skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Well let's put aside the disk failure issue. Modern 4-drive NAS systems can tolerate a lost drive and alert you promptly to replace it. You'd have to have pretty bad luck to lose more than one drive at the exact same time."

Very interesting and well thought out posting, but the above quotation represents a very, very naive understanding of how these arrays work with large, multi-TB hard drives.

In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.

I am not anti-NAS - I use them myself for critical data - but with 3 and 4TB hard drive, I would only use raidz3 (or equivalent) at this point (and preferably with 12 or fewer drives in the array).
Except that it doesn't appear as though new users can upload RAW images anymore [1]. Oh well. It seemed like a good service for a minute there.

[1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324
Frustrating or motivating? As far as I am concerned, if I live long enough to get even a blurry image of an exoplanet, I will die happy. And the best part: I have a good chance of this happening: http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/presentations/AIAA_Space_2014Blackw...
Can you share what you had for your autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay, and your approximate rate of transactions?
I really wish I had the ability to:

1. Call out any remote API.

2. Schedule a task to run at a certain time of day.

Basically, I want cron with workflow and recipes.
As tempting as it may be, never do "side" projects while in the confines of your full time gig. There are lots of sticky legal areas. Your company could possibly even claim rights to your "side" project since you worked on it using company resources (computers, office, etc).
There's a lot of examples. Have a look at Bluemix.net, Jazz.net, Bluemix Devops Services (https://hub.jazz.net/) and some of the DevOps tooling like Urbancode.
You've posted a very personal situation on a blog that links to your LinkedIn page and therefore indirectly to your employer.

I applaud the apparent introspection you're exhibiting in your blog post but I would caution you against sharing it with the world.
"Everything you heard about me is true ... I am not a free-marketeer ... I believe in the heavy hand of government."
Not a dig at anyone, especially not the Arabs who basically preserved philosophy and mathematics while Europe entered the Dark Ages. My point was simply that Kepler 452b-ians observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets.
Got fired from my last job for them not having enough work for me. Felt pretty bad about that because it was my first job and I didn't really feel that I had learned enough to be a capable developer. Found a better job in 2 weeks :)

Last thing I heard they also are letting go one of the most capable and senior developer I know and had already fired the interaction designer/graphics girls. They're down to 5 people now.

Based on my limited experience I would say it's usually a pretty bad sign if there's not enough work for the developers...
No excuse to not have a junior dev completely busy, but there's also no excuse to go working on your personal competing consulting service while on your employer's payroll.

TBH, he's probably lucky that he only got fired, and didn't end up with a lawsuit on his hands, too. (Had he actually taken clients, I suspect he would have.)
My understanding was that VR was intensely nauseating if you can't at least move your head and have the motion translated (at very low latency!). Is that not the case?
I really like comments that are made to provide some provenance to a news piece. These facts/references should arguably should have been in the text of the article. Double kudos for providing provenance for your provenance.
I do about the same except that "rating" need not be precise. There are only three categories:

- good / pick (5 stars)

- bad => delete (your first step)

- in between => no need to rate further

There is no objective difference between a 2-star and a 3-star image; the really interesting step is to rate the picks (I actually quite enjoy this step).
While the idea on the surface is great, it would be good for you to map out all the stakeholders that are involved in the recruiting process. Figure out who will be the one paying for your service. Is it the company? The talented individuals? Recruiting firms?

Companies approach recruiting with the fixed mindset because there is a job that needs to be completed and they want to minimize their risk/cost so they hire someone who has done it before.

As JSeymourATL mentioned, you're going to have to educate a lot of folks on why the growth mindset is a better alternative than the fixed mindset. In theory it's great but you'll need proof that it's better for the company and by better, either it saves them money or makes them more money. I would start with working with companies who aren't doing great and are willing to experiment.

For structuring the business, that's your job to validate what works. This was essentially the same question that I asked a few months back while starting my company and our customer development process is helping us to figure out where we should play. Build multiple models and test to see which fits. You could even become a training company to help people along that mindset. You'll have to find out what is the real problem and who is going to pay you to solve that problem.

Hope that helps! Best of luck!
This one didn't go too bad. It even came in under the revised (increased) budget:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Tunnel_Project

But now they get to drain the great lakes faster for profit.
For any photographers looking to self-host their collections, I strongly recommend taking a look at Koken. Paul mentions it in his article. Unfortunately, they're looking to sell the company - so I'm not sure how long their product will be around, but it's a great solution for self-hosted photos. http://koken.me/
I'm grateful for everything Continuum has done for the Python community. They seem to have such an amazing team, and I'm glad to hear this.
Your company could possibly even claim rights to your "side" project since you worked on it using company resources

Citation: Hooli vs. Pied Piper
OP should make a startup that manufactures "bad decisions" because he is a goldmine.

Do yourself a favor and delete this post.
Yes and?

To me that's a 'knowledge premium'. Garages expect men to be more knowledgeable about car repair and less likely to be intimidated about going for another quote.

Likewise if I go to the market to buy veggies, a less than honorable seller might push inferior product to me as a man than a woman who he expects to be more discerning.
The business of generating fake enthusiasm,from flash mobs to the campaign trail
Agreed. Re-read my comment?
PuTTY! For some reason, it was the only software that would reliably communicate on the serial port of one particular Linux system I was using.
> At least 25% of it will be over IPv6!

We probably will need IPv10 to connect all the dots in the sky!
Typical poorly managed small company. Sure, just forget about your employees and cross your fingers that they miraculously are able to figure out what they need to do, then panic and fire people when you decide to check on the state of affairs.
How to develop the perfect web skillset
Controlling the Police Cameras
For what it's worth, after the original monolithic plan for the Berlin airport needed to be changed there was no other grand plan but rather small teams each independently and locally applying changes on-the-go. Let's say as we see it didn't go too well.
> Based on my limited experience I would say it's usually a pretty bad sign if there's not enough work for the developers...

This is absolutely true. It either means resources are being inefficiently allocated or there's not enough business to justify so many salaries.
That's nuts. Double stacking doesn't seem viable with Central Europe's more thoroughly electrified rail network. Not that it's inherently incompatible, just that we'd have to rebuild it all. Also, the tunnels.

A curious case of technological leapfrogging (in a sense; I rather prefer the electrified network even at the cost of no double stacked freight trains).
You of course don't have to... In which case you get your screen real estate (and computer cycles and attention) chewed up by ads, get fewer ads on no websites, and get to have all your browsing behavior tracked too.

Alternatively, you can install an ad-blocker, which will never be supported by sites that run ads (so will break them in exciting ways), can come with its own can of worms regarding tracking your browsing, and puts a publisher in a tragedy of the commons where if enough people go that road, they can't generate ad revenue and will have to seek other options (see sibling threads for side-effects).

Alternatively, you can seek out media that is entirely ad-free of its own volition; you'll curtail your own consumption, but it's an option.

It's a wide, free world out there.
A Peer Review Bot for GitHub: Because reviews rock, but managing them is tedious
This looks really dumb. The gameplay's going to be crap, it's probably going to wildly overuse cutscenes, and the game's message isn't subtle at all.

It's supposed to be all literary and pretentious, but it's not going to be fun. I can't believe backers want to waste real money on this garbage.
> Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok).

Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website.

I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2].

[1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-...

[2] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324-what-...
I don't see what's wrong with that. Converging on one way of doing things is part of the purpose of a standard. We still have the option of implementing a different method if we prefer, just as much as we ever did.
>Maybe we should be using Hacker News to, I don't know, show off cool hacks and build projects, instead of living vicariously through stereotypes on TV?

Not mutually exclusive.
This assumption is incorrect. From management's perspective it could have appeared he was not able to keep up with the workload because he was working on his projects half the time. It seems he didn't even attempt to tell them he wanted to do more and instead opted to work on his own projects.
Fluentd and Docker integration meetup
And it still is!

So what's everyone complaining about? Language (keyword/syntax) bloat without adding new functionality?
Inside the warped mind of Anders Breivik
Doom was the death knell for my Amiga days as well. That and by that time, IIRC, it was obvious that Commodore was going under fast. I don't want to go pull out an Amiga and play, but it's rare to experience something that actually feels like a whole new ball game. (The Oculus Rift is close.)
The calculation probably includes new debt and projected repayment options, e.g. a rising growth factor, so it's not to be taken as fact.
The highly unusual company behind Sriracha, the world’s coolest hot sauce (2013)
I got it, thanks. And thanks for following up. I'll take a look and let you know what I find.
Thanks for pointing that out, it has since been fixed.
Many technologies exist to achieve this, they're just not in the "consumer ready" stage yet.

3D scanning is best for static objects like walls in your room. They never move or change, so scan the whole space. When you turn your head in VR, you'll see accurate 3D representations of that 3D environment.

Full 6DOF tracking is another method. Given a 3D scanned static object, like a coffee cup, you can track it using various optical and IMU-based techniques. This means a static object can be dynamically tracked as it moves, giving you accurate information about the 3D world to pick up your coffee cup without spilling it.

Optical tracking can be used to replicate facial movements into 3D models (see: Faceshift), to track finger movements (see: LeapMotion/Kinect), or full body motion.

Video can fill in the gaps for dynamic content. This can be achieved in two ways:
1) depth cameras which combine RGB video like a normal camera with depth information, allow us to reconstruct dynamic objects at proper depth.
2) 360-degree stereoscopic video which gives a fixed perspective to the full 3D environment. This isn't great for "3D from all angles" as non-rotational head movements won't see an accurate view.

A combination of these technologies will enable a VR user to see a real 3D environment, and feel like they are in it.

One thing is certain: it's coming. It's just a matter of time. The technology is rapidly maturing.
It doesn't even matter what he was doing with his time. If his employer wasn't satisfied with what he was producing it's in their best interest to let their employee know they need to correct the situation.

Firing him means they were in panic mode because they were lazy and decided not to manage their employees.
We have sensitive telescopes. If there was life out there, we would have noticed. You would have astronomy conferences filled with people trying to figure out what all these weird spectra objects are, or trying to decipher all these structured radio observations.
I'm working on this!
The copyright on the site suggests that citycreator goes back to 2002. If that's so, then why is it being posted now in 2015?

It's a neat site. And yay for no flash.
> In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.

Are you talking about Unrecoverable Read Errors? [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306499
" One of the services I mentioned offering once online was digital signage – which was my company’s primary line of business."

Does that imply you were trying to start a competing business to the company you were working for ? I'm sorry but if thats the case... this is not a matter of feigning ignorance, this is just plain stupid.
And also doesn't want to use any resources, or perform any heat-generating computation?
It's definitely a different experience though. If the narrative calls for [someobject] to be in a scene and an advertiser pays to make it their object, that doesn't generally detach me from the story like an ad interstitial does.
The iLoo would take the meaning of zero-day exploits to a whole new level...

BTW patch your iLoo regularly! Reinstalling really is an unpleasant job :)
The pub has seven reviews on Google, several of which mention that it is accessible by boat. It appears to be right on a river.
That might be new -- weird. mpix is the online version of Miller's Imaging, which is a pro lab. They make very nice prints.

They basically will ship photos anywhere (mounted, whatever), well armored, and prices were pretty decent.
He's 20. Legal action might be sensible if there was something to gain ($). Overall, I'd say this is a relatively low risk public statement and I thought it was pretty neutral in tone.
So what do you do when you are in the position of not having work to do, and you have asked repeatedly for more work?
Answers to asking for more work have been basically to wait.
What about if you get told not to work on stuff when asking about specific tickets or things that do need to be worked on and add company value?
Plausible, but what would be explanations for sending ourselves back to the stone age instead of carry advanced knowledge along?
That's because you treat VR vs AR vs reality as three different extremes.

They're not.

Think of them as a spectrum. VR + stereoscopic image passthrough gets you an AR-like view of the real world around you. These overlays allow you to pick up coffee cups, see when your kid is poking you, etc.
I'm a fan of the unscripted travel variety too (backpacking ftw!), although I'm also really into the idea of 360 video of things like short previews of festivals, some harder to get to places, just to get a sense of where I should prioritize my sight seeing.

VR can give you a sense of what a new place is going to be like, but it'll never be quite like breathing the air or climbing on things.
Cool. If/when we get to it, I'll let you know.
Startups sometimes
This seems to point a wacky domain 'http://oreillymaker.com/' that should work but doesn't :( Looks neat but doesn't work.
OP, if you do not find a way to delete this off internet and caches than you might want to borrow a brick wall and bang your head against as that is exactly the message you sent to every potential employer worldwide.

Its not a good thing and nothing to speak about..
but dey tuk his jub!!
Heading to VidCon? It's Time to Remember Where It All Started
I like his honesty. He is only 20. It wouldn't put me off hiring him, if I were in a position to do so. It's a pretty measured post too, and he's not blaming anyone, so I wouldn't think it would be something he'll regret. Hopefully not.
The more advanced edition will come with Oculus Rift VR.
This is a cool concept for 2002: a JavaScript game where you build a city and then share it with others by sending it to them as an e-Card.
It may also violate your company's license agreements for the software you used to do it.
Searching around in the news, it seems like the only time Google uses patents offensively is when fighting against patent trolls:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21458094

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/12/26/google-sues-apple-back...

This doesn't seem to fit with the definition of a patent troll to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
Only if it's printed on toilet paper :)
meh. you're a startup you want to waste your precious time taking a punk kid to task over consulting? you only waste time with shit like this if it's personal. and in that case you have already lost.
...aaaaaand it's down, hugged to death by Hacker News probably.
Under communism, there are still structures that resemble corporations: they are just state-owned. In these corporations there are layers of management, with bosses at the top who earn big salaries. They have access to the flow of money and materials, and use that privilege to their own personal advantage.

Workers owning the means of production under communism is an empty concept. The workers don't actually hold any deeds that show they own some concrete share of anything, with a concrete monetary figure attached to that share.

Proper ownership means that you hold the title to a piece of the pie, and you can cash that out if you want to leave that system. That cannot be under communism, because freely held shares are private ownership. As soon as you have that, some workers will buy out shares from others creating inequality. Speaking of leaving the system: for many people from the Eastern Bloc between the 1940's and 1980's, that meant getting over some barbed wire fence, and losing everything they had. (Conforming that they actually owned nothing.)

The idea that everyone owns everything under communism is purely symbolic. In fact the state owns everything, and those who run the state, who have all the power, effectively are the state, and so they are effectively the owners.
Is JavaScript really a prototype-based language? In prototype-based programming, you create an object which has shared functionality (the prototype), and then create new objects by cloning that object. That's not how you implement shared functionality in JavaScript; in JavaScript, you implement shared functionality by delegating to another object. In other words, JavaScript objects work like Python, or Ruby, or Smalltalk (yes, unlike these languages JavaScript, until ES6, makes no language-level distinction between an object which is also a class, and an object which isn't a class, but that's just a matter of syntactic sugar).
Last year, I went to Edinburgh from Oxford. It was slightly cheaper for me to:
* Drive to Birmingham airport
* Pay for airport parking
* Fly to Edinburgh
* Get the bus to/from Edinburgh center

...than to get the train, booked about a month in advance. And of course, I got the best part of a whole extra day in Edinburgh with the time saved.

Crazy.
Personally I find this discovery rather sobering.

It's becoming increasingly clear that solar systems are quite common. As our planet detection abilities increase to smaller and smaller planets I believe we'll find more and more of those too. Some of these (like this one) will be in the habitable zone of a star. Some of those assumedly will develop life. Some of those will develop sentient life.

I just picture a timeline like Earth's projected on this planet, which of course has no basis in fact. But imagine a civilization that's had 2 billion years of life longer than ours?

That's a really long time obviously. It's hard to imagine that such a civilization couldn't develop automated methods to populate the local space around them. This is one of the counterarguments to life being common in the universe of course. At 1% of the speed of light you could populate the galaxy with autonomous robots in a "mere" 10 million years.

So our inability to detect anything like this gives weight to the argument that no such starfaring civilization exists or that they're less than ~10 milllion years old.

Was there civilization on this planet and it died out for some reason? We'll probably never know.

As these planets mount up (as I believe they will), it'll further strengthen the idea that we're basically doomed (ie the Great Filter) and further suggest we are a mere cosmic blink.
Show HN: My first OSS project (Java)
I would like to share with you my first OSS project feedback is welcome, currently on v1.2 nearly releasing 1.3 (due to bugs).

Link: http://mementocode.blogspot.pt/2015/07/my-first-open-source-project.html

The link is a post on my blog (where I would like to be able to spare some more time writing)
So what's the current fraction of stars that have habitable zone planets? (i.e. how many stars were surveyed?) That would get us an estimate of how many of those 259 might contain Earth-like planets: we use the fraction of orbital those planets that Kepler detects to estimate the total fraction of planets per star, and multiply that by 259.
Hannibal lived 247 – 183/182/181 BC. That's a few hundred years earlier than 615 AD.
Imo it's also unethical as a professional
> On business

I guess it's fine if you're not paying...
3 billion pairs * 2 bits/pair = 750 MB of data.
So you could put in GPU memory and do some kind of brute-force search on the GPU.
If you try to move around a lot in a non-positional tracking system like the Gear VR or in a 360 video, you might feel nauseous. But if you're sitting down and just looking around, generally developers are getting better at not making people sick in VR.

The other half of that is when your motion isn't translated 1:1 to your perspective in the game (e.g., exaggerated movements in a first-person shooter), that's when you can really feel simulation sickness.

Valve's "room-scale tracking" actually solves a lot of that by keeping your perspective in sync with your real self. I'd say it's the best VR solution I've tried yet.
I want their Channel Platform to come out so badly. Being able to hook any service into IFTTT would be incredibly powerful/useful
CenturyLink gigabit fiber reaches 100,000 Seattle households ahead of schedule