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To have a look at what's new in 9.6 see: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Newin96

Quick list of major features:

Parallel sequential scans, joins and aggregates

Elimination of repetitive scanning of old data by autovacuum

Synchronous replication now allows multiple standby servers for increased reliability

Full-text search for phrases

Support for remote joins, sorts, and updates in postgres_fdw

Substantial performance improvements, especially in the area of improving scalability on many-CPU servers



average is skewed towards distribution outliers, the more asymmetric the distribution the more pronounced will be such effect.

On the other hand median just gives you the value that split the distribution in two exact parts.

Price/Income distributions are the perfect match if you want to see avg bias taken to its extreme.

e.g.

median of [2,2,2,2,2,2,2,100] = 2 average of [2,2,2,2,2,2,2,100] = 14.25



Strange nobody mentioned Nassim Taleb and his work on that matter: The Precautionary Principle - www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf

Quoting the first paragraph of the paper:

The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence.


The act of publishing a book or an article (edit: or a cartoon), has occasionally led to far-reaching, sometimes violent, unforeseen and unpredictable systemic consequences, sometimes bringing down governments.

Yet Taleb has published several, apparently with no concern whatsoever about his own precautionary principle.


Not at all. The point of his book is to educate people and reframe how they think about risk, so he achieved exactly what he intended. If one of those is to bring a more risk-based understanding of GMOs, which in turns makes people more cautious from a scientific perspective, then mission accomplished.

The fundamental problem with loosing GMOs into the environment is that there's no plan B for screwing up the earth or your health, so we have to be extra, extra conservative. Even if only 1 in a million GMOs turn out to have disastrous consequences, given enough development and use, eventually we will create something with unforeseen consequences that passes whatever standards for safety we have. But given the replicable nature of biology, it will be everyone's problem instead of a localized disaster.

The people claiming we have sufficient scientific evidence for GMOs don't understand this key point: our usual standards for evidence of safety must be orders of magnitude higher to risk the planet.


This is a point of view that seems to rest on the idea that "conventional" human agriculture isn't a disaster for the planet. But it manifestly is.


Well before there were GMO, there was the fertilizer bloom at the mouth of the Mississippi that is a clear disaster: http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-oc....


Who proposed the precautionary principle and whether they've acted in accordance with it is irrelevant when the considering the matter of whether it should apply to GMO food.


Bringing down a government does not belong to the same group of consequences the precautionary principle is applied to.

PP is used when a system, in this case the humanity, is at risk of total failure, i.e. ruin.


Untraceable money is an oxymoron, the whole point of money is that the whole network of people using it, can trust it is not forged out of someones ass, and is instead what its claimed to be.

Quick someone tell the federal reserve / ecb that QEs can't be used because they are an oxymoron (sorry can't resist).

That said it is possible to have an open ledger used to avoid duble spends without revealing anything about someone finance, just look for monero (xmr) or zerocash.


This is the third time in a week that this article is posted on hn

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9375978

It seems to be a real hot-button to say the least.


The NextDraft effect ?


Dave Pell is really influential among people who read hn imho, so yes NextDraft network effect could have played a role here.

That said I think jurnos really like this kind of narrative and subject, since it's really appealing to theirs audience.

It's a sort feedback loop that time will help to "break".


this one is a different article, but same story.


Already posted and discussed here a few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854


I don't know about "web" scale, but it will definitely scale horizontally without using any external tools/extensions.

There's still a somewhat annoying limitation that is related to the status of table partitioning in postgresql.

In fact the planner automatically choose the right child table, be it on the same db or into another server, for UPDATE and SELECT statements but not for INSERTs. This is a known limitation and there's active work to fix it but don't hold your breath though.


The main function of prisons is to keep the criminals away from law-abiding society

Really? I thought it was about correcting/reforming.


The four recognized purposes of punishment are: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. Which is primary, or even whether they are all legitimate is a matter of fierce debate.


So an 18 year old kid gets busted for a drug offense. He gets thrown in jail for several years along with hardened and violent criminals. His "rehabilitation" consists of an immersion in a world of criminality, and when he is finally released, he has a record that will stay with him for the rest of his life and severely limit his choices moving forward.

Yes, he's been reformed. Just not in a good way. Not in a way that does anything to try to fit him back into society.


Depends on the country maybe? Here in Brazil no one believes criminals can be fixed, here we want them away, locked up or dead.


They should change name from correctional facilities to something else then.

Joking aside, I think that using prisons just for isolation is a waste of tax payer money.

Just think about at the case at hand, we are wasting the money needed to keep this guy in jail for another 8 decades with no actual reasons.

edit: fix grammar


Where, here in Brasil they are not called Correctional Facility!

In fact the only place where I saw "Correctional Facility" was in US-movies and series, I thought it was some fictional name or something like that.


What's the alternative, in your mind?


It's not a matter of belief, it is a matter of demonstrable fact that some criminals are capable of completely reforming. To deny this is simply to deny reality.

(It is also clearly apparent that some criminals are unreformable - telling the difference a priori remains the hard part).


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