skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, the world of software spans from proofs-of-concept to libraries to full-fledged services consumed by others to games to dedicated business applications. As such, any complaints about "ethics" really require additional context before we can make useful headway.

All of the aforementioned fields have different requirements, and honestly many of them don't need ethics. In computer games, for example, I don't think that "ethics" beyond a mere "okay, well, it sorta passes QA" is sufficient. In fact, in many cases, the rate of release of software and low barriers to entry have basically obviated the need for a sort of professional ethics to protect the consumer: any software that is grossly unreliable tends to be replaced in short order in any space (say, the social web) by a competitor. It's in the aloof silos of, say, aerospace or healthcare IT where the true garbage is fermented, because they have nobody breathing down their necks as long as the paperwork looks right.

Also, I think that we don't get and don't take enough credit in our profession for how deeply we influence businesses. Done correctly, a team of programmers should be able to automate away everyone at the company who isn't directly interfacing with customers--themselves included. What does ethics have to say about such a situation, especially when the people making requests don't understand how the business itself is implemented?
India ends Russian space partnership and will land on the moon alone
This. Every test just explores one special case of the invariant I would prefer to enforce but cannot with today's tooling.
Thanks for the feedback, I will review the pricing to data storage cost.
My general thought is that most people won't max out the system, and that the cheaper accounts will offset the cost of the larger ones.
Why do you think that you have any right when others have their rights (in this case, the most important one) wiped?
Plz don't say that ;_;
Maybe because it's included in the product name?

It's not unreasonable to assume that "Soylent" contains lots of soy.
You bring up a good point though, the service is much more focused on smaller data sets. I'm not trying to compete with huge storage services.
So, the problem with this stuff is that mere additional compiler passes and better type systems are not how we get "responsibility". That's just a red-herring.

It's as though we said "Yes, the next generation of calipers will add an additional factor of ten in precision to our machinist's work and so increase our responsibility!"...and then those machinists go on to build gas chambers.

We cannot confuse the quality of the tools with the broader notion of ethics and responsibility, even if it's the only thing we have actual control over.
well, if you consider that they're probably just deploying on $5 and $10 digitalocean droplets, the 'unlimited' nature of the requests just means 'as much as your instance can handle', and there's a built-in profit margin.
Debunked: Your SSD won't lose data if left unplugged after all
Society is just a bunch of people. They can agree about something among themselves, but they can't force that agreement on others.

Imagine you are in a bar with friends, and they agreed, that you should pay the bill. Can they collect your money by force? Clearly the answer is no.
Back when these were declassified, I prepared a transcript and annotated parts of it: http://gwern.net/docs/1955-nash Good for those who don't want to go through the scanned PDF version but a HTML version. (My version also has links to various discussions such as class exercises in breaking his proposed system.)
Hmm... is there an archive for DNS entries, like the Internet Archive acts as for actual content?

Edit: Apparently there is dnshistory.org. Looks like the registration expired for that domain in 2013, so I don't know why it's resolving to anything. But the A record used to point to 74.208.41.229, which seems to still be listening on port 80 but is just 404ing.
> Material-wise, I had everything I needed and could ever want.

But not a 4-month emergency fund?
Hidden Structure: Using Network Methods to Map System Architecture (2013)
Currently the service is in rackspace, and it's not cheap hosting. But yes, "unlimited" means as fast as the service can handle among all the other requests that are incoming too.
Rather than any intrinsic property of the font, I'd ascribe it to the associations we have to it. Has previous things we read in this font been trustworthy?
It's a pretty clear play on Soylent Green, which would imply that it's made of people.

Fortunately neither is true.
University of Virginia does this as well:

"Out of respect for the founder of the University who did not have a Ph.D., University faculty are referred to as Mr. or Mrs. instead of Doctor, even if they have a Ph.D. Students and faculty historically addressed each other in this manner. Medical doctors are the exception to the rule and they should be referred to as Doctor."

http://www.virginia.edu/deanofstudents/studenttraditions.htm...
Update: Please vote on this poll if you think we're in a tech bubble: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656
5 pounds in two weeks comes out to around 1,250 extra calories a day, or 2.5 Soylent meals. Are you sure you were using the correct serving sizes?
I remember the days of hacking Wizardry 1 and 2 on the Apple... for awhile we had an arcade in an upper scale mall named The Galleria called 2001 which used to let you rent time on Apple 2 computers.
I think the problem is this notion of "tech bubble", when in fact (from my understanding, which is no doubt imperfect!) the behavior is just kind of the inevitable trend of people looking to invest. It was houses in 2008, energy in 2000, tech in the mid-late 90s, tulips two hundred years ago...I don't think we should take too much credit for this--it's just finance folks/investors being clever and Ponzi'ing each other.

What is troubling, though, is the amount of personal data and privacy violations and voluntary surveillance we've trained the populace into accepting as collateral damage when trying to raise our valuations up and fix broken revenue models. That's, I fear, going to be what remains long after our fortunes have dwindled.
I remember this one. I successfully extracted the data from this disk back in the day, but using a much less complicated method. My memory is a bit hazy after 30 years, but basically it went like this:

Reboot, let it load for a few seconds, then open the disk drive door. It will print "I/O ERROR" and drop to the basic prompt. At this point, the autorun flag is set, but you can clear it by typing "FP". Close the disk drive, then you can load any of the basic programs and list them. If you look through the listings, you will find some CALLs, which switch the RWTS. So I just loaded the files, switched the RWTS, and saved them to a normal disk. Ta-da!
why not just separate all the clients onto cheap discrete VMs running the api, and forward requests with nginx or haproxy or something?
My simplistic take away is it's an answer to this question about algorithms.

For a problem you can have a number of different algorithms to solve the problem. And a number of algorithms to check the solution to a problem. This is a point that is skipped over and trips lay people up because in school people are usually taught _the algorithm_ for solving a problem. But there are all sorts of ways to skin the cat mathematically. Some of these algorithms are great and some are 'bad'

Polynomial time algorithms are good. Ones that blow up exponentially are bad.

The question is, if you find a good polynomial time checking algorithm for a problem, does that mean there are polynomial time solving algorithms for that problem? Or not.
What would you do if you knew nobody would judge you?
Just because you "understand how to drive" doesn't mean you are protected from being killed while driving.
What is the source of this data?
Made me think of a dystopian future where the autonomous car would use the few milliseconds it had to make its choice to set up an auction where the bots of the insurers of the involved parties would bid on the outcome of that choice.

The scary thing is that I don't think that is extremely far fetched.
It would require running rustc through emscripten, which is not feasible; as ELF binaries and .so objects and .rlib files, it’s currently in the vicinity of 150MB, of which 100MB is binaries which I expect would be somewhat larger in JavaScript.
Opt out of NSA's mass surveillance programs with privacy and encryption tools
> I've gotten looks from taxi drives in south Europe for this, they treat it as an insult. I feel it's better to insult than be dead.

It's easier than that -- just tell the driver you're not worried about him or her, but about the other drivers on the road.
This service isn't designed to compete with something that has dedicated VMs and that kind of thing. It's vastly cheaper than most other data stores for this reason. Granted, it will scale for very heavy use. Right now, it's essentially launch day, so how much people use it will determine how I optimize it.
Key/value databases are simple enough to setup and run, even for small projects. I can't see myself paying for a service like this.
How would you spearhead such an organization?
I'm not sure why anyone would think this was the case. If SSD's lost data that quickly, wouldn't you expect to see data loss/corruption in a laptop if it happened to get uncharged?

Surely there would have been reports of data loss already.
I never heard of any... example?
I will sign up in a heartbeat because I EmberJS is my primary workhorse framework. Please tag things that are Ember CLI though. Things pre-CLI are of no use to me because of how drastic the changes are.
I was wondering this myself, there's about 9 wifi connections around the samsung "smart" tv I use.
No, not really.

There are many NP-Complete problems, and there are many NP problems that are thought to be neither NPC nor in P.

In fact, if P != NP, there are infinitely many such problems.

So proving P != NP could proceed by finding some problem in NP that is not also in P.
Patent for much cheaper and lighter telescope using mylar and laser
> You don't know the long term effects of random social media posts either.

Right, hence the whole rest of my message concerning intent, consent, and their importance with regards to morality and ethics.

> Was that also unethical?

Maybe? I wasn't there, I can't tell you. There are plenty of ways to act VERY unethically when it comes to sales and advertising, even while being truthful (e.g. you could omit some very important information). Deceptive advertising is a whole class of illegal actions in many developed nations, and not all of those actions involve the strictest definition of lying.

Not sure what hypothesis testing has to do with anything, experimentation certainly doesn't need to go hand-in-hand with statistical analysis.

I almost added a bit about taking the whole thing to its logical conclusion that the entire field of advertising and sales is arguably unethical. I haven't really thought that entirely through so I omitted it, but it's food for thought nonetheless.
Indeed. Although setting up a central data server with an API takes a bit more work. However, if you're willing to do the work and set all of that up yourself, than yes, the service isn't for you. I see it more as a simple way for someone to integrate their script or app without having to do a lot of the cloud-setup.
Apparently (1998 figures) in the US about 41,000 people die in road accidents of which about four are motorcoach passengers. So in general anything to get people onto busses rather than cars would be a plus.

http://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/Bus_Crashworthiness.as...
I transferred most of my disks in the mid-90s and even back then many of them were corrupt. (I also lived in the south FWIW)
Because this (arguably) medical experimentation was done without informed consent.
If I think the risk is high enough to worry about, I'm going to use a method that gets close to eliminating it. I'm not going to settle for only removing one vector.
>> curl https://tinycache.io/api/v1/YOUR_API_KEY/mysecretkey?decrypt...

Passing the key as a GET parameter is not super-secret, I would avoid doing that if possible.
I gave Soylent a try when it first came out. The initial formulation gave me incredible gastro-intestinal distress, and it was so painful that I could barely sleep at night. Apparently they heard this sort of feedback from a bunch of people and changed their mixture so it wasn't as hard on the digestive tract. I haven't tried it though, so I don't know if it'd work for me. Honestly, I'm a bit scared to do so. Oh the pain!
So I'm a so-called "full stack engineer" and the definition I've internalized is that a REST api is essentially about modeling the entities in your application and defining what actions can be taken on each (with consistent use of verbs). And a "hypermedia api" approach is more about modeling behavior.

As an example, an api for AirBnB's mobile website might expose a /srp endpoint that can be used by a thin client to render the results recursively. Again, the way I've internalized it, to be a REST api I'd expect a client to request results from a /listings endpoint of some kind.

I think there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding and that precise language is better for everybody. What should we be calling these things? I'd love your thoughts on it.
Cratejoy (YC S13) is hiring a director of marketing for our SaaS platform
Awesome I (a human) love it. Trying to sign up but I'm having this problem:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yd91j84bmrg4w0w/Screenshot%202015-...
> is it the wrong URI because the path is wrong (and then I'll double check the docs and my code)

This is the source of the problem. REST APIs are hypertext-driven. They use links, like the web. You access resources by following links, not by constructing URIs. If you are reading the specification to find out which paths to use, then hard-coding them in your client software, then you don't have a REST architecture, you have something very different (which, unfortunately, some people insist on calling "REST" anyway).

REST revolves around hypertext. You don't hard-code paths, the server provides resources that link to one another. The client accesses the resources by following the links, not by constructing URIs itself.

If you have a REST architecture, then you can't get the path wrong in your client code because the path isn't in your client code. It's in a resource the server gives you.

> All server code for REST will be written in terms of /path/to/{ID}.

Perhaps, but the client should not be aware of this. The ID that a REST client uses is the URI.

> We have a path, we have a instance ID, which each may be incorrect.

The only ID that the client has is a URI, and if you get a 404, it means that there's no resource available for you to access with that ID. The client does not have a path, and the client does not have an instance ID. It only has a URI.
Technically it is secure over HTTPS. Is there a specific concern you have?
Wait, you run a company (Aerospike) making a DB engine. It had better be backdoored and automatically relaying data to intelligence services, or at least banned for export without spyware - if that isn't the case, you're not living by your own mantra, and I'd be curious as to why not?
programmers don't byte, they just nibble a bit
Farthest Journey by Hoverboard – Guinness World Records
URLs have a tendency to end up in logs. Unless you are careful in your implementation (including what you inherit with your 'stack'), you may end up inadvertently persisting keys.

EDIT (btw, I love the concept of your product)
I think you made a typo but get the gist, but the rounding functions are the square brackets with the top or bottom horizontal parts missing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_and_ceiling_functions

[] would be array indexing (or ranges, for instance delta_{theta} e (math symbol, element of, but can't type that here) [0,pi] )
and {} are sets/tuples
From what I understand, they're not planning to go into the low-carb-high-protein market, as there is already a giant protein powder industry out there to cover that kind of need.

I'd love to be wrong though, as I usually do 40P/25C/35F and I would LOVE to not have to spend a hours every weekend doing meal-prep, having to plan just how much food I need delivered, stuffing everything into tuppowerare etc. Would love to do something more enjoyable and useful with that time.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I feel like there's an unmet need for healthy (arguably, powdered food is likely not in this category), quickly available, hassle free and nutrition-plan specific meals out there. I can't find anybody who addresses this need though. Idea for YC2016, please? :)
The Order of the Engineer was established to address some of these issues. There is a similar Pledge given to graduates of Computer Science programs at various college/universities throughout the US via the Pledge of the Computing Professional (link at http://www.computing-professional.org).
Hmm, not sure what's going on with that. Try again, I changed the captcha type.
Yes, I'm doing ok now. Thanks for the kind words.

Yes, the house foreclosed after 2 missed payments. Bank of America moved quick in my instance. I could have stayed in the house but I also lost my car and my house was very far away from my haunting grounds. Logistically it wouldn't have worked. Plus there's the fact that I couldn't afford utilities (in Texas you need A/C). I have no deficiency judgement as that was all cleared up after I was forced to file Chapter 7.

No, I never believed in credit cards. I always tried to carry a low debt load, at least as much as I can.

Yes I applied for public assistance, but since that year I made a good bit of money on paper I didn't qualify for government assistance. Trust me, I couldn't even get approved for WIC or Texas Lone Star.

I'm glad I was able to share my story with everyone. In America it's very easy to lose everything (and gain it back again).

These days I save as much as possible and live a very frugal existence. That's been my mantra ever since I recovered.

Cheers!
why not just store this as a gist with comments?
IIRC there were studies that images of eyes force people to answer questions more honestly. I wonder which effect is stronger.
This is so true. If you're clearing $100K+/year in income there is a big red flag if when that goes away you have

$400.00 in the bank (from the article)

If you are reading this and you are making $100K+ a year and not saving any of it, that is a huge problem for you.

To quote Mr. Money Mustache, every dollar you spend stops working for you. If you are a basketball star, a software engineer, or a movie star, let your relatively high income offset your future low income life.
Remembering John Nash

It was an afternoon of Monday, May 9 2011 (the so-called ‘Victory Day’ in post-Soviet Union countries - that’s how I remember). For the previous 2 weeks, I was busy working on my final project for the Information Retrieval course - Natural Language Processing project which aimed to teach Japanese grammar with example sentences. The Spring semester was about to end, and I was struggling with my New Jersey pollen allergies while having a lunch with a friend at the Frist Campus Center.

We were sitting at the table right next to the tray return conveyors, so when I spotted a familiar figure returning his tray, I decided to approach him. That was indeed Prof. Nash. The topic for the conversation was not hard to find, as just a couple of days before on the Kazakh news sites, I saw that he was one of 6 Nobel Laureates who attended the annual Astana Economic Forum in my hometown. Apparently, he just got back from the forum past Friday. We talked about his meeting with the Prime Minister, the fact that the meeting with the President was cancelled on the last minute. He said it was his first time in Kazakhstan and his second time in the former Soviet Union country (he's been to Saint Petersburg a couple of times) and one thing that surprised him was the fact that all the signs in the Central Asian country were in Cyrillic (not Chinese). We chatted for about 5-10 minutes. I guess, that’s how you blow an opportunity to talk mathematics with the legendary mathematician.

Next year in May 2012 he attended the Astana Economic Forum once again. It just so happened that he flew back on the same Lufthansa Astana -> Frankfurt flight with my family who were traveling to the US for my graduation. My mom told me how over the course of the flight a few times on his way back from the restroom he stopped by my younger brother Nurym and in complete silence watched him time his 4x4x4 Rubik’s cube solves.

One year later in May 2013 while browsing the shelves of The Labyrinth Bookstore in downtown Princeton I stumbled upon the book “The Essential John Nash” which with plain and informal style attempts to explain the Nash’s diverse contributions to game theory as well as pure mathematics. It was so good that I finished one chapter right at the store and took the book home.

The world lost a beautiful mind. Rest in peace, Prof. Nash. The Phantom of Fine Hall.
I agree with you both. "One can, and one should," and it’s even better if the profession provides a mechanism to remove from practice its own worst offenders. The AMA/ABA examples I gave above do not just offer protection to their members, but they also hold power to send their unethical practitioners to the poorhouse. (If you’re a junior physician with lots of student loans but lose your license due to an ethics violation, I don’t know what you’ll do. Loans don’t go away in a bankruptcy.) So those professions come with a terrible downside for flagrant violators. We don’t have any such downside in software, which may explain some of the moral depravity mentioned.
I've been eating our own type of soylent for the past year and a half now. 2 per day, morning and noon, and 'normal' dinner. The type I eat is ketogenic (meaning low carb).

I have to conclude that I feel better than ever before. Where previously I ate very monotonic (and one could argue, I still do), I did not get all the nutrients I should. I now do, and feel pretty damn good.

I do feel soylent is the future, but there are many varieties.

In my circles, the whole movement has sparked a lot of discussion, and many people close to me are now eating all kinds of soylent, homemade, joylent, jake shake etc.

Let's hope that someday the whole 'fat is bad' concept leaves the mainstream, it does not seem to do a lot of good.

Btw the variety I eat costs below 5 euros per day, with 2100 calories. And I think it tastes pretty great. Only wins.
I like the idea of the pixel font, but find one that doesn't make the N look ugly. Silkscreen's usually a safe choice.

And I'd make the dev account more than 100 hits/day. I could easily go through that while actually coding, fixing bugs, repeat.

Since the use case is about quick, lightweight projects, I'd make creating an account optional until you need it. I'd want this to be as frictionless as possible, so that if I'm in the throes of coding and want the simplest possible key value store, I can just type in a URL like https://tinycache.io/api/myemail@address.com/CACHE_KEY and know it'll work without having to break out of my editor.
Congratulations on releasing something out there. I think above all, you will walk away with some gained wisdom in various areas of web services that'll make your next project even better.