jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> If Python's performance in the ML space is not sufficient, then the community would have quickly moved on from it and built something better.

Python's performance is sufficient when the bottleneck is actually the computation done in the accelerator. In my flavour of ML, we use small models, think 3 layer NN 64 neuron wide and in some cases a small CNN. During training, most of the models reported using <150MB.

Most of the community finds python sufficient because they do not need to interleave training and simulating.

> For ML purposes, if your model isn't running on the GPU, it doesn't matter if you're using Swift, Rust, or whatever, your stuff is gonna be slow. Like it or not, Python is one of the best glue languages out there, and the reason why libraries like TensorFlow and Torch are not used in their native languages (C++) [0] is because they're significantly simpler to use in Python and the performance overhead is usually one function call (e.g run_inference(...)) and not billions.

You don't know in what I am running/doing, hence your comment comes off as ignorant.

This is the setup:

Run X number of simulated steps on CPU, collect X samples, store them in a buffer of size either X, or Z>>X, train for Y number of steps sampling from buffer, copy model to CPU, repeat for total of 1M steps, repeat 10+ times to get a good average of the performance.

All of that without any hyper parameter tuning.

Now, you also need to note that a non trivial amount of work is also done in python to augment the inputs as necessary. If the work is done in numpy, there's usually little overhead, but, it is often the case that the environment I am simulating is wrapped in wrapper functions that modify the behavior, e.g. I may need to remember the last 4 instances created by the environment, and so on. All these modifications quickly accumulate and for a single experiment of 1M steps, you end up with billions of python calls. The community uses more or less the same package/framework as the intermediary between simulations and models.

The issue is so prominent, that the community as a whole moved away from running in single core the simulations, to having multiple parallel actors to collect transitions/data points, this also requires new theory. Furthermore, there have been many proposed architectures for distributed and asynchronous training because the bottleneck is not the GPU or the model, but rather, how fast you can collect transitions. Infact, there was a distributed architecture by google that literally sends the transitions over the network into a few GPUs, the reason is that the network cost is amortized because you get to run hundreds of simulations concurrently.

IIRC, a maintainer of a popular project/framework that I contribute saw improvements upwards of 2x when using C++ over python.
Could it be that you have more knowledge of Swift and don't care/want to invest in understanding Node.js/JavaScript? I really enjoy writing backend code in TypeScript for Node.js. But loath having to write Swift code for iOS. I know a big part is my unwillingness to invest time in Apple's ecosystem and properly learn Swift.
I wondered if we'd see this quibble. The constitution explicitly says that the newly created states are "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever" which obviously means they must have the same sovereignty. Yes, nearly all of the subsequent states after the first thirteen came into existence as sovereign states and joined the union simultaneously as part of a single process, but those remain distinct events.
Nobody can answer that with the little information you provided. At least need your rough location, new location if it is different, experience level and rough current pay and both position titles to know.

33% is unusually high for an at market level person just moving from one company to another for the same position, unless you posses a special skill or knowledge. So that probably means either you were pretty far below market, or you are switching roles. At least in the US I'd say that to be the case.
Which is sort of my point. If you have to rewrite or expand significant parts of the the type system anyway is there any advantage over just doing the same work for Python?

There's many other advantages of Swift over Python for ML (concurrency and performance) but I just don't see the type system as one. At least not anymore.
> - Black fails at its most basic premise - "avoiding manual code formatting" - because a trailing comma causes a list/function call to be split over lines regardless of width

Ah that's why `manage.py shell` now split json pasted on several lines, very annoying
Experience is great but never let it stand in the way of progress.

- Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (@Boris)

http://startupquote.com/post/4840020049
the design and implementation for Doing It Right take care, attention and time

Doesn't NoSQL require the same, only it shifts from being the job of a db engineer/sysadmin to that of the developers?
One can run a commercial website backed by MySQL using the GPL license. The GPL only requires you to release your code if they link off each other and you're distributing the application. Web sites don't usually have their code distributed. Even if you are distributing the code, it's very likely that you don't need to distribute it as GPL, but that's a longer discussion. Suffice it to say, you don't need a commercial MySQL license to run a website.

There's no weekend project that's going to be "fully scalable". Scaling isn't just grabbing a NoSQL backend and declaring victory. A lot of scaling is figuring out how you're going to use your data and creating data structures that allow for fast, efficient, and scalable access. Many NoSQL data stores force one to think about how you're going to access the data more than SQL databases since the NoSQL stores usually don't support things like joins. One still has to do a lot of work to design to implement it right.
Architecture of a site you probably never use: 60 mysql servers (30 master/master pairs) ranging from 2 core machines with 8 GB RAM to 8 core machines with 64 GB RAM and RamSan PCI SSDs.

Some tables are sharded, others aren't. Some tables are imported into hadoop for hive queries, others aren't. Backups are run using a fragile program called zrm and an army of outsourced DBAs to manage it.

The army of outsourced DBAs also deal with replication failures, figuring out why inexplicable deadlocks happen, tuning every inane innodb configurable, and "rebuilding" servers when mysql decides to slow itself down and yearns for a complete dump/reload of all tables.

Friends don't let friends use mysql.
The context of the copy-on-write win was the bytecode for modules. I don't know that you'd have anybody meddling with the reference counts for that...but I haven't really looked.
> people have more information than just alphabetic letter position to work with, they have an idea about frequency in names as well.

Perhaps a better analogy would be binary searching in a phone book or dictionary for a foreign language.
That was 2002. Here is the state of the art in 2008: http://cs.anu.edu.au/techreports/2007/TR-CS-07-04.pdf

Unsurprisngly, things have changed. Many of Linus's complaints were valid, and we've learned how to address them.
I don't understand -- why didn't Google just acquire the company / patent? Would the cost be far overshadowed by the risk of losing the suit... and then they'd have another patent arrow in their quiver?
What was the motivation to start from scratch rather than compile at least a subset of Racket to JS? I imagine Pyret was a massive amount of work. Same effort could've brought Racket to the browser.

---
Big thank you to the PLT group for HTdP that introduced me to programming and PLAI class that taught me PL hacking and ultimately landed me a job writing compilers
After being an user from 2007 I've deleted my account in February 2013, then re-registered in October 2013. It doesn't contain any private data now, only close circle of friends and acquaintances and is primarily used as a contact holder/event responder.

It might be a generational thing, maturity or otherwise, but IMHO Facebook (and other social networks) has impacted our lives in unhealthy ways, more then being useful. Specially since businesses and everyone came on it (parents, relatives). This switched it from a cool place to hangout to some serious business.

Those two articles explain it more: http://seersuckermag.com/opinion/read/facebook-isnt-giving-b...

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us...
What evidence do you have that the majority of developers are on Unix? Just web devs or all devs?

I doubt that it's true in either case. IT departments around the world employ programmers to make all sorts of business apps including internet/intranet web apps. Even some very small companies have custom apps to do business and the vast majority of businesses are using Windows.
This is in part to survey whether you use those apps but also to enable photo and video sharing. The latter isn't currently available.
There are many sites that sell pro templates for a very affordable prices (e.g, Theme forest http://themeforest.net)
Real estate agents are like the dealer in blackjack: they always sit on 17. Playing with recruiters means you go bust on 21 instead of 22: they add even less value than real estate agents.
"If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy."

You make a good point. I am not a Python programmer but I have tried a few AppEngine tiny experiments with Django and webapp. webapp was clearly designed for the platform. Similar case for Java: JDO or JPA never seemed like a good fit to the data store, but Objectify seems crafted to add a nice but thin layer on top of the low level APIs.
I tried it out and got stuck at Gross Monthly Income. It is limited to "Minimum: $2,500 Maximum: $8,000". So what do I do when I don't fit in there?

Other seemingly arbitrary limitations:

- Net income : Net Income should be less than Gross Income.

- Liquid assets : Currently we support between $1000 and $1,000,000 only.
The big question is how they quantified attractiveness in their study, it seems to be one of those "I know it when I see it" things.

Attaching a photo to a resume is a huge no-no in the US, but I've seen many people check applicants' photos online (OK, I admit, I've done it, too).

Other things being (almost) equal, I see no problem in hiring a more attractive man/woman applicant over a less attractive one. I think attractive people in general have more self esteem and make friends more easily, both good traits in the workplace. Why discriminating based on intelligence is OK while doing it based on beauty such a taboo?
I'll pile on this.

I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine.

I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are.

I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so I'd love to see where App engine might fit in some of my business' architecture.
P.S. remote work is not an option for contract role, too
Having experienced, in a couple of very different countries, the difference between public and private housing and healthcare I know which one I prefer.

No experience as an insider in academia so can't comment on that.
Similarly it spells "Go" correctly :)
No content here, just a signup form for e-mails.
512 kbps DSL -- just barely, frustratingly capable of watching Netflix at the worst quality level
If Apple gets any bigger we're going to have to start worrying about them buying Google and then shutting it down.
So, the actor model is an anti-pattern? Like Akka in Scala?
It feels pretty great in corners because the suspension keeps the car level. I don't have experience driving many other higher end cars to compare it to, though.
That's because controversy and polarization are the two biggest propaganda techniques to sell papers. Everyone knows that women are better at some things than guys and vice versa - men can't have babies and breast feed. Women can't have babies without sperm. Everything else is kind of a free for all
All providers managing their speedtest servers with QoS. These servers will be handled as a business critical system. All other services are available as they are, if not specified in a contract. So, you might toss your tinfoil hat into trashcan. Yet better you can use mtr (https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/) to just find the real source of the problem.
I see VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) ads frequently.
There are several ways to defeat DKIM here:

• If you can break DNS, you can get an NXDOMAIN reply, making recipients think there aren't any domainkeys

• If the domainkey private key is small, you can factor it. There's an article on HN's frontpage right now about this.

• If the server uses domainkeys, but it doesn't specifically verify the From: header, an attacker can still forge a message if they share a popular mail provider with their target. I don't know if this is still practical.

• Stupidity. DKIM is difficult to test, and as a security measure it would need to be tested.

An autoreponse confirmation would be immune to all of these attacks and would be trivial to implement correctly.
I love the blazing fast throughput of MongoDB but the gotchas make me nervous.

I wish there was a MongoDB Guru site where I could contract out some MongoDB related maintenance activities such as validating my MongoDB installation and making sure that I have not made dumb errors, demystifying performance issues etc. So far I am making do with documentation and mailing lists but I would rather contract this out to a specialist.

Anyone know of any provider like this with affordable rates ?
I think unless Marissa Mayer actually emailed you and allowed her email to be disclosable, i'd not use her name in a screenshot.
This site. http://efreedom.com is winding me up at the moment. It's scraping from stackoverflow and Google has it ahead in the serps for a fair number of search queries I've run.

I wouldn't mind so much, but a) the site isn't as user friendly as stackoverflow and b) obviously isn't updated with answers as fast as stackoverflow is.

Obviously I should just be searching stackoverflow directly, but I'm afraid that habit of going to google first is a difficult one to break.
i'm glad to see "shithead" made it on the list at the 249th place.
Oh good, so you at least have a sense of humour. But you would do better to fill your profile details and be your true person here. Don't hide your identity, don't hide your ideas. Flesh out the details or you will not get the best response possible.

What businesses have you built? Who do you know? Can you name some names? How much cash can you bring to the table? How much PR power do you have? Do you write a popular blog? Can you call someone at the NYTimes or WSJ to get featured?

Details. That's where it's at.
There aren't only the two possibilities. Cartels come to mind. In a cartel situation appealing to consumers with better services is not a necessity.
To be honest, that sounds a little naive. If you were to become really big, would you not sell? Or just not to Yahoo? Things can change a lot in a few years.
I'd happily pay one or two dollars a month for search that was significantly better than google. But making a better search engine than google is... highly nontrivial.

Even if you get a few million users paying a dollar a month before you stop sucking, your total revenue is barely equivalent to google's orange juice budget. They have thousands of engineers working on making search better plus a pretty good working search engine plus huge infrastructure. What do you have?

edit: Oh yes, and if you do manage to make search better in a way that google hasn't thought of, your best bet is to sell it to google.
Wonderfully indented code is not always readable. Readable code is always indented well.
See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Personally, I think their definition is a bit broad - I tend to think of natural monopolies are where the universe's physical limitations cause obvious problems either physical or practical for competition.

For example, in a totally libertarian society where you would pay a toll to drive on any road, you wouldn't want hundreds of companies trying to making their own roads between points A and B - it wouldn't be an efficient use of space, and just imagine that turnpike.

Still, someone needs to manage the road to your house, power/cable/telephone/etc. thus the government manages the companies that manage that service.

The reason that these monopolies are "natural" is that there's a physical limitation involved - it just also happens to be codified with a contractual agreement.
> the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful

The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum.

If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now.

The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
It’s not a basis for their products but this is something https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/intro.ipynb#rece...
https://github.com/nteract/commuter
Generally there's "wet" leases (aircraft + at least one crewmember) and "dry" leases (just the aircraft). There are also different certification requirements between the two lease types. [1]

I believe as of late Amazon has been dry leasing aircraft and contracting with Air Transport International, Atlas, Sun Country, and others for crew and potentially maintenance as well.

[1] https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2020/march/pilo...
They donate 2.5x the licensing fee from ICE to "nonprofit organizations working to support immigrant communities targeted by the current administration".

They also mention that "While ICE does manage immigration law enforcement, ... they are also on the front lines of fighting human trafficking [and] child exploitation" and that "GitHub has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control."

If gh were to revoke their licenses, they would probably (a) just switch to gitlab or something similar, (b) be harming the anti-trafficking and anti-child exploitation efforts just as much as their anti immigration, and (c) not have an incentive to donate all this money to support groups.

https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...
Every developer should learn Prolog or a logic language in their career. It's mind-bending in the best way, and opens your eyes to how a computer can do
work for you by you describing the problem instead of the solution.

SQL is a language that could have been a Prolog. In fact, querying in Prolog in general is absolutely beautiful.

Prolog is homoiconic like lisp; extending the language with new features is trivial as it requires no new syntax.
Thanks for the info (I did not know that)!
they may be better off in future antitrust proceedings
Your example was a 0.001% to 99.999% ratio, which is like rolling a 100,000 sided die, if I understand correctly. That would be much safer than rolling a 100-sided die (1% chance to fail) the same number of times.
On top of its transport layer abstraction, socket.io adds various useful features including events, rooms, namespacing, efficient/convenient (de)serialization and network callbacks. I've been using it in websockets-only mode for various projects, because I don't care for slower / less reliable transports but still want the extra features.
Its my opinion that they are out there, their communications with us have already been very, very extensive. This guy is a good place to start researching the phenomenon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBbdJMl0H64
This whole page could do with a little padding/margin work.
I've had servers in FMT1 since 2000. They had a series of power issues. Generators didn't start and everything died. Next time the power went out the generator started and the switch from the grid to the generator blew out the switching system (and killed one of my hard drives and who knows what else) IIRC. I'm pretty sure Linode moved to FMT2 because of this. There have been other problems but around 10 years ago they reached a point where the whole power backup system was new and they have only had one outage that I can remember since then.
> which language has standardized SIMD vector datatypes ?

D does:

https://dlang.org/spec/simd.html
> Any part of your software that consumes data across a trust boundary is a perfect candidate for fuzzing.

Sure, but one thing I don't understand is why fuzzing is not used more often for testing basically any pure function (whose output depends only on its input, and which has no side effects, or whose side effects are easy enough to rollback during fuzzing).

This is the method: take multiple distinct implementations of the same function/algorithm and give them all the same data. Usually, you'd just be checking for them crashing or tripping up some sanitizer; but now you can check if each implementation's output matches the outputs of all the other implementations, and crash if any of the outputs doesn't match (can be accomplished with __builtin_trap(); in C/C++). The fuzzer will register this crash like any other failure, and then you know you have a bug, and with which input the bug manifests.

> Current fuzzing tools (open source or otherwise), aren’t very developer friendly, often forcing users to learn completely new testing paradigms, work with low-level structures they don’t understand, and significantly modify their application to get any results at all.

This list of issues seems sort of manufactured, and I doubt this FuzzBuzz product can improve the situation, as the article doesn't give any information on what the product actually is.

> Fuzzbuzz uses automation and intelligence to make fuzz testing as developer friendly as possible [...]

Advertising a product without saying anything about it is off-putting to me. I know it works sometimes, but I think that's usually when you're "big" already, like Coca Cola.
Also, embracing your inner geek doesn't necessarily mean changing the world. A lot of very smart people are in the business of making people click on ads more, or buy virtual cow and candies.
So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? No. All companies need not do the exact same thing. Missing mobile is relevant because it is eating into Microsoft's PC revenues, but social and search is a whole new business that Microsoft didn't need to get involved in at all.

In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.
This is the first time I hear about the TSA but how could this be legal? How can a private entity force someone to stay in some room?

It's really disgusting, I hope it gets lot of attention.