skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Money. I hate to be so cliche but money is the absolute #1 driving force for everything I do / learn / work towards.

People say money can't buy happiness, and that may be true, but money can help buy life. Without money you can't see doctors, you can't receive cancer treatment, its more difficult to get a good education without money, it's difficult to do fun things without money.

Yes, we're programmers and you don't need to goto school to learn a language, but my kids may not necessarily be programmers. Hopefully they want to become doctors, or dentists, or lawyers or engineers. And those jobs require degrees and those degrees require money, sometimes, lots of it. Can they earn it on they're own and get school loans like everyone else? Absolutely - but if I can help them accomplish their goals, all the better.

Having my name known in some obscure group only known to programmers - meh. Walking into a room and people recognizing my face and coming up to talk to me? meh. Putting snow tires on a $250,000 sports car and driving around in a NY winter? hell yes - because I can and because I earned it.
Thank you. It's quite interesting, actually, how the easy-to-compute discriminative models can be fooled so easily, while they hypothesize that generative models (which are much more general, and closer to our best models of human cognition), despite being much slower, ultimately provide better performance at the boundaries of the classification region.

I'd go on to venture that our minds probably use discriminative models for "intuitive" judgements, while reasoning that can explain the variance in percepts uses generative models, thus obtaining better performance where necessary despite using more energy. Or possibly, the generative models can be used to train the intuitive discriminative ones, slowly allowing the less intensive part of the mind's processing to adjust its class boundaries to suit what's really known.
Bent Flyvbjerg studies these "megaprojects" and offers various explanations why a) they are being conducted in the first place despite the fact that b) they are usually any combination of over budget, behind schedule or below expectations in terms of their benefits.

Here is an interview with him on EconTalk about the subject:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/bent_flyvbjerg.html
> Which tends to promote the idea that the MS way is the right way, and if I need something else I must be doing something wrong

This is not exactly true. MS recommends other technologies when they fit. Like Redis for caching on azure.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cac...
unset($_SERVER['HTTPS']);
7 simple rules to make your Node and Express apps easier to modify and maintain
I wonder how many journalists are employed by news organizations compared to fact checkers. Seems to me like the main thing keeping journalist's facts correct is not wanting to lose their reputation points.
Why would Bloc.io lie about copying Free Code Camp student's app without credit?
And to get into the hall of fame, you do an Olympics.
Maybe a PGP key instead of a javascript form for submitting a secret to setup the account?
People doing unsafe things with their cameras is popular. It wasn't some shaky cam either, and the bear holding her shoe in a later shot and licking the bars is powerful. More so this was in 1994, camera mishaps aren't new.
Show HN: Time March-For Historical and Personal  Timelines, Chronological Events
Yes, beware! The tendency to value clever quips and memes over actual content WAS the difference between Reddit and HN. And used to be the difference between the nicer parts of Reddit and 4Chan before that... :/
Everything is relative, and surely there are some misfeatures that simply can't be handled gracefully. But broadly, no: if some user wants to hit a archived site from 1995 using Chrome 44, I think virtually everyone would expect that to work and not fail.

To take your extrapolation in the other direction: you're arguing that if we want to hit old stuff that we need to do it in a VM running Windows 98 and IE4.
Pretty exciting!
I understand that they rely on the network effect, but my point is that if they went to a pay version (note that I edited what I said I would be willing to pay- the first was an accident) their revenue would increase. If a significant number of us did so then perhaps they could even reduce costs by not having to meddle as much with advertisers. $25/year more than doubles their revenue from me. And they can still show me some ads.

The tracking is ridiculously comprehensive as you point out- yet they don't get the value that they could get from direct payment. So I'm suggesting that they do us all a favor and let us opt-out of privacy invasion with cash.
LinkedIn Just Removed the Ability to Export Your Contacts
Read: "Where are all the aliens?"
http://qz.com/452452/where-are-all-the-aliens/

"We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked."
Illumos zones are as lightweight as containers, can run Linux, and provide full isolation of the guest system. www.illumos.org
Very reasonable requirements. Same here. I just want it to store files, retrieve files, have decent performance, and never screw up in a way that prevents recovery. I'd hope the baseline Is that so much to ask in 2015? ;)
Here is some blatant speculation about the problem with .NET and OSS.

The the larger problem is one of self-selection. C# devs are not alone in not contributing to opens source software. The vast majority of devs don't make meaningful contributions to OSS. It's just the the few people who get really stoked about open source software and love making a positive contribution to world through software have been turned off by Microsoft's behavior for the last 10-15 years. So they never entered the .NET/C# world to begin with.

The second is incentives. Java shops are much more comfortable with open source then .NET shops. Open source is still terrifying to many enterprise customers, and a lot of .NET shops. And the incentives besides making a positive contribution to the world [0] for contributing to OSS are it looks good on your resume, maybe you could consult on it, and getting to be paid to work on your own OSS project. But with most customers not using OSS the developers don't get a lot of personal benefits from it.

The third is how bug fixing your favorite OSS acts like a gateway drugs. In the past .NET devs wouldn't have very much experience with any OSS. If they found a bug in their favorite framework they would report it. End of story. Everything they used was closed source MS stack. But if they were working with Java(and probably working on an OSS library) they could dive into that library and make the fix themselves. Now that all of the core libraries for MS are being open sourced many more devs will start to get familiar with what it's like to be able to make a change to library or framework you use on a daily basis. And hopefully some will catch the OSS bug.

I think this will change. As Microsoft pushes more OSS, enterprise customers will see it as less scary. Devs who are into OSS might start considering .Net as an option. And finally devs will start to get a taste of what it's like to get to fix a bug on a framework or library that 1000's of people use.

[0] -see point 1 why people who wanna make a positive contribution to world through open source software shy away from being .net developers
One thing to keep in mind is that there is one thing that happens with exoplanets that can never happen with Pluto: the planet can pass between its star and us (i.e. eclipse the star). This gives a lot of information about the planet's composition, because light from the star will scatter/change color according to the planet's composition. See this image: http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/images/transitschematic.gif.

Now maybe you can do that with Pluto using some far-off star for reference, not sure. Also, I'm not sure if in this specific example the exoplanet made a transit of its star, or if it was detected by other means (usually by measuring its gravitational affect on the star, i.e. its star "wobbles").
I'm looking into that. When you have a lot of memory, it's in fact more convenient in a way that you can carry the entire cluster in your laptop. lol
The tools and libraries from Microsoft are so solid that frankly you don't need an entire class of open source projects.

I don't need to "contribute" and "socialize" with some Python craziness named after a dolphin (though I did!) because Amazon provides a real .NET SDK for talking to AWS. I don't need to wrestle with three different constantly-patched Ruby image libraries because .NET has been able to load and save six kinds of bitmaps via everything from C# to F# to Excel macros since the 90s.

The community around node.js in many ways is an attempt to re-write .NET from the ground up. And they're doing an amazing job. But so am I, when I can write three lines of code in a version of F# that shipped six years ago and issue SQL-like data gathering queries over everything from Wikipedia to the Department of Labor.

That said -- Microsoft's idiotic forges and weirdo repositories were total incompetent nonsense. And the stupidity with their C compilers -- from strategy to implementation -- presented a brick wall to anything resembling clean cross-platform development, which DAMMIT, is a must.

There is a lot more open-source .NET code out there than you'd think. But it tends to be very narrow and very vertical (and often, very high quality) because the core libraries are so broad and so great.
Does anybody know what the path is to performing some kind of spectroscopy on this planet? Detecting molecules that might indicate life - water, ozone?
By some accounts we should probably be desperately hoping we are alone in the universe (at least with regards to technological civilizations), since it would mean the Great Filter is behind us rather than ahead. The alternative being we're very likely to go extinct before we get a chance to colonize the galaxy, and since that could probably be done using synthetic biology developed within the relatively near future, that would give our civilization an expected lifetime of less than a few hundred years at most. The more life that exists close to or surpassing our own level of development, the more bleak the future looks for our civilization.
Not really.

Cold storage is absolutely a necessity when you reach the scale of imgur, unless you want to run the service incredibly inefficiently.

imgur keeps photos forever [0]. To do so without some kind of cold storage infrastructure in place for all the millions of photos that will probably never be seen again, or perhaps at a rate of once per year, would be infrastructure cost suicide.

Facebook faces a similar challenge and has gone in to detail about how it developed a cold storage strategy to deal with it[1].

I would say that for a service like imgur there is probably a level of parity between the amount of importance they need to place on content delivery and on cold storage.

[0] https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/201476457-How-long-...

[1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/1433093613662262/-under-the-...
moving from magit 1.x to this magit made me accidentally push some commits to the master branch. This is because my fingers still want to exercise the magit 1.X key combo's. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
So what's the canonical way to:
create branch X,
switch to branch X,
and make it so my next push will go to origin/X ?
You are da man. This is really cool! I can only imagine how much you've been through!
> 1,400 light-years away

Very cool that we can find it, but I don't think we'll be visiting this one any time soon...
"Hey Hacker News! Try out our pilot program." Just sign here.

It's another wannabe startup that asks people to sign up before disclosing terms, or, in this case, anything at all. And they want access to your server. Right.

No business address on the site. A low-rent "domain control only validated" SSL cert. Anonymous domain registration. They do show up as a Delaware corporation, all of two months old:

CANARY COMPUTER CORPORATION
File Number:	5749511
Filing State:	Delaware (DE)
Filing Status: Unknown
Filing Date:	May 18, 2015

They're not known to Dun and Bradstreet, so you can't do a background check on them. Those are all scumbag flags.
Put Effective meta description on a blog drive tariff from search result :SEO
I'm a European and I honestly have no idea how to answer to the point, but even if the law allows surveillance, there's also the question of resources; even if the laws in my country (Romania) would be worse than those in the US, our intelligence agencies are far, far less capable than the NSA and out-sourcing this is a whole different can of worms and can't ever be justified to the public, even if they are in fact doing it.

I must say that I don't believe in laws that protect my privacy. However, I do believe in using technologies for protecting my privacy. For example what I do like about the US is that you've got your Fifth Amendment which apparently applies to encryption keys. And such a protection against "Self-Incrimination" is actually the exception rather than the rule.
Ask HN: What data visualisation tools do data scientists and developers use?
As a data scientist or software engineer working with "medium / large" amount of data, how do you visualize them?

Lets take a few example:

- Working on a iPhone app dealing with signal processing, Fourier transform etc, how do you visualize your signal and frequencies?

- As a back-end engineer working with a directed graph data structure, how do you quickly visualize your graph? are you interested in seeing your graph changing, step by step?

- How do you quickly visualize massive amount of data points into time series?
I think he meant the "developing for a locked in and dead ecosystem" developers.
Lots of downvotes, but I can relate to what you are saying. 10 years of working in a pro Microsoft organization trying to do PHP and Ruby development showed me that developers and managers alike bought into Microsoft's ideas at the time. Microsoft was good, Microsoft offered support, and open-source was just for hobbyists. 10 years of working with servers that were hostile towards openness, and 10 years of watching Microsoft blatantly steal from open-source and not give back.

Now they're giving back. And that's great. But I was involved with IronRuby. And I will never trust MS and open-source after that all went down. I'm a big fan of Chocolatey.org, and I'm hearing that MS wants to do their own version of that too.

The more things change...
False equivalence. Germany actually has the money it's wasting.
I've very curious what the general "impression" regarding IBM is around HN? They are not discussed much around here.
Doesn't explain why Java developed a robust OSS ecosystem long before it went open source. Java did benefit from the model Sun set up on J2EE of setting out JSR 'specifications' and only providing limited capability reference implementations, which made it possible for the Apache Java ecosystem to spring up, initially around the Xerces and Xalan XML libraries. Maybe - maybe - Microsoft is starting to get on board with this kind of model now.
It's all about exposure :D
Create your own erasure code
Berlin sure doesn't.
You nailed it. And there were typically utilities to do it on every 'NIX box I encountered. Along with scripts to mostly automate the process. :)

Then there was my evolved scheme of using diversity where I had different OS's or filesystems with stuff handled at application layer. More complex to set up but decreases chance any one set of code is going to mess you up. Safety or security through diversity is a powerful technique. Harder to do today with so much code reuse: things might only be different on the surface with same bugs lurking underneath. All these different web security schemes using the same OpenSSL library is a good example.
However, the egress charge only applies to data moved off Google Cloud Services. If you use a Google compute instance to verify the backup (same size as the Linode at $0.05/hr), the cost becomes:

(7 * 50 * .01) + (30 * .05) + (30 * .01 * 50) = $20.00/month
David Guill is another deadly serious RPI cluster builder. I don't know what he's running, but I can only admire what he had done.

http://likemagicappears.com/projects/raspberry-pi-cluster/
If you really want control, do it by using something like an issue tracking or case management system.

The most important character of "an issue" or "a requirement" it is that it is a unit of work that can be "done", "in progress", or "not done". Throughout the life of the project, there are going to be negotiations between people about what exactly is done and how requirements will change, and those kind of systems are designed for that and capture not only the changes but also some of the semantics.

Some issue tracker may have (6) AND (7) built in. Otherwise you may need to make some reports.
Hi Jason, can I ask what a "designer organism" is? Is this just a more marketing-friendly term for a GMO?
Congrats to the compose folks! IIRC, they acquired Cloudant a little while ago.
I hate this attitude that negativity is unproductive. Pointing out a problem, articulating its impacts, and hypothesizing about its causes are essential steps to effective problem solving.

And I further abhor the notion that anger is not useful. Anger gets attention, and passion elicits empathy and thoughtfulness. Anger is motivating. Anger is a rejection of despair, which is the real enemy of change.
Well, now that Microsoft's open sourced ASP.NET and working on .NET Core, you can add ".NET" to that list.
I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.
I didn't say that taking a side in the debate is "ignorance, or... fearmongering".

I said that conflating deaths in nuclear accidents and deaths from nuclear accidents was. If you want to take a position on the distinction, that's one thing. Not even seeing it — or, worse, ignoring it for intellectually dishonest purposes — is something else entirely.
Perfume Manufacturers Must Cope with Scarcity of Precious Supplies Like Rose Oil
I am extremely, extremely skeptical that Microsoft doesn't have a way for nvidia to fix this.

As a heavy desktop Linux user, hearing about examples of half-assed, incompetent, hacky, lazy product support by nvidia isn't exactly new territory.

Nvidia is causing your pain, not Microsoft.
As this account attests, in the biomedical field cargo cult science (withholding data) and politics are rife. After decades of looking at it (back to the late '70s), I along with many others much better informed have to conclude less than half of it is correct.

I recently got a routine visit with a resident just starting his outpatient period; he commented that he didn't pay much attention to research, rather, he trusted the experience of his superiors who'd treated many thousands of patients.

And then there's the iffy quality of generics, which now cover the bulk of what's prescribed due to patent expiration....
Choosing the Best Headphones for Developers
Do you really believe that it'll ever be on the JVM? Why would Microsoft put any effort into that? CLR is now cross platform. If you want functional programming that is similar in style to F# (and ML-family of languages), check out Scala.
We're using Confluence for that. It's nice because issues and branches are all cross linkable with wiki pages. I suspect you could get similar behavior in wikimedia with other trackers and hubs.
This, I think the spending on education, science and technology should be the by far the most spending, like 10x imo.
I'll try to pretend that I didn't tear up reading that story but it would be a lie.
HubSpot COS vs. Joomla
Kiwi bird genome sequenced
I try but don't hold me accountable for any inaccuracies.

At the moment three public prosecutors independently investigate that companies practices which is rare in Germany: 1) A gigantic adventure park in Poland which was never supposed to be built 2) A cartel which allowed them to build two power plants 3) Falsification of balance sheets.

Imtech is responsible for parts of the airport's construction – including the two parts which created most problems: the smoke extractor and the cabling. As the airport was close to be finished, opening date just days away, Imtech send fraudulent invoices they knew nobody would double-check. This is a practice that seems really common with such projects.

Similar things happened a few years earlier: When the planning agency went bankrupt and it was known that due to regulatory changes the plans needed to be fixed they nonetheless went on to built the (now obsolete) parts – knowing they will be the company that will be called to fix it again. Additionally the work was done sloppily: Among the quoted examples were control boxes build too close together that you couldn't open their doors.

What was really important for the company was that all invoices should be paid by the end of 2012 to include them in that years balance sheet – while delaying paying their workers until January. As time was running out they resorted to a bribe: In December 2012 an employee of Imtech gave an employee of the Berlin airport an envelope with 150 000 € at the side of the highway. Airport employees spend overtime during the christmas holidays so that all payments of 65 Mio. € could be processed.

The article then goes on the describe the involvement of top management which indicate that this is done systematically. They also describe the two other projects from above. They also suggest that these projects look like a Ponzi scheme: A project's loss is paid by doing even crazier projects.
An old fashioned opensource developer will not contribute to a closed source MS foundation. Ok .net is now opensource but this step is too too late.
What can I say? I like trying to make things work better.

-adrian
Does anyone know why bandwidth costs for both AWS and Google have remained flat while storage has rapidly approached .01 cents a gb?

Do they have fixed costs or is this one of the last ways they have to to make money on their platforms?
Develop Now with ClojureScript for React Native
That doesn't stop Lyft from accepting tips. I think Uber is just pushing back against tipping culture out of a desire to hypersimplify their user experience. It's a noble goal, but there's still a huge amount of pro-tipping social inertia in places like the US, which ends up making the process more complicated as people just tip in cash instead.
What kind of security experts are they talking to... My personal list of most important things to do:

1. Run a version of Linux ( Windows is simply insecure )

2. Use Firefox + NoScript and only ever temporarilly allow JS to run as needed. ( JS is -not- safe and at any point in time there are at least a handful of zero day exploits )

3. Use an offline password manager ( KeePass )

4. Use a secure anonymous non-logging VPN for all internet use

5. Use a paid private email account, not some free one

6. Use VMs for running software that may not be safe
It only serves two fronts; education and development.
Education-wise, you need something dirt-cheap to play with. For developer, you need some intermediate stage to deploy your work to test before going after a big cluster.