, but for drawing the difference is noticeable. The lower sensitivity takes a toll when you try to customize the response curve...

It's not the pressure levels that cause me problems with drawing as much as the inaccuracy in slow strokes. You can't do careful drawing with precise strokes, because the moment you slow down it starts to waggle around as it interpolates across the screen's grid. Lines bow outward into a faint square pattern.

Here's what happens if you try to draw a set of parallel lines: http://i.imgur.com/NUM64KO.png

I love mine in spite of that, and it works for quick sketches where curve smoothing covers the digitizer inaccuracy. But I wish I could draw on it. Maybe the next iteration will tighten things up.
You can still get to it by going to https://maps.google.com/lochp
Anyone know what mesh lounge chair that is in the picture?
> When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author
did that actually provided significant value,
particularly in that final stretch.

Yeah, and that's kind of the point. Human value is not intrinsically quantifiable. You can try and apply objective numbers to human behavior, but usually only with brutal results.

She nails that point in the second paragraph with the five step break-down.

Reviews often boil down to a game of "yeah, but what have you done for me lately?"

You generally get railroaded by systems like stack ranking, unless you totally depersonalize your relationship with your peers and directors, and play the numbers game, tallying up petty minutia which may or may not be completely disregarded by the ones who make the rules anyway.

This sort of relationship is biased in favor of firing, rather than maintaining and building loyalty. It's all about negative reinforcement, and keeping your subordinates at arms length, so you can easily replace the ones that burn out, once they've proven useless.

If that's the sort of atmosphere you crave, have fun. It's not the only way.
Slightly off topic but if you're annoyed with the new Google Maps you can still use the classic version at https://maps.google.com/lochp.
Sales and the field also had (not sure if they still do) a different compensation structure than day to day engineering. That can also play into things.
thanks for posting, this and the 19 other articles that follow were great.
In Bangkok I pay a premium to use Uber, because their seatbelts always work; the regular cabs here never seem to have them. As someone else mentioned, this might be a British thing, as it's completely inconceivable to me that you wouldn't put a seatbelt on if one was available.
"We've always been at war with Eastasia".
I think healthy fast food is starting to arrive -- I live in Colorado, and we've got quite a few good places (like "Mad Greens" http://www.madgreens.com/ "the Protein Bar" http://www.theproteinbar.com/, "Modmarket" http://modmarket.com/, etc.). Many of them are expanding to other markets, so hopefully this trend will grow! They're generally 2-4 dollars more expensive than other fast food options, however.
Thanks, I think you just gave me my new map.

The map itself is fairly clean. It had a little trouble figuring out that Northsouth and Eastwest, mytown, mystate was an intersection on a map site (WTF?) and not a search for businesses with Northsouth in the name, but when I gave it blvd to Northsouth and figured it out.

The routing line on directions was nicely moveable.

And, duckduckgo has a bang code for it, !bm.

I'm there.
This is not true. The US hasn't been at war since WWII. Everything since has been a conflict. Even Vietnam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Janus_%28Roman_Forum%...
Drop the "Rift". Just "Oculus." It's cleaner.
Odd that they don't seem to count the Cold War. I understand that their measure of what they count as a war is subjective, but surely the Cold War impacted the average person's life at least as much as the War on Terror and had a significantly bigger economic impact.
I've noticed people recently referring to non-programmers as non-technical. It's a weird thing.
Google is the "always online" company. So MapQuest should be the anti-Google: make a good, free offline maps app. All of the ones I've tried (on Android, at least) either had too little detail or a cumbersome user interface. But all of them were promoted to me directly by word-of-mouth. Make a great one, and people will spread it around. Become the fanatic's map app. The MapQuest brand could have the perfect retro-niche appeal for this.
Question: ProductManagement  or AgileDevelopment?
> Young Americans have lived in a country at war for almost their whole lives, but they have to be reminded of it.

This statement would benefit from a historical chart of journalism practices in war reporting.
For me, "yelling in some foreign language" is more disturbing because I don't know the argument he/she is trying to make. Is the yelling/frustration warranted or not?

Granted, when you're yelling at people on the street, it's likely roadrage and unwarranted in any language but, admittedly, that sense of rationality is slightly depressed in this situation.
It's too bad the article didn't say "Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war"".
Vietnam meets anyone's definition of war.
Actually, because Congress or the President have not yet acted, we have been in a period of war since 1990.

http://www.benefits.va.gov/pension/wartimeperiod.asp

source: am Veteran/Military lawyer
Yeah, what's with these assumptive statements?

Now, Morris is the first to admit that this wasn’t exactly a true scientific experiment, but you know what? That’s okay! Because the findings are still fascinating.

Experiment validity and the interestingness of the results are orthogonal. Considering the topic, I'd hypothesize that the less valid the experiment is, the more the experimenter is motivated to make the results look interesting.
Bugbuz – Web-based Python debugger
I'm so relieved to learn it's not just me. Google has spent years building a magic search box that finds everything I want. I have no idea why they decided one day that spreadsheets were so thoroughly not documents that they would only sully the search on docs.google.com.
I wouldn't advocate stack ranking. I would advocate cleaning out or re-purposing deadwood that is not doing anything productive or dragging the rest of the team down. If you can find something else productive for them to do, then that is great, but sometimes people just need to go elsewhere. If things are going well, then firing the least best of your crack staff is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
"Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war" -- Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example"
This review claims the setup is reasonable and even mobile app acccess works, http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/10/synology-gets-even-better-w-ve...
> But that state of war, we are told (I am too young to know better) feels different than America during World War II...

Whenever my dad or grandparents would talk about war, they'd always mention how less involved our current wars are.

During those wars, it was an all-out effort on the homefront and you were constantly reminded that you were under attack.

It's crazy how shut-off we are from current conflicts because of 1) the scale, and 2) the distance. Even though the news _constantly_ reported on the Iraq War and the conflicts over in the Middle East, it wasn't something I thought about while I was growing up.

I wonder how much more respect our soldiers would see, and how less willing we'd be to go to war if we actually felt impacts day-to-day. (E.g., rationing, everybody knowing somebody overseas, women taking over factories, etc.)
If it is no longer common to do this, you have the potential to stand out all the more for performing this social courtesy.

This is not one of those things like wearing a suit to a shorts-and-sandals startup, where they say "Oh what a dweeb, he's totally a not a culture fit here." No one thinks badly of sending a simple thank you note. Don't write them a love letter or anything, but spend the 2 minutes to write a sincere custom note, and snail mail it if possible, or email it otherwise.
Why PHP is obsolete (2014)
There's something more to it, though.

America has such a massive commercial and industrial apparatus (regardless of what anybody trying to puff up the Chinese or Russians might say) that we have effectively made it entirely possible to maintain a relatively high state of war without the general economy really ever feeling it.

In concert with this, the clever manipulation of the populace by both mainstream media, government agencies, and also by internet news outlets has allowed the populace to at once constantly fear for their safety while never actually building to the point of questioning why, exactly, the same officials and policies are held day in and day out. This isn't the matter of conspiracies, mind you, it's simply business.

The utterly terrifying thing is that, in the meanwhile, all of us nice techies have been training people to accept ubiquitous surveillance and even outright writing the tools ourselves.

And so, the credible foreign enemies gone, we see all this apparatus beginning to turn inwards.
This is dumb. Being "at war" is not binary and it's silly to think of it as such. Call the US's involvement whatever you want, but saying it's the same thing as WWI or WWII is insane.
The terror wars are the most alarming because it has also militarized our police, created a lower bar for our justice system or two justice systems, created secret courts, attacked our Constitution with the Patriot Act, abolished privacy, and the cost is more than all other wars combined.

In the end, every war since WWII, where the world was decimated and we got the advantage of rebuilding, has left the country in a worse economic condition than the last. Every single war creates a sideways market and has created more imbalance.

We now have the possibility of losing the people internally and that is typically how all empires fall, from within due to overextended wars and lack of spending internally.

You could also throw in the War on Drugs as another war not recognized by this but that is the war that has taken the most of our freedoms since the War on Terror. Overriding the justice system to force moralistic laws, taking freedoms from individuals on a grand scale, general warrants that we crossed the ocean to get away from. There may be an end to the War on Drugs in some ways soon, but the War on Terror seems to have no end or way to end it until it has broken the US internally.

If 'terrorists hate our freedoms' then why are our lawmakers taking away our rights?
Therefore it sounds like the discussion here about holding the CEO directly responsible for these crimes is irrelevant and unenforceable.
It's not at all, at least from a financial standpoint:

http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/June20...

We've spent more on the Middle East than WW1 and Vietnam combined.
Yeah, we saw a ton of bad attrition. Really good people leaving. I myself often thought I would quit; eventually, I did, though not because of the review model.

Ask HR about bad attrition and they would totally deny it. "Sure, people leave. They leave all the time." But if your really, really good systems programmers are bailing, you have a problem; those people do not grow on trees.
Can us nice techies put our minds towards a non-violent economic migration plan for the entire military-industrial complex :) Other industries are regularly lectured on the merits of adapting to a changing economy.
Except United States' technical definition of war, which must be authroized by Congress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...
We know Palmer Luckey created Oculus and that his work attracted John Carmack, which led to the VR revolution that exists today. They may have some legal standing even if they have no ethical standing.
The fact that the conflicts of today are much much smaller (by any measure you choose to use) than those of last century is a WONDERFUL THING. It's not crazy. It's AWESOME. Fewer people are dying or being injured. It's costing less money. Fewer people's lived are impacted. It's one of the biggest areas of progress for mankind. Celebrate it!
I initially came to hear about Nash through the movie, and Crowe did such a wonderful job!

I never heard of game theory before, and it piqued my interest, and it is quite amazing how much watching a movie did to increase my knowledge!
Data Mining Algorithms in Plain English
I worked at two companies in the last 3 years that both used MapQuest a lot. Both companies had fleets of drivers (one had about 200 trucks and the other had about 500). The first was pretty low tech and just distributed MapQuest printouts to drivers that had to go somewhere. The other was quite a bit more technically sound and had a pretty cool dispatching and routing system. All the maps were rendered using MapQuest. I was pretty surprised but in both cases it seems that these companies started doing things that way before Google Maps took off and they just stuck with what worked for them.

I know its anecdotal but I think it could point to something. The first company was in central Florida and the second was in NYC. They were also in completely different industries.
http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/local/2014/08/09...

Killed last year in Afghanistan at age 19. He was six years old on 11 September 2001.
Amen. And I could almost stand the more-button-presses thing if it weren't so slow. Now my typical interaction trying to search Google Maps goes like:

* Open the app.
* Wait for it to load.
* See the details of directions from hours ago.
* Hit back.
* Wait for it to render.
* Press back and wait again.
* Hit back a couple more times.
* Get frustrated that I'm still seeing old directions.
* Hit back twice more.
* Suddenly I am out of the app.
* Launch it again.
* Wait.
* Finally enter my search.

The server-side stuff, like the actual directions, is still amazing. But the UX design just doesn't seem to be driven by actual use.
Not in terms of % of GDP which is the only measure that actually matters.
Reading over some of the specifications - I really like this approach - I think this is probably the closest I have seen to a truly distributed approach to IM at the protocol layer.

If anyone would like to try the chat interface my address is ricochet:qn6uo4cmsrfv4kzq
Funny enough, physically school buses are the vehicles that require seat belts the least. But politically probably the easiest to require seat belts in.
What really drove it home for me was how much my Mom freaked out when the war in Kuwait broke. I was seventeen at the time, and she was worried that I would get drafted.
> However, that passage provides no specific format for what form legislation must have in order to be considered a "declaration of war" nor does the Constitution itself use this term.
The American Civil War doesn't count either, then?
Sony Terms with Spotify Uncovered in Contract
Flickr download counter-countermeasures applied
Wow that's very sad.
It drove home what for you exactly? The fact that your mom was irrationally worried about something that was never going to happen?

No one in the US has been drafted in over 40 years.
How could we be at war? We don't even have a War Department anymore.
what about the "war on drugs", which If I recall was 1990? Or the Cold war? How are these not the same as the war on terrorism (which gets some sort of recognition specially here, maybe just to make things look more dramatic)?
Wars against ideals or ambiguous targets make this binary thing very difficult to pin down.
As shown elsewhere, especially from the American side, this is simply not true. Your assertion about fewer people's lives being impacted is also quite false--just look at any airport on holiday.

This is no progress at all. Instead, we've gotten to the point where we can maintain any number of flashpoints we like, at any time, with any amount of media coverage desired, and all without ever having to have a useful policy discussion about it with our citizens.

The thing about the large wars of the past? After a while the citizenry lost their taste for it, because it cost them directly. Our current state of affairs is, sadly, not evolving in that direction.
I only use Windows for gaming and it's going to stay that way unless OS X completely drives me away. Each person's preference is different when it comes to OS, and I am not loyal to any (have used Win/Mac/Linux and they all have their strong points). When it comes to day-to-day use, though, I prefer Mac OS by a long shot. I just prefer the aesthetic, apps, and other small things it offers vs. other platforms. It's not necessarily "better" it just fits my preferences more than any other OS.
To a good number of people, "REST" means the Web—but not SOAP. Mapping CRUD to HTTP methods, and so forth, completely escapes some people.

"REST good. I want." That's as far as some thinking goes :-(
This Journey Called Life
My wife didn't realize until yesterday (we're in our 30s) that all young men 18-25 still have to sign up for the Selective Service database
An Apple ][ Emulator in JavaScript
Maybe this would be helpfull:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/adept-method/

It's by the author of better explained - a really great math teaching site.
The best way to think of the military industrial complex is a giant social and corporate welfare program. Just like there are prison towns, where the entire non-imprisoned population depends on the prisoners for jobs, there are entire swaths of our country dependent on military bases, contractors, etc.
I find it super amusing how similar interviews at a particular point in time are. It's like all the questions come from the same book that all the managers read or something.

If I have a job I want, at this point, I actually try to schedule a couple of interviews at other companies for similar positions first, because then I'll know what questions are "in style" and can make sure I study up on the answers.
> There’s a metric in the career-tracking website called “promotion velocity”

I can believe that one person was dumb enough to put a metric like that somewhere. But how could an organization be filled with people unable to recognize the systemic effect of highlighting that, the perverse incentives it gives?
sure, the question of "what is a war?" fits what you're describing but not the question of "is the US at war?" which is a binary matter of whether Congress and the President have taken us to a war
I think you're asking questions so you can find an answer to attack. It's an old and boring way to argue on the internet.

The truth is nothing is perfect, the reason these discussions don't go anywhere is because you're going to insist on finding the imperfections and then try to exploit that to win.

That is your right, but I explained both what it is, and why it's often correct.

I'm just too old to let myself get pulled into one of these discussions, sorry.
This is why I always read the comments first.
You've made so many mistakes of logic and fact, it's hard to figure out where I should begin. First, itself "wild" and not "wiled". Second, Apple doesn't allow "virus scanners," which is why you'll never hear companies like Sophos talking about malware on iOS -- they have nothing to gain. If you are in the right circles, you know there is plenty of malware on the App Store -- it's significantly easier to get it on the App Store than it is to get it on the Play Store. The main deterrent to malware on both platforms is the requirement that the app publisher have a credit card, which the stores both verify. If a publisher behaves badly, their identity is already known through their bank. Finally, you seem to be confusing manual scanning, static analysis, dynamic analysis, and human review to the point where it's hard to even figure out what you're claiming. Google implemented dynamic analysis long before 2014 (your "wiled west"), which Apple very clearly still hasn't done.
the real question here is, what was the reason for printing directions? I think I also used MapQuest the last time I printed directions, 7 or 8 years ago? My phone just tells me when i need to turn now....
Don't forget that it's a holiday in the 'States. I'd wager many readers are probably out barbecuing, or camping, or stuck at an airport right now.
Is there something particularly noteworthy about this case?

Both sides have youth signing up in droves to kill each other, and each individual is simultaneously a courageous hero fighting for freedom, or subhuman trash.
It doesn't strike you as, I don't know, a little odd, that we have paid for a Vietnam and a WW1 without noticing it?

Yes, the sheer performance of the rest of the economy has enabled the % GDP to be smaller than previously, but that doesn't make the scale of the thing any less impressive.