skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
making LA sound terrible is an entire cottage industry and this is a prime example of some top notch product.

the truth is a lot more boring. LA is a great major city to live/work in but an exceptionally shitty place to visit, unless you stay with knowledgeable locals.

in that way, it's the opposite of SF and NY, tough places to live in but mind-blowing next-level kind of awesome places to visit.
NB: I'm religious, and in my opinion therefore biased.

I would counter that we need something to "retard" (your word) us as a species from acting on pure intellect and reason.

For example - the purely rational and logical conclusion based on genetics, biology and economic theory would be that we cull the unfit, lame, and stupid for the betterment of the species.

That we emotionally rebel against such an intelectual conclusion indicates that there are higher values that we humans possess in varying degrees that are not based on pure reason.

From what I've seen historically, those arguments and suppositions that back us away from pure rationality tended to have been espoused by the religious or at least spiritual.

I would say that we could debate the merits of such a religious viewpoint - but the very existence of human culture up until now has certainly been influenced and shaped by such a viewpoint and would need consideration by all but the most strident of logical thinkers.
Bad Designs: Stuck between two doors
An hour by public transport, which I realize makes a big difference as I usually spend that time on my kindle. If your journey involves central London (as mine usually do), using a car doesn't even seem like an option - that's why I don't even have a licence.
I firmly believe that laws provide psychological boundaries for most people (in that I believe most people are neutral good, lawful good or neutral evil), and provide tools for some to abuse others (the lawful evil). Given a perfect distribution, or even a bell curve, I think yes, most uses of law are not used for evil purposes. But there is a significant segment of the spectrum that does. Of course, in my purely anecdotal system based on Dungeons and Dragons. :P
The current holding comes from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and is in Oracle's favor. Unlike other regional Courts of Appeal, the Fed Circuit's decisions are binding nationwide because the court has subject-matter jurisdiction rather than geographic jurisdiction. The Solicitor General's amicus is in full support of the Fed Circuit's decision, and the Supreme Court has historically taken an SG amicus hugely into account when the SG is not a party to the case. Should they choose to do so here, they will not grant cert, let the decision stand, and it will be binding nationwide due to stare decisis.

So, while your statement is true, the situation is more dire than you suggest.
In recent decades, certain Catholic persons, even ones in important leadership positions, have vigorously opposed it.

But not all modern-day Catholics do so – as a Catholic, I do not.

Here is what Pope Pius XII had to say in the middle of the 20th Century:

"Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live."

– Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System (14 Sep 1952)[1]

See also Fr. George Rutler's article in Crisis Magazine, Hanging Concentrates the Mind (8 Feb 2013)[2], and Avery Cardinal Dulles' essay in First Things, Catholicism & Capital Punishment (Apr 2001)[3].

In short, there is more to the "Catholic view" than Evangelium Vitae[4], the 1997 Catechism[5], recent statements by Pope Francis[6], and statements by other Catholic writers and leaders repeating or expanding upon the same ideas[7] (all due respect being given to their persons and offices). The modern Catholic position, if you will, on the death penalty is something of an anomaly against the backdrop of what previous Councils, Popes, Doctors and Fathers of the Church have taught. As a matter of intellectual honesty, at least, I think it's important that Catholics "play with a full deck" when treating this difficult subject. Having dug into the matter, I concluded that the modern position is not sound, and so have adopted the Church's traditional view on the death penalty.

[1] https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12PSYCH.HTM

[2] http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/hanging-concentrates-the-...

[3] http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/04/catholicism-amp-c...

[4] http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/doc...

[5] http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a5.htm#2267

[6] http://visnews-en.blogspot.com/2015/03/pope-francis-death-pe...

[7] One example, there are many more: http://www.macatholic.org/sites/macatholic.org/files/assets/...
Why wouldn't prevention of recidivism reduce the overall level of the crime?
Apple Is Working with Postmates to Offer Same-Day Delivery
Except that much of what makes the death penalty expensive, the lengthy appeals process, is to counteract the risk of a false conviction. You can't not pay that price unless you're willing to accept a higher false conviction rate and therefore more folks wrongfully killed by the state.

Can't say I'm a fan of that option.
It makes sense, north of 50°N GPS accuracy goes quickly down, as most of its satellites’ orbits are optimized for coverage over the equator.
Alan, Alien
Ask HN: Would publishing a drone strike API give veto power on drone strikes?
If I publish an API describing a system whereby the head of state of a western democracy can assassinate his citizens via drone strikes in Pakistan, will the White House stop infringing my IP?

The administration's position on API copyright seems to imply yes. (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/white-house-sides-with-oracle-tells-supreme-court-apis-are-copyrightable/)
Thing is, "E=mc²" is already a symbolic representation of the relationship, on two levels - choice of units and dimensionality, and also use of arbitrary letter shapes to represent quantities.

When you spend all day hacking code with a text editor it's easy to forget that code is really a linear list of symbols, and the text version of the code is just a human-editable representation of it.

So it's funny to think art buyers have persuaded themselves they can "buy" an algorithm, or that a printout of an algorithm is the same as the algorithm itself - and not just one of infinitely many possible representations of it.
gwern saves the day once again.
Thanks for your feedback! I spent a lot of time chasing down memory leaks with this project, which was fun, but clearly that's not the last of the hurdles with C. My dream is to program space robots, which probably will never happen, but I feel one step closer every time I build something in C.
fastly is vi, cloudflare is emacs
I don't see any problem with walking away from police, even running isn't so bad (especially if you didn't start running the moment you saw the police), provided that you stop walking or running if instructed to do so. The important thing is not to cause suspicion by acting like you are fleeing the scene of a crime. Running away by itself is not cause for suspicion, but running away from police when a crime has been committed and failing to stop when instructed to, would be in my opinion.
Re-Architecting Sprint Demos for a Growing Engineering Team
You do realize you can just ask your doctor for an acne antibiotics prescription and be immune to Lyme disease, right? Doctors routinely do this for people who work in dangerous areas for Lyme disease, etc..
You Own Devices Act: Embedded Software Copyright Exemption
Great writeup! Deserve a spot on the official docs.
During that time, you can easily make them from scratch and have fun doing it. Hm.
I am a Brit who now lives in the Bay Area (~400 miles, 5 hours drive north of LA). What really chews your soul is sitting in stop and go traffic. Journeys with lots of motion seem to pass by quicker as you are actually doing something and the scenery, cars etc around you are constantly changing.

But when you are driving in that stop go traffic that feels comparable to walking speed, with the same cars around you, and no particular visible progress, the brain really hates it.

These highways are in what you would consider urban areas, but there are walls on either side to alleviate the noise for residents. Consequently there isn't that much to see along stretches other than stop and go cars going into the distance.
Yes indeed, that's why I only said they agreed "on the integers". Your other example is deviously clever, nicely done.
Wow, my Mandrake 7.1 user manual just became a collectible.

Easy to forget little things, but a lot of people my age would not become computer scientists without Mandrake, RedHat and Knoppix.
Pius XII's view was more or less rebutted by the USCCB statement in 1980, which held:

* (Deterrence/Protection) The modern state is more than powerful enough to prevent criminals from murdering people without killing them, absolving the state of the duty to kill in order to protect.

* (Restoration) Execution can't have any restorative value, because it's hard to restore any part of the spirit of a dead person.

* (Retribution) Retribution is a valid goal for punishment, but even for murderers, execution exceeds the justification of retribution and contradicts the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Everything the church has said since the National Council voted to oppose capital punishment seems to be in line with that statement, through four (very) different popes.

I'm not not Catholic and, like I think most people in my parish, I believe all sorts of things the church formally doesn't accept --- parity between same- and different- sex marriages, the right of women to freely make reproductive health choices, fundamental and universal equality between men & women --- and, similarly, you're free to oppose the church's teachings on capital punishment.
> Why wouldn't prevention of recidivism

Ceteris paribus, it would. However, there's no actual evidence that, with the death penalty, it does.
Ask HN: Will Reactive Patterns help agar.io?
I spent some days playing the addictive game agar.io
From time to time the game suffers some kind of lag.
Is in that kind of situations when Reactive Patterns comes to the rescue?
Can any provide me with some real world examples where Reactive has been used?
Or is just another buzzword to catch on?

P.S. Excuse my F..k.n English, please.
I agree. It worries me that finding out exactly what data your device or software shares with whom is very hard to find nowadays. You buy something without really knowing what it does.

This is not really new (how many people, even today, are aware that most color laser printers embed their serial number on every page they print?) but the rise of ubiquitous mobile computers equipped with a camera, an always-on microphone and permanent net access raises grave privacy concerns.
Oracle ... said the appellate court's decision was a
"win for the entire software industry that relies on
copyright protection to fuel innovation."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/supreme-court-ask...
Huh this is very close to what happened to me - I had once installed Mandrake alongside Windows on my parents' PC some time in the middle school years, and it failed to install itself fully, but it was quick to put the bootloader (LILO, remember that one?) on the MBR. Naturally the LILO config entry for Windows had the wrong partition number or something I don't remember, and Windows wouldn't start anymore.

Mandrake on the other hand had a jolly half-installed X11 windows system which failed to bootstrap itself, leaving me with a nice command line prompt (a good learning experience to say the least.) I think I screwed around with `vi` before my dad called in his friend who worked in software. (Said software friend tried editing LILO config before realizing Mandrake would start in read-only-mode by default (chrooting was something quite alien he didn't work with Linux anyway)), and so he proceeded to use the default partition editor on an MS-DOS floppy disk. Lo and behold said partition editor only works with disks that are 32 GB or smaller. Ours was 40 GB. Partition table borked.

We eventually got it all back. Good experience. I learned about the existence of virtual machines on the desktop (and doing experiments there) right after. :)
This post makes some great strides in explaining the core power of the meteor framework;

Until now, I think Meteor wasn't on message for the experienced developer market.

It's a mistake to sell a technical product with the pitch "Look at what you can do with just a few lines of code!!!". And/ Or over simplified demos.

We want to see more articles like this- So now we know how it works - what are the limitations? What are the problems scaling? etc.
Has anyone thought of how the distributed commit log can be extended to client-side FRP?

Elm has this notion of signal – http://elm-lang.org/learn/What-is-FRP.elm – which is really a stream of changing values, that are used to construct varying model and its rendered view (virtual DOM and all that).

I am wondering if we can merge these two notions – signals and commit logs. Consequently, this would replace the traditional "request-response" model in REST API with nothing but signals, thus leveraging the simplicity of FRP for the whole application. Client side Elm code does a "send" on the signal that is connected to the server-side commit log, and also reads from another signal connected to another log that receives new data (added from various places).
ZeroMQ is amazing. A few years ago I built a prototype project for a client that basically was fail2ban but scalable. It monitored nginx logs and broadcasted some information, and workers did the rest. Most of the data was in memory and passed around, and communication was done via ZeroMQ. It was done this way so that we could split the heavy-load components off the server and into workers, and allow the server to simply do it's job: tail nginx logs and act upon ban requests from workers. It was amazing, sadly I never completed it and deployed it on a production environment but from initial tests, it outperformed fail2ban by a lot.
I think you would find very few life sentence inmates willing to convert themselves to death row inmates for the chance at an Innocence Project exoneration.
Throughout my experiences with both Python and Rust, I am able to use the same ideas to accomplish tasks. The Zen of Python fits both languages in my opinion also.

I think that they are both very pragmatic languages, they are not trying to be expressive in the way that Ruby does, or try to write the coolest one liner, writing Rust or Python is about writing good code.

At least in my opinion. I think both languages complement each other extremely well, and I hope to see more of the two of them meshing in the future.

Im not sure if I actually said anything here... sorry im tired. What I meant to say is that I feel that idiomatic Python can look a lot like idiomatic Rust, and that they can complement each other in code by using Rust instead of C.
I think you're misrepresenting yourself. You sound like a fairly standard centre-left (in the US, perhaps 'far left') person. You talk of a safety net and communal healthcare, and ramping taxes to pay for them - this is something I've never encountered a libertarian encouraging. The more frothy ones actually call that kind of idea 'violent'. And just like you don't have to be a libertarian to want improved civil liberties (I actually see libertarians functionally arguing against them, as their methods enforce network effects) you also don't have to be a libertarian to want the power of government reduced, or a reduction in crony-capitalism.

In regards to regulation of industry, IP laws are a complete sideshow, complete with tinsel and fireworks. I'm talking about things like chemical dumping. IP is largely based around the entertainment and high-tech industries, which for the most part an individual can take or leave. But a company dumping chemicals that you can't easily detect? That can fuck you up for life, and once the damage is done to your health, no court order can recover it. Or similarly, mandating minimum safety requirements in vehicles - it reduces healthcare requirements, and strengthens societies by having fewer families with maimed or killed members, whereas an unregulated vehicle industry cuts a lot of corners that a consumer doesn't see, and therefore doesn't understand the value of.

Honestly, if I was to read what you wrote here about what you wanted without any ideological labels being mentioned, I'd think you were a fairly standard leftie.
You're correct, although I'm unable to edit the original post now. Thanks for the correction too - it made me look up the definitions of both. Always good to learn something!
"Data gravity" ?
Will it be different in 20 years? Or even 50? Right now these countries are warzones, and the stronger parties seem to be those more willing to pick up weapons and slaughter people.
Exactly whose stated opinion? That is the problem. DoJ and "the White House" are not exactly the same thing.
Indeed.

On the other hand the interviewing company should avoid such situations too because of the information secrecy - unless they are mandating an NDA with each and every candidate.
Recurse Center – Code Words
> I think you mean 1995, not 1965 (PJP2 wasn't Pope in '65; PP6 was).

Correct (and corrected).

> Since 1980 (really, 1974), it's been the position of the US Council of Catholic Bishops that Catholics are called on not just to personally oppose capital punishment, but to militate for its abolition in the US. There's not much subtlety to it.

The subtlety, such as it is, is in the rationale for the opposition (that capital punishment is not a priori wrong, merely wrong in actual factual conditions that obtain -- relevant to the USCCB position -- in the modern U.S. [and, in the context of Evangelium Vitae and other similar pronouncements of the universal Church, more generally in the modern world].)

But, no, the opposition itself is not subtle.
A parallel question - who owns copyrights to community written APIs of MySQL that Oracle so conveniently sells?
Yeah, the Ruby community is very blog-centric, and I have thought of that before, so you are most probably right.

I too would like to see a study, but I would have no idea how to conduct it!

Maybe the Ruby community is just reaching out everywhere trying to find a better language (just a jab from a python dev ;P )
Spot on. We ran the migrations against production-sized data beforehand, and everything was fine. We did it again after the downtime, and got the same results.

Most of our queries are fast (tens of milliseconds or lower), which is how we got away without knowing about this for so long. Unsurprisingly, we've been making a bigger effort to eliminate any slow queries we do find lately. ;)
Possibly stupid question... Why there's _1 and _2 variants for each hash size?
At one time I was in a physics program at university until I discovered that I couldn't understand physics. I changed to computer science ;-). My experience, though, was that most people I talked to had only a cursory understanding of actual physics. What they really understood was the math.

Like I said, I sucked pretty badly at physics but my impression is that people tend to jump back and forth between imagining the physics, modelling it in math, making predictions based on the math, imagining again what the physics would look like, ad infinitum. So for complex problems, I don't think anyone has a whole physics problem in their head at once and are reasoning about it at that level. They just have pieces and use the math as a way of swapping parts of the problem in and out of their head (if that makes any sense).

I think that's one of the biggest problems with popular descriptions of physics. It doesn't make any sense without the math, but average people don't have the math background. So the descriptions make absolutely no sense. Often you get people who are interested in the physics (but without training) imagining all sorts of crazy things because they have built their understanding on these kinds of nonsense descriptions.

It's been this way for quite a long time. Newton had use new mathematical techniques (calculus) to understand things like the force of gravity. Even if you go back to Archimedes, I wonder how much of his reasoning about density was based on modelling it with math and how much was based on intuition about the physical universe.
>There are people who commute for an hour, and who select a place to live knowing they'll have to commute for an hour, despite having options within 5-10 minutes. I can't even begin to fathom why someone would do that, and waste 10 hours of their life every week for years.

I am from Perth, Australia and people voluntarily driving for upwards of 30 minutes each way is extremely common with 1 hour not being all that unusual so people will happily buy a home that is distant from where they work.

Although Perth isn't huge in terms of population (~2 million) it is extremely spread out due to its very low population density. 310/km2 Vs 5354/km2 for London for example. Australian cities generally have a low density, Melbourne is 430/km2, but Perth is at the low end of the low end.

Most Perth people have never lived anywhere else so they grow up assuming that being in the car for 20-40 minutes to get anywhere is common and that a 1 hour drive to work isn't particularly bad. At a company I worked at there was someone who had a 2 hour commute. That is very definitely at the very high end and he actually lived outside of the city and drove in every day but let that sink in a little. 4 hours a day in the car.

This is, in my opinion, part of the reason why Perth people who experience living elsewhere rarely return to live in Perth. Some return after some time elsewhere but typically they leave for good after another year or two. Once you have acclimatized to having a <20 minute commute, especially if its by public transport or walking, the notion of paying a bunch of money to buy a car so you can sit in traffic for 20-60 minute each way every day is profoundly unattractive.
For a sufficiently powerful laser weapon, yes, low absorption doesn't matter.

If the attacker is just trying to heat up the bulk of the target until it melts, or is otherwise disabled, then a low-absorption coating would indeed slow them down. Such weapons have been proposed, but they're not especially effective anyway, and that's not how modern experimental military lasers are designed to work.

Weapons lasers are designed to focus as much power as possible into as small an area as possible in order to cause physical damage at the point of impact- blasting a hole in the thing, setting it on fire, etc. Heating the bulk of the target is a mere side-effect.

In that regime, anything less than 100% reflectivity is essentially pointless. Sure, it'll delay penetration, but not by any significant amount. Within a very tiny fraction of a second, the part of the laser energy that you do absorb in the target spot will be enough to destroy the reflective coating, and bring the full beam energy to bear. Unless your projectiles are expected to have flight times measured in milliseconds, the delay provided by a special low-absorption coating is utterly useless.

If you can prevent the enemy from dwelling on a particular spot, then things look much better. If you can screw up their targeting quickly enough, maybe you can actually prevent damage to the reflective coating after all. Even if you can't, maybe you can keep the laser occupied with constantly eating through fresh areas of reflective armor, never absorbing the beam's full power. But at that point, it's not the low-absorption coating that's saving you- it's your ability to screw up their targeting.